He decided he would go into Vyborg, and have a drink.
12 p.m., Leningrad to Vyborg highway
The two MI6 cars were leaving the outskirts of Leningrad, with the blue KGB Zhiguli following, when a Soviet police car pulled out ahead of Ascot’s Saab, and positioned itself at the head of the little convoy. A few moments later, a second police car passed in the opposite direction, then signaled and performed a U-turn, and slotted in behind the KGB car. A fourth car, a mustard-colored Zhiguli, joined the rear of the column. “We were bracketed,” said Ascot. He exchanged an anxious look with Caroline but said nothing.
Some fifteen minutes later, the police car in front suddenly pulled ahead. At the same moment, the KGB car also accelerated, overtook the two British cars, and assumed the front position. A mile ahead, the first police car was waiting in a side road. Once the convoy had passed, it pulled out and took up the rear position. The convoy was bracketed again, but now with the KGB in front, and the two police cars behind. A classic Soviet power play had just taken place, coordinated by radio and performed as a bizarre motorized dance: “The KGB had said to the police: ‘You can stay, but we’re going to run this operation.’ ”
Whatever order they might choose to drive in, this was intense surveillance, with no effort made to disguise it. Ascot drove on gloomily. “At that point I thought we were in a pincer movement. I saw us turning into the place and meeting a reception committee, a whole lot of uniformed people coming out of the bushes.”
The kilometer marker posts were counting down. “I had no plan formulated to deal with such a situation: I hadn’t quite imagined that we might be moving toward the rendezvous with the KGB a few yards ahead and just behind us.” With one car in front and three in the rear, it would be impossible to pull into the turnout. “If they are still with us at the rendezvous point,” thought Ascot, “we are going to have to abort.” PIMLICO—and his family, if he had brought them—would be left high and dry. Assuming, that is, that he had ever left Moscow.
12:15 p.m., a café south of Vyborg
The first car on the road going in the direction of Vyborg had been a Lada, which obligingly stopped the moment Gordievsky stuck out his thumb. Hitchhiking, known as Avtostop, was common in Russia, and encouraged by the Soviet authorities. Even in a military zone, a lone hitchhiker was not necessarily suspicious. The young driver was smartly dressed in civilian clothes. Possibly military or KGB, Gordievsky reflected, but if so he was remarkably incurious, asked not a single question, and played loud Western pop music all the way to the edge of the town. When Gordievsky proffered three rubles for the short journey, the man accepted the money wordlessly and drove away without looking back. A few minutes later Gordievsky was sitting down to his fine lunch: two bottles of beer and a plate of fried chicken.
The first bottle of beer slipped down, and Gordievsky began to feel a delicious drowsiness as the adrenaline subsided. The chicken leg was one of the tastiest things he had ever eaten. The empty cafeteria on the outskirts of Vyborg seemed utterly nondescript, a glass and plastic bubble. The waitress had barely glanced at him as she took his order. He began to feel, not safe exactly, but oddly calm and suddenly exhausted.
Vyborg had changed nationality repeatedly down the centuries, from Sweden to Finland to Russia, then the Soviet Union, back to Finland, and finally Soviet again. In 1917, Lenin had passed through the town at the head of his contingent of Bolsheviks. Before the Second World War its population of 80,000, though the majority were Finnish, also included Swedes, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Tatars, and Jews. During the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union (1939–40), virtually the entire population was evacuated, and more than half the buildings were destroyed. After bitter fighting, it was occupied by the Red Army, and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944, when the last Finns were expelled and replaced by Soviet citizens. It had the stark, inert atmosphere of every town that has been demolished, ethnically cleansed, and rebuilt swiftly and cheaply. It felt utterly unreal. But the café was warm.
