The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  Guscott outlined the operational plan. If Oleg agreed, he would meet his MI6 case officers, at lunchtime, once a month, in this flat. The KGB station emptied out during the lunch hour, when the officers went to wine and dine their contacts (or, more precisely, themselves). Gordievsky’s absence would not be noticed.

  Guscott now handed him a key to a house between Kensington High Street and Holland Park. This was his refuge, a place where he could go to ground, with or without his family, the moment he sensed danger. If he wanted to cancel a meeting, needed to see an MI6 officer at short notice, or required emergency help of any sort, he should call the telephone number he had dialed on arrival. The switchboard was manned twenty-four hours a day, and an operator would direct the call to whichever of the team was on duty.

  Guscott offered one more, crucial, reassurance. The escape plan from Moscow, Operation PIMLICO, would be kept in readiness while he was in London. The KGB was generous in its holiday entitlement, and officers tended to return on annual leave for four weeks in the winter and up to six weeks in the summer. He might also be summoned back at short notice. Whenever he was in Moscow, MI6 officers would continue to check the signal sites at the bread shop on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the Central Market, looking out for a man with a Safeway bag. They would even do so when the spy was not in the country. The KGB closely watched all British diplomats in Moscow and bugged their apartments, while surveillance posts monitored their movements from the top of the Hotel Ukraine and the roof of the foreigners’ apartment block. Any deviation from routine might be noticed; if they regularly walked past the bread shop when Gordievsky was in Moscow, stopped doing so when he was absent, and started again when he returned, the pattern might just be detected. For several weeks on either side of his visits, MI6 would continue to monitor the site. Strict tradecraft required that the procedure for Operation PIMLICO be maintained for months, or years.

  The case had entered a new phase and was given a new code name: SUNBEAM became NOCTON (a village in Lincolnshire).

  MI6 had never run a KGB spy based in London before, and the situation raised novel challenges, not least the threat posed by its sister service, MI5. The Security Service was responsible for monitoring the movements of all suspected KGB officers in London. If Section A4, the MI5 surveillance team known as the “Watchers,” spotted Gordievsky attending a clandestine meeting at a suspicious location in Bayswater, they would undoubtedly investigate. But issuing a blanket order not to put Gordievsky under surveillance would clearly indicate that he was being protected. Either way, the security of the case could be fatally compromised. No operation of this importance could have been run in Britain without informing the Security Service. A decision was therefore taken to run the case jointly with MI5, and “indoctrinate” a handful of senior MI5 officers, including the director general: that way MI6 could be informed of the times when Gordievsky was under surveillance, and thus ensure that meetings took place without the Watchers observing.

  This collaboration between MI5 and MI6 was unprecedented. The two branches of British intelligence had not always seen eye to eye—perhaps unsurprisingly, since the task of catching spies and the job of running them are not necessarily compatible, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally in conflict. The two intelligence organizations had distinct traditions, codes of behavior, and techniques. The rivalry was deep, and often counterproductive. Historically, some in MI6 had tended to look down on the domestic Security Service as little more than a police outfit, lacking in imagination and verve; MI5, in turn, tended to view foreign-intelligence officers as flaky public school adventurers. Each regarded the other as “leaky.” The long investigation by MI5 into the MI6 officer Kim Philby had deepened the mutual suspicion into outright hostility. But for the purposes of NOCTON they would be working in tandem: MI6 would run Gordievsky day to day; a chosen few in MI5 would be kept abreast of developments and handle the security aspects of the case. The decision to widen the circle of secrecy outside MI6 represented a remarkable break with tradition, and a gamble. Information shared between MI6 and MI5 relating to Gordievsky was given the code name LAMPAD (an underworld nymph in Greek mythology). A tiny handful within MI6 knew of NOCTON; an even smaller number within MI5 knew of LAMPAD; the intersecting Venn diagram of MI6 and MI5 personnel who were privy to both numbered no more than a dozen people.

