The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  The Centre’s main fear after Symonds’s return was that he might reveal his career as a KGB agent. Should he do so, it was decided to dismiss his revelations as fantasy. The Bulgarian medical authorities were asked to prepare a certificate stating that he was mentally deranged.96 The certificate, however, was not needed. At his trial, in which he conducted his own defense, former Detective Sergeant Symonds made no reference to his Soviet connection, which remained completely unknown to the prosecution. Instead, he claimed that he had spent eight years on the run from crooked senior detectives who had threatened to kill him if he gave evidence in court. Symonds was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on three charges of corruptly obtaining a total of 150 pounds from a London criminal. The prosecution offered no evidence on five further counts of corruption. Symonds was indignant at the verdict. “I decided to return, hoping to have a fair trial,” he told the court. “I have not had a fair trial and that is all I have to say.”97

  AT ALMOST THE moment that Symonds returned to England in 1980 to face trial, Lukasevics left for Moscow at the end of his eight-year term as London resident. The Centre, unimpressed by his performance, concluded that he had made inadequate progress in rebuilding the residency’s agent network after the 1971 expulsions and banished him to his native Latvia.98 Lukasevics’s successor, the heavy-drinking Arkadi Vasilyevich Guk (codenamed YERMAKOV), is remembered by Oleg Gordievsky, who served under him, as “a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning.” He owed his overpromotion to London resident largely to the British policy of refusing visas to known, and more able, Soviet intelligence officers. Guk’s naturally suspicious mind gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories: among them the conviction that many of the advertisement hoardings on the London Underground concealed secret look-out posts from which MI5 kept watch for KGB officers and other suspicious travelers.99

  During Guk’s first year as resident, a series of operations officers were sent home in disgrace. In 1980 Yuri Sergeyevich Myakov (codenamed MOROZOV), who had been posted to London three years earlier, was recalled for an allegedly serious breach of security: showing KGB material to the GRU residency without first gaining Guk’s approval.100 In 1981 Guk also insisted on the recall of Aleksandr Vladimirovich Lopukhin, an operations officer working in London under cover as correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda since 1979, whom he denounced for unsatisfactory performance, keeping himself apart from Soviet colleagues and preferring a Western lifestyle.101 Also in 1981 the head of Line N (Illegals Support), Anatoli Alekseyevich Zamuruyev (codenamed ZIMIN), who had occupied a cover position in the secretariat of the Cocoa Organization since 1977, was declared to be mentally ill and sent back to Moscow.102

  When Oleg Gordievsky arrived in London as a Line PR officer in the summer of 1982, he found the residency a “hotbed of intrigue.” For the previous eight years he had been SIS’s most important penetration agent inside the KGB. His presence in London eventually compromised almost all residency operations. In 1983 Gordievsky was promoted to head of Line PR and deputy resident. On being appointed resident-designate in January 1985, he was able to fill in most of the remaining gaps in his knowledge of the KGB’s British operations.

  Among the intelligence passed by Gordievsky to MI5 was information on the attempt by one of its own officers, Michael Bettaney, a disaffected alcoholic in the counter-espionage directorate, to volunteer as a Soviet agent. On Easter Sunday 1983 Bettaney put through Guk’s letter-box in Holland Park an envelope containing the case put by MI5 for expelling three Soviet intelligence officers in the previous month, together with details of how all three had been detected. Bettaney offered to provide further information and gave instructions on how to contact him. Guk thus found himself presented with the first opportunity for a quarter of a century to recruit an MI5 or SIS officer. His addiction to conspiracy theory, however, persuaded him to look the gift horse in the mouth. The whole affair, he suspected, was a British provocation. The head of Line KR, Leonid Yefremovich Nikitenko, who was reluctant to disagree with the irascible Guk, concurred. Gordievsky said little but informed SIS.

