Embarrassed and enraged, and still uncertain exactly how Gordievsky had made his getaway, the KGB responded with a campaign of disinformation, planting fake news to the effect that he had been smuggled out of the embassy during the diplomatic reception, heavily disguised, or issued false papers. His rank and importance were downplayed. The KGB would later claim—as MI6 had once claimed of Philby—that they had suspected him of disloyalty all along. In his memoirs, the former foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov suggested that, under interrogation, Gordievsky had offered to switch sides yet again. “Gordievsky was close to confessing when he began to probe the possibility of actively operating against the British, and even offered various guarantees that he could work successfully as a double agent. The KGB leadership was informed that day. Foreign-intelligence officers were confident he would admit everything the next day. But suddenly an order came from above to stop the debriefing, remove outside surveillance, and send Gordievsky to a health centre…from there he fled across the Finnish border.” Primakov’s gloss does not make sense. If Gordievsky only came “close” to confessing, he plainly did not actually do so; and if he did not admit to being a British agent, how could he have offered to be a double agent?
Both Primakov and Viktor Cherkashin, Ames’s first KGB handler, insisted that the KGB had been alerted to Gordievsky’s betrayal by an unnamed source months before his return to Moscow. But, for all the bluster and fakery, the KGB leadership knew the truth: it had held the most significant spy of the Cold War in its grasp, and then let him slip through its fingers.
Two days after the Anglo-Soviet diplomatic bloodbath, a long column of passenger cars, some twenty in all, trundled along the Leningrad to Vyborg highway. Eight were British diplomatic cars, and every other car was a KGB surveillance vehicle. The diplomats were being expelled through Finland: Ascot and Gee were retracing the escape route, only now they were escorted out of the country “like prisoners being paraded in triumph.” In his luggage, Gee had carefully packed a Harrods bag, and a tape of Sibelius’s Finlandia. As they reached the turnout with its distinctive rock, the KGB cars slowed, and the Soviet officers all swiveled in their seats and stared at the spot as they drove slowly past. “They had worked it out.”
The KGB, legalistic to the last, had not quite finished with Gordievsky. On November 14, 1985, he was tried in absentia by a military tribunal, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death. Seven years later, Leonid Shebarshin, who had succeeded Kryuchkov as head of the FCD, gave an interview in which he said he hoped Gordievsky would be assassinated in Britain, and issued what sounded like a public threat to do so. “Technically,” he said, “it’s nothing very special.”
* * *
Oleg Gordievsky became a one-man intelligence roadshow. He traveled the world, accompanied by a series of MI6 minders, explaining the KGB and demystifying that most mysterious of organizations. Among other countries, he traveled to New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and throughout Scandinavia. Three months after his exfiltration, a gathering was held at Century House, to which representatives of all the intelligence services were invited, along with selected government officials and allies, to examine the Gordievsky haul and its implications for arms control, East-West relations, and future intelligence planning. The hundreds of individual reports were piled up on a single conference table, “like a huge buffet,” over which the assembled spies and spymasters browsed and gorged for two solid days.
In Britain, MI6 bought a house for him in the London suburbs, where he lived under a false name. MI6 and MI5 took the death threats seriously. He gave lectures, listened to music, and wrote books with the historian Christopher Andrew, works of detailed scholarship that still stand as the most comprehensive accounts of Soviet intelligence to date. He even gave television interviews, disguised in a faintly absurd wig and false beard. The KGB knew what he looked like, but it was not worth taking chances. As Gorbachev’s reforms began to sweep the Soviet Union, and the Communist empire started to totter, his expertise was ever more sought after.
In May 1986, Margaret Thatcher invited him to Chequers, her official country residence. For nearly three hours, she interviewed the man she had known as Mr. Collins: on arms control, Soviet political strategy, and Gorbachev. In March 1987 he briefed her again, this time in Downing Street, before she made another successful visit to Moscow. The same year, he met Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, where they discussed Soviet espionage networks and posed for the cameras. The meeting lasted twenty-two minutes (four minutes longer, Gordievsky gleefully noted, than the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, had enjoyed with the leader of the free world). “We know you,” said Reagan, putting an arm around the Russian’s shoulder. “We appreciate what you’ve done for the West. Thank you. We remember your family, and we’ll fight for them.”
