Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  When it was over, I went in search of poor old Shatov, our temporary analyst, who had not been allowed to attend the meeting (to have caught a glimpse of Gorbachev would have been his dream). ‘Well,’ he said enviously, ‘what was he like?’

  ‘Just another Soviet apparatchik,’ I sighed. ‘Far too pleased with himself. He couldn’t stop talking — went on for forty minutes.’

  Shatov stared at me and said, ‘Old boy, you don’t understand. A member of the Politburo who can speak for forty minutes without notes — he must be a genius!’

  The tour went off well, due largely to the excellence of the interpreters, who greatly improved Gorbachev’s speeches in translation, and to the skill of Mikhail Bogdanov, who spoke first-rate English and knew the country well, and now helped me prepare the fact sheets with which we briefed Gorbachev every morning.[33] Yet there was another ingredient in the briefings about which no one else in the Embassy had any clue: the input from my friends in the British service. Every evening we were under pressure to produce a forecast of the line the next day’s meetings would take, and this of course was impossible to discover from normal channels. I therefore went to the British and asked urgently for help: could they give me an idea of the subjects Mrs Thatcher would raise? They produced a few possibilities, from which I managed to concoct a useful-looking memorandum; but the next day’s meeting was much more fruitful. When I asked for a steer on Geoffrey Howe, they let me see the brief which the Foreign Secretary would be using in his talks with Mr Gorbachev. My English was still poor, and my ignorance was compounded by nervousness and lack of time, so that I had to concentrate hard to remember all the points.

  Back at the station, full of excitement at my little coup, I sat down at a typewriter (illegally) and hacked out a rough draft, allegedly based on my general sources and what I had gleaned from newspapers. Then I gave it to Shatov, who laboriously rewrote it in such vague and general terms that Nikitenko, when he saw it, exploded with vexation. ‘I can’t show this to Gorbachev!’ he cried. ‘It’s far too woolly.’ I agreed, and said slyly, ‘Leonid Yefremovich, I don’t want to argue with Shatov because he’s a very conscientious fellow, but maybe you’d like to have a look at my own version.’ Nikitenko quickly read it and said, ‘Yes! This is just what we need.’ Instinctively, he noticed the Foreign Office briefing shining through my text — and in it went, verbatim.

  Every evening Nikitenko would stand on the landing of the Embassy, holding our three or four typed sheets and talking to the guards until he got the opportunity to go in and lay the briefs on Gorbachev’s desk. When they came out, sometimes with passages underlined to show gratitude or satisfaction, we took them back to the Residency and sent them as KGB analytical telegrams to the Centre, so that they would know what Gorbachev had seen. This system proved a great success — and we knew that Gorbachev was reading what we wrote with close attention, because one morning, after we had included a flattering paragraph about his wife, Raisa, which recorded how people had admired her, he made his first and only correction, crossing out five lines, to leave only two lines of modest, matter-of-fact tribute, and adding a note: ‘It is very dangerous to make other members’ wives jealous.’

  Like her husband, Raisa went down well with the British — but to us she was a disaster, bigoted, arrogant and self-important. She refused to have our first choice of interpreter, Mikhail Bogdanov’s wife, who spoke beautiful English, on the grounds that she was used to being surrounded by men. Instead, we had to give her Yuri Mazur, a former sailor from a humble background, but a man with a formidable intellect, who had known Britain for twenty-five years.[34]

  In the event the tour was cut short, from five days to four, by the death of Marshal Ustinov, a leading member of the Politburo. Gorbachev could have finished his programme — the telegram from Moscow was one of information, not instruction — but he chose to go home, making only the briefest of visits to Scotland. A few weeks later in Moscow I heard that Nikitenko had received an order for handling the visit so well, but, in fact, the people who had made Gorbachev’s trip a success were Bogdanov, Shatov, the SIS and myself. All the security had been organized by the British. I protested to Gribin that justice had not been done but, of course, there was no redress, and we could never find out what had happened — whether Nikitenko had ingratiated himself with someone in the entourage, or whether the decoration was simply given to the nominal boss.

