The Spy and the Traitor

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The Spy and the Traitor Page 21

by Ben MacIntyre


  The next morning, Manningham-Buller cooked him breakfast, which he did not eat. Sleepless, hungover, hungry, and exceptionally ill-tempered, Bettaney announced he had no intention of confessing. But then he suddenly abandoned the hypothetical form of speech, and switched to the first person. He began referring sympathetically to “Kim [Philby] and George [Blake],” the earlier Cold War spies.

  Deverell was out of the room when Bettaney turned to the interrogators, at 11:42, and declared: “I think I ought to make a clean breast of it. Tell Director K I wish to make a confession.” It was entirely in character for the impulsive Bettaney to hold out adamantly for so long and then suddenly buckle. Within the hour, he was in Rochester Row police station, making a full confession.

  A more intensive search of 5 Victoria Road revealed proof of his espionage: in a Philips electric-shaver box were details of KGB officers he intended to contact in Vienna; photographic equipment was discovered under rubble in the coal cellar; the laundry cupboard contained undeveloped film of classified material; in a cardboard box, under a layer of glasses, were handwritten notes on top-secret material; typed notes were sewn into a cushion. Bettaney was strangely contrite: “I have put the Service in a bloody position—it wasn’t my intention.”

  The uncovering of yet another mole inside the British spy establishment was portrayed as a triumph for the Security Service. Margaret Thatcher congratulated MI5’s director general on “how well the case had been handled.” The Nadgers sent a personal message to Gordievsky, emphasizing “how warmly we feel about him.” And Gordievsky sent a message back, through Spooner, saying that he hoped one day to thank the officers of MI5 in person: “I don’t know whether such a day will come or not—maybe not. Nevertheless I would like this idea to be recorded somewhere: they have underlined my belief that they are the real defenders of democracy in the most direct sense of the word.”

  Margaret Thatcher was the only member of the cabinet aware of Gordievsky’s role in catching the British spy. Inside British intelligence, only the Nadgers knew what had really happened. With the press in a frenzy, some judicious disinformation was spread suggesting that the tip-off about Bettaney’s treachery had come from “signals intelligence” (i.e., wiretaps), or that the Russians themselves had told the Security Service about the spy in its midst. One newspaper reported, wrongly: “The Russians in London grew tired of Bettaney’s approaches to them and, believing that he was a classic agent provocateur, told MI5 that Bettaney was wasting his time. It was then that MI5 began investigating Bettaney.” In case there might be another spy within, and to divert attention away from the real source, MI5 faked up a report for the files suggesting that the leak about Bettaney’s approach had come from a regular diplomat in the Soviet embassy. The Soviets denied everything, and insisted that the talk of KGB espionage was cynically fabricated propaganda, “aimed at damaging the normal development of Soviet-British relations.” Inside the KGB station, Guk clung to his belief that the whole charade had been orchestrated by MI5 to embarrass him. (To do otherwise would have been to admit a blunder of staggering proportions.) Gordievsky detected no hint of suspicion as to the real source of Bettaney’s exposure: “I do not think Guk or Nikitenko ever connected me with ‘Koba.’ ”

  Amid all the speculation, and the reams of newsprint devoted to the sensational Bettaney case, the truth never once broke the surface: that the man in Brixton Prison awaiting trial on ten counts of violating the Official Secrets Act had been put there by Oleg Gordievsky.

  Chapter 10

  MR. COLLINS AND MRS. THATCHER

  The Iron Lady had developed a soft spot for her Russian spy.

  Margaret Thatcher had never met Oleg Gordievsky. She did not know his name, and referred to him, inexplicably and insistently, as “Mr. Collins.” She knew he spied from within the Russian embassy, worried about the personal strain he was under, and reflected that he might “jump at any time,” and defect. If that moment came, the prime minister insisted, he and his family must be properly cared for. The Russian agent was no mere “intelligence egg layer,” she said, but a heroic, half-imagined figure, working for freedom under conditions of extreme peril. His reports were conveyed by her private secretary, numbered and marked “Top Secret and Personal” and “UK Eyes A,” meaning they were not to be shared with other countries. The prime minister consumed them avidly: “She would read, word for word, annotate, pose questions, and the papers came back with her marks over them, underlinings, exclamation marks and comments.” In the words of her biographer, Charles Moore, Thatcher was “not above being excited by secrecy in itself and by the romance of espionage,” but she was also conscious that the Russian was furnishing uniquely precious political insight: “Gordievsky’s despatches…conveyed to her, as no other information had done, how the Soviet leadership reacted to Western phenomena and, indeed, to her.” The spy opened up a window into Kremlin thinking, which she peered through with fascination and gratitude. “Probably no British prime minister has ever followed the case of a British agent with as much personal attention as Mrs. Thatcher devoted to Gordievsky.”

