Art of Betrayal (43 page)

The unusual opportunity of six months' work experience abroad bought Gordievsky's ticket on a train that arrived in Berlin late on the evening of 11 August 1961. The talk in the city was of refugees heading west by the thousand. ‘Don't go out anywhere,' he was warned by an Embassy official the next evening. By morning, barbed wire was rising across the city, marking the ugly, painful birth of the Berlin Wall. He watched the violence which met those who tried to escape its rise. The reality that coercion rather than consent underpinned Communism was being laid bare before his eyes and yet he was still enough of his father's son to take up the offer to work with the instrument of repression, the KGB. The lure of foreign travel, the excitement of emptying dead-letter boxes and the thrill of meeting deep-cover illegal agents was too strong a pull for the adventurous young man, even if the first doubts had taken root.

Next came marriage to Yelena and a first foreign posting to Copenhagen, a taste of the West. The small liberties were what struck him – the opportunity to listen to church music, or to borrow
whatever books you wanted from a library. Gordievsky's cover was in the consular department but his real task was supporting the illegals in the country, checking dead-letter boxes and signal sites. It was also here that his friendship with Mikhail Lyubimov began. After Her Majesty's Government had declared him persona non grata, Lyubimov had found his way to Copenhagen and the position of deputy resident. He had initially missed the bright lights and glamour of London's streets and parties but slowly began to find some compensation in the bracing walks, fresh fish and unstuffiness of Danish life. The two men, both educated at the Institute of International Relations, recognised an independent, free-thinking streak in each other – although Gordievsky's would take him to a place Lyubimov would not follow. They considered themselves to be different from some of the more thuggish zealots of the KGB. In the evening, the Embassy club showed Russian films and served cheap vodka, but the two men often opted out in favour of classical music and conversation.
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Both agreed that banning the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn had been a mistake. That the two men felt comfortable enough in each other's company to talk politics was a sign of genuine trust, since a report to superiors about an indiscretion could be terminal for a career.

The two KGB officers had watched in curious trepidation in 1968 as liberal reformers in Czechoslovakia first began to open the country up. This had turned to horror as the Soviet tanks went in to crush the ‘Prague Spring' and with it hopes of socialism with a human face. For Gordievsky, the feeling of alienation from the system he served went deeper as he watched crowds gather and hurl missiles at the Embassy in Copenhagen. The seeds of dissent planted earlier in life and nurtured by the sight of the Wall going up in 1961 had grown into a deep-seated but clandestine conviction that he no longer wanted to work for a ‘criminal' regime. He needed to cleanse his conscience. But rather than resign he wanted to subvert from within and started to think about how to offer himself up to his enemies. ‘They've done it! It's unbelievable,' he told his wife over the phone as the tanks made their way through Prague. ‘I just don't know what to do.' He knew the phone would be tapped and hoped that someone would pick up on his comments. But before anyone acted, his time in Denmark was up and by January 1970 he was back in Moscow. Events in London
then intervened. In the wake of Oleg Lyalin's 1971 defection in London and the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers, Gordievsky's department, which covered Scandinavia as well as Britain, was shaken up. The Danes expelled three ‘diplomats' and suddenly in October 1972 he had an opportunity to return to Copenhagen.

For his second Danish tour, Gordievsky switched to Line PR of the KGB – reporting on politics. Lyubimov returned a year or two later as resident, allowing the two men to resume their conversations over long walks in the Danish woods. Copenhagen may have lacked London's pizzazz but at least now Lyubimov was the boss, he reflected. A black Mercedes ferried him to the set of white villas surrounded by gardens which made up the Soviet Embassy just to the north of the city centre. The KGB offices were on the first floor (to prevent tunnelling). A concealed bell had to be rung to gain entry. Lyubimov had his own office in which he hung portraits of his twin heroes, Lenin and Philby, the latter with an inscription from the British spy wishing him luck. ‘Your silver-framed portrait hangs directly above our officer counter near the portrait of the Gods. If my office were raided it would be evidence enough to have me declared persona non grata,' Lyubimov wrote to Philby, also sending the odd jar of marmalade, some whisky, once even a book of nineteenth-century erotic pictures.
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Lyubimov spent his days contemplating what pitches and dangles to play on the Americans, whose Embassy was separated from his own by only a few hundred yards and a graveyard. His thoughts would be interrupted by the occasional knock on the door and his lean, strong-jawed deputy would enter.

