The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Probably no British prime minister has ever followed the case of a British agent with as much personal attention as Mrs Thatcher devoted to Gordievsky. In October 1984 she expressed concern at the strain he must be under after ten years as a British agent, supposing that he might ‘jump at any time’, and sought assurances that he and his family would be well looked after when he decided to defect. The Prime Minister emphasized her concern for Gordievsky as an individual – not just as an ‘intelligence egg layer’.96 Gordievsky expressed his warm appreciation when the Prime Minister’s concern was reported to him by his case officer.97 The insights into Soviet policy provided by Gordievsky’s intelligence were of particular importance to Mrs Thatcher in December 1984 during the visit to Britain of Mikhail Gorbachev, heir apparent to the ailing Konstantin Chernenko, at the head of a delegation from the Supreme Soviet – a visit which proved to be a turning point in Soviet–British relations. To assist Gordievsky in writing briefs during the visit which would impress both Gorbachev and the Centre, his case officer showed him the brief prepared by the FCO for Sir Geoffrey Howe. Gordievsky later recalled:

  We knew that Gorbachev was reading what we wrote with close attention, because one morning, after we had included a flattering paragraph about his wife, Raisa, which recorded how [British] people had admired her, he made his first and only correction, crossing out five lines, to leave only two lines of modest, matter-of-fact tribute, and adding a note: ‘It is very dangerous to make other members’ wives jealous.’98

  Gorbachev’s visit began a slow thaw in the glacial Soviet–British relations of the early Thatcher era. ‘His personality’, Margaret Thatcher later recalled, ‘could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik.’99 ‘I like Mr Gorbachev,’ she told the press. ‘I think we can do business together!’ The Prime Minister must also have been reassured by the knowledge that the best-informed political briefing provided to Gorbachev during his visit came from a dedicated, long-serving British agent in the KGB.

  Gordievsky’s briefs doubtless impressed the Centre as well as Gorbachev, almost certainly influencing the decision of the FCD Third Department in January 1985 to recommend his appointment as London resident in succession to Guk.100 Plans considered by Director K to declare Nikitenko, the acting resident, persona non grata in order to clear the way for Gordievsky’s promotion were abandoned as unnecessary and possibly counter-productive.101 On 28 April, despite unsuccessful lobbying by Nikitenko to press his own claims to succeed Guk, Gordievsky formally became resident-designate.102 The reasons for the Centre’s almost simultaneous realization that Gordievsky was a British agent still remain obscure. Though Aldrich Ames, a Soviet agent in the CIA, betrayed Gordievsky to his controller in Washington, Gordievsky believes that the original KGB lead may have come from another, as yet unidentified, source outside the British intelligence community. On 16 May 1985 he was called back to Moscow, ostensibly for high-level briefings and formal confirmation as resident but in reality for an interrogation intended to secure a confession that he was a long-serving British agent. His last KGB operation on 18 May, the eve of his departure from London, was to leave £8,000 for an illegal codenamed DARIO hidden in a large brick which he deposited on a grassy verge near Coram’s Fields children’s playground in Bloomsbury.103 DARIO was photographed picking up the brick by a female K Branch officer using a camera concealed in a baby’s pram. A week later, immediately after Gordievsky’s interrogation in Moscow, the Centre – for the first time in KGB history – recalled all its (apparently underperforming) illegals from Britain, realizing that they had been compromised.104

  Despite being drugged by KGB interrogators after his return to Moscow to weaken his defences, Gordievsky did not confess and was allowed to go on leave, doubtless in the hope that he would be caught red-handed contacting British intelligence. Remarkably, Gordievsky succeeded in evading KGB surveillance and, with SIS assistance, escaped across the Finnish frontier.105 On 22 July Gordievsky arrived at Heathrow to be greeted with champagne by a reception committee which included John Deverell, whom he remembers as ‘a man of exceptional intelligence and charm, who became a staunch friend and ally’.106 He spent the next five days at a Security Service safe house in the Midlands where he was visited by ‘C’ and questioned about his two months in Russia by Deverell and his SIS case officer. On 27 July Gordievsky moved to an intelligence training centre, where he began a marathon two-month debriefing session. A later Security Service assessment concluded: ‘[Gordievsky]’s commitment to his work with SIS and the Security Service never wavered. He was patient and thorough in dealing with detailed questions at a time of extraordinary tension and anxiety. His judgement and analysis seemed unaffected.’107 Gordievsky’s escape, probably the most remarkable of the Cold War, was so extraordinary that the DG, Sir Tony Duff, felt it prudent to send the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, a memorandum to counter suggestions from a small number of Whitehall sceptics that Gordievsky might have been turned into a double agent during his time in Moscow, then deliberately sent back to Britain.108

