Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  The Soviet Embassy was in Christianiagade, an attractive quarter just north of the city centre. Other countries also had their bases close by, and it was a standing joke that we were separated from the American Embassy only by a graveyard. Our premises consisted of three large, white-stuccoed villas — an establishment that had once been some rich man’s home. The biggest building had elegant, high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor, ideal for receptions, with big oil paintings on the walls, vases in the corners, and a large, central hall which went right up to the roof, with a balustraded landing round it on the first floor. The main KGB station was in the loft, just under the roof, although later, when we needed more space, we built new offices in the basement. Across a courtyard stood a second villa, with the Consular Department on the ground floor. The third building contained a small leisure centre and club, with a school for the children. All around was an attractive garden, and there was also a mews, with garages — once stables — on the ground floor, and small flats for staff above.

  Quite by chance I had met Leonid Zaitsev, the Resident, or head of the KGB station, once before, when I was at School 101 and he had come on a course. On that occasion he had suggested that I should go to work in his department, but I had already been earmarked by Directorate S for service with the illegals, so I had to refuse his overtures. By KGB standards he was a thoroughly nice character, and prepared to defend his friends: a man of enormous industry, dark haired and round faced, whose ruddy cheeks and sparkling black eyes accurately reflected his zest for life. He had few weaknesses, for he did not pursue women or drink anything except the odd glass of dry white wine; yet he was a powerful trencherman, and, in due course, his love of food markedly filled out his tall figure.

  There was also a harmless, if slightly ridiculous, streak of vanity about him: after a trip to Britain, where he saw smartly dressed City types sporting folded handkerchiefs in the breast pockets of their suits, he bought simulated handkerchiefs by the dozen, sheets of cardboard, with a frieze of white cloth triangles along one side, cut them up, and went about with his breast pocket permanently adorned. He also adopted a number of British customs, such as insisting on taking flowers whenever he was invited to a party, and writing to thank his hosts afterwards.

  His main problem was that just because he was meticulous, disciplined and conscientious, he believed erroneously that everyone else in the KGB must be the same. Also if he decided that colleagues or subordinates were doing something wrong, he had an irritating way of nagging at them, as if repeated criticism would cure them of their bad habits. He had an insatiable appetite for work, and kept a huge ledger in which he registered his multiple activities: the overall plan of action for the station, meetings with targets of cultivation, development of counter-surveillance routes, all in minute detail. He also tended to overestimate the knowledge and abilities of young officers, delegating too much responsibility to them. However, when he became personally involved in a case, he took immense pains —as when he and a junior colleague, Nikolai Korotkikh, were trying to recruit a black American, and he spent hours rehearsing every move, as if for a stage production.

  One of Zaitsev’s first actions on my behalf was to arrange for me to learn Danish. When I tried to watch television in the Embassy on my first evening, I was terrified to find that I couldn’t understand a single word, so different was it from Swedish in both vocabulary and pronunciation. Soon, however, I joined the Berlitz school in Stroget, the main pedestrian street in the centre of Copenhagen, where I was allocated two teachers, one a student, the other a man in his sixties.

  It was an excellent idea to confront me with two such different influences simultaneously and my instructors’ questions kept me on my toes. When the young man asked what I thought of the Danish welfare state, I could not tell if he was fishing for a compliment, or wanted a critical assessment. Deciding the second was more likely, I said something not entirely complimentary, only to see him look disappointed, and to realize that I had made a mistake. The old man, in contrast, opened with a slow question about furniture: did I prefer old or new? ‘I expect you prefer old furniture,’ I replied, ‘but to someone like me, coming from poor Russia, which is full of hideous old furniture, I find modern Danish designs very exciting.’ It turned out that he considered modern furniture hideous, but the good-natured argument that followed was ideal for learning.

  I did two lessons a week at Berlitz, and then joined adult education classes for a ‘Danish for Foreigners’ course at a ridiculously low fee — the equivalent of £2 for six months. I found the challenge of a new language fascinating, particularly when it was presented in such a lively and imaginative way. In eight months I could carry on a normal conversation, but when I returned to Copenhagen on my second posting in the 1970s I became fluent.

