* * *
After an almost sleepless night, Gordievsky dressed, took two more pep pills, and headed for the Center, pretending this was just another working day, knowing it might be his last. He had been seated at his desk just a few minutes when the phone rang and he was summoned, once more, to Grushko’s office.
There, ranged behind a massive desk, a KGB tribunal was waiting. On either side of Grushko sat Gribin, stone-faced, and Golubev, the chief of Directorate K. Gordievsky was not invited to sit.
A remarkable piece of espionage theater now ensued.
“We know very well you’ve been deceiving us for years,” declared Grushko, like a judge passing sentence. “Yet we’ve decided that you may stay in the KGB. Your job in London is terminated. You’ll have to move to a nonoperational department. You should take any holiday you are owed. The anti-Soviet literature in your home must be delivered to the library of the First Chief Directorate. Remember, in the next few days, and forever, no telephone calls to London.”
Grushko paused, and then added in a tone that was almost conspiratorial: “If only you knew what an unusual source we heard about you from.”
Gordievsky was stunned, and momentarily speechless. The very oddity of the scene seemed to call for some dramatic performance on his part. Adopting an air of bafflement that was only half feigned, he said: “I’m terribly sorry about what happened on Monday. I think there was something wrong with the drink, or with the food…I was in a bad way. I felt awful.”
Golubev the interrogator seemed to wake up at this point, and asserted, surreally: “Nonsense. There was nothing wrong with the food. It was delicious. The sandwiches with the salmon roe were excellent, and so were the ones with ham.”
Gordievsky wondered if he might be hallucinating again. Here he was being accused of treason, and the chief investigator was defending the quality of KGB sandwiches.
Gordievsky addressed Grushko: “Viktor Fyodorovich, as to what you say about my deceiving you for a long time, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. But whatever your decision, I’ll accept it like an officer and gentleman.”
And then, radiating injured innocence and soldierly honor, he turned and marched out.
Back at his desk, Gordievsky felt his head spinning. He had been accused of working for an enemy intelligence service. KGB officers had been shot for doing far less. Yet they were keeping him on the payroll and telling him to take a holiday.
A moment later, Gribin entered his office. During the weird scene in Grushko’s office, he had not uttered a word. Now he looked sadly at Gordievsky.
“What can I say to you, old chap?”
Gordievsky sensed a trap.
“Kolya, I don’t know exactly what this is all about, but I suspect I’ve been overheard saying something critical about the Party leaders, and now there’s a big intrigue going on.”
“If only it was that,” said Gribin. “If only it was a question of some indiscretion recorded by the microphones. But I’m afraid it’s far, far worse than that.”
Gordievsky adopted a look of fresh bewilderment: “What can I say?”
Gribin looked at him hard: “Try to take it all philosophically.” It sounded like a death sentence.
Back at the flat, Gordievsky tried to make sense out of what had taken place. The KGB did not go in for clemency. If they knew even a fraction of the truth, he was doomed. But the fact that he was not yet in the Lubyanka basement could only mean that the investigators still lacked decisive proof of his guilt. “For the moment I could not tell what the KGB had or had not found out; but it was clear that I was, in effect, under sentence of death, even if that sentence was suspended pending further investigations.” The KGB was running a long game. “They’ve decided to play with me,” he thought. “Like a cat with a mouse.” Eventually the cat gets bored with the game, and either frightens the mouse to death, or kills it.