  It was later discovered that for several weeks after Gordievsky’s escape the KGB had no idea what had happened to him and thought he might have committed suicide. Moscow was officially informed of Gordievsky’s defection on 15 August without any public announcement in the hope that negotiations could begin to enable his wife and two small daughters to join him in Britain. Following its usual practice with defectors, however, the KGB was determined not to allow Gordievsky’s family to leave Russia.109 Preparations thus began for Operation EMBASE, the public announcement of the defection and the expulsion of KGB and GRU officers in London identified by Gordievsky.110 Margaret Thatcher did not want the press statement to ‘mince words’.111 On 12 September, the day the news of Gordievsky’s defection (though not as yet of his escape from Russia) was made public, twenty-five Soviet intelligence officers were expelled.112 When the Russians retaliated with twenty-five British expulsions (not all intelligence personnel) from Moscow, Sir Robert Armstrong proposed four further expulsions from London. Mrs Thatcher did not consider this ‘an adequate response’ and raised the number to six, once again matched by Moscow.113

  The first apparent sighting of a Soviet illegal in Britain after the recall of KGB illegals to Moscow in May 1985 came on 19 April 1986 when a member of the Soviet Trade Delegation suspected (probably wrongly, it was later concluded) of being a GRU officer was followed to Hampstead Heath and seen to behave ‘in a generally furtive manner’ before entering the Old Bull and Bush public house. Half an hour later another man appeared and searched an area of ground before he too went into the Old Bull and Bush. The second man was followed to his home address in Friern Barnet, north London, and identified as a forty-year-old Dutch citizen named Erwin Van Haarlem. Initially, Van Haarlem was suspected of being an agent of the GRU ‘legal’ residency. As investigations continued, however, it was concluded that he was an unidentified illegal who had taken the identity of the real Erwin Van Haarlem, the illegitimate wartime son of a Dutch mother and a German soldier who had been killed fighting in France. In October 1985, after ten years working for the Hilton hotel group, he had become a self-employed art dealer. This, however, was simply a cover profession which generated very little income; Van Haarlem paid tax on sales he had not made simply to keep up his cover.114

  Van Haarlem’s main intelligence work as an illegal was to penetrate British supporters of the Jewish ‘refuseniks’ in the Soviet Union who were prevented from emigrating to Israel. During a visit to Russia with a refusenik-support group, he impressed his colleagues by the bravado with which he denounced the KGB and the iniquities of the Soviet system. The KGB’s known obsession with monitoring Western support for Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union strengthened the belief that he was an illegal agent (probably Czech rather than Dutch) working for the Russians.115 K Branch later concluded, however, that, though the StB passed all Van Haarlem’s intelligence reports t
o the Soviet ‘friends’, he himself had ‘no direct contact with the KGB’.116 A Special Branch raid on Van Haarlem’s flat on the morning of Saturday 2 April 1988 caught him, still in his pyjamas, sitting on a stool in the kitchen in the act of taking down a coded message from Prague through an earphone. As the police entered, he leaped to his feet in surprise, knocking over the stool and dropping the earphone, from which the morse transmission from Prague was clearly audible to the officers in the room. Clearly in a state of shock, Van Haarlem made no attempt to keep up the pretence of Dutch nationality, admitted he was Czech, asked for the Czechoslovak embassy to be informed, and produced a bar of soap from a bedroom drawer containing one-time pads for his cipher communications.117

  The Van Haarlem case led to the last major espionage trial of the Thatcher era and the first of an illegal since Gordon Lonsdale in 1961. At his trial in February and March 1989, the main Security Service witness was ‘Miss J’ (Stella Rimington), described by the judge as ‘a very senior and experienced person involved in intelligence’, who explained the role of illegals.118 Court appearances were still very rare for Security Service officers and Rimington found it a disorienting experience. To protect her identity she was permitted what was termed a ‘light disguise’ – a curlyhaired wig, make-up which aged her by about ten years, and clothes unlike any in her wardrobe. (When, a few months later, she met the trial judge at a dinner party, he failed to recognize her without the disguise.)119 Rimington told the jury it was unlikely that Van Haarlem had been posted to London simply to report on refusenik-support groups. He was a ‘sleeper’ intended for a front-line intelligence role in time of war or East–West crisis when the legal residencies could no longer operate normally. The jury took only three-quarters of an hour to find Van Haarlem guilty of committing an act preparatory to espionage. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.120 Van Haarlem had little idea how he had been tracked down. A Service officer who questioned him in prison reported that he ‘showed great ignorance about Security Service practice and displayed signs of paranoia’. Van Haarlem claimed to be well aware that his television had been ‘fiddled’ with, that he had been frequently followed by a silver Mercedes, and that Service personnel ‘were in and out of his flat quite often’. He was wrong on all counts.121 Van Haarlem’s real name, the Service discovered, was Václav Jelínek.122

  The coded radio message being received by Van Haarlem from the Czech StB as police entered his flat on 2 April 1988.

