The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  This was exactly the sort of challenge Veronica Price relished, and she was already something of a specialist in the art of exfiltration. In the mid-1970s, she had arranged Operation INVISIBLE, the smuggling of a husband-and-wife team of Czech scientists across the border into Austria. She had also sprung a Czech intelligence officer code-named DISARRANGE out of Hungary. “But the Czechs and the Hungarians didn’t have the KGB,” she said. “Russia was much, much harder,” and the distance to reach safety much farther. Quite apart from losing the agent, a failed escape would hand the Russians a major propaganda weapon.

  One possibility was by sea. Price began investigating whether, using forged documents, a fugitive might be able to board a commercial liner or merchant vessel sailing from one of the Russian ports. But the docks and harbors were as heavily policed as the frontiers and airports, and producing forgeries was virtually impossible since official Russian documents included watermarks, like banknotes, that could not be replicated. A motorboat might possibly ferry an escaping spy to safety across the Black Sea to Turkey, or across the Caspian to Iran, but there was a strong chance of being intercepted by Soviet patrol vessels and sunk. The long Turkish and Iranian land borders with the USSR were hundreds of miles from Moscow and heavily defended by guards, minefields, electric fences, and barbed wire.

  The diplomatic bag could be used to transport sensitive items across borders, principally documents, but also drugs, weapons, and, conceivably, people. Opening a parcel marked as diplomatic luggage was technically a violation of the Vienna Convention. Libyan terrorists smuggled guns into Britain this way. The Soviets themselves had attempted to expand the definition of a diplomatic bag, by claiming that a nine-ton truck filled with crates and destined for Switzerland should be exempt from search. The Swiss refused. In 1984 a fugitive diplomat in London, the brother-in-law of the newly deposed Nigerian president, was drugged, blindfolded, put in a wooden crate labeled “extra cargo,” and addressed to the Ministry of International Affairs in Lagos. He was discovered by customs officials at Stansted Airport and released. A man-sized diplomatic bag emerging from the British embassy in Moscow would not pass unnoticed.

  One by one, each option was rejected as unfeasible or insanely risky.

  But there was another tradition of international diplomacy that might possibly be manipulated to Gordievsky’s advantage.

  According to long-standing convention, cars driven by embassy staff with diplomatic license plates are not usually subject to search when crossing international frontiers—an extension of diplomatic immunity, whereby diplomats are granted safe passage and protection from prosecution under the laws of the host country. But this was a convention, not a legal rule, and Soviet border guards felt little compunction in searching any car that aroused suspicion. Still, it was a small gap in the fortified wall surrounding Russia: a spy hidden inside a diplomatic car might conceivably slip through this chink in the Iron Curtain.

  The Russian border with Finland was the nearest East–West frontier to Moscow, though still a twelve-hour drive from the Russian capital. Western diplomats regularly visited Finland for rest and recreation, shopping or medical treatment. They usually traveled by car, and the Russian border guards were used to seeing diplomatic vehicles pass through the checkpoints.

  But getting an escapee into a car posed another conundrum. The British embassy, consulate, and all diplomatic residences were securely guarded by KGB officers in police uniform. Any Russian attempting to enter was stopped, searched, and closely interrogated. Moreover, British embassy cars were routinely tailed by KGB surveillance wherever they went, and diplomatic vehicles were serviced by KGB mechanics who, it was assumed, fitted them with hidden bugs and tracking devices.

  After weeks of attacking the problem from every angle, Veronica Price framed a plan, peppered with conditionals: if Gordievsky could alert the MI6 station in Moscow that he needed to escape; if he could make his own way to a rendezvous point near the Finnish border without being followed; if a diplomatic car driven by an MI6 officer could throw off KGB surveillance for long enough to pick him up; if he could be hidden securely inside the vehicle; and if the Soviet border guards adhered to diplomatic convention and let them pass through without investigation…then he might escape to Finland. (Where he could still be arrested and sent back to Russia by the Finnish authorities.)

