The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  The CIA’s Junior Officer Training course was intended to inspire patriotic devotion to duty in the complex and demanding world of intelligence gathering. But it could have other effects. Ames learned that morality can be malleable; the laws of the United States overrode those of other countries; and a greedy spy was worth more than an ideological one, because “once you had the money hooks in, it was easier to hold them and play them.” Agent recruitment, Ames came to believe, depended on “the ability to assess a person’s vulnerability.” Once you knew a man’s weakness, you could snare and manipulate him. Disloyalty was not a sin, but an operational tool. “The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust,” Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.

  Ames was posted to Turkey, a center for the espionage war between East and West, and began putting his training into practice by recruiting Soviet agents in Ankara. Ames decided he was a natural spymaster, with “the ability to focus on a target, establish a relationship, [and] manipulate myself and him into the situation I aimed for.” His bosses, however, considered his performance no more than “satisfactory.” After the Prague Spring, he was instructed to paste up hundreds of posters at night with the slogan: “Remember ’68”—to give the impression that the Turkish population was outraged by the Soviet invasion. He dumped the posters in a bin and went for a drink.

  Returning to Washington in 1972, Ames took a training course in Russian, and spent the next four years working in the Soviet–East European Department. The ship he joined was not a happy one. The revelation that Richard Nixon had used the CIA to try to obstruct a federal investigation into the Watergate burglary in 1972 triggered a crisis within the agency and a series of investigations into its activities over the preceding twenty years. The resulting reports, known as the “Family Jewels,” identified a damning litany of illegal actions far outside the CIA’s charter, including wiretapping of journalists, burglaries, assassination plots, experimentation on humans, collusion with the Mafia, and systematic domestic surveillance of civilians. James Angleton, the CIA’s cadaverous, orchid-collecting counterintelligence chief, had almost destroyed the CIA with his internal mole hunts, based on the obsessive and erroneous belief that Kim Philby was orchestrating the mass penetration of Western intelligence. Angleton was finally forced to retire in 1974, leaving behind a legacy of profound paranoia. The CIA was also falling behind in the spy war: “Thanks to the excessive zeal of Angleton and his counterintelligence staff, we had very few Soviet agents inside the USSR worthy of the name,” said Robert M. Gates, who was recruited at around the same time as Ames and went on to head the CIA. The agency would undergo wholesale reform over the next decade, but Ames had joined when it was at its lowest ebb: demoralized, disorganized, and widely distrusted.

  In 1976 he was moved to New York to try to recruit Soviet agents, and then posted on to Mexico City in 1981. The CIA noted his drinking, as well as a tendency to procrastinate and complain, but there was never any suggestion he should be fired. After nearly twenty years in the CIA he understood the workings of the agency, but his career was stagnating, for which he blamed everybody else. His attempts to recruit agents in Mexico yielded little, and he regarded most of his colleagues, and all of his superiors, as idiots. “Much of what I was doing was for nothing,” he admitted. Ames had married a fellow intelligence officer, Nancy Segebarth, swiftly and with too little thought. His marriage, like Gordievsky’s first, turned out to be chilly and childless. Nan did not come with him to Mexico City. He had a number of unsatisfying affairs with women he did not much like.

  By mid-1982 Ames was slipping into a rut: disgruntled, lonely, peevish, and unfulfilled, but too lazy and boozy to do anything to arrest the slide. Then Rosario came into his life, and the lights came on.

  Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy was the cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy. Born into an impoverished aristocratic Colombian family of French origin, Rosario was twenty-nine, well read, flirtatious, and vivacious, with curly dark hair and a flashing smile. “She was like a breath of fresh air entering a room stale with cigar smoke,” said one State Department employee in Mexico City. She was also immature, needy, and greedy. Her family had once owned large country estates. She had been educated at the finest private schools, and had studied in Europe and the United States. She was a member of the Colombian elite. But the family was broke. “I grew up around people with wealth,” she once said. “But we never had it.” Rosario intended to rectify that.

