* * *
On Sunday, June 30, after three hours of dry-cleaning, exhausted and rigid with tension, Gordievsky arrived at Red Square, which was packed with Russian tourists.
At the Lenin Museum, he headed to the basement lavatories, locked himself in a cubicle, and took a pen and envelope out of his pocket. Opening up the envelope, hands quivering, he wrote, in block capitals:
AM UNDER STRONG SUSPICION AND IN BAD TROUBLE, NEED EXFILTRATION SOONEST. BEWARE OF RADIOACTIVE DUST AND CAR ACCIDENTS
Gordievsky suspected he had been sprayed with spy dust. He knew the KGB had a nasty technique of ramming cars that might be involved in an espionage operation, to force the actors into the open.
As a last act of evasion, he entered GUM, the vast department store running along the side of Red Square, and moved swiftly from one department to another, up and down stairs, along one aisle and down another. Anyone observing him would have assumed he was an overexcited but hopelessly indecisive shopper—or that he was trying to shake off a tail.
It was only now that he spotted a flaw in the brush contact plan. He was supposed to be recognized by his cap, but men were not allowed to wear hats in St. Basil’s. (Religion was banned in Communist Russia, but marks of religious respect, oddly, were still observed.) That hiccup paled to irrelevance a moment later, when he entered the vast cathedral a few minutes before 3 p.m., headed for the stairs, and found the way barred by a large sign: UPPER FLOORS CLOSED FOR REDECORATION.
The staircase, on which he was supposed to pass his message, was sealed off with tape. Stumped, his shirt soaked with the sweat of adrenaline and fear, he looked around, pretending to admire the cathedral interior, wondering if the lady in gray might still be lingering. There was no one fitting that description among the crowds. People seemed to be staring back at him. On the Metro, he carefully tore the envelope to pieces inside his pocket, chewed each fragment to pulp, and spat them out, one by one. Close to despair, he arrived home three hours after he had left, wondering when, or even if, the KGB surveillance team had lost and found him again.
The brush contact had failed. The MI6 team in Moscow had not picked up the signal flown at the Central Market on June 15.
The reason was simple. MI6 already knew that the top floor of St. Basil’s was closed for renovation. “We had to work on the assumption that before flying the Central Market signal, he would have checked the St. Basil’s location and realized this was a nonstarter.”
Many years later Ascot looked back on the missed signal as a blessing: “Thank God. Red Square was a terrible place for a brush contact, stuffed with KGB. I tried to ban that meeting place. We would have been caught.”
The KGB waited and watched.
In London, MI6 tried to imagine what had happened to their spy, hope ebbing.
MI6 continued to monitor the escape signal site. Every evening at 7:30, Ascot, Gee, or the secretary, Violet, headed to the pavement outside the bread shop, sometimes by car (the signal time had been chosen to coincide with a convenient moment when they would normally be returning from work), or on foot. They were buying far more bread than they could eat. It was agreed that if one of them spotted the man with the Safeway bag, he or she would call Ascot and leave a message about tennis: that would be the signal between them that PIMLICO was under way.
And on the other side of the city Gordievsky wondered how his life had come to this: an enemy of the people, about to desert his family, drinking too much and guzzling prescription sedatives, trying to summon up the courage to activate a plan that was probably suicidal. He paid another visit to Mikhail Lyubimov, who was struck once more by the change in Gordievsky’s behavior. “He looked even worse than before, nervously pulled out of his briefcase an open bottle of export Stolichnaya, and poured himself a drink with a shaking hand.” Lyubimov, touched and saddened, invited him to come and stay at his dacha in Zvenigorod. “We can chat and relax.” Lyubimov came away thinking that his old friend might be close to suicide.
Back at the flat, questions ricocheted around Gordievsky’s exhausted, pickled mind. Why had the brush contact failed? Had MI6 abandoned him? Why was the KGB still toying with him? Who had betrayed him? Could he get away?
William Shakespeare has an answer for most of life’s questions. In Hamlet, the greatest writer in the English language pondered the nature of fate and courage, when life’s challenges seem overwhelming. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
On Monday, July 15, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky reached for his copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
He had left a pile of clothes to soak in the kitchen sink, and now deftly slipped the book under them and into the soapy water. After ten minutes the book was sodden.
