What none of the newspapers guessed was that MI5’s first convicted traitor had been exposed by an MI6 spy inside the KGB. Gordievsky had saved Britain from an intelligence catastrophe, and once again paved the way for his own professional advancement.
Arkadi Guk was identified in court testimony as the KGB’s head of station. The portly Russian general was photographed leaving his Kensington home with a wife in winged spectacles. His picture was splashed over the front pages beneath the headline “Guk the Spook,” the blundering Soviet spy chief who had “turned down the KGB’s first opportunity since the Second World War to recruit a penetration agent inside the Security Service.” Guk actually seemed to be enjoying the attention, and was “parading around like a film star.”
Here was the perfect opportunity to get rid of him, which would clear the way for Gordievsky to rise further up the KGB pecking order and increase his access to secret material. MI6 requested Guk’s immediate expulsion. Whitehall had little appetite for another diplomatic row. There would be no second opportunity to get rid of the rezident, pointed out Christopher Curwen, the new director of Counter-Intelligence and Security (DCIS) at MI6: “Guk has always been most careful not to become directly involved in KGB agent running operations and is likely to be even more careful in the future.” Some in MI5 also argued against the move, pointing out that a new post security officer had just been deployed to Moscow who would certainly be thrown out in a tit-for-tat expulsion if Guk was given his marching orders. But that, MI6 insisted, was a price worth paying. With Guk out of the way and Nikitenko nearing the end of his posting, Gordievsky might eventually take over as KGB rezident in London. “The stakes are very high,” argued one senior official. “Nothing less than the chance of access to all, or practically all, the KGB operations against this country.” A letter was drafted for Mrs. Thatcher to send to the Foreign Office, stating that since Guk had been identified publicly, he must be ejected. In a clever little detail, Guk was spelled “Gouk” in the letter. That was how the Daily Telegraph, uniquely among British newspapers, spelled it. Mrs. Thatcher was a Telegraph reader. The hint to the Foreign Office was implicit: the prime minister had read about the Russian spy chief in her morning newspaper and wanted him out, so if the Foreign Office continued to block the expulsion, she would take it personally. The ploy worked.
On May 14, 1984, Guk was declared persona non grata for “activities incompatible with his diplomatic status,” and given a week to pack his bags and leave Britain. As expected, the Soviets immediately responded by kicking MI5’s new appointee out of Moscow.
A farewell party was held at the Soviet embassy on the evening before Guk’s departure, with lashings of food and drink, and a succession of speeches in honor of the departing rezident. When it was Gordievsky’s turn to speak, he ladled on the flattery. “I must have sounded just a touch too smooth, and very slightly insincere.” Guk lurched up afterward and muttered, “You’ve learned a lot from the ambassador,” whose talent for hypocritical speechifying was a running joke in the embassy. Although already quite drunk, Guk sensed that his underling was happy to see him depart. The next day, General Guk flew back to Moscow and vanished into complete obscurity. He had embarrassed the KGB by drawing attention to himself. That, far more than his extraordinary incompetence, was unforgiveable.
Leonid Nikitenko was named acting rezident, and immediately began angling to make the appointment permanent. Gordievsky became his deputy, with increased access to the KGB station telegrams and files. MI6 was suddenly inundated with fresh intelligence. The ultimate prize was now within reach: if he could maneuver his way into the rezident’s office, the station’s entire trove of secrets would be his for the taking. Only Nikitenko stood in the way.
Leonid Nikitenko was one of the cleverest men in the KGB, and one of the few who saw his job as a vocation. He would go on to head Directorate K, the KGB’s counterintelligence branch. One CIA officer who met him described “a barrel-chested bear of a man, full of life…he loved the drama of the spy game, and there was no question he was good at it. He was at home in this secret universe and relished every moment, an actor on a stage that he had set for himself, playing a role that he had scripted.” After more than four years in the UK, the yellow-eyed counterintelligence officer was overdue to be rotated back to Moscow, but Nikitenko had his sights set on the coveted role of rezident. A KGB job abroad usually lasted three years but the Center was sometimes prepared to extend a posting, so he now launched a vigorous campaign to demonstrate that he was the best man for the job; or, more accurately, to show that Gordievsky was not. The two men had never liked each other: a war over the succession to Guk now began, all the more intense for being undeclared.
MI6 wondered whether to intervene yet again and declare Nikitenko persona non grata, leaving Gordievsky a clear route to the top. The knock-on effect was working: in a pun on the code name for the case, the case officers called it the “NOCTON effect.” The strategy was tempting. If Gordievsky could be levered into the top position, then his time in London would yield maximum results, and at the end of his posting he could defect. But, after some debate, it was decided that expelling Nikitenko would be a step too far, and “possibly counterproductive.” Kicking out two KGB officers in quick succession was par for the course given the febrile atmosphere of the times; removing all three of Gordievsky’s immediate bosses might look like a pattern.
