7

ESCAPE FROM MOSCOW

It was June 1985. As he opened the door of his Moscow apartment, Mikhail Lyubimov did not need to draw on his largely redundant spy skills to realise that something was wrong. Tension was etched on to the face of the old friend who stood on his doorstep. There were too many beads of sweat even for the stifling city heat of a Moscow summer.1 Lyubimov was an outsider now. A second divorce and an independent streak was enough to draw the ire of the hardliners in the KGB who had forced his departure a few years earlier. He had embarked on a new career as a writer.² But his visitor was still an insider and he was not supposed to be in Moscow. He was supposed to be in London.

The lean KGB officer stepped into the kitchen and turned on the tap. ‘What are you doing?’ Lyubimov asked, thinking that he was trying to drown out any conversation if anyone was listening in. He just needed a drink, the man explained. He was in a bad way. His throat was dry. The vodka came out.

Memories had begun to pierce the fog that enveloped Oleg Gordievsky’s mind and that shrouded events of a few days earlier. The journey to a small guesthouse on the outskirts of Moscow and the offer of some Armenian brandy was clear. But after that there were only brief, malevolent flashes like a dark forest lit up by lightning strikes. There were the faces of the men staring at him and the words ‘confess’ repeated again and again. He had been drugged, he knew. But what had he said? He remembered a kind of euphoria that had come over him after the brandy which left him laughing and arguing and talking expansively with no nervousness or fear. He knew he had been close to breaking. He knew they were on to him.

As the memories slowly fought their way to the surface, Gordievsky had begun to recall more of what had been said.

‘Why do you have all those anti-Soviet volumes – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Maximov and the rest?’ the voice asked him.

‘But of course,’ he heard himself say, ‘as a PR [Political Reporting] Line officer I was supposed to read books like that.’

‘You used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal in this country.’3

There were other accusations that had also seeped into his consciousness before he arrived at Lyubimov’s apartment which he did not now mention to his friend.

‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,’ they had said. ‘We know you were a British agent. You’d better confess.’ Confess, the man said again and again. You’ve already done it, just do it again, they said, talking slowly as if to a child.

‘No, I’ve nothing to confess,’ Gordievsky could recall replying. He did not mention these exchanges, only the books, to his friend. Gordievsky and Lyubimov had bought the banned books together years earlier when their friendship had been forged serving overseas, happier times when both men were rising through the ranks of the KGB. Those were days when Gordievsky had knocked on Lyubimov’s door and walked in with a batch of telegrams from Moscow Centre and the latest gossip, not with a bottle of vodka and talk of interrogation. Lyubimov, unaware of how serious events were, tried to reassure his friend that even if he was fired it was not the end of the world. ‘I had to leave the KGB,’ he explained. ‘Find something interesting to do. It may be a blessing.’ Once Gordievsky had left, Lyubimov hurried to find his copies of Solzhenitsyn, wrapped them in plastic and buried them in the garden. Just in case.⁴

The KGB was family to Gordievsky, but not everyone loves or is loyal to their kin. His father and brother had both served in its ranks. But within his home lay the seeds of mistrust which would lead to betrayal. His father was a committed Communist who never spoke to his son of his work. But the young Gordievsky could sometimes glimpse the fear that lay hidden beneath the loyalty. In the late 1930s his father had watched friends and colleagues in the NKVD, the KGB’s forerunner, being arrested as part of the great purges that engulfed the Soviet state. Some had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. The father would repeat the mantra ‘The NKVD is always right,’ but the son would remember the dread that lay beneath the profession of faith. Sometimes the young Oleg would overhear his parents arguing in their bedroom about politics, the only place they could talk freely.5 His mother was not a true believer in the cause; she was more willing to question and criticise. She could see the intrigues and the brutality that her husband, perhaps for self-protection, chose not to speak of. For Oleg the combination of fascination and fear of the secret state came young.

The interwoven strands of loyalty and mistrust coexisted in the young man as he grew up and went to college, planning on a career in the Foreign Ministry. On the surface he was a normal Homo Sovieticus, able to live under the doublethink that George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, toeing the party line in public, thinking more freely in private. Parents would warn children what to joke about, especially outside the home. When he studied languages at college, Gordievsky noticed that many other students chose not to read Western newspapers even when they were finally allowed to for fear of being seen as overly interested in ‘subversive’ views. Gordievsky was curious enough to read them and began to open his mind.

The unusual opportunity of six months’ work experience abroad bought Gordievsky’s ticket on a train that arrived in Berlin late on the evening of 11 August 1961. The talk in the city was of refugees heading west by the thousand. ‘Don’t go out anywhere,’ he was warned by an Embassy official the next evening. By morning, barbed wire was rising across the city, marking the ugly, painful birth of the Berlin Wall. He watched the violence which met those who tried to escape its rise. The reality that coercion rather than consent underpinned Communism was being laid bare before his eyes and yet he was still enough of his father’s son to take up the offer to work with the instrument of repression, the KGB. The lure of foreign travel, the excitement of emptying dead-letter boxes and the thrill of meeting deep-cover illegal agents was too strong a pull for the adventurous young man, even if the first doubts had taken root.

Next came marriage to Yelena and a first foreign posting to Copenhagen, a taste of the West. The small liberties were what struck him – the opportunity to listen to church music, or to borrow whatever books you wanted from a library. Gordievsky’s cover was in the consular department but his real task was supporting the illegals in the country, checking dead-letter boxes and signal sites. It was also here that his friendship with Mikhail Lyubimov began. After Her Majesty’s Government had declared him persona non grata, Lyubimov had found his way to Copenhagen and the position of deputy resident. He had initially missed the bright lights and glamour of London’s streets and parties but slowly began to find some compensation in the bracing walks, fresh fish and unstuffiness of Danish life. The two men, both educated at the Institute of International Relations, recognised an independent, free-thinking streak in each other – although Gordievsky’s would take him to a place Lyubimov would not follow. They considered themselves to be different from some of the more thuggish zealots of the KGB. In the evening, the Embassy club showed Russian films and served cheap vodka, but the two men often opted out in favour of classical music and conversation.6 Both agreed that banning the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn had been a mistake. That the two men felt comfortable enough in each other’s company to talk politics was a sign of genuine trust, since a report to superiors about an indiscretion could be terminal for a career.

The two KGB officers had watched in curious trepidation in 1968 as liberal reformers in Czechoslovakia first began to open the country up. This had turned to horror as the Soviet tanks went in to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ and with it hopes of socialism with a human face. For Gordievsky, the feeling of alienation from the system he served went deeper as he watched crowds gather and hurl missiles at the Embassy in Copenhagen. The seeds of dissent planted earlier in life and nurtured by the sight of the Wall going up in 1961 had grown into a deep-seated but clandestine conviction that he no longer wanted to work for a ‘criminal’ regime. He needed to cleanse his conscience. But rather than resign he wanted to subvert from within and started to think about how to offer himself up to his enemies. ‘They’ve done it! It’s unbelievable,’ he told his wife over the phone as the tanks made their way through Prague. ‘I just don’t know what to do.’ He knew the phone would be tapped and hoped that someone would pick up on his comments. But before anyone acted, his time in Denmark was up and by January 1970 he was back in Moscow. Events in London then intervened. In the wake of Oleg Lyalin’s 1971 defection in London and the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers, Gordievsky’s department, which covered Scandinavia as well as Britain, was shaken up. The Danes expelled three ‘diplomats’ and suddenly in October 1972 he had an opportunity to return to Copenhagen.

For his second Danish tour, Gordievsky switched to Line PR of the KGB – reporting on politics. Lyubimov returned a year or two later as resident, allowing the two men to resume their conversations over long walks in the Danish woods. Copenhagen may have lacked London’s pizzazz but at least now Lyubimov was the boss, he reflected. A black Mercedes ferried him to the set of white villas surrounded by gardens which made up the Soviet Embassy just to the north of the city centre. The KGB offices were on the first floor (to prevent tunnelling). A concealed bell had to be rung to gain entry. Lyubimov had his own office in which he hung portraits of his twin heroes, Lenin and Philby, the latter with an inscription from the British spy wishing him luck. ‘Your silver-framed portrait hangs directly above our officer counter near the portrait of the Gods. If my office were raided it would be evidence enough to have me declared persona non grata,’ Lyubimov wrote to Philby, also sending the odd jar of marmalade, some whisky, once even a book of nineteenth-century erotic pictures.7 Lyubimov spent his days contemplating what pitches and dangles to play on the Americans, whose Embassy was separated from his own by only a few hundred yards and a graveyard. His thoughts would be interrupted by the occasional knock on the door and his lean, strong-jawed deputy would enter.

Gordievsky was Lyubimov’s right-hand man. There was no reason to doubt his loyalty. He was always respectful and kept Lyubimov informed of what he was doing, even down to when he was setting off to play badminton. But his loyalty was a lie. Beneath the calm surface, a profound conversion had taken him down a path he had long contemplated. The human factor had also worked along the grain of ideology. Gordievsky’s marriage was breaking down. His wife had embraced feminism and said she did not want children. He had become privately convinced of his decision to work for the other side but had been unsure how to make the approach. A brazen walk into an embassy might be rebuffed, he feared. Then the other side made its move.

On the evening of 2 November 1973 there was a knock on the door of his flat. A Hungarian he had known from Moscow was at the door. Over a whisky, he gave a roundabout story to explain why he happened to be in Denmark and had chosen to drop by. Gordievsky sensed something was up, especially when the man said he had defected from Hungary in 1970. There were nerves on both sides, but they agreed to have lunch the next day. At the lunch, Gordievsky was careful not to show his hand too much, remaining non-committal. Then there was nothing for three weeks. MI6 finally took the plunge at one of Gordievsky’s regular badminton games. In the middle of the game, a man appeared in an overcoat. Gordievsky immediately recognised him as Rob, a forty-something self-confident British diplomat. Gordievsky was surprised by the brazenness of the gambit and broke away from his game to ask what the man wanted. Rob said it would be good to meet and they planned lunch in three days. Gordievsky understood that he had to play it carefully with his own Embassy and informed them of the approach. He was given official permission to meet. Over lunch, the two men chatted warily but amiably.

