Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Having been a serving officer, he received a full military funeral: a cremation, during which his coffin was lowered through the floor of the building, as if into the earth. As the service began, I suddenly found myself thinking of Misha, a blind musician who had married the daughter of the woman from whom we rented a dacha in the 1950s. Having lost his sight in the war, Misha never realized how ugly his wife was; but they had one child, and I think were reasonably content. Then he died, still fairly young, and as we were approaching the crematorium for his funeral, Vasilko had said to me, ‘Poor Misha suffered a lot in this life, but now his troubles are at an end.’

  How clearly those words came back to me as we said goodbye to Vasilko. The main speech was made by the Party boss from Directorate S, who played a larger role in the service than normal because he was a kind of tutor and educator for the illegals working from Moscow, half priest, half personnel officer. His address was poor, and at the end of it he made a bad mistake, announcing, ‘Now let us say farewell to Oleg Antonovich...ahem!...Vassily Antonovich Gordievsky.’ At that moment, as the floor opened and the coffin began to go down, soldiers with automatic weapons fired three single blank shots, and as the floor closed again, the national anthem was played over loudspeakers. I was left reflecting on the speaker’s slip of the tongue. It did not worry me unduly: for one thing, it suggested that in the KGB I was better known than my brother, even though he had served with distinction and won a decoration. For another, there is a Russian proverb which says that anyone who is buried by mistake can look forward to a long life. So the error, though irritating, seemed a good omen.

  After the funeral we all went round to Vasilko’s parents-in-law where there was much eating and drinking — too much — and further speeches. Some relations had not even known that he was in the KGB, and were astonished when they heard the three shots. What his award had been for nobody seemed certain, but I believe it was for his rescue of the illegal who developed a persecution mania in Sweden, a difficult assignment which he managed with considerable skill. Much about him remained mysterious to the end, not least the name under which he had lived and worked. I knew that he had assumed an Austrian identity — which accounted to some extent for the accent with which he spoke German — but, true to his training, he had never told me what he was called.

  Sad as it was, his death turned to my advantage, for I was able to use it as a moral lever in putting pressure on Lazarev. A few days after the funeral I went to see him, thinking that the moment was psychologically in my favour: now that my brother had died as a result of his work for Directorate S, it would be hard for the boss to refuse my request. Sure enough, Lazarev said, ‘All right. If you don’t want to work here, I can’t keep you. I’ll let you go.’ But then he turned nasty and began to talk in a most unpleasant way: ‘You think that we here are black-bone, and that in the political department you’ll be a white-bone man,’ and so on. The illegals were surrounded by a romantic aura, and, according to official mythology, his Directorate was the most important in the KGB; but, of course, it annoyed him greatly that a man who had proved himself able and a good linguist should want to move on to the political side.

  Typically, Gromushkin, my department head, now made a protest and tried to keep me. It was not as if I had ever done much good work for him. My German was excellent, my Danish serviceable, but I had found the work in Moscow deadly dull, and in Denmark I had failed to recruit anyone of significance, either in a foreign consular department, or in a register office. In other words, my service to Directorate S had been entirely undistinguished — and yet Gromushkin tried to hold on to me, out of sheer spite.

  While I was waiting for release, my department-to-be began moving out to Yasenevo, the fantastic new headquarters just being completed in the woods outside the Moscow orbital road. There, a magnificent Finnish building of ultra-modern design had been cleverly fitted into the sloping terrain, with access-ways and car parks beautifully set into the trees. No expense had been spared. There were three futuristic conference halls, one to seat a hundred, another for three hundred, and the third for eight hundred, this last cast in the form of a stage and amphitheatre, all in white marble. The building had full air-conditioning, with blinds between the twin panes of double-glazing, and the windows commanded wonderful views of birch forest and meadow. The canteen and cafeteria were excellent, and there were several first-class libraries, and a vast archive department, all close-carpeted, spacious and quiet. The banya (sauna) was reserved for use by the bosses, but the swimming pool, football pitch, gym and tennis courts were open to all.

  Directorate S had no desire to head for this new Mecca. In their view it was much too far away. All their personnel, the illegals’ residential flats and safe apartments were in the city centre, together with their support services such as photography, ciphers and surveillance. How could all these people move out? They remained in the main building, the Lubyanka, which they later regretted.

  My own order to move came through at last in August — and highly convenient my new workplace proved, for it was no more than twenty minutes’ journey from our flat. One evening I happened to be in the building as part of a team of extra duty officers, who did a twenty-four-hour stint to help the regular professionals. As not much was happening the general in charge took three of us to sample the bosses’ sauna, attached to the sports centre. This was spectacularly fitted out, with plenty of space, beautiful Finnish wood, excellent showers, and the fluffiest towels imaginable. We enjoyed ourselves hugely, trying it out. Then our guide asked if we would also like a glimpse of the private sauna reserved for the head of the First Chief Directorate and his guests. We said, ‘Of course!’ and a moment later he slipped us through a locked door into a truly palatial suite, where everything was on a still larger scale: an enormous sauna, a room in which to lie down and relax, and a dining room with an elegant whitewood table, chairs all round, and a refrigerator full of drinks. Such was the style to which the real bosses were accustomed.

