The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  The brush contact should only be initiated if he uncovered information with a direct impact on British national security, such as a Soviet spy inside the UK government. MI6 had no way to respond to such a message.

  If he needed to escape, he could activate the exfiltration plan by standing at the bread shop on Kutuzovsky Prospekt with his Safeway bag at 7:30 on a Tuesday evening. MI6 would monitor the site every week.

  Having rehearsed the plans, Guscott handed over a hardback copy of the Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It looked like an ordinary souvenir that a Russian might take home from the West. In reality, it was an ingenious aide-mémoire, a gift from Veronica Price. Beneath the endpaper, the paper covering the inside of the back cover, was a small sheet of cellophane, on which Operation PIMLICO was written out, in Russian: the details of the timings, recognition clothing, escape signals, the rendezvous point after the 836 kilometer marker, and the distances between key points. Gordievsky should place the book in the bookshelf of his Moscow apartment. To refresh his memory before attempting to escape, he could soak the book in water, peel back the endpaper, and extract the plastic sheet. As a further security measure, the place-names were changed from Russian to French: Moscow was “Paris”; Leningrad was “Marseilles,” and so on. If the KGB found the “crib” while he was still heading for the border, it would not necessarily give away the precise escape route.

  Guscott finally handed over a London telephone number. If and when Gordievsky found himself outside the Soviet Union, and felt it was safe to do so, he should call the number. Someone would always answer. The Russian wrote down the number in his notebook, backward, amid a jumble of jottings.

  Some months earlier, Gordievsky had passed Guscott an important morsel of information, plucked off the Scandinavian grapevine: the KGB, or the military GRU, and possibly both, had recruited an important spy in Sweden. Details were sketchy, but the mole appeared to work for one of the Swedish intelligence agencies, civilian or military. MI6 discussed the tip-off with the Danes, and discreet inquiries were made. “It didn’t take long to nail him,” said Guscott. “We soon had enough to identify this man with near certainty.” Sweden was an important ally, and evidence that the Swedish intelligence community had been penetrated by the Soviets was too important not to share. Guscott now explained to Gordievsky that this information had been passed to Stockholm without revealing its origin, and would soon be acted on. He made no objection. “By now he trusted us to protect him as the source.”

  Gordievsky and Guscott shook hands. For twenty months, without detection, they had met at least once a month, exchanging hundreds of secret documents. “This was a real friendship, a real affinity,” Guscott said, many years later. But it was a strange sort of amity, one that had grown up within strict limits. Gordievsky never knew the real name of Nick Venables. The spy and his handler had never shared a restaurant meal. “I would like to have gone for a run with him, but we could not,” said Guscott. Their relationship had taken place entirely within the walls of a safe house, always with a tape recorder running. Like all spy relationships it was compromised and colored by deception and manipulation: Gordievsky was undermining a political regime he reviled and gaining the dignity he craved; Guscott was running a long-term, deep-penetration agent inside the enemy’s citadel. But it also meant more than that, to both of them: theirs was an intense emotional bond forged in secrecy, danger, loyalty, and betrayal.

  With the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a Safeway bag, Gordievsky left the safe flat for the last time, and headed into the Danish night. From now on, the affair would be run at long distance. In Moscow, Gordievsky would be able to communicate with British intelligence if he wanted to, but MI6 had no means of initiating contact with him. He could try to escape if he needed to, but the British could not initiate the escape plan. He was on his own. British intelligence could only watch and wait.

  If Gordievsky was prepared to run the race without knowing when it might end, then so was MI6.

  * * *

  At the First Chief Directorate headquarters in Moscow Center, Gordievsky presented himself to the head of the Third Department, explained that he was getting a divorce and planned to remarry, and watched his career shrivel up in front of him. The department chief was a short, fat Ukrainian named Viktor Grushko, cheerful, cynical, and wholly obedient to the moralistic culture of the KGB. “This changes everything,” said Grushko.