‘Of course you will write a report about our meeting,’ Rob said at the end.

‘Yes I will, but I will write it in such a way that nothing serious will be said in it,’ Gordievsky replied.8 It was a hint. But then there was nothing. For nearly a year British intelligence failed to reel in the fish that had taken their bait. They were ‘quite timid’, Gordievsky would later say.⁹ The reason was that they thought he was literally too good to be true. The KGB man had to be a dangle, a plant, luring them into a trap. Gordievsky had deliberately tried to provoke an approach and that seemed suspicious to an intelligence service still saturated by a fear of moles, double agents and deception. But after a year Rob appeared again at the badminton court and suggested a meeting. Finally, in a bar at an upmarket hotel, the two men began to open up. ‘Now, Mr Gordievsky. It is dangerous to meet here,’ he said. Gordievsky understood that the opening up of a clandestine path was also the offer of betrayal. ‘The Russians do not come here,’ Gordievsky replied, crossing an invisible line that both spies understood. An agreement was made to meet at a more secure venue on the outskirts of Copenhagen. This was to be the point of no return. But at the meeting the limits of British knowledge were still clear.

‘You’re KGB,’ Rob said.

‘Of course.’

‘Tell me, then. Who is the PR Line Deputy in your station?’

Gordievsky stared and smiled before saying, ‘I am.’ But behind the smiles he was nervous.

At their next meeting, Rob introduced a tall, well-built MI6 officer and explained that he would be Gordievsky’s case officer. It is common practice to use one officer to carry out the recruitment of an agent and then another to run them. While a few individuals can manage to be both ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’, MI6 officers are carefully assessed to see if they are more suited to either recruiting or running and to doing so in a particular environment. In the Middle East a brazen, confident pitch might be expected by the recipient while with Soviet officials even an invitation to dinner might be considered far too forward. The emphasis with them was instead on being perceptive about the small signs that someone might be just that bit different and willing to take risks, perhaps by having a local girlfriend. It was more about being receptive so that a Soviet official understood they could talk to you if they wanted to. Many MI6 officers wondered how Rob had managed to recruit the service’s most important agent as they considered him rather unimpressive, but his sensitive manner had ensured that Gordievsky found him easy to talk to. In Gordievsky’s case there was an added factor. It was not the British who had spotted him first but the Danes. They had decided that Gordievsky looked interesting and had studied him for some time, but they realised they were not in a position to recruit him and run him properly. That would require Russian-speakers, resources and an established infrastructure. They worked closely and had a good relationship with the British (closer than with the Americans, who sometimes exhibited a tendency to ride roughshod over local services) and so had reached out. Running Gordievsky in Denmark would be much easier for MI6 with local help.

The tall new officer was the man who would run Gordievsky, but their opening meeting was a disaster. Gordievsky did not take to the unsmiling figure and found him vain and pushy. Gordievsky’s English was poor, so the two men spoke German. The MI6 officer nearly blew the whole affair with an aggressive, hostile approach, pounding Gordievsky verbally with question after question about KGB operations. ‘Why is he so aggressive? I came with an open soul,’ Gordievsky thought. He was unsure what to do but told himself to calm down and suppress the feelings of disappointment. This man cannot be typical of the British, he thought.10

It was only decades later that Gordievsky learnt the reason for his aggression. When they finally met again, Rob, who had recruited him, would confess that he had been convinced Gordievsky was a double agent and had filed reports strongly expressing that view. ‘From the start to the finish, I thought you were an agent provocateur,’ he later told Gordievsky, explaining that he simply could not believe that any KGB officer could be so willing to provide so much and be so open (although the KGB almost never used its own officers as agents provocateurs since they knew too much and might decide to turn for real).¹¹ But once MI6 officers saw the volume and quality of Gordievsky’s reporting, they soon changed their mind.

Gordievsky was discomfited by the British aggression but he had made his choice. He said he did not want to do anything to hurt his colleagues in Copenhagen and he did not want any money. He wanted to do it for belief.¹² The British failed to appreciate the depth of his ideological conversion, and his case officer occasionally brought newspaper cuttings designed to show the Soviets in a bad light. Back at the Embassy, Lyubimov never suspected a thing. ‘He was very tactful. He showed his loyalty from time to time,’ he says of his friend. ‘He was very attentive.’

And so it began. The rushed meetings in Danish flats. The gradual softening of the relationship with his case officer until, after two years, he was replaced with a more amenable officer. The relief, bordering on euphoria, of having finally embarked on the path he wanted to walk coupled with the perpetual fear of being discovered with a camera in hand and secrets on film. The fear ratcheted up a level when a KGB agent in Norway was arrested thanks to his assistance and word got round that there might be a leak. Eventually his tour was up and it was time to return to Moscow. One problem was a divorce from his wife and a new relationship. This was awkward in KGB circles. Fortunately, Gordievsky’s boss and friend helped him out. Lyubimov warned him of trouble and promised to help by sending favourable reports to Moscow on his work, saying that he was a good candidate for promotion and particularly for the job of deputy head of the Third Department of the First Chief Directorate.13 There would be no hushed meetings and clandestine contacts between Gordievsky and the British in Moscow. Even with the strictest Moscow Rules, it would have been suicidal. Everyone who had tried it had been captured. Two decades on, the lesson of Penkovskythat the KGB was dominant on its home turf – was still keenly felt.

Then came one of those strokes of luck which a good intelligence operation needs. In late 1981, a job came up in London. Slots were precious and hard to come by following the 1971 expulsion. The arrival of a visa application for an Oleg Gordievsky was met with intense excitement at Century House, MI6’s grey tower-block headquarters south of the river where it had moved from Broadway in the mid-1960s (and which looked more like something out of the Soviet Union than most of its denizens would care to admit). Having been too cautious early on, MI6 was now nearly too eager, the visa being granted a few days more quickly than normal. In preparation for his arrival, Gordievsky was allowed to study the existing KGB files on its past operations in Britain, heroic accounts of the ‘Magnificent’ Cambridge Five and the other moles and spies that had riddled the British establishment. He paid very close attention.

The city that Gordievsky watched out of the window of the Embassy car that crawled through the traffic from Heathrow in June 1982 was a world away from the clean, compact openness of Copenhagen. It was big, smelly, sprawling and dirty. Where Lyubimov had been enthralled by his London of the 1960s, Gordievsky was initially shocked by the country to which he had offered his loyalty but in which he had never set foot. That year unemployment had topped three million for the first time since the 1930s as Thatcherism began to bite. But the Iron Lady’s popularity had skyrocketed thanks to victory against Argentina in the Falklands War that spring.

Gordievsky never had any doubts he was following the right path ideologically. But it was his personal ties that introduced the only moments of intensely private questioning. He was arriving in London with his second wife and two daughters. He had embarked on his clandestine life as a British agent when his first marriage was on the rocks. Now, he sometimes looked at his wife and daughters and occasionally wondered where his path would lead. ‘What have I done? How do I get out of this?’ he thought to himself. He knew there was no way out. Sometimes he felt the urge to tell his wife. One time he was bitterly criticising some decision in Moscow and she told him to stop. ‘You cannot do something about it,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can do something. Maybe one day you will see that I was able to do something about it,’ he replied. He nearly went further but stopped himself. Her mother and father worked for the KGB. What if she betrayed him? Even if she would not do that, would it not be safer for her not to know in case she was ever questioned? He never shared these moments of doubt with his MI6 case officers and they never suspected.14

On his second night in London, he went to a phone box and called a number. A tape recording was waiting on the other end. If an agent surfaces anywhere in the world there is usually an attempt initially to reconnect him with his old case officer even if he has moved on. The next time Gordievsky called, his last handler from Denmark answered and they met in Sloane Street. He was to meet in the lobby of a hotel and then follow him to his car. They then drove to a safe flat in Bayswater. The man explained that he was now posted abroad but had come back to pass Gordievsky over to his new case officer.

Like handing over a priceless vase, the process of passing an agent from one officer to another is a delicate procedure. Agents rely on their handlers as the only person they can confide in, and so poor chemistry, as Gordievsky had encountered at the start, can lead to a stumble and perhaps a fall. Gordievsky’s new case officer was only in his mid-thirties but with the first hint that the dark hair was receding. He was a details man who had a natural empathy and an understanding of Russian which meant Gordievsky took to him straight away.

John Scarlett has never publicly confirmed that he was the officer assigned to Gordievsky. MI6 has never even formally acknowledged that Gordievsky was its agent. It never publicly confirms or denies the identity of anyone who has spied for it for a simple, utilitarian reason. While the CIA will always be able to offer more cash to lure potential spies motivated by money, the British argue that they maintain their own competitive niche in the spies’ marketplace by offering something that some spies may treasure even more highly than money – the promise of secrecy and of never revealing their identity. This, oddly, applies even when an agent identifies themselves publicly and, in Gordievsky’s case, even after they receive an honour from the Queen, a CMG for ‘services to the security of the United Kingdom’, the same honour, it was noted at the time, that James Bond received in fiction.15

Scarlett, a doctor’s son, had grown up in South London and read history at Oxford before joining MI6 in 1971. His first posting was to Nairobi where a letter from Shergy, then head of personnel, informed him that he had been chosen to learn Russian before being sent to the Soviet Union, a sign that he was being fast-tracked and that those above him thought he had what it took to play by Moscow Rules. ‘Running agents in the old Soviet Union was an extremely difficult thing to do and it was very stressful and it could be very exciting,’ Scarlett explained in a BBC interview.¹⁶ ‘There was huge attention to detail, very careful case management, very careful tradecraft, very careful planning. So it was not easy.’

