Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Luck deserted us, however, and when we reached our hotel in Horsens, the surveillance was still behind us. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Zaitsev. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ring him and say that the meeting’s off.’ Clearly he was right — but how to call? With typical paranoia, we assumed that the telephones in the hotel were bugged. After some reflection we decided to go for a walk along the harbour, close by. On the quay stood several terminal buildings, for passengers travelling to and from the islands, with telephone cabins beside them, and as we passed one of these, Zaitsev kept walking while I nipped in and made a quick, untraceable call, apologizing that we could not keep the rendezvous. A couple of weeks later I again made the trip — on my own, this time — to say goodbye to Oppermann and thank him for his help.

  Over Christmas we had time on our hands. For us atheists there was no holiday, but with all Danes taking time off and offices closed, none of our normal contacts was available. The result was a good deal of drinking and celebration, and at one party our political discussion became heated, in a clash of intellects between myself and Seryogin. With several drinks inside me, I was provoked to make derogatory remarks about the Communist system, and suddenly realized that I had gone too far. But Seryogin, instead of losing his temper, took me in his arms like a great bear, and said, ‘Oleg Antonovich, if you feel like this, why do you stay in the system [which meant in the KGB]?’ ‘Oh, well,’ I answered, ‘between friends we can say anything we like.’ I was left with the unpleasant feeling that I had done something silly but Seryogin, reactionary though he was, never denounced me.

  I had hoped to stay in Denmark for a few months longer, but the man nominated to succeed me was anxious to start the good life of the West, and began manoeuvring to take over. So it was that in January 1970 Yelena and I regretfully packed and set off for Moscow.

  Chapter Eight – Marking Time in Moscow

  The poison of European life had entered my system. Back in Moscow I was shocked to find how shabby everything seemed: it was impossible to forget that Over There another life was going on, better than ours in every respect — not just more colourful and attractive in material terms, but full of intellectual vigour, and fired by the twin flames of freedom and democracy. When, once again, I saw the queues, the shortages, the filthiness of public lavatories, the bureaucracy, the corruption, the red tape, the rudeness of officials, the impossibility of obtaining redress when one had a complaint — when I saw all this, I felt physically ill. I now found the relentless propaganda actively offensive, and I came particularly to dislike the official music which blared out from radios and loudspeakers in public places, all the most patriotic and least interesting pieces, written according to Communist formulas. That ghastly totalitarian cacophony, itself a form of propaganda, made life hideous until I trained myself to close my ears to it.

  By no means everyone returning from abroad felt the contrast as sharply as I did. To those who had been in Algeria or Mozambique, for instance, Moscow seemed wonderful. Yet even people who had been in East Germany had to admit that the DDR was better off than we were — even if they were careful not to speak freely about the miracles they had seen across the border in places like West Berlin. The official line was that a spell in a normal, wholesome Soviet environment would cure anyone of the poison of abroad — but for me there was no antidote except to return.

  I found some compensation in that I was able to buy a new flat. While abroad I had joined a housing co-operative, put my name on a list, deposited some money and now we had a brand-new flat in the area on the edge of the city known as Belyayevo, where eight-storey blocks were going up in green fields. Because local furniture and fittings were so poor, I had brought back some Scandinavian wall units, and I spent many hours happily drilling holes, until one wall was almost entirely covered with shelves from floor to ceiling.

  Although our partnership was no easier — it had become a working relationship rather than a romantic one — Yelena and I had decided to stick together for the time being as there seemed no sensible alternative. Fortunately she again got a well-paid job, this time in the Twelfth Department, which listened to embassies, flats and hotel rooms. On the English side of the department there were dozens of transcribers, eavesdropping on the American and British embassies, on other English-speaking embassies, and on visitors; but on the Scandinavian side there were only three slots, and luckily one of them came vacant at the right moment. Yelena’s Danish was already good, particularly for listening, and she had picked up a good deal of Swedish and Norwegian from television programmes in Copenhagen. Now she prepared to learn both languages properly, and she was taken on with the rank of senior lieutenant.

