Lonsdale would not talk. No one understood yet that he was an illegal. It took a strange bit of detective work to understand that he was not really Lonsdale after all. The doctor in Canada who had been present at the real Lonsdale’s birth was tracked down. He remembered the birth because he had had to travel miles into the countryside down dark lanes. He checked his records which showed that the real Lonsdale had been circumcised as a baby.40 The man who had been arrested had not been. The revelations of illegals, radio sets in the suburbs and treacherous Britons were sensational and captivated the nation, leading to much despair on the part of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.41 So important was the trial that Lonsdale/ Molody was prosecuted by the Attorney General himself, the formidable Reginald Manningham-Buller. The sentence was twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Manningham-Buller had also dealt with the Blake case personally. He had proposed to the Prime Minister that Blake should be charged on five counts for each posting and he made sure the judge knew that at least forty agents had been betrayed.42 The high-profile spy trials meant that reporters were frequently camped out on the doorstep of Manningham-Buller’s home. He developed a distaste for the world of spies which he regarded as somewhat seedy. The Attorney General’s daughter Eliza, barely into her teens, watched with curiosity, an introduction into a world into which she would later plunge.
In prison, Lonsdale briefly met George Blake. ‘Of one thing I am certain,’ Lonsdale told Blake. ‘You and I are going to be on Red Square for the big parade on the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution.’43 Lonsdale was out not long afterwards. An RAF plane flew him to West Berlin. Then at 5.30 a.m. on 22 April 1964 he was taken in a black Mercedes to the checkpoint at Heerstrasse.44 It had rained through the night and there was a thin drizzle as dawn broke. His car was joined by another yellow Mercedes with an escort of black limos coming from East Berlin. Concrete blocks laid out in a zig-zag slowed the cars as they approached. The two vehicles edged into no man’s land and stopped. Lonsdale stepped out on his side as did a man from the other vehicle. They stood a few yards apart. Their identities were checked by officials from the opposing side with a nod. There were some muted hand signals and then a Soviet official shouted ‘Exchange’ and the two men passed each other. ‘He looks sleek, well fed,’ Greville Wynne thought as he passed Lonsdale. ‘But then he has not been in the Soviet Union for a long time.’ Wynne was taken into a black limo with a Union Jack on the bonnet. The previous day, he had realised he was heading west as his plane flew into the sunset. ‘If you speak or misbehave you will be shot,’ a Soviet consul had told him as they stepped into the car early the next morning.45
After more than a year in detention in the USSR, Wynne was now a free man but damaged. Within a few days of being back home, he had a nervous breakdown sitting in his armchair. His wife called MI6, who sent its own doctors. His business was finished and life never quite matched up afterwards to the excitement and danger he had experienced. He lost touch with his wife and son and began to spin fantasies about his role in the Penkovsky case, deceiving himself perhaps above all. Afterwards, MI6 laid down new rules for the use of businessmen, aware of the cost that it had exacted from a man who had just wanted to be part of the club. Konon Molody, Gordon Lonsdale, returned to the Soviet Union a hero but also struggled to adjust. His life in the West had left him impatient with the reality of Communism and he was particularly critical of the way in which Soviet industry was run and international trade conducted. This did not make him popular. He died of a heart attack while picking mushrooms in the woods aged forty-eight.46
Blake, Vassall, Portland, Lonsdale – the density of spy cases contributed to the heady atmosphere of the early 1960s as one of Britain’s periodic bouts of spy mania consumed the nation. The politicians were not happy with having to answer questions time and time again about ‘lax’ security. When Vassall was arrested, Prime Minister Macmillan vented his fury against the spies. ‘I am not at all pleased,’ he told Roger Hollis, head of MI5. ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room: he buries it out of sight.’47 He would refer, with some displeasure, to the ‘so-called Security Service’. Often the politicians seemed to want the scandals brushed under the carpet rather than exposed in the courts, hence the offers of immunity to Philby and Blunt.
