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April 17 - May 20, 2024
Gordievsky’s information was an epiphany for President Reagan … only Gordievsky’s timely warning to Washington via MI6 kept things from going too far.’
The breaking of the Enigma code shortened the Second World War by at least a year. Successful espionage and strategic deception underpinned the Allied invasion of Sicily and the D-Day landings. The Soviet penetration of Western intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s gave Stalin a crucial advantage in his dealings with the West. The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it:
Chernenko struck her as astonishingly ancient, a living fossil of the communist past. ‘For heaven’s sake try and find me a young Russian,’
Gordievsky did not hesitate: ‘Of course. He is a traitor to NATO and Norway, so of course you must arrest him as soon as possible.’
Quisling’, the wartime Nazi collaborator whose name became an English noun meaning traitor.
Twelve days before Gordievsky was due to take over as rezident, Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB.
‘We’re on the brink, to stop now would be a dereliction of duty and everything I’ve done. There is a risk, but it’s a controlled risk, and one I’m prepared to take. I will go back.’
Like the CIA before him, Budanov looked for patterns.
Being posh is quite a good cover for spying, and Viscount Ascot was an exceptionally good spy. After joining MI6 in 1980, he learned Russian and was posted to Moscow in 1983 at the age of thirty-one.
He loved Leila, but he did not entirely trust her; and, in one part of his heart, he feared her.
The daughter of a KGB general, steeped in propaganda from childhood, Leila was a loyal and unquestioning Soviet citizen. She had enjoyed her exposure to Western life, but never fully immersed herself in it as he had.
a willingness to betray those nearest to you for the greater good was the ultimate mark of committed citizenship and ideological purity.
‘I would have let him escape,’ she said. ‘Oleg had made his moral choice and for that, at least, he deserves respect. Whether considered bad or good, the man made his choice in life, he did it because he considered it necessary.
He told himself he had no choice, which is what we all tell ourselves when forced to make a terrible choice.
Finlandization’ had come to mean any small state cowed into submission by a much more powerful neighbour, retaining theoretical sovereignty but effectively in thrall. Finland was officially neutral in the Cold War, but the Soviet Union retained many of the conditions of control in the country: Finland could not join NATO, or allow Western troops or weapons systems on its territory; anti-Soviet books and films were banned. The Finns deeply resented the term Finlandization, but it accurately represented the situation of a country forced to look both ways, keen to be seen as Western but unwilling
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The story is about risk – ‘man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table’ – and getting out in time.
Powell tried to interrupt the conversation, but was silenced with a cold look. Cold looks are taught at equerry school.
‘She admired him hugely even though it cut against some of her principles – she hated traitors. But he was different. In a different league. She had huge respect for those who stood up to the regime.’
Diplomats were not permitted to drive alone; without a co-driver with a valid Soviet licence
He had brought along Hotel du Lac, the Booker Prize-winning novel by Anita Brookner. ‘I thought if I took a long book it would be tempting fate, so I took a short book.’
Yurchenko would identify two spies inside the American intelligence establishment (including one former CIA officer),
Among those affected was Vladimir Putin, a product of the Leningrad KGB who saw most of his friends, colleagues and patrons purged as a direct consequence of Gordievsky’s escape.
But I thought: “You did what you wanted to do – I am still here with the children. You ran, but we are prisoners.” ’
Life went forward,’ she said. ‘The children went to school, they had some joy. Never did I dare to cry in front of my children or show what was in my soul. I always had a proud mind and a smile on my face.’
The letter, in Russian on three pages of foolscap, was not written under KGB direction. It was honest, and furious. Walker read it: ‘It was the letter of a very strong, able, very angry woman saying: “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you abandon me? What are you doing to rescue us?”
‘He did what he believed in, and I respect him for that. But he didn’t ask me. He involved me without my choice. He didn’t give me an opportunity to choose. From his point of view he was my saviour. But who put me in the shit-hole? He’d forgotten the first part. You can’t kick someone off a cliff and then put out a hand and say: “I saved you!” He was so bloody Russian.’
They parted for ever in 1993, their relationship destroyed by the battle between the KGB and MI6, between communism and the West. The marriage had been conceived amid the impossible contradictions of Cold War espionage, and died just as that war was ending.
Ames earned a grand total of $4.6 million from the Soviets, a figure only slightly more astonishing than the fact that his monogrammed shirts and gleaming new teeth had passed unremarked by his CIA colleagues for so long.
Ames spied for money; Gordievsky was driven by ideological conviction.
Gordievsky was on the side of the good; and Ames was on his own side.
Today Gordievsky seldom leaves the house, though friends and former colleagues in MI5 and MI6 frequently visit him.
Both MI6 and the CIA insisted that, since the war, all codewords were chosen from a list of deliberately meaningless terms,
Parshikov also points out that while many fellow KGB officers were sceptical of the ‘sclerotic’ Kremlin leadership, only Gordievsky chose to work for an enemy power in the way he did: ‘Though he justified his actions as a fight against Communism and the Soviet Union, did Oleg really hate his Motherland, rather than communism?’