  I worked at Yasenevo for only a few weeks, and in the first days of October we left again for Copenhagen. By then Yelena had become well established in her listening job: she had been promoted to captain, and was earning a good salary. Naturally her employers did not want to lose her, but again Yakushkin came to our rescue and prised her out by sheer force of rank and personality.

  Chapter Nine – Changing Sides

  Arriving in Copenhagen for the second time on 11 October 1972, I found myself in a dilemma. For years I had been wavering, but now I was anxious to make contact with someone from the West, and to help the Western powers. I had, however, to press on with my KGB work, which was aimed first at acquiring intelligence, and second at subverting Western policy and institutions. I consoled myself with the thought that much, if not most, of what I was doing was completely harmless.

  Officially I was a second secretary in the Embassy, and later I moved up to first secretary, becoming the official press attaché, an excellent cover, which required me to be in frequent contact with Danish newspapers, television and radio, and to cultivate good relationships with the media, politicians and civil servants. I had time to read a lot, listened for hours to the radio, wrote reports and generally prepared to take over from my predecessor, Leonid Makarov, a poorly educated but methodical man from whom I learned a good deal.

  In my two-year absence, an extraordinary change had come over the city: with censorship thrown to the winds, the permissive society was rampant. Bookshops and cinemas peddled hard pornography in the most blatant displays, and the beaches were dotted with naked men and women. Within the city limits women were supposed to remove only the tops of their swimsuits, but further out total nudity prevailed.

  In the KGB station I was now a political intelligence officer, an interesting job that involved much more overt activity than my earlier role. My task was to acquire contacts in places like the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government departments, as well as in the political parties, th
e trade unions and the media — any organization through which the KGB might be able to influence public opinion. I might, for example, cultivate the head of an organization opposed to the European Common Market, because the policy of the Kremlin and the KGB was to split Europe and prevent its consolidation.

  This kind of manoeuvring could be quite stimulating and yet, perhaps because I was older and more experienced, I saw how ineffective the bulk of KGB work was. Most of it was what we called ‘active measures’, and amounted to no more than attempts at manipulating public opinion through speeches, newspaper articles and brochures. There was practically no real intelligence work, in the form of recruiting agents: although we continued to hunt for contacts, the Danes proved exceptionally resistant to our overtures. Prosperous, fired by patriotism, a sense of duty and integrity, they did not want to be recruited.

  Another reason for our lack of success was the weakness of the Resident, Anatoli Danilov, who had succeeded Zaitsev. In England, on an earlier posting, Danilov had brought off a memorable coup by recruiting an agent who had high value in KGB eyes; but after that he had been content to rest on his glory. ‘I’ve done my bit,’ he would say. ‘I’m not bothering any more.’ By the time I arrived, he was drinking a great deal, particularly at lunch, and doing little work. I found him an uninspiring leader — and he once did something that made me positively despise him.

  We were both on leave in Moscow at the same time, and Danilov was about to go on holiday in the south, leaving in the early hours of the morning. Because he was afraid he would not be able to get a taxi, he asked me to pick him up and drive him to the airport at 2.30 a.m. I cannot remember whether or not I managed to get in a nap first, but when I set out at two o’clock to collect him the whole of Moscow was alive with empty taxis, cruising hopefully with their green lights on. My entire night was destroyed, and I reflected bitterly that if a man treats his subordinates like that, they will never have the slightest respect for him.

  In Copenhagen, the apathy of the Danes notwithstanding, one or two men were prepared to help us, and among these was Gerd Petersen, who had been declared a confidential contact by the Centre long before I arrived. An unprepossessing little man, with long, greasy hair and the sagging pot-belly of a beer-drinker, Petersen was a dedicated left-wing politician. For years he had been an out-and-out Communist, but then he shifted his ground to become deputy leader and later leader of the Socialist People’s Party. Since he was also a Member of the European Parliament, and an official observer at the arms-control negotiations, he was a valuable source of news and gossip for us: not a witty man, but an intelligent one, full of interesting information. In 1973 it fell to me to take him over, and I ran him until the end of my time in Denmark. An exhausting business it was, too, for he loved his food and drink, and lunches with him often lasted four hours: after innumerable shots of schnapps, washed down by tall, foaming glasses of beer, it needed intense concentration to remember everything that had come up in conversation.

  Not that Petersen was popular with all the Soviet officials in Copenhagen. One day Danilov made the mistake of boasting to the Ambassador of how well the KGB was getting on with him whereupon the Ambassador exclaimed, ‘I hate that nasty little fox. How can you possibly be in touch with him?’

  Things looked up when Danilov was replaced by a far more interesting and sparky new Resident, Alfred Mogilevchik. In his late thirties, dynamic, he had worked in Britain, spoke excellent English and German, and was determined to liven up the station. I got on well with him from the start, but even so was surprised when, within a few months of arriving, he said he wanted to make me his deputy.

  ‘I’ve only been on the political side for two years,’ I said. ‘All the rest of my time has been spent on the illegals.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘You’ve got the brain, the energy and the ability to deal with people. Also you know Denmark and speak the language. What else do I need?’

