On 16 April 1985, CIA officer Aldrich Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. He had told his superiors he was trying to recruit an agent, but he was the one doing the betraying. By the time of a third meeting at a hamburger joint in Georgetown on 13 June, Ames was receiving a shopping bag of money. He was extremely well placed as the head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet division. He was the man who had identified Gordievsky for the CIA and who held exactly the same position in the agency that Philby once held in MI6. It meant he saw all the files and knew all the agents.
Ames’s treachery seemed to explain Gordievsky’s near-demise. Not everyone was sure. Ames claimed he did not give any agents’ identities away until his 13 June lunch, by which time Gordievsky had already been recalled to Moscow. But he might have given away just enough to draw suspicion on to Gordievsky and it might explain why Gordievsky was interrogated but never arrested. The KGB may have had only a tip-off and not concrete evidence, making the situation similar to Philby’s initial questioning in 1951 after Burgess and Maclean had fled, when the evidence was strong but essentially circumstantial. It may also have been that one of Gordievsky’s sharper colleagues in London noticed that he was producing lots of reports during the Gorbachev visit but without meeting many contacts. A new head of division in Moscow who had never liked Gordievsky may have ordered an investigation.58
Ames’s treachery was not discovered until 1994. Gordievsky and Ames even met face to face in 1989, Gordievsky not knowing that he was shaking hands at Langley with the man who might nearly have killed him. It had all been about the money – $2 million in all. Where the early British traitors had been ideological, the CIA’s traitors were utterly venal. The damage was the same. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the head of the CIA’s Soviet division learnt everything from CNN because he had no agents left to report to him on what was unfolding.59 Just like MI6 in the 1950s, the CIA was institutionally unwilling to accept the idea that it might be penetrated. Just as Angleton had warned, it was manipulated by KGB double agents and deception operations. But its failure to deal with the problem was itself a legacy of Angleton. The memory of what he had done was so painful that counter-intelligence had become a backwater for careers, and no one, but no one, wanted to start that whole molehunting business again. The result was inevitable and catastrophic. It was not just Ames either. Five current or former CIA officers betrayed their country in the decade after Angleton left.60 Intelligence and counter-intelligence exist in a natural tension. If one dominates the other, then trouble arrives soon afterwards. The CIA was plunged into a bad place full of suspicion internally and was mistrusted around Washington.
Philby and Gordievsky bookended the Cold War – one side’s hero, the other’s villain. Recruiting an officer from the other side is always relished deeply because of the opportunities it provides for quickly uncovering the other side’s secrets and subverting their work. But with Gordievsky there was also the sense of payback for the betrayal that had so scarred MI6 decades earlier. There were one or two other spies of an importance approaching that of Gordievsky but whose names have never come to light, insiders say. They maintain that over the course of the Cold War the British Secret Service ran somewhere between forty and eighty agents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and lost only a handful, Penkovsky among them.
Gordievsky’s afterlife was happier than Philby’s in many ways. He was given the kind of status and access that Philby had craved but never received. He lived in a well-heeled suburban town with none of the cravings for home that plagued Philby, none of the complexities or doubts over his actions. In Moscow, their mutual friend Mikhail Lyubimov still celebrates the life of one old comrade by meeting on Philby’s birthday with his widow and others who knew him. The ageing band gathers every year at Philby’s old flat to drink vodka and whisky and celebrate his life. But the taste for espionage has long ago faded. ‘When I started my career I liked espionage very much and I was enthusiastic,’ Lyubimov recalls wistfully. ‘But by the end of my career I became disappointed. I came to the conclusion that it does more harm than good.’ The betrayer had become the betrayed.