  She met Rick Ames at a diplomatic dinner party. They sat on the floor eagerly discussing modern literature, and then went back to his flat. Rosario thought Ames was a regular American diplomat, and therefore probably reasonably rich. Rick found her “brilliant and beautiful,” and swiftly decided he was in love. “Sex between us was fantastic,” he said.

  Rosario’s enthusiasm may have dimmed a little when she discovered that her new American lover was already married, impecunious, and a CIA spy. “What are you doing with these creeps?” she demanded. “Why are you wasting your time, your talents?” Ames promised he would divorce Nan as soon as possible and marry Rosario. Then they would start a new life together back in the US, and “live happily ever after.” For a man on a paltry CIA salary, this was a costly promise: divorcing Nan was likely to be expensive, and taking on Rosario, with her extravagant tastes, could be ruinous. He told Rosario he would quit the CIA and start another career, but at the age of forty-one he had neither the inclination nor the energy to do so. Instead, somewhere in Rick Ames’s unquiet mind, a plan was forming to make his underpaid and unsatisfying job at the CIA a lot more lucrative.

  * * *

  While Aldrich Ames was making plans for a profitable new future, on the other side of the world a stocky man in a peaked leather cap slipped out of the Soviet embassy at Number 13, Kensington Palace Gardens, in London, and headed west toward Notting Hill Gate. After a few hundred yards he doubled back, turned right down one road, and swiftly left down another before entering a pub and, a minute later, walking out through a side door. Finally, in a side street, he entered a red telephone box, closed the heavy door, and dialed the number he had been given in Copenhagen four years earlier.

  “Hello! Welcome to London,” said the recorded voice of Geoffrey Guscott, in Russian. “Thank you so much for calling. We look forward to seeing you. Meanwhile take a few days to relax and settle in. Let’s be in touch at the beginning of July.” The recording invited him to call back on the evening of July 4. The sound of Guscott’s voice was “immensely reassuring.”

  MI6 had been running Oleg Gordievsky for eight years; it now had an eager, experienced spy implanted inside the KGB’s London station, and it was not going to blow the case by moving too fast.

  Oleg and his family had settled quickly into their two-bedroom flat in a building entirely occupied by Soviet embassy staff on Kensington High Street. Leila was entranced by her unfamiliar new surroundings, but Gordievsky felt an unexpected twinge of disappointment. Britain had been his goal ever since his recruitment by Richard Bromhead, and the place had taken on an aura of glamour and sophistication in his imagination that it could never match in reality. London was a lot dirtier than Copenhagen, and not much cleaner than Moscow. “I had imagined that everything would be much tidier and more attractive.” Still, he reflected, simply getting to the UK was “a mighty victory, for British intelligence and for me.” MI6 would undoubtedly know he had arrived, but he waited a few days before making contact, just in case he was under KGB surveillance.

  The morning after his arrival, Gordievsky walked the quarter mile to the Soviet embassy, presented his brand-new pass to the doorman, and was escorted to the KGB rezidentura: a cramped, smoky, fortified enclave on the top floor, rigid with mistrust and ruled over by an obsessively suspicious chief who went by the blunt and unmusical name of Guk.

  General Arkadi Vasilyevich Guk, nominally first secretary at t
he Soviet embassy but in reality the KGB rezident, had arrived in Britain two years earlier, and made a point of refusing to assimilate. Fiercely ignorant, brutally ambitious, and frequently drunk, he dismissed any form of cultural interest as intellectual pretension, and entirely rejected all books, films, plays, art, and music. Guk had come to prominence in the KGB’s counterintelligence (KR) directorate by liquidating nationalist opposition to Soviet rule in the Baltic states. He was an advocate and connoisseur of assassination, and liked to boast that he had offered to liquidate a number of renegades who had fled to the West, including Stalin’s daughter and the chairman of the Jewish Defense League in New York. He ate only Russian food, in vast amounts, and barely spoke any English. Before coming to London, he had been head of the municipal KGB station in Moscow. In contrast to Mikhail Lyubimov, he hated Britain and the British. But most of all he loathed the Soviet ambassador, Viktor Popov, an educated, slightly foppish diplomat who represented everything Guk despised. The KGB chief spent much of his time closeted in his office, drinking vodka and chain-smoking, bitching about Popov and trying to think of new ways to undermine him. Much of the information he sent back to Moscow was pure invention, cleverly framed to feed Moscow’s rampant conspiracy theories—such as the idea that the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), the new grouping formed in March 1981, had been created by the CIA. Gordievsky summed up his new boss as “a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain and a large reserve of low cunning.”

