Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Until the early 1970s I clung to the hope that the Soviet Union might still reject the Communist yoke and progress to freedom and democracy. Until then I had continued to meet people who had grown up before the revolution or during the 1920s, when the Soviet system was still not omnipotent. They were nice, normal Russians — like some distant relatives of my father who were engineers: not intellectuals or ideologues, but practical, decent people, embodying many of the old Russian engineer characteristics so well described by Solzhenitsyn. But then the last of these types died out, and the nation that emerged was composed purely of Homo sovieticuses: a new type had been created, of inadequate people, lacking initiative or the will to work, formed by Communist society.

  My belief at the time was that the nation would never recover, but that at least something ought to be done to protect democracy in the West against the huge concentration of military power and the deluge of propaganda. In practical terms, this meant that I must try to help Western Europe and North America to protect their security, their independence and their freedom, by whatever means I could devise.

  Those means were limited. All I could do was to pass information, to show what the KGB and the leadership in the Kremlin were doing. Of course, in the sum of things, I knew little, but I reckoned that even fragments of knowledge would be better than nothing. I was naïve enough to suppose that, since in the KGB every fact and statistic was secret, or at least classified, any disclosure would be potentially valuable; later I realized that although a report might be classified, it did not necessarily mean that it had any interest or importance.

  Looking back now, I find it extraordinary that I was driven so hard by ideological compulsion. Yet my feelings were immensely strong because I was living and working on the frontier between the totalitarian world and the West, seeing both sides, and constantly angered by the contrast between the two. The totalitarian world was blinded by prejudice, poisoned by hatred, riddled by lies. It was ugly, yet pretending to be beautiful; it was stupid, without vision, and yet claiming to be fit to lead the way and pioneer a path into the future for the rest of mankind. Anything I could do to damage this monster, I gladly would.

  *

  Often at diplomatic parties I saw diplomats (or were they intelligence officers?) from the British and American embassies, yet I did not know how to bridge the huge gap between us in a way that would not embarrass or prejudice either side. Also, I was inhibited by a serious inferiority complex, caused by my inability to speak English. In the end, it was the other camp that made the first move.

  At about eight o’clock on the evening of 2 November 1973 there came a knock on the door of our flat. When I opened it, there to my astonishment stood Lazlo Barany, a Hungarian who had been one of the best triple-jumpers in the Track and Field Club at our Institute in Moscow.

  ‘Bog ty moi!’ I exclaimed. ‘My God! Lazlo! What the hell are you doing here?’

  Even as he grinned and shook hands, a sixth sense told me that he had not come of his own accord, but had been sent by one of the services. The immediate question in my mind was, British or American?

  He began to tell some elaborate story of how he had come over on business from America, where he was living, and was staying with a Danish girl he had met in London. By chance he had heard I was working in Copenhagen, and longed to see me again after all those years...I stopped him, brought him in, introduced him to Yelena and gave him a whisky. He looked much as I remembered him: a good European face, blue eyes, short brown hair neatly cut and parted. Yet my mind was a whirl of conflicting ideas and emotions. I was delighted to see him, because he had been a good friend, but I was also apprehensive, and did not believe a word of what he was saying. At the same time, I was troubled by a foolish but inescapable embarrassment about the smallness of the flat: although new, it was rather primitive, and I felt ashamed to have been discovered living in such drab surroundings.

  ‘I wish you’d come to see me in my Moscow flat,’ I said. ‘That’s much nicer.’

  ‘Never!’ he replied. ‘There’s no chance of my going back there.’

  He told me that he had defected from Hungary in 1970, and for a few minutes we carried on a desultory conversation, but he remained tense. He finished his drink, stood up, and said, ‘Look, I’m disturbing you. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow, and we can have a proper talk then.’ He gave me the name of a restaurant in the city centre, and I agreed to meet him at one o’clock.

  His visit left me feeling profoundly disturbed. That he had been sent, I had no doubt, but why to the flat, where Yelena was bound to see him? If our marriage had been sound, it would not have mattered, but as things were, I knew that it was doomed and would end as soon as we returned to Moscow — which made everything much more dangerous. In an attempt to reassure her, I explained that I had known Lazlo well at college, and said how strange it was that he should suddenly arrive like that, but I could see that she, too, was worried by his appearance. For years afterwards I feared that it might have been some inadvertent remark of hers that finally gave me away. At lunch next day Lazlo seemed more relaxed, more like his old self. We had a window table and sat comfortably, watching people pass back and forth in the pedestrian street outside. He told me that he had settled in North America, where he had become an insurance agent.

  ‘What a waste!’ I teased. ‘Why didn’t you find a more challenging job? You speak Russian, French, English. You’d make a brilliant expert on international relations.’

  He shrugged off my suggestion, and began to defend the Western way of life. Again I was tense. In this, my first encounter with someone representing the Western services, I saw a need to be extremely careful. I was walking on the edge of an abyss, and must not go over the brink. Thus, although I longed to explain that I had been entirely pro-Western since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, I merely remarked that in the Embassy we had bet each other a case of champagne about what the outcome in Prague would be.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘So you had a sportif attitude to that event, did you? Well, the fate of a whole nation was at stake.’