  In the longer term, Gorbachev’s career continued to demonstrate the huge gulf between the viewpoints of East and West. In the West he became a hero, the first leader with the courage to pronounce that Communism was dead; but in the Soviet Union he was deeply unpopular and continued to be regarded as typical provincial Party apparatchik, with a provincial brain and education, who brought about a monumental political change more or less by mistake.

  I feel that he is due some credit, but not much, because what happened was not what he wanted or what he was aiming at. He created a movement towards change, but the movement gathered such momentum that it ran away from him, out of control. He began with the idea of uskoreniye, or acceleration, the speeding-up of industrial and technological progress, because he realized that the gap between the Soviet Union and the West had widened so much that, if nothing were done, Russia would in the end be so far behind that she would have to surrender. His method was to divert resources into areas where we were not doing well, and his aim at that stage was not to abolish socialism so much as to discover ways of making it work better.

  But the more he found out about the old system, the more he understood that it deserved the sharpest criticism. That was why, at the Plenum of the Central Committee in 1987, he launched the concept of glasnost and fiercely criticized the Brezhnev era as one of stagnation. All the crimes and shortcomings of Soviet society were like a colossal ulcer, covered by a thin skin, but not healed, suppurating beneath the surface: people started to write and talk about it more and more. Gorbachev himself was nervous about the momentum glasnost started to acquire — and it simply ran away from him.

  *

  Although no longer directly concerned with Line N, I had to deal several times with illegals. When I arrived at the Residency, an industrious man called Grachev had been controlling them from a slot in the Consular Department; but at the end of my first year he had left, and only two Line N officers remained in London, one working in the International Cocoa Organization, and the other in a boat-repair firm. The latter had an outstandingly beautiful wife, a stunning woman in her mid-thirties who had herself received a commendation — I think for going to Somerset House and procuring valuable documents on some pretext.

  Both men were responsible for finding signal sites and reading signals, and one day the man from Cocoa announced that he had discovered an excellent new site, right in the middle of London. In Curzon Street, Mayfair, he reported, there was a wooden noticeboard, which would be ideal for chalk-marks. When I told Jack about this, he nearly fell off his chair in excitement, for the site was right across the street from one of MI5’s main offices, and it seemed to offer an exceptional chance of spotting one of the elusive creatures who surfaced so rarely.

  All I could tell them was that the woman, code-named Inge, was due to leave a signal any day. The head of the Russian counter-espionage section found a window which commanded a good view of the board, and set up a rota of watchers. By sheer bad luck, at the critical moment, someone offered the man on watch a cup of tea: lowering his binoculars, he turned to take it, and when he looked again, the signal had appeared. The woman had come and gone without him catching a glimpse of her.

  Soon after that, a request came from the Centre to carry out a visual control on another of Grachev’s illegals, and the task fell to me. I learnt that the man would be standing outside the window of a toyshop, with a copy of Der Spiegel sticking out of his pocket, at a particular time on a particular day: my job was simply to pass by on the other side of the street and make sure that he was alive and well. Having co-ordinat
ed matters with the British security service, in the hope that they could photograph and identify the man, I took the tube to Morden, the southernmost station on the Northern Line, and arrived early to give myself plenty of time. My friends were there somewhere, I knew, but they were discreet, and I never spotted them.

  As the time for the rendezvous approached, I took off my watch and held it in the palm of my hand, so as to make my timing absolutely precise. When I walked round the corner of the block, there he was, unmistakably, a fairly tall fellow of about thirty, with dark hair, wearing an anorak. He was obviously on the alert, eager to spot the observer sent to cast an eye over him. What he did not know was that two parties were watching him simultaneously. After a minute or so I went back to the Underground, and later discovered from my friends that they had followed him into it as well. When he took a train towards the centre of London, they did the same, and he led them unwittingly to a parked car, whose number they took. The details enabled them to identify him as an alleged German, working as a mechanic in some repair shops. (On the day of my escape from Moscow — 20 July 1985 — a team went straight there to arrest him, only to find that he had disappeared suddenly on 25 May, the day after I was interrogated by the KGB. Later we learnt that telegrams and radio messages recalling all illegals immediately had been sent out on 25 or 26 May.)