  And so, with the approval of the Centre, I became Deputy Resident, a success in terms of prestige, but not one that made any difference to my rank (which remained that of major) or salary. To this day I am haunted by a scene that took place a few months after my promotion. Arriving at the Embassy one morning to start work, I found the hall half full of people standing about in rigid attitudes as if paralysed. In the middle was Mogilevchik, looking stricken, his eyes swollen as if he had been crying. Somebody whispered that his wife had died suddenly in the night: he had come back from a reception to find her suffering severe pains caused by a blood-clot in the arm. He had called in a doctor from a Russian ship but the man arrived too late to save her.

  The disaster had a devastating effect on the Embassy, for everyone had liked the wife, a good-looking woman with two handsome children. Mogilevchik was recalled to Moscow, as it was the practice of the Centre to bring back people who lost their families. Not until later did the truth begin to come out. I heard from a Danish journalist with good police contacts that the wife had committed suicide, and later still it emerged that Mogilevchik had been a bully at home, treating her like a peasant (although his own father was only a humble Byelorussian). Probably he was also having affairs, and I suspect that he spent part of that fatal night with some other woman. The private lives of the Embassy staff sometimes proved more dramatic than their work.

  Later in 1976 a man arrived who was to have a profound influence on my career: Nikolai Gribin came to the Copenhagen Residency to serve under me. A complex character, very much a child of his time, he had the advantage of being slim, dark and handsome, and wore a neat moustache, which became him well. Although on the one hand a typical toady and careerist, he had many attractive features: apart from his looks, he had a pleasant, easy voice, and sang romances or modern Russian ballads, accompanying himself on the guitar. This, coupled with his wife’s being an outstanding cook and gifted at producing a beautifully decorated table — by which Russians set great store — made him a natural entertainer, and the parties the couple gave actively boosted his career. Gribin was abstemious, took care of his health, and drank only moderate amounts of white wine.

  His career went off to a flying start when he recruited, as agent, the bearded left-wing Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, who had worked in the United States and specialized in taking pictures of slums and drug-addicts, presenting them as the true face of America. Holdt’s work had already appeared in exhibitions and in books, but Gribin cultivated him assiduously. He then had the nerve to inform the Centre that all Holdt’s photographs derived from active measures of the KGB, which had been carrying on its normal task of running down America. The Centre swallowed this, and gave Gribin high credit.

  Thereafter he withdrew from operational work, and concentrated exclusively on administration, taking infinite pains to please his bosses in Moscow. He studied their habits and preferences minutely, and, whenever he went home on leave, took them presents of things that they particularly coveted, something optical for one, something electronic for another, books for a third, medicine for a fourth, pornographic videos for a fifth. Also, he put much effort into writing letters, which were serious, neither too long nor too short, and showed consideration for people, as well as strong interest in work.

  In due course he became Resident in Copenhagen, and in this role also he shone, running the station efficiently, and entertaining on a lavish scale at home. His bosses thought him a splendid fellow, and he achieved rapid promotion, leapfrogging over me to become head of the Third Department of the First Chief Directorate in 1984.

  *

  Meanwhile my own mental evolution had been continuing. For months I had been seeking some means of making contact with the West, and I had started to look on my KGB activities as a kind of hobby rather than as work: I was improving my reputation in Moscow by sending back cleverly written reports, but I was doing nothing that could damage the West. I had discovered how easy it was to manipulate the KGB.

  Twenty years on, it is difficult to remember
what a dreadful place the Soviet Union had become in the 1970s. From the vantage point of the 1990s, President Gorbachev called that time the ‘era of stagnation’ — and that was a classic understatement. Everything was deteriorating, standards of behaviour as much as physical conditions. The optimism of the early 1960s under Khrushchev had died away; then, at least, there had been a feeling that although the regime was still Communist, it was going forward. In the 1970s under Brezhnev the feeling was not merely of no progress, but of retrogression.

  Although President Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to Moscow to negotiate the SALT treaty, it was clear that the Soviet Union had reached nuclear parity with the United States, or even overtaken it, and was deliberately extending its intercontinental missile superiority. It had also become aggressively imperialistic all over Africa — in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia and Algeria — and was growing ever more hostile towards China, hysterically inflating the threat represented by the Chinese. At home, the KGB had grown to a grotesque size, the First Chief Directorate alone increasing from 5000-odd to 16,000 personnel.

  This expansion was financed with proceeds from the sale of oil, for when the international oil crisis led to a temporary global shortage, Moscow found that it could profitably dispose of a useful proportion of its own oil abroad. In the Soviet Union the centralized economy was still functioning as inefficiently as ever, but injections of foreign currency from the sale of oil encouraged the government to believe that it could easily continue its operations abroad, giving money to Communist parties and financing the KGB. This largesse provoked a curious reaction on the part of the intelligence services, which felt that, to justify their own expansion, they had to provide ammunition for the Soviet leaders: hence the paranoia about hostile Western intentions, fed by fanciful intelligence reports, which developed during the 1980s.