Maksim Parshikov, Gordievsky’s closest colleague, noticed that his friend now “seemed to get into his stride. From the moment he was promoted to deputy rezident Oleg seemed softened, liberated, and behaved more calmly and naturally.” Some thought he was getting above himself. Mikhail Lyubimov, his friend and former colleague, was back in Moscow trying to make a new career as a writer after his sacking. “He and I exchanged letters, and I was upset when he didn’t reply promptly, sometimes sending only one letter to two of mine—power spoils people, and the deputy rezident in London is a big shot.” Lyubimov had no idea how busy his old friend was, doing two secret jobs at once, while scheming for another promotion.
The family had settled happily in London. The girls were growing up fast, speaking fluent English and attending a Church of England school. A century earlier, Karl Marx himself had been astonished how quickly his own children adapted to life in Britain: “The idea of leaving the country of their precious Shakespeare appals them; they’ve become English to the marrow,” said Mrs. Marx. Gordievsky was similarly surprised, and delighted, to find himself the father of two little English girls. Leila was also enjoying British life more and more. Her English improved, but it was hard to make English friends, as wives were forbidden to see British citizens unaccompanied. Unlike Gordievsky, permanently on edge among his colleagues, she mixed easily with others in the KGB fraternity, drinking tea and gossiping happily with the wives of other embassy staff. “I grew up in a family of KGB officers,” she once said. “My dad was a KGB officer, my mother was a KGB officer. Almost everyone in our district, where I spent my youth, was employed by the KGB. The fathers of all of my friends and classmates were KGB officers. Therefore, I never considered the KGB to be monstrous, or associated with anything horrible. It was my whole life, my everyday life.” She was proud of her husband’s rapid promotion, and encouraged his ambition to take over as rezident. He often seemed preoccupied and occasionally stared intensely into the distance, as if locked on to another world. He bit his nails constantly. Some days he seemed particularly excited, wired taut with nervous stress. She put that down to the pressure of his important job.
Gordievsky loved Leila’s lack of inhibition, her vitality and dedication to family life. Her naive sweetness, her very lack of worldly suspicion, was an antidote to the contortions of subterfuge he was living through. He had never felt so close to her, despite the falsehood, known only to him, that kept them apart. “I was so happily married,” he reflected. From time to time, he wondered whether he could let her in on his secret and draw her into a complicity that would make their
union truthful, and complete. She would find out eventually, when and if he finally defected to Britain. When MI6 gently probed him on how his wife might react when that moment came, he was adamant: “She will accept it. She is a good wife.”
From time to time, he openly criticized Moscow in front of Leila. On one occasion, a little carried away, he described the Communist regime as “bad, wrong, criminal.”
“Oh stop yakking,” Leila snapped at him. “It’s just chat, you can’t do anything about it so what point is there in talking about it?”
Nettled, Gordievsky shot back. “Maybe I can do something. Maybe one day you will see that I was able to do something about it.”
Just in time, he reined himself in. “I stopped. I knew if I had continued I would have told her more, or given her a hint.”
Later he reflected: “She would not have understood. Nobody would have understood. Nobody. I never told anyone else. It was impossible. Strictly impossible. It was lonely. It was very lonely.” There was a hidden solitude in the heart of his marriage.
Gordievsky adored his wife, but he could not trust her with the truth. Leila was still KGB. And he was not.
On holiday back in Moscow that summer, Oleg was summoned to the First Chief Directorate headquarters for “high-level discussions” about his future. Nikolai Gribin, the guitar-playing whiz kid he had gotten to know in Denmark who now headed the British-Scandinavian section, was “friendliness itself,” and dangled two possible promotions: the role of deputy department head back in Moscow or that of rezident in London. Gordievsky politely but firmly indicated his preference for the latter job. Gribin advised patience: “The closer anyone moves to the position of head of station, the greater the danger, the more intense the intrigues.” But he pledged to give Gordievsky his full backing.
The conversation moved on to politics, and Gribin spoke warmly about a bright new star in the Communist firmament named Mikhail Gorbachev. The son of a combine harvester operator, Gorbachev had risen swiftly within the Communist hierarchy, becoming a full Politburo member before the age of fifty. He was widely tipped as the likely successor to the moribund Chernenko. The KGB, Gribin revealed, had “come to the conclusion that Gorbachev was the best bet for the future.”
Margaret Thatcher had reached the same conclusion.
Gorbachev had been identified as the energetic Russian leader she was hoping for: a reformist, a man of vision who had traveled outside the Soviet bloc, in contrast to the narrow-minded Soviet gerontocracy. The Foreign Office had put out feelers, and in the summer of 1984 Gorbachev accepted an invitation to visit Britain the following December. Charles Powell, Mrs. Thatcher’s private secretary, told her the visit presented “a unique opportunity to try and get inside the minds of the next generation of Soviet leaders.”
It was also an opportunity for Gordievsky. As head of political intelligence in the rezidentura, he would be responsible for briefing Moscow on what Gorbachev should expect; as a British agent, he would also be briefing MI6 on Russian preparations for the visit. Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides: Gordievsky could advise Gorbachev on what to say to Thatcher, while simultaneously suggesting what Thatcher might say to Gorbachev. And if the meeting went well, it would improve Gordievsky’s chances of securing the post of rezident—and the intelligence windfall that this would bring.
