The Spy and the Traitor Read online

  Gordievsky adopted his first spy name. Soviet and Western intelligence services used the same method for choosing a pseudonym—it should be close to the real name, with the same initial letter, because that way if a person addressed you by your real name, someone who only knew you by your spy name might well assume he or she had misheard. Gordievsky chose the name “Guardiyetsev.”

  Like every other student, he swore eternal loyalty to the KGB: “I commit myself to defend my country to the last drop of blood, and to keep state secrets.” He did this without qualms. He also joined the Communist Party, another requirement of admission. He might have his doubts—many did—but that did not preclude him from joining the KGB and the Party with wholehearted commitment and sincerity. And, besides, the KGB was thrilling. So, far from being an Orwellian nightmare, the yearlong training course at School 101 was the most enjoyable period of his young life, a time of excitement and anticipation. His fellow recruits were selected for their intelligence and ideological conformity, but also for the spirit of adventure common to all intelligence services. “We had chosen careers in the KGB because they held out the prospect of action.” Secrecy forges intense bonds. Even his parents had little idea where Oleg was or what he was doing. “To make it into service in the FCD was the concealed and open dream of the majority of young officers of state security, but only a few were made worthy of this honor,” wrote Leonid Shebarshin, who attended School 101 at around the same time as Oleg and would end up a KGB general. “The…work united intelligence officers in a unique camaraderie with its own traditions, discipline, conventions, and special professional language.” By the summer of 1963, Gordievsky had been fully adopted into the KGB brotherhood. When he swore to defend the Motherland to his last breath and his last secret, he meant it.

  Vasili Gordievsky was working hard for Directorate S, the illegals section of the FCD. He had also started to drink heavily—not necessarily a drawback in a service that prized the ability to consume vast amounts of vodka after work without falling over. An illegals specialist, he moved from place to place under different aliases, servicing the undercover network, passing on messages and money to other hidden agents. Vasili never told his younger brother what he was doing, but he hinted at exotic locations, including Mozambique, Vietnam, Sweden, and South Africa.

  Oleg hoped to follow his brother into this exhilarating undercover world overseas. Instead, he was told to report to Directorate S in Moscow, where he would be preparing documentation for other illegals. Trying to mask his disappointment, on August 20, 1963, Gordievsky climbed into his best suit and reported for work at KGB headquarters, the complex of buildings that stands near the Kremlin, part prison, part archive, the bustling nerve center of Soviet intelligence. At its heart stood the sinister Lubyanka, a neo-Baroque palace originally built for the All-Russia Insurance Company, whose basement housed the KGB torture cells. Among KGB officers, the KGB control center was known as “the Monastery” or, more simply, “the Center.”

  Instead of going undercover in some glamorous foreign location, Gordievsky found himself shuffling paper, “a galley slave” filling out forms. Each illegal required a fake persona, with a convincing backstory, a new identity with complete biography and forged paperwork. Each illegal had to be sustained, instructed, and financed, requiring a complex arrangement of signal sites, dead drops, and brush contacts. Britain was seen as particularly fertile ground for planting illegals, since there was no system of identity cards in the country, and no central registration bureau. West Germany, America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were all prime targets. Placed in the German section, Oleg spent his days creating people who did not exist. For two years, he lived in a world of double lives, sending counterfeit spies into the outer world and meeting those who had returned.

  The Center was stalked by living ghosts, heroes of Soviet espionage in their dotage. In the corridors of Directorate S, Gordievsky was introduced to Konon Trofimovich Molody, alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” one of the most successful illegals in history. In 1943, the KGB had appropriated the identity of a dead Canadian child named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale and given it to Molody, who had been raised in North America and spoke faultless English. Molody/Lonsdale settled in London in 1954 and, posing as a jovial salesman of jukeboxes and bubblegum machines, recruited the so-called Portland spy ring, a network of informants gathering naval secrets. (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 tip-off from a CIA mole had led to Molody’s arrest and conviction for espionage, although even at his trial the British court was uncertain of his real name. When Gordievsky met him, 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 U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962.

  But the most famous Soviet spy in semiretirement was British. Kim Philby had been recruited by the NKVD in 1933, 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. He now lived in a comfortable flat in Moscow, attended by minders, “an Englishman to his fingertips,” as one KGB officer put it, reading the cricket scores in old copies of The Times, eating Oxford marmalade, and frequently drinking himself into a stupor. Philby was revered as a legend within the KGB, and he continued to do odd jobs for Soviet intelligence, including running a training course for English-speaking officers, analyzing occasional cases, and even helping to motivate the Soviet ice hockey team.

  Like Molody and Fisher, Philby gave lectures to starstruck young spies. But the reality of life after KGB espionage was anything but happy. Molody took to drink and died in mysterious circumstances on a mushroom-picking expedition. Fisher became deeply disillusioned. Philby attempted to kill himself. All three would end up celebrated on Soviet postage stamps.

