8

THE AFGHAN PLAINS

As they had done for a century and a half, British spies wound their way across the unforgiving terrain that joined Pakistan and Afghanistan. The horses and mules that Rudyard Kipling had used to cross the border in disguise had been replaced by sturdy, muddied Land Rovers but it still took the best part of a day to coil over the hills and around the mountains from Peshawar. This was the stark, beautiful terrain where the original Great Game in the nineteenth century had been played out and where the long intelligence duel between Britain and Russia had begun. Then the British spies, operating out of their offices in Peshawar, Kabul and Kandahar, had come to bully, bribe and barter with tribal chiefs to keep the Russians away from the imperial treasure chest of India. ‘All sorts and conditions of men were made use of, high and low, rich and needy, mullahs and murderers, brigands, fugitives, anyone,’ one officer remarked of the intelligence work of that time.1 The quiet, walled compound in the Afghan capital Kabul – still known as the British cemetery – continues to bear witness to the human costs of imperial ambition with its roll call of those who fell as lonely garrisons were overwhelmed by wave after wave of religiously inspired mujahedeen. In February 1980, the successors to the spies of the past were arriving determined to ensure that the favour was returned to the Russians.

For most of the twentieth century Afghanistan had been a forgotten place, far away from the front lines of espionage and the Cold War. But as the 1980s opened it had been thrust back to the centre of geopolitics and intrigue. The Cold War was only the latest of many ‘other people’s wars’ to be fought in the hills and plains of Afghanistan.

Six weeks before the Land Rovers struggled over the rough terrain, the Soviet war machine had thundered its way into Afghanistan. Now waiting for two MI6 officers was a gathering of tribal leaders, known as a loya jirga. The tribesmen had gathered in a school courtyard, a dusty, mud-and-brick compound, to hear from their British guests. The local men lined up with the younger fierce faces on the flank and the long, calmer white beards in the middle. Gerry Warner, who had taken over just six months earlier as the British Secret Service Controller for the region, addressed them through an interpreter while his head of station in Pakistan watched. London and Washington had decided that Soviet aggression would be confronted. But not directly. Instead it would be confronted through the men in front of Warner along with their sons, brothers and cousins. At what cost? he wondered. ‘We are willing to help you. But if we do help you, I want to be sure you understand what this means. If we give you help you will be able to fight longer and more of your young men will be killed. And I still don’t believe you can win this war,’ he told them. There was a muttering from the gathered throng and then the longest beard spoke up. ‘We are grateful for your help,’ the man explained through the interpreter. ‘But we will fight even without this help. And the Russians will leave in ten years.’ He was wrong. They were gone in nine.

The Soviets had invaded after a succession of coups had eventually brought to power Hafizullah Amin, a hardline Communist whom the KGB (wrongly) thought might be a CIA agent. They had endeavoured to assassinate him, but neither poison nor snipers seemed to work. A KGB illegal had been infiltrated into the presidential palace as a cook to try and poison him, but it was unsuccessful.2 In the end it was decided to kill him as part of a full-frontal assault on his country. In Moscow, Kim Philby watched in dismay. ‘Was it essential to take up the military option?’ he wrote to his friend Graham Greene. ‘Wouldn’t a quiet kinjal-thrust from behind an arras have done just as well?’³ Invading was a decision which would contribute in no small part to the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new struggle with terrorism. Afghanistan was the pivot from one era to the next.

For the Cold Warriors in London and Washington, the invasion of Afghanistan was an opportunity not to be missed. CIA officers had begun preparing the previous year. One senior officer addressed staff in Islamabad in August 1978 and said that when he saw that a Soviet-backed regime had taken over in a coup, he had turned to his wife and said, ‘Honey, those Communist bastards are not going to screw with our Afghanistan like this. I’m going to overthrow that damn regime.’ He told the four-man CIA team to get in touch with the nascent Afghan resistance, the mujahedeen groups, and see what they were made of.4 A small programme providing humanitarian support as well as anti-Soviet propaganda had begun in mid-1979. By mid-December – before the Soviet invasion – a meeting of top officials, including the US Vice-President, had decided that the US would ‘explore with the Pakistanis and the British the possibility of improving the financing, arming and communications of the rebel forces to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviets to continue their efforts … We will attempt to increase propaganda and pressure on the Soviets worldwide. We will recommend to our European allies that they encourage their press to pay more attention to the subject.’⁵ The pitched battles of the Cold War had been fought not in Europe but through proxies in the developing world from the Congo and Cuba to Vietnam and now, following the invasion, to Afghanistan, which was next in line to be swept up into the maelstrom of superpower conflict. Afghanistan would also offer the Camel Drivers of MI6 a chance to engage in some of their most aggressive and direct covert action.

The Prime Minister took a helicopter to one of the refugee camps over the border in Pakistan into which millions of Afghans had spilled. Her speech would be interrupted as the Afghans rose to their feet. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they chanted at the Iron Lady. Margaret Thatcher was deeply concerned by the idea that control of Afghanistan might allow the Soviet Union to thrust through Iran towards the Gulf and cut off oil supplies. The invasion had confirmed everything she had believed about the dangers of easing relations with the Soviets through the policy of détente. ‘I knew the beast,’ she would say. The Prime Minister told the refugees of her admiration for their refusal to ‘live under a godless communist system which [was] trying to destroy [their] religion and [their] independence’.⁶ Back home, her Secret Service was looking at the options. The Americans eventually settled on providing weapons to the mujahedeen. Stansfield Turner, President Jimmy Carter’s cautious Director of the CIA, who had been appointed to clean the agency’s house out after scandals and Congressional inquiries, initially had deep concerns about the efficacy and the morality of such an operation until he was persuaded by his more aggressively minded staff. ‘Eventually they convinced me the guerrillas were going to fight even if they just had old British Enfield rifles from World War I.’7 The British Foreign Office and, initially at least, the Ministry of Defence were also reluctant. ‘They really had to be dragged kicking and screaming,’ one official recalled.