  Rather more intelligent, but also more menacing, was Leonid Yefremovitch Nikitenko, the head of counterintelligence, Guk’s principal confidant. He was handsome, charming when he felt like it, and cold-blooded. He had deep-set, yellowish eyes, which missed very little. Early on, Nikitenko had decided that the way to get ahead in London was to pander to Guk, but he was a skilled counterintelligence officer, methodical and devious, and after three years’ experience in London he had learned much about the ways of British intelligence. “There is no business like it,” Nikitenko declared, reflecting on his work combating MI5 and MI6. “We are politicians. We are soldiers. And, above all, we are actors on a wonderful stage. I cannot think of a better business than the intelligence business.” If anyone was going to make problems for Gordievsky, it was Nikitenko.

  The head of the PR Line, Gordievsky’s immediate superior, was Igor Fyodorovich Titov (no relation to Gennadi), a balding, chain-smoking martinet with an insatiable taste for Western pornographic magazines, which he bought in Soho and sent to Moscow in the diplomatic bag as gifts for his KGB cronies. Titov was not officially on the embassy diplomatic staff but worked under journalistic cover, as a correspondent for the Russian weekly New Times. Gordievsky had gotten to know Titov in Moscow, and considered him “a truly evil man.”

  The three bosses were waiting for Gordievsky in the rezident’s office. Their handshakes were tepid, the greetings formulaic. Guk immediately took against the newcomer on the grounds that he appeared cultured. Nikitenko eyed him with the reserve of a man trained to trust nobody. And Titov saw his new subordinate as a potential rival. The KGB was an intensely tribal community: both Guk and Nikitenko were products of Line KR, with an ingrained counterintelligence mind-set, and therefore instinctively regarded the newcomer as a threat, who had “elbowed his way” into a job for which he was barely qualified.

  Paranoia is born of propaganda, ignorance, secrecy, and fear. The KGB’s London station in 1982 was one of the most profoundly paranoid places on earth, an organization imbued with a siege mentality largely based on fantasy. Since the KGB devoted enormous time and effort to spying on foreign diplomats in Moscow, it assumed MI5 and MI6 must be doing the same in London. In reality, although the Security Service certainly monitored and shadowed suspected KGB operatives, the surveillance was nothing near as intensive as the Russians imagined.

  The KGB, however, was convinced that the entire Soviet embassy was the target of a gigantic and sustained eavesdropping campaign, and the fact that this snooping was invisible confirmed that the British must be very good at it. The Nepalese and Egyptian embassies next door were assumed to be “listening posts,” and officers were banned from speaking near the adjoining walls; unseen spies with telephoto lenses were thought to be tracking everyone entering or leaving the building; the British, it was said, had built a special tunnel under Kensington Palace Gardens in order to install bugging equipment beneath the embassy; electric typewriters were banned, on the grounds that the sound of tapping might be picked up and deciphered, and even manual typewriters were discouraged in case the keystrokes gave something away; there were notices on every wall warning: DON’T SAY NAMES OR DATES OUT LOUD; the windows were all bricked up, except in Guk’s office, where miniature radio speakers pumped canned Russian music into the space between the panes of the double glazing, emitting a peculiar muffled warble that added to the surreal atmosphere. All secret conversations took place in a metal-lined, windowless room in the basement, which was dank all year round and roasting in summer. Ambassador Popov, with his offices on the middle floor, believed (probably rightly) that the KGB had inserted bugging devices through his ceiling to listen in on his conversations. Guk’s personal obsession was the London Underground system, which he never entered since he was convinced that certain advertising panels in Tube stations contained two-way mirrors, through which MI5 was tracking the KGB’s every move. Guk went everywhere in his ivory-colored Mercedes.

