Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Yet the KGB had a far more worrying foreign preoccupation than a scrap in the South Atlantic. This was Operation RYAN (the initials standing for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie, or Nuclear Missile Attack), the largest peacetime intelligence operation ever launched by the Soviet Union: it assumed that the United States and NATO were preparing a pre-emptive first nuclear strike, and its aim was to gather information on the hostile intentions of the West. The idea of a sudden attack, which had no foundation in reality, had been floated by Andropov at a major KGB conference in Moscow during May 1981. Almost certainly it had derived from the Soviet high command and the KGB and GRU had been ordered to work together on global intelligence-gathering. Clearly, the Residency in London would be a key source of information.

  Eventually my personal files were released, but still the build-up of documentation ground on, and it was not until 28 June — five months after my visa had come through — that I was able to book air tickets to London. As the day of our departure approached, excitement rose to fever pitch: the girls — Maria at two, Anna at nine months — were too young to appreciate what was about to happen, but for their parents it was almost like being put in orbit and sent to the moon.

  On the day of departure I felt acutely nervous, fearing that some last-minute snag would bring all my plans to nothing. As I was preparing sandwiches for relatives who were coming round to say goodbye, I managed to stab myself: I had left a pat of butter in the refrigerator until the last moment, to stop it melting and, as I tried to cut it the knife slipped and the point drove deep into my hand. Luckily it did not hit a bone or cut a sinew, and I was able to patch myself up and continue with the party —but the accident was a little sign of how taut I had become.

  Chapter Eleven – London

  My Status as Counsellor entitled us to first-class seats on the Aeroflot jet, so that the three-and-a-half-hour journey passed comfortably enough. But Heathrow was a shock: never in my life had I seen so many aircraft; never had I smelt such a stink of aviation fuel. After the modest proportions and cleanliness of Copenhagen, London seemed a colossal mess. A car from the Soviet Embassy met us, and our drive into the West End of the city was itself a revelation. I had frequently read that London was one of the richest cities in the world — but here was a vast, undistinguished urban sprawl, with street after street of grimy old houses, litter in the gutters, and appalling traffic. To some extent the squalor was redeemed by the little gardens in front of the houses, and by the immaculately kept public parks but, on the whole, I had imagined that everything would be much tidier and more attractive.

  Our flat, in Kensington High Street, was also a disappointment — small, dark, poorly equipped, and in every respect inferior to the one we had left in Moscow. Yet soon we found compensations in our immediate neighbourhood, not least in the form of Edwardes Square. This magnificent private garden, the largest of its kind in London, big enough to jog round, and frequent winner of a competition for the best-kept garden square in London, was open to people from the Embassy, and was a great luxury.

  Our plane came in at about six in the evening, so that by the time we reached the flat, our priorities were to put the girls to bed and settle in. Much as I wanted to ring the secret number I had carried in my head for the past four years, I had no chance to do so. I knew nothing about our surroundings, and had no idea who might be watching us, or from where. Even if I went to a public kiosk and put in a call from there, I might easily be seen, and arouse somebody’s suspicions. My only course was to be patient. I did not mind — I felt elated to have reached Britain. I felt that simply to be in London, with my head full of KGB and Kremlin secrets that I could pass on, was a mighty victory for British intelligence and for me.

  Next morning was cool and cloudy, and I went round early to the Soviet Embassy at No. 13 Kensington Palace Gardens, a large, impressive house standing back from a private, tree-lined road, only a few yards off the busy thoroughfare of Bayswater Road. There I met up with Lev Parshin, another new Counsellor, who had been on the aircraft with me. Before we could take stock of our surroundings, we were swept into the daily conference presided over by the Ambassador, Viktor Popov.

