I believe now that it is only in the West that Russia can save itself. The other nations of Eastern Europe — Poland, Hungary, the Czech republic, Slovakia and Estonia — are falling over themselves to join Western alliances, to adopt Western economic and political systems. Russia, I am convinced, will have to do the same. She will have to build not on the experience of the Communist era, which is totally discredited, but on the experience of the old, pre-revolutionary Russia, which was much closer to the West.
In these pages I have frequently ridiculed the KGB for its incompetence, its dishonesty and its failure to grasp the realities of Western life. Nevertheless it was a highly dangerous organization — a huge and typical Soviet department with an enormous budget and many thousands of officers. Even if out of every hundred officers eighty or ninety were useless, the remaining ten or twenty could still pose a serious threat. During my time in London, for instance, the station included many duds, but there were also a few highly gifted men — Mikhail Bogdanov, Yuri Kobaladze, Leonid Nikitenko — with the ability to achieve real breakthroughs on the intelligence front. The KGB did not need that many good agents. The damage done by Aldrich Ames was immense. In Britain Geoffrey Prime and Michael Smith were similarly dangerous; and if Michael Bettaney’s overtures had not been rejected, he, too, could have caused a disaster.
I believe that my own main contribution lay in my ability to report so fully on the KGB. The information I provided gave the West a big leap in its knowledge of the KGB, of the Soviet system as a whole, and of the KGB’s place within the system. In particular, I gave details of the KGB operation in Britain: even information about where the organization was weak proved helpful, as it enabled the British to save resources. I can say, without exaggeration, that my information saved taxpayers several million pounds, not merely in Britain, but also in the United States, Germany, France, Holland and the Scandinavian countries. Because I was producing day-to-day intelligence from the KGB, as well as the texts of annual reports and plans, the British, paradoxically, knew more about the situation in the KGB station in London than did Moscow. This knowledge of KGB methods and mentality made life easier for MI5 and MI6, and enabled London to form a clearer picture of the KGB’s work against the British Embassy in Moscow.
By exposing Michael Bettaney (the only member of MI5 sentenced to gaol in the history of the organization), I believe I contributed substantially to the security of Britain. The information which I gave about the illegals — their training, the development of their identities, their methods of operation — led to a number of arrests in the 1980s and 1990s. I also gave many details about areas with which I was not directly concerned: I spirited out an annual report of the KR Line (penetration of the British intelligence community), and provided so many new facts about Line X (acquisition of technological and scientific secrets) that MI5 were later able to arrest Michael Smith, who is now serving a twenty-five-year sentence.
On the wider political front, I was able to give Western intelligence officers a far clearer account of the mentality of Soviet leaders than they had ever had before. I exposed the tendentiousness of KGB political reporting, as well as the organization’s imperfect objectivity and poor analysis — all of which increased Moscow’s misconceptions about the West. I also revealed that it was the International Department of the Central Committee which dictated Soviet foreign policy. (Until then, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had believed that policy was set by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.) I provided much information about Soviet policy towards numerous other nations and geographical areas, not least the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the world’s oceans. My revelations about the KGB’s ‘active measures’ — attempts to manipulate Western public opinion — helped Britain and the United States to make sound judgements.
Through my activities, the British government and MI5 received confirmation that their policy towards Soviet espionage in Britain was proving effective. Their new policy of setting a ‘diplomatic ceiling’, and fixing a limited number of ‘slots’ for Soviet diplomats, critically weakened the KGB in Britain. There was an immense difference between the situation in the 1960s, when there had been 120 Soviet spies in London, and that of the 1990s, with only thirty-six. Security in Britain became much better than in other Western countries — and my presence as a British agent was itself protection against any possible penetration of the London government or intelligence organizations.
All these factors, I believe, significantly increased confidence within the British intelligence community, and within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
As for my own future — that looks Western too. As I write, I am still under sentence of death in Russia, so that any swift return is out of the question. As time passes, my roots in England go down deeper, and the chances of settling back in Russia diminish. All the same, I should love to travel in my homeland, and see some of the places to which I have never been, among them Armenia, the lands between the Volga and the Urals, and the ancient towns encircling Moscow known as the Golden Ring.
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[1] I heard later that, at that moment, in London, a high-powered meeting concerned with my escape was taking place in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The atmosphere was extremely tense. At midday London time David Goodall, then Deputy Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for Russian affairs, looked at his watch and said, ‘Gentlemen, they’re crossing the border about now. Let’s have a moment’s silence and pray for the success of the operation.’
