A stunning summer sunrise on Saturday morning greeted the two cars as they drove towards Leningrad. There was a mix of fatalism and excitement as the two officers set out with their families. There was the knowledge that, succeed or fail, it was the end of their time in Moscow. Expulsion was inevitable, but it would be faced either while basking in the glow of a daring escape or, more likely, having been caught in the act. The pessimists gave the plan about a one-intwenty chance of working. Everything had to go right. Cumulatively the chances of one thing going wrong that would throw all the timings were high. Surveillance vehicles followed them almost all of the way. They had to reach the designated spot close to the Finnish border at exactly the right moment – not too early or too late, so when they had some time to kill they visited a monastery, still under surveillance. As they drove out of Leningrad, city surveillance handed over to provincial. They would need to be shaken off somehow. A stroke of luck helped. All the cars on the highway were stopped for ten minutes to allow a convoy of tanks to pass. Time was ticking by. Once the tanks had passed, the drivers floored the accelerator. A gap opened up with the surveillance cars behind still coming out of the queue of traffic.
The two cars pulled off the main road into a layby in a forest to have a picnic. The surveillance cars, now desperate to catch up, roared past. As the picnic items were unpacked and the tea was being poured, a smelly-looking tramp got out of a ditch. ‘Which car?’ he said.
Gordievsky had slept with the doors of his Moscow flat barricaded on Thursday night, fearing arrest. On Friday afternoon he had shaken off his surveillance on the way to the Leningrad station. Police were everywhere, inducing panic before he remembered there was a large festival taking place. He slept fitfully on the overnight train, eventually falling out of his bunk after taking sedatives. Next was another train taking him close to the border and then a bus journey before a walk. As he located the agreed spot, he waited among the tall conifers with mosquitoes gnawing at him. He was way too early and walked back into the nearby town to kill time before returning and sipping a bottle of beer hidden in the grass. These were the hardest moments. As he waited, he became nervous that he had missed the car. He knew it would not come back. He walked out on to the road. ‘Stop, this is madness,’ he told himself, and went back to wait in the heat and the undergrowth. At last came the sound of the cars and he peered at the people getting out. The last time he had seen one of them was eating a Mars bar on a Moscow street.
Gordievsky was bundled into the boot of the Ford Cortina (the smaller of the two cars), and a heat-reflecting blanket was put over him to fool any infra-red sensors. He was given a bottle to urinate into and some pills to calm him down. He gulped one down straight away. The cars made their way to the border crossing. As diplomatic cars, they should have been exempt from being searched. There had been despair a week before when a British military attaché had allowed his trunk to be searched for fear it had set a precedent. If a search was demanded, the cars would refuse and head back to Moscow. Later the team would realise they had forgotten even to lock the boot. No agent had ever been exfiltrated successfully from Russia since the start of the Cold War. At that moment in Century House in London, the Foreign Office adviser to MI6, gathered with senior staff, looked at his watch. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, they’re about to cross the border. I think it would be appropriate to say a prayer.’
A packet of cheese and onion crisps was opened as the team waited for their papers to be checked. They fed a few crisps to the dogs that sniffed vehicles for signs of life in a desperate attempt to throw them off the scent. Another unorthodox method was employed. One of the two families had a baby whom they had taken with them. The dirty nappy of the baby was changed on the car boot with Gordievsky underneath. Inside Gordievsky, unable to take off his jacket in the confined space, was drenched with sweat and struggling to breathe, listening to the odd fragment of Russian spoken in an official voice. As the barrier looked set to rise, the phone in the guard’s booth rang. He walked slowly over to answer it. He glanced over at the car. Then he put the phone down and wandered slowly back to the car. More documents please, he said. He checked them and then walked back to the kiosk. The boom swung up and the car gratefully pulled out. A few moments later, Gordievsky heard the ominous, brooding opening notes of Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’ come on to the car stereo. He was over the border.
The relief dissipated minutes later when he felt the car stop and then reverse. The boot was flung open. Joan’s face stared down on him with a smile. It had been her plan and it had worked. The first words Gordievsky spoke were: ‘I was betrayed.’ Five miles from the border, in what still felt like bandit country, a second team including Joan had been waiting for him. One of the officers who had helped deal with his reports in London, had reconnoitred the route while he had been posted to Moscow just before the escape and had now prepared the second half of the plan. Gordievsky changed clothes in the forest. If anyone tried to drive towards them the officer would block the road with his car. ‘You must be very tired but we are so very glad to see you,’ he said as he extended his hand to the agent whose reports he had worked on but whom he had never met face to face. Gordievsky shook it but remained quiet, the enormity of what had happened still dawning on him.
A team from Danish intelligence were also waiting. Gordievsky was placed in the boot of one of their cars which headed in one direction while an MI6 officer took the old clothes and documents away in a plastic bag. He signalled back to London from a payphone: ‘Really enjoyed the fishing. It has been a successful trip. And we’ve had one guest.’ There had always been an expectation that Gordievsky’s family might be taken out with him and the reference to ‘one guest’ was supposed to convey that Gordievsky came out alone, although there was some confusion on the other end as to whether there was one guest in addition to their agent. The cars carrying the lone guest drove north through the night towards Norway without stopping. As they reached the Arctic Circle the summer sun disappeared for only a few hours before rising again. Eventually they came to Norway’s north, and from there a flight to Oslo and then to London brought Gordievsky to his new home.
