Only once was Philby allowed to enter the headquarters of the service he had sworn loyalty to so many years earlier. ‘I have held official passes to seven major intelligence headquarters,’ he told an audience in 1977. ‘So I claim that this is the eighth major intelligence organisation which I have succeeded in penetrating.’63 ‘There was a terrible silence,’ remembers Lyubimov and then a few angry whispers before Philby added that where before he had been surrounded by wolves, this time it was by comrades. There was relieved and enthusiastic applause.
He took the gathered officers through his recruitment, explaining what had made his first case officer so appealing and how important his controller’s patience had been in waiting for him slowly to establish his credentials so that he could eventually join the Secret Service. He also gave them a piece of advice: never confess if confronted – an interesting remark given that he had provided half a confession to Elliott in Beirut. KGB officers found Philby very different from Blake. Blake clung to the belief that his work had not led to the death of any agents. Philby knew it had ‘and it didn’t seem to bother him’. It was a war, a Cold one perhaps, but a war nevertheless.64
There was only one Englishman and one former member of MI6 who truly understood Philby. Some friendships could survive betrayal. When Graham Greene came out to visit, it had been thirty-five years since the two had last met. Both were nervous. Greene sat silent in the car as it approached Philby’s Moscow apartment.65 When he walked in, they hugged each other and clapped each other on the back. The vodka came out and two greying old men talked about what they had done in the war. Greene had written an introduction to Philby’s 1968 memoir, My Silent War, which was remarkable in its defence of his old colleague. Greene wrote of how he had been dismayed by Philby’s brutal manoeuvring against a colleague and how he had seen it as pure ambition. ‘I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself and so my old liking for him comes back.’ Greene offered a strange defence of Philby. It was like English Catholics who had helped Spain, he wrote, and who would have had to live through the Inquisition. What mattered to Greene was that Philby had acted out of belief and not self-interest. He even later defended his role in the deaths of the agents sent by boat to Albania. ‘They were going into their country armed to do damage to that country. They were killed instead of killing.’66 The introduction was a very public message – you are still my friend.
Greene had also sent Philby a draft of a novel he had waited many years to write. The Human Factor was the story of an MI6 officer who betrays his service to the Soviets, but for love not ideology. The hero-of-sorts falls for the girl in Africa not Austria, but, as with Philby, the die had been cast from that moment. Philby said the one thing he disliked was the portrayal of the drab life in Moscow for the man after he is forced to flee Britain. Greene did not change anything.67 The same year the book came out, he had been asked what he would have done if he had known of Philby’s treason in the 1940s. ‘I think perhaps, if in a drunken moment he had let slip a hint, I would have given him twenty-four hours to get clear and then reported it,’ he replied.68 For Greene, there was always the fascination with intelligence as a game in which human motivations were played out.
The ‘turning’ of a KGB man, for instance, would never surprise me, because the profession can become a sort of game as abstract as chess: the spy takes more interest in the mechanics of his calling than its ultimate goal – the defence of his country. The ‘game’ (a serious game) achieves such a degree of sophistication that the player loses sight of his moral values. I can understand a man’s temptation to turn double agent, for the game becomes more interesting.
