Art of Betrayal (45 page)

But even though there were few high-level agents, Gordievsky was able to lay to rest some of the fears that had warped the life of British intelligence since the days of Philby and his friends. He confirmed that John Cairncross, the Cambridge-educated former civil servant, had indeed been the fifth man and that there were no further high-level penetrations. This included Roger Hollis, just as word of the
investigation into him was emerging into public view. In Moscow the media reports that he was one of their spies were met with bemusement. ‘The story is ridiculous. There's some mysterious, internal British intrigue at the bottom of all this!' a KGB colleague told Gordievsky when they saw the British stories.
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Gordievsky's most important success in counter-intelligence was preventing the Soviets acquiring a new mole deep within MI5 and wreaking the same kind of damage they had managed in their golden age. In June 1983, Guk turned to Gordievsky. ‘Would you like to see something exceptional?' the KGB boss asked him. He showed Gordievsky a British document outlining the ‘order of battle' of the KGB and GRU in London. It was clear that it came from MI5 and from K branch – the team dedicated to working against Soviet spies. Guk revealed it had been pushed through the letterbox of his home in Holland Park, West London. It was the second packet to arrive, the first having come on Easter Sunday. The letter that accompanied the intelligence suggested a dead drop at the cistern of a cinema toilet on Oxford Street and was signed ‘Koba', the name Stalin had used before the revolution.
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Guk was faced with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recruit a serving intelligence officer, to restore the station to its former glory. But he was convinced it was a trap. The traitor had thought he was being clever by passing on a staff list because he believed that Guk would be able to verify that it was true. But instead the Resident concluded that, precisely because it was something he already knew rather than fresh intelligence, it was the sign of a plant. Part of the problem was that, compared with those carefree days in the 1960s that Lyubimov had revelled in, the KGB had now become smaller and more cautious in London, less willing to take risks, more worried about what the other side knew.

Gordievsky called for a meeting with the British when he heard the news. He told MI6 he realised this must be a game – a double agent or a plant by them to lure Guk into a trap. Scarlett and the team knew it was not and broke the news calmly to him. They had a problem. The revelation of an aspiring traitor inside MI5 meant that a spy-hunt was needed. But the old question once again arose – how could MI5 investigate itself? In this case there was an answer. The person offering the information had clearly not known that Gordievsky was spying for Britain or else they would never have risked
an approach to the Residency. A very small number of MI5 officers who worked on the KGB desk had been indoctrinated into the secret of Gordievsky's true loyalty. The traitor could not possibly be one of them, because if they had been they would have tipped off Guk to Gordievsky or avoided approaching the KGB in London knowing there was a British agent in place who would betray the move. So a team was formed out of this small group of officers. If ever there was an example of why the identities of agents have to be restricted to a ‘need to know' basis, this was it. If Gordievsky's identity and activities had become common currency in MI5, he would have been betrayed and on a plane back to Moscow with a firing squad waiting for him. Gordievsky did return to Moscow during the investigation for a holiday. He did so knowing that British intelligence was leaking somewhere, a display of remarkable confidence.

