The business breakthrough had been made possible, in part, by Gordievsky.
The Center was pleased. Gorbachev, the KGB’s preferred candidate for the leadership, had demonstrated statesmanlike qualities, and the London rezidentura had excelled itself. Nikitenko received a special commendation “for handling the trip so well.” But much of the credit redounded to Gordievsky, the capable head of political intelligence who had produced such detailed and knowledgeable briefings, based on information gathered from his many British sources. Gordievsky was now the front-runner for the job of rezident.
And yet, amid the satisfaction of a job well done for both the KGB and MI6, a sharp little shard of anxiety lodged itself in Gordievsky’s mind.
In the midst of the Gorbachev visit, Nikitenko had summoned his deputy. On the desk before him, the acting rezident had laid out the memoranda sent to Gorbachev, complete with his jottings.
The KGB’s counterintelligence specialist fixed Gordievsky with an unwavering yellow gaze. “Hmm. Very good report about Geoffrey Howe,” said Nikitenko, and then paused for a beat. “It sounds like a Foreign Office document.”
Chapter 11
RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Burton Gerber, chief of the CIA’s Soviet section, was an expert on the KGB, with wide operational experience of the espionage war with the Soviet Union. A lanky Ohio native, assertive and single-minded, he was one of a new generation of American intelligence officers, unscathed by the paranoia of the past. He established the so-called Gerber Rules, which held that every offer to spy for the West should be taken seriously, every lead pursued. One of his odder hobbies was the study of wolves, and there was something distinctly vulpine about the way Gerber hunted his KGB prey. Posted to Moscow in 1980 as the CIA’s station chief, he had returned to Washington early in 1983 to take over the agency’s most important division: running spies behind the Iron Curtain. There were plenty of them. The uncertainty of the previous decade had given way, under the director of the CIA, Bill Casey, to a period of intense activity and considerable achievement, particularly in the military sphere. Within the Soviet Union, the agency had more than a hundred covert operations under way, and at least twenty active spies, more than ever before: inside the GRU, the Kremlin, the military establishment, and scientific institutes. The CIA’s spy network included several KGB officers, but none of the caliber of the mysterious agent supplying firsthand, high-grade material to MI6.
What Burton Gerber didn’t know about spying on the USSR wasn’t worth knowing, with one important exception: he didn’t know the identity of Britain’s KGB spy. And that bugged him.
Gerber had seen the material being supplied by MI6, and he was both impressed and intrigued. The psychological gratification of all intelligence work lies in knowing more than your adversaries, but also more than your allies. In the all-embracing, global view from Langley, the CIA had a right to know anything and everything it wanted to know.
The Anglo-American intelligence relationship was close and mutually supportive, but unequal. With its vast resources and worldwide network of agents, the CIA was rivaled only by the KGB in its intelligence-gathering capability. When it served America’s interests to do so, the CIA shared information with its allies, although, as with all intelligence agencies, sources were rigorously protected. Intelligence sharing was a two-way street, but in the opinion of some CIA officers America had a right to know everything. MI6 was providing intelligence of the highest quality, but no matter how often the CIA hinted that it would like to know where it was coming from, the British refused to say, with infuriating and obdurate politeness.
The hints became less subtle. At a Christmas party, Bill Graver, the CIA’s station chief in London, came sidewinding up to the MI6 Sovbloc controller. “He grabbed me and pinned me up against the wall and said: ‘Can you tell me more about this source? We need to have some guarantee that this info is reliable, because it’s really shit hot.’ ”
The British officer shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you who it is, but you can be reassured that we have full confidence in him, and that he has the authority to authenticate this intelligence.” Graver backed off.
