Leningrad Station was awash with people, and police. By chance, 26,000 young leftists from 157 countries were pouring into Moscow for the Twelfth World Festival of Youth and Students, starting the following week, billed as a celebration of “anti-imperialist solidarity, peace, and friendship.” At a mass rally, Gorbachev would tell them: “Here, in the homeland of the great Lenin, you can directly feel how deeply our young people are devoted to the noble ideals of humanity, peace, and socialism.” Most festival-goers had come not for Lenin, but for the music: among the performers would be Dean Reed, the pro-Soviet American-born singer who had settled behind the Iron Curtain, the British pop duo Everything But the Girl, and Bob Dylan—who had been invited by the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky. Many of the youth delegates were arriving from Scandinavia, via Finland. Gordievsky was alarmed to see riot police patrolling the station, but then tried to reassure himself: with so many people crossing the northern border, the guards might be too preoccupied to pay much attention to diplomatic cars passing in the other direction. He bought bread and sausage at a stall. As far as he could tell, no one was following him.
The overnight train to Leningrad consisted largely of fourth-class sleeper carriages, with six bunks to each compartment, opening onto a corridor. Gordievsky found he was in the topmost bunk. He collected clean sheets and made up his bed. The female conductor, a student earning money during her vacation, did not seem to pay him particular attention. At 5:30 precisely the train pulled out. For a few hours, Gordievsky lay on the bunk, chewing his scanty supper and trying to remain calm, while beneath him his fellow passengers did the crossword together. He took two sedative pills, and in a few moments fell into a deep sleep, compounded by mental exhaustion, fear, and chemicals.
7 p.m., British embassy, Moscow
The ambassador’s inaugural drinks party was a great success. Sir Bryan Cartledge, who had arrived the night before, gave a brief speech, of which the MI6 party could remember not a single word. Rachel stayed at home, moaning for the hidden microphones, and occasionally emitting “the odd sob.” After an hour of diplomatic chitchat beneath the chandeliers, the two intelligence officers made their excuses, explaining that they had to drive overnight to Leningrad to take Rachel to a doctor in Finland. Of those at the party, only the ambassador, the minister, David Ratford, and the MI6 secretary, Violet Chapman, knew the real purpose of their journey. At the end of the party, Violet retrieved the PIMLICO “medicine package” from the MI6 safe in the embassy, and handed it to Ascot: tranquilizer pills for the adults, and a pair of syringes for sedating two terrified little girls.
Back at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, while the men loaded up the cars, Rachel went into the bedroom where her children were sleeping and kissed them good night. She wondered when she would see them again. “If we get caught,” she reflected, “we’re going to be stuck for a very long time.” Gee walked his stiff-backed and hobbling wife to the Ford Sierra, and settled her in the front seat.
At about 11:15 p.m., the two-car convoy pulled into the wide avenue and headed north, with Gee taking the lead in the Ford, while Ascot followed in his Saab. Both couples had brought a plentiful stock of music cassettes for the long journey to Helsinki.
A single KGB surveillance car escorted them to Sokol, on the city’s outskirts, and then peeled off. As they hit the wide highway, Ascot and Gee could detect no obvious surveillance cars following them. This was not necessarily reassuring. A tail car was not the KGB’s only method of vehicle surveillance. Along every main road State Automobile Inspection Posts (GAI posts) were stationed at regular intervals, which would note when a car under observation passed by, radio ahead to alert the next post, and if necessary maintain contact with any surveillance cars that might be deployed out of sight.
Inside the cars the atmosphere was otherworldly and tense. Since the vehicles were assumed to be bugged, recording or relaying sound to an unseen radio car, there could be no letup in the playacting. The performance was entering its second, mobile act. Rachel complained of her painful back. Ascot grumbled about having to drive hundreds of miles with a small baby, just as the new ambassador had arrived. No one mentioned the escape, or the man who was even now, they all hoped, in a train rumbling toward Leningrad.
“This has got to be a setup,” Gee mused, as Rachel fell asleep. “We can’t possibly get away with this.”