Moscow and the Soviet Union lay at the heart of Scarlett’s career and eventually provided his path to the top of the service. But his cover was blown early, according to Russian reports.¹⁷ On his arrival in Moscow he inherited an agent in the Soviet navy. Unfortunately, the officer was a plant under Soviet control being used to identify members of the MI6 station. Having your cover as an MI6 officer blown when still in your twenties is normally a minor disaster, restricting your ability to carry out undercover assignments. When Scarlett had to go back behind the Iron Curtain to meet an agent he had to go in disguise and under so-called natural cover, posing as someone else rather than working as a diplomat. On one occasion, he went in disguise to meet an agent in a claustrophobically small safe flat. ‘The agent arrived. He was very nervous, understandably, so my job was to make him less nervous,’ Scarlett recounted later. ‘I explained that in order to be doubly, doubly sure that we weren’t under any observation – which in itself was a bit disconcerting for him to think that we might be – we went into the bathroom and then to make doubly, doubly sure that the bathroom was covered as well I turned on the taps and had the running water going on in the background. And after about three minutes I realised that he was sweating profusely and I was beginning to too and I thought, “I knew he was nervous, I didn’t realise he was going to be that nervous.” Then of course I noticed that I had boiling hot water coming out of the taps and the place was absolutely sweltering.’ With a turn of the hand, Scarlett became the spy who turned on the cold and finished the meeting.

The problem of being a Russian specialist already identified by the enemy ended up working to the advantage of Scarlett in the early 1980s. It had made him the ideal officer working out of the London station to deal with a Russian-speaking KGB officer who was arriving in the capital. It was the kind of assignment that could make a career. Dealing with Penkovsky had required quick-footed improvisation by MI6. That operation had been mounted in a rush at a time when the amateurism of the past had yet to be fully excised. Shergy’s legacy was that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the professionalism he had engendered had been institutionalised and MI6 was able to run a valuable agent like Gordievsky for close to a decade. For those engaged in the task there was also a clandestine thrill beyond the ins and outs of the intelligence produced. This, they felt, was payback for Philby.

For Scarlett and every other officer who sat in a room with him listening to secrets pouring out, Gordievsky was the best agent they ever dealt with. ‘It is quite likely the agent is taking a great risk and a great chance and he’s placing a great deal in the hands of the case officer so he has to trust him,’ Scarlett later noted when discussing such relationships. ‘He has to have confidence in his judgement; he has to have confidence in his ability to run the matter securely … the case officer has to have an adequate degree of expertise in the subject with which he is dealing and of course he has to be backed up – as he is – by teamwork … All successful operations are the result of teamwork, although of course when it comes to it, it may well be that the meeting itself takes place between the individual case officer and the individual agent.’18 Running Gordievsky was a full-time job but one carried out with back-up.

The meetings with Gordievsky largely took place in a safe flat in Bayswater, West London. Gordievsky would arrive by car during his lunch-hour bearing whatever documents he had removed from the Embassy in nearby Kensington. A few sandwiches and a bottle of beer would be waiting on the table alongside a tape recorder. They only had an hour, so a support officer, known to Gordievsky as Joan, would photograph and copy the documents while Scarlett and Gordievsky talked in Russian. The support officer was a crucial member of the team and offered a subsidiary relationship so that an agent was not overly dependent on one person. Joan was in the Daphne Park mould. She had joined as a secretary before becoming a general officer. A genteel, Home Counties exterior masked a steely determination and a deep expertise in tradecraft. Scarlett, and others later, would defer to her on the details as she organised the timings, transport and logistics. She remained when Scarlett moved on after two years, and Gordievsky would eventually owe much to her.

The nerves always came for Gordievsky as the meeting approached its end and he knew it was time to return to the Embassy. Security was the primary concern. ‘John would ask me, “Where’s the car? Is it in the basement underneath or did you leave it in the street?’” he later recalled. Gordievsky would sometimes have to admit sheepishly he had left it in the street. The security worries were real even in London. One day as he left, he saw the big black car of his KGB Resident drive past. Gordievsky returned to the Embassy fearing that he would be questioned, but he had not been spotted. Scarlett and Gordievsky would meet once a week, although there was much debate in Century House over whether that was too often. As with Penkovsky, there was a tension between the desire to extract as much as possible from such a unique source and the awareness that every meeting – even in London – carried a risk.

Almost everything Gordievsky said during those meetings met the standard of being classed intelligence ‘product’. Scarlett would work through the transcript straight away, often issuing ten reports from each meeting within a day or two, the most urgent ones first which would arrive in Whitehall in-trays. It was as if MI6 had tapped into a rich seam and a gush of intelligence was pouring out which needed to be captured. There had been nothing like it since Penkovsky, but with two crucial differences. Gordievsky lasted much, much longer and was far more emotionally stable, easier to work with and better disciplined. The circle who knew about Gordievsky even within MI6 was tiny as they worked within a secret unit, even under cover within their own organisation. The reports officer who processed the incoming intelligence and distributed it to others in government was believed by most colleagues to be working on material from Russia.

Gordievsky’s insights were in two main areas. One was on the work of the KGB in London, classic counter-intelligence information about the operations of the enemy. The other was politics and strategy in Moscow. When it came to the former, the KGB station in London lacked the scale and swagger it had had in Lyubimov’s time, but it still kept itself busy trying to recruit agents and maintain a network of illegals. Before Gordievsky arrived, Lukasevics, the man who had lured Anthony Cavendish’s Latvians to their doom after the Second World War, had just left as resident and been replaced by the hulking form of Arkadi Guk. In Gordievsky’s eyes he was ‘a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning’ who plotted against his own Ambassador while drinking neat vodka.19 Guk ordered his staff not to use the Underground – because, he said, behind the adverts were secret spying booths for MI5. Some officers were even convinced that a tunnel had been dug below to target the Embassy. The obsession with being watched and listened to created the type of deeply paranoid atmosphere that pervaded the CIA in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s. Guk’s office had special windows and jamming devices with radio loudspeakers installed in the space between the double glazing. Now and again, KGB technicians from Moscow would come in and strip the offices and then line them again with new substances to repel the bugs. A metal-lined conference room would become unbearably hot when crammed with staff for a meeting. In this environment, seeking out agents in British public life continued with only mixed success and a large degree of healthy exaggeration in reports back to Moscow.

The reality of life and work for the KGB in London was passed on by Gordievsky. ‘The amount of information about the Soviet intrigues of different character was piling on my desk. So I had to select the most important and the most dangerous points and tell them about them orally. Tape recorder was on the table and John Scarlett was … listening.’²⁰ Scarlett would absorb every detail of life within the protected walls of the Residency. ‘You are an extra member of the KGB Residency,’ Gordievsky would joke with Scarlett, a remark that would no doubt have excited the molehunters of the past if they had heard it.

Gordievsky was able to identify a number of agents who were talking to the KGB, although the truth was that the cupboard was pretty bare and the successes were greatly exaggerated in order to enhance officers’ careers. Most of the KGB’s real spies now focused on technical and scientific intelligence, received in exchange for money. There were also many ‘paper agents’ who were kept on the books in order to make officers look busy to Moscow. Additionally, many individuals were listed as ‘confidential contacts’, a level below ‘recruited agents’. With a confidential contact, a KGB officer might take someone to lunch and then write up a report on the gossip and information produced, the kind of work diplomats and journalists do all the time. The informant might have no idea the Russian was a KGB officer or that anything they said was being written up. Some might also receive a nice fat envelope now and again, which should perhaps have raised their suspicions. Moscow Centre might also be told that such an agent was being carefully cultivated and was close to being recruited as a proper spy (that point coming when they agreed to secret collaboration with the KGB).21 KGB officers had to fill in immensely long questionnaires on their targets and it could always be claimed that a few more good lunches on expenses were needed before making the final pitch. Gordievsky had learnt from Lyubimov how in London in the 1960s he had recruited contacts and treated them as secret agents, using the ‘paraphernalia’ of espionage. ‘Why did you bother with all that cover stuff?’ Gordievsky once asked Lyubimov. ‘Why didn’t you just have overt relationships with them?’ Lyubimov had explained that Moscow expected agents to be treated like that and also that using dead-letter drops made the agent feel that they were important, drawing them into the excitement of being a spy.

But even though there were few high-level agents, Gordievsky was able to lay to rest some of the fears that had warped the life of British intelligence since the days of Philby and his friends. He confirmed that John Cairncross, the Cambridge-educated former civil servant, had indeed been the fifth man and that there were no further high-level penetrations. This included Roger Hollis, just as word of the investigation into him was emerging into public view. In Moscow the media reports that he was one of their spies were met with bemusement. ‘The story is ridiculous. There’s some mysterious, internal British intrigue at the bottom of all this!’ a KGB colleague told Gordievsky when they saw the British stories.22

Gordievsky’s most important success in counter-intelligence was preventing the Soviets acquiring a new mole deep within MI5 and wreaking the same kind of damage they had managed in their golden age. In June 1983, Guk turned to Gordievsky. ‘Would you like to see something exceptional?’ the KGB boss asked him. He showed Gordievsky a British document outlining the ‘order of battle’ of the KGB and GRU in London. It was clear that it came from MI5 and from K branch – the team dedicated to working against Soviet spies. Guk revealed it had been pushed through the letterbox of his home in Holland Park, West London. It was the second packet to arrive, the first having come on Easter Sunday. The letter that accompanied the intelligence suggested a dead drop at the cistern of a cinema toilet on Oxford Street and was signed ‘Koba’, the name Stalin had used before the revolution.²³ Guk was faced with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recruit a serving intelligence officer, to restore the station to its former glory. But he was convinced it was a trap. The traitor had thought he was being clever by passing on a staff list because he believed that Guk would be able to verify that it was true. But instead the Resident concluded that, precisely because it was something he already knew rather than fresh intelligence, it was the sign of a plant. Part of the problem was that, compared with those carefree days in the 1960s that Lyubimov had revelled in, the KGB had now become smaller and more cautious in London, less willing to take risks, more worried about what the other side knew.