For the first years of liberty, he was exceedingly busy, but often profoundly miserable.
Gordievsky’s family remained captives of a vengeful KGB. In a recurrent dream, he saw his wife and daughters returning at the arrivals hall in Heathrow to a joyful reunion, only to wake up to the knowledge that he was alone.
In Moscow, Leila lived under effective house arrest, kept under close surveillance in case she, too, somehow managed to flee. Her telephone was tapped. Her letters were intercepted. She could not find a job, and depended on her parents for support. One by one, her friends seemed to melt away. “There was an absolute vacuum. Everyone was frightened to see me. I changed the childrens’ names to Aliev, because Gordievsky is such a distinctive name. My daughters would have been ostracized.” She stopped cutting her hair, and declared she would not cut it again until she was reunited with her husband. When, years later, she was asked by a journalist how she felt when she heard he had defected to Britain, she said: “I was simply glad to know he was alive.” Under the terms of Gordievsky’s conviction for treachery, their combined property was confiscated: flat, car, luggage, and the video recorder brought from Denmark. “The camp bed with the holes in the mattress, the iron. They especially liked the iron because it was an imported one, a Hoover,” Leila said.
Gordievsky tried to send her telegrams, but these never reached her. He bought presents, including expensive clothes for the girls, which he lovingly wrapped and sent to Moscow. All were seized by the KGB. When a letter finally arrived from Leila, he read the first few lines and realized it had been dictated by the KGB. “They’ve forgiven you,” she wrote. “You can easily get another job.” Was this plainly a trap to lure him back? Was she conspiring with the KGB? He managed to smuggle a letter to her, through a Soviet official, in which he stuck to the claim that he was the victim of a KGB plot, perhaps thinking this would protect her. Leila was appalled. She knew it was not true. “He told me: ‘I’m not guilty of anything. I’m an honest officer, I’m a loyal citizen and so on, and I had to flee abroad.’ Why he lied to me again I don’t know. It was surreal. I tried to understand. There were some words about the children, and he said he still loved me. But I thought: ‘You did what you wanted to do—I am still here with the children. You ran, but we are prisoners.’ ” They were deceiving each other. Perhaps they were deceiving themselves. The KGB told Leila that her husband was having “an affair with a young English secretary.”
Leila was informed by the KGB that if she formally divorced Gordievsky, her property would be returned, including the iron. “They said I should think of the children.” She agreed. The KGB sent a taxi to take her to the divorce court, and paid the divorce tax. She reverted to her maiden name. She believed she would never see him again. “Life went forward,” she said. “The children went to school, they had some joy. Never did I dare to cry in front of my children or show what was in my soul. I always had a proud mind and a smile on my face.” But she told a sympathetic Western journalist who managed to secure a brief interview that she still loved her husband, and longed to be with him. “Even if I am not his wife on paper, I am still his wife in spirit.”
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The campaign to get the family out continued for six years, relentlessly and fruitlessly. “We tried to approach them through the Finns and Norwegians, but we had no cards,” said George Walker, the MI6 officer in charge of Operation HETMAN and now one of Gordievsky’s main points of contact with the service. “We spoke to people in neutral countries, and human rights people. We got the French, the Germans, the New Zealanders, everybody, to organize and try to build pressure for their release. The Foreign Office was constantly bringing it up through the ambassadors in Moscow.” When Margaret Thatcher met Gorbachev in March 1987, she immediately raised the issue of Gordievsky’s family. Charles Powell observed the Soviet leader’s reaction. “He went white with anger and refused to respond at all.” They would meet twice more over the coming years. On both occasions, Thatcher raised the matter again, and was rebuffed. “But it didn’t deter her, it never did deter her.”
The KGB would not relent. “Oleg had made absolute fools of them,” said Walker. “The only punishment they could inflict on Oleg was not to let his wife and children go.”
