The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  “What about Michael Bettaney?” he asked. “It looks as though he was a real man after all, and seriously wanted to cooperate with us. He could have become a second Philby.”

  “Of course he was real,” Gordievsky replied. “And he would have been far better than Philby, much more valuable.” (A wild exaggeration.)

  “But how did we make such a mistake?” Grushko pressed him. “Was he genuine from the start?”

  “I thought so. I can’t imagine why comrade Guk didn’t agree.”

  A pause, before Grushko continued:

  “Guk was expelled. But he hadn’t done anything about Bettaney. He hadn’t even made contact. So why did they sack him?”

  Something in Grushko’s expression made Gordievsky’s stomach lurch.

  “I think his mistake was to behave too much like a KGB man, always driving around in his Mercedes, boasting about the KGB and playing the general. The Brits didn’t like that.”

  The subject was dropped.

  A few minutes later, the officer appointed to greet Gordievsky at the airport was summoned by Grushko and loudly upbraided for his inefficiency. “What happened? You were supposed to meet Gordievsky and bring him home. Where were you?” The man stammered that he had gone to the wrong part of the airport. The scene seemed stage-managed. Had the KGB deliberately failed to send anyone to greet him in order to follow his movements on arrival?

  Gordievsky returned to his office, fiddled with his notes, and waited for the summons from the KGB boss that would indicate he was safe, or the tap on his shoulder from the counterintelligence section that would mean the end. Neither came. He went home, to spend another evening of wondering, another night of fearful imagining. The next day was the same. Gordievsky might have been bored, had it not been for the dread inside. On the third day Gribin said he was leaving work early, and offered a lift in his car.

  “What if a summons comes, and I’ve gone?” asked Gordievsky.

  “There’s no chance of them sending for you tonight,” replied Gribin.

  As they crawled through the traffic in the rain, Gordievsky remarked, as casually as he could, that important work needed to be done in London.

  “If there is nothing to detain me in Moscow, I would like to get back to deal with it. There is an important NATO meeting coming up, and the parliamentary year is ending. Some of my people need guidance with running contacts…”

  Gribin waved his hand, a little too airily. “Oh, nonsense! People are often away for months at a time. Nobody’s indispensable.”

  The next day was played out with the same mixture of inner turmoil and external charade, as was the next. A strange deceptive dance was under way, with both Gordievsky and the KGB pretending to be in step, while waiting for the other to trip up. The strain was unremitting and unshared. He could detect no surveillance, yet a sixth sense told him eyes and ears were everywhere, on every corner, in every shadow. Big Brother was watching him; or, more precisely, the man at the bus stop was watching him, the neighbor on the street, the babushka with her samovar in the lobby. Or perhaps not. As the days passed without incident, Gordievsky began to wonder if his fears were imaginary. Then came proof they were not.

  In a corridor of the Third Department, he bumped into a colleague from Directorate S (responsible for the illegals network) named Boris Bocharov, who hailed him: “Oleg, what is happening in Britain? Why have all the illegals been pulled out?” Oleg struggled to disguise his shock. The order to stand down the deep-cover spies could only mean one thing: the KGB knew it had been compromised in the UK and was urgently dismantling its illegals network. DARIO, the recipient of the cash-filled brick, had lasted less than a week as an undercover spy in London. He has never been identified.

  A strange parcel was waiting on Gordievsky’s desk, addressed for “Mr. Grushko’s eyes only.” It had arrived in the diplomatic bag from the London rezidentura, and since Gordievsky was now the London rezident, the clerks had assumed he was the logical first recipient. Hands trembling, he shook the parcel and heard a dry rattle and the tinkle of a buckle from within. This was surely his own satchel, which he had left on his desk in London, containing a number of important papers. The KGB was gathering evidence. Keep calm, he told himself. Behave normally. He passed the parcel to Grushko’s office, and returned to his desk.

  “People say that when soldiers hear the artillery start, they go into a sort of panic. That is what happened to me. I could not even remember the escape plan. But then I thought: ‘The plan is unreliable anyway. I should forget about it, and just look forward to the bullet in the back of the neck.’ I was paralyzed.”

