Chairman Andropov, by then mortally ill, denounced the United States in apocalyptic terms with vague but strident claims that hinted that President Reagan was secretly preparing a nuclear strike, but Soviet paranoia reached its zenith during the Nato command-post exercise Able Archer, held in Europe from 2 to 11 November. The aim of this was indeed to practise nuclear release procedures, and because some details differed from those of previous exercises, they struck Soviet surveillance teams deployed round American bases as particularly sinister. When the teams detected changed patterns of officer-movement and an hour’s radio silence one evening, the KGB decided that American forces had been placed on alert. In the middle of the exercise flash telegrams sent by the Centre both to our Residency and to the GRU station told us of this stand-to, and implied that it might represent the first stage of preparation for nuclear war.
When the exercise ended peacefully, the paranoia in Moscow became slightly less acute and, without wishing to seem boastful, I think I can say that the information which I was passing weekly to the British may have helped lower tension, since the West began to make reassuring noises on the nuclear theme. But then in November, when Cruise missiles were deployed in Britain and Pershing missiles in West Germany, anxiety climbed again in Moscow and the demands for RYAN intelligence remained as pressing as ever. In his annual review at the end of 1983, Guk had had to admit ‘shortcomings’ in the Residency’s quest for intelligence about ‘specific American and NATO plans for the preparation of surprise nuclear missile attack on the USSR’. The Centre had answered angrily, blinded by its own prejudices to the fact that no such plans existed.
In London the Soviet persecution complex surfaced in a quite different form, over two unfortunate suicides. One man, a senior official connected with Soviet—British trade, hanged himself in his lavatory, for no clear reason but probably the result of personal problems, alcohol and pills. The other death was that of the wife of an official in one of the international organizations, who had been working as a receptionist in the Embassy. Perhaps because of some medical problem — she may have thought she had cancer — she threw herself out of the window of their fifth-floor flat and was killed. Both bodies were sent to Moscow and examined in the KGB hospital where doctors claimed to have found traces of some chemical substance which they said must have been administered by the British special services to upset the victims’ mental balance and induce them to commit suicide.
This was nonsense. Neither victim was a target nor of any interest to the British. The man had worked in a commercial organization, and the woman was merely a receptionist, but the diagnosis was yet another sign of how Soviet paranoia was feeding on its own neuroses. Guk expected some positive verdict on the bodies; everybody concerned wanted one. The KGB medical personnel who carried out the autopsies were only too ready to provide one: they did what was expected of them, and produced the right answer.
However, with the death of Andropov in February 1984, and the decision by Mrs Thatcher, Vice-President Bush and other Western leaders to attend his funeral, tension eased still further; and under Andropov’s dim successor, Konstantin Chernenko, the atmosphere never again grew so dangerously volatile. In London, Nikitenko, who became Acting Resident after Guk’s departure, found it hard to take RYAN seriously. Yet for me personally the stress of that year never slackened, since I was constantly switching between two totally different worlds.
Chapter Twelve – British Targets
The principal objective of the KGB in Britain, as elsewhere, was to recruit agents who would be able to steal classified information of military or political value. In this, during my own time in London, the KGB was markedly unsuccessful; yet the KGB was also steadily pursuing its parallel activity of creating favourable propaganda, and in this field its success was noticeable. It categorized anyone of interest it came across as a potential ‘target’, and those targets, after a substantial period of cultivation, would be declared by the KGB as either ‘agents’ or ‘confidential contacts’. Agents were supposed to be more or less conscious assistants to the Soviet state; in their relationship with their case officer there was some degree of discipline and the Centre insisted that contact between them took place in secret. A ‘confidential contact’ was a person who, in the KGB’s eyes, was or might be prepared to be helpful to the Soviets, but the pattern of the relationship was dictated by the contact themselves. There was no discipline and Moscow rarely insisted on secrecy. In cases where ‘agents’ and ‘confidential contacts’ were not able to obtain valuable information and were to be used mostly for forming a favourable public opinion to Moscow, they were called ‘agents of influence’ or ‘confidential contacts of influence’. These were likely to be people whose political inclinations might make them sympathetic to some aspect of the Soviet view of the world; many were idealists and most ‘gave’ their ‘help’ unwittingly. They would be fed selected information, given the Soviet view on whatever was happening and encouraged to develop their views along the lines the KGB wanted. Every target of cultivation would be given a code-name by the KGB to keep their true identity secret in case the correspondence was intercepted.
‘Contacts’ did not usually know they were being pursued, or that the ‘press attaché’ or Soviet correspondent buying them a drink or a meal was, in fact, a KGB officer. Many would have been horrified if anyone had suggested they were actively ‘helping’ the adversary. But no KGB officer could disclose to his targets that he was a member of the intelligence services; so we posed as diplomats, trade attaches, journalists and the like; that was the ‘cover’ we had been given in order to get into the UK in the first place, and to operate there.
It must be made very clear that what I am disclosing in this book is what appeared to the KGB or what was noted in the KGB’s records. The fact that someone was regarded as an agent of influence or a confidential contact meant no more than that it was how the KGB regarded them. These were in any event largely passive roles: contact was cultivated by us often over long periods of time; and was received by the targets with differing degrees of welcome. And in most cases, because we were operating under cover, the targets would have been justified in assuming that we were what we said we were: diplomats, journalists or trade attachés.
