In the middle of the day I got out money for the journey. At that date there were no ordinary banks in Moscow, only primitive savings banks, and I reckoned that the most I could draw from my account without attracting notice was three hundred roubles (then worth three hundred pounds). Most of this I intended to leave for Leila: eighty roubles would be plenty for my train ticket, a couple of taxis and meals during my journey. At the end of it, roubles would be of no further use to me: I would either be out of the Soviet Union or in gaol.
Tuesday evening was clear and warm, but not too hot — a lovely Moscow summer’s evening. This time I was full of resolve not to make mistakes. Wearing a smart, lightweight pale-grey suit and tie, and carrying a Safeway supermarket bag, I left the flat at 4 p.m. and went through my full repertoire of dry-cleaning tricks: to the shops, to the police station, and on to my sister’s block, where I watched from the staircase window. When all seemed clear, I continued to the rendezvous, arriving early at 6.45.
Purely to kill time, I went into a shop, bought a packet of cigarettes, opened it and put one in my mouth. As I discovered later, this proved a mistake for the contact who came to meet me knew that I did not smoke, and the sight of the cigarette made him doubt my identity. Never having seen me in the flesh, he was relying on photographs for identification, and when he saw a man smoking he immediately wondered if this was not a KGB provocation, designed to entangle British intelligence officers.
By 6.59 I was on station, at the edge of the pavement, by the lamp-post. Hardly had I reached the spot when a black Volga pulled out of the traffic and stopped half on the pavement: it looked exactly like a police or surveillance car, and when two men jumped out of it, I felt certain they were members of a police arrest group. They disappeared through the crowd, but the driver, who had stayed behind, began looking at me with great suspicion. I stared back at him — and suddenly I realized that his companions were doing nothing more sinister than picking up money from the shops. When I saw what was happening, I relaxed and winked at the driver, who returned my wink and grinned back at me.
All that took only a few seconds, and I had to remain in my exposed position for, once again, what seemed an age. People flocked past on foot, heading home from their offices, and government limousines sped by along the main road. My instructions were to stay there long enough to be noticed, then to withdraw to the corner and stand outside the window of a bakery. After seven minutes I moved back, watching out all the time for someone of typically English appearance, and someone who would show that he had seen me by chewing something.
Time crawled past: ten minutes, fifteen. An endless stream of faces flowed along the pavement, but none looking English, and none munching. Then at last, after twenty-four minutes, I saw him: a man with an unmistakably British look, carrying a dark-green Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar. As he passed within four or five yards, he stared straight at me, and I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, ‘Yes! It’s me! I need urgent help!’ He walked on, giving no other sign, but I knew without any doubt that contact had been made. I forced myself to stroll off casually for several hundred metres. Then I took a taxi to my father-in-law’s, and found him rather annoyed that I was so late but I invented some story to account for the delay, and although his special chicken was slightly spoiled, I felt elated that one important stage of my escape was behind me.
Wednesday brought proof positive that my habitual dry-cleaning was not superfluous. My most urgent task now was to buy a railway ticket for Leningrad, and this meant a trip to the Leningrad station on Komsomolskaya Square. I set off on foot as usual, heading for my local shopping centre and, after calling into a couple of shops, walked slowly along the footpath leading to the small blocks of flats, which were staggered in two groups of three. Once round the corner and out of sight, I sprinted twenty or thirty yards, darted on to the nearest staircase and up a flight.
From a window I saw a fat man hurry round the corner, almost running, then stop and search about him. He looked hot and uncomfortable in jacket and tie, but he was clearly no fool, for he realized that I had done something unusual. He began to scrutinize the windows on the staircases, of which (luckily for me) there were twelve in all. Hanging back in the shadow, I felt cold sweat break out on my back. Oh, clever chap! I thought. Then he began to speak into a small microphone fastened to his lapel. After hesitating for a moment he hurried on — and five or six seconds later a coffee-coloured Lada nosed into view, crawling along the footpath. The track was supposed to be for pedestrians only and was barely wide enough for a single car, but here was the motorized surveillance, coming down it! In the front a man and a woman, both in their early thirties, were speaking simultaneously into a microphone.
