The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  One powerful impression quite quickly built up in my mind: the Soviet leadership really did believe the bulk of their own propaganda. They did have a genuine fear that ‘the West’ was plotting their overthrow – and might, just might, go to any lengths to achieve it. This near obsession, it became clear, was fuelled by the rhetoric (and sometimes more than rhetoric) which accompanied . . . the more or less simultaneous arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.17

  The only other cabinet minister indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case (on 24 January 1983) was the Home Secretary.18 With one extraordinary exception which comes close to second sight, there is no known case of a Security Service officer not indoctrinated into the case who suspected that Oleg Gordievsky was a British agent. The exception was an officer involved in identifying Soviet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover, who was indoctrinated on 15 March 1983 to help monitor Gordievsky’s security and provide other forms of support. She explained to the colleague who had indoctrinated her that a few nights earlier she had dreamed that she was walking along a corridor in the Service’s Gower Street headquarters and went into a small office directly ahead of her. ‘There, sitting at the desk, was Gordievsky.’19

  Though Gordievsky was run by SIS rather than by the K3 joint section, his case was very much a combined operation with the Security Service providing various forms of support. In collaboration with SIS, the small group in the Security Service who were indoctrinated into the case set out to strengthen Gordievsky’s position within the London residency in two ways. The first was by giving him apparently impressive (though unclassified) information designed to enhance his reputation within the KGB as a political intelligence officer – work for which his role as a British agent left him too little time. K6 sometimes lacked the resources to give all the assistance requested. This caused almost the only friction between the two Services in the history of the Gordievsky case.

  The second way in which the Security Service sought to advance Gordievsky’s career was by finding reasons to justify the expulsion of more senior officers in the London residency in the hope that he would be able to take their place. The two KGB officers it was most anxious to expel were the head of Line PR, Igor Titov, and the resident, Arkadi Guk. In March 1983, after discussion with Gordievsky, Titov was declared persona non grata. To avoid arousing any suspicion of the real motive for the decision, the case against Titov was submitted to the FCO at the same time as that against two GRU officers who had already been earmarked for expulsion and were also PNG’d.20 As had been hoped, Gordievsky succeeded Titov as head of Line PR.

  Gordievsky reported to his SIS case officer that Line PR at the London residency was running half a dozen agents and more than a dozen confidential contacts, with only modest success. (At this stage he had only limited knowledge of operations by other Lines.)1 Neither of the London residency’s two most prominent Line PR agents, Jack Jones and Bob Edwards MP, was any longer of much significance.21 Gordievsky reported that Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent only from 1964 to 1968. Though contact was later re-established, Jones no longer held clandestine meetings with his case officer or passed on confidential material.22 He ceased to be general secretary of the TGWU in 1978 and left the TUC General Council in the same year. As his case officer five years later, Gordievsky found that, unsurprisingly, Jones no longer had access to inside information of much significance. On one occasion, however, Gordievsky’s report on a meeting with Jones made a considerable impression in the Centre:

  One day I took with me a brochure from the Trades Union Congress which gave a long list of union leaders, and asked [Jones] to comment on them. This he did to such effect that I was later able to write a three-page summary, which I added to my report of our meeting. ‘Our agent’s information on trade union personalities was so extensive’, I wrote, ‘that I am attaching it as an appendix.’ The combined document made it appear that he had been outstandingly helpful and volunteered many facts of the greatest value. You can see from this what the facts really were and how, by careful reporting, success can be created out of very little.23

  Though the KGB was believed to have assessed Jones’s motives as ideological during the period when it regarded him as an agent, Gordievsky found him willing to accept gifts, some of them in cash.24 The DG, Sir Tony Duff, reported to the cabinet secretary in October 1985 that Jones ‘last received money (£250) from his case officer [Gordievsky] on the instructions of the KGB Centre in May 1984’. Thereafter the Centre issued instructions that, given Jones’s lack of access to confidential information, he was to be contacted only at six-monthly intervals.25

