Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  I am now ashamed to admit it but I found School 101 idyllic: the year I spent there was the best time of my life. Later, under Yuri Andropov, the place was inflated into the Red Banner Institute of the KGB, and became a colossal academy of espionage; but in my day it was only a modest establishment, of three large wooden buildings standing in the middle of a lovely forest. Two were accommodation blocks, and the third the centre for studies. The bedrooms, for two people each, were rather basic, but the place had a number of features which I found attractive. One was the excellent sports hall, another the swimming pool, a third the tennis courts and a fourth the banya, or sauna bath, which was the best I had seen, spotlessly clean and heated by a wood-burning stove, with big stones on to which you could throw water to produce steam. The woods were ideal for running, and although the school was surrounded by a perimeter fence, it was easy enough to get permission to go for long runs outside it.

  Soon after we arrived, we gathered for an introductory speech from the head of our faculty, Colonel Vladykin, who turned out a bit of a surprise. I think we had all secretly dreaded finding ourselves in the charge of big, tough, coarse officers, but here was a small, thin, insignificant-looking man, physically unimpressive, dressed in a smart civilian suit. He was courteous and spoke softly, with the mannerisms inculcated by good upbringing.

  ‘Dear friends,’ he began, with thoroughly un-Soviet warmth, ‘the first thing you must remember is that you are all here under assumed names. You’ll be known by the names I give you — I have a list here. Don’t ask each other your real names. You’re not supposed to know them.’ He warned us not to speak about the school to anyone outside, not to reveal its address or how to find it, not to disclose its size, or any information about the teachers, or the curriculum. Even our parents were not supposed to know exactly where we were or what we were learning.

  Next Vladykin announced: ‘Now that you’re officers, you must swear the oath which is an absolute condition of being a member of the armed forces. As you’re all together, I’ll read the text out loud. Then I’ll distribute leaflets with a box for your signature, and collect them afterwards.’

  This he proceeded to do, reading out in an expressionless voice, ‘I, entering the ranks of the armed forces of the USSR, commit myself to defend my country to the last drop of blood, and to keep State secrets.’

  With that, he handed out the leaflets, which we signed and returned to him. I remember feeling glad that he was not rude or pompous, but natural and rather avuncular. He then invited us, one at a time, into his little office. To make things easier, he had chosen pseudonyms with initial letters the same as those of our real surnames. I became Guardiyetsev — a name I found very silly, but one which, since it had already been entered in the records, I had to accept. I was also granted the rank of lieutenant — a pleasant surprise as I might have become only a second lieutenant with lower pay.

  I was immediately struck that everything seemed so civilized. This was the first chance I had had to observe officers of the First Chief Directorate in action, and I noticed at once how different they were from everyone I had seen before. They never wore uniform, always good civilian clothes. The teachers and practical instructors all spoke well: former KGB officers, who wanted to go on earning full salaries as long as possible, they were fairly intelligent, obviously had interesting experience behind them, and worked with dedication. Several had a good sense of humour, and they gave the impression of enjoying their jobs. Altogether, the school was well run.

  Once again, languages formed an important part of the curriculum. I put in for English, only to be rebuffed once more. ‘English?’ said the authorities. ‘Everyone wants to learn English. Why not carry on with Swedish, now you’ve started it? We can give you a finishing course in Swedish with no trouble.’ So I found myself in a tiny group of three: myself, Feliks Maier (whose real name was Meyner) and Yuri Vesnin (actually Voznesensky). No two young men could have been more different. Yuri was a typical Russian peasant from Petrozavodsk, square and solid, who neither looked nor was sophisticated. Feliks, in contrast, was a tall, elegant Estonian, careful, phlegmatic, a great planner, the personification of a European. As Solzhenitsyn once wrote, ‘I have never in my life met an Estonian who was a bad person’ — and Feliks lived up to this encomium. Yet he had an unusual background, in that he had been born in Siberia or, rather, what is now northern Kazakhstan: in the nineteenth century his family had been one of the thousands who settled in the East, along with Swiss, Polish and German migrants, just as my mother’s family had gone to Central Asia. Although he still spoke Estonian and knew all about its culture, he had become so firmly attached to the Soviet system that this now meant far more to him than his roots.

  He and I hit it off well, but we had some blistering political arguments. The Twenty-second Party Congress of 1962 proved hysterically anti-Stalinist, even to the extent of taking a decision to erect a monument to the victims of Stalinist repression, but many traditional Communists felt that Khrushchev and his colleagues had gone too far, and that Soviets should not criticize themselves so harshly. Feliks was one of these moderates. I, on the other hand, became a fervent advocate of the ideas put forward at the Congress. At one point he said, ‘They can’t put up a monument. How can we have a monument to the victims of our own regime? It’s a contradiction in terms.’ Of course he was right, and soon the idea was conveniently forgotten.

