One episode of trouble seemed to lead to another. While I was still at home recuperating, Nikolai Tarnavsky rang in a state of agitation saying, ‘Oleg, I need your help!’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m flat on my back.’
‘No, it’s urgent. Yura has hanged himself.’
‘Yura!’
‘Yes, we’ve got to identify the body.’
Yura was not a member of our station, but an officer from the Estonian KGB, who had gained a place at Copenhagen University in an exchange of students between Denmark and the Soviet Union. A man of about twenty-eight, he was a victim of Zaitsev’s blind enthusiasm for work: the Resident had not been perceptive enough to see that Yura lacked ability and was poor at languages. Instead of letting him carry on gently, Zaitsev had pressed him frequently to write more reports, cultivate more fellow students, produce a plan of operations. Now it turned out that the poor fellow had hanged himself in a shower cubicle, worn down by the strain and loneliness of living among strangers, especially in the dark of the Scandinavian winter.
Our immediate necessity was to identify his body. Tarnavsky’s problem was that he spoke poor Danish, and also that he was deaf in one ear. The result was that when a policeman telephoned to tell him that a Soviet citizen was dead, he had failed to identify the hospital to which the body had been taken. Ill as I was, I struggled up, and Tarnavsky drove me back and forth all over Copenhagen in search of a phantom hospital with ‘Frederik’ in its name. After following several false trails and startling various receptionists with our inquiries — ‘Have you got a dead Russian here?’ — I belatedly discovered that Frederik was the name of the street, and realized that the hospital was only half a mile from my flat, between there and the Embassy. Eventually we found several policemen on duty, and went with them to the morgue, where they uncovered a body, asking, ‘Well, is it him?’
The hanging had distorted the features so much that the face hardly resembled Yura’s, as I remembered it. Nevertheless, I said, ‘Yes, it’s him.’ Then, glancing at Tarnavsky, I saw that he was as shocked and uncertain as I was. Yet he, too, confirmed the body’s identity. Although we went through a period of uncertainty, Yura never surfaced again.
Back in the station, we urgently discussed the disaster. The police had ruled out any suggestion of foul play, and the death looked like suicide. Talking to his fellow students later, I found that Yura had struck them as not a very sociable person: he had joined in their discussion groups, but not with any enjoyment, and it seemed that the stress of trying to operate in a foreign environment had become too much for him. No doubt this was true; but later we discovered that another factor had played a part in the tragedy. Two years earlier Yura had got married to a girl who was said to be highly attractive but, because the slot in Copenhagen University was for one person only, he had had to leave her behind in Tallinn. Then a friend had told him that she had started an affair.
*
With all these varied activities, my time was well occupied yet, inevitably, my mental development was proceeding fast towards enlightenment and rejection of the whole Communist system. The physical and intellectual attractions of Copenhagen were in themselves highly seductive: there was so much beauty, such lovely music, such excellent schools, such openness and liveliness and cheerfulness among ordinary people, and — trivial as it may sound — such wonderful libraries, that I could only look back on the vast, sterile concentration camp of the Soviet Union as a form of hell. It was only a tiny detail, but in the libraries they issued you with all the books you wanted and gave you free plastic bags so that you could take out as many as you could carry. This impressed me enormously.
In purely material terms, I saw more and more clearly that political freedom and economic prosperity are closely connected, and that combination of the two produces spiritual and cultural freedom as well — the opposite of what Communist dogma was trying to make Soviet citizens believe. At that time one of the most prominent slogans in Moscow was ‘CAPITALISM IS ROTTING AWAY’. When people returned from countries like Denmark, and their friends asked, ‘Well, is it rotting?’ they would answer, ‘Yes, but the smell of decay is wonderful!’
Above all, I revelled in Copenhagen’s music. I went to concerts in halls and churches, and constantly listened to the radio, or to records at home. I was fascinated by the works of composers with a religious connotation — Bach, Handel, Haydn, Buxtehude, Schutz and Telemann. Such music was never played in the Soviet Union, but here life was full of it, especially at Christmas and Easter.
