The next morning, Friday, May 17, brought a second urgent telegram from the Center addressed to Gordievsky, and a measure of reassurance. “As to your Moscow trip, please remember that you will have to speak about Britain and British problems, so prepare well for specific discussions, with plenty of facts.” That sounded more like a regular meeting, with the usual excessive demands for information. Gorbachev, in power for just three months, was taking a keen interest in Britain after his successful visit the previous year. Chebrikov was known to be a stickler for protocol. Perhaps there was nothing to worry about.
That evening, Gordievsky and his handlers gathered once more in the safe flat. Veronica Price provided smoked salmon and granary bread. The tape recorder was running.
Simon Brown laid out the situation. No intelligence had been picked up by MI6 to suggest that Oleg’s recall was anything other than routine. But if Gordievsky wanted to defect now, he was free to do so, and he and his family would be protected and looked after for the rest of their lives. If he decided to carry on, Britain would be eternally in his debt. The case was at a crossroads. Quit now, and they would scoop up the enormous winnings already made and head to the bank. But if he returned from Moscow having been personally blessed as rezident by the head of the KGB, then they would hit an even bigger jackpot.
Brown later reflected: “If he decided not to go, he wasn’t going to be dissuaded, and nor would we have tried. I think he realized we were genuine. I tried as much as possible to be impartial.”
The case officer ended with a declaration: “If you think this looks bad, stop now. Ultimately it has to be your decision. But if you do go back and things go wrong, then we will execute the exfiltration plan.”
It is perfectly possible for two people to listen to the same words and hear entirely different things. This was one of those moments. Brown thought he was offering Oleg a way out, while reminding him that this might waste a golden opportunity. Gordievsky believed he was being instructed to return to Moscow. He was hoping to hear his case officer say that he had done enough, and he should now stand down with honor. But Brown, as instructed, gave no such direction. The decision was Gordievsky’s.
For long minutes, hunched and still, the Russian sat utterly silent, apparently lost in thought. Then he spoke: “We’re on the brink, to stop now would be a dereliction of duty and everything I’ve done. There is a risk, but it’s a controlled risk, and one I’m prepared to take. I will go back.”
As one MI6 officer puts it: “Oleg knew we wanted him to carry on and he bravely went along with this, in the absence of any clear signs of danger.”
Veronica Price, architect of the escape plan, was now all business.
Once more, she walked Gordievsky through all the arrangements for Operation PIMLICO. Yet again, Gordievsky studied the photographs of the rendezvous site. These had been taken in winter, when the large rock at the entrance to the turnout stood out against the snow. He wondered if he would be able to recognize it with the trees in foliage.
Throughout Gordievsky’s time in Britain, the escape plan had remained primed and ready. Every new MI6 officer deployed to Moscow was scrupulously briefed on the details, shown a photograph of the spy named PIMLICO (though never told his name), and coached on the procedures for the brush contact, pickup point, and exfiltration: the complex pantomime of the escape and recognition signals. Before leaving Britain, the officers, and their spouses, were taken to a forest near Guildford, where they practiced climbing in and out of the trunk of a car, in order to appreciate exactly what might be involved in rescuing this nameless spy and his family. At the start of a posting, each officer was instructed to drive to Russia from Britain, via Finland, in order to familiarize himself with the route, the rendezvous point, and the border crossing. When Simon Brown drove through the border post for the first time in 1979 he counted seven magpies perched on the barrier post, and was immediately put in mind of the old nursery rhyme about counting magpies: “Seven for a secret never to be told.”
