Then, on the afternoon of Thursday, 16 May, the thunderbolt struck. I was sitting at my desk in the Resident’s office when the cipher clerk brought in a telegram. As I read the handwritten message, I felt sweat break out on my back, and for a second or two my vision clouded. Fighting to control myself, I was dreadfully afraid that the clerk must notice how badly shocked I was.
‘In order to confirm your appointment as Resident,’ said the cable, ‘please come to Moscow urgently in two days’ time for important discussions with Comrades Mikhailov and Alyoshin.’ Instantly I sensed that something was badly wrong. Mikhailov was the pseudonym of Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB; Alyoshin was Kryuchkov, head of the First Chief Directorate. This was a summons from the highest possible level. And yet I had been through everything during my visit to Moscow in January. I had seen everyone I needed to see, and had been fully briefed. This new instruction made no sense.
I felt slightly better next morning when another telegram arrived saying, ‘As to your Moscow trip, please remember that you will have to speak about Britain and British problems, so prepare well for specific discussions, with plenty of facts.’ In retrospect, I am sure Moscow realized that their first telegram might have sounded alarming, and were trying to create a more solid impression with their second. This certainly sounded more genuine, and for a while I dared hope that everything was all right. But I also sensed that I might be in mortal danger, and I considered disappearing then and there, something about which I had often spoken with my British contacts.
My latest case officer, Stephen, seemed more impressed than puzzled by the telegrams. So did Joan. Both said they would be fascinated to learn Chebrikov’s master plan for Britain. To me this was almost the final straw: were possible words of wisdom from Chebrikov more important than my life? I was longing to hear them say, ‘Oleg, we don’t like this. Why not just stay here and vanish, to start another life?’ But they said nothing of the sort, and when I asked whether there were any signs, either from their own analysis or from other stations, that I might be in danger, their answers were reassuring. As far as they could tell, nothing had gone wrong. Only one man advised against my returning, and that was purely on intuitive grounds.
So I decided to obey the summons. But first I went through my modified escape plan yet again, and Joan showed me photographs of the forest rendezvous at which, in the last resort, I would be picked up. The only snag was that the pictures had been taken in April and October, when there were few leaves on the trees, and I might need to activate the plan in the middle of summer when the area would look quite different.
Once again, I could not share my problems with Leila. All I could say was that I had been summoned for top-level discussions, and when I caught the plane for Moscow, I went off fervently hoping this was true.
Chapter Fourteen – Sentence of Death
Flying over the Baltic, I had a wonderful view of Denmark, which lay basking in the sun, cradled in the arms of a blue, blue sea. Then suddenly I was in Moscow, and the difference was like that between day and night. Everything was grey and unpleasant, with people in uniforms all round, and long queues at the passport check. I found myself in the middle of a line, among a lot of foreigners. When I reached the hatch, there were only four or five people behind me, but the passport officer took such an age to deal with me that by the time he had finished, another flight had come in, and another immense queue had built up.
As a Soviet national, I should have passed straight through but the Borderguard officer, a simple-looking fellow, studied my passport for an inordinate length of time. Next he consulted some notes, repeatedly looking back and forth between them and my document. Then he made a telephone call. Watching him through the glass, I could practically see his mind working: he had discovered something wrong.
Later I found out that the passport officers had been told to inform the KGB the moment I crossed the border on to Soviet soil. In the arrival hall I was still on neutral, international territory, but at the control point I crossed the frontier into the Soviet Union. At that instant, I assume, an urgent telegram was sent to the Residency in London: what it said, I do not know, for the people in Britain were not aware of the plot to detain me.
Once through the checkpoint, I negotiated Customs without difficulty — but then something else unexpected happened. I had been told that Igor Titov, head of the British section, would be there to meet me, but there was no sign of him. Again, something seemed to have gone wrong. Outside, there was a shortage of taxis, but I saw that one driver who had already loaded two passengers was looking for a third. When he offered me his front seat, I took it. When I asked where he was going, he said, ‘To the West German Embassy.’ Here was yet another snag. In Moscow I was not supposed to consort with foreigners but I thought, What the hell! There was a chance that I would be noticed by the surveillance outside the Embassy, but I had to get home somehow, and it was worth the risk.
As we drove, I turned round, purely to be sociable, and said something in German to the couple in the back. They were not diplomats — only technical personnel — but immediately they were terrified. To have a stranger address them in German in the middle of Moscow — obviously they had been swept up into a KGB plot the moment they landed, and they sat there in silence, rigid with apprehension. I was thinking, What a reversal of roles! Normally it is Homo sovieticus who behaves like that in the presence of foreigners: now it’s the other way round.
At my own flat, I sustained another shock, the worst yet. When I undid two locks as usual, and pushed the door, it would not move. Someone had turned the third lock as well, the lock for which I had long since lost the key. The discovery made me feel cold. No burglar would ever have done that: only someone with a set of skeleton keys...only the KGB.