  Unlike Jack Jones, the veteran KGB agent Bob Edwards MP was almost unknown outside Westminster and the ranks of the hard left. He remained, however, an enthusiastic participant in Soviet ‘active measures’ (influence operations). Though there is no evidence that these had any significant impact, the KGB rated him highly and awarded him the Order of the People’s Friendship, the third-highest Soviet decoration, in 1980.26 The medal remained in his file at the Centre but on one occasion was taken by his case officer, Leonid Zaitsev, to show him at a meeting in Brussels. Zaitsev, who had run Edwards while he was stationed at the London residency in the 1960s, was by then head of FCD Directorate T (science and technology) but continued as his controller – partly, Gordievsky believed, because he regarded Edwards as an old friend, partly because he liked trips to the West as an operations officer.27 Remarkably, the KGB made arrangements to stay in contact with Edwards by radio and dead letter-box (DLB) in the event of war.28 Gordievsky reported that most of Line PR’s political reporting from London to the Centre was based not on secret sources but on the press and conversations with journalists and politicians – though some contacts received substantial payments.29

  Though the arrival of Gordievsky at the London residency in 1982 and the remarkable quality of the intelligence he supplied marked one of the high points of British intelligence during the Cold War, the public image was one of Soviet rather than British intelligence successes. In 1981 Chapman Pincher, with the secret assistance of the disaffected former Security Service officer Peter Wright, revealed publicly for the first time that Sir Roger Hollis had been investigated on charges of being a Soviet agent, and claimed that the charges were accurate.30 Gordievsky was able to confirm what earlier Security Service investigation had already shown31 – that the charges were nonsense. The Centre was deeply puzzled as to why Hollis had ever been investigated and why the charges against him, which it knew to be false, had aroused a media storm in Britain. Igor Titov told Gordievsky after he had been PNG’d from London, ‘The story is ridiculous. There’s some mysterious, internal British intrigue at the bottom of all this!’32 Though ridiculous, the Hollis story was front-page news in Britain and widely believed.

  A Security Service brief to Mrs Thatcher dubbed 1982 ‘the year of the security scandal’.33 The most damaging security scandal was that of Geoffrey Prime, formerly of GCHQ, whose career as a Soviet agent came to light only after he was arrested in the summer of 1982 for sexually abusing under-age girls. He handed over to the police a 2,000-card index of girls whose telephone numbers or photographs he had obtained from local papers. His wife told the police that he had also been engaged in espionage and handed to them two plastic sachets containing one-time pads, typed instructions for reading microdots, and twenty-six envelopes containing letters addressed to East Berlin. A search of the house uncovered further espionage paraphernalia. Prime eventually admitted that after leaving GCHQ and breaking contact with the KGB in September 1977 he had been recontacted by telephone in April 1980. Regretting that he had earlier ‘let the Russians down’, he flew to a meeting with a new case officer in Vienna, taking with him a series of Minox films and handwritten notes he had made during his last sixteen months at GCHQ. A Security Service assessment later concluded that, ‘Though espionage did not give him a sense of purpose, it provided a feeling of importance.’ Prime spent several d
ays being debriefed in Vienna, mostly on board a Russian cruise ship, where he was kept apart from other passengers until the final evening when he dined on the captain’s table and was introduced as a British businessman. He was questioned about, but not criticized for, his resignation from GCHQ and asked if it would be possible to rejoin. Prime said he did not wish to do so. Though told that most of the films he had brought with him had not come out, he was given £600 before returning to England. After one further meeting with a case officer in West Berlin in October 1981, the KGB ended contact with him.34

