The Spy and the Traitor Read online

The next two years were, in Oleg’s words, “an in-between, inconsequential time.” Although he had been promoted and was better paid, his job was little different from the one he had left three years before, preparing identities for illegals. He applied to learn English, hoping this might lead to a posting in the United States, Britain, or one of the Commonwealth countries, but was told there was no point, since the Danes had apparently identified him as a KGB officer, and it was therefore unlikely he would be sent abroad to a Western country. Morocco was a possibility. He began learning French, with little enthusiasm. Sunk in the gray conformity of Moscow, Gordievsky suffered acute cultural withdrawal symptoms. He was restless, resentful, increasingly lonely, and stuck.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1970, a young British intelligence officer was leafing through a “personal file” that had recently arrived from Canada. Geoffrey Guscott was slightly built, bespectacled, multilingual, highly intelligent, and dogged. More George Smiley than James Bond, he already had the look of an avuncular university tutor. But appearances could not have been more deceptive. According to one colleague, Guscott “probably personally inflicted more damage on Soviet intelligence than anyone else in history.”

  Brought up in southeast London, the son of a printer who had left school at fourteen, Guscott had a working-class background that set him apart from the majority of MI6 officers. He won a scholarship to Dulwich College, and then a place at Cambridge to read Russian and Czech. On graduation in 1961, a letter arrived from out of the blue, inviting Guscott to a meeting in London. There he met a cheery veteran of British intelligence who described his experiences as a wartime spy in Vienna and Madrid. “I had a yen to travel, and it seemed to me exactly what I wanted to do,” recalled Guscott. At the age of twenty-four, he was enrolled in Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, known to itself as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, but referred to by just about everyone else as MI6.

  In 1965, Guscott was posted to Czechoslovakia, as the tide of reform was beginning to rise. For three years he ran a spy code-named FREED, an officer in the Czech intelligence service, and by the time of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was back in London, responsible for the recruitment of Czech officials, both inside and outside Czechoslovakia. The Soviet invasion sent the Czech desk into overdrive. “We had to grab every opportunity we could.”

  The file on Guscott’s desk, code-named DANICEK, concerned the recent defection of a junior officer named Stanislaw Kaplan from the Czech intelligence service.

  Kaplan had taken a holiday in Bulgaria soon after the Prague Spring. There he had vanished, before reappearing in France, where he formally defected to the French intelligence service. Kaplan explained that he wished to settle in Canada. The Canadian intelligence service had a close relationship with MI6, and an officer was sent from London to debrief the defector. The Canadians undoubtedly informed the CIA of Kaplan’s defection. The young Czech officer was eager to cooperate. By the time it landed on Guscott’s desk, the DANICEK dossier was several inches thick.

  Kaplan was described as intelligent and forthright, “a cross-country runner who enjoyed the opposite sex.” He brought useful details about the workings of Czech intelligence, and his years as a student in Moscow. As a matter of routine, defectors were asked to identify anyone they knew of potential interest to Western intelligence. Kaplan’s file contained around a hundred names, mostly Czechoslovakian. But five of the “personalities” listed by Kaplan were Russians, and one of these stood out.

  Kaplan described his friendship with Oleg Gordievsky, a fellow long-distance runner destined for the KGB, who had evinced “clear signs of political disillusionment.” During the Khrushchev Thaw, the two friends had discussed the limitations of Communism: “Oleg was a man who was not closed off, a thinking man who was aware of the horrors of the past, a person not so different from him.”

  Guscott cross-referenced the name and found that an Oleg Gordievsky had been sent to Copenhagen in 1966 as a consular official. Relations between PET and MI6 were close. The Danish intelligence file on Gordievsky indicated that he was almost certainly a KGB officer, probably providing support to illegals. Nothing could be pinned on him directly, but he had evaded surveillance several times in a way that suggested professional training. He had made suspicious contact with a policeman and several priests. A bug planted in his apartment revealed that his marriage was in trouble. His visit to a sex shop and his purchase of gay pornography had prompted “a clumsy blackmail attempt,” without result. Gordievsky had returned to Moscow in January 1970 and vanished into the maw of the Center, doing heaven knew what.

