It was his mother who persuaded him that he needed to take a break. The many perks of KGB membership included access to various health spas and holiday centers. One of the most exclusive of these was the sanatorium at Semyonovskoye, about sixty miles south of Moscow, built by the chairman of the KGB, Andropov, in 1971 for “the rest and cure of leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet Government.” Still acting on the pretense that all was as it should be, the KGB authorities granted Gordievsky permission for a two-week stay at the spa.
Before leaving, he called his old friend Mikhail Lyubimov, the former KGB rezident in Copenhagen now trying to make a living as a writer. “I’m back. It seems permanently,” said Gordievsky, in an “uneven voice.” They agreed to meet. “I was completely staggered by his appearance,” wrote Lyubimov. “Pale as death, nervy, with fussy movements and confused speech. He explained his problems by saying that some books by Solzhenitsyn and other émigrés had been spotted in his London home, this had been reported by his enemies in the rezidentura, and in Moscow it had been blown up into a serious issue.” Lyubimov, ever buoyant, tried to cheer him up: “Forget it, man. Why not leave the KGB and write a book? You were always keen on history and you have a good brain.” But Gordievsky seemed inconsolable, drinking glass after glass of vodka. (“A new phenomenon,” Lyubimov noted. “I always thought he was one of the few people in the KGB who didn’t drink.”) Gordievsky said that he was going to a health farm to “repair his nervous system,” and then staggered off into the Moscow night. Lyubimov was worried enough about his old friend’s state of mind to call Nikolai Gribin, with whom he remained on good terms. “What’s wrong with Oleg? He’s not the man he was. What has happened to bring him to this point?” Gribin “muttered something about the KGB resort in Semyonovskoye, where an unsuccessful rezident could be cured” and added: “He will be there soon.” Then he rang off.
As the date of his departure approached, Gordievsky reached a decision. Before leaving for the sanatorium, he would fly the signal at the Central Market indicating that he needed to pass on a message. On his return, three Sundays later, he would go to the brush contact site at St. Basil’s. He had not yet decided what message to send to MI6. He only knew he needed to make contact, before he went mad.
Meanwhile, the KGB investigators watched and probed, combing the files, interviewing everyone Gordievsky had worked with, searching out the clues that would prove his guilt and seal his fate.
Budanov was prepared to be patient. He did not have to wait long.
* * *
On June 13, 1985, Aldrich Ames committed one of the most spectacular acts of treason in the history of espionage: he named no fewer than twenty-five individuals spying for Western intelligence against the Soviet Union.
In the month since his first payment from the KGB, Ames had arrived at a brutally logical conclusion. Any of the CIA’s numerous spies inside Soviet intelligence could get wind of what he was up to and expose him. The only way to protect himself, therefore, was to reveal to the KGB any and every asset who could betray him, so the Russians could sweep them up and execute the lot: “Then they would pose no threat.” Ames knew he was issuing a death warrant for every person he named, but that, he reasoned, was the only way to ensure that he would be safe, and rich.
“All of the people on my June 13 list knew the risks they were taking. If one of them learned about me, he would have told the CIA and I would have been arrested and thrown in jail…It wasn’t personal. It was simply how the game was played.”
That afternoon, Ames met Sergey Chuvakhin in Chadwick’s, a popular Georgetown restaurant, and handed him seven pounds of intelligence reports in a shopping bag, a vast trove of secrets he had amassed over the preceding weeks that would later become known, unromantically, as “the big dump”: classified cables, internal memos, and agent reports, an “espionage encyclopedia, a who’s who that revealed the identity of every important Soviet intelligence officer working for the United States.” And one working for the UK, to whom he had almost certainly alluded on their first meeting. And he provided a name: the MI6 spy the CIA had pinpointed three months earlier and code-named TICKLE was Oleg Gordievsky. Burton Gerber claimed Ames had discovered the name “coincidentally.” Milton Bearden, soon to become Gerber’s deputy in the Soviet section, alleges that Ames had done the detective work himself.
Ames’s intelligence bonanza was swiftly passed on to Moscow, and an enormous mopping-up operation began. At least ten spies identified by Ames would perish at the hands of the KGB, and more than one hundred intelligence operations were compromised. Soon after the big dump, Ames received a message, via Chuvakhin, from Moscow: “Congratulations, you are now a millionaire!”
This was the evidence Budanov had been waiting for, proof positive of Gordievsky’s treachery, straight from the CIA. Yet still the KGB did not pounce. Quite why has never been fully established, but a combination of complacency, inattention, and overambition seems the most likely explanation: the counterintelligence directorate was preoccupied with rounding up the two dozen spies identified by Ames; Budanov still wanted to catch Gordievsky in flagrante with MI6, to cause Britain maximum embarrassment.
And anyway, under constant surveillance, Gordievsky could not possibly escape.
