Despite every precaution, there was no accounting for accidents. On one occasion, Guscott arranged to make a brush contact at a railway station in the north of the city. He placed himself by a window in the station café and drank a coffee while waiting for Gordievsky to appear and leave a roll of microfilm under a ledge in the nearby telephone kiosk. The Russian duly appeared, made the drop, and walked away, but before Guscott could get to the kiosk, a man stepped into it ahead of him and began making a telephone call. A long telephone call. The minutes slipped past, as the man obliviously chattered on, inserting one coin after another. There was only a thirty-minute window in which to pick up the film, copy it, and return it at a second contact site in another location, and it was closing fast. Guscott loitered outside the telephone box, hopping from foot to foot, exhibiting an anxiety that was not feigned. The man on the telephone ignored him. Guscott was on the point of barging in and grabbing the roll when the man finally hung up. Guscott reached the second brush contact site with less than a minute to spare.
As Lyubimov’s deputy and confidant, Gordievsky had access to many of the microfilms, and “the volume of tape blossomed.” Scores, and eventually hundreds, of documents were extracted and copied, with details of code names, operations, directives, and even the entire 150-page confidential review compiled by the embassy, a complete picture of Soviet diplomatic strategy in Denmark. The information was carefully parceled out back in London, disguised, and then distributed, piecemeal: to MI5, if it affected national security, and occasionally, if sufficiently important, to the Foreign Office. Of Britain’s allies, only the Danes received direct intelligence from the SUNBEAM files. Some of the material—notably that relating to Soviet espionage in the Arctic—was shown to the foreign secretary, David Owen, and the prime minister, James Callaghan. No one was told where it had come from.
Guscott flew to Denmark more frequently, and stayed for longer, moving into the Ballerup flat for three days at a stretch. The two spies would carry out a microfilm exchange at lunchtime on Friday, then meet at the flat on Saturday evening and again the next morning. His romantic trysts with Leila, and his espionage assignations with Guscott, meant that Gordievsky was away from home for longer and longer periods. He told Yelena he was busy with secret KGB work that was none of her business. She may or may not have believed him.
Gordievsky’s conditions for cooperation diluted, then evaporated. The Russian knew he was being recorded. He abandoned his own refusal to reveal names and identified every KGB officer, every illegal, and every source. Finally, he agreed to accept money. Guscott told him that, “from time to time,” sterling would be deposited for him in a London bank, as a contingency, a measure of Britain’s gratitude, and an unstated acknowledgment that, eventually, he would defect to the UK. Gordievsky might never be able to spend his espionage earnings, but he valued the gesture and accepted the cash.
Gordievsky was more valuable than money, and there was another, highly symbolic way to show it: a personal thank-you letter from the chief of MI6.
Maurice Oldfield, the most senior spy in Britain, signed himself “C,” in green ink, a practice first adopted by the founder of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, who imported it from the Royal Navy, where ships’ captains customarily write in green ink. The tradition has been adopted by every MI6 chief since. Guscott typed a letter of thanks and congratulations from Oldfield to Gordievsky, in English, on thick cream notepaper, which the head of the service signed with a green flourish. Guscott translated it into Russian, and presented both the original and the translation to Gordievsky at their next meeting. Oleg’s face lit up as he read the encomium. Guscott took the letter away again when they parted: a personal letter signed in green ink from Britain’s spymaster-in-chief was not the sort of souvenir to keep in his possession. “It was a way to reassure Oleg that we took him seriously and put it on a formal footing, to establish a personal connection and show Oleg he was dealing with the organization itself. That all helped to settle him down, and marked the maturity of the case.” At the next meeting, Gordievsky produced his reply to Oldfield. The correspondence between SUNBEAM and C remains in the MI6 archives, proof of the personal touch on which successful spying depends.
Gordievsky’s letter was his testament.
