The student acting as target would move along a predetermined route through the city, while his partner was supposed to find three sheltered positions from which he could watch him and anybody following. If I was the target, the surveillance team would tell me where to start, and I would be required to give them certain information: my time of departure from the start-point, and details of how to identify me. I would telephone the number given me and say, ‘I’m wearing a brown jacket. At 10.05 a.m. precisely I will appear on the corner of Metrostroyevskaya and Sadovaya. I’ll stand there on the corner for three minutes, with newspaper rolled — not folded — under my left arm. Then I’ll start walking.’ The voice at the other end would say, ‘Thank you. That’s fine’, and everything was set.
The exercise was scheduled to last three hours, and during it I would have some task to perform — meet an agent, post something in a deadletter box, or make a brush-contact; but the first requirement was to carry out proverka — dry-cleaning — a combination of manoeuvres designed to establish with certainty whether or not you were under hostile surveillance. (If you did find you were being followed, the rule was that you should never take sudden evasive action, since this would only attract attention and arouse suspicion.)
The most difficult task of all, it seemed to me, was to place a container in a deadletter box under the eyes of a surveillance team without them spotting your action. After much thought, I selected a place I had known from childhood, a spot where a footbridge of steel girders went over a railway, but where many people were too lazy to climb the steps and simply walked across the tracks. At the point where the steps went up, the underneath of the bridge was low overhead, so that anyone walking under it disappeared for a moment as he was about to cross the line. In that instant, I thought, I should be able to attach a matchbox, which was fitted with a magnet, to the underside of a girder, without being seen, and walk on as if I had done nothing.
For me, the bridge had the added advantage of being on the way to my parents’ flat: if challenged, I could justify my route by saying that I had been going home for a chat. It turned out, however, that the surveillance team were sharp that day: when I made the drop, they were close to me, and although they did not see me place the box, they deduced that I was up to something. They searched the bridge and found what I had left.
The teams were not usually briefed in advance about what we had been told to do: they followed a target, watched what he did, and were on their guard, trying to spot the sheltered positions from which the target’s partner might be watching them. Having identified a possible lookout station, they would send one man on ahead to keep the target in view, and then rapidly search the shop or office or staircase they suspected. Usually they were very efficient, and whenever they caught someone spying on them, there was great jubilation.
Meanwhile, the target would be moving on; if he met anyone, it was the surveillance team’s task to describe both the contact and the scene — how long the two remained together, what they were doing, whether they exchanged anything. If it was good fun being the target, it was no less fascinating to guard a target’s tail. I remember once taking up station in the Museum of Architecture, where a colleague had found a good position in the window of a first-floor hall full of exhibits. Watching from there, I saw my partner approach and work his way along the street, but then suddenly whip round, as though aware of someone behind him. I just caught a glimpse of a man following, but the road was so busy that I did not see him well enough to make a positive identification.
All these exercises, of course, were for training only. In real life the KGB rule was, and is, that if you think you are under surveillance, you do not go through with any operation. In this the Russians are quite different from the intelligence officers of other services, who carry on even if they know they are being followed.
Our most complicated exercise consisted in meeting an agent, and then reporting the encounter. Before we started, we were supposed to know what our contacts looked like, more or less; we also knew that, being retired KGB officers, they would all be sixty or over. But to achieve positive identification each of them would be displaying a prearranged signal — a magazine folded in one or other hand, or sticking out of a pocket. A typical rendezvous would be a restaurant, a modest cafeteria or wine bar, where one could sit talking over a drink and a snack without attracting unwelcome attention.
The old KGB men knew that we were all beginners, so never tried to be unpleasant. If they set traps, the traps were according to the script, prepared by the staff of the school. A man might casually mention, for instance, that his niece was applying for a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then move the conversation on to some other topic. But that one remark represented an important operational opening — the key moment of the entire meeting — and if the student missed it, he would lose much credit later. Afterwards, we had to write two reports. The first described the operation itself — how we had found the rendezvous, whether or not surveillance had been present, how long the meeting had lasted, what sort of a mood the agent was in, happy, relaxed, nervous. In the second report we gave details of any information gleaned from him, perhaps about American policy towards the Middle East, or some similar question.
Naturally the reports threw up many discrepancies. The surveillance might describe the target as having behaved in a particular way, and he might not agree. An agent, similarly, might give an account of a meeting which struck the student as unfair — although the former KGB officers had no vested interest in the proceedings, we all wanted to present ourselves in the best possible light. Sometimes students gave detailed reports of surveillance where none had existed for often we could not be certain whether or not there was anybody behind us.
