John Deverell, the head of K Section, went on to head MI5 in Northern Ireland. He was killed in 1994, along with most of Britain’s other Northern Ireland intelligence experts, when their Chinook helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre. In March 2015, after Roy Ascot had taken his seat in the House of Lords, a fellow peer, the historian Peter Hennessy, spectacularly blew his cover: “Although I know that he is too discreet to mention it, the noble Earl possesses a special place in intelligence history as the officer who spirited that remarkable and brave man, Oleg Gordievsky, out of Russia and into Finland.” Ascot’s daughter, whose dirty nappy had played such a strange role in the Cold War, became an authority on Russian art. The KGB could never quite believe that MI6 had taken along a baby as cover on an exfiltration operation.
Michael Bettaney was released on parole in 1998, having served fourteen years of his twenty-three-year sentence. In 1987, Stig Bergling, the Swedish spy, was let out of prison for a conjugal visit with his wife and escaped to Moscow, where he lived on a handsome stipend of five hundred rubles a month. He moved on to Budapest a year later, and then Lebanon, where he worked as a security consultant to Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze militia. In 1994 he called the Swedish security service and announced he wanted to come home. After serving three more years, he was released on the grounds of ill health. Bergling died of Parkinson’s disease in 2015, soon after shooting and wounding a nurse in his care home with an air gun. Arne Treholt was released and controversially pardoned by the Norwegian government in 1992 after serving eight years in a maximum-security prison. His case remains a source of dispute in Norway. The Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission reopened an investigation into the conviction and concluded in 2011 that there was no basis to suggest evidence had been tampered with, as Treholt’s supporters claimed. After his release, he settled in Russia and then Cyprus, where he works as a businessman and consultant. Michael Foot sued the Sunday Times in 1995 over an article, serializing Gordievsky’s memoirs, with the headline: “KGB: Foot Was Our Agent.” Foot described the article as a “McCarthyite smear,” and was paid substantial damages, some of which were used to finance the running of Tribune. Foot died in 2010 at the age of ninety-six.
For Western intelligence services, the Gordievsky case became a textbook example of how to recruit and run a spy, how to use intelligence to inform and improve international relations, and how, in the most dramatic circumstances, a spy in peril could be saved. But the question of who had betrayed him still lingered. Gordievsky had his own theories: perhaps his first wife, Yelena, or Standa Kaplan, his Czech friend, had given him away; perhaps Bettaney had worked out who had exposed him as an MI5 mole; or was it the arrest and trial of Arne Treholt that had alerted the KGB? It did not occur to him, or MI6, to suspect the friendly American officer who frequently sat across the table during his marathon CIA briefings.
After a stint in Rome, Aldrich Ames was assigned to the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group and given access to fresh information on the agency’s Soviet agents, which he passed straight to the KGB. The death toll mounted, as did the balance of his Swiss and American bank accounts. He bought a brand-new silver Jaguar, and then an Alfa Romeo. He spent half a million dollars, in cash, on a new home. He had his nicotine-stained teeth capped. Rosario’s aristocratic airs provided cover, since he claimed the money came from her wealthy relatives. The KGB assured him that it could help him escape if he ever came under suspicion: “We were prepared to do in Washington what the British had done in Moscow with Gordievsky,” said his KGB handler. Ames earned a grand total of $4.6 million from the Soviets, a figure only slightly more astonishing than the fact that his monogrammed shirts and gleaming new teeth had passed unremarked by his CIA colleagues for so long.
On the surface, Gordievsky and Ames behaved in similar ways. Both turned against their respective organizations and countries, and used their intelligence expertise to identify spies for the other side. Both betrayed the oath they had made at the start of their careers, and both appeared to live one life, while living another in secret. But there any similarity ends. Ames spied for money; Gordievsky was driven by ideological conviction. Ames’s victims were rooted out by the KGB and, in most cases, killed; the people Gordievsky exposed, such as Bettaney and Treholt, were watched, intercepted, tried by due process, imprisoned, and eventually released back into society. Gordievsky risked his life for a cause; Ames wanted a bigger car. Ames chose to serve a brutal totalitarian regime for which he felt no affinity, a country where he would never have considered living; Gordievsky had tasted democratic freedom, and made it his mission to defend and support that way of life and culture, finally settling in the West at huge personal cost. In the end, the difference between them is a matter of moral judgment: Gordievsky was on the side of the good; and Ames was on his own side.
