In March 1983, Igor Titov was declared persona non grata in the UK, and ordered to leave the country immediately. Gordievsky was informed in advance of the plan to throw out his boss. To deflect suspicion, two GRU officers were simultaneously expelled, for “activities incompatible with their diplomatic status,” the accepted euphemism for espionage. Titov was enraged. “I am no spy,” he lied to reporters. Few in the KGB station were sorry to see him go, and fewer were surprised. The preceding months had seen a flurry of spy expulsions in Western countries, and there was ample evidence to indicate Titov was an active KGB officer.
With Titov eliminated, Gordievsky was the obvious candidate to succeed him as head of political intelligence. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
MI6’s ruse to bump their spy up the KGB ranks worked perfectly. By the middle of 1983, he had been transformed from an unpopular failure in danger of losing his job into the rising star of the rezidentura, with a burgeoning reputation for recruiting agents and gathering intelligence. And his manufactured promotion had been achieved without raising a flicker of suspicion. As Parshikov observed: “It all seemed quite natural.”
As chief of political intelligence in the rezidentura, Gordievsky now had access to the PR Line files and was able to confirm what MI6 already suspected: Soviet penetration of the British establishment was pitiful, with just half a dozen people classed as “recruited agents” (mostly very old) and perhaps a dozen “confidential contacts” (mostly very minor). Many were merely “paper agents,” who were “kept on the books in order to make officers look busy to Moscow.” There was no new Philby hidden in the woodwork. More positively, Gordievsky’s new position gave him increased insight into the workings of other departments, or lines: Line X (scientific and technical), Line N (illegals), and Line KR (counterintelligence and security). Piece by piece, Gordievsky was cracking open the secrets of the KGB and passing them on to MI6.
Yet another source of information became available when Leila joined the KGB station as a part-time employee. Arkadi Guk needed another secretary. Leila was a fast and efficient typist. She was told to put her children into morning nursery and report for work at the rezidentura. Henceforth, she would be typing Guk’s reports. Leila was in awe of the rezident. “He was a peacock. To be a KGB general, that was really something. I never asked questions, just typed what I was told to type.” She did not notice how closely her husband was listening when, over dinner, she would describe her day, the reports she had typed up for the boss, and the gossip among the secretaries.
Parshikov noted how happy his newly elevated boss seemed, and how generous. “Guys, spend money on entertainment expenses,” Gordievsky told his subordinates. “This year we spent very little on entertainment and gifts for contacts. If you don’t, next year the allowance will be cut.” It was a call to fiddle their expenses, and some of his colleagues needed no second invitation.
Gordievsky had every reason to feel contented and confident. He was rising up the ranks. His position was secure. His intelligence haul was landing, regularly, on the desk of the British prime minister, and he was attacking, from within, the Communist system he loathed. What could go wrong?
On April 3, 1983, Easter Sunday, Arkadi Guk returned to his flat in 42 Holland Park and found an envelope had been pushed through the letterbox. It contained a top-secret document: the MI5 legal brief outlining the case for expelling Titov and the two GRU men the previous month, including details of how all three had been identified as Soviet intelligence officers. In an accompanying note, the writer offered to provide more secrets, and gave elaborate instructions on how to contact him. It was signed “Koba,” one of Stalin’s early nicknames.
Someone inside British intelligence was offering to spy for the Soviet Union.
A KGB family. Anton and Olga Gordievsky, with their two younger children, Marina and Oleg (around age ten).
The Gordievsky siblings. Vasili, Marina, and Oleg, in about 1955.
Moscow Institute of International Relations track team. Gordievsky, far left; Stanislaw “Standa” Kaplan, second from the right. Kaplan, a future Czechoslovakian intelligence officer, would defect to the West and play a key role in the recruitment of his old university friend.
Long-distance runner training on the shores of the Black Sea.
Oleg Gordievsky in his student days at Moscow’s elite Institute of International Relations, where he was first recruited by the KGB.
Anton Gordievsky in the KGB uniform he habitually wore. “The Party is always right,” he insisted.
Vasili Gordievsky, a highly successful KGB “illegal,” who operated undercover in Europe and Africa, and drank himself to death at the age of thirty-nine.
The Lubyanka. The KGB headquarters known as “the Center”; part prison, part archive, and the nerve center of Soviet intelligence.
Oleg Gordievsky in KGB uniform: an ambitious, loyal, and highly trained officer.
The construction of the Berlin Wall, August 1961. The spectacle of the physical barrier being erected between East and West made a profound impression on the twenty-two-year-old Gordievsky.
The Prague Spring, 1968. A lone protestor defies a Soviet tank. Gordievsky was appalled when 200,000 Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the reform movement.
Covert surveillance photographs of Gordievsky taken by the Danish intelligence service (PET) during his postings to Copenhagen. For years, these were the only images available to MI6 of the Russian intelligence officer code-named SUNBEAM.
Playing badminton doubles with an unidentified partner in Copenhagen. The KGB officer was first directly approached by MI6 while on the badminton court.