  In June and July, Bettaney stuffed two further packets of classified information from Security Service files through Guk’s door, unwittingly providing what Guk believed was clinching evidence of an MI5 provocation. Understandably despairing of Guk, Bettaney decided to try his luck with the KGB in Vienna instead. He was arrested on September 16, a few days before he planned to fly out. Guk’s reputation never recovered. Shortly after Bettaney was sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment the following spring, Guk himself was declared persona non grata by the British authorities.103

  Guk’s four, somewhat incompetent years as London resident included the most dangerous phase of operation RYAN. The whole of Line PR in London were skeptical about the Centre’s fear that NATO was making plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. None, however, were willing to risk their careers by challenging the alarmist assumptions on which RYAN was based. As a result, the residency’s chief priority from 1981 until at least the early months of 1984 was the preparation of fortnightly reports on its search for non-existent evidence of NATO preparations for nuclear aggression. The Centre’s alarmism reached its peak in November 1983 during the NATO exercise ABLE ARCHER, which it feared might be used to begin the countdown to a first strike. In his annual review of the work of the London residency at the end of 1983, Guk was forced to admit “shortcomings” in obtaining intelligence on “specific American and NATO plans for the preparation of surprise nuclear missile attack against the USSR.” During the early months of 1984, helped by reassuring signals from London and Washington, the mood in Moscow gradually lightened. In March Nikolai Vladimirovich Shishlin, a senior foreign affairs specialist in the Central Committee (and later an adviser to Gorbachev), addressed the staff of the London embassy and KGB residency on current international problems. He made no mention of the threat of surprise nuclear attack. The bureaucratic momentum of operation RYAN, however, took some time to wind down. When the London residency grew lax in the early summer of 1984 about sending its pointless fortnightly reports, it received a reprimand from the Centre telling it to adhere “strictly” to the original RYAN directive.104

  Like his predecessor, Lukasevics, Guk tried to compensate for his residency’s failings by exaggerating the success of its active measures. In particular, he sought to take some of the credit for the resurgence of the British peace movement caused by the intensification of the Cold War in the early 1980s. Twenty years earlier, the KGB had been suspicious of the British peace movement, fearing that it might detract from the authority of the World Peace Council.105 During Guk’s years as resident, however, most sections of the peace movement spent more time campaigning against American than against Soviet nuclear weapons. In July 1982 Guk briefed the newly arrived embassy counselor, Lev Parshin, about a mass demonstration in London against the deployment of US cruise missiles. Although a few KGB agents and contacts joined the march, the demonstration had been wholly organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) without any assistance from the residency. Guk, however, assured Parshin, “It was us, the KGB residency, who brought a quarter of a million people out on to the streets!”106

  The main authentic successes of the London residency during Guk’s four years in London were, as during the previous two decades, in scientific and technological intelligence gathering. Between 1980 and 1983 Gennadi Fyodorovich Kotov (codenamed DEYEV), a Line X officer working under cover in the Soviet trade delegation, ran twelve agents and obtained 600 items of ST information and samples.107 Another Line X officer, Anatoli Alekseyevich Chernyayev (codenamed GRIN), who operated under diplomatic cover from 1979 to 1983, obtained 800 items of classified information. He was expelled in 1983 during a round of tit-for-tat expulsions. A Centre report concluded that, despite his expulsion, Chernyayev might not have been definitely identified by MI5 as a KGB officer.108 Its author, however, was unaware
that Gordievsky had identified the entire KGB residency.

  Following Guk’s expulsion in the spring of 1984, Nikitenko, the head of Line KR, was made acting resident. In January 1985 the Centre decided that he was to return to Moscow in the spring and that the post of resident should go to Gordievsky. And so, when Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary in March 1985, the London residency was at its operational nadir, with an SIS agent about to assume command of it.