The news that the Soviet leader-in-waiting was coming to London plunged the London KGB station into a ferment of preparations. Instructions from Moscow flooded in, demanding detailed information on every aspect of British life: political, military, technological, and economic. The continuing miners’ strike was of particular interest: Would they win? How were they financed? Strikes, of course, were forbidden in the Soviet Union. The Center wanted chapter and verse on what Gorbachev should expect from his British hosts, and what British intelligence might be planning by way of unpleasant surprises. When Khrushchev had visited London in 1956, MI6 bugged his hotel, monitored his telephone calls, and even sent a frogman to inspect the hull of the Soviet cruiser on which he had arrived.
The legacy of mistrust ran deep on both sides. Gorbachev was a dedicated Party member, a creation of the Soviet system; Thatcher was a strident opponent of Communism, a philosophy she condemned as immoral and oppressive. “Is there conscience in the Kremlin?” she had asked a year earlier in a speech to the Winston Churchill Foundation in the United States. “Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for?…No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil.” History has framed Gorbachev as a liberal progressive. The future architect of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) would transform the Soviet Union, setting in motion forces that would dismantle it. But little of that was visible in 1984. Thatcher and Gorbachev stood on opposite sides of a vast political and cultural gulf. A successful meeting was by no means guaranteed; rapprochement would require some delicate diplomacy and surreptitious engineering.
The KGB saw the visit to Britain as an opportunity to strengthen Gorbachev’s hand. “Send us the best possible briefing,” Gribin told Gordievsky. “That way, it will look as though he has a superior intellect.”
Gordievsky and his team set to work. “We really rolled up our sleeves,” recalled Maksim Parshikov, “producing in-depth memoranda on all fundamentally important aspects of British policy and details on all the British participants.” Everything Gordievsky gathered for Nikitenko to pass to the KGB in Moscow he also handed over to MI6. More than that, British intelligence fed Gordievsky with information to introduce into his reports to Moscow: subjects for discussion, possible points of agreement and disagreement such as the miners’ strike, and tips on how to interact with the personalities involved. Britain’s intelligence service was effectively setting the agenda for the upcoming meetings, and briefing both sides.
Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev arrived in London on December 15, 1984, on a visit that would last eight days. There was time for shopping and sightseeing, including a devout pilgrimage to the seat in the British Library where Marx wrote Das Kapital, but the visit was in essence an extended diplomatic démarche, as the Cold War adversaries cautiously sounded each other out in a series of meetings at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. Every evening, Gorbachev demanded a detailed memorandum of three or four pages, with a “forecast of the line the next day’s meeting would take.” The KGB did not have that information. But MI6 did. Here was a perfect opportunity to ensure the two teams were on the same page, while demonstrating Gordievsky’s value to his Moscow bosses. MI6 obtained the Foreign Office briefing document drawn up for Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, listing the points he would be raising with Gorbachev and his team. This was then handed over to Gordievsky, who dashed back to the KGB station, hurriedly typed it up into Russian, and handed it over to the reports officer to put into the daily memorandum. “Yes!” said Nikitenko, when he read it. “This is just what we need.”
Geoffrey Howe’s Foreign Office briefing had become Mikhail Gorbachev’s KGB briefing. “In it went, verbatim.”
Gorbachev’s visit to Britain was a resounding success. For all their ideological differences, Thatcher and Gorbachev appeared to be on the same wavelength. Of course, there were moments of strain: Thatcher lectured her visitor on the merits of free enterprise and competition; Gorbachev insisted “the Soviet system was superior” and invited her to see for herself how “joyfully” the Soviet peoples lived their lives. They sparred over the fate of dissidents, including the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and the arms race. In a particularly tense exchange, Thatcher accused the USSR of funding the miners. Gorbachev denied it. “The Soviet Union had transferred no funds to the NUM,” he said, before shooting a sideways glance at his propaganda chief, a member of the Soviet delegation, and adding: “As far as I know.” That was a lie, and Mrs. Thatcher knew it. Back in October, Go
rbachev himself had personally signed off on a plan to provide the striking miners with $1.4 million.
But, for all the verbal jousting, the two leaders got on well. It was almost as if they were working from the same script, which, in a way, they were. The daily KGB briefing for Gorbachev came back “with passages underlined to show gratitude or satisfaction.” He was reading it closely. “Both sides were being briefed by us,” said the MI6 analyst. “We were doing something new—really trying to use the information, not distort it, to manage relations and open up new possibilities. We were a handful of people working amazing hours on the cusp of history.”
Observers noted the “palpable human chemistry at work.” At the end of their discussions, Gorbachev pronounced himself “very satisfied indeed.” Thatcher felt the same: “His personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik.” Gordievsky reported the “enthusiastic Moscow feedback” to MI6.
In a note to Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher wrote: “I certainly found him a man one could do business with. I actually rather liked him—there is no doubt that he is completely loyal to the Soviet system, but he is prepared to listen and have a genuine dialogue and make up his own mind.” That expression became the catchphrase of the visit, shorthand for the more vigorous leadership that would emerge when Chernenko died and was finally succeeded, in March 1985, by Gorbachev: “A man one could do business with.”
The Spy and the Traitor Page 23
