Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  As far as I could tell, she had had no other lovers, and I got the impression that her experience of close relationships was limited. I put this down to the Muslim element in her background, and she agreed that her upbringing had been inhibiting. Yet she had great potential: she was sociable, interesting, original, witty and eager to be liked. The prospect of living with her one day was enormously appealing.

  At first Yelena did not know that I had met her. Then slowly she realized that something was going on, and she made a couple of unpleasant scenes in the flat. The worst thing about this was that the Danes were listening, and passed word of our wrangling to the British; the next thing I knew, Andrew was anxiously inquiring if my work for him was causing me undue stress. I told him part of the truth — that my marriage was in a bad state — but I added, ‘Don’t blame yourself. This has been going on for ages, and is nothing to do with you.’

  And yet in a way it was: my decision to help the West had introduced a new element into my life. I realized that — as usual — I had allowed my head to rule my heart. That I was now covertly fighting Communism, purely for ideological reasons, meant that half my existence and my thoughts had to remain secret: I could not open my heart to anyone. With Yelena this had hardly mattered, as our partnership had always remained superficial, but now, with Leila, what would happen? Could I establish the close, warm relationship I longed for? All I could do was follow my instincts and hope that things would work out.

  For month after month my clandestine assignations had continued without any scares. But then vague rumours began to circulate that the KGB was leaking. The stories came from officers returning after leave in Moscow, where people gossiped and talked shop for hours on end. For me, there was nothing sinister about these rumours — until January 1977. Then a cold prickle went up my spine when I heard that in Oslo the Norwegians had arrested a woman called Gunvor Haltung Haavik, an elderly secretary in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, who had been a KGB spy for nearly thirty years. Until then I had never known her name but in the previous year a new KGB officer posted to us from Moscow, Vadim Cherny, had begun talking to me about a woman agent in Norway known as ‘Greta’, and I, of course, warned my British contacts. When the arrest took place, I thought that it must be my information that had led to her exposure — and I have several times been credited with her downfall. Later I found out that the Norwegians had been on her track since at least 1975, so that whatever I said merely gave them additional ammunition.[24]

  From Cherny I also learnt that the KGB had another, even more important agent in Norway, also in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that it was someone with a journalistic background. These details I also passed on, and they were instrumental in the eventual unmasking of Arne Treholt, a flamboyant, fair-haired political activist who at the time of Haavik’s arrest was thirty-five and a leading personality in the Norwegian Labour Party. (It took the Norwegians years of investigation before they were able to pinpoint him. They were still searching when I arrived in England in 1982. I was then able to identify him positively, and he was finally arrested on 1 January 1984, as he was about to board a plane for Vienna with sixty-six classified documents from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in his briefcase.)

  Also in 1978 I learnt by chance that the KGB or GRU (or possibly both) had acquired an agent in Sweden, a member of some security organization, either civil or military. My information was sparse but I warned the British that the Swedish intelligence community had been penetrated, and they passed on the message. It turned out that the Swedes already had other small indications that there might be a traitor in their ranks, but it was my tip that led them to Stig Bergling, who had worked in the civilian security service, then switched to the military service, and gone to Israel as a member of the United Nations’ peacekeeping force. With the Israelis’ co-operation, the Swedes arrested him out there, brought him home, and gaoled him. It turned out, as I had suspected, that he was a son of two Soviet services: he had been recruited by the KGB, but then had been passed to the GRU, who ran him in the Middle East.[25]

  In Denmark the KGB had no agent comparable with Haavik or Treholt: the only threat of any consequence to the West was a fat policeman in the immigration department whom the KR Line had been running as an agent. He was useful, because he could tell the KGB about Danish policy towards foreigners, embassies and so on, and the police often picked up rumours from the security service, which was only a specialized branch of their own organization. To stop that leak, I told the British about the policeman, who was soon moved away to some provincial town. It was easy enough for the authorities to shift him, because he had been drinking excessively and therefore they had a ready excuse.