  Guscott made a note in the Gordievsky file that if this able, elusive, possibly gay KGB officer who had once harbored freethinking ideas reappeared in the West, he might be worth approaching. Oleg was “flagged” as a “person of interest,” and given the code name SUNBEAM.

  In the meantime, Britain had KGB spies to deal with closer to home.

  On September 24, 1971, the British government ejected 105 Soviet intelligence officers, the largest expulsion of spies in history. The mass eviction, code-named Operation FOOT, had been brewing for some time. Like the Danes, the British closely monitored accredited Soviet diplomats, journalists, and trade representatives, and had a clear idea which were authentic and which were spies. The KGB had become ever more brazen in its espionage, and MI5, the British Security Service, was itching to strike back. The trigger was the defection of Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer posing as the representative of the Soviet knitwear industry. So, far from selling Communist cardigans, Lyalin was the most senior representative of the KGB’s Thirteenth Department, the sabotage section responsible for drawing up contingency plans in the event of war with the West. He was given the MI5 code name GOLDFINCH, but he sang like a canary: among the secrets he revealed were plans to flood the London Underground, assassinate key figures in British public life, and land a sabotage team on the Yorkshire coast. These revelations furnished the pretext MI5 had been waiting for. Every known spy was kicked out, and one of the largest KGB stations in the world was reduced, overnight, to naught. The KGB would spend the next two decades struggling to restore the rezidentura to its former potency.

  Operation FOOT took Moscow completely by surprise and provoked consternation within the First Chief Directorate. With its headquarters at Yasenevo, near Moscow’s outer ring road, the department responsible for foreign intelligence had undergone rapid expansion under Brezhnev, multiplying from 3,000 officers in the 1960s to more than 10,000. The mass expulsion was seen as a major debacle. The head of the section responsible for Britain and Scandinavia was sacked (the two regions were, for historical reasons, lumped together in the KGB departmental structure, along with Australia and New Zealand) and replaced by Dmitri Yakushin.

  Known as the “Gray Cardinal,” Yakushin was an aristocrat by birth but a Bolshevik of conviction, a committed Communist with the airs of a nobleman and a voice like a pneumatic drill. He had fought in a tank regiment during the war, specialized in pig husbandry at the Soviet Agriculture Ministry, and then transferred to the KGB, rising to become deputy head of the American department. Unlike most of the senior KGB brass he was a cultured man who collected rare books and spoke his mind, very loudly. Gordievsky’s first brush with the Gray Cardinal was extremely alarming.

  One night, listening in secret to the BBC World Service, Gordievsky learned that Denmark, in a carry-over effect from Operation FOOT, had expelled three of his former colleagues, KGB officers working under diplomatic cover. The next morning he mentioned the news to a friend in the Danish section. Five minutes later, his telephone rang, and a deafening blast echoed down the line: “Comrade Gordievsky, if you insist on spreading rumors around the KGB about alleged expulsions in Demark, you will be PUNISHED!” It was Yakushin.

  Oleg feared the sack. Instead, a few days later, after the BBC report was confirmed, the Gray Cardinal summoned him to his office and got straight to the point, at around a hundred decibels. “I need s
omeone in Copenhagen. We have to rebuild our team there. You speak Danish…How would you fancy working in my department?” Gordievsky stammered that he would like nothing better. “Leave it to me,” Yakushin bellowed.

  But the head of Directorate S declined to let him go, with the pettiness typical of a boss determined to retain a member of staff just because another boss has tried to poach him.

  There matters rested, frustratingly, until Vasili Gordievsky, the brother who had gotten him into the KGB, helped to speed Oleg’s promotion by the radical expedient of dropping dead.

