Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Every contact I had with officials deepened my sense of impending doom. My own doctor, a woman I knew quite well, looked worried when she gave me a check-up. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demanded. ‘Your heartbeat’s irregular. You’re frightened. What are you so scared of?’ Whenever I met Boris Bocharov, who was in charge of the illegals in Britain, he kept asking, ‘What went wrong?’ Then one day he said, ‘Now I know what happened. Your deputy defected.’ I said, ‘What nonsense! Nobody’s defected. I can vouch for it.’

  In the personnel department I had always got on well with the three women who worked in the secretariat, bringing them little presents whenever I came back from abroad. Now, when I told them I would not be returning to England, I saw in their faces that they knew something bad about me. Then, as I surrendered my diplomatic passport in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I found the same man who had done the paperwork to despatch me to England three years earlier. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to keep the passport?’ he asked. ‘If you give it up, do you realize I’ll have to cross you off the list of the nomenklatura?’ As I watched, he opened a big ledger and crossed out my name, so ending my life on the lowest rung of the Soviet élite.

  Another distressing scene took place in my flat, when Aleksandr Fedotov, a radio-intercept specialist whom Guk had sacked from London, came to pay me a visit. Aware as ever of the listening microphones, I told him that I seemed to be the victim of a tremendous intrigue, that I had lost my job and my posting and, like him, would never return to London. As he was leaving, he expressed his warm sympathy, and said loudly, ‘Oleg Antonovich, what can you expect in this dreadful totalitarian society?’ I looked at him with agony in my eyes, unable to speak for fear of compromising myself still further. The listeners must have been on the alert: after my escape he was the one man dismissed from the KGB.

  A few days later Leila and the children arrived back in Moscow. They had been made to leave London so suddenly that she had not even had time to buy the girls holiday clothes but, in spite of the haste, she reached Moscow in high spirits, and when I met them at the airport was full of enthusiasm about the special treatment they had received. In London an official of Aeroflot had met them and escorted them all the way to the aircraft, where they had first-class seats. When they landed, another Aeroflot man had escorted them off. Knowing that all this had been laid on by the KGB, my heart sank — and it was a bitter blow for me, in the car, to tell Leila what a disaster had befallen us.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m in big trouble,’ I began. ‘We can’t go back.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘We can’t ever go back to England.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  I pretended that my troubles were caused by KGB intrigues, which were worse than ever now that I was rising towards the apex of the command pyramid. At first Leila could scarcely comprehend our change of fortune, so suddenly had it hit her; but as she recovered from her initial shock she translated her immediate anxieties into worries about me, because she could see that I was depressed enough to be physically ill.

  When she spoke about it to my mother, Mama, with her practical outlook, said, ‘All right, let’s get him interested in his car. Make him prepare it for its annual test.’ So I spent some time at the garage in which the car was kept because without passing its test it was not allowed on the road; but the truth was that I hated all things mechanical, and did it only to fill in time and think about my predicament. Meanwhile, my stock of allegedly seditious books had been confiscated, and I had had to sign a list as they were being taken away. I knew my signature meant that even if the KGB managed to prove nothing else they could still give me a couple of years in gaol, for having the books.

  In the flat it was almost unbearable to hear the girls talking English to each other, and saying, ‘I don’t like it here. Let’s go back to London.’ I tried to keep morale up by saying loudly for the benefit of the listening microphones, ‘I shall complain to Mr Aliyev [like Leila, an Azeri, a leading member of the Politburo]. Let’s write him a letter, because it’s an outrage to treat a KGB colonel like this.’

  Yet real life had to go on. Leila made plans to take the children for a long summer holiday in Azerbaijan, staying with relations of her father at a place on the Caspian where the girls would be able to swim. As for me, I was battling day and night with the problem of what I should do. Should I activate my escape plan before it was too late? I could only presume that the KGB were searching for further evidence which would seal my fate — and yet there was a chance that they might not find anything. With my wife and children around me, it was impossible to take such a harsh decision. My heart was aching so much that I could hardly bear to think about it. But slowly the conviction grew that my only real option was to flee the country.