  On 17 May 1988, almost three years after Gordievsky’s exfiltration, Director K reported to the Management Board that the Security Service debrief of Gordievsky had finally been completed: ‘It had been the longest and most comprehensive debrief ever undertaken by the Service; over 1300 specific briefs from sections had been answered and 2500 reports issued within the Service.’123 Mrs Thatcher continued to attach great importance to Gordievsky’s assessments of Soviet policy. Sir Geoffrey Howe later called him ‘a secret weapon in our drive for better East–West relations’: ‘His invaluable (not least because it was so regular) commentary on thinking in the Kremlin . . . played an important part in shaping our own strategy.’124

  In the short term the expulsion of thirty-one Soviet intelligence officers in September 1985, following Gordievsky’s escape, though less dramatic than Operation FOOT fourteen years earlier, was thought to have temporarily ‘paralysed’ the KGB residency in particular and caused the other Soviet Bloc residencies in London ‘to lie low for a while’.125 K Branch realized, however, that, even with Gordievsky’s ‘invaluable help’ in identifying intelligence personnel, it would only be a matter of time before the KGB and GRU residencies resumed something approaching the level of activity before the expulsions. It reported in June 1988: ‘The KGB has now clawed back to half its pre-expulsion strength. Both residencies are now once again viable intelligence-gathering units and growing more active. While continuing to contain them as far as possible we must also now move to operations to disrupt them.’

  During the 1980s Line X (scientific and technological intelligence) in the KGB London residency had greater success than Line PR.126 The last major success of the residency in the Thatcher era, in the autumn of 1990, was to resume running the electronics engineer Michael John Smith, who had so far escaped detection by the Security Service.127 S&T was also a field in which the intelligence services of the Soviet Bloc were of particular importance to the Centre.128 In 1980, possibly an exceptional year, just over half the S&T obtained by the KGB came from the intelligence services of the Soviet Bloc, the East Germans and the Czechoslovaks chief among them.129 Only a decade later, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the KGB lost all its main European intelligence allies. By 1990 some of the Soviet Union’s closest Cold War intelligence allies had begun to co-operate with Western agencies. The illegal Václav Jelínek, alias ‘Erwin Van Haarlem’, who had previously refused to talk to the Security Service, was instructed to do so by the post-Communist Czech intelligence service.130

  During the final years of the Cold War, Chinese espionage in Britain was probably more difficult to monitor than KGB operations. The Service reported in 1988:

  At around 500 [the Chinese] are the largest official community in London. There are over 2,000 students at some 300 establishments and colleges; and delegations visiting the UK run into thousands. Both the Chinese Intelligence Services have substantial resources and both are represented here with their officers and co-optees working within the diplomatic community and outside it. We cannot therefore pretend to anything like satisfactory coverage.131

  According to Chinese defectors, there was a dramatic increase in Beijing’s scientific and technological intelligence-gathering in the later 1980s. In 1986 Beijing rated Britain as the fourth most important source of S&T. By 1988, the S&T unit at its London embassy was rated the ‘most productive in terms of reporting’ anywhere in the world.132 An Interdepartmental Working Group convened by the Cabinet Office in 1987 concluded, after considering detailed evidence from K6 and K8, that List X firms showed insufficient awareness of ‘the weight and intensity of the Chinese Intelligence effort in the United Kingdom’. One cautionary example used by C Branch in 1988 concerned a leading hi-tech company with classified defence contracts which, to strengthen its commercial links with China, gave a ‘scholarship’ to enable a young Chinese weapons engineer, whose father had an important job in Beijing, to train with it. A C Branch security adviser agreed with the List X company’s security controller a training programme which would keep ‘Mr Zhang’ (not his real name) away from sensitive areas. When the adviser visited the company in April 1988, however, he found that for the past four months ‘Mr Zhang’ had been working in a secure area with engineers who were in the habit of discussing classified projects and in the vicinity of filing cabinets containing documents marked SECRET. ‘The assumption has to be made’, the C Branch adviser concluded, ‘that [Zhang] will have been working to a detailed intelligence brief.’133

  Chinese espionage never came close, however, to equalling the threat from Soviet Bloc espionage during the Cold War. A Cabinet Office assessment concluded in 1988:

  The Chinese Government is not hostile to the British Government or NATO in the way the Soviet Government and the Warsaw Pact are. We should recognise the distinction between [Soviet] spying with the hostile intent of gaining an advantage over an enemy, and [Chinese] spying with the purely selfish intent of gaining a national advantage.134

  The Chinese military threat to British interests was rated so low that, as K8 (whose responsibilities included monitoring Chinese intelligence operations) reported to the DG: ‘The Chinese enjoy an access to the MoD and Armed Forces that is not afforded to any other Communist country. For example, the Chinese are now authorised to receive Confidential information from MoD. Also Chinese students are increasingly attending [military] courses in the UK . . .’135