  I was surprised to find how high a proportion of the people working in our Embassy were spies. Ostensibly there were twenty civilian and four military diplomats; but of the twenty only six were genuine, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of the remaining fourteen, nine or ten were KGB, and the rest GRU. (This proportion remained about the same in all the Soviet Union’s Western embassies, including London, until the great scandal of 1971 when the British expelled 105 Soviet officers in a single purge.)

  The nerve centre of the Embassy in Copenhagen — as in every such Soviet establishment — was the referentura, a specially protected suite of rooms in which the cipher clerks worked, receiving and despatching coded messages from and to the Centre. The rooms of the KGB and GRU Residents were defended against eavesdropping to a high degree by mechanical and electronic devices; they were lined entirely with metal, like ovens, with all the windows bricked up, so that the inmates had to work in horribly claustrophobic conditions. Yet the referentura was still more heavily protected. As elsewhere, it was on the first floor, to keep it away from tunnels — with which the KGB were obsessed — and the single door leading to it had no handle or keyhole on the outside, no aperture but one tiny fisheye peephole for those inside to scrutinize visitors. A bell was concealed in a recess beside the door, and those who knew about it rang to alert the clerk on duty. Inside were four small rooms, one each for the cipher clerks of the KGB, GRU, Embassy and Trade Delegation, all with their own ciphers and equipment. There was also a larger room, a kind of air-lock, in which people other than the cipher clerks were allowed to read telegrams. Once on duty, the senior cipher clerk was not allowed to leave the referentura under any circumstances.

  One of the cipher clerks, Leonid, was the first person with whom I made friends. A man of about thirty-five, he had a wife a couple of years younger and a small child. Because of his job, which made him a high security risk, he was not supposed to go anywhere alone, and when he began to make friendly overtures, asking Yelena and myself round to supper, I suspected that he might be doing it with the ulterior motive of trying to secure lifts, for I had been allocated a car (first a big, heavy old Soviet Pobeda, and then, joy of joys, a new Volkswagen Beetle). Because they were an amusing couple, I did not mind driving them about, and I took them on several excursions, to the beaches and into the woods to pick mushrooms.[17] Later, when I had been ill, the wife made a half pass at me, which I did not feel like reciprocating, but we remained on good terms. We were all devastated when, in December 1968, Leonid made a dreadful mistake.

  One of his duties as cipher clerk was to receive and send the KGB part of the diplomatic bag. Letters and documents arrived as film, but in the package there was sometimes an enclosure wrapped in brown paper. One morning Leonid tore off the wrapping and threw it straight into the stove which he used for destroying documents, not noticing that the parcel had included a thousand dollars in clean (that is, old but untraceable) notes, destined for one of our agents. An appalling loss, considering the low level of salaries. The rest of us rallied round, contributing large numbers of kroners to help him reduce the debt, and to pay it off, Zaitsev got the Centre to extend his tour of duty from two years to three.


  My own cover was that I was working in the Consular Department of the Embassy. I presented myself as a member of the diplomatic staff, but in that guise I was really no more than a clerk, dealing with inquiries about visas, wills and inheritances, and sometimes transferring funds to heirs in Russia. Each day began with a general conference presided over by the Ambassador, during which relevant items of news were read out for the benefit of the company by those who knew Danish. For the next couple of hours after that I was supposed to help Tarnavsky and his wife handle visa applications. Because we received no help from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we were busy and it was valuable experience to talk to so many ordinary Danish citizens. In those easy days before international terrorism had become widespread, procedures were delightfully relaxed. I worked at a desk in one corner of a large reception room, and people waiting for attention sat on sofas round the edge. Feeling that it was my duty to be nice to everyone, I would take each applicant and sit with him or her at a coffee table to conduct our business.