  Racked by uncertainty, I appealed to Gribin to give me a ticket for a holiday in some sanatorium and, after consultation with his bosses, he decided to send me to Semyonovskoye, a well-known KGB establishment 100 kilometres due south of Moscow. The statutory length of a stay in such a place was twenty-four days, and the KGB knew that, for that time, I would be effectively under control, although not physically restrained.

  So, on 15 June, I set off by electric commuter train for Semyonovskoye, leaving the family in the flat, but planning to return and see them before they departed for the far south. I was not escorted — the KGB were pretending that they were not too worried about me — but almost certainly I was under surveillance. Arriving in the evening, I found the sanatorium attractively set in wooded hills, with a stream running through the grounds. I checked in with the duty doctor, who was expecting me, and told me I had been allocated a bed in a double room on the first floor, with a balcony facing the river.

  The only disagreeable feature of the place was that an immensely deep nuclear shelter was being built almost in the grounds and construction work went on, with lights blazing, all through the night. I discovered that the shelter was a Category A model, designed for top-rank KGB officers and connected by underground tunnels both to the generals’ block (part of the sanatorium) and to a luxurious dacha, once owned by Stalin but now used by KGB leaders.

  Throughout my stay I was furnished with a room-mate, clearly put there to keep an eye on me. The first was a pensioner in his mid-sixties, very active and orthodox in his ideas, who for the first couple of days tried to follow me everywhere before he tired of this restless occupation. Probably he put in a bad report on me for sitting on the balcony and listening through headphones to foreign stations on my short-wave radio — but by that stage I was past caring. Little did he know that the BBC’s World Service programme Outlook nearly made me cry with nostalgia: the good old English tunes they played represented a world I might never see again.

  For the second half of my stay the pensioner was replaced by a lieutenant colonel of the Borderguard Troops: a typical Soviet officer whose aim in coming to the sanatorium was to drink and pick up a woman — in both of which he succeeded. In some ways he was an attractive character, and talked openly about his problems; he also told me a good deal about borders and frontier defences, a subject in which I had a rapidly growing interest. Although totally hidebound in some areas — believing, for instance, that Britain was crippled by shortages of material goods, and that life there was as bad a struggle as in Russia — he also had a streak of scepticism when it came to his own area of expertise.

  He said he found it hard to believe Soviet propaganda’s claims that spies and infiltrators were constantly trying to violate the country’s borders and penetrate the frontiers from outside. ‘That’s obviously not true,’ he said. ‘All the border defences must be against something else. What do you reckon it is?’ I said, ‘Well, I think you’re right. It’s all to stop Soviet people trying to flee to the West.’

  This relaxed minder spent much of his time with the woman he had picked up, and she, too, was an interesting character. She worked in the watching department of the KGB in Novosibirsk, spying o
n people through peepholes and hidden television cameras. When I asked if that wasn’t rather amusing, she replied, ‘Not at all. I spend my life watching wild, raw sex and violence — drunks beating up their mistresses, and so on. It’s all incredibly depressing.’

  Another of the residents was Leonid Makarov, who had arrived at the Residency in Copenhagen towards the end of my first tour there, and now held a senior position in the Ukrainian KGB. When he met me in the corridor, not having seen me for years, he did not appear in the least surprised or ask what I was doing. I felt sure that he had dropped into my Department in Moscow recently, and knew all about me. Yet he did show curiosity when he found that I had borrowed a book about the nineteenth-century Russo-Turkish wars from the library. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ he said, ‘what is there of interest in that old campaign?’ I told him that one did not get a chance to study the Russo-Turkish wars every day — but it was a lucky encounter because it occurred to me that if I escaped from the Soviet Union, he would probably tell the department that he had caught me studying maps of Transcaucasia and the Turkish border. In fact I was privily studying maps of the border area between the Soviet Union and Finland, standing between the banks of bookshelves where no one could see me.

