The Spy and the Traitor Read online

  Professionally, Gordievsky was gliding smoothly upward through the KGB ranks; internally, he was in turmoil. 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. News filtered through of Kaplan’s defection to Canada. His friend had been tried in absentia by a Czechoslovakian military court for revealing state secrets and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Gordievsky was shocked, but also left wondering whether the West had registered his cry of protest after the Prague Spring. If so, why was there no response? And if Western intelligence did ever try to sound him out, would he accept or reject the advance? Gordievsky later claimed that he was primed and waiting for a tap on the shoulder from the opposition, but the reality was more complicated than memory, as it almost always is.

  Back on the diplomatic-party circuit, Gordievsky frequently spotted the same tall, affable Englishman.

  Richard Bromhead had two photographs of Gordievsky, both supplied by the Danes, one taken covertly during his previous posting and the latest from his visa application.

  “It was a stern face that I had studied, but not unpleasant. He looked hard-bitten and tough and I could not imagine how, even in the circumstances the London report had described, anyone could have thought him to be homosexual. Nor did he look like a man it would be easy for a Western intelligence officer to approach, in any sense.” In common with others of his time and class, Bromhead believed that all homosexuals behaved in certain ways that made them easy to identify.

  Their first direct encounter took place at the Copenhagen town hall, a redbrick edifice called the Rådhus, at the opening of an art exhibition. Bromhead knew that a Soviet delegation would attend. As a regular at the “diplomatic lunch club,” where real diplomats and spies intermingled, he had made the acquaintance of several Soviet officials. “I was on quite good terms with a horrible little man who came from Irkutsk, poor chap.” Bromhead spotted the diminutive Irkutskian among a group of Soviet diplomats that included Gordievsky, and sauntered over. “Without seeming to put any special emphasis on it, I was able, while greeting them, to include Oleg in the general greeting. I didn’t ask his name, and he didn’t volunteer it.”

  The two men fell into a halting conversation about art. “When Oleg spoke, the sternness disappeared,” wrote Bromhead. “He had a ready smile, with a genuinely humorous aspect to it, often lacking in other KGB officers. The new arrival seemed natural and genuinely amused by life. I liked him.”

  Bromhead reported back to London that the target had been contacted. The main problem was communication. Bromhead had forgotten almost all his Russian; he spoke only a smattering of Danish and a very little bit of German—the language he had used to order around German POWs was not, in these circumstances, very suitable. Gordievsky spoke fluent German and Danish, but no English at all. “We managed at a superficial level,” said Bromhead.

  The Soviet, British, and American embassies backed onto one another, in an odd diplomatic triangle, separated by a graveyard. Despite the frigidity of the Cold War, there was considerable social interaction between Soviet and Western diplomats, and over the following weeks Bromhead contrived to be invited to several parties attended by Gordievsky. “We nodded to each other over the heads of fellow guests at a few diplomatic receptions.”

  Recruiting a rival intelligence officer required a complicated pas de deux. Too obvious an approach would scare Gordievsky away, but too subtle a signal would be missed. MI6 wondered if Bromhead had the delicacy needed for this kind of dance. “He was very gregarious, but a bit of a bull in a china shop, and well known in the Soviet embassy, where he’d been identified as MI6.” Characteristically, Bromhead simply decided to throw a party and invited Gordievsky, along with some other Soviet officials. “PET produced a lady badminton player. The thinking was that this lady and Gordievsky would have a common interest.” Lene Køppen was a student dentist who would go on to win the world title in ladies singles badminton. She was extremely pretty, and entirely unaware she was being used as bait. The approach was “not necessarily sexual,” according to one MI6 case officer. But if Gordievsky turned out to be heterosexual, and badminton led to bed, then so much the better. It didn’t. Gordievsky had two drinks, chatted briefly and inconsequentially with Køppen, and left. As Bromhead had predicted, the Russian was proving friendly but unapproachable, socially, sportingly, and sexually.

  Back in London, Geoffrey Guscott was now on the Soviet desk. He discussed the SUNBEAM case with Mike Stokes, a senior officer who had been the case officer to Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s most successful Soviet spy to date. Penkovsky was a colonel in the GRU, the KGB’s military counterpart. For two years, starting in 1960, he was run jointly by MI6 and the CIA, supplying scientific and military intelligence to his handlers in Moscow, including the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba—information that enabled President John F. Kennedy to gain the upper hand during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, Penkovsky was caught, arrested, interrogated by the KGB, and, in May 1963, executed. Stokes was a “huge, inspiring physical presence” who knew a great deal about recruiting and running Soviet spies. Together, Stokes and Guscott hatched an ambitious plan: a “litmus test” of Gordievsky’s sympathies.

  On the evening of November 2, 1973, Oleg and Yelena had just finished dinner (a joyless, almost silent occasion) when there was a loud knock on the door of the apartment. Gordievsky found Standa Kaplan, his Czechoslovakian friend from university, smiling on the doorstep.

  Gordievsky was stunned, and then suddenly very scared.

  “Bozhe moi! My God. Standa! What the hell are you doing here?”