At around the same time, MI6 asked the CIA for a favor. For years, senior officers in British intelligence had been lobbying the technical department at Hanslope to develop an effective secret camera, but the MI6 board had always vetoed this on the grounds of expense. MI6 was still using the old-fashioned Minox camera. The CIA, however, was known to have recruited a Swiss watchmaker to develop an ingenious miniature camera hidden inside an ordinary Bic cigarette lighter, which could take perfect photographs when used in conjunction with a length of thread, 111/4 inches long, and a pin. Using a piece of chewing gum, the thread was stuck to the bottom of the lighter; when the pin at the end lay flat on a document, that measured the ideal focal length, and the button on top of the lighter could be pressed to click the shutter. The pin and thread could be hidden behind a lapel. The lighter looked entirely innocent. It even lit cigarettes. This would be the ideal camera for Gordievsky. When the time came for him to defect, he could take it into the residency and then, photographically speaking, “empty out the safe.” In a decision that went all the way up to Bill Casey, the CIA finally agreed to provide MI6 with one of the cameras, but before it was handed over an intriguing exchange took place between the CIA and MI6.
CIA: Do you want this for any particular purpose?
MI6: We have someone on the inside.
CIA: Would we get the intelligence?
MI6: Not necessarily. That can’t be guaranteed.
MI6 was not responding to demands, coaxing, or bribery, and Gerber was frustrated. The British had someone very good and they were hiding him. As the subsequent secret CIA assessment of the ABLE ARCHER scare put it: “The information reaching [the CIA]…came primarily from British intelligence and was fragmentary, incomplete, and ambiguous. Moreover, the British protected the identity of the source…and his bona fides could not be independently established.” This intelligence was being passed all the way up to the president: not knowing where it came from was just embarrassing.
And so, with approval from above, Gerber launched a discreet spy-hunt. Early in 1985, he instructed a CIA investigator to set about uncovering the identity of the British superspy. MI6 should on no account discover what was going on. Gerber did not see this as a betrayal of trust, and still less as spying on an ally; he believed it was more a tying up of loose ends, prudent and legitimate cross-checking.
Aldrich Ames was the CIA’s chief of Soviet counterintelligence. Milton Bearden, a CIA officer who eventually took over the Soviet division, wrote: “Burton Gerber was determined to identify the British source and assigned the Soviet and East European Division’s chief of counter-intelligence, Aldrich Ames, to puzzle it out.” Gerber later claimed that he had not asked Ames himself to do the detective work, but another, unnamed officer who was “gifted in doing that kind of checking.” That officer would have been working alongside Ames, the counterintelligence chief.
Ames’s job title sounded impressive, but the section of the Soviet department responsible for rooting out spies and assessing which operations were vulnerable to penetration was considered a backroom job in Casey’s CIA, “a dumping ground for vaguely talented misfits.”
Ames was forty-three years old, a gray government bureaucrat with bad teeth, a drinking problem, and a very expensive fiancée. Every day, he left his small rented apartment in Falls Church, struggled through the commuter traffic to Langley, and then sat at his desk, “brooding, and thinking dark thoughts about the future.” Ames was in debt to the tune of $47,000. He fantasized about robbing a bank. An internal assessment noted his “inattention to matters of personal hygiene.” Lunch was almost always liquid, and long. Rosario spent “her ample free time spending Rick’s money,” and complaining that there was not enough of it. His career had stalled. This would be his last promotion. The CIA had let him down. He was also resentful of his boss, Burton Gerber, wh
o had reprimanded him for taking Rosario to New York at agency expense. Perhaps the agency should have spotted Ames was going bad, but, as with Bettaney in MI5, mere oddity of behavior, alcoholic excess, and a patchy work record were not in themselves grounds for suspicion. Ames was part of the furniture at the CIA, tatty but familiar.
Ames’s position and seniority gave him access to the files on all operations aimed at Moscow. But there was one Soviet spy, sending valuable intelligence to the CIA at one remove, whose identity he did not know: a high-grade agent handled by the British.
Identifying a single spy within the vast Soviet government apparatus was a daunting task. In the words of Sherlock Holmes: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” That is what the CIA now set about trying to do. Elementary, it wasn’t, but every spy leaves clues. The CIA sleuths began combing through the information supplied by the mysterious British agent over the previous three years, trying to pinpoint him (or, conceivably, her) by a process of elimination and triangulation.