  I longed to say that I knew this perfectly well, that I felt great personal bitterness about it, and that I saw the invasion as the principal turning point of my own life. But I forced myself to remain noncommittal, to reveal only the tip of the iceberg of my real feelings. As I did not know who had sent Lazlo, or what his authority was, I thought it essential that although I should put out positive signals through him, I should not lose control of the situation or become easy prey to anybody. Neither did I want to call his bluff by telling him to come clean about his mission. Our meeting ended inconclusively, but I knew that I had given away enough for him to put in a positive report.

  The period that followed was difficult. Every day I expected some further approach, but it was nearly three weeks before one came. When the British made a move, it caught me off-guard. Having become enthusiastic about badminton, I had taken to hiring a court at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. I would pick up a girl student called Anna, drive her to the court, and have an hour’s match. Evidently the British knew this — with the help of the Danish surveillance, who had seen my car parked outside the club — and one morning I was in the middle of a game when a man suddenly appeared beside the court, not in sports gear but dressed for the office, with an overcoat over his suit. It was an old-fashioned hall, built in the 1930s, with no accommodation for spectators beyond a few benches, and when the newcomer showed himself clearly, it was obvious that he wanted to speak to me.

  I recognized Dick immediately, for he was one of the best-known diplomats on the Copenhagen circuit: in his early forties, tall, with dark-brown hair and a good-looking typically English face, he stood out in any gathering through the sheer force of his ebullient self-confidence. His voice was not loud, but his personality was so striking that he tended to dominate any conversation in which he took part; and if I sometimes wished that he might show a little more humility, I could not deny th
at he had a great gift for cheering people up. He gave the impression of enjoying his work, knowing everybody, and being in control of events. It was entirely in character that he would turn up at Embassy parties whether he had been invited or not, either scrounging an invitation from a colleague, or just coming along without one. In those days, before international terrorism forced the introduction of more stringent controls, it was difficult to check whether he was supposed to be there or not — but, in any case, everyone was glad to see him.

  Now, though, in the early morning, I felt slightly annoyed: this seemed an unsuitable place in which to make contact, and it was rude to my partner to ask her to stop playing. I apologized to her and proposed a short break, then went over to ask Dick what he wanted. He simply said that it would be nice to meet in some place where we would not be overheard. I agreed, and we made a rendezvous for lunch in three days’ time.

  This man, I felt certain, had an important message for me; but in contrast with his normally extrovert behaviour, he was stalking me slowly and carefully, taking every precaution.

  Many Russians, knowing that the host was an intelligence officer, would not have accepted the invitation; and, as he afterwards let on, he was not sure that I would come. But I decided to go — and I decided, for the time being, to play the game straight from the Soviet end. Back at the Embassy I went to Danilov and asked, ‘What do I do? This fellow from the British Embassy has invited me to lunch. Should I accept?’

  Danilov cabled the Centre for guidance, and Yakushkin, who was broad-minded, promptly replied: ‘Yes! You should be aggressive and not shy away from an intelligence officer. Why not meet him? Take an offensive position! Britain is a country of high interest to us.’

  So I had official permission to go ahead, which in itself was a form of deception on my part; but because I had handled the matter in that way, I knew that I would have to write a report after the meeting. No matter, I thought, I can manage that.

  We met in the restaurant, and our conversation was no more than a cautious sounding out. Dick was less ebullient, more considerate, than at diplomatic receptions, and I was surprised when he began to speak about the numbers of KGB officers employed under cover in Soviet embassies, and wondered why Moscow sent so many intelligence officers abroad. When I gave noncommittal answers, he skilfully steered off that subject, and, in spite of language difficulties, took trouble to talk about subjects of interest to me, including religion, philosophy and music. Towards the end of the meal he asked if I would have to put in a report on our meeting, and I said, ‘Probably, yes, but I’ll make it a very neutral one.’ I wanted to give him the feeling, without expressing it, that I was keen to meet again. Both of us were careful not to speak about the future, and we parted without making any further arrangement.

  My report to the Centre was as bland as I had promised. I deliberately made it long, to increase the apparent importance of my own initiative, but did not commit myself in any way. In sum, I said that our meeting had been of interest, but no more than that. (Later I heard that Yakushkin was delighted with my memorandum.)

  After that, silence fell, and to my consternation no further contact took place for nearly a year. Then at last, on 1 October 1974, Dick appeared again outside the badminton court and invited me to a meal at his own house. I said I would prefer some public place, and we settled on the Skovshoved Hotel in the northern suburbs. After an agreeable and harmless dinner there, I felt it was time I took the initiative, and suggested that we should meet again in the bar on an upper floor of the new Scandinavian Air System’s (SAS — the airline) Hotel on the way out to the airport.

  This time, as soon as Dick arrived, the feeling between us was different. As we sat in the bar, in mid-conversation he said abruptly, ‘This isn’t a good place.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We might be seen accidentally.’