* * *
On the morning of June 15, 1985, the third Saturday of the month, Gordievsky emerged from the flat, carrying a Safeway bag, and wearing the gray leather cap he had brought back from Denmark and a pair of gray trousers. He walked a quarter mile to the nearest shopping precinct, careful not to look behind for his tail, the first rule of evading surveillance. The lessons he had learned at School 101, twenty-three years earlier, were coming back. He entered a pharmacy, and casually looked through the window, while appearing to search the shelves. Then to a savings bank on a second floor, which afforded a view of the street from the stairs; then a busy food shop. Next he walked up a long, narrow alleyway between two blocks of flats, turned the corner, and ducked into one of the blocks, climbed two flights of the communal stairs, and surveyed the street. No sign of surveillance, which did not mean it was not there. He walked on, rode a bus for a few stops, got off again, hailed a taxi, took a roundabout route to the apartment block where his younger sister, Marina, lived with her new husband. He climbed up the main stairs, passed the door of her apartment without knocking and then went down the back staircase, sauntered into the Metro and headed east, changed trains, alighted, crossed the platform, and headed west again. Finally, he reached the Central Market.
At 11 a.m., he took up his post beneath the clock, and pretended to be waiting for a friend. The place was thronged with Saturday morning shoppers, but he saw no one carrying a Harrods bag. After ten minutes he left. Had MI6 spotted his signal indicating he needed to make a brush contact at St. Basil’s three Sundays hence? He would have to wait another two weeks before finding out if the signal had been picked up.
Two days later, Gordievsky found himself in a spacious room overlooking the Lopasnaya River, in one of Russia’s most luxurious official resorts. But he also discovered he had a roommate, a man in his mid-sixties who followed him everywhere. Many of the guests were clearly spies and stool pigeons, planted to watch and listen. Gordievsky had packed the Safeway bag in his luggage. Partly this was out of superstition, an unwillingness to be parted from his escape signal, but it was also a practical measure: he might need to get to the signal site in a hurry. One afternoon he found his roommate inspecting the treasured shopping bag. “Why have you got a foreign plastic bag?” the man asked. Gordievsky snatched it from his hand. “You never know when there might be something in the shops worth buying,” he snapped.
The next day, jogging in the woods, he spotted surveillance officers lurking in the undergrowth, who hurriedly turned their backs and pretended to be urinating. Semyonovskoye sanatorium was, in reality, an extremely comfortable prison, where the KGB could keep a close eye on Gordievsky, and wait for him to drop his guard.
The sanatorium ha
d a good library, containing a number of map books. Surreptitiously, he studied the border region between Russia and Finland, trying to memorize its contours. He ran every day, building up his fitness. The more he thought about the escape, the less impractical it seemed. Slowly, through the paralyzing fog of fear, he was inching toward a decision: “There’s no alternative. If I don’t get out I’m going to die. I’m as good as a dead man on holiday.”
Chapter 13
THE DRY CLEANER
Gordievsky returned from the Semyonovskoye sanatorium refreshed, apprehensive, but also, for the first time since his return to Russia, resolute: he must escape. He would first alert his British friends that the KGB was onto him by passing a written message at the brush contact site in St. Basil’s, then fly the PIMLICO escape signal and flee. The chances of success were vanishingly small. If he had been betrayed by a mole inside MI6, then the KGB would be lying in wait. Perhaps they were expecting him to make exactly this move, and preparing a trap. But at least he would die trying, no longer ensnared in the hellish web of surveillance and suspicion, waiting for the investigators to move in.
Risking his own life was the easier part of that decision. What about his family? Should he try to take Leila and his daughters with him, or leave them behind? During a decade of spying he had made many hard choices, but nothing remotely as agonizing as this: a decision pitting loyalty against prudence, a choice between survival and love.
He found himself intently studying his daughters, now aged five and three, and trying to imprint them on his memory: Maria, now known as Masha, so active and bright, a natural athlete like her father; plump little Anna, fascinated by animals and insects. At night he heard the girls talking in their beds, in English: “I don’t like it here,” Masha told her younger sister. “Let’s go back to London.” Did he dare to take them with him when he tried to escape? Sensing her husband’s inner turmoil but ignorant of its real cause, Leila told her mother-in-law that she feared Oleg was having some sort of crisis, triggered by trouble at work. Ever practical, Olga Gordievsky advised her to distract him with small projects, odd jobs around the house and fixing the car. Leila did not press him for explanations, or reprimand him for his drinking, though it alarmed her deeply. Her gentle solicitude, her instinctive sense that the man she loved was going through some private inner hell he could not share, made the looming decision all the harder to bear.
Including Leila and the girls in the escape plan would radically increase the probability of failure. Gordievsky was trained to evade surveillance, whereas they were not. A family of four was far more conspicuous than a single man traveling alone. However heavily sedated, his daughters might wake up in the car trunks; they might cry, or suffocate; they would certainly be terrified. If they were caught, innocent Leila would be considered complicit in his espionage, and treated accordingly. She would be interrogated, imprisoned, or worse, and certainly ostracized. His daughters would be pariahs. He had chosen this path, and they had not. What right did he have to expose them to such danger? Gordievsky was a gruff father and a demanding husband, but a doting one. The thought of abandoning his family caused him such anguish that he found himself gasping, doubled up in physical pain. If he did manage to get away, perhaps the British could eventually persuade the Kremlin to release his family to the West. Spy swaps were part of the established Cold War arithmetic. But that could take years, if it ever happened at all. He might never see his family again. Perhaps it was better to take the chance and try to escape together, as a family, whatever the outcome, regardless of the danger. At least they would succeed, or fail, together.
