ABLE ARCHER marked a turning point, a moment of terrifying Cold War confrontation, undetected by the Western media and public, that triggered a slow but perceptible thaw. The Reagan administration began to moderate its anti-Soviet rhetoric. Thatcher resolved to reach out to Moscow. “She felt the time had come to move beyond the rhetoric of the ‘evil empire’ and think how the West could bring the Cold War to an end,” according to a senior adviser. Kremlin paranoia started to abate, particularly after the death of Andropov in February 1984, and though KGB officers were told to remain alert for signs of nuclear preparation, the momentum of Operation RYAN began to wane.
Gordievsky was partly responsible. Hitherto, his secrets had been doled out to the US in small, highly selective bits and pieces; from now on, his intelligence haul would be shared with the CIA in ever larger chunks, though still carefully camouflaged. The information about Soviet alarm during ABLE ARCHER was said to have come from “a Czechoslovak intelligence officer…tasked with monitoring major NATO exercises.” Gordievsky was happy for MI6 to share his intelligence with the CIA. “Oleg wanted it,” said one of his British handlers. “He wanted to make an impact.” And he did.
The CIA had several spies in the USSR, but no source able to provide this kind of “real insight into Soviet psychology,” and supply original “documents which betrayed a genuine nervousness that a preemptive strike could take place at any time.” Robert Gates, deputy director of intelligence at the CIA, read the reports based on Gordievsky’s intelligence, and realized the agency had missed a trick: “My first reaction to the reporting was not only that we might have had a major intelligence failure, but further that the most terrifying thing about ABLE ARCHER was that we may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it.” According to a secret internal CIA summary of the ABLE ARCHER scare, written several years later, “Gordievsky’s information was an epiphany for President Reagan…only Gordievsky’s timely warning to Washington via MI6 kept things from going too far.”
From ABLE ARCHER onward, the essence of Gordievsky’s political reporting was passed to Ronald Reagan in the form of a regular summary, clearly flowing from a single agent. Gates wrote with hindsight: “Our sources in the Soviet Union tended to be those who provided us with information about their military and military R&D. What Gordievsky was giving us was information about the thinking of the leadership—and that kind of information was for us as scarce as hens’ teeth.” Reagan was “very moved” by what he read, knowing that it came from an individual risking his life from somewhere deep within the Soviet system. The information from MI6 was “treated as the holy of holies in the CIA, seen only by a small group who read it in hard copy under strict conditions,” before being repackaged and sent to the Oval Office. Gordievsky’s intelligence underpinned “Reagan’s conviction that a greater effort had to be made not just to reduce tension, but to end the Cold War.” The CIA was appreciative but frustrated, deeply curious as to where this steady stream of secrets could be coming from.
Spies tend to make extravagant claims for their craft, but the reality of espionage is that it frequently makes little lasting difference. Politicians treasure classified information because it is secret, which does not necessarily render it more reliable than openly accessible information, and frequently makes it less so. If the enemy has spies in your camp, and you have spies in his, the world may be a little safer, but essentially you end up where you started, somewhere on the arcane and unquantifiable spectrum of “I know that you know that I know…”
Yet very occasionally spies have a profound impact on history. The breaking of the Enigma code shortened the Second World War by at least a year. Successful espionage and strategic deception underpinned the Allied invasion of Sicily and the D-day landings. The Soviet penetration of Western intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s gave Stalin a crucial advantage in his dealings with the West.
The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer. As a classified internal CIA review put it, the ABLE ARCHER scare was “the last paroxysm of the Cold War.”
