They immersed themselves in the artistic life of the British capital, attending classical-music concerts, gallery openings, and theatrical performances. His spying for the West was, he believed, the act of a cultural dissident, not a turncoat: “Just as Shostakovich, the composer, fought back with music, and Solzhenitsyn, the writer, fought back with words, so I, the KGB man, could only operate through my own intelligence world.” He fought back with secrets.
Every morning, he would run in Holland Park. And every week or so, on a different, prearranged day, when MI5’s Watchers were known to be elsewhere, he would tell colleagues he was meeting a contact for lunch, climb into his car, and drive to the safe house in Bayswater. In the underground garage, he pulled a plastic cover over his car to conceal the diplomatic plates.
The Center no longer sent its instructions on microfilm, so Gordievsky found himself smuggling out physical documents before each meeting, sometimes in batches. He would wait until the office emptied before discreetly tucking the papers into a pocket. There were plenty to choose from. The different departments in the Center competed in making demands on the London rezidentura’s numerous personnel: twenty-three KGB officers within the embassy, another eight working undercover at the Soviet trade delegation, four more posing as journalists, as well as illegals and a separate posse of fifteen military-intelligence officers deployed by the GRU. “The Center churned out an immense volume of information, any of which I was at liberty to pass on.”
Once Gordievsky was inside the flat, Spooner debriefed him while Veronica Price made lunch and Sarah Page, an MI6 secretary of gentle charm and extreme efficiency, photographed any documents in the bedroom. After completing the excavation of Gordievsky’s memory, the focus shifted to current operations. “Quite quickly we were into live stuff,” said Spooner. “He would bring us up to date on everything that had happened in the intervening period: events, instructions, visits, local activity, conversations with rezidentura colleagues.” A trained observer, Oleg made mental notes of anything and everything that might be of use: instructions from the Center, the latest RYAN requests and reports, the activity of illegals and clues to their identities, targets of cultivation, agent recruitment, and staff changes. But he also brought gossip and rumor, tidbits revealing what his colleagues were thinking, plotting, and doing after hours, how much they were drinking, whom they were sleeping with, whom they wanted to sleep with. “You are an extra member of the KGB rezidentura,” Gordievsky told Spooner.
From time to time, Veronica Price would go over the details of Operation PIMLICO, in case he was suddenly recalled to Moscow and needed to escape. The exfiltration plan had undergone some important modifications since it was first conceived. Gordievsky was now a married man with two young children. MI6 would therefore provide not one escape car, but two; one adult and one child would be hidden in each trunk, and the girls would be injected with a strong soporific drug to make them sleep and reduce the trauma. To prepare for the time when he might have to drug his own daughters at the moment of exfiltration, Veronica Price produced a syringe and an orange for him to practice administering injections. Every few months, he would weigh his daughters, the weights would be reported to the MI6 station in Moscow, and the dosage in the waiting syringes would be adjusted accordingly.
The case developed its own rhythm, yet the tension was relentless. After one meeting at the safe flat, Oleg went to retrieve his car from nearby Connaught Street (for once he had decided not to park in the underground garage). As he was about to step off the pavement he saw, to his horror, Guk’s ivory Mercedes gliding toward him down the road with the fat rezident at the wheel. Thinking he had been spotted, Gordievsky broke into a sweat and immediately began inventing reasons to explain what he was doing in a residential neighborhood away from the embassy. But Guk, it seems, had not seen him.
Only three politicians were brought into the circle of trust. Margaret Thatcher was indoctrinated into the NOCTON case on December 23, 1982, fully six months after Gordievsky’s arrival in Britain. The raw intelligence was placed in a special red folder, known as a “red jacket,” and placed inside a locked blue box to which only the prime minister, her foreign adviser, and her private secretary had the key. Thatcher was informed that MI6 had an agent within the KGB’s London station. She did not know his name. William Whitelaw, her home secretary, was informed a month later. The only other cabinet minister in the know was the foreign secretary. The NOCTON material, most notably Operation RYAN, made a “powerful impression” on Geoffrey Howe when he took up that post: “The Soviet leadership really did believe the bulk of their own propaganda. They did have a genuine fear that ‘the West’ was plotting their overthrow—and might, just might, go to any lengths to achieve it.”