I must emphasize that my decision is not the result of irresponsibility or instability of character on my part. It has been preceded by a long spiritual struggle and by agonizing emotion, and an even deeper disappointment at developments in my own country and my own experiences have brought me to the belief that democracy, and the tolerance of humanity that follows it, represents the only road for my country, which is European in spite of everything. The present regime is the antithesis of democracy to an extent which Westerners can never fully grasp. If a man realizes this, he must show the courage of his convictions and do something himself to prevent slavery from encroaching further upon the realms of freedom.
* * *
Gunvor Haavik arranged to meet her KGB controller, Aleksandr Printsipalov, on the evening of January 27, 1977. The Russian was waiting when she arrived at the rendezvous, a dark side street in an Oslo suburb. So were three officers of the Norwegian security service, who pounced. After a “violent struggle,” the Soviet officer was finally subdued, and some 2,000 kroner was found in his pocket, the latest payment to GRETA. Haavik offered no resistance. Initially, she admitted only to her love affair with the Russian Kozlov, but finally she broke down: “I shall now tell it how it is. I have been a Russian spy for nearly thirty years.” She was charged with espionage and treason. Haavik died of a sudden heart attack in prison six months later, before her case came to trial.
In the diplomatic fallout, Gennadi Titov, the KGB rezident, was expelled from Oslo, and news that an important agent had been arrested in Norway filtered swiftly down to the KGB station in Denmark, prompting a flurry of speculation among the officers, and, in the case of one of them, a “cold prickle” of fear. Gordievsky assumed his tip-off had led directly to her arrest. Everyone connected to the case would now be interviewed. If the talkative Cherny remembered his idle conversation about GRETA with Gordievsky from a few months earlier, and was brave enough to report it, the KGB mole hunters might start to pick up the trail. The weeks passed without a tap on his shoulder and Gordievsky slowly relaxed, but the incident was a sobering warning: if the information he passed over was acted on too obviously, it would lead to his destruction.
Yelena Gordievsky was nobody’s fool. Her husband was up to something. Increasingly, he was away overnight, and for weekends, offering only the most curt explanations for his absences. Yelena knew, without having to be told, that her husband was having an affair. She accused him, angrily; he denied it, unconvincingly. A series of “unpleasant scenes” ensued in the flat, loud and doubtless overheard by their KGB neighbors. This was followed by a furious, wordless silence. The relationship was all but dead, but they were both trapped. Like Gordievsky, Yelena did not want her own KGB career to be damaged by scandal, and she wanted to remain in Denmark. A breakup would see them both on the next plane to Moscow. They had married in obedience to KGB rules, and they must stay married, at least in name, for the same reason. But the marriage went black.
One day, Guscott asked Gordievsky if he was under any “undue stress.” Clearly, the Danish eavesdroppers had overheard the domestic turmoil and flying crockery in his apartment, and reported back to MI6. He reassured his case officer that, although his marriage might be coming apart, he was not. But it was another reminder that he was being watched, even by those who were now his friends.
Leila was an emotional haven. Compared to the grim compromises in his crumbling marriage, the moments of intimacy with her seemed all the sweeter for being snatched and hurried, seized in one hotel room or another. “We made plans to marry as soon as I could disentangle myself,” he wrote. Yelena was all elbows and anger, whereas willowy, dark-haired Leila was soft, kind, funny. She had been born and bred into the KGB. Her father, Ali, had been rec
ruited in his early twenties, in his hometown of Shaki in northwest Azerbaijan. Her mother, one of seven children of a poor Moscow family, was also KGB, and had met her future husband on a training course in Moscow soon after the war. But, unlike his wife, Gordievsky never felt she was watching him, assessing him. Her very naivety was an antidote to the complexity of his life. He loved her as he had never loved anyone before. But he was simultaneously engaged in a tumultuous secret affair with MI6. His emotional desires and his espionage stood in direct conflict. Divorce and remarriage would damage not only his KGB career, but also his prospects of obtaining more valuable intelligence for MI6. Love often begins with an outpouring of naked truth, a passionate baring of the soul. Leila was young and trusting, and she believed utterly in her handsome, considerate lover. “I never felt I stole him from Yelena. Their marriage was finished. I idolized him. I put him on a pedestal. He was perfect.” But, unbeknownst to her, he was never fully present. “Half my existence and my thoughts had to remain secret.” He wondered if his double life would make an authentic marriage of minds impossible: “Could I establish the close, warm relationship I longed for?”