That morning, Mikhail Lyubimov arrived at Zvenigorod station in good time for the 11.13 a.m. train. His friend did not emerge from the last carriage as he had promised. After a while, he checked the timetable again to see when the trains departed from Moscow. Perhaps there had been some confusion. He waited some more, glancing at his watch. But his friend never came. Lyubimov was left alone on the platform. ‘It was not so easy when you work with a man all your life and he is a traitor,’ Lyubimov, who was interrogated over the following days, would reflect. ‘It was not just betraying the Soviet Union. But he betrayed me.’ The two friends would never meet or speak again.50
The escape was a humiliation for the KGB. After three or four days, whispered rumours and gossip had gone round its headquarters about the disappearance of the future London Resident. But there was no announcement.51 A few days later the new British Ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. A Soviet official produced a photograph taken just a few days earlier of the Ambassador in full ceremonial uniform surrounded by all his Embassy team as he presented his credentials. The Soviet official placed a finger on the faces of the two MI6 officers who had smuggled Gordievsky out of the country. The Ambassador played innocent but he was told that those two – and others – had forty-eight hours to leave the country.52 Gordievsky was free, but he was not put out to pasture. On his second day in Britain, Chris Curwen – now C, the Chief of MI6 – flew by helicopter to the Midlands country house where Gordievsky had been put up to meet his prize catch. The formality of the country house with its butlers did not suit Gordievsky, who was next taken to the Fort, the service’s training facility. The reports officer, who had been waiting in Finland, and others would listen in over a year as he drained his memory bank and talked through the documents he had smuggled out. Supervising the process were more senior officers including
Shergy’s Sov Bloc rising stars Colin McColl and Gerry Warner.
Margaret Thatcher began to treat Gordievsky as an occasional adviser. At their first meeting, she expressed her gratitude for his work and then began to ask what more he could tell her about Gorbachev, how to handle him and what the pressure points were. (The only time a meeting with Thatcher did not go well was in 1989 when she asked Gordievsky what he thought the Soviet position would be on the unification of Germany, and the Prime Minister, deeply hostile to it, did not like his answer that Moscow would find it hard to oppose.) Her views were not necessarily changed by Gordievsky, but he provided her with the ammunition and confidence to make her case for how to deal with the Soviet Union and how much pressure to apply.
Another visitor arrived by helicopter at the Fort in September. Bill Casey, the buccaneering head of the CIA, came down to the Fort specifically to see Gordievsky. Reagan was about to meet Gorbachev in Geneva for one of the superpower summits that dictated the course of the Cold War and wanted a breakthrough on arms reductions. Casey sat in front of Gordievsky with a yellow-and-blue CIA notebook scribbling away like a schoolboy until he asked if he could use a tape recorder. The American spoke in a thick accent and mumbled, which meant that C, also present, had occasionally to translate. He had come to take part in a role-playing game. ‘You are Mr Gorbachev,’ he said, pointing to Gordievsky, ‘and I am Mr Reagan. We would like to get rid of nuclear weapons, starting with a large number of strategic weapons. To inspire confidence, we will give you access to Star Wars,’ the latter comment referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative designed to shoot down missiles and the source of much Soviet angst. ‘What do you say?’ asked Casey.
Gordievsky leant back in his seat. ‘Nyet.’
‘Why, why?’ asked Casey.
‘I don’t trust you. You will never give us anything,’ Gordievsky replied. By chance the last meeting he had attended in Moscow was about the upcoming Geneva talks in which the KGB had said that there was no point trusting the US since it had no desire for serious agreement.53
‘What should we do?’ asked Casey. The Kremlin will believe you only if you drop Star Wars, Gordievsky explained. Impossible, said Casey, it was the President’s pet project. Gordievsky, like many in MI6, held to a tough line and suggested keeping going with Star Wars, arguing that the Soviet Union would never be able to keep up technologically and would eventually be forced to give in. Later Gordievsky would also go to the Oval Office of the White House to meet Reagan in person and on a subsequent visit would meet President George H. W. Bush.