  Another successful operation — successful on several fronts — took place in Coram’s Fields, in Bloomsbury. This time my task was to deposit a special brick, made up by the operational technology department and containing eight thousand pounds in untraceable banknotes, for collection by another illegal. The site had been chosen by the boat-repair man with the beautiful wife: a footpath alongside a high wire fence, on one edge of the gardens. As it was a fine Saturday evening, I took the girls along with me — Maria was then five, Anna four — and my driver made a brilliant job of dry-cleaning our route around Central London, avoiding the centre.

  Once again I had made sure that the security service was present. This time a cyclist appeared to be having problems with his machine, and a woman was pushing what looked like a baby, but was in fact a camera, in a perambulator. Soon after I had deposited the brick inside a plastic bag, a man appeared, picked it up, was secretly photographed, and set off northwards on foot, presumably towards the signal site at which he would make a mark to let us know that he had collected his money. On the way there the security service lost him, through being ultra-careful not to show themselves; but my driver, checking the site, found what looked like a poorly executed signal. As I knew for sure that the deadletter box had been emptied, I sent Moscow a message to this effect. A senior MI5 officer, meanwhile, suggested that the illegal’s photograph should be exhibited on the television programme Crimewatch. He meant it as a joke, but it seemed to me a brilliant idea, and I was sorry that the service was too shy of publicity to go through with it.

  Occasionally an illegal precipitated a minor crisis — as on a Sunday when I was acting head of station, and was also the duty diplomat in charge over the weekend. I was sitting comfortably in the Resident’s office, formerly occupied by Guk, when there came a knock on the door, and in burst the operational driver, saying excitedly, ‘The signal’s there!’ After checking a site for several days, he had seen a cross appear. Immediately I rang the cipher clerk, who had schemes of signals for every illegal. It turned out that the cross meant ‘Need meeting urgently’. Another line in his entry gave the place for meetings (in Barnet) and the time, 1600.

  Already it was 10.30 a.m. As I was on duty, I was not supposed to leave the Embassy, but when I rang the guard to see who else was around I found that there was no other KGB man who could sit in for me, even for a couple of hours. One clean diplomat who might have done it had just left for home. The situation looked desperate. There seemed only one thing to do. Asking the guard to hold the fort for a few minutes, I drove myself quickly to Holland Park and sought out the first secretary, Aleksei Nikiforov. I had no right to order him in: all I could do was beg for his help in a crisis. Luckily he was a nice man and agreed to stand in for me.[35]

  Away we went to Barnet. As usual, the operational driver made a thorough job of his dry-cleaning, and we reached our destination with no problems. Having agreed with him that he would return to the rendezvous in half an hour, I walked the last five minutes of the route to the high street. The illegal was due to be standing outside a shop, looking into the window — and there he was: a young man, in his late twenties, strongly built, with short black hair. In a way he looked quite Russian, but he could equally have been a New Zealander or an Australian.

  As I came up to him, I brought out the key phrase: ‘Didn’t I meet you on the Majestic in June ’81?’

  He smiled and said, ‘Not June ’81. It was August ’82.’ His English sounded excellent, but he said, ‘Shall we speak English or Russian?’

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’ I exclaimed. ‘Russian, of course.’

  Then he said, ‘I’ve finished the operation. Here’s what I’ve got to send to the Centre. Please get it to them as soon as possible. I’m leaving the country soon.’

  Part of the prearranged drill was that we should walk some way together, like friends chatting, so we headed out into some playing fields, which were good and open, with few people about, and no one close to us. But the young man was not at ease. Soon he said, ‘Well, that’s it,’ and walked off, as if he barely trusted me.

