Always full of anecdotes, he often spoke of the British traitors Burgess and Maclean, and of how he had helped prepare their flight to the Soviet Union, personally supervising the preparation of their documents and schedules. He also spoke of Helen and Peter Kroger, who had to flee from America when the authorities there started to arrest atomic spies. ‘They’re very good comrades,’ he said. ‘We must do everything we can to get them out.’ When Konon Molody, alias Gordon Lonsdale, was released from gaol in Britain in 1964, he again became active. Later, in 1971, as we were chatting one day, he grew emotional with pride. ‘Oleg,’ he said confidentially, ‘I must show you something. Look at this!’ He opened a drawer and brought out a perfectly forged American passport. ‘The first one!’ He beamed. ‘So many years of work! We had a hell of a job to make paper with the right fibre content but now we’ve done it.’
You never knew who you might meet in the corridors of Directorate S, for illegals who had been exposed and brought back to Moscow were liable to appear there, as if the place were their club. Among them was Molody — a splendid man, full of fun, always laughing, bubbling with sarcastic anecdotes about the bosses. He told me that when he was released after four years in gaol, and returned to Moscow, he got a telephone call from the financial section of the First Chief Directorate. ‘Comrade Molody,’ said the clerk, ‘will you please come down and collect your wretched money? We’re holding so much that it’s become a burden.’ Molody promptly went out, bought a small grip and took it to the cashier, who handed over a colossal heap of notes. At the savings bank down the road, Molody took his turn in a queue, and when he opened his bag at one of the hatches, the young woman nearly fainted. Controlling herself, she counted in the largest sum she had ever seen — perhaps 20,000 roubles, and a terrific amount in Russian terms. Within minutes, the bank contacted the police, checking that this immense deposit was in order.
Another time I was acting as Kultorg, or organizer of cultural activities, a post that entailed selling tickets for Moscow theatres. One day when I offered some to Molody, he riffled through my selection, rejecting everything until he came to the Romany gypsy theatre, for which he bought two tickets. A couple of days later he ran into me, full of indignation. ‘What were you up to, making me buy those bloody seats?’ he demanded.
‘What was wrong? Weren’t they any good?’
‘The seats were fine. It was the gypsies — it turned out they were all bloody Jews!’
Another survivor with whom I often talked was Rudolph Abel, the KGB man caught by the Americans and sentenced to thirty years in 1957, but released in exchange for the U-2 pilot Gary Powers in February 1962. He was entirely different from Molody, being embittered and disillusioned. After his rescue, he was attached to the Fifth Department, but without any function, or even a desk: he had a room, with only a chair in one corner, and he would come and sit there. One day on Dzerzhinsky Square he ran into Ernst Krenkel, a hero of the 1930s with whom he had served in a machine-gun unit in 1929. They had since lost touch. When Krenkel asked, ‘Where are you working now?’ Abel said, ‘Don’t you read your newspapers?’
‘Well, I must have missed something.’
‘Ah, I work here.’ Abel pointed at the KGB main building.
‘Really!’ said Krenkel. ‘And what do you do there?’
‘I’m a museum exhibit.’
The remark was bitterly ironic — and Abel’s cynicism was by no means misplaced. Years later I heard that Anatoli Lazarev, who succeeded General Tsymbal as head of Directorate S, remained suspicious to the last that Abel had been an American agent. As the former illegal lay dying, Lazarev ordered a man to surround his bed with a consignment of the newest listening equipment, in the hope that during his final delirium he might say something which would give him away.
After their return to Moscow, both Lonsdale and Abel acted as lecturers and consultants to latter-day illegals, and they travelled a good deal to provincial KGB departments. For people outside Moscow it was quite a thrill to see such heroes of the intelligence service in the flesh, and to hear their stories at first hand. Wherever they went, they were wined and dined, and they had at least two months’ holiday every year.
Molody was exceptional in his high spirits: few senior KGB officers had any sense of humour, and juniors made jokes at their peril. One day in my second year I was approached by a pleasantly intellectual-looking man who introduced himself as the editor of the Directorate S magazine, and asked if I would contribute a funny article. Humour was not really my line, but I did my best and wrote a piece about hobbies and collecting, casually mentioning that in our Directorate people collected many different things. Some, I wrote, collected bottles of drink, but the contents had a curious tendency to disappear, so that the collection became one of empty bottles.
When the magazine came out and was going its rounds, I was summoned to see General Tsymbal. He asked if I had written the article about hobbies, and when I agreed, said, ‘That was rather ambiguous, what you wrote about drink having a tendency to disappear.’
‘Isn’t that what happens?’
‘Well,’ he blustered, ‘we aren’t supposed to say such things. It suggests that our officers drink. In fact’ — he lowered his voice to a heavily confidential tone — ‘I myself don’t see anything wrong with what you wrote. But, you know, people from the Party committee asked me to have a word with you about it...’
