The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  Twelve days before Gordievsky was due to take over as rezident, Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB.

  Ames was truculent. His breath smelled and his job stank. He felt underappreciated by the CIA. But he would later offer a simpler explanation for his actions: “I did it for the money.” He needed to pay for Rosario’s shopping trips to Neiman Marcus and dinners at the Palm restaurant. He wanted to move out of his one-bedroom apartment, pay off his ex-wife, hold an expensive wedding, and own his car outright.

  Ames chose to sell out America to the KGB in order to buy the American Dream he felt he deserved. Gordievsky had never been interested in the money. Ames was interested in nothing else.

  Early in April, Ames telephoned an official at the Soviet embassy named Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, and suggested they meet. Chuvakhin was not one of the forty KGB officers working in the embassy. He was an arms control specialist and a “person of interest” to the CIA, considered a legitimate target for cultivation. Ames told colleagues he was sounding out the Russian official as a possible contact. The meeting was “sanctioned” by both the CIA and FBI. Chuvakhin agreed to meet Ames for drinks at 4 p.m. on April 16, at the bar of the Mayflower Hotel, not far from the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington, DC.

  Ames was nervous. Waiting at the Mayflower bar, he drank a vodka martini, and then another two. When, after an hour, Chuvakhin had still not appeared, Ames decided to “improvise,” as he put it: he walked, rather unsteadily, up Connecticut Avenue to the Soviet embassy, handed the package he had intended for Chuvakhin to the receptionist, and left.

  The small parcel was addressed to the KGB rezident in Washington, General Stanislav Androsov. Inside was another envelope, addressed to Androsov under his operational alias, “Kronin.” A handwritten note read: “I am H. Aldrich Ames and my job is branch chief of Soviet counter-intelligence at the CIA. I served in New York where I used the alias Andy Robinson. I need $50,000 and in exchange for the money, here is information about three agents we are developing in the Soviet Union right now.” The names he listed were all individuals the Soviets had “dangled” at the CIA, posing as potential recruits but in reality KGB plants. “These weren’t real traitors,” Ames later said. By revealing them, he told himself, he was not harming anyone or damaging a CIA operation. The envelope also contained a page torn from the CIA internal telephone directory, with Ames’s name underlined in yellow felt pen.

  Ames had carefully engineered his approach to include four distinct elements that would establish his seriousness: information about current operations that no mere provocateur would have revealed; an earlier alias that would be known to the KGB from his time in New York; knowledge of the rezident’s secret code name; and proof of his own identity and CIA job. That would surely grab the Soviets’ attention, and get the money rolling in.

  Knowing how the KGB worked, Ames did not expect an immediate response: the “walk-in” would be referred back to Moscow, inquiries would be made, the possibility of a provocation explored, and eventually the Center would take up his offer. “I was sure they would respond positively,” he later wrote. “And they did.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, on April 28, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky became London rezident, the most senior KGB officer in London. The handover from Nikitenko was peculiar. By tradition, the departing KGB station chief left behind a locked briefcase containing important secret documents. With Nikitenko safely on the plane to Moscow, Oleg opened the case, to find just one brown envelope containing two sheets of paper: photocopies of the letters Michael Bettaney had pushed through Guk’s letterbox two years earlier, the contents of which had already been reported in every British newspaper. Was this a joke? A souvenir hinting at Guk’s incompetence? A warning? Or was Nikitenko sending some ominous message? “Was it because he did not trust me, and felt he could not leave anything that was still secret?” But if that was the case, why leave a veiled tip-off? Most likely, Nikitenko was simply trying to destabilize the rival who had gotten the job he coveted.

  MI6 was also puzzled: “We were expecting the crown jewels and didn’t get them. We had wondered whether we would learn that members of the cabinet were long-standing KGB agents, or discover more Bettaneys, and we didn’t. That was a relief, but mixed with disappointment.” Gordievsky began reading through the rezidentura files, and gathering for MI6 what would surely prove to be a bonanza of fresh intelligence.

