6

COMPROMISING SITUATIONS

The early 1960s were a golden age for the small army of Soviet spies plying their trade in Britain. The liberalism of the Swinging Sixties had yet to take hold and the spies knew how to exploit the yawning gap between the stuffy external world of the bowler-hatted establishment and its seedy underbelly of sex and greed. Their tools were the dark arts of provocation and blackmail. It was into the strange but exhilarating surroundings of London that Mikhail Lyubimov, a twenty-six-year-old Russian intelligence officer, was plunged when he arrived in 1961. The Beatles were still waiting to release their first album and London was still shrouded in a dense, filthy smog on winter mornings. The only reason for his assignment was the shape of his face. ‘I had a very British look,’ he explains. ‘Long faced, a little bit like a good horse. And the chief of the KGB department said, “You are very good for England.” My fate was decided like this.’1 The arbitrariness of the decision was typical of the peculiar bureaucracy of the KGB’s Moscow Centre.

Lyubimov was garrulous, erudite and talented, although some of his KGB contemporaries considered him a touch over-ambitious. The Soviet Union was relaxing somewhat after the death of Stalin in 1953, but it was still a society largely closed off to foreign influences and his initial understanding of Britain had come from reading the carefully approved literature kept on a special shelf at the Moscow Institute for International Relations. It portrayed Britain as a decadent, decaying empire in which the poor were exploited by capitalist overlords. Victory was inevitable and Lyubimov’s mission was to hasten the overthrow of this system, specifically by burrowing into the heart of the establishment and recruiting members of the Conservative Party to become agents of the Soviet state. ‘I came full of enthusiasm and because of this horse-like look I was just directed at the Conservative Party,’ he remembers. For Lyubimov, who had been expecting to go to the rather quieter venue of Finland, the bright lights of London offered their own delights. It was a plum posting – a chance to enjoy life in the West – and it began an enduring fascination for all things British, leaving him an Anglophile with a twist, a man who with some guilt enjoyed English literature and Scotch whisky but who also revelled in subverting the country that produced them.

The posting to London also presented the opportunity to work against the KGB’s oldest foe, to take part in the latest chapter of that long intelligence duel dating back even before the 1917 Revolution and do battle with the enemy which had been trying to destroy the great socialist experiment through its plots. The KGB knew the British were cunning and dangerous. But Russians also believed themselves to be just a little bit smarter, and the London Residency of the KGB was its glittering prize, the place out of which Philby and the others had been run in the glory days. ‘Like a banquet table laden with caviar, sturgeon and bottles of vodka, it was overflowing with valuable agents, who had, at various times, permeated every pore of the British establishment,’ Lyubimov recalls.2

Lyubimov’s cover was as a press attaché at the Embassy. On arrival, his first task was to buy a pinstriped suit. It was a stretch on his meagre KGB salary, but looking the part was important. Money was tight. He walked everywhere in London not just as part of a ‘dry cleaning’ procedure to rid himself of any surveillance but because London taxicabs were so shockingly expensive. He was at the bottom of the pile in the Embassy, so he shared a flat just off Kensington High Street. Though he liked Britain, he retained his socialist beliefs and quietly fumed at the stratified divisions of the British class system which were everywhere. When his wife was due to give birth, he chose a hospital in the East End because he had more faith in the obstetricians there than in those who served the bourgeoisie. He preferred Marks and Spencer to Harrods, although he found the latter a useful place to slip his tail using the lifts, side exits and crowds. He would enjoy seeing the flushed, panting faces of his pursuers. He would then put on his best ‘arrogant’ English expression on the bus to blend in.³

Next, Lyubimov began frequenting London’s smoke-filled clubs to start meeting the right kind of people. As if he were a child with his face pressed against the glass of a sweet shop, every Tory, every toff, every member of the establishment was a potential target. The annual Conservative Party Conference was, to him, a veritable nirvana. In 1962 it was hosted in the sleepy North Wales seaside town of Llandudno. Amid the fading Victorian bed-and-breakfast guesthouses, Lyubimov cut a swathe through the twinset-and-pearl Conservative ladies and the moustached Conservative gentlemen enjoying their time away from home. ‘I went to the parties. I even danced with the Conservative members,’ he recalls. ‘Females. Not males.’ At night, though, he locked his room, fearing that a British ‘provocation’ might try and hop into his bed.

Lyubimov was something of a curiosity to those he met. Just as he arrived, Yuri Gagarin had made it into space, boosting Russia’s image, so invitations to attend receptions and parties landed at a healthy rate in his in-tray. At that time it was very much in vogue to lecture about the Soviet Union, and Lyubimov would give long talks over cups of tea extolling the virtues of Communism and hoping that someone interesting might perhaps introduce themselves at the end. Among those he got to know (but whom he did not recruit and who did not spill any secrets) were Nicholas Scott, then leading the Young Conservatives, the future Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne and Peter Walker, a newly elected MP.

His real task was to seek out, befriend and then recruit individuals who might be persuaded to provide information to the KGB. From the Conservative Party, he soon broadened out his targets to Labour and to pretty much anyone else. There was lunch with the odd Labour luminary like Dick Crossman who provided good conversation but nothing more. The Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband was regarded as unfit to be approached by the KGB due to his independent thinking. One woman thought about handing over secret documents but gave him nothing. There was a diplomat who promised gold but provided only dross. He followed one Foreign Office official into a pub and tried to strike up a conversation as he munched on a sandwich but with no success. And a girl in Conservative Central Office nearly fainted when he explained that he was a Russian.4 Sometimes on a long drive he would become aware of a car on his tail. Special Branch or MI5, he assumed. Sometimes his tail would appear in the same pub as him. A man in a beige mac would sit nursing a pint of warm bitter in the lounge bar of a dingy pub. Normally, the watcher and the watched would keep half an eye on one another but avoid direct contact, although on one occasion he got so lost trying to find a hotel that he turned round and asked his watchers for directions. They dutifully obliged. But such contact was the exception. Often he saw nothing He had shaken off his tail. Or perhaps it had never been there.

The truth was that the watchers of MI5’s A4 surveillance branch were struggling to contain the massive espionage operation being run out of the Soviet Embassy. In an observation post in a house opposite the main gates of the Embassy, a pair of watchers sat surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups and undertook the mind-numbingly dull task of training their binoculars and cameras on Lyubimov and his colleagues as they walked or drove in and out. These officers spent years of their lives in the tiny room and knew many of the faces instantly but had a three-volume folder of photos to consult if needed. Once they had identified a target, they would radio colleagues who would then pick up the Soviet officials as they headed out into town and follow them on foot or by car. The watchers’ movements were co-ordinated from a control room off Regent’s Park with a huge street map of London on one wall and a constantly crackling radio. But the watchers simply did not have the numbers to cope with their wily opponents. At least sixty members of the KGB were operating, like Lyubimov, under cover in the Embassy. Dozens more worked for military intelligence, with another contingent based at the Soviet Trade Delegation. More still worked as journalists and members of the press. In all there were around 500 Soviet officials operating in Britain of whom 120 were identified as intelligence officers (the suspected figure was closer to 200). This was more than were based in the US if the United Nations was excluded. The Soviet spies had also learnt, from their agents, every trick and technique the watchers employed and devised their own counter-surveillance routes to evade them. With only minimal surveillance, the Russians were almost entirely free to engage in their pursuit of the powerful and the vulnerable with little impediment. MI5 was swamped.5

