Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  Next, Lyubimov began frequenting London’s smoke-filled clubs to start meeting the right kind of people. As if he were a child with his face pressed against the glass of a sweet shop, every Tory, every toff, every member of the establishment was a potential target. The annual Conservative Party Conference was, to him, a veritable nirvana. In 1962 it was hosted in the sleepy North Wales seaside town of Llandudno. Amid the fading Victorian bed-and-breakfast guesthouses, Lyubimov cut a swathe through the twinset-and-pearl Conservative ladies and the moustached Conservative gentlemen enjoying their time away from home. ‘I went to the parties. I even danced with the Conservative members,’ he recalls. ‘Females. Not males.’ At night, though, he locked his room, fearing that a British ‘provocation’ might try and hop into his bed.

  Lyubimov was something of a curiosity to those he met. Just as he arrived, Yuri Gagarin had made it into space, boosting Russia’s image, so invitations to attend receptions and parties landed at a healthy rate in his in-tray. At that time it was very much in vogue to lecture about the Soviet Union, and Lyubimov would give long talks over cups of tea extolling the virtues of Communism and hoping that someone interesting might perhaps introduce themselves at the end. Among those he got to know (but whom he did not recruit and who did not spill any secrets) were Nicholas Scott, then leading the Young Conservatives, the future Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne and Peter Walker, a newly elected MP.

  His real task was to seek out, befriend and then recruit individuals who might be persuaded to provide information to the KGB. From the Conservative Party, he soon broadened out his targets to Labour and to pretty much anyone else. There was lunch with the odd Labour luminary like Dick Crossman who provided good conversation but nothing more. The Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband was regarded as unfit to be approached by the KGB due to his independent thinking. One woman thought about handing over secret documents but gave him nothing. There was a diplomat who promised gold but provided only dross. He followed one Foreign Office official into a pub and tried to strike up a conversation as he munched on a sandwich but with no success. And a girl in Conservative Central Office nearly fainted when he explained that he was a Russian.4 Sometimes on a long drive he would become aware of a car on his tail. Special Branch or MI5, he assumed. Sometimes his tail would appear in the same pub as him. A man in a beige mac would sit nursing a pint of warm bitter in the lounge bar of a dingy pub. Normally, the watcher and the watched would keep half an eye on one another but avoid direct contact, although on one occasion he got so lost trying to find a hotel that he turned round and asked his watchers for directions. They dutifully obliged. But such contact was the exception. Often he saw nothing He had shaken off his tail. Or perhaps it had never been there.

  The truth was that the watchers of MI5’s A4 surveillance branch were struggling to contain the massive espionage operation being run out of the Soviet Embassy. In an observation post in a house opposite the main gates of the Embassy, a pair of watchers sat surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups and undertook the mind-numbingly dull task of training their binoculars and cameras on Lyubimov and his colleagues as they walked or drove in and out. These officers spent years of their lives in the tiny room and knew many of the faces instantly but had a three-volume folder of photos to consult if needed. Once they had identified a target, they would radio colleagues who would then pick up the Soviet officials as they headed out into town and follow them on foot or by car. The watchers’ movements were co-ordinated from a control room off Regent’s Park with a huge street map of London on one wall and a constantly crackling radio. But the watchers simply did not have the numbers to cope with their wily opponents. At least sixty members of the KGB were operating, like Lyubimov, under cover in the Embassy. Dozens more worked for military intelligence, with another contingent based at the Soviet Trade Delegation. More still worked as journalists and members of the press. In all there were around 500 Soviet officials operating in Britain of whom 120 were identified as intelligence officers (the suspected figure was closer to 200). This was more than were based in the US if the United Nations was excluded. The Soviet spies had also learnt, from their agents, every trick and technique the watchers employed and devised their own counter-surveillance routes to evade them. With only minimal surveillance, the Russians were almost entirely free to engage in their pursuit of the powerful and the vulnerable with little impediment. MI5 was swamped.5