A climax was reached with the pitch-perfect Profumo Affair. This ticked every box for the hungry press pack. Politicians. Country houses. Showgirls. Russian spies. It was all there, above all the cream of the establishment mixing with the seedy underworld which it could never quite resist. On one night in August 1961, Cliveden, the glorious country house of Lord Astor, played host to the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, Lord Mountbatten and the President of Pakistan as well as nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler and Evgeni Ivanov, an assistant Soviet naval attaché and – of course – a spy. MI5 had itself been trying to get close to Ivanov, adding another layer of complication. When the guests stripped off to take a dive in the pool, Profumo and Keeler met for the first time. As their affair continued, no secrets were ever passed, but for the Secretary of State for War to be having an affair with the same woman as a Russian spy was quite enough once the papers got hold of it. ‘This was all dirt,’ a despondent Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary as his government was rocked by crisis.48 The scandal cost Profumo his career. It also made life harder for the Russians. ‘It changed the good face of Soviet citizens. After Profumo, we were considered as all spies,’ says Lyubimov with just a hint of irony.49 The British press published pictures of Soviet diplomats, warning the public that these were the people they would be rubbing shoulders with on buses and to beware.
A small purple-covered booklet became Britain’s last line of defence against Communist subversion and the work of Lyubimov and his colleagues (‘he may be closer than you think’). Their Trade is Treachery was distributed to government officials to warn them of what lay in wait. ‘Spies are with us all the time. They are interested in everything … This booklet tells you about the great hostile spy machine that tries to suborn our citizens and turn them into traitors … This booklet tells you how to recognise at once certain espionage techniques, and how to avoid pitfalls which could lead to a national catastrophe or a personal disaster — or both.’ The booklet recounted recent cases and explained how Russians might target and cultivate someone. One piece of advice offered to officials to help them avoid haemorrhaging national secrets was that great Civil Service injunction: ‘Keep the office tidy.’50
And soon the tables were turned on Mikhail Lyubimov. After attending a public lecture he bumped into an individual whom he knew and whom he thought would make a prize agent – a Foreign Office man with links to GCHQ. After all the setbacks experienced with Lonsdale and Blake, the KGB had been keen for Lyubimov to pursue him vigorously. The two set off for a pub and ordered whisky. After the second whisky, the Foreign Office man suddenly stood up and announced that he had to go to the lavatory. Two ‘rough-looking men’ came and seated themselves next to Lyubimov. One seemed a bit unshaven; the other, red faced and plump, sat slumped next to him. ‘Mr Lyubimov, you are a complete failure,’ one of them said. They then revealed that they knew something about him, which Lyubimov will only describe as ‘compromising’. They had the photographs to prove it, they explained. They then uttered the words that send chills down the spine of any diplomat. ‘Mr Lyubimov. Either your career is over or you work for us.’ The men were from MI5.