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Thousands of people filled Red Square for the funeral of Yuri Andropov on February 14, 1984. Among the international dignitaries in attendance was Margaret Thatcher, clad in elegant mourning dress and looking slightly stouter than usual thanks to a hot water bottle tucked beneath her coat to ward off the Moscow chill. The funeral, she had told Vice President George Bush, was “a Godsend” for East-West relations. She put on a bravura show. While other Western leaders “chattered inattentively” during the funeral, and even sniggered when Andropov’s coffin was dropped by bearers, she remained “suitably solemn” throughout. A burly British bodyguard, his pockets bulging with what the KGB assumed to be weaponry, followed her back to the reception at the Kremlin and then whipped out a pair of high-heeled shoes for the prime minister to change into. She spent forty minutes talking to Andropov’s successor, the elderly and ailing Konstantin Chernenko, and told him “they had a chance, perhaps the last chance, of securing fundamental disarmament agreements.” Chernenko struck her as astonishingly ancient, a living fossil of the Communist past. “For heaven’s sake try and find me a young Russian,” she told aides in the plane on the way home. In fact, officials had already identified someone who might fit the bill as an interlocutor on the Soviet side, a rising star in the Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev.
Thatcher had played her role perfectly, following a script that had been written, in part, by Gordievsky. Before the funeral, James Spooner asked him for tips on how Thatcher should aim to present herself: Gordievsky urged decorum and friendliness, but warned that the Russians were touchy and defensive. “Oleg provided a full briefing on how she should conduct herself,” said the MI6 officer responsible for analyzing and distributing the “product” from the case. “On the rostrum she wore a black dress and a fur hat, and looked very serious. It was a seductive performance. She had an insight into their psychology. Without Oleg she would have been much tougher. Because of Oleg she knew how best to play her hand. They noticed.”
Back at the Soviet embassy in London, Ambassador Popov told a meeting of embassy staff, including the KGB contingent, that Mrs. Thatcher’s attendance at the funeral had gone down extremely well in Moscow. “The prime minister’s sensitivity to the occasion and formidable political brain has made a deep impression,” Popov reported. “Mrs. Thatcher had gone out of her way to charm her hosts.”
Here was a perfect intelligence cycle: Gordievsky was briefing the prime minister on how to respond to the Soviets, and then reporting back the Soviet reaction to that behavior. Spies usually furnish facts, leaving the recipient to analyze them; with his unique perspective, Gordievsky was able to interpret, for the West, what the KGB was thinking, hoping, and fearing. “That is the essence of Oleg’s contribution,” said the MI6 analyst. “Getting inside the minds of others, getting into their logic, their rationality.”
Gordievsky’s espionage was both positive and negative: in its positive form, it supplied important secrets, advance warnings, and insight; in its negative but equally useful form, it offered reassurance that the KGB station in Britain was, by and large, hopeless, as lumbering, inefficient, and mendacious as the man who ran it. Arkadi Guk scorned his bosses back at the Center, but rushed to fulfill their demands, however ludicrous. When he heard on the BBC that a cruise missile exercise had taken place at Greenham Common, the rezident hastened to manufacture a report indicating that he had known about the test beforehand. When mass antinuclear demonstrations took place in Britain, Guk claimed credit by insisting, falsely, that the KGB’s “active measures” had prompted the protests. Two suicides of
Soviet citizens in London, one in the trade delegation and the other the wife of an official, thrust Guk’s suspicions into overdrive. He sent the bodies back to Moscow, with orders to establish whether they had been poisoned, which the KGB scientists obediently confirmed—even though one had hanged himself and the other had thrown herself off a balcony. Here, thought Gordievsky, was “yet another sign of how Soviet paranoia was feeding off its own neuroses.” The KGB rezident carefully covered up his own incompetence over the Bettaney case, assuring Moscow that it was all an elaborate ruse cooked up by British intelligence.
