Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky

by Oleg Gordievsky

  Of course he knew very well who I was, having been briefed the day before. Over the next few weeks we became good friends — and I shall always be grateful to his attractive young wife, with her striking dark-blue eyes: a specialist in flower-arranging, she always put beautiful vases in my room.

  At first I lived in a wing of the fort overlooking the sea, where the accommodation was Spartan, but adequate. One morning as I went for a shower I saw a man who was new to me, bald on top of his head, but with curly short hair round the sides. He looked at me, not sure who I was, and an hour later we met officially. He turned out to be the main political analyst, and a brilliant one at that, among the most skilful in Whitehall. With him I began a marathon debriefing, which lasted almost without a break for eighty days.

  Talking to this man, Gordon, with his huge knowledge and speed of assimilation, I discovered how much I had squandered in the past. In Denmark people had missed tremendous opportunities of extracting important information from me because they had tended to stick to mundane details about agents, names, leads, illegals, penetrations and all the other trivia, missing the larger political issues. Only a few of the names we had discussed in Copenhagen were of real significance: the rest were just material from the huge KGB correspondence, most of which, as I have said, was generated by people writing to justify their own existence.

  Working together, Gordon and I produced a number of major reports, known to the service as CX Reports, which emanate from specially protected sources. As well as being enthusiastic and sharp, he wrote admirably, in short words and concise sentences, so that the reports were a delight to read. Being ambitious, and knowing his value, he could sometimes be difficult, but I relished working with him, and found life much more enjoyable now that it was filled with so much creative endeavour.

  A few days after I had reached Britain, some hot news arrived from the United States: another senior KGB officer, Vitali Yurchenko, had defected to the Americans in Rome on 29 July, and had been taken to Washington. One of the first things he had told his hosts was that one Colonel Gordievsky —’probably your man’ — was in big trouble in Moscow. The American services cabled Britain, ‘We don’t have any such man, do you?’, and the Brits were able to reply with enthusiasm, ‘Yes, we do! He’s our man, and he’s here in England.’ I remembered Yurchenko: by training a counter-intelligence officer, who later switched to the American department of the First Chief Director-ate, by the end of 1984 he had become number one on Gribin’s list of potential Residents in London. Although he had scarcely known me, he now did me a good turn: he had heard some details of my interrogation while he was still in Moscow, and confirmed to a sceptical British officer that the account I had given was true. But he could not throw light on the fundamental mystery of who it was who had betrayed me.

  *

  After a run on the beach or golf-course, a shower and then breakfast, I would start work at 9 or 9.30 a.m., and carry on right through until 6 p.m. There was no end to the people who wanted to talk to me and, although Gordon demanded the lion’s share of my time, I generally switched to several different teams each day, doing two-hour stretches with each. The sheer variety of British people was a revelation. Until then I had got to know only three or four in Denmark and the same in London: now I was meeting brilliant officers every day, not least an Anglo-Indian lady bubbling over with fun and enthusiasm, and a deeply religious man called John, who was impressively thorough and meticulous and paid close attention to human problems. These new contacts made me realize how poorly organized the KGB was, both in its training and in its operations. For all its facilities — School 101 and the new Andropov Institute — its instruction and methods were crude compared with those of the British. The KGB was grossly overstaffed: its stations were too large, its officers were poorly controlled, and there was no focus on things that were important. But its greatest weakness, of course, was that all its operations were based on, and crippled by, Communist dogma.

  At the fort I was admirably looked after, but I still felt tense and below par, suffering from the loss of the family. ‘What have I done?’ I kept asking myself. ‘I was looking forward to life in the West — to all the freedom — and now I’m stuck here on my own. I’ve lost my children. I’ve lost my wife. I’ve lost my home. Everything’s gone. Here I am, getting old, and what have I achieved? All I’ve done is ruin everything.’ It was terrible to feel that, in spite of my escape, I had suffered a resounding defeat.

  Bit by bit I heard what had happened in London and Moscow. About a week after I came to England, a message from the Centre reached the KGB station in London saying that Comrade Gornov had disappeared. The British watchers across the road got the impression that the Embassy went into a state of paralysis. (Weeks later they sent a team to remove all the possessions we had left behind in our flat in Kensington. These were packed up in boxes and sent to Moscow, but the next thing people saw was the furniture from the KGB station being brought out and moved to the workshop at No. 10 Kensington Palace Gardens, where it could be taken apart, piece by piece, to search for the secret transmitter-microphones which I was assumed to have planted in it.)

  In Moscow the KGB waited in vain for me to reappear. They had no clue where I had gone, and after a while they began to think that I must have committed suicide. They therefore launched an All-Union Search, which meant that police and militia were looking for my body in ditches and under bridges the whole way from Brest-Litovsk to Vladivostok. Leila and the children were brought back to Moscow, where she was questioned endlessly but, of course, she had no more idea than anyone else about what had happened to me.