Gordievsky was the star turn at a conference at Century House for officials across Whitehall and spoke to senior military chiefs. He was a valuable tool for building MI6’s reputation. The year of debriefing generated a set of extraordinarily detailed reports. A fifty-page briefing entitled ‘Soviet Perceptions of Nuclear Warfare’ had a particular influence.54 Even the sceptics about intelligence in the Foreign Office sat up and listened. Rodric Braithwaite, the young private who had sat with headphones clamped over his ears in the cellar in Vienna in the early 1950s, had risen through the ranks of the Foreign Office to become ambassador to Russia by the closing years of the Cold War. He remained somewhat doubtful of the output of the organisation that he had declined to join but saw the value of its star agent. ‘What Gordievsky described was the kind of terror the Russians felt facing us,’ he explained. ‘Something which if you have ever been in Moscow you would have perceived but if you are Prime Minister or President you hadn’t the remotest idea of. You would have thought these villainous people are trying to nuke us tomorrow and you never thought they were terrified that we were going to nuke them tomorrow.’ It was not so much the originality of Gordievsky’s analysis that was influential, Braithwaite argues, as its provenance. Information acquired secretly is often privileged over the same information acquired openly – the sight of ‘Top Secret’ written across the top of a paper often leads the reader to assume it must be true and more true than something acquired openly. ‘There was nothing mysterious about those Russian attitudes … [but] it came from a source which they had to accept because of Gordievsky’s personal background. Reagan and Thatcher were prepared to listen to it.’55
Gordievsky remained driven. All he cared about was his work and getting his family out. The latter proved a problem. The Soviets had no idea where Gordievsky had gone until MI6 decided to tell them a few weeks later. London was not a suitable location, it was decided, and so Gerry Warner went to Paris and asked his station chief to engineer a meeting with a non-KGB member of the Soviet Embassy at a plush club. The Soviet Scientific Counsellor duly arrived. On the manicured lawn, Warner was introduced. ‘We’ve got a message for the head of your KGB station,’ Warner began. The man went white as a sheet. ‘You’re looking for Gordievsky. We’ve got him. We’d like his family.’ The poor counsellor staggered off in shock. The reply from Moscow was an emphatic no. A death sentence was passed in absentia against Gordievsky. Reuniting the former KGB man with his family became a priority for the British government right up to the Prime Minister, who would raise the issue regularly with Gorbachev at their summits.
The pressure would eventually work and his family would come to Britain as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the final release brokered by Rodric Braithwaite. But it was too late. His decision not to tell his wife that he was working for British intelligence had shielded her when she was interrogated. But it had also left her bitter at never having known the truth. She left him as soon as she made it back to Britain. His daughters barely remembered him.56 Gordievsky had followed his beliefs, but in doing so he had paid a heavy personal price.
As the Cold War began to draw to its unexpected close, MI6, like Gordievsky, remained sceptical about Gorbachev. Throughout the Cold War, it saw one of its roles as preventing political leaders being taken in by Soviet rhetoric. There was a desire to force politicians to face uncomfortable truths. ‘It is always a temptation for anybody to choose the easier course and it is always a temptation if somebody is saying “I am a friend of yours and I don’t mean any harm” to accept that,’ argues Gerry Warner. ‘But if you are being told all the time by a microphone in your ear that it is totally untrue and that he’s holding a knife behind his back and he’s about to kick you where it hurts, the temptation is less to trust him. And that is the kind of way in which I think it would have been very easy both for Conservative and Labour governments throughout the Cold War to choose the easy option if they hadn’t been constantly reminded of what was going on.’ As the politicians, and particularly the Prime Minister, started to invest more heavily in Gorbachev and his reforms, MI6 endeavoured to continue this function. Some critics felt that rather than reflecting the underlying intelligence it was the product of a deeply ingrained MI6 culture in which the service struggled to believe that the Soviet Union could change and be anything other than an implacable enemy.
Ammunition for its hawkish position of not being too quick to trust Gorbachev came from one defector right at the end of the Cold War. A very scared Vladimir Pasechnik contacted the British Embassy in Paris during a 1989 visit to France. The Foreign Office were eventually persuaded it was worth getting him out. A scientist who worked on the Soviet’s secret biological weapons programme, he revealed that the USSR was secretly developing chemical and biological weapons such as VX, sarin and plague, including strains designed to survive Western antibiotics. The reports were met with intense resistance at first from the Foreign Office and Whitehall as they indicated that Gorbachev was evading treaty commitments. The Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Percy Cradock, personally came to speak to the defector to convince himself of the veracity of the information.57 Cradock and others in the intelligence world remained sceptical that Gorbachev was really changing the Soviet Union, believing that his reforms were cosmetic and not perceiving the way in which they would start to gather a momentum of their own which took events beyond those planned by the leadership.
&nbs
p; Gordievsky’s first words out of the car boot – ‘I was betrayed’ – had also been enough to send shudders down the spine of a Secret Service which thought it had just emerged from the wilderness of mirrors of the molehunt. There was the question that is asked after every blown operation. Was there another traitor? Another Philby? It took a decade following the escape to understand that there was indeed another traitor. But he was not British. At the moment that Gordievsky was returning to his drugged interrogation in Moscow, the CIA was watching its own slow-motion horror movie. Its entire network of what the agency’s more cynical operators called ‘assets’ was being rolled up one by one in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Agents were being recalled back to Moscow or disappearing off its streets or having ‘accidents’.
It had taken a few years to shake off the Angleton-induced paralysis that had hobbled the recruitment of Soviet spies, but by the early 1980s the agency had hoovered up a good selection of sources. Perhaps, however, Angleton and his fellow believers would, on one level, be proved right. For all their obsession with a mole within their garden, the CIA finally acquired one soon after it stopped looking.
Art of Betrayal Page 35