  For most members of the Embassy and KGB staff, the high spot of the day was the lunch hour: then we sallied forth in droves to our operational meetings, all out to cultivate local contacts. It was then that the KGB practice of handing out unlimited funds to its members poured money into the pockets of restaurateurs all over Copenhagen.

  The form was that at the beginning of the month every officer would draw an advance of about two hundred and fifty pounds against his expenses for entertaining contacts, and if he ran out of cash prematurely, he could draw more with no questions asked. The system was an invitation to corruption, for accounting was slack, the principal weakness being that we were encouraged not to ask for receipts in restaurants. This rule derived from the KGB’s archaic belief that to ask for a copy of the bill was somehow infra dig; that it was more polished and cosmopolitan simply to wave away the invoice with the tip. Stylish this may have been yet it also spelt fiscal disaster, for it meant that nobody had to produce any accurate account of where his money had gone.

  We were supposed to write reports of our activities: the Centre kept demanding information, and calling for as many names as possible to be included. But in fact we reported on only our most significant meetings: if the contact was classed as an agent, a confidential contact or a target of cultivation, we were obliged to put in every last detail — name of restaurant, address, map reference, date, time, arrangements for meeting, personal facts about the contact, and presents or money given.

  Needless to say, because the system was so deeply flawed, people constantly took advantage of it, inventing meetings and creating fictitious contacts while they pocketed the money. Years later in England I saw how an officer called Viktor Muzalyov perfectly exemplified this trend. One day in London our lady cashier said to me, ‘Oleg Antonovich, did you know? Muzalyov draws two hundred pounds against expenses every month, and always puts in an account showing he has spent precisely that amount.’ When I challenged him, Muzalyov claimed that he thought it was his duty to make his accounts tally precisely but we discovered that he was pocketing the cash, not just because he wanted it, but to cover that he had no contacts. Such reports as he produced were sheer fantasy, including those about his alleged meetings with the trade union leader Rodney Bickerstaffe. For months Muzalyov graphically described how he had been cultivating this important target, but in fact he never met him.

  In Copenhagen, under Zaitsev, who was strict and upright, corruption remained more or less under control, but under his successor it ran riot. Oddly enough, one thing that KGB officers did not do was take their wives out to meals under the pretence of entertaining Danes: first, they did not dare to for fear of being spotted, and second, the wives would never have condoned any such practice. They had no idea of the scale of the abuse that was going on, and they would have been horrified by the idea of spending a fortune on lunch when they had so little cash for everyday needs.

  Apart from the constant effort to find and cultivate targets, my principal task was to gather information about documentation and to look for Scandinavian identities, Danish ones above all. Until then the KGB had never done this kind of work in the region, so at least I was breaking new ground, the first man to explore local systems of registration and describe them to the Centre. The work proved a relaxed form of research, which I enjoyed, and it was not long before I found out that the foundation of the registration system lay in the ledgers of the official established Protestant Church, or Folkekirke. If we could gain access to the ledgers — as our predecessors had to the Standesamtbücher in East Germany a generation earlier — we would be able to create any number of Danish identities. First, though, we had to find priests or their attendants who would respond to cultivation.

  Then the question arose as to how we should proceed if we found a cleric who was prepared to lend us a ledger for a couple of nights. The answer was that we would ask Moscow to send out a team of forger-artists. I, or a fellow-officer, would draft the entry we wanted — name, place and date of birth, names of parents. Then, if there was space at the end of a page or the close of a year, the visiting experts would enter the new person’s details there; failing that, they would take the whole book apart and rebind it with a new page inserted.

  My most regular task was to meet couriers on their way from or to Moscow and escort them between the airport or the main railway station and the Embassy. All of them arrived carrying a briefcase fitted inside with a metal box made up in compartments which held containers of film. If it suddenly became necessary to destroy the briefcase’s most secret contents, the courier could press a button, which would release acid and melt the film in seconds.