  With the terms of engagement agreed, and the tea cleared away, Gordievsky leaned forward and started to unload four years of accumulated secrets, a great tumbling screed of information gathered and committed to memory in Moscow: names, dates, places, plans, agents, and illegals. Guscott scribbled notes, and only occasionally interrupted to clarify some point. But Gordievsky needed little prompting. He steadily ran through his prodigious reservoir of memorized fact, step after step, lap after lap. The first meeting only skimmed the surface of Gordievsky’s memory, but as time passed and he relaxed, the secrets poured out of him, in a controlled, cathartic cascade.

  Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it. Gordievsky’s powers of recall were different. He was not just consistent, but progressive and accreting. “He added more and more details, at every meeting, gradually building up what we knew,” said Veronica Price. A photographic memory records a single, precise black-and-white image; Gordievsky’s memory was pointillist, a series of dots that, when joined up and filled in, created a massive canvas of vivid color. “Oleg had a great gift for remembering conversations. He recalled timing, context, wording…he wouldn’t be steered.” He had even memorized his conversations with other officers when he was assigned to night duty. As a highly trained intelligence officer, he knew what was likely to be of interest, and what was surplus. The information came ready-packaged and analyzed. “He had keen insights, a very good understanding of what it meant, which set him apart.”

  The meetings followed a set pattern, at first once a month, then fortnightly, then every week. Whenever the Russian arrived at the safe flat, Guscott and Price would be waiting with a warm welcome and a light lunch. “He was still suffering from culture shock, and working in a KGB station that was essentially hostile,” Guscott recalled. “He had piles of knowledge stored up. Our main aim was to ensure there was no withdrawal. We were very anxious to reassure him.”

  On September 1, 1982, Gordievsky arrived at the flat to find a third person waiting alongside Guscott and Price, a dapper, intense-looking young man with dark receding hair. Guscott introduced him, in Russian, as “Jack.” Gordievsky and James Spooner shook hands for the first time. Their rapport was immediate.

  James Spooner’s fluent Russian and operational skills made him the natural candidate to run the case when Guscott returned to Stockholm. He had been due to take up a new posting in Germany when he was asked to run NOCTON instead. “It took me about two minutes to say yes.” The agent and agent runner quietly appraised each other.

  “I had been carefully briefed, and he was exactly what I had expected,” said Spooner. “Young, vigorous, on the ball, disciplined, focused.” These were words that might have been used to describe Spooner himself. Both men had been steeped in intelligence throughout their adult lives; both viewed spycraft through the prism of history; they spoke the same language, figuratively and actually.

  “I never had any suspicion of him. Not a squeak,” said Spooner. “It’s hard to explain, but you just know what to trust and what not to trust. You exercise your judgement. Oleg was completely reliable, honest, and driven by the right motivations.”

  Gordievsky immediately recognized Spooner as a “first-class intelligence officer, but also truly kind, full of emotion and sensitivity, honest both personally and in his ethical principles.” He would later describe him as “the best minder I have ever had.”

  To Gordievsky, Britain still seemed “alien and unfamiliar,” but, as one meeting followed a
nother, the routine of regular contact with MI6 fell into a pattern. The Bayswater flat provided a haven, a refuge from the brutal infighting and paranoid antagonisms inside Guk’s KGB rezidentura. Veronica would prepare a meal from the local deli, usually picnic food, including occasional Russian delicacies such as pickled herring and beetroot, and a bottle of beer or two. Spooner always placed a tape recorder on the coffee table, backup in case the hidden eavesdropping technology failed, but also a statement of professionalism, a focus. The meetings lasted up to two hours, and at the end of each they made an arrangement for the next. Then Spooner would transcribe and translate their exchanges and write up a full report. He often worked late into the night, and from home to avoid drawing attention inside Century House: to disguise from MI6 colleagues what he was really up to, Spooner was said to be working on a case abroad, requiring foreign travel. His transcript would then become the quarry from which to mine individual reports for the various “customers”—each one, as was standard MI6 practice, dealing with only one subject area. One meeting might produce twenty reports, some as short as a single sentence. Responsibility for collating, analyzing, dividing, disguising, and distributing the NOCTON product fell to a special cell within MI6, led by a talented Cold War specialist.