Saturday, July 20
3:30 a.m., Moscow to Leningrad train
Gordievsky woke up on the bottom bunk, with a splitting headache and, for a long and unreal moment, no idea where he was. A young man was looking down on him from an upper bunk, with an odd expression: “You fell out,” he said. The sedatives had plunged Gordievsky into such profound slumber that when the train braked suddenly he had rolled off the bunk and landed on the floor, cutting his temple as he fell. His jersey was covered in blood. He staggered into the corridor for some air. In the next compartment, a group of young women from Kazakhstan were talking animatedly. He opened his mouth to join in the conversation, but as he did so one of the women recoiled in horror: “If you speak one word to me, I’ll scream.” Only then did he realize what he must look like: disheveled, blood-spattered, and unsteady on his feet. He backed away, grabbed his bag, and retreated to the end of the corridor. There was still more than an hour to go before the train reached Leningrad. Would the other passengers report him for being drunk? He went to find the guard, handed her a five-ruble note, and said: “Thank you for your help,” though she had done nothing but supply his bedsheets. She gave him a quizzical look, with what seemed to be a hint of reproach. But she pocketed the money anyway. The train rattled on through the lifting darkness.
4 a.m., Moscow to Leningrad highway
About halfway to Leningrad, in the Valdai Hills, the escape team drove into a spectacular dawn that moved Ascot to lyricism: “A thick mist had risen from the lakes and rivers, extending into long belts beside the hills and through the trees and villages. The land slowly coalesced into substantial forms out of these foaming banks of violet and rose. Three very bright planets shone out in perfect symmetry, one to the left, one to the right, and one straight ahead. We passed solitary figures already scything hay, picking herbs, or taking cows to pasture along the slopes and gullies of common land. It was a stunning sight, an idyllic moment. It was difficult to believe that any harm could come out of a day of such beginnings.”
Florence slept happily in her car seat on the backseat.
A devout Catholic and a spiritual man, Ascot thought: “We are on a line and we are committed to it—there is only one line and that’s the one we’ve got to go on.”
In the second car, Arthur and Rachel Gee were experiencing their own transcendent moment, as the sun emerged over the horizon and light flooded the mist-cloaked Russian uplands.
The Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms was playing on the cassette deck, with Mark Knopfler’s virtuoso guitar seeming to fill the dawn.
These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Someday you’ll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you’ll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms
Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I’ve watched all your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms
“For the first time I thought: this is going to come out all right,” Rachel recalled.
At that moment, a snub-nosed brown Soviet-made Fiat, known as a Zhiguli, the standard-issue KGB surveillance car, slotted in behind the convoy at a distance of about two hundred feet. “We were being followed.”
5 a.m., Main railway station, Leningrad
Gordievsky was among the first passengers to alight when the train pulled in. H
e walked swiftly to the exit, not daring to look behind to see if the guard was already talking to station staff and pointing out the strange man who had fallen out of his berth and then overtipped her. There were no taxis outside the station. But a number of private cars were milling around, their drivers touting for fares. Gordievsky climbed into one: “To the Finland Station,” he said.
Gordievsky arrived at the Finland Station at 5:45. The almost deserted square in front was dominated by a vast statue of Lenin, commemorating the moment in 1917 when the great theorist of revolution arrived from Switzerland to take charge of the Bolsheviks. In Communist lore, the Finland Station is symbolic of revolutionary liberty and the birth of the Soviet Union; to Gordievsky it also represented the route to freedom, but in the opposite direction, in every sense, to Lenin.
The first train toward the border left at 7:05. It would take him as far as Zelenogorsk, thirty miles northwest of Leningrad and just over a third of the way to the Finnish border. From there he could catch a bus that would take him along the main road toward Vyborg. Gordievsky climbed aboard, and pretended to fall asleep. The train was excruciatingly slow.