  That evening he placed a call to the Kensington flat. Leila answered. Recording devices in both London and Moscow clicked on.

  “How are the children doing at school?” he asked, enunciating clearly.

  Leila, detecting nothing unusual, replied that the girls were doing fine. They chatted for a few minutes and then Gordievsky rang off.

  Gribin, all bogus bonhomie, invited Gordievsky to stay in his dacha for the weekend. Clearly he was under instructions to stick closely to his underling in case he let anything slip. Gordievsky politely declined the invitation, explaining that he had not yet visited his mother and sister, Marina, since his return to Moscow. Gribin was insistent they meet, and announced that he and his wife would visit Gordievsky at home. For several hours, sitting around a fake-marble-topped coffee table, they talked of life in London, how the girls were growing and speaking English as a first language. His daughter Maria had even learned the Lord’s Prayer in English. To a casual listener, Gordievsky might have been a proud father describing the pleasures of a foreign posting to an old and close colleague over a friendly cup of tea. In reality, a brutal, unacknowledged psychological fistfight was taking place.

  By Monday morning, May 27, Gordievsky was ragged from sleeplessness and strain. Before leaving home, he swallowed one of Veronica Price’s pep pills, a nonprescription caffeine-based booster often used by students trying to stay alert during all-night study sessions. By the time he reached the Center, Gordievsky was feeling better, the edge taken off his exhaustion.

  He had been seated at his desk only a few minutes when the phone rang, the dedicated line from the office of the department head.

  Gordievsky felt a small surge of hope. Perhaps the long-awaited meeting with the KGB chiefs was at hand. “Is it the bosses?” he asked when Viktor Grushko came on the line.

  “Not yet,” said Grushko blandly. “There are two people who want to discuss high-level agent penetration in Britain with you.” The meeting place, he added, would be outside the building. Grushko would be coming, too. This was all highly unusual.

  Apprehension rising, Gordievsky left his briefcase on the desk and headed down to the lobby. Grushko appeared a moment later, and ushered him into a car parked at the curbside. The driver swung out of the rear gates, and after less than a mile stopped beside a high-walled compound used to house the visitors and guests of the First Chief Directorate. Chatting amiably, Grushko led Gordievsky to a small bungalow, a benign-looking building surrounded by a low picket fence and apparently unguarded. The day was already muggy and hot, but inside it felt cool and airy. Bedrooms led off a long central room, sparsely but elegantly furnished with new furniture. At the door stood two stewards, a man in his fifties and a younger woman. Both greeted Gordievsky with extreme deference, as if he were a visiting foreign dignitary.

  When they were seated, Grushko produced a bottle. “Look, I’ve got some Armenian brandy,” he said cheerfully, and poured out two glasses. They drank. The servants laid out plates and a platter of sandwiches, cheese, ham, and red salmon caviar.

  At this moment, two men entered the room. Gordievsky did not recognize either of them. The older, in a dark suit, had the lined and leathery face of a heavy drinker and smoker. The younger man was taller, with a long face and pointed features. Neither smiled. Grushko made no introductions, other than to say that the two men “want to talk to
you about how to run a very important agent in Britain.” Gordievsky’s anxiety rose another notch: “I thought: ‘This is nonsense. There is no important agent in Britain. There is some other reason for all this.’ ” Grushko carried on blithely. “Let’s eat first,” he said, as if hosting a convivial working lunch. The male servant poured more brandy. The men drained their glasses, and Gordievsky followed suit. Another bottle appeared. Another round was poured and drunk. The strangers made the smallest of small talk. The older man chain-smoked.

  Then, with shocking suddenness, Gordievsky felt his reality lurch into a hallucinatory dream world, in which he seemed to be observing himself, only half-conscious, from far away, through a refracting, warping lens.

  Gordievsky’s brandy had been spiked with some sort of truth serum, probably a psychotropic drug manufactured by the KGB known as SP-117, a form of sodium thiopental containing a fast-acting barbiturate-anesthetic, without smell, taste, or color, a chemical cocktail designed to erode the inhibitions and loosen the tongue. While the attendant had poured the other three men drinks from the first bottle, Gordievsky’s glass had been surreptitiously filled from a different one.