He finally confided to Mikhail Lyubimov that he was having an affair with a young secretary at the World Health Organization, and hoped to marry her. His friend and boss was sympathetic, but realistic. From personal experience, Lyubimov knew that his protégé’s prospects would suffer when the KGB puritans discovered the situation. After his own marriage failed, Lyubimov had been demoted and ignored for several years. “A divorced Oleg was doomed to get a dull backroom job,” he wrote. The rezident promised to put in a good word with the bosses.
Gordievsky and Lyubimov had grown even closer. In the summer of 1977, they traveled together to the Danish coast for a weekend break. On the beach one afternoon, Lyubimov described how, as a young KGB officer in 1960s London, he had cultivated various figures on the left, including a fiery Labour MP named Michael Foot, who was seen by Moscow as a potential “agent of influence,” someone who could be fed pro-Soviet ideas, and reproduce them in articles and speeches. The name meant nothing to Gordievsky.
Lyubimov might be “a friend for life,” but he was also a prime source of intelligence. Everything Gordievsky gleaned from him was passed back to MI6, including documents personally addressed to the rezident under his code name, KORIN. The friendship was also a betrayal. Lyubimov later reflected: “Oleg Gordievsky was playing me like a penny whistle.”
After each meeting, Guscott reported personally to Oldfield. During one of these debriefing sessions, the case officer described how Lyubimov was being “chatted up” by the new head of station in Copenhagen, and seemed very friendly. “SUNBEAM will eventually leave Denmark, so we should be looking for a replacement target. Who better than Lyubimov? He is very Anglophile, and has been tapped up once already. You would like him. He’s also a raging snob, and he might respond well to an approach by someone senior.” Thus was born a radical idea. Maurice Oldfield, the chief of MI6, would fly to Copenhagen and try to recruit the KGB rezident, in person. The director of counterintelligence was having none of it: C could not be risked on an active operation, and if it went wrong, then attention would be drawn to Gordievsky. “The plan was kiboshed, thank God,” said one intelligence officer. “It was insane.”
Gordievsky wrote: “I felt relief and euphoria that I was no longer a dishonest man working for a totalitarian regime.” Yet this honesty demanded emotional deception, fraud in a virtuous cause, a sacred duplicity. He was telling MI6 every secret truth he could find, while lying to his colleagues and his bosses, his family, his best friend, his estranged wife, and his new lover.
Chapter 5
A PLASTIC BAG AND A MARS BAR
On Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth, not far from Waterloo Station, stood Century House, a large, ugly, twenty-two-story office block of glass and concrete. The building was wholly unremarkable. The men and women who passed in and out looked like all the other office workers in the area. But an inquisitive observer might have noticed that the security guard in the lobby was more muscular, and a good deal more alert, than the regulation issue. He might also have wondered why so many telephone engineering vans were parked outside the office at odd times of day. He might have spotted that the workers kept irregular hours, and noticed the chunky electric bollards guarding the underground parking garage. But had the inquisitive observer hung around long enough to notice these things, he would have been arrested.
Century House was the headquarters of MI6, and the most secret premises in London. Officially, it did not exist, and nor did MI6. It was a place so discreet and deliberately commonplace that new arrivals often wondered if they had mistakenly been sent to the wrong address. “There were even those who were recruited into the Service,” wrote one former officer, “but did not realize until after they had completed a week or two’s work there.” The public remained perfectly ignorant of the real purpose of this undistinguished building, and those few officials and journalists who did know what it was for kept mum.