Gordievsky was Lyubimov's right-hand man. There was no reason to doubt his loyalty. He was always respectful and kept Lyubimov informed of what he was doing, even down to when he was setting off to play badminton. But his loyalty was a lie. Beneath the calm surface, a profound conversion had taken him down a path he had long contemplated. The human factor had also worked along the grain of ideology. Gordievsky's marriage was breaking down. His wife had embraced feminism and said she did not want children. He had become privately convinced of his decision to work for the other side but had been unsure how to make the approach. A brazen walk into an embassy might be rebuffed, he feared. Then the other side made its move.

On the evening of 2 November 1973 there was a knock on the door of his flat. A Hungarian he had known from Moscow was at the door. Over a whisky, he gave a roundabout story to explain why he happened to be in Denmark and had chosen to drop by. Gordievsky sensed something was up, especially when the man said he had defected from Hungary in 1970. There were nerves on both sides, but they agreed to have lunch the next day. At the lunch, Gordievsky was careful not to show his hand too much, remaining non-committal. Then there was nothing for three weeks. MI6 finally took the plunge at one of Gordievsky's regular badminton games. In the middle of the game, a man appeared in an overcoat. Gordievsky immediately recognised him as Rob, a forty-something self-confident British diplomat. Gordievsky was surprised by the brazenness of the gambit and broke away from his game to ask what the man wanted. Rob said it would be good to meet and they planned lunch in three days. Gordievsky understood that he had to play it carefully with his own Embassy and informed them of the approach. He was given official permission to meet. Over lunch, the two men chatted warily but amiably.

‘Of course you will write a report about our meeting,' Rob said at the end.

‘Yes I will, but I will write it in such a way that nothing serious will be said in it,' Gordievsky replied.
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It was a hint. But then there was nothing. For nearly a year British intelligence failed to reel in the fish that had taken their bait. They were ‘quite timid', Gordievsky would later say.
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The reason was that they thought he was literally too good to be true. The KGB man had to be a dangle, a plant, luring them into a trap. Gordievsky had deliberately tried to provoke an approach and that seemed suspicious to an intelligence service still saturated by a fear of moles, double agents and deception. But after a year Rob appeared again at the badminton court and suggested a meeting. Finally, in a bar at an upmarket hotel, the two men began to open up. ‘Now, Mr Gordievsky. It is dangerous to meet here,' he said. Gordievsky understood that the opening up of a clandestine path was also the offer of betrayal. ‘The Russians do not come here,' Gordievsky replied, crossing an invisible line that both spies understood. An agreement was made to meet at a more secure venue on the outskirts of Copenhagen. This was to be the point of no return.
But at the meeting the limits of British knowledge were still clear.

‘You're KGB,' Rob said.

‘Of course.'

‘Tell me, then. Who is the PR Line Deputy in your station?'

Gordievsky stared and smiled before saying, ‘I am.' But behind the smiles he was nervous.

At their next meeting, Rob introduced a tall, well-built MI6 officer and explained that he would be Gordievsky's case officer. It is common practice to use one officer to carry out the recruitment of an agent and then another to run them. While a few individuals can manage to be both ‘hunters' and ‘farmers', MI6 officers are carefully assessed to see if they are more suited to either recruiting or running and to doing so in a particular environment. In the Middle East a brazen, confident pitch might be expected by the recipient while with Soviet officials even an invitation to dinner might be considered far too forward. The emphasis with them was instead on being perceptive about the small signs that someone might be just that bit different and willing to take risks, perhaps by having a local girlfriend. It was more about being receptive so that a Soviet official understood they could talk to you if they wanted to. Many MI6 officers wondered how Rob had managed to recruit the service's most important agent as they considered him rather unimpressive, but his sensitive manner had ensured that Gordievsky found him easy to talk to. In Gordievsky's case there was an added factor. It was not the British who had spotted him first but the Danes. They had decided that Gordievsky looked interesting and had studied him for some time, but they realised they were not in a position to recruit him and run him properly. That would require Russian-speakers, resources and an established infrastructure. They worked closely and had a good relationship with the British (closer than with the Americans, who sometimes exhibited a tendency to ride roughshod over local services) and so had reached out. Running Gordievsky in Denmark would be much easier for MI6 with local help.