  The clandestine listeners were regarded as highly important, and people who excelled themselves received decorations: for example, the woman who eavesdropped on Henry Kissinger, the American National Security Adviser and later Defense Secretary, during negotiations for the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), won a special award. Generally they monitored tapes, rather than live conversations, using a foot control to stop the tape or run it back, and writing out long-hand notes which secretaries later typed. As in Denmark, they were sometimes required to transcribe entire conversations, and sometimes given the freedom to make selections. Different technical devices were known to the KGB by various letters: ‘A’ stood for telephone, ‘B’ for microphone, ‘C’ for observation through keyhole, ‘D’ for one-way mirror. The term ‘letter operation’ was thus a euphemism for one of the most widespread of KGB activities, the use of a technical device against a specific target. The transcribers were also furnished with standard abbreviations to account for time-lapses or passages of silence during which nothing was being said, among them ‘PA’, which stood for polovoi akt, or sexual intercourse.

  I made it a rule never to ask Yelena about her targets: it was better for both of us that I should know nothing. Nevertheless, I was well aware that her work demanded not only concentration but also considerable skill. The easiest part of it was listening to bugged telephones: people who did that were known as ‘the lucky ones’, because the sound was usually clear, and the meaning of what had been said unambiguous. Sound picked up by microphones planted in walls tended to be poor, and needed acute interpretation. In spite of the difficulty, people who specialized in this line became brilliant at it, and regarded themselves as the real professionals, while the easier work could be done by amateurs.

  Back at work in Directorate S, I applied to join an English course at the Dzerzhinsky High School; but my department head, Pavel Gromushkin — ever the peasant — boomed out, ‘What’s the use of learning English? You can never work in England, you’re blown!’

  At the time I thought he was referring to the enormous number of days I had spent under surveillance in Denmark, and to my unfortunate trips to West Germany. Only some time later did I hear that the authorities had another reason to be anxious about me. It turned out that two KGB officers in Buenos Aires, on their way to empty a deadletter box, had walked into a trap: as lights snapped on, they found themselves surrounded by police, got into a fight, started to run, shed incriminating material as they went, were caught, searched and interrogated before they were released and expelled from Argentina.

  At much the same time, the Argentinian secret service also arrested a couple of Soviet illegals called Martinov, who I, quite by chance, had put on to a Russian ship in Copenhagen, on their way to Leningrad. After questioning, the Argentinians sent them on to Washington for further debriefing, and Gromushkin was convinced that there they would give everything away: they would relate how a man from the Soviet Embassy, with a diplomatic passport, had put them on the boat, and they would give a physical description of me, so that by now all the Western services would know that Mr Gordievsky, alias Gornov, was an intelligence officer.

  How much of this reasoning was realistic I could not tell. The Martinovs had never known my real name but the Danes could easily follow the trail back to me. (Two years later anot
her senior officer described all this talk of being blown as nonsense. ‘Most of our officers can be regarded as blown after a couple of months in a foreign country,’ he said. ‘What does it matter? Even if you aren’t blown already, you will be in a few weeks so it makes no difference.’) In any case, Gromushkin decided to send me to a country not under the influence of the Western services, and aimed me towards Morocco. That meant I had to learn French, and for the next two years I went to French courses.

  Those two years proved an in-between, inconsequential time. I was put into an analytical group, where the work tended to be boring and uneventful — although I inevitably learnt a good deal more about how documents were created, and came across some choice examples of KGB behaviour. For example, we had two or three people planted in international hotels where their job was to photocopy foreign passports. Sometimes we urgently needed an up-to-the-minute passport stamp, and whenever this happened we would send somebody speeding round to one of the hotels. On just such an errand to the Intourist Hotel at the lower end of Gorky Street, I spotted our man in the foyer, and a group of thuggish-looking fellows loitering near the entrance. My man spoke to them, then came over and gave me an envelope, whispering, ‘Do you know who they are?’