  While British intelligence had been hunting for Koba, the KGB was working hard to try to ensure that Thatcher lost the 1983 general election. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was “the Iron Lady”—a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she reveled—and the KGB had been organizing “active measures” to undermine her ever since she came to power in 1979, including the placing of negative articles with sympathetic left-wing journalists. The KGB still had contacts on the left, and Moscow clung to the illusion that it might be able to influence the election in favor of the Labour Party, whose leader, after all, was still listed in KGB files as a “confidential contact.” In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.

  Had Labour won, Gordievsky would have found himself in a truly bizarre position: passing KGB secrets to a government whose prime minister had once been the willing recipient of KGB cash. In the end, Michael Foot’s earlier incarnation as Agent BOOT remained a closely held secret; KGB efforts to swing the election had no impact whatever, and on June 9 Margaret Thatcher won by a landslide, boosted by victory in the Falklands the year before. Armed with a new mandate and secretly equipped with Gordievsky’s insights into Kremlin psychology, Thatcher turned her sights to the Cold War. What she saw was deeply alarming.

  In the latter half of 1983, East and West seemed to be heading into armed and perhaps terminal conflict, propelled by a “potentially lethal combination of Reaganite rhetoric and Soviet paranoia.” Speaking to the Houses of Parliament, the American president promised to “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” The US military buildup continued apace, accompanied by a range of psyops (psychological operations), including penetrations into Soviet airspace and clandestine naval operations demonstrating how close NATO could get to Russian military bases. These were designed to stoke Russian anxiety, and they succeeded: the RYAN program moved up a gear, as KGB stations were bombarded with orders to find evidence that the United States and NATO were preparing a surprise nuclear attack. In August a personal telegram from the head of the First Chief Directorate (later the KGB’s chief), Vladimir Kryuchkov, instructed rezidenturas to monitor preparations for war, such as the “secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons” into the Soviet Union. KGB stations that dutifully reported suspicious activity were praised; those that did not were sharply criticized, and told to do better. Guk was forced to admit “shortcomings” in his efforts to uncover “specific American and NATO plans for the preparation of surprise nuclear-missile attack against the USSR.” Gordievsky dismissed Operation RYAN as “farcical,” but his reports to MI6 left no room for doubt: the Soviet leadership was genuinely fearful, braced for combat, and panicky enough to believe that its survival might depend
on preemptive action, a situation that grew dramatically worse following a tragic accident over the Sea of Japan.

  In the early hours of September 1, 1983, a Soviet interceptor aircraft shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers and crew. The shooting down of KAL Flight 007 sent East-West relations plummeting to a dangerous new low. Moscow initially denied any role in the shoot-down, but then claimed the airliner was a spy plane that had violated Soviet airspace in a deliberate provocation by the United States. Ronald Reagan condemned the “Korean airline massacre” as “an act of barbarism…[and] inhuman brutality,” stoking domestic and international outrage and luxuriating in what one US official later called “the joy of total self-righteousness.” Congress agreed to a further increase in defense spending. Moscow, in turn, interpreted Western anger over KAL 007 as manufactured moral hysteria, preparatory to an attack. Instead of an apology, the Kremlin accused the CIA of a “criminal, provocative act.” A volley of most urgent “flash” telegrams arrived at the London KGB station, with instructions to protect Soviet assets and citizens against possible attack, pin the blame on America, and collect information to bolster Moscow’s conspiracy theories. The London KGB station was later commended by the Center for its “efforts to counteract the anti-Soviet campaign over the South Korean airliner.” Ailing and bedridden with what would prove to be his final illness, Andropov lashed out at what he called America’s “outrageous militarist psychosis.” Gordievsky smuggled the telegrams out of the embassy and passed them to MI6.

  The downing of KAL 007 was the consequence of basic human incompetence on the part of two pilots, one Korean and one Russian. But Gordievsky’s reporting to MI6 clearly showed how, under the pressure of escalating tension and mutual incomprehension, an ordinary tragedy had exacerbated an extraordinarily dangerous political situation.

  Into this stew of ferocious mistrust, misunderstanding, and aggression came an event that took the Cold War to the brink of actual war.

  “ABLE ARCHER 83” was the code name for a NATO war game, held from November 2 to 11, 1983, intended to simulate an escalating conflict, culminating in a nuclear attack. This sort of military dress rehearsal had been held many times in the past, by both sides. ABLE ARCHER involved 40,000 US and other NATO troops in Western Europe, deployed and coordinated through encrypted communications. The command post training exercise imagined a situation in which the Blue Forces (NATO) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia, before invading Finland, Norway, and eventually Greece. As the make-believe conflict intensified, a conventional war would seem to escalate into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons, enabling NATO to practice nuclear release procedures. No real weapons were deployed. This was a dummy run, but in the febrile atmosphere following the KAL 007 incident, Kremlin alarmists saw something much more sinister: a ruse intended to cover up preparations for the real thing—a nuclear first strike of the sort that Andropov had been predicting, and Operation RYAN had been seeking, for more than three years. NATO began to simulate a realistic nuclear assault at the very moment the KGB was attempting to detect one. Various unprecedented features of ABLE ARCHER reinforced Soviet suspicions that this was more than a game: a burst of secret communications between the US and UK a month earlier (in fact a response to the US invasion of Grenada); the initial participation of Western leaders; and different patterns of officer movements at US bases in Europe. The cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, later briefed Mrs. Thatcher that the Soviets had responded with such deep alarm because the exercise “took place over a major Soviet holiday [and] had the form of actual military activity and alerts, not just war-gaming.”

