Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Chapter Six – Among the Illegals

  I reported for work on 20 August 1963, wearing my best suit and tie. After being issued with a pass in the little building which housed the Pass Office, I walked to the KGB headquarters, known throughout the world of espionage as the Centre. The main building is not one but three, all connected. The earliest structure was the one taken over from the Rossiya Insurance Company, the Lubyanka, which became the headquarters of the Cheka in 1918, but the hulk which dominates all photographs was built by German prisoners after the Second World War. Yet the most impressive section is the one at the back, made of dark grey granite, with black marble on the ground floor, built during the 1930s when the NKVD was fast expanding.

  My first impression was of corridors and rooms brightly lit and spotlessly clean: the whole place had the air of being well run. Yet appearances were deceptive. Because the KGB is supposed to be a military unit, action can be initiated only on receipt of a signed order from the head of the appropriate department and, needless to say, no order had arrived appointing me to any particular job. The personnel officer, a kindly fellow, said, ‘Well, until it comes, you’d better do something. You can help them sort out the books in the library.’

  I soon found that there was not one library but several: one for operational literature, textbooks and pamphlets, a smaller one belonging to the First Chief Directorate, and the main library, which had an immense stock of foreign reference books and dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, school textbooks, as well as works of history and fiction. Never in my life had I seen so many books! The first that my eyes lit on, lying on a round table in the middle of the big hall, was a coffee-table volume on the Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miró. I had never heard of him, and I was impressed. Then I saw that whole shelves were full of books on modern artists, Picasso among them, all unknown to most Russians, and thrilling to encounter for the first time. Also I saw the autobiography of General Wrangel, the White Russian commander who defended the Crimea during the civil war, and memoirs by Russian refugees published in the West. Well! I thought. It was worth joining the KGB just to read all these fantastic books. I did not know that the libraries were little used because most people were afraid of being seen devoting time to the study of banned literature.

  There was plenty of work to do, as the library was being reorganized, but after a day or two I began to feel uneasy. I had expected to make an immediate start on my training as an illegal. I imagined that I would be taken to a safe flat, and shown various other flats in which to learn my trade, one for operational activities with my tutor and the Party secretary, another for photography, a third for radio work, a fourth for wardrobe, where clothes and disguises would have been found for me. Instead of this, I was stuck in the main building arranging books.

  When I saw the man from the personnel department, I said, ‘Look, what’s happening? When I joined School 101, the whole idea was that I was going to become an illegal. What am I doing here?’

  The officer looked slightly embarrassed and said, ‘I’m afraid there’s been a change of mind. They’ve decided not to take you as an illegal. Instead, you’re to work in the superstructure of Directorate S [for Special], the organization which deals with the illegals’ affairs.’

  I said, ‘I’m sorry, I wanted either to become an illegal or to go into political intelligence. I don’t want to go into the superstructure.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve no choice,’ he said. ‘You’ve already been recruited by the Second Department, so you have to go there.’

  I was appalled. I discovered that the department for which I was destined dealt with documentation. I protested vigorously but was told that they needed people like me and that I had no alternative. My euphoria drained away: I had thought I was launching into a sunny new life, and suddenly the sky had clouded over. I would hardly be using my languages; instead, I would be training people whose languages were probably not as good as mine. As a student, I had been more or less a free man. Now I was going to be a galley-slave.

  Because my appointment order still had not come through, the personnel officer said that I could move into his room for a few days and give him a hand. He was a timid fellow of thirty-one or so, who had been recruited to the KGB seven years earlier. Because he had trained as an engineer, he was put into T (for Technology) Department and sent to Britain as a member of the permanent trade delegation in London, but the authorities must have realized that he was too limited to develop into an intelligence officer, and when he returned to Moscow he was dumped in the personnel department, which only handled paperwork.

  While I was working with him, he told me a good deal about England. He had certainly enjoyed being there, but his view of London was simplistic. The traffic was terrible, he said, and people were mad about dogs, of which there were many varieties. English people — women particularly — went to great lengths to impress others. ‘If they’ve got good legs,’ he said, ‘they display them as much as possible. Breasts the same. Dresses, shoes, the same.’ He shot me a peculiar look. ‘I can tell you more. There was one woman in our street who had nothing to show off but her crotch — and she worked out her clothes so that she could display it!’

  This fellow put me to work on the thick, brown record cards kept at the back of each file. I was supposed to write down the numbers and dates of the orders by which each man had been promoted, all the details of his career. It was a terrible job, and one day, through not paying attention, I made a mistake. The engineer noticed it immediately, and said, ‘Don’t you understand? It’s absolutely unacceptable to leave a single figure out. They may be just numbers to you, but to others they’re all-important data. They’re the man’s career — his salary and pension are all based on those figures. You mustn’t omit a single one.

