Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Yet another public figure in whom Moscow showed interest was the author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. One day in London we received a long letter about him from the Centre, saying that the KGB had monitored him while he was visiting East European countries: they had not yet tried to contact him but, after studying his record, they had come to the conclusion that he was good material for cultivation, as he was progressive (that is, in Moscow’s eyes, friendly to the Soviets), and also influential in the British media. Like many such suggestions, this one was killed at birth by lack of resources: if we in the KGB did not have sources even in the most important places — the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister’s office, the Home Office —how could we afford to chase after individual media men? But I never received the slightest indication that Bragg would have played our game.

  One curious episode concerned Lady Olga Maitland, who at that time was not an MP but an energetic and noisy right-wing campaigner against peace organizations such as CND. We often discussed her in the Residency but never did anything about her until we acquired a new recruit from Moscow, Sergei Sayenko. Young, slim and handsome, once a champion middle-distance runner, Sergei became distinctly interested in Lady Olga, not just as a target but as a person. Because I did not think that she had any information of strategic or political importance, I told him several times to lay off, but he persisted in meeting her, and I assumed that he just enjoyed her company. I have no evidence that she ever made any ideological or, indeed, any other concessions to him but all the same I found their relationship strange, from both the intelligence and the human point of view.

  On the Embassy side, as opposed to the KGB, the clean diplomats carried on a good deal of cultivation under their own steam, openly inviting politicians to lunches and receptions and not being put out if their guests stuck up for Western ideas and methods. Julian Amery, who had been Conservative Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1972 to 1974, was particularly strong in this respect: he frequently came to the Embassy, and enjoyed himself there, but always upheld the British line with vigour. So, too, did John Biggs-Davidson, another Conservative MP, a friendly man, who explained many things to me. A Catholic, and much in favour of the Establishment, he once hit back briskly at someone who asked him about the possibility of withdrawing troops from Northern Ireland. Now, look,’ he said, ‘if I asked you about withdrawing Soviet troops from some province in Central Russia, what would your reaction be? Our troops are in Ireland because it’s part of the United Kingdom — and that’s it.’ Another frequent and friendly guest was Norman Atkinson, the Labour MP for Tottenham, who was popular with the Soviet diplomats, and on all invitation lists — as was Sir Anthony Buck, then chairman of the Conservative Parliamentary Defence Committee. Anthony Marlow, Conservative MP for Northampton, was also busily cultivated by the Embassy: then as now he was strongly pro-Arab, an alignment useful to the Russians, whose aim was always to damage Israel by supporting the Arabs, and so to undermine American interests in the Middle East.

  A few MPs were considered too extraordinary for the KGB to bother about them. One such maverick was Frank Cook, who struck the KGB as always being eager to demonstrate his anti-British attitudes. However, during one reception at No. 18 Kensington Palace Gardens his behaviour became so uncouth that nobody in the KGB showed any further enthusiasm for cultivating him.

  Equally left-wing, and often found at Soviet receptions, was Denzil Davies, who at that time was shadow defence secretary. I kept thinking how extraordinary it would be if Labour came to power, and the defence secretary — a notoriously keen imbiber —proved to be fundamentally pro-Soviet and anti-American. Well, we never found out on either account!

  Sometimes the Embassy’s manoeuvring was blocked by instructions from Moscow. For instance, Kenneth Warren, MP for Hastings, an aeronautical expert and a member of many select committees in the House of Commons, seemed eager to become a guest of the Soviets, he had a genuine interest in Russia, but telegrams from the Centre said, ‘Stay away from him, because he may be connected with special services’, a very usual expression of KGB paranoia. I never discovered any confirmation of this but I found Warren, who, of course, didn’t know who I was, sympathetic, and was grateful for his interest. With Peter Temple-Morris, Conservative MP for Leominster, things were the other way round. A telegram from the Centre advised us (wrongly, as it turned out) that he was sympathetic: he was certainly outspoken, and had an Iranian wife: it might be useful if we got in touch with him. When I met him at Embassy receptions, I found him knowledgeable, friendly and curious, in the best sense of the word, but I never detected any evidence that he would be prepared to help. If I had spoken better English, and been less busy, I should have liked to cultivate him but, as things stood, I had no chance.