  Back at the Embassy, I thanked Nikiforov profusely for his help, delivered the package to the cipher clerk, and immediately sent the Centre a telegram. I told my English friends about the incident but we never identified the man, even though we returned to the case and studied it again after my escape. Almost certainly his operation was a documentary one: probably he had come to England to get a passport, but although we went through all the applications made during that period by applicants between the ages of twenty and thirty, we could not pinpoint him. Like the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish, the illegals normally swam at such a depth in the ocean that it was almost impossible to spot them from the surface.

  *

  For months Nikitenko clung to the hope that he might be officially appointed Resident, lobbying friends in the First Chief Directorate with subtle letters. But then in January 1985 I was summoned to Moscow for a high-level briefing, and this made it clear that I had been chosen as the best candidate to succeed Guk. I found Gribin the same as ever, friendly and resolute on my behalf. What was more, he appeared to have won the latest power struggle.

  But then an unfortunate incident took place at the department’s annual conference, at which I, among several others, was detailed to make a speech. Gribin told me it was important that I should make a good impression, so I worked hard at my address, and it turned out well, if slightly longer than it should have been; what upset things was that the chairman of the meeting, Pozdnyakov, introduced me as ‘the Resident Designate in London, Comrade Gordievsky’. Gribin was furious, because this sort of premature announcement, before things had been properly decided, was exactly what he wanted to avoid. Immediately after the meeting the man who ran the personnel department stormed back to his office and rang Gribin, demanding to know who had appointed me, so that Gribin had to distance himself from Pozdnyakov’s statement — typical KGB politics.

  In spite of this setback, I went to see all the department heads concerned, including the head of Directorate S, Yuri Drozdov, a tall, lean general on whom Frederick Forsyth based his character Yevgeni Karpov in his novel The Fourth Protocol. He, also, offered me a job, saying that he would be pleased to see me back in my old Directorate; but he alarmed me by asking me to keep close track of Nicholas Barrington, a senior British diplomat, ‘because we need to settle a score with him.’ The KGB suspected Barrington of having helped Vladimir Kuzichkin to defect from Iran to Britain in 1982. When I reached London I warned my people, who took immediate precautions. Then I visited the cipher department, where I received some instruction in the use of codes and ciphe
r equipment. Finally, in my last hour in the building, I happened to read a circular which said that a KGB officer, Lieutenant Colonel Vetrov, had been accused of spying for France, tried, sentenced to capital punishment and executed. The news sent a shiver down my spine — but at least I was soon able to pass it to the British, who told the French.

  Back in London in early February, I found Nikitenko by no means reconciled to the news that I was about to leapfrog him. He had begun writing letters which aimed to undermine me, and had also started to withhold telegrams which I should have seen. Apart from that, all seemed well, and I continued to receive encouraging letters from Gribin.

  Then, in the middle of March, his communications ceased. I did not know what to make of this. The work of the Residency carried on normally, and the silence from Moscow was only faintly ominous. On 24 April Nikitenko’s replacement arrived, a sinister fellow called Korchagin, who should have run Abrivard. I took over formally from Nikitenko on 28 April, and he finally left for Moscow on 2 May.

  At last I was on my own, in full command of the Residency. Yet I sensed that things were not as they should be. First, no telegram had come from the Centre permitting me access to the cipher communication codes; and second, Nikitenko had left behind his official briefcase. On opening it, I found it contained nothing but one small brown envelope, in which there were two photocopies of the letters from Michael Bettaney. Why had he, normally such a careful man, left behind papers that no longer had any relevance? Was it because he did not trust me, and felt he could not leave anything that was still secret?

  These puzzles gave me a feeling of unease but for a couple of weeks life proceeded normally. In spite of all my efforts to improve East—West understanding, a vast gulf remained unbridged — as witness an event that occurred at the end of April. The British decided to expel five GRU officers, two uniformed and three who had been working under civilian cover. The dismissals had nothing to do with me, but both the Ambassador and Nikitenko, thinking on the same traditional lines, sent identical telegrams to the Centre claiming that the expulsions had been deliberately timed as a special provocation to spoil Soviet celebrations of Victory Day, which would fall on 9 May, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. When I told the British of this reaction, they were dumbfounded by the absurdity of such an idiotic accusation: nobody in London had given the anniversary a thought.