Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  This they began to do. Of course, there was nothing sensational: they could not pass me anything classified but, if they used their imagination, they could always come up with something worthwhile. One young officer typed out very good little summaries about, for instance, current problems in South Africa, or the state of the Anglo-American relationship: each was about three-quarters of a page, which I would take back with me, translate into KGB language, embellish with a few extra details, and hand in as my contribution. By this means, I slowly pushed up my rating.

  My meetings with the British soon took on a regular pattern. I would drive into the underground garage and pull a plastic cover over my car to conceal the diplomatic numberplate. Upstairs, I would find the team waiting for me. At first, because it was lunch-time and I was always hungry, they laid on a full-scale meal, but time was so precious that I soon suggested they should reduce this to sandwiches and a can of beer, so that we could talk more easily while we ate.

  At the beginning I hoped that these sessions would rapidly improve my English but Jack, whose Russian was adequate, asked me to talk in my own language, since that was quicker and more accurate with a tape-recorder running. (Later I learnt that Jack had to spend very long and tiring hours transcribing the tapes.) Joan would sit in a corner, not understanding much, but whenever we had a break I would speak to her in English. For ease of reference, I was known as Feliks, the cover-name which I had suggested to Michael in Copenhagen: I had taken it from Feliks Mainer, my Estonian friend at school, and at that stage did not realize that the word meant ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ in Latin.

  There was no chance of being followed by the KGB on my way to the safe flat, but once on my way back to the Embassy, just after I had left the apartment block and was crossing Connaught Street, a couple of blocks in from the Bayswater Road, I saw Guk go past driving his ivory Mercedes. As I was about to step out of the road on to the pavement, I assumed that he must have seen me, and I got back in a state of some agitation, wondering what story I should invent. In the event, none was needed, for when I met him later in the afternoon he did not mention the incident, and I realized that he had not seen me: he was such a poor driver that he had had all his attention focused on the road and other traffic.

  Later, in 1984, we deliberately used Connaught Street as the scene of an experiment. One of the Line N officers, in charge of illegals, claimed that he always had the most enormous surveillance behind him, five cars at a time. I thought he was imagining it: I supposed that because the British knew quite a lot about the KGB, through me, they would hardly bother to put five cars behind a single officer. When I challenged him, however, he became indignant and produced a piece of paper with five registration numbers written on it.[31]

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is fascinating. Let’s set a trap. You drive along Connaught Street at lunch-time one day, and I’ll be watching from the window of the Duke of Kendal pub on the corner to see who’s behind you.’

  Our plan worked perfectly. Instead of going home for lunch, I drove up the Bayswater Road, turned left and right, parked, and went into the pub, where I bought a pint and stationed myself in a window. At 1.25 p.m. my man drove slowly past and, sure enough, there behind him were three of the cars whose numbers he had taken. The first crew looked tense, no doubt because in that heavy traffic it would have been easy to lose the target, but the other two seemed relaxed. Where cars four and five were it was impossible to say: maybe on parallel streets. But, in any event, my man was vindicated.

  Soon after that Prokopchik, the acting head of Line X, told me that he had seen even more cars behind him; and when I remonstrated about this with Jack, saying that it was a great waste of British resources, he told me that they suspected Prokopchik of running two agents but that they could not find out who they were. In this I was unable to help him, for it was fundamental practice in the KGB that one line never told another about what it was doing.

  *

  With all this activity, time passed at an extraordinary speed: Leila and the family settled down well, and we found that, although our flat was not very comfortable, life in Kensington had many advantages. There were little Turkish, Arab and Iranian restaurants, which gave out wonderfully Oriental smells all afternoon and evening, and excellent food shops, many run by Indians and Pakistanis, which stayed open until midnight, to say nothing of the unlimited shopping facilities in High Street Kensington, Knightsbridge and places further afield. The High Street was full of life until late at night, which delighted Leila. As for me, I could run in Holland Park, which was beautifully kept. In due course the girls began going to a local school, and they picked up English at an incredible speed — so fast that they began to use it as their first language when talking to each other and to their dolls.

