The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  In whispered trysts, they made extravagant plans. They imagined having children. The KGB frowned on adultery, and even more on divorce. “Our meetings were very secret. Any photo that could be evidence of adultery would be used against him, and punished very severely. He would have been expelled in twenty-four hours.” They would have to be patient. But, then, he was used to a slow and secret courtship.

  Gordievsky worked hard at both his jobs. He played a lot of badminton. Leila shared her flat with two roommates, and Yelena was often at home, so he and Leila would meet for secret assignations, covert and thrilling. But here was another layer of deception, and anxiety: he was now betraying Yelena on two levels, professional and personal. Exposure of either one could spell disaster. He covered the tracks of his double infidelity with precision and care. Every few days, he would send a disguised message to Leila and commit adultery in a different Copenhagen hotel; every four weeks, he would make his way to an unremarkable flat in a boring Danish suburb and commit treason. Over the course of a year, he established a system of evasion, eluding both Soviet surveillance and the suspicions of his wife. His relationships, with both Leila and MI6, were deepening. He felt safe. Which he was not.

  One winter evening, a young Danish intelligence officer was heading home to Ballerup when he spotted a car with diplomatic license plates parked in a side street, far from the diplomatic enclaves. The young man was curious. He was also trained and eager. On closer inspection, he recognized the car as belonging to the Soviet embassy. What was a Soviet diplomat doing in the suburbs, at 7 p.m. on a weekend?

  A dusting of snow had fallen, and fresh footprints led away from the car. The PET officer followed them for about two hundred yards, to an apartment block. A Danish couple was leaving as he approached and obligingly held the front door open for him. Wet footprints crossed the marble floor to the stairs. He followed them to the door of a flat on the second floor. From inside came the sound of low voices, speaking a foreign language. He noted down the address and license plate number.

  The following morning, a report landed on the desk of Jørn Bruun, the head of Danish counterintelligence: a Soviet diplomat suspected of working for the KGB had been traced to a Ballerup flat, where he was overheard speaking an unidentified language, possibly German, to a person or persons unknown: “There is something suspicious here,” the report concluded. “We should do something about it.”

  But before the machinery of Danish surveillance could leap into motion, Bruun switched off the engine. The report was expunged from the file. The overzealous young officer was commended for his perceptiveness and then “fobbed off” with a vague explanation as to why the lead was not worth pursuing. Not for the first time, a security service had, by its diligence, very nearly wrecked an ongoing case.

  Gordievsky was shaken to learn how close he had come to being uncovered. “The mishap gave us a shock whose aftereffects lingered,” he said. Henceforth he would travel to Ballerup by underground.

  His refusal to name names waned as the months passed. Not that there were many names to name. The network of Soviet agents and informants in Denmark was, he revealed, pitifully small. There were Gert Petersen, the thirsty politician; an overweight policeman in the Danish immigration department who passed on occasional tidbits; and several illegals planted around the country, waiting for the Third World War. The KGB officers in Copenhagen, Oleg explained, spent far more time inventing contacts in order to justify their expenses than actually meeting anyone. This reassuring intelligence was passed on to PET. The Danes were careful not to sweep up the few spies Gordievsky fingered, since this would immediately have pointed to an informant within the KGB. Instead, PET decided to keep tabs on the handful of Danish KGB contacts and wait.

  If the KGB had few spies worthy of the name in Denmark, the same was not true of Denmark’s Scandinavian neighbors.

  Gunvor Galtung Haavik was an inconspicuous employee in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a former nurse who worked as a secretary and interpreter and was now nearing retirement. She was tiny, sweet-natured, and rather shy. She was also a veteran, highly paid spy of thirty years’ standing, who had been secretly awarded the Soviet Order of Friendship “for strengthening international understanding”—which, in a way, she had, by handing over several thousand classified documents to the KGB.

