Thus, when our first child was due, I had to take Leila in and leave her. I knew she was in a lot of pain, but that was the last I heard until, next day, a member of the staff rang and said that a baby girl had been born without complications. After another three days I was given a time at which I might come and collect her, and I joined the usual throng of fathers and other relatives gathered outside the home and waving to their loved ones in the windows. Protocol demanded that I should bring a bunch of flowers for the young mother, and five roubles for the nurse who carried the baby out, a ritual with which I was delighted to go along.
Leila proved a first-class mother — a role she mastered particularly well. During her first year back in Moscow she also finished a correspondence course in journalism under the auspices of Moscow University, aiming to win the Certificate of Higher Education which was vital to success in Soviet life. She had started this before her stay in Denmark, and now had to write a diploma report, or final paper — a modest version of a Ph.D. When she asked me for ideas about a subject, I had an inspiration. ‘I know!’ I said. ‘The Communist press in Denmark. It’ll be a first because nobody has ever done it.’ I began to dictate to her and found it dead easy since I had been studying the subject at first hand for years, and knew it inside out. Between us we produced a long paper, full of interest, and the head of her department — a well-known journalist and teacher at Moscow University — made a special request to be her sponsor. So Leila won her certificate — which, sadly, she has never used.
She was marvellous in the home, putting to good use experience gained when she was a child. As a young girl she had helped look after her baby brother, born when she was eight or nine, when life was difficult; working with her mother had given her an ideal practical grounding in most domestic practices.
*
In the KGB there was an unwritten rule that if someone got divorced and then married again, time must pass before he could be professionally forgiven: events must demonstrate that the new relationship was in good order and the new family doing well. After the birth of Anna, things became easier for me but from time to time intrigues would flare up. Now, working at high level in the Centre for the first time, I saw how vicious and bitter these internecine squabbles could be, especially when Gennady Titov (no relation of Igor) succeeded Grushko as head of the Third Department.
This Titov, nicknamed ‘The Crocodile’, was one of the most unpleasant and unpopular officers in the whole of the KGB. Undoubtedly he had a certain glamour, being quick-witted, well informed, and full of vulgar jokes and anecdotes. He had an astonishing ability to talk mat — the alternative language used by Russian men among themselves, in which every other word is an obscenity — and, if the door of the room opened or a woman appeared, to switch back to normal speech in mid-phrase, without the slightest hesitation.[28] He was also a good listener but he was totally unprincipled and prepared to do anything to secure his own advancement. His career was made when, as KGB Resident in Norway from 1972 to 1977, he ran Arne Treholt; and although he was expelled from Oslo when Haavik was unmasked, he continued to handle Treholt, meeting him in Helsinki and Vienna. His most powerful single weapon was his ability to flatter: he shamelessly flattered not only Treholt but also his own boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the First Chief Directorate.
At least Grushko, a former diplomat, was able to put a façade of decency over his actions. Gennady Titov, in contrast, was cynical and boorish. Titov and Grushko spent countless hours scheming and playing office politics, chasing what were known as apparatniye igry, or departmental gains, trying to advance their own careers, secure in the knowledge that, if they failed to get what they wanted at a particular point, they would stay where they were, but that if they won, they would be promoted.[29]
Of course, not everyone in the KGB was as unpleasant as these two: as I had told the British, the organization included some truly first-class people, among them Albert Akulov, who was appointed deputy department head in succession to me. A real intellectual, and broadly educated, he had a wide knowledge of history and a phenomenal memory. Also, he spoke Finnish, Swedish, German and English. I never met anyone else in the KGB with such ability and natural good manners: he was never rude to anybody, and he could speak eloquently, without notes, on a variety of subjects. Grushko, though probably jealous, treated him decently, but the loutish Titov hated him, seeing such a cultured man as an irritation, a potential threat and a daily reproach to boorishness.