The CIA initially put the loss of so many of its Soviet agents down to causes other than an internal spy, including a bug in CIA headquarters or a broken code. The lingering trauma from Angleton’s mole hunts in the 1960s and 1970s made the possibility of betrayal from within too painful to contemplate. But finally it became clear that only treachery could explain the level of attrition, and by 1993 Ames’s lavish lifestyle had finally attracted attention. He was placed under surveillance, his movements tracked and his rubbish searched for clues. On February 21, 1994, Rick and Rosario Ames were arrested by the FBI. “You’re making a big mistake!” he insisted. “You must have the wrong man!” Two months later he pleaded guilty to spying, and was sentenced to life in prison; in a plea bargain, Rosario got five years for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit espionage. In court, Ames admitted that he had compromised “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me” and had provided the Soviet Union and Russia with a “huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies.” Rick Ames, Prisoner 40087-083, is currently imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Gordievsky was staggered to discover that the man he had regarded as a model American patriot had tried to murder him. “Ames blew my career and life into shreds,” he wrote. “But he did not kill me.”
In 1997 the American television journalist Ted Koppel interviewed Ames in prison. Gordievsky was interviewed in England beforehand, and Koppel brought the videotape with him to show to Ames, and gauge his reaction. The betrayed man directly addressed his betrayer. “Aldrich Ames is a traitor,” said Gordievsky, as Ames, dressed in prison garb, intensely studied the footage on a screen. “He only worked for money. He was simply a greedy bastard. He will be punished by his own conscience until the end of his days. You can say: ‘Mr. Gordievsky has nearly forgiven you!’ ”
Koppel turned to Ames as the tape ended: “Do you believe him that he has nearly forgiven you?”
“I think so,” said Ames. “I think everything he said there certainly strikes me very strongly. I said once that the men I betrayed had made similar choices and taken similar chances. Any reasonable person hearing me say that is going to say: ‘What arrogance!’ But that was not an arrogant statement.” Ames’s tone was self-justifying, almost smug, as he insisted on the moral equivalence between his actions and those of the other spy. But the sight of Gordievsky also prompted Ames to utter something that sounded close to regret: “The kind of shame and the kind of remorse that I feel is something that is and always will be intensely personal.”
Oleg Gordievsky still lives, under an assumed name, in the detached house on a nondescript suburban street in England that he moved into soon after his escape from Russia. His home is almost entirely unremarkable. Only the high hedges around it, and the telltale ping of an invisible electronic tripwire as you approach the building, indicate that it might be different from the neighboring houses. The execution order is still in force, and MI6 continues to watch over its most valued Cold War spy. The anger of the KGB lingers. In 2015, Sergei Ivanov, then Vladimir Putin’s chief of sta
ff, blamed Gordievsky for damaging his KGB career: “Gordievsky turned me in. I cannot say that his shameful betrayal and recruitment by the British intelligence service broke my life but I got certain problems at work.” On March 4, 2018, a former GRU officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned by assassins using a Russian nerve agent. Like Gordievsky, Skripal had spied for MI6, but he had been caught in Russia, tried, imprisoned, and then exchanged in a spy swap in 2010. Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB bodyguard accused of murdering the defector Alexander Litvinenko a decade earlier, offered an intriguing response when asked whether Russia had also poisoned Skripal: “If we had to kill anyone, Gordievsky was the one. He was smuggled out of the country and sentenced here to death in absentia.” Putin and his people have not forgotten. The security measures surrounding him were reinforced in the wake of the Skripal poisoning. His home is under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Today Gordievsky seldom leaves the house, though friends and former colleagues in MI5 and MI6 frequently visit him. New recruits are occasionally brought to meet a legend of the secret services. He is still considered a potential target for retribution. He reads, writes, listens to classical music, and closely follows political developments, particularly in his native land. He has never returned to Russia since the day he crossed the Finnish border in 1985, and says he has no desire to do so: “I am British now.” He never saw his mother again. Olga Gordievsky died in 1989, at the age of eighty-two. To the end, she insisted that her son was innocent. “He is not a double agent, but a triple agent, still working for the KGB.” Gordievsky never had the opportunity to tell her the truth. “I would dearly have liked to let her have my version of events.”
