Her flight to England on 6 September, and her arrival here, both proved spectacular. A television team was on board the aircraft, and the air crew celebrated a red-letter day with champagne all round. At Heathrow we had made careful arrangements to keep things under control. The Foreign Office insisted that Leila should give a brief press conference, but I had worked out a scheme for throwing the media off our tracks and had gone on ahead to wait for her at the fort. Since any car could have been followed by motorcycles, we had laid on a helicopter for the cross-country journey, and as soon as she had spoken to the press, she and the children were bundled on board for a short flight to the south coast.
There I waited in a state of breathless anticipation. By then, in September, the nights were closing in, and dark was falling before the party arrived. Then, as I stared into the sky, one of the stars grew brighter and brighter, until it resolved itself into the nose-light of the approaching helicopter, which swung down to land outside the fort.
Out came Leila, much as I remembered her, but the girls had changed practically out of recognition. All the same, they both looked lovely, in T-shirts with little rucksacks that I had sent them. I think Maria recognized me faintly, but to Anna, who had last seen me when she was four, I was a stranger.
Out came bunches of flowers and bottles of champagne, and soon another reception-cum-celebration was under way. The stewards — the same as when I arrived in England — brought simple presents for the children. Then a Landcruiser and driver appeared, and we all piled in: there was not much luggage, for the travellers had had to leave almost everything behind, but the back of the vehicle was filled with flowers.
So we motored for an hour through the dark. Towards the end Maria began to feel sick — and then, in the drive of the house, we saw the one sight we had hoped not to see: a journalist and cameraman waiting for us. In spite of all our precautions, one newspaper had outwitted us. I was furious, and let fly at the intruders.
In and around the house I had put up yellow ribbons — an American tradition to celebrate return and reunion after long absence. I had bought the nicest possible sheets and pillowcases for the girls, with pictures on them. Above all I had left lamps switched on in every room: the real family reunion, and a grand distribution of presents, took place in a cheerful blaze of light.
Chapter Sixteen – The Reckoning
Not until 1994 did we solve the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question of who had given me away. For years four main suspicions had plagued me. The first was that the leak might have derived indirectly from my initial contact with Lazlo, the Hungarian sent by the British to my flat in Copenhagen: I feared that Yelena might have inadvertently said something to arouse KGB suspicions. The second possibility was that Michael Bettaney might have deduced that I was the source who gave him away: perhaps he had passed my name via some intermediary to the KGB. The third conceivable channel was Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985: he, too, had been in a position to know my identity. Finally, it seemed possible that the leak had sprung from the trial of the Norwegian spy Arne Treholt early in 1985. For complex reasons, the West German security service had run checks on me, and asked the Danes if I was a fully identified KGB officer. The Danes replied that I had been while I was working in Copenhagen. But earlier, in 1982, to make things easier for the British, who were trying to get me a visa to work in London, they had reported that I had not been fully identified as KGB — and it seemed possible that the anomaly had been picked up by moles of the East German Stasi, who passed it back through Berlin to Moscow.
Yet in the end all these fears proved groundless. Prolonged analysis by the British services also failed to produce any clue about where the leak had been. My Judas, it turned out, was the American intelligence officer Aldrich Ames, known to his colleagues as Rick, who was arrested for spying for the Russians early in 1994 and later sentenced to life imprisonment. Little did I realize, when I met him twice during 1989, that on 18 May 1985, the day after I was recalled to Moscow for interrogation, he had received his first payment, of ten thousand dollars, for putting the KGB on my trail.
As a senior officer in Soviet counter-espionage, he sat in on several of the briefings I gave the CIA, and I rather liked him. His face looked gentle and kind, and I thought that he embodied the openness, honesty and decency which are supposed to characterize Americans. What I could not know was that he was a mediocre operator, and had made a mess of his private affairs: he had separated from his first wife, started drinking heavily, and had taken up with a demanding Colombian woman eleven years his junior. By 1985 he had run into debt and badly needed money. Then the KGB officer whom he had been cultivating made a brilliant counter-move, and suggested that Ames should work for him, rather than vice versa. Obviously the KGB promised Ames handsome payment — and what they wanted first was a single piece of really valuable information.
Luckily for him, he was able to supply exactly that. For several years the British had been sending the Americans key information, which I had given them, and the CIA, methodical as ever, had probably collected all these reports in one folder. Ames saw that file, and although — thank God — he never knew my name, he told the Russians that the British had a source with access to the highest level of KGB intelligence. When he, or possibly someone in Copenhagen, added that this source had a strong Danish connection, the trail led straight to me.
I consider myself fortunate. Ames blew my career and life into shreds, but he did not kill me. Several former KGB men, also shopped by him, went to their deaths. By the time the FBI arrested him and his wife on 21 February 1994, he had received over 2 million dollars in Soviet payments. It is clear that if he had brought about my execution, it would not have worried him in the least: when he sat opposite me at the CIA briefings, he showed no sign of unease or remorse at being confronted by a man he had betrayed.