It was an open secret that many KGB officers drank to excess. Early in my time with the Second Department Mr Podgornov, one of the deputy department heads and a friendly fellow, disappeared for three or four months, but then was reinstated. Later it emerged that he had rarely been sober in the office, and a secret search had revealed bottles hidden in the safe and filing cabinets. He had been persuaded to go into hospital for a spell of drying-out. That he had been allowed to resume his job was an indication of how widespread alcoholism had become: the authorities who let him come back were reluctant to throw the first stone.
Another year I noticed that a certain officer always took a bottle of whisky out of his safe and poured himself a tumbler just before he went home in the evening. In due course I reported him to the deputy department head, who listened with keen attention and a peculiar look in his eye, but without making any comment. Suddenly I realized that the boss was doing exactly the same, and I rapidly backed off. Even though such blatant cases often came to light, people in the KGB drank less than those in the rest of Soviet society, who tried to drown their sorrows and frustrations in alcohol. Yet it was typical that the men who sought to control the minds of the entire nation could not tolerate even such a feeble joke. Later my brother told me how he, too, was reprimanded for trying to be funny, and his wife became alarmed that he was going to lose his job for having been frivolous.
What I never managed to find out, and still do not know, was the number of people with whom we were dealing: how many illegals were in service, how many were recruited each year, how many failed in training. Foreign signal organizations, listening to radio traffic, produce a figure, but it is certainly inaccurate since some of the communications are fake, made only to confuse hostile monitoring agencies.
Another tantalizing question was why I had not been taken on for training as an illegal, while others with languages less fluent than my German secured places. Years later I discovered that one of the men who interviewed me was a psychologist: he had detected an oddity in my speech — a slight jerkiness or irregularity of rhythm which he thought would surface in any language I spoke and might be dangerously distinctive. My mother used to talk in the way he described, so it was possible that I did too, but when I mentioned it to another senior officer, he dismissed it as ridiculous. ‘That had nothing to do with it,’ he insisted. ‘The problem was your brother.’
It seemed that the KGB had an obsession about the dangers of two brothers working in the same organization, and especially in the same country: the risk of them defecting was deemed too great. Yet I was never convinced
about this, and to this day I remain uncertain about why I was rejected. Why should proximity undermine two brothers’ loyalty to the State?
During the 1970s the majority of people in the KGB were still heavily indoctrinated, and regarded defection as an act of treason so outrageous as to be almost incomprehensible. When Oleg Lyalin went over to the West in London during September 1971, he became a universal hate-figure. Another shocking defection was that of Stanislav Levchenko, who fled the KGB in Tokyo and went to the United States in 1979. When Viktor Grushko, the department head, addressed his staff on the subject, he described the defection as ‘an unnatural, perverted action’.
*
By 1963, when I was twenty-four, I began to feel it was time I got married, and I started searching in earnest for the right girl. I hoped to find one who could speak German, so I began to frequent colleges in which girls were learning foreign languages. Once I went so far as to pretend that I was an inspector, sent by the Young Communist League, and sat in on a lesson in the philological faculty of Moscow University. Some of the girls there were highly attractive but, as I sat at the back, listening and watching, I could see no way of approaching them.
Then one evening, I went to a dance evening at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute, a vast teacher-training establishment with many departments, like a university. There I was much taken with a beautiful half-Armenian girl, Yelena Akopian, who was training to be a teacher. Like all Armenian women she had beautiful eyes and hers were especially striking, a fine shape and a bright green colour, set off by her dark hair.
Cautious inquiries revealed that she was twenty-one, and about to finish her course in German. She told me that her father, Sergei Akopian, had been killed in a plane crash in June 1941, two months before she was born. He had worked for a firm testing new military aircraft, and had the bad luck to be flying as navigator when a prototype Tupolev 31 crashed during a test flight, a few days after the Germans had invaded Russia.[16] Her mother, a Russian woman, had married again, and her second husband, an engineer, was a good man; but there was a suspicion that he carried a faulty gene, and indeed their son, Yelena’s half-brother, was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of twenty-four. I wanted to get married because I thought it would be good for my career, and help me if I were sent abroad. Yelena was also keen because there was still a shortage of the right kind of men in Moscow, and girls were afraid that if they passed the critical moment they might find themselves left on the shelf. So, without much real thought or self-examination on either side, we hurried into marriage.
I found Moscow’s wedding palaces thoroughly unappealing, with their tinsel decoration and pompous rigmaroles, so we went to a register office and had a simple ceremony, with a few friends as witnesses. Yelena, being even poorer than I was, had nothing to wear but a modest dark green dress, and she was very nervous. Then we went back to my parents’ flat, where my mother had arranged dinner for a group of friends. The occasion went off all right but was not a great success, because my mother did not approve of my decision to get married without consulting her: she felt we should have talked things through much more — and maybe she was right. I think she was jealous of Yelena: certainly she and my sister Marina were jealous of Vasilko’s wife Ella (short for Elvira), even though they concealed their feelings fairly well. My mother and Marina were never unkind to Yelena, just rather cold.