  The older man was General Sergei Golubev, the head of Directorate K, the KGB branch in charge of internal counterintelligence. The other was Colonel Viktor Budanov, the KGB’s top investigator.

  They began to ask questions, and Gordievsky found himself answering them, only dimly aware of what he was saying. Yet some part of his brain was still self-aware and defensive. “Stay alert,” he told himself. Gordievsky was now fighting for his life, in a miasma of sweat and fear, through a haze of drugged brandy. He had heard the KGB sometimes used drugs to extract secrets rather than physical torture, but he was wholly unprepared for this sudden chemical assault on his nervous system.

  Gordievsky could never explain exactly what happened over the next five hours. Yet he later recalled scraps, like the half-remembered shards of some shattering nightmare, assembled through a pharmacological fog: suddenly vivid scenes, snatches of words and phrases, the looming faces of his interrogators.

  Of all people Kim Philby, the elderly British spy still living in Moscow exile, came to his aid. “Never confess,” Philby had advised his KGB students. As the psychoactive drug took a grip, Philby’s words came back: “Like Philby, I was denying everything. Deny, deny, deny. It was instinctive.”

  Budanov and Golubev seemed to want to talk about literature, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. “Why do you have all these anti-Soviet volumes?” they demanded. “You deliberately used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal.”

  “No, no,” Gordievsky heard himself say. “As a political-intelligence officer I needed to read books like that; they gave me essential background.”

  Suddenly here at his side was Grushko, all smiles. “Well done, Oleg! You’re having an excellent conversation. Carry on! Tell them everything.” Then he was gone again, and the two interrogators were leaning over him once more.

  “We know you are a British agent. We have irrefutable evidence of your guilt. Confess! Priznaysya!”

  “No! I’ve nothing to confess.” Slumped and soaked in sweat, he felt himself slip in and out of consciousness.

  Budanov, with the soothing voice one might use to a recalcitrant child: “You confessed very well a few minutes ago. Now please go through it again, and confirm what you said. Confess again!”

  “I’ve done nothing,” he pleaded, clinging to his lie like a drowning man.

  At some point he recalled lurching to his feet, rushing to the bathroom, and vomiting violently into the basin. The two attendants seemed to stare at him nastily from a corner of the room, all deference gone. He asked for water, and drank greedily, spilling it down his shirtfront. Grushko was there one moment, and gone the next. The interrogators seemed alternately consoling and accusatory. Sometimes gently admonishing him: “How can you, a Communist, be proud of your daughter being able to say the Lord’s Prayer?” The next moment trying to trap him, reeling off the names of spies and defectors by their code names. “What about Vladimir Vetrov?” Budanov demanded, referring to the KGB officer executed a year earlier for collaborating with French intelligence. “What do you think of him?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Gordievsky.

  Then Golubev played his trump card. “We know who recruited you in Copenhagen,” he growled. “It was Richard Bromhead.”

  “Nonsense! That’s not true.”

  “But you wrote a report about him.”

  “Of course, I met him once, and I wrote a report of the meeting. But he never focused on me particularly. He used to talk to everybody…”

  Budanov tried another tack: “We know that your telephone call to your wife was a signal to the British intelligence service. Just admit it.”

  “No,” he insisted. “That is not true.” Deny, deny, deny.

  The two interrogators refused to let up. “Confess!” they said. “You’ve done it once already. Confess again!”

  Sensing his willpower waning, Gordievsky summoned up a spark of defiance, and told the two KGB questioners they were no better than Stalin’s secret police, extracting false confessions from the innocent.

  Five hours after the first sip of brandy, the light in the room seemed to fade suddenly. Gordievsky felt a deathly fatigue engulf him, his head tipped back, and the spy slipped into the black.