  I did not like the look of Popov, and soon my intuition proved correct. A cantankerous little man, short and weedy, he had a round, half-Tatar face and a permanently sour expression. That first morning he led off in typically sarcastic fashion, clearly irked that nobody had told him that Parshin and I were coming. ‘Comrades,’ he began portentously, ‘two new Counsellors of the Embassy arrived yesterday. This is their first morning in London. A simple question: if we get two new Counsellors every day, how many will we have by the end of the year?’

  My relationship with Popov remained difficult from then until I departed for Moscow three years later — and the elation I had felt the previous night evaporated during the course of the morning. The London Embassy, I realized, was dramatically different from the one in Copenhagen. There I had been lucky enough to have two reasonable bosses — Mogilevchik and Lyubimov — and as the station had not been regarded as particularly important, the people staffing it had been more or less normal. London, a place of high importance, was full of the nastiest people imaginable, both in the Embassy and in the KGB station. The envy, the vicious thinking, the underhand attacks, the intrigues, the denunciations, all these were on a scale that made the Centre in Moscow seem like a girls’ school, and turned life into a nightmare.

  The Ambassador himself was the subject of scandalous gossip for he had married a second wife twenty-eight years younger than himself. What particularly annoyed Popov’s enemies were his intellectual pretensions. He had once been head of the Moscow Diplomatic Academy, which ran special courses for people joining the diplomatic corps from outside, and because he had presided over some research, with a few teachers under him, he regarded himself as an academic.

  Both Popov’s deputies were hostile to me, for various reasons. One, Dolgov, was an able and hard-working diplomat, but the other, Bykov, had been appointed purely because of the status of his father-in-law, Pyotr Abrasimov, the Soviet Ambassador in East Berlin and an influential Party apparatchik. When the Polish Pope John Paul II was elected in October 1978, Bykov happened to be in temporary charge of the Embassy, and made a complete fool of himself by sending the Centre a long telegram in which he made the point that a Slavonic Pope would be a tremendous advantage to the Communist bloc, as he would give us stronger influence over the Vatican, the Catholic Church and the West. Unfortunately for Bykov, the official conclusion was precisely the opposite: that a Polish Pope was a dangerous threat to Communism.

  Head of the PR (political) Line, and my immediate superior, was Igor Titov, who had preceded me to London, but had become no more civilized in transit. The only thing to recommend him was that he had reintroduced a practice, much enjoyed in the 1970s, whereby on a Friday evening all the KGB political intelligence officers would gather in the garden of a pub in Notting Hill Gate, and sit talking shop for hours. The pub was reputed to be the place in which Oleg Penkovsky had been debriefed by the British during his short trips to London during the 1960s and, of course, it was against all KGB rules for the staff to collect there.

  The greatest ogre in the station was the Resident, Arkady Guk, a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning. Just as Stalin hated the Jews in the Politburo, and could not sleep until he had destroyed them all, so Guk loathed intellectuals and in particular the Ambassador, against whom he waged a continuous private war. Unable to forgive Popov for his intellectual superiority, he dedicated most of his mental energy to the campaign.

  In this his principal toady was Leonid Nikitenko, the KR (counter-intelligence) Line deputy, a tall man, good-looking in a way, who could be charming if he wanted, and was not a bad counter-intelligence officer. I found that Guk’s predecessor as Resident, a Latvian called Lukasevicz, had hated Nikitenko, and had tried to humiliate him, and that Nikitenko had returned his loathing with int
erest. The result was that when Guk took over, Nikitenko did everything possible to please his new boss, suppressing his own personality and ideas in his attempts to flatter. He and Guk spent most of their working day locked in the Resident’s office, smoking and drinking neat vodka out of tumblers while they dreamt up ever-wilder and more malicious gossip, principally about the Ambassador.

  The animosity within the building was so strong that I felt it immediately, on my first day. Many of the hints that Guk and his sycophants dropped were outrageous: ‘I think the Ambassador could be a British agent...There are signs of a leakage...Maybe he’s working for them...What I wonder is how he manages to satisfy her...No wonder she drinks...’ Nikitenko did not necessarily share Guk’s opinions, but, determined to keep in with him, played his tune all the time.

