The realisation of just how catastrophic this misunderstanding could be came in November 1983. NATO was running a high-level command exercise codenamed ‘Able Archer’. Gordievsky and others across Europe received ‘Most Urgent’ flash telegrams from Moscow. The Soviets feared that the exercise might be a prelude to a real attack with the exercise used to mask the preparations (a tactic the Soviets themselves had contemplated). When Gordievsky passed on the reporting, the reaction in London was one of alarm, particularly as officials saw signals intelligence which dovetailed with and was explained by Gordievsky’s reports. Part of the Soviet land-based missile force went on to its own heightened alert. The world was not on the brink of war but there was a danger that, as in the First World War, mobilisations and preparations could be embarked on from which no one could back down. No one had realised just how scared the Soviets were about an imminent attack or just how blind they were in terms of intelligence about the real thinking and plans of the West, a mirror image of Western blindness in Vienna at the dangerous start of the Cold War.37 ‘There was a degree of misunderstanding and fear among the Soviet leadership which we had underestimated,’ argues Scarlett. ‘And that was a bit of a wake-up call – [you have] got to be careful how you manage tension, you mustn’t let it get too acute. We didn’t understand the extent to which the Soviet leadership didn’t understand us.’38
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was one of only a handful of people outside MI6 to know that a senior KGB officer in London was offering up secrets. A fan of Frederick Forsyth novels, she took a close interest in intelligence (preferring the hardliners of MI6 to the ‘wimps’ at the Foreign Office) and in the Gordievsky reporting specifically. It was among the only raw intelligence, known as red-jackets because of the folders in which it came, that found its way on to her desk, courtesy of her Foreign Affairs Adviser Charles Powell, who acted as a filter. The papers would be put into a blue box for which only the Prime Minister, Powell and Robin Butler, her Civil Service private secretary, had the key. The reports around the time of Able Archer led to a recognition that some of the rhetoric had to be toned down. MI6 knew it was on to a winner with the reporting and made the most of it. ‘It was like a cat which had swallowed gallons of cream,’ a Whitehall official recalled. One of the intelligence officers put it another way. ‘At that time, on this target and on these issues, it was the apogee of what the business was all about.’39 The reporting fed into a seminar at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, in which the decision was made to reach out to reformists in the USSR by inviting some of them to Britain. The hardline language was toned down.40
Another importance of Gordievsky was not what he produced but the fact that he produced anything and that he produced it for so long. It meant the days of paralysing fears of penetration were past and that the service could successfully run an agent over an extended period. This built confidence not just within the Secret Service but also in its relations with allies and especially the Americans. MI6 always knew how to play its cards cannily at home and abroad and made sure the Americans saw the material. Whereas signals intelligence from GCHQ and America’s NSA is almost all shared under an agreement, human intelligence was subject to more of a barter process between the allies. Gordievsky’s material was gratefully received. It was treated as the holy of holies in the CIA, seen only by a small group who read it in hard copy under strict conditions. The CIA had plenty of agents who could count tanks but none who could offer the same insight into the Soviet Union’s thinking (one Polish agent would provide vital information on the Warsaw Pact, but there was no one in Moscow at the level of Gordievsky).41 Gordievsky revealed just how skewed the Soviet perception of Western motives had become – wars can follow on from such misunderstandings, the CIA analysts understood, and these had become dangerous times. Gordievsky’s warnings of Soviet fears began to have an impact in Washington, and also helped ‘reinforce Reagan’s conviction that a great effort had to be made not just to reduce tension but to end the Cold War’, according to the then Deputy Director of the CIA, Robert Gates.42
Gordievsky’s intelligence highlighted one of the central debates within MI6. Should intelligence be protected cautiously in order not to reveal the source, as traditionalists argued or, as modernisers contended, was such intelligence useless if it was locked away in a box preventing it having any impact? No one took a position at the extremes, but every day there would be decisions about where on the spectrum to reside. Gordievsky showed the benefits of distributing intelligence widely – it certainly had an impact in London and Washington. But it would also show the risks, not least to the agent.