  Gordievsky systematically excavated his memory, remembering, refining, and accumulating. After three months of debriefing, he had scoured his recollections for every detail: the result was the single largest “operational download” in MI6 history, an astonishingly meticulous and comprehensive insight into the KGB: its past, present, and future plans.

  One by one, Gordievsky exorcised the demons of MI6 history. Kim Philby was still working for the KGB, he explained, but as a part-time analyst, and certainly not the all-seeing mastermind imagined by the CIA’s James Angleton. For years, the British establishment had wondered if another spy like Philby lurked within its ranks, while the tabloids relentlessly hunted for the so-called “Fifth Man,” identifying numerous candidates and wrecking several careers and lives in the process. Peter Wright, the renegade MI5 officer and author of Spycatcher, had been obsessed with the theory that Roger Hollis, the former chief of MI5, was a Soviet mole, prompting a series of highly damaging internal investigations. Gordievsky laid that conspiracy theory to rest, definitively clearing Hollis’s name. The Fifth Man, he confirmed, was John Cairncross, a former MI6 officer who had confessed to being a Soviet agent back in 1964. The spectacle of the British tying themselves in knots over a fantasy provoked much baffled amusement in the Center, Gordievsky reported, and seemed so bizarre that the KGB suspected a plot. He described how Gennadi Titov himself, on reading yet another British newspaper account of the witch hunt, had asked: “Why is it they are speaking about Roger Hollis? Such nonsense, can’t understand it, it must be some special British trick directed against us.” The twenty-year mole hunt had been a fabulously destructive waste of time.

  Gordievsky’s research in the KGB archives unlocked other mysteries. A Soviet spy discovered back in 1946, code-named ELLI but never formally identified, was actually Leo Long, another former intelligence officer recruited to the Communist cause at Cambridge University before the war. The Italian nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who worked on Britain’s wartime atomic bomb research, had volunteered his services to the KGB seven years before he defected to the USSR in 1950. Gordievsky was also able to reveal that Arne Treholt, the Norwegian spy, was still active. Treholt had been part of Norway’s delegation to the United Nations in New York, and was now back in Norway, studying at the Joint Staff College with access to plenty of sensitive material—which he passed on to the KGB. The Norwegian security service had been monitoring Treholt ever since Gordievsky’s first tip-off in 1974, but had not yet pounced—partly at British urging, since it was feared that arresting him might direct suspicion onto their source, who had not been identified to the Norwegians. Now the noose began to tighten around Treholt.

  * * *

  A small group of senior MI6 officers gathered in Century House to hear the initial results of the debriefing from the NOCTON case officers. These were not demonstrative and emotional people, but there was an air of “excitement and anticipation” in the room. The grandees had expected to learn of a vast network of KGB agents in Britain, Communist spies like the Cambridge Five who had wormed their way into the establishment in order to destroy it from within. It was assumed that the KGB in 1982 must be as potent as ever. Gordievsky proved it was not.

  The discovery that the KGB had only a small handful of agents, contacts, and illegals in Britain, none seriously threatening, came as both a relief and a disappointment. Gordievsky had revealed how the KGB archives contained active files on Jack Jones, the trade union leader, and Bob Edwards, the Labour MP. He identified sympathetic “contacts” who had accepted KGB money or entertainment, such as Richard Gott, the Guardian journalist, and the elderly peace activist Fenner Brockway. But the spy hunters found they had little in the way of big game worth pursuing. There was one particular source of concern: Gordievsky had apparently never heard of Geoffrey Prime, an analyst at GCHQ, the branch of British intelligence dealing with communications and signals intelligence, who had just been arrested as a Soviet spy. If Gordievsky had seen all the files, why was there not one on Prime, who began spying for the USSR in 1968? The answer was simple: Prime had been run by KGB counterintelligence rather than the British-Scandinavian section.