  Haavik’s story was a classic tale of KGB manipulation. At the tail end of the war, with Norway still under Nazi occupation, she was working in a military hospital in Bodø when she fell in love with a Russian prisoner of war, Vladimir Kozlov. He neglected to tell her that he was already married, with a family back in Moscow. She helped him escape to Sweden. After the war, as a fluent Russian speaker, she was hired by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and sent to Moscow as secretary to the Norwegian ambassador. There, her love affair with Kozlov was rekindled. The KGB got wind of the illicit romance and provided an apartment where they could meet: then they threatened to expose the adulterous relationship to the Norwegians and exile Kozlov to Siberia, unless Haavik agreed to spy for them. For eight years she passed over reams of top-secret material, and continued to do so after being posted back to the Foreign Ministry in Oslo. Norway, the northern flank of NATO, shared a 120-mile Arctic border with the USSR and was regarded by the KGB as “the key to the north.” Here the Cold War was fought with icy ferocity. Haavik, code-named GRETA, met eight different KGB handlers at least 270 times. She continued to receive cash from Moscow, and messages from Kozlov (or rather the KGB pretending to be her Russian lover). A gullible, heartbroken spinster bullied into cooperating with the KGB, she was not even a Communist.

  Arne Treholt was as conspicuous and glamorous as Haavik was not. The son of a popular Norwegian cabinet minister, a prominent journalist and member of Norway’s powerful Labor Party, he was flamboyant, handsome, and outspoken in his left-wing views. Treholt was going places, fast. He burnished his celebrity credentials by marrying a Norwegian television star, Kari Storækre. The New York Times described him as “one of the golden young men of public life in Norway.” Some thought he might end up as prime minister.

  But in 1967 Treholt’s trenchant opposition to the Vietnam War attracted the attention of the KGB. He was approached by Yevgeny Belyayev, an intelligence officer working undercover as a consular official in the Soviet embassy. Treholt later told police (a statement he subsequently recanted) that he had been recruited through “sexual blackmail” after an orgy in Oslo. Belyayev encouraged Treholt to accept cash in return for information, and in 1971, at the Coq d’Or restaurant in Helsinki, he introduced him to Gennadi Fyodorovich Titov, the new KGB rezident in Oslo. Titov’s ruthlessness had earned him the nickname “the Crocodile,” although with his large round spectacles and waddling gait he looked more like a particularly malicious owl. Titov had a “reputation as the most accomplished flatterer in the First Chief Directorate.” Treholt liked flattery. He also liked a free lunch. Over the next decade, he and Titov dined together, at the KGB’s expense, on fifty-nine occasions. “We had glorious lunches,” Treholt recalled, many years later, “where we discussed Norwegian and international politics.”

  Norway lay outside Gordievsky’s remit, but the Scandinavian countries were lumped together in KGB thinking, and each station was aware, to some extent, of the activities of the others. In 1974, a new KGB officer named Vadim Cherny was posted to Denmark from Moscow, where he had been working in the Scandinavian-British section of the FCD. Cherny was a mediocre officer and an inveterate gossip. One day he let slip that the KGB was running a woman agent, code-named GRETA, inside Norway’s diplomatic service. A few weeks later he mentioned that the KGB had recruited another, “even more important” agent inside the Norwegian government, “someone with a journalistic background.”

  Gordievsky passed this information on to Hawkins, who reported it back to MI6 and PET.

  These two highly valuable leads were conveyed to Norwegian counterintelligence. The source was heavily camouflaged: Norway was told the repo
rt was reliable, but not who or where it came from. “This was not information Oleg was supposed to have in the course of his work, but stuff he had picked up—so we decided it could not be traced back directly to him.” The Norwegians were grateful, and thoroughly alarmed. Gunvor Haavik, the demure senior secretary at the Foreign Ministry, had been under suspicion for some time. Gordievsky’s warning provided crucial confirmation. Fashionable young Arne Treholt had also popped up on the radar after being spotted in the company of a known KGB operative. Both would now be closely watched.

  The Norwegian connection illustrated a central challenge of the Gordievsky case, and a conundrum of spying in general: how to make use of high-grade intelligence without compromising its source. An agent deep inside the enemy camp may unmask spies in your own camp. But if you arrest and neutralize them all, then you alert the other side to the spy within their own camp, and you endanger your source. How could British intelligence take advantage of what Gordievsky was revealing without burning him?