Full of foreboding, I went down to the concierge, and from her desk rang Gribin, with whom I was supposed to make contact. During my two recent visits to Moscow he had been very sweet to me, but now he sounded cold. There was no warmth or enthusiasm in his voice. In a very off-hand way he just said, ‘How are things?’
I launched into a litany of complaints. ‘The first thing’, I said, ‘is that Igor never met me. I don’t know why.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Gribin. ‘That’s strange. He was supposed to.
‘The second thing is that I can’t get into my flat...’ Because I was so wound up, I went on for some time, and this irritated Gribin. He must have realized immediately that a silly mistake had been made by the people who carried out the secret search. He was irritated by everything — by me, by my flat, by the locks, by the people who had made the blunder, by the whole tedious difficulty which I, a suspected person, was causing him.
Presently I rang off and went in search of assistance from a family a few storeys higher: a young man whom I had helped to join the KGB, and his father-in-law, a former surveillance man, now retired but still active, doing plumbing and electrical repair jobs. He came down with some tools, but found he could not pick the third lock. ‘I’ll have to force the door,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll patch it up as best I can.’ He, too, thought it strange that the lock had been turned.
In the short time since I had landed, my mind had become schizophrenic. One part of it wanted to comfort me, saying, ‘This is paranoia. Calm down. Things can’t be that bad.’ But the other part was working overtime: the long passport check, no Igor Titov, Gribin so cool, the third lock...This second voice told me to have a good hunt round. I went straight into the bedroom and looked under the bed where I kept two boxes of books that the KGB would regard as seditious — books on politics, art, which I had bought in Denmark. They were still there. Then I thought, No — stupid. If they did make a secret search, they wouldn’t have taken the books anyway. What they were looking for was evidence of my collaboration with the British.
Presumably they had bugged the flat in my absence. I prowled the rooms looking for signs of microphones. In the lavatory I examined everything in the cupboard, and came on a little
box of wet tissues which I had bought long ago in Denmark. Inside the lid was a covering of thick foil, and now, in the middle of it, there was a hole where someone had pushed a finger through. At once the suspicious half of my brain said, ‘That proves it!’ But the other half said, ‘It could have been anyone. It could have been Leila, or some curious guest. The hole could have been there for years.’
It was difficult to settle down or sleep. My mind was whirling with the vital question: who had betrayed me? How much did the KGB know? What should I do?
On Monday morning I was due in the office. The man who drove me was Vladimir Chernov, expelled from Britain as a spy in the autumn of 1982, one of the nicest members of the London station. Since then he had become a personal aide of Viktor Grushko, now a deputy head of the First Chief Directorate. On the way in I said, ‘Volodya, is everything all right? When I left for London at the beginning of February, the talk was all about me being appointed Resident. Now it’s 21 May, and I still haven’t heard anything.’
‘It must be all right,’ said Volodya stoutly. ‘I was still taking papers about you to the Secretariat at the end of April. Everything was in progress then.’
At the department Gribin met me. He seemed nearly normal, but not quite. ‘You’d better start preparing’, he told me, ‘because the two big bosses are going to summon you for a discussion.’ He gave me some questions to think about; but instead of just saying, ‘OK, be yourself. Talk naturally,’ he launched into a complicated explanation of how I should conduct myself in the presence of Chebrikov and Kryuchkov. He pointed out that they represented the summit, the royal court, of the Soviet Empire, and warned me of their personal preferences and special tricks. Later, I realized that he was acting out a charade, which accounted for his slightly odd manner.
Again I said how surprised I was about the lock on the door of my flat, but again he did not want to talk about it so I stopped. Next Titov started to apologize for failing to meet me: he claimed that there had been a misunderstanding, and that he had been looking for me in the other wing of the terminal. Then I was summoned to Grushko’s office. I felt as if I was going into an audience with a monarch, and found him a different man from the one I had known in January: cool, hard and relentlessly inquisitive. ‘What about Michael Bettaney?’ he asked. ‘It looks as though he was a real man, after all, and seriously wanted to co-operate with us. That means he could have become a second Philby.’
Wanting to rub salt into the KGB’s wounds, I said, ‘Of course he was real. And he would have been far, far better than Philby, from our point of view.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Because Philby was working for us mainly at a time when we and Britain were allies, during the Second World War and up to the time of the Cold War, so that he was not all that important. Bettaney would have been an agent in the era of confrontation, when we are in a state of cold war with the West. He would have been much more valuable.’
‘But how did we make such a mistake? Was he genuine from the start?’
‘I thought so. I can’t imagine why Comrade Guk didn’t agree.’
Grushko thought for a moment, then said, ‘Guk was expelled. But he hadn’t done anything about Bettaney. He hadn’t even made contact. So why did they sack him?’
I could not be sure what Grushko was hinting at. Did he think that the British had expelled Guk to make way for me? I merely said, ‘That’s right. He never contacted Bettaney. I think his mistake was to behave too much like a KGB man. You know what a big, pompous fellow he looks — always driving around in his expensive Mercedes, boasting about the KGB, playing the general. The Brits didn’t like that.’