Gordievsky called for a meeting with the British when he heard the news. He told MI6 he realised this must be a game – a double agent or a plant by them to lure Guk into a trap. Scarlett and the team knew it was not and broke the news calmly to him. They had a problem. The revelation of an aspiring traitor inside MI5 meant that a spy-hunt was needed. But the old question once again arose – how could MI5 investigate itself? In this case there was an answer. The person offering the information had clearly not known that Gordievsky was spying for Britain or else they would never have risked an approach to the Residency. A very small number of MI5 officers who worked on the KGB desk had been indoctrinated into the secret of Gordievsky’s true loyalty. The traitor could not possibly be one of them, because if they had been they would have tipped off Guk to Gordievsky or avoided approaching the KGB in London knowing there was a British agent in place who would betray the move. So a team was formed out of this small group of officers. If ever there was an example of why the identities of agents have to be restricted to a ‘need to know’ basis, this was it. If Gordievsky’s identity and activities had become common currency in MI5, he would have been betrayed and on a plane back to Moscow with a firing squad waiting for him. Gordievsky did return to Moscow during the investigation for a holiday. He did so knowing that British intelligence was leaking somewhere, a display of remarkable confidence.

One of those assigned to work on the case was a female MI5 officer who had experienced an early introduction to the world of the molehunt. Eliza Manningham-Buller had seen her father as attorney general prosecute a previous generation of traitors, including George Blake. After Benenden School and then Oxford (playing the Fairy Godmother in a drama production), she had taught English until talent-spotted at a party. Her father had tried to dissuade his daughter from joining MI5. ‘He thought it was a bit murky,’ she later recalled. ‘He thought the whole espionage and counter-espionage business was slightly sordid which, to a degree, he was right about.’24 Her decision to ignore his entreaties may have had something to do with her mother having had a small taste of the secret life in the Second World War when she had trained carrier pigeons which would be dropped in France and then return to her Gloucestershire cottage carrying secret messages which would be quickly picked up by a despatch rider.²⁵ In 1974, Eliza had joined an organisation she found to be strangely inward looking. Despite her pedigree, she had been unsure quite what to expect. ‘I hardly knew what I was joining because in those days it was much more secret,’ she recalled later. ‘When I arrived I was astonished – I was very naive I think – that this was an organisation that listened to people’s telephone calls and opened their mail.’²⁶ MI5 was still stuck in the past. Former members of the Colonial Service who had once kept an eye on subversives in places like Malaya and India until independence and then needed a new job still dominated the organisation. The gloomy Leconfield House headquarters with its dirty windows suffered from the lethargy of some far-flung outpost. ‘They would quite often go off at lunch-time for a drink and not come back till four o’clock,’ recalls Stephen Lander, who joined in 1975. ‘I remember one colleague used to shut his door at lunchtime, put on his bedroom slippers, put the phone in the drawer and have an hour’s sleep … I nearly left in my first year. I thought they were all mad.’27

Attitudes to women were also a throwback. ‘When I joined, women were definitely lesser citizens,’ recalls Manningham-Buller. ‘We weren’t allowed to do the full range of intelligence work. We weren’t allowed, for example, to mount an eavesdropping operation. We weren’t allowed to approach and try and recruit people because who would want to work for a woman? And there was a paternalistic attitude that we mustn’t do anything to put the little dears in danger.’²⁸ With the arrival of a new generation of university graduates through the 1970s, attitudes began to change. ‘These young men were indistinguishable from us women with degrees so after a time we bundled together and we had a quiet female revolution,’ recalls Stella Rimington, who was one of the first women allowed to run agents and later became director general. ‘We wrote a letter to the bosses. And the bosses scratched their heads at this … a few women started to be promoted, barriers began to break down.’²⁹ Attitudes to MI6 had also begun to evolve. For many years, the foreign spies had enjoyed the touch of glamour, looking askance at the Security Service as superannuated policemen in grubby macs who rooted around files. Meanwhile, the MI5 officers viewed their cousins somewhat despairingly, perceiving a macho, individualistic and amateurish culture. But, slowly, joint working began to evolve, particularly on a case like Gordievsky and particularly when the evidence of a traitor arrived, sending a shockwave through both organisations.

Manningham-Buller had worked on the KGB desk analysing Gordievsky’s output on Soviet activities in the UK, and so she was informed that close to her was a traitor. ‘I felt very shaken by it. Because you have to work on the assumption – and most of the time it’s entirely justified – that your colleagues are trustworthy people of integrity. And when you discover that you have somebody who doesn’t fall into this category, it is a shock … And it was one of the nastiest times in my career, particularly in the early days when you didn’t know who it was, because you would get in the lift and look round and wonder.’30

There was a sense of intensity and urgency for the small team. This molehunt was the mirror image of that of the 1960s. Then Peter Wright and Arthur Martin had their suspects but were looking for evidence to back up their theories. This time, the evidence of betrayal was clear but the suspect was unknown. Meetings could not be held in MI5 headquarters in case the spy was alerted. So the London flat in Inner Temple of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s now widowed mother was used as a place where MI6 and MI5 officers could gather. Her mother was never told why people were meeting there but guessed it was sensitive. When her other daughter asked to come round, she was told that she could not because of church meetings. ‘One of my sisters complained that my mother had become obsessively religious with meetings apparently every other night,’ Eliza recalled.³¹

Suspicions based on who had access to the documents Gordievsky had seen began to centre on Michael Bettaney. His behaviour was odd, he drank too much and he was a little too interested in certain files. Bettaney told one officer that even if the KGB were offered a ‘golden apple’ or ‘peach’ of a source, they would not take it. He speculated openly about Philby’s and Blake’s motives. The team followed him and had his house broken into in a desperate search for hard evidence. Signs emerged that he was planning to go to Vienna, possibly to approach a KGB officer there who had been expelled from London in 1971. The decision was taken to interrogate him before he left. It had to be done carefully to avoid in any way exposing the fact that Gordievsky had tipped off the British. Bettaney was on a training course run by MI6 when he was summoned for a meeting. He was taken to a flat in Gower Street. The evidence – such as it was – was laid out before him, including a photograph of Guk’s door to suggest that Bettaney might have been photographed in the act (which he hadn’t been). As in the days of Blake, the idea was to talk him into a confession at which point the police would be called in to hear it again formally (in the time of Blake and Vassall, Manningham-Buller’s father was waiting literally next door for the formal process). Bettaney was not arrested, which would have led to his being offered a lawyer who no doubt would have told him to say nothing. He was kept overnight and the next morning Eliza Manningham-Buller cooked him a breakfast which he did not eat. Bettaney began to crack, first referring to a hypothetical spy who might have done these things and then moving into the first person in discussing events. He expressed some sympathy for ‘Kim’ and ‘George’, as he called Philby and Blake. Exhausted, he eventually said, ‘I think I ought to make a clean breast of it,’ and confessed all.32

Gordievsky, unlike Penkovsky, could offer relatively little on the Soviet military and its operations. But his reporting on the political and strategic thinking in Moscow proved highly influential and, like Penkovsky, extremely well timed. It took a while for MI6 to realise how acute Gordievsky’s political observations were and how much he had to offer on the mindset of the Soviet leadership. By the 1970s, the ‘train-spotters’ of old who had counted tanks and the like had been replaced by highly effective signals and satellite intelligence. But that only told you so much. What did the Soviet leaders want to do with the tanks and missiles? The answer to that lay within their heads. While intercepted communications could tell you something of this, the real answers could come only from a spy to whom you could put questions. This had been a weakness. ‘What we were less successful at is getting into the mindset of the leadership,’ Scarlett explained. ‘I remember when I was a young officer in Moscow in the 1970s reading this and that, trying to understand Soviet policy in various parts of the world, and thinking and saying “If only we knew what it was they were saying to each other when they discussed these issues and these policies in the politburo. If only we knew how they were developing policy towards Afghanistan.” And it was very difficult to get into that mindset because there was so much propaganda and jargon around.’ Gordievsky offered answers.

Early on in his time in London Gordievsky produced a report on Operation Ryan. It was very short and attracted only limited attention from both Gordievsky and the service. Scarlett was told by his predecessor to keep an eye on it when he took over. It was close to a year and a half before it became clear just how important it was. Ryan was a sign that the Cold War was once again going through one of its dangerous phases, not quite on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Penkovsky had operated, but not too far off either. Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief turned Soviet leader, was convinced that the West was preparing a ‘first strike’ using nuclear weapons.33 ‘Reactionary imperialist groups in the USA have openly embarked on a course of confrontation,’ read one top-secret KGB memo sent out to embassies; ‘the threat of outbreak of a nuclear war has reached dangerous proportions.’³⁴ Moscow believed that President Reagan’s rhetoric was designed to prepare the population for a nuclear war that the Americans hoped somehow to survive and win. As a result Andropov launched Ryan, the largest Soviet peacetime intelligence operation in history, run jointly by the KGB and the GRU. Its goal was to look for the warning signs that war was imminent. It was the same low-tech intelligence tripwire that MI6 had been building with its train-spotters in Vienna and that the JIC later developed into its Amber and Red Lists. The deployment to Germany of Pershing missiles which could reach Moscow in four to six minutes meant that Moscow was desperate for any sign of impending preparations for conflict.³⁵

Gordievsky, like officers in embassies across the West, received a list of signs to look for. The indicators ranged from the substantive involving troop movements to the odd such as checking if there was a rise in the price of blood from donors because of the authorities buying up supplies for wartime to treat burns from nuclear fall-out. No one had noticed that in the West blood was not paid for but donated free of charge. Another idea was to count how many lights were left on at the Ministry of Defence at night. An increase in the number would show that civil servants were planning something. Many staff in residencies abroad, including Gordievsky, treated this as just another stupid order from headquarters which they had to comply with rather than argue about. So they all duly reported even the smallest hint of preparations for war in order to keep their superiors happy. One problem was that their superiors then believed every sign, an indication of a frequent problem in which those living insulated lives at the top understand less than those seeing reality on the ground.