The only place in the flat he could be sure of being unseen by any hidden cameras was a small box room off the corridor. Inside, by the light of a candle, Gordievsky peeled back the wet endpaper, extracted the thin cellophane sheet inside, and read the escape instructions: the train from “Paris” to “Marseilles,” the distances, and Kilometer Post 836. If he flew the signal the next day, Tuesday, and it was acknowledged, he could be picked up on Saturday. The very familiarity of the instructions was reassuring. He dropped the soaked copy of the Sonnets down the rubbish chute. That night he slept with the instructions in a tin tray on the bedside table, under a newspaper, with a box of matches alongside. If the KGB raided in the night, he would probably have time to destroy the damning evidence.
The next morning, Tuesday, July 16, he read the escape plan for the last time in the dark box room, and then watched the cellophane sheet flare up with an acrid flash. The telephone rang. It was Leila’s father, Ali Aliyev, the retired KGB general. The old man knew that his son-in-law was having problems at work, and had been asked by his daughter to look after Gordievsky while the family was away at the dacha. “Come for supper at seven tonight,” said Aliyev. “I’ll cook a nice chicken in garlic.”
Gordievsky thought fast. The invitation for 7 p.m. clashed with the escape signal timing. The KGB eavesdroppers listening in on the bugged telephone would be suspicious if he turned it down; and if he accepted, they would be expecting him at his father-in-law’s home at Davitkova, on the city outskirts, at the very moment when, with luck, he would be free of surveillance at the signal site on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. “Thank you,” he said, “I’ll look forward to it.”
Gordievsky wanted to look smart for his rendezvous with MI6, even if the KGB was waiting. He dressed in suit and tie, put on shoes that were probably radioactive, and picked up his Danish leather cap. Then he took the Safeway plastic bag, with its distinctive bright red logo, from the drawer of his desk.
The phone rang again. It was Mikhail Lyubimov, urging him to come and stay at his dacha for a few days the following week. Gordievsky, again thinking quickly, accepted the invitation. He would come on Monday, he said, catch the train arriving at Zvenigorod at 11:13, and travel in the last carriage. On the notebook by his telephone he wrote: “Zvenigorod 11:13.” Here was another false trail for the KGB. By the following Monday, he would be either in prison, or in Britain, or dead.
At 4 p.m., he left the flat, and for the next two hours and forty-five minutes carried out the most rigorous dry-cleaning operation so far: shops, buses, Metro trains, in and out of apartment blocks, pausing to buy some provisions to bulk up the Safeway bag, methodically brushing off his tail and moving just fast and erratically enough to make it all but impossible to keep up with him, but not so swift as to make that obvious. Only the most skilled trackers could have followed him through this artificial maze. At 6:45 he emerged from Kievsky Metro station. He could not detect anyone following him. He had gone “black,” or so he fervently hoped.
Tuesday, July 16, was a glorious summer evening, clear and bright. He walked slowly toward the bread shop, and killed time by buying a packet of cigarettes. Ten minutes early for the 7:30 signal, he took up the position on the edge of the sidewalk, outside the bread shop. The heavy traffic on th
e avenue included numerous official limousines, carrying home members of the Politburo and KGB officials. He lit a cigarette. The edge of the sidewalk suddenly seemed an idiotically conspicuous place to stand. There were too many people milling about, reading the notice boards and bus timetables, or pretending to. The place seemed suspiciously crowded. A black Volga, a favored vehicle of the KGB, pulled out of the traffic and mounted the sidewalk. Two men in dark suits jumped out. He flinched. The driver seemed to be staring at him. The two men entered the shops and reemerged with a strongbox: a routine cash collection. He tried to breathe again. He lit another cigarette.
It was Arthur Gee’s turn to monitor the signal site, but the traffic was slow.
Roy and Caroline Ascot were going out to dinner with a Russian acquaintance, a former diplomat. As they pulled onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt in their Saab and headed east, a surveillance car slotted in behind as usual. It was easy to spot the KGB vehicles: the brushes of the KGB carwash, for reasons unknown, could not quite reach a spot in the middle of the hood, so each car had a telltale triangle of dirt on the front. Ascot glanced across the wide avenue, and froze: a man was standing in front of the bread shop, holding a carrier bag with a distinctive red pattern “like a beacon among the drab Soviet shopping bags.” The time was 7:40. Gordievsky’s instructions were to remain at the site no longer than half an hour.