  It was the longest of long shots. But it was the best shot Veronica Price could come up with. Which meant it was the best shot available.

  The MI6 head of station in Moscow was instructed to find a suitable rendezvous point near the Finnish border where a fugitive might be picked up. He drove to Finland from Leningrad, as if on a shopping trip, and identified a turnout that could serve as the pickup point, about thirty-six miles short of the border and close to the road sign marked KILOMETER POST 836, indicating the distance from Moscow. Militia posts ten miles apart (known as GAI posts, an acronym for State Automobile Inspectorate) monitored the movement of all traffic, but especially foreign cars. The turnout was almost equidistant between two of them. If the MI6 pickup car paused for a few minutes, assuming it was not being tailed by the KGB, the next militia post would probably not spot the delay. The area was heavily wooded, and a track arced off to the right in a wide D-shaped loop, shielded from the road by a line of trees, before rejoining the highway. A large rock, the size of a London terraced house, marked the entrance to the turnout. The MI6 officer took some photographs out of the car window, and motored on south toward Moscow. Had he been spotted, the KGB would surely have wondered why a British diplomat wanted to photograph a big rock in the middle of nowhere.

  Veronica Price’s plan also required a “signal site,” where Gordievsky could indicate when he wanted to pass on a message or needed to escape.

  Many of the British diplomats in Moscow, including the MI6 station of two officers and a secretary, were housed in the same complex on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, known as Kutz, a wide avenue to the west of the Moscow River. On the other side of the avenue, in the shadow of the Soviet Gothic tower the Hotel Ukraine, was a bread shop, beside a set of billboards displaying bus timetables, concert performances, and copies of Pravda. The place was usually thronged with people reading the newspapers, and the bread shop was much used by foreigners from the well-guarded housing complex opposite.

  The plan envisaged that at 7:30 p.m. every Tuesday when Gordievsky was in Moscow, a member of the MI6 station would “police” the signal site. The spot was actually visible from parts of the housing complex; an MI6 officer would head out with the excuse of buying bread or time his return from work to be passing the site at exactly the right moment.

  The exfiltration plan could be activated in only one way: Gordievsky must be standing by the bread shop at 7:30, holding a plastic bag from a Safeway supermarket. Safeway bags bore a large red S, an immediately recognizable logo that would stand out in the drab Moscow surroundings. Gordievsky had lived and worked in the West, and there would be nothing particularly remarkable about his holding such an object. Plastic bags were prized, especially foreign ones. As an additional recognition signal, Gordievsky should wear a gray leather cap he had recently purchased, and a pair of gray trousers. When the MI6 officer spotted Gordievsky waiting by the bread shop with the all-important Safeway bag, he or she would acknowledge the escape signal by walking past him carrying a green bag from Harrods and eating a chocolate bar, either a KitKat or a Mars bar—“a literally hand-to-mouth expedient,” as one officer remarked. The chocolate eater would also be wearing something gray—trousers, skirt, or a scarf—and would make brief eye contact but not stop walking. “Gray was an unobtrusive color, and therefore helpful in averting pattern accumulation by watchers. The downside being that it was all but invisible in the murk of a long Moscow winter.”

  The escape signal having been flown, the second stage of the plan would swing into operation. Three days later, on the Friday afternoon, Gordievsky should catch the overnight train to Leningrad. There was no suggestion th
at Yelena would be coming, too. On arrival in Russia’s second city, he would take a taxi to the Finland Station, where Lenin famously arrived to launch the revolution in 1917, and take the first train to Zelenogorsk, up the coast on the Baltic Sea. From there he would catch a bus heading for the Finnish border and get off at or near the rendezvous point, about sixteen miles south of the border town of Vyborg and twenty-six miles from the frontier itself. At the turnout he should hide in the undergrowth and wait.