  Gordievsky, the highflier, was brought down to earth with a thump, just as Lyubimov had predicted. Instead of becoming department deputy, he was banished to the personnel section, accompanied by a strong whiff of moral disapprobation. “You’ve had an affair while on assignment,” some of his colleagues pointed out, gloating. “Very unprofessional.” His work was as tedious as it was inconsequential. Frequently he was relegated to night duty officer. Although still a senior officer, he had “no definite function.” Once again, he was stuck.

  The divorce was concluded with unemotional Soviet dispatch. The judge addressed Yelena: “Your husband is divorcing you because you don’t want to have children, and he does. Is that right?” Yelena snapped back: “Not at all! He fell in love with a pretty girl. Nothing else.”

  By now, Yelena had been promoted to the rank of captain. She returned to her old job, eavesdropping on foreign embassies. As she was the injured party in the divorce, her KGB career was unaffected, but she never forgave Gordievsky, and she never remarried. When the senior women officers in the KGB gathered to drink tea together, Yelena would rage about her ex-husband’s disloyalty: “He’s an insincere shit, a deceiver, a man with a false front. He is capable of any sort of betrayal.” Gossip about Gordievsky’s infidelity swilled around the lower reaches of the KGB. Most dismissed Yelena’s remarks as the bitterness of a divorcée. “What else do you expect from a deserted wife?” remarked a colleague in the Third Department. “Neither I, nor anyone else, ever thought to report the matter.” But perhaps someone did.

  A month after Gordievsky’s return, his father died at the age of eighty-two. Only a small handful of elderly KGB officers attended the cremation. At a wake in the family flat, packed with more than thirty relatives, Gordievsky gave a speech extolling his father’s work for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union—an ideology and a political system he was now actively conspiring to undermine. Years later, Gordievsky reflected that his father’s death might have been a “liberation” for his mother. In fact, the person secretly liberated by his father’s demise was Gordievsky himself.

  Anton Lavrentyevich never told his family what he had done as a secret policeman during the famines and purges of the 1930s. Only years after his death did Gordievsky learn that his father had been married before he met Olga, and may have had children by this earlier, hidden marriage. Oleg, in turn, never explained to his father the nature of his work for the KGB, let alone his new loyalty to the West. The old Stalinist would have been appalled and terrified. The lies that had riddled the relationship between father and son continued to the grave. Gordievsky had secretly detested all that his father stood for—the blind obedience to a cruel ideology and the cowardice of the Homo Sovieticus. But he had also loved the old man, and even respected his obstinacy, a trait they shared. Between father and son, love and deception ran in tandem.

  Gordievsky’s remarriage was as swift and efficient as his divorce. Leila returned to Moscow in January 1979, and the wedding took place a few weeks later in a register office, followed by a family dinner at her parents’ apartment. Olga was pleased to see her son so happy. She had never much cared for Yelena, regarding her daughter-in-law as a beady-eyed KGB careerist. The couple set up home in a new flat at 103 Leninsky Prospekt, on the eighth floor of an apartment block owned by a KGB cooperative. “Our relationship was warm and close,” wrote Gordievsky. “Everything I had always longed for.” The deception at the heart of this marriage was masked by the simple domestic pleasures of buying furniture, putting up bookshelves, and hanging the paintings
brought from Denmark. Oleg missed the music and freedoms of the West. But Leila returned to the Soviet way of life without complaint or question: “Real happiness is to queue all night, and then get what you want,” she said. Soon she was pregnant.

  Gordievsky was put to work writing a history of the Third Department, a non-job that offered an insight into past Soviet espionage, but none into current operations. Only once did he glimpse a file on the desk of a colleague in the Norwegian section, with a heading that ended OLT—the first half of Treholt’s name being covered up by another paper. Here was further indication that Arne Treholt was an active KGB agent. The British would be interested in this, he reflected, but not enough to run the risk of attempting to inform them.

  He made no attempt to contact MI6. An exile in his own country, he nursed his secret allegiance with lonely pride. In the whole of Russia, there was probably only one man who would have understood what Gordievsky was feeling.