The West had thought that the alarmist language coming out of the Soviet Union was just that. Now, thanks to Gordievsky, they realised that it reflected a real underlying fear which their assessments had not picked up. Part of the problem was that the Soviets were listening to the American rhetoric and watching US actions with increasing alarm, as President Reagan talked in 1983 of an ‘evil empire’ and of the Soviet leadership being the ‘focus of evil in the modern world’. A few weeks after that statement he announced his ambitious Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, which threatened to undermine the notion of mutually assured destruction that had kept the balance of fear in place. Reagan’s strategy of putting pressure on the Soviets through an arms race (in addition to psychological tactics like probing gaps in air defence) was working, but it also carried risks if pushed too far. The combination of fear and ignorance was potentially catastrophic. A top-secret Soviet plan outlining KGB priorities for 1984 talked of imperialist intrigues in Poland and Afghanistan, arguing that ‘the threat of an outbreak of nuclear war is reaching an extremely dangerous point’ and warning of an ‘unprecedented sharpening of the struggle’.36 It was a surprise attack the Soviets feared most.

The realisation of just how catastrophic this misunderstanding could be came in November 1983. NATO was running a high-level command exercise codenamed ‘Able Archer’. Gordievsky and others across Europe received ‘Most Urgent’ flash telegrams from Moscow. The Soviets feared that the exercise might be a prelude to a real attack with the exercise used to mask the preparations (a tactic the Soviets themselves had contemplated). When Gordievsky passed on the reporting, the reaction in London was one of alarm, particularly as officials saw signals intelligence which dovetailed with and was explained by Gordievsky’s reports. Part of the Soviet land-based missile force went on to its own heightened alert. The world was not on the brink of war but there was a danger that, as in the First World War, mobilisations and preparations could be embarked on from which no one could back down. No one had realised just how scared the Soviets were about an imminent attack or just how blind they were in terms of intelligence about the real thinking and plans of the West, a mirror image of Western blindness in Vienna at the dangerous start of the Cold War.³⁷ ‘There was a degree of misunderstanding and fear among the Soviet leadership which we had underestimated,’ argues Scarlett. ‘And that was a bit of a wake-up call – [you have] got to be careful how you manage tension, you mustn’t let it get too acute. We didn’t understand the extent to which the Soviet leadership didn’t understand us.’³⁸

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was one of only a handful of people outside MI6 to know that a senior KGB officer in London was offering up secrets. A fan of Frederick Forsyth novels, she took a close interest in intelligence (preferring the hardliners of MI6 to the ‘wimps’ at the Foreign Office) and in the Gordievsky reporting specifically. It was among the only raw intelligence, known as red-jackets because of the folders in which it came, that found its way on to her desk, courtesy of her Foreign Affairs Adviser Charles Powell, who acted as a filter. The papers would be put into a blue box for which only the Prime Minister, Powell and Robin Butler, her Civil Service private secretary, had the key. The reports around the time of Able Archer led to a recognition that some of the rhetoric had to be toned down. MI6 knew it was on to a winner with the reporting and made the most of it. ‘It was like a cat which had swallowed gallons of cream,’ a Whitehall official recalled. One of the intelligence officers put it another way. ‘At that time, on this target and on these issues, it was the apogee of what the business was all about.’39 The reporting fed into a seminar at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, in which the decision was made to reach out to reformists in the USSR by inviting some of them to Britain. The hardline language was toned down.⁴⁰

Another importance of Gordievsky was not what he produced but the fact that he produced anything and that he produced it for so long. It meant the days of paralysing fears of penetration were past and that the service could successfully run an agent over an extended period. This built confidence not just within the Secret Service but also in its relations with allies and especially the Americans. MI6 always knew how to play its cards cannily at home and abroad and made sure the Americans saw the material. Whereas signals intelligence from GCHQ and America’s NSA is almost all shared under an agreement, human intelligence was subject to more of a barter process between the allies. Gordievsky’s material was gratefully received. It was treated as the holy of holies in the CIA, seen only by a small group who read it in hard copy under strict conditions. The CIA had plenty of agents who could count tanks but none who could offer the same insight into the Soviet Union’s thinking (one Polish agent would provide vital information on the Warsaw Pact, but there was no one in Moscow at the level of Gordievsky).⁴¹ Gordievsky revealed just how skewed the Soviet perception of Western motives had become – wars can follow on from such misunderstandings, the CIA analysts understood, and these had become dangerous times. Gordievsky’s warnings of Soviet fears began to have an impact in Washington, and also helped ‘reinforce Reagan’s conviction that a great effort had to be made not just to reduce tension but to end the Cold War’, according to the then Deputy Director of the CIA, Robert Gates.42

Gordievsky’s intelligence highlighted one of the central debates within MI6. Should intelligence be protected cautiously in order not to reveal the source, as traditionalists argued or, as modernisers contended, was such intelligence useless if it was locked away in a box preventing it having any impact? No one took a position at the extremes, but every day there would be decisions about where on the spectrum to reside. Gordievsky showed the benefits of distributing intelligence widely – it certainly had an impact in London and Washington. But it would also show the risks, not least to the agent.

Trust only goes so far even among the most intimate of allies, and it was never quite the same between Britain and America after Philby. Britain had passed the intelligence from Gordievsky to the CIA but with the identity of the source disguised. This was not good enough for the CIA, which occasionally experienced a touch of jealousy over its smaller cousin’s success in recruiting human sources (MI6 liked to think it was more subtle in its approaches, relying less on cash and more on understanding an agent’s motivation). The CIA tasked the head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet division with discovering the spy’s identity. By March 1985 the counter-intelligence chief concluded that Gordievsky was a likely candidate and sent a cable to the CIA’s London station asking if he fitted the profile. The London station said yes. The CIA never told the British it had guessed who its spy was. When they later found out what had happened – and what the consequences of this action had been – British officers were furious. ‘It wasn’t a game. If we had wanted to tell them, we would have done,’ one person involved fumed.⁴³

The unmasking of Bettaney in 1984 had provided a unique opportunity, British intelligence realised. The British had already expelled one official, which enabled Gordievsky to become head of political reporting. Now they had a pretext to expel Guk. Summoned back to Moscow, Gordievsky was told he was a candidate for resident. Within sight lay a unique opportunity to subvert pretty much all of the KGB’s operations against Britain. As the battle raged in Moscow over who should get the job, Gordievsky in London had an important visitor to deal with. One reformist who had accepted an invitation from the British government was the rising star Mikhail Gorbachev. Gordievsky was asked to prepare the briefings for him. Reports were written on the miners’ strike, CND, Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party to prepare him for his meetings. When he spoke at the Embassy on his arrival, Gordievsky thought him strangely disappointing, talking for far too long. ‘Just another Soviet apparatchik,’ Gordievsky concluded with his jaded eye.44 It was obvious, though, that Gorbachev was different from the old guard – he was saying that American foreign policy was not shaped by a secret cabal – but he was not yet ready to call for openness and a new policy of glasnost.

The visit was remarkable because Gordievsky was able to brief both Gorbachev and the British government (through MI6). MI6 even showed Gordievsky a brief on what the British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe would be raising with Gorbachev which could then be rewritten as his own briefing for the Soviet leader.⁴⁵ All his briefs were written with the assistance of his youthful MI6 reports officer who was managing indirectly to brief both the British and Soviet senior leadership. Thatcher noticed ‘just how well briefed Mr Gorbachev was about the West. He commented on my speeches, which he had clearly read.’⁴⁶ Gorbachev’s trip was a success and an important one. Thatcher was convinced that he was someone she could do business with. After the visit, Downing Street sent a note to the White House on the possibilities of engagement. Gorbachev disliked nuclear weapons and wanted an end to the arms race but was determined to try and stop Reagan’s missile defence initiative. Three weeks later, Thatcher gave Reagan a fuller account at Camp David, explaining that it was worth investing in getting to know Gorbachev. Reagan agreed. The combination of pressure in the early 1980s followed by relaxation and engagement in the latter half of the decade helped push the sclerotic Soviet system towards change, aiding a process of liberalisation which would unravel the Soviet Union from within.

Gordievsky’s briefings also played well in Moscow – one reason why he was appointed resident-designate at the end of April 1985. The prize was within his grasp. Then it slipped away. The cipher clerk brought the telegram into the Resident’s office on 16 May. As Gordievsky read the handwritten message, he tried to hide the fear that had swept over him. ‘In order to confirm your appointment as Resident please come to Moscow urgently in two days’ time for important discussions.’ This was not usual procedure, he knew. As if realising that it had been too blatant, the Centre sent a further telegram the next day explaining that the summons was to discuss British issues. There were difficult discussions within MI6 and between Gordievsky and his case officers about what to do. They sat down and asked him if he knew any reason why he should not return. He answered that he did not. They had not asked if he thought he should go back, a question which might have elicited a different answer. One part of Gordievsky was determined to keep going, especially with the pinnacle of his career in sight and a chance, with Gorbachev now in charge, to help engineer real change. But as Gordievsky looked at the faces in the room, one person thought they saw something else in his eyes – perhaps a hope for a reprieve and a wish that he would be told there was no choice but to defect immediately. He conducted his last assignment on a Saturday by taking his two small daughters to a park in Bloomsbury and leaving behind an artificial brick containing thousands of pounds for an agent to pick up, and then he headed off.

Everything was nearly normal in Moscow when Gordievsky returned. But not quite. Those tiny tell-tale signs were there, he thought, that something was amiss. The slight pause as the border guard at Moscow’s airport studied the passport and the telephone call before allowing him to pass. The third lock on the door of his flat turned even though he no longer used that key. The sense that someone had been inside the apartment and the fear that every room might be bugged. Care and diligence are the hallmarks of the successful spy who stays alive, but when the heat is on, fear and suspicion can crowd out balanced judgement and warp the mind. Keeping cool – being able to maintain watchfulness without slipping into paranoia – is the hardest test. Tiny decisions about when to run and when to wait and call your opponents’ bluff over what they know determine whether escape or a firing squad are the final destination. Philby kept his nerve time and time again as he was tested. Now it was Gordievsky’s turn to run the gauntlet over the coming days as he met with KGB colleagues and tried to decipher what lay behind each glance and each question. In the eyes of colleagues he sensed fear and an eagerness for distance.