Another major preoccupation of the KGB was the use of signals. These were of two kinds: one, the signal of personal identification, as in the carrying of a magazine or newspaper, folded or rolled in a particular fashion; and the other, the cryptic signal posted at a prearranged site. Later, in the 1970s, the KGB introduced the use of disposable items, such as a crushed cigarette packet, a bent nail or a banana skin, left in certain places, for example on a particular window-ledge or balcony. As you passed such a ledge, you could casually lob the marker object on to it, and the site was supposed to be checked within half an hour. In the 1960s, however, the most usual signal was a chalk mark, put up on lamp-post, wall, noticeboard or signpost. It could take many forms — a numeral, a cross, a V inside a circle — and could mean many things: I have put something in the deadletter box; I have emptied the deadletter box; I need a meeting urgently; I am leaving the country tomorrow. (There was a condition that the signaller should come back after a certain time to remove the mark with a damp cloth.) For every illegal working abroad, there was a file of ‘contact conditions’, on which his case officer could check sites, times and meanings of messages at a glance.
I am aware that to Western readers all this may sound rather childish — and indeed we ourselves saw the childish side of it. We sometimes felt it was fairly ridiculous that intelligent people, who had spent six years at college studying academic subjects, reading serious books and learning languages, should now be playing elaborate games of barely adult hide-and-seek, and surreptitiously scratching up chalk marks on lamp-posts. It had hardly penetrated our consciousness that this might later be a matter of life or death. Yet we reassured ourselves by saying, truthfully enough, that there was an element of adventure in intelligence work, and that we had chosen careers in the KGB because they held out the prospect of action. We knew that for most of our working lives we would sit about reading and doing paperwork: why not have a few little adventures while the chance was there? We were a motley collection of young men with different cultural and educational backgrounds, all trying to make good, so, of course, there were a lot of high spirits and jokes, but we took the work seriously.
As there were nearly two hundred students in School 101, and a similar number in the spy school
of the GRU Military Diplomatic Academy, all doing practical exercises in Moscow, the surveillance teams received an immense amount of practice, and became expert at their job. During one exercise I went into a cafe to have lunch, well aware that people were almost certainly close behind me. I queued at a counter, took my food to a table, sat down, ate, and returned my plates, all the time keeping the sharpest possible lookout. Never in all those moves did I see anything to arouse my anxiety, yet at the debriefing afterwards the surveillance described my every move — and still I could not work out who or where they had been.
‘You looked at the person at the next table with great suspicion,’ one of them told me. ‘Surely you didn’t think that was one of us?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I did.’
‘You really thought we’d come and sit right beside you? Of course not, we’d never do that.’
Two years later, while preparing for my first posting abroad, I went through some of the exercises again, but this time as part of a surveillance team. For three hours we worked behind a student target, and it was like being in a film, chasing him through the centre of Moscow, a thrilling adventure.
Apart from constantly teaching students new tricks, all this intensive training yielded one direct benefit in the real world of espionage. Because generation after generation of aspiring KGB officers had been all over the capital in search of sites for signal and deadletter boxes, there was hardly a street or square, hardly a bridge, tunnel, courtyard or flight of steps that had not been used at some time or other. The result was that the surveillance knew every convenient place by heart. When foreign intelligence services like the CIA went looking for sites they kept resorting to ones already familiar to the authorities, and it was easy for the KGB to catch Americans red-handed.
One exercise that struck me as largely a waste of time — it was so rarely used — was the brush-contact. I never understood why so much was written and said about it because in real life its possibilities were so limited. The most normal place to try it was in the space between the two sets of doors with which many Moscow shops are fitted for insulation in winter. If possible, one made a signal through the window to the incoming contact, then went out and slipped him some small object as he brushed past in the air-lock. Sometimes on exercises we quickly exchanged briefcases — one fundamental rule being that all our briefcases were supposed to be identical.
Our curriculum contained relatively little in the way of indoctrination and, really, none was needed, for most of the students were so thoroughly indoctrinated already that they were like professors of Marxism. As for my own mental development, I have to admit that I was so absorbed in this new work, so carried away by the thrill of the material, that I worried less about ideology than in other periods. Nevertheless, one function of the school was to ensure that all students became members of the Communist Party, another element in the overall plan to ensure our loyalty and discipline.
Towards the end of the academic year all those who had not yet joined but were members of the Komsomol, or Young Communist League, were obliged to sign on as candidate members. In theory every student needed three recommendations: one from the Komsomol organization, and two from full members of the Party who had known the candidate for at least a year. In practice this was impossible, since we students had known each other only since August; there had to be a minor violation of the rules. But, in my case, two older members were available, in the form of Feliks and Yuri, and someone from the Komsomol was found to sponsor me, so that in June 1963 I became a candidate member of the Party. From that moment I was supposed to pay 1½ per cent of my income into Party funds, more if my salary became very high, in a form of minimal income tax. (A year later, in the KGB itself, three colleagues gave their recommendations, and I became a full member.)