  With a full briefing from me, the British now knew every detail of the KGB in London, and they had the ammunition to carry out a full-scale purge of spies. The Foreign and Home Offices started to discuss what to do about the heavy KGB and GRU presence. Most senior officials were in favour of a large-scale expulsion but I was afraid that another major blow to the KGB would diminish my family’s chances still further, and I begged my contacts to exercise restraint, suggesting that some sort of deal might be worked out. Luckily a few senior officers were prepared to try for one, even though any such move was strongly against the instincts of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

  Eventually it was decided to approach a Soviet official secretly, and give him a verbal message saying, ‘In case you’re looking for Mr Gordievsky, he’s here.’ The message would make it clear that the British knew all about the Soviet intelligence presence in London, but that they would treat it leniently, allowing Moscow to withdraw people gradually, over a long period, provided the Gordievsky family was set free.

  The difficulty was to find a contact to whom such a message could safely be passed. In the end the choice fell on a counsellor at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, not a KGB man but a clean diplomat whose name was familiar to me because Katya had once mentioned it in a thesis she was writing about centrist political parties in France. She had formed a high opinion of the man, who was Jewish and bright, and he seemed an ideal channel.

  A meeting was arranged in Paris, and there, on the afternoon of 15 August, the message was passed. At my suggestion, it did not name me, but began, ‘A former senior KGB officer, who until recently was head of station in London...’ Our contact took the point immediately, and asked only one question: ‘Why did you come to me?’ Our messenger answered truthfully, ‘Because we regard you as the most intelligent Soviet diplomat in Western Europe.’ They agreed a procedure for meeting again in two weeks’ time, and parted.

  Thus, on the evening of 15 August, or the morning of the 16th, the KGB at last found out that I was safe and well in Britain. Their rage knew no bounds, and when their answer to our proposal came, on only the tenth day, it was pure vitriol. The officer who went to the second meeting in Paris returned full of gloom. The reply, he said, was one long tirade of abuse: according to the KGB, it was sheer impudence on our part to propose such an exchange, and outrageous to allow only two weeks in w
hich to work out some arrangement. We were well aware that under the Soviet system such a matter could not possibly be decided in such a short time. In sum, the answer was a total rejection.

  The KGB’s anger infected Stephen. ‘A reply like that demands a tough response!’ he fumed. ‘Now, Oleg, we’ve really got to throw all those damned spies out.’ And so they did, drafting a list and preparing to make an announcement at the beginning of September. Yet now the Centre, sensing that retaliation was imminent, played a clever delaying card. On 29 August a senior official of the British department rang the Moscow Embassy and said, ‘Mr Gorbachev wishes to see the British Ambassador, and may summon him at any time. Be prepared.’ So for the next few days — from 4 to 7 September —the Ambassador, Sir Bryan Cartledge, stood by...and, of course, no summons came.

  The British let off their bomb on the 12th, when they released a statement saying that I had defected. They made it sound not as if I had escaped from Moscow, but as if I had merely changed sides and stayed in Britain. At the same time, they declared twenty-five members of the Soviet Embassy staff personae non gratae.

  In 1971, when the British expelled 105 Soviet personnel, Moscow’s riposte had been weak: they had thrown out only sixteen or seventeen people from the Moscow Embassy, including several of no importance, thus demonstrating that they were anxious to remain on good terms with Britain. Now things were different. Having achieved the status of global superpower, the Soviet Union was in arrogant mood, and Gorbachev did not want to show himself a weakling. Besides, he regarded the KGB as his darling, and it was he who authorized a brutal response.

  Moscow made an exact quid pro quo, also expelling twenty-five, but because the British official presence in the Soviet Union has always been far smaller than the Soviet presence in Britain, the number was, in proportion, high. In London the British security service had already prepared a second list of six names to put through if the Soviet response should be so foolish, and this they now did. Again Moscow retaliated with the same number. The loss of thirty-one people — even though twelve were businessmen — devastated the British community in Moscow, and effectively wrecked the Embassy. (Later, in the winter, the KGB leaked a totally invented story to the journalist Viktor Louis, saying that I had escaped by being picked up in a diplomatic car in Moscow, secretly taken into the Embassy, and smuggled out again in the hubbub after the reception.)

  I felt bitter, because the atmosphere between the KGB and Britain had become highly poisonous, and I knew that my chances of extracting the family had diminished significantly. Life became difficult. I began having daydreams about Leila and the children arriving — I saw them coming through Customs at Heathrow — but I knew that it was all fantasy. For the moment, my only panacea was to bury myself in work. Gerry Warner, then deputy head of the intelligence service, was particularly sympathetic: seeing how important the family was to me, he launched a full-scale special initiative to get them out. The operation was given the code-name ‘Hetman’ — the title of leaders of the Ukrainian Cossacks — and soon the file on it grew to many volumes.

  Several of my debriefing sessions were with Colin McColl, later head of MI6. I soon saw how sharp and eloquent he was but he once disconcerted me by remarking on how incredibly boring most KGB documents were. He was right, of course: the reports and messages were couched in utterly wooden and unimaginative language, but I, having risked my life to spirit them into Western hands, could not help feeling an element of personal criticism in his strictures.

