In asking his questions, Quayle revealed a confrontational attitude. His was the robust, conservative voice of American foreign policy. I sensed that he had limited knowledge but was determined to improve it. I also felt that he had suffered a good deal from criticism for his lack of understanding of foreign affairs, and now desperately wanted someone to back up his own ideas. When we finished, he said, ‘Well, good! That entirely confirms what I thought’ — but I said something to warn him that he should not think he knew it all.
When I visited the States again a year later, he asked to see me once more: a different office, a different photographer, and Quayle a different man, tired, worried and already ground down by the burdens of office. This time he had detailed someone to prepare questions for him to ask me, but he did not want me to know this, and had tried to memorize them. From his expression I could see that all the time he was trying to read his mental list of questions, and not listening to what I said but relying on the note-taker and on being able to read a cleaned-up version of my replies later.
Every visit that I made to America was rewarding. In one year I made three trips, then two in each of the next two years, and three more later — ten visits in all. Always I travelled as a guest of the CIA, who would inform fellow agencies such as the FBI, Naval Intelligence, the State Department and others of my impending arrival, so that they could book some of my time if they wanted it. These trips were organized in a clandestine manner: hotel rooms were booked in other names and nobody was supposed to know who I was. But gradually, as my name and presence became more familiar — and particularly after publication of my book KGB: The Inside Story — standards were allowed to slip. Instead of being debriefed in five-star hotels, I simply moved from one office to another in the main building of the CIA, surviving on sandwiches and disgusting coffee from machines. ‘What’s happened?’ I once asked in mock-complaint. ‘You used to fly me first class and keep me in luxury. Now I go club class and work on concrete staircases.’ Their explanation was that, with the appearance of the book, I was no longer a secret person and there was no need for me to remain in hiding.
The CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, about half an hour out of Washington, struck me as a fascinating place. During the day there were always dozens of people standing on the steps outside, drawing desperately on cigarettes, as no smoking was allowed inside the building. Every lavatory cubicle was equipped for people in wheelchairs, with a door that opened automatically at the touch of a button: few people in wheelchairs worked there, but some government regulation demanded that they be universally provided for.
I liked almost all the people I met in the CIA. The overall intellectual standard struck me as lower than in the British service — for the British, needing fewer people, can afford to recruit only those with really good brains. In the CIA some were very good indeed, some less so, but almost all were generous, kind and cordial, with their hearts in the right place. Yet I also found the Americans more critical about their superiors, and more inclined to gossip about them: there seemed to be much more irritation with authority than in Britain, where the easy, unconfrontational attitude to leadership made relationships easier. Such prejudices as the Americans had were the result of ignorance rather than propaganda, and they had a positively Teutonic respect for rules and regulations. People kept asking, ‘What is the KGB instruction for such-and-such a situation?’ and I would say, ‘Now, look, there are endless rules and regulations in Soviet Communist life. But what the intelligence service needs above all is vision, imagination and spontaneity. It follows that there can’t be rules for every situation. People play things by ear, and rely on traditional solutions, not all of which are on paper. And when definite instructions exist, they are generally ignored.’
That used to surprise them. Yet often they showed a high degree of brilliance, as in a two-hour session on illegals. In a large room, a number of people sat in a semicircle, and officers responsible for that side showed immense knowledge of their subject, remembering names and personalities of individuals, who had done what, and when. In this field, at least, the CIA’s professionalism was striking.
One senior intelligence officer with responsibility for Soviet affairs cast doubt on all my information about Operation RYAN. His theory was that the whole thing had been no more than a deception exercise by the Soviet leadership: certainly he had tested and studied every aspect of RYAN most cleverly, and I was impressed by his thoroughness and knowledge. In the end he came to believe in the reality of the Soviet leaders’ paranoia, but he remained sceptical about some aspects. He claimed, for instance, that in the Able Archer exercise, and the reaction to it, the levels of preparedness were not what one would expect before a real nuclear attack: he said that when Americans observed the actions of Soviet troops inside Russia, and checked signal intensities, there was no hard evidence of anything extraordinary.