“Arthur’s missed him,” thought Ascot, swearing under his breath. “My heart went straight to my toes.” He poked Caroline in the ribs, pointed across the road, and drew on the dashboard the shape of the letter P, for PIMLICO. Caroline resisted the urge to swivel in her seat and stare: “I knew exactly what he meant.”
Ascot had ten seconds to decide if he should swing the car around and perform the recognition signal. There were KitKat bars in the glove compartment. But the KGB was already tight on his bumper, and any change of behavior would instantly arouse suspicion. The KGB would know, from bugging the telephone, that they were going out to dinner: suddenly performing a U-turn, jumping out of the car, and eating a chocolate bar while walking down the sidewalk would lead the KGB straight to PIMLICO. “I drove on, feeling as if the world had fallen in and I had done the wrong thing, for the right reasons.” The dinner party was hellish. Their host was an unreconstructed Communist apparatchik who spent the whole evening “talking about how great Stalin was.” All Ascot could think about was the spy with the Safeway bag, waiting in vain for a man with a chocolate bar.
In fact, while Ascot had been driving east on Kutuzovsky, Arthur Gee passed the bread shop in his Ford Sierra, slowed a little, and scanned the sidewalk. There seemed to be lots of people milling around, noticeably more than usual for a weekday evening. And there, on the edge of the sidewalk, he was almost certain, was a man wearing a peaked cap, holding an unusual shopping bag. Whether it was adorned with a large red S, he could not be quite sure.
Gee drove on, adrenaline racing, made a U-turn at the end of the avenue, entered the compound and parked in the garage. Trying to appear unhurried, he took the elevator to the flat, dropped his briefcase, and called loudly to Rachel: “I need to get some bread.”
She immediately knew what was happening. “We had absolutely tons of bread already.”
Gee swiftly changed into his gray trousers, picked up the Harrods bag, and grabbed a Mars bar from the kitchen drawer. The time was 7:45.
The elevator took an eternity. He walked to the underpass, fighting the urge to run. The man had gone. He wondered if he would recognize him anyway, since he had only ever seen one grainy photograph of PIMLICO standing outside a butcher’s shop in a Danish suburb. “I was so convinced I had seen someone,” Gee recalled. He queued at the bread shop, keeping one eye on the street, which seemed even more crowded than before. Gee decided to make another pass, one hand on the Harrods bag in his pocket. Then he saw him.
A man of medium height, holding a Safeway bag, standing in the shadow of a shop. He was smoking a cigarette. For a moment Gee hesitated. Veronica had never described PIMLICO as a smoker, and it was not the sort of detail she would have omitted.
Gordievsky spotted Gee at the same moment. On the point of leaving, he had drawn back from the sidewalk edge. It was not the man’s gray trousers that first caught his attention, or the way he drew a green bag from his pocket, took out a bar of chocolate, and tore off the black wrapper. It was his demeanor. To Gordievsky’s famished eyes, the man walking toward him, chewing, looked wholly, unmistakably British.
Their eyes locked for less than a second. Gordievsky heard himself “silently shouting,” at the top of his voice: “Yes! It’s me!” Gee took another, deliberate bite of the Mars bar, slowly looked away, and walked on.
Both men knew, with crystal conviction, that the signal had been flown, and it had been acknowledged.
General Aliyev was annoyed when Gordievsky finally arrived at his flat, sweaty and apologetic, nearly two hours late. His special garlic chicken was overcooked. Yet his son-in-law seemed strangely “elated,” and devoured the burned meal with gusto.
Roy and Caroline Ascot returned from their excruciating dinner party around midnight, accompanied by five surveillance cars. Beside the telephone was a note from the nanny, saying that Arthur Gee had called and left a message.
The German tennis player Boris Becker had won Wimbledon for the first time, at the age of seventeen. The message read: “Would you like to come and watch a video of the tennis later in the week?”