Ames’s motives in changing sides were purely financial: mine were ideological and philosophical. As I made clear earlier, one of my conditions for starting to work with the British was that I should not be paid; and although the British government has been kind and good to me since I escaped to live in England, financial gain was never my incentive. Rather, I was driven by contempt for Communist tyranny — and now history has endorsed my opinion that the system was one under which it was impossible for humans to live happily.
In Britain, I have been enormously impressed by the quality of the professionals with whom I have worked in the security services and the Foreign Office: men and women of high intellectual level, well educated with a quick, intuitive understanding of people and their problems. This, I feel sure, is not merely the product of good training, but springs from basic character. In ideological terms, I have found the security and intelligence services far better informed and motivated than the rest of the population, many of whom, even now, seem starry-eyed about Communism and ignorant of its evils. The officers with whom I have dealt all have a high sense of duty and responsibility, and seem to be guided by a special intuition which tells them infallibly what is in their country’s best interests. Besides, they are never afraid to take decisions without consulting their superiors — an impressive difference from their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
In the early days of my co-operation I was disappointed that none of my contacts could speak much Russian, but later I discovered that the services — in marked contrast to the bulk of the population — include many brilliant linguists. I know one man, for instance, who speaks both Arabic and Polish perfectly, and another who, besides being trilingual in French and German, is equally at home in Finnish. My case officer Andrew spoke German, Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat and Swedish.
Of people in general, what has struck me most is that the British are infallibly kind and friendly: they expect the best of you, and on meeting you take it for granted that you’re a good fellow. This, again, is an immense difference from Soviet life, which brutalized citizens so badly that people constantly
expected to be attacked, and to become victims of scheming or at the very least of sarcasm. I was imbued with such a prickly, defensive attitude when I arrived that I made several fundamental mistakes: expecting a remark to be aggressive or sarcastic, I once or twice let out a sharp answer before I realized that the approach had been friendly.
Other key English qualities, it seems to me, are discretion, respect for privacy, and tolerance towards foreigners. The level of politeness, of courtesy and tact, must be unique in the world, possibly approached in New Zealand, but nowhere else. Also I have often noticed how wonderfully unspoilt and spontaneous people are, retaining their ability to enjoy simple natural things like clouds, sunsets, landscape, sea and flowers. I am sure people were like that in nineteenth-century Russia, but Communism destroyed all spontaneity, making it impossible for people to be sentimental, or to express appreciation.
Of course, the British have some obsessions that Russians find ridiculous: the relative merits of conifers and broadleaved trees, yellow oilseed rape blossom, grey squirrels and Canada geese. Only a prosperous society, without serious problems, could become exercised about such minuscule irritations. I remember a countryman in Norfolk complaining that the quality of life was deteriorating because Happy Eater restaurants and streetlights were springing up everywhere. If ever he had to spend a few weeks in the Russian outback, he would change his tune and positively clamour for such amenities.
And dislikes? Only trivia. Why does Radio Three close down so soon after midnight? Why do people persist in eating off the wrong side of their forks? Why, at dinner parties, are serious subjects of conversation deferred until coffee comes round — by which time everyone is too tired to think straight?
Looking back, I have no regrets about switching allegiance to the West. On the contrary: far from ruing my decision, I am only sorry that I did not make it earlier, immediately after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That was the event that determined the course of my life, and I wish now that I had responded to it more promptly. What I do regret very much is that I let myself be outsmarted by the KGB in 1985. Not only did the disaster destroy my family life: it also ended my active career prematurely. I should have liked to go on bridging the gap between two worlds right to the end of Gorbachev’s time in office, explaining the phenomena of change to the West.
My greatest sorrow and pain were that I was cut off from my family for so long, and so missed six irreplaceable years of watching my daughters grow up. Still worse, my marriage to Leila did not survive our separation. In those six years we had grown apart, and, much as I longed to weave the threads of our lives together again, it proved impossible. The KGB had worked to poison Leila’s mind against me, telling her lies about how I had taken up with a young secretary, and so on; she herself, though putting on a brave face and dismissing such allegations as rubbish, did not know what to believe, and had been badly hurt by the rumours.
She had also been much distressed by my failure to tell her that I was working for the British: although she never said so, I believe that she found it a sign of less than full trust on my part, and she felt — quite rightly — that I had deceived her. Also, she thought it a cruel and irresponsible act for anyone in a position as risky as mine to marry and have children. Her predicament in Moscow had become so unpleasant — exposed, alone, the wife of a traitor, shunned by former friends — that she inevitably came to feel, if not hostility, at least a desire to punish me.