When the car disappeared between the blocks, I waited half a minute, came down, and hurried back on my tracks till I reached the main road. There I leapt into a bus, rode it for a couple of stops, took a taxi to the traffic police station, went in, came out, made sure no one was behind me, and continued slowly to the Leningrad station, where I bought a fourth-class ticket with a reservation for a train due to leave Moscow at 5.30 p.m. on Friday. That night I slept with the doors of the flat barricaded once more, the ticket and a box of matches lying on the tin tray beside me. To catch a glimpse of a single man or woman on your tail is one thing, but to see a whole carload of surveillance behind you — that gives you a terrible feeling.
Thursday I spent with my sister Marina and, as part of my general deception plan, I made a date to visit her early the next week. It felt odd and uncomfortable to be deceiving members of my own family, but for the benefit of KGB listeners I had to maintain the pretence that I was going to be around beyond the weekend. Yet, at the same time, some devil made me deliberately taunt the unseen eavesdroppers. I rang my old friend and colleague Mikhail Lyubimov, who had been dismissed from the KGB for marital indiscretions, and in the course of a general conversation I reminded him of the short story by Somerset Maugham called ‘Mr Harrington’s Washing’. This concerns a maddeningly fastidious and self-centred American businessman, Mr Harrington, who falls in with the British secret agent Ashenden on the Trans-Siberian railway as they travel west-wards from Vladivostok in 1917, and then are trapped in Petrograd by the Bolshevik coup. Ashenden is intriguing to keep Russia in the war against Germany, but everyone advises Harrington to escape to Sweden while he still has the chance. He is shot dead in the street, however, when he insists on trying to recover the clothes he had sent to the hotel laundry. The reader is left to assume that Ashenden, together with his overpowering ladyfriend, Anastasia Aleksandrovna, slips away through Finland.
Lyubimov had forgotten the story, but I knew that he had Maugham’s collected works and I told him, ‘It’s in Volume Four. Look it up, and you’ll see what I mean.’
Soon he returned my call, saying, ‘Oh, yes, I see’ — but of course he did not.
In a way it was a risk to draw the KGB’s attention to a story about someone trying to escape through Russia’s northern frontier but I wanted to insult their intelligence or, rather, lack of it, and I felt confident that they would not pick up the reference in time to do anything about it. To throw the listeners still further off the scent, I made a precise rendezvous with Lyubimov for the following Monday. When he invited me to join him and his girlfriend Tanya for lunch in their dacha at Zvenigorod, outside Moscow, I said I would be in the last carriage of the train which reached his station at 11.30 a.m.
On Thursday night I again slept with the doors barricaded and my railway ticket under a napkin on the tin tray. On Friday, feeling emotional and overexcited, I spent the morning cleaning the flat. I knew I would probably never see the place again, but I wanted to leave everything in perfect order. I did not doubt that the KGB would study every detail, and I was anxious that they should find things shipshape — washing-up done, crockery put away, documents in place, spare cash on the shelf. Having calculated that eighty roubles would suffice for my journey, I left two hundred and twenty in a neat
pile — enough, at that date, to keep Leila going for a couple of months. In spite of all the care I took, I forgot one special item: the snuff I had bought in case I had to deal with inquisitive search-dogs at the frontier.
At last, about 4 p.m., it was time to leave. Although the flats were modest, the foyer of the block was huge and portentous, with marble walls, tall windows, and plants scattered about in tubs. A concierge, one or other of a rota of middle-aged women, was always on duty at the desk in the corner, and I knew that she was bound to see me as I went out. I therefore made myself look as ordinary as possible, in a thin green sweater, old green corduroy trousers and scuffed brown shoes. I rolled up a light jacket and put it in the bottom of a carrier bag, together with my Danish cap, essentials for washing and shaving, and a small road atlas covering the area of the Finnish border. Knowing that Soviet maps were deliberately falsified in border regions, to confuse and mislead would-be escapers, I was not sure how much use this would be but it was all I could get. Everything else I left behind — and when I closed the door, I knew that I was closing it not only on my home and my possessions, but on my family and my life.