  The men shook hands, and Gordievsky ushered Kaplan inside, knowing that, in doing so, the game was changing irrevocably. Kaplan was a defector. If one of Gordievsky’s KGB neighbors saw him enter the flat, that alone would be grounds for suspicion. Then there was Yelena. Even if their marriage had been sound, as a loyal KGB officer she might feel obliged to report her husband’s encounter with a known traitor.

  Gordievsky poured his old friend a whisky and introduced him to Yelena. Kaplan explained that he was now working for a Canadian insurance company. He had come to Copenhagen to see a Danish girlfriend, found Oleg’s name in the diplomatic list, and decided on a whim to look him up. Kaplan seemed unchanged, the same open face and jaunty manner. But a slight tremor in the hand on the whisky glass betrayed him. Gordievsky knew he was lying. Kaplan had been sent by a Western intelligence service. This was a trial, and a very dangerous one. Was this the long-awaited response to the telephone call placed five years earlier after the crushing of the Prague Spring? If so, who was Kaplan working for? The CIA? MI6? PET?

  The conversation was fractured and twitchy. Kaplan described how he had defected from Czechoslovakia, reaching Canada via France. Gordievsky mumbled something noncommittal. Yelena looked anxious. After just a few minutes, Kaplan drained his glass and got to his feet. “Look, I’m disturbing you. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow and we can have a proper talk.” Kaplan suggested a small restaurant in the city center.

  Closing the door, Gordievsky turned to Yelena and remarked how strange it was that Kaplan should appear unannounced. She said nothing. “What a funny coincidence that he should turn up in Copenhagen,” he said. Her expression was unreadable, but tinged with apprehension.

  Gordievsky arrived deliberately late for lunch, having satisfied himself that he was not being followed. He had barely slept. Kaplan was waiting at a table in the window. He seemed more relaxed. They chatted about old times. Seated at a café table across the road, a well-built tourist was reading a guidebook. Mike Stokes was keeping watch.

  Kaplan’s visit had been minutely planned and rehearsed. “We needed a pl
ausible reason for Kaplan contacting him,” said Guscott. “On the other hand, we wanted him to realize he was being tapped up.”

  Kaplan’s instructions were to talk about his defection, the newfound joys of living in the West, and the Prague Spring. And then gauge Gordievsky’s reactions.

  Gordievsky knew he was being assessed. He felt his shoulders tense, as Kaplan recalled the dramatic events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Gordievsky merely observed that the Soviet invasion had come as a shock. “I needed to be extremely careful. I was walking on the edge of an abyss.” When Kaplan described the details of his defection and his pleasant new life in Canada, Gordievsky nodded in a way that seemed encouraging, without being obvious. “I thought it essential that although I should put out positive signals, I should not lose control of the situation.” He had no idea who had sent Kaplan to test him, and he was not about to ask.

  In every courtship, it is important not to appear overeager. But Gordievsky’s caution was more than mere flirtation technique. Though he had wondered whether Western intelligence would contact him following his outburst over events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he was still not entirely sure he wanted to be seduced, or who was wooing him.

  At the end of lunch, the two old friends shook hands, and Standa Kaplan disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. Nothing definitive had been said. No declarations or promises had been made. But an invisible line had been crossed. Gordievsky reflected: “I knew that I had given away enough for him to put in a positive report.”

  Stokes debriefed Standa Kaplan in a Copenhagen hotel room and then flew back to London to report the results to Geoffrey Guscott: Gordievsky had been surprised by Kaplan’s sudden appearance, but not horrified or angry; he had seemed interested and sympathetic, and expressed his astonishment at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. And, most important, Gordievsky had given no hint that he would file a report to the KGB on his unexpected meeting with a convicted anti-Communist traitor. “This was fascinating. This was what we wanted to hear. Gordievsky was plainly being very cautious, but if he had not reported it, he would be taking a first, big step. We needed to make it clear, without being too obvious, that we were in the market. We needed to engineer a chance meeting.”

  * * *

  Richard Bromhead was “absolutely bloody freezing.” It was seven in the morning, snow had fallen overnight, and the temperature was minus six. A steel-gray dawn was struggling up over Copenhagen. SUNBEAM seemed most inaptly named. For three successive mornings, at this “ungodly hour,” the MI6 man had sat in his wife’s tiny, unheated car, on a deserted, tree-lined street in the northern suburbs, peering through the fogged windshield at a large concrete building, and wondering if he was getting frostbite.

  Danish surveillance had established that Oleg Gordievsky played badminton every morning with a young woman named Anna, a student member of the Danish Young Communists, at a suburban sports club. Bromhead staked out the place, choosing to drive his wife’s inconspicuous blue Austin rather than his own Ford with diplomatic plates. He parked in a spot with a direct line of sight to the door of the club, but kept the engine switched off since the steam from the exhaust might attract attention. On the first two mornings, “Oleg and the girl eventually appeared about 7:30, shook hands, and went to their respective cars. She was young, with short dark hair, athletic and slim but not particularly pretty. They didn’t look as though they were lovers, but I couldn’t be sure. They might simply be prudent in public.”