But into that thought wriggled a worm of doubt. Spies trade in trust. Over a lifetime of espionage, Gordievsky had developed a knack for detecting loyalty, suspicion, conviction, and faith. He loved Leila, but he did not entirely trust her; and, in one part of his heart, he feared her.
The daughter of a KGB general, steeped in propaganda from childhood, Leila was a loyal and unquestioning Soviet citizen. She had enjoyed her exposure to Western life, but never fully immersed herself in it as he had. Would she put her political responsibility above marital loyalty? In all totalitarian cultures, the individual is encouraged to consider the interests of society before personal welfare: from Nazi Germany to Communist Russia to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and North Korea today, a willingness to betray those nearest to you for the greater good was the ultimate mark of committed citizenship and ideological purity. If he revealed himself to Leila, would she renounce him? If he told her of the escape plan and asked her to join him, would she refuse? Would she denounce him? It is a mark of how far ideology and politics had corrupted human instinct that Gordievsky could not be sure whether his wife’s love was stronger than her Communism, or vice versa. He attempted a litmus test.
One evening, on the balcony of their apartment, out of reach of the microphones, he attempted to sound out the loyalties of his own wife, in a classic KGB “dangle.”
“You enjoyed London, didn’t you?” he said.
Leila agreed that their life in Britain had been magical. She already missed the Middle Eastern cafés on Edgware Road, the parks, and the music.
He pressed on: “You know how you said you wanted the girls to go to English schools?”
Leila nodded, wondering where this was going.
“I have enemies here. We are never going to be sent back to London. But I have an idea: we could go to Azerbaijan, on holiday to visit your family there, and then slip over the mountains into Turkey. We could escape, and go back to Britain. What do you think, Leila? Shall we run away?”
There was a narrow, heavily militarized eleven-mile border between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Gordievsky, of course, had no real intention of trying to get across it. This was a test. “I wanted to gauge her reaction to the idea.” If she agreed, it would be a sign that she was willing, at some level, to defy Soviet law and run away with him. He could then introduce her to the PIMLICO plan, and reveal the real reason he needed to escape. If she refused, and was interrogated after his disappearance, she might provide a false clue about his escape route and send the hunters haring to the Azeri-Turkish border.
Leila looked at him as if he was raving. “Don’t be idiotic.”
He quickly dropped the subject. And deep inside him a dreadful conviction took root. “My heart was aching so much that I could hardly bear to think about it.” His wife’s loyalty could not be relied upon, and he must continue to deceive her.
That conclusion may have been wrong. Many years later Leila was asked whether, if she had known of the escape plan, she would have told the authorities. “I would have let him escape,” she said. “Oleg had made his moral choice and for that, at least, he deserves respect. Whether considered bad or good, the man made his choice in life, he did it because he considered it necessary. Knowing the mortal danger he was in, my soul could not have carried the sin of sending him to his death.” She did not, however, say whether she would have been prepared to join him in the escape attempt. Still on the balcony, he told her again: “There is a conspiracy; people are very jealous of my appointment as rezident. But if something happens to me, don’t believe anything anyone tells you. I’m a proud officer, a Russian officer, and I did nothing wrong.” She believed him.
Gordievsky was not given to introspection, but at night, with Leila sleeping peacefully alongside him, he wondered what kind of person he had become, and whether his double life had “drastically inhibited [his] emotional development.” He had never told Leila who he really was. “Inevitably this meant that we had never come as close as we might have in normal circumstances: always I had withheld the central feature of my existence from her. Is intellectual deception of one’s partner more or less cruel than physical deception? Who can say?”
But his mind was made up. “My overriding priority was to save my skin.” He would attempt to escape alone. At least that way, he reflected, Leila would be able to tell the KGB, honestly, that she had known nothing.
The decision to leave his family behind was either an act of monumental self-sacrifice, or one of selfish self-preservation, or both. He told himself he had no choice, which is what we all tell ourselves when forced to make a terrible choice.
Leila’s father, the elderly KGB general, had a dacha in Azerbaijan on the shores of Lake Caspian, where Leila had spent her childhood holidays. It was agreed that she and the girls would join her Azeri family there for a long summer holiday. Masha and Anna were excited at the prospect of spending a month at their grandfather’s dacha, swimming and playing in the sun.
Gordievsky’s parting from his family was an agony, not least because Leila and the girls had no inkling of its significance. The saddest moment of his life took place in a humdrum rush, in a bustling supermarket doorway. Leila was distracted, rushing to buy clothes and other last-minute supplies for the train journey south. The girls had already vanished into the shop before he could embrace them. Leila gave him a swift kiss on the cheek and a cheerful wave. “That could have been a bit more tender,” he said, half to himself, the reproach of a man about to commit an act of desertion that would end in indefinite separation at best, and at worst his own arrest, disgrace, and execution. Leila did not hear him. She vanished into the crowded shop in pursuit of their daughters without a backward glance. And part of his heart broke.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 29