The Chief of MI6, now Dickie Franks (who had once been Greville Wynne’s handler), organised a dinner party of media editors. He explained to them that the mujahedeen were actually ‘freedom fighters’, not ‘rebels’ as the Soviets portrayed them. The first priority was information – not collecting it but shaping it in the public mind. Everyone had watched America lose public support for Vietnam as pictures of war were broadcast directly back into living rooms across the nation. This time there was a desire to determine the global outlook on the conflict from the outset. Television was what really mattered. Nothing was more picturesque and evocative than the sight of the Khyber Pass and the rugged farmer-soldiers resisting the steel and might of the Soviet bear. The problem was getting access to the land-locked country. It was suggested at the start of 1980 that Afghans could be found who could be equipped with small video cameras, rather than bulky film cameras, which they could take into the country. When this was done, a studio in London’s East End converted the video taken by the smaller cameras. Out came shaky footage of a Soviet MiG fighter jet strafing a village against a blue sky. Women and children could just about be seen running away. It went around the world. MI6 used its contacts in Muslim countries to spread the pictures and keep the conflict in the headlines. But the quality of these pictures was relatively poor and editors quickly demanded better quality. Soon well-known journalists would start to make their own long trek into the hills, notably Sandy Gall from Britain’s ITN who travelled on horseback with Russian jets streaking overhead. ‘So far the West has stood idly by and done nothing to help the Afghans,’ an Afghan commander told him. ‘All we have had from the West is words not deeds.’⁸

Dressed in Afghan clothes, Gall’s American equivalent Dan Rather first went into the country in 1980 for CBS News. His report was watched back in Washington by a Texan Congressman, Charlie Wilson, who, as well as enjoying sitting in hot tubs with pretty girls doing coke, sat on the Defence Appropriations Sub-Committee in Congress which funded covert action. He asked his staff how much was being spent on Afghanistan. Five million dollars, they said. ‘Double it,’ Wilson replied.9 For Wilson and one faction of CIA officers, Afghanistan was simple. This was a chance to kill lots of Soviets, an opportunity for revenge for the open wound of Vietnam. Nothing more and nothing less. That required weapons and training. And a place from which to operate.

The dusty, dangerous city of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, long the redoubt for spies and adventurers, was home to the leading political figures of the Afghan mujahedeen. The so-called Peshawar seven, who almost without exception despised each other and feuded incessantly, were to be the conduits for the money and weapons coming in. They would then distribute them to their field commanders, who were rooted in local villages and tribes. Six of the seven political leaders were Pashtuns, the tribe which straddled the Pakistan and Afghanistan border and which was closest to Pakistan and its military intelligence agency, the ISI. The ISI chief General Akhtar Abdur Rahman was a Pashtun. Only one leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former law professor at Kabul University, was not Pashtun. He was a Tajik, from the group that made up about a third of the Afghan population. Pakistan was the key to the covert war. The mujahedeen’s success relied on the sanctuary and training camps over the border. President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan had come to power in a military coup and was deeply religious and committed to the operation but also calculating in his approach. ‘The water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature,’ he told his top brass. Make it too hot and the Soviets might decide to punish Pakistan.¹⁰ He wanted control over how the CIA’s largesse was distributed and to whom. Everything would be done through the ISI.

With his jet-black hair and eyes, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was a ruthless, violent fundamentalist. When they looked into his eyes the Americans sensed a dislike of them that could not be hidden. Yet he received more of the American money and arms than anyone else. The reason was simple. He was the most aggressive when it came to killing Soviets and he was the favourite of the ISI and Pakistan’s President. The CIA had tried to build their own contacts only from 1978 and so were dependent on the ISI (although MI6 did introduce one man called Abdul Haq who proved highly popular with the Americans and with the media who christened him ‘Hollywood Haq’ for his love of the camera).11

Long mule caravans snaked into Afghanistan carrying weapons. At first they were largely small arms of Soviet provenance in order to prevent the programme being traced back to the US. Large quantities from Egypt would be shipped up to Karachi in Pakistan and then trucked up the border by the ISI to be taken across (the mules were so important that the Soviets targeted them and the CIA shipped in more in response).¹² It was hardly the most covert operation in the world since it involved thousands of people. The mujahedeen would be trained in and recruited from the massive refugee camps, four near Peshawar and three around Quetta. They would also receive detailed satellite maps of Soviet positions courtesy of the CIA.

When the CIA officers running the programme visited Century House they would always have to hide their surprise at the shabbiness of their cousins’ headquarters. Only when promoted to a certain level were the British officers allowed curtains and a desk which even vaguely looked like it was made of wood. Still, the British did their best to keep up the show. Some of the blue-collar CIA officers found the lunches and dinners in the stuffy old gentlemen’s clubs and the introductions to tailors during their London visits a touch tiresome. They wanted to talk business. The British officers were forthright in saying they could not contribute any cash. The piggy bank was rather empty. Anything else we could help with? they would ask. Britain was supplying a few weapons and even winter coats from Ministry of Defence stores whose regimental buttons had been removed. How about ammunition? one American asked. In particular there was a need for more .303 ammunition for the old British Lee-Enfield rifle. The weapon had been first introduced in 1895 when Britain was still in Afghanistan the first time round and remained the staple of many a mujahedeen warrior partly because of its reliability. The CIA man explained they had swept the world for more stocks and wondered if the UK had some in reserve since it used to be their standard-issue weapon in Empire days. MI6 duly went away and checked with the Ministry of Defence. They said they had 2.25 million rounds but since the old rifles were a reserve weapon they could spare only a few thousand. Some bargaining ensued. When the CIA representative passed through town a few months later and checked up on the request, the British proudly said they had rustled up half a million. Thanks, the CIA man said, thinking to himself that the old Empire was not quite what it used to be.13 His shopping list had a requirement to obtain 400 million rounds. The CIA’s covert war was to be fought on a previously unimagined scale and no one else could compete when it came to resources. On another occasion, an MI6 officer explained to a CIA counterpart that there were not enough mine detectors to clear a particular route for supplies. ‘How many could you use?’ the CIA officer asked. ‘Would ten be too much?’ the MI6 man responded. The CIA provided twenty-five. They cost only $300 each.¹⁴ The CIA’s Afghan programme would eventually become a $700-million-a-year operation, dwarfing the entire budget not just of MI6 but of all Britain’s intelligence agencies combined.