One of those assigned to work on the case was a female MI5 officer who had experienced an early introduction to the world of the molehunt. Eliza Manningham-Buller had seen her father as attorney general prosecute a previous generation of traitors, including George Blake. After Benenden School and then Oxford (playing the Fairy Godmother in a drama production), she had taught English until talent-spotted at a party. Her father had tried to dissuade his daughter from joining MI5. ‘He thought it was a bit murky,' she later recalled. ‘He thought the whole espionage and counter-espionage business was slightly sordid which, to a degree, he was right about.'
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Her decision to ignore his entreaties may have had something to do with her mother having had a small taste of the secret life in the Second World War when she had trained carrier pigeons which would be dropped in France and then return to her Gloucestershire cottage carrying secret messages which would be quickly picked up by a despatch rider.
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In 1974, Eliza had joined an organisation she found to be strangely inward looking. Despite her pedigree, she had been unsure quite what to expect. ‘I hardly knew what I was joining because in those days it was much more secret,' she recalled later. ‘When I arrived I was astonished – I was very naive I think – that this was an organisation that listened to people's telephone calls and opened their mail.'
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MI5 was still stuck in the past. Former members of the Colonial Service who had once kept an eye on subversives in places like Malaya and India until independence and then needed a
new job still dominated the organisation. The gloomy Leconfield House headquarters with its dirty windows suffered from the lethargy of some far-flung outpost. ‘They would quite often go off at lunch-time for a drink and not come back till four o'clock,' recalls Stephen Lander, who joined in 1975. ‘I remember one colleague used to shut his door at lunchtime, put on his bedroom slippers, put the phone in the drawer and have an hour's sleep … I nearly left in my first year. I thought they were all mad.'
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Attitudes to women were also a throwback. ‘When I joined, women were definitely lesser citizens,' recalls Manningham-Buller. ‘We weren't allowed to do the full range of intelligence work. We weren't allowed, for example, to mount an eavesdropping operation. We weren't allowed to approach and try and recruit people because who would want to work for a woman? And there was a paternalistic attitude that we mustn't do anything to put the little dears in danger.'
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With the arrival of a new generation of university graduates through the 1970s, attitudes began to change. ‘These young men were indistinguishable from us women with degrees so after a time we bundled together and we had a quiet female revolution,' recalls Stella Rimington, who was one of the first women allowed to run agents and later became director general. ‘We wrote a letter to the bosses. And the bosses scratched their heads at this … a few women started to be promoted, barriers began to break down.'
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Attitudes to MI6 had also begun to evolve. For many years, the foreign spies had enjoyed the touch of glamour, looking askance at the Security Service as superannuated policemen in grubby macs who rooted around files. Meanwhile, the MI5 officers viewed their cousins somewhat despairingly, perceiving a macho, individualistic and amateurish culture. But, slowly, joint working began to evolve, particularly on a case like Gordievsky and particularly when the evidence of a traitor arrived, sending a shockwave through both organisations.

Manningham-Buller had worked on the KGB desk analysing Gordievsky's output on Soviet activities in the UK, and so she was informed that close to her was a traitor. ‘I felt very shaken by it. Because you have to work on the assumption – and most of the time it's entirely justified – that your colleagues are trustworthy people of integrity. And when you discover that you have somebody who doesn't fall into this category, it is a shock … And it was one of the
nastiest times in my career, particularly in the early days when you didn't know who it was, because you would get in the lift and look round and wonder.'
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There was a sense of intensity and urgency for the small team. This molehunt was the mirror image of that of the 1960s. Then Peter Wright and Arthur Martin had their suspects but were looking for evidence to back up their theories. This time, the evidence of betrayal was clear but the suspect was unknown. Meetings could not be held in MI5 headquarters in case the spy was alerted. So the London flat in Inner Temple of Eliza Manningham-Buller's now widowed mother was used as a place where MI6 and MI5 officers could gather. Her mother was never told why people were meeting there but guessed it was sensitive. When her other daughter asked to come round, she was told that she could not because of church meetings. ‘One of my sisters complained that my mother had become obsessively religious with meetings apparently every other night,' Eliza recalled.
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Suspicions based on who had access to the documents Gordievsky had seen began to centre on Michael Bettaney. His behaviour was odd, he drank too much and he was a little too interested in certain files. Bettaney told one officer that even if the KGB were offered a ‘golden apple' or ‘peach' of a source, they would not take it. He speculated openly about Philby's and Blake's motives. The team followed him and had his house broken into in a desperate search for hard evidence. Signs emerged that he was planning to go to Vienna, possibly to approach a KGB officer there who had been expelled from London in 1971. The decision was taken to interrogate him before he left. It had to be done carefully to avoid in any way exposing the fact that Gordievsky had tipped off the British. Bettaney was on a training course run by MI6 when he was summoned for a meeting. He was taken to a flat in Gower Street. The evidence – such as it was – was laid out before him, including a photograph of Guk's door to suggest that Bettaney might have been photographed in the act (which he hadn't been). As in the days of Blake, the idea was to talk him into a confession at which point the police would be called in to hear it again formally (in the time of Blake and Vassall, Manningham-Buller's father was waiting literally next door for the formal process). Bettaney was not arrested, which would have led to his being offered a lawyer who no doubt would have told him to say nothing. He
was kept overnight and the next morning Eliza Manningham-Buller cooked him a breakfast which he did not eat. Bettaney began to crack, first referring to a hypothetical spy who might have done these things and then moving into the first person in discussing events. He expressed some sympathy for ‘Kim' and ‘George', as he called Philby and Blake. Exhausted, he eventually said, ‘I think I ought to make a clean breast of it,' and confessed all.
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Gordievsky, unlike Penkovsky, could offer relatively little on the Soviet military and its operations. But his reporting on the political and strategic thinking in Moscow proved highly influential and, like Penkovsky, extremely well timed. It took a while for MI6 to realise how acute Gordievsky's political observations were and how much he had to offer on the mindset of the Soviet leadership. By the 1970s, the ‘train-spotters' of old who had counted tanks and the like had been replaced by highly effective signals and satellite intelligence. But that only told you so much. What did the Soviet leaders want to do with the tanks and missiles? The answer to that lay within their heads. While intercepted communications could tell you something of this, the real answers could come only from a spy to whom you could put questions. This had been a weakness. ‘What we were less successful at is getting into the mindset of the leadership,' Scarlett explained. ‘I remember when I was a young officer in Moscow in the 1970s reading this and that, trying to understand Soviet policy in various parts of the world, and thinking and saying “If only we knew what it was they were saying to each other when they discussed these issues and these policies in the politburo. If only we knew how they were developing policy towards Afghanistan.” And it was very difficult to get into that mindset because there was so much propaganda and jargon around.' Gordievsky offered answers.

