Veronica Price took his arm and gently guided him away, a dozen yards into the forest, out of range of any microphones in the British cars.
Now, at last, he spoke, addressing her by the alias she had always worn: “Jean, I was betrayed.”
There was no time for more.
At the second rendezvous point, Gordievsky was swiftly dressed in fresh clothing. His dirty clothes, shoes, bag, and Soviet papers were bundled up and placed in the trunk of Shawford’s car, along with the false passports for Leila and the girls, the redundant syringes, and clothes. Price took the wheel of the Finnish rental car, while Brown and Gordievsky climbed into the backseat. She turned onto the highway heading north. Gordievsky waved away the sandwiches and fruit juice Price had carefully packed. “I wanted whisky,” he said later. “Why didn’t they give me whisky?” Brown had expected him to be hysterical with exhaustion, but instead Gordievsky seemed “perfectly controlled.” He began to tell his story, describing the drugged interrogation, how he had evaded surveillance, and the mysterious way the KGB had followed, but not arrested him. “As soon as he was able to talk—he was straight into analysis of the case, and how we’d misjudged it.” Brown gently raised the question of his family. “It was too much of a risk to bring them,” Gordievsky said flatly, and stared out of the window at the passing Finnish countryside.
At the petrol station on the road to Helsinki, Shawford met Ascot and Gee, heard a swift account of the escape, and headed for the telephone box. The phone rang on P5’s desk in Century House. The entire PIMLICO team clustered around the desk. The Sovbloc controller snatched up the receiver.
“How is the weather?” he asked.
“The weather’s excellent,” said Shawford, and the Sovbloc controller repeated the words to the team clustered around the desk. “The fishing has been very good. The sun is shining. We have one extra guest.”
The message caused momentary confusion. Did that mean another escapee, in addition to the four family members? Had Gordievsky brought along someone else? Were there five people heading for Norway, and, if so, how would the “guest” get across the border without a passport?
Shawford repeated. “No. We have ONE guest. In total.”
The team whooped in unison as the call ended. But the joy was uneven. Sarah Page, the MI6 secretary who had done so much to maintain the nuts and bolts of the case and was now six months pregnant, felt a lurch of empathy for Leila and the children. “Oh the poor wife, and his daughters,” she thought. “They have been left behind. What will happen to them?” She turned to another secretary and muttered: “What about the human cost?”
P5 called C. C called Downing Street. Charles Powell told Margaret Thatcher. The Sovbloc controller drove to Chevening House, the Foreign Secretary’s country residence in Kent, to inform Geoffrey Howe that Gordievsky had crossed the Russian border. At the last moment, he decided not to take champagne—a wise decision, for Geoffrey Howe, who had never been fully behind PIMLICO, was not in a celebratory mood. He had a large map of Finland spread out on a table. The MI6 man pointed to the road where Gordievsky must now be traveling north. “What are your plans in the eventuality that a KGB hit squad is on his trail?” asked the foreign secretary. “What if it goes wrong? What about the Finns?”
That night, on the top floor of the Klaus Kurki, the smartest hotel in Helsinki, Shawford hosted a dinner for the MI6 exfiltration team. They dined on roasted ptarmigan and claret; for the first time, out of microphone range, the Moscow MI6 staff discovered PIMLICO’s real name, and what he had done. If the KGB was still watching, they would have noticed that Rachel Gee’s bad back had miraculously recovered.
The two escape cars drove on through the night, heading toward the Arctic Circle. They stopped only briefly, to fill up with gas and, once, to allow Gordievsky to shave off three days of stubble in a mountain stream, using a side-view mirror. He got halfway through shaving before the mosquitoes drove him back to the car. “We were still in semi-hostile territory. The Russians could have mounted something if they wanted to. It was perfectly within their capabilities. But the further we got from the border, the more confident we became.” The Danish PET officers stuck close. The Arctic sun dipped briefly below the horizon and then rose again. Gordievsky dozed, half awake and semi-bearded, and barely spoke. Shortly after eight o’clock on Sunday morning, they reached the Finnish-Norwegian border at Karigasniemi, a single-pole barrier across the road. The border guard barely bothered to examine the three Danish and two British passports before waving the cars through. At Hammerfest, they spent the night in an airport hotel.