  Guk disliked me from the start. Although not clever, he was well served by instinct, and seemed to feel that there was something different about me. He cannot have had any inkling that I was working for the British: rather, he saw a man entirely different from himself, a man with intellectual interests, who read books as well as magazines and newspapers, the only one in the station whose radio was tuned to play classical music.

  Occasionally, after a few large vodkas, he would mellow and offer advice. I once confided to him that I was nervous of the responsibility of running the station on my own — which I would have to do if both he and Nikitenko were away — and he said, ‘Don’t worry: it’s easy. Whatever the problem, whatever the dilemma, ask the Centre. They love giving advice and instructions. The second thing is, do whatever you can to prevent defections. The worst thing that can possibly happen is the defection of a KGB officer. Do absolutely anything to stop one of your own men taking off. A KGB officer knows everything a diplomat knows, and a lot of specialist stuff besides.’

  Guk went on to boast how he had once prevented the defection of a KGB reservist, one of the men called up in the 1970s to work in organizations outside the KGB but attached to it. This man was stationed in London, and married to a Russian, but he fell in love with an Englishwoman. Although a good worker, he was overwhelmed by the experience, came to Guk, said he was infatuated, and confessed that he did not know what to do. Guk pretended to listen sympathetically, and then made soothing noises. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry. Let’s see what we can sort out.’ But this was pure deception: at once Guk opened up a correspondence by telegram with Moscow, preparing an operation to evacuate the man as quickly as possible. The moment the documents were in order, and an air ticket had been bought, he went round to the man’s flat at 5 a.m. and woke him up, crying, ‘Quick! Get dressed! Something urgent’s come up.’ With the poor fellow still only half awake, he bundled him into a car, drove him to the Embassy, thence to the airport, and frogmarched him on to a plane for Moscow.

  Alcohol always brought out Guk’s tendency to brag about his achievements. He enjoyed relating how, while stationed in New York, he had discovered the hiding place of the KGB defector Nikolai Khokhlov, and had proposed to the Centre that he should be liquidated. Permission was refused, on the ground that more important targets had precedence; and the same thing happened when Guk proposed the assassination of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who by then was living in America. The truth was that although Guk liked the idea of throwing his weight about, he was a major liability to the KGB: with his low intelligence and poor judgement further impaired by a combination of alcohol and bigotry, he made it impossible for the Centre to gain any clear picture of the true state of affairs in Britain. One Russian word summed up his character perfectly: he was a samodur, or petty tyrant, prone to attacks of folie de grandeur, and always liable to behave irrationally.

  One of his obsessions was the Underground. He urged all members of his staff to use it as little as possible, and to go by surface transport whenever they could. The reason, he said, was that many of the advertisement panels along the walls of Underground stations were in reality glass-fronted booths, in which sat members of the British security service, spying on the KGB as they went about their business.

  Guk’s animosity against me spread to those others in the station who licked his and Nikitenko’s boots, principally the analyst and writer of political reports, Valery Yegoshin. Narrow-faced, with close-set eyes and thin lips, and light brown hair which turned even fairer in summer, Yegoshin had a rather austere and even intellectual appearance, appropriate enough for someone who was a historian by training. Not only did he carry a useful store of dates and facts in his head: he was also skilful at concocting plausible political reports out of odds and ends culled from newspapers, magazines and press conferences. Able to read English easily, he ploughed through a large amount of raw material, and could regularly turn out one or even two substantial reports a day.