The inquiry probably went something like this.
The details about Operation RYAN supplied by MI6 indicated that the source was a KGB officer, and although the material was said to come from a middle-ranking official, the quality suggested someone in a senior position. The regularity of the reporting implied that the individual was meeting MI6 frequently, which in turn would indicate he was probably located outside the Soviet Union, and possibly in the UK itself—a hunch reinforced by the fact that he seemed to be “privy to information about England.” An individual spy may be pinpointed by what he produces, but also by what he does not. The intelligence being passed on by the Brits contained little technical or military information, but a great deal of high-grade political intelligence. The probability, therefore, was that he was working in the PR Line of the First Chief Directorate. An agent inside the KGB would undoubtedly have fingered a number of Western spies working for the Soviets. So where had the Soviets recently lost agents? Haavik and Treholt in Norway. Bergling in Sweden. But the most dramatic exposure of a Soviet spy in recent times had taken place in Britain, with the much-publicized arrest and trial of Michael Bettaney.
The CIA understood the structure of the KGB intimately. The Third Department of the FCD lumped together Scandinavia and Britain. The pattern seemed to point at someone in that department.
A trawl of the CIA database of known and suspected KGB agents would have established that only one such individual had been in Scandinavia when Haavik and Bergling were nabbed, and in Britain when Treholt and Bettaney were caught: a forty-six-year-old Soviet diplomat who had appeared on the radar in Denmark back in the early 1970s. A cross-reference would have located Oleg Gordievsky’s name in the CIA file on Standa Kaplan. A closer look would have revealed that the Danes had identified this man as a probable KGB officer, but the British had granted him a visa as a bona fide diplomat in 1981, in direct contravention of their own rules. The Brits had also recently expelled a number of KGB officers, including the rezident, Arkadi Guk. Were they deliberately clearing an upward path for their own spy? Finally, a search of the CIA records from Denmark in the 1970s revealed that “a Danish intelligence officer had once let slip that MI6 had recruited a KGB officer in 1974 while he was stationed in Copenhagen.” A cable to the CIA station in London established that Oleg Gordievsky fit the profile.
By March, Burton Gerber was sure he knew the identity of the spy Britain had concealed for so long.
The CIA had won a small but satisfying professional victory over MI6. The Brits thought they knew something the Americans did not know; but now the CIA knew something that MI6 did not know they knew. That is how the game is played. Oleg Gordievsky was assigned the random CIA code name TICKLE, a neutral-sounding label to go with a little harmless international rivalry.
* * *
Back in London, Gordievsky awaited word from Moscow with mounting excitement tinged with a queasy unease. He was in pole position to take over as rezident, but the Center, as usual, was taking its time. Nikitenko’s sinister remarks about Gordievsky’s unusually well-informed briefings during the Gorbachev visit continued to haunt him, and he privately berated himself for failing to disguise his hand sufficiently.
In January, he was instructed to fly back to Moscow for a “high-level briefing.”
Within British intelligence, the summons triggered a debate. Given Nikitenko’s veiled threat, some feared a trap. Should this be the moment to bring Oleg in from the cold and arrange his defection? The spy had already acquitted himself nobly. A few argued that the risk of letting him return to Russia was too great. “There was a potential bonanza here. But if it went wrong, we would not just lose a highly placed agent. We were sitting on a treasure trove of information that so far had had only limited circulation because it could not be fully exploited and shared without potentially compromising Oleg.”
But the prize was now within reach, and Gordievsky himself was confident. There were no danger signals from Moscow. The summons was probably evidence that he had won his power struggle with Nikitenko. “We were not too concerned, and nor was he,” Simon Brown recalled. “The slowness in getting him confirmed was a worry, but his view was that he was probably OK.”
Even so, Gordievsky was offered the opportunity to quit. “We said to him—and we meant it—if you want to step off now, you can. It would have been a bitter disappointment if he had. He was as keen as we were. He didn’t see any great hazard.”