When it came to Philby, Greene added that he still admired the way his friend had played the game and especially his constancy. ‘I myself would not be capable of such courage, of such a force of conviction.’69
That day in Moscow, the two men realised that a deep bond lay between them. Yet it was not faith but doubt. ‘He is burdened by doubt as well,’ Philby told Rufina afterwards.70 Greene had cited one of his heroes Monsignor Quixote: ‘Sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith.’ Greene was never a Communist, Philby never a Christian. But both men understood the other’s faith and with it the awareness of a chasm of doubt which, if fallen into, would render their lives as lived meaningless. ‘For the first time, we were able to speak frankly with each other.’ Philby had been used by the KGB in the first years after arriving, including not just writing his own book but also ghosting Gordon Lonsdale’s, ‘but when they didn’t use me, the doubt crept in,’ he later said.71 Greene was excoriated in the British press for his dinner (‘morally on a par with having a holiday with Dr Goebbels while this country was at war with Nazi Germany’, said the Daily Mail) but he went back three more times.72 For others the treachery remained too much. In the late 1980s, John le Carré was allowed into Russia and received a message at a party saying that a ‘great admirer’ Kim Philby wanted to meet him. ‘It was a horrific suggestion,’ le Carré later explained. ‘I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand. It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive.’73
Was friendship Greene’s only motivation? He kept in touch with MI6 long after leaving and did the occasional job for them.74 He passed on to the service the letters and postcards he received from Philby, once saying, ‘Well, if there was anything political in it, I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield, so it was either information or disinformation.’75 The friendship may have been real between the two men but it also might have been useful for the service to know what the old boy was thinking and also to keep a channel open in case he ever wanted to change sides again and get out. The Soviets certainly worried about the latter possibility. They sometimes wondered if he had fooled them all along, like he had fooled everyone else. Yet until his death in 1988 Philby always remained an Englishman in his manners but a Communist in his beliefs, willing to criticise both worlds but ultimately loyal to the latter. Even his former KGB controller was never quite sure about Philby. ‘In the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.’76 When Philby died, Lyubimov would mourn the departure of a friend. But he would also be living with his own experience of the bitterness of betrayal as another of his friends had become the man who gave MI6 their opportunity to avenge the past.
7
ESCAPE FROM MOSCOW
It was June 1985. As he opened the door of his Moscow apartment, Mikhail Lyubimov did not need to draw on his largely redundant spy skills to realise that something was wrong. Tension was etched on to the face of the old friend who stood on his doorstep. There were too many beads of sweat even for the stifling city heat of a Moscow summer.1 Lyubimov was an outsider now. A second divorce and an independent streak was enough to draw the ire of the hardliners in the KGB who had forced his departure a few years earlier. He had embarked on a new career as a writer.2 But his visitor was still an insider and he was not supposed to be in Moscow. He was supposed to be in London.
The lean KGB officer stepped into the kitchen and turned on the tap. ‘What are you doing?’ Lyubimov asked, thinking that he was trying to drown out any conversation if anyone was listening in. He just needed a drink, the man explained. He was in a bad way. His throat was dry. The vodka came out.
Memories had begun to pierce the fog that enveloped Oleg Gordievsky’s mind and that shrouded events of a few days earlier. The journey to a small guesthouse on the outskirts of Moscow and the offer of some Armenian brandy was clear. But after that there were only brief, malevolent flashes like a dark forest lit up by lightning strikes. There were the faces of the men staring at him and the words ‘confess’ repeated again and again. He had been drugged, he knew. But what had he said? He remembered a kind of euphoria that had come over him after the brandy which left him laughing and arguing and talking expansively with no nervousness or fear. He knew he had been close to breaking. He knew they were on to h
im.
As the memories slowly fought their way to the surface, Gordievsky had begun to recall more of what had been said.
‘Why do you have all those anti-Soviet volumes – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Maximov and the rest?’ the voice asked him.
‘But of course,’ he heard himself say, ‘as a PR [Political Reporting] Line officer I was supposed to read books like that.’
‘You used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal in this country.’3
There were other accusations that had also seeped into his consciousness before he arrived at Lyubimov’s apartment which he did not now mention to his friend.
‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,’ they had said. ‘We know you were a British agent. You’d better confess.’ Confess, the man said again and again. You’ve already done it, just do it again, they said, talking slowly as if to a child.