  Meanwhile two MI6 officers driving a diplomatic car would have set off from Moscow and spent the night in Leningrad. The precise timings were dictated, and complicated, by Soviet bureaucracy: official permission to travel had to be obtained two days before departure, and special export license plates needed to be attached to the diplomatic car. The garage performing this function was only open on Wednesdays and Fridays. If Gordievsky flew the signal on Tuesday, then the car paperwork could be completed by one o’clock on Friday afternoon and the MI6 team could depart later that day so as to arrive at the rendezvous site at exactly 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, a gap of just four days. They would drive into the turnout, as if intending to have a picnic. When the coast was clear, one of the officers would open the hood of his car: that would be Gordievsky’s signal to emerge from hiding. He would immediately climb into the trunk of the car, where he would be wrapped in a space blanket to deflect the infrared cameras and heat detectors believed to be deployed at Soviet borders, and given a tranquilizer pill. He would then be driven across the border into Finland.

  The escape plan was code-named PIMLICO.

  In MI6, as in most secret services, code names were in theory allocated randomly from an officially approved list. Usually they were real words, and deliberately anodyne in order to give no hint of what they referred to. But spies frequently cannot resist the temptation to choose words that resonate or offer some subtle, or less than subtle, clue to reality. The keeper of MI6’s code words was a secretary named Ursula (her real name). “You rang Ursula and asked her for the next name on the list. But if you didn’t like it you could go back and try to get her to give you a better one. Or you could get a whole set of code words for different aspects of the case, and then choose the one you liked best.” The wartime MI5 code name for Stalin (meaning “man of steel”) was GLYPTIC, meaning an image carved in stone; the Germans code-named Britain GOLFPLATZ, or golf course. Code words could even be used as a veiled insult. There was some snorting in Century House when a CIA cable accidentally revealed that the American code name for MI6 was UPTIGHT.

  PIMLICO sounded quintessentially British—and Britain was where, if it worked, Gordievsky would end up.

  At their next meeting Gordievsky listened politely as Guscott outlined PIMLICO. He studied the photographs of the rendezvous spot, and attended carefully to the arrangements for the escape signal at Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

  Gordievsky thought long and hard about Veronica Price’s escape plan, and then pronounced it completely unworkable.

  “It was a very interesting, imaginative plan for escape—but so complicated. There were so many details, unrealistic conditions for the signal site. I didn’t take it seriously.” He committed the plan to memory, and inwardly prayed that he would never have to remember it. Back in Century House, skeptics said PIMLICO would never work. “I took it very seriously,” Price later recalled. “A lot of others didn’t.”

  In June 1978, Mikhail Lyubimov ushered Gordievsky into his office at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen and told him he would soon be returning to Moscow. The end of his second, three-year posting in Denmark was no surprise, but it raised a number of issues, for his marriage, his career, and his espionage.

  Yelena, now fully aware of her husband’s long affair with a secretary, agreed to a divorce once they were back in Moscow. Leila’s job with the World Health Organization was also coming to an end, and she would be returning to Russia as well in a few months. Gordievsky wanted to remarry as soon as possible, but he was under no illusions about the impact a divorce would have on his career. Gordievsky had risen far and fast within the KGB, and at the age of forty he was now being considered for a major promotion, to the post of deputy head of the Third Department, with responsibility for Scandinavia. But he had made rivals and enemies along the way, and the puritanical backbiters at Moscow Center would be itching for an excuse to cut down the tall poppy. “They’ll go for you,” warned Lyubimov, speaking from personal experience. “Not only will they condemn you for the divorce, they’ll also accuse you of having had an affair en poste.” The rezident sent a report to Moscow commending Gordievsky as a “thorough, politically right-thinking officer, strong in all aspects, a good linguist, and a competent writer of reports.” Lyubimov also wrote a cover letter to the department head describing Gordievsky’s marital problems and urging leniency, in the hope this might “soften the blow.” Both men knew that, given the ferocious moralism of Moscow Center, he was probably heading back to a long stint in the doghouse.

  With his return to Moscow looming, and his professional future uncertain, Gordievsky might have taken this opportunity to end his career as a spy, and go to ground. MI6 had always made it clear that he could bail out and take sanctuary in the UK at any point. He might understandably have decided that, rather than return to the grim privations and repression of Soviet life, he would now like to defect to the West and, if possible, take his lover with him. But the possibility of defecting does not seem to have crossed his mind. He would go back to Russia, nurture in secret his newfound allegiance to Britain, gather what secrets he could, and bide his time.