There was one particularly unpleasant scene when Titov and Svetanko, the deputy head, between them lost a secret document — in KGB terms, a serious crime. After a desperate hunt, Titov began to make mendacious accusations in the hope that he could blame some junior member of his department; just in time, his secretary found the missing document, a thin sheet of paper which had stuck to another by static electricity. By then, however, Titov had shown his true face — and a horrible sight it was.
Every now and then I had to act as duty officer and go through the elaborate ritual of opening and closing the department. In the evenings, as each officer left, he would put the keys of his safes and his room into a little wooden box, close it, and press his own individual stamp into a lump of plasticine, to make a seal. I would then collect all the boxes and put them in the safe in the room occupied by the secretary to the boss. Having locked the safe, and put the key into another wooden box, I would get out a spare set of keys and open up all the rooms again for the cleaning lady, who made her round during the next hour and a half. When she had finished, I would again lock all the rooms, and hang a wooden tag on each door, with my own stamp on a Plasticine seal. Finally I would lock the door of the secretary’s room, seal it with the same device, put the key into a wooden box, seal that also and take it to the secretariat of the First Chief Directorate, which was manned twenty-four hours a day.
In the morning I would arrive at 7 a.m., before anyone else, fetch my box, unlock the secretary’s door, take out the individual officers’ boxes and arrange them on the desk. When each man came in soon after eight, he would take his box, break the seal, take out his keys, open his own door and finally open his safe. When the boss arrived, between eight and nine, I would make a little formal report: ‘Comrade Colonel, in the time of my duty nothing extraordinary has happened...’
This was one of the few military elements in the KGB, which for 99 per cent of the time behaved like a civilian organization. Nobody ever wore uniform: suits were the order of the day —and sober ones at that. Anyone who dressed in a loud or ostentatious fashion attracted widespread criticism, both overt and otherwise. Especially in the First Chief Directorate, people were expected to be courteous and well mannered. Shouting and stamping were out, and orders were supposed to be given in the form of requests. Some people would go to ridiculous lengths in this respect: a big boss would purr, ‘My dear Lyonya, please have the kindness to go to the fifth floor on my behalf and fetch that book.’ But any such request was an order, and even if many officers sounded as mild as sheep, they were wolves at heart.
A new shadow was cast over me when my friend and supporter Mikhail Lyubimov returned from his position as head of station in Copenhagen and found himself swept up in a scandal worse than mine. He, too, was having matrimonial problems, but he had the misfortune to fall in love with the wife of a KGB agent. This man, an informer, wrote a letter of complaint to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, saying that ‘The local head of the KGB used his position of power to take my wife away from me. As a KGB agent, I was powerless to defend myself...’
The authorities were outraged, not least because Lyubimov did not come clean until after his next promotion had been announced: he had just been appointed head of a think-tank attached to the First Chief Directorate when the news of his infidelity broke. This was altogether too much for the puritanical bosses: in not declaring it before his appointment, he had deceived the KGB, they trumpeted, and now he was dismissed outright. Whatever their real feelings on love and
marriage, the truth was that Titov and Grushko saw him as a potential threat, and orchestrated the campaign against him.
Lyubimov’s departure not only meant the loss of a talented man: it also made my own life more difficult, because everyone started to say, ‘What the hell’s going on in Denmark? The place is full of scandals breaking out everywhere.’ Merely to have served in Copenhagen was to invite suspicion. I also felt a sense of personal loss as Lyubimov had proved a good friend and would have helped me still more in future.
The result of all this was that my position continued to deteriorate. I still went to important meetings, and twice I wrote the department’s annual report, which showed that great trust was placed in me. Yet I was not sure that I had any future in the KGB, and this uncertainty gave me the idea of joining the Andropov Institute.