On the intelligence front, our highest aim was to penetrate the administration of the day, whether Conservative or Labour, and discover government secrets. In my time the KGB in Britain was living largely in the past, and still sticking too often to socialist politicians, a hangover from the 1960s and 1970s, when Labour had been in power. In the 1980s my colleagues were, of course, eager to penetrate the Conservative Party, but, except in a few cases, we lacked the resources and skill to do so.
If I put names to all the people I could mention in this chapter, it would cause uproar. Unfortunately I have to be circumspect: I am constrained by the stringent and archaic libel laws of the country. Although everything I could write here would be absolutely correct, some of the proof that would stand up in a court of law is locked away in KGB files in Moscow, which are not accessible to me. Nevertheless, I hope I can show how the KGB sought to manipulate some public figures in the cause of Soviet propaganda.
Considering the tenor of the Labour Party’s manifesto for 1983, it is hardly surprising that Moscow, its front organization, the Soviet Embassy, in London and the KGB cultivated the British Left so assiduously. The socialists were calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament, cancellation of the Trident missile system, refusal to deploy Cruise missiles, and the removal of American nuclear bases from Britain, all objectives warmly welcomed by Moscow.
In Soviet eyes, the KGB’s most valuable confidential contact in London was the veteran Labour MP Fenner Brockway. No matter that, by the 1980s, he was more than ninety years old: his left-wing sympathies and his incurable naivety made him a perfect subject for cultivation, and for years he was run by Mikhail Bogdanov, the most polished and sophisticated member of the KGB station.
The son of a mus
ician in Leningrad, Bogdanov was then in his early thirties, handsome, well dressed and personable. His cover job was that of London correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Socialist Industry, and he worked from his flat near the western end of Kensington High Street. Since his journal had no means of servicing foreign correspondents, the position was entirely bogus and left him plenty of time for cultivating likely targets.
Bogdanov drove Brockway everywhere in London — to the restaurant, from the restaurant, to the House of Lords, to his home — buying him whisky, sweaters, gloves and anything else that took his fancy. In those days Moscow placed tremendous importance on peace movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and did all it could to manipulate them. Most people in the West thought CND and similar bodies harmless enough: arms control, committees in Geneva...everyone wanted the nations to disarm, and it all sounded so innocent. Moscow, though, was making a deliberate and purposeful attempt to throw a smokescreen over its own ever-expanding production and deployment of nuclear weapons. ‘It’s the West who is developing its nuclear arsenal,’ said Soviet sources. ‘It’s the West who is testing them, the West who is installing all these bloody Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles in the heart of Europe.’
With typically cold-blooded cynicism, Moscow exploited anyone naïve enough to sing its own tune. No British public figure did this more effectively than Brockway, whose World Disarmament Campaign, a relatively small organization which he founded with Philip Noel-Baker in 1979, continually played into KGB hands. So often in his speeches did Brockway spout ideas fed to him by Bogdanov that in our reports to the Centre he featured more than any other politician. He was always doing good work on the KGB’s behalf, in London, East Berlin, Prague, Brussels and elsewhere, not least in his advocacy of nuclear-free zones, which the Kremlin wanted to create so as to corral Western fire-power in the event of global war. He was little more than a puppet in KGB hands.
Curiously, in his last book, 98 Not Out, published in 1986, Brockway did not mention Bogdanov or the KGB. This suggests that he probably realized the true provenance of his faithful chauffeur and amanuensis, but even so was unable to discern that his own activities posed a considerable threat to the West. It was, in a way, an oblique tribute to the success of the KGB’s operation that a statue to Brockway was unveiled in Red Lion Square, London, during his lifetime, in 1985.
Two others seen as helpful by the Soviets were the Labour MPs Frank Allaun and James Lamond. Both were deeply involved in the pro-Moscow peace movement, and both seemed to the Soviet Embassy to behave as if they were agents not of the KGB but of the International Department, always doing exactly what the official Soviet peace committee wanted of them. Their trips abroad, their statements, their behaviour, their votes — all appeared to Moscow to be nicely in line with Soviet propaganda. No doubt they would not view their association in such a way, but I can only relate what was recorded in KGB files and the Soviet Embassy memos.
Soviet attempts to manipulate Western peace movements took many forms. Visitors to the Embassy came from all walks of life and included such obvious targets as Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock, for instance, general secretary and chairman of CND. They did not like receptions but along with many others came openly for private conversations with the Ambassador, his deputy or Lev Parshin; they also travelled widely, to Moscow and the East European countries, and wherever they went, people from the official peace committees sought to influence them. In London Bogdanov tried to make contact with Joan Ruddock, and invited her to drinks; whether she was nervous that someone might compromise her or try to photograph her in the company of a Soviet official, I do not know, but she stayed away. Her anxiety was, no doubt, increased by the rumours that CND was receiving Soviet money although I have no evidence that this was true.