That made me explain how I had understood RYAN. It was not so much that the Soviet authorities were expecting a nuclear attack at any moment. Rather, they were trying to create a system which would be able to react instantaneously to any future attack — to have their system in place. I explained that Moscow had become worried by the Star Wars initiative: if the whole of the United States was shielded by an umbrella proof against intercontinental missiles, might not the American nation become so overconfident and aggressive as to resort to a sudden assault?
Sometimes, in an attempt to liven up my lectures, I told the odd joke — but it was not always successful. One day, for instance, I brought out the one about the American sent to Russia as an illegal. He has been thoroughly trained and prepared, his identity documents are faultless, he speaks fluent Russian, he dresses like a Russian, crosses the border without difficulty and tries to settle down. His work, however, is not a success, and one day, drinking with his friend Vanya, he complains about his fate. ‘Vanya,’ he says, ‘what’s wrong with me? Don’t I speak Russian perfectly?’
‘Yes, John, your Russian’s brilliant.’
‘And don’t I play balalaika well?
‘Like a dream, John.’
‘And don’t I drink vodka by the tumblerful, just as you Russians do, Vanya?’
‘Oh, yes, you can drink.’
‘So what’s wrong, then?’
‘Just one drawback, John, you’re black.’
The story might have gone down better if the audience had appreciated that it was supposed to be funny. But another, a typical KGB joke, was easier to spot.
A gala session in the KGB’s Dzerzhinsky Club. There are over a thousand senior officers in the hall. Lined up on the platform are the most important bosses, and two of them, one older, one younger, are sitting together, chatting during the speeches which, as usual, are of crippling tedium. The older man says, ‘Ivan, I’ve spotted the CIA spy in our ranks.’
‘Really! Which is he?’
‘Row eleven — just in the middle there, with the blue tie.’
‘But how can you tell?’
‘From the old proverb. It’s very simple: “The enemy never sleeps”.’
*
Work and travel abroad did much to stop me brooding about the family; but the problem of recovering them remained my chief preoccupation, and it was a big moment when the first genuine letter from Leila found its way through, in the winter of 1989-90. When I was telephoned and the caller said, ‘We’ve got a letter from your wife,’ my first reaction was that it could not be spontaneous, and that there was no point in hurrying to get it. But when I suggested that this missive, too, was probably inspired by the KGB, the caller said, ‘No, no, it’s quite different. Please come in.’
The envelope was addressed in crude fashion: ‘ENGLISH FOREIGN OFFICE — For Oleg Gordievsky’ was all it said. But a battery of Finnish stamps showed clearly where it had come from. Inside was a wonderful, genuine letter, six pages of single-spaced typing, the first true communication for four and a half years. Reading it gave me a tremendous thrill: not just to learn th
at all the family were well, but to find that Leila was her normal forthright self. ‘Stop all that nonsense about not ringing,’ she had written. ‘Call whenever you like, and I won’t say anything silly.’ The letter must have been smuggled out to Finland by courier, and when we managed to identify the man, I got someone from the station in Helsinki to go and thank him on my behalf.
Galvanized by this revolutionary development, I began to ring regularly, once a fortnight at a fixed time; and during every call I included some arguments about why it would make sense for the KGB to reunite the family. On another front, the Foreign Office told me that a member of the British Embassy in Moscow would visit Leila and take along any parcel I sent. I rushed out and bought beautiful clothes for the girls, padded jackets especially, and sent them off.
