Defectors are very strange, complex creatures and their management, like the handling of all human sources, is an immensely challenging occupation because of the many unpredictable complications associated with issues of motivation, loyalty, trust, deception and betrayal. Nevertheless, a well-informed defector is an invaluable asset and will be suitably motivated to cooperate fully with the debriefers and thereby hope to enhance his or her value.
From a counter-intelligence perspective, the first ‘pressings’ of a defector, like a great vintage wine, are likely to be of top quality, with the remainder being of rather less value. A defector can provide an overview and context of an asset that will provide the detail missing from relatively sterile technical alternatives, such as intercepted communications or comprehensive surveillance. Put simply, an indiscreet conversation in the canteen, the corridor gossip around the water-cooler, may offer a vital clue that no amount of wire-taps, overhead reconnaissance or sophisticated satellite imagery will ever provide.
The principal task of any intelligence agency is to generate reliable information for policymakers, and this is accomplished by developing a matrix or jigsaw puzzle of individual pieces that, when fitted together, reveal a picture on a topic that fulfills a requirement set by ministers and their advisors. The agencies will rely on a variety of sources, including open-source material, intercepted communications, diplomatic gossip, prisoner interrogation reports, tips passed through liaison relationships with friendly nations, aerial observation, technical sensors categorised as measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) and, of course, human sources. Often categorised as HUMINT, the human factor is the least predictable source of all, but it can be of critical importance when a priority target country, perhaps Iran or North Korea, creates a closed society, and an environment, which is sometimes referred to as ‘denied territory’ that renders conventional tradecraft redundant. For example, conditions in the Soviet Union were so adverse with a ubiquitous hostile security apparatus, that it was almost impossible for Western intelligence personnel to recruit or manage agents in Moscow or Leningrad during the Cold War. Virtually every active spy was caught within a few weeks. Similarly, there was precious little information from within the totalitarian regime, and Kremlin-watchers were limited to studying small quantities of signals intelligence and some satellite coverage. Entirely absent were the other components of the overall jigsaw, and in those circumstances the relative value of defectors was greatly enhanced.
It was the British intelligence community, specifically the Security Service (MI5), which was the first institution to recognise the significance of defectors when, in 1937, the former GRU illegal rezident in The Hague, Walter Krivitsky, failed to attract the interest of the French or the American authorities in taking him seriously. Alarmed by the purges in Moscow, which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, Krivitsky abandoned his post in the expectation that his knowledge of clandestine Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe would be received with enthusiasm, but he was greeted with disinterest by the authorities in Paris, Ottawa and Washington DC. Finally, after he had compromised John King, an active Soviet spy and British Foreign Office cipher clerk, he was invited to London and interviewed at length. Krivitsky’s bona fides had been established by King’s confession, and his information became the foundation for numerous other counter-espionage investigations that followed. Krivitsky would return to the United States where he would die in mysterious circumstances in February 1941, but his information would remain relevant for decades.
In 1948 an unidentified MI5 officer completed A Study of Defectors from the USSR, which included an account of Krivitsky’s interviews conducted in January 1940, described as having ‘provided an enormous body of very valuable information.’
Almost forty years later SIS’s Ian Chalmers drafted a report on ten post-war defectors, among them OVATION (Oleg Gordievsky), REDWOOD (Vladimir Kuzichkin) and NORTH STAR (Mikhail Butkov). Whereas the MI5 document took a positive tone, and concentrated on the success of the individuals concerned, the SIS version did not avoid the hazards of resettlement and the problems of handling these unusual men. Gordievsky underwent a painful (and expensive) divorce, alienation from his two daughters and severe alcoholism. Kuzichkin became one of London’s most popular acupuncturists – with actor Alec Guinness as a patient. He married twice before drinking himself to death in Weston-super-Mare. At one point his alcoholism resulted in a protracted stay at SIS’s country retreat near Chichester, followed by a period in The Priory, having been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. As for Butkov, the KGB officer who had operated in Oslo under TASS cover until his defection in May 1991, he later set up a fake business school in Berkshire, attracting foreign students with a promise of visas, and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for fraud.