Gordievsky came to with a jolt. Had he been asleep? Suddenly it was 1 p.m. Three men had entered the cafeteria, and were staring at him, Gordievsky thought, with suspicion. They were well dressed. Trying to appear unhurried, he picked up the second bottle of beer, put it in the bag, left money on the table, and walked out. Steeling himself, he walked casually south; after four hundred yards, he dared to look back. The men were still inside the café. But where had the time gone? The road was now deserted. With the arrival of lunchtime, the traffic had melted away. He began to run. The sweat was pouring off him after just a few hundred yards, but he picked up speed. Gordievsky was still an accomplished runner. Despite the trials of the last two months, he remained fit. He could feel his heart pumping, from fright and exertion, as he got into his stride. A hitchhiker might be unremarkable, but a man sprinting along an empty road would surely excite curiosity. At least he was running away from the border. He ran faster. Why had he not remained at the rendezvous? Could he possibly cover the sixteen miles back to the turnout in an hour and twenty minutes? Almost certainly not. But he ran anyway, as fast as he could. Gordievsky ran for his life.
1 p.m., two miles north of Vaalimaa village, Finland
On the Finnish side of the border, the MI6 reception team got into position early. They knew Ascot and Gee had set off from Moscow on time the previous evening, but had heard nothing since. Price and Brown parked their red Volvo off the track, on the edge of the clearing. Shawford and the Danes took up positions on either side of the road. If the two cars arrived with the KGB in hot pursuit, Eriksen and Larsen would use their vehicle to try to block or ram the pursuers. They seemed most cheerful at the possibility. It was hot and quiet, oddly peaceful after the frenetic activity of the previous four days.
“I felt an extraordinary period of stillness at the center of the turning world,” Simon Brown recalled. He had brought along Hotel du Lac, the Booker Prize–winning novel by Anita Brookner. “I thought if I took a long book it would be tempting fate, so I took a short book.” The Danes dozed. Veronica Price made a mental checklist of everything on the escape plan. Brown read as slowly as he could, and “tried not to think of the minutes ticking by.” Dark forebodings kept intruding: “I wondered whether we had killed the kids by injecting drugs into them.”
1:30 p.m., Leningrad to Vyborg highway
Russia’s road-building authorities were proud of the highway running from Leningrad to the Finnish border, the main gateway between Scandinavia and the Soviet Union. It was a show road, wide and properly asphalted and cambered, with neat signs and road markings. The little convoy was making good progress, cruising at seventy-five miles per hour, with the KGB car in front, the MI6 cars corraled in the middle, and two police vehicles and a second KGB car following a little way behind. It was all far too easy for the KGB, so Ascot decided to make it more difficult.
“I had been under surveillance for years, and we had got to know the way the KGB Seventh Directorate thought. While they often knew that you knew they were around, what really offended and embarrassed them was when someone deliberately indicated that he had spotted them: psychologically, no surveillance team likes to be shown up by its target as obvious and incompetent. They hate you putting two fingers up, and saying in effect: ‘We know you are there and we know what you’re up to.’ ” On principle, Ascot always ignored surveillance, however overt. Now, for the first time, he broke his own rule.
The Viscount-spy reduced speed until he was traveling at just thirty-five miles per hour. The rest of the convoy did likewise. At Kilometer Post 800, Ascot slowed again, until they were crawling along at barely thirty miles per hour. The KGB car in front decelerated and waited for the British cars to catch up. Other cars began to stack up behind the convoy.
The KGB driver did not like it. The British were mocking him, deliberately impeding progress. “Finally, the nerve of the driver in front broke, and he shot off at top speed. He didn’t like being shown up.” A few mi
les farther on, the blue KGB Zhiguli was waiting in a side road leading to the village of Kaimovo. It tucked in behind the other surveillance cars. Ascot’s Saab was once again in the lead.
Gradually, he increased speed. So did Gee, maintaining a distance of just fifty feet between his car and the Saab in front. The three following cars began to fall behind. The road ahead was straight and clear. Ascot accelerated again. They were now speeding at around eighty-five miles per hour. A gap of more than eight hundred yards had opened up between Gee and the Russian cars. Kilometer Post 826 shot past. The rendezvous point was just ten kilometers ahead.