  From the start, MI6 opted to play the long game. Gordievsky was still a young man. The information he supplied was excellent, and it would only improve with time and promotion. Too much haste or hunger for information might scupper the case, and destroy Gordievsky. Security was paramount. The Philby disaster had taught Britain the perils of betrayal from within. The tiny group of officers in MI6 indoctrinated into the secret were told only what they needed to know. Inside PET, even fewer were aware of Gordievsky’s existence. The information he supplied was passed on sparingly to allies, sometimes using intermediaries, or “cutouts,” in nuggets carefully masked to appear as if they had come from elsewhere. Gordievsky was revealing secrets hand over fist, but MI6 ensured his fingerprints were nowhere upon them.

  The CIA was not informed about SUNBEAM. The so-called special relationship was particularly warm in the intelligence sphere, yet the “need to know” principle applied, in both directions. The CIA, it was agreed, certainly did not need to know that Britain had a major spy deep within the KGB.

  Intelligence services do not like their officers to remain in one place indefinitely lest they become too comfortable; in the same way, agent runners are rotated, to ensure that they do not lose objectivity or end up too heavily invested in one case or a single spy.

  In accordance with this principle, the KGB rezident in Copenhagen, Mogilevchik, was duly replaced by Gordievsky’s old friend Mikhail Lyubimov, the amiable Anglophile with the taste for Scotch and tweed tailoring. The two men immediately resumed their friendship. Lyubimov was on his second marriage. The breakup of his first had caused a hiccup in his KGB career, but he was now on the ascendant again. Gordievsky admired this “genial, relaxed fellow,” with his worldly, wry take on the world. They spent long evenings together, chatting and drinking, discussing literature, art, music, and espionage.

  Lyubimov could see that his friend and protégé would go far. The bosses considered Gordievsky “competent and erudite,” and he was good at his job. “Oleg behaved impeccably,” wrote Lyubimov. “He didn’t get involved in any of the infighting, was always ready to provide whatever I wanted, [was] modest like a true communist, didn’t strive for promotion…some in the embassy staff didn’t like him: ‘arrogant,’ they called him, ‘too clever by half.’ But I didn’t see these as vices. Don’t most people think they are clever?” Only in retrospect did Lyubimov recall some telltale signs. Gordievsky had largely stopped going to diplomatic parties, and other than Lyubimov, he seldom socialized with other KGB officers. He buried himself in dissident literature. “In his flat were books by certain authors banned in our country which I, as his senior colleague, advised him to keep out of sight.” The two couples often had dinner together, when Gordievsky would tell jokes, drink a little too heavily, and make a show of being happily married. A remark by Yelena stuck in Lyubimov’s memory. “He’s not really an extrovert at all,” she said. “Don’t imagine he’s being sincere with you.” Lyubimov knew the marriage was under severe strain and paid no attention to the warning.

  One evening in January 1977, Gordievsky arrived at the safe flat as usual to find Philip Hawkins waiting with a bespectacled younger man, whom he introduced as “Nick Venables.” Hawkins explained that he would soon take up a new posting abroad and this man was his replacement.

  The new case officer was Geoffrey Guscott, the highflier who, seven years earlier, had read Kaplan’s file and flagged Gordievsky as a potential target. Guscott had been acting as Hawkins’s desk officer and was therefore familiar with every aspect of the Gordievsky case. But he was nervous. “I thought I knew enough to handle it, but I was still quite young. MI6 said: ‘You’ll cope.’ But I wasn’t so sure.”

  Gordievsky and Guscott took to each other at once. The English officer spoke fluent Russian, and from the start they used the familiar form of address. Both were long-distance runners. But, more than that, in contrast to Hawkins, Guscott seemed to value Oleg as an individual, not just as a source of information. “Inspiring in every way, always cheerful, always sincerely apologetic about any mistakes he made,” Guscott was a kindred spirit who now devoted himself to the case full-time, in deep secrecy. Within MI6, only his secretary and immediate superiors knew what he was doing. The SUNBEAM case moved up a gear.