7 a.m., KGB headquarters, Moscow Center
It is not clear exactly when the KGB noticed that Gordievsky had gone. But by dawn on July 20, the surveillance team from the First Chief Directorate (Chinese department) must have been seriously worried. He had last been seen on Friday afternoon, jogging into the woods on Leninsky Prospekt, carrying a plastic bag. On the previous three occasions that he had gone missing, Gordievsky reappeared within a few hours. This time, he had not returned to the flat. He was not with his sister, his father-in-law, or his friend Lyubimov, or at any other known address.
At this moment, the most sensible action would have been to raise the alarm. The KGB could then have launched an immediate manhunt, stripped Gordievsky’s flat for clues to his whereabouts, pulled in for questioning every friend and relative, redoubled surveillance of British diplomatic personnel, and then shut down every avenue of escape, by air, sea, and land. There is no evidence, however, that the surveillance team did this on the morning of July 20. Instead, they seem to have done what timeservers do in every autocracy that punishes honest failure: they did nothing at all, and hoped the problem would go away.
7:30 a.m., Leningrad
The MI6 exfiltration team parked outside Leningrad’s Astoriya hotel. The brown KGB surveillance car had followed them all the way to central Leningrad, before disappearing. “I assumed we had a new tail,” wrote Ascot. They opened the trunks and “ostentatiously rummaged inside, to show the surveillance we had nothing to hide and our [trunks] were genuinely full of luggage.” While Gee and the two women went inside to feed the baby and have breakfast (“disgusting hard-boiled eggs and wooden bread”), Ascot remained in his car, pretending to be asleep. “The KGB was sniffing around and I didn’t want people to look inside.” Two different men approached the car and peered through the window; on both occasions, Ascot pretended to wake up with a start, and glared at them.
The hundred-mile drive north to the turnout, he estimated, would take about two hours. So they would need to leave Leningrad at 11:45 to get there in plenty of time for the rendezvous at 2:30. The car that had shadowed them into Leningrad, and now the inquisitive types hanging around the car, suggested a worrying degree of KGB interest. “At that point I knew they were going to follow us to the border, and that took the enthusiasm out of me.” The powerful Western cars might be able to outrun a single Soviet-made KGB car and get far enough ahead to swerve into the rendezvous turnout without being seen. But what if the KGB also put a surveillance car in front, as they sometimes did? If PIMLICO had been unable to shake off surveillance, they could be driving into an ambush. “I feared most of all that two sets of KGB surveillance would plan on meeting in a pincer movement at the rendezvous itself. My remaining optimism was evaporating fast.”
With two hours to kill, Ascot suggested they use up the time by making an ironic pilgrimage to the Smolny Institute and Convent, one of Communism’s most venerated sites. Originally the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, one of the first schools in Russia to educate women (aristocrats only), the great Palladian edifice was used by Lenin as his headquarters during the October Revolution, and became the seat of the Bolshevik government until it was moved to the Kremlin in Moscow. It was filled with what Ascot called “Leniniana.”
In the gardens of the Smolny, the foursome sat on a bench, and ostensibly huddled over a guidebook. “It was a last council of war, rehearsing everything,” said Ascot. If they successfully reached the rendezvous site, the contents of the car trunks would need to be rearranged to accommodate the passengers. Rachel would lay out the picnic while the men cleared the luggage from the trunks. Caroline, meanwhile, would walk to the entrance of the turnout with Florence in her arms, and look up and down the road. “If anything seemed amiss, she would remove her headscarf.” But if the coast was clear Gee would open the hood of his car to signal to PIMLICO that it was safe to emerge. Any microphones would overhear the conversation, so the pickup should be conducted wordlessly. If he was the only escapee, he would be hidden in the trunk of Gee’s car. The Ford suspension was higher than that of the Saab, and the extra weight of the body would be slightly less noticeable. “Arthur would lead the way out of the RV site,” wrote Ascot. “And I would protect from behind, against any attempt to ram the boot.”
Lenin’s revolutionary headquarters seemed an appropriate place to be plotting. “It was two fingers to the KGB, really.”