Officially the Red Banner Order Andropov Institute of the KGB, but generally known by the name of the KGB chairman, the Institute was the overblown modern successor of School 101, a huge, pompous intelligence centre. At that time it was developing what it called academic activities. The aim was to create a faculty of scholarly people writing theses or studying to become lecturers and teachers: recruits were being sought, and because I seemed to be in a cul-de-sac, as far as my career was concerned, I decided to join for a year or two.
I had reckoned without the malice of senior colleagues, who again brought up the matter of my divorce and made entry difficult for me. I therefore switched to the idea of remaining in the department but becoming a postgraduate student, writing a thesis on the psychology of the Scandinavian nations. Thus I spent several months at the Institute, in two separate periods, but when I saw the other people in my group, I realized that I had joined a bunch of freaks. One was a secret alcoholic, and one had been working in East Germany but was tormented by violent family rows. Another was a sex maniac who kept telling us how, in the middle of some open space, he had made love to a woman so vastly fat that he had had to adopt some special position to achieve entry. I kept thinking: In some ways I’m just as odd as any of them. I never finished my thesis because word began to go round the department that the authorities were looking for someone to work in Britain.
For me it was a major stroke of good fortune that, in the autumn of 1981, a slot became available at the Soviet Embassy in London. Not only that, the post was an attractive one, that of Counsellor. The department needed a senior man with wide experience, someone whose career had been under the umbrella of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For various reasons, nobody else was suitable. After the mass expulsion of 1971, few cover positions were available in Britain, especially on the diplomatic front. The result was that fewer KGB had tended to work under cover of the Embassy, and more had used the media: the authorities had taken to recruiting people from the journalism faculty of Moscow University, and a number of journalist-KGB were available but no diplomats and certainly no one suitable for the position of Counsellor.
Gennady Titov had a number of cronies, and he began to invite them into his office so that they could deliver lectures on their own specialities, for officials of the department to assess them. After each had performed, Titov would ask, ‘What did you think of that? Did you like him?’ But the cronies were so uniformly awful that Titov’s officials — much as they wanted to flatter him — all came to the same conclusion: that they could not stand any of his candidates, who were simply not up to the job.
Only one other candidate seemed possible: Viktor Kubeykin, who had served in Britain during the 1970s and had worked actively with the British Labour Party and the trade unions. Among the many people he had sought to cultivate had been Ray Buckton, general secretary of ASLEF, the rail drivers’ union, who had been given the code-name Bartok, because Kubeykin’s wife was a musician. He had managed to get closer to Richard Briginshaw, general secretary of the print union NATSOPA, a man who he regarded as someone who might possibly be willing to co-operate with the Soviets. But when the Ministry applied for a visa for Kubeykin, it was categorically refused by the Foreign Office in London, where the security service knew too much about him.
That left only myself. Luckily for me, Nikolai Gribin was appointed head of the department — and, slowly, the idea started to prevail that Gordievsky might be the solution to the problem. I supported the idea as hard as I could, while remaining humble about my qualifications and not saying too much. For Titov and Grushko, it was deeply galling to know that, if I got the job, they would not benefit. Had they been able to shoehorn some protégé of theirs into the slot, they would have gained influence in London but if I went it would not advance their cause in the slightest because I had no other powerful friends, inside or outside the KGB, who would be gratified by my appointment.
In January 1982 Titov announced that he was going to test the water. The British had just applied for a visa for a new Counsellor whom they wanted to appoint to their Embassy in Moscow, and the KGB decided to do a little horse-trading: in their reply to the British application, they implied, without saying as much, that they would grant the British their visa if they in turn granted mine. Little did they realize that the British needed no persuasion. On the contrary, Titov half expected the ploy to fail. ‘Gordievsky’s well known in the West,’ he said. ‘They may easily reject him. But let’s try it anyway.’
For me, of course, the prospect of going to London was electrifying; and Leila, who had no inkling of my connection with the British, also became tremendously excited. Yet the process of getting all our papers in order proved agonizingly slow.