  * * *

  As Ames predicted, the KGB took time to respond to his overtures, but then did so with enthusiasm. In early May, Chuvakhin called Ames, and casually suggested they “get together for a drink at the Soviet embassy on May 15, and then proceed to lunch at a local restaurant.” In fact Chuvakhin was neither enthusiastic nor casual. He was a genuine arms control expert, and had no desire to be dragged into some dodgy and dangerous spy game. “Let one of your boys do this dirty work,” he said, when instructed to contact Ames and arrange the meeting. The KGB swiftly set him straight: Ames had singled him out, and Chuvakhin would be playing the game whether or not he wanted to.

  The KGB had been busy over the previous three weeks. Ames’s letter was passed immediately to Colonel Viktor Cherkashin, chief of counterintelligence at the Soviet embassy. Realizing its importance, Cherkashin dispatched a densely encoded “burst” transmission to Kryuchkov, head of the First Chief Directorate, who went to see Viktor Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB, who immediately authorized the withdrawal of $50,000 in cash from the Military Industrial Commission. The KGB was a cumbersome beast, but it could move fast when it needed to.

  On Wednesday, May 15, Ames reappeared, as bidden, at the Soviet embassy, having informed the CIA and FBI he was following up his earlier efforts to cultivate the military specialist. “I knew what I was doing. I was determined to make it work,” he said. Chuvakhin met Ames in the embassy lobby and introduced him to the KGB officer Cherkashin, who then led him to a small conference room in the basement. Not a word was exchanged. Indicating by gestures that the room might be bugged, the smiling Cherkashin handed Ames a note: “We accept your offer and are very pleased to do so. We would like you to use Chuvakhin as the cut-out, the go-between for our discussions. He will be able to give you the money and be available to lunch with you.” On the back of the note Ames wrote: “Okay. Thank you very much.”

  But that was not all.

  There is one question every case officer is bound to ask of a newly recruited spy: Do you know of any penetration of our service? Does your side have a spy inside our organization who could give you away? Gordievsky had been asked this question the moment he agreed to spy for Britain. Cherkashin was highly trained. It is inconceivable that he would have failed to ask whether Ames was aware of any spies inside the KGB who might discover that he was offering to swap sides and report this back to the CIA. Ames in turn would have been expecting the question. He knew of more than a dozen such agents, including two inside the Soviet embassy itself; and one, the most senior of all, being run by the British.

  Ames later claimed that he did not, at this stage, identify Gordievsky by name. His systematic betrayal of every Soviet agent on the CIA’s books would not take place for another month. In memoirs published in 2005, Cherkashin claimed the crucial tip-off about Gordievsky came not from Ames, but from a shadowy informant, “a Washington-based British journalist.” The CIA dismisses this as disinformation designed to reflect well on the KGB, with “all the earmarks of being a false lead.”

  Most intelligence analysts who have studied the Gordievsky case agree that, at some point during his initial contact with the Russians, Ames revealed that there was a top-level mole inside the KGB working for British intelligence. He may not have been aware of Gordievsky’s name by this point, particularly if he was not personally conducting the investigation. But he surely knew that the investigation into the identity of an MI6 spy code-named TICKLE was under way, and it is highly likely he passed this on during the wordless meeting in the basement of the Soviet embassy
, in a warning message scribbled on a piece of paper. Even if he did not yet divulge a name, this would have been enough to unleash the hunting dogs of Directorate K.

  When Ames emerged from his subterranean meeting, Chuvakhin was waiting in the lobby. “Let’s go for lunch,” he said.

  The two men sat at a corner table in Joe and Mo’s restaurant, and began to talk, and drink. Uncertainty surrounds exactly what was said during that “long, boozy” lunch. Ames later claimed, implausibly, that they spent the time discussing arms control. It is possible that, somewhere between the third and fourth martinis, Ames confirmed the existence of a British-run spy in the KGB. But he later admitted: “My memory is sort of a blur.”