Viktor Budanov had a point to prove. Gordievsky believed Veronica’s pep pill had saved him. But, in fact, it might have been his defiant remark in mid-interrogation, comparing the investigators to Stalin’s killers, that explained why he was still alive. Budanov had been nettled by that suggestion. He wanted proof. He would let Gordievsky think he was safe but keep him under surveillance until he cracked, confessed, or tried to contact MI6, at which point Budanov would swoop. There was no reason for haste, since there was nowhere for the man to run to. No suspected spy had ever escaped from the Soviet Union while under KGB surveillance. Normally, the Seventh Directorate would have used its own surveillance personnel to follow a suspect, but in this case it was agreed to use a team from the FCD. Grushko had been insistent: since this was his department’s problem, his department would solve it, and the fewer people outside the directorate who knew what was happening the better (for Grushko’s career, among other things). The surveillants could not be people Gordievsky might recognize, and so a surveillance team from the Chinese department was seconded for the job: they were not told exactly who the suspect was, or what he was suspected of doing; they were merely told to follow him, report his movements, and not let him out of their sight. Once Gordievsky’s family was back in Moscow, there was even less chance he might try to abscond. Leila and the two girls would be held as hostages. A second, daytime break-in was staged at Gordievsky’s flat and his shoes and clothes were sprayed again with radioactive dust that was invisible to the naked eye but that could be seen with special glasses and tracked using an adapted Geiger counter. Wherever he went, Gordievsky would now be leaving a radioactive trail.
Budanov was disappointed that the truth drug had not worked properly, though it seemed that Gordievsky had no memory of what had been said during the interrogation. The investigation was proceeding as planned.
* * *
In London, the NOCTON team was by now deeply alarmed. “It was a very long two weeks,” said Simon Brown. MI5 reported that Gordievsky had called his wife from Moscow, but the conversation had not been fully recorded, and the eavesdroppers had failed to note whether Gordievsky had made the all-important reference to his daughters’ schooling. Had Gordievsky signaled that he was in trouble? “There was not enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion.” When the senior MI6 officer liaising with the MI5 eavesdropping team was asked how the alarm raised by Gordievsky could possibly have been missed, he offered a quotation from Horace: Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, often translated as “Even Homer nods.” The most highly trained experts can still be caught napping.
Then came the hammer blow. The Security Service reported that Leila Gordievsky and her two children were booked on a flight to Moscow. “When I heard that, my blood turned cold,” recalled Brown. The sudden recall of Gordievsky’s family could mean only one thing: he was in the hands of the KGB, and it was impossible to intervene. “Stopping them traveling would have been a death sentence for him.”
An urgent cable was dispatched to the MI6 Moscow station with instructions to be on high alert for the activation of Operation PIMLICO. But within the London team there was deep pessimism, and a widespread assumption that the case was over. “Once the family was brought back to Moscow, it seemed certain that Gordievsky had already been arrested. Escape seemed exceptionally unlikely.” The spy had been found out. But how? What had gone wrong?
Brown recalled: “It was an awful time. The whole NOCTON team was in shock. I stopped going into the office, because everyone was walking around like zombies.
“As time went on, I convinced myself we’d got it hopelessly wrong, and Oleg was dead.”
Of all the MI6 officers, Veronica Price was emotionally the closest to Gordievsky. Ever since 1978, protecting him had been her most pressing duty, a daily preoccupation. Her manner remained brisk and businesslike, but she was deeply concerned. “I thought we had done all we could with the plans,” she said. “Now it was up to the Moscow people to take over.” Price did not hold with hand-wringing. Her ward, her special responsibility, had been lost, but she was confident he woul
d be found and saved.
Price had been told that the mosquitoes could be fierce on the Russian-Finnish border in early summer. So she bought some mosquito repellent.
* * *
Viscount Roy Ascot, later to become an earl, was MI6 station chief in Moscow, and possibly the most blue-blooded spy Britain has ever produced. His great-grandfather had been Britain’s prime minister. His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was a scholar and lawyer, one of the most brilliant of his generation, who was killed in the First World War. His father, the second earl, had been a colonial administrator. People tend to either fawn over aristocracy or dismiss it. Being posh is quite a good cover for spying, and Viscount Ascot was an exceptionally good spy. After joining MI6 in 1980, he learned Russian and was posted to Moscow in 1983 at the age of thirty-one.