Guk jealously guarded his secrets, yet Gordievsky was able to pick up an astonishing quantity of useful information, ranging from embassy gossip to information of political and national significance. The KGB ran a number of illegals in Britain, and although Line N operated semi-independently within the rezidentura, Gordievsky tipped off MI5 whenever he picked up information about the underground spy network. At the height of the miners’ strike in 1984–85, Gordievsky learned that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had contacted Moscow to request financial support. The KGB opposed funding the miners. Gordievsky himself told KGB colleagues that it would be “undesirable and unproductive” for Moscow to be seen bankrolling industrial action. But the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party thought otherwise, and approved the transfer of more than $1 million from the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank (in the end, the Swiss receiving bank became suspicious, and the transfer never happened). Thatcher vilified the miners as “the enemy within”—a prejudice no doubt reinforced by the discovery that the enemy without was prepared to finance their strike.
Gordievsky’s espionage radar was able to pick up other enemies, far from Moscow. On April 17, 1984, a woman police officer named Yvonne Fletcher was killed by machine-gun fire from the Libyan People’s Bureau in St. James’s Square in central London. The next day the KGB rezidentura received a telegram from the Center relaying “reliable information that the shooting had been personally ordered by Gaddafi” and reporting that “an experienced hitman from the Libyan intelligence station in East Berlin had been flown to London to oversee the shooting.” Gordievsky immediately passed the telegram to MI6, which reinforced the argument for a strong response. The Thatcher government broke off diplomatic relations with Libya, expelled Gaddafi’s thugs, and effectively expunged Libyan terrorism from Britain.
Intelligence sometimes matures slowly. Gordievsky had first alerted MI6 to the espionage activities of Arne Treholt back in 1974, but it took the Norwegian security service a decade to act, partly to protect the source. In the meantime, the glamorous star of the Norwegian left had risen to become head of the press section at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Early in 1984, Gordievsky was told that the Norwegians were ready to swoop. He was asked if he objected: since he had provided the first tip-off, his security might be compromised if Treholt was apprehended. Gordievsky did not hesitate: “Of course. He is a traitor to NATO and Norway, so of course you must arrest him as soon as possible.”
Treholt was detained at the Oslo airport on January 20, 1984, by the chief of Norwegian counterintelligence. He was believed to be heading for Vienna to meet Gennadi “the Crocodile” Titov, his KGB handler and lunch partner for the previous thirteen years. Some sixty-five classified documents were found in his briefcase. Another eight hundred documents were found in his home. Initially he denied spying, but when shown a photograph of himself with Titov, he vomited violently and then said: “What can I say?”
Titov was also intercepted by the Norwegian intelligence service, which offered him a deal: if he agreed to change sides or defected to the West, he would be paid half a million US dollars. He refused, and was thrown out of the country.
At his trial, Treholt was accused of inflicting “irreparable damage” on Norway by passing secrets to Soviet and Iraqi agents in Oslo, Vienna, Helsinki, New York, and Athens. He was accused of receiving $81,000 from the KGB. Newspapers described him as the “greatest traitor to Norway since Quisling,” the wartime Nazi collaborator whose name became an English noun meaning traitor. The judge observed that he harbored “unrealistic and exaggerated opinions about his own importance.” He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
In the late summer of 1984, James Spooner moved to another posting and was succeeded as case officer by Simon Brown, the Russian-speaking former head of the Soviet section, P5, who had tailed Bettaney disguised as a tramp. Brown had been inducted into the NOCTON case back in 1979, when, as station chief in Moscow, he had been responsible for monitoring the signal sites for PIMLICO, the escape operation. There was not the same immediate personal chemistry Gordievsky had enjoyed with Spooner. During their first encounter Veronica provided celery for lunch and put the kettle on. Brown was nervous. “I thought: if I don’t speak fluent Russian he’s going to think I’m an idiot. Then, when I played back the tape, to my horror all I could hear was the rising whoosh from a boiling kettle and the crunch of a man eating celery.” The MI6 secretary Sarah Page was always present at such meetings, quietly unflappable and reassuring: “Her calming presence did much to humanize and gently soothe the somewhat fraught atmospherics.”