In this atmosphere of freedom, I blossomed as a human being, starting to play badminton, joining clubs, and, whenever I was away from my Soviet colleagues, talking to people like a normal man. What I did not know was that the Danes learnt a good deal about my state of mind by eavesdropping on my conversations with Yelena through the microphones in our flat. I had still not rejected the Communist system entirely, but in private I had become openly critical of the purges, of the routine violation of law, and of the totalitarian control which prevailed in the Soviet Union. Yelena, who was easily influenced, listened to my sceptical views, and began to share and echo them, often becoming even more outspoken than I was. I kept a good deal to myself, while she was inclined to chatter away.
One event in particular increased my disillusionment: the trial, in 1966, of the writers Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel. That shook liberal-minded Russians everywhere, but especially those working abroad. We could hardly believe that at home things were going in the retrogressive, Stalinist direction, and we tried to shut our eyes to what was happening.
Then in the spring and summer of 1968 fresh, radical intellectual forces began to surge through Europe. In Czechoslovakia a well-intentioned but weak new head of the Party, Alexander Dubček, was swept forward by his country’s movement towards liberalization, and started to relax Stalinist controls, ushering in what became known as the Prague Spring. All over Western Europe students began to stage riots, first in West Germany, then most notably in Paris, where May became the ‘month of the barricades’ and thousands of people were injured in running fights with the police. For the young people concerned, all this was immensely exciting, and I admired their spirit — as well as their predilection for psychedelic art. But from a standard Russian point of view the youth revolution looked like dangerous folly. I saw that there was a great confusion of minds in Western Europe, and that the main threat was not from the relatively benign regimes against which young people were protesting, but from the tyrannical, military, secret-police power in the Kremlin, which, with its 400,000 troops in East Germany, was keeping the Baltic and East European countries suppressed beneath its iron fist.
In Copenhagen we talked constantly of the youth revolution, but the subject of most intensive debate was Czechoslovakia, where Dubček’s reforms had seriously alarmed the Kremlin. In July, as a thousand Soviet tanks and 75,000 troops massed on the Czech border, we found ourselves dividing into two camps, those in favour of the Czechs, and the hard-liners, who wanted order restored. The pro-Czech faction included my friend and colleague Mikhail Lyubimov, then deputy head of station, and we felt desperately involved. ‘No,’ we kept saying, ‘they can’t invade! They won’t dare to!’ — for we saw Czechoslovakia as our one hope for a liberal future, not only of that country but of Russia as well. It was wishful thinking, and we were foolishly supposing we could influence events by exerting moral pressure and righteous indignation from long range. At the same time the hard-liners, who included Anatoli Seryogin, an incorrigible Stalinist, were demanding firm action by Soviet forces. In the end one of them said, ‘OK, let’s have a bet on it. A case of champagne on the fact that the invasion goes ahead.’ It was a measure of our desperation that, in the face of all the evidence, we took the bet.
As the world knows, the invasion went ahead on the morning of 21 August; and it was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined irrevocably the course of my own life. Over the past two years I had become increa
singly alienated from the Communist system, and now this brutal attack on innocent people made me hate it with a burning, passionate hatred. ‘Never again will I support it,’ I told myself. ‘On the contrary, from now on I must do everything I can to fight it.’ Even as the tanks were smashing their way into Prague, I rang Yelena from the booth in the main hall of the Embassy, on a line which I knew was bugged by the Danes, and cried, ‘They’ve done it! It’s unbelievable. I just don’t know what to do.’
This was my first, deliberate signal to the West. I knew it would be heard and taken note of. To say that I was asking the West to approach me would be an exaggeration. All I meant to say was, ‘I hate this. I can’t stand it. I feel bitter about it. I protest. Please realize that I am a decent person, not like the rest of my colleagues.’ My outburst did not produce any immediate reaction, but there is no doubt that it led, in due course, to my co-operation with the West.