At the start of the conflict, Gerry Warner had asked his desk officer, a former soldier, to seek out the best commander to support. ‘I want you to find Napoleon while he is still an artillery colonel,’ Warner instructed him. Even though the scale of the American effort vastly overshadowed that of Britain, MI6 was able to do things the Americans could not because of a strict line in the sand drawn in Washington. It had been decreed that there should be no chance of Americans coming face to face with Soviets on the ground. That risked sparking a war, so CIA personnel were banned from going into the country. The British meanwhile were allowed in and out; they also were not locked into the same tight relations with Pakistan that the CIA enjoyed. So they began to seek out their own niche. Warner’s desk officer examined reports from the field and intercepted Soviet communications. He looked all over the map, including at some individuals fighting in Helmand, but he kept coming back to one guerrilla leader who was giving the Soviets a bloody nose. Ahmad Shah Massoud’s importance lay not just in his fighting skills but in the terrain into which he melted after each attack on the Soviets. The Panjshir Valley, beginning only fifty or so miles north-east of Kabul and running for nearly one hundred miles in all, was Massoud’s home. A river wound through the valley with a dusty track and then verdant fields by its side and it was home to about 150,000 people. The Soviets were pounding the countryside to try and drain support away from the mujahedeen but to no avail. The strategic importance came from its proximity to the Salang highway which snaked its way through the valley. This carried three-quarters of the ground traffic of Soviet supplies heading for Kabul. It offered a perfect target for hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.

The guide greeted four British men in the lobby of a Peshawar hotel. He had been asked by Massoud’s brother to take them into the Panjshir. They told him and everyone else they met that they were freelance journalists reporting on the suffering of Afghan civilians. But the guide – who had spent some time in a military academy – noticed that the bearing and manner of the men was more typical of soldiers. They travelled for five days, mainly by night, covering ground quickly accompanied by packhorses carrying their equipment. By day the heat on the plains would be unbearable; at night up in the mountains the cold would penetrate even the thickest layers. The men – despite their training – struggled to keep up with their guide and a succession of stomach bugs slowed them down. Occasionally, they would pass so close to Russian soldiers that they could hear them talking. Sometimes they would be spotted and bullets would fly. They never fought back and simply kept moving. When they at last reached Massoud, their guide quickly realised from their reception and the large bundles of cash he glimpsed that these men were not normal journalists.15

The first British teams which had gone out to meet Massoud under journalistic cover were relieved to find him receptive, partly because he felt short-changed by the CIA–ISI operation. ‘Massoud fought the enemy with empty hands,’ argues Abdullah Anas, one of his commanders.¹⁶ Massoud complained that the Pakistanis cheated him out of weapons. ‘We get a top layer in each box of what we ordered. Then underneath them, the numbers are made up with old models,’ he told a visiting (genuine) British journalist. ‘We pay for our own arms from donations from workers in Kabul, and from money from emeralds. The rest we capture ourselves from the Russians.’ He explained to the first British team to arrive that what he needed most was not regular weapons but specialist military training and supplies.

The British men who arrived were soon taken to see Massoud, who drove around in a captured Russian jeep with bullet holes in the windscreen and his short-wave radio always tuned to the BBC World Service. Massoud would be turned into an almost mythic character, a Che Guevara of the East, an image whose value he understood and which he carefully cultivated. He was from a well-off background and was well educated, having attended the lycée in Kabul where he learnt French. Slim with a wispy beard, he had a cool, quiet, almost feline manner and rarely became angry. He was an adept tactician and had become a student of the great thinkers of guerrilla warfare – including Che and Mao Tse-tung. He was deeply religious, always working closely with the mullahs in what he called a holy war. But he was not as radical as some other commanders like Hekmatyar, with whom a long feud had begun in the 1970s when the latter’s men had failed to join Massoud as agreed for an uprising. Massoud barely left the valley for the rest of his life, moving from village to village night by night, usually sleeping beneath a tree or sometimes in a cave. His strength was also his weakness. In his home terrain of the Panjshir, he commanded undivided support and inspired a fierce loyalty; elsewhere he was seen as too rooted in one place and in one ethnic group ever to be a national leader.

The four men who arrived in the Panjshir were part of an annual mission that MI6 had begun organising. The SAS was keen to get involved but it was considered too dangerous for serving British soldiers to travel into the country. If they were captured they would not be deniable. So MI6 built on its existing paramilitary capability – known as the ‘increment’ – which consisted of soldiers who had ‘officially’ retired but were in fact available for special operations. Soldiers with the right skills would be interviewed in a London hotel and provided with false identity documents and training in intelligence techniques. A team consisting of seven or eight MI6 and increment officers would typically travel into Afghanistan twice a year, heading in through Chitral to the top end of the Panjshir on foot and horseback, dressed in the local shalwar kameez to blend in as far as possible. During their visits they would also teach English to Massoud’s aides, such as Abdullah Anas. A secret training base was established in a small, narrow valley in the Panjshir with a large cave. At night, the men would communicate with London through satellite phones. They had brought with them laser binoculars and special sights for weapons. During their two- to three-week stay, the teams would train the mujahedeen on the use of explosives, sniper rifles, silencers and the manufacture of improvised explosive devices. They would also teach the use of mortars and accompany the Afghans out on attacks to help instruct them on their use.

The secure radios provided by the British team were particularly valuable since they allowed tactical co-ordination of attacks by different groups of fighters without the fear that the Soviets were listening in and preparing an ambush. These were still being used in the late 1990s. One of Massoud’s commanders, Muslem Hayat, says that in his area of operations which covered two square miles and three villages, he was able to destroy 100 tanks and armoured vehicles and 400 trucks using improvised explosive devices. He personally laid a thousand devices over the years.17 One substance popular with the Afghans looked like camel dung and if put in the petrol tank of a Soviet vehicle would damage the engine. The flow of weapons was not one way. The conflict provided a unique opportunity for the West to get its hands on the latest Soviet military technology, and MI6 and the CIA were both issued with collection-guidance lists from their defence ministries on what kit was wanted for closer examination. This ranged from small arms like the latest AK-47 assault rifle to the real prizes like the new avionics systems for Soviet helicopters. Both the CIA and MI6 managed to extract helicopters from the battlefield, MI6 taking one out in parts on the back of mules.

Leafy rural Britain as well as the Panjshir was the site of mujahedeen training. Massoud personally selected a small number of educated and reliable fighters who could be sent abroad. Some of these battle-hardened men were taken to the Gulf where perhaps they might be able to blend in. But others were deposited in the rather more unusual surroundings of Scotland and rural Sussex. They were trained at a facility run by a small security company. The locals, who might well wonder who the rather exotic new arrivals might be, were to be told that the company had a contract in the Gulf. Ten to twelve men would be instructed at a time, living in an old barn. ‘They were well armed and ferocious fighters but they lacked battlefield organisation,’ recalled one person involved in the training.¹⁸ They were tutored in ‘specialist skills’ including planning ambushes and attacking aircraft on the ground before being taken back into Afghanistan via Pakistan where they could get on with killing Russians and coaching their comrades. Many of those who received this training would years later go on to prominent positions in the Afghan parliament and government.