  Lectures began as soon as we had settled in and, for people completely new to the KGB, there were some unpleasant revelations. Through my father I knew a good deal about the organization, and other students also had some previous experience; but some were shocked by the discovery that the entire work of the intelligence service was based on various forms of deception. Naïve young men imagined that intelligence-gathering was an activity that KGB officers carried out on their own; they supposed that they would travel alone to foreign countries, collect information and take photographs, exactly like journalists. Now, suddenly, they found that all such tasks were regarded as secondary, and that our primary role would be to recruit agents: to find suitable citizens of other countries and somehow to turn them, to persuade or force them to break the law of their country under our leadership and become secret servants of the Soviet intelligence service.

  Our teachers knew from experience that some students would be shocked by this concept and might not be able to cope with it. In most years, I learnt later, one or two dropped out right at the beginning. Ours proved a robust intake, and nobody fell at this first hurdle but several were so bad at languages that it was clear they would never become fluent enough to work as intelligence officers, no matter how many hours they put in.

  We were issued with one main textbook, The Foundation of Soviet Intelligence Work, which contained sections on all aspects of tradecraft (jargon for tricks of the trade): acquisition of contacts, targets of cultivation, recruitment, running agents, agent communications, personal meetings, use of deadletter boxes, signal sites, brush-contacts, surveillance, identification of hostile surveillance, use of impersonal communications, shortwave radio communications. We would have a lecture — say, on signal sites — then read the relevant chapter in the textbook and follow up with study of more books specified on lists of additional reading, which we took out of the library.

  Most of these were strange-looking, for they had been run off through copying-machines on poor-quality paper, and even those properly printed had been turned out on primitive equipment. The short texts developed the ideas of tradecraft: they were written by veteran officers, and included case histories which were often interesting, but so thoroughly sanitized that it was impossible to tell in what country they had taken place. They would start off, ‘In an Asian country there was an embassy of a major Western power...’ and never became any more specific than that. The names, also, were falsified, so that ‘Mr Johnson’ featured in many of them, and the operational officer was often ‘Mikhail Krotov’. In spite of these limitations, the case histor
ies were often quite complicated, illustrating not merely techniques of cultivating contacts, but what were known as operational combinations, which involved the use of several techniques simultaneously. In the evenings we were supposed to read further textbooks, written by former officers about individual operations. These were absolutely riveting but still secret: we had to read them in the library and were not allowed to take them to our rooms.

  On the sports side, I was in my element. Most of the students were interested in running, and regular training — for which the woodland tracks were ideal — greatly improved my fitness. (When the snow came in winter, we switched to cross-country skiing.) On one of my first days I noticed a man lifting weights in a primitive outdoor area under a roof beneath some trees. I fell into conversation and discovered that, although he spoke perfect Spanish, the KGB, for some mysterious reason, had ordained that he should learn Indonesian. He had a ribald sense of humour and adopted as his personal slogan, which he quoted frequently in a loud voice, Freud’s dictum, ‘Der Mensch sexualisiert den All’ — Man sexualizes the universe. His enthusiasm for body-building appealed to me and I joined in, later doing a lot of work with weights, which improved my physique steadily over the winter. One of my best days came at the end of October, when every student in the school had to enter a 3000-metre race. It was a wonderful crisp morning, with frost thawing, and I ran the race of my life. Everyone had expected a second-year student, a professional cross-country skier, to be the fastest but he took part in a different heat and, because his time was one second slower than mine, I came out the winner. (By an extraordinary coincidence, this man was one of the team who investigated me on suspicion of being a British spy in 1985.)

  Each group of twenty-five students had a tutor and, under him, we began to tackle problems in which we were presented with a situation and a number of characters. In an office, for instance, are a girl secretary and her boss; in touch with them are an intelligence officer, an agent, another contact, and one person not in any operational position but burdened with debts. Given the position and the characters, how would we penetrate such a set-up? A simple problem of this kind would take up one lesson of fifty minutes, but more complex ones would occupy two hours. All the students would write their solutions, which would be collected, read and analysed by our tutor. He would then go through them with us a day or two later.

  Within a couple of weeks it was clear that we had one outstanding student in our group: Misha Ilyushin to us, Mikhail Ilyinsky in real life, a young man of Latin good looks and exceptional ability, with such a quick mind that he would finish a one-hour problem in thirty-five minutes, leave his paper on our tutor’s desk and disappear to the gym for a workout, secure in the knowledge that, next day, his solution would be judged the best. He had a marvellous gift for languages: brought up speaking French, he also learnt Italian and English, and when at the Institute of International Relations he had been put into the Asian section to study Vietnamese. He was also a fine athlete, skilled at football and ice-hockey, and dedicated to keeping fit. Altogether he seemed a brilliant prospect for the KGB, especially as an illegal: he would have made a perfect Frenchman.

  And what happened? One day a message reached School 101 from the parents of a girl who complained that their daughter had been seduced a few months previously by a student at the Institute. Now she was pregnant, and claiming that the father of the child was Mikhail Ilyinsky. Nobody was much surprised, because, with his looks and intellect, he swept girls off their feet. Many thought they were in love with him, but he never took them seriously, considering himself too young for any long-lasting relationship. Yet this sudden challenge struck him like a knife in the back. He tried to parry it by claiming that he had not seduced the girl: she had demanded it. ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘if she is pregnant, it can’t be by me, because that night, if I remember right, she was in the middle of her period.’