Before leaving Britain, Ascot and his wife, Caroline, had been briefed on PIMLICO. Spouses of serving officers were treated as additional, unpaid adjuncts to the MI6 station, and entrusted with high-grade secrets when necessary. The daughter of an architect, Caroline, Viscountess Ascot, was scholarly, imaginative, and unshakably discreet. The Ascots were shown a photograph of Gordievsky, and drilled on the plans for making the brush contact and exfiltration. Veronica Price personally described Gordievsky to them, without ever revealing his name, where he might be, or what he did. Everyone referred to him as PIMLICO. “Veronica was straight out of John le Carré. In her face, manner, and bearing, she described the man as quite simply a hero. She completely admired him and thought there was something unique about him. She told us: ‘PIMLICO is an absolutely remarkable person.’ ”
Over the previous two years of their Moscow posting, the Ascots had traveled by car to and from Helsinki several times, to familiarize themselves with the escape route and the rendezvous point. Just five people in Moscow knew of the escape plan: Ascot and his wife; his deputy, Arthur Gee, an experienced officer who was soon due to take over from Ascot as head of station, and his wife, Rachel; and the MI6 secretary, Violet Chapman. All five lived in the expatriate compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Every month, one of the officers headed off to the Central Market to look out for a man with a Safeway bag. Whenever Gordievsky had returned home on leave, and for several weeks before and after, one of them had checked the signal site outside the bread shop on the other side of the avenue, every evening, rain or shine. The rotation was deliberately irregular. Violet could actually see the site from the stairwell outside her flat. When it was their turn, Ascot and Gee monitored the site on foot, or when driving home. “We had to ring the changes quite imaginatively so a pattern didn’t build up that could be spotted by those who we knew were watching us and listening. You can imagine the number of artificially cultivated and artificially broken conversations necessary to the timing of this maneuver.” The team kept a stock of chocolate on hand, ready to give the recognition signal. “Large numbers of stale, uneaten chocolate bars used to accumulate in our coat pockets, handbags, and glove compartments.” Ascot acquired a lifelong aversion to KitKats.
Ascot knew the escape plan by heart, and did not think much of it. “It was a complex plan, and we knew how flimsy the whole thing was. It seemed so unlikely it would happen.” Operation PIMLICO provided for the exfiltration of up to four people, two adults and two little girls. Ascot had three children of his own under six years old: getting them to sit quietly on the backseat of his car was hard enough. How they would react to being stuffed in a trunk did not bear thinking about. Even if the spy managed to throw off the surveillance for long enough to reach the border, which seemed unlikely, the chances of the MI6 officers evading the KGB and reaching the rendezvous without being intercepted were, he calculated, almost exactly nil.
“The KGB was absolutely all over us.” The flats of the diplomats were bugged, as were their cars and telephones. The KGB occupied the floor above: “Every evening you would see them carrying out their tapes in Red Cross boxes, having sat upstairs listening to us.” They strongly suspected the presence of hidden cameras. Whenever Caroline went shopping, she had a three-car convoy of KGB cars in attendance. Ascot himself was sometimes accompanied by no fewer than five. The cars of suspected MI6 officers were sprayed with the same radioactive dust put on Gordievsky’s shoes and clothes. If the dust turned up on the clothes of someone they suspected of spying for Britain, that would be proof of contact. In addition, the KGB sometimes sprayed the footwear of suspected spies with a chemical odor imperceptible to humans, but easily traced by sniffer dogs. Each MI6 officer kept two pairs of identical shoes, so that he could slip on an uncontaminated pair if necessary. Another pair was kept inside the station at the embassy, sealed in a plastic bag. These were known as “doggy-proof” shoes. The only way husband and wife could communicate at home was by passing notes, in bed, under the sheets. Usually these were written in fountain pen with soluble ink on toilet paper that could then be flushed. “We were under constant watch. There was almost no privacy, ever, anywhere. It was exhausting, and quite stressful.” Even in the embassy, the only place to be sure a conversation was not overheard was the “safe-speech room” in the basement, “a sort of Portakabin surrounded by noise within an empty space.”