The Americans and the Pakistanis did not buy into Massoud – the Pakistanis because he was a Tajik, not a Pashtun, the Americans because he had called a ceasefire with the Soviets in early 1983 which lasted around a year. In the previous two years he and his 3,000-odd men had fought off six Soviet assaults, including one comprising 15,000 soldiers accompanied by a massive bombing campaign.19 The Soviets feared, admired and hated Massoud at once. His frustrating of their forces had led to his being christened ‘The Lion of the Panjshir’. His ceasefire had been a tactical move to buy some time to regroup as supplies were running low. But the Americans, egged on by the Pakistanis, saw it as an unwillingness to fight. ‘Massoud’s biggest interest in life was Massoud. And he was particularly good at it,’ argued one CIA chief in Islamabad.²⁰ ‘He could have done a lot more than he did.’ Massoud’s own people were angered by America’s aloofness. ‘The Americans wanted to fight the Cold War. He wanted to fight for the Afghans,’ declares Abdullah Anas.²¹

The British had a different view. They saw Massoud as an effective fighter and worked hard at meetings in Washington to persuade the Americans that they should back him – American buy-in, however reluctant, was important since the CIA would actually be funding much of the British support. The fact that the gargantuan CIA programme had left Massoud behind was something of an advantage to the British. He could be their man. It provided an opportunity for Britain to wield some influence and show that it knew best, an attitude the Americans were always aware of. The CIA thought the British popularised Massoud because he was the only contact they had. There was ‘always an underlying prickliness about the come-lately Americans taking the lead in their old backyard’, reckoned the Texan Milt Bearden, who ran CIA operations in Afghanistan in the second half of the decade.²² Another senior CIA officer was aware of how the British were always trying to stay in the game. ‘They probably thought they knew more about Afghanistan than we did and they could play Athens to our Rome. There was a certain desire to be involved. They didn’t want to be missing out.’²³ The ISI meanwhile ignored the British. Why talk to them when you have the Americans? They thought the British were playing their own game. Like the inhabitants of many former parts of the British Empire, the Pakistanis remained convinced that the conniving British had a devious plan and were playing divide and rule, manipulating everyone else. MI6 was not to be trusted, they thought. That at least left some space in which the British could operate, a chance to play the Great Game.

Stuart Bodman was a British journalist who died in a firefight near Bagram airbase on 1 July 1983. Except he was not and he did not. The confusion was both deliberate and accidental, all part of the world of deniable operations. The Afghan Foreign Ministry held a press conference a few months after he died proclaiming that Bodman was a spy, his work evidence of the ‘shameless interference of imperialist countries’ and in particular of ‘the hellish organisation of the intelligence service of England’. He had been identified by the passport and driving licence found by his body, they said. The documents showed he was working for a press agency called Gulf Features Service.

Enterprising Fleet Street reporters tracked Stuart Bodman down two weeks later to a pub near London. ‘The closest I came to spies was when I caddied for Sean Connery at Kingston Hill Golf Club years ago,’ explained the thirty-year-old, who worked in a warehouse.24 Records at the Passport Office showed that someone had falsely applied for a ten-year passport under Bodman’s name in November 1982. ‘I’ve never been further than Jersey,’ the real Stuart Bodman said.²⁵ Gulf Features had been set up just a few months earlier by a successful, well-respected British industrialist named Sir Edgar Beck. It was rather a strange venture for a man who had a long career behind him in the construction and maintenance of major public buildings in London, including the Foreign Office and Downing Street. He denied all knowledge of Bodman and Afghanistan, saying it was all ‘a complete mystery’. So, no doubt, was the failure of his news agency to publish any stories.²⁶ ‘We know absolutely nothing about it,’ was the Foreign Office response to inquiries.

Bodman was a British spy, but he was not Bodman and he was not dead. The identity was one of those used by MI6 for the increment soldiers it smuggled into the Panjshir for the same mission as the four men who had travelled in with a guide. The fake Bodman had spent a few weeks training Massoud’s men. As their time came to an end, Massoud turned to the Britons. ‘The Russians know you are here,’ he told them. ‘Bodman’ and two colleagues had slipped into a vast convoy that smuggled lapis lazuli through Logar to Peshawar in Pakistan. Hundreds of horses carried the motley band of travellers, which included a team of French doctors, one of whose female members a British soldier had taken rather a shine to. At local villages they would stop for water. The Soviet airbase at Bagram was close, but the mujahedeen controlled the countryside. At one point, they came across a group of wandering Afghan nomads who had pitched their own tents. The nomads appeared unusually anxious, the accompanying mujahedeen noticed. Half an hour later, they learnt why.27

It was the dead of night when flares lit up the sky followed by the sound of gunfire. They were on a plain not far from Bagram airbase and bullets whizzed past. Then helicopter gunships roared overhead. No one could see where the Soviets were coming from and the convoy scattered in a thousand directions. Horses were cut down. One of the Britons was half trampled by one of their animals panicking. An Afghan hauled him out. One guide crawled to a nearby river. He could see Russian tanks scouring the landscape and kept his head down until the next morning when he began to walk again. Eventually in the second village he visited, the guide found the British men. Battered and bruised, they resumed their journey, still hunted by the Soviets. Twice more they came close to being ambushed by commandos and changed their route to try and evade their pursuers. ‘It was a very lucky escape for the British,’ reckons one of Massoud’s lieutenants. They finally made it over the border around two in the morning. Two of the British men, still dressed in Afghan garb, were barely able to walk and were virtually dragged by their guides.