  On 16 September, who should come skimming into the fort by helicopter but Bill Casey, veteran head of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who wanted to brief President Reagan for his first meeting with Gorbachev, due in November. Being so fresh from Moscow, and having seen Gorbachev in action, I had plenty of ideas, and I spent the working day with Casey, while Christopher Curwen tactfully translated the American’s questions for me (apart from his accent, he was having trouble with his teeth, which made him hard to understand). Over lunch we went on talking, and then Casey asked if he could use a tape recorder to catch some of my answers. I found it immensely flattering that such a senior figure should be taking notes like a schoolboy.

  He was anxious to plan the meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva, and he asked many questions about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly known as Star Wars. If America offered the Soviet Union a share in the technology of SDI, he wanted to know, would Gorbachev accept it? My answer was an emphatic, ‘No.’ I said that the Russians would think the offer was a trick, to involve them in colossal expense, and would not dream of accepting it. I suggested, on the contrary, that if the Americans were prepared to drop SDI, they might win important concessions on arms control. But Casey’s reaction was as negative as mine: ‘Never,’ he said. ‘SDI’s the President’s pet.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But I think that in the long term SDI will ruin the Soviet leadership.’

  Afterwards, Gerry Warner said that he considered it was this one meeting which, indirectly, set off the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union. The advice I gave Casey encouraged the Americans, at Geneva, to maintain their strong military position and take a tougher line with the Eastern bloc. This in turn made clear to Gorbachev what he was up against internationally, and at home forced him to take urgent measures to catch up with the West. So he began the reforms, which were swept up on the roller-coaster of political logic and ran away from him.

  It was difficult for me to judge the value of my information to the West, but I believe I was able to contribute in four main areas.

  The first was the political, military and strategic thinking of the Kremlin, especially Soviet arms control policy and attitudes to NATO. While still working in the KGB, I had smuggled out large numbers of secret reports on these subjects so that the West had direct sight of Soviet documents and methods. Later, during my first two years of debriefings, I was able to add a good deal more.

  The second area was KGB operations. I was able to describe these at first hand: besides identifying individual officers, I gave details of methods used, the role of the illegals, with the result that several potentially dangerous agents and contacts were rendered harmless: Bettaney in Britain, Treholt in Norway, Bergling in Sweden, one man in France and others in Denmark.

  The third area was the evaluation of Soviet threats — military, political, propagandist, and intelligence. In a few spheres the Soviet threat was greater than it appeared, but in almost all it was far smaller, and I was able to explain how the land lay. For instance, one British security officer told me that when he read the KGB’s ‘Plan of Work in Britain for 1984’, which I had obtained for him, his hair stood on end; but when I told him how little of the plan was real, and how much was high-flown phraseology coined to please the Centre, he felt far more relaxed. Here, as elsewhere, I saved Western agencies huge amounts of money because I gave them the confidence to stop monitoring activities which did not merit their time or attention.

  The fourth area was the explanation of Soviet psychology: how people thought, spoke and acted, both in the KGB stations in embassies abroad and in Moscow. By showing how the Communist bureaucracy worked, and how one department was connected with another, I was again able to save a good deal of work and expense.

  *

  In October I felt that I had spent long enough living in a barracks, and began looking for a flat of my own. My first searches brought disappointment: perhaps I had been spoiled by the high standards in Scandinavia, but here I saw one new flat after another flawed by poor workmanship or design. At last, however, Joan hit on a new development which was of superior quality: blocks of flats were set on wooded hills, and skilfully blended into the surroundings. There I bought an apartment.

  On the night before I was to move in, and sleeping in a hotel, my case officer knocked on the door in the small hours and said, ‘I’ve just heard some terrible news on the radio. Yurchenko’s redefected.’

  ‘I
’m not surprised,’ I muttered. ‘He’s just a Homo sovieticus, a piece of shit.’ But Stephen, like other friends, was worried about my state of mind and feared that Yurchenko’s action might give me ideas. There is a Russian proverb: ‘Another man’s soul is a dark place.’ How could the British see or read what I was really thinking? They were afraid that, desperate to rejoin my family, I might vanish in the middle of the night and give myself up to the Soviet Embassy. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that. And, anyway, I’m full of contempt for Yurchenko.’ Later I wrote to Bill Casey, saying I was ashamed of the way Yurchenko had behaved, but that he was only a Homo sovieticus, and that no one should lose sleep over him. I wanted the letter to be one of sympathy for what had happened, but the CIA misinterpreted it as trying to console them for having made a mistake. In their answer they said that it had not been a mistake, but that, on the contrary, Yurchenko had been immensely useful to them while he lasted. Back in Moscow, he claimed that he had never defected voluntarily, but had been drugged and kidnapped — clearly basing his account on that of Oleg Bitov, who said exactly the same thing. The Americans retaliated by pointing out that the two worst tortures he had endured were learning to play golf and acquiring a tan on a sunbed.

  *

  Now that I had a home of my own, I began to enjoy an extraordinary sense of freedom. For the first time in my life I was free of inhibitions. For the first time I could trust people. I did not have to tell lies. I talked openly to many British friends, and the experience was exhilarating. I could open my heart, and, as we say in Russia, my soul. (The Russian for soul is dusha, and dushevnost means ‘coming from the heart’.)