  *

  Almost before I had got my breath, twelve months had flown: it was June 1983, and the time was approaching for me to go home on leave. For several weeks I had been aware that something unusual was brewing in the station. Guk and Nikitenko were constantly discussing some subject that was evidently of greater importance than their normal preoccupations.

  Then one day Guk, unable to contain himself any longer, said, ‘Would you like to see something exceptional?’ Whereupon he showed me photocopies of two highly classified documents, produced in English by MI5, giving the full order of battle in the KGB and GRU stations.

  ‘Bozhe!’ I said softly. ‘My God! Where did these come from?’

  Without giving details, Guk said that an envelope had been pushed through the letterbox of his flat in Holland Park late one night. The messenger had claimed in a letter to be a security service officer and, clearly, he knew that the surveillance on the block of flats stood down at midnight because he had come after that.

  Of course I was immediately on fire with curiosity to know how accurate the documents were and, above all, to find out what they said about me. But I feigned nonchalance as I glanced first down the list of GRU. Then I said, ‘Oh, I don’t really know what they all do anyway. But what about us?’ I saw at once that almost all the twenty-three KGB officers had been correctly identified, and that they had been listed under three grades. Grade One was entitled ‘fully identified’, Grade Two ‘more or less identified’, and Grade Three ‘under suspicion of belonging to the KGB station’. To my immense relief, I saw my own name under Grade Two. That meant, obviously, that the compiler of the list knew nothing of my British connection; it also gave some explanation of why I had been granted a visa so swiftly the year before. But the list also assigned KGB officers to their various lines — PR, KR, X and N — and represented a considerable achievement.

  ‘It’s pretty accurate,’ I said, as I handed back the document.

  ‘Yes,’ Guk agreed. ‘They’ve done well.’

  Who was the messenger, and what lay behind his overtures? Our immediate feeling was that the initiative was the beginning of what the KGB called a game, and the Americans a dangle. Certainly Guk got this impression, and he never changed his mind. Nikitenko, I believe, considered the approach genuine, but by then he had become so used to buttering up Guk that he suppressed his instincts and sided with his boss.

  Also on Guk’s desk I saw a letter from the mysterious messenger, asking the Resident to come to a meeting. Later I caught sight of another of his missives, which had been left in Nikitenko’s briefcase; this one was addressed to ‘Comrade Guk’, and even used his patronymic with his first name: Arkady Vassilyevich. It suggested exceptionally complicated procedures for dry-cleaning on the way to the rendezvous and for the posting of signals — the writer was a man of some imagination, fascinated by the paraphernalia of espionage. The letter was signed ‘Koba’, the name used secretly by Stalin before the revolution and openly thereafter.

  Of course his overtures caused some excitement in the Residency; but Guk and Nikitenko decided to reject them, for two reasons. First, the writer never offered any additional facts beyond his first lists. His order of battle, though accurate
, was no news to the KGB men, who hoped for more definite information about how their ranks had been penetrated. Second, his proposed method of setting up a meeting was so complicated that it made them wary of committing themselves to any follow-up.

  They therefore ignored the approaches, and never answered. But then another letter arrived, and somehow I learnt that the writer was proposing to communicate yet again in the first days of July. As I was about to go on holiday, I thought I had better act fast. At the first opportunity I slipped out to a telephone kiosk and rang the emergency number which I carried in case I needed to make immediate contact with the British. I said I would be at the flat at 1 p.m. I felt excited, and not a little nervous, because the situation was one of high drama: almost certainly a traitor was at large, and if he knew about my involvement with the British services, my own life was in danger.

  I found that Jack was temporarily away, and in his absence it was Joan who met me. By then I had total confidence in her, and was delighted to see her, but at the same time I felt that this meeting was a huge responsibility for a general service officer not used to conducting complicated intelligence debriefings. Nevertheless, there was nothing to be done except tell her what I knew.