Meanwhile Gordievsky continued with his day job: the cultivation of political contacts, some of them genuine Soviet sympathizers and some, like Rosemary Spencer, providing useful chicken feed. The researcher at the Conservative Central Office was not the only controlled-access agent, unaware that Gordievsky was really a double agent working for British intelligence, being used by MI5 to feed him information. Neville Beale, a Tory member of the Greater London Council for Finchley and former chairman of the Chelsea Conservative Association, was another. He provided Gordievsky with council documents that were nonconfidential and quite boring, but were further evidence of his skill in extracting official information.
The Center frequently came up with suggestions for possible recruits, most of them entirely impractical and unlikely. In 1984 a personal telegram arrived from the Center, instructing Gordievsky to reconnect with Michael Foot, the former Agent BOOT. After his crushing election defeat, Foot had stepped down as Labour leader, but he remained an MP and a leading figure of the Left. The telegram noted that although Foot had had no interaction with the KGB since the late 1960s, “it might be useful to reestablish contact.” If it emerged that a spy run by MI6 was actively trying to recruit one of Britain’s most senior political figures, the fallout would be spectacular. “Drag your feet,” MI6 advised. “Get out of it if you can.” Gordievsky sent a message back to the Center, saying he would contrive to speak to Foot at a party, “gently” reveal a knowledge of his past contacts, and sound out his sympathies. Then he did nothing at all, and hoped the Center would forget about the idea—which it did, for a time.
In the first two years, the NOCTON case produced thousands of separate intelligence and counterintelligence reports, some only a few sentences long, others running to many pages. These were further divided up and parceled out—to MI5, Margaret Thatcher, parts of Whitehall and the Foreign Office, and, increasingly, the CIA. Other selected allies received occasional counterintelligence leads, but only when important interests were at stake. The CIA was in a special, “favored nation” category.
MI6 was mightily pleased with Gordievsky, and so was the KGB. The bosses in Moscow were impressed by the steady stream of information he was producing as head of the PR Line; MI6 was providing him with enough interesting information among the chicken feed to keep the KGB fat and satisfied; even Guk was happy with him, unaware that his successful underling was about to bring his own espionage career to an ignominious end.
The trial of Michael Bettaney opened at the Old Bailey on April 11, 1984, under the tightest possible security, with court windows masked, a large police presence, and a scrambler-telephone link to MI5 headquarters should consultation be necessary during proceedings. The evidence was so secret that most of the trial took place in camera, without public or reporters present. Bettaney w
ore a pinstriped suit and a spotted tie. He insisted that his motivation had been “pure and ideological—he was not a homosexual, not being blackmailed, and not working for profit.”
After five days of testimony, Bettaney was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.
“You have made treachery your course of action,” said Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, pronouncing sentence. “It is quite plain to me that in many ways you are puerile. It is also clear to me that you are both opinionated and dangerous. You would not have hesitated to disclose names to the Russians which would almost certainly have led to death for more than one person.”
The press accepted Bettaney’s self-description as a Communist spy, because it was easier to understand a man who had undergone a “gradual but eventually overwhelming political conversion.” The newspapers saw in Bettaney what they wanted to see: “Tweedy twit became a wicked traitor,” shouted the Sun. “The intelligence cold war never diminishes,” said The Times. The Daily Telegraph tied itself in homophobic knots trying to imply he was gay, and therefore implicitly untrustworthy. “Bettaney appeared to have enjoyed the company of the arty, homosexual college community.” The left-leaning Guardian was the most sympathetic: “In his own mind he was using his position in MI5 to try to stop Britain and the Western Alliance tottering into a new world war.” In Washington, the American establishment fretted (and quietly sniggered) at the way British intelligence had yet again fallen prey to internal espionage. “The President is truly alarmed,” said a White House spokesman. One CIA source told the Daily Express: “We have to wonder again about security in the British intelligence community.” A subsequent inquiry by the Security Commission was damning of MI5’s failure to detect the danger posed by the unstable Bettaney. The Times even wondered whether the time had come to merge MI5 and MI6 into a single intelligence agency: “After all, the KGB operates both at home and abroad.”
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