But Lyubimov’s ambition meant that his cover did not remain intact for long. ‘Very soon I became well known as a spy in the Conservative Party,’ he recalls. ‘I worked very intensively and I was foolish enough at that time to be very active.’ At parties he would often be introduced to other guests as ‘the Russian spy, Mr Lyubimov’. He would remain silent or perhaps laugh off the remark. Spying in the early 1960s was taking on a different hue from its past connotations. The association with the Second World War was fading and being replaced not just by a sense of seriousness about the mission when it came to the Cold War, especially during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in autumn 1962 when the world prepared itself for a nuclear exchange, but also by a touch of glamour and even playfulness. Nothing epitomised this more than the arrival that same year on cinema screens of James Bond in the form of Dr No. Ian Fleming’s creation was taking on a life of its own with President Kennedy citing Bond in his top ten books. Lyubimov met Bond’s creator Ian Fleming just after Dr No had been finished at a party hosted by Lady Antonia Fraser. ‘We were drinking and discussing world problems. He was a good drinker and we drank a lot of whisky,’ Lyubimov recalls. ‘I didn’t know that he would be so famous. But actually Bond was never considered to be a serious film in the KGB.’ That was only half true since the KGB would later encourage the creation of a Communist answer to Bond to challenge the cultural pre-eminence of 007, but without much success. From 1962 onwards, Bondmania would spread globally and become associated with the new Britain of the 1960s, a very different Britain from the author Ian Fleming’s world, taking on an increasingly fantastical air, distant from the realities of both the Cold War and Britain’s place in it.

Lyubimov’s successes in recruiting actual agents, rather than just making friends with Conservative MPs, was limited. But one Conservative MP did fall foul of the dark side of the KGB’s work in Lyubimov’s time although not by his hand. The bluff naval commander Anthony Courtney, who had helped drop Anthony Cavendish’s doomed agents off the Baltic coast in the late 1940s, had enjoyed another twist in an eventful career. During his time in Naval Intelligence he had worked closely with MI6, suggesting ideas for using Royal Navy surface craft and submarines for intelligence operations in the Black Sea. Kim Philby had listened with interest. Courtney would later wonder if that was the moment he first came to the attention of the KGB. But he would almost certainly have been known to them well before that, not least from his time in Moscow during the war and his affair with a dancer.6

Courtney had pressed officials to post him to Moscow but without luck. He had also hoped to join MI6, but a half-offer from the Chief evaporated after others in the service and Foreign Office said they were unsure about him.⁷ He had retired from the navy short of money and decided to run a consultancy for businesses trading with the Soviet bloc, much like Greville Wynne. He met with the Soviet Trade Delegation in London and threw parties for visiting Russians. He asked to visit Portsmouth with some Russian captains to look at buying old ships and he visited Moscow, dropping in on the State Scientific and Technical Commission that housed Penkovsky. In early 1959, the chance to fulfil a long-standing ambition emerged when the sitting Conservative MP for Harrow East was forced to resign after he was caught engaged in a homosexual act (still illegal at the time) with a member of the Coldstream Guards in St James’s Park. The good men and women of Harrow East needed a new representative. ‘An air of horrified prudishness pervaded the atmosphere in the constituency,’ Courtney remembered. So the local Conservatives picked a former navy commander who could not possibly let them down.

But Courtney fell for the classic honey trap. During his visits to Moscow he had got to know Zina Volkova, a forty-something beauty with fair hair and hazel eyes, who ran a car service for visiting foreigners. Courtney kept up his business links after entering parliament and in June 1961 he arrived in Moscow for a trade fair. At the airport arriving for the same fair, Greville Wynne was picking up film from Oleg Penkovsky and then heading for his hotel, the Metropol, before going to the Embassy to hand it over to Rauri Chisholm. Courtney meanwhile was having dinner at the National with Zina. His wife had died in March of that year, and after dinner he and Zina retired to his bedroom for a few hours. What Courtney did not realise was that hidden cameras in a hotel room recorded their every embrace. ‘The affair was not a success,’ Courtney later remarked of that night with characteristic British understatement. It was to be his downfall.

Courtney had been speaking out in parliament from 1962 about the free rein given to the likes of Lyubimov in London compared to the harassment of British Embassy staff in Moscow. Why was the Soviet Embassy in London allowed to have Russian chauffeurs while British diplomats in Moscow were forced to employ local drivers and staff, all recruited through an agency clearly under control of the Russian intelligence services? Courtney was drawing attention to a very real vulnerability which would be used to entrap a number of Embassy staff. The relationship between the two countries, he said, ‘called to mind a pair of dancers, a self-satisfied elderly gentleman performing an elegant minuet, oblivious of the fact that his partner was doing the twist’. He was thus a prime target for the KGB. According to Lyubimov, there was an attempt at blackmailing the MP into becoming an agent, something Courtney himself denied.8 Courtney’s problem was that the very summer he had dined with Zina in the hotel he had met Elizabeth Trefgarne, the widow of a peer who was to be his new wife. Courtney had told her of the affair, but it still looked rather awkward. At the same time, molehunters decided there was something suspicious about Courtney, particularly the fact that he flew his private aeroplane behind the Iron Curtain. They wanted him investigated, but were blocked.

Courtney’s refusal to work for the KGB may explain his increasingly vociferous parliamentary outbursts against its work in London. Why had 200 British Foreign Service personnel serving in the Communist world since 1949 left their posts early, seventy-eight of them on grounds of misconduct or unsuitability? When will the government stop behaving ‘like a lot of hypnotised rabbits in the face of an efficient Soviet espionage organisation?’ he asked.⁹ The first sign of trouble came early in 1965 when anonymous letters concerning his private life were sent to him and to his stepson – who happened to be Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the then leader of the Conservative Party. Courtney continued to press his case, calling on the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson in June that year to complain about Soviet actions in London. The confidential briefing note for the Prime Minister said that Courtney’s ‘suggestions have generally been impracticable and unhelpful’.¹⁰ In July he tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons on security.¹¹ Within weeks came the bombshell. Courtney received a phone call from a fellow MP telling him to come to the House. In the rarefied confines of Westminster Hall with MPs scurrying about preparing for the summer break, he was handed a buff-coloured envelope. Inside was a letter and six photos, five of him with two featuring a woman. He could be seen seated on a bed unbuttoning a woman’s blouse. It certainly looked like Zina. Another photograph was more compromising but showed some signs of having been touched up. They were, he conceded, ‘dynamite’. To round things off was the line ‘to be continued …’. Other copies were sent to the Labour and Conservative chief whips and worst of all to his prudish Constituency Association. When he got home another buff-coloured envelope came through the letterbox. Two more copies went to his wife. The KGB called this Operation Proba and it was rather pleased with the outcome.12

Courtney went to see Roger Hollis, an old friend, with a copy of the letter to ask for advice. An MI5 officer was sent to see him. Courtney was slightly alarmed to find that the man did not speak Russian and did not know as much about the Russian Secret Service as he did. Courtney became irritable and could not sleep at night. Shortly after receiving copies, his wife informed him that she would be filing for divorce. Courtney moved out of their house and into a London flat, becoming increasingly lonely and isolated. The rot exposed by Philby, Burgess and Maclean had gone deep, he believed, and a taint of treachery remained, perhaps at a high level in the Foreign Office. It was clear, though, that the Conservative Party leadership were determined to avoid ‘another’ scandal and would not be willing to offer him much support. He kept a loaded .38 revolver at his bedside. One day he would think of suicide, another of shooting a Russian.