The first sign of a change of tempo had come on Monday, May 20, with a cable warning that PIMLICO was now on high alert. “We sensed something was wrong,” wrote Ascot. “We tried to resist this sense, but in contrast to the many weeks of the previous three years, we felt each night could be for real.” A fortnight later, following the departure of Leila and the girls, a message from London urged that the signal site be monitored with even greater vigilance. “The telegrams said: ‘Nothing to worry about,’ ” recalled Ascot, “so there was clearly something to worry about.”
* * *
Gordievsky was waiting at the airport when his wife and children arrived back in Moscow. So was the KGB. Leila was in good spirits. An official from Aeroflot had accompanied Leila and the girls onto the plane in London, and another had greeted them at Moscow and escorted them from the first-class cabin. They were whisked to the front of the passport queue. Being the wife of the rezident had its perks. She was relieved to see Gordievsky waiting at the arrivals barrier. Great. He’s all right, she thought.
One look at Gordievsky’s haggard face and haunted expression changed that. “He looked terrible, stressed and tense.” In the car, he explained: “I’m in big trouble. We can’t go back to England.”
Leila was astonished. “Why on earth not?”
Gordievsky took a deep breath, and lied.
“There is a plot against me, and tongues are wagging, but I’m innocent. Some conspiracy against me is brewing behind the scenes. Because I have been appointed rezident, a good position with lots of applicants, certain people are out to get me. I’m in a very difficult position. Don’t believe what you may hear about me. I’m not guilty of anything. I’m an honest officer, I’m a Soviet citizen, and I’m loyal.”
Leila had been brought up within the KGB, and was familiar with the malicious gossip and intrigue that gusted around the Center. Her husband had risen far and fast within the organization, so of course his devious and jealous colleagues would be out to get him. After the initial shock, Leila’s natural optimism resurfaced. “I am practical, pragmatic, down to earth. Naive, maybe sometimes. I just accepted it. I was his wife.” The plotting against him would subside, and his career would get back on track, as it had done before. He should try to relax, and wait for the crisis to blow over. Everything would turn out all right.
Leila did not notice the KGB car tailing them back from the airport. Gordievsky did not point it out.
He did not tell his wife that he had been ordered to surrender his diplomatic passport, and that he was now on leave, indefinitely. Nor did he reveal that his box of Western books had been confiscated, and he had been instructed to sign a document admitting possession of anti-Soviet literature. For the hidden microphones, and Leila’s benefit, he kept up the charade, loudly complaining of th
e injustice and the baseless plot against him: “It’s an outrage to treat a KGB colonel like this.” She did not know that his colleagues no longer met his eye, and that he sat at an empty desk all day. He did not tell her that their flat was bugged, or that they were under twenty-four-hour KGB surveillance. He told her nothing, and she believed him.
But Leila could see her husband was under intense psychological strain. He looked terrible, with hollow, bloodshot eyes. He had begun drinking Cuban rum, anesthetizing himself into sleep every night. He even took up smoking, trying to calm his raging nerves. In two weeks he had lost fourteen pounds. She made him see a doctor, a family friend, who was shocked at what she heard through the stethoscope. “What’s wrong with you?” the doctor demanded. “Your heartbeat’s irregular. You’re frightened. What are you so scared of?” She prescribed sedatives. “He was like a beast in a cage,” Leila recalled. “My role was to calm him down. ‘I am your rock,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Drink if you want to. I don’t mind.’ ”
At night, rum-sodden and panic-stricken, Gordievsky chewed over his limited options. Should he tell Leila? Should he try to make contact with MI6? Could he activate his escape plan, and attempt to flee? But if he did so, should he take Leila and the girls, too? On the other hand, he had survived the drugged interrogation, and he had not been arrested. Was the KGB genuinely backing off? If they still did not have the evidence to haul him in, then an escape attempt would be foolish and premature. He would wake exhausted, no nearer a decision, head pounding and heart fluttering.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 28
