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August 14 - August 24, 2022
Amid the stifling conformity of Stalin’s Russia, it was possible to believe differently in secret but far too dangerous for honesty, even to members of your own family. From boyhood, Oleg saw that it was possible to live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.
Amid the stifling conformity of Stalin’s Russia, it was possible to believe differently in secret but far too dangerous for honesty, even to members of your own family. From boyhood, Oleg saw that it was possible to live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.
the most famous Soviet spy in semi-retirement was British. 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, to the deep and abiding embarrassment of the British government.
the most famous Soviet spy in semi-retirement was British. 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, to the deep and abiding embarrassment of the British government.
There was a very good reason, he reflected, why ordinary Soviet citizens were not permitted to travel abroad: who but a fully indoctrinated KGB officer would be able to taste such freedoms and resist the urge to stay?
There was a very good reason, he reflected, why ordinary Soviet citizens were not permitted to travel abroad: who but a fully indoctrinated KGB officer would be able to taste such freedoms and resist the urge to stay?
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.
To assist in what Bromhead called his ‘teasing operations’, Bruun allocated him two of his best officers, Jens Eriksen and Winter Clausen. ‘Jens was small with a long fair moustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.’
The KGB had long excelled in the dark art of manufacturing ‘fake news’.
Two years in Moscow had exacerbated his alienation from the communist regime, and returning to Denmark had deepened his dismay at Soviet philistinism, corruption and hypocrisy. He began to read more widely, collecting books that he would never have been permitted to own in Russia: the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Maximov and George Orwell, and Western histories that exposed the full horror of Stalinism.
Why not meet him? TAKE AN OFFENSIVE POSITION! Britain is a country of high interest to us.’ 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.
In spying, as in love, a little distance, a little uncertainty, an apparent cooling on one side or the other, can stimulate desire. In the eight frustrating months that followed lunch at the Østerport Hotel, Gordievsky’s enthusiasm grew.
In that one cathartic moment, in the corner of a Copenhagen hotel, 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.
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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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.
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.
The Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers.
There was some snorting in Century House when a CIA cable accidentally revealed that the American codename for MI6 was UPTIGHT.
He read Churchill’s History of the Second World War, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Fielding’s Tom Jones.
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.
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.
The revelation that Richard Nixon had wanted to use the CIA to try to obstruct a federal investigation into the Watergate burglary in 1972 triggered a series of investigations into the agency’s activities over the preceding twenty years. 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.
Gordievsky summed up his new boss as ‘a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain and a large reserve of low cunning’.
Gordievsky now found himself working inside a miniature Stalinist state, sealed off from the rest of London, an enclosed world of roiling distrust, petty jealousies and backbiting. ‘The envy, the vicious thinking, the underhand attacks, the intrigues, the denunciations, all these were on a scale that made the Centre in Moscow seem like a girls’ school.’
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.
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. No one in the KGB outstations dared to draw attention to this elemental misunderstanding. 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.
Almost any human behaviour, if scrutinized sufficiently intensely, can begin to seem suspicious: a light left on in the Foreign Office, a parking shortage at the Ministry of Defence, a potentially bellicose bishop.
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. Both Britain and America had suffered high-level penetration by communist agents in the past, and both nursed the lingering suspicion that the other might be unreliable.
His spying for the West was, he believed, the act of a cultural dissident, not a turncoat: ‘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.
Shawford handled political reporting from the case. He began to pull together information that Gordievsky could pass off as his own and feed back to the KGB: enough to convince the Centre that he was an expert in gathering political intelligence, but not so good that it might actually prove useful to the Soviets. In spy jargon such information is known as ‘chickenfeed’, genuine but not seriously damaging information
Here was another example of the combined trickery and tenderness inherent in espionage: a friendship between a British Tory researcher and a Russian Soviet diplomat, both of whom were secret spies. They were lying to each other, with genuine affection.