  Outside, the weather remained perfect — warm without being too hot, sunny and dry. I swam in the river, and enjoyed jogging through the woods, where several times I spotted surveillance men hastily pretending to urinate into the undergrowth as I appeared; twice I walked the ten kilometres to the railway station, partly to increase my fitness, in case I had to make a long trek during my escape. On one glorious day the family came down to see me, and I found it incredibly poignant, not knowing when I should see the girls again. Their characters were developing clearly. Maria, or Masha, was active, bright, quick-moving, good at sports and interested in everything; Anna (who later slimmed down to become a good runner) was a bit plump, and inclined to be moody, but already devoted to animals and fascinated by insects. As I put them on the train to return to Moscow, we had only a few seconds, so I hopped on board and kissed them, just before the automatic doors closed.

  By then my resolve was hardening, and soon after the family had gone, I took the decision to prepare for my escape. ‘There’s no alternative,’ I told myself. ‘If I don’t get out, I’m going to die. I’m as good as a dead man on holiday.’

  So it was that I returned once more to Moscow, and began the sequence of moves described in Chapter One.

  Chapter Fifteen – Free Agent

  Awkwardly I scrambled out of the car and lurched to my feet, soaked in sweat, my trousers hanging down. All round stood the glorious, soaring, clean pines of a Finnish forest; close at hand I saw a ring of friendly, smiling faces, among them that of Stephen, my latest case officer from England, lit up with excitement. Nobody looked more triumphant than Joan, for the exfiltration plan had been hers alone, and it had worked like magic. It may sound as if bundling me into the boot of a car was a simple operation, but it had been preceded by an enormous, sustained effort. The British had watched the signal sites in Moscow for seven years: even when I was abroad, they had watched them once a week, and then, when I was back in the Soviet capital, every day.

  Yet now the jubilation was shot through with anxiety about the circumstances of my betrayal. When Joan took me aside and asked urgently, ‘What happened?’, all I could answer was that I did not know. ‘Obviously some information got into their hands — but how, I’ve no idea. You can see what trouble I was in — I’ve had to leave the family behind.’

  For a few minutes I was borne up by the elation of success. The whole KGB had been after me, and yet we had outsmarted them. What a victory for me, and for the British! I kept thinking, I’m safe! Not only that. Also safe was the huge store of knowledge accumulated in my head: now I could give it to the British government, and they, if they wished, could pass it on to the Americans. Looking at the happy, smiling, normal people round me, I again felt the tremendous contrast with the callousness and dirt and untidiness which had prevailed beyond the border. The faces round me were open and friendly and alive. I felt ashamed to think that in the KGB there were no such faces, only snouts, full of evil and vice and unpleasantness and hatred. I kept thinking of the book by Yevgeni Zamyatin, Litsa i Khari, ‘Snouts and Faces’. Russians once had perfectly normal, nice faces, visible in pre-revolutionary photographs, but Communism had turned them into snouts, ugly mugs twisted by brutality and intrigue, which betrayed their owners’ mental and physical degradation.

  This was no time for lingering over philosophical reflections. Friendly Danes had brought me new clothes — trousers, a shirt and a sweater. None of them fitted but they were better than nothing. The rescue cars went on their way to Helsinki, and the rest of us piled into two Volvos for a marathon drive to the Norwegian border in the far north-west.

  That trip took thirty hours, with only a few short pit-stops. The cars had food and drink on board, and, with the drivers taking turns — Joan and Jack alternating with two Danes — we just kept going. Every time we stopped to stretch our legs, the mosquitoes were hellish. On the way I learnt that when I sent out my emergency appeal for help most of my British friends had been on holiday but that they had been called in and had come at once to Finland. I also learnt that, against this very moment, the British had gone to the length of rehearsing the entire drive, not once but twice, so that they could judge conditions and timings in snow and ice as well as in summer.