  Vasili had been drinking heavily for years. In Southeast Asia he contracted hepatitis and was advised by doctors never to touch another drop of alcohol. But he continued, and swiftly drank himself to death at the age of thirty-nine. He was given a full military funeral by the KGB. As three KGB officers fired automatic weapons in salute, and the flag-draped coffin was lowered into the floor of the Moscow crematorium, Gordievsky reflected how little he had really known about the man he called “Vasilko.” His mother and sister, clutching each other in grief and awed by the turnout of KGB dignitaries, knew even less. Anton wore his KGB uniform and told everyone he was proud of his son’s service to the Motherland.

  Oleg had slightly feared his mysterious older brother. He remained entirely unaware of Vasili’s illegal activities in Czechoslovakia. The brothers had seemed outwardly close, but in reality they had been separated by a wide gulf of secrecy. Vasili died a decorated KGB hero, and Oleg’s stock rose accordingly, providing a small “moral lever” in his efforts to pry himself out of Directorate S and into Yakushin’s British-Scandinavian section. “Now that my brother had died as a result of his work for Directorate S, it would be hard for the boss to refuse my request.” With extreme reluctance, the illegals section let him go. The Soviets applied for a Danish visa, stating that Gordievsky would be returning to Copenhagen as second secretary at the Soviet embassy; in reality, he was now a political-intelligence officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate—the post formerly occupied by Mikhail Lyubimov.

  The Danes could have turned down the visa, since Oleg was a suspected KGB officer. Instead, they decided he should be allowed to return, and watched closely. London was informed.

  The question of his sexuality was raised again. Gordievsky, it seemed, had not reported the homosexual approach made two years earlier. Had he done so, MI6 surmised, he would probably not have been sent abroad a second time because, in the distorted thinking of the KGB, any officer targeted by Western intelligence was immediately rendered suspect. MI6 assumed that Oleg had decided to conceal the attempted seduction, when he had merely failed to notice it. “The presumption was that he had kept it to himself,” wrote one officer. If Gordievsky was hiding a guilty secret from his bosses, and if Standa Kaplan was right about his political leanings, the Russian might be worth another approach.

  MI6 and PET prepared a welcoming reception.

  Chapter 3

  SUNBEAM

  Richard Bromhead was Our Man in Copenhagen, and didn’t much mind who knew it.

  The MI6 head of station in Denmark was an old-fashioned, public school–educated Englishman, a cheerful, back-slapping fellow who referred to the people he liked as “complete darlings” and those he did not as “prize shits.” Bromhead was descended from poets and adventurers. The family was pedigreed and penniless. He attended Marlborough College, then performed National Service in Germany, where he found himself in charge of 250 German prisoners in a former camp for British POWs. (“The Kommandant was an Olympic rower. Charming chap. We had a ball.”) He went to Cambridge University, studied Russian, and claimed to have forgotten every word the moment he left. He was turned down by the Foreign Office, then failed to get a job in a bakery, decided to become an artist, and was living on onions in a run-down London flat and drawing pictures of the Albert Memorial when a friend suggested he apply for a job in the Colonial Office. (“They wanted me to go to Nicosia. I said: ‘Lovely. Where’s that?’ ”) In Cyprus, he wound up as private secretary to the governor, Hugh Foot. (“It was great fun. There was an MI6 officer living in the garden, lovely chap, recruited me.”) Inducted into “the Firm,” he was posted first to the UN in Geneva under deep cover, and then to Athens. (“Place immediately broke out in revolution. Ha, ha.”) Finally, in 1970, at the age of forty-two, he was appointed senior MI6 officer in Copenhagen. (“I was supposed to go to Iraq. Not sure what happened.”)

  Tall, handsome, and immaculately tailored, always ready for a joke and another drink, Bromhead swiftly became a familiar figure on the Copenhagen diplomatic-party circuit. He referred to his clandestine work as “mucking about.”

  Richard Bromhead was one of those Englishmen who put a great deal of effort into appearing to be a lot stupider than they really are. He was a formidable intelligence officer.