  On this, the third morning of subzero surveillance, Bromhead decided he could stand the waiting no longer: “My toes were completely frozen.” Judging the approximate moment when the game should be over, he entered the club through the unlocked front door. There was no one in reception. Oleg and his partner were almost certainly the building’s only occupants. If he found them in flagrante on the floor of the badminton court, Bromhead reflected, this could be tricky.

  Gordievsky was between serves when the British spy came into view. He immediately recognized Bromhead. In his tweed suit and heavy overcoat he looked incongruous in the empty sports complex, and unmistakably British. Oleg raised his racquet in greeting, and then turned to finish the game.

  The Russian did not seem surprised to see him. “Perhaps he was expecting me?” thought Bromhead. “Such an experienced and observant officer could well have noticed my car on one of the previous days. Once again, his friendly smile. Then deadly serious application to the game.”

  In fact, as he played on, and Bromhead observed from a spectator’s bench, Gordievsky’s mind was whirling. Everything was slotting into place: Kaplan’s visit, the party at Bromhead’s house, and the fact that the genial British official seemed to have been at every social event he had attended in the last three months. The KGB had identified Bromhead as a probable intelligence officer, with a reputation for “extrovert behavior,” and “turning up at embassy parties whether he had been invited or not.” The Englishman’s appearance in the deserted badminton court at this hour in the morning could mean only one thing: MI6 was trying to recruit him.

  The game came to an end, Anna headed to the showers, and Gordievsky sauntered over, a towel around his neck, hand outstretched. The two intelligence officers assessed each other. “Oleg displayed no sign of nervousness,” Bromhead wrote. Gordievsky noted that the Englishman, who usually radiated “ebullient self-confidence,” seemed for once deadly serious. They spoke a combination of Russian, German, and Danish, into which Bromhead inserted some incongruous French.

  “Would you be able to talk to me, tête-à-tête? I would love to have a private conversation, someplace where we would not be overheard.”

  “I would like that,” said Gordievsky.

  “It would be very interesting for me to have that sort of conversation with a member of your service. I think you are one of the few who would speak honestly to me.”

  Another line crossed: Bromhead had revealed he knew Gordievsky was a KGB officer.

  “Could we have lunch?” Bromhead continued.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It might be more difficult for you to meet up than for me, so why don’t you name a restaurant that would suit you?”

  Bromhead had expected Gordievsky to choose some obscure, discreet rendezvous spot. Instead he suggested they meet, in three days’ time, at the restaurant in the Østerport Hotel, directly across the main road from the Soviet embassy.

  As he drove away in his wife’s battered car, Bromhead was elated, but also uneasy. Gordievsky had seemed strangely calm, apparently unperturbed by the approach. He had chosen a restaurant so near his own embassy that a hidden microphone would be able to relay their conversation to listeners across the road. They could be spotted by Soviet officials, who frequently dined at the hotel. For the first time, it struck Bromhead that he might be the target, not the initiator, of an attempted enlistment. “Oleg’s behavior and choice of restaurant made me strongly suspect I was being played at my own game. It was all just too easy. It didn’t feel right.”

  Back at the embassy, Bromhead fired off a cable to MI6 headquarters: “For God’s sake, I think he’s trying to recruit me!”

  But Gordievsky was merely establishing his cover. He, too, returned to his embassy and asked the rezident, Mogilevchik, “This fellow from the British embassy has invited me to lunch. What do I do? Should I accept?” The question was passed on to Moscow, and an emphatic reply immediately boomed back from Dmitri Yakushin, the Gray Cardinal: “YES! You should be aggressive and not shy away from an intelligence officer. 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.

  One of the oldest gambits in intelligence is “the dangle,” when one side appears to make a play for someone on the other, lures him into complicity, and gains his trust, before exposing him.

  Bromhea
d wondered if he was the target of a KGB dangle. If not, was Gordievsky genuinely trying to recruit him? Should he pretend to be interested, and see how far the Soviets were prepared to go? For Gordievsky, the stakes were even higher. The visit from Kaplan and Bromhead’s subsequent approach might all be part of an elaborate plot, in which he revealed his hand only to be exposed. Yakushin’s blessing provided some protection, but not much. If he fell victim to an MI6 dangle, his career in the KGB would be over. He would be recalled to Moscow. He would doubtless fall victim, retrospectively, to the KGB logic that anyone the other side attempted to recruit was, prima facie, suspect.

  James Jesus Angleton, the famously paranoid postwar chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, described the spying game as a “wilderness of mirrors.” Already, the Gordievsky case was reflecting and refracting in strange ways. Bromhead was still pretending to arrange a casual meeting between fellow intelligence officers, albeit on different sides of the Cold War—while wondering if he was being recruited himself. Gordievsky was pretending to his KGB bosses that this was a stab in the dark by British intelligence, a chance encounter leading to lunch—while wondering if MI6 might be planning to stitch him up.

  Three days later, Bromhead walked through the cemetery behind the embassies, crossed the busy Dag Hammarskjölds Allé, entered the Østerport Hotel, and took a seat in the restaurant with his back to the window, where he could “keep a close watch on the main entrance to the dining room.” PET had been informed the lunch was taking place, but Bromhead had insisted there should be no surveillance present, in case Gordievsky spotted it and backed out.