The Russians, who had been tipped off about the route, had failed to capture their main prize. But in the chaos the team had abandoned their equipment including their secure radios, satellite phones and fake documentation. Within two hours, realising that they had a useful haul, the Soviets sent four helicopters from Kabul which took the equipment to Moscow. Some of the documentation was later put on display at a Kabul press conference in October when the Soviets through their Afghan clients decided to publicise the find. Stuart Bodman was dead, they said. In fact his body was that of a Panjshiri horseman.28 They said he also had with him a video camera and a modern communications unit with a computer encoding system. There was also a diary, they said, which mentioned twenty-five time fuses, twenty-five electric fuses and fifty detonators for the manufacture of mines and bombs as well a list of chemicals and instructions on how to make explosives and where to place them. An explosives specialist named Tom may also have been part of the group, they said.²⁹

The Afghan and Soviet press did their best to expose what the British were up to. ‘A good pay is taken by the hired instructors training Afghan terrorists in Pakistan to carry out acts that are not worthy of gentlemen. One of the instructors … is making remote-controlled high-explosive bombs that are launched on peaceful Afghan villages. It is an open secret that some important highways in Afghanistan have been blown up with British mines.’³⁰ At other times, the Afghans accused the CIA of sending in undercover spies with film cameras from Peshawar.³¹ The CIA did run a programme which sent non-Americans, often Europeans, into the country posing as journalists on false passports and with communications and filming equipment to report back on what they saw.³² Groups of private individuals and small charities providing medical and humanitarian aid would soon follow the journalists in the pilgrimage to see Massoud which caused some awkwardness for the secret MI6 teams which had to be careful not to run into them.

As well as being able to go into the country, the British were also able to support activities that the CIA could not. The Americans were still struggling under the burden of the Congressional inquiries of the mid-1970s into assassination and covert war. A few of the more wily CIA officers saw a way of getting round their own lawyers and restrictions by bankrolling the British to undertake certain actions. ‘They had a willingness to do jobs I couldn’t touch. They basically took care of the “How to Kill People” department,’ one CIA officer claimed later in an account of the war. ‘The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn’t because it infringed on murder, assassination, and indiscriminate bombings. They could use guns with silencers. We couldn’t do that because a silencer immediately implied assassination – and heaven forbid car bombs! No way I could even suggest it, but I could say to the Brits, “Fadallah in Beirut was really effective last week. They had a car bomb that killed three hundred people.” I gave MI6 stuff in good faith. What they did with it was always their business.’33

British officials involved at the time shy away from American talk of ‘assassination’ but say fighters were trained in the use of silencers and sniper rifles as well as in the manufacture and planting of improvised explosive devices to blow up Soviet convoys. Fortunately for the British, these fighters allied to Massoud would be on their side in 2001 and in the battles that followed. This was not the case for those the Americans worked with like Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani who received the bulk of American aid.

For Margaret Thatcher it was all simple. They were freedom fighters not terrorists. Abdul Haq came to visit Downing Street, one of his feet having recently been blown off. He had subsequently admitted to being behind a bomb blast at Kabul airport that killed twenty-eight people. When questioned as to why the Prime Minister refused to meet members of the Palestinian PLO or Nelson Mandela’s ANC, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said it was different as the Afghan rebels were fighting a foreign invader.³⁴ ‘They were good terrorists so we supported them. The ANC were bad. That caused her no moral problem at all,’ explains one of Thatcher’s former officials. The Chief of MI6, and his Director of Operations Colin McColl, would occasionally brief the Prime Minister on operations, but contact was sporadic – perhaps a forty-minute meeting every six months. Just as there was little contact on the ground between MI6 and CIA teams in Pakistan, there was relatively little co-ordination at the level of political leaders. MI6 was left to get on with its own business.

The great terror for the mujahedeen remained the Mi-24 Hind gunships which flew out of Bagram airbase and which provided the Soviets with control of the skies. After four years it was clear that the Soviets were hurting, but not enough. They had also begun to use more special forces, their Spetsnaz troops, to carry out commando raids, often dropping on to hills by helicopter. There were those in Washington who wanted to escalate the covert war, to supply more advanced weaponry and to shift from just hurting the Soviets to trying to drive them out. Politicians like Charlie Wilson were pushing the CIA to send more advanced weapons systems, especially surface-to-air missiles, and to up the funding. The first attempt to counter Soviet advantage in the air was a British-made device which London was keen to deploy. There had been resistance in some quarters to using more advanced weaponry because of a fear that the Western hand in the war would be made all too clear, but resistance in London and Washington was eventually overcome (Thatcher personally pushing it through in London).

The Afghan warriors employing the British-supplied Blowpipe missile quickly saw that their task required something approaching a death-wish. It was a shoulder-fired surface-to-air weapon but a pretty inept one. The user had to launch it while standing directly in front of an attacking aircraft and then guide the missile to the target by manipulating a joystick with his thumb as he stared death in the face, like playing some suicidal video game. The operator would be looking, literally, down the barrel of a gun. The general opinion of British soldiers who had used them in the Falklands was that they were ‘a pile of crap’ and they were being phased out in the British army in favour of the new Javelin weapon.35 Still, hundreds were smuggled into Afghanistan via Pakistan. A British team came out to provide the extensive training required. The results, even when tried out on ‘gently descending parachute flares’, were miserable. Half of the first batch would not accept the command signal and went astray. After a British expert had flown over and agreed that something was wrong they were all taken back to England to be modified before being returned for action.³⁶ No one is able to recall a single aircraft being shot down using a Blowpipe.³⁷ At one battle, Pakistani officers tried to show the mujahedeen how to fire them and launched thirteen with no hits and with one Pakistani captain and an NCO severely wounded by the unscathed attacking aircraft.³⁸ The British military were mortified by the failure of their kit.

After the Blowpipe the Stinger arrived in Afghanistan. This was an American ‘fire and forget’ weapon that locked on to the heat source of an aircraft. In a sign of how much this had become a media war, the mujahedeen fighters given the privilege of firing the first missile were also given a video camera on which to record the event. They came, unsurprisingly, from Hekmatyar’s party. The result of their foray into TV journalism was filmic chaos. At three in the afternoon on 25 September 1986, a group of Hind gunships came in to land. As they made their final approach, the words ‘Allahu Akbar’ could be heard repeatedly on the tape as three missiles blazed away. Two hit their target. The picture then shook as people, including the cameraman, jumped up and down in celebration. It then zoomed into the wreckage and on to the grisly image of the corpses. Mujahedeen began cursing and firing shots into a body before a final close-up of one deceased member of the Soviet aircrew barely out of his teens. The video would be shown by the CIA to President Reagan in the White House.39 Massoud received almost none of the Stingers: only eight came his way at the end of the war out of 2,000 provided to the mujahedeen (600 of which were estimated to be still at large in 1996).⁴⁰ Abdullah Anas and others would occasionally purchase some on the black market from other corrupt Afghan commanders. The missiles certainly boosted morale, but even they were not as effective as sometimes claimed. Only 16 per cent actually hit their targets, according to one official involved at the time.⁴¹ Soviet aircraft flew higher, and more of them remained in base for longer, although this also may have been due to a political decision. Journalists kept offering to pay money to see a Stinger being fired and bringing down a Soviet aircraft, but they never got the picture.⁴²