Thus when we began to talk on the telephone, she sounded as if she really wanted to join me in Britain, and to reunite the family. Later, though, it turned out that this was not true. What she wanted, first of all, was to escape from the Soviet Union because life there was hard and difficult: she wanted the children to have a better life and a better education. She also wanted to live in the West, and to be able to visit Russia from time to time. Above all, she wanted to come and show me that she was no soft, pacific victim, but a tough character fully able to criticize my actions and maybe prove that I had been wrong all the time.
Having deceived me on the telephone, and in some of her letters, she arrived here in a critical mood, showing hostility and demanding explanations. I did not like this, and I hoped the mood would pass. I strove to combat it by showering affection and presents on the girls: I took them on holiday to America, to Rome, to the Canary Islands, and gave them expensive toys like computers. They, for their part, had got wind that I was in some way an important person. Yet nothing could change the fact that, over the years of separation, they had become closely attached to their mother, and that she had deliberately kept them dependent on her.
In the end I was forced to acknowledge that a combination of my own actions, our separation and the efforts of the KGB had destroyed whatever nice feelings Leila may once have had for me: there was nothing left, and no basis for becoming married again. In 1993 I therefore approached a solicitor to arrange a settlement of our affairs. I think, in a way, we were both emotional casualties of the Cold War.
On the credit side of working for the West, my life became immensely more exciting and rewarding than it would have been if I had slogged on in the KGB. Moreover, I succeeded in my main aim of damaging Soviet Communism, and of limiting its power to harm the West. I never dared dream that the whole system would collapse in the way it did, and I certainly do not believe that my own small efforts in any way hastened its demise. Nevertheless, events have vindicated my claims that it was a truly poisonous system, and the West now sees how terrible it was.
As for my standing in Russia, I never hoped for any understanding or appreciation there. It was more important to me to be honest to my own conscience and to the West. After seventy years of Communist propaganda, people in the Soviet Union had become so heavily indoctrinated that they regarded the Party and the KGB as national institutions and anyone who attacked either must be a traitor to the nation. This being so, I could not expect anyone to understand, still less condone, what I had done. But then, when Communism suddenly disintegrated, I found that a few enlightened people began to appreciate my behaviour, and from 1990 one or two journalists started to express approval in newspaper articles.
At the same time, other people launched virulent attacks — not because they disapproved of my actions but because they had failed to do anything themselves. Because I took a decision they wished they had taken, they were belatedly filled with jealousy and irritation.
I still firmly believe that my decision to help the West was my only option; yet I have often wondered why so few members of the Soviet foreign policy Establishment — the KGB, the GRU and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — defected during my working life. The main reason, I believe, is simply that the Soviet system was so efficient: the whole apparatus of the KGB, its personnel departments, the Cadres Abroad department of the Central Committee — all this huge apparatus for selecting the right people to go abroad, and then indoctrinating them, worked well. For one reason or another, those chosen were not liable to take big ideological decisions. Some were tied by the size of their families: they had so many relatives that they did not dare leave that number of hostages behind. Others were intelligent but blinkered, and wanted success within the system that had produced them: the idea of publishing a book abroad, or being useful to a foreign government, did not appeal.
Mikhail Lyubimov epitomized this type. Although highly intelligent, and full of warm feelings for Britain, its literature and traditions, he yet retained many crazy leftist ideas. In 1976 and 1977, after he had served in London, he could still discuss Trotsky with serious interest, and in spite of his experience in the West, he remained seduced by the idea of becoming a KGB general. His dream was to become a well-known literary figure, able to recite reams of English verse, and yet to be an important KGB general — an impossible combination.
Of maybe fifteen people who defected during the past thirty-odd years, most went for entirely mundane reasons: one because he had lost a secret KGB document, another to escape his wife
, another because he wanted a more comfortable life, and so on. I believe I am one of the few who chose to co-operate with the West out of purely ideological convictions, and who deliberately planned to do so over a long period.
In saying this, I do not mean to boast or claim any credit. Rather, I thank goodness for the various slices of luck that enabled me to see the truth, and to escape from the indoctrination process before it was too late. The first was that I learned German early, and got the chance to read Western newspapers when I was only twenty-one. By this means I found out a great deal about what was happening in the world, long before my contemporaries had any chance to do the same. Another crucial factor was my stay in East Berlin: seeing the Wall go up, and witnessing the hatred and despair that Communism inflicted on ordinary people, showed me that the system was both illegal and criminal.
During my twenties I developed a romantic, idealistic attitude towards recent historical events. The last people who had tried to beat off the Communist threat, and protect the country from totalitarian occupation, had been the White Russians who fought in the Civil War — men like Admiral Kolchak and General Wrangel. When I realized what colossal efforts they had made and began to identify with them, they became my heroes.
Then, while serving abroad, I remembered that the British and French had been allies of the Russians in the two world wars, and I decided that, in a way, I could regard myself as a surviving White Russian officer who had remained faithful to the old oath of the entente cordiale, right from the beginning. Once I had decided that it was undignified and dishonest to serve the Communist regime, my mind was made up.
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