  At the end of the meal, Chuvakhin, who had drunk considerably less than Ames, handed him a plastic shopping bag filled with papers. “Here are some press releases I think you will find interesting,” he said, just in case the FBI might be listening on a directional microphone. The men shook hands, and the Russian hastened back to the embassy. Despite the alcohol sloshing through his system, Ames climbed into his car and headed homeward. On the George Washington Parkway, he parked in a scenic turnout overlooking the Potomac and opened the shopping bag: at the bottom, under assorted embassy bumf was a wrapped rectangular parcel, the size of a small brick. He tore off a corner. Ames was “totally exhilarated.” Inside was a wad of five hundred $100 bills.

  While the American was counting his money, back at the Soviet embassy Chuvakhin briefed Cherkashin, and the KGB officer composed another encrypted “burst” cable, marked for the attention of Chebrikov himself.

  By the time Ames got home, one of the biggest manhunts in KGB history was under way.

  * * *

  On Thursday, May 16, the day after Ames’s first meeting with Cherkashin, an urgent telegram from Moscow landed on the desk of the newly appointed KGB rezident in London.

  As he read it, Oleg Gordievsky felt a cold prickle of apprehension.

  “In order to confirm your appointment as rezident, please come to Moscow urgently in two days’ time for important discussions with Comrades Mikhailov and Alyoshin.” These were the operational aliases for Viktor Chebrikov and Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman and the head of the First Chief Directorate. The summons came from the summit of the KGB.

  Gordievsky told his secretary he had an appointment, rushed to the nearest telephone box, and called an emergency meeting with his MI6 handler.

  Simon Brown was waiting at the Bayswater safe house when he arrived a few hours later. “He looked worried,” Brown recalled. “Obviously concerned, but not panicked.”

  Over the next forty-eight hours, MI6 and Gordievsky would have to decide whether he should answer the summons and return to Moscow, or wrap up the case and move, with his family, into hiding.

  “Oleg started rehearsing the pros and cons: his immediate rationale was that it was unusual, but not so unusual as to be immediately and necessarily suspicious. There could be all sorts of logical reasons for the recall.”

  Moscow had been oddly silent since his appointment. Gordievsky had expected at least a note of congratulation from Gribin, and more worryingly he had not yet received the all-important telegram containing the rezidentura’s cipher communication codes. On the other hand, his KGB colleagues exhibited no trace of suspicion, and seemed anxious to please.

  Gordievsky wondered if he was worrying unnecessarily: perhaps, along with Guk’s job, he had inherited his predecessor’s paranoia.

  More than one MI6 officer compared the situation to a gambler’s dilemma. “You have built up a big pile of chips. Do you stake it all on one last spin of the roulette wheel? Or do you gather up your winnings and leave the table?” Calculating the odds was no easy matter, and the stakes were now astronomically high: a win could yield untold riches, with access to the KGB’s innermost secrets; but a losing bet could mean Gordievsky would be lost forever, or he might simply disappear with no confirmation for months as to his fate. None of his store of intelligence could be used and more widely disseminated meanwhile. And for Gordievsky himself it would mean, ultimately, his destruction.

  There was something odd about the tone of the message, at once peremptory and polite. According to KGB tradition, the Chairman himself appointed rezidents, particularly in target countries as important as the UK. Chebrikov had been away from Moscow in January when Oleg was awarded the job, and so this might be no more than formal confirmation, a ceremonial “laying on of hands” by the KGB supremo. Perhaps the fact that he had yet to be fully “anointed” by the KGB explained the lack of information left by Nikitenko and the failure to send the cipher codes. If the KGB suspected him of treachery, why did they not call him home immediately, rather than in two days’ time? Perhaps they were trying not to spook him with an immediate recall. But if they knew he was a spy, why had they not sent in the thugs of the Thirteenth Department, specialists in kidnapping, to drag him back to Russia? And if this was just business as usual, why the lack of forewarning? Gordievsky had been fully briefed on his new role just three months earlier. What further discussions were necessary? And what made these so vital and urgent that their import could not be revealed in a telegram? The summons came from the head of the KGB: that was either alarming or a sign of the esteem in which Gordievsky was now held.

