Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "I am a diplomat," said the Russian. "I demand to speak to the Embassy... I have my pass!"

  He tried to reach across toward his trousers. One of our boys stood on them.

  "Hardly diplomatic behavior," said the D1. He bent down and threw the naked Russian his underpants. Then he got down to business.

  "Let's face it, you're finished, Grigovin. They'll send you back if they find out."

  He let the thought sink in.

  "You look as if you're more suited to the West. We know, we've checked. Four years in America, three years in Denmark. Now London. You don't want to go back anyway, do you? Why don't you come over? We'll look after you. There's a good pension. You'll be safe."

  The Russian brushed the offer aside with a wave of his hand, and again demanded to speak to his Embassy.

  For two hours the D1 tried to reason with him. Think of the future, he told him. He would be stripped of his privileges and sent back to Moscow in disgrace, to serve his career out in some dreary Siberian outpost. No more foreign exchange, no more overseas perks.

  "I am a diplomat," Grigovin kept saying "I demand to speak to my Embassy."

  He was like a World War II captured airman, reciting only his name, rank, and serial number. He was a crack soldier, and eventually we realized there was to be no defection. His clothes were returned and we dumped him back on the pavement near Kensington Park Gardens. Months of planning, years of patient waiting were wasted.

  The next morning an anonymous brown package was delivered to the Embassy, addressed to the Ambassador personally. It contained photographs of Grigovin in bed. That evening Special Branch sighted the KGB man being escorted onto an Aeroflot plane. We did send a report to the MI6 station in Moscow advising them to keep an eye out for him in case he had second thoughts and managed to make contact. But we never heard from Grigovin again.

  Defections are always tinged with tragedy, but none was as sad as the case involving a young man called Nadiensky - the defector who changed his mind. He worked for the shipping section of the Trade Delegation, and we identified him early on as a KGB officer. He was a quiet man, and his only claim to fame was that his wife was related to a senior Soviet official in the Politburo. He first came to our attention when the Watchers saw him meet a girl in a London park.

  Initially all effort went into the girl. The Watchers tracked her home, and she was identified as a secretary in a minor government agency with no access to classified material. Michael McCaul went to see the girl, and asked why she was meeting a Soviet official. She convinced him that Nadiensky had no interest in her for espionage purposes. They were in love, and she had no idea that he was involve with the KGB. She said he was not at all how she imagined Russians. He was a romantic and rather frightened man, who talked constantly of making a new life for himself in the West.

  Once again D1 (Operations) and D4 met to consider the best course of action. We decided to ask the girl to continue the affair normally, while we planned an approach to Nadiensky. It was obvious that the operation could not be sustained over the long term. The girl was already under great stress, and it seemed likely that she would soon betray herself. But the prize was a considerable one. Although Nadiensky himself was a low-level officer, almost certainly co-opted for the duration of his posting in London, he had enormous propaganda value. This was the time of Stalin's daughter Svetlana's defection, and we knew the embarrassment it would cause the Russians to have a relative of one of their senior politicians seek asylum in the West.

  On the following Sunday Nadiensky was due to visit Harwich on official business. He was accompanying some Soviet sailors to their ship, which was due to sail that night, and he applied routinely for permission from the Foreign Office to leave the 80-kilometer restriction which is imposed on all Eastern Bloc diplomats. McCaul sat in his car outside Harwich docks with a team of Watchers and waited for Nadiensky to emerge. As he walked past, McCaul called him by name. He hesitated momentarily.

  "We know about the girl..." hissed McCaul, "we know you want to stay. Get in the car quickly, and we can talk!"

  Nadiensky looked up and down the street and then, seizing his moment, ducked into the back of the car. McCaul drove straight to my house in Essex. We gave him tea, and tried not to talk too much. We had the bird, but it was important not to panic him.

  "I hear you want to join us...?" I began, when Nadiensky had adjusted to his surroundings.

  He nodded, at first nervously, and then decisively.

  "We believe you've been co-opted?" I queried.

  He gulped his tea.

  "The KGB, you mean?" he asked in good English.

  "We assumed you were," I went on.

  "You have no choice," he flashed suddenly with some bitterness, "if they want you to work for them, they simply order you. You have no choice."

  I ran through the arrangements we could make. There would be safety and protection, a pension, and later perhaps a job. There would be a short meeting with the girl, but then he would have to work hard for some months.

  "For British Security I know," he said. He half smiled. He knew the game, co-opted or not.

  That evening we drove Nadiensky to a safe house near Wimbledon, and armed guards were posted inside with him. Twelve hours later the Foreign Office received a request from the Soviet Embassy asking if they had any information concerning the whereabouts of a certain junior diplomat who had disappeared while returning from a routine visit to Harwich.