  Perhaps the most enigmatic of all our contacts was Robert Maxwell, the millionaire tycoon who was lost overboard from his yacht off the Canary Islands in 1991, and later found to have embezzled millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds. Ten years before that, in Moscow, I happened to see a copy of a telegram sent by Popov from London, which described a meeting with Maxwell. The message itself was of no interest, but on it Svetanko, the deputy department head responsible for British affairs, had scrawled, ‘Look at this arch-spy.

  I glanced at it and said, ‘Dmitri Andreyevich, what do you mean?’

  ‘Maxwell’s a British spy,’ Svetanko answered. ‘He’s been in British intelligence ever since the end of the war, and the Embassy’s playing stupid games with him. They’re idiots to have anything to do with him.’

  That seemed strange to me. When I reached London I found that Maxwell — originally a Czech — had once been an MP, but had long since given up politics in favour of full-time business, and had become the epitome of a bloated, old-fashioned capitalist, rude to his staff and widely hated. Yet, as I watched him talking to Popov at Soviet Embassy receptions, I saw that the Ambassador held him in high regard. I also learnt that he had earned himself considerable influence with the Central Committee in Moscow by publishing the collected works of Andropov, Chernenko and Brezhnev in English — a move that powerfully flattered the latter-day Soviet leaders.

  What particularly irritated the KGB was that, although they regarded Maxwell as a spy, the Central Committee ignored their warnings and continued to develop their relationship with him. Then, at the end of 1984, a request came from the Centre asking us in the KGB station to provide a detailed assessment of the man. It fell to me to write this, and I produced what I thought was a realistic sketch. I said that Maxwell was a former politician who had become a leading businessman, and that he liked having influence with important people in Eastern Europe. In Britain, I wrote, his standing was not good: he was unpopular with the trade unions, who regarded him as the worst kind of boss, arrogant and pompous. I mentioned that in earlier years he had been connected in some way with intelligence.

  By then Guk had left, and Nikitenko was Acting Resident. When he read my draft, he said, ‘We can’t send it like this because we’ve always maintained that Maxwell is definitely a British spy.’

  ‘Now, look,’ I said, ‘he’s getting on. Whatever he may have done once, he’s obviously not still running errands for any of the services. It’s typical KGB nonsense about him being a spy.’

  ‘Well...’ said Nikitenko doubtfully, ‘we aren’t revolutionaries. We can’t change our line just because Guk’s gone. Let’s add a paragraph on these lines: “We do not rule out the possibility that after meeting important persons in the East European countries, Maxwell, being on good terms with the British intelligence services, may write detailed reports of his impressions...”’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘If you insist.’ So we added something on those lines. But I got the impression that Moscow’s sudden interest indicated some change of attitude towards Maxwell. It seemed that they planned to make even more use of him — and later rumours certainly indicated that the KGB had begun to manipulate him as a publici
ty agent.

  *

  My conclusion from all this is that if the Labour Party had been returned to power in the general election of June 1983, the KGB would have been in a strong position. Even if we had no fully fledged agents in the party, we did have some good confidential contacts and helpful friends, all ready to talk. With Labour in power, the KGB would have been able to pick up a great deal of information about what was going on within the British government. On the other hand, when Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives came back in a landslide, our prospects, not surprisingly, were much poorer.

  Chapter Thirteen – Acting Resident

  With Guk gone, Nikitenko hoped to take over as Resident, and he schemed relentlessly to that end. But until the Centre made up its mind, he merely acted as a stand-in.