  Brown tried to put himself into the mind of the KGB. “If they had known, 100 percent, they would not have behaved that way, and taken the risk of giving him time to escape. They would have bided their time, played it longer, fed him chicken feed, and waited. They could have brought him back in a more professional way. They could have faked his mother’s death or something.”

  The meeting ended without reaching a firm conclusion. Gordievsky agreed to meet again at the safe house the following evening, Friday, May 17. In the meantime, he would book a ticket on the Sunday flight to Moscow, and give no hint that anything might be amiss.

  Maksim Parshikov was driving out of the embassy parking garage to a lunch appointment when, to his surprise, Gordievsky “threw himself across the path of the car and excitedly spoke through the open window: ‘I have been summoned to Moscow. Come after the lunch break, and we will talk.’ ” Two hours later, Parshikov found the new rezident “nervously pacing back and forth” in his office. Gordievsky explained that he had been called back to receive Chebrikov’s final blessing. That was not abnormal in itself, but the way it had been done was strange: “No one had sent any personal letters to alert me beforehand. But there is nothing for it: I will go for a few days, and find out what’s going on. You will be deputy in my absence. Sit tight, and don’t do anything until I return.”

  Back at Century House a “convocation of the chief and grandees” gathered in C’s office to discuss the situation: Chris Curwen, the newly appointed chief, John Deverell from MI5, the controller of the Sovbloc section, and Brown, Gordievsky’s case officer. There was no sense of alarm. Some in MI6 later claimed to have harbored serious concerns, but then spies, like everyone else, tend to claim twenty-twenty vision with hindsight. The case was on the cusp of triumph, and Veronica Price and Simon Brown, the officers closest to the case, could see no clear reason to pull the plug. Deverell reported that MI5 had picked up no indication the KGB had discovered their spy. “We took the decision that we really couldn’t tell whether it was safe for him to go back,” said the Sovbloc controller. It was agreed that the final choice should be left to Gordievsky himself. He would not be forced to return to Moscow, but neither would he be encouraged to throw in the towel. “This was a cop-out,” one MI6 officer insisted with hindsight. “His life was at stake and we should have protected him.”

  The key to successful gambling is intuition, the sixth sense that enables a player to predict events and read an opponent’s mind. What, if anything, did the KGB know?

  In reality, Moscow knew very little.

  Colonel Viktor Budanov of Directorate K, the counterintelligence branch, was by general agreement the “most dangerous man in the KGB.�
�� In the 1980s he had served in East Germany, where one of the KGB officers under his command was the young Vladimir Putin. Within Directorate K, his role was to investigate “abnormal developments,” maintain security within the various intelligence branches of the First Chief Directorate, eliminate corruption in the ranks, and root out spies. A dedicated Communist, spare and desiccated, he had the face of a fox and the mind of a highly trained lawyer. His approach to his work was methodical and fastidious. He saw himself as a detective, working to uphold the rules, not an agent of retribution. “We always strictly followed the letter of the law, at least during my time with counterintelligence and intelligence divisions of the KGB of the Soviet Union. I never had to launch an operation that could have broken the law effective in the territory of the Soviet Union.” He would catch the spy by evidence and deduction.

  Budanov had been informed by his superiors that there was a senior mole in the KGB. He did not yet have a name, but he had a place. If the traitor was being run by British intelligence, then he might be someone inside the London rezidentura. Before leaving London, Leonid Nikitenko, an experienced counterintelligence officer, had sent a series of critical reports questioning Gordievsky’s reliability. Ames’s tip-off, combined with Nikitenko’s unverified suspicions, might have pointed to the new rezident. Gordievsky was a suspect, but he was not the only one. Nikitenko himself was another. Parshikov a third, though he was not yet recalled. And there were others. The reach of MI6 was global, and the mole could be anywhere. Budanov did not know for certain that Gordievsky was the traitor; but he certainly knew that once the man was back in Moscow, his guilt or innocence could be ascertained without the risk of his absconding.