‘No, I’ve nothing to confess,’ Gordievsky could recall replying. He did not mention these exchanges, only the books, to his friend. Gordievsky and Lyubimov had bought the banned books together years earlier when their friendship had been forged serving overseas, happier times when both men were rising through the ranks of the KGB. Those were days when Gordievsky had knocked on Lyubimov’s door and walked in with a batch of telegrams from Moscow Centre and the latest gossip, not with a bottle of vodka and talk of interrogation. Lyubimov, unaware of how serious events were, tried to reassure his friend that even if he was fired it was not the end of the world. ‘I had to leave the KGB,’ he explained. ‘Find something interesting to do. It may be a blessing.’ Once Gordievsky had left, Lyubimov hurried to find his copies of Solzhenitsyn, wrapped them in plastic and buried them in the garden. Just in case.4
The KGB was family to Gordievsky, but not everyone loves or is loyal to their kin. His father and brother had both served in its ranks. But within his home lay the seeds of mistrust which would lead to betrayal. His father was a committed Communist who never spoke to his son of his work. But the young Gordievsky could sometimes glimpse the fear that lay hidden beneath the loyalty. In the late 1930s his father had watched friends and colleagues in the NKVD, the KGB’s forerunner, being arrested as part of the great purges that engulfed the Soviet state. Some had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. The father would repeat the mantra ‘The NKVD is always right,’ but the son would remember the dread that lay beneath the profession of faith. Sometimes the young Oleg would overhear his parents arguing in their bedroom about politics, the only place they could talk freely.5 His mother was not a true believer in the cause; she was more willing to question and criticise. She could see the intrigues and the brutality that her husband, perhaps for self-protection, chose not to speak of. For Oleg the combination of fascination and fear of the secret state came young.
The interwoven strands of loyalty and mistrust coexisted in the young man as he grew up and went to college, planning on a career in the Foreign Ministry. On the surface he was a normal Homo Sovieticus, able to live under the doublethink that George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, toeing the party line in public, thinking more freely in private. Parents would warn children what to joke about, especially outside the home. When he studied languages at college, Gordievsky noticed that many other students chose not to read Western newspapers even when they were finally allowed to for fear of being seen as overly interested in ‘subversive’ views. Gordievsky was curious enough to read them and began to open his mind.
The unusual opportunity of six months’ work experience abroad bought Gordievsky’s ticket on a train that arrived in Berlin late on the evening of 11 August 1961. The talk in the city was of refugees heading west by the thousand. ‘Don’t go out anywhere,’ he was warned by an Embassy official the next evening. By morning, barbed wire was rising across the city, marking the ugly, painful birth of the Berlin Wall. He watched the violence which met those who tried to escape its rise. The reality that coercion rather than consent underpinned Communism was being laid bare before his eyes and yet he was still enough of his father’s son to take up the offer to work with the instrument of repression, the KGB. The lure of foreign travel, the excitement of emptying dead-letter boxes and the thrill of meeting deep-cover illegal agents was too strong a pull for the adventurous young man, even if the first doubts had taken root.
Next came marriage to Yelena and a first foreign posting to Copenhagen, a taste of the West. The small liberties were what struck him – the opportunity to listen to church music, or to borrow whatever books you wanted from a library. Gordievsky’s cover was in the consular department but his real task was supporting the illegals in the country, checking dead-letter boxes and signal sites. It was also here that his friendship with Mikhail Lyubimov began. After Her Majesty’s Government had declared him persona non grata, Lyubimov had found his way to Copenhagen and the position of deputy resident. He had initially missed the bright lights and glamour of London’s streets and parties but slowly began to find some compensation in the bracing walks, fresh fish and unstuffiness of Danish life. The two men, both educated at the Institute of International Relations, recognised an independent, free-thinking streak in each other – although Gordievsky’s would take him to a place Lyubimov would not follow. They considered themselves to be different from some of the more thuggish zealots of the KGB. In the evening, the Embassy club showed Russian films and served cheap vodka, but the two men often opted out in favour of classical music and conversation.6 Both agreed that banning the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn had been a mistake. That the two men felt comfortable enough in each other’s company to talk politics was a sign of genuine trust, since a report to superiors about an indiscretion could be terminal for a career.