Before climbing back into their cars for the last leg, they wandered down to the banks of the Neva, and watched the river flowing past an abandoned wharf, “now strewn with rusting, wheel-less buses and torn bales of cellophane floating into the river weed.” Ascot suggested this might be a good opportunity for a brief communication with the Almighty. “All four of us had a moment of reflection. We felt very connected to something beyond—and we really needed to.”
On the outskirts of Leningrad, they passed a large GAI police post with a watchtower. Moments later, a blue Zhiguli, with two male passengers and a tall radio aerial, tucked in behind them. “This was a depressing sight,” wrote Ascot. “But worse was to follow.”
8:25 a.m., Zelenogorsk
Gordievsky climbed down off the train and looked around. The town of Zelenogorsk, known until 1948 by its Finnish name, Terijoki, was waking up, and the station was busy. It seemed impossible that he could have been followed here, but back in Moscow the surveillance team must have raised the alarm by now. The border post at Vyborg, fifty miles to the northwest, might already be on alert. The escape plan called for him to catch a bus the rest of the way, and get off at the 836 marker post, 836 kilometers from Moscow and sixteen miles short of the border town. At the bus station he bought a ticket to Vyborg.
The ancient bus was half full, and as it wheezed out of Zelenogorsk, Gordievsky tried to make himself comfortable on the hard seat and closed his eyes. A young couple took the seat in front of him. They were talkative and friendly. They were also, in a way that is almost unique to Russia, stupendously drunk at nine o’clock in the morning. “Where are you going?” they hiccupped. “Where are you from?” Gordievsky gave a mumbled reply. As is the habit of drunks seeking conversation, they asked the same question, louder. He said he was visiting friends in a village near Vyborg, dredging up a name from his study of the mini-atlas. Even to his own ears, that sounded like a flat lie. But it seemed to satisfy the couple, who burbled on inconsequentially and then, after about twenty minutes, lurched to their feet and alighted, waving cheerily.
Dense woods lined either side of the road, conifers mixed with scrub birch and aspen, broken by the occasional clearing with picnic tables. It would be an easy place to get lost in, but also a good place to hide. Tourist buses streamed in the opposite direction, bringing Scandinavian youths to the music festival. Gordievsky noted a large number of military vehicles, including armored personnel carriers. The border
area was heavily militarized, and some sort of training exercise was under way.
The road curved to the right, and suddenly the photographs Veronica Price had shown him so often seemed to come alive. He had not spotted the marker post, but felt certain this was the place. Jumping to his feet, he peered out of the window. The bus was almost empty now, and the driver was looking at him quizzically in his mirror. He brought the bus to a stop. Gordievsky hesitated. The bus started to move again. Gordievsky hurried up the aisle, one hand over his mouth. “Sorry, I’m feeling sick. Can you let me off?” Irritated, the driver stopped once again and opened the door. As the bus pulled away, Gordievsky bent over the roadside ditch, pretending to retch. He was making himself far too conspicuous. At least half a dozen people would now remember him clearly: the train guard, the man who had found him blacked out on the floor of the compartment, the drunk couple, and the bus driver, who would surely recall a sick passenger who seemed not to know where he was going.
The entrance to the turnout was three hundred yards ahead, marked by the distinctive rock. It turned off in a wide D-shaped loop a hundred yards in length, with a screen of trees on the roadside and thick undergrowth of bracken and scrub. A military track at the widest point of the D led deeper into the woods on the right. The dirt surface of the turnout was dusty, but the ground around it was boggy, with pools of semi-stagnant water. It was beginning to get warm, and the earth gave off a pungent, fetid aroma. He heard the whine of a mosquito, and felt the first bite. Then another. The forest seemed echoingly quiet. It was still only 10:30. The MI6 getaway cars would not arrive for another four hours, if they came at all.
Fear and adrenaline can have a strange effect on the mind, as well as the appetite. Gordievsky should have remained hidden in the undergrowth. He should have pulled his jacket over his head, and allowed the mosquitoes to do their worst. He should have waited. Instead he did something that was, with hindsight, very nearly insane.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 33