I was by no means the only person in Copenhagen who felt outraged. Throughout the morning Czechs living in Denmark kept arriving at the Embassy, not so much to protest as to try to find out what was happening: they were in shock, desperate to know if the news was true, and if so why. In the afternoon things turned ugly when a crowd assembled outside and people began to pelt the building with missiles, some of them incendiary devices. Several smashed through the windows and landed on the floor, luckily without causing any serious fires; throughout the attack the Consul kept walking round his department cynically making a list of replacements he would claim in compensation from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs: ‘Ah, good. We could do with a new sofa — and a new table.’
As for my own future course of action, I could not immediately see what to do. When I went back to Moscow, I thought, I would write and circulate truthful reports which would reveal the facts about NATO: that the West had no aggressive intentions against the Soviet Union, and that on the Soviet side propaganda was affecting even those who were supposed to be making realistic political assessments. Then I saw how childish any such idea was: to try to organize underground cells in Russia would be futile, for the domestic KGB would penetrate them at once.
Nevertheless, I was determined not to remain one of those many thousands of Russians who restricted their contempt for the regime to the odd indecent gesture, and that made with the hand in the pocket. In due course I would do something constructive. I realized that the first thing I needed to do was to switch from working with the illegals and go into political intelligence, which would put me much closer to the front, in a position to obtain intelligence myself. This, then, became my next objective.
For the time being, life had to go on. One day in the autumn of 1968 I mentioned to Zaitsev that, although I was enjoying life in Denmark, I was really a German specialist and that I would love to go to Germany as a tourist, to see some of the places about which I had only read. Normally such a trip would have been difficult to arrange, for all Soviet officials living abroad were doing so on the basis of individual permission, specially granted, for the country in which they were working, and nowhere else. Yet Zaitsev found a way round this by sending a telegram to the Centre which claimed that, ‘led by operational considerations’, he had decided that it would improve the security of operations with the illegals if ‘Mr Gornov’ (my mother’s patronymic) were to visit West Germany twice, once by rail and once by road, so that he could make a thorough study of border procedures on both sides of the Danish—German frontier. So well did he phrase his recommendation that the Centre forgot its normal obsession with special permissions, and simply said, ‘All right.’
We had no trouble obtaining a German visa, but my request for one alerted the German security service, who set up elaborate surveillance measures on their side of the border. Already I was under heavy surveillance by the Danes, who were still trying to determine which of us alleged Soviet diplomats were KGB men, and who (we calculated) had spent more than three hundred days tailing me.
For once Zaitsev decided that we would deliberately give my followers the slip. The door of my flat opened on to a balcony, which led to the staircase, so that if I walked out normally, anyone watching from below would see me go — the outer wall along the balcony was only waist-high. This time, under Zaitsev’s instructions, I opened the door carefully, crawled out on to the balcony, pulled the door to behind me, proceeded invisibly on all fours to the staircase, ran down one flight and took the lift to the basement garage. There Sasha was waiting, and we drove out with me lying on the back seat of the car.
As usual, a Danish surveillance team in a car was waiting for me to appear, but they did not grasp what was happening, and we reached a suburban railway station without being followed. There I caught a train back to the central terminus, and an hour later, that same evening, I was on the express to Hamburg. To the considerable rage of the BfV, the German security service, I visited Hamburg, took a train to Jutland, inspected another crossing-point there, and on the next day caught the train back to Copenhagen, all without being picked up.
Perhaps it was foolish of Zaitsev to have suggested that I should make two trips in quick succession. For myself, all I had wanted was to visit Germany on a quick tour paid for by the KGB, but now, by sending Intelligence Officer Gornov on two missions within a few days of each other, the Embassy stirred up a hornets’ nest of activity in the Danish and German security services. This time there was no question of shaking off the surveillance: I drove southwards to the ferry hotly pursued by two carloads of Danes, and on the far side was immediately picked up by three carloads of Germans from the BfV. Leading my hefty tail, I drove down to Bonn, where I visited a friend in the Soviet Embassy, and went on up the Rhine, enjoying the prospect of steep vineyards and castles perched on crags, to see some of the towns which I knew from my history studies, Koblenz, Mainz and finally Frankfurt.