He was graded as ‘more or less identified’. He immediately grasped the implications: whoever had compiled the list did not know, for certain, that he was a KGB agent; and whoever had passed it on could not know that he was secretly spying for Britain, because if he did he would have betrayed him to Guk to protect himself from exposure.
For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6’s self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.
Ames chose to sell out America to the KGB in order to buy the American Dream he felt he deserved. Gordievsky had never been interested in the money. Ames was interested in nothing else.
Colonel Viktor Budanov of K Directorate, the counter-intelligence branch, was by general agreement the ‘most dangerous man in the KGB’. In the 1980s he had served in East Germany, where one of the KGB officers under his command was the young Vladimir Putin.
Then, with shocking suddenness, Gordievsky felt his reality lurch into a hallucinatory dream world, in which he seemed to be observing himself, only half-conscious, from far away, through a refracting, warping lens.
Gordievsky’s brandy had been spiked with some sort of truth serum, probably a psychotropic drug manufactured by the KGB known as SP-117, a form of sodium thiopental containing a fast-acting barbiturate-anaesthetic, without smell, taste or colour, a chemical cocktail designed to erode the inhibitions and loosen the tongue.
A remarkable piece of espionage theatre now ensued. ‘We know very well you’ve been deceiving us for years,’ declared Grushko, like a judge passing sentence. ‘Yet we’ve decided that you may stay in the KGB. Your job in London is terminated. You’ll have to move to a non-operational department. You should take any holiday you are owed. The anti-Soviet literature in your home must be delivered to the library of the First Chief Directorate. Remember, in the next few days, and for ever, no telephone calls to London.’ Grushko paused, and then added in a tone that was almost conspiratorial: ‘If only
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On 13 June 1985, Aldrich Ames committed one of the most spectacular acts of treason in the history of espionage: he named no fewer than twenty-five individuals spying for Western intelligence against the Soviet Union.
William Shakespeare has an answer for most of life’s questions. In Hamlet, the greatest writer in the English language pondered the nature of fate and courage, when life’s challenges seem overwhelming. ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’
‘The Finns had an agreement with the Russians to turn over to the KGB any fugitives from the Soviet Union that fell into their hands.’ The term ‘Finlandization’ had come to mean any small state cowed into submission by a much more powerful neighbour, retaining theoretical sovereignty but effectively in thrall.
Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, who had crossed the road from Downing Street. He loudly plonked his leather briefcase on the table: ‘I am quite certain that the Prime Minister will feel we have an overwhelming moral duty to save this man.’
His rebellion had always been, in part, a cultural one, a defiance of the philistinism of Soviet Russia. Leaving an obscure hint from Western literature was his parting shot, a demonstration of his own cultural superiority.
At that second, a tramp erupted from the undergrowth, unshaven and unkempt, covered in mud, ferns and dust, dried blood in his hair, a cheap brown bag clutched in one hand, and a wild expression on his face. ‘He looked absolutely nothing like the photograph,’ thought Rachel. ‘Any fantasies we had of meeting a suave spy disappeared on the spot.’ Ascot thought the figure looked like ‘some forest troll or woodman in Grimms’ Fairy Tales’.
Suddenly classical music was blasting out of the tape deck at top volume, no longer the soupy pop of Dr. Hook, but the swelling sounds of an orchestral piece he knew well. Arthur and Rachel Gee still could not tell their passenger, in words, that he was free; but they could do so in sound, with the haunting opening chords of a symphonic poem written by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in celebration of his native land. They were playing Finlandia.
‘All right,’ said Gordievsky. ‘Then keep it up. You keep up the pressure. Gorbachev and his people know they can’t outspend you. Your technology is better than theirs. Keep it up.’ Moscow would beggar itself trying to match Star Wars, he added, pouring money into a technological arms race it could never win. ‘In the long term SDI will ruin the Soviet leadership.’
The Leningrad KGB, responsible for surveillance of the British diplomats, was held directly accountable, and many senior officers were either sacked or demoted. 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.