[2] Many prominent Bolsheviks, like Lenin, and outstanding intellectuals such as Korolenko and Gorky, had a high regard for Jews, and tried to help them. Later I found that I had inherited my father’s sympathy for them.
[3] One minor consequence of his downfall was that all trace of him had to be expunged from official records, and group photographs of the expedition were destroyed. In the same way, numerous political books published in the 1920s and 1930s had to be expurgated to remove references to figures who had been declared enemies of the people. One prominent victim was Lev Kamenev, a chief editor of the first edition of Lenin’s works, whose long introductions and supplementary articles suddenly became suspect.
[4] Lysenko was president of the Lenin Academy of Agriculture until the early 1950s, when he was denounced and dismissed by Nikita Khrushchev.
[5] When Khrushchev came to power in 1956, one of his first actions was to return government offices to normal working hours. He also made Saturday part of the weekend — a revolutionary innovation for which people are grateful to this day.
[6] Although I did not know it at the time, that was the first transmission by Radio Liberty, broadcasting from Munich, which by chance had taken to the air on an historic day.
[7] Under Stalin the parade grew out of hand until it was taking six hours. Khrushchev cut it down to two and a half, and this was regarded as a tremendous step towards democratization.
[8] Gonionsky’s wife spoke perfect Italian, and during the war had worked as an illegal — a buried agent — in Italy, adopting Italian identity. In due course she became my sister Marina’s main teacher at the college.
[9] Strictly speaking, the plural of Homo sovieticus should be Homines sovietici; but the form used here has gained widespread recognition.
[10] In the mid-1960s he began to sign protests against the persecution of intellectuals in Moscow, and became a non-person. In 1967 he came to Copenhagen, where he had been invited to lecture on the Soviet Union’s Winter War against Finland, and, in a private meeting, told me that news of Western support for Russian intellectuals and dissidents percolated through to Moscow, information which made a deep impression on me.
[11] 20cm double fast fire air-defence cannon.
[12] No butter, no cream — b
ut never mind:/ The Red Flag’s flying high.
[13] Only a dead man doesn’t pee in the basin.
[14] Later he joined the intelligence service in Czechoslovakia — but only in order to be sent abroad so that he would be able to defect. This he did, in 1968 or 1969, not during the Soviet invasion of his country but some time afterwards.
[15] Fortunately he had the resilience to succeed in another career. A natural writer, he became a journalist and worked for Trud, the organ of the trade union movement, before joining Izvestiya as the paper’s leading foreign correspondent and being sent to Vietnam, an important post during the war, and from there to Italy. He soon married — a different girl — and had a son, of whom he was extremely proud, referring to the toddler by its first name and patronymic: ‘Vladimir Mikhailovich is doing well.’
[16] Later in Denmark I bought a book called Tupolev’s Camp (banned in the Soviet Union), which told how in 1938 the celebrated aircraft designer and his associates had all been declared Enemies of the People, and fenced into a kind of camp, where they continued to work as prisoners. The book, by one of the inmates, described how Pilot Ivanov and Navigator Akopian were killed in the crash of Tupolev 31.
[17] At School 101 all the students had learnt to drive and had passed a test; but neither training nor test offered any real challenge, as we simply cruised about the clear, open roads near the school and never had to contend with traffic. The result was that most of us were far from safe in the early stages of our motoring careers.
[18] Once as a courier was waiting for a train in Stockholm with an immense package, a passing Swede asked him in Russian what it was. ‘Diplomatic baggage, obviously,’ he replied, to which the Swede retorted: ‘Oh, I thought it was a royal — a grand piano!’
[19] The Ambassador’s early-morning meetings were a great strain for Korotkikh, who had usually been drinking all night in his attempts to turn the American. ‘Oleg, Oleg,’ he would groan in my ear, almost anaesthetizing me with alcohol fumes, ‘I’m totally smashed!’ Yet Zaitzev insisted that he should attend, for the sake of appearances, even if he was allowed to disappear soon afterwards to catch up on his sleep. One of nature’s great boozers, Korotkikh made several recruitments, and once at a conference in Moscow confided the secret of his success: ‘I make it a rule never to speak to my target about anything except booze and women!’
[20] While I went jogging, Yelena used to take the cat for walks on a lead; but one day it ran off and disappeared. All we found were its bloodstained collar and lead, and we could only conclude that it had been eaten by a fox.