  But Lyubimov’s ambition meant that his cover did not remain intact for long. ‘Very soon I became well known as a spy in the Conservative Party,’ he recalls. ‘I worked very intensively and I was foolish enough at that time to be very active.’ At parties he would often be introduced to other guests as ‘the Russian spy, Mr Lyubimov’. He would remain silent or perhaps laugh off the remark. Spying in the early 1960s was taking on a different hue from its past connotations. The association with the Second World War was fading and being replaced not just by a sense of seriousness about the mission when it came to the Cold War, especially during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in autumn 1962 when the world prepared itself for a nuclear exchange, but also by a touch of glamour and even playfulness. Nothing epitomised this more than the arrival that same year on cinema screens of James Bond in the form of Dr No. Ian Fleming’s creation was taking on a life of its own with President Kennedy citing Bond in his top ten books. Lyubimov met Bond’s creator Ian Fleming just after Dr No had been finished at a party hosted by Lady Antonia Fraser. ‘We were drinking and discussing world problems. He was a good drinker and we drank a lot of whisky,’ Lyubimov recalls. ‘I didn’t know that he would be so famous. But actually Bond was never considered to be a serious film in the KGB.’ That was only half true since the KGB would later encourage the creation of a Communist answer to Bond to challenge the cultural pre-eminence of 007, but without much success. From 1962 onwards, Bondmania would spread globally and become associated with the new Britain of the 1960s, a very different Britain from the author Ian Fleming’s world, taking on an increasingly fantastical air, distant from the realities of both the Cold War and Britain’s place in it.

  Lyubimov’s successes in recruiting actual agents, rather than just making friends with Conservative MPs, was limited. But one Conservative MP did fall foul of the dark side of the KGB’s work in Lyubimov’s time although not by his hand. The bluff naval commander Anthony Courtney, who had helped drop Anthony Cavendish’s doomed agents off the Baltic coast in the late 1940s, had enjoyed another twist in an eventful career. During his time in Naval Intelligence he had worked closely with MI6, suggesting ideas for using Royal Navy surface craft and submarines for intelligence operations in the Black Sea. Kim Philby had listened with interest. Courtney would later wonder if that was the moment he first came to the attention of the KGB. But he would almost certainly have been known to them well before that, not least from his time in Moscow during the war and his affair with a dancer.6

  Courtney had pressed officials to post him to Moscow but without luck. He had also hoped to join MI6, but a half-offer from the Chief evaporated after others in the service and Foreign Office said they were unsure about him.7 He had retired from the navy short of money and decided to run a consultancy for businesses trading with the Soviet bloc, much like Greville Wynne. He met with the Soviet Trade Delegation in London and threw parties for visiting Russians. He asked to visit Portsmouth with some Russian captains to look at buying old ships and he visited Moscow, dropping in on the State Scientific and Technical Commission that housed Penkovsky. In early 1959, the chance to fulfil a long-standing ambition emerged when the sitting Conservative MP for Harrow East was forced to resign after he was caught engaged in a homosexual act (still illegal at the time) with a member of the Coldstream Guards in St James’s Park. The good men and women of Harrow East needed a new representative. ‘An air of horrified prudishness pervaded the atmosphere in the constituency,’ Courtney remembered. So the local Conservatives picked a former navy commander who
could not possibly let them down.

  But Courtney fell for the classic honey trap. During his visits to Moscow he had got to know Zina Volkova, a forty-something beauty with fair hair and hazel eyes, who ran a car service for visiting foreigners. Courtney kept up his business links after entering parliament and in June 1961 he arrived in Moscow for a trade fair. At the airport arriving for the same fair, Greville Wynne was picking up film from Oleg Penkovsky and then heading for his hotel, the Metropol, before going to the Embassy to hand it over to Rauri Chisholm. Courtney meanwhile was having dinner at the National with Zina. His wife had died in March of that year, and after dinner he and Zina retired to his bedroom for a few hours. What Courtney did not realise was that hidden cameras in a hotel room recorded their every embrace. ‘The affair was not a success,’ Courtney later remarked of that night with characteristic British understatement. It was to be his downfall.

