The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

by Ben Macintyre

Over the previous months, the stream of East Germans fleeing to the West through West Berlin had reached a torrent. By 1961, some 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20 percent of the entire population, had joined the mass exodus from Communist rule.

The East German government, prompted by Moscow, was taking radical steps to stanch the flow: the construction of the Berlin Wall was under way, a physical barrier to cut off West from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany. The “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” was, in reality, a prison perimeter, erected by East Germany to keep its own citizens penned in. More than 150 miles of concrete and wire, with bunkers, anti-vehicle trenches, and chain fencing, the Berlin Wall was the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain, and one of the nastiest structures man has ever built.

The brothers attended a performance of the Christmas Oratorio, which left Oleg “intensely moved.” Russia seemed “a spiritual desert” by comparison, where only approved composers could be heard, and “class hostile” church music, such as Bach’s, was deemed decadent and bourgeois, and banned.

(A KGB dentist had drilled several unnecessary holes in his teeth before he left Moscow, which meant Molody could simply open his mouth and point out the KGB-made cavities to confirm his identity to other Soviet spies.) A

At one signal site, Oleg left a bent nail on a windowsill in a public toilet to indicate to an illegal that he should pick up cash at a predetermined dead-drop site. The answering signal from the undercover agent, acknowledging that the message had been received, was a beer bottle cap left in the same place. On returning to the spot, Oleg found the cap from a bottle of ginger beer. Was ginger beer, in spy signaling, the same as ordinary beer? Or did this have another meaning? After an intense all-night discussion with colleagues back at the rezidentura he reached the conclusion that the spy did not see any difference between one bottle cap and another.

The decision to spy on one’s own country, in the interests of another, usually emerges from the collision of an outer world, often rationally conceived, and an inner world, of which the spy may be unaware. Philby defined himself as a pure ideological agent, a devoted secret soldier in the Communist cause; what he did not admit was that he was also motivated by narcissism, inadequacy, his father’s influence, and a compulsion to deceive those around him. Eddie Chapman, the wartime crook and double agent known as Agent ZIGZAG, considered himself a patriotic hero (which he was), but he was also greedy, opportunistic, and fickle, hence his code name. Oleg Penkovsky, the Russian spy who furnished the West with crucial intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis, hoped to prevent nuclear war, but he also wanted prostitutes and chocolates

brought to his London hotel, and demanded to meet the Queen. The outer world that propelled Oleg Gordievsky

“What are your ambitions for your time in Moscow?” Guscott asked him. “I want to find out the most secret, the most important, the essential elements in the Soviet leadership,” Gordievsky replied. “I want to find out how the system works. I will not be able to find everything, because the Central Committee keeps secrets even from the KGB. But I will find whatever I can.” Here lay the essence of Gordievsky’s rebellion: to find out as much as he could about the system he loathed, the better to destroy it.

Jack Jones was one of the most respected figures in the trade union movement, a crusading socialist once described by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as “one of the world’s greatest trade union leaders.” He was also a KGB agent.

In December 1981, Gordievsky broke the seal and opened the file for the first time. On the first page appeared a formal introductory note: “I, senior operational officer Major Petrov, Ivan Alexeyevich, herewith open a file on the agent Michael Foot, citizen of the UK, giving him the pseudonym Boot.” 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.

The Labour leader James Callaghan was defeated by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and resigned eighteen months later. Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party on November 10, 1980. “I am as strong in my socialist convictions as I have ever been,” he said. Britain was deep in recession. Thatcher was unpopular. Opinion polls put Labour more than ten percentage points ahead of the Conservatives. The next general election was due in May 1984, and there seemed a good chance that Michael Foot could win it and become prime minister.

Major Petrov clearly had a sense of humor, and had been unable to resist the pun on Foot/Boot when choosing a code name. But the rest of the dossier was deadly serious. It described, step by step, how a twenty-year relationship with Foot had evolved since the late 1940s, when the KGB decided that he was “progressive.” At their first meeting with Foot, in the offices of Tribune, KGB officers posing as diplomats slipped £10 into his pocket (worth roughly £250 today). He did not object. One sheet in the file listed the payments made to Foot over the years. This was a standard form, with the date, amount, and name of the paying officer. Gordievsky scanned the figures and estimated there had been between ten and fourteen payments during the 1960s, of between £100 and £150 each, so roughly £1,500 in total, worth more than £37,000 ($49,000) today. What happened to the money is unclear. Lyubimov later told Gordievsky that he suspected Foot might have “kept some for himself,” but the Labour MP was not a mercenary man, and it seems more likely the cash was used to prop up Tribune, which was perennially broke. Another page listed the case officers who had run Agent BOOT out of the London rezidentura

Paranoia is born of propaganda, ignorance, secrecy, and fear. The KGB’s London station in 1982 was one of the most profoundly paranoid places on earth, an organization imbued with a siege mentality largely based on fantasy. Since the KGB devoted enormous time and effort to spying on foreign diplomats in Moscow, it assumed MI5 and MI6 must be doing the same in London. In reality, although the Security Service certainly monitored and shadowed suspected KGB operatives, the surveillance was nothing near as intensive as the Russians imagined. The KGB, however, was convinced that the entire Soviet embassy was the target of a gigantic and sustained eavesdropping campaign, and the fact that this snooping was invisible confirmed that the British must be very good at it. The Nepalese and Egyptian embassies next door were assumed to be “listening posts,” and officers were banned from speaking near the adjoining walls; unseen spies with telephoto lenses were thought to be tracking everyone entering or leaving the building; the British, it was said, had built a special tunnel under Kensington Palace Gardens in order to install bugging equipment beneath the embassy; electric typewriters were banned, on the grounds that the sound of tapping might be picked up and deciphered, and even manual typewriters were discouraged in case the keystrokes gave something away; there were notices on every wall warning: DON’T SAY NAMES OR DATES OUT LOUD; the windows were all bricked up, except in Guk’s o...