  Only a month later, however, the Washington main residency achieved one of its greatest post-war triumphs. On April 16 Aldrich Ames, a senior officer in the CIA’s Soviet division, walked into the lobby of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street and handed a guard a letter addressed to the resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov. Ames claims that his original aim was a one-time scam to extract 50,000 dollars from the KGB by revealing the names of three apparent CIA spies in the Soviet Union whom he knew were really double agents controlled by the Centre. Only later, he insists, did he identify Gordievsky and over twenty other genuine Western agents, a majority of whom were shot. According to Viktor Cherkashin, head of Line KR (counter-intelligence) in Washington, however, Ames’s letter of April 16, 1985 included, in addition to the names of the double agents, the identities of two real American agents—one of them a colleague of his in the Washington residency. Both were executed. Though Ames insists that he did not betray Gordievsky until June 13, it is quite possible that he did so earlier.109

  By mid-May 1985 the Centre had reached the alarming conclusion that its resident-designate in London was a British agent—although it remains unclear whether it based that conclusion on intelligence from Ames. On May 17 Gordievsky received a summons to return to the Centre for consultations before formally taking up the post of resident. In Moscow he was drugged and interrogated, but no admission of guilt extracted from him. On May 30 Gordievsky was given a period of leave during which the Centre placed him under constant surveillance, doubtless in the hope that he would be caught making contact with SIS or provide other compromising evidence. He was well aware that, whether or not further evidence was obtained against him, it had already been decided to execute him as a British agent. On July 20, however, Gordievsky was successfully exfiltrated across the Finnish border in the boot of an SIS car—the only escape in Soviet history by a Western agent under KGB surveillance. In October thirty-one Soviet intelligence personnel identified by Gordievsky were expelled from London. Owing to the lack of any more senior candidate, the inexperienced Aleksandr Smagin, formerly KGB security officer at the Soviet embassy, was appointed as the new London resident.110

  The greatest known success of KGB operations in Britain during the Gorbachev era was the reactivation of Michael Smith, probably the most important British Line X agent since the retirement of Norwood. When Mitrokhin last saw Smith’s file in 1984, he had been trying for six years without success to recover the security clearance which had made him such a valuable agent in the Thorn—EMI Weapons Division in 1976-8. By now, the Centre was close to writing him off. The last contact with Smith noted on his file was in March 1983. In 1984 it was decided to put him “on ice” for the next three years.111 In December 1985, however, Smith was taken on as a quality assurance engineer by the GEC Hirst Research Centre at Wembley, in north-west London, where seven months later he was given limited security clearance for defense contracts on a need-to-know basis.112

  In 1990 Line X at the London residency renewed contact with Smith, arranging meetings either in the graveyard of the church of St. Mary at Harrow on the Hill or in the nearby Roxeth recreation park at South Harrow. Security procedures were devised at each site to warn Smith if it was under surveillance. At St. Mary’s church he was told to look for a white chalk line on the vicarage wall near a fire hydrant. If the line was uncrossed, it was safe for him to enter the graveyard. He was also told to look at the church noticeboard. A small green dot, usually on a drawing pin, indicated that the meeting with his case officer was still on; a red dot was a warning to leave immediately. Though Smith had originally been an ideological agent, his motives had become increasingly mercenary. At meetings between 1990 and 1992 he was given a total of over 20,000 pounds for material from GEC defense projects, some of which he spent on an expensive flamenco guitar, a musical keyboard and computer equipment. Smith became increasingly confident and careless. When he was arrested in August 1992, the police found documents on the Rapier ground-to-air missile system and Surface Acoustic Wave military radar technology in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag in the boot of his Datsun.113

  IN THE COURSE of the Cold War, there had been a remarkable transformation in the balance of intelligence power between Britain and the Soviet Union. When the Cold War began, at a time when Britain possessed no major intelligence assets in Moscow, the KGB was still running the Magnificent Five (Blunt, admittedly, on a part-time basis) and had other major agents inside the British nuclear project. So far as is known at present, there were no comparable British agents during the closing years of the Cold War, though it is impossible to exclude the possibility (not, however, a probability) that there may have been a British Ames who has so far gone undetected. SIS, by contrast, attracted a series of KGB officers either as penetration agents or as defectors—among them Oleg Gordievsky, Vladimir Kuzichkin, Viktor