‘Excuse me,’ he said in shock and stood up. He virtually ran to his car and drove straight to the Embassy to report the incident. A formal protest was soon made to the Foreign Office about the ‘barbarous provocation’ against an innocent Soviet diplomat. The reply came that he had been involved in activities incompatible with his diplomatic status. MI5 had recently decided to try and throw their opponents off balance with a new aggressive strategy.51 Lyubimov and his family were at least allowed to slip quietly away, avoiding the blaze of publicit
y that accompanies many an expelled spy’s departure. His time as a spy in London was over. But his involvement with Britain was not. The mischievous desire to subvert remained. Lyubimov returned to Moscow to work on the KGB’s British desk planning future operations against British nationals in the UK and around the world. ‘I remember meeting a British trade unionist in Moscow,’ he wrote later. ‘He was so far to the left it should actually have been him who was recruiting me! When I mentioned that I was connected with the KGB and asked him about the political cooperation he was almost overwhelmed. “At last!” he exclaimed.’52 By the early 1970s Lyubimov had written a thesis entitled ‘Special Traits of the British National Character and their Use in Operational Work’. This paper, which he wrote partly for the guarantee of a 10 per cent salary increase, became the textbook for training a generation of young KGB agents sent to Britain. Among the characteristics for the KGB man to understand and exploit were aggression, self-control, hypocrisy and understatement. It advised them not to start conversations with strangers on the tube and how to buy a round in the pub.53
When he was made deputy chief of the Third Department which dealt with the UK and Scandinavia in 1974, Lyubimov was faced with a challenge. The KGB’s operations against Britain had been decimated. After a torrid decade of spy scandals, MI5 finally got a grip on the Soviet operation in 1971 with the mass expulsion of Soviet ‘diplomats’ in Operation Foot. Patience had finally run out at the top of government and concerns about diplomatic repercussions were brushed aside after the Prime Minister was briefed on the scale of a KGB operation which had led to twelve British subjects being convicted of passing secrets in the previous ten years. The defection of a KGB officer Oleg Lyalin provided the perfect pretext. In April 1971, Lyalin, ostensibly and rather bizarrely the knitwear representative with the Soviet Trade Delegation, walked into Hampstead police station asking to see Special Branch officers. Rather than sweaters and cardigans, Lyalin was in fact an expert in hand-to-hand combat and part of the ultra-secret Department V that dealt with sabotage in the event of war, the latest incarnation of the stay-behind networks of old. No one had ever defected from it before.54 He revealed plans to land teams of special forces, flood the London Underground, blow up Fylingdales military base in North Yorkshire and assassinate key figures at the outbreak of war with the aim of demoralising the British population. Among the disclosures was that the KGB had managed to recruit a clerk in the Greater London Council’s motor-licensing pool which helped them identify the MI5 and police vehicles being used to tail its officers. He was briefly run as an agent in place by MI5 but his complicated personal life (involving large quantities of drink, a Russian wife, a Russian mistress, the wives of Embassy colleagues and a British mistress) soon brought an end to that.
Late one evening Lyalin was careering down Tottenham Court Road drunk. His lights were off and the mysterious blonde at his side scarpered immediately when police pulled him over. Lyalin was placed in the back of their panda car and put his feet up on the seat. ‘What are you playing at?’ the policeman in front asked. ‘You cannot talk to me, you cannot beat me, I am a KGB officer,’ Lyalin replied.55 By the time he appeared in court the next morning, there was no choice but for him to defect straight away. Using Lyalin’s information as the official justification, an existing plan was accelerated and more than a hundred Soviet diplomats were sent packing to Moscow.56 It was the largest single diplomatic expulsion in history (although the Prime Minister was warned that even after the expulsion there were still 137 intelligence officers from Eastern Europe at work, including fifty-five Poles and forty-six from Czechoslovakia).57 The drinks were cracked open in MI5 headquarters to celebrate, pulled out of a large safe where they were kept. Staff knew that for the first time they had cleared the nest of vipers that had been running rings around them through the 1960s. The KGB in London never recovered.
So how could Lyubimov revitalise the operations in the mid-1970s, especially when new recruits would have little chance of experiencing the realities of life in Britain?58 And why were so many Sov Bloc officials defecting one way and so few Westerners going the other way? Who could help?