Slowly, word got round Fleet Street. Reporters turned up on his doorstep. Private Eye magazine published the story followed by what Courtney described as ‘a short piece of cheap nastiness on BBC Television’. His constituency party, unable to believe that they had been caught up in another scandal, tried to deselect him. Courtney did his best to rally support among the ladies of Stanmore but at the general election in March 1966 he lost his seat by 378 votes. Ten weeks later, his divorce came through. Courtney remained a campaigner on the issue of Russian intelligence for years afterwards, recounting stories of a young acquaintance who awoke from being drugged to find himself in a homosexual embrace, with pictures being taken by old-fashioned photographers, ‘black velvet hoods and all’, and of a commercial counsellor in Moscow who later became a Conservative MP who had been compromised by a girl but who, to Courtney’s annoyance, had never paid for it with his career.13 More than a decade after being ejected from parliament he offered his own advice to British businessmen travelling to Moscow. Beware Russian women knocking at your hotel door ‘who will be only too anxious … to give you a real socialist “good time’”, he would tell them. ‘I have spoken on many occasions round the country on these matters of which I have had some experience and perhaps inevitably I have been accused of seeing “Reds under the Bed”. Well, I had one in mine, and the repercussions ever since have taught me that it simply isn’t worth it. I hope you will agree.’¹⁴

A compromising situation was most easily engineered on the KGB’s home turf, as happened with Courtney. An official UK government study warned of the dangers:

The Embassy in Moscow and our other Embassies behind the Iron Curtain can only be seen therefore as, in some sort, beleaguered forces under a constant and insidious attack, carried out not only by the skilful development of seemingly innocent contacts with Russian citizens but also by the insertion within the Embassy premises of the most ingenious listening and, sometimes, photographic devices and the conscription as regular informers and reporters of the locally engaged staff working for the Embassy – for example, cooks, housemaids and chauffeurs.¹⁵

One British Ambassador to Moscow had an affair with his Russian maid. She was a KGB agent and photos were taken of them, forcing his departure. Another British diplomat got his maid pregnant and she asked for help with an abortion, obliging him to identify the MI6 station chief.¹⁶ A Greek ambassador, confronted with pictures of himself in flagrante with his housekeeper, grabbed the pictures and gleefully showed them around the diplomatic circuit as a sign of his virility until other diplomats became rather bored. Honey traps were a speciality of the KGB, while the East German Stasi specialised in using men (known as ‘Romeos’) to target single female secretaries working for officials who would have plenty of access to classified material. The latter tactic, which involved manipulating someone’s emotions, was often far more productive than blackmailing an unwilling individual.

Working in Moscow as a diplomat was guaranteed to put even the steeliest soul on edge. The British and American embassies were wired for sound. The US Embassy had a series of microphones placed within the Great Seal of the United States in the Ambassador’s office. Around fifty bugs were secreted elsewhere in the walls (the KGB even managed to bug Peter Lunn’s office in Beirut when he was MI6 station chief, a particularly ironic achievement given that Lunn and Elliott had failed to record their own meeting with Kim Philby in decent quality).17 Knowing that you were always being listened to played with some people’s heads. Some cracked.

The Russians’ most spectacular success in engineering a compromising situation came with an Admiralty clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow named John Vassall. The son of a clergyman, Vassall was a loner whom acquaintances thought a bit of a snob. Most of the Britons in Moscow avoided contact with Russians, finding the atmosphere in the city menacing, and chose instead to socialise among themselves. As a junior official in Moscow Vassall felt locked out of the whirlwind of Embassy parties enjoyed by the top diplomats. The well-dressed young man still managed his own busy diary of bridge games, drinks and theatre amid his official duties but also showed an openness towards Russians. One or two colleagues would later say they considered him ‘a bit of a pansy’ and even called him ‘Vera’ behind his back. But they also claimed that they had never dreamed he was what was known at the time as an active homosexual engaged in acts which were still illegal. Only years later would an official tribunal explain that Vassall had been ‘addicted to homosexual practice from youth’, language which illustrated why so many like him chose a clandestine life which in turn made them vulnerable. But in Moscow, while Vassall’s colleagues may have professed not to notice his preferences, this secret could not be kept from the watching eyes of the KGB. They had their own man inside the Embassy whose job was to seek out the vulnerable.¹⁸

The handsome Russian interpreter had joined the Embassy before Vassall and proved all too adept at securing theatre and travel tickets and the best food from the markets which, in turn, helped ensure that he was invited to staff parties. He had already attempted to lure a member of another Embassy into a homosexual relationship and tried to involve a member of the British Embassy in the black market to open up a vulnerability.19 He carefully cultivated Vassall, who had his ‘vanity flattered’ as he was taken out to restaurants and introduced to other Russians who would eventually do the dirty work. After three months, the trap was set. Vassall was invited to dinner at a restaurant near the Bolshoi Theatre. ‘We were taken to the first floor where I first thought was a dining room, but they invited me into a private room,’ he later confessed.

We had drinks, a large dinner and I was plied with very strong brandy and after half an hour I remember everybody taking off their jackets and somebody assisted me to take off mine. I remember the lighting was very strong and gradually most of my clothes were removed. There was a divan in the corner. I remember two or three people getting on the bed with me, all in a state of undress. There certain compromising sexual actions took place. I remember someone in the party taking photographs.²⁰

Soon afterwards, he went with another Russian to a flat in central Moscow. The man disappeared and two officials in plain clothes confronted him. One of the officials produced photographs from the party. ‘After about three photographs, I could not stomach any more. They made one feel ill,’ he later recalled. ‘They asked me if this was myself and I replied that it was.’ They told him he could be jailed in Russia for that kind of activity and then threatened to show the photos to senior Embassy staff including, rather strangely, the Ambassador’s wife, who perhaps was not the type to approve. If he did not do as he was told, he would not be allowed to leave Russia. He was then driven back to his flat. That evening, the KGB man in the Embassy told him he should meet some Russian officials in a hotel. One of the men threw the photos in his face and told him he risked an international incident. Slowly, over weeks, the Russians turned up the heat until he agreed to hand over documents. Vassall was not their only target at that time. Soon after he had begun his work, a woman employee of the Embassy was compromised and she was sent back home immediately.²¹