As the afterlives of so many spies attest, espionage extracts a heavy price.
Oleg Gordievsky still lives a double life. To his suburban neighbors, the bowed, bearded old man living quietly behind the tall hedges is just another old-age pensioner, a person of little consequence. In reality he is someone else entirely, a figure of profound historical importance and a remarkable man: proud, shrewd, irascible, his brooding manner illuminated by sudden flashes of ironic humor. He is sometimes hard to like, and impossible not to admire. He has no regrets, he says, but from time to time he will break off in mid-conversation and stare darkly into a distance only he can see. He is one of the bravest people I have ever met, and one of the loneliest.
In the 2007 queen’s birthday honors, Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), for “services to the security of the United Kingdom”—the same medal, he likes to point out, that was awarded to the fictional James Bond. The media in Moscow reported, wrongly, that former Comrade Gordievsky would henceforth be “Sir Oleg.” Gordievsky’s portrait hangs in Fort Monckton.
In July 2015, on the thirtieth anniversary of his escape, all those involved in running the case and exfiltrating him from Russia gathered to celebrate the seventy-six-year-old Russian spy. The original cheap imitation leather suitcase, with which he escaped to Finland, is now in the MI6 museum. At the anniversary celebration he was presented, as a souvenir, with a new travel bag. It contained the following: a Mars bar, a plastic Harrods bag, a map of western Russia, pills “for the relief of worry, irritability, insomnia and stress,” mosquito repellent, two bottles of chilled beer, and two cassette tapes: Dr. Hook’s Greatest Hits and Sibelius’s Finlandia.
The final items in the bag were a packet of cheese and onion crisps, and a baby’s nappy.
CODE NAMES AND ALIASES
ABLE ARCHER 83—NATO war game
BOOT—Michael Foot (KGB)
COE—Bettaney case (MI5)
DANICEK—Stanislaw Kaplan (MI6)
DARIO—Unidentified KGB illegal (KGB)
DISARRANGE—Exfiltration of Czech intelligence officer (MI6)
DRIM—Jack Jones (KGB)
ELLI—Leo Long (KGB)
ELMEN—Joint MI5-MI6 Bettaney counterintelligence operation (MI5-MI6)
EMBASE—Expulsion of KGB/GRU personnel after Gordievsky’s defection (UK)
FAREWELL—Vladimir Vetrov (Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire)
FAUST—Yevgeni Ushakov (KGB)
FOOT—Expulsion of KGB-GRU personnel (MI5-MI6)
FREED—Czech intelligence officer (MI6)
GLYPTIC—Joseph Stalin (MI5)
GOLDFINCH—Oleg Lyalin (MI5-MI6)
GOLFPLATZ—Great Britain (German)
GORMSSON—Oleg Gordievsky (PET)
GORNOV—Oleg Gordievsky (KGB)
GROMOV—Vasili Gordievsky (KGB)
GRETA—Gunvor Galtung Haavik (KGB)
GROUND—Cash transfer to DARIO (KGB)
GUARDIYETSEV—Oleg Gordievsky (KGB)
HETMAN—Campaign for release of Leila Gordievsky and daughters (MI6)
INVISIBLE—Exfiltration of Czech scientists (MI6)
KOBA—Michael Bettaney
KORIN—Mikhail Lyubimov (KGB)
KRONIN—Stanislav Androsov (KGB)
LAMPAD—Joint MI5-MI6 liaison (MI5-MI6)
NOCTON—Oleg Gordievsky (MI6)
OVATION—Oleg Gordievsky (MI6)
PIMLICO—Gordievsky exfiltration operation (MI6)
PUCK—Michael Bettaney (MI5)
RON—Richard Gott (KGB)
RYAN—Raketno-yadernoye napadeniye (Soviet Union)
SUNBEAM—Oleg Gordievsky (MI6)
TICKLE—Oleg Gordievsky (CIA)
UPTIGHT—MI6 (CIA)
ZEUS—Gert Petersen (KGB)