  Now in mid-summer we sped north along beautifully engineered roads, twisting and turning round huge lakes through a world of amazing greenness, on which darkness never fell. As we crossed the Arctic Circle into Lapland the forest gradually died out and gave way to meadows full of wild flowers. With my knowledge of the KGB and its vindictiveness, I became haunted by a vision of Chebrikov somehow organizing a blockade on the Finnish—Norwegian border: all cars, I felt certain, would be stopped and searched, Needless to say, when we reached the frontier, the road lay wide open: the guards were standing with their backs to it, and did not even turn round as we passed; but my apprehension must have affected the officers escorting me because, when we all got out and shook hands on Norwegian soil, I noticed that their palms were wet.

  At Tromso we were met by a British officer and booked into a hotel. By then, with the immediate excitement worn off, stress and exhaustion were almost overcoming me, and I felt too ill to eat anything in the wonderful seafood restaurant where we had dinner. Even to dress in semi-respectable clothes seemed an immense effort, and I had to ask poor Joan, who was also dog-tired after our night on the road, to take up the bottoms of my new trousers, so that I did not look entirely ridiculous. In the morning I felt so bad that I suggested to Stephen that I should go into a nursing home for a couple of days to receive proper medical attention. His reaction was merely a nod: to him, all foreigners were hypochondriacs and he sensibly took no notice of my plea.

  Next day we caught a local plane to Oslo. There a Norwegian officer led us through back corridors at the airport to put us on a British Airways flight for London. At Heathrow, Special Branch officers slipped us off the aircraft, avoided Customs, and took us straight to the car park of a hotel, where a high-powered reception committee had gathered to greet me. Among them was the head of British intelligence’s Soviet section; another was one of the directors of the security service, John Deverell, a man of exceptional intelligence and charm, who became a staunch friend and ally.[39] Everyone was euphoric at scoring such a victory over the KGB: champagne flowed, and the atmosphere was one of celebration.

  After a while my helpers drove me to the Midlands where a landowner had put his large country home at our disposal. It was a lovely old house, equipped with every comfort and full of servants, standing in splendid grounds; but I found I could not enjoy it. With the tension and excitement gone, reaction set in: I felt utterly worn out and wanted a room of my own and privacy — a place where I could read and be quiet and recover. Instead of that, the h
ouse was full of bustle, of people coming and going, and I could not concentrate on the one thought in my head, which was to find some means of making contact with my family and telling them what had happened.

  On my second day in the country, Christopher Curwen, alias ‘C’, the head of MI6, arrived by helicopter. Obviously a man of high intelligence, he took up my point and worked at it like a terrier with a bone. How could we send a message to Leila, who was still in the far south of Russia? KGB surveillance men would probably be sitting on the staircase outside my own flat, waiting for me to reappear. What if I telephoned her parents, or Arif and Katya? Almost certainly those lines would be bugged by now. After chewing over every possibility, Curwen came to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing whatever we could do. He was cold and objective, but clearly right.

  His verdict left me even more depressed. I had imagined that the British services were omnipotent, that they could arrange anything; but now they were unable to manage even such an elementary manoeuvre as to send a message to my wife.

  A retired security officer, spending time in the village beyond the grounds to pick up local gossip, soon found that people realized something strange was going on in the big house. ‘This is no good,’ he said as he returned. ‘We’ve got to get out.’

  Our destination was a nineteenth-century naval fortress on the south coast, now used by the intelligence community for training and seminars. I was offered a helicopter ride but, as a result of the recent stress, I had developed a foolish fear of flying, of being trapped inside an aircraft and unable to help myself if anything went wrong (this persisted for nearly eighteen months). I declined, and we went by car to the outskirts of London, where the all-but-complete M25 yawned smooth and empty but unusable, and on southwards.

  At the fort we were met by a handsome, energetic-looking man in his early fifties, who introduced himself as the commandant. ‘Of course I don’t know who you are or why you’re here,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but that doesn’t matter. We’re used to such things. Everyone loves it here. We’re on the sea and it’s a bit windy, but the fresh air is terrific.’