Grushko gave me a sceptical look, but said no more about it. Yet the atmosphere remained febrile. Later, a scene developed in front of my eyes when he met Titov in the corridor and tore into him for making such a blunder at the airport. Part of my brain was saying, ‘There’s something unnatural about this. Why is Grushko making such a fuss and humiliating Titov in my presence?’ Either he was supposed to have met me and had made a mistake — the most natural explanation, for if Titov had been there, I should have felt more relaxed, which was what they wanted — or the KGB had deliberately not met me, so that they could see where I went if I left the airport on my own.
It was not long before another small but sinister event occurred. On Tuesday morning the diplomatic bag arrived from London: it should have been closed on Friday evening, while I was still in charge of the Residency, and sent off on Monday morning. Normally the cipher clerks were sticklers for protocol, and did everything precisely by the book. Yet this bag now contained a box bearing a peculiar inscription — ‘For Mr Grushko’s eyes only’ — which had not been there on Friday.
It should never have come into my hands but somehow it did: another blunder. I felt it, shook it, tried to judge its weight. The sober part of my brain told me clearly, ‘Oleg, this box contains your personal papers, the contents of your satchel, which you left in London.’ Probably the Centre had sent London a telegram on Sunday, while there was still time to reopen the bag. But in Moscow, because the clerks were so inexperienced, they brought me the package and asked me how to register it so that eventually it was I who delivered it to Grushko’s secretariat.
Apart from all these errors, practically nothing was happening. For day after day I fiddled with the notes I had brought with me about Britain’s economy, her position in the world, her relations with America, her achievements in science and technology, all the time awaiting the summons from on high. On the evening of Thursday, my fourth blank day in the office, Gribin offered me a lift into central Moscow. ‘What if a summons comes, and I’ve gone?’ I asked. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘There’s no chance of them sending for you tonight.’
It was an unpleasant evening. A heavy drizzle set in, and the traffic was bad. In the car I continued to express disappointment. I pointed out that in London important work was going undone, and that, if there was nothing to detain me in Moscow, I would rather go back and deal with it. There was plenty to get on with: the parliamentary year was ending, an important NATO meeting was imminent, people running contacts needed guidance, and so on. Gribin remained offhand, saying, ‘Oh, nonsense! People are often away for months at a time. Nobody’s indispensable.’ Yet still I sensed something wrong. His remarks struck a false note.
Next morning Gribin put out a sustained effort to make me spend the weekend with him and his wife. Clearly he had instructions to keep me under control, if possible under his eye, and he spent half an hour trying to persuade me to join him at some dacha. But so far I had had no chance of seeing my mother and sister, and I insisted that I wanted to remain in Moscow, so that I could meet them. In the end he gave up, and on Saturday they both came to my flat, where we had a good chat about life in England, sitting round our marble-topped coffee table. I told them how the girls now spoke English as their first language, and how Maria had learned to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English.
Monday brought matters to crisis-point. Luckily I had with me some pep-pills which the British had given me in London, and one of these, taken every morning, helped fight fatigue. Without it, I might easily not have survived.
I was sitting in the office when a call came through on the telephone without a dial which went only to the department head. It was Grushko himself. ‘Can you please come over?’ he said.
‘At last!’ I replied. ‘Is it one of the bosses?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘There are two people who want to talk to you about high-level agent penetration of Britain.’
He said we would meet these men not in his office but somewhere outside the building. That seemed strange, as well — but there was no refusing the order. Thinking that I was just off for a chat, I left my keys and briefcase on my desk and went to meet Grushko.
Together we went down to the lobby and out through the revolving doors. Soon a car appeared, but instead of heading for
the front gates of the compound, which gave on to the Moscow orbital road, the driver went out the back and proceeded less than two kilometres to a compound of comfortable cottages designed mainly for foreign guests of the First Chief Directorate. We did not enter the compound but drew up at a single bungalow outside it, a house surrounded by a low fence, but otherwise unprotected.
It was a hot, sticky day, with the oppressive feeling that thunderstorms might build up. Grushko said, ‘We’re early — let’s walk around.’ So we strolled up and down, with him asking apparently frivolous questions about my parents and their background. At the time I could not see what he was driving at, and only later did it dawn on me that he had been trying to dig up some Jewish elements in my family. A virulent anti-Semite, Grushko was thinking, If Gordievsky’s a traitor, there must be something Jewish in his ancestry.
After a while we went into the little house, which was pleasantly cool inside. It was well equipped with furniture made of light-coloured wood — ash or pine. It had one long, central room, and smaller bedrooms leading off it, all with fairly low ceilings, but everything looked bare, with no curtains or pictures on the pale walls. It looked as though it had never been lived in. There were two servants: a man in his fifties, very deferential but clearly KGB, who must have had some other job besides that of lackey, and a good-looking woman in her early thirties. Grushko said we would have our talk over a sandwich, and then proposed a drink. As it was only a few days since Gorbachev had brought in restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, I said, ‘Are you sure that’s all right?’
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 35