Lyubimov will have no truck with those who liken the betrayal of Philby to that of Gordievsky. ‘It is different because Philby never worked for the MI6 actually,’ he argues, using a logic only a spy can really understand. ‘He worked for the Soviet Union. He many times himself told me, “Look, they consider me to be a double agent. I am not a double agent. I worked only for the Soviet Union.” How could he be a traitor if since from the very beginning he worked for the Communists? What did he betray? Gordievsky is a traitor. This is clear because he worked for the KGB, then he went to the British side.’61 Gordievsky has no time for the accusations of a betrayal. ‘The betrayal question is pointless because it was a criminal state,’ is his answer. ‘The most criminal element of the criminal state was the KGB. It was a gang of bandits. To betray bandits … was very good for the soul.’62
Did it all matter? Did the spying and the lying and betraying make any real difference? Critics argue that all the spying accomplished was to raise the temperature by heightening the suspicions that fuelled the Cold War in which ignorant armies clashed by night. Those who believe in intelligence say it did make a difference by managing a hostility that was real and dangerous. ‘The risk in the Cold War and the Cold War going very badly wrong was surprise,’ argues Scarlett. ‘What nobody wanted was to be surprised … intelligence gave knowledge which greatly reduced that fear of a surprise attack. And as the Cold War developed, more confidence developed that the other side was understood, and that helped manage the situation and was a key reason why we got to the end without a blowout.’63
Much of the vast Cold War intelligence effort was precautionary and was never actually used. The counting of Soviet tanks was designed to watch for enemy activity and prepare a response should war come. The fact that such tactical intelligence was never needed does not mean it was not important in increasing confidence. On the strategic level, each side was desperate to mask its weakness and project strength. But neither truly understood how the other perceived its actions and how it misread its intentions. It was not what a country was doing which was misunderstood but the why. Spies, like Gordievsky, may have helped open a window into the reality beneath the rhetoric and provide a transparency which helped prevent miscalculation. But Gordievsky’s contribution came late in the day; before then there was strategic blindness. ‘Both sides were stumbling about with a vague idea of one another’s capabilities but only a thin and mostly distorted idea of one another’s intentions,’ argues Rodric Braithwaite. And if the idea that Gordievsky’s actions did help ease tension by revealing the mind of the enemy (just as Penkovsky had over the Berlin crisis in 1961), why is the same not true for Philby and his cohorts who spied the other way? The answer cannot hold for one side and not the other. Did Philby and his friends help Stalin calibrate his policy to avoid hostilities at the beginning of the Cold War and reduce his own paranoia about invasion? It is true they were never quite trusted and their intelligence was never exploited in quite the same way in Moscow because of a less rigorous analytical and assessment process. But the question still remains whether it would actually have been safer for both sides to have had more spies in the enemy camp and to have had more in their own. Some have wondered whether openness might negate the need for spies at all and make the world safer. ‘Much better if the Russians saw the Cabinet minutes twice a week. Prevent all that fucking dangerous guesswork,’ Harold Macmillan’s private secretary once remarked.64
Western intelligence had expended enormous energy in counting missiles and tanks, often erring on the side of caution by overestimating their numbers and never really understanding that the weight of the Soviet military machine masked a hollowness in the wider Soviet economy which was creaking ever more loudly under the strain. The Soviet Union had been able to match the West for military hardware through the 1970s but failed to keep pace in the f
ield of consumer goods that would prove to people that life under Communism really was better than under capitalism. And then by the 1980s the Reagan arms build-up, encapsulated in the Star Wars concept, ensured that the US began to pull away here too, not least in the mind of the Soviets.65
No one saw the end of the Cold War coming as the 1980s began to draw to a close. Contrary to expectation, spies are often very poor at predicting change. The job of spies is to steal secrets. But the demise of the Soviet Union was not a secret locked away in a safe. ‘It was inconceivable the killer piece of information could exist,’ argues Rodric Braithwaite. ‘Because the Russians themselves didn’t know what they were up to or what was going to happen.’66 The fall of the Soviet Union was the product of long-term social and economic trends, many of whose outworkings were in the open but which were never fully understood. Attempts by Gorbachev to create ‘socialism with a human face’ were part of the reason. But so were events in a landlocked country thousands of miles away where the latest chapter in a much older Great Game was being played out as the British Secret Service took on the Russians.