  To anyone who cared to look closely (and few Russians did), the contrast between the myth and reality of the KGB was self-evident. The Center was a spotlessly clean, brightly lit, amoral bureaucracy, a place at once ruthless, prissy, and puritanical, where international crimes were conceived with punctilious attention to detail. From its earliest days, Soviet intelligence operated without ethical restraint. In addition to collecting and analyzing intelligence, the KGB organized political warfare, media manipulation, disinformation, forgery, intimidation, kidnapping, and murder. The Thirteenth Department, or the “Directorate for Special Tasks,” specialized in sabotage and assassination. Homosexuality was illegal in the USSR, but homosexuals were recruited to entrap gay foreigners, who could then be blackmailed. The KGB was unapologetically unprincipled. Yet it was a prudish, hypocritical, and moralistic place. Officers were forbidden to drink during working hours, though many drank prodigiously at all other times. Gossip about the private lives of colleagues swirled around the KGB, as in most offices, with the difference that in the Center scandal and tittle-tattle could destroy careers and end lives. The KGB took an intrusive interest in the domestic arrangements of its employees, for no life was private in the Soviet Union. Officers were expected to get married, have children, and stay married. There was calculation as well as control in this: a married KGB officer was considered less likely to defect while abroad, since his wife and family could be held as hostages.

  Two years after joining Directorate S, Gordievsky concluded that he was not going to follow in his brother’s footsteps as a deep-cover spy posted abroad. But Vasili himself may have been the main reason Oleg was rejected for illegals work: according to KGB logic, having more than one family member abroad, and particularly having two in the same country, might be an inducement to defect.

  Gordievsky was bored and frustrated. A job that
had seemed to promise adventure and excitement had turned out to be humdrum in the extreme. The world beyond the Iron Curtain he had read about in Western newspapers seemed tantalizingly out of reach. So he decided to get married. “I wanted to go abroad as soon as possible and the KGB never sent unmarried men abroad. I was in a hurry to find a wife.” A woman with German language skills would be ideal, since they might then be posted to Germany together.

  Yelena Akopian was training to be a German teacher. She was twenty-one, half Armenian, intelligent, dark-eyed, and sharply witty. She was a master of the one-line put-down, which he found attractive and alluring, for a time. They met at the home of a mutual friend. What sparked between them had less to do with passion than a shared ambition. Like Oleg, Yelena longed to travel abroad, and imagined a life far beyond the confines of the cramped flat where she lived with her parents and five siblings. Gordievsky’s few previous relationships had been brief and unsatisfying. Yelena seemed to offer a glimpse of what a modern Soviet woman might be, less conventional than the female students he had met before, with an unpredictable sense of humor. She pronounced herself a feminist, although in 1960s Russia the term was strictly limited. He told himself that he loved her. They got engaged, Gordievsky later reflected, “without much real thought or self-examination on either side,” and then married, without fanfare, a few months later, for reasons that were less than romantic: she would improve his chances of promotion, and he was her passport out of Moscow. This was a KGB marriage of convenience, though neither admitted it to the other.

  Late in 1965 came the break Gordievsky had been waiting for. A slot opened up for a post running illegals in Denmark. His cover job would be that of a consular official dealing with visas and inheritances; in reality, he would be working for “Line N” (standing for nelegalniy, or illegals), responsible for the operational fieldwork of Directorate S.

  Gordievsky was offered the job, managing a network of undercover spies in Denmark. He accepted with alacrity and delight. As Kim Philby observed after he was recruited into the KGB in 1933: “I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.”

  Chapter 2

  UNCLE GORMSSON

  Oleg and Yelena Gordievsky landed in Copenhagen on a glittering frosty day in January 1966 and entered a fairy tale.

  As one MI6 officer later remarked: “If you had to choose a city to demonstrate the advantages of Western democracy over Russian communism, you could hardly do better than Copenhagen.”

  The capital of Denmark was beautiful, clean, modern, rich, and, to the eyes of a couple newly emerged from the drab oppression of Soviet life, almost impossibly alluring. Here were sleek cars, shiny office buildings, smart designer furniture, and smiling Nordic people with magnificent dentistry. There were teeming cafés, bright restaurants serving exotic food, shops selling a bewildering array of goods. To Gordievsky’s famished eyes, the Danes seemed not just brighter and more alive, but culturally nourished. He was astounded by the range of books available in the first library he entered, but even more surprised to be allowed to borrow as many as he wanted and to keep the plastic bag he took them away in. There seemed to be very few policemen.