For seven long and damaging years, first in Moscow and then in London after his return, Vassall passed reams of secret documents – first hidden in the folds of a newspaper, later camera film of reports he had photographed in the office. Back in London, where he had access to atomic secrets, he even sailed through newly introduced ‘Positive Vetting’ security checks, instituted after Burgess and Maclean to look for potential spies. The KGB made him dependent on it by slowly increasing payments, allowing him to move out of his parents’ house and into a flat in the exclusive Dolphin Square apartment block near Westminster inhabited by members of parliament and of the establishment (Vassall would later claim that two Conservative MPs had slept with him at his flat).22 He lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to the pay he received from the Russians of between £500 and £700 a year, usually delivered in bundles of five-pound notes. About half the money went on clothes, partying and holidays; the other half went into savings accounts and to buy Premium Bonds (the KGB managing to support the British Treasury). His treachery went undiscovered until Anatoly Golitsyn and then Yuri Nosenko provided enough clues to identify him. But evidence was still needed that could stand up in court. MI5 began eavesdropping on his Dolphin Square flat and members of its A4 surveillance team followed him to and from work on the Number 24 bus. MI5’s technical wizard Peter Wright said he tried marking some documents with minute amounts of radioactive material which would be picked up by a Geiger counter at exits to the Admiralty, but the plan never worked as wristwatches seemed to set off the detector and management raised concerns about exposing staff to radiation.²³ MI5 then secretly burgled his flat while he was at work. Once it knew there were documents there the Security Service told the police to arrest him and ‘find’ the documents themselves.

Vassall was approached on a London street by two policemen. ‘I think I know what you are after,’ he told them. During the car journey to Scotland Yard, one of the Special Branch officers recalled Vassall ‘panting with fear’. He began to confess. When they asked if he had any cameras in his flat at Dolphin Square, he said he had two and one of them had a film inside. ‘I think you will find what you are looking for on it.’ Once he had been taken to New Scotland Yard, the secrets tumbled out. ‘By the way, Superintendent,’ he told one of the policemen. ‘You will find standing in the wardrobe in the bedroom a small corner piece. This has a concealed aperture at its base.’ He explained that a secret key was hidden in an oblong box which had to be inserted into the bottom shelf to release a hidden catch, causing a shelf to emerge in which more films were stored. In 1962, Vassall, who over seven years had done enormous damage, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. The case, more than almost any other, damaged the government by creating a widespread public belief that it had failed to get a grip on the issue of security.24

Blackmail had always been part of Soviet espionage, but by the late 1960s it had become even more important. The great Soviet agents of the 1930s like the Cambridge spies had been willing recruits, driven by a fear of fascism at that time and still able to see hope in Communism. Three decades later, the idealistic were harder to find, much to the KGB’s frustration. And so blackmail and the offer of money were employed more regularly. Many intelligence officers feel uncomfortable anyway with ideological recruits since they are less likely to do what they are told. Once someone has received money, they will also find it harder to walk away.

Did the British employ blackmail as well? There was a debate within the service about whether or not to follow Soviet methods. One of those opposed to its use was Gerry Warner. ‘I don’t believe in blackmail for both moral and practical reasons. An agent who is working because he is being blackmailed, because he is being coerced into it, he – or she – is never going to be reliable. He has every good reason to betray you if he thinks he can get away with it … An agent who is being blackmailed has no reason to tell you the truth – he may make things up. He has no loyalty to either himself or to you so it is not a practical business and quite clearly it is not a moral business. If we had descended to the kind of practices that the KGB and GRU routinely practised there was no point in doing the job.’²⁵ But there is evidence that blackmail was occasionally attempted. MI5 was said to have tried to ensnare a KGB officer in London by introducing him at a party to a high-class call girl who was on its books and then photographing him in the act and entering the room. But when the MI5 man confronted the naked Russian, he simply demanded to talk to his Embassy and refused to co-operate.²⁶ ‘Obviously a new recruit is always going to ask the question “Do we blackmail people, do we seek to compromise them, do we seek to put pressure on them?” a chief of MI6 later claimed. ‘No is the answer … in 1923 an internal study of the service and the methods used by the service wrote, “an individual’s vices are not played upon in order to obtain a hold upon him”. There you have it in one sentence. Do we use pressure? No we don’t.’27

Vassall had been sufficiently important to be run by the KGB chief in London, the domineering Nikola Rodin. But the Soviet Embassy was not the only home for spies. There was another elite breed of KGB officer who truly operated out of sight. These were the famed Russian ‘illegals’. On 3 March 1955, the liner America docked at Southampton. One of those to disembark was a Canadian named Gordon Lonsdale. Well spoken, handsome and replete with cash, he used his connections as a member of a St James’s club, the Royal Overseas League (patron: the Queen), to rent a top-end apartment just off Regent’s Park. He then enrolled to take a course learning Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies. But while other students spent their time struggling with the new language, Lonsdale found it all too easy. The reason was that he could already speak the language fluently. The course was simply cover, an excuse to find his feet in London and meet the many government officials also taking it. And Lonsdale was not really Lonsdale.

The real Gordon Lonsdale was most likely dead. He had been a Canadian whose Finnish mother had taken him to the Soviet Union. He probably died around the age of thirty. His death had been covered up by the KGB who had stolen his identity and given it to one of their most prized assets – a man called Konon Molody. Molody was born in Moscow and had been chosen for the life of an illegal. How early no one knows, but he was sent to California to learn English with an aunt when he was aged just ten. After returning to the USSR, he then went to Canada to familiarise himself with his new identity. He had holes drilled in his teeth and went to a specific dentist in Vancouver who would recognise the cavities. That he was a patient named Molody reciting a line from Heinrich Heine would confirm that he was the right person. The dentist then helped him use Lonsdale’s birth certificate to get hold of a Canadian passport, allowing him to build a credible back-story – or legend.²⁸ This had to be watertight. The illegals operate under deep cover. There is no pretence of being a Soviet diplomat and these men and women have no diplomatic immunity if they are caught. Even more remarkably, they give no sign of being Russian but take on a totally different nationality. These were the spies used to meet the truly important agents in the West.

Once in London, Lonsdale moved into business. He had spotted a gap in the market from his time in North America – Britain had yet to develop the American love affair with the jukebox. So he began selling the machines carrying the latest rock-and-roll songs. It was a job that allowed him to travel widely. He had a natural aptitude for business and next became director of a company selling bubblegum machines. At one point he was making so much money that he was able to pay his profits back to the KGB like the good Communist that he was. All the time, he was waiting for instructions to be activated. Every day he visited one of the red London telephone boxes near the back entrance to the Savoy Hotel on the Strand. He would pretend to use the phone but actually feel underneath the wooden shelf holding the telephone directories for a map pin. When he eventually found the pin, he knew it was a sign to head for a dead-letter box. There he found a small wedding-ring case with instructions inside on where to meet a senior KGB officer to receive his marching orders. It was time to get down to his real work. He had an agent to run.