8
THE AFGHAN PLAINS
As they had done for a century and a half, British spies wound their way across the unforgiving terrain that joined Pakistan and Afghanistan. The horses and mules that Rudyard Kipling had used to cross the border in disguise had been replaced by sturdy, muddied Land Rovers but it still took the best part of a day to coil over the hills and around the mountains from Peshawar. This was the stark, beautiful terrain where the original Great Game in the nineteenth century had been played out and where the long intelligence duel between Britain and Russia had begun. Then the British spies, operating out of their offices in Peshawar, Kabul and Kandahar, had come to bully, bribe and barter with tribal chiefs to keep the Russians away from the imperial treasure chest of India. ‘All sorts and conditions of men were made use of, high and low, rich and needy, mullahs and murderers, brigands, fugitives, anyone,’ one officer remarked of the intelligence work of that time.1 The quiet, walled compound in the Afghan capital Kabul – still known as the British cemetery – continues to bear witness to the human costs of imperial ambition with its roll call of those who fell as lonely garrisons were overwhelmed by wave after wave of religiously inspired mujahedeen. In February 1980, the successors to the spies of the past were arriving determined to ensure that the favour was returned to the Russians.
For most of the twentieth century Afghanistan had been a forgotten place, far away from the front lines of espionage and the Cold War. But as the 1980s opened it had been thrust back to the centre of geopolitics and intrigue. The Cold War was only the latest of many ‘other people’s wars’ to be fought in the hills and plains of Afghanistan.
Six weeks before the Land Rovers struggled over the rough terrain, the Soviet war machine had thundered its way into Afghanistan. Now waiting for two MI6 officers was a gathering of tribal leaders, known as a loya jirga. The tribesmen had gathered in a school courtyard, a dusty, mud-and-brick compound, to hear from their British guests. The local men lined up with the younger fierce faces on the flank and the long, calmer white beards in the middle. Gerry Warner, who had taken over just six months earlier as the British Secret Service Controller for the region, addressed them through an interpreter while his head of station in Pakistan watched. London and Washington had decided that Soviet aggression would be confronted. But not directly. Instead it would be confronted through the men in front of Warner along with their sons, brothers and cousins. At what cost? he wondered. ‘We are willing to help you. But if we do help you, I want to be sure you understand what this means. If we give you help you will be able to fight longer and more of your young men will be killed. And I still don’t believe you can win this war,’ he told them. There was a muttering from the gathered throng and then the longest beard spoke up. ‘We are grateful for your help,’ the man explained through the interpreter. ‘But we will fight even without this help. And the Russians will leave in ten years.’ He was wrong. They were gone in nine.
The Soviets had invaded after a succession of coups had eventually brought to power Hafizullah Amin, a hardline Communist whom the KGB (wrongly) thought might be a CIA agent. They had endeavoured to assassinate him, but neither poison nor snipers seemed to work. A KGB illegal had been infiltrated into the presidential palace as a cook to try and poison him, but it was unsuccessful.2 In the end it was decided to kill him as part of a full-frontal assault on his country. In Moscow, Kim Philby watched in dismay. ‘Was it essential to take up the military option?’ he wrote to his friend Graham Greene. ‘Wouldn’t a quiet kinjal-thrust from behind an arras have done just as well?’3 Invading was a decision which would contribute in no small part to the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new struggle with terrorism. Afghanistan was the pivot from one era to the next.
For the Cold Warriors in London and Washington, the invasion of Afghanistan was an opportunity not to be missed. CIA officers had begun preparing the previous year. One senior officer addressed staff in Islamabad in August 1978 and said that when he saw that a Soviet-backed regime had taken over in a coup, he had turned to his wife and said, ‘Honey, those Communist bastards are not going to screw with our Afghanistan like this. I’m going to overthrow that damn regime.’ He told the four-man CIA team to get in touch with the nascent Afghan resistance, the mujahedeen groups, and see what they were made of.4 A small programme providing humanitarian support as well as anti-Soviet propaganda had begun in mid-1979. By mid-December – before the Soviet invasion – a meeting of top officials, including the US Vice-President, had decided that the US would ‘explore with the Pakistanis and the British the possibility of improving the financing, arming and communications of the rebel forces to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviets to continue their efforts … We will attempt to increase propaganda and pressure on the Soviets worldwide. We will recommend to our European allies that they encourage their press to pay more attention to the subject.’5 The pitched battles of the Cold War had been fought not in Europe but through proxies in the developing world from the Congo and Cuba to Vietnam and now, following the invasion, to Afghanistan, which was next in line to be swept up into the maelstrom of superpower conflict. Afghanistan would also offer the Camel Drivers of MI6 a chance to engage in some of their most aggressive and direct covert action.