  The Foreign Office Northern Department had already been alerted to the defection of Nadiensky by the Deputy Director-General, then F.J.. The Foreign Office treated the matter as they treated all matters which were likely to upset the Russians, as something to be avoided at all costs. They immediately sent an official down to the safe house to interview Nadiensky. He was asked if he was applying voluntarily, and whether he wanted to speak to anyone at the Soviet Embassy. He confirmed his decision was voluntary, and told him he had no wish to speak to any Russians. The Foreign Office broke the news to the Soviet Embassy.

  Immediately Nadiensky's wife was seen leaving for Moscow. The following day the Soviet Embassy demanded that the Foreign Office arrange for Nadiensky's wife to be able to speak to him on the telephone from the Soviet Union. At first Nadiensky did not wish to speak to her, and we were very unhappy at this blatant attempt to pressure a man already under great strain. But the Foreign Office insisted on protocol.

  The call was only the first of many which the Russians insisted on over the next four days. Mostly it was Nadiensky's wife, but other relations took their turn in tearfully pleading with him to reconsider his decision.

  "Think of us," they told him, "think of the ruin and scandal that will befall us."

  Nadiensky began to wilt visibly. Over in Whitehall the Foreign Office and MI5 practically came to blows. Why did the Foreign Office allow these calls, we wanted to know, when the Russians never allowed access to our people, like Greville Wynne, when they were arrested in Moscow. But the Foreign Office, with little regard for our priorities, and none for Nadiensky's interests, sat on the niceties of the diplomatic trade.

  "We cannot deny the family humanitarian access," they said.

  On the fourth day Nadiensky told us he had decided to go back. It was causing too much trouble for his family. McCaul tried to point out the dangers, but it was futile. He was like a patient on the operating table, hovering between life and death, and now we could feel him gently slipping away.

  "Are you sure you want to go back?" I asked Nadiensky when I last saw him, shortly before he went back.

  "What I want no longer matters," he said without emotion. "I have done my duty by my family."

  Fatalism was Nadiensky's only refuge. He was one of the many faceless victims of the Cold War, his life ground down between the two great secret armies which face each other West and East.

  But if it was our own fault that we had stumbled into the maze of intelligence provided by defectors, we desperately needed a way out.
Angleton opted for blind faith in Golitsin to lead him to safety. In one way it made sense to turn to the architect of the maze to help us find a way out. But although I began as a fervent admirer of Golitsin and all his theories, by the end of the 1960s I was beginning to have my doubts.

  The problem was Golitsin's obsession with his "methodology." He claimed that if he was given access to the files of Western intelligence services it would trigger associations in his memory which could lead him to spies. The theory was that since so much of the intelligence he saw in Dzherzhinsky Square was bowdlerized, in other words, source-disguised to protect the identity of the agent supplying the KGB, if he read the files he might be able to seize on points of familiarity with the material he had seen in the KGB Registry.

  There were two ways of playing Golitsin. One was to accept his methodology, and allow him to dictate the entire thrust of counterintelligence policy. The other was to continue the frustrating task of trying to prize out from him the nuggets of fact, such as the sorts of information contained in the reports he had seen, the approximate location of an agent, and so forth, which could then be investigated by orthodox counterintelligence methods.

  Where Western counterespionage services succeeded in obtaining from him these kinds of factual leads, Golitsin was of enormous help. This was how we finally put the finger on Vassall, and how Marcel Chalet was able to identify Georges Paques. It was the same with Golitsin's political intelligence. Where he stuck to what he saw and what he heard, he was impressive and believable. There is no question, for instance, that he attended Shelepin's famous conference at which Directorate D, responsible for Disinformation Operations, was established. But where Golitsin extrapolated from what he knew to develop broad theories, such as his forty-year grand disinformation program, or where he attempted to fit events which occurred after his defection into his theories, as he did with the Sino-Soviet split, he was disastrous.

  Most of the Golitsin acolytes in MI5, of which I was one, soon broke with Golitsin's wilder theories and strict adherence to his methodology. Only Arthur, and more junior officers like Stephen de Mowbray, who was responsible for Golitsin during a spell of duty as an MI6 liaison officer in Washington in the early 1960s, remained loyal.

  But in Washington the situation was very different. Angleton swallowed the "methodology" hook, line, and sinker and allowed Golitsin to range freely across the CIA's files, picking traitors apparently at random, and often unable to justify his decisions on anything other than the flimsiest of grounds. The results were disastrous, and led to the worst excesses of counterintelligence misjudgment. A string of senior CIA officers, most notably Dave Murphy, the head of the Soviet Division, unfairly fell under suspicion, their careers ruined. In the end, the situation became so bad, with so many different officers under suspicion as a result of Golitsin's leads, that the CIA decided the only way of purging the doubt was to disband the Soviet Division, and start again with a completely new complement of officers. It was obviously a way out of the maze, but it could never justify the damage to the morale in the Agency as a whole.