‘Can you please come over?’ a superior requested, knowing there was no choice in the answer. ‘There are two people who want to talk to you about high-level agent penetration of Britain.’47 He was taken to a small house. Only later did he remember that the other three men drank brandy out of one bottle, while he was served out of another. At the time, all he remembered was a strange out-of-body sensation overcoming him and then waking up in a bed in only his vest and underpants the next morning. He was probably supposed to have remembered nothing of the interrogation, but that morning he had taken a pill provided by MI6 to maintain alertness which may have counteracted at least some of the potency of the KGB drugs. ‘You’re a very self-confident man,’ he remembered one of the men saying to him. But had he given anything away? ‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,’ a KGB boss told him. ‘And yet we’ve decided that you may stay in the KGB. Your job in London is terminated of course.’ He knew they suspected him. But he also knew they did not have enough proof. If they did he would be a dead man. Slivers of memory began to rise to the surface from the drugged interrogation. There were the books and questions about why his daughter knew the Lord’s Prayer. And then the accusation. ‘We know who recruited you in Copenhagen,’ they had said. ‘That’s not true,’ he remembered saying. ‘We know you were a British agent. You’d better confess.’ Confess, the man said again and again. You’ve already done it, just do it again, he said, talking slowly as if to a child. ‘No, I’ve nothing to confess.’ Had he confessed? He did not think so. They had only the books for sure, and he went to Lyubimov’s apartment in a sweat to talk about those. But they knew there was more. The surveillance was everywhere. It was time to run. ‘If I don’t get out, I’m going to die,’ he told himself.⁴⁸

An escape plan had first been devised when Gordievsky returned to Moscow from Copenhagen in the late 1970s. The plan was kept up to date by Joan, the officer who would attend some of the briefings in London. This was not easy. Brush contact and signalling sites had to be identified in Moscow by people based in London. Moscow in winter is a very different city from Moscow in summer, and so they had to be workable in both seasons. Contingencies had to be planned for – what if roadworks closed a designated site?

Details of Gordievsky’s plan were kept on an LP sleeve in secret writing which he would then have to develop. The idea was to have a signalling spot which was available to Gordievsky every Tuesday night. That spot, near the Ukraine Hotel, had to be passed and watched at exactly the right time by someone from the small MI6 station every week, come rain come shine, and there needed to be a plausible reason for doing so. Even when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched. In fact precisely when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched in case the KGB had surveillance on the MI6 officers and associated a deviation from the pattern with the absence of Gordievsky. When he returned in May the KGB watched him every day. At first the surveillance was intense. His tall apartment block was inhabited mainly by fellow KGB officers. They all noticed the arrival of heavy surveillance – sometimes as many as fifteen cars or people outside the apartment and in nearby parking lots and markets. The fact that they were clearly observable was no doubt intended to put Gordievsky under more intense psychological pressure in the hope of forcing errors on his part. He would go jogging and shopping and act normally knowing that he had to be patient and wait for the surveillance to ease before making his move.49 This lasted for weeks.

The signal Gordievsky was to give to MI6 when he was ready needed to be precise and sufficiently unusual in order to avoid the entire complex escape procedure being kicked off by some innocent action misinterpreted. In practice, this meant the signal was mildly absurd, which did not necessarily induce confidence on the part of Gordievsky. A man wearing a particular type of trousers, carrying a particular bag and eating a particular brand of chocolate would walk past Gordievsky to acknowledge that the signal had been received. The first time Gordievsky waited at the point, there was nothing. Had he left too soon? he wondered. He tried again the following Tuesday. This time a man, unmistakably British in his attire, carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar strolled past and looked him in the eye saying nothing.

One of Gordievsky’s final acts in Moscow was to phone a friend. He called Mikhail Lyubimov and said he would like to meet him on Monday. Lyubimov noticed a confidence to his friend’s voice that was in sharp contrast to the nervous wreck who had appeared in his apartment only a few weeks earlier. They agreed to meet at Lyubimov’s dacha in Zvenigorod an hour outside Moscow where he was taking a break. Gordievsky knew the phone was bugged but also asked an odd question. Did his old friend remember a short story by Somerset Maugham called ‘Mr Harrington’s Washing’? The reference was a risky joke. ‘I knew the KGB was not bright enough to work it out.’ The story by Maugham, a former British Secret Service officer, involved a plan to escape from Russia over the border with Finland.

The Gordievsky escape plan at the end of the Cold War mirrored the plan hatched during Harrington’s escape during the days of the Bolshevik Revolution in that it required a risky crossing of the border into Finland. In case his family was coming, two cars were needed, each driven by one of the MI6 officers in the Embassy. They would leave Moscow on Friday and stay overnight in Leningrad before going over to Finland on Saturday. The pretext was one of the officers’ wives needing some specialist, but not too serious, medical treatment in Helsinki which had led the two families to decide to make a weekend trip together. Phone calls were made to London to establish the cover story. The first problem was an unfortunate coincidence. A new British ambassador was due to fly in that very Friday and he was going to have a welcome reception for staff. Would two of his staff really miss the opportunity to attend? So they would have to leave afterwards and drive through the night to make the rendezvous. The Ambassador was also briefed on the escape plan, and he was highly reluctant. He could just see his first week in the job being marked not by the usual introductions but by a huge diplomatic row as two of his staff were caught smuggling a spy out of the country. It could be the shortest posting in Foreign Office history. But he was overruled. The plan required political clearance and this had gone to the highest level.

Getting an agent out of Moscow was about as risky an operation as one could ask for. Getting caught in the act could have major diplomatic repercussions at just the time when the Prime Minister was working hard to improve relations with Gorbachev. As a result, the decision on whether or not to go ahead was one for Margaret Thatcher herself to take. The problem was that when the moment came she was not in Downing Street. She was up in Scotland staying at Balmoral Castle undertaking one of the Prime Minister’s regular visits to the Queen. The conversation could not be held on the phone in case of interception, so Thatcher’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Charles Powell had to race to Heathrow to catch a flight to Aberdeen and then take a car to Balmoral to seek approval. On arrival, the Queen’s aides were none too amused when he explained that he could not tell them why he had come and what was so urgent. For all the risks, Thatcher had no doubt that the escape plan had to be put into action. ‘We have an obligation and we will not let him down,’ Thatcher remarked. The escape plan was always high risk. There were people at Century House who thought a trap would be waiting. Surveillance was heavy and the fear was that Gordievsky had been broken and it was a provocation, much like the arrest of the American after clearing Penkovsky’s dead drop a quarter of a century earlier.

A stunning summer sunrise on Saturday morning greeted the two cars as they drove towards Leningrad. There was a mix of fatalism and excitement as the two officers set out with their families. There was the knowledge that, succeed or fail, it was the end of their time in Moscow. Expulsion was inevitable, but it would be faced either while basking in the glow of a daring escape or, more likely, having been caught in the act. The pessimists gave the plan about a one-intwenty chance of working. Everything had to go right. Cumulatively the chances of one thing going wrong that would throw all the timings were high. Surveillance vehicles followed them almost all of the way. They had to reach the designated spot close to the Finnish border at exactly the right moment – not too early or too late, so when they had some time to kill they visited a monastery, still under surveillance. As they drove out of Leningrad, city surveillance handed over to provincial. They would need to be shaken off somehow. A stroke of luck helped. All the cars on the highway were stopped for ten minutes to allow a convoy of tanks to pass. Time was ticking by. Once the tanks had passed, the drivers floored the accelerator. A gap opened up with the surveillance cars behind still coming out of the queue of traffic.

The two cars pulled off the main road into a layby in a forest to have a picnic. The surveillance cars, now desperate to catch up, roared past. As the picnic items were unpacked and the tea was being poured, a smelly-looking tramp got out of a ditch. ‘Which car?’ he said.

Gordievsky had slept with the doors of his Moscow flat barricaded on Thursday night, fearing arrest. On Friday afternoon he had shaken off his surveillance on the way to the Leningrad station. Police were everywhere, inducing panic before he remembered there was a large festival taking place. He slept fitfully on the overnight train, eventually falling out of his bunk after taking sedatives. Next was another train taking him close to the border and then a bus journey before a walk. As he located the agreed spot, he waited among the tall conifers with mosquitoes gnawing at him. He was way too early and walked back into the nearby town to kill time before returning and sipping a bottle of beer hidden in the grass. These were the hardest moments. As he waited, he became nervous that he had missed the car. He knew it would not come back. He walked out on to the road. ‘Stop, this is madness,’ he told himself, and went back to wait in the heat and the undergrowth. At last came the sound of the cars and he peered at the people getting out. The last time he had seen one of them was eating a Mars bar on a Moscow street.

Gordievsky was bundled into the boot of the Ford Cortina (the smaller of the two cars), and a heat-reflecting blanket was put over him to fool any infra-red sensors. He was given a bottle to urinate into and some pills to calm him down. He gulped one down straight away. The cars made their way to the border crossing. As diplomatic cars, they should have been exempt from being searched. There had been despair a week before when a British military attaché had allowed his trunk to be searched for fear it had set a precedent. If a search was demanded, the cars would refuse and head back to Moscow. Later the team would realise they had forgotten even to lock the boot. No agent had ever been exfiltrated successfully from Russia since the start of the Cold War. At that moment in Century House in London, the Foreign Office adviser to MI6, gathered with senior staff, looked at his watch. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, they’re about to cross the border. I think it would be appropriate to say a prayer.’