  Gordievsky’s detailed depiction of the KGB operations in London, Scandinavia, and Moscow proved that the Soviet adversary was not the ten-foot giant of myth, but flawed, clumsy, and inefficient. The KGB of the 1970s was clearly not what it had been a generation earlier. The ideological fervor of the 1930s, which had seen the recruitment of so many committed agents, had been replaced by a terrified conformity, which produced a very different sort of spy. It remained vast, well funded, and ruthless, and it could still call on some of the brightest and best recruits. But its ranks now also included many time servers and bootlickers, lazy careerists with little imagination. The KGB was still a dangerous antagonist, but its vulnerabilities and deficiencies were now exposed. At the same time that the KGB was entering a period of decline, new life and ambition were beginning to animate Western intelligence. MI6 was emerging from the defensive crouch it had adopted during the debilitating spy scandals of the 1950s and 1960s.

  A tremor of confidence and excitement ran through the organization. This KGB could be beaten.

  But there was one aspect of the Gordievsky trove that made the top brass of British intelligence and security sit up and swallow, hard.

  Michael Foot’s dalliance with the KGB lay in the distant past. Gordievsky had been careful not to exaggerate the importance of Agent BOOT, and Geoffrey Guscott was clear in his assessment of the case: Foot had been used only for “disinformation purposes,” a long time ago; he was not a spy, or a “conscious agent,” in the accepted sense. But since 1980 he had been leader of the Labour opposition, challenging Margaret Thatcher for leadership of the country. He might become prime minister at the next general election, to be held at the latest by 1984. If his previous financial relationship with the KGB was revealed, it would destroy Foot’s credibility, end his chances of winning power, and possibly change the course of history. Many already considered him dangerously left-wing, but his contacts with the KGB would lend his ideological position an altogether more sinister tint. The truth was sufficiently damning to make Foot appear naive and foolish in the extreme. But in the heat of an election he could be made to look like a full-blown, paid-up KGB spy.

  “We were worried about the sensitivity of this knowledge and the need to avoid it being used for party-political reasons,” said Spooner. “There was a deep ideological division in the country, but we knew we had to keep this information out of the political mainstream. We were sitting on information that was massively open to misinterpretation.”

  The revelations about Foot had serious implications for national security. MI6 passed the evidence
to John Jones, director general of MI5. The Security Service would have to decide the next move. “It was their call.”

  As cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong was the head of the Civil Service, the senior policy adviser to the prime minister, and the official responsible for overseeing the intelligence services and their relationship to government. Politically neutral, the living embodiment of Whitehall probity, Armstrong had served as principal private secretary under both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. He was among Thatcher’s most trusted advisers. But that did not mean he told her everything.

  The director general of MI5 told Armstrong that Michael Foot had once been Agent BOOT, a paid contact of the KGB. They agreed that the information was far too politically incendiary to be passed on to the prime minister.

  When asked about this episode, many years later, Armstrong was deliberate and opaque, in the finest government tradition: “I knew that Michael Foot was thought to have had contacts with the KGB before he became leader of the Labour Party and that Tribune was believed to have received financial support from Moscow, probably from the KGB…Gordievsky confirmed this. I do not know how much of that was disclosed to the foreign secretary or to the prime minister.”

  Armstrong would later find himself the key witness in the “Spycatcher trial,” the British government’s failed attempt to block the publication of Peter Wright’s revelatory memoir. He coined the phrase “economical with the truth.” He certainly appears to have been most economical in distributing the truth about Michael Foot. He did not tell Margaret Thatcher or her other top advisers; he did not tell anyone in the Civil Service, the Conservative Party, or the Labour Party. He did not tell the Americans, or any other of Britain’s allies. He did not tell a soul.