  One minor sensation of the summer of 1984 was the return to Moscow of Oleg Bitov, a former senior editor on the Moscow Literary Gazette who had defected during a film festival in Venice the previous year. After extensive debriefing by MI5, Bitov had sold his story to the Sunday Telegraph for forty thousand pounds, and appeared to have settled down well in London, living in a flat in East Sheen. He had begun to travel in the United States and Europe, and was hoping to make a literary career for himself in the West: apart from producing articles, he had recently signed a contract to write a book about his life. A reasonably intelligent man, who specialized in translation work, he was also self-important, impractical, and had a weakness for alcohol, whisky particularly.

  On Thursday 16 August he disappeared. His car, a red Toyota Tercel, was later found abandoned in Emperor’s Gate, Kensington. Friends were puzzled, especially as he had just started on a course of dental treatment to replace several unsightly metal false teeth: after the first appointment, in a series of six, his gums were full of gaps from which the old teeth had been removed, and it seemed an odd moment for anyone to abscond. Word went round that he had been snatched by the KGB and smuggled out to Moscow; some people even said that he had been a KGB agent all along. The mystery remained unsolved when, a month later, he appeared in Moscow at a staged Press conference, claiming, among other ridiculous and transparent lies, that he had not defected voluntarily, but had been drugged and kidnapped by the British, then forced at gun point to write his newspaper series.

  The truth was simpler. Missing his teenage daughter Xenia, and worried that he could not fulfil his literary obligations, Bitov gave himself up. After lunch that Thursday in August, when everything was quiet during the holiday period, he walked up to the gate of the main Soviet Embassy building at No. 13 Kensington Palace Gardens and rang the bell. The duty guard asked what he wanted, whereupon he said, ‘I’m Oleg Bitov. Let me in.’ The guard, never having heard of him, told him to go away. Bitov then said, ‘I’ve got something important here,’ and threw his briefcase over the gate, so that it landed in the drive.

  This galvanized the guard into telephoning the duty diplomat, who did know who Bitov was and let him in. Nikitenko, hastily called in, proceeded to interview him. Bitov said that he wanted to return to Moscow, and that, in return for safe passage, would give the authorities a great deal of information about the operational methods of the British services. His briefcase, he said, contained a series of cassette tapes on which he had recorded details of his experiences in Britain.

  Against all the rules, whether on their own decision, or with special permission from the Centre, they took him into the Embassy and let him spend the night in a room in the basement normally used by the chef for laying out food before big receptions. Presently instructions came from the Centre to issue him with a temporary Soviet passport, and to smuggle him on to an aircraft for Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where a representative of the Soviet Embassy would meet him and put him on a plane for Moscow. This the Embassy staff did: he was driven out of Kensington Palace Gardens lying on the back seat of a car, with a blanket thrown over him. Our people were astonished that the British surveillance had not seen him when he presented himself at the gates — normally, routine observation immediately picked up anyone who did that. But somehow Bitov was missed, and his disappearance created a sensation, not only in the press, but also within MI5.

  Unfortunately I was on leave when all this happened but I returned to London at the end of August, to find everyone in the Residency talking about it: even though they had done nothing but hide Bitov for a couple of days, they thought they had brought off the most tremendous success, and Nikitenko was given an official commendation. At my next meeting with the British, Jack said, ‘Oh, by the way, Oleg, do you know anything about a man in whom our sister service has an interest — Bitov? You may have heard, he’s disappeared.’

  I sat there, keeping a straight face. ‘Bitov?’ I said casually. ‘Ah, yes, I did hear about him.’

  ‘You did! What happened to him?’

  ‘He’s in Moscow.’ So I told them the whole story.

  *

  In the autumn of 1984 we were told to expect an important agent from France. His code-name was Paul; he had a beard, and spoke only French. We were told that he would be run impersonally, as far as possible, through deadletter boxes, with an occasional visual contact, which would take place outside the cinema near Putney Bridge. Nikitenko was instructed to study the place and start going there each Thursday at 8 p.m.