  On November 5, the London rezidentura received a telegram from the Center warning that once the US and NATO decided to launch a first strike, their missiles would be airborne in seven to ten days. Guk was ordered to carry out urgent surveillance to detect any “unusual activity” in key locations: nuclear bases, communications centers, government bunkers, and, above all, 10 Downing Street, where officials would be working frantically to prepare for war, “without informing the press.” In an instruction that says much about its own priorities, the KGB instructed its officers to monitor evidence that members of the “political, economic and military elite” were evacuating their own families from London.

  The telegram, passed by Gordievsky to MI6, was the first indication received by the West that the Soviets were responding to the exercise in an unusual and deeply alarming way. Two (or perhaps three) days later, a second flash telegram was sent to KGB rezidenturas reporting, erroneously, that American bases had been placed on alert. The Center offered various explanations, “one of which was that the countdown to a nuclear first strike had begun under the cover of ABLE ARCHER.” (In fact, the bases were merely tightening security, following the terrorist attack on American service personnel in Beirut.) The intelligence from Gordievsky came too late for the West to stop the exercise. By this point, the Soviet Union had begun preparing its own nuclear arsenal: aircraft in East Germany and Poland were fitted with nuclear weapons, around seventy SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe were placed on heightened alert, and Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were deployed under the Arctic ice to avoid detection. The CIA reported military activity in the Baltic states and Czechoslovakia. Some analysts believe that the Soviet Union actually readied its ICBM silos, preparatory to launch, but held back from doing so at the last moment.

  On November 11, ABLE ARCHER wound down on schedule, the two sides slowly lowered their guns, and a terrifying Mexican standoff, unnecessary and unnoticed by the general public, came to an end.

  Historians disagree on just how close the world had come to war. The authorized history of MI5 describes ABLE ARCHER as the “most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.” Others argue that Moscow knew all along that this was merely an exercise, and that Soviet nuclear-war preparations were merely shadowboxing of a familiar sort. Gordievsky himself was phlegmatic: “I felt that this was a further and disturbing reflection of the increasing paranoia in Moscow, not a cause of urgent concern in the absence of other indications.”

  But within the British government, those who read Gordievsky’s reports and the stream of telegrams from Moscow believed nuclear catastrophe had been narrowly averted. In the words of Geoffrey Howe, Britain’s foreign secretary: “Gordievsky left us in no doubt of the extraordinary but genuine Russian fear of a real-life nuclear strike. NATO deliberately changed some aspects of the exercise so as to leave the Soviets in no doubt that it was only an exercise.” In fact, by departing from standard practice, NATO may have compounded the impression of sinister intent. A subsequent report by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) concluded: “We cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted ABLE ARCHER…as posing a real threat.”

  Margaret Thatcher was deeply worried. The combination of Soviet fears and Reaganite rhetoric might have ended in nuclear war, but America was not fully aware of a situation it had partly created. Something must be done, she ordered, “to remove the danger that, by miscalculating Western intentions, the Soviet Union would over-react.” The Foreign Office must “urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise NATO attack.” MI6 agreed to “share Gordievsky’s revelations with the Americans.” The distribution of NOCTON material moved up another gear: MI6 specifically told the CIA that the KGB thought a war game had been a deliberate prelude to the outbreak of war.

  “I don’t see how they could believe that,” said Ronald Reagan, when told that the Kremlin had genuinely feared a nuclear attack during ABLE ARCHER, “but it’s something to think about.”

  In fact the US president had already given considerable thought to the prospect of nuclear apocalypse. A month earlier, he was “greatly depressed” after watching The Day After, a film about
an American Midwestern city destroyed in a nuclear attack. Shortly after ABLE ARCHER, he attended a Pentagon briefing depicting the “fantastically horrible” impact of a nuclear war. Even if America “won” such a conflict, 150 million American lives would probably be lost. Reagan described the briefing as “a most sobering experience.” That night he noted in his diary: “I feel the Soviets are…so paranoid about being attacked that…we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.”

  Both Reagan and Thatcher understood the Cold War in terms of a Communist threat to peaceful Western democracy: thanks to Gordievsky, they were now aware that Soviet anxiety might represent a greater danger to the world than Soviet aggression. In his memoirs, Reagan wrote: “Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans…I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.”

 

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