  ‘By whom accidentally?’

  ‘Any of your colleagues.’

  ‘Oh, no. This is an expensive hotel. I don’t think any of them come here.’

  But Dick was not happy, and for our next rendezvous he named an inconspicuous little restaurant a short distance north-west of the city centre, in a district definitely not frequented by Soviet personnel. All at once we were almost colleagues, speaking together of precautions. In inviting Dick to the SAS hotel I had known what I was doing, and I was alive with anticipation; he had sensed this, and felt the same. So at last we began to speak in plain language.

  When we went to the restaurant three weeks later, ours was a perfect clandestine meeting: two intelligence officers coming together to do business. Without messing about, he said, ‘You’re KGB.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell me, then. Who is the PR Line deputy in your station?’

  For a second I stared at him in surprise. Then I could not help smiling as I said, ‘I am! You boasted that you knew who everybody was, but you don’t even know who I am!’

  ‘Really!’ He seemed impressed. ‘All right, then. I’d like you to meet someone special, a senior officer who will come from London.’ He went on to explain that his own time in Copenhagen was running out, and that he would have to hand me over to a colleague. I was sorry to hear this, since he had always been so friendly and optimistic, but I saw that his move was inevitable. Our conversation was still difficult because of our lack of a common language, and Dick found it strange that, for all my desire to help the West, I could not speak English. I, too, was irritated with myself for never having learnt. Anyway, he indicated that the next time we met he would take me to a safe apartment and produce a man who could discuss things in a language properly understood by both sides. With these factors in our favour, we could put our relationship on sound foundations, and begin serious co-operation.

  Both sides were still wary. The British, as I later discovered, could hardly believe that my reactions to their overtures were spontaneous. Rather, they suspected that I was deliberately setting up a major provocation. The deputy in the KGB station so keen to co-operate with the enemy? It looked like what the Americans call a dangle, a bait. At that stage the Americans had an obsession about dangle operations because they had been fed loads of rubbish on the subject by a KGB man called Galitzine, who had defected in Finland. They imagined that the KGB was able to dangle a senior officer such as myself, when any such move was out of the question because a man of my rank would never be risked or allowed to speak to a foreign service. If he did, official doctrine had it, he would be bound to reveal something, and in the KGB there is nothing that can be revealed because everything is a closely guarded secret. So there was absolutely no chance of my being a dangle but that the West did not appreciate this was a measure of the vast gulf of misunderstanding which separated the two sides in the Cold War. I conceived it as part of my mission to reduce this ignorance, which constituted no mean danger. Even as Dick was proposing our next meeting, the British were not sure whether I was under control. They thought it quite possible that I might lead KGB colleagues to the flat, which they would then attack, beating up anyone inside and declaring the whole exercise an anti-Soviet provocation.

  However, Dick gave me a date and time and, at the appointed hour, I was outside the restaurant on a dark winter evening. He appeared punctually, and said, ‘Come, I’ll show you the way.’ As we walked, turning a couple of corners, he was his usual friendly self, but I assumed that a secretary or colleague was sitting in a car close by, armed with a telephone, so that she or he could warn the people in the apartment if they saw anyone following us.

  For the first time I was entering enemy territory. I was not afraid of being kidnapped, but I knew that things were now serious: this was the real start of operations. Biting my nails in agitation, I accidentally nipped one finger and made it bleed.

  As I entered the flat, I was confronted by a big man, whom Dick introduced as Michael. He was tall and physically powerful, and I immediately felt ill-at-ease with him. Yet my most pressing need was to do something abou
t my finger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to patch myself up.’ Things could hardly have been more awkward. My hosts seemed as nervous as I was — and now their guest had arrived injured! In some embarrassment Michael said, in German, ‘The bathroom’s upstairs. There’s stuff in the cupboard.’ I went up to the second floor — a rarity in Scandinavian flats — and stuck a plaster over my wound. Then I came down and our conversation began.

  I was surprised, and not a little put out, to find the big man acting in a hostile, almost threatening manner. I expected our co-operation to begin in a spirit of friendliness and enthusiasm: I had hoped that the British would be grateful that I was offering help, and risking a good deal on their behalf. Far from it: Michael lit off into a barrage of abrupt questions — ‘Who is your Resident? How many KGB officers are there in the station?’ — as gruffly if he were interrogating a prisoner.

  In his mind, that was close to what he was doing, for afterwards, when I tried to discover why he had behaved like that, I learnt that he had interrogated German prisoners after the Second World War and knew no other way of questioning a stranger. Someone else suggested that his aggressive attitude was his way of suppressing his nerves, which were probably as taut as mine. In any event, the inquisition continued for some time, and I did not like it.

  Even as Michael was hectoring, I began to say to myself, ‘Take it easy. This can’t be the true spirit of the British intelligence service. Most of them must be nice, normal people. This fellow can’t be representative. It’s just his style. Whatever he says, I must suppress my anger, because it’s the West, not him, with whom I want to co-operate.’