Towards the end of the war, there was an element of theatre to proceedings, a sense that much of it was being played out for the now extensive audience of visiting journalists. Massoud was a master of the media. He understood its value. His soldiers also grew used to the presence of journalists. When the cameras came out, they would immediately strike a pose. The only way into the country was under the protection of a particular commander, so media accounts almost always tended to fête their protector. Massoud was widely glamorised even though he could be as brutal as any commander. Hacks paid for mujahedeen to attack a particular Russian post so that they could film it. There was talk that some had offered $10,000 for a picture of the execution of a Russian soldier. The Pakistanis had always been very adept at the theatrics. The performances had been well rehearsed for visiting dignitaries from Washington, including Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (who at one point introduced his latest girlfriend, who was called Snowflake, to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an unlikely meeting if ever there was one).⁴³

When the custom-fitted, unmarked and blacked-out Starlifter aircraft pulled up at Islamabad airport it meant that the CIA Director, Bill Casey, had travelled out to see the show. When Casey paid his first visit to the country he was made to believe he was being driven by jeep into Afghanistan. In fact that was considered far too dangerous and he was actually taken to a fake training camp in Pakistan. He cried tears of joy at the sight of so many willing warriors. Eventually he would be allowed to see a real camp.44 The mumbling Casey, who had fought with the CIA’s forerunner the OSS during the Second World War, was in many ways a throwback to the CIA of Frank Wisner and the early Cold War. He did not care much for intelligence analysis or Congressional oversight. He wanted the CIA to be a tool to wage a clandestine war against the Soviet Union. President Reagan’s strategy was to pressure the Soviets on all fronts and all around the world, whether in Central America or Central Asia. It was the 1980s version of that old Cold War notion of rollback. Part of the idea was propaganda. The Soviets were worried about the spread of radical Islam in these years. The Americans were not. Ten thousand Korans were printed and distributed in Central Asia, religion being used to undermine the godless Soviets.⁴⁵ Casey also wanted to take mujahedeen operations into the Soviet Union itself, a step further than even the Albania operation of the early 1950s. He wanted to have strategic bridges and roads blown up to impede the movement of Soviet supplies into Afghanistan. This did happen, although the CIA always denied that it had authorised the attacks and said that the mujahedeen had acted on their own or with Pakistani support.

The ISI sent its own men undercover into Afghanistan to act as advisers and eyes and ears. Two-man teams would go in for three months, growing thick beards to blend in. They were told to deny any connection to the Pakistani government and to avoid being captured alive. The ISI’s head of Afghan operations, Mohammad Yousaf, was explicit about the training provided for sabotage and assassination, including how to spot Soviet officers in order to kill them. ‘These attacks could range from a knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar to the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official’s office.’⁴⁶ The attacks became more aggressive and less clearly military, more what most would call terrorism. A bomb under a dining table at Kabul University in late 1983 killed nine Soviets including a female professor. ‘Educational institutions were considered fair game as the staff were all Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma,’ according to Yousaf. Shots were fired at a Soviet cinema; remote-controlled car bombs began to go off; rockets were lobbed into Kabul killing civilians. Boats carrying supplies towards Afghanistan were also targeted. ‘We required limpet mines that a small recce boat or a swimmer could carry, which could be clamped to the side of the boat just below the water line,’ Yousaf recalled later. ‘For these we turned to the British, via MI6. They obliged and it was the UK’s small but effective contribution to destroying a number of loaded barges on the Soviet side of the Amu throughout 1986.’47 CIA officials supplied electronic timers, plastic explosives and other items which could have military uses but which could also be deployed against civilians. They told the ISI never to use words like sabotage or assassination when Congressmen came through. No one wanted an inquiry.⁴⁸ Moscow began to issue warnings, hinting that it would strike training camps in Pakistan. The water was getting too hot and the temperature was soon turned down a notch.

The CIA chief in Islamabad, Milt Bearden, and his ISI counterpart, Brigadier Yousaf, increasingly began to argue as the decade came to a close. The ISI man had an abiding distrust of the Americans, a distaste for the fact that Yankee money was funding his jihad and tried to assert control, which Bearden resisted. The Americans began to perceive risks in their reliance on the Pakistanis and tried to go around the ISI’s back to build their own relations with commanders. They engaged sources to provide reports on what weaponry was reaching the front line and find out whether the Pakistanis were actually passing on all the material they claimed (the CIA reckoned at least a third of the weaponry was siphoned off by the ISI for other projects). The CIA also tried building relations with Massoud, although officers did not see him face to face, instead working through intermediaries. One officer assigned to work with Massoud learnt that Hekmatyar had put word out to have him (the American) killed.⁴⁹

In Moscow, a few in the Soviet leadership realised early on that they were not going to win the war in a conventional sense. But there were always voices calling for more troops and tougher tactics and there was an unwillingness early in the 1980s to accept that the intervention had become a war which was now being lost. As the decade stretched on and the coffins returned home and the mothers of the soldiers began to protest, the conflict increasingly became the Soviets’ Vietnam. The leadership struggled to find a way to extricate itself from a war which sapped morale and underscored the decay of hardline Communist power and policy. Thatcher could see by the second half of the 1980s that Gorbachev was looking for a way to disengage from Afghanistan. He told her it would be easier to find a solution if she stopped supplying the rebels with weapons.50 But Britain and the US did not stop. They were determined to drive home the advantage, to keep the pressure on the Soviet Union. They continued even after the Geneva accords were signed in 1988 when it became clear that the war-weary Soviets were pulling out.

As the end of the war approached, CIA and MI6 officers in Pakistan increasingly argued about what – and who – would come next. Senior Americans remained opposed to Massoud, the British supportive. When the dangers of backing certain commanders like Hekmatyar were explained by a British officer to visiting American Congressmen, a message came back from Downing Street through headquarters and out to the field: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ The British pushed for working with the UN to try and forge a political compromise between the different factions. A few in Washington agreed, but the CIA was determined to keep going. Milt Bearden pointed out that the British had lost two wars in Afghanistan already.