On the Baltic coast with Mikhail Lyubimov, the KGB rezident in Copenhagen and Gordievsky’s close friend and patron.
Traveling in Denmark with Lyubimov (standing); his wife, Tamara (left); and Gordievsky’s first wife, Yelena (right).
Scandinavian spies (next three images).
Arne Treholt (left), rising star of the Norwegian Labor Party, with his KGB handler Gennadi “the Crocodile” Titov (center), on the way to one of their fifty-nine lunches.
Stig Bergling, the Swedish policeman and security service officer who became a Soviet spy in 1973.
Gunvor Galtung Haavik, the inconspicuous secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs who spied for the KGB for more than thirty years under the code name GRETA. Seen here immediately after her arrest in 1977.
A handwritten message from Ames to his KGB handlers, arranging a “dead drop” of intelligence information.
Aldrich Ames at around the time he joined the CIA. He would eventually betray the entire CIA spy network inside the Soviet Union, sending many agents to their deaths.
Ames with his second wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. “She was a breath of fresh air,” said Ames. She was also demanding, extravagant, and extremely expensive.
Top: Sergey Chuvakhin, the Russian arms control specialist selected by Ames as his first point of contact in the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. “I did it for the money,” he later said.
Bottom: Colonel Viktor Cherkashin, chief of counterintelligence at the Soviet embassy and Ames’s first KGB spymaster.
Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the First Chief Directorate and later head of the KGB.
Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman whose extreme paranoia prompted Operation RYAN, a demand for evidence of a Western “first strike” that brought the world close to nuclear war. In 1982 he succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader.
Nikolai Gribin, the charismatic, guitar-playing head of the KGB’s British-Scandinavian section, and Gordievsky’s immediate boss.
Colonel Viktor Budanov of Directorate K, the counterintelligence branch. The “most dangerous man in the KGB,” he personally interrogated Gordievsky in May 1985.
Viktor Grushko, the Ukrainian deputy head of the First Chief Directorate, and Gordievsky’s most senior inquisitor.
The signal site
Leila
Aliyeva, Gordievsky’s second wife, pictured at around the time they first met in Copenhagen. She was twenty-eight, the daughter of KGB officers, working as a typist for the World Health Organization. They married in Moscow in 1979.
Chapter 9
KOBA
Arkadi Guk detected threats and conspiracies everywhere: the KGB rezident in London saw them in the minds of his Soviet colleagues, behind the billboards in the London Underground, and in the invisible machinations of British intelligence.
The letter from “Koba” sent his suspicious mind into a frenzy. The instructions it contained were detailed and explicit: Guk should indicate his willingness to cooperate by putting a single thumbtack at the top of the right-hand banister of the stairs from platforms three and four of the Piccadilly line at the Piccadilly Underground station; Koba would acknowledge receipt of the signal by wrapping a piece of blue adhesive tape around the telephone cable of the middle telephone box of a row of five on Adam and Eve Court, off Oxford Street; he would then make the dead drop, a canister of film containing secret information, taped under the lid of the cistern of the gents’ lavatory in the Academy Cinema, Oxford Street.
Guk had until April 25 to accept the offer, twenty-two days hence.
The rezident took one look at the extraordinary letter and decided it must be a plant, a “dangle” by MI5, a deliberate provocation designed to trap him, embarrass the KGB, and then have him expelled. So he ignored it.
Guk assumed, rightly, that his home must be under MI5 surveillance. A genuine spy inside British intelligence would surely know this, and would therefore not take the risk of being spotted delivering a packet to his front door. It did not occur to him that Koba could have access to MI5’s surveillance schedules, and might therefore have chosen to make his delivery after midnight on Easter Sunday, when he knew there were no Watchers on duty.
Guk filed the package away, congratulating himself on having foiled so obvious a ruse.
But Koba refused to be ignored. After two months of silence, on June 12 a second packet plopped through Guk’s letterbox in the middle of the night. This one was even more intriguing: it contained a two-page MI5 document, a complete list of every Soviet intelligence officer in London; each spy was graded as “fully identified,” “more or less identified,” or “under suspicion of belonging to the KGB station.” Once again, the accompanying note offered to supply further classified material, and suggested a new signaling system and a dead-letter box: if Guk wanted to make contact, he should park his ivory Mercedes during lunchtime on July 2 or 4, at the parking meters on the north side of Hanover Square. If he received the signal, on July 23 the writer would leave a green Carlsberg beer can containing film at the foot of a broken lamppost without a shade and leaning to one side, on the footpath running parallel to Horsenden Lane in Greenford, West London. Guk should acknowledge receipt of the can and its contents by placing a piece of orange peel at the foot of the right-hand gatepost of the first entrance to St. James’s Gardens in Melton Street, by Euston Station. Again, the message was signed by Koba.