The tall new officer was the man who would run Gordievsky, but their opening meeting was a disaster. Gordievsky did not take to the unsmiling figure and found him vain and pushy. Gordievsky's English was poor, so the two men spoke German. The MI6 officer nearly blew the whole affair with an aggressive, hostile approach,
pounding Gordievsky verbally with question after question about KGB operations. ‘Why is he so aggressive? I came with an open soul,' Gordievsky thought. He was unsure what to do but told himself to calm down and suppress the feelings of disappointment. This man cannot be typical of the British, he thought.
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It was only decades later that Gordievsky learnt the reason for his aggression. When they finally met again, Rob, who had recruited him, would confess that he had been convinced Gordievsky was a double agent and had filed reports strongly expressing that view. ‘From the start to the finish, I thought you were an agent provocateur,' he later told Gordievsky, explaining that he simply could not believe that any KGB officer could be so willing to provide so much and be so open (although the KGB almost never used its own officers as agents provocateurs since they knew too much and might decide to turn for real).
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But once MI6 officers saw the volume and quality of Gordievsky's reporting, they soon changed their mind.

Gordievsky was discomfited by the British aggression but he had made his choice. He said he did not want to do anything to hurt his colleagues in Copenhagen and he did not want any money. He wanted to do it for belief.
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The British failed to appreciate the depth of his ideological conversion, and his case officer occasionally brought newspaper cuttings designed to show the Soviets in a bad light. Back at the Embassy, Lyubimov never suspected a thing. ‘He was very tactful. He showed his loyalty from time to time,' he says of his friend. ‘He was very attentive.'

And so it began. The rushed meetings in Danish flats. The gradual softening of the relationship with his case officer until, after two years, he was replaced with a more amenable officer. The relief, bordering on euphoria, of having finally embarked on the path he wanted to walk coupled with the perpetual fear of being discovered with a camera in hand and secrets on film. The fear ratcheted up a level when a KGB agent in Norway was arrested thanks to his assistance and word got round that there might be a leak. Eventually his tour was up and it was time to return to Moscow. One problem was a divorce from his wife and a new relationship. This was awkward in KGB circles. Fortunately, Gordievsky's boss and friend helped him out. Lyubimov warned him of trouble and promised to help by
sending favourable reports to Moscow on his work, saying that he was a good candidate for promotion and particularly for the job of deputy head of the Third Department of the First Chief Directorate.
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There would be no hushed meetings and clandestine contacts between Gordievsky and the British in Moscow. Even with the strictest Moscow Rules, it would have been suicidal. Everyone who had tried it had been captured. Two decades on, the lesson of Penkovskythat the KGB was dominant on its home turf – was still keenly felt.

Then came one of those strokes of luck which a good intelligence operation needs. In late 1981, a job came up in London. Slots were precious and hard to come by following the 1971 expulsion. The arrival of a visa application for an Oleg Gordievsky was met with intense excitement at Century House, MI6's grey tower-block headquarters south of the river where it had moved from Broadway in the mid-1960s (and which looked more like something out of the Soviet Union than most of its denizens would care to admit). Having been too cautious early on, MI6 was now nearly too eager, the visa being granted a few days more quickly than normal. In preparation for his arrival, Gordievsky was allowed to study the existing KGB files on its past operations in Britain, heroic accounts of the ‘Magnificent' Cambridge Five and the other moles and spies that had riddled the British establishment. He paid very close attention.