More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 14 - October 4, 2025
“There is no such thing as a former KGB man,” the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin once said.
“Only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise and stop them fleeing to the West.”
In Denmark, births and deaths were registered by the Protestant Church and recorded by hand in large ledgers. With the help of a skilled forger from Moscow, any number of new identities could be fabricated from scratch by altering church records. He began cultivating clerics to gain access to the registers and organizing burglaries at various churches. “I was breaking new ground,” he said later. The church registers of Denmark contain a number of Danes entirely invented by Oleg Gordievsky.
The young man was an agent of the Danish intelligence service. The conversation had been the opening gambit in an attempted homosexual entrapment. Prompted by Oleg’s apparent taste for gay pornography, the Danes had set a honeytrap, one of the oldest, grubbiest, and most effective techniques in espionage. PET was never quite sure why it failed. Had the highly trained KGB officer spotted the attempted seduction? Or perhaps the honey in the trap was simply not to his taste. The true explanation was simpler. Gordievsky was not gay. He had not realized he was being chatted up.
“Jens was small with a long fair mustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.”
Danes are almost too nice to be spies, too honest to be subversive, and too polite to say so. Every attempt to recruit a Dane bumped into an impenetrable wall of courtesy. Even the most ardent Danish Communists balked at treachery.
For many years, the KGB used the acronym MICE to identify the four mainsprings of spying: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego.
During the war, the Hanslope boffins produced an astonishing array of technical gadgets for spies, including secure radios, secret ink, and even garlic-flavored chocolate—issued to spies parachuting into occupied France to ensure their breath smelled convincingly French on landing.
When the MI6 officer spotted Gordievsky waiting by the bread shop with the all-important Safeway bag, he or she would acknowledge the escape signal by walking past him carrying a green bag from Harrods and eating a chocolate bar, either a KitKat or a Mars bar—“a literally hand-to-mouth expedient,” as one officer remarked. The chocolate eater would also be wearing something gray—trousers, skirt, or a scarf—and would make brief eye contact but not stop walking.
Agent BOOT was the Right Honorable Michael Foot, distinguished writer and orator, veteran left-wing MP, leader of the Labour Party, and the politician who, if Labour won the next election, would become prime minister of Britain. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had been a paid KGB agent.
“We were worried about the sensitivity of this knowledge and the need to avoid it being used for party-political reasons,” said Spooner. “There was a deep ideological division in the country, but we knew we had to keep this information out of the political mainstream. We were sitting on information that was massively open to misinterpretation.”
How refreshing!
it was agreed that should a politician with a KGB history become prime minister of Britain, then the queen would have to be informed.
Awkward!
In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe.
The Kremlin, however, assuming that capitalism penetrated every aspect of Western life, believed that a “blood bank” was, in fact, a bank, where blood could be bought and sold.
In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.
According to a secret internal CIA summary of the ABLE ARCHER scare, written several years later, “Gordievsky’s information was an epiphany for President Reagan…only Gordievsky’s timely warning to Washington via MI6 kept things from going too far.”
Two suicides of Soviet citizens in London, one in the trade delegation and the other the wife of an official, thrust Guk’s suspicions into overdrive. He sent the bodies back to Moscow, with orders to establish whether they had been poisoned, which the KGB scientists obediently confirmed—even though one had hanged himself and the other had thrown herself off a balcony.
In the end, the difference between them is a matter of moral judgment: Gordievsky was on the side of the good; and Ames was on his own side.