I went down from the eighth floor in the lift. Sure enough, the concierge was at her desk but, if she noticed me at all, she probably mistook my green clothes for the tracksuit in which I often went jogging, and thought I was going for a run. Outside, I presumed that one surveillance car would be close to the small blocks of flats, with two others somewhere in support. But this time, instead of heading in that direction, I walked off into the wood on the far side of the main road, and as soon as I was hidden in the trees, began to run. In a couple of minutes I reached the shopping precinct, but from a different direction. The place was busy, and I was soon lost in the crowd. It took only a minute to buy a cheap hold-all made of artificial leather, a poor-quality bag but authentically Soviet. Having transferred my sparse luggage into it, I went on, dry-cleaning myself in classic fashion all the way to the Leningrad station, and continuing the process even as I crossed the expanse of Komsomolskaya Square.
By then I was so nervous that everything appeared highly sinister: an incredible concentration of police and internal anti-riot troops seemed to be patrolling the station. The whole place was seething with men in uniform. I felt threatened by this totalitarian display, and for a moment my overheated imagination made me think they were looking for me. Then I remembered that young people from all over the world were pouring into the city for an international youth festival, which was due to open on Sunday. The first event of that kind, held in 1957, had seemed to me a marvellous occasion, lit up by the spontaneous excitement of the Khrushchev era; but this was different, artificial, over-organized and unattractive. Yet I saw that it might work to my advantage, for the great influx of foreigners coming across from Scandinavia would surely help to distract the frontier officials.
On the train my fourth-class ticket gave me a top bunk in an open-fronted compartment with room for six. There was little privacy, as people were constantly walking past, but I got clean sheets from the conductor — a nice-looking girl, obviously a student earning money during her vacation — and made up my bed for the night. The train pulled out punctually at 5.30, and for the first hour or two people sat around on the lower bunks, chatting and reading out the clues of a crossword. At that time, in the era of stagnation two years before glasnost, strangers never talked to each other in public about politics or anything contentious: doing the crossword was a harmless and neutral activity in which everyone could take part without risk. I must have had something to eat: probably I bought bread and sausage in the station, but I do not remember. In any case, I went to bed about 9 p.m. and took a double dose of sedatives.
The next thing I knew, I woke up to find myself no longer in the top bunk, but in the one below. It was 4 a.m., and already light. For a few seconds I lay feeling stunned. Never before in my life had I lost control. Looking up, I saw a young fellow in the bunk above — my bunk! When I asked what had happened, he said, ‘Don’t you remember? You fell out.’
Checking myself over, I found one cut on my temple, another on my shoulder, and blood inside my green sweater. Considering that I had fallen a metre and a half on to the hard floor, it was not surprising that my head and neck were aching. I was in a bad way — dirty, dishevelled, unshaven, and looking like a vagabond in my shabby old clothes.
With some fresh air from the corridor, I started to feel better and, in any case, the train was already approaching Leningrad, so I sat on the bottom bunk and waited. In the next section were some lively young students from Kazakhstan, beautiful, long-legged girls, full of life and conversation. Presently one of them made some remark on which I wanted to comment, but as I opened my mouth the girl next to me drew back and gasped, ‘If you speak one word to me, I’ll scream.’
That made me realize how awful I must look. Grabbing my bag, I stood up and went along to the little compartment occupied by the guard. She could have made trouble and reported me to the police, or had me taken to hospital, so I handed her five roubles and said quietly, ‘Thank you very much for your help.’ At that date it was a colossal tip — ten times what she might have expected — but she took the money, giving me a reproachful look, and I went on into the open area at the end of the carriage, where I stood for the rest of the journey.
As the train pulled in, I jumped out and disappeared into the crowd. Outside, the huge square was empty, looking pretty and clean in the early-morning light; people were waiting for taxis in a long line, but there were also some private cars touting for hire, so I went up to one of the drivers and asked, ‘How much to go to the Finland station?’