  *

  At Easter 1978, because KGB business seemed slack, I took the opportunity of going into hospital for an operation on my nose. For several years I had suffered from nasal congestion, which had developed into asthma, and a small operation was needed to open up the air passages. The first time I presented myself, the doctor did some checks and said, ‘I can’t operate, your blood pressure’s too high.’ I said, ‘All right. Let’s try again tomorrow. I’ll come back.’ At the Embassy I found some pills, took them for twenty-four hours, and presented myself again. They seemed to have done the trick, and the operation went ahead — although afterwards the surgeon told me that it had produced a disgusting amount of blood.

  I spent the next four days recuperating. Nobody came to see me: Yelena had no desire to, and Leila did not feel confident about visiting someone else’s husband. I did not mind as I had a lively companion in the form of a lonely old Dane, a great drinker, who had come to grief after an evening in a pub. When he emerged, in the early hours of the morning, frost had set in, and he measured his length on some ice, breaking his nose. Because he lived in a cold little flat, he was delighted to have a few days in a luxurious hospital, with pretty nurses, excellent food, and a Russian for company. When I got someone from the Embassy to bring in a couple of bottles of vodka, the nurses were thrilled, and made a splendid Easter lunch, with lavish food, and fruit juice spiked with vodka.

  As the time approached at which I would have to return to Moscow, Yelena and I were trying to make decisions about what we would do when we got home. She was ambivalent about her intentions: in any other society she would have divorced me promptly, but the KGB were immensely hypocritical and puritanical about such matters and would, we knew, make things as difficult as possible for us. For my part, I knew that a divorce would lead to acrimonious exchanges with my bosses in the office, and with executives of the Party. There was also the question of what position I might be appointed to next. As in all departments of the KGB, the more senior one became the fiercer grew the intrigues surrounding the promotion of candidates to particular jobs. I needed support, and here my superior in Copenhagen, Mikhail Lyubimov (who had succeeded Mogilvechik as Resident), proved good to me. ‘They’ll go for you,’ he warned me. ‘Not only will they condemn you for the divorce, which they don’t like. They’ll also accuse you of having had an affair en poste, which will be bad for you. Let’s soften the blow by doing something positive.’

  Lyubimov became a friend for life. A genial, relaxed fellow with a good brain, he had been posted to the London station in the 1960s, determined to subvert the whole of Britain, including the Royal Family. The result was that he fell in love with the place, and became an enthusiastic advocate of all things British, not least English literature and Scotch whisky.

  Now, by sending a couple of favourable reports to the Centre, he gave the impression that my work in Denmark had been good, and persuaded the powers that I was the best candidate to become deputy head of the Third Department of the First Chief Directorate. In our terms this was a tremendously important post, in effect, the deputy head of the third most important department in the KGB. The idea was that I would become supervisor of the Scandinavian and Finnish sections, and that my next posting after that would probably be as head of station in Stoc
kholm or Oslo, or even Copenhagen yet again.

  Chapter Ten – Fresh Start

  Back at the Centre in Moscow, I went in to see my department head, Viktor Grushko, an engaging character not at all typical of the KGB. As his name suggested, he was Ukrainian, and was short, rotund, with lively brown eyes and black hair. His colouring suggested the presence of some Balkan or Turkish blood, and he had a soft, smiling approach which accurately hinted at his strange combination of laziness and industry: although he liked to take things easy, he could work hard if he had to. Unlike Zaitsev, he realized at an early stage in his career that intelligent delegation was the way forward, and he did not try to do everything himself. Neither was he intimidating: his voice was soft, and free of any regional accent. Although he was not an intellectual, he had a good native wit which enabled him to hold his own in intelligent company. His first posting abroad, to Norway, had been as a clean diplomat.

  As I came into his office, he was all smiles, and I could see that he was about to have the pleasure of offering me a magnificent promotion; but before he could do that I handed him a letter from Lyubimov, which explained my domestic problems. ‘Viktor Feodorovich,’ I warned him, ‘before you say a word, you’d better read this.’