It was New Year’s Day 1975 and, in a private room of an upmarket restaurant in Moscow, KGB bigwigs clinked vodka glasses and offered lengthy toasts to the health of their guest of honour who was celebrating his birthday. The guest stood for each toast and politely raised his glass, but Kim Philby looked increasingly bored. To Lyubimov’s eyes, he resembled a ‘run of the mill, semi-unemployed pensioner, who was dying to get stuck into some real work’.59
Philby’s existence in Moscow had embodied the strange afterlife of the spy – once so highly prized but increasingly redundant as the store of valuable knowledge is eroded by time. Philby saw himself as a Soviet intelligence officer and had expected to be masterminding operations against Britain, just as the press back home assumed he was. But the KGB never quite trusted him, a few wondering even if he was really a double agent who had been working for British intelligence all along. ‘It is very much in line with a myth about the subtlety of the British intelligence,’ recalls Lyubimov with a touch of sadness for his old comrade, with whom he became close friends. ‘Philby could not grasp he was no longer a valued agent but a problem.’60 ‘He was a strong romantic. And he remained a believer in Communism – not in the Communism like the Soviet one but that Communism of Marx and Engels and he had to adapt himself to the situation in the Soviet Union because there was no democracy here at all. He knew perfectly well that he was bugged.’ There were concerns he might flee, especially since he never quite lost his independent, anti-establishment streak. There was also an intrinsic wariness of someone who might profess to be a Communist but who was still as British as they came, a Cambridge graduate from an upper-middle-class family. Later, Lyubimov would deliver pots of Oxford Coarse-Cut Marmalade and Scotch sent over from England as well as corduroy trousers and Jaeger pullovers. ‘I am convinced that Kim missed England, even though he was at pains to hide this even from those close to him. He was an Englishman to his fingertips, and he needed those now-vanished relics of his former life.’ Philby would cook bacon and eggs and fried bread for breakfast and then eat while listening to the cricket scores on the BBC World Service, reading the odd John le Carré novel.
The drinking had got worse in the early Moscow years. Hair of the dog at noon. Maybe a nasty fall later in the day, disturbed dreams at night followed by a morning hangover before it began again. His relationship with Eleanor, who had followed him to Moscow in September 1963, never recovered from his betrayal. It was not so much his being a spy as his leaving one day without so much as a word. They lived for a while in a ‘huge grim block’ which reminded her of the Lubyanka prison.61 On a long walk one day she asked, ‘What is more important in your life – me and the children or the Communist Party?’ He answered without hesitation: ‘The party, of course.’ Philby never saw Guy Burgess again after their dinner in Washington in 1951. By the time Philby arrived in Moscow, Burgess had drunk himself to oblivion and was already on his deathbed. Philby, unforgiving of Burgess’s ‘betrayal’ in running and pointing the finger at him, never visited as his former friend’s overworked liver finally gave out. He barely knew Donald Maclean. They had kept their distance since the 1930s, but they began to meet, play bridge and joke about how ‘when the revolution comes’ they would visit Italy and Paris. Eleanor thought their reminiscing about those they had known felt stale and forced. When she returned from a brief visit to America, she found the Macleans’ marriage had broken down and she realised that Philby had moved in on his fellow spy’s wife. She left soon afterwards.
A fellow spy would fortuitously provide Philby an escape raft from alcoholic self-destruction. Philby had not known George Blake when they both worked for MI6, but the two former officers briefly became friends. Blake had engineered a daring escape through a window in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 with the help of sympathetic peace activists who then sheltered him and drove him to B
erlin in a camper van. It meant he was able to meet Lonsdale/Molody on Red Square for that anniversary after all. In Moscow one day, a colleague of Blake’s wife called Rufina was introduced to Philby. He quickly made his intentions clear. She thought he looked a ‘middle-aged man with a puffy face’ but while the looks had gone, the charm had not, nor the determination. ‘You’re a lucky bloke,’ Blake remarked to him.62 Rufina found it hard to reconcile the gentle, sometimes helpless man she knew with the master spy. He told her he never enjoyed the deception. They married and she had placed him on an even keel by the time he met Lyubimov.
After that night at the restaurant, Lyubimov and Philby became close friends, meeting regularly and drinking late into the night in Philby’s book-lined apartment. Lyubimov found Philby’s ideas for revitalising the London Residency useful although not enormously original. His most valuable role came in running a training class for new recruits. The fresh young KGB men would arrive at a safe flat on Gorky Street to be told what to wear and how to start a conversation when in England. Philby would role-play being a civil servant and then ask them to approach him and talk to him as a potential recruit.
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