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April 17 - May 20, 2024
Gordievsky exhibited what he hoped was the right combination of enthusiasm, obsequiousness and fake humility; he lobbied without being obvious, quietly disparaged any rivals, and soft-soaped the Crocodile until the suds flew.
Jack Jones was one of the most respected figures in the trade union movement, a crusading socialist once described by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as ‘one of the world’s greatest trade union leaders’. He was also a KGB agent.
Agent BOOT was the Right Honourable 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 meetings took place roughly once a month, frequently over lunch at the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho. Every rendezvous was carefully planned. Three days beforehand, Moscow sent an outline of what should be discussed. The resulting report was read by the PR Line chief in London, then the rezident, before being sent on to Moscow Centre. At each stage, there was an evaluation of the developing case.
The reports were not very imaginative, but they were intelligent, well written. This was a very developed relationship, sympathetic on both sides, with confidentiality on both sides, they spoke with cordiality, and lots of specifics, saturated with real information.’
He was an ‘opinion-creator’, and therefore more an agent of influence (a term of art) than an agent (a specific term of espionage).
He leaked no state secrets (and at that time had no access to any). He doubtless believed he was serving progressive politics and the cause of peace in accepting Soviet largesse in support of Tribune.
He took cash directly from us, which meant we could regard him in good conscience as an agent.
If an agent takes money it is very good – a reinforcing element in the relationship.’
Lenin is often credited with coining the term ‘useful idiot’, poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it, or subscribing to the goals intended by the manipulator.
Michael Foot had been useful to the KGB, and completely idiotic.
He wondered if he would ever reach the country to which he had sworn secret allegiance.
a moustache that never seemed fully confident of itself,
ended up working for the CIA in Burma, passing money to Burmese publications secretly bankrolled by the US government.
Ames learned: that morality can be malleable; the laws of the US overrode those of other countries;
‘The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust,’ Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent-running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.
The resulting reports, known as the ‘Family Jewels’, identified a damning litany of illegal actions far outside the CIA’s charter, including wiretapping of journalists, burglaries, assassination plots, experimentation on humans, collusion with the Mafia and systematic domestic surveillance of civilians.
London was a lot dirtier than Copenhagen, and not much cleaner than Moscow.
the windows were all bricked up, except in Guk’s office, where miniature radio speakers pumped canned Russian music into the space between the panes of the double glazing, emitting a peculiar muffled warble that added to the surreal atmosphere.
Like many people of her age and class, Price regarded tea as a sacred patriotic ritual.
Guscott introduced her as ‘Jean’. Her face, Gordievsky reflected, ‘seemed to embody all the traditional British qualities of decency and honour’.
The two branches of British intelligence had not always seen eye to eye – perhaps unsurprisingly, since the task of catching spies and the job of running them are not necessarily compatible, sometimes overlapping and occasionally in conflict. The two intelligence organizations had distinct traditions, codes of behaviour and techniques. The rivalry was deep, and often counterproductive.
The long investigation by MI5 into the MI6 officer Kim Philby had deepened the mutual suspicion into outright hostility.
A photographic memory records a single, precise black-and-white image; Gordievsky’s memory was pointillist, a series of dots which, when joined up and filled in, created a massive canvas of vivid colour.
The discovery that the KGB had only a small handful of agents, contacts and illegals in Britain, none seriously threatening, came as both a relief and a disappointment.
‘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.’
The Director General of MI5 told Armstrong that Michael Foot had once been Agent BOOT, a paid contact of the KGB. They agreed that the information was far too politically incendiary to be passed on to the Prime Minister.
He coined the phrase ‘economical with the truth’.
In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe.
A similarly close eye should be kept on slaughterhouses: if the number of cattle killed at abattoirs increased sharply, that might indicate that the West was stockpiling hamburgers prior to Armageddon.
In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous than revealing your own ignorance is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.
A state that feared imminent conflict was increasingly likely to lash out first.
The relationship between the British and American intelligence agencies is a little like that between older and younger siblings: close but competitive, friendly but jealous, mutually supportive but prone to spats.
America might have the money and technological muscle, but the Brits understood people, or liked to believe so.
But only a tiny handful of American intelligence officers ever knew that the Brits had a highly placed Soviet mole: one of these was Aldrich Ames.
‘Just as Shostakovich, the composer, fought back with music, and Solzhenitsyn, the writer, fought back with words, so I, the KGB man, could only operate through my own intelligence world.’ He fought back with secrets.
Gordievsky was in trouble: disliked by the rezident, unpopular within the embassy, and struggling to make an impression in a new post, a new language and a new city.
He was also so busy gathering information for the British there was insufficient time to devote to his KGB day job.
In spy jargon such information is known as ‘chickenfeed’, genuine but not seriously damaging information that can be given to an enemy to establish an agent’s bona fides, bulky, filling, but lacking in any real nutritional value.
Rosemary’s MI5 handler advised her on what information she might pass over, nothing too sensitive, but items of interest from her work, snippets of insider Tory gossip, morsels of chickenfeed.
The relationship between Gordievsky and Spencer became a solid friendship, but it was also one of deception. She believed she was deceiving him; and he was deceiving her by allowing her to think that.
during the Second World War, her mother trained carrier pigeons which were dropped into occupied France and used by the Resistance to send messages back to Britain.
This was grim work, complex and extremely dangerous: running agents inside the IRA, tapping telephones, talking to unpleasant people in very unfriendly pubs, in the knowledge that a wrong move could mean a bullet in the head in a Belfast backstreet.
This was a business that involved heavy drinking, on both sides of the Cold War, and officers and agents frequently took refuge from the stress in booze, and the blurring of reality that alcohol can bring.
In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was ‘the Iron Lady’ – a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she revelled
Ronald Reagan condemned the ‘Korean airline massacre’ as ‘an act of barbarism … [and] inhuman brutality’, stoking domestic and international outrage and luxuriating in what one US official later called ‘the joy of total self-righteousness
The downing of KAL 007 was the consequence of basic human incompetence on the part of two pilots, one Korean and one Russian.
On 11 November, ABLE ARCHER wound down on schedule, the two sides slowly lowered their guns, and a terrifying Mexican standoff, unnecessary and unnoticed by the general public, came to an end.
Historians disagree on just how close the world had come to war.
In his memoirs, Reagan wrote: ‘Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans … I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.’