  This he began to do, but then came another instruction telling him to stop for a while. Soon after that he went on holiday, leaving me in charge for the first time. While he was away we received a telegram asking us to find two deadletter boxes, for the same French agent, each big enough to contain a small briefcase. I asked the KR Line officer based at the trade delegation to find one deadletter box, and offered to look for the other myself. Because I was so busy, I approached one of my English contacts for ideas, and he came up with Brompton Cemetery, in the Fulham Road. That, he said, was a good wild and woolly place, and he even drew my attention to a particular grave. ‘Look for a big holly tree,’ he said, and he named that kind of tree in Russian: kamenniy dub, literally a stone oak.

  One Saturday, I took Leila and the children out to the cemetery, and we walked along the central path. As we strolled, I noticed that most of the other visitors were men, in couples, and that several of them were wearing shorts, which struck me as rather odd. Not until later did I learn that the place was a favourite rendezvous for gays. Towards the end of the graveyard we came to a patch of dense undergrowth and shrubs: I could not find the tombstone my colleague had suggested, but I came on another which would do perfectly, with a stone standing almost vertically, and an ideal hollow behind it, screened by long grass. Having made some careful notes, I went home.

  Alas, all these preparations proved fruitless. For weeks we watched the pub and the deadletter box, but nobody appeared, and in the end we learnt that this famous agent was not coming after all: a cipher clerk in the French military intelligence service, called Abrivard, he had died of cancer. Not that his identity emerged quickly: it took the French DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) over two years to discover it. Wanting to assess the damage he had caused, they were determined to seize his notes and, after a long struggle, managed to steal them from Abrivard’s former mistress.

  *

  On holiday in Moscow in August, I was summoned to the Centre for high-level discussions about my future, and there I again met Gribin, now head of the British—Scandinavian department. With his neat moustache and slim face, he looked much the same as ever and, even though I knew that at heart he was a toady and a careerist, I had to admit that his attitude to me was friendliness itself.

  ‘Oleg,’ he said, ‘you’re the ideal person to become my deputy here. I’d love to have you — hypothetically, that is. Of course it’s impossible. The trouble is, you’re abroad. You’re only in your third year of service in London. On the other hand, the job of Resident there...’

  He went on to describe how, since Guk’s expulsion from Britain, he had been besieged by different lobbies and factions
within the First Chief Directorate, all trying to put forward candidates for the post of Resident in the London station. He told me that for months he had been lobbying on my behalf, and that he had ridden off numerous attempts by various pressure groups to force their own men into the slot. Telephone calls, threats, pledges, begging requests — every approach had been tried. And who was the strongest other candidate, of all those thrust forward? None other than Vitali Yurchenko, a man with a primitive, military mind who had completed one tour in America from 1975 to 1980 but only as a security officer in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and had never done any operational work abroad.

  ‘How could I put up with such a man in London?’ asked Gribin angrily. ‘He wouldn’t work. He would only play at being an important man in an important place. I couldn’t have him. It’s you I want.’ Yet he went on to say that he would have to proceed with the utmost caution. ‘The closer anyone moves to the position of head of station,’ he said, ‘the greater the danger, the more intense the intrigues, the more vicious the attempts to undermine and discredit him.’ He told me he would keep in touch by letter to let me know how our joint campaign was going.

  Then, in a fascinating aside, he said that everyone at the Centre had been thinking about the future of the KGB and of the nation, and he spoke with warmth of a new, up-and-coming politician called Mikhail Gorbachev, who was planning a visit to Britain for the end of the year. The KGB, said Gribin, had come to the conclusion that Gorbachev was the best bet for the future, and that it would do all it could to help him — though in the subtlest way, without revealing its allegiance. ‘That’s why, when he goes to London, we shall ask you to send us the best possible briefing,’ Gribin confided. ‘That way, it will look as though he has a superior intellect.’