  As he read, the merriment drained from his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said wearily, ‘I’m afraid this changes everything.’ Suddenly he saw that instead of a simple promotion he had a scandal on his hands. He sighed and added, Now I’m afraid you’ll have to stick to Partcom [a kind of second personnel department]. For the moment I’ll keep you in the department, and you can be a senior officer running important errands. I have plenty of work for you — don’t worry.’

  He began to talk of other things. ‘What about Otto?’ he asked. ‘Did that meeting take place?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, and I started to describe my final contact in Denmark. But even as I was speaking, I saw a look of terrible boredom come over Grushko’s face: he simply did not want to bother with small-scale operations such as the one I was describing. He wanted nothing to do with the huge reports that people kept sending in from foreign stations: even though he was head of the department, he never read them, knowing that most of what they said was invented and that the contacts they described were utterly unimportant. What he wanted was news of real agents like Treholt but, of course, I had none to give. Failing that, he was eager for gossip about personal relationships in the stations: who was doing what, what feeling was like between the Ambassador and the Resident. After a while, he said, ‘All right, then. Off you go and enjoy your holiday but you’d better be prepared for unpleasant conversations.’

  I had plenty of those. As always, mean-minded people were keen to exploit the discomfort of my impending divorce and inflate its negative aspects. ‘You’ve had an affair,’ they said menacingly. ‘While on assignment you became involved in an affair. Very unprofessional.’ Their sole object was to create scandal and make my life difficult.

  Humiliating scenes were most likely to take place at meetings of the Partcom, which regarded itself as a moral guardian of the staff. There the committee would go through the record of the person who had sinned, forcing him (or her) to repent in public, to grovel, to promise that he would cleanse himself and accept the judgement of his comrades. Neglected or beaten wives would complain about the behaviour of their husbands, asking for them to be denounced as scoundrels, or sometimes appealing for help in getting them back.

  Attacks were all part of the normal back-biting and competition for places, but in my case they were exacerbated by jealousy. By then I had won a reputation as a thorough, politically right-thinking officer, strong in all aspects of my work: a good linguist, a competent writer of reports, a historian, a front-line operator who had proved himself skilled at making contacts and had run a couple of agents in Denmark. The KGB was full of people who, though good in some areas, were weak in others and it was these flawed characters who led the intrigues, inspired by envy of someone who could perform well across the board.

  A month’s convalescence in the hot, dry air and sea climate of the Crimea did much to restore my damaged nose, which was still sore and congested after the operation. I stayed at a sanatorium between Yalta and Gurzov, which brought back happy memories of that phenomenal holiday at Artek, not far along the coast, where the long-legged East German girls had run rings round their keepers.

  In Moscow again, I tried to come to terms with the fact that, although now a senior officer, I had no definite function. I also found that I had to be constantly on my guard against unpleasant surprises, the worst of which occurred as the result of an exercise conducted by the British traitor Kim Philby. From time to time the KGB would present Philby with a case for analysis, and late in 1978 they turned him on to the Haavik affair, having sanitized the material by changing names so that he could not tell where the events described had taken place. His conclusion, based on a careful study of events, was that the leak which betrayed the agent could only have come from inside the KGB.

  One morning soon after that Grushko gathered his senior officers in his office — seven of us altogether, including himself —and said in his most serious voice: ‘There are signs that the KGB is leaking, and that the adversary is getting information.’ He explained how Philby had reported on the Haavik case, and told us the conclusion he had reached. Then he added: ‘This is particularly worrying, because the pattern of events suggests that the traitor may be in the room at this moment. He could be sitting here among us.’

  I needed every ounce of physical effort that I could muster to stop myself blushing. I pinched myself sharply in the thigh, through my trouser pocket, and the sudden pain distracted my attention for an instant, helping me to keep my face straight. But it was a close shave, and left me feeling sick.