  The Soviet embassy consisted of three stucco villas on Kristianiagade in the northern part of the city, more like a grand gated hotel than a Soviet enclave, with immaculate sweeping gardens, a sports center, and a social club. The Gordievskys moved into a newly built apartment with high ceilings, wooden floors, and a fitted kitchen. He was allocated a Volkswagen Beetle and a cash advance of $700 every month for entertaining contacts. Copenhagen seemed to be alive with music: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Telemann—composers he had never been allowed to hear in Soviet Russia. 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?

  Of the twenty officials in the Soviet embassy, just six were genuine diplomats, while the rest worked for the KGB or the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. The rezident, Leonid Zaitsev, a charming and conscientious officer, seemed oblivious to the fact that most of his underlings were incompetent, lazy, or crooked, and usually all three. They expended far more energy on fiddling their expenses than actually spying. The broad remit of the KGB was to cultivate Danish contacts, recruit informants, and target possible agents. This, Gordievsky swiftly realized, was “an invitation to corruption,” since most officers simply invented their interactions with Danes, falsified bills, made up their reports, and pocketed their allowances. The Center does not appear to have noticed the anomaly that few of its personnel in Copenhagen spoke good Danish, and some spoke none at all.

  Gordievsky was determined to show that he was not like the rest. Already proficient in Swedish, he set about learning Danish. His mornings were spent processing visa applications, in obedience to his cover job in the consulate; the spying began at lunchtime.

  The KGB illegals network in Scandinavia was patchy. Much of Gordievsky’s work was administrative: leaving money or messages at dead drops, monitoring signal sites, and maintaining clandestine contact with the undercover spies, most of whom he never met face-to-face or knew by name. If an illegal left an orange peel under a specific park bench, this meant “I am in danger,” whereas an apple core indicated “I am leaving the country tomorrow.” These complex arrangements sometimes descended into farce. 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.

  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. He began cultivating clerics to gain access to the registers and organizing burglaries at various churches. “I was breaking new ground,” he said later. The church registers of Denmark contain a number of Danes entirely invented by Oleg Gordievsky.

  In the meantime, he set about recruiting informants, agents, and clandestine couriers. “That’s the main purpose of our life here,” Zaitsev told him. After months of cultivation, working under the alias “Gornov” (his mother’s maiden name), he persuaded a schoolteacher and his wife to act as a “live letterbox,” passing messages to and from illegals. He befriended a Danish policeman, but after a few meetings began to wonder whether he was recruiting the man, or if it was the other way around.

  Less than a year after his arrival in Copenhagen, Gordievsky was joined by a KGB officer of a very different stamp from the others. Mikhail Petrovich Lyubimov was a booming, cheerful, highly intelligent Ukrainian whose father had served in the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. Lyubimov had graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations four years ahead of Gordievsky, and then wrote a thesis for the KGB entitled English National Character and Its Use in Operational Work. In 1957, on KGB orders, he seduced an American girl at the World Youth Festival in Moscow. Four years later, he was deployed to Britain as a Soviet press attaché, while recruiting informants within trade unions, student groups, and the British establishment. He spoke English with a fruity upper-class accent, larded with old-fashioned Britishisms (What ho! Pip pip!), making him sound like a Russian Bertie Wooster. Lyubimov had developed a fascination for all things English, or, more accurately, the aspects of English culture that he liked: whisky, cigars, cricket, gentlemen’s clubs, tailored tweed, billiards, and gossip. British intelligence nickn
amed him “Smiley Mike.” The British were the enemy, and he adored them. In 1965 he had tried and failed to recruit a British cipher clerk, and the intelligence service promptly attempted to recruit him. When he declined the offer to spy for Britain, he was declared persona non grata and sent back to Moscow—an experience that did nothing whatever to dent his rampant Anglophilia.

  At the end of 1966, Lyubimov was posted to Copenhagen as chief of political intelligence (the “PR Line,” in KGB nomenclature).

  Gordievsky took to Lyubimov immediately. “It is not the winning that counts but playing the game,” Lyubimov boomed, as he regaled the younger man with tales of his life in Britain, recruiting spies while sipping Glenlivet in paneled clubrooms. Lyubimov adopted Gordievsky as his protégé and said of the younger man: “He impressed me with his splendid knowledge of history. He loved Bach and Haydn, which inspired respect, particularly compared to the rest of the Soviet colony in Denmark, who spent all their time on fishing trips, shopping, and amassing as many material possessions as they could.”

  Just as Lyubimov had fallen in love with Britain, so Gordievsky found himself smitten by Denmark, its people, parks, and music, and the liberty, including the sexual freedom, that its citizens took for granted. The Danes had an open attitude toward sex, progressive even by European standards. One day Oleg visited the city’s red-light district, and on a whim entered a shop selling pornographic magazines, sex toys, and other erotica. There he bought three homosexual porn magazines and took them home to show Yelena. “I was just intrigued. I had no idea what homosexuals did.” He placed the magazines on his mantelpiece, an open exhibition of a freedom unavailable in Soviet Russia.