  ‘Well, they look like KGB to me.’

  ‘That’s right. They’re the surveillance unit attached to the hotel. And d’you know what? They’ve got a couple of rooms fitted up with hidden cameras, and that stunning girl at the reception desk has just been making love with her boyfriend! Doing everything!’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I said coldly. ‘Don’t you realize? She’s not a target of cultivation. Nor is her boyfriend. All you’re doing is filming innocent people for your own amusement.’

  Immediately the man became worried, thinking that I was about to denounce him. Of course I had no such intention, but the episode represented the KGB at its normal low ebb.

  In technical terms we were starting to fall behind some of our allies, particularly the East German Stasi (secret police), whose document-manufacture had become very sophisticated, using fine colour photography rather than the old catalogue of colours on which they had relied earlier. During my time we, too, went over to the new system, which was much more accurate and objective.

  Occasionally the department was augmented by the arrival of illegals who, after service outside the Soviet Union, had not been sent abroad again. In a class of her own was Nora, an extraordinarily forceful, energetic and aggressive woman, full of life and ideas, who had worked as an illegal in several countries, leaving behind her a trail of cast-off husbands, none of whom had been tough enough to stand up to her for long. In her strength and vigour she was admirable, but she had one disastrous idiosyncrasy: body odour, such as none of us had ever experienced or even imagined. Her immediate boss christened her ‘The Ginger Lady’, believing (wrongly) that ginger has a powerful smell.

  One day she was put to sit in our room, and we were all terrified, because her stink was intolerable: even when she went out, it remained overpowering, and we spent hours discussing what we could do about it. So intimidating was she that at first no one would tackle her, but then a man who sat in the middle of the room, who we knew as Colonel Petropavlovsky, agreed to have a go.

  Some days later he reported quietly that he had had a word. At first she had been enraged, he told us, and had cried, ‘The comrades can put up with it!’ But he had gone on to suggest that it was better to keep body and clothes clean with frequent washing, rather than resorting to deodorants, and in the end she had calmed down. Then she disappeared for a few days, and, when she came back, to our unbounded relief we found that the smell had gone. Yet still she had a secret up her sleeve. ‘You know,’ she said casually, ‘I’ve got a new interest in life. I bought a season ticket to the swimming pool, and I go there every morning on my way to work.’ Poor pool! Poor fellow swimmers! But at least the problem had been shifted off our own territory.

  *

  The great event of 1971 was the expulsion from Britain of 105 KGB officers. This was a bombshell, an earthquake of an expulsion, without precedent, an event that shocked the Centre profoundly. It was triggered by the defection of Oleg Lyalin, a member of the KGB station in London, and in particular of the Thirteenth Department, the unit responsible for gathering information about strategic targets, sabotaging key facilities, and providing safe houses for the teams which would be sent into enemy territory during the first few days of all-out East—West conflict. Even before Lyalin’s defection, the British security service, MI5, had a pretty good idea of who was who among the serried ranks of alleged diplomats in the Soviet Embassy, but with his help their knowledge became precise and, out of a total of 120 KGB and GRU, they sent 105 packing.

  This unprecedented event led to a violent shake-up in Moscow, and especially in the First Chief Directorate’s British—Scandinavian Department, which dealt with political intelligence and was the most important arm of the intelligence service. The head of the department was demoted, and his place was taken by Dmitri Yakushkin, a formidably outspoken man.

  Unlike most of his KGB colleagues, Yakushkin came from a noble family, but from one of those clans which never suffered after the revolution. He was the great-grandson of one of the Decembrists, the group of officers, mostly aristocrats, who clubbed together early in the nineteenth century and tried to engineer an uprising against the Tsar. Other members of his family had joined the Bolsheviks early in the 1920s. He grew up with the commanding height, the patrician looks and the aquiline nose of a nobleman, and expectations to match: he had no doubt he would become a senior figure in one organization or another. His first attempt, however, was a failure: he joined the Ministry of Agriculture, only to realize that this was not the place for him. When he switched somehow to the KGB, his career prospered, and he was sent as a senior official to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Then he returned to Moscow, where he became deputy head of the American Department, and in the autumn of 1971 was promoted to head of the British—Scandinavian Department.