But while Gordievsky’s espionage for MI6 prospered mightily, his work for the KGB was bogging down. Guk and Nikitenko, the rezident and his deputy, were openly hostile. Igor Titov, his immediate boss, was consistently unfriendly. But not all of his colleagues were paranoid philistines. Some were highly perceptive. Maksim Parshikov, a fellow PR Line officer in his thirties, was the son of a Leningrad artist who shared many of Gordievsky’s cultural tastes. They listened to classical music on Radio 3 while working at adjacent desks in the political section. Parshikov found his colleague “agreeable and intelligent, with an education and a level of culture that set him apart.” When Parshikov caught a cold, Gordievsky introduced him to the nasal decongestant Otrivin, which he had recently discovered in a British pharmacy. “We were united in our love of classical music, and Otrivin,” Parshikov wrote. Yet he sensed Gordievsky’s internal anxiety: “For me and others who were close to Oleg during his first months in London, it was obvious that something serious and uneasy was happening in his life—he seemed extremely nervous and under pressure.” There was something different about the new man, a tense reserve. As Parshikov said:
The leadership of the rezidentura disliked him from the start. He did not drink in the usual way, he was too intellectual, he was not “one of us.” Imagine a typical party, to mark a Soviet holiday, in a small central room of the residency. Everything is as it should be: on the table are sandwiches and fruit, vodka and whisky for the men, a bottle of wine for the few ladies. Toasts are drunk, one by one, starting with the rezident. Gordievsky voluntarily assumes the role of butler, obligingly filling every empty glass, except his own, which contains only red wine. He never really fraternized. Some found it weird. But I thought: what the hell, you come across different people in our ranks. The wife of one officer could not stand Gordievsky. She could not explain the reason for her dislike, but she thought Oleg somehow “wrong,” “unnatural,” with “two faces.”
Parshikov paid little attention to the bad-mouthing. “I was too lazy to get involved with slandering my nice colleague in the rezidentura.” Gordievsky’s main problem, Parshikov reflected, was his failing job performance. His English was still poor. He seemed to head off to lunch with some regularity, but came back with little new information. Within months of his arrival, a whispering campaign had begun in the gossip-soaked rezidentura to the effect that Oleg was not up to the job.
Gordievsky knew he was floundering. He had inherited a number of contacts from his predecessor in the PR Line, but these provided no useful intelligence. He contacted a European diplomat identified by the Center as an agent, and found that “although he was prepared to eat large meals, he never told me anything of the slightest interest.” Another individual identified for possible recruitment was Ron Brown, the Labour MP for Edinburgh Leith, a former trade union organizer who had attracted the KGB’s attention by his vocal support for Communist regimes in Afghanistan, Albania, and North Korea. He was frequently in trouble with the parliamentary authorities for rowdy behavior, and would eventually be expelled from the Labour Party after stealing his mistress’s underwear and wrecking her flat. Born in Leith, Brown had a Scottish accent as thick as porridge. He was colorful, convivial, and, to Russian ears, almost completely incompr
ehensible. Gordievsky, who had difficulty enough following the Received English pronunciation of the BBC, took Brown out to lunch on several occasions, and sat nodding intelligently, grasping one word in ten, while the Scotsman burbled away in his native brogue. “For all I understood, he could have been talking Arabic or Japanese.” Back at the rezidentura, Gordievsky wrote up a report that was pure fabrication, based on what he thought the Scot might have said. Brown may have been leaking top-grade secrets; but, equally, he might have been talking about football. Brown’s guilt, or innocence, remains a historical mystery, hidden forever behind his impenetrable Scottish accent.
Reviving and consolidating old contacts was as frustrating as trying to find new ones. Bob Edwards was nearly eighty, the oldest sitting MP, an unrepentant friend of the KGB who was happy to chat about the old days but had very little to reveal about the new ones. Gordievsky also reestablished contact with Jack Jones, the former trade union leader, and met him in his flat. Long retired, Jones was delighted to accept lunch and occasional disbursements of cash, but as an informant he was “absolutely useless.” The Center frequently identified prominent “progressives,” such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament campaigner Joan Ruddock and the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, in the belief that with the right approach they might spy for the Soviets. In this, as in so much else, the KGB was mistaken. For weeks, Gordievsky floated around the fringes of the Labour Party, the peace movement, the British Communist Party, and the trade unions, trying and failing to cultivate new contacts. After six months, he had little to show for his efforts.
The rezidentura’s chief analyst, another of Guk’s cronies, was scathing about Gordievsky’s work, and began complaining that the new man was an incompetent dud. Gordievsky confided to Parshikov that he was afraid to return to Moscow on annual leave, fearing that “he might be criticized for his poor performance.” The Center was unsympathetic: “Stop panicking and keep working.”
Gordievsky was in trouble: disliked by the rezident, unpopular within the embassy, and struggling to make an impression in a new post, a new language, and a new city. He was also so busy gathering information for the British there was insufficient time to devote to his KGB day job.
Gordievsky’s problems in his day job presented MI6 with an unexpected and alarming dilemma. If he was sent home, the West’s most important spy case would come to a halt just as it was beginning to produce intelligence of world-changing importance. The case depended on Gordievsky’s professional progress, because the more he succeeded in the eyes of the KGB, the better his promotion prospects, and the wider his access to useful material. His KGB career needed a boost. MI6 decided to bring this about in two, unprecedented ways: by doing the spy’s homework for him, and by disposing of those who stood in his way.