ZIGZAG—Eddie Chapman (MI5)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the wholehearted support and cooperation of its subject. Over the last three years, I have interviewed Oleg Gordievsky, at the safe house, on more than twenty occasions, amassing more than one hundred hours of taped conversations. His hospitality has been endless, his patience boundless, and his memory prodigious. His cooperation came without strings attached or any attempt to shape the writing of this book: the interpretation of events and the mistakes it contains are entirely my own. Through Gordievsky, I was able to speak to every MI6 officer involved in the case, and I am hugely grateful to them for their help. They agreed to speak freely, on condition of anonymity. Living former MI6 officers, and some former Russian and Danish intelligence officers, appear here under pseudonyms, including several individuals who have already been publicly identified. All other names are real. I have also benefited from the generous help of many of the former KGB, MI5, and CIA officers involved in the Gordievsky case. This book was not authorized or aided by MI6, and I have had no access to the files of the intelligence service, which remain classified.
Two people have been particularly helpful: arranging meetings with the different participants, attending interviews with Gordievsky, checking the manuscript for factual accuracy, providing nourishment, spiritual and gastronomic, and generally ensuring that a complex and potentially fraught operation has been completed with efficiency and endless good humor. They deserve far greater credit than I can give them; but, to their credit, they do not want it.
I also wish to thank Christopher Andrew, Keith Blackmore, John Blake, Bob Bookman, Karen Brown, Venetia Butterfield, Alex Carey, Charles Cohen, Gordon Corera, David Cornwell, Luke Corrigan, Charles Cumming, Lucie Donahue, St John Donald, Kevin Doughten, Lisa Dwan, Charles Elton, Natasha Fairweather, Emme Fane, Stephen Garrett, Tina Gaudoin, Burton Gerber, Blanche Girouard, Claire Haggard, Bill Hamilton, Robert Hands, Kate Hubbard, Lynda Jordan, Mary Jordan, Steve Kappas, Ian Katz, Daisy Lewis, Clare Longrigg, Kate Macintyre, Magnus Macintyre, Robert McCrum, Chloe McGregor, Ollie McGregor, Gill Morgan, Vikki Nelson, Rebecca Nicolson, Roland Philipps, Peter Pomerantsev, Igor Pomeranysev, Andrew Previté, Justine Roberts, Felicity Rubinstein, Melita Samoilys, Mikael Shields, Molly Stern, Angus Stewart, Jane Stewart, Kevin Sullivan, Matt Whiteman, Damian Whitworth, and Caroline Wood.
My friends and colleagues at The Times have been a
n endless source of support, inspiration, and deserved mockery. The late Ed Victor, my brilliant agent for twenty-five years, was there at the inception, and Jonny Geller took over the reins magnificently. The teams at Viking and Crown have been superb. Finally, my thanks and love to my children, Barney, Finn, and Molly, the kindest and funniest people I know.
REFERENCES
The majority of source material for this book derives from interviews with the participants, officers of MI6, the KGB, and the CIA, most of whom cannot be named; interviews with Oleg Gordievsky and his family and friends; and his memoir, Next Stop Execution, published in 1995. Other sources and significant quotations are cited below.
1. The KGB
“There is no such thing”: Vladimir Putin, speaking to an FSB audience, quoted in Anna Nemtsova, “A Chill in the Moscow Air,” Newsweek, February 2, 2006.
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