Whenever Gordievsky was in Moscow, and for several weeks before he arrived and after he left, the MI6 team was instructed to monitor the signal site on Kutuzovsky Prospekt not just weekly, but every evening. A Tuesday night was the optimal time to fly the signal, since the exfiltration team would then be able to reach the rendezvous in just four days, the following Saturday afternoon. But in an emergency the team could go into action on any day: a signal on Friday, for example, would mean exfiltration would have to take place the following Thursday, due to the restricted opening times of the garage providing the license plates. One officer left a vivid account of the extra burden this placed on the British spies: “Each night for about eighteen not wholly foreseeable weeks a year, we had to check the bread shop, near the combined bus and concert timetable, where we expected—and always dreaded—that PIMLICO would appear. The winters were the worst: too dark and foggy to check by any means other than walking; the snow scraped off the sidewalks piled so high that you could barely identify someone from more than thirty yards away. And how many times a week can a wife plead that she’d forgotten to buy any bread that day, and ‘Would you be so kind as to pop out in minus twenty-five degrees for the last, stale consignment of buns’?”
Preparing for Operation PIMLICO was one of the most important tasks of the MI6 station: a dedicated escape plan to save a spy who frequently wasn’t there, in readiness for a time when he might be. Every MI6 officer kept on hand, in his flat, a pair of gray trousers, a green Harrods bag, and a stock of KitKats and Mars bars.
One additional refinement was added to the plan. If, after getting to Moscow, Gordievsky discovered he was in trouble, he could alert London: he should make a telephone call to Leila, on their London home number, and inquire how the children were doing at school. The phone was being tapped, and MI5 would be listening. If the warning call came through, MI6 would be told, and the Moscow team would be placed on full alert.
Finally Veronica Price handed him two small packets. One contained pills. “These may help you to stay alert,” she said. The other was a small pouch of snuff from James J. Fox, tobacconist of St. James’s. If he sprinkled it over himself as he climbed into the trunk, it might put the sniffer dogs at the border off his scent and perhaps disguise the smell of any chemical the KGB might have sprayed on his clothes or shoes. A team of London-based MI6 officers would be waiting at a secluded rendezvous point on the Finnish side of the border to spirit Oleg to Britain. If that moment ever came, said Veronica, she would be there in person to greet him.
That evening, Gordievsky told Leila he was flying back to Moscow for “top-level discussions” and would return to London in a few days. He seemed nervous and eager. “He was going to be confirmed as rezident. I was excited, too.” She noticed that his fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
* * *
Saturday, May 18, 1985, was a day of intense espionage, in three capitals.
In Washington, Aldrich Ames deposited $9,000 in cash in his bank account. He told Rosario the money was a loan from an old friend. The exhilaration of his treachery was starting to wear off, and reality was setting in: any one of the CIA’s spies might get wind of his approach to the KGB and expose him.
In Moscow, the KGB prepared for Gordievsky’s arrival.
Viktor Budanov had the flat on Leninsky Prospekt thoroughly searched, but nothing incriminating was found, save a lot of questionable Western literature. The handsome edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets attracted no special attention. The apartment was invisibly bugged, including the telephone, by the technicians of Directorate K. Cameras were concealed in the light fixtures. On the way out, the KGB locksmith carefully locked the apartment’s front door.
Budanov, meanwhile, was combing through Gordievsky’s personnel file. Save for a divorce, on the surface his record was blemish-free: the son and brother of distinguished KGB officers, married to the daughter of a KGB general, a dedicated Party member who had worked his way to the top through diligence and flai
r. Yet a closer look would have revealed another side to Comrade Gordievsky. The KGB investigation dossier will never be released, so it is impossible to say exactly what the investigators knew, and when.
But there was plenty for Budanov to chew on: Gordievsky’s close friendship at university with a Czech defector; his interest in Western culture, including banned literature; his ex-wife’s assertion that he was a two-faced fraud; the way he had taken out and read every British file in the archive before his posting to London; and the suspicious speed with which his British visa had been issued.
Like the CIA before him, Budanov looked for patterns. The KGB had lost a number of valuable assets in Scandinavia: Haavik, Bergling, and Treholt. Had Gordievsky, in Denmark, gotten wind of those agents and informed Western intelligence? Then there was Michael Bettaney. Nikitenko could confirm that Gordievsky had been made aware of the Englishman’s bizarre offer to spy for the KGB. The British had caught Bettaney with remarkable dispatch.