[21] One of these, Vitaly Nyukin, had been at the Institute with me. Later, in the 1970s, I taught him Danish, and later still he was posted to Singapore. In 1985, on the day after my secret interrogation by the KGB, all the other illegals were abruptly recalled to Moscow, but he was somehow overlooked and left in the Far East until 12 September, when the British announced that I was alive and well in England.
[22] In submitting to the operation on my own, I broke a fundamental KGB rule: that no officer may be anaesthetized without a colleague being present, for fear that he may give away secrets while unconscious.
[23] I strongly suspected this at the time, and years later I got positive proof of it when, in a country with a larger British station than the one in Denmark, a specialist in operational technology casually remarked that it was he who had installed the wiring to bug the flat in Copenhagen where my meetings took place.
[24] Haavik held more than 250 meetings with various case officers over twenty-seven years of espionage, and handed thousands of classified documents to the KGB. Six months after her arrest she died in prison of a heart-attack, before being brought to trial.
Cherny — a mediocre worker, typical of the KGB — later committed suicide in Moscow when he found he had cancer, shooting himself with a pistol which he kept in the office.
[25] In 1987 Bergling was released from gaol to spend the weekend with his mistress. He disappeared, and the Swedes rightly concluded he had defected to the Soviet Union. Taken to the Lebanon by the GRU, he worked there as an agent, but then in 1994 surrendered to the Swedish authorities, and was returned to prison.
[26] Tchebotok fancied Yelena and, although I do not believe he ever had an affair with her, I knew that he once photographed her naked to the waist.
[27] The Directorate responsible for surveillance in Moscow, No. 7, and known as semyorka (figure seven), employed about 1000 men, and these were reinforced by another 500 or so from the Moscow Oblast Directorate, so that at least 1500 men were available for surveillance in the city.
[28] Russians claim, but have never proved historically, that it was the brutal savages of the Tatar-Mongolian horde who brought mat with them and foisted it on the natives.
[29] They succeeded so well that in the end Kryuchkov became chairman of the KGB, Grushko his number two and Titov his number three. Then, to my boundless satisfaction, all three went down in flames after the attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991. Kryuchkov and Grushko were both arrested on suspicion of plotting, and Titov, though claiming to have had nothing to do with them, was removed from the KGB.
[30] Carlsson later returned to Sweden, where he rose to become an important official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then the United Nations envoy to Namibia. The KGB kept in touch with him, but he was killed in the Lockerbie air disaster of 1988.
[31] In due course I discovered that the middle-rank MI5 officers organizing the surveillance knew nothing about my involvement with MI6 and were operating normally.
[32] Three years later Svetlana bitterly regretted her decision, and had to write a special letter to President Gorbachev, begging for permission to return to the West.
[33] Bogdanov had been one of Kim Philby’s brightest pupils in his little seminars, and by 1984 was cultivating some useful contacts at the Economist magazine. He established such a cordial relationship with Brian Beedham, one of the journalists there, that he persuaded the Centre to list him as a confidential contact.
[34] When Raisa went to Reykjavik for Gorbachev’s meeting with Reagan, she cold-shouldered the Soviet Ambassador and his wife (a popular couple), and a few days later had them dismissed from their posts, because they had not shown sufficient awe in their attitude towards her. She also told Nancy Reagan that Communism was a superior scientific doctrine, and would triumph over capital-ism, which was doomed. The Russian people never regarded Raisa as a true First Lady, because her husband had manipulated the Party apparatus, rather than being elected. When Boris Yeltsin came to power, his wife was regarded as a genuine First Lady.
[35] In 1994 he did an excellent job in Bosnia as Moscow’s representative in the negotiations for a peace settlement.
[36] The older man, I discovered later, was General Golubev, who had been promoted after claiming to recruit an agent in Egypt — even though, under Nasser, agents were two a penny. He became head of the Fifth Department of Directorate K, which investigates all abnormal developments, and later was promoted to be a deputy head of the Directorate, gaining the rank of General. His colleague, Colonel Budanov, succeeded him as head of the Fifth Department. Both, in other words, were highly trained investigators.
[37] It was this one question that later enabled the British services to identify Budanov.
[38] This detail came from Vitali Yurchenko, who defected eight days after I had escaped.
[39] He was tragically lost in the helicopter crash which killed twenty-five security officers on their way from Belfast to Scotland in June 1994.
[40] Having made the elementary mistake of recognizing the Emergency Committee which organized the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, he was dismissed, and burst into tears at the press conference announcing his removal, so fervently had he dreamt of becoming Ambassador.
Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky Page 43