  ‘I’m sure this is some sort of operational game that the security services are playing with the KGB station,’ I began in English, ‘but we’d better make sure.’ I told her the outline of what had happened, and she came out with a classically calm, British reaction. ‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘there is no operational game in progress.’

  Tense as I was, I loved that phlegmatic response, and I went on with the rest of the story. She made thorough notes, then hurried away. A couple of days later I met Jack, back on duty, and gave him a fuller version of events. Then I left with the family for our holiday in Moscow, with the affair very much in the air.

  *

  At least the journey home was enjoyable. We took the train —one of those long-distance carriages beloved of Russian travellers, which went the whole way from the Hook of Holland to Moscow. After a short night on a ferry, we found the carriage waiting for us in the Dutch port and knocked up the two Russian guards, who were asleep in their compartment; the attendants were expecting us, knew our places, carried our luggage aboard and stowed it, to earn their little bribes. Then we took an electric commuter train into Rotterdam, where we went sightseeing and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Back in the Hook of Holland, we felt ravenous, so we found a Chinese restaurant: the meal was delicious, but so huge that mountains of food were left over at the end. When Leila, with her characteristic lack of inhibition, asked the waiters if we could take it with us, they said ‘Sure!’ and packed it into neat little boxes. We ate the rest en route.

  On holiday, I was worried about what was happening in London. Back at the station on 18 August, I tried not to show any curiosity, and avoided asking questions unless they were absolutely necessary. But in my other incarnation I found that the British had caught their man, even though the hunt for him had proved exceptionally difficult. A senior officer in MI5 had said to MI6, ‘Not in our organization, look in yours.’ So the search was concentrated there for a while, only to switch back to MI5, where about fifty people had had access to the documents of which Guk had received copies. In the end three suspects were identified, and a decision was taken to put them under surveillance. But the question was, who could do the job? They knew all the surveillance people like old acquaintances. Their faces were entirely familiar. Normal methods were out, and ad hoc surveillance teams were formed from officers and secretaries in MI6, not professionals, but people with at least some training in the work.

  It was a combination of surveillance outdoors and close observation in the office that led the investigators to Michael Bettaney, an officer in his thirties, working in MI5’s counter-espionage department. Like many people doing something outrageous, he eventually went on to a high, becoming overexcited and saying strange things: ‘If I were a Soviet agent...If I’d been in touch with Guk, the KGB Resident...’ Further suspicion derived from the discovery that he was preparing for a trip to Vienna, home of the biggest KGB station in Europe and the one with the easiest access, since the Austrians used no surveillance.

  The service decided that it was too dangerous to let him go there. He was in possession of secrets from many theatres of operation, including Northern Ireland where he had once worked. The authorities therefore made a secret search of his flat and found hundreds of classified documents hidden beneath the floorboards. With his guilt no longer in doubt, he was arrested.

  It was vital for the British — and for me — that his trial was managed in such a way that my lead to him was covered, and word was put about that he had given himself away by making a fundamental error. When the arrest was announced on 16 September, Nikitenko seemed to make a connection, and told Guk that this was probably the man who had been trying to approach him. Guk, however, was so immersed in conspiracy theories, and understood the West so poorly, that he preferred to go on believing that no real man existed. He still maintained that the British had been playing some sophisticated game against us, and that the announcement of an arrest was merely their way of ending it. He remained convinced that there would be no man and no trial. When Bettaney stood trial the following spring, and was sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment, the British declared Guk persona non grata, which was ironic, considering that he had done nothing to help Bettaney, and expelled him from the country.

  I do not think Guk or Nikitenko ever connected me with ‘Koba’, alias Bettaney. They may have thought that his exposure was their own fault, that the leak derived from their excessive discussion of the affair. The other people who knew too much about it were Yegoshin, Titov and Mishustin, as well as the cipher clerks and radio operators. Titov had known about it from the moment the first letter arrived but he was expelled in the spring of 1984, when the British discovered that he had been targeting an American student, with the aim of recruiting him.