On inspection, Gordievsky’s work record would also have thrown up some interesting traces. In the first few months of his posting to Britain, he had performed so badly there was talk of sending him home, but then the range of his contacts had markedly improved, as had the depth and quality of his intelligence reports. The decision by the British government to expel Igor Titov and Arkadi Guk in quick succession had seemed unremarkable at the time, but no longer. Budanov may also have learned of Nikitenko’s earlier suspicions, notably the way that Gordievsky had produced reports during Gorbachev’s visit that read as if they had been copied directly from Foreign Office briefings.
Deep in the files was another potential lead. Back in 1973, during his second posting to Denmark, Gordievsky had had direct contact with British intelligence. A known MI6 officer, Richard Bromhead, had approached him, and invited him to lunch. Gordievsky had gone through the correct procedure, informing his rezident and gaining formal permission before meeting the Englishman at a Copenhagen hotel. His reports from the time indicated that the contact had come to nothing. But had it? Had Bromhead recruited Gordievsky eleven years earlier?
The circumstantial evidence was certainly damaging, but not yet conclusively damning. Budanov would later boast in an interview with Pravda that Gordievsky was “identified by me personally among hundreds of officers serving with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.” But at this stage he still lacked hard proof: his punctilious legal mind would only be satisfied by catching the spy red-handed, or a complete confession, preferably in that order.
In London, the NOCTON team on the twelfth floor of Century House was excited, and nervous.
“There was anxiety, and a great weight of responsibility,” said Simon Brown. “We might be acquiescing in him going back to his death. I thought it was the right decision, otherwise I would have tried to persuade him not to go along with it. It felt like a calculated risk, a controlled gamble. But then we’d been taking risks from the start. That is in the nature of it.”
Before leaving, Gordievsky had a task to complete for the KGB: a dead drop for an illegal agent, newly arrived in Britain and operating under the code name DARIO. A Line N officer in the rezidentura usually performed illegals operations in Britain, but this one was considered important enough for the new station chief to carry out in person.
In March, Moscow had sent £8,000 in untraceable £20 notes, with orders to transfer the money to DARIO.
The cash could simply have been handed over to the illegal on arrival, but the KGB never opted for simplicity when something more elaborate could be devised. Operation GROUND was an object lesson in overcomplication.
First, the rezidentura technical department fashioned a hollow artificial brick, in which to conceal the money. DARIO would signal that he was ready for the pickup by leaving a blue chalk mark on a lamppost on the south side of Audley Square, near the American embassy. Gordievsky was instructed to deposit the money brick, inside a plastic bag, on a verge between a path and a high fence on the north side of Coram’s Fields, a park in Bloomsbury. DARIO would acknowledge safe receipt by leaving a lump of chewing gum on top of a concrete post near the Ballot Box pub in Sudbury Hill.
Gordievsky described the operational details to Brown, who passed them on to MI5.
On the evening of Saturday, May 18, Gordievsky took his daughters to play in Coram’s Fields. At 7:45 p.m., he dropped the brick and bag. The only people in the vicinity were a woman wheeling her baby in a pram and a cyclist fiddling with his bike chain. The woman was one of MI5’s top surveillance experts. Her pram contained a concealed camera. The cyclist was John Deverell, the head of K Section. A few minutes later a man appeared, walking fast. He stooped to scoop up the bag, pausing just long enough for the hidden camera to catch an image of his face. Deverell followed as he hurried northward, but then he ducked into the Tube station at King’s Cross. Deverell hurriedly chained up his bicycle and dashed down the escalator, but he was too late: the man had been swallowed up by the crowds. MI5 also failed to spot whoever stuck a plug of chewing gum on a concrete post outside a nondescript pub in northwest London. DARIO was well trained. Gordievsky sent a cable to Moscow reporting the successful completion of Operation GROUND. The mere fact that he had been allowed to carry out such a sensitive mission was, in itself, reason to think that he was still trusted.