Soviet soldiers finally marched out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989. General Boris Gromov was the last to leave, solemnly walking across the Friendship Bridge that connected the two countries. Fourteen thousand of his comrades had been killed in the preceding years. Perhaps a million, perhaps two million Afghans had died. No one had counted. Some 300,000 to 400,000 had been armed over the decade.⁵¹ Milt Bearden sent a high-priority ‘Immediate’ cable back to Langley. Subject: ‘Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan’. The content of the message was a page which spelt out the words ‘We won’ in Xs across an entire page. For the first time Bearden switched off the light in his office, which he had previously kept on every night to make the Soviets across the road think he never stopped working.⁵² ‘Vietnam avenged,’ one person remembers Bearden saying with his fist in the air.

They had won. But had their Afghan allies won? No institutions had been built. That had never been the point of the war in Western eyes. And the Soviets might have gone, but their Communist government was still in place and would last until 1992, much longer than many expected. An attempt by the mujahedeen to take Jalalabad in a frontal assault failed dismally. ISI figures like Mohammad Yousaf became bitter and suspicious, believing that the Americans were trying both to sabotage Pakistan’s interests and to spread disunity among the Peshawar seven, though they hardly needed American help for that.53 Without American largesse to keep them on board, old feuds among the Peshawar seven predictably bubbled back up to the surface. Massoud and Hekmatyar squared off for a fight. For all his tactical skill, Massoud lacked the ability to transcend his narrow position. The Americans had lost interest in Afghanistan after 1989 and walked away. Job done. Having been swept up in the superpower conflict like many other parts of the world, Afghanistan was suddenly dropped to earth with a jolt. But, uniquely, the country would have its revenge for being jilted so swiftly.

Afghanistan fell off the requirement list for MI6 set by the Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall once the Soviets had left. In the new budget climate, that meant that even if someone told an MI6 officer something interesting or important about the country the officer would worry that pursuing a lead when there was no requirement would get them into trouble. Relationships atrophied. Just enough was done to keep contact with Massoud on life support. The CIA shut down its Afghan programme in 1992. Massoud was angry that the Americans had simply walked away. In later years when Afghanistan suddenly became important again, relationships would have to be rebuilt, often with money instead of trust. That would lead to the old familiar faces re-emerging, now as warlords, the kaleidoscope of allegiances shaken up only a little.

The war left a dark legacy not just in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan that would shape the country’s path. There were the millions of Afghan refugees who came to Pakistan and stayed, along with their guns. There was the power of the military in society and of the ISI within the military. The US had turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons during the years of their joint jihad. CIA analysts who had criticised the policy of ignoring the sprawling black-market network in nuclear know-how run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan found their careers suddenly taking a sharp turn south.54 But then as soon as the war in Afghanistan was won, the US decided it did not need Pakistan any more. In 1990 long-deferred sanctions were imposed on Islamabad’s nuclear programme. The Pakistanis were left high and dry. They would never trust the Americans again.

Pakistan also had to deal with a culture of jihad that had taken deep root in parts of the country. Saudi money, which matched CIA funding, helped build radical madrasas which offered free education for the poor but led to many young people coming out the other end enthused with the notion of jihad. That might be fine when it was jihad against the Soviets. It would become more problematic later. The Saudis had encouraged their own jihadists to head for Afghanistan, where they joined a small army of other volunteers or jihadists from across the Arab world and North Africa. Clustered around two of the Peshawar seven, Haqqani and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the 4,000-odd Arabs did not do much fighting. But when the war was over they looked for ways and means to continue their jihad. Some found an outlet in a new front in Kashmir promoted by the ISI. The Pakistani spy service had become adept at training in the techniques most would call terrorism and passed these skills on to a new generation of jihadists eager to fight against India. Other Arab jihadists looked further afield for an enemy.

Afghanistan would soon become the sanctuary for those who sought to attack the West. When the Communist government in Kabul fell in 1992, Hekmatyar and Massoud battled each other and Kabul was shelled to pieces and consumed in an orgy of rape and murder. The anarchy that resulted opened the way for a new force to emerge backed by Pakistan and the ISI in the form of the Taliban. These Muslim fundamentalists promised order and purity out of chaos and swept to power in Kabul in 1996. At the same time as the Taliban emerged triumphant, the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden flew in on a small plane from Sudan, returning to the country in which he had fought in the 1980s. Training camps drew in recruits from around the world, some run by old mujahedeen commanders from the 1980s with ISI trainers still offering free tuition, others closer to bin Laden specialised in recruiting for operations abroad. The only significant region which did not fall to the Taliban was the Panjshir Valley and the north where Massoud held firm. In Peshawar, one of Massoud’s brothers and closest aides met with his contact from MI6. ‘We were right,’ the British officer told him with a touch of smugness, thinking no doubt more of the arguments with the Americans than the fate of Afghanistan. ‘Hekmatyar failed and Massoud succeeded.’55

The CIA had largely disengaged from the country. Its main operation was trying to buy back and recover its Stinger missiles. As it became clear that bin Laden was targeting the US, especially after the deadly 1998 attacks on its embassies in Africa, the CIA tried to rebuild its relationship with Massoud to get to bin Laden, hoping to reactivate the contacts it had developed at the end of the 1980s. Massoud was curious but wary. His sanctuary was being squeezed by the Taliban, but he could see little benefit in acting as the proxy for an agency which cared only about getting bin Laden. In the end, he was offered cash but no military assistance.

One of the reasons for wariness in dealing with Massoud was the new agenda being pursued by both the CIA and MI6. By the 1990s fighting drugs had replaced fighting Soviets, and everyone knew that heroin was coming into Europe from Afghanistan, including from Massoud’s territory. The ‘drugs and thugs’ desk at MI6 which dealt with crime and narcotics knew that Massoud’s people were involved and from 1997 the New Labour government made dealing with narcotics a top priority for MI6.⁵⁶ This could conflict with counter-terrorism, which was also rising up the agenda. MI6 officers tried to peer across the Afghan hills but saw little. It was taking time to build up sources to find out what was going on. The Pakistanis pressed for recognition of the Taliban, offering help to establish contacts. A few wonder if that might have been worth doing in order to gain some leverage over them to expel bin Laden, but in London a new government was in power which promised an ethical dimension to its foreign policy. Talking to the Taliban would not fit with that.