  Kim Philby might be aging, lonely, and frequently plastered, but he was as intellectually sharp as ever. No one understood better, from long firsthand experience, the double life of the spy, how to avoid detection, and how to catch a mole. He remained a figure of legend inside the KGB. Gordievsky had brought back a Danish book about the Philby case and asked the Englishman to sign it for him. The book came back with the inscription: “To my good friend Oleg—Don’t believe anything you see in print! Kim Philby.” They were not friends, though they had much in common. For thirty years, Philby had secretly served the KGB from inside MI6. He now lived in comfortable semiretirement, but his expertise in treachery remained at the disposal of his Soviet masters.

  Soon after Gordievsky’s return, Philby received a request from the Center, asking him to evaluate the Gunvor Haavik case and assess what had gone wrong. Why had the veteran Norwegian spy been arrested? For weeks, Philby pored over the Haavik files and then, as he had done so many times in his long career, arrived at the correct conclusion: “The leak which betrayed the agent could only have come from inside the KGB.”

  Viktor Grushko summoned senior officers to his office, including Gordievsky. “There are signs that the KGB is leaking,” Grushko declared, before presenting Philby’s meticulous conclusions in the Haavik case. “This is particularly worrying, because the pattern of events suggests that the traitor may be in the room at this moment. He could be sitting here among us.”

  Gordievsky felt a jolt of fear, and pinched his leg, hard, through his trouser pocket. Haavik had met more than a dozen KGB handlers during her long espionage career. Gordievsky had never been involved in running the case, and had no responsibility for Norway. Yet he was sure that his tip-off to Guscott had led directly to Haavik’s arrest, and now, thanks to an elderly British spy with a nose for deception, the cloud of suspicion was wafting perilously close. He felt the nausea rise in his throat. Returning to his desk in a state of concealed shock, he wondered what else he had told MI6 that might come back to threaten him.

  * * *

  Stig Bergling once described the life of a secret agent as “gray, black, white and dull with fog and brown coal smoke.” His own career as a Swedish policeman, intelligence officer, and Soviet mole was luridly colorful.

  Bergling had worked as a policeman before enrolling in the surveillance unit of the Swedish security service, known as SÄPO, tasked with monitoring the activities of suspected Soviet agents in Sweden. In 1971 he was appointed SÄPO liaison with the Swedish Defence Staff, with access to highly classified information, including details of all Sweden’s military defense facilities. Two years later, while working as a UN observer in Lebanon, he made contact with Aleksander Nikiforov, the Soviet military attaché and GRU officer in Beirut. On November 30, 1973, he sold a first cache of documents to the Soviets for $3,500.

  Bergling spied for two reasons: money, which he greatly liked, and the overbearing attitude of his superior officers, which he didn’t. Over the next four years he supplied the Soviets with 14,700 documents, revealing Sweden’s defense plans, weapons systems, security codes, and counterespionage operations, and communicated with his Soviet handlers using secret ink, microdots, and shortwave radio. He even signed a receipt that read: “Money for information to the Russian intelligence service,” which meant, of course, that he was now vulnerable to blackmail by the KGB. Bergling was quite stupid.

  Then came Gordievsky’s tip-off pointing to a Soviet agent in Swedish intelligence. The MI6 director of counterintelligence flew to Stockholm and informed the Swedish security service that it had a spy in its midst.

  By this time Bergling had become head of SÄPO’s investigation office, a reservist officer in the Swedish army, and, secretly, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence.

  The Swedish investigators closed in. On March 12, 1979, at Sweden’s behest, he was arrested at the Tel Aviv airport by Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, and handed over to his former colleagues in SÄPO. Nine months later he was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment. Bergling had earned a small fortune from his Soviet spymasters. The damage he inflicted on Sweden’s national defense cost an estimated £29 million to repair.

  One by one, the Soviet spies fingered by Gordievsky were being picked off. As a result, the West was probably safer. But Gordievsky was not. With internal suspicion building inside the Third Department, his career in the doldrums, but now happily married and expecting his first child, Gordievsky might, once again, have chosen to make a break with the past, sever all contact with MI6, hope the KGB never discovered the truth, and lie low for the rest of his life. Instead, he picked up the pace. His career needed a kick start. He must get himself posted to the West, perhaps even to Britain itself.