  In the middle of that dreary chore came a sudden moment of excitement. Among the old blue files, with ‘Committee of State Security’ and the Soviet insignia on the outside, I saw a familiar name jump out at me from the little window in the cover: GORDIEVSKY. My own file? Surely I couldn’t have such a thick one already? My brother’s, then? No. This was Anatoli Georgiyevich Gordievsky, a Japanese specialist, and a veteran of the Second World War. From some of his banal pronouncements, which people had copied out of his reports to use as anecdotes, I could see that he was not very clever. All the same, I was fascinated, and so was Vasilko: when I spoke to him about it, and he heard the name Georgiyevich, he said, ‘Ah, yes...’ in a way that made me think he knew more about my father’s background than he had let on.

  At last my own order came through, and I was taken on to the staff of the Second Department of Directorate S. Each department had its function: the Second (mine) created identities for illegals; the Third trained them and prepared them for going abroad, while the Fifth dealt with security and the recovery of agents who had been exposed. Others, however, were more shadowy. For instance, at that date the ultra-secret Thirteenth Department, formed during the Second World War to carry out sabotage behind enemy lines, was still in existence. When the Cold War developed, it was supposed to recruit agents who would set up cells of sabotage workers in the countries that lined up against the Soviet Union.

  Such people were difficult to find, of course: in the 1930s, when Europe was full of dedicated Communists, it would have been easy enough but in the 1950s and 1960s fewer and fewer dissidents were prepared to blow up bridges and power-lines just to please the Kremlin. Also, as intercontinental weapons were perfected, it became less and less likely that a Third World War would be a protracted struggle so the role of the Thirteenth Department declined still further. But it was also responsible for carrying out assassinations abroad, and illegals trained as hitmen were allocated to it. (It was dissolved in 1971 when one of its members, Oleg Lyalin, defected from the KGB station in London thereby provoking a mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence agents.)

  I found that at the time of my joining the KGB the function of the illegals was changing. They were peculia
r creatures, who combined the qualities of an agent or member of the public with those of a trained, full, conscious member of the KGB. Soviet nationals, they assumed foreign identities — became Germans, Dutch, French, Belgians and so on — by taking over the papers of either a real person who had died, or a fictitious one. Between the wars the KGB and GRU had been imaginative and bold, and had had many officers who spoke foreign languages fluently. They were able to deploy illegals all over Europe and the Near and Middle East, sending men back and forth between Turkey, Egypt, Greece, wherever. After the war, however, the system became bogged down in a mass of documentation: because the KGB expelled all Jews, the quality of their people fell, and it became necessary to employ Russians from peasant backgrounds who did not understand the West. The result was a vast bureaucracy, with something called a ligenta biografia, or invented biography, being laboriously compiled for every man before he went abroad.

  This set out an entire fictitious life, with short paragraphs in two columns. On the left were alleged details of the man’s career, and opposite the fabricated evidence supporting them:

  Michael Smith’s parents were both born in London.

  The birth and wedding certificates will be in his pack of documents.

  He spent his childhood in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when his parents emigrated there for a while.

  The period in Halifax is invented. No traces survive. The story is that his documents were destroyed in an office fire in 1951. MS has visited Halifax briefly, studying places alleged to do with his childhood.

  So it went on for several pages. After the war the typical role of an illegal was simply to live in the country of his adoption and wait for the Third World War to erupt. He had a buried radio, which he would exhume when hostilities broke out, and then, assuming that all conventional communications had been destroyed, his hour would come. What he would report back to the Centre was never clear to me — presumably the number of nuclear mushrooms that he could see on the horizon.

  In my time, the 1970s, things began to change, and people talked about activating the illegals, to make them work more. Some were regarded as hopeless and told to carry on with their waiting game, but the better men and women were instructed to find contacts and cultivate them, though not to recruit anybody, a job which would be done by a special envoy so that the illegal could remain hidden.

  Some of the most dynamic operators, who, for various reasons, found it impossible to continue living abroad in the same place, were brought back to Moscow and attached to a mobile unit known as the Nagayev Group, after its first commander. Like the journalists on British national newspapers called ‘firemen’, they were despatched to all parts of the world when a job needed to be done. Something similar happened to my brother, whose wife found that she could not stand living abroad: he was attached to the mobile group in East Berlin, and carried out valuable assignments in Mozambique, South Africa and South Vietnam, where there was no regular Soviet representation. Once he had to recover an illegal who had gone mad in Sweden. Far-ranging operators like him moved about with the greatest care, always ensuring that they had the means of making a quick getaway. If, for instance, the Directorate had identified a potential target in Egypt, perhaps an American businessman with a weakness for drink or girls, an illegal who knew Cairo well would fly in with a well-prepared plan of approach. He would also have with him an air ticket to Cyprus so that if a meeting went wrong, and the target threatened to report him, he could immediately fly off and disappear into thin air.

  *

  In this strange world the Second Department’s work consisted largely in the physical creation of the necessary papers for illegals, and we specialized in what was known as perebroski, a much-used term which meant the transfer of an illegal from one country to another — from the Soviet Union to the West, from Austria to Hungary or vice versa. It was a complicated exercise which had to be done thoroughly, with every document changed and every loose end woven in.

