‘Oh, yes,’ said Grushko airily. ‘Look, I’ve got some Armenian brandy.’
The servants brought out plates of sandwiches, and we each drank one small tot of brandy, which was good. (Armenians are proud of their spirits and, to this day, claim that Sir Winston Churchill drank only Armenian brandy.)
Then two men arrived. They were obviously KGB, but I had never seen either before, and I thought, How odd, they’re supposed to be from my Directorate. But they looked more like counter-intelligence officers. The senior man, in a dark suit, must have been in his late fifties but looked older, with a lined face and the grey appearance that results from excessive smoking and drinking. His colleague, in a lighter suit, was perhaps ten years younger, tall, sinister and unsmiling, with a long face and rather prominent features. Grushko did not introduce them, except to say, ‘Oh, Oleg, these are the people who want to talk about agent-penetration in Britain. Let’s have lunch first, and then we can get down to it.’
It was all rather clumsily done, not nearly as smooth or subtle as it would have been in Britain. Grushko seemed excessively animated — no doubt because he was not used to taking part in a typically Chekist counter-intelligence operation.[36]
He began to play the role of a good host. ‘Let’s all have a drink together,’ he said, and the servant poured brandies all round. Later, struggling to work out what had happened, I seemed to remember that the other three were served out of the first bottle, from which my initial tot had come. Then the servant had appeared with another bottle, indicating that the first one had run out.
In any case, I drank the tot straight down — and in a matter of seconds I was a different man. It was almost the same as when I had the anaesthetic for my nose operation in Denmark in 1978: there was no physical sensation, but instead of passing out, I was suddenly transformed into someone else.
The next thing I knew for sure I woke up in bed in the room across the corridor, wearing only vest and underpants, unable to remember anything since drinking the brandy. It was early morning — the next morning. The bed was clean, the room fresh, but I felt sick, with a severe headache. I got up slowly, dressed, and went in search of the servant, asking for coffee. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ he said, and brought cup after cup, but the caffeine seemed to have no effect. I felt more depressed than ever before in my life. I kept thinking, ‘They know. I’m finished.’ How they had found out, I could not tell. But there was not the slightest doubt that they knew I was a British agent.
Eventually the same two men reappeared, and their attitude was thoroughly ambivalent. They did not want to give away too much about the interrogation but on the other hand they did not try to conceal that an interrogation had taken place. For a while they watched me in silence. Then the younger one said that one of my remarks had upset him.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What was that?’
‘You accused us of reviving the spirit of 1937, the Great Terror.’
‘Really!’
‘Yes!’ This came out aggressively, and the man went on in the same tone, ‘Just remember one thing, Comrade Gordievsky, what you said wasn’t true, and I’ll prove it.’
Ambiguous as it was, that one remark gave me hope. I began to hope that things were not as bad as I had feared: perhaps I had panicked because I was a British agent. I told myself to keep calm and wait to see what developed. I felt too confused and embarrassed to ask what had happened to me. Had I been sick, or collapsed? Who had put me to bed?
‘Another thing about you, Comrade Gordievsky,’ said Golubev. ‘You’re a very self-confident man.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, you’re over-confident.’
‘You’re implying I’ve been rude to you. If I have, I apologize. I don’t remember. But it’s the first time in my life anyone’s told me I’m over-confident.’ Then I asked, ‘Anyway, what are we waiting for?’
One of them said, ‘A man’s coming to take you home.’ For a few minutes we sat awkwardly, waiting. Then the younger man asked, ‘Have you been around Britain much?’
‘Not much, really,’ I said. ‘There’s so much work at the Residency. Not much time to travel. There are only four places I’ve been — Blackpool, Brighton, Bournemouth and Harrogate.’
‘Harrogate?’ said the man sharply. ‘Where’s that?’[37]
‘In Yorkshire. Some way north of London, near York. It’s quite a nice town, and used a good deal for political conferences because they’ve built a very good new congress hall there.’
Eventually a strange man appeared wearing a dark suit, almost black, with a car and driver, and he took me back and dropped me outside my apartment block. There I was, unshaven, shaky and dishevelled, standing on the pavement at 11 a.m., a lovely summer morning. Once again, I could not get into my flat without help because I had left my keys on my desk. I had to go up to the family who had helped me before and borrow my spare set from them. Inside, I collapsed on the bed and tried to think. As the day wore on, my anguish and tension mounted until I was in a state of near panic. During the afternoon I felt an imperative need to speak to someone, and telephoned Grushko. It was a desperate move, but I needed to hear some word of comfort from him. At least he had been a member of my own department, and in political intelligence, whereas the other two men were from somewhere else. I said, ‘I’m sorry if I was rude to those fellows but they were very strange.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘they’re excellent chaps. There’s nothing wrong with them.’
Grushko’s unsympathetic attitude deepened my anxiety. I absolutely had to speak to somebody else. The only person I could think of was Katya, Leila’s sister-in-law, an intelligent and analytical woman. I rang her, said I had a problem, and asked her to come round — so she did. She pressed a pair of trousers for me while we talked.