The Prime Minister took a helicopter to one of the refugee camps over the border in Pakistan into which millions of Afghans had spilled. Her speech would be interrupted as the Afghans rose to their feet. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they chanted at the Iron Lady. Margaret Thatcher was deeply concerned by the idea that control of Afghanistan might allow the Soviet Union to thrust through Iran towards the Gulf and cut off oil supplies. The invasion had confirmed everything she had believed about the dangers of easing relations with the Soviets through the policy of détente. ‘I knew the beast,’ she would say. The Prime Minister told the refugees of her admiration for their refusal to ‘live under a godless communist system which [was] trying to destroy [their] religion and [their] independence’.6 Back home, her Secret Service was looking at the options. The Americans eventually settled on providing weapons to the mujahedeen. Stansfield Turner, President Jimmy Carter’s cautious Director of the CIA, who had been appointed to clean the agency’s house out after scandals and Congressional inquiries, initially had deep concerns about the efficacy and the morality of such an operation until he was persuaded by his more aggressively minded staff. ‘Eventually they convinced me the guerrillas were going to fight even if they just had old British Enfield rifles from World War I.’7 The British Foreign Office and, initially at least, the Ministry of Defence were also reluctant. ‘They really had to be dragged kicking and screaming,’ one official recalled.
The Chief of MI6, now Dickie Franks (who had once been Greville Wynne’s handler), organised a dinner party of media editors. He explained to them that the mujahedeen were actually ‘freed
om fighters’, not ‘rebels’ as the Soviets portrayed them. The first priority was information – not collecting it but shaping it in the public mind. Everyone had watched America lose public support for Vietnam as pictures of war were broadcast directly back into living rooms across the nation. This time there was a desire to determine the global outlook on the conflict from the outset. Television was what really mattered. Nothing was more picturesque and evocative than the sight of the Khyber Pass and the rugged farmer-soldiers resisting the steel and might of the Soviet bear. The problem was getting access to the land-locked country. It was suggested at the start of 1980 that Afghans could be found who could be equipped with small video cameras, rather than bulky film cameras, which they could take into the country. When this was done, a studio in London’s East End converted the video taken by the smaller cameras. Out came shaky footage of a Soviet MiG fighter jet strafing a village against a blue sky. Women and children could just about be seen running away. It went around the world. MI6 used its contacts in Muslim countries to spread the pictures and keep the conflict in the headlines. But the quality of these pictures was relatively poor and editors quickly demanded better quality. Soon well-known journalists would start to make their own long trek into the hills, notably Sandy Gall from Britain’s ITN who travelled on horseback with Russian jets streaking overhead. ‘So far the West has stood idly by and done nothing to help the Afghans,’ an Afghan commander told him. ‘All we have had from the West is words not deeds.’8
Dressed in Afghan clothes, Gall’s American equivalent Dan Rather first went into the country in 1980 for CBS News. His report was watched back in Washington by a Texan Congressman, Charlie Wilson, who, as well as enjoying sitting in hot tubs with pretty girls doing coke, sat on the Defence Appropriations Sub-Committee in Congress which funded covert action. He asked his staff how much was being spent on Afghanistan. Five million dollars, they said. ‘Double it,’ Wilson replied.9 For Wilson and one faction of CIA officers, Afghanistan was simple. This was a chance to kill lots of Soviets, an opportunity for revenge for the open wound of Vietnam. Nothing more and nothing less. That required weapons and training. And a place from which to operate.
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