  Although MI5 avoided the excesses of the CIA, Golitsin was still badly handled. He was allowed to think himself too important. All defectors should be treated at arm's length, and made to earn their keep, and as little feedback as possible should ever be given to them, so that they are never able to assess their own significance in relation to the rest of the Intelligence Service's activities. Right from his first visit to Britain in 1963, we opened up to Goltsin, and I was responsible for that as much as anyone. When the Mitchell case got under way Arthur and I shared everything with him, with Hollis' and F.J.'s agreement. He even chose the code name for the case, SPETERS, after a famous old Chekhist intelligence officer. He knew from the start that we were hunting a high-level spy, and inevitably that must have colored the intelligence he gave us. In the tense and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories.

  But there is no question that he knew of many penetrations in the West. The record in Britain, Norway, and France proves it. But in our haste we were never able to get an uncorrupted version of all his leads, and this, I am sure, is still costing the West dear.

  The tide finally turned against Golitsin in 1967. He was invited to address the first CAZAB conference in Melbourne, Australia. His appearance was eagerly awaited by all those present, since so much of the previous five years had flowed from him. Golitsin was cocky as ever, and soon launched into a lengthy oration on the failures of Western intelligence services to interpret his material correctly.

  "I know of more spies," he boomed, "why are you not willing to cooperate with me?"

  He laid special emphasis on Britain, and the many penetrations which, he claimed, were as yet undiscovered, and which only he could locate. F.J. was smiling the smile he reserved for particularly tiresome people. He always hated his linen to be washed in public. Finally his patience snapped.

  "What is it you want?" he asked. "The files... access to your files," replied Golitsin. "All right, you can have them - anything you want. We'll see if you've got anything to give us."

  Golitsin came over in spring 1968. I initially pressed him to come over straightaway, but it was winter in London, and he told me darkly that he had already seen too much snow in his life. He was set up in a safe house near Brighton, and Michael McCaul and his wife lived with him to keep house and provide him with company. Every week I came down from Leconfield House with a briefcase of files for him to study.

  When I first gave him material I warned him that he could not take notes. Both F.J. and I were worried that part of the motivation behind his "methodology" was so that he could amass as much intelligence from each Western service as possible for some unknown future purpose.

  "But of course," he replied huffily, "I am a professional, Peter, I understand these things."

  For four months Golitsin roamed across the most secret files in MI5, and every month Michael McCaul went to Glyn Mills Bank and drew out 10,000 pounds in cash, placed it in a small suitcase, and brought it down for Golitsin.

  But for all the money, there was little that Golitsin had to give. F.J. had called his bluff. There were some useful things, of course. He studied the VENONA, and was able to fill in a few groups using his knowledge of KGB procedure. He spent a long time studying the files of the Joint Services Language School in Cambridge, looking through the curriculum vitaes of candidates to see if any caught his attention. We even conducted voice tests with some of those he was particularly interested in, to see if Golitsin could detect, from the idioms they used, whether or not they were picking up Russian words from KGB controllers. It was artful, but it never paid off, and in the end we decided that the only safe thing to do was to close the school down.

  But in the crucial area - whether or not he could shed any light on the penetration problem - he was a complete loss. He filled in some more details in the Skripkin allegation and he did have one totally bizarre theory. He spent weeks studying the VENONA traffic to see if he could help us identify the unknown cryptonyms. There were two in particular which interested him - David and Rosa - who from the message already broken were obviously working together, probably as man and wife, or perhaps brother and sister. Golitsin asked for the files of all MI5 officers who had served during the time the VENONA traffic was taken. One day he announced he had an answer.

  "Your spies are here. My methodology has uncovered them," he intoned darkly, pointing his finger like the witch-finder at two files on the table in front of him. I knew the files well. They belonged to Victor and Tess Rothschild.

  "Don't be totally absurd, Anatole," I said. "Victor is one of the best friends this Service has ever had... how on earth did you jump at that conclusion?"

  "They are Jewish. David and Rosa are Jewish names..."

  It sounded like KGB anti-Semitism to me, and I could not help thinking that if this had been the CIA and I had been An
gleton, Victor and Tess would almost certainly have been listed as spies on Golitsin's groundless interpretation.

  The principal problem with Golitsin's methodology was that he interpreted the files as if he were still in the KGB. He looked for operations which went wrong, or mistakes which were attributable to a single officer.

  "Where is that man now?" he would ask.

  "Same job," I would reply.

  Golitsin would say nothing for a few days, and then announce that he was sure the man was a traitor.

  "But why, Anatole?"

  "Because in KGB, failure is a serious offense. You would not be trusted, and that makes a man unhappy, and maybe then he thinks of turning."

  He never understood the culture of the West, and because he himself was driven to defect because his career was damaged after his abortive visit to Stalin, he assumed that anyone in the West would act in the same way.

  "But that's not how it is in the West," I used to tell him. "We don't act like that over here - it only happens in the FBI."