Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  In Church affairs, my luck improved when I got a specific request from Moscow to acquire a birth and baptism certificate for a man fighting to win an inheritance suit. The person concerned had been born in Horsens, a small town in Jutland, and here was an official request for information from a legal authority in the Soviet Union. Rather than write or telephone, I decided to visit the place, which was two and a half hours’ journey away by road and ferry. I was rewarded by finding that the Catholic priest was a charming man in his sixties with the German-sounding name of Niels Oppermann. I got on so well with him that I started making regular visits, taking him boxes of cigarettes and the odd bottle of whisky, which he much appreciated in spite of twinges of guilt about drinking and smoking.

  His elderly housekeeper would lay out a cold lunch for us in his house across the courtyard from the church, and often I would bring the conversation round to his registers of parishioners. He brought the books over and left me to make notes from them, obviously willing to help. If I had gone one stage further, and offered him money to let me borrow them — what then? I kept hoping that he would co-operate, because the Catholic Church, unlike the Protestant, was exceedingly poor and received no funds from the State, but our negotiations never reached that delicate point: I saw that his books were far too thin, and contained so few names that it would have been impossible to hide new ones among the old.

  *

  On the domestic front things went reasonably well at first, but later deteriorated. Yelena and I had been allocated a brand-new flat, which Zaitsev had somehow managed to acquire in anticipation of our arrival. But before we even reached Copenhagen the accommodation had been purloined by Nikolai Korotkikh, the KGB officer celebrated for his skill at recruiting agents. The reason for his abrupt arrival was that the Embassy had identified a soft target in the form of a communications clerk in the American Embassy, a man who drank heavily, liked company, chased girls and frequented nightclubs, and was short of money. Having found out where he lived, they decided to take an apartment in the same building and install Korotkikh in it; then, at a later date, they would set up an ‘accidental’ meeting, which would lead to cultivation and recruitment.[19]

  So much for the plan. What happened was that Korotkikh arrived before his flat was ready, and moved into the one designated for me. Being a good colleague, he apologized handsomely, but for the time being Yelena and I were put into the guest room in the basement of the Consular building, which was not as bad as it sounds. Its windows were rather high, but the room itself was enormous, and we had all the necessities, including a cooker, shower and lavatory. Being young and unspoilt, we accepted it happily enough for a couple of months. The shortness of the journey to work, up one flight of stairs, was a major asset.

  When at last we moved, the spaciousness of our new apartment seemed incredible: admittedly the place was almost empty, but we had three rooms and a kitchen, all to ourselves. And what rooms they were, with fine wooden floors, a fitted kitchen, a small balcony, and everywhere workmanship of the highest quality. Gradually, with help from the KGB station, we managed to buy curtains and a few pieces of furniture, all modest but adequate. One day a visiting Dane amused us by spotting a tiny crack between wall and floor, and exclaiming in horror. ‘If you knew what we were used to in Moscow,’ I told him, ‘you wouldn’t worry.’

  We were short of money because my pay was pitifully low, and in Denmark inflation was rampant. Later, salaries were raised substantially, but then we had the tantalizing experience of seeing the shops bursting with things we longed to buy, but were unable to afford. Yet that was a relatively minor problem: much worse, Yelena began to exhibit what I can only call anti-domestic tendencies. Becoming an ever-more ardent feminist, she lost interest in cooking or cleaning, and behaved in what was to me a most peculiar way. Her own room, for instance, was chaotic, with clothes strewn all over the floor, and she made no effort to keep the rest of the flat in order. If I sought to remonstrate, she was always ready with some fashionable feminist phrase, to the effect that there were better things for women to do than housework. There was a kind of exaggerated vanity in the way she tried to save money by never spending anything on the flat, yet every now and then she would recklessly lash out on an expensive suede coat or pair of shoes. (Because she thought her legs were too short, she went in for immensely high heels.) This became even worse during our second tour, in the 1970s.

  As a mild form of retaliation, I took a course in cookery, which I found useful, although most of my fellow-students already knew a good deal and I was permanently labouring to catch up. Goaded by the memory of how many of my precious books in Moscow were falling apart, I also enrolled for a course in book-binding, which my father had always told me was a most enjoyable craft (he was right).

  We had not been in the new flat for long when we were invited out to supper one evening by a Danish couple, a policeman and his wife, a gifted amateur artist who specialized in high-class copies of famous paintings. I had been cultivating him, partly because he had some duties in the harbour, and partly because I thought he might lead me to other useful contacts. Now, I sensed, he was starting to cultivate me, and something made me feel that the main purpose of the invitation was to keep us under control for the evening, so that the Danish counter-intelligence service could bug the apartment with microphones. Before we left, therefore, I squeezed a small blob of glue into the crack between one of the bedroom doors and its frame.