Two years after the escape, a letter from Leila arrived in London, brought out by a Finnish truck driver who posted it to London from Helsinki. The letter, in Russian on three pages of foolscap, was not written under KGB direction. It was honest, and furious. Walker read it: “It was the letter of a very strong, able, very angry woman saying: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How could you abandon me? What are you doing to rescue us?’ ” Any hope that the story might have a fairy-tale ending began to fade. Betrayal, extended separation, and KGB misinformation had eroded what little marital trust remained. Occasionally they managed to make telephone contact, but the conversations were strained, as well as overheard and recorded. The girls were shy and monosyllabic. The stilted exchanges on a crackling line seemed only to magnify the distance, both physical and psychological. Walker observed: “I knew from the start it wasn’t going to be an easy reconciliation. It would have been extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances. But once I’d read the letter it was clear that it was very unlikely that there was going to be a reunion.” Operation HETMAN continued nonetheless. “My job was to make sure that we still remembered this woman.”
The escape had stunned and deeply embarrassed the KGB, but the heads that rolled were, as always, the smaller ones. Nikolai Gribin, Gordievsky’s immediate boss, was demoted, even though he had no responsibility for what had happened. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the First Chief Directorate, became chairman of the KGB in 1988. As his deputy, Viktor Grushko rose with him. Viktor Budanov, who had led the investigation, was appointed head of Directorate K and rose to the rank of general. After the collapse of Communism, Budanov founded Elite Security. In 2017, it was announced that Elite had won a $2.8 million contract to guard the US embassy in Moscow, an irony that amused Mikhail Lyubimov, who pointed out that the Russian embassy in Washington would be quite unlikely to hire a company with links to the CIA.
The Berlin Wall, the barrier that had triggered the first stirrings of rebellion in Gordievsky, came down in 1989, following a wave of anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe. With glasnost and perestroika, the KGB began to loosen its grip on the disintegrating Soviet Union. The hardliners of the Kremlin were increasingly unhappy with Gorbachev’s reforms, and in August 1991 a group of plotters, led by Kryuchkov, attempted to seize power. He doubled the pay of all KGB personnel, ordered them back from holiday, and placed them on alert. The coup collapsed after three days. Kryuchkov was arrested, along with Grushko, and charged with high treason. Gorbachev moved quickly against his enemies in Soviet intelligence: the KGB’s 230,000 troops were placed under Defence Ministry control, Directorate K was disbanded, and most of the top leadership was fired—with the exception of Gennadi Titov, now a general. “The Crocodile” happened to be on holiday when the coup was launched, and was promoted to head of counterintelligence. “Spying has become much harder than it used to be,” he said wistfully, a few days after the attempted putsch.
Kryuchkov was replaced by Vadim Bakatin, a democratic reformer who set about dismantling the vast espionage and security system that had terrorized the Soviet Union for so long. “I am presenting the president with plans for the destruction of this organization,” said Bakatin. The new head of the KGB would also be its last. One of his first acts was to announce that the Gordievsky family would be reunited. “I felt it was an old problem, which should be resolved,” said Bakatin. “When I asked my generals, they all categorically said, ‘No!’ but I decided to ignore them, and regard this as my first major victory in the KGB.”
Leila Aliyeva Gordievsky and her daughters, Maria (Masha) and Anna, landed at Heathrow on September 6, 1991, and were flown by helicopter to Fort Monckton, where Gordievsky was waiting to take them home. There were flowers, champagne, and presents. He had tied yellow ribbons, the American symbols of homecoming, throughout the house, bought fresh new linen for the girls’ beds, and turned on every lamp to create a “cheerful blaze of light.”