  In November 1982 Prime was sentenced to thirty-eight years’ imprisonment. Over the next five months he was interviewed in Long Lartin Prison by K Branch officers on thirteen occasions. His interrogators were puzzled by some of what he told them, in particular by the off-hand manner and lack of understanding shown by his Soviet case officers by contrast with the much greater professionalism shown by the KGB in running most other British agents investigated by the Security Service. Prime described, for example, how during a meeting in the Turkenschanze Park in Vienna in September 1975 the more senior of his KGB case officers, ‘Mike A’, became visibly bored with the highly classified intelligence he was providing. While the more junior ‘Anatoli’ carried on talking to Prime, ‘Mike A’ walked away and began a game of chess with a total stranger.35 Such episodes seemed so contrary to KGB practice that the K Branch interrogators began to doubt Prime’s version of events. Their doubts dissolved when it was realized that Prime had been run not by case officers of the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for most espionage operations, but by the Third Directorate, which was out of its depth with an agent of Prime’s importance.36

  In the wake of Prime’s arrest, a Security Service brief for the Security Commission, which was also passed on to the Prime Minister, reviewed the forty-three cases since 1952 of British Soviet Bloc agents who had been convicted, had confessed or had defected. The brief concluded that sixteen had primarily mercenary motives, fourteen (including Prime)37 were ideological and ten had been recruited through ‘emotional blackmail’. Three Soviet agents (who, interestingly, included George Blake) were regarded as having ‘other’ motives. A majority of the most important cases, however, were ideological.38 The Service’s categorization of motives was arguably less satisfactory than the FBI MICE acronym (money, ideology, compromise, ego); ego, omitted in the Security Service analysis, has frequently been an important subsidiary motive in cases ranging from the Cambridge Five to the Americans Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. In sixteen of the forty-three cases the main initial lead to detection had come from Service sources, eleven from defectors, eight from liaison and eight from other sources.39

  By far the most serious counter-espionage case for the Security Service in the final decade of the Cold War began on Easter Sunday 1983 when Michael Bettaney, a heavy-drinking, disaffected officer in K4 (the department responsible for the investigation and analysis of Soviet London residencies), pushed through the letter-box in Holland Park of Arkadi Guk, the KGB resident, an envelope containing the case put by the Security Service for expelling three Soviet intelligence officers in the previous month, together with details of how all three had been detected. The envelope also contained the offer of further secrets as well as instructions on how to contact him. Bettaney did not reveal his identity but signed himself ‘Koba’, a name once used by Joseph Stalin.40 Fortunately for the Security Service, Arkadi Guk had a penchant for conspiracy theories about its operations: among them his claim that many advertising hoardings on the London Underground concealed secret observation posts from which MI5 monitored the movements of KGB officers and other suspicious travellers. Presented by Bettaney with the KGB’s first opportunity for a quarter of a century to recruit an MI5 or SIS officer, Guk demonstrated an ability of heroic proportions to look a gift horse in the mouth. With a greatly exaggerated belief in the extent of Security Service surveillance, he must have found it difficult to believe that an MI5 officer could put a packet through his letter-box without being observed. Guk therefore concluded that Bettaney’s offer must be a provocation designed to trap him and did not respond to it.41

  On 11 April the small circle of Security Service officers with access to Gordievsky’s intelligence learned that Guk was aware of the Service case for the expulsion of the three Soviet intelligence officers in March – though he had not told Gordievsky how the information had reached him.42 It was not immediately clear that the leak had come from within the Service since the case for the expulsion had been passed on to both the Foreign Office and the Home Office as well as (probably) to Number Ten. The first person to fall (wrongly) under suspicion was a Foreign Office official whose contacts with a Line KR (counter-intelligence and security) officer operating under diplomatic cover in the London residency had already caused some security concern.43