  Makarov, Mikhail Butkov and Vasili Mitrokhin.114 Other defectors exfiltrated by SIS included the leading Russian scientist Vladimir Pasechnik, who provided extraordinary intelligence on the vast Soviet biological warfare program.115 There may well have been other agents and defectors whose names have yet to be revealed. On present evidence, during the final phase of the Cold War SIS had clearly the better of its intelligence duel with the KGB.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

  The Soviet intelligence offensive against West Germany during the Cold War had three distinguishing characteristics. First, the division of Germany made the Federal Republic (FRG) easier to penetrate than any other major Western state. So many refugees fled to the West from the misnamed German Democratic Republic (GDR)—about three million before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961—that it was not difficult to hide hundreds, even thousands, of East German and Soviet agents among them. Among the bogus refugees were a series of illegals. Some were KGB officers of Soviet nationality who had spent several years establishing false German identities in the secure environment of the GDR, many of whom moved on to operate against north American and other targets.1 Others were East German illegal agents recruited and trained by the KGB, most of whom were deployed against targets in the Federal Republic.2

  Secondly, the FRG was the only Western state on which Moscow received even more high-grade intelligence from an allied agency—the Stasi’s foreign section, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklúrung (HVA)3—than it did from the KGB. From 1952 to 1986 the HVA was headed by Markus Johannes “Mischa” Wolf, probably the ablest of the Soviet Bloc intelligence chiefs. Wolf was the son of a well-known German Communist doctor and writer who had been forced to flee to Moscow after Hitler’s rise to power. He owed his appointment as head of East German foreign intelligence shortly before his thirtieth birthday to his devoted Stalinism and hence the confidence he inspired in the KGB (then the MGB), as well as to his own ability. In 1947 he told his friend Wolfgang Leonhard that East German Communists would have to give up the idea of the “separate German way to socialism” mentioned in their Party program. When Leonhard, who worked in the Party central secretariat, told him he was wrong, Wolf replied, “There are higher authorities than your central secretariat!” Shortly afterward, the “higher authorities” in Moscow did indeed put an end to talk about the “separate German way.”4 Wolf has never suffered from false modesty. “As even my bitter foes would acknowledge,” he boasts in retirement, “[the HVA] was probably the most efficient and effective such service on the European continent.”5

  The third distinguishing characteristic of Soviet intelligence operations in West Germ
any was that, in addition to receiving HVA reports, the KGB’s own penetration of the FRG was powerfully assisted by its East German allies. As well as establishing legal residencies in Bonn, Cologne and Hamburg,6 the KGB was also able to run West German operations from its base at Karlshorst in the Berlin suburbs. This was the largest Soviet intelligence station outside the USSR, using East German illegals and other agents supplied by the Stasi and HVA. Though the KGB was, in principle, responsible for funding its Karlshorst station, in the mid-1970s the GDR was contributing 1.3 million marks a year to its running costs.7

  The first major recruitments by the Karlshorst KGB in the FRG which are recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin occurred in 1950. SERGEYEV (also codenamed NIKA), a young West German Communist recruited in that year, was instructed to distance himself from the Communist Party in order to allow him to provide intelligence on the Trotskyists in the FRG, with whom—despite their political insignificance—the Centre remained obsessed for ideological reasons. His file records that early in his career as an agent he provided the intelligence which made possible the abduction of Weiland, a leading Trotskyist, from West Berlin by a special actions snatch squad.8 SERGEYEV became one of the KGB’s longest serving West German agents and by 1963 was receiving a salary of 400 deutschmarks a month. A Centre report on his work claims that, “With his help, in 1951-74, Trotskyist organizations in the FRG and western Europe were cultivated and compromised.” Simultaneously, SERGEYEV served for some years as a respected north German Bürgermeister. Fearing that he was under surveillance, the KGB broke contact with him in 1981, giving him a final payment of 3,000 deutschmarks.9