Ascot swung around a bend and hit the brakes.
An army column was crossing the road, from left to right: tanks, howitzers, rocket launchers, armored personnel carriers. A bread van was already stopped ahead, waiting for the convoy to pass. Ascot drew to a halt behind the van. Gee pulled up behind him. The surveillance cars caught up, and bunched up behind. The Russian soldiers on top of the tanks spotted the foreign cars, and raised clenched fists and shouted, an ironic Cold War salutation.
“That’s it,” thought Ascot. “We are done.”
2:00 p.m., Leningrad highway, ten miles southeast of Vyborg
Gordievsky heard the truck rumbling up behind him before he saw it, and stuck out his thumb. The driver beckoned the hitchhiker aboard. “What do you want to go there for? There’s nothing there,” he said when Gordievsky, panting, explained that he would like to be dropped off at Kilometer Post 836.
Gordievsky shot him what he hoped was a conspiratorial look. “There are some dachas in the woods. I’ve got a nice lady waiting for me in one of them.” The truck driver gave a snort of approval, and grinned in complicity.
“You lovely man,” thought Gordievsky, when the driver dropped him, ten minutes later, at the rendezvous point, and drove away with a lascivious wink and three rubles in his pocket. “You lovely, Russian man.”
At the turnout, he crawled into the undergrowth. The mosquitoes hungrily welcomed him back. A bus carrying women to the military base turned into the turnout and went down the track; Gordievsky flattened himself on the damp earth, wondering if he had been spotted. Silence fell, save for the whining mosquitoes, and his thumping heart. Dehydrated, he drank the second bottle of beer. 2:30 passed. Then 2:35.
At 2:40, another moment of madness gripped him, and he got to his feet and walked into the road, heading in the direction the MI6 getaway cars should be coming from. Perhaps he could save a few minutes by meeting them on the road itself. But after a few steps, sanity returned. If the cars had a KGB escort, they would all be caught in the open. He ran back to the turnout and dived into the concealing bracken once more.
“Wait,” he told himself. “Control yourself.”
2:40 p.m., Kilometer Post 826, Leningrad to Vyborg highway
The last vehicle of the military convoy finally trundled across the road. Ascot gunned the engine of the Saab, shot around the stationary bread van, and accelerated hard, with Gee just a few yards behind him. They were a hundred yards ahead before the KGB car had started its engine. The road ahead was clear. Ascot put his foot to the floor. Handel’s Messiah was playing on the tape deck. Caroline turned it up to full volume. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” Ascot thought grimly: “If only…”
The MI6 officers had driven the route several times before, and both knew that the turnout was just a few miles ahead. In moments they were back up to eighty-five miles per hour, and the escort cars were already five hundred yards behind, the gap steadily increasing. Just before the 836 Marker Post, the road straightened and dipped for about half a mile, and then rose again before making a sharp bend to the right. The turnout was on the right, about two hundred yards farther on. Would it be full of Russian picnickers? Caroline Ascot still did not know whether her husband was going to attempt the pickup or drive on past the turnout. Nor did Gee. Nor, in fact, did Ascot.
At the brow of the dip, as Ascot turned into the curve, Gee glanced in his rearview mirror, to see the blue Zhiguli just coming into view on the straight, half a mile behind—a gap of half a minute, perhaps less.
The rock loomed into view, and almost before he knew he had done it, Ascot slammed on the brakes, shot into the turnout, and came to a screeching stop, with Gee just a few yards behind, their skidding tires kicking up a cloud of dust. They were screened from the road by the trees and the rock. The place was deserted. The time was 2:47. “Please God, don’t let them see the dust,” thought Rachel. As they clambered out of the cars, they heard the sound of three Zhiguli engines, screaming in protest, hurtle past on the main road, less than fifty feet away on the other side of the trees. “If just one of them looks in his rear mirror now,” thought Ascot, “he will see us.” The sound of the engines faded. The dust settled. Caroline tied on her headscarf, picked up Florence, and headed to the lookout point at the turnout entrance. Rachel, following the script, took out the hamper and laid out the picnic rug. Ascot set about transferring luggage from the trunks to the backseats, and Gee moved to the front of the Saab, preparing to open the hood as soon as Caroline gave the all-clear signal.