There, on Friday evening, I parked the car in the central square outside the main railway station, and went off to do some shopping, one particular target being an ammonia pistol, for warding off attackers, which a colleague had asked me to buy him. Back in the car, I set off again, and quite by chance as I crossed the square a huge wave of cross-traffic cut off my pursuers and bogged them down. They suffered a double blow: on my first trip to Germany they never picked me up at all, and on my second, in spite of intensive efforts, they lost me for the second half of the journey. In a few days I had acquired a reputation as a slippery and dangerous customer.
In terms of useful intelligence, the trip yielded practically nothing, but it did give me vivid confirmation of how strongly West Germany had recovered from the ravages of the Second World War. I knew that by 1945 much of the country’s industry, and thousands of homes, had been destroyed yet now I saw no sign of a ruin anywhere, only beautiful new roads and houses, and, in the Ruhr especially, new factories of imaginative design. The air of prosperity and dynamism impressed me greatly: here again was proof that the combination of freedom and democracy works wonders, and the contrast with East Germany — dark, primitive, poor and depressed — was overwhelming.
*
My manoeuvres in Germany made the Centre nervous, and they began trying to recall me on the grounds that I was under threat, having attracted an unhealthy amount of attention. By then, however, Zaitsev had conceived a plan that, on his behalf, I should ghost a book about Denmark, which he proposed to pass off as his own work, and he persuaded Moscow to let me stay on. A telegram came saying, CEASE OPERATIONAL ACTIVITIES. STAY TO MAKE ANALYSIS, BUT NO MORE OPERATIONS, and I was free to launch into a year of leisurely research and writing, which I much enjoyed. It became possible for me to finish work at 6 p.m., and to take advantage of the long, light summer evenings. I stepped up my badminton, and began to run again, both activities enhanced by the beautiful surroundings, whether new sports halls or ancient woods, in which they took place.
One Saturday in February 1969 the Ambassador suddenly asked if I would help him by driving immediately to the airport and entertaining an impo
rtant visitor until he was ready to take over. The traveller turned out to be Galina Brezhnev, daughter of the Chairman, changing planes on her way to Stockholm. She was then a tall, slim but rather masculine figure, clad in an expensive-looking astrakhan fur coat, and accompanied by her son, a poisonously spoilt brat of seven.
I had bought a newspaper, and the headline — of course —was HOW LONG CAN BREZHNEV HANG ON? When I showed it to her, she insisted that I should translate the story, so I began to read it out, word by word. It was a ridiculous article, in which the author totted up the number of times that Brezhnev’s name had been mentioned in speeches on the Day of the Red Army (23 February), and claimed to detect from his analysis that a plot was being hatched against him. Naturally Galina did not like this, and kept saying, ‘No, no — it’s all wrong.’ When the Ambassador eventually arrived, we all went off for a drive through the city, and lunch in the Embassy.
Towards the end of 1969 I had one last burst of operational activity when I set off with Zaitsev for what I hoped would be the decisive meeting with Oppermann, the priest I had been cultivating in Horsens. All went well until, on our way up through Jutland, Zaitsev inadvertently drove up to the gates of a military base. At once he turned round and went on, but someone must have noticed our diplomatic number plate and passed a report up the line to the security service, for a little while later, as he was motoring on, Zaitsev suddenly said, ‘Za nami khvost’ — There’s a tail behind us.
As I have mentioned, the KGB maintained a strict rule about never showing the surveillance that you have seen them. When something like that happened, you were supposed to keep going and bring your cover story into play, visiting some objective other than your real one and then returning to base. But on this occasion Zaitsev was rather put out, because it seemed unprofessional that the Resident should have made life difficult for one of his subordinates. He carried on in the hope that we would shake off the tail, not by any violent manoeuvres but through some stroke of good fortune, for instance at a traffic light, as had happened to me in Frankfurt.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 19