At their last meeting before his departure, Veronica Price carefully rehearsed Operation PIMLICO, step by step.
On his arrival at FCD headquarters in Moscow Gordievsky was welcomed heartily by Nikolai Gribin, the department head, and told that he “had been chosen as the best candidate to succeed Guk.” The official announcement would not be made until later in the year. A few days later he was introduced at an internal KGB conference as “the rezident designate in London, Comrade Gordievsky.” Gribin was furious that the appointment had been prematurely revealed to their KGB colleagues, but Gordievsky was relieved and delighted: word of the promotion was out.
His satisfaction was only slightly dented by learning of the fate of a colleague, Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB colonel in Line X, the department devoted to technical and technological espionage. After working in Paris for several years, Vetrov had begun spying for the French intelligence service. Code-named FAREWELL, he provided more than 4,000 documents and information that led to the expulsion of forty-seven KGB officers from France. Back in Moscow in 1982, Vetrov got into a violent argument with his girlfriend in a parked car. When an auxiliary policeman heard the commotion and knocked on the window, Vetrov, thinking he was about to be arrested for spying, stabbed and killed him. While in prison, he carelessly revealed that he had been involved in “something big” before his arrest. Subsequent investigation revealed the extent of his treachery. The unfortunately named FAREWELL was executed on January 23, a few days before Gordievsky flew back to London. Vetrov was a murderous maniac who had brought about his own destruction, but his execution was a reminder of what happened to KGB traitors caught spying for the West.
When Gordievsky returned to London at the end of January 1985 with news of his appointment, the rejoicing in MI6 was unconstrained—or would have been, had it not also been utterly secret. In the Bayswater safe house, the meetings took on new urgency and excitement. Here was an unprecedented coup: their spy would soon be taking over the KGB station in London, with access to every single secret therein. After this, he would surely rise further. There were hints that he was about to be promoted again, and might end up a KGB general. Thirty-six years before, Kim Philby had risen to become MI6’s station chief in Washington, DC, a KGB spy at the heart of Western power. Now MI6 was doing to the KGB what the KGB had once done to it. The wheel had turned. The possibilities seemed limitless.
Gordievsky awaited formal confirmation of his appointment in a euphoric daze. One change in his friend’s behavio
r struck Maksim Parshikov as distinctly odd: “His sparse, graying hair suddenly acquired a yellow-red color.” Overnight, Gordievsky’s hairdo changed from Soviet-salt-and-pepper to punk-exotic. His colleagues sniggered privately. “Had a young mistress appeared on the scene? Or, God forbid, five minutes before taking over as KGB rezident in London, had Oleg unexpectedly turned gay?” When Parshikov cautiously inquired what had happened to his hair, Oleg explained, with some embarrassment, that he had accidentally used his wife’s hair dye instead of shampoo, a most unconvincing explanation, since Leila’s dark locks were quite different in color than the startling ochre hue of Gordievsky’s new dye job. “When the ‘mistake with the shampoo’ took on a regular character, we stopped asking.” Parshikov concluded: “Everyone has a right to their own strangeness.”
Nikitenko was instructed to prepare for his return to Moscow. He was furious at being leapfrogged by an underling with just three years’ experience in Britain, and elaborately insincere in his congratulations. Gordievsky would not officially take over as rezident until the end of April; in the interim, Nikitenko went out of his way to be as uncooperative and unpleasant as possible, dripping poison into the ears of his superiors and disparaging the new appointee to anyone who would listen. More worryingly, he refused to hand over telegrams that the rezident-in-waiting had a right to see. Perhaps this was merely petty revenge, Gordievsky told himself, but there was something about Nikitenko’s attitude that smelled of something nastier than just sour grapes.
For Gordievsky and the NOCTON team, the case entered a peculiar limbo. When Nikitenko finally departed, to take up his new job at KGB headquarters in the counterintelligence department, Gordievsky would have the keys to the KGB safe, and MI6 would surely reap a bumper harvest.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 24