  When we came home, not only had the glue been dislodged but the door was standing wide open. Clearly we had had visitors, and I assumed — rightly, as it turned out — that the Danes could now listen to our conversations. What I did not find out until years later was that when they came in that night, they accidentally let out Yelena’s black cat, which ran along the balcony and gained access to the communal stairs. After a sharp chase they managed to drive it back into our flat, but the incident threw them off balance and made them careless about closing the inner doors.[20]

  At least Yelena was working, and in a job she enjoyed. This was in the KGB listening station, which eavesdropped on the radio networks of the Danish security service. Her task was to listen to recordings made earlier in the day, and transcribe significant details or passages for further analysis. Generally she would start in the afternoon, so that she could work on the tapes made of the Danes following Soviet diplomats, KGB and GRU officers on their way out to operational lunches. If the surveillance thought they were undetected, they would talk freely, not knowing that we were picking up every word. Part of Yelena’s job was to evaluate the levels of surveillance used, and to decide how many cars had been behind whom. For easy reference the Danes gave us all nicknames. The Ambassador’s deputy, for instance, was called Bondar, and the Danes christened him ‘Bonde’, a neat nickname, because the word means ‘peasant’, and he looked just like one, albeit a fairly sophisticated specimen. I was known as ‘Gormsen’, or ‘Uncle Gormsen’. Many an afternoon and evening Yelena heard the Danes give out, ‘Uncle Gormsen’s proceeding westwards on So-and-So,’ and afterwards I would be able to analyse the tactics they had been using, whether they had been driving on parallel roads, and so on.

  Sometimes she listened live, and occasionally events became dramatic — as on the day when an agent was driving up from Holland to meet one of our officers, Boris, for supper in the harbour at Dragor, a little town on Amager Island, some twenty kilometres from the city centre. Just before 7 p.m. Yelena suddenly heard the signs of active pursuit: it sounded as if the Danes had either picked up the incoming agent and were behind him, or were on the tail of our own man.

  At once she called the duty officer and reported alarming signals. Listening in with her to the Danes talking between their cars and to headquarters, he deduced that it was the agent who was being followed. It looked as if the Danes must have been given a tip-off by the Germans or Dutch.

  Urgent action was needed. The plan was that after the meal the agent would go out to his car, fetch wha
tever he had brought to the meeting, hand it over, and receive a payment in exchange. This had to be prevented at all costs. The duty officer, Anatoli Seryogin, consulted Zaitsev, who took an instant decision: within minutes Seryogin was on his way, with an assortment of fishing tackle in the back of the car as cover, alongside Sasha, our operational driver, to break up the meeting and snatch Boris out of danger.

  Twenty minutes later they reached the harbour, and to demonstrate their innocence to the surveillance team, presumed to be in another car somewhere close, they started fishing. Then, as soon as he dared, Seryogin sent the driver into the restaurant, with orders to show his face, in the hope that Boris, who knew him well, would realize that something was amiss and leave at once. Boris saw him, and was surprised, but concealed any reaction, so that the manoeuvre had to be repeated a few minutes later. This time the driver went up to him and said in mid-conversation, ‘Borya, I’m sorry, but you must leave immediately. Your son’s dangerously ill.’

  This had the required effect. Boris stood up, apologized to his companion, insisted on paying for the meal, put money on the table, and left, driving quickly away to the trade delegation’s block of flats. The agent, an experienced operator, understood that all was not well and when, on glancing casually round, he saw a single man sitting in a corner, he too made a swift getaway.

  But for our quick reaction, the meeting could have had serious consequences. The Danes might have arrested either or both of the parties, and held Boris until he could be collected by a representative of the Embassy. They might also have confiscated whatever was being passed — probably a part or documents connected with high technology — and photographed the handover. Any of these actions would have been awkward for us. As for the agent — bad luck. But it would have been difficult for the Danes to prosecute him.

  It was this incident which, unfortunately for us, led the Danes to tighten up their radio procedures. Going over what had happened, they drew their own conclusions, and later started to disguise their communications, so that although we continued to pick up a good deal, intercepts became harder to interpret. My search for identities proved laborious, and my chances of success became even smaller when the Danes began to transfer their population register from the old church books into a central, computerized system. Nevertheless, I discovered the mechanics of how passports, birth and baptismal certificates were issued, and I was able to put this knowledge to good use when the Centre got leads on two German soldiers who had married Danish women and had children by them during the Second World War. Those children had full rights as Danish citizens, and my task was to acquire copies of their birth certificates without revealing that I was a Soviet citizen. This I managed by claiming to be a distant relative: I got copies of the documents and forwarded them to Moscow, where they helped put two illegals in business.[21]

  Another minor but useful discovery was that of a small town on the German border where marriages could be registered easily. Procedures had been made so simple that any couple, even foreigners, could come along and get married in a few minutes. When I visited the office, I pretended I was writing a paper for the Soviet authorities about various aspects of Danish law, but I forwarded details to the Centre in the hope that they might prove useful.