  * * *

  Gordievsky awoke in a clean bed, with morning sunlight streaming through the window, dressed only in an undershirt and underpants. His mouth was dust-dry, and his head ached with a savage intensity he had never experienced before. For a moment he had no idea where he was, or what had happened: but then slowly, in fragments, with growing horror, some of the events of the previous day began to filter back. A wave of nausea struck as he levered himself upright in bed. “I’m finished,” he thought. “They know everything.”

  But set against that conclusion was one self-evident fact suggesting the KGB might not know quite everything: he was still alive.

  The male attendant, obsequious once more, arrived with coffee. Gordievsky drank cup after cup. Head still throbbing, he climbed into his suit, hung neatly by the door. He was tying his shoes when the two interrogators reappeared. Gordievsky braced himself. Had the coffee been drugged? Was he about to descend back into that chemical fog? But no. His misted brain seemed clearer by the moment.

  The two men looked at him quizzically.

  “You’ve been very rude to us, Comrade Gordievsky,” said the younger man. “You accused us of reviving the spirit of 1937, the Great Terror.”

  Budanov’s manner was sullenly resentful. Gordievsky’s accusation that he was no better than a Stalinist butcher had offended his sense of legal propriety. He considered himself an investigator, an upholder of the rules, a seeker after truth, an inquirer not an inquisitor, dealing in facts not falsehoods. “What you said wasn’t true, Comrade Gordievsky, and I’ll prove it.”

  Gordievsky was stunned. He had expected his interrogators to display the triumphant swagger of hunters who had trapped their quarry and would now go in for the kill. Instead they seemed aggrieved and frustrated. Through his befuddlement, Gordievsky experienced a sudden clarity, and with it a little surge of hope: the two interrogators, he realized, had not gotten what they wanted.

  “If I have been rude, I apologize,” he stammered. “I don’t remember.”

  There was an awkward silence. Then Budanov spoke again. “A car is coming to take you home.”

  An hour later, disheveled and bemused, Gordievsky found himself outside the apartment on Leninsky Prospekt; once again he was locked out, having left his keys on his office desk, so once again the locksmith neighbor had to let him in. It was now midmorning. Gordievsky collapsed in a chair, more conscious than ever of being watched, and tried to recall the events of the night before.

  His interrogators seemed to know about Richard Bromhead. They also seemed to have realized that h
is call to Leila was a tip-off to British intelligence. But they clearly did not, yet, know the full magnitude of his espionage. He was certain that, despite their angry demands for a confession of guilt, he had stuck to his denials. The truth serum had not worked properly. Perhaps the single pep pill he had swallowed that morning had been enough to counteract the full effects of the sodium thiopental, a fortuitous side effect that Veronica Price had never envisaged when she gave them to him. Even so, any lingering hope that he was still above suspicion had now evaporated. The KGB was on his trail. The interrogators would be back.

  As the aftereffects of the drugs ebbed, the nausea was replaced by a steadily rising panic. By the middle of the afternoon, he could take the tension no longer. He called Grushko at the office, and tried to sound normal.

  “I’m sorry if I was rude to those fellows, but they were very strange,” he said.

  “No, no,” said Grushko. “They’re excellent chaps.”

  Next he called Gribin, his department head.

  “Something extraordinary has happened, and I’m very worried,” said Gordievsky. He described being taken to the little bungalow, meeting the two strangers, and then passing out. He pretended to remember nothing of the interrogation.

  “Don’t worry, old chap,” said Gribin, lying silkily. “I’m sure it’s nothing important.”

  * * *

  Back in London, Leila was beginning to wonder why her husband had not called again. Then came the explanation. On the morning of May 28, an official from the embassy arrived unannounced at the flat. Oleg had been taken ill, he explained, a minor heart problem. “It’s nothing too serious, but you will have to go back to Moscow immediately with the girls. The embassy chauffeur will be coming to collect you. As the wife of the rezident, you will be flying first-class. Take only hand luggage, as you will all be returning to London very soon.” Leila packed hurriedly while the official waited in the hall. “I was worried for Oleg, of course. Why had he not called himself to reassure me that he was OK? That was odd.” Perhaps the heart problem was more serious than the official was letting on. The girls were excited to be going on a surprise holiday to Moscow. They were all waiting at the front door when the embassy car pulled up.