By then, after numerous defections, the pile of paperwork needed by a person leaving for abroad had risen to monstrous proportions. The more defections that took place, the greater became the number of forms that had to be filled in: everybody concerned wanted to transfer responsibility to someone else, so that if a man did go absent, so many people would have been involved in putting his dossier together that it would be difficult to blame any individual.
My new diplomatic passport came through from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in record time, and application forms for my visa, together with photographs, went off to the British Embassy in Moscow. (We also needed photographs of Leila and the girls, and had to take them to a studio on a freezing day when all the buses were jammed in the traffic, with snow lying on the ground — Anna was only four months old.) The normal delay at the British Embassy was thirty days, and when my visa was granted in only twenty-two days, I was both annoyed and alarmed: the British had been too quick off the mark for comfort. The sheer speed of their reaction aroused the suspicions of an experienced man in the personnel section of the Foreign Ministry. ‘It’s very strange they granted you the visa so quickly,’ he said. ‘They must know who you are — you’ve been abroad so much. When your application went in, I felt sure they’d turn it down. They’ve rejected so many requests lately. You can count yourself very fortunate.’
I did. But my positive vetting was far from over, and for months I remained uncertain about whether I would reach London or not. Two main files were going the rounds, one on my personality, containing financial and medical documents, and one on my career to date. In March these were requested by the Fifth Department of Directorate K, which investigated all suspicious cases, and there they remained for weeks. So long did they keep them, far longer than usual, that Svetanko became indignant and exclaimed, ‘Oh, these wretched secret policemen! Endlessly checking up on us! What right do they have to do that? We can perfectly well check up on ourselves.’
As I waited, I began to study British affairs, about which I knew little. Margaret Thatcher, already denounced by the Soviet Union as ‘the Iron Lady’ and ‘the Wicked Cold War Witch’, was half-way through her first term as prime minister, and the KGB had eagerly watched her confrontation with the miners, who came out on strike in February 1981. In terms of Soviet propaganda, Mrs Thatcher was a typical, reactionary, right-wing Western leader, a close ally of President Reagan, bound, by virtue of her Conservative nature, to be
hostile to the Soviet Union. The KGB had a clearer view of her, as an extremely intelligent prime minister and a clever manipulator: some people even felt sorry for Edward Heath, whom she had forced out of the Conservative leadership. We also discussed, with no little amusement, the totally fanciful claims by British authors that Sir Roger Hollis, former head of MI5, had been a KGB mole.
But there was far more interesting material than this close at hand, in the form of files kept in the British section, which I began to read for background information. These were not the most secret documents, which were stored in the department head’s archive, or in separate personal files, but I saw several files on Britons regarded by the KGB as agents and confidential contacts, and these were highly revealing.
A Briton who figured prominently in the files was Jack Jones, the trade union leader. In the 1960s he also had attracted the KGB’s interest, especially when he became executive officer at the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1963, and then General Secretary in 1969. Attempts to contact him had been temporarily frozen after the débâcle of 1971, but occasional contacts had begun again afterwards, and there were clear indications in the file that the KGB wished to revive its association with him (this task fell to me when I reached London).
My own documentation was still not complete when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982. The despatch of a combined task force from England, and the ensuing war, brought out a great surge of animosity against Britain. If the hostility of the Soviet Union was strong, that of the KGB was almost hysterical. I was amazed by its virulence, and I could see only two reasons for it: one, that the majority of the KGB were influenced by official propaganda, and two, that the mass-expulsion of 1971 still rankled. Even then, more than a decade after the event, there was a feeling that for Soviet intelligence officers life in Britain had never again been the same, and that operations there were hampered to an irritating degree by restrictions on personnel. All in all, people were keen to see Argentina, regarded as a friendly Third World country, give the arrogant Britons a bloody nose. Besides, many of my colleagues thought Britain was going to lose: they started counting ships and casualties. My view was that Britain, a major NATO power with so much modern technology behind her, must prevail.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 26