‘Ten roubles,’ he said. It was an incredible amount, more than my fare for all the eight hundred kilometres from Moscow, but I was in such a fever to keep moving that I did not argue.
When we reached the Finland station at 5.45, I found that the first train in the direction of the frontier would run in twenty minutes. I took it, and arrived in Zelenogorsk, ninety kilometres north-west of Leningrad, at 8.30 a.m. My judgement must have been clouded by excitement and anxiety, for I then made the first of many mistakes.
My rendezvous with the British was near the main road to the border, but several kilometres short of it: the most sensible course would have been to take a train to Viborg, the frontier town, and make my way back to the pick-up point by bus or on foot. If I had done that, it would not have mattered even if I had been seen on the road: at least I would have been proceeding southwards, away from the border. Yet something made me tackle the last stage of my journey the other way round: I decided to take one bus to Terioki, half-way to Viborg, and another on from there. I knew of Terioki only as the place where, in December 1939 during the early stages of the Soviet-Finnish war, a worker-peasants’ Finnish government had been formed. At least the station buffet was open by the time I arrived, and I bought a piece of fried chicken and a cup of tea for breakfast. That Saturday morning the station was busy, with plenty of casually dressed people around so that I no longer looked out of place.
As I ate, I hoped fervently that the British side of the operation was proceeding on schedule. The plan was that at the meeting place, by a large stone in the forest, a team would pick me up, hide me in the boot of a car, and go on through the frontier into Finland. Everything depended on the drivers managing the journey successfully, avoiding KGB surveillance, and reaching the rendezvous point on schedule.
I would have been even more worried if I had known how awkward the timing of my departure from Moscow had proved: precisely coinciding, as it did, with the arrival of a new British Ambassador, it created severe problems. Clearance for my exfiltration had to be obtained from the Foreign Office in London: in his memoirs Conflict of Loyalty, published in 1994, Geoffrey Howe, then foreign secretary, described how at the last minute, on Saturday 20 July, ‘two senior officials (one from the FCO, the other from SIS)’ attended on him at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s official country residence,
and how he ‘gave authority for the plan to go ahead’ — a decision endorsed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
That Thursday the new British Ambassador, Sir Bryan Cartledge, flew to Moscow to take up his appointment, and on Friday he marked his arrival by throwing a large evening reception at the Embassy. Since many of the guests were targets of KGB surveillance, the whole area of the Embassy was boiling with undercover agents. Later, the KGB leaked to the Western press a story that I had been smuggled into, and out of, the Embassy during the disturbance caused by the reception. In fact, as I have shown, I never went near the Embassy, and I was on the train before the party began. Now, on Saturday morning in Terioki, my thoughts were concentrated on the rendezvous ahead. At the bus station I discovered the number of the service I needed, and bought a ticket to the furthest stop. Then, as I consulted my atlas during the journey, I discovered that this bus would terminate short of my destination.
Another bus, then, and one going all the way to Viborg. This time the main hazard was a couple in their thirties, both drunk enough to be excessively sociable. ‘Where are you from?’ they asked in friendly but slurred voices. ‘Where are you going?’ I said I was visiting friends in a village whose name I had seen on the map. I was encouraged to see coaches full of students coming the other way, clearly on their way to the youth festival. I reassured myself again: the frontier would be busy, the officials preoccupied. From the number of armoured personnel carriers and artillery pieces on the move, I deduced that there must be some major military base nearby.
In due course the drunks got out — and so, in ones and twos, did all the other passengers, until I was the only person left on board. Suddenly I seemed to recognize my surroundings, which matched the description given in the escape plan. At that point the main road was running due north through a forest, and a loop-road went off to the right, like the curve of a capital D. All at once the scene seemed familiar. When the bus came to a stop, I hesitated, not sure whether this was my halt or not. As we rolled forward again, I realized I should have got off, so I hurried forward up the aisle, calling to the driver, ‘Sorry, I’m feeling sick. Can you put me off?’
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 2