  MI6 offered to supply a miniature camera. With this Gordievsky could photograph documents inside the rezidentura, and then hand over the undeveloped film. Oleg declined. The risk of being caught was too high: “One glimpse through a half-open door and everything would be finished.” Possession of a British-made mini-camera was about as incriminating as evidence could get. But there was another way to smuggle documents out of the KGB station.

  Messages and instructions from Moscow arrived in the form of long reels of microfilm, transported via the Soviet diplomatic bag. The rezident, or more usually the cipher clerks, then cut the film into strips and distributed these to the relevant sections, or “Lines”: Illegals (N), Political (PR), Counter Intelligence (KR), Technical (X), and so on. Each length of film might include a dozen or more letters, memos, or other documents. If Gordievsky could smuggle the microfilm strips out of the embassy during his lunch hour, he could transfer them to Guscott, who could copy them and then hand them back. The entire process would take less than half an hour.

  Guscott passed a request to the MI6 technical department at Hanslope Park, a country house estate in Buckinghamshire surrounded by leafy parkland and a security cordon of barbed wire and guard posts. Hanslope was (and is) one of the most secretive and heavily guarded outstations of British intelligence. During the war, the Hanslope boffins produced an astonishing array of technical gadgets for spies, including secure radios, secret ink, and even garlic-flavored chocolate—issued to spies parachuting into occupied France to ensure their breath smelled convincingly French on landing. Had Q, the technical wizard in the James Bond series, actually existed, he would have worked at Hanslope Park.

  Guscott’s request was at once simple and challenging: he needed a small, portable device that could copy a strip of microfilm, secretly and swiftly.

  Sankt Annæ Plads is a long, tree-lined public square in the center of Copenhagen, not far from the Royal Palace. At lunchtime, particularly in good weather, the place is thronged with people. One spring day in 1977, a well-built man in a business suit entered the telephone kiosk at the end of the park. As he was dialing, a tourist wearing a backpack stopped to ask directions and then walked on. In that moment, Gordievsky slipped a roll of microfilm into Guscott’s jacket pocket. Jørn Bruun had ensured there was no PET surveillance. A junior officer from the MI6 station loitered on a nearby bench.

  Guscott rushed to a nearby PET safe house, locked himself in an upstairs bedroom, and took from his backpack a pair of silk gloves and a small flat box, six inches long by three inches wide, roughly the size of a pocket diary. He drew the curtains, turned off the light, unwound the microfilm strip, inserted one end into the little box, and pulled it through.

  “It was quite a
sweaty-palm procedure, fiddling in the dark. I always knew that if I couldn’t do the operation in time, I would have to abort. And if I damaged the microfilm, it was a real problem.”

  Exactly thirty-five minutes after the first brush contact, the two men performed another at the other end of the park, imperceptible to anyone but a highly trained surveillance officer, and the reel was back in Gordievsky’s pocket.

  The flow of documents out of the KGB rezidentura and into the hands of MI6 swelled to a torrent: initially just the PR Line instructions from Moscow Center, of which Gordievsky was the recipient, then gradually expanding to include microfilm strips issued to other officers, which they frequently left on desks or in briefcases during the lunch hour.

  The rewards were great, but so were the risks. With each transfer of stolen material, Gordievsky knew he was taking his life in his hands. Another KGB officer might return unexpectedly from lunch and find his microfilm instructions missing, or Gordievsky might be spotted filching material not intended for his eyes. If he was found to be in possession of microfilm outside the embassy, he was doomed. Each brush contact, Guscott observed with ringing understatement, was “highly charged.”

  Gordievsky was terrified, but determined. Each contact left him fizzing with the gambler’s rush of a successful gambit, but wondering whether his luck could hold. Even in the coldest weather, he returned to the rezidentura in a muck sweat of fear and excitement, hoping his colleagues would not notice his shaking hands. The contact sites followed a deliberately irregular pattern: a park, a hospital, a hotel toilet, a station. Guscott parked a car nearby, in case the copying process had to be carried out inside the vehicle, using a lightproof fabric bag.