  I had another unpleasant moment with Aleksandr Tchebotok, a friend who had cultivated one particular Danish journalist so successfully that Lyubimov described him as fully recruited. One day Tchebotok came into my office and said querulously, ‘The trouble with this man is that whenever I try to talk to him about co-operation, he says, “But what if there’s a traitor in the KGB? He’ll be bound to give me away, and the authorities will find out about me.”’

  The remark was so sudden that I made some inarticulate sound, which Tchebotok inevitably noticed. Good friend though he was, and none too bright, he was immediately worried, and asked, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I’m in such a mess at home. I can’t stop thinking about family affairs. People are being very unfair about my divorce.’

  By making him feel guilty, I managed to turn the conversation on to harmless territory — but it was a good lesson in the need to keep my composure better.[26]

  Then again, a few months later, a specialist in Arctic affairs, Anatoli Semyonov, began talking about an apparent leak in his sphere. Sitting at his desk in his own little office, this highly intelligent man said, ‘As you know, we’ve been paying special interest to Arctic affairs since 1973, and the KGB has been the main force in the drive to make the polar ocean and surrounding territories a major strategic asset to the Soviet Union. It’s all been top secret — and yet, in recent years, we’ve started to feel that the West knows more than it should about our operations there. Odd, isn’t it?’

  I managed to make some noncommittal remark, but my stomach was churning. The number one Arctic power was Norway, and I knew that Arne Treholt had been supplying us with extremely useful information. The number two power was Canada, but Denmark was also important because Greenland was part of its territory, and over the years of my association with the British I had passed across much background material, some verbally, some in the form of documents. Probably Semyonov consulted me purely because he knew I was a Danish specialist — but I remained harried by the fear that he might somehow have been harbouring positive suspicions.

  During this difficult period I made no attempt to contact the British. I had hidden my instruction
s for doing so in the most secret places I could devise, and I knew that contact sites were being watched regularly. If I appeared at one, my message would get through, but I did not intend to take any action unless I heard something new and dramatic about penetration of the West. Every now and then I learnt new details of KGB operations, which would certainly have interested the British service, and more facts about Treholt gradually surfaced: one day his identity was finally confirmed for me when I saw, upside down on someone’s desk, a half-covered piece of paper bearing the letters OLT. But the risk of being spotted by the domestic KGB was so high that attempts at making contact would have been justified only by some exceptional development.[27]

  Besides, I had another reason for biding my time: already I had started to feel that I might go abroad again, and I set my sights on being posted to Britain. The first step would be to obtain a transfer to the British section in my department, and with this aim in mind I began to cultivate the people there. This proved no easy task for they were a tight-knit little group, with their own habits and traditions, all speaking English and deliberately distancing themselves from other colleagues.

  Luckily I got on well with the deputy department head in charge of British affairs, Dmitri Svetanko, who, although bossy, was essentially kind-hearted. With his bald head, protuberant eyes, sagging belly and choleric temper, he looked the heavy drinker he was (every few months he would go over the top and get into a fight, or threaten to break up a restaurant); but he was also industrious, and liked men of action, among whom he numbered me. We struck up a bit of a friendship.

  If Svetanko was basically good-natured, the same could not be said of the head of the British section, Igor Titov, a truly evil man, profoundly anti-British. Much younger, barely thirty-five, but prematurely balding and with a dark-grey tinge to his skin, he gave the impression of being permanently dissatisfied. He rarely laughed or let his face soften into any show of friendliness; rather, he maintained a cynical, disapproving look, which was reinforced by his habit of chain-smoking. Neither did knowledge of his private habits increase my respect for him: when cartons of duty-free cigarettes arrived for him in the diplomatic bag from London he could hardly wait to snatch them up and lock them away in a steel cabinet. He also received through the diplomatic bag a steady supply of pornographic magazines, bought for him in Soho, carefully wrapped, and addressed to him personally. These rags he would pass round to cronies, before handing them on as small bribes or payments to anyone who had done something for him.