No one paid much attention to Mr. Hanssen, the rather tired-looking Danish gentleman, and his British friends, who boarded the flight to Oslo the next morning, and then caught the connecting flight to London.
On Monday evening, Gordievsky found himself in South Ormsby Hall, a grand country house in the Lincolnshire Wolds, surrounded by servants, candlelight, splendid paneled rooms, and admiring people, eager to congratulate him. The seat of the Massingberd-Mundy family since 1638, the hall had 3,000 acres of surrounding parkland and a complete absence of inquisitive neighbors. Its owner, Adrian Massingberd-Mundy, was an MI5 contact and happy to host a welcoming reception for an honored guest of the service. He was staggered to be told who his guest really was, and sent an aged retainer on a bicycle into the nearby village, to hang around the pub and “check for any signs of loose talk.”
Just forty-eight hours earlier, Gordievsky had been lying in the trunk of a car, drugged, half naked, drenched in his own sweat, sick with fear. Now he was being waited on by a butler. The contrast was too much. He asked if he could telephone his wife back in Russia. MI6 told him he could not. A call would alert the KGB that he was in Britain, something the British wanted to reveal only when they were good and ready. Exhausted, anxious, wondering why he had been taken to this English palace in the middle of nowhere, Gordievsky retired to a four-poster bed.
That evening, MI6 sent a telegram to the Finnish spy chief, Seppo Tiitinen, explaining that British intelligence officers had smuggled a Soviet defector to the West via Finland. The message came back: “Seppo is content. But he wants to know if force was used.” The exfiltration, MI6 reassured him, had been completed without recourse to violence.
The consequences, fallout, and benefits from Britain’s most successful Cold War spy case began to be felt long before news broke of Gordievsky’s astonishing escape.
After a day in Helsinki, during which Gee’s car was thoroughly cleaned to try to remove any evidence that Gordievsky had been in its trunk, the exfiltration team drove swiftly back to Moscow. They knew they would be declared persona non grata and thrown out of the Soviet Union as soon as the KGB uncovered what had happened. But they were elated. “I’ve never felt such a sense of complete exhilaration,” said Ascot. “We were going back into the evil empire, and we’d licked them. After two and a half years of being intimidated, in a system that you knew always won, we’d miraculously dodged them.” David Ratford, the chargé d’affaires, performed a five-minute jog of jubilation around the embassy. The ambassador, however, did not.
A few days later, Sir Bryan Cartledge formally presented his credentials to the Kremlin: a ceremonial photograph was taken, with the staff of the embassy surrounding the new ambassador, dressed in full diplomatic uniform. Ascot and Gee were there—fully aware, as was the ambassador, that they would not be there much longer.
Mikhail Lyubimov was waiting at Zvenigorod Station to meet the 11:13 train on Monday morning. But Gordievsky was not in the last carriage. Nor was he on the next train from Moscow. Irritated but worried, Lyubimov returned to his dacha. Was Gordievsky lying blotto in his flat, or had something worse happened to his old friend, once so punctual and reliable? “Drinking entails optionality,” he reflected sadly. A few days later, Lyubimov was summoned to KGB headquarters for questioning.
Rumors of Gordievsky’s disappearance had begun to swirl around the KGB, accompanied by wild speculati
on, and some deliberate misinformation. For weeks, Directorate K remained convinced that he must still be in the country, drunk or dead. A search of the Moscow area was launched, including lakes and rivers. Some said he had slipped out through Iran, using false papers and in heavy disguise. Budanov claimed that Gordievsky had been spirited into a British safe house after escaping from the KGB sanatorium, knowing full well that he had returned from Semyonovskoye weeks before his disappearance. Leila was brought back from the Caspian and taken to Lefortovo Prison for questioning: the interrogation, the first of many, continued for eight hours. “Where is your husband?” they asked, again and again. Leila replied with asperity: “He’s your officer. You tell me where he is.” When the interrogators revealed that Gordievsky was suspected of working for British intelligence, she refused to believe it. “That seemed so crazy to me.” But as the days turned into weeks, with no word or sighting, the grim truth took root. Her husband had gone. But Leila flatly refused to accept what she was hearing about her husband’s treachery. “Until he tells me himself I will not believe it,” she told the KGB interrogators. “I was very calm, I was strong.” Gordievsky had warned her not to believe any accusations made against him, so that is what she did.