Ella, by the way, was good-looking, being slim and long-legged, which was unusual for Russian women. I thought her rather sophisticated, but later I saw that her polish was only skin deep. Her father was a clerk in an ammunition factory, who confided that in the 1930s and 1940s he had been an interrogator in the NKVD. It was he who spoke about ‘achieving concrete results’, by which he meant capital punishment, and because he used the phrase without regret, I realized that he was a real, old-fashioned KGB man, without university education, compassion or mercy, who had been happy to send people to another world, just to achieve concrete results. When I heard that, I liked him a good deal less.
In any case, Yelena and I had got married. We could not afford either the time or the money for a honeymoon, so we went straight to live in a flat that was normally occupied by an illegal but was luckily empty. It was close to the Ostankino, the television tower, which was then under construction, with work proceeding twenty-four hours a day, and lights blazing all night. The flat contained little furniture, but it was good enough for beginners.
Graduating from college, Yelena got a job as a German teacher in a school but soon she found she hated both the place and the work as she was not a natural teacher, and had only moderate German. Neither did she like doing overtime, nor taking on extra-curricular activities.
Much more serious was the coolness which, all too soon, began to develop between us. I started to wonder whether or not she was a good partner for me. Our characters were very different: whereas I was outgoing, energetic and always thinking about politics, she tended to be rather inert, both mentally and physically. Looking back, I suspect there was never any real love on her side and mine never had a chance to develop, so that our relationship never became close.
It would have been better if I had known in the first place that she had no intention of having children. As it was, she got pregnant, and had an abortion without my consent. When she found she had conceived, she became hysterical: she developed an absolute horror of having a baby, of giving birth. She lacked the maturity to manage a child, and she sensed this instinctively. Everything connected with the idea appalled her. Her instability had a bad effect on me, making me confused. My attitude to Yelena (and to all women) was naturally respectful. Her wishes were important to me. If she did not want to have a baby, I did not see how I could force her to. Did I want a child? I was not sure, but I felt that, by nature, I was a family man, and that I would like to become a father. I discussed the matter with her endlessly. I pointed out that her doctor had found everything normal, and had said that it would be good for her to have the baby. ‘Surely the doctor’s right?’ I said. ‘Why don’t we go ahead and have it?’ But she became so hysterical, so violently opposed to the idea, that I did not feel I could insist. But if she did not want children, how could we ever become a proper family? A feeling of emptiness plagued me for years, gradually growing stronger and, although we continued to live together, the bond between us was one more of convention than of love.
Then, towards the end of 1965, a slice of luck gave us both new hope. One day Mr Podgornov, he of the hidden bottles, summoned me to say that the department had been offered a slot in Copenhagen. We had several people in Finland, he said, but had never had anybody in Scandinavia. Then he made some flattering overtures. ‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said. ‘You’re an able young man. It would be an awful waste if you only went to East Germany. You ought to work in a proper operational environment, cultivating targets in a Western country.’ He went on to say that he had served only in Zaire, which was beset by many of the shortages suffered in Moscow, but that even Africa was better than the Soviet Union. Denmark, he insisted, would be paradise: ‘You’d really love it there. So if you don’t mind, I’ll lobby for you to go.’
When I pointed out that I spoke only Swedish, and that none too fluently, he brushed aside my protestations. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon adapt and learn Danish — and if you don’t take the chance, there are plenty of others who’ll snap it up.’
I left the interview with my heart pounding. The prospect of living abroad was intoxicating. Yelena was equally thrilled, and we set about making preparations to go to Copenhagen.
A few days before we were due to travel, the owner of our flat suddenly returned and we had to leave in a hurry. We stayed with my parents for the short time that remained. My last few days in the office were hectic. We had little information about Scandinavia, and no chance of learning Danish, because there was no teacher, no textbook and no time. It was all I could do to wind down my other duties before leaving in the first days of 1966.
&n
bsp; Chapter Seven – Copenhagen
Most Soviet diplomats travelled to European destinations by train, usually in special carriages which went right through from Moscow to their destination, but we were told to fly so we packed as many of our meagre household belongings as we could into suitcases, and took off by Aeroflot jet. In the plane I suddenly noticed that the cuffs of my shirt were badly frayed, the people in the seats alongside could see them and I spent some time squirming awkwardly as I tried to turn them under and hide the ragged ends, reflecting on how poor and inexperienced we were.
We arrived in Copenhagen on a brilliant winter day of frost and diamond-bright sunshine, early in January 1966. At once I was struck by the beauty of the city, its cleanliness, its prosperity. After the drab austerity of the Soviet Union, it was a new world — a wonderland of handsome buildings, gleaming cars, shops packed with goods — especially stylish modern furniture — such as we had only dreamed of.
We were met by Ninel Tarnavsky (who liked to be known as Nikolai), officially head of the Consular Department at the Embassy, but also Deputy Resident, or second in command of the KGB station, with responsibility for the KR (or counterintelligence) Line. He turned out to be a kind man, stationed in Copenhagen with his wife and daughter, but he never brought off the slightest operational success or penetration. The summit of his achievement was to establish a relationship with a senior figure in the Danish security service, and even this he managed only by domestic means: as his wife was a skilled cook, he got her to lay on a stylish dinner for this important officer, and regarded it as a triumph that he accepted the invitation.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 16