  From the day he arrived in Copenhagen, Bromhead set about making the lives of his Soviet adversaries a misery. In this project he joined forces with the deputy head of PET, a jocular lawyer named Jørn Bruun, who “delighted in actively harassing Bloc—and especially Russian—diplomats and other staff, in ways which cost practically nothing and were virtually undetectable.” 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 mustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.”

  One of their chosen targets was a known KGB officer named Bratsov. 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. Another victim was a keen young officer in the KGB station who tried to recruit a Danish MP, who promptly informed PET. “This MP lived in a town that was two hours’ drive from Copenhagen. 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. He would then drive back, pretty squiffy, file a long report for the KGB, and finally get to bed at six in the morning. Then the MP would call him up at nine and say: ‘Come here immediately, I’ve got something frightfully important to tell you.’ Eventually the Russian had a nervous breakdown and packed it in. Ha, ha. The Danes were super.”

  Gordievsky’s visa was approved. Bromhead was instructed by MI6 to get close to the new arrival and, when the moment seemed right, sound him out. PET would be kept informed of developments but agreed that the case should be run in Denmark by MI6.

  Oleg and Yelena Gordievsky arrived back in Copenhagen on October 11, 1972. It felt like a homecoming. The enormous Danish undercover cop nicknamed Obelix discreetly followed them out of the arrivals hall.

  In his new role as a political-intelligence officer, Gordievsky would no longer be running illegals, but actively gathering secret intelligence and trying to subvert Western institutions. In practice this meant seeking out, cultivating, recruiting, and then controlling spies, contacts, and informants. These might be Danish government officials, elected politicians, trades unionists, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, or anyone else with privileged access to information of interest to the Soviet Union. They might even, ideally, work in Danish intelligence. As in other Western countries, a few Danes were committed Communists, prepared to take orders from Moscow; others might be willing to trade intelligence for money (the grease that oils the wheels of so much espionage), or susceptible to other forms of persuasion, coercion, or inducement. In addition, PR Line officers were expected to undertake “active measures” to influence public opinion, sow disinformation where necessary, cultivate opinion formers sympathetic to Moscow, and place articles in the press that painted the Soviet Union in a positive (and often false) light. The KGB had long excelled in the dark art
of manufacturing “fake news.” Under KGB taxonomy, foreign contacts were classified in order of importance: at the top was an “agent,” someone who consciously worked for the KGB, usually for ideological or financial reasons; below that was a “confidential contact,” a person sympathetic to the Soviet cause, willing to help clandestinely, but possibly unaware that the friendly man from the Soviet embassy worked for the KGB. A grade below that were numerous more open contacts, people whom Gordievsky, in his cover role as second secretary, would be expected to meet anyway in the course of his work. There was a wide gulf between a confidential contact, who might merely be approachable and sympathetic, and a spy prepared to betray his country. But one could evolve into the other.

  Gordievsky slipped easily back into Danish life and culture. Mikhail Lyubimov had returned to Moscow to a senior role in the British-Scandinavian section, and Gordievsky stepped into his shoes. This new form of intelligence work was exciting but frustrating; Danes are almost too nice to be spies, too honest to be subversive, and too polite to say so. Every attempt to recruit a Dane bumped into an impenetrable wall of courtesy. Even the most ardent Danish Communists balked at treachery.

  But there were exceptions. One was Gert Petersen, leader of Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party and later a member of the European Parliament. Petersen, code-named ZEUS and categorized as a “confidential contact” by the KGB, passed on classified military information gleaned from Denmark’s Foreign Policy Committee. He was well informed, and very thirsty. Gordievsky was startled, and rather impressed, by the quantity of beer and schnapps he was able to consume at KGB expense.

  The new rezident in Copenhagen, Alfred Mogilevchik, appointed Gordievsky as his deputy. “You’ve got the brains, the energy, and the ability to deal with people,” Mogilevchik told him. “Also, you know Denmark and speak the language. What else do I need?” Gordievsky was promoted to major.