  Courtney had been speaking out in parliament from 1962 about the free rein given to the likes of Lyubimov in London compared to the harassment of British Embassy staff in Moscow. Why was the Soviet Embassy in London allowed to have Russian chauffeurs while British diplomats in Moscow were forced to employ local drivers and staff, all recruited through an agency clearly under control of the Russian intelligence services? Courtney was drawing attention to a very real vulnerability which would be used to entrap a number of Embassy staff. The relationship between the two countries, he said, ‘called to mind a pair of dancers, a self-satisfied elderly gentleman performing an elegant minuet, oblivious of the fact that his partner was doing the twist’. He was thus a prime target for the KGB. According to Lyubimov, there was an attempt at blackmailing the MP into becoming an agent, something Courtney himself denied.8 Courtney’s problem was that the very summer he had dined with Zina in the hotel he had met Elizabeth Trefgarne, the widow of a peer who was to be his new wife. Courtney had told her of the affair, but it still looked rather awkward. At the same time, molehunters decided there was something suspicious about Courtney, particularly the fact that he flew his private aeroplane behind the Iron Curtain. They wanted him investigated, but were blocked.

  Courtney’s refusal to work for the KGB may explain his increasingly vociferous parliamentary outbursts against its work in London. Why had 200 British Foreign Service personnel serving in the Communist world since 1949 left their posts early, seventy-eight of them on grounds of misconduct or unsuitability? When will the government stop behaving ‘like a lot of hypnotised rabbits in the face of an efficient Soviet espionage organisation?’ he asked.9 The first sign of trouble came early in 1965 when anonymous letters concerning his private life were sent to him and to his stepson – who happened to be Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the then leader of the Conservative Party. Courtney continued to press his case, calling on the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson in June that year to complain about Soviet actions in London. The confidential briefing note for the Prime Minister said that Courtney’s ‘suggestions have generally been impracticable and unhelpful’.10 In July he tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons on security.11 Within weeks came the bombshell. Courtney received a phone call from a fellow MP telling him to come to the House. In the rarefied confines of Westminster Hall with MPs scurrying about preparing for the summer break, he was handed a buff-coloured envelope. Inside was a letter and six photos, five of him with two featuring a woman. He could be seen seated on a bed unbuttoning a woman’s blouse. It certainly looked like Zina. Another photograph was more compromising but showed some signs of having been touched up. They were, he conceded, ‘dynamite’. To round things off was the line ‘to be continued …’. Other copies were sent to the Labour and Conservative chief whips and worst of all to his prudish Constituency Association. When he got home another buff-coloured envelope came through the letterbox. Two more copies went to his wife. The KGB called this Operation Proba and it was rather pleased with the outcome.12

  Courtney went to see Roger Hollis, an old friend, with a copy of the letter to ask for advice. An MI5 officer was sent to see him. Courtney was slightly alarmed to find that the man did not speak Russian and did not know as much about the Russian Secret Service as he did. Courtney became irritable and could not sleep at night. Shortly after receiving copies, his wife informed him that she would be filing for divorce. Courtney moved out of their house and into a London flat, becoming increasingly lonely and isolated. The rot exposed by Philby, Burgess and Maclean had gone deep, he believed, and a taint of treachery remained, perhaps at a high level in the Foreign Office. It was clear, though, that the Conservative Party leadership were determined to avoid ‘another’ scandal and would not be willing to offer him much support. He kept a loaded .38 revolver at his bedside. One day he would think of suicide, another of shooting a Russian.