Early on in his time in London Gordievsky produced a report on Operation Ryan. It was very short and attracted only limited attention from both Gordievsky and the service. Scarlett was told by his predecessor to keep an eye on it when he took over. It was close to a year and a half before it became clear just how important it was. Ryan was a sign that the Cold War was once again going through one of its dangerous phases, not quite on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Penkovsky had operated, but not too far off either. Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief turned Soviet leader, was convinced
that the West was preparing a ‘first strike' using nuclear weapons.
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‘Reactionary imperialist groups in the USA have openly embarked on a course of confrontation,' read one top-secret KGB memo sent out to embassies; ‘the threat of outbreak of a nuclear war has reached dangerous proportions.'
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Moscow believed that President Reagan's rhetoric was designed to prepare the population for a nuclear war that the Americans hoped somehow to survive and win. As a result Andropov launched Ryan, the largest Soviet peacetime intelligence operation in history, run jointly by the KGB and the GRU. Its goal was to look for the warning signs that war was imminent. It was the same low-tech intelligence tripwire that MI6 had been building with its train-spotters in Vienna and that the JIC later developed into its Amber and Red Lists. The deployment to Germany of Pershing missiles which could reach Moscow in four to six minutes meant that Moscow was desperate for any sign of impending preparations for conflict.
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Gordievsky, like officers in embassies across the West, received a list of signs to look for. The indicators ranged from the substantive involving troop movements to the odd such as checking if there was a rise in the price of blood from donors because of the authorities buying up supplies for wartime to treat burns from nuclear fall-out. No one had noticed that in the West blood was not paid for but donated free of charge. Another idea was to count how many lights were left on at the Ministry of Defence at night. An increase in the number would show that civil servants were planning something. Many staff in residencies abroad, including Gordievsky, treated this as just another stupid order from headquarters which they had to comply with rather than argue about. So they all duly reported even the smallest hint of preparations for war in order to keep their superiors happy. One problem was that their superiors then believed every sign, an indication of a frequent problem in which those living insulated lives at the top understand less than those seeing reality on the ground.