  The most secure area of the department was the section occupied by the forgers: a pair of sealed rooms with one door only. In there worked three or four men (backed up by another three in East Germany), and although they never invented anything, because they were always copying drafts or original documents, they were highly skilled artists. The store of forged documents and samples, managed entirely by women, was amazingly rich: thousands upon thousands, constantly replenished. The blank papers and forms were produced at a KGB laboratory somewhere outside Moscow, and the details of identities to be created — name, forenames, date and place of birth, numbers — would be presented to the forgers. They created the new documents. They had many shelves full of typewriters, for various languages and typefaces, including some of the primitive dot-printers used in Germany, but they executed all the calligraphy themselves, mixing their own inks and, if necessary baking documents in a special oven to make them look old. They went to extraordinary lengths — for instance copying a whole page stolen from a church register and rewriting dozens of entries in Gothic Schrift so that they could respace the lines and insert one new name. They used ultraviolet lamps to look for watermarks and other traces in the paper on which foreign documents were printed, and turned out forgeries so skilful that they were indistinguishable from the originals, including blank passports of every conceivable nationality from Finnish to Iranian and Japanese.

  Sometimes they came up against problems that seemed almost insoluble — for instance, the covers of Finnish passports, made from a blue plastic compound which they could not imitate. Then one of the three Directorate S officers on service in Finland went into a stationery shop to buy some small item and saw large rolls of blue plastic stacked above the counter. When he asked to see one, he realized that it was exactly the material they were looking for, so he bought the whole roll and sent it back to Moscow, enough for several hundred passports.

  If I had been less interested in history, politics, ideology and languages, I might well have been fascinated by my new work because it was full of the paraphernalia of espionage, highly secret, the heart and soul of the KGB intelligence service. Such was the importance of Directorate S that the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, several times addressed its staff while I was a member.

  On payday every month all members of the Communist Party would go to the Party secretary’s office to put in the regular 3 per cent levy from their wages, but, in a little ceremony, the secretary would take his papers and rubber stamp and go down to Mr Semichastny’s office to receive the boss’s 3 per cent in the holy of holies.

  The entire Directorate was a hive of activity. The Anglo-American section was studying possibilities in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, with a lesser interest in Canada and Africa. Britain was regarded as particularly important, because documentation there was so lax: nobody was required to carry identity cards, and there was no central registration bureau like the Meldeamt in Germany. Also it was relatively simple to obtain a British passport, and this was the dream of many a KGB officer: ‘Somerset House’ was one of the most popular phrases in Directorate S. People on assignment to London would go there, search the records, find a birth certificate that looked potentially useful, obtain a copy, and then assemble the other documents needed for a passport. Three guarantors were needed, and three signatures were forged. The great question was whether the Passport Office would check these through. Sometimes they did, but often they did not — a loophole exploited profitably by the KGB.

  The Directorate was looking for opportunities all over the world — in India, Pakistan, Iran, Japan, China. Cuba was important, because it provided a large number of false identities. In West Germany, officers were seeking people with Swiss or Austrian connections, since a man speaking German with a slight foreign accent could plausibly claim to originate from one or other of those countries. ‘Europe’ meant all of the continent except Britain, Germany and Austria, and we had agents working on our behalf in every country. In France and Italy they had pr
obably been recruited in left-wing circles soon after the war. In Finland they were similarly drawn from the left, but also there were a couple of Orthodox priests who had been bribed to allow the KGB to make extra entries in their church registers. In Belgium there were a number of former Communists, plus a few Russian or Ukrainian women who had married Belgians and pressured their husbands to help. Thus, by a combination of industry, patience and stealth, the European section was slowly building up its strength.

  And yet, in spite of its high rating, the work did not appeal to me. I was put into the German section, where my fluency in the language made things easy for me, but I found that all I was doing was dealing endlessly with sheets of paper. I had no interest in all those wretched passports and attests and certificates. Besides, I found that 95 per cent of the work concerned East Germany. Although the main flow of political refugees was from East to West, there were always a few people returning, either disillusioned with life beyond the Iron Curtain or lured back by the pull of their families. Extensive research was needed o establish where each had come from, and why, and all suitable personal documents were confiscated and used to create new identities for illegals.

  These were added to the ever-growing body at work in East Germany. There, in the 1940s and 1950s, KGB officers had perfected the practice of forging entries in the Standesamtbucher (citizens’ registers) by borrowing or stealing the huge volumes and, whenever they found a gap between lines, adding an extra name to create a new person, perhaps a child of real parents who were dead.

  The head of the Second Department was Pavel Gromushkin, a man from a humble background who had been carried to the top of his profession by sheer energy and enthusiasm (he was a member of the All-Union Volleyball Federation, and active in the leadership of the Dynamo sports club). Never having had a proper education, he spoke in the vernacular, and often became lost for words — as on the famous occasion when, presenting an award to some girl on International Women’s Day (8 March), he meant to say ‘Give her a clap’, or ‘Give her a big hand’, but came out with, ‘It’s not enough just saying it — congratulate her with your hands!’ — a remark whose unintentional ambiguity caused great delight around the corridors.