Trust only goes so far even among the most intimate of allies, and it was never quite the same between Britain and America after Philby. Britain had passed the intelligence from Gordievsky to the CIA but with the identity of the source disguised. This was not good enough for the CIA, which occasionally experienced a touch of jealousy over its smaller cousin’s success in recruiting human sources (MI6 liked to think it was more subtle in its approaches, relying less on cash and more on understanding an agent’s motivation). The CIA tasked the head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet division with discovering the spy’s identity. By March 1985 the counter-intelligence chief concluded that Gordievsky was a likely candidate and sent a cable to the CIA’s London station asking if he fitted the profile. The London station said yes. The CIA never told the British it had guessed who its spy was. When they later found out what had happened – and what the consequences of this action had been – British officers were furious. ‘It wasn’t a game. If we had wanted to tell them, we would have done,’ one person involved fumed.43
The unmasking of Bettaney in 1984 had provided a unique opportunity, British intelligence realised. The British had already expelled one official, which enabled Gordievsky to become head of political reporting. Now they had a pretext to expel Guk. Summoned back to Moscow, Gordievsky was told he was a candidate for resident. Within sight lay a unique opportunity to subvert pretty much all of the KGB’s operations against Britain. As the battle raged in Moscow over who should get the job, Gordievsky in London had an important visitor to deal with. One reformist who had accepted an invitation from the British government was the rising star Mikhail Gorbachev. Gordievsky was asked to prepare the briefings for him. Reports were written on the miners’ strike, CND, Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party to prepare him for his meetings. When he spoke at the Embassy on his arrival, Gordievsky thought him strangely disappointing, talking for far too long. ‘Just another Soviet apparatchik,’ Gordievsky concluded with his jaded eye.44 It was obvious, though, that Gorbachev was different from the old guard – he was saying that American foreign policy was not shaped by a secret cabal – but he was not yet ready to call for openness and a new policy of glasnost.
The visit was remarkable because Gordievsky was able to brief both Gorbachev and the British government (through MI6). MI6 even showed Gordievsky a brief on what the British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe would be raising with Gorbachev which could then be rewritten as his own briefing for the Soviet leader.45 All his briefs were written with the assistance of his youthful MI6 reports officer who was managing indirectly to brief both the British and Soviet senior leadership. Thatcher noticed ‘just how well briefed Mr Gorbachev was about the West. He commented on my speeches, which he had clearly read.’46 Gorbachev’s trip was a success and an important one. Thatcher was convinced that he was someone she could do business with. After the visit, Downing Street sent a note to the White House on the possibilities of engagement. Gorbachev disliked nuclear weapons and wanted an end to the arms race but was determined to try and stop Reagan’s missile defence initiative. Three weeks later, Thatcher gave Reagan a fuller account at Camp David, explaining that it was worth investing in getting to know Gorbachev. Reagan agreed. The combination of pressure in the early 1980s followed by relaxation and engagement in the latter half of the decade helped push the sclerotic Soviet system toward
s change, aiding a process of liberalisation which would unravel the Soviet Union from within.
Gordievsky’s briefings also played well in Moscow – one reason why he was appointed resident-designate at the end of April 1985. The prize was within his grasp. Then it slipped away. The cipher clerk brought the telegram into the Resident’s office on 16 May. As Gordievsky read the handwritten message, he tried to hide the fear that had swept over him. ‘In order to confirm your appointment as Resident please come to Moscow urgently in two days’ time for important discussions.’ This was not usual procedure, he knew. As if realising that it had been too blatant, the Centre sent a further telegram the next day explaining that the summons was to discuss British issues. There were difficult discussions within MI6 and between Gordievsky and his case officers about what to do. They sat down and asked him if he knew any reason why he should not return. He answered that he did not. They had not asked if he thought he should go back, a question which might have elicited a different answer. One part of Gordievsky was determined to keep going, especially with the pinnacle of his career in sight and a chance, with Gorbachev now in charge, to help engineer real change. But as Gordievsky looked at the faces in the room, one person thought they saw something else in his eyes – perhaps a hope for a reprieve and a wish that he would be told there was no choice but to defect immediately. He conducted his last assignment on a Saturday by taking his two small daughters to a park in Bloomsbury and leaving behind an artificial brick containing thousands of pounds for an agent to pick up, and then he headed off.