To be sure that Leila was at home when the Embassy representative went round, we worked out an arrangement that would pin her down. During one of my telephone calls, I would fix the precise date and time of the next and the messenger would turn up at the moment the second call was due. As luck would have it, I happened to be in New Zealand when the day for the first call came along, and I had to make it at 8 a.m. one morning, sitting at the desk of the head of the New Zealand security service. Everyone was excited, but at first we could not get through. ‘All right,’ said my host calmly, ‘we’ll keep talking, and the girls will keep trying.’ So we did, and suddenly, after half an hour, we got a connection. I ran across to the telephone, and there was Moscow, echoing through the satellite. As we chatted, I said to Leila, ‘D’you realize, I’m in Wellington, New Zealand. I’m ringing from the university, because they invited me to lecture here.’ I duly set a date and time for our next communication, and the first secretary from the Embassy went round on the dot, taking the clothes I had sent, together with five thousand pounds in cash and a large supply of roubles. The money was enough for Leila to pay off the remaining debt on the flat, and to top up her monthly allowance for several years.
The first secretary was charmed by her, and vice versa, and they agreed to meet again. But somehow this good start came to nothing. In spite of making various plans, the Embassy did not manage to deliver a second parcel I sent, and various invitations from the Embassy never bore fruit. Leila and the diplomat met again, obviously under surveillance, but when they planned a third rendezvous, to hand over the parcel, the KGB moved quickly to declare him persona non grata. Although the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, managed to delay his departure from Moscow by six months, through a personal appeal to his opposite number, Edvard Shevardnadze, the diplomat did not see Leila again until she reached England eighteen months later. In telephone conversations she was disappointed and angry.
We also had problems with two long letters I tried to send via the Foreign Office. In writing to her, my natural sense of mischief rose to the surface in the form of an inclination to tease the KGB, and I referred to them sarcastically as ‘the clerks’ and ‘the executioners’ (in early nineteenth-century Russia a clerk was known as an ‘executor’). The letter was passed to the British Embassy in Moscow, for onward transmission, but the Ambassador, Sir Bryan Cartledge, read it and refused to pass it. According to Foreign Office dogma, you must always be polite, flexible, courteous...and I was being openly contemptuous. The letter was therefore returned — whereupon I sent it through the KGB after one of my meetings with them at the Foreign Office.
At least Leila started to write letters regularly, addressing them to me at an anonymous postbox in London, and she described various events well, among them the death of my mother, which took place in November 1989. I knew that she had been ill, but not what the trouble was, and it was bitter for me that I could not see her before she died, at the age of eighty-two. Towards the end of her life she had been much influenced by my sister Marina, who had taken a hostile attitude towards me. My mother, not understanding the political complexity of the modern world, had to go along with what her daughter was telling her, but I would dearly have liked to let her have my version of events.
By May 1991 the liberalization of the Soviet Union had reached such a stage that Arif and Katya were allowed to travel abroad for the first time in their lives, and they took their little son with them to Italy to spend a couple of weeks on holiday with friends in Pisa. We formed a plan that I should join them for a day or two, so I filled an old suitcase with things for my children and flew out, only to find the weather appalling, with Pisa barely visible beneath sheets of rain. The Italian security service were warned that I was coming and, because they were worried that the KGB might be using Arif as a decoy, they surrounded me with full protection.
It was a joyous moment when I met my in-laws in a cafe, and I was amused to see Arif wearing an ancient brown sports jacket which I had left behind six years ago — an indication of how severe the shortages in Moscow still were. We took a taxi to a nice, authentic restaurant, and after a splendid dinner we decided to walk back to where they were staying. We had gone only a few yards when Katya said, ‘Oleg, look out, we’re being followed.’
‘Relax,’ I told her. ‘They’re only there to protect me. You did well to notice them. But you never spotted them in the restaurant — five men all sitting at one table.’
Next day we were taken on an excursion by Katya’s hosts — an attractive, sexy woman and her husband. Afterwards, to say thank you, I tried to invite them both to lunch at a restaurant, but they insisted on giving us lunch in their house. We bought a couple of bottles of wine and had a party there. We were all delighted by Pisa, which is so small that one can walk everywhere; and another bonus was that Arif and Katya discovered that there was a direct rail carriage all the way to Moscow, so that it was no trouble for them to take my suitcase back with them.