  On the eve of his departure Guk had a leaving party in the common room, which took the usual form — but the food and drink were exceptionally good: beer, wine and vodka flowed in abundance, and the buffet was laden with sandwiches, piroshki, meatballs and salads. A rota of speeches had been organized. First Guk’s friend Nikitenko held forth, and then it was my turn. Out of necessity and practice I had developed a knack of saying the right thing at such events, and I felt I did quite well, including a good many facts and some compliments about Guk. Yet I must have sounded just a touch too smooth, and very slightly insincere, because all Guk said, immediately, was, ‘You’ve learnt a lot from the Ambassador.’ In the art of making insincere speeches, Popov was undisputed champion. He never spoke from the heart, and Guk correctly sensed that I had not done so either.

  With the departure of Guk, his circle of cronies broke up. Yegoshin, the analyst, had already started going downhill, drinking heavily, smashing cars, and being cautioned by the police. Because of his position, he had been allowed to operate freely anywhere in London; he gave his contacts lunch in the most expensive restaurants and also added twenty or thirty pounds to every bill. His abuse of the system was blatant: he made no attempt to conceal it, but regarded it as a reward for the brilliant work he was doing. In the end he was shot down by Nikolai Gribin, by now head of the department, who found out what had been going on. In June 1984, when Yegoshin was on holiday in Moscow, Gribin summoned him to an interview. Yegoshin arrived drunk, as usual, and tried to take a flippant line, whereupon Gribin remarked, ‘You don’t seem very interested in your job.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Yegoshin airily, ‘if I’m not needed any more, I’m quite prepared not to go back.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Gribin. ‘You can stay here.’

  That was an immense blow but stay he did, and it fell to me to empty his desk in London. In one of the drawers I found a note saying, ‘Please be very careful about my savings’, and there was a large brown envelope stuffed with
notes, amounting to a couple of thousand pounds. This, I knew, was merely his pocket money because he had been passing his salary to his wife: he had made a small fortune by brazenly deceiving the State. Honesty compelled me to parcel up the envelope and send it to him through the diplomatic bag.

  Yegoshin’s behaviour had often driven me to distraction yet now I saw that we were going to miss his ability. When I asked Gribin how we would do without him, he replied, ‘Oh, you’ll manage. And we in the Centre will manage too.’ But I insisted that he should send us a replacement. He did — a man called Shilov (code-named Shatov), less talented, but adequate, who saw us through a difficult time. In Moscow, where drink was much more expensive and difficult to come by, Yegoshin pulled himself together and did useful work.

  *

  All through 1983 the Centre had continued to bombard us with farcical RYAN instructions. We were told, for instance, to look out for ‘increased purchases of blood and a rise in the price paid for it’ at donor centres, and ordered to report any changes immediately. Any surge of activity in this sphere would be a sure sign — the Centre had no doubt — of impending hostilities. What they failed to realize was that in Britain no payments are made for blood donations. Frantic efforts were made to discredit President Reagan, and frequent telegrams from Moscow repeated that his administration was actively preparing for war. In the autumn East—West tension rose to a dangerous pitch after the shooting down of a Korean airliner, KAL 007, over the Sea of Japan on 1 September. Within a few days it became obvious to the world that the Soviet fighter pilot, who fired two missiles and then announced on his radio, ‘The target is destroyed,’ had made a terrible mistake, but the Kremlin and the KGB made all-out efforts to demonstrate that ‘the intrusion of the plane into Soviet airspace’ had been ‘a deliberate, thoroughly planned intelligence operation’, directed from ‘certain centres in the territory of the United States and Japan’. So manifestly absurd was this lie that many of my colleagues in the Residency were dismayed by the damage done to the Soviet Union’s international reputation.