Harry Houghton enjoyed the seedier side of life. When he was posted as a clerk to Warsaw in 1951 he had begun to dabble in the black market, travelling with a gun to seal deals in the back streets of the city involving illicit penicillin supplies (not dissimilar to Harry Lime in Vienna). Booze and women flowed freely and his marriage came under strain. This had all been noticed by his bosses and after being spotted drunk at a reception he was sent back to Britain to work at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, joined to the mainland by a causeway at Chesil Beach.29 Houghton would later allege that his treachery began one afternoon when his office phone rang and the caller said he had come from Poland with a message from an old girlfriend. Houghton claimed they had met at Dulwich Picture Gallery and the man told him the girl would like to leave but would be allowed to do so only if Houghton could provide some information. ‘Putting it bluntly, all the later mistakes stemmed from that one mistake – chasing a bit of skirt behind the Iron Curtain,’ he would later say, explaining that it all started gently with a few innocuous documents before the temperature was raised.30 These were lies. Houghton had unilaterally offered secrets to the other side in Warsaw in exchange for cold hard cash.³¹ He had provided thick bundles of documents including the Naval Attaché’s codebooks. Back in Britain, his work then accelerated. He was given a Minox camera which could pass as a cigarette lighter and copied thousands of files from a safe room where security was lax. In London, amid concerns for the security of their valuable agent, the KGB – which had taken control of him from the Poles – switched to running him through Lonsdale rather than through an Embassy-based KGB officer (although initially Houghton was led to believe he was still meeting Poles in case it scared him off, a so-called ‘False Flag’ operation).³² Houghton would carry a newspaper in his left hand as he entered the Bunch of Grapes pub on Brompton Road. ‘Is that the evening paper you’ve got there?’ a man would ask.

‘No, I’m afraid it’s the daily,’ Houghton would reply.

‘I wanted the racing results,’ the man would say and walk into the gentlemen’s lavatory. A few minutes later Houghton would follow to pick up a package. As their marriage fell apart, his wife noticed his strange trips to London on the first Saturday of each month and even spotted secret documents at home. She told a number of officials that she thought her husband was in touch with Communist agents. This information was sent to MI5, but everyone agreed she was simply being spiteful and making it up. Her accusations were ‘nothing more than the outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife’, it was said. She and Houghton soon separated.³³

Houghton, even though he was street-smart, proved easy prey for a skilled agent handler like Lonsdale. Lonsdale convinced him that the two men were friends. ‘I came to enjoy the company of the people I worked with, and the challenges they set,’ recalled Houghton. ‘We were a team.’³⁴ There was also the sheer exhilaration of being a spy. The feelings were never reciprocated. ‘He was vain as well as shifty,’ Lonsdale said contemptuously of Houghton. ‘Once he has his claws into the agent, there’s no getting away,’ he added, describing how a good officer traps his target. Lonsdale always agreed the next meeting place and time so that there would be no need for phone calls or a trail for MI5 to follow.

Houghton’s access to secrets was limited after it had been noticed that some documents had been misplaced overnight, but he then found a new route through a girlfriend, Ethel ‘Bunty’ Gee. When he first told her what he was doing she refused to believe it and then began to cry. But she quickly changed her mind and began to cooperate (‘She’s very friendly and talkative. But an awful cook,’ Lonsdale told the KGB in one message after dinner at their house).35 At one of many meetings a bundle of 150 five-pound notes was handed over in a brown carrier bag. Lonsdale would receive messages from Moscow on a standard short-wave radio receiver at prearranged frequencies usually at three or four in the morning.

A Polish defector – codenamed ‘Sniper’ – revealed in April 1960 that the Poles had recruited an agent in Warsaw, and Houghton was soon put under surveillance by MI5, whose spycatchers had been embarrassed when they realised they already had a trace on him thanks to his ex-wife’s suspicions.³⁶ Houghton was watched meeting a man on a park bench and then in a café at Waterloo where an envelope was handed over. The man was then identified as Gordon Lonsdale. MI5 broke into Lonsdale’s flat and installed a listening device. Lonsdale was seen delivering items to a safety deposit box at the Midland Bank on Great Portland Street. As the MI5 officer who opened the box flicked through a set of photographs, he saw something which halted him in his tracks. One of the pictures was of himself.³⁷ He had some explaining to do, but realised that he and Lonsdale had both been at a party thrown by a Canadian diplomat and Lonsdale had been taking clandestine photos. The box also contained a cigarette lighter set in a bowl. Peter Wright X-rayed these back at MI5, which revealed a hollow base acting as a secret compartment. Using a rubber suction cup and tweezers he carefully pulled out a set of tiny one-time cipher pads and London map references. Everything was carefully copied and then returned to the safety deposit box in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Did Lonsdale realise he was being watched? Wright would later believe that signs of increased radio traffic at the Soviet Embassy at the time the safety deposit box was removed was an indication that a mole in MI5 had tipped off the KGB.³⁸

Small groups of watchers would tail Lonsdale from his office and then peel off to be replaced by others. This went on for weeks, MI5 officers privately wondering at the quantity and quality of women with whom Lonsdale seemed to consort. They also learnt that he used the cistern in a toilet at the Classic Cinema at Baker Street as a drop point, hiding notes and radio spare parts in a condom deposited in the lavatory. He was also spotted heading to a bungalow in the bucolic London suburb of Ruislip. It was the home of a sociable, elderly couple who ran an antiquarian booksellers on the Strand, Peter and Helen Kroger. What MI5 call a ‘static observation post’ – in other words a camera in a neighbour’s house – was set up to watch the comings and goings of this innocent-looking couple. Peter Wright began reading some of Lonsdale’s messages from Moscow which included not only professional information about how to run Houghton, but also news of his wife and children back home. They were missing him and wanted him back.

In January 1961, the CIA informed MI5 that Sniper was defecting and so the net had to be drawn in. On a Friday night, Arthur Martin and Peter Wright from MI5 sat in a brown cell-like room in their headquarters and listened in to the sounds from Lonsdale’s flat which they had bugged. Listening to targets like Lonsdale sometimes generated a strange affinity among the buggers as the intimate details of a person’s life were revealed. ‘It’s not as if he’s a traitor … not like Houghton. He’s just doing his job like us,’ Wright reflected.39 They heard him make love to a girl and then in the morning persuade her to leave, saying he had urgent business. Lonsdale, Houghton and Gee were all meeting at Waterloo Bridge Road. Houghton thought he had seen someone running behind him to catch his bus but thought nothing much of it. As Gee handed over a shopping bag containing secret films, three cars drew up on the kerb and a dozen men in regulation beige mackintoshes seized the group. Special Branch went to visit the Kroger house. The Krogers were not who they appeared to be. They were two more Russian illegals – real names Morris and Lona Cohen. They had operated in the United States in the 1940s until Philby had tipped the KGB off that they might be discovered. In the London suburbs, their job was to support Lonsdale and act as the link between him and Moscow. The Special Branch officer told Lona she would be taken away for questioning. Could she just stoke the boiler before she went? she asked. The officer was sharp enough to say, ‘First let me see what’s in your handbag.’ She refused. There was a struggle. Inside the bag, the officer found a glass slide with three microdots and a typed sheet of code. When the home was searched a microdot reader was found in a box of face powder. Microdots allowed documents to be reduced to a size sometimes of less than a millimetre and then concealed, even in a bottle of orange juice. Also discovered were seven passports and the crucial piece of equipment – a powerful radio transmitter in a grey suitcase-sized case which could compress a long message and then send it as a burst transmission all the way to Moscow in a few seconds.