Three months after the family was reunited, the Soviet Union was dissolved. The newspapers published posed photographs of the family, strolling happily through London, a picture of domestic harmony and the power of love at a time of tumultuous political upheaval in Russia. Here was a convenient romantic symbol for the end of Communism. But after six years of enforced estrangement, there was also deep pain. Masha, now aged eleven, barely remembered her father. To his ten-year-old younger daughter, Anna, he was a stranger. Oleg expected Leila to slot back into the marriage just as before. He found her critical and hostile, “demanding explanations.” He accused her of making the children deliberately dependent on her. For Leila, the return to Britain was just the latest chapter in a story over which she had no control. Her life had been destroyed by politics and the secret choices made by a man she had loved deeply, and trusted completely, but had never fully known. “He did what he believed in, and I respect him for that. But he didn’t ask me. He involved me without my choice. He didn’t give me an opportunity to choose. From his point of view he was my savior. But who put me in the shit-hole? He’d forgotten the first part. You can’t kick someone off a cliff and then put out a hand and say: ‘I saved you!’ He was so bloody Russian.” Leila could not forget, or get over, what had happened to her. They tried to reassemble a family life, but the marriage that existed before the escape was from another world, another time, and could not be wished back to life. In the end, she felt Gordievsky’s loyalty to an idea had taken precedence over his love for her. “The relationship between a person and the state is one thing, and the relationship of two loving people is completely different,” she said, many years later. The marriage, already over in the eyes of Soviet law, came to a swift and bitter end. “There was nothing left,” Oleg wrote. They parted forever in 1993, their relationship destroyed by the battle between the KGB and MI6, between Communism and the West. The marriage had been conceived amid the impossible contradictions of Cold War espionage, and died just as that war was ending.
Leila divides her time between Russia and the UK. Their daughters, Maria and Anna, attended British schools and universities, and remain in Britain. They do not use the name Gordievsky. MI6 continues its duty of care to the family.
Gordievsky’s friends and colleagues in the KGB could not forgive him either. Maksim Parshikov was brought back from London, investigated by the KGB, and then fired. He spent the rest of his life wondering why Gordievsky had taken the leap into betrayal. “It’s true that Oleg was a dissident. But who in the USSR in his sober mind wouldn’t be a dissident in the 1980s, at least to a certain extent? The majority of us in the London rezidentura were a bunch of dissidents to different degrees, and we all liked life in the West. But it was only Oleg who turned out to be a traitor.” Mikhail Lyubimov took the betrayal as a personal injury: Gordievsky had been his friend, they had shared secrets, music, and the works of Somerset Maugham. “Immediately after Gordievsky’s flight, I felt the fist of th
e KGB. Almost all former colleagues immediately broke contact with me, and shied away from meetings…I heard rumors that menacing KGB orders referred to me as the main culprit in Gordievsky’s betrayal.” Only now did he understand the clue Gordievsky had given him on the eve of his escape by referring to “Mr. Harrington’s Washing.” Though he never succeeded in becoming the Russian Somerset Maugham, Lyubimov wrote novels, plays, and memoirs, and remained a most distinctive hybrid of the Cold War: Soviet in loyalty, old-school English in manner. He deeply resented that he had been used to divert the attention of the KGB at the crucial moment in the escape, and made into what he called, in English, a “red herring.” Gordievsky had outraged his sense of British fair play. They never spoke again.
Sir Bryan Cartledge was surprised how quickly, after the tit-for-tat spy expulsions, relations between Britain and the Soviet Union resumed their former warmth. He completed his ambassadorship in the Soviet Union in 1988. Looking back on the case, he described the exfiltration as “an extraordinary victory.” Gordievsky had supplied “a compendium of knowledge of the KGB’s structure and modus operandi…enabling us comprehensively to frustrate them, probably for years.” Rosemary Spencer, the researcher at the Conservative Central Office, was shocked to discover that the charming Russian diplomat she had grown so close to, at the behest of MI5, was working for MI6 all along. She married a Dane, and moved to Copenhagen.
Gordievsky’s MI6 case officers and handlers maintained their bond, a secret cell inside the secret world. The other officers—Richard Bromhead, Veronica Price, James Spooner, Geoffrey Guscott, Martin Shawford, Simon Brown, Sarah Page, Arthur Gee, Violet Chapman, George Walker—stayed in the shadows, where they remain, at their own request, because these are not their real names. At a secret audience with the queen, Ascot and Gee were each appointed an OBE, and Chapman was appointed an MBE. Philip Hawkins, the Scotsman who had been Gordievsky’s first case officer, gave a typically dry response when he learned of the escape: “Oh, he was genuine after all, was he? I never believed he was.”
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