There was still time to pull out. Instead, on Sunday afternoon, he kissed his wife and daughters. He knew he might never see any of them again. He tried not to show it, but he kissed Leila a little longer, and hugged Anna and Maria a little closer. Then he climbed into a taxi and headed for Heathrow.
At 4 p.m. on May 19, in an act of stupendous bravery, Oleg Gordievsky boarded the Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
Chapter 12
CAT AND MOUSE
In Moscow, Gordievsky checked the locks again, praying he might be mistaken. But no, the third lock, the dead bolt he never used and had no key for, had been turned. The KGB was on to him. “This is it,” he thought, as a trickle of fear sweat ran down his back. “I will soon be a dead man.” At a time of the KGB’s choosing, he would be arrested, interrogated until the last secret had been wrung out of him, and then killed, the “ultimate punishment,” an executioner’s bullet in the head and an unmarked grave.
But as his horrified thoughts raced and skidded, Gordievsky’s training began to kick in. He knew how the KGB worked. If Directorate K had uncovered the full extent of his espionage, he would never have reached his own front door: he would have been arrested at the airport, and would now be in the basement cells of the Lubyanka. The KGB spied on everyone. Perhaps the break-in at his flat was just routine snooping. Clearly, if he was under suspicion, the investigators did not yet have sufficient evidence to nail him.
Paradoxically, given its lack of moral restraint, the KGB was an intensely legalistic organization. Gordievsky was now a KGB colonel. He could not simply be detained on suspicion of treachery. There were strict rules about torturing colonels. The shadow of the purges of 1936 to ’38, when so many innocents had perished, still lingered. In 1985 evidence needed to be gathered, a trial held, and sentence duly passed. The KGB investigator Viktor Budanov was doing exactly what MI5 had done with Michael Bettaney, and what every effective counterintelligence agency does: watching the suspect, listening, waiting for him to make a mistake or contact his handler, before pouncing. The difference was this: Bettaney did not know he was under surveillance, and Gordievsky did. Or thought he did.
But he still needed to get into the flat. One of the other residents of the block was a KGB locksmith with a set of tools, and happy to help a neighbor and fellow officer who had lost his key. Once inside the apartment, Gordievsky discreetly checked for any other evidence of a KGB visit. Doubtless, the place was now bugged. If the technicians had planted cameras, they would be watching his behavior carefully for suspicious signs, such as searching for bugs. From now on, he must assume that his every word was being heard, his every move watched, his every telephone call recorded. He mus
t behave as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He must appear calm, casual, and confident; everything, in fact, that he was not. The flat seemed tidy. In the medicine cabinet he found a box of wet-wipe tissues, sealed with a foil top. Someone had pushed a finger through the seal. “It could have been Leila,” he told himself. “The hole could have been there for years.” Or it could have been a KGB searcher, poking around for clues. In a box under his bed were books by authors that the Soviet censors would consider seditious: Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Maximov. Lyubimov had once advised him that displaying these on open shelves was a risk. The box appeared undisturbed. Gordievsky cast an eye along the bookshelf and noted that the OUP edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets was still in place, apparently intact.
When he called his boss at home, Gordievsky thought Nikolai Gribin sounded odd. “There was no warmth or enthusiasm in his voice.”
He barely slept that night, fears and questions swirling. “Who had betrayed me? How much did the KGB know?”
The next morning he made his way to the Center. He did not detect any surveillance, which by itself meant nothing. Gribin met him at the Third Department. His manner seemed almost normal, but not quite. “You’d better start preparing,” Gribin remarked. “The two big bosses are going to summon you for a discussion.” They spoke desultorily of what Chebrikov and Kryuchkov might be expecting to learn from the new London rezident. Gordievsky said he had brought extensive notes, as instructed: on Britain’s economy, relations with the US, and developments in science and technology. Gribin nodded.
An hour later he was summoned to the office of Viktor Grushko, now deputy head of the First Chief Directorate. Usually so affable, the Ukrainian seemed tense, and “relentlessly inquisitive.”
The Spy and the Traitor Page 26