The two KGB officers had watched in curious trepidation in 1968 as liberal reformers in Czechoslovakia first began to open the country up. This had turned to horror as the Soviet tanks went in to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ and with it hopes of socialism with a human face. For Gordievsky, the feeling of alienation from the system he served went deeper as he watched crowds gather and hurl missiles at the Embassy in Copenhagen. The seeds of dissent planted earlier in life and nurtured by the sight of the Wall going up in 1961 had grown into a deep-seated but clandestine conviction that he no longer wanted to work for a ‘criminal’ regime. He needed to cleanse his conscience. But rather than resign he wanted to subvert from within and started to think about how to offer himself up to his enemies. ‘They’ve done it! It’s unbelievable,’ he told his wife over the phone as the tanks made their way through Prague. ‘I just don’t know what to do.’ He knew the phone would be tapped and hoped that someone would pick up on his comments. But before anyone acted, his time in Denmark was up and by January 1970 he was back in Moscow. Events in London then intervened. In the wake of Oleg Lyalin’s 1971 defection in London and the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers, Gordievsky’s department, which covered Scandinavia as well as Britain, was shaken up. The Danes expelled three ‘diplomats’ and suddenly in October 1972 he had an opportunity to return to Copenhagen.
For his second Danish tour, Gordievsky switched to Line PR of the KGB – reporting on politics. Lyubimov returned a year or two later as resident, allowing the two men to resume their conversations over long walks in the Danish woods. Copenhagen may have lacked London’s pizzazz but at least now Lyubimov was the boss, he reflected. A black Mercedes ferried him to the set of white villas surrounded by gardens which made up the Soviet Embassy just to the north of the city centre. The KGB offices were on the first floor (to prevent tunnelling). A concealed bell had to be rung to gain entry. Lyubimov had his own office in which he hung portraits of his twin heroes, Lenin and Philby, the latter with an inscription from the British spy wishing him luck. ‘Your silver-framed portrait hangs directly above our officer counter near the portrait of the Gods. If my office were raided it would be evidence enough to have me declared persona non grata,’ Lyubimov wrote to Philby, also sending the odd jar of marma
lade, some whisky, once even a book of nineteenth-century erotic pictures.7 Lyubimov spent his days contemplating what pitches and dangles to play on the Americans, whose Embassy was separated from his own by only a few hundred yards and a graveyard. His thoughts would be interrupted by the occasional knock on the door and his lean, strong-jawed deputy would enter.
Gordievsky was Lyubimov’s right-hand man. There was no reason to doubt his loyalty. He was always respectful and kept Lyubimov informed of what he was doing, even down to when he was setting off to play badminton. But his loyalty was a lie. Beneath the calm surface, a profound conversion had taken him down a path he had long contemplated. The human factor had also worked along the grain of ideology. Gordievsky’s marriage was breaking down. His wife had embraced feminism and said she did not want children. He had become privately convinced of his decision to work for the other side but had been unsure how to make the approach. A brazen walk into an embassy might be rebuffed, he feared. Then the other side made its move.
On the evening of 2 November 1973 there was a knock on the door of his flat. A Hungarian he had known from Moscow was at the door. Over a whisky, he gave a roundabout story to explain why he happened to be in Denmark and had chosen to drop by. Gordievsky sensed something was up, especially when the man said he had defected from Hungary in 1970. There were nerves on both sides, but they agreed to have lunch the next day. At the lunch, Gordievsky was careful not to show his hand too much, remaining non-committal. Then there was nothing for three weeks. MI6 finally took the plunge at one of Gordievsky’s regular badminton games. In the middle of the game, a man appeared in an overcoat. Gordievsky immediately recognised him as Rob, a forty-something self-confident British diplomat. Gordievsky was surprised by the brazenness of the gambit and broke away from his game to ask what the man wanted. Rob said it would be good to meet and they planned lunch in three days. Gordievsky understood that he had to play it carefully with his own Embassy and informed them of the approach. He was given official permission to meet. Over lunch, the two men chatted warily but amiably.
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