  “What are your ambitions for your time in Moscow?” Guscott asked him.

  “I want to find out the most secret, the most important, the essential elements in the Soviet leadership,” Gordievsky replied. “I want to find out how the system works. I will not be able to find everything, because the Central Committee keeps secrets even from the KGB. But I will find whatever I can.” Here lay the essence of Gordievsky’s rebellion: to find out as much as he could about the system he loathed, the better to destroy it.

  Like long-distance running, successful espionage requires patience, stamina, and timing. Gordievsky’s next job was likely to be in the Third Department, covering Britain and Scandinavia. He would study the KGB from within, gathering whatever information might be useful to Britain and the West. Once any fuss about his divorce and remarriage subsided, he would probably resume his upward climb through the KGB ranks, as Lyubimov had done. Perhaps in as little as three years, he might land another foreign posting. He would pace himself during the next lap. Whatever might arise in Moscow, his commitment would continue. He would stay in the race.

  A spy deep within the KGB was the ultimate prize of every Western intelligence agency. But as the chief of the CIA, Richard Helms, observed, infiltrating an agent into the KGB was “as improbable as placing resident spies on the planet Mars.” The West had “very few Soviet agents inside the USSR worthy of the name,” which meant that “reliable intelligence of the enemy’s long-range plans and intentions [was] practically non-existent.” British intelligence now had an opportunity to exploit their man inside the KGB to the full, by extracting any and every secret he came across.

  Instead, MI6 decided to do the opposite.

  In an act of self-discipline and self-denial almost unique in intelligence history, Gordievsky’s spymasters did not encourage him to remain in contact in Moscow or try to feed back secrets. Instead, the agent runners of Century House opted to let their spy lie fallow. Once he was back in Moscow, Gordievsky would be left entirely alone.

  The reasoning was simple and flawless: in Russia, it would be impossible to run Gordievsky as he had been handled in Denmark. There was no safe house in Moscow, no friendly local intelligence service willing to watch his back, no reliable fallback should he be uncovered. The level of surveillance was too intense, with every British diplomat—and not just suspected intelligence officers—under constant watch. The history of r
unning agents in the Soviet Union proved that overeagerness was almost always fatal, as shown by Penkovsky’s grim demise. Sooner or later (and usually sooner) the spy was uncovered by the all-seeing state, captured, and liquidated.

  As one MI6 officer put it: “Oleg was too good to jeopardize. We had something so precious that we had to exercise restraint. There was enormous temptation to continue contact in the Soviet Union, but the Service lacked confidence that we would be able to do this sufficiently often and securely. There was a good chance that we would burn him up.”

  Guscott informed Gordievsky that MI6 would not seek to communicate with him in Moscow. There would be no attempt to set up clandestine meetings or harvest intelligence. But if Gordievsky needed to make contact, he could.

  At 11 a.m., on the third Saturday of every month, MI6 would send an officer to loiter under the clock in Moscow’s Central Market just off the Garden Ring Road, a bustling spot where a foreigner would not look out of place. Again, he or she would be carrying the Harrods bag and wearing some gray clothing. “The purpose of this was twofold: if Oleg just wanted reassurance that we were continuously looking out for his interests, he could see us but not make himself visible. If he wanted to make a brush contact and pass on a physical message, he would make himself visible by means of the gray cap and Safeway bag.”

  If he appeared with the bag and cap, then the brush contact plan went into a second phase. Three Sundays later, he should go to St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square and ascend the spiral staircase at the rear of the building at exactly 3 p.m. Again, for ease of recognition, he should wear his gray cap and gray trousers. An MI6 officer, probably a woman wearing a gray item of clothing and holding something gray in both hands, would time her descent from the upper floor, and in the constricted space, passing abreast, he could then pass her a written message.