At that second, a tramp erupted from the undergrowth, unshaven and unkempt, covered in mud, ferns, and dust, dried blood in his hair, a cheap brown bag clutched in one hand, and a wild expression on his face. “He looked absolutely nothing like the photograph,” thought Rachel. “Any fantasies we had of meeting a suave spy disappeared on the spot.” Ascot thought the figure looked like “some forest troll or woodman in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”
Gordievsky recognized Gee as the man with the Mars bar. Gee had barely glimpsed him outside the bread shop, and momentarily wondered if this scruffy apparition could be the same person. For a beat, on a dusty track in a Russian forest, the spy and the people sent to rescue him stared at one another in indecision. The MI6 team had prepared for four people, including two small children, but PIMLICO was evidently alone. Gordievsky was expecting to be picked up by two intelligence officers. Veronica had said nothing about any women, let alone women who seemed to be laying out some sort of formal English picnic, complete with teacups. And was that a child? Could MI6 really have brought along a baby on a dangerous escape operation?
Gordievsky looked from one man to the other, and then grunted, in English: “Which car?”
Leila and her two daughters, soon after arriving in London in 1982, at a café outside the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.
The Soviet embassy at Number 13, Kensington Palace Gardens. The KGB’s London station, or rezidentura, was located on the top floor, and was one of the most profoundly paranoid places on earth.
Gordievsky’s daughters, Maria and Anna. The family had settled happily in London, and the girls grew up speaking fluent English and attending a Church of England school.
Michael Bettaney, the MI5 officer who approached the KGB in London and offered to spy for the Soviets, using the code name “Koba,” one of Stalin’s nicknames.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, a key member of the secret MI5-MI6 task force nicknamed “the Nadgers” set up to try to identify the spy inside the British Security Service. She would go on to become director general of MI5 in 2002.
General Arkadi Guk (right), the KGB rezident, with his wife and bodyguard. Gordievsky described him as a “lump of a man, with a mediocre brain and a large reserve of low cunning.”
Guk’s home at 42 Holland Park. On April 3, 1983, Bettaney pushed a package through the letterbox containing a top-secret MI5 document and an offer to divulge more intelligence to the KGB. Guk dismissed this as an MI5 “provocation.”
Century House, MI6’s London headquarters until 1994; an unremarkable building but the most secret premises in London.
Michael Foot, Labour MP, future leader of the party, and a KGB contact code-named BOOT.
Jack Jones, described by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as “
one of the world’s greatest trade union leaders.” He was also a KGB agent.
Oleg Gordievsky with Ron Brown, Labour MP for Edinburgh Leith (center), and Jan Sarkocy (right), a Czechoslovakian spy who also met Jeremy Corbyn, the future party leader. Gordievsky attempted to recruit Brown to the KGB on several occasions, but found his Scottish accent completely incomprehensible.
The downing of KAL Flight 007 in September 1983 by a Soviet fighter prompted widespread protests and brought Cold War tensions to new levels of intensity.
Margaret Thatcher attends the funeral of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in Moscow on February 14, 1984. Britain’s prime minister played a “suitably solemn” role following a script written, in part, by Gordievsky.
The future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meets Thatcher at Chequers in December 1984. She later described him as “a man one could do business with.”
Mikhail Lyubimov, the Anglophile, tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking KGB officer nicknamed “Smiley Mike” by MI5, which tried to recruit him as a double agent.
The cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, responsible for overseeing the intelligence services. He decided not to inform Thatcher that Michael Foot, her Labour opponent, had once been a paid KGB contact.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 34