Martin Shawford, a young MI6 officer in the NOCTON cell within the Soviet branch, was assigned the task of making Gordievsky look good in the eyes of his peers and bosses. Speaking Russian and newly returned from a posting in Moscow, Shawford handled political reporting from the case. He began to pull together information that Gordievsky could pass off as his own and feed back to the KGB: enough to convince the Center that he was an expert in gathering political intelligence, but not so good that it might actually prove useful to the Soviets. In spy jargon such information is known as “chicken feed,” genuine but not seriously damaging information that can be given to an enemy to establish an agent’s bona fides, bulky, filling, but lacking in any real nutritional value. British intelligence had become expert in manufacturing chicken feed during the Second World War, passing vast quantities of carefully monitored information through double agents to their German handlers: some true, some half true, and some false but undetectably so. Shawford combed open-source information such as magazines and newspapers for nuggets of information Gordievsky could have gleaned from contacts or other sources: summaries of the situation in apartheid South Africa, the state of the Anglo-American relationship, or internal gossip from the Conservative Party gathered on the fringes of party conferences. With some imagination, these could be made to seem like gathered intelligence. “We needed material he could feed back into the rezidentura to justify his absences, his meetings, and so on. It was important to build up his credibility and justify his movements. We knew what sort of chitchat he might be picking up from the sort of people he knew.” MI6’s demands for releasable material were such that K6, the MI5 department responsible for the case, struggled to keep up. “This caused almost the only friction between the services in the history of the Gordievsky case.” Shawford would type up a three-quarter-page summary every week, which Gordievsky took back to the rezidentura, translated into KGB language, added a few details of his own, and handed to the bosses. The original MI6 crib sheet he tore into shreds and washed down the toilet.
But feeding Oleg chicken feed was only one way of fattening up his career prospects. In order to convince his superiors that he was working well, Gordievsky needed to meet real people who could supply him with genuine, though valueless, information. Simply offering reams of information without a named source would eventually invite suspicion. Gordievsky needed his own “confidential contacts.” So MI6 gave him some.
Within MI5, Department K4 handled counterespionage against Soviet targets, identifying, monitoring, tailing, and whenever possible neutralizing spies active in Britain—KGB and GRU officers, their recruits, and illegals. This frequently involved the use of “access agents,” people in civilian life who could make contact with a suspected spy, gain his confidence, draw him out, extract information, and pretend to be sympathetic and available for recruitment. If the spy revealed himself, he could be arrested if he was an illegal or expelled if he was in Britain under diplomatic cover. But the ultimate aim of any such operation was to lure a spy into complicity and then persuade him, by inducement or threat, to spy against the Soviet Union. These access agents, also known as “controlled contacts,” were ordinary men and women, secretly recruited by K4 to lend a hand in the unseen espionage battle. They were, in effect, dangles; they were also, by definition, the sorts of people a Soviet intelligence officer might want to recruit. In the early 1980s, K4 was simultaneously running dozens of cases against Soviet targets, using scores of undercover access agents.
The striking, tall, dark-haired figure of Rosemary Spencer was a familiar sight in Conservative Central Office, the nerve center of the Tory Party based at 32 Smith Square, in the heart of Westminster. Miss Spencer, forty-two years old, worked in the international section of the research department, and had helped to draw up the Franks Report into the Falklands War. People said, rather unkindly, that she was married to the party. She was convivial, clever, possibly rather lonely, and just the kind of well-informed member of the political establishment that the KGB encouraged its officers to recruit. Her Conservative colleagues would have been staggered to discover that the jolly single woman in the research department was really an undercover agent for MI5.
Gordievsky first encountered Rosemary Spencer at a party in Westminster. Their meeting was not accidental. He had been told to look out for a vivacious Tory researcher. She had been warned that she might be approached by a KGB officer posing as a Russian diplomat, and if so she should encourage the relationship. They met for lunch. Gordievsky was at his most charming. He knew she was an MI5 access agent. She knew he was KGB. She did not know he was actually working for MI6. They lunched again. And then again. Rosemary’s MI5 handler advised her on what information she might pass over, nothing too sensitive, but items of interest from her work, snippets of insider Tory gossip, morsels of chicken feed. These Gordievsky typed up into a report, which included not just what Rosemary had told him, but other information, supplied by MI6, that a well-connected member of the Conservative Party might have told him. The KGB was duly impressed: Gordievsky was cultivating an important new source inside the Conservative Central Office, who might eventually develop into a confidential contact, or even an agent.
The relationship
between Gordievsky and Spencer became a solid friendship, but it was also one of deception. She believed she was deceiving him; and he was deceiving her by allowing her to think that. He was using her to improve his standing within the KGB. She thought she was striking a blow against the Soviet Union. Here was another example of the combined trickery and tenderness inherent in espionage: a friendship between a British Tory researcher and a Russian Soviet diplomat, both of whom were secret spies. They were lying to each other, with genuine affection.
Within the KGB rezidentura, Gordievsky’s stock rose rapidly. Even Guk seemed to be warming to him. Reports to the Center were signed by the rezident, and Gordievsky’s work was beginning to make Guk look good. Parshikov noticed a marked change in Gordievsky’s demeanor. “He began to get used to the team, to build relationships with people.” He seemed more confident and relaxed. One person who did not appreciate Gordievsky’s success was his immediate superior, Igor Titov. The head of the PR Line had always regarded his subordinate as a threat, and Gordievsky’s knowledgeable reports and new raft of sources redoubled his determination to stymie his underling’s chances of promotion. Gordievsky was on the way up. But Titov was in the way. So MI6 removed him.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 18