  He may have been right. Girls often used such ploys to get the men they wanted — and this one probably believed that the KGB would force Misha to marry her. If he had done so, everything would have quietened down. As it was, he refused — and by sheer bad luck his own little affair coincided with the arrest and exposure of Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU officer who had been secretly working for Western intelligence agencies. This led to a tremendous shake-up in both the GRU and the KGB. The message passed round was that all immoral behaviour, all loss of moral principle, was to be severely punished. So the KGB, hypocritical as it was, set out to humiliate poor Ilyinsky: they interviewed him at length, held a Party meeting to discuss his behaviour, and eventually decided to dismiss him — the most brilliant student in School 101.[15]

  Another student in line to become an illegal was Vladimir Myagkov. Compared with Ilyinsky, he was nobody — a grey, provincial type who never excelled at anything — and even though he survived School 101 a nasty experience befell him during his later training. The authorities decided to test him by sending him to Kazakhstan without proper documents to see if he could survive for a couple of days with no identity cards. If he had managed to avoid arrest, or if, in custody, he had behaved cleverly, sidestepping difficult questions from the police, he would have earned high marks, but in the event he had to be evacuated. Dismissed from training to be an illegal, he served at a lower level in the KGB, only to be demoted yet again. (In spite of these failures, he later rendered me a useful turn by surreptitiously obtaining somebody else’s file, a service for which I was most grateful.)

  I found most of our lessons fascinating, but was less interested in the practical sessions on photography, the creation of microdots and so on. In sport, also, there were two areas I disliked: shooting and unarmed combat. We were taught to use hand-guns, but I was never very good with them, and I was particularly bored by the stripping, cleaning and assembly of weapons. Wrestling and self-defence also left me cold — perhaps because at heart I am unaggressive, and do not like the idea of attacking people. The KGB had developed its own form of unarmed combat, which we practised during one period every week; but although I am fairly well co-ordinated — as I discovered later when I started to play badminton — I could not master all the holds.

  It was a measure of our absorption that I missed the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. One of our teachers’ aims was to make us concentrate, and this shows how successful they were. Khrushchev’s confrontation with President Kennedy was barely reported in the Moscow papers, and in the school we had no means of hearing about it. Had I been living at home, I would probably have picked up something on the radio; as it was, we were so wrapped up in our studies that our contact with the outside world was minimal. Not until much later did I find out how close we had come to catastrophe.

  I enjoyed the training even more when, in November, as the cold weather was setting in, we moved on to practical exercises. For five or six days at a time we left the school and moved to a building in central Moscow known as the Villa, a folly built by some wealthy capitalist at the beginning of the century. There we stayed for the working week, carrying out what were known as gorodskiye zanyatiya, or city exercises, in an intense programme that we found both stimulating and exhausting.

  After only three months’ training, we were still very green, and at first everything seemed terribly difficult. Imagine an impoverished student from the provinces, not used either to having money or to spending it, not familiar with bars or restaurants, being required to order drinks or a meal for a contact who, until that first meeting, he had never seen. Imagine the mental pressure on a twenty-four-year-old faced with the task of trying to influence or direct someone far his senior. What we did not know at first was that most of our contacts were retired KGB officers, supplementing their pensions by turning out to act as agents; all we could be sure was that they were senior citizens, and therefore rather inhibiting. We had already learnt that all KGB contacts are divided into the following groups: agents (people actively working for the org
anization), confidential contacts (low-grade agents not entirely attached, but still doing something), targets of cultivation (people to whom you are talking and whom you hope to recruit) and other contacts (who are useful but sporadic in their assistance).

  As a start, we were let loose in Moscow and told to look for operational sites — for posting signals, meeting people, making brush-contacts. Then we began exercises in counter-surveillance — fascinating games of cat-and-mouse. For these we worked in pairs, one student acting as the target of surveillance, while his partner reconnoitred sheltered positions from which he could watch his friend and see if anyone was following him.

  The surveillance was carried out by professional teams from the KGB, who themselves were in training. The minimum team would be one car and three people, one to drive, the other two to help each other keep a suspect in sight. Sometimes, wanting to increase the pressure both on us and on themselves, they might have three cars, each carrying three officers, some of them women, and all competent drivers, so that they could exchange jobs freely. To confuse targets further, they might change hats, wear different coats at different times, put spectacles on or take them off, and even sport false beards.

  Every surveillance man or woman had a personal radio, with a microphone under shirt or tie, and a transmitter in a pocket. This kept them in constant touch with a car, which carried a more powerful set. One of the strangest facts we learnt was that every Metro station in Moscow is fitted with a special aerial, coming up to ground level in a tube, so that an officer can send a signal up to a car the moment he arrives at any platform down below.