Grinning, Ascot showed the message to his wife. Gee had picked up the escape signal after all. “I was relieved that he’d seen it. But it was like the coming of Armageddon.”
PIMLICO had been triggered.
* * *
The KGB surveillance team had already lost Gordievsky twice. On both occasions he soon popped up again, but he knew that they would be more attentive from now on, if they were any good at their jobs. Which, oddly, they were not.
The decision to use a surveillance team from within the First Chief Directorate, rather than the experienced professionals of the Seventh Directorate, had been taken for reasons of internal office politics. Viktor Grushko did not want the story of Gordievsky’s treachery gaining wider currency. The deputy head of the FCD was determined to solve this embarrassing, and possibly damaging, problem in-house. But the team allocated to follow the suspect were used to trailing around after Chinese diplomats, a boring job requiring little imagination or expertise. They did not know who Gordievsky was, or what he had done; they had no idea they were tailing a trained spy and dangerous traitor. And so, when Gordievsky lost them, they assumed it was accidental. Admitting to failure was not a career-enhancing move in the KGB. So instead of reporting that their quarry had vanished, twice, they were merely relieved when he turned up again, and kept their mouths shut.
On Wednesday morning, July 17, Gordievsky left the flat, and headed, using every trick in the antisurveillance manual, toward Leningrad Station on Komsomolskaya Square, to buy a train ticket. At the bank, he took out three hundred rubles in cash, wondering if the KGB was monitoring his account. He trailed through a shopping center, and then headed for a nearby housing project, where a narrow footpath passed between high apartment buildings, arranged in two blocks of three. He turned the corner at the end of the path, and sprinted thirty yards into the nearest staircase, and up one flight. From the landing window, he saw an overweight man in a jacket and tie burst into view at a fast jog, and then stop and look up and down the pathway, clearly flustered. Gordievsky shrank into the shadow. The man spoke into a lapel microphone, and ran on. A moment later a beige Lada, another vehicle favored by the KGB, came rattling up the footpath at a brisk pace: the man and woman in the front seat were both speaking into a microphone. Gordievsky choked down a fresh squall of terror. He had known the KGB was tailing him. But this was the first time he had flushed them out into the open. They were probably following the classic KGB surveillance pattern: one car out front, two others nearby in support, two officers in each, linked by radio, o
ne to follow on foot whenever necessary, the other by road. He waited five minutes, then descended, walked briskly to the main road, caught a bus, then a taxi, then a Metro train, and finally reached Leningrad Station. There, under a false name, he booked a fourth-class ticket for the 5:30 p.m. overnight train to Leningrad, leaving on Friday, July 19, and paid in cash. When he got home, he spotted the beige Lada, parked a little way down the street.
* * *
Simon Brown was on leave. Gordievsky’s case officer was still coming to terms with the grim situation: one of the most effective agents ever recruited by British intelligence had been sent back to Moscow, and apparently straight into a KGB ambush. Inevitably, questions were being asked: How had Gordievsky been found out? Was there another mole inside MI6? The familiar, leaden fear of internal betrayal gnawed once more. As for Gordievsky, he was now surely languishing in a KGB cell, if he was not already dead. The relationship between an agent and case officer is a peculiar amalgam of the professional and the emotional. A good agent runner provides psychological stability, financial support, encouragement, hope, and a strange species of love; but also the promise of protection. Recruiting and running a spy carries a duty of care, the implicit commitment that the spy’s safety will always come first, and the risks will not outweigh the rewards. Every case officer feels the burden of that pact, and Brown, a sensitive man, felt it more acutely than most. He had done everything right, but the case had gone wrong, and the responsibility was ultimately his. Brown tried not to dwell on what Gordievsky must be going through, but could think of little else. Losing an agent can feel like an act of intimate betrayal.
P5, the head of the Soviet operational section, was in his Century House office at 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 17, when the phone rang. A double-encrypted telegram had been sent overnight by the Moscow office, hidden among the regular flow of Foreign Office wireless traffic. It read: PIMLICO FLOWN. HEAVY SV [surveillance]. EXFILTRATION UNDERWAY. ADVISE. P5 dashed downstairs to C’s office. Christopher Curwen had been fully briefed on the case, but seemed momentarily fazed.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 30