The same arguments were in play in Washington, where the CIA and others worried that some figures in the Northern Alliance (the umbrella group Massoud had created in 1996) were directly involved in drugs or human rights abuses. The CIA decided to remain largely neutral between Massoud and the Taliban, on the grounds that supporting Massoud might just perpetuate the civil war.57 The CIA, during the Clinton administration, was going through one of its periodic swings away from aggressive activity and the main fear for officers was once again of being hauled before Congress. The gung-ho days of Bill Casey were a distant memory. Even when the CIA had bin Laden in its sights, it hesitated before pulling the trigger. It had been given the authority to capture but not explicitly to kill. To kill would break the ban on assassination which had once again been emphasised in the 1990s. A major plan to collect more intelligence in Afghanistan began in 1998 using eight separate tribal networks. Five times in the next two years, CIA teams deployed to the Panjshir Valley to meet with warlords including Massoud. The CIA would boast that it had accumulated a hundred sources and sub-sources. But most of these were low level. Officials would later protest that the intelligence was never quite good enough to launch a missile or a snatch operation directed at the Al Qaeda leader. It was either single sourced or else bin Laden was hunting with a group of sheikhs from the United Arab Emirates. Or he was near a mosque – what would the newspaper headlines look like the next morning if they blew it up? Those in the CIA unit tracking bin Laden, like its chief Mike Scheuer, fumed at the failure of their leadership and that of the White House for not taking more risks.⁵⁸

On one occasion in 1998, MI6 believed it might be able to obtain ‘actionable intelligence’ which could help the CIA capture Osama bin Laden. But given that this might result in his being transferred or rendered to the United States, MI6 decided it had to ask for ministerial approval before passing the intelligence on in case the Al Qaeda leader faced the death penalty or mistreatment. This was approved by a minister ‘provided the CIA gave assurances regarding humane treatment’. In the end, not enough intelligence came through to make it worth while going ahead.⁵⁹

It was becoming clearer in 2001 that Massoud and his men were the best option for going after bin Laden. The priority for MI6 was developing intelligence coverage. The first real sources were being established, although no one penetrated the upper tier of the Al Qaeda leadership itself. The problem was not locating bin Laden but getting close to him – that would require an agent of some sort in place who could help either directly by himself passing through security or by facilitating access for a team coming in. As the year progressed, plans were drawn up and slowly worked their way up to the White House for discussion on 4 September 2001. They involved dramatically increasing support for Massoud. Britain and MI6 were involved. ‘The posse was getting ready,’ reckons one British official involved. ‘But it wasn’t ready in time.’

On 9 September 2001, two Arab journalists who had been waiting to interview Massoud were told they finally had their chance. The queue of those wanting to speak to the Northern Alliance leader was not quite what it had been, but he still liked to use the power of the media. His enemies had decided to exploit this. Their letter of introduction had come from something called the Islamic Observation Centre in London. The two visitors were shown into a large room and did what most TV journalists do and began rearranging the furniture to get the right shot. A coffee table and some chairs were shifted so that the interviewer sat next to Massoud while the cameraman positioned his heavy-duty camera on the tripod. These two were a bit amateurish, thought some of Massoud’s aides. What are the questions, Massoud, ever the experienced interviewee, asked? ‘We want to know why commander Massoud said that Usama bin Laden was a murderer and should be sent from Afghanistan and many more questions,’ the interviewer said. Massoud frowned but told them to continue. The last thing the Lion of the Panjshir ever saw was the red light of the camera going on.60

Anatoly Golitsyn with his wife Svetlana at Coconut Grove in Los Angeles soon after he defected from the KGB in 1961.

Stephen de Mowbray joined MI6 in the wake of the Second World War and went on to play a key role in the molehunts within British intelligence.

Sir Dick White rose first to be director general of the Security Service, MI5, and then chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

James Jesus Angleton was a deeply controversial head of counter-intelligence at the CIA. Many believed he never recovered from the betrayal of his close friend Kim Philby and would later obsess about the threat of Soviet moles.

Sir Roger Hollis, head of MI5, was investigated for being a possible KGB agent. A report would later conclude he was not working for the Russians, but its contents remain secret. (Getty)

Sir Maurice Oldfield leaving Buckingham Palace following his investiture. As a chief of MI6 he was widely admired, though the concealment of his homosexuality would cause a scandal after his death. (Corbis)

David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, served with military intelligence in Vienna before joining MI5 and MI6, and later making his name as a writer. (Getty)

Admiralty clerk John Vassall was caught in a ‘compromising situation’ in Moscow and blackmailed over his homosexuality. He would spend years passing British secrets before being caught, partly thanks to leads from Anatoly Golitsyn. (Corbis)

Greville Wynne arriving back in Britain after being released as part of a ‘spy-exchange’ between Britain and the USSR. (Getty)

No man’s land in Berlin: the moment in when Greville Wynne was exchanged for Gordon Lonsdale.

Kim Philby (left) with George Blake (right) in the Soviet Union. The two former MI6 officers had not known each other in Britain when they were both spying for the KGB. They were only briefly friends in Moscow before they fell out, although Blake did introduce Philby to his last wife, Rufina.

Gordon Lonsdale, whose real name was Konon Molody, worked as an undercover KGB officer, or ‘illegal’, in Britain until he was caught. (Getty)

Oleg Gordievsky preparing for an orienteering competition at a KGB holiday resort near Moscow in 1971. Gordievsky soon became one of MI6’s most important agents.

Gordievsky (left) working the diplomatic circuit in Copenhagen and talking to the Danish Defence Minister. He was first approached by MI6 in Denmark although there were initial fears that he might be a double agent.

Oleg Gordievsky, Mikhail Lyubimov and their wives in Denmark. Gordievsky and fellow KGB officer Lyubimov were close friends until Gordievsky fled Moscow.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, known as the Lion of the Panjshir for his guerrilla war against the Soviet Union. MI6 built up close relations with him and sent undercover teams to train and support his fighters. (Getty)

Two future director generals of MI5, Stephen Lander and Eliza Manningham-Buller, shortly after they joined the service. They are pictured on a training course on the roof of a Security Service building on Gower Street.

Despite the reservations of her father (who had prosecuted George Blake), Eliza Manningham-Buller joined MI5 and worked on the Gordiesvky case and was later the head of the Security Service at the time of the 7 July 2005 attacks.

Sir Richard Dearlove, Chief of the Secret Service from 1999 to 2004, pictured after giving evidence into the inquest into the death Diana, Princess of Wales, in 2008. Dearlove led MI6 through the aftermath of the 11 September attacks and the Iraq war. (Getty)

Sir John Scarlett, who earlier in his career ran Gordiersky as an agent, was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the run up to the Iraq War and Chief of MI6 from 2004 to 2009. (Andrew Crowley)