  This facility was invaluable to Guk, for political reports were the station’s showcase, and whatever happened — even if people were on holiday or ill — the news must keep flowing. Guk himself was incapable of writing a report: so limited was his ability that he often did not even understand what papers were about. But he was happy enough to sign, and take the credit for, whatever Yegoshin wrote, so it was not surprising that he valued his analyst above all other officers. Yegoshin, for his part, was a dedicated internal spy, always whispering in Guk’s ear private details about his colleagues which might be used to discredit them. Before my arrival he had heard that I, too, was a political analyst, which, of course, turned him against me: he considered himself the analyst, the only one who knew what to report and how to present his material. So, to protect his own position, he adopted a hostile attitude, which, since my main work in the KGB was political reporting, made things difficult. Thus, almost immediately, I found myself besieged on all fronts.

  I soon saw that relations between the Embassy and the station were none too cordial, and that the station itself was split into cliques. Igor Titov was working under the awkward cover of correspondent for the New Times, a semi-official foreign affairs weekly, published in English and other languages. As this meant he had to be away from the station for much of the day he decided that he, too, needed to be on good terms with Guk and Nikitenko, and he also started to support them.

  Another despicable toady was Slava Mishustin, picked personally by Guk, who put him in charge of Line I (information). His principal task was to collect and systematize the information coming into the station, including all available facts about the restaurants and meeting places that officers were using for their rendezvous with contacts (no restaurant was supposed to be used more often than once every six months, and we were supposed to check a list before booking). This work gave Mishustin the perfect excuse for keeping a close eye on everyone else’s movements. Had he been a cheerful fellow, things would not have been too bad but he had a carping nature, and was never happy. Neither was his wife, who was employed in the Embassy as an accountant. Both of them watched every move, reported frequently to Guk, and tried to scrape up discreditable information about anyone they disliked.

  On my second evening in London it was a relief to escape from this hotbed of intrigue and make the telephone call that had been on my mind for years. Still not knowing who was who in the street, or where the observation posts were sited, I slipped out to a call-box and dialled my personal number. Imagine my relief and delight when I heard Andrew’s voice at the other end: only a tape, but undoubtedly a tape of Andrew. ‘Hello, Oleg!’ it said. ‘Welcome to London! Thank you so much for calling. We look forward to seeing you. Meanwhile, take a few days to relax and settle in. Let’s be in touch at the beginning of July.’ Disappointing as it was not to have immediate live contact, the sound of that voice was immensely reassuring.

  On the day suggested, I rang the same number again, and this time Andrew was there in person. ‘Come to the Holiday Inn in Sloane Street at 3 p.m. tomorrow,’ he said. He explained that he would be in the lobby, together with a female companion, and that when I saw him, I was to continue walking straight t
hrough, out of the far doorway into the street behind the hotel, where his car would be in a multi-storey park.

  It was a simple but effective plan. Following his instructions, I saw him sitting on a chair, with a fine-looking, middle-aged woman beside him. As I approached, they rose to their feet and began walking to the far door. I went after them, across the street and up to the first floor of the car park, where he greeted me and introduced his assistant as Joan. We then drove to a safe flat in a new block in Bayswater, and got down to talking.

  Andrew explained that he was already working in a different country, and had come to London specially to greet me, as he was the only available British officer who knew me personally. At our next meeting he introduced me to my new mentor, Jack, who was brilliant, the best minder I have ever had. Young, of medium height, with dark hair already receding, he was married, with four children, and besides being highly intelligent had all the warmth of a true family man. He was a first-class intelligence officer, but also truly kind, full of emotion and sensitivity, honest both personally and in his ethical principles. As the expression goes in Russian, he had a fine structure of soul. Tremendously quick to take the point and to understand my problems, he was forever analysing things and looking for new solutions.

  Joan was older, about fifty-five, with ash-blonde hair, and a face that seemed to embody all the traditional British qualities of decency and honour. Over the next few months she became another wonderful confidante. Not the least of her virtues was her skill as a listener: she imparted confidence by the speed and sympathy with which she absorbed ideas. No mere assistant, she turned out to have been the architect of my escape plan: beginning as early as 1978, she had done a great deal of thorough research work to produce it, and in due course she set about creating a streamlined version.