  Life was full of curious incidents, many of which would have been ridiculous had they been less nerve-racking. In one operation we dropped money for an illegal in a deadletter box, and as a signal to him we left a large bent nail on a windowsill in a public lavatory. The answering signal, showing that the money had been collected, was supposed to be the top of a beer bottle, placed on another windowsill in the same building. Imagine our consternation when we found a bottle-top in the right place, but from a bottle of ginger beer. Was this the same thing? Was the signal adequate? Or did it mean something different? Even though it was past midnight, we brought Zaitsev into the discussion, and there we sat in the small hours of the morning, a gaggle of KGB officers anxiously debating whether or not ginger beer counted as beer. None of us knew what the stuff was. I remembered it only from the autobiography of Karl Marx, who described how he bought ginger beer for children in Highgate. It certainly did not sound alcoholic. Nevertheless, in the end we decided that the signal was good — and we were right, for the illegal had got his money.

  Panic set in again when I sent an officer called Cherny to check another signal — a piece of fruit left lying on some grass. Back he came saying, ‘Yes, it’s there. There’s half an orange on that bit of lawn.’

  ‘Did you stop to make sure?’

  ‘No, I just drove past. But it’s there all right.’

  When I consulted that illegal’s list of signals, I became alarmed. An orange meant that the man was in danger. Maybe he was on the point of being arrested. Catastrophe could be threatening: immediate action was needed. Busy as I was, I decided to check the signal for myself. I got out my car and drove past the site. There lay the object, quite clearly an apple, which meant, ‘Am leaving the country tomorrow,’ and so, far from needing any action, gave us respite from looking after our colleague. Back in the Residency I said, ‘Mr Cherny, it’s only an apple. Why did you lie to me?’

  ‘I told you, I thought it was an orange.’

  ‘You should have stopped to make sure.’

  He shrugged, as if he considered the matter of no importance, but he had given himself away. Either he had not been to the site at all, or he had driven past at speed, too scared to slow down in case he should be spotted by some alien observer.

  The episode demonstrated the fallibility of the signals system. On another occasion soon afterwards I went to check a site in central Copenhagen where the illegal, having collected a cache of money and letters from a deadletter box on the outskirts of the city, was supposed to have written a figure 5 on a water-pipe which ran down the outside of a block of flats. Reaching the place at the preordained time, I found no figure 5. Ten minutes later I made another pass to check every possibility, that I had the right block of flats, the right pipe, and had come at the right time. Everything was in order, yet still there was no signal. It was already 9.30 p.m., and, knowing how meticulous Zaitsev was in such matters, I went straight to him and explained what had happened. As a recent recruit, not yet fully trusted with responsibility, I had only been used to look for the receipt signal. The drop had been carried out by an older officer, who had already gone home. ‘All right,’ said Zaitsev immediately, ‘we’ll go and check both sites in your car.’ So off we went, on an icy winter’s night.

  The deadletter box was in a classic site, in a hole beneath the trunk of a living tree, in a half-wild park on the north-eastern outskirts of Copenhagen. As I drew up and parked a few yards away under the firs, Zaitsev said, ‘OK, see if the package is still there.’

  I walked warily forward, my mind spinning as if in a nightmare. Just as I reach into the hole, I kept telling myself, floodlights will blaze up and cameras will start whirring: we shall both be totally compromised. Yet my groping fingers closed on cold air, and nothing disturbed the stillness. The package had gone. We still did not know whether to feel relieved or alarmed: someone else might have got the money and letters. The only thing to do was to visit the signal site yet again — and when we did, there was a nice neat 5 on the water-pipe, just where it should be.

  ‘Do you believe me — that I came twice before and found nothing? I asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Zaitsev. ‘Obviously the fellow was late, that was all.’ But he sent the Centre a long telegram reprimanding the illegal, which proved a bad idea, as people in Moscow took offence, feeling that his criticism rubbed off on them.

  *

  One evening in 1967 I was suddenly sick, and smitten by a severe pain in the stomach. It was 8 p.m., and Yelena was still at work in the Residency. Because the attack was so violent, I rang for a mobile doctor, and one soon arrived, but he turned out to be useless — young, pompous and over-confident. ‘It’s nothing but stomach catarrh,’ he said. ‘Take
this, and you’ll be fine.’

  He handed me a pill, which I dutifully swallowed. But stomach catarrh? I had never heard of any such complaint. Soon, far from feeling better, I grew worse: fingers and toes began to go numb, and I was in such pain that I feared I would faint. In desperation I rang the Embassy and asked Sasha, the operational driver, to take me immediately to the casualty department of the nearest hospital.

  There I queued for half an hour before somebody noticed that I was in a bad way. Then suddenly people flew into action: inside another half-hour, after various tests, I was on the operating table. A mask was placed over my face, and that was the last I knew.[22]

  Next morning, though weak, I was recovering, and when the house doctor came, he said, ‘Deres appendix var meget betendt. Your appendix was very inflamed. You got here just in time.’ Silently I cursed the pompous young doctor and his stomach catarrh and I vowed there and then not to pay his bill. Later, when he telephoned to protest, I said, ‘What makes you think I owe you anything? You nearly killed me.’ Still he insisted on payment, but, armed with advice from a Danish friend, I threatened to report him to the Society of General Practitioners: this worked like magic, and I never heard from him again.