Lonsdale would not talk. No one understood yet that he was an illegal. It took a strange bit of detective work to understand that he was not really Lonsdale after all. The doctor in Canada who had been present at the real Lonsdale’s birth was tracked down. He remembered the birth because he had had to travel miles into the countryside down dark lanes. He checked his records which showed that the real Lonsdale had been circumcised as a baby.40 The man who had been arrested had not been. The revelations of illegals, radio sets in the suburbs and treacherous Britons were sensational and captivated the nation, leading to much despair on the part of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.⁴¹ So important was the trial that Lonsdale/ Molody was prosecuted by the Attorney General himself, the formidable Reginald Manningham-Buller. The sentence was twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Manningham-Buller had also dealt with the Blake case personally. He had proposed to the Prime Minister that Blake should be charged on five counts for each posting and he made sure the judge knew that at least forty agents had been betrayed.⁴² The high-profile spy trials meant that reporters were frequently camped out on the doorstep of Manningham-Buller’s home. He developed a distaste for the world of spies which he regarded as somewhat seedy. The Attorney General’s daughter Eliza, barely into her teens, watched with curiosity, an introduction into a world into which she would later plunge.

In prison, Lonsdale briefly met George Blake. ‘Of one thing I am certain,’ Lonsdale told Blake. ‘You and I are going to be on Red Square for the big parade on the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution.’⁴³ Lonsdale was out not long afterwards. An RAF plane flew him to West Berlin. Then at 5.30 a.m. on 22 April 1964 he was taken in a black Mercedes to the checkpoint at Heerstrasse.44 It had rained through the night and there was a thin drizzle as dawn broke. His car was joined by another yellow Mercedes with an escort of black limos coming from East Berlin. Concrete blocks laid out in a zig-zag slowed the cars as they approached. The two vehicles edged into no man’s land and stopped. Lonsdale stepped out on his side as did a man from the other vehicle. They stood a few yards apart. Their identities were checked by officials from the opposing side with a nod. There were some muted hand signals and then a Soviet official shouted ‘Exchange’ and the two men passed each other. ‘He looks sleek, well fed,’ Greville Wynne thought as he passed Lonsdale. ‘But then he has not been in the Soviet Union for a long time.’ Wynne was taken into a black limo with a Union Jack on the bonnet. The previous day, he had realised he was heading west as his plane flew into the sunset. ‘If you speak or misbehave you will be shot,’ a Soviet consul had told him as they stepped into the car early the next morning.⁴⁵

After more than a year in detention in the USSR, Wynne was now a free man but damaged. Within a few days of being back home, he had a nervous breakdown sitting in his armchair. His wife called MI6, who sent its own doctors. His business was finished and life never quite matched up afterwards to the excitement and danger he had experienced. He lost touch with his wife and son and began to spin fantasies about his role in the Penkovsky case, deceiving himself perhaps above all. Afterwards, MI6 laid down new rules for the use of businessmen, aware of the cost that it had exacted from a man who had just wanted to be part of the club. Konon Molody, Gordon Lonsdale, returned to the Soviet Union a hero but also struggled to adjust. His life in the West had left him impatient with the reality of Communism and he was particularly critical of the way in which Soviet industry was run and international trade conducted. This did not make him popular. He died of a heart attack while picking mushrooms in the woods aged forty-eight.⁴⁶

Blake, Vassall, Portland, Lonsdale – the density of spy cases contributed to the heady atmosphere of the early 1960s as one of Britain’s periodic bouts of spy mania consumed the nation. The politicians were not happy with having to answer questions time and time again about ‘lax’ security. When Vassall was arrested, Prime Minister Macmillan vented his fury against the spies. ‘I am not at all pleased,’ he told Roger Hollis, head of MI5. ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room: he buries it out of sight.’47 He would refer, with some displeasure, to the ‘so-called Security Service’. Often the politicians seemed to want the scandals brushed under the carpet rather than exposed in the courts, hence the offers of immunity to Philby and Blunt.

A climax was reached with the pitch-perfect Profumo Affair. This ticked every box for the hungry press pack. Politicians. Country houses. Showgirls. Russian spies. It was all there, above all the cream of the establishment mixing with the seedy underworld which it could never quite resist. On one night in August 1961, Cliveden, the glorious country house of Lord Astor, played host to the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, Lord Mountbatten and the President of Pakistan as well as nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler and Evgeni Ivanov, an assistant Soviet naval attaché and – of course – a spy. MI5 had itself been trying to get close to Ivanov, adding another layer of complication. When the guests stripped off to take a dive in the pool, Profumo and Keeler met for the first time. As their affair continued, no secrets were ever passed, but for the Secretary of State for War to be having an affair with the same woman as a Russian spy was quite enough once the papers got hold of it. ‘This was all dirt,’ a despondent Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary as his government was rocked by crisis.⁴⁸ The scandal cost Profumo his career. It also made life harder for the Russians. ‘It changed the good face of Soviet citizens. After Profumo, we were considered as all spies,’ says Lyubimov with just a hint of irony.⁴⁹ The British press published pictures of Soviet diplomats, warning the public that these were the people they would be rubbing shoulders with on buses and to beware.

A small purple-covered booklet became Britain’s last line of defence against Communist subversion and the work of Lyubimov and his colleagues (‘he may be closer than you think’). Their Trade is Treachery was distributed to government officials to warn them of what lay in wait. ‘Spies are with us all the time. They are interested in everything … This booklet tells you about the great hostile spy machine that tries to suborn our citizens and turn them into traitors … This booklet tells you how to recognise at once certain espionage techniques, and how to avoid pitfalls which could lead to a national catastrophe or a personal disaster — or both.’ The booklet recounted recent cases and explained how Russians might target and cultivate someone. One piece of advice offered to officials to help them avoid haemorrhaging national secrets was that great Civil Service injunction: ‘Keep the office tidy.’50

And soon the tables were turned on Mikhail Lyubimov. After attending a public lecture he bumped into an individual whom he knew and whom he thought would make a prize agent – a Foreign Office man with links to GCHQ. After all the setbacks experienced with Lonsdale and Blake, the KGB had been keen for Lyubimov to pursue him vigorously. The two set off for a pub and ordered whisky. After the second whisky, the Foreign Office man suddenly stood up and announced that he had to go to the lavatory. Two ‘rough-looking men’ came and seated themselves next to Lyubimov. One seemed a bit unshaven; the other, red faced and plump, sat slumped next to him. ‘Mr Lyubimov, you are a complete failure,’ one of them said. They then revealed that they knew something about him, which Lyubimov will only describe as ‘compromising’. They had the photographs to prove it, they explained. They then uttered the words that send chills down the spine of any diplomat. ‘Mr Lyubimov. Either your career is over or you work for us.’ The men were from MI5.