I felt a compulsion to run through what had happened. I said I had drunk a couple of glasses of brandy at lunch-time, and had collapsed. Katya did her best to comfort me, but when she had gone I realized that terror and panic were getting the better of me, and preventing me analysing events.
I rang Gribin and said, ‘Something extraordinary has happened, and I’m very worried.’
‘OK,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll come over with Irina, and we can go for a walk.’ Gribin, still acting, as I worked out later, seemed nearly his old self, and Irina played her part even better. ‘Don’t worry, old chap,’ said Gribin, after I had given him an outline of events. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing important. Let’s talk about something more amusing. Tell me about your children, that story about Anna calling to you.’
I was glad of the diversion, and recounted the story of how little Anna, aged four, had looked up from the courtyard below, seen me in the window of our London flat, and shouted, ‘Daddy, I love you!’ The Gribins made much of the anecdote — but afterwards I felt sickened by their hypocrisy. Knowing that I was doomed to die, they deliberately brought up one of the tenderest episodes of my entire life, and exploited it to put me off my guard.
Next day in the office I recovered my keys. Titov — obviously still in the dark about my interrogation — made a great fuss about having found them, together with my briefcase, and not knowing what to do. Then the special telephone rang again, and Grushko asked me to go and see him.
I found him in his beautiful big office, sitting at a large table made up in the form of a T, with several chairs round it, as if for a conference. On one side of him sat Gribin, yesterday’s friend, now looking glum; on the other was the No. 1 interrogator, General Golubev, whose name Gruskho had accidentally revealed while talking to me on the telephone the day before. Like a schoolboy, I stood at one side of the stalk of the table, in front of them.
Gribin did not utter a word, but Grushko began, ‘Yesterday I spent the whole evening talking to Vladimir Aleksandrovich [Kryuchkov] about you. We know very well that you’ve been deceiving us for years. If only you knew what an unusual source we heard about you from! And yet we’ve decided that you may stay in t
he KGB. Your job in London is terminated, of course. There’s no question of your remaining there. Your family will be brought back during the next few days. You’ll have to move to a non-operational department. For the moment, you’d better take the holiday that’s due to you, and after that we’ll decide where to put you. Meanwhile, that anti-Soviet maculatura [mass of papers] which you keep at home — that you will deliver to the library of the First Chief Directorate. And remember, in the next few days, and for ever, no telephone calls to London.’
As these hammer-blows hit home, I began to feel sick with fear. But my only possible course seemed to be to feign innocence. ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened on Monday,’ I said. ‘I think there was something wrong with the drink or, more likely, with the food. I was in a very bad way. I felt awful.’
Suddenly Golubev seemed to wake up, and he said loudly, ‘What nonsense! There was nothing whatever wrong with the food. It was delicious. We had very good cheese sandwiches. The ones with red salmon roe were excellent, and so were the ones with ham.’
In dire trouble though I was, I stood there thinking, What an incredible, surrealist experience! Here they are, more or less pronouncing on my life and death, and yet he’s defending his bloody sandwiches.
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘But obviously something was wrong. As to what you’re saying about my deceiving you for a long time, Viktor Fyodorovich, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. But whatever your decision, I’ll accept it like an officer and a gentleman.’
That seemed a pompous quotation, but in the heat of the moment it was all I could think of — and it had an electrifying effect on Grushko, who leapt from his chair, hurried round the table and shook my hand, suddenly looking far happier. I do not know what he had expected — perhaps that I would go to the General Secretary of the Communist Party and complain that some KGB officers had given me drugged brandy. Perhaps he had feared that I would make an hysterical scene in his office, which would have been embarrassing for everyone. But in any case he seemed immensely relieved.
As for me — I was anything but happy. I was thinking, This is total nonsense. How can I remain in the KGB if they know I have been working for a foreign country? Hundreds of men had been sacked from the KGB for the pettiest of crimes — losing an unimportant document, embezzling a small amount of money, or (like Lyubimov) becoming involved in scandals with women. How can they pretend that they will keep me on? Obviously they had some deeper long-term design.
I thought, The less I say, the better. The only thing to do is to use my holiday allowance, as they suggest. So I went back to my room, on one level devastated and on the other thinking, All the waiting and anticipation are over. They know what I’ve done. But for some reason they’ve decided to play with me, like a cat with a mouse. All I can do is get out and go home.
Before I could quit, the telephone rang: Gribin, from two doors along the passage. He called me in and said, ‘Oformlai’, get your paperwork done for the holiday. That was all. Then he came in to say goodbye; with the need to act removed, he was cool and matter-of-fact. ‘What can I say to you, old chap?’ he began. Still wanting to fight my way out, I said, ‘Kolya, I don’t know exactly what this is all about, but I suspect that I’ve been overheard saying something critical about the Party leaders, and that now there’s a big intrigue going on.’
‘If only it was that,’ he said, gazing at me. ‘If only it was a question of some indiscretion recorded by the microphones. But I’m afraid it’s far, far worse than that.’
I made a face to suggest that I had no idea what he was talking about, and muttered, ‘What can I say?’
Gribin indicated that the meeting was over. ‘Try to take it all philosophically,’ he said — and with that I left, never to see him again.