  Slowly, word got round Fleet Street. Reporters turned up on his doorstep. Private Eye magazine published the story followed by what Courtney described as ‘a short piece of cheap nastiness on BBC Television’. His constituency party, unable to believe that they had been caught up in another scandal, tried to deselect him. Courtney did his best to rally support among the ladies of Stanmore but at the general election in March 1966 he lost his seat by 378 votes. Ten weeks later, his divorce came through. Courtney remained a campaigner on the issue of Russian intelligence for years afterwards, recounting stories of a young acquaintance who awoke from being drugged to find himself in a homosexual embrace, with pictures being taken by old-fashioned photographers, ‘black velvet hoods and all’, and of a commercial counsellor in Moscow who later became a Conservative MP who had been compromised by a girl but who, to Courtney’s annoyance, had never paid for it with his career.13 More than a decade after being ejected from parliament he offered his own advice to British businessmen travelling to Moscow. Beware Russian women knocking at your hotel door ‘who will be only too anxious … to give you a real socialist “good time’”, he would tell them. ‘I have spoken on many occasions round the country on these matters of which I have had some experience and perhaps inevitably I have been accused of seeing “Reds under the Bed”. Well, I had one in mine, and the repercussions ever since have taught me that it simply isn’t worth it. I hope you will agree.’14

  A compromising situation was most easily engineered on the KGB’s home turf, as happened with Courtney. An official UK government study warned of the dangers:

  The Embassy in Moscow and our other Embassies behind the Iron Curtain can only be seen therefore as, in some sort, beleaguered forces under a constant and insidious attack, carried out not only by the skilful development of seemingly innocent contacts with Russian citizens but also by the insertion within the Embassy premises of the most ingenious listening and, sometimes, photographic devices and the conscription as regular informers and reporters of the locally engaged staff working for the Embassy – for example, cooks, housemaids and chauffeurs.15

  One British Ambassador to Moscow had an affair with his Russian maid. She was a KGB agent and photos were taken of them, forcing his departure. Another British diplomat got his maid pregnant and she asked for help with an abortion, obliging him to identify the MI6 station chief.16 A Greek ambassador, confronted with pictures of himself in flagrante with his housekeeper, grabbed the pictures and gleefully showed them around the diplomatic circuit as a sign of his virility until other diplomats became rather bored. Honey traps were a speciality of the KGB, while the East German Stasi specialised in using men (known as ‘Romeos’) to target single female secretaries working for officials who would have plenty of access to classified material. The latter tactic, which involved manipulating someone’s emotions, was often far more productive than blackmailing an unwilling individual.

  Working in Moscow as a diplomat was guaranteed to put even the steeliest soul on edge. The British and American embassies were wired for sound. The US Embassy had a series of microphones placed within the Great Seal of the United States in the Ambassador’s office. Around fifty bugs were secreted elsewhere in the walls (
the KGB even managed to bug Peter Lunn’s office in Beirut when he was MI6 station chief, a particularly ironic achievement given that Lunn and Elliott had failed to record their own meeting with Kim Philby in decent quality).17 Knowing that you were always being listened to played with some people’s heads. Some cracked.

  The Russians’ most spectacular success in engineering a compromising situation came with an Admiralty clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow named John Vassall. The son of a clergyman, Vassall was a loner whom acquaintances thought a bit of a snob. Most of the Britons in Moscow avoided contact with Russians, finding the atmosphere in the city menacing, and chose instead to socialise among themselves. As a junior official in Moscow Vassall felt locked out of the whirlwind of Embassy parties enjoyed by the top diplomats. The well-dressed young man still managed his own busy diary of bridge games, drinks and theatre amid his official duties but also showed an openness towards Russians. One or two colleagues would later say they considered him ‘a bit of a pansy’ and even called him ‘Vera’ behind his back. But they also claimed that they had never dreamed he was what was known at the time as an active homosexual engaged in acts which were still illegal. Only years later would an official tribunal explain that Vassall had been ‘addicted to homosexual practice from youth’, language which illustrated why so many like him chose a clandestine life which in turn made them vulnerable. But in Moscow, while Vassall’s colleagues may have professed not to notice his preferences, this secret could not be kept from the watching eyes of the KGB. They had their own man inside the Embassy whose job was to seek out the vulnerable.18