‘Excuse me,’ he said in shock and stood up. He virtually ran to his car and drove straight to the Embassy to report the incident. A formal protest was soon made to the Foreign Office about the ‘barbarous provocation’ against an innocent Soviet diplomat. The reply came that he had been involved in activities incompatible with his diplomatic status. MI5 had recently decided to try and throw their opponents off balance with a new aggressive strategy.⁵¹ Lyubimov and his family were at least allowed to slip quietly away, avoiding the blaze of publicity that accompanies many an expelled spy’s departure. His time as a spy in London was over. But his involvement with Britain was not. The mischievous desire to subvert remained. Lyubimov returned to Moscow to work on the KGB’s British desk planning future operations against British nationals in the UK and around the world. ‘I remember meeting a British trade unionist in Moscow,’ he wrote later. ‘He was so far to the left it should actually have been him who was recruiting me! When I mentioned that I was connected with the KGB and asked him about the political cooperation he was almost overwhelmed. “At last!” he exclaimed.’52 By the early 1970s Lyubimov had written a thesis entitled ‘Special Traits of the British National Character and their Use in Operational Work’. This paper, which he wrote partly for the guarantee of a 10 per cent salary increase, became the textbook for training a generation of young KGB agents sent to Britain. Among the characteristics for the KGB man to understand and exploit were aggression, self-control, hypocrisy and understatement. It advised them not to start conversations with strangers on the tube and how to buy a round in the pub.⁵³

When he was made deputy chief of the Third Department which dealt with the UK and Scandinavia in 1974, Lyubimov was faced with a challenge. The KGB’s operations against Britain had been decimated. After a torrid decade of spy scandals, MI5 finally got a grip on the Soviet operation in 1971 with the mass expulsion of Soviet ‘diplomats’ in Operation Foot. Patience had finally run out at the top of government and concerns about diplomatic repercussions were brushed aside after the Prime Minister was briefed on the scale of a KGB operation which had led to twelve British subjects being convicted of passing secrets in the previous ten years. The defection of a KGB officer Oleg Lyalin provided the perfect pretext. In April 1971, Lyalin, ostensibly and rather bizarrely the knitwear representative with the Soviet Trade Delegation, walked into Hampstead police station asking to see Special Branch officers. Rather than sweaters and cardigans, Lyalin was in fact an expert in hand-to-hand combat and part of the ultra-secret Department V that dealt with sabotage in the event of war, the latest incarnation of the stay-behind networks of old. No one had ever defected from it before.⁵⁴ He revealed plans to land teams of special forces, flood the London Underground, blow up Fylingdales military base in North Yorkshire and assassinate key figures at the outbreak of war with the aim of demoralising the British population. Among the disclosures was that the KGB had managed to recruit a clerk in the Greater London Council’s motor-licensing pool which helped them identify the MI5 and police vehicles being used to tail its officers. He was briefly run as an agent in place by MI5 but his complicated personal life (involving large quantities of drink, a Russian wife, a Russian mistress, the wives of Embassy colleagues and a British mistress) soon brought an end to that.

Late one evening Lyalin was careering down Tottenham Court Road drunk. His lights were off and the mysterious blonde at his side scarpered immediately when police pulled him over. Lyalin was placed in the back of their panda car and put his feet up on the seat. ‘What are you playing at?’ the policeman in front asked. ‘You cannot talk to me, you cannot beat me, I am a KGB officer,’ Lyalin replied.55 By the time he appeared in court the next morning, there was no choice but for him to defect straight away. Using Lyalin’s information as the official justification, an existing plan was accelerated and more than a hundred Soviet diplomats were sent packing to Moscow.⁵⁶ It was the largest single diplomatic expulsion in history (although the Prime Minister was warned that even after the expulsion there were still 137 intelligence officers from Eastern Europe at work, including fifty-five Poles and forty-six from Czechoslovakia).⁵⁷ The drinks were cracked open in MI5 headquarters to celebrate, pulled out of a large safe where they were kept. Staff knew that for the first time they had cleared the nest of vipers that had been running rings around them through the 1960s. The KGB in London never recovered.

So how could Lyubimov revitalise the operations in the mid-1970s, especially when new recruits would have little chance of experiencing the realities of life in Britain?⁵⁸ And why were so many Sov Bloc officials defecting one way and so few Westerners going the other way? Who could help?

It was New Year’s Day 1975 and, in a private room of an upmarket restaurant in Moscow, KGB bigwigs clinked vodka glasses and offered lengthy toasts to the health of their guest of honour who was celebrating his birthday. The guest stood for each toast and politely raised his glass, but Kim Philby looked increasingly bored. To Lyubimov’s eyes, he resembled a ‘run of the mill, semi-unemployed pensioner, who was dying to get stuck into some real work’.⁵⁹

Philby’s existence in Moscow had embodied the strange afterlife of the spy – once so highly prized but increasingly redundant as the store of valuable knowledge is eroded by time. Philby saw himself as a Soviet intelligence officer and had expected to be masterminding operations against Britain, just as the press back home assumed he was. But the KGB never quite trusted him, a few wondering even if he was really a double agent who had been working for British intelligence all along. ‘It is very much in line with a myth about the subtlety of the British intelligence,’ recalls Lyubimov with a touch of sadness for his old comrade, with whom he became close friends. ‘Philby could not grasp he was no longer a valued agent but a problem.’60 ‘He was a strong romantic. And he remained a believer in Communism – not in the Communism like the Soviet one but that Communism of Marx and Engels and he had to adapt himself to the situation in the Soviet Union because there was no democracy here at all. He knew perfectly well that he was bugged.’ There were concerns he might flee, especially since he never quite lost his independent, anti-establishment streak. There was also an intrinsic wariness of someone who might profess to be a Communist but who was still as British as they came, a Cambridge graduate from an upper-middle-class family. Later, Lyubimov would deliver pots of Oxford Coarse-Cut Marmalade and Scotch sent over from England as well as corduroy trousers and Jaeger pullovers. ‘I am convinced that Kim missed England, even though he was at pains to hide this even from those close to him. He was an Englishman to his fingertips, and he needed those now-vanished relics of his former life.’ Philby would cook bacon and eggs and fried bread for breakfast and then eat while listening to the cricket scores on the BBC World Service, reading the odd John le Carré novel.

The drinking had got worse in the early Moscow years. Hair of the dog at noon. Maybe a nasty fall later in the day, disturbed dreams at night followed by a morning hangover before it began again. His relationship with Eleanor, who had followed him to Moscow in September 1963, never recovered from his betrayal. It was not so much his being a spy as his leaving one day without so much as a word. They lived for a while in a ‘huge grim block’ which reminded her of the Lubyanka prison.⁶¹ On a long walk one day she asked, ‘What is more important in your life – me and the children or the Communist Party?’ He answered without hesitation: ‘The party, of course.’ Philby never saw Guy Burgess again after their dinner in Washington in 1951. By the time Philby arrived in Moscow, Burgess had drunk himself to oblivion and was already on his deathbed. Philby, unforgiving of Burgess’s ‘betrayal’ in running and pointing the finger at him, never visited as his former friend’s overworked liver finally gave out. He barely knew Donald Maclean. They had kept their distance since the 1930s, but they began to meet, play bridge and joke about how ‘when the revolution comes’ they would visit Italy and Paris. Eleanor thought their reminiscing about those they had known felt stale and forced. When she returned from a brief visit to America, she found the Macleans’ marriage had broken down and she realised that Philby had moved in on his fellow spy’s wife. She left soon afterwards.