Later, in Britain, my dearest wish was, of course, to dial his number and say, ‘Kolya — do you remember? You told me to try to take it philosophically. Well — I did!’ But I never rang him. He was immensely career-oriented and mendacious, like most Soviet men: he had furthered his career by petty bribery, by flattery, and by entertaining the bosses with his guitar and easy romances. That was his way. But also he was the most innocent of my colleagues in the KGB — and in the aftermath of my escape he was the only one to be demoted. Others should have been held responsible for my escape, but either they were outside the central apparatus of the KGB at the critical moment, or they were protected by their networks of personal connections. Oleg Kalugin, former head of counter-intelligence, was in exile in Leningrad. Gennady Titov and Viktor Grushko had made themselves such sycophants of Kryuchkov that he could not punish them for if he had done so, it would have implied that he himself was ultimately responsible, which he was.
So I left. But as I prepared to go on holiday, I was haunted day and night by memories of the interrogation. Clearly I was supposed to remember nothing, but, perhaps because of the pep-pill I had taken in the morning, one by one parts of it began to come back, and the burning question — which I could not answer — was: how much had I given away? Had I compromised myself entirely? Or had I managed to hold out?
It was as if flashes of light briefly lit up individual scenes. For instance, there had been a session about my books. ‘Why do you have all those anti-Soviet volumes — Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Maximov, and the rest?’
‘But, of course,’ I had said, ‘as a PR Line officer I was supposed to read books like that. I needed to. They gave me essential background.’
Clearly the interrogators were trying to build a case against me. ‘No,’ they insisted. ‘You deliberately deceived the authorities. You used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal in this country. The number of books shows the extent to which you broke the law.’
Presently Grushko reappeared, walking round the table and again acting the host. ‘Well done, Oleg!’ he said heartily. ‘You’re having an excellent conversation. Carry on! Do please tell them everything. Educate them properly.’ He went on like that for a while, then suddenly seemed to lose patience, and went out, leaving his henchmen to carry on.
As the argument ground on, the sound corner of my brain was saying, ‘So they did make a secret search, after all.’ Another give-away moment came when one of them asked unpleasantly, ‘How can you be proud of your daughter Maria being able to say the Lord’s Prayer? How can you, a Communist, speak like that about something connected with religion?’ Again, the sound corner of my brain said, ‘Microphones!’ The only people to whom I had made that remark were my mother and my sister, and I had said it in the sitting room of my flat. That proved beyond all doubt that, in my absence, the apartment had been bugged.
It was clear that at intervals my brain, or part of it, had been making perfect sense, and had been able to draw these conclusions.
Then they began to say nastily, ‘What about Spotty? What about Toad?’ They were using the unflattering code-names which every KGB defector is assigned in the files. ‘What about Rascal? What about Scruff?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, and I continued to profess ignorance until they were forced to name one traitor openly — Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, who had co-operated with the French intelligence and had been executed in 1984. They asked me what I thought of such people, watching my reaction and waiting to see what I said. Then suddenly the search came nearer home, and they started to talk about my own past.
‘Ah yes, but we know who recruited you in Copenhagen,’ said Golubev, chain-smoking as always. ‘It was Dick Balfour.’ ‘Nonsense!’ I said. ‘That’s not true.’
‘But you wrote a report about him.’
‘Of course. I met him once. Yakushkin told me to. And I wrote a report of the meeting. But he never focused on me particularly. He used to talk to everybody — and Lipasov especially.’ Out of the mists the name came to my assistance.
‘Lipasov!’ said one of them. ‘Why didn’t he write reports, then?’
‘Ask him,’ I said.
‘I’ve no idea. But he must have.’
Dimly I heard one of them keep repeating, ‘Remember one thing. We’ve got irrefutable evidence of your guilt. We know you were a British agent. You’d better confess. Priznaysya! Confess!’
Then there was a pause. I remember Budanov sitting near me, while Golubev went out and then reappeared. His movements all seemed abrupt, but probably I was half asleep.
‘Priznaysya!’ he repeated hypnotically. ‘Confess! You confessed very well a few minutes ago. Now please go through it again, and confirm what you said. Confess again!’
They were talking slowly and emphatically, as if to a child who forgets what he heard five minutes ago. I kept saying, ‘No, I’ve nothing to confess. I’ve done nothing.’ And so it went on.
Reconstructing events, I guessed that the interrogation lasted five hours, from 1.30 p.m. until nearly seven. At one stage I went to the bathroom, and I may have been sick. As I went, I saw the two servants staring at me in the most unpleasant way, the man especially. Later, I heard indirectly that I made several visits to the bathroom, and drank large quantities of water: the interrogators concluded that I had been trained by the British in techniques of combating drugs, and was trying to clear the poison out of my system.[38] In fact I just had a great thirst. On the other hand, it may well have been the single British pep-pill which I had taken that morning which helped me to hold out as well as I did. That was about all I could remember — and still the key question went unanswered: had I or had I not given myself away irrevocably? For the moment I could not tell what the KGB had or had not found out; but it was clear that I was, in effect, under sentence of death, even if that sentence was suspended pending further investigations.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 36