A packet of cheese and onion crisps was opened as the team waited for their papers to be checked. They fed a few crisps to the dogs that sniffed vehicles for signs of life in a desperate attempt to throw them off the scent. Another unorthodox method was employed. One of the two families had a baby whom they had taken with them. The dirty nappy of the baby was changed on the car boot with Gordievsky underneath. Inside Gordievsky, unable to take off his jacket in the confined space, was drenched with sweat and struggling to breathe, listening to the odd fragment of Russian spoken in an official voice. As the barrier looked set to rise, the phone in the guard’s booth rang. He walked slowly over to answer it. He glanced over at the car. Then he put the phone down and wandered slowly back to the car. More documents please, he said. He checked them and then walked back to the kiosk. The boom swung up and the car gratefully pulled out. A few moments later, Gordievsky heard the ominous, brooding opening notes of Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’ come on to the car stereo. He was over the border.

The relief dissipated minutes later when he felt the car stop and then reverse. The boot was flung open. Joan’s face stared down on him with a smile. It had been her plan and it had worked. The first words Gordievsky spoke were: ‘I was betrayed.’ Five miles from the border, in what still felt like bandit country, a second team including Joan had been waiting for him. One of the officers who had helped deal with his reports in London, had reconnoitred the route while he had been posted to Moscow just before the escape and had now prepared the second half of the plan. Gordievsky changed clothes in the forest. If anyone tried to drive towards them the officer would block the road with his car. ‘You must be very tired but we are so very glad to see you,’ he said as he extended his hand to the agent whose reports he had worked on but whom he had never met face to face. Gordievsky shook it but remained quiet, the enormity of what had happened still dawning on him.

A team from Danish intelligence were also waiting. Gordievsky was placed in the boot of one of their cars which headed in one direction while an MI6 officer took the old clothes and documents away in a plastic bag. He signalled back to London from a payphone: ‘Really enjoyed the fishing. It has been a successful trip. And we’ve had one guest.’ There had always been an expectation that Gordievsky’s family might be taken out with him and the reference to ‘one guest’ was supposed to convey that Gordievsky came out alone, although there was some confusion on the other end as to whether there was one guest in addition to their agent. The cars carrying the lone guest drove north through the night towards Norway without stopping. As they reached the Arctic Circle the summer sun disappeared for only a few hours before rising again. Eventually they came to Norway’s north, and from there a flight to Oslo and then to London brought Gordievsky to his new home.

That morning, Mikhail Lyubimov arrived at Zvenigorod station in good time for the 11.13 a.m. train. His friend did not emerge from the last carriage as he had promised. After a while, he checked the timetable again to see when the trains departed from Moscow. Perhaps there had been some confusion. He waited some more, glancing at his watch. But his friend never came. Lyubimov was left alone on the platform. ‘It was not so easy when you work with a man all your life and he is a traitor,’ Lyubimov, who was interrogated over the following days, would reflect. ‘It was not just betraying the Soviet Union. But he betrayed me.’ The two friends would never meet or speak again.50

The escape was a humiliation for the KGB. After three or four days, whispered rumours and gossip had gone round its headquarters about the disappearance of the future London Resident. But there was no announcement.⁵¹ A few days later the new British Ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. A Soviet official produced a photograph taken just a few days earlier of the Ambassador in full ceremonial uniform surrounded by all his Embassy team as he presented his credentials. The Soviet official placed a finger on the faces of the two MI6 officers who had smuggled Gordievsky out of the country. The Ambassador played innocent but he was told that those two – and others – had forty-eight hours to leave the country.⁵² Gordievsky was free, but he was not put out to pasture. On his second day in Britain, Chris Curwen – now C, the Chief of MI6 – flew by helicopter to the Midlands country house where Gordievsky had been put up to meet his prize catch. The formality of the country house with its butlers did not suit Gordievsky, who was next taken to the Fort, the service’s training facility. The reports officer, who had been waiting in Finland, and others would listen in over a year as he drained his memory bank and talked through the documents he had smuggled out. Supervising the process were more senior officers including Shergy’s Sov Bloc rising stars Colin McColl and Gerry Warner.

Margaret Thatcher began to treat Gordievsky as an occasional adviser. At their first meeting, she expressed her gratitude for his work and then began to ask what more he could tell her about Gorbachev, how to handle him and what the pressure points were. (The only time a meeting with Thatcher did not go well was in 1989 when she asked Gordievsky what he thought the Soviet position would be on the unification of Germany, and the Prime Minister, deeply hostile to it, did not like his answer that Moscow would find it hard to oppose.) Her views were not necessarily changed by Gordievsky, but he provided her with the ammunition and confidence to make her case for how to deal with the Soviet Union and how much pressure to apply.

Another visitor arrived by helicopter at the Fort in September. Bill Casey, the buccaneering head of the CIA, came down to the Fort specifically to see Gordievsky. Reagan was about to meet Gorbachev in Geneva for one of the superpower summits that dictated the course of the Cold War and wanted a breakthrough on arms reductions. Casey sat in front of Gordievsky with a yellow-and-blue CIA notebook scribbling away like a schoolboy until he asked if he could use a tape recorder. The American spoke in a thick accent and mumbled, which meant that C, also present, had occasionally to translate. He had come to take part in a role-playing game. ‘You are Mr Gorbachev,’ he said, pointing to Gordievsky, ‘and I am Mr Reagan. We would like to get rid of nuclear weapons, starting with a large number of strategic weapons. To inspire confidence, we will give you access to Star Wars,’ the latter comment referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative designed to shoot down missiles and the source of much Soviet angst. ‘What do you say?’ asked Casey.

Gordievsky leant back in his seat. ‘Nyet.’

‘Why, why?’ asked Casey.

‘I don’t trust you. You will never give us anything,’ Gordievsky replied. By chance the last meeting he had attended in Moscow was about the upcoming Geneva talks in which the KGB had said that there was no point trusting the US since it had no desire for serious agreement.53

‘What should we do?’ asked Casey. The Kremlin will believe you only if you drop Star Wars, Gordievsky explained. Impossible, said Casey, it was the President’s pet project. Gordievsky, like many in MI6, held to a tough line and suggested keeping going with Star Wars, arguing that the Soviet Union would never be able to keep up technologically and would eventually be forced to give in. Later Gordievsky would also go to the Oval Office of the White House to meet Reagan in person and on a subsequent visit would meet President George H. W. Bush.

Gordievsky was the star turn at a conference at Century House for officials across Whitehall and spoke to senior military chiefs. He was a valuable tool for building MI6’s reputation. The year of debriefing generated a set of extraordinarily detailed reports. A fifty-page briefing entitled ‘Soviet Perceptions of Nuclear Warfare’ had a particular influence.54 Even the sceptics about intelligence in the Foreign Office sat up and listened. Rodric Braithwaite, the young private who had sat with headphones clamped over his ears in the cellar in Vienna in the early 1950s, had risen through the ranks of the Foreign Office to become ambassador to Russia by the closing years of the Cold War. He remained somewhat doubtful of the output of the organisation that he had declined to join but saw the value of its star agent. ‘What Gordievsky described was the kind of terror the Russians felt facing us,’ he explained. ‘Something which if you have ever been in Moscow you would have perceived but if you are Prime Minister or President you hadn’t the remotest idea of. You would have thought these villainous people are trying to nuke us tomorrow and you never thought they were terrified that we were going to nuke them tomorrow.’ It was not so much the originality of Gordievsky’s analysis that was influential, Braithwaite argues, as its provenance. Information acquired secretly is often privileged over the same information acquired openly – the sight of ‘Top Secret’ written across the top of a paper often leads the reader to assume it must be true and more true than something acquired openly. ‘There was nothing mysterious about those Russian attitudes … [but] it came from a source which they had to accept because of Gordievsky’s personal background. Reagan and Thatcher were prepared to listen to it.’⁵⁵

Gordievsky remained driven. All he cared about was his work and getting his family out. The latter proved a problem. The Soviets had no idea where Gordievsky had gone until MI6 decided to tell them a few weeks later. London was not a suitable location, it was decided, and so Gerry Warner went to Paris and asked his station chief to engineer a meeting with a non-KGB member of the Soviet Embassy at a plush club. The Soviet Scientific Counsellor duly arrived. On the manicured lawn, Warner was introduced. ‘We’ve got a message for the head of your KGB station,’ Warner began. The man went white as a sheet. ‘You’re looking for Gordievsky. We’ve got him. We’d like his family.’ The poor counsellor staggered off in shock. The reply from Moscow was an emphatic no. A death sentence was passed in absentia against Gordievsky. Reuniting the former KGB man with his family became a priority for the British government right up to the Prime Minister, who would raise the issue regularly with Gorbachev at their summits.

The pressure would eventually work and his family would come to Britain as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the final release brokered by Rodric Braithwaite. But it was too late. His decision not to tell his wife that he was working for British intelligence had shielded her when she was interrogated. But it had also left her bitter at never having known the truth. She left him as soon as she made it back to Britain. His daughters barely remembered him.56 Gordievsky had followed his beliefs, but in doing so he had paid a heavy personal price.

As the Cold War began to draw to its unexpected close, MI6, like Gordievsky, remained sceptical about Gorbachev. Throughout the Cold War, it saw one of its roles as preventing political leaders being taken in by Soviet rhetoric. There was a desire to force politicians to face uncomfortable truths. ‘It is always a temptation for anybody to choose the easier course and it is always a temptation if somebody is saying “I am a friend of yours and I don’t mean any harm” to accept that,’ argues Gerry Warner. ‘But if you are being told all the time by a microphone in your ear that it is totally untrue and that he’s holding a knife behind his back and he’s about to kick you where it hurts, the temptation is less to trust him. And that is the kind of way in which I think it would have been very easy both for Conservative and Labour governments throughout the Cold War to choose the easy option if they hadn’t been constantly reminded of what was going on.’ As the politicians, and particularly the Prime Minister, started to invest more heavily in Gorbachev and his reforms, MI6 endeavoured to continue this function. Some critics felt that rather than reflecting the underlying intelligence it was the product of a deeply ingrained MI6 culture in which the service struggled to believe that the Soviet Union could change and be anything other than an implacable enemy.