  The course of the investigation changed dramatically after a report from Gordievsky on 17 June revealed that the KGB residency had received a document listing KGB and GRU staff in London.44 Gordievsky had been shown the document by the residency reports officer, Slava Mishustin, who sought his help in translating it and commented that KGB officers at the Centre were never given ‘such precise information’ about the personnel of Western intelligence stations in Moscow: ‘This shows how much better they work than we do.’45 Gordievsky was able to describe the document he had seen in enough detail for it to be identified as one of about fifty copies of a recent chart of the KGB London residency produced by K4. The hunt (codenamed ELMEN) for the source of the top-secret information reaching the residency henceforth concentrated on the Security Service.46 Important additional information from Gordievsky arrived on 21 June in a report entitled ‘An official from British Counter-Intelligence offers his services to the KGB (Early April–mid June 1983)’. Gordievsky had been told by Guk and the head of the Line KR, Leonid Nikitenko, that the original information on the expulsions of Soviet intelligence officers had arrived in an envelope pushed through Guk’s letter-box in April which contained an offer of further classified material and suggested a signalling system and DLB for maintaining contact. Both Guk and Nikitenko believed the approach was a carefully planned British provocation and had decided (with the Centre’s approval) not to respond to it. Between 10 and 14 June a further packet had been pushed through Guk’s letter-box containing the document listing the personnel of the KGB and GRU residencies, as well as renewing the offer of more top-secret material and making detailed proposals for establishing contact. Guk remained convinced that the whole affair was a devious Security Service plot.

  On 24 June, in agreement with the DDG (Cecil Shipp), Director K (John Deverell) decided to concentrate the search for the traitor in K Branch.47 The ELMEN investigators (later known to each other as the ‘Nadgers’)48 were chosen from the ranks of those indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case on the grounds that, since he had not been betrayed, the culprit could not be one of them. The investigation was led personally by John Deverell, and meetings of the Nadgers took place in his rooms in order not to attract attention in the rest of the Branch.

  K’s suite, with office conference room, secretary’s room and three doors to the corridor, proved to be a suitable, indeed the only suitable, place where full discussions could regularly take place, and although towards the end of the investigation doors were opening and shutting furtively as in a French bedroom farce . . . nobody outside the team noticed anything out of the ordinary.49

  On 27 June the ELMEN investigators received a further important lead from Gordievsky. He had learned that the second letter pushed through Guk’s letter-box about a fortnight earlier asked the residency to give a series of signals on 4 (or possibly 6) July to indicate that it was now willing to make contact – among them parking Guk’s car in a London square not far from the Soviet embassy.50 Deverell and the Nadgers unanimously agreed that the officers who had been identified as the most likely suspects (one of them Bettaney) should be put under surveillance on their way t
o work on 4 July to see if any of them checked whether the KGB residency was displaying any of the signals requested in the second letter to Guk. The surveillance was expected to be difficult since Bettaney in particular was known to be very surveillance conscious. Because A4, still in ignorance of the case, could not be used, the Nadgers proposed to conduct the surveillance themselves with the assistance of ELMEN indoctrinees in SIS. Assistance by SIS, however, was vetoed by the DDG. Remarkably, and with the full support of the Nadgers, Deverell deliberately ignored Shipp’s ruling (an act of disobedience for which there are few parallels in Security Service history).51 One member of the Nadger surveillance team recalls, ‘I was five months pregnant at the time and had a very hard time keeping up.’ Her baby, who took part in the surveillance while still in the womb, was christened ‘Little Nadger’ by her colleagues.

  In the event none of the suspects deviated from their normal routes to work on 4 July. Bettaney, however, took a two-hour lunch break during which it was thought he might have gone to check whether the KGB residency was displaying the signals which indicated its willingness to make contact.52 By this time Gordievsky was on leave in Moscow and unable to provide any further leads until after his return on 10 August.53 From 4 July onwards, however, Bettaney’s bizarre behaviour combined with his pursuit of files of particular interest to the KGB increasingly persuaded the Nadgers of his guilt. K6/7 noted on 7 July that he was showing an obsessional interest in Guk, joking that the Service really needed to recruit him.54 Next day Bettaney told K4C/1 that, even if the KGB were offered a ‘golden apple’ or ‘peach’ of a source inside British intelligence, they would reject it.55 Director K noted on the same day that, as well as asking odd questions about individual Soviet intelligence officers, Bettaney had begun to talk at length about what had led Philby, Blake and Prime to work for the KGB.56