  Gordievsky now found himself working inside a miniature Stalinist state, sealed off from the rest of London, an enclosed world of roiling distrust, petty jealousies, and backbiting. “The envy, the vicious thinking, the underhand attacks, the intrigues, the denunciations, all these were on a scale that made the Center in Moscow seem like a girls’ school.”

  The KGB station was a truly nasty place to work. But then the KGB, in Gordievsky’s mind, was no longer his primary employer.

  On July 4, 1982, Gordievsky called the MI6 number again, from a different phone booth. The switchboard, alerted in advance, immediately routed the call to a desk on the twelfth floor. This time Geoffrey Guscott answered in person. Their conversation was joyful, but brisk and practical: a proposed rendezvous at 3 p.m. the following afternoon in a place where, it was calculated, Russian spies were most unlikely to be lurking.

  The Holiday Inn on Sloane Street had a good claim to be London’s most boring hotel. Its sole distinction was to host the annual Slimmer of the Year competition.

  At the appointed hour, Gordievsky entered the swinging doors and immediately spotted Guscott across the lobby. Beside him sat an elegant woman in her early fifties with neat blond hair and sensible shoes. Veronica Price had worked on the case for five years, but had only ever seen Gordievsky in blurred photographs and passport snaps. She nudged Guscott and whispered: “There he is!” Guscott thought the forty-three-year-old Gordievsky had aged in the intervening years, but he appeared fit. A “slight smile” crossed the Russian’s face as he spotted his English handler. Guscott and Price rose to their feet and, without making eye contact, made their way down the corridor leading to the back of the hotel. As agreed, Gordievsky followed them out through the back door, across the tarmac, and up one flight of stairs to the first floor of the hotel parking garage. A beaming Guscott was waiting beside a car, with the back door open. Price had parked it the night before for a quick getaway, beside the stairway door but near the exit ramp. The car was a Ford, specially purchased for the purposes of the pickup, with a license plate untraceable back to MI6.

  Only when the spy was safely inside did they exchange greetings. Guscott and Gordievsky sat in the back, speaking rapid Russian, two old friends catching up on family news, while Price drove, steering confidently through the light traffic. Guscott explained that he had returned to London from abroad in order to welcome Gordievsky, make plans for the future, and arrange his handover to a new case officer. The Russian nodded. They passed Harrods and the Victoria and Albert Museum, crossed Hyde Park, turned into the forecourt of
a new block of flats in Bayswater, and drove into an underground parking garage.

  Veronica had spent weeks scouting West London with oblivious estate agents before finding the right safe house. The one-bedroom flat on the third floor of a modern block was screened from the street by a line of trees. The exit from the underground garage led directly into the building: anyone attempting to follow Gordievsky might see his car drive in, but would be unable to tell which flat he had entered. A gate from the rear garden led into a side street, offering an emergency escape route through the back of the building and into Kensington Palace Gardens. The flat was sufficiently far from the Soviet embassy to make it unlikely that Gordievsky would be randomly spotted by other KGB officers, but near enough for him to drive there, park, meet his case officers, and return to Kensington Palace Gardens—all within two hours. A nearby delicatessen could supply gastronomic backup. Price insisted: “The flat had to have a nice atmosphere, a certain status. Some shabby place in Brixton wouldn’t do.” It was furnished with tasteful modern furniture. It was also bugged.

  Once they were seated in the sitting room, Price bustled around, laying out tea. Female case officers were virtually unknown in the KGB, and Gordievsky had never met a woman quite like Price. “He took to her at once,” Guscott observed. “Oleg had an eye for the women.” This was also his first experience of a formal English tea. Like many people of her age and class, Price regarded tea as a sacred patriotic ritual. Guscott introduced her as “Jean.” Her face, Gordievsky reflected, “seemed to embody all the traditional British qualities of decency and honor.”