Gordievsky was moved from South Ormsby Hall to Fort Monckton (1MTE, standing for Military Training Establishment), the MI6 training base at Gosport. Above the gatehouse of the Napoleonic fort, he was lodged in a guest suite habitually used by the chief, simple but comfortable. Gordievsky did not want to be lauded and spoiled; he wanted to get to work, and demonstrate—to himself above all—that the sacrifice had been worthwhile. Yet at first he seemed almost overwhelmed by his sense of loss. During the first, four-hour debriefing he focused almost exclusively on the circumstances of his escape, and the fate of his wife and children. He drank endless cups of strong tea and bottles of red wine, preferably Rioja. He repeatedly asked for news of his family. There was none.
For the next four months, Fort Monckton would be his home, private, secluded, and well defended. The need-to-know principle was strictly applied to the identity of the mystery occupant of the gatehouse, but soon many of the staff came to understand that this long-term visitor was someone of importance, to be treated as an honored guest.
The case was awarded a new code name, its last, and one in keeping with the moment of jubilation. SUNBEAM, alias NOCTON, alias PIMLICO, was now, and henceforth, OVATION. As SUNBEAM, Gordievsky had supplied intelligence on the KGB’s Scandinavian operations; as NOCTON, in London, he had produced information that significantly affected strategic thinking in Downing Street and the White House; but as OVATION the case would enter its most valuable phase. Much of the intelligence Gordievsky had produced over the years had been too good to be used, because it was too specific and therefore potentially too incriminating. To protect his security, it had been chopped up, repackaged, disguised, and distributed, with extreme parsimony, to only the most restricted readership. During the London phase alone, the case had produced hundreds of individual reports—ranging from long documents to political reporting to detailed counterintelligence briefs—only a few of which had ever been shared outside British intelligence, and then only in edited form. Now the French could be informed of all intelligence directly relating to France; the Germans could be told of just how close the world had come to disaster during the ABLE ARCHER scare; the full story of how Treholt, Haavik, and Bergling had fallen under suspicion could be revealed to the Scandinavians. With Gordievsky now safe in Britain, and the operational case ended, the vast trove of intelligence gathered over the previous eleven years could be exploited to the full; it was finally time to cash in the winnings. Britain had secrets to trade in abundance. The Fort Monckton apartment became the setting for one of the most extensive intelligence gathering, collating, and distribution exercises ever undertaken by MI6, as a succession of officers, analysts, secretaries, and others harvested the fruits of Gordievsky’s espionage.
With the successful exfiltration, a host of new questions arose. When should the CIA, and other Western allies, be told of MI6’s coup? Whether to inform the media, and if so, how? And, above all, how to manage relations with the Soviet Union? Would the improved understanding between Thatcher and Gorbachev, so painstakingly built up with Gordievsky’s secret help, survive this dramatic turn of events in the spy war? Above all, MI6 pondered what to do about Leila and the two girls. Perhaps, with careful diplomacy, Moscow could be persuaded to release them. The sustained, intensely secret campaign to try to reunite Gordievsky with his family was code-named HETMAN (a historical term for a Cossack leader).