  By the time I met him his hair had turned silver-grey, and, as I soon found out, his baritone voice boomed out fortissimo when he became annoyed. Our first brush took place almost at once. In the flat one morning I happened to hear on the BBC World Service that the Danish government had decided to expel three Soviet spies, alleged to be diplomats, from the Embassy in Copenhagen. As soon as I reached my office, at 9 a.m., I telephoned a colleague who looked after Danish affairs on the political side and told him the news.

  ‘Have you heard that?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘We’ve had telegrams saying that the issue hasn’t been settled yet. We’re hoping for the best.’

  Five minutes later my telephone rang, and a terribly loud voice, audible not only at arm’s length, but all round the room, began to roar out of it. ‘COMRADE GORDIEVSKY!’ it bellowed. ‘If you INSIST on spreading rumours round the KGB about alleged expulsions from Denmark, YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!’ So thunderous was the threat that several colleagues glanced at me fearfully.

  This was Yakushkin, sounding off in characteristic style. Obviously the man to whom I had spoken had gone straight to him and obviously he was infuriated by the idea of beginning work in a new department with yet another expulsion. Within hours telegrams from Copenhagen landed on his desk confirming what I had heard. Other men — Westerners, certainly — would have rung briefly to apologize. Not Yakushkin. His method of making things up was rather different. Ten days later he called again, and said in a perfectly normal, polite voice, ‘Comrade Gordievsky, would you be so kind as to pop up and see me?’

  Up I went, into his office. Having taken a good look at me, he set me back by asking, ‘How would you fancy working in my department?’

  ‘Well!’ I hesitated, but recovered quickly. ‘I’ve always dreamt about working in political intelligence. And of course, I would love to go abroad again, particularly to Oslo or Stockholm.’

  ‘No, no!’ sa
id Yakushkin quickly. ‘It’s Copenhagen where I need someone. We have to rebuild our team there. You speak Danish. I’ve been asking about you all over the First Chief Directorate, and it seems that, of all the people available, you’re the only one with the right language qualifications. Besides, I understand that your work with contacts is good, and that you know how to deal with people.’

  My heart and mind were racing. Much as I wanted to see another Western country, I knew that any foreign posting would be infinitely better than Moscow. Also, at the back of my mind, the enormous, reckless idea was already smouldering that I might make contact with someone in the West, British or American.

  Concealing my excitement, I said, ‘But how will you get me out of Directorate S? Will General Lazarev let me go?’

  In his big-boss way Yakushkin blustered, ‘Leave it to me!’ and away I went, full of sudden hope. Then, of course, nothing happened. The weeks dragged by — two, four, six — until one day I met Yakushkin in the corridor and said, ‘By the way, what happened about your offer?’ He looked uncomfortable, because it went against his pride to have failed, and said, ‘I couldn’t get you out. That bloody General Lazarev won’t release you.’

  We decided that the only thing to do was for me to make a personal appeal. Normally any such tactic was regarded as self-defeating for if a man comes along and says, in effect, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t like working in your Directorate,’ the boss takes it as an insult. In my case, however, it seemed the last resort — and then, as if to endorse my decision, there came a cruel yet beneficial twist of fate, in the form of the death of my brother.

  Vasilko had been ill for some time. On his travels in South-East Asia he had contracted hepatitis B, and he had been brought back to Moscow to work from there as one of the Nagayev group of roving illegals. Although told to stop drinking alcohol, he had foolishly carried on, and whenever I had seen him, he had looked worse and worse. All the same, it was a severe shock when he died, aged only thirty-nine, in May 1972.