  He would learn to speak English.

  The KGB offered a 10 percent salary increase to officers who passed an official foreign-language course, with a maximum of two languages. Gordievsky already spoke German, Danish, and Swedish. He enrolled anyway. At forty-one, he was the oldest student in the KGB English course, which was designed to take four years; he completed it in two.

  If his KGB colleagues had been paying closer attention, they might have wondered why Gordievsky was in such a hurry to learn a new language without any financial incentive, and why he was suddenly so interested in the UK.

  Gordievsky bought a two-volume Russian-English dictionary and immersed himself in British culture—or as much of it as Soviet citizens were allowed to see. He read Churchill’s History of the Second World War, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and Fielding’s Tom Jones. Mikhail Lyubimov, who had returned from Copenhagen to take up a prestigious position as head of the First Chief Directorate think tank, recalled how his friend “frequently dropped in for a chat and asked for sage advice about England.” Lyubimov was delighted to oblige, happily expatiating on the joys of London clubland and Scotch whisky. “What an irony!” Lyubimov later wrote. “There I was giving advice on England to an English spy.” Leila also helped him with his studies, testing him at night on his English vocabulary and picking up some of the language herself. “I was so envious of his ability. He could learn thirty words in one day. He was brilliant.”

  At Lyubimov’s suggestion, Gordievsky began reading the novels of Somerset Maugham. A British intelligence officer during the First World War, Maugham brilliantly captures the moral fogginess of espionage in his fiction. Gordievsky was particularly taken with the character of Ashenden, a British agent sent to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution: “Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness,” wrote Maugham. “People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them.”

  To further improve his English, Gordievsky helped to translate Kim Philby’s reports. Like other government officials of his generation, Philby wrote and spoke a convoluted form of upper-class bureaucratic English. “Whitehall Mandarin,” a languid drawl with extended vowels, was exceptionally difficult to render in Russian, but it offered a useful primer in the arca
ne language of British officialdom.

  The British and Scandinavian sections operated side by side within the Third Department. Gordievsky began cultivating anyone who might assist him to transfer to the British side. In April 1980, Leila gave birth to a daughter, Maria, and the proud father invited Viktor Grushko, his department head, and Lyubimov to come and celebrate with him. “Grushko and I were invited to a dinner of Azerbaijani delicacies, prepared by his mother-in-law,” Lyubimov recalled. “She told us about the merits of her husband, who had worked in the Cheka. Gordievsky showed off the paintings he had collected in Denmark.”

  The problem with buttering up the boss is that bosses tend to move on, which can mean a lot of wasted butter.

  Mikhail Lyubimov was suddenly and ignominiously fired from the KGB. Like Gordievsky, he fell foul of the Center’s moralists, but his sin was worse: with his second marriage failing, he had fallen in love with the wife of another officer, and then failed to inform the KGB before his next appointment. He was dismissed without appeal. Lyubimov had been a useful source of secrets, but also a patron, adviser, ally, and close friend. The irrepressible Lyubimov declared his intention to become a novelist, the Russian Somerset Maugham.

  Viktor Grushko was promoted to deputy head of the FCD, and succeeded as head of the Third Department by Gennadi Titov, “the Crocodile,” the former rezident in Oslo and Arne Treholt’s case officer. The new head of the Scandinavian-British section was Nikolai Gribin, a glamorous figure who had served under Gordievsky in Copenhagen in 1976, but had since leapfrogged ahead of him in the KGB hierarchy. Gribin was slim, neat, and handsome. His party trick was to pick up a guitar and strum mournful Russian ballads until everyone in the room was weeping. He was exceptionally ambitious, and made an art of cultivating senior officers. “The bosses thought him a splendid fellow.” Gordievsky, by contrast, regarded Gribin as a creep, “a typical toady and careerist.” But he needed his support. Gordievsky held his nose and poured on the sycophancy.