The Sovbloc controllerate took up the whole of the twelfth floor. In one corner stood a cluster of desks occupied by the P5 section, the team running Soviet operations and agents, which liased with the Moscow MI6 station. Only three people in P5 knew of the Gordievsky case. One of them was Veronica Price.
Price was forty-eight in 1978, unmarried, dedicated to the service, and one of those brisk, practical, quintessentially English women who brooks no nonsense, least of all from men. The daughter of a solicitor who had been badly wounded in the First World War (“bits of shrapnel fell out of him for the rest of his life”), she grew up with a strong sense of patriotic rectitude, but also a streak of drama inherited from her mother, a former actress. “I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to travel.” Having failed to get into the Foreign Office due to inadequate shorthand, she wound up as a secretary in MI6. She served in Poland, Jordan, Iraq, and Mexico, but it took MI6 nearly twenty years to realize that Veronica Price’s skills went far beyond typing and filing. In 1972 she took an exam to become one of the first women officers in the British secret service. Five years later, she was appointed deputy to the head of P5. Every day, she commuted to Century House from the Home Counties, where she lived with her widowed mother, her sister Jane, several cats, and a large collection of bone china. Price insisted on doing things properly. She was very sensible and, as one colleague put it, “completely single-minded.” She liked solving problems. In the spring of 1978, Veronica Price was indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case, and so it was that she found herself grappling with a problem that had never faced MI6 before: how to smuggle a spy out of Soviet Russia.
A few weeks earlier, Gordievsky had arrived at the safe flat looking tired and preoccupied.
“Nick, I need to think about my security. For the first three years I didn’t think about it, but soon I will be returning to Moscow. Can you organize an escape from the Soviet Union for me, in case I come under suspicion? If I go back, is there some way I can get out?”
Disquieting rumors had begun to circulate: Moscow Center suspected a spy was operating within the KGB. The gossip did not suggest the leakage was coming from Denmark, or even Scandinavia, but the mere hint of an internal investigation was enough to provoke a nasty shiver of apprehension. What if MI6 had itself been penetrated? Was another Philby lurking inside British intelligence, ready to expose Gordievsky? There was no guarantee he would eventually get another foreign posting, particularly if he divorced, and he might find himself trapped in the Soviet Union forever. Gordievsky wanted to know that there was a chance he could get out if he needed to.
Spiriting the Russian spy out of Denmark would have been child’s play, requiring only a call to his emergency number, a night in a safe house, a false passport, and a ticket to London. But engineering an escape from Moscow, if the KGB uncovered him, was a very different prospect, and probably impossible.
Guscott’s response was sobering. “We cannot make any promi
ses, and we cannot give a hundred percent guarantee that you can escape.”
Gordievsky knew the probability of success was much lower than that. “Of course,” he replied. “That is absolutely clear. Just give me the possibility, just in case.”
The Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers. The population was under constant surveillance, and no segment of society was more closely watched than the KGB itself: the Seventh Directorate was responsible for internal surveillance, with some 1,500 men deployed in Moscow alone. Under Leonid Brezhnev’s inflexible brand of Communism, paranoia had increased to near Stalinist levels, creating a spy state pitting all against all, in which phones were tapped and letters opened, and everyone was encouraged to inform on everyone else, everywhere, all the time. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting spike in international tension, had intensified KGB internal scrutiny. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” writes Robert Conquest.
Infiltrating, recruiting, and maintaining contact with spies inside the Soviet Union was extremely difficult. The few agents enlisted or inserted behind the Iron Curtain tended to vanish, without warning or explanation. In a society permanently on the alert for espionage, the life expectancy of a secret agent was short. When the KGB net closed, it did so with brutal speed. But, as a serving KGB officer, it seemed possible that Gordievsky might get wind of an imminent threat to his safety, giving him just enough time to attempt an emergency escape.
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