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April 17 - May 20, 2024
The Great Purge of 1936–8 saw the wholesale liquidation of ‘enemies of the state’: suspected fifth columnists and hidden Trotskyists, terrorists and saboteurs, counter-revolutionary spies, Party and government officials, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia, Poles, Red Army soldiers and many more.
But as in every revolution, the enforcers themselves inevitably became suspect.
The ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ was brief and restricted, but a period of genuine liberalization that saw the relaxation of censorship and the release of thousands of political prisoners. These were heady times to be young, Russian and hopeful.
The KGB ran two distinct species of spy in foreign countries. The first worked under formal cover,
By contrast, an ‘illegal’ spy (nelegal, in Russian) had no official status, usually travelled under a false name with fake papers,
Gordievsky did not seek to join the KGB; this was not a club you applied to. It chose you.
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.
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.
how to spot when you were being followed, and dodge surveillance in a way that would appear accidental rather than intentional, since a target that is obviously ‘surveillance aware’ is likely to be a trained intelligence operative.
Molody had just returned to Moscow after being swapped for a British businessman arrested on spying charges in Moscow. A similarly fabled figure was Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, the illegal whose spying in the US had earned him a thirty-year sentence before he was exchanged for the downed U2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962.
Kim Philby had been recruited by the NKVD in 1934, rose up the ranks of MI6 while feeding vast reams of intelligence to the KGB, and finally defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963,
All three would end up celebrated on Soviet postage stamps.
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.
Among the targets were intellectuals, academics, journalists, students and writers, including Milan Kundera and Václav Havel.
The West missed the signal. Gordievsky reached out, and nobody noticed. In the torrent of material intercepted and processed by the Danish security service, this small but significant gesture passed undetected.
until Vasili Gordievsky, the brother who had got him into the KGB, helped to speed Oleg’s promotion by the radical expedient of dropping dead.
Vasili died a decorated KGB hero, and Oleg’s stock rose accordingly,
Richard Bromhead was one of those Englishmen who put a great deal of effort into appearing to be a lot more stupid than they really are. He was a formidable intelligence officer.
Whenever this man was followed into a particular Copenhagen department store, Clausen would commandeer the loudspeaker system and announce: ‘Would Mr Bratsov of KGB Ltd please come to the information desk.’ After the third such summons, the KGB sent Bratsov back to Moscow.
We would get him to call up the Russian and say: “Come here immediately, I’ve got something frightfully important to tell you.” The Russian would then drive to the home of the MP, who filled him full of vodka and fed him lots of nonsense.
Danes are almost too nice to be spies, too honest to be subversive, and too polite to say so.
The Soviet, British and American embassies backed onto one another, in an odd diplomatic triangle, separated by a graveyard.
This was Gordievsky’s insurance policy. Having obtained official permission to go ahead, he could now make ‘sanctioned contact’ with MI6, without the KGB suspecting his loyalty.
One of the oldest gambits in intelligence is ‘the dangle’, when one side appears to make a play for someone on the other, lures him into complicity and gains his trust, before exposing him.
Bromhead was still pretending to arrange a casual meeting between fellow intelligence officers, albeit on different sides of the Cold War – while wondering if he was being recruited himself. Gordievsky was pretending to his KGB bosses that this was a stab in the dark by British intelligence, a chance encounter leading to lunch – while wondering if MI6 might be planning to stitch him up.
Bromhead replied in a messy mixture of Danish, German and Russian, a linguistic smorgasbord that made Gordievsky laugh, though ‘there didn’t seem to be any malice’ in his amusement.
all the strands of a long-brewing rebellion had come together: his anger at his father’s unacknowledged crimes, his absorption of his mother’s quiet resistance and his grandmother’s hidden religious beliefs; his detestation of the system he had grown up in and his love of the Western freedoms he had discovered; his simmering outrage over the Soviet repressions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Wall; his sense of his own dramatic destiny, cultural superiority and optimistic faith in a better Russia.
Bromhead wrote. ‘I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that I might have constructed a bottomless “heffalump trap” into which my service was clearly determined to plunge headlong.’
Philby’s conversion occurred before he had managed to get himself recruited by MI6 in 1940 with the explicit intention of working for the KGB against the capitalist West;
Pavel Sudoplatov, one of Stalin’s spymasters, had this advice for his officers seeking to recruit spies in Western countries: ‘search for people who are hurt by fate or nature – the ugly, those suffering from an inferiority complex, craving power and influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances … In cooperation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential and powerful organization will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.’ For many years, the KGB used the acronym MICE to identify the four
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But there is also romance, the opportunity to live a second, hidden life. Some spies are fantasists.
all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.
with the passionate fury of an aficionado, he hated ersatz Soviet music and the censorship of the Western classical canon.
All spies need to feel they are loved. One of the most powerful forces in espionage and intelligence work (and one of its central myths) is the emotional bond between spy and spymaster, agent and handler. Spies want to feel wanted, part of a secret community, rewarded, trusted and cherished.
Exploiting and manipulating that hunger for affection and affirmation is one of the most important skills of an agent-runner.
‘First, I don’t want to damage any of my colleagues in the KGB station. Second, I don’t want to be secretly photographed or recorded. Third, no money. I want to work for the West out of ideological conviction, not for gain.’
At School 101 he had been taught techniques for memorizing large quantities of information. His powers of recall were prodigious.
‘My new role gave a point to my existence.’ That role, he believed, was nothing less than undermining the Soviet system, in a Manichean struggle between good and evil that would eventually bring democracy to Russia, and allow Russians to live freely, read what they wanted, and listen to Bach.
At his urging she read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle, depicting the dark brutality of Stalinism.
She was also a veteran, highly paid spy of thirty years’ standing, who had been secretly awarded the Soviet Order of Friendship ‘for strengthening international understanding’ – which, in a way, she had, by handing over several thousand classified documents to the KGB.
conundrum of spying in general: how to make use of high-grade intelligence without compromising its source. An agent deep inside the enemy camp may unmask spies in your own camp.
From the start, MI6 opted to play the long game. Gordievsky was still a young man. The information he supplied was excellent, and would only improve with time and promotion. Too much haste or hunger for information might scupper the case, and destroy Gordievsky.
Hanslope was (and is) one of the most secretive and heavily guarded outstations of British intelligence. During the war, the Hanslope boffins produced an astonishing array of technical gadgets for spies, including secure radios, secret ink and even garlic-flavoured chocolate – issued to spies parachuting into occupied France to ensure their breath smelled convincingly French on landing.
Her very naïvety was an antidote to the complexity of his life.
(‘bits of shrapnel fell out of him for the rest of his life’),
it took MI6 nearly twenty years to realize that Veronica Price’s skills went far beyond typing and filing.
where she lived with her widowed mother, her sister Jane, several cats and a large collection of bone china.
We had something so precious that we had to exercise restraint. There was enormous temptation to continue contact in the Soviet Union, but the Service lacked confidence that we would be able to do this sufficiently often and securely.
Bergling spied for two reasons: money, which he greatly liked, and the overbearing attitude of his superior officers, which he didn’t.
A British intelligence officer during the First World War, in his fiction Maugham brilliantly captures the moral fogginess of espionage. Gordievsky was particularly taken with the character of Ashenden, a British agent sent to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution: ‘Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness,’ wrote Maugham. ‘People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them.’