For sheer naivety, we all agreed that no one could touch Tam Dalyell, the Old Etonian left-winger with a castle in Scotland. Although never classed as a confidential contact, he became useful to the KGB’s propaganda initiative because of his obsession about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano during the Falklands War. As I have said, the KGB and the Soviet establishment were strongly on the Argentinian side in the conflict, so that anyone who criticized Britain’s handling of the war and the Conservative government found a warm interest in Moscow.
Again, it was Bogdanov who courted Dalyell: he met him frequently in London, and stayed at his castle — and, indeed, in the acknowledgements in his book Thatcher’s Torpedo Dalyell mentioned Bogdanov as a sympathetic Soviet diplomat from whom he had received help. Whether or not Dalyell realized he had been dealing with a secret intelligence officer is another matter: I doubt it. Bogdanov, for his part, reckoned that he had contributed a number of good ideas to the book, and reported enthusiastically on his dealings with the author. In the London station’s annual report to the Centre for 1983 (which I compiled), there was a section on Tam Dalyell, saying how helpful to us Dalyell’s obsession had been. Unfortunately when I submitted the report to Guk for clearance, he in his ignorance changed ‘Tam’ to ‘Tom’ without asking me so that the document went off to Moscow with a glaring mistake in it, much to Bogdanov’s disgust. This highlights another problem we faced; not only the ignorance of the likes of Guk but the insatiable demand for information from the Centre. Meeting this demand meant that KGB officers had to keep up a steady flow of reports; such a flood of information meant that no one was capable of sorting out the good from the bad and so officers often exaggerated their successes and up-rated the importance of their contacts.
However, some politicians appeared to support the Soviet line so freely that the KGB saw no need to influence them. One such was Tony Benn, whose views seemed to the Russians almost indistinguishable from those of the Communist Party, and whom the Embassy could rely on without any promoting to make pro-Soviet, anti-American statements in the House of Commons and on other prominent platforms. With a typical lack of acumen, Popov failed to notice that large sections of the British public regarded Benn as an eccentric and did not take him seriously. One day, at the ghastly morning conference in the basement of the Embassy, the Ambassador made the following pronouncement in a rather pained voice: ‘Comrades, reading my memoranda over the past twelve months, I find that some of the information which I put into the mouths of contacts and sent back to Moscow has proved entirely misleading. One important politician made a number of public predictions, which I put over with great enthusiasm. Looking back, I see that all his assessments were wrong, and that none of his predictions has come true. So please in future, when you write your memos, be very careful. And please re-read your memos for the past year to find out who’s been consistently off-beam.’
I was sitting next to Lev Parshin, and whispered in his ear, ‘Who’s he talking about?’
‘Who d’you think?’ Parshin answered. ‘Tony Benn.’
Another day Popov canvassed our opinion on how he should initiate a conversation with David Steel, the Liberal leader, who was coming to a reception. The Ambassador asked, ‘What if I said, “Mr Steel, do you realize you have the same name as our great leader Stalin?” [Stalin is Russian for steel.] What do you think? Would that be a good line to open with?’ We all looked at each other in agony but no one dared speak.
One man highly regarded by the KGB was the red-bearded Guardian journalist Richard Gott, who had been recruited as a prominent left-winger during the 1970s, but who had then lost touch. Gott resigned from the Guardian at the end of 1994 following revelations about his ‘connections’ with the KGB. Another person, who must remain unnamed, became the object of KGB interest and during my time in London the Centre issued instructions to make contact. It was decided that a suitable inducement would be a payment of six hundred pounds in cash.
The job of handing it over fell to Bogdanov, and we had an intense discussion about how the money should be passed. Bogdanov and I decided the best thing would be to put the cash in an envelope and hand it over during or after a lunch meeting, but when we
suggested this to Guk he shot the idea down, saying that it was far too risky: money in an envelope was obviously incriminating if the carrier was searched.
Guk’s preferred method was one he had used in New York: to stuff the bundle of notes into the pocket of the recipient as he walked past in the street. We pointed out that, although this might work in winter, when people were wearing heavy over-coats, it was a non-starter in summer. Eventually I had the idea that we should buy a cheap plastic wallet, put the money in that, and hand it over. Guk agreed. ‘Not in the restaurant,’ he said. ‘After you have left. Walk round a corner, and then quickly, before the surveillance can catch up to see what you’re doing, pass it.’ So that was what Bogdanov did — and later he had several meetings with the person, none of them very productive.
An embarrassing episode took place in the winter of 1982-83, when Igor Titov decided to see if there were more journalists in addition to Gott worth targeting on the staff of the Guardian. With some difficulty he persuaded the Central Committee to authorize a tour of the Soviet Union, and off went a group from the newspaper. In Russia they were dispersed and sent on various assignments; then they returned and published a special issue devoted to different aspects of Soviet life. Needless to say, even though they were basically sympathetic, they could find little that was positive to write about, and dogmatic members of the Central Committee soon accused Titov of having involved them in an exercise which had produced an unfavourable result. Defending himself, he sent Moscow a long telegram analysing the special issue, and pointing out that about 60 per cent of it was in favour, so that on balance the enterprise had been worthwhile. Nevertheless, it left a bad taste in many mouths.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 30