MI6 never doubted Gordievsky’s honesty, yet some found elements of his story hard to swallow. In Whitehall, a handful of skeptics wondered whether “Gordievsky might have been turned into a double agent during his time in Moscow, then deliberately sent back to Britain.” Why had he not been arrested and imprisoned the moment he arrived in Moscow? The analysts put that down to KGB complacency, a legalistic approach, a determination to entrap the spy and his handlers in the act, and fear. “If you’re in the KGB, and you’re going to shoot somebody, you have to have absolute proof, because it may be your turn next. They tried too hard to get hard evidence: that is what saved him, and his own sheer, desperate courage.” But Gordievsky’s description of being drugged and interrogated at the First Chief Directorate dacha seemed scarcely credible. “There were doubts about the sequence of events. It just seemed so melodramatic.” Finally, hanging over the entire case was the most unsettling question of all: who had betrayed him?
Confirmation that Gordievsky’s story was true arrived, a week later, from an unexpected quarter: the KGB.
On August 1, a KGB officer named Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the US embassy in Rome and announced that he wished to defect. The Yurchenko case is one of the strangest in intelligence history. A KGB veteran of twenty-five years’ standing, General Yurchenko had risen to become head of Department Five of Directorate K of the FCD, investigating suspected espionage by KGB officers. Additionally, he was involved in “special operations abroad” and the use of “special drugs.” In March 1985 he had become deputy chief of the First Department, responsible for coordinating KGB efforts to recruit agents in the United States and Canada. He was succeeded by Sergei Golubev, one of the men who had jointly interrogated Gordievsky. Yurchenko remained plugged into the activities of Directorate K, and had good relations with Golubev.
Yurchenko’s motives remain murky, but his defection appears to have been spurred by a failed love affair with the wife of a Soviet diplomat. He would redefect back to the Soviet Union four months later, for reasons that are still unclear. The Soviets later claimed he had been kidnapped by the Americans, but they were equally uncertain what to make of him. Yurchenko may have been unhinged. But he knew a number of very important secrets.
Yurchenko’s defection was hailed as a major triumph for the CIA, the agency’s biggest KGB catch to date. The officer appointed to debrief the Russian defector was the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence expert, Aldrich Ames.
At first, Ames was worried by the news of a senior KGB defector. What if Yurchenko knew he was spying for the Soviets? But it swiftly became clear that the Russian was unaware of Ames’s espionage. “He didn’t know anything about me,” Ames said later. “If he had, I would have been one of the first persons he would have identified in Rome.”
Ames was waiting at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington when Yurchenko was flown in from Italy on the afternoon of August 2.
The first thing he asked the defector, before they had even left the airport tarmac, was the question every intelligence officer is trained to ask a walk-in spy: “Are there any important indications that you know of that the CIA has been penetrated by a KGB mole?”
Yurchenko would identify two spies inside the American intelligence establishment (including one CIA officer), but his most important revelation, that very evening, concerned his former colleague Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB rezident in Lond
on who had been summoned back to Moscow as a suspected traitor, given a truth serum, and grilled by the investigators of Directorate K. Yurchenko had heard through the KGB grapevine that Gordievsky was now under house arrest and liable to be executed. He did not know that Gordievsky had since escaped to Britain; and nor, of course, did Ames. The Russian defector also did not know who had betrayed Gordievsky to the KGB. But Ames did.
Ames’s reaction to the news that Gordievsky had been arrested was indicative of a man whose parallel lives had so completely merged that he could no longer tell them apart. Ames had sold out Gordievsky to the KGB. But his first instinct, on discovering the consequences of his own action, was to warn the British that their spy was in trouble.
“My first thought was, Jesus Christ, we’ve got to do something to save him! We’ve got to get a cable to London and tell the Brits. I had given the KGB Gordievsky’s name. I was responsible for his arrest…I was genuinely worried about him, yet at the same time I knew I had exposed him. I know that sounds crazy, because I was a KGB agent too.” Perhaps he was being deliberately disingenuous. Or perhaps he was still only half a traitor.
The CIA dispatched a message to MI6: a newly arrived Soviet defector was reporting that a senior KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, had been drugged and interrogated as a suspected British spy. Could MI6 shed any light? The CIA did not reveal that it knew perfectly well Gordievsky had been spying for the British. The cable from Langley came as a relief to the OVATION team: here was independent verification of Gordievsky’s story. But it also meant that the Americans would have to be told that he had escaped.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 36