  There was a tradition that the couriers who came to Scandinavia once a fortnight travelled by train as far as Helsinki, Oslo or Copenhagen, and then flew on to Reykjavik, where the KGB and GRU stations were being refurbished, and new listening equipment was being installed for eavesdropping on US radio traffic from the air-base at Keflavik, in the far west of Iceland. For my first couple of years in Denmark I was constantly receiving these couriers and posting them onwards, together with bulky items of equipment being transported as diplomatic baggage. Four days later, they would pass back through, minus their loads.[18]

  Most of the couriers were former professional sportsmen from the Dynamo club, burly chaps who had retired in their late thirties and joined the service. For them the job held many attractions: they travelled widely at no cost to themselves, ate free, and had various cosy contacts in the embassies, where single women secretaries were often waiting for them. Moving regularly through eight or more countries, they were on a non-stop sexual odyssey, and it was always refreshing to hear travellers’ tales from such jolly, straightforward people.

  Another of my tasks was to speed the transit of illegals who passed through Denmark on their way home for holidays in Russia. Our method was to infiltrate them on to Soviet passenger ships, several of which maintained a regular service between Le Havre and Leningrad, and every transit operation was thoroughly planned. The captain of the ship would be interviewed, or even recruited as a KGB agent; then, at my first special meeting with the illegal I would brief him on exactly what he had to do, and take over all his documents. At a second meeting I would give him a Soviet seaman’s passport made out in the name of one of the crew members. Even if the Danish authorities carried out a fairly thorough check, the details would tally with the crew list and it would not be apparent that there were two men with the same name on board: naval discipline did not apply, and the captain never lined up his whole crew together on deck so that they could be counted.

  Because everyone was nervous that the illegals might be exposed, we took a lot of trouble over handling them. We considered it dangerous, for instance, to let them go on board carrying large pieces of luggage because that made it obvious that they were just joining the ship. Instead, we made them leave their heavy bags in lockers or at the left-luggage depot at the main railway station and then hand me the keys o
r receipts at a clandestine meeting. There was a small risk that when I went to recover something from the left-luggage depot, and handed in a ticket, the attendant would ask me what my suitcase looked like but that was a minor problem. Again, whenever an illegal came off a ship, the KGB did not consider it safe for him to walk down the gangway on his own in case the Danish surveillance should pick him up. Rather, we arranged for the captain to come down with him and put him into my car, as though we were going off on a sightseeing trip. Often I had a second car behind me, and as we were leaving the dock area the driver would slow down to a walking pace in a narrow street, where he could not be overtaken, so as to balk any surveillance team trying to stay with me.

  Towards the end of March Zaitsev summoned me to his room one morning and said, ‘Why are we getting so few meets?’

  ‘What meets?’ I said. The technical term was barely familiar.

  ‘You don’t seem to understand. Every member of the Residency, whatever his job, is supposed to cultivate Danes and recruit them as agents. That’s the main purpose of our life here. The rest of your job you can do in your spare time. The essential thing is to cultivate people.’

  I was so naïve, after two years’ immersion in paperwork in Moscow, that I had not started to think operationally. I was used to burrowing among files, certificates, statistics and legal documents but not to tackling strangers, especially in a foreign language. The idea terrified me — but Zaitsev helped a bit by giving me specific examples of what I might do: recruit a Dane who might become an illegal agent, like the Krogers, or someone who would act as a live letterbox, or someone in the Consular Department of another embassy, who could supply us with foreign passports.

  In fact, my only solid recruiting achievement in all those four years was the acquisition of one live letterbox and his wife, who agreed to pass letters to and from illegals. The man was a schoolteacher, son of a former KGB agent, and after I had held some preliminary conversations with him, Zaitsev helped me sketch out the crucial meeting which would lead to recruitment. As always, the Resident’s attention to detail was impressive: he planned every course of the menu, insisting that we had champagne, fillet steaks and crêpes flambées. His main point was that everything must look seductive: it was essential that we had a flaming spirit lamp brought to the table for cooking the pancakes. His tactics succeeded, to the extent that the man and his wife — a pretty young girl — agreed to work for us, although in the end it was she who proved the tougher and more committed of the two.