Everything was nearly normal in Moscow when Gordievsky returned. But not quite. Those tiny tell-tale signs were there, he thought, that something was amiss. The slight pause as the border guard at Moscow’s airport studied the passport and the telephone call before allowing him to pass. The third lock on the door of his flat turned even though he no longer used that key. The sense that someone had been inside the apartment and the fear that every room might be bugged. Care and diligence are the hallmarks of the successful spy who stays alive, but when the heat is on, fear and suspicion can crowd out balanced judgement and warp the mind. Keeping cool – being able to maintain watchfulness without slipping into paranoia – is the hardest test. Tiny decisions about when to run and when to wait and call your opponents’ bluff over what they know determine whether escape or a firing squad are the final destination. Philby kept his nerve time and time again as he was tested. Now it was Gordievsky’s turn to run the gauntlet over the coming days as he met with KGB colleagues and tried to decipher what lay behind each glance and each question. In the eyes of colleagues he sensed fear and an eagerness for distance.
‘Can you please come over?’ a superior requested, knowing there was no choice in the answer. ‘There are two people who want to talk to you about high-level agent penetration of Britain.’47 He was taken to a small house. Only later did he remember that the other three men drank brandy out of one bottle, while he was served out of another. At the time, all he remembered was a strange out-of-body sensation overcoming him and then waking up in a bed in only his vest and underpants the next morning. He was probably supposed to have remembered nothing of the interrogation, but that morning he had taken a pill provided by MI6 to maintain alertness which may have counteracted at least some of the potency of the KGB drugs. ‘You’re a very self-confident man,’ he remembered one of the men saying to him. But had he given anything away? ‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,’ a KGB boss told him. ‘And yet we’ve decided that you may stay in the KGB. Your job in London is terminated of course.’ He knew they suspected him. But he also knew they did not have enough proof. If they did he would be a dead man. Slivers of memory began to rise to the surface from the drugged interrogation. There were the books and questions about why his daughter knew the Lord’s Prayer. And then the accusation. ‘We know who recruited you in Copenhagen,’ they had said. ‘That’s not true,’ he remembered saying. ‘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, he said, talking slowly as if to a child. ‘No, I’ve nothing to confess.’ Had he confessed? He did not think so. They had only the books for sure, and he went to Lyubimov’s apartment in a sweat to talk about those. But they knew there was more. The surveillance was everywhere. It was time to run. ‘If I don’t get out, I’m going to die,’ he told himself.48
An escape plan had first been devised when Gordievsky returned to Moscow from Copenhagen in the late 1970s. The plan was kept up to date by Joan, the officer who would attend some of the briefings in London. This was not easy. Brush contact and signalling sites had to be identified in Moscow by people based in London. Moscow in winter is a very different city from Moscow in summer, and so they had to be workable in both seasons. Contingencies had to be planned for – what if roadworks closed a designated site?
Details of Gordievsky’s plan were kept on an LP sleeve in secret writing which he would then have to develop. The idea was to have a signalling spot which was available to Gordievsky every Tuesday night. That spot, near the Ukraine Hotel, had to be passed and watched at exactly the right time by someone from the small MI6 station every week, come rain come shine, and there needed to be a plausible reason for doing so. Even when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched. In fact precisely when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched in case the KGB had surveillance on the MI6 officers and associated a deviation from the pattern with the absence of Gordievsky. When he returned in May the KGB watched him every day. At first the surveillance was intense. His tall apartment block was inhabited mainly by fellow KGB officers. They all noticed the arrival of heavy surveillance – sometimes as many as fifteen cars or people outside the apartment and in nearby parking lots and markets. The fact that they were clearly observable was no doubt intended to put Gordievsky under more intense psychological pressure in the hope of forcing errors on his part. He would go jogging and shopping and act normally knowing that he had to be patient and wait for the surveillance to ease before making his move.49 This lasted for weeks.