A fellow spy would fortuitously provide Philby an escape raft from alcoholic self-destruction. Philby had not known George Blake when they both worked for MI6, but the two former officers briefly became friends. Blake had engineered a daring escape through a window in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 with the help of sympathetic peace activists who then sheltered him and drove him to Berlin in a camper van. It meant he was able to meet Lonsdale/Molody on Red Square for that anniversary after all. In Moscow one day, a colleague of Blake’s wife called Rufina was introduced to Philby. He quickly made his intentions clear. She thought he looked a ‘middle-aged man with a puffy face’ but while the looks had gone, the charm had not, nor the determination. ‘You’re a lucky bloke,’ Blake remarked to him.62 Rufina found it hard to reconcile the gentle, sometimes helpless man she knew with the master spy. He told her he never enjoyed the deception. They married and she had placed him on an even keel by the time he met Lyubimov.

After that night at the restaurant, Lyubimov and Philby became close friends, meeting regularly and drinking late into the night in Philby’s book-lined apartment. Lyubimov found Philby’s ideas for revitalising the London Residency useful although not enormously original. His most valuable role came in running a training class for new recruits. The fresh young KGB men would arrive at a safe flat on Gorky Street to be told what to wear and how to start a conversation when in England. Philby would role-play being a civil servant and then ask them to approach him and talk to him as a potential recruit.

Only once was Philby allowed to enter the headquarters of the service he had sworn loyalty to so many years earlier. ‘I have held official passes to seven major intelligence headquarters,’ he told an audience in 1977. ‘So I claim that this is the eighth major intelligence organisation which I have succeeded in penetrating.’63 ‘There was a terrible silence,’ remembers Lyubimov and then a few angry whispers before Philby added that where before he had been surrounded by wolves, this time it was by comrades. There was relieved and enthusiastic applause.

He took the gathered officers through his recruitment, explaining what had made his first case officer so appealing and how important his controller’s patience had been in waiting for him slowly to establish his credentials so that he could eventually join the Secret Service. He also gave them a piece of advice: never confess if confronted – an interesting remark given that he had provided half a confession to Elliott in Beirut. KGB officers found Philby very different from Blake. Blake clung to the belief that his work had not led to the death of any agents. Philby knew it had ‘and it didn’t seem to bother him’. It was a war, a Cold one perhaps, but a war nevertheless.⁶⁴

There was only one Englishman and one former member of MI6 who truly understood Philby. Some friendships could survive betrayal. When Graham Greene came out to visit, it had been thirty-five years since the two had last met. Both were nervous. Greene sat silent in the car as it approached Philby’s Moscow apartment.⁶⁵ When he walked in, they hugged each other and clapped each other on the back. The vodka came out and two greying old men talked about what they had done in the war. Greene had written an introduction to Philby’s 1968 memoir, My Silent War, which was remarkable in its defence of his old colleague. Greene wrote of how he had been dismayed by Philby’s brutal manoeuvring against a colleague and how he had seen it as pure ambition. ‘I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself and so my old liking for him comes back.’ Greene offered a strange defence of Philby. It was like English Catholics who had helped Spain, he wrote, and who would have had to live through the Inquisition. What mattered to Greene was that Philby had acted out of belief and not self-interest. He even later defended his role in the deaths of the agents sent by boat to Albania. ‘They were going into their country armed to do damage to that country. They were killed instead of killing.’⁶⁶ The introduction was a very public message – you are still my friend.

Greene had also sent Philby a draft of a novel he had waited many years to write. The Human Factor was the story of an MI6 officer who betrays his service to the Soviets, but for love not ideology. The hero-of-sorts falls for the girl in Africa not Austria, but, as with Philby, the die had been cast from that moment. Philby said the one thing he disliked was the portrayal of the drab life in Moscow for the man after he is forced to flee Britain. Greene did not change anything.67 The same year the book came out, he had been asked what he would have done if he had known of Philby’s treason in the 1940s. ‘I think perhaps, if in a drunken moment he had let slip a hint, I would have given him twenty-four hours to get clear and then reported it,’ he replied.⁶⁸ For Greene, there was always the fascination with intelligence as a game in which human motivations were played out.

The ‘turning’ of a KGB man, for instance, would never surprise me, because the profession can become a sort of game as abstract as chess: the spy takes more interest in the mechanics of his calling than its ultimate goal – the defence of his country. The ‘game’ (a serious game) achieves such a degree of sophistication that the player loses sight of his moral values. I can understand a man’s temptation to turn double agent, for the game becomes more interesting.

When it came to Philby, Greene added that he still admired the way his friend had played the game and especially his constancy. ‘I myself would not be capable of such courage, of such a force of conviction.’⁶⁹

That day in Moscow, the two men realised that a deep bond lay between them. Yet it was not faith but doubt. ‘He is burdened by doubt as well,’ Philby told Rufina afterwards.⁷⁰ Greene had cited one of his heroes Monsignor Quixote: ‘Sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith.’ Greene was never a Communist, Philby never a Christian. But both men understood the other’s faith and with it the awareness of a chasm of doubt which, if fallen into, would render their lives as lived meaningless. ‘For the first time, we were able to speak frankly with each other.’ Philby had been used by the KGB in the first years after arriving, including not just writing his own book but also ghosting Gordon Lonsdale’s, ‘but when they didn’t use me, the doubt crept in,’ he later said.⁷¹ Greene was excoriated in the British press for his dinner (‘morally on a par with having a holiday with Dr Goebbels while this country was at war with Nazi Germany’, said the Daily Mail) but he went back three more times.72 For others the treachery remained too much. In the late 1980s, John le Carré was allowed into Russia and received a message at a party saying that a ‘great admirer’ Kim Philby wanted to meet him. ‘It was a horrific suggestion,’ le Carré later explained. ‘I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand. It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive.’⁷³

Was friendship Greene’s only motivation? He kept in touch with MI6 long after leaving and did the occasional job for them.⁷⁴ He passed on to the service the letters and postcards he received from Philby, once saying, ‘Well, if there was anything political in it, I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield, so it was either information or disinformation.’⁷⁵ The friendship may have been real between the two men but it also might have been useful for the service to know what the old boy was thinking and also to keep a channel open in case he ever wanted to change sides again and get out. The Soviets certainly worried about the latter possibility. They sometimes wondered if he had fooled them all along, like he had fooled everyone else. Yet until his death in 1988 Philby always remained an Englishman in his manners but a Communist in his beliefs, willing to criticise both worlds but ultimately loyal to the latter. Even his former KGB controller was never quite sure about Philby. ‘In the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.’⁷⁶ When Philby died, Lyubimov would mourn the departure of a friend. But he would also be living with his own experience of the bitterness of betrayal as another of his friends had become the man who gave MI6 their opportunity to avenge the past.