By then many kind helpers had taken up the battle for the family on my behalf, not least Nicholas Bethell, the politician and author, whom I had first met while still working at the London Residency. With his prominent public position, and his wide experience in the field of human rights, Lord Bethell was an ideal advocate, and between us we concocted a plan whereby he should call in on Leila during a visit to Moscow in September 1990. The ruse worked to perfection. To make sure she was at home on the day, I warned her by telephone that someone would come to see her on 30 September. He telephoned her that morning from his hotel, explained who he was, and went round within an hour, risking arrest by the KGB whose minders were as usual parked in force outside the block of flats. In the event they did not try to intervene, and Bethell conducted what he described as a ‘spirited interview’. This he published a week later, in the Sunday Express, in the form of an open letter to Gorbachev, quoting Leila at length on the villainies and treachery of the KGB. He also published two glorious colour photographs which he had taken of the family, and these alone gave our morale a powerful boost. Whether or not the diatribe had any influence on events, it is impossible to say, but I was, and remain, profoundly grateful to Lord Bethell for his efforts on our behalf.
At the start of 1991 I began predicting that there would be a coup d’état against Gorbachev and his regime. I could see that members of the Central Committee were being pushed to the wall by the march of political development, and that soon only two courses would be open to them: either they would fight back, or they would have to surrender and disappear. Since they were not the type to give in, the only possible outcome seemed to be a coup, and, indeed, on 6 January 1991 I forecast just such an event in a big article in the Sunday Times. My only mistake was to predict that the coup would succeed.
When it started, on 17 August, at first things looked very black. The man behind it was Kryuchkov, whose aim was clearly to re-establish the old order and with it the supremacy of the KGB. Yet only two days later everything swung round with dramatic speed. Kryuchkov was arrested, and the liberal-minded Vadim Bakatin became chairman of the KGB.
When these hectic events began, the Sunday Times invited me to act as a consultant for the week, and I spent some frantic days
in their office, armed with my Russian radio and a portable telephone. Then the unbelievable happened. One day as I sat there, the telephone rang, and a man from Independent Television said, ‘We think your family are about to be released. Bakatin, the new head of the KGB, has just given a press conference in Moscow and said that they can go.’
Before I could take in the news, the man was asking me if I would go straight round to the ITV studios to be filmed. Life became like a circus, with unbelievable events occurring all over the place. As I walked up the steps into the studios, I dialled Leila in Moscow, only to find that people from ITN were already at our flat, shooting film there, so our conversation was filmed simultaneously at both ends. I could hear her doing her best to be careful, and not let her hopes soar too high, because she knew that the KGB could easily change its mind. ‘But if it’s true,’ I said, ‘when will you come?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said coolly. ‘There’s no particular hurry. Perhaps next week.’
What had happened, it turned out, was that the new British Ambassador, Sir Roderick Braithwaite, had got in touch with Bakatin the moment the situation changed, and had reminded him of the Gordievsky problem. Then at the press conference Bakatin revealed that he had decided to satisfy the Ambassador’s request. When the journalist Olga Belan — an old friend of Leila from her days as a reporter — asked him if he could reveal how he had reached his decision, he replied, ‘Oh, well, all right. I felt that it was an old problem which should be resolved. When I asked my generals, they all categorically said, “No!”, but I decided to ignore them, and regard this as my first major victory in the KGB.’
Next morning, Friday, Leila got a call from Ovir, the visa and permit department, asking why she had not come in to collect her passport — as if they had been awaiting her visit for days. A passport being an unrealizable dream for 99 per cent of Soviet citizens, this was an amazing question. Leila suggested, ‘Tomorrow?’, but since that was Saturday she agreed to go in on Monday. By an extraordinary coincidence the British Prime Minister, John Major, was in Moscow that week with his wife Norma, and one of Leila’s last engagements in Russia was to take the children to tea with them at the Embassy.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 41