Guk summoned Leonid Nikitenko, his counterintelligence chief, and behind closed doors in the embassy attic, over vodka and cigarettes, they picked over the mystery. Guk still insisted the approach was a clumsy plot. A spy who volunteers his services is known as a “walk-in,” and is immediately more suspect than one who has been picked out for recruitment. The document revealed only what the KGB already knew, information that was correct but unhelpful: in other words, chicken feed. Once again, it does not seem to have occurred to him that Koba was demonstrating his bona fides by deliberately furnishing information that Guk could verify. Nikitenko was less convinced this was an MI5 provocation. The document seemed authentic, a complete chart of the rezidentura’s “order of battle,” drawn up by the Security Service. It was certainly accurate. The spycraft of signal sites and dead-letter boxes was sufficiently complex to indicate someone who did not wish to be caught. To Nikitenko’s yellow eyes, the offer looked genuine, but he was far too canny and ambitious to contradict his boss. The Center was consulted, and the order came back: do nothing, and see what transpires.
Gordievsky sensed that “something unusual was brewing in the station.” Guk and Nikitenko kept disappearing into a private huddle and sending urgent telegrams to Moscow. The rezident wore his most conspiratorial look. For a man steeped in paranoid secrecy, Guk could be surprisingly indiscreet. He was also a braggart. On the morning of June 17, he called Gordievsky into his office, closed the door, and asked portentously: “Would you like to see something exceptional?”
Guk then pushed the two photocopied pages across his desk. “Bozhe Moi!” Gordievsky muttered softly. “My God. Where did these come from?”
He scanned the list of KGB officers, and came to his own name. He was graded as “more or less identified.” He immediately grasped the implications: whoever had compiled the list did not know, for certain, that he was a KGB agent; and whoever had passed it on could not know that he was secretly spying for Britain, because if he did, he would have betrayed him to Guk to protect himself from exposure. Koba clearly had access to secrets, but he did not know Gordievsky was a double agent. Yet.
“It’s pretty accurate,” he said, handing back the document.
“Yes,” said Guk. “They’ve done well.”
Gordievsky got a closer look at the document when the deputy reports officer, Slava Mishustin, asked for help in translating it. Mishustin marveled that the British had been able to gather “such precise information” on the KGB personnel. Gordievsky had a pretty good idea where that information had come from.
But he was more puzzled than alarmed. He tended to agree with Guk that the midnight deliveries to 42 Holland Park seemed more like a provocation than a genuine offer. British intelligence must be up to something. But if the Brits were attempting a dangle, why had Spooner not warned him? And would MI5 really want the KGB to know that it had correctly identified all its officers working in Britain?
He slipped out at lunchtime and called the emergency number. Veronica Price answered immediately. “What is going on?” asked Gordievsky, before describing the mysterious deliveries to Guk’s flat and the documents he had seen. For a moment, Veronica was silent. Then she said: “Oleg, we need to meet.”
James Spooner and Veronica Price were waiting at the safe house when Gordievsky appeared an hour later.
“I know you wouldn’t do this, but someone is messing us around,” he said.
Then he saw the look on Spooner’s face. “Oh my God! You don’t mean it’s real?”
Veronica spoke: “As far as we know, there is no provocation operation under way.”
Gordievsky later described the MI6 reaction as “classically calm.” In reality, the revelation that someone in British intelligence was volunteering to spy for the Soviets provoked consternation among the few made aware of it, accompanied by a horrible flood of déjà vu. As with Philby, Hollis, and other spy scandals of the past, British intelligence would now have to launch an internal mole hunt and try to dig out the traitor. If the mole got wind of the investigation, he might realize that someone inside the KGB rezidentura had tipped off the British, and Gordievsky himself would be in danger. The “walk-in” was clearly well placed, with access to classified material and a knowledge of spycraft. He or she had to be stopped before more damaging secrets were passed to the Soviets. Several thousand people worked for MI5 and MI6. Koba was among them.
But in the feverish hunt that now ensued, British intelligence had one overriding advantage.
The spy, whoever it was, did not know that Gordievsky was a double agent. If Koba had been part of the NOCTON team, he would never have made such an approach, knowing this would immediately be reported back to MI6 by Gordievsky—as had now happened. His first move would have been to expose Gordievsky to Guk and ensure his own safety. This had not happened. The search for the traitor should therefore be carried out exclusively by those officers who knew the Gordievsky sec
ret and could be trusted completely. The mole hunt was code-named ELMEN (a municipality in the Austrian Tyrol).
The handful of MI5 personnel indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case would be responsible for finding the internal mole, under the leadership of John Deverell, director of K, MI5’s counterintelligence branch. Working out of Deverell’s office, they were sealed off from the rest of MI5 while they dug, a secret cell within a secret department of a secret organization. “Nobody outside the team noticed anything out of the ordinary.” The ELMEN team nicknamed themselves “the Nadgers.” This slang term is obscure, but appears to have been coined by Spike Milligan on The Goon Show in the 1950s, to mean a nonspecific affliction, disease, or illness. As in “Oo-er, I’ve got a nasty dose of the nadgers.” Nadgers is also slang for testicles.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 19