The signal Gordievsky was to give to MI6 when he was ready needed to be precise and sufficiently unusual in order to avoid the entire complex escape procedure being kicked off by some innocent action misinterpreted. In practice, this meant the signal was mildly absurd, which did not necessarily induce confidence on the part of Gordievsky. A man wearing a particular type of trousers, carrying a particular bag and eating a particular brand of chocolate would walk past Gordievsky to acknowledge that the signal had been received. The first time Gordievsky waited at the point, there was nothing. Had he left too soon? he wondered. He tried again the following Tuesday. This time a man, unmistakably British in his attire, carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar strolled past and looked him in the eye saying nothing.
One of Gordievsky’s final acts in Moscow was to phone a friend. He called Mikhail Lyubimov and said he would like to meet him on Monday. Lyubimov noticed a confidence to his friend’s voice that was in sharp contrast to the nervous wreck who had appeared in his apartment only a few weeks earlier. They agreed to meet at Lyubimov’s dacha in Zvenigorod an hour outside Moscow where he was taking a break. Gordievsky knew the phone was bugged but also asked an odd question. Did his old friend remember a short story by Somerset Maugham called ‘Mr Harrington’s Washing’? The reference was a risky joke. ‘I knew the KGB was not bright enough to work it out.’ The story by Maugham, a former British Secret Service officer, involved a plan to escape from Russia over the border with Finland.
The Gordievsky escape plan at the end of the Cold War mirrored the plan hatched during Harrington’s escape during the days of the Bolshevik Revolution in that it required a risky crossing of the border into Finland. In case his family was coming, two cars were needed, each driven by one of the MI6 officers in the Embassy. They would leave Moscow on Friday and stay overnight in Leningrad before going over to Finland on Saturda
y. The pretext was one of the officers’ wives needing some specialist, but not too serious, medical treatment in Helsinki which had led the two families to decide to make a weekend trip together. Phone calls were made to London to establish the cover story. The first problem was an unfortunate coincidence. A new British ambassador was due to fly in that very Friday and he was going to have a welcome reception for staff. Would two of his staff really miss the opportunity to attend? So they would have to leave afterwards and drive through the night to make the rendezvous. The Ambassador was also briefed on the escape plan, and he was highly reluctant. He could just see his first week in the job being marked not by the usual introductions but by a huge diplomatic row as two of his staff were caught smuggling a spy out of the country. It could be the shortest posting in Foreign Office history. But he was overruled. The plan required political clearance and this had gone to the highest level.
Getting an agent out of Moscow was about as risky an operation as one could ask for. Getting caught in the act could have major diplomatic repercussions at just the time when the Prime Minister was working hard to improve relations with Gorbachev. As a result, the decision on whether or not to go ahead was one for Margaret Thatcher herself to take. The problem was that when the moment came she was not in Downing Street. She was up in Scotland staying at Balmoral Castle undertaking one of the Prime Minister’s regular visits to the Queen. The conversation could not be held on the phone in case of interception, so Thatcher’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Charles Powell had to race to Heathrow to catch a flight to Aberdeen and then take a car to Balmoral to seek approval. On arrival, the Queen’s aides were none too amused when he explained that he could not tell them why he had come and what was so urgent. For all the risks, Thatcher had no doubt that the escape plan had to be put into action. ‘We have an obligation and we will not let him down,’ Thatcher remarked. The escape plan was always high risk. There were people at Century House who thought a trap would be waiting. Surveillance was heavy and the fear was that Gordievsky had been broken and it was a provocation, much like the arrest of the American after clearing Penkovsky’s dead drop a quarter of a century earlier.
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