Joining the Party was something that no Soviet citizen employed by the government machine could avoid, but by the 1960s membership was not regarded as any form of commitment or ideological belonging. All the meaning it had held during the 1920s had long since vanished, and people signed on automatically. It was like having to be in your office by nine o’clock, or having to lock your papers in the filing cabinet when you went home — a routine action, bereft of emotional significance. At Party meetings people had to pay lip service to ideology, but everyone knew that it was just a show, and the way that life was organized in the Soviet Union. I joined without any sensation of unease: I did not feel I was deceiving anyone, least of all myself. If I wanted to join the intelligence service, to work abroad and have an interesting life, it was what I had to do.
On the moral front, the attitude of the Party and the KGB was old-fashioned. Students were not supposed to sleep around or have strange friends: if anybody made a peculiar approach, we were supposed to report it immediately. On the other hand the authorities knew that most single young men were looking for girls, and encouraged them. ‘Look for a friend for life,’ was the slogan. As for homosexuality, that was never officially mentioned: both then and later, the intelligence service remained incredibly ignorant about it, and somehow the notion did not exist, except in the minds of the officers of the Second Chief Directorate who deliberately exploited it by recruiting young men as agents to seduce and blackmail foreign visitors. If people spoke about it at all, it was as if they were relating anecdotes rather than talking about real life.
In the school the emotional lives of our own small language group were complicated by the proclivities of our teacher, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, an attractive woman of nearly forty, slightly plump but with pretty blue eyes and curly dark hair, whose husband, I guessed, had been posted to Sweden, where she had picked up a smattering of the language. She neither spoke nor taught Swedish well but because there were only three of us in the group, we made progress all the same.
Then she began bringing us Swedish novels, which we soon found had a strong erotic content. They were, in fact, some of the front-runners in the wave of sexual liberation which had begun surging through Scandinavia, and our teacher clearly enjoyed discussing the contents with us. After a while Feliks said, ‘Friends, I reckon our Nadezhda Aleksandrovna’s getting obsessed with sex.’ A few days later he remarked, ‘I find that Nadezhda Aleksandrovna isn’t entirely happy with the way her husband treats her.’ Later again he said, ‘My friends, I suspect that our dear teacher actually wouldn’t mind having a closer relationship with one of us.’
‘Well, Feliks,’ I said, ‘you’re a fine, upstanding fellow. Why not have a go?’
‘No, no.’ He sighed. ‘I fancy her all right, but I’m a married man, and I love my wife.’
Then he tried Yuri, but the answer was the same, for Yuri, though utterly unsophisticated with his hair poorly cut and sticking out in all directions, was a tender and loving husband. So Feliks turned to me and said, ‘What about you, Oleg? You’re our only hope.’
True enough, I was still single but I was timid, and, at twenty-two, had no idea how to deal with a woman of maybe thirty-nine. So — no doubt to her secret disappointment — none of us was prepared to perform.
Matters came to a head in February and March, with two of the important festivals of the Soviet calendar. The Day of the Soviet Army, on 23 February, commemorates the creation of the Red Army in 1918, and is sometimes marked by the giving of presents to men. Nadezhda Aleksandrovna sought to seize the initiative by presenting each of us with a gift.
We should have made a joke out of it, of course, but, being modest and embarrassed, we declined to accept the offerings. She saw this as an insult, and took it very hard. Then, barely a fortnight later, International Women’s Day, 8 March, was upon us, the occasion for all women to receive nice presents. We duly produced tokens of our esteem but she refused to accept them on the grounds that we had rejected hers. In vain we assured her that our sole motive in all this manoeuvring was to show our respect for her, our revered teacher. Our relationship was irretrievably wrecked — but it had been full of exciting tensions. Obviously she was
aroused and frustrated by the close proximity of three young men and hoped that it might lead to an adventure. For our part, it was a novelty to have a teacher who was sexually motivated and passed on such spicy books under the guise of work.
Because we were encouraged to go in search of girls at weekends, I tried diligently to find someone I liked but had little success until one day I came across a student who attracted me. We spent much of Saturday evening chatting in a cafe, where we had a couple of glasses of wine — but these went to her head and, when we kissed goodnight outside, she deliberately bit my lip, leaving a blood blister. Not only did it hurt, it was still very much in evidence on Monday morning, and Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, being the sort of person she was, went on and on about it. ‘What’s happened to you?’ she kept asking. ‘Oh, yes, I can imagine!’
At the end of the course we sat three exams: in languages, Marxism/Leninism and tradecraft. For our little Swedish-speaking family, the language paper was a formality. So was the one on Marxism/Leninism. That left tradecraft, and even here we found the questions relatively simple. Our tutor had taken so much trouble with us that we all went through without casualties. By then he knew us well, having set us our problems, read our reports, organized our recruitment to the Party, and spent time in the homes of married students to find out what kind of feeling existed in the family.
During our final few days there was a good deal of talk about the end-of-term parties held by previous courses and how some of them had ended in riots of drunkenness and debauchery. We were a sober crew, however, and when the time came to leave, we went quietly, eager to launch on our careers. I graduated as an operational officer, one rung higher up the ladder than the junior operational officer I might have been, and went to join the KGB in the summer of 1963.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 14