Ammunition for its hawkish position of not being too quick to trust Gorbachev came from one defector right at the end of the Cold War. A very scared Vladimir Pasechnik contacted the British Embassy in Paris during a 1989 visit to France. The Foreign Office were eventually persuaded it was worth getting him out. A scientist who worked on the Soviet’s secret biological weapons programme, he revealed that the USSR was secretly developing chemical and biological weapons such as VX, sarin and plague, including strains designed to survive Western antibiotics. The reports were met with intense resistance at first from the Foreign Office and Whitehall as they indicated that Gorbachev was evading treaty commitments. The Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Percy Cradock, personally came to speak to the defector to convince himself of the veracity of the information.57 Cradock and others in the intelligence world remained sceptical that Gorbachev was really changing the Soviet Union, believing that his reforms were cosmetic and not perceiving the way in which they would start to gather a momentum of their own which took events beyond those planned by the leadership.

Gordievsky’s first words out of the car boot – ‘I was betrayed’ – had also been enough to send shudders down the spine of a Secret Service which thought it had just emerged from the wilderness of mirrors of the molehunt. There was the question that is asked after every blown operation. Was there another traitor? Another Philby? It took a decade following the escape to understand that there was indeed another traitor. But he was not British. At the moment that Gordievsky was returning to his drugged interrogation in Moscow, the CIA was watching its own slow-motion horror movie. Its entire network of what the agency’s more cynical operators called ‘assets’ was being rolled up one by one in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Agents were being recalled back to Moscow or disappearing off its streets or having ‘accidents’.

It had taken a few years to shake off the Angleton-induced paralysis that had hobbled the recruitment of Soviet spies, but by the early 1980s the agency had hoovered up a good selection of sources. Perhaps, however, Angleton and his fellow believers would, on one level, be proved right. For all their obsession with a mole within their garden, the CIA finally acquired one soon after it stopped looking.

On 16 April 1985, CIA officer Aldrich Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. He had told his superiors he was trying to recruit an agent, but he was the one doing the betraying. By the time of a third meeting at a hamburger joint in Georgetown on 13 June, Ames was receiving a shopping bag of money. He was extremely well placed as the head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet division. He was the man who had identified Gordievsky for the CIA and who held exactly the same position in the agency that Philby once held in MI6. It meant he saw all the files and knew all the agents.

Ames’s treachery seemed to explain Gordievsky’s near-demise. Not everyone was sure. Ames claimed he did not give any agents’ identities away until his 13 June lunch, by which time Gordievsky had already been recalled to Moscow. But he might have given away just enough to draw suspicion on to Gordievsky and it might explain why Gordievsky was interrogated but never arrested. The KGB may have had only a tip-off and not concrete evidence, making the situation similar to Philby’s initial questioning in 1951 after Burgess and Maclean had fled, when the evidence was strong but essentially circumstantial. It may also have been that one of Gordievsky’s sharper colleagues in London noticed that he was producing lots of reports during the Gorbachev visit but without meeting many contacts. A new head of division in Moscow who had never liked Gordievsky may have ordered an investigation.58

Ames’s treachery was not discovered until 1994. Gordievsky and Ames even met face to face in 1989, Gordievsky not knowing that he was shaking hands at Langley with the man who might nearly have killed him. It had all been about the money – $2 million in all. Where the early British traitors had been ideological, the CIA’s traitors were utterly venal. The damage was the same. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the head of the CIA’s Soviet division learnt everything from CNN because he had no agents left to report to him on what was unfolding.⁵⁹ Just like MI6 in the 1950s, the CIA was institutionally unwilling to accept the idea that it might be penetrated. Just as Angleton had warned, it was manipulated by KGB double agents and deception operations. But its failure to deal with the problem was itself a legacy of Angleton. The memory of what he had done was so painful that counter-intelligence had become a backwater for careers, and no one, but no one, wanted to start that whole molehunting business again. The result was inevitable and catastrophic. It was not just Ames either. Five current or former CIA officers betrayed their country in the decade after Angleton left.60 Intelligence and counter-intelligence exist in a natural tension. If one dominates the other, then trouble arrives soon afterwards. The CIA was plunged into a bad place full of suspicion internally and was mistrusted around Washington.

Philby and Gordievsky bookended the Cold War – one side’s hero, the other’s villain. Recruiting an officer from the other side is always relished deeply because of the opportunities it provides for quickly uncovering the other side’s secrets and subverting their work. But with Gordievsky there was also the sense of payback for the betrayal that had so scarred MI6 decades earlier. There were one or two other spies of an importance approaching that of Gordievsky but whose names have never come to light, insiders say. They maintain that over the course of the Cold War the British Secret Service ran somewhere between forty and eighty agents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and lost only a handful, Penkovsky among them.

Gordievsky’s afterlife was happier than Philby’s in many ways. He was given the kind of status and access that Philby had craved but never received. He lived in a well-heeled suburban town with none of the cravings for home that plagued Philby, none of the complexities or doubts over his actions. In Moscow, their mutual friend Mikhail Lyubimov still celebrates the life of one old comrade by meeting on Philby’s birthday with his widow and others who knew him. The ageing band gathers every year at Philby’s old flat to drink vodka and whisky and celebrate his life. But the taste for espionage has long ago faded. ‘When I started my career I liked espionage very much and I was enthusiastic,’ Lyubimov recalls wistfully. ‘But by the end of my career I became disappointed. I came to the conclusion that it does more harm than good.’ The betrayer had become the betrayed.

Lyubimov will have no truck with those who liken the betrayal of Philby to that of Gordievsky. ‘It is different because Philby never worked for the MI6 actually,’ he argues, using a logic only a spy can really understand. ‘He worked for the Soviet Union. He many times himself told me, “Look, they consider me to be a double agent. I am not a double agent. I worked only for the Soviet Union.” How could he be a traitor if since from the very beginning he worked for the Communists? What did he betray? Gordievsky is a traitor. This is clear because he worked for the KGB, then he went to the British side.’61 Gordievsky has no time for the accusations of a betrayal. ‘The betrayal question is pointless because it was a criminal state,’ is his answer. ‘The most criminal element of the criminal state was the KGB. It was a gang of bandits. To betray bandits … was very good for the soul.’⁶²

Did it all matter? Did the spying and the lying and betraying make any real difference? Critics argue that all the spying accomplished was to raise the temperature by heightening the suspicions that fuelled the Cold War in which ignorant armies clashed by night. Those who believe in intelligence say it did make a difference by managing a hostility that was real and dangerous. ‘The risk in the Cold War and the Cold War going very badly wrong was surprise,’ argues Scarlett. ‘What nobody wanted was to be surprised … intelligence gave knowledge which greatly reduced that fear of a surprise attack. And as the Cold War developed, more confidence developed that the other side was understood, and that helped manage the situation and was a key reason why we got to the end without a blowout.’⁶³

Much of the vast Cold War intelligence effort was precautionary and was never actually used. The counting of Soviet tanks was designed to watch for enemy activity and prepare a response should war come. The fact that such tactical intelligence was never needed does not mean it was not important in increasing confidence. On the strategic level, each side was desperate to mask its weakness and project strength. But neither truly understood how the other perceived its actions and how it misread its intentions. It was not what a country was doing which was misunderstood but the why. Spies, like Gordievsky, may have helped open a window into the reality beneath the rhetoric and provide a transparency which helped prevent miscalculation. But Gordievsky’s contribution came late in the day; before then there was strategic blindness. ‘Both sides were stumbling about with a vague idea of one another’s capabilities but only a thin and mostly distorted idea of one another’s intentions,’ argues Rodric Braithwaite. And if the idea that Gordievsky’s actions did help ease tension by revealing the mind of the enemy (just as Penkovsky had over the Berlin crisis in 1961), why is the same not true for Philby and his cohorts who spied the other way? The answer cannot hold for one side and not the other. Did Philby and his friends help Stalin calibrate his policy to avoid hostilities at the beginning of the Cold War and reduce his own paranoia about invasion? It is true they were never quite trusted and their intelligence was never exploited in quite the same way in Moscow because of a less rigorous analytical and assessment process. But the question still remains whether it would actually have been safer for both sides to have had more spies in the enemy camp and to have had more in their own. Some have wondered whether openness might negate the need for spies at all and make the world safer. ‘Much better if the Russians saw the Cabinet minutes twice a week. Prevent all that fucking dangerous guesswork,’ Harold Macmillan’s private secretary once remarked.64

Western intelligence had expended enormous energy in counting missiles and tanks, often erring on the side of caution by overestimating their numbers and never really understanding that the weight of the Soviet military machine masked a hollowness in the wider Soviet economy which was creaking ever more loudly under the strain. The Soviet Union had been able to match the West for military hardware through the 1970s but failed to keep pace in the field of consumer goods that would prove to people that life under Communism really was better than under capitalism. And then by the 1980s the Reagan arms build-up, encapsulated in the Star Wars concept, ensured that the US began to pull away here too, not least in the mind of the Soviets.⁶⁵

No one saw the end of the Cold War coming as the 1980s began to draw to a close. Contrary to expectation, spies are often very poor at predicting change. The job of spies is to steal secrets. But the demise of the Soviet Union was not a secret locked away in a safe. ‘It was inconceivable the killer piece of information could exist,’ argues Rodric Braithwaite. ‘Because the Russians themselves didn’t know what they were up to or what was going to happen.’⁶⁶ The fall of the Soviet Union was the product of long-term social and economic trends, many of whose outworkings were in the open but which were never fully understood. Attempts by Gorbachev to create ‘socialism with a human face’ were part of the reason. But so were events in a landlocked country thousands of miles away where the latest chapter in a much older Great Game was being played out as the British Secret Service took on the Russians.