Outside of the intelligence community the concept of defectors is little known and less understood. The Daily Telegraph journalist Gordon Brook-Shepherd, a former wartime SIS agent who died in January 2004, is the only historian to have studied the phenomenon in depth, starting in 1977 with The Storm Petrels: The First Soviet Defectors 1928– 19382, inspired by an interview in Paris with Boris Bajanov, who had defected in 1928, Brook-Shepherd covered George Agabekov, Grigory Bessedovsky, Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky. His second book, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors3, published a decade later, included Oleg Penkovsky and an unidentified FAREWELL, now known to be Vladimir Vetrov, even though neither officer ever defected.
Brook-Shepherd’s analysis of post-war defectors was described by the CIA’s Cleve Cram as ‘not only an exciting read but is accurate in almost every respect.’ Cram, whose research was supported by his legendary CIA analyst Carolyn Carpenter, had spent nine years in London as the deputy station chief, retired in 1992, having completed his SAWDUST review of the Golisyn controversy, and embarked on a lengthy study, Of Moles and Molehunting, of the contemporary literature devoted to the singular, compelling issue of hostile penetration of MI5. However, during his professional career, which had included a spell as station chief in Ottawa, Cram developed an increasing antipathy for James Angleton, the chief of the CIA’s counter-intelligence staff who was accused of having succumbed to Anatoli Golitsyn’s ‘monster plot’, a pejorative term used by Angleton’s critics to deride his perception of the Kremlin’s Machiavellian schemes to undermine and mislead the West.
Cram lauded Brook-Shepherd who had received ‘generous help from the CIA and the British intelligence services’. He was able to interview at least six defectors (Yuri Rastvorov, Piotr Deriabin, Arkadi Shevchenko, Vladimir and Tatiana Rezun, and Stanislav Levchenko) and described, chronologically, the cases of Igor Gouzenko, the GRU cipher clerk who defected in Canada in September 1945, FAREWELL, the KGB Line X (science and technology) officer who was executed in the Lubyanka in January 1985, Nikolai Khokhlov, Yuri Nosenko and Stanislas Levchenko.
In turning his attention to failed defectors, Brook-Shepherd described the cases of Konstantin Volkov, the NKVD deputy rezident who had offered to switch sides in Istanbul in September 1945, and Vladimir Skripkin, a GRU officer who had indicated his wish to desert in Tokyo in May 1946. The son of a general, Skripkin had been betrayed by a Soviet mole in London, and then entrapped at his apartment in Moscow when he was visited by a pair of NKVD investigators masquerading as British representatives and, most importantly, armed with a codeword previously agreed with Skripkin and ostensibly known only his British contacts.
The next cases to be examined by Brook-Shepherd were the four NKVD officers who in 1954 independently opted to defect when news of Lavrenti Beria’s arrest and execution in Moscow circulated among his subordinates. Yuri Rastvorov sought asylum from the Americans in Tokyo in January 1954; Peter Deriabin abandoned his post in Vienna in February 1954; Nikolai Khokhlov followed his example in Frankfurt, also in February 1954; and in April of the same year, the Canberra rezident, Vladimir Petrov, and his wife, Evdokia, sought refuge with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Brook-Shepherd devoted two chapters to Oleg Penkovsky, who was arrested in Moscow in October 1962, and then turned his attention to the controversy surrounding Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Golitsyn defected in Helsinki in December 1961, while Nosenko made contact with the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 but did not defect until February 1964. Many of the issues raised by these two cases are unresolved, but in 1978 Nosenko, who had been accused of fabricating some aspects of his story – which allegedly included access to the KGB file of the John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald – was exonerated, compensated for his ill-treatment by the CIA, and employed by them as a consultant. Finally, Yuri Rastvoroov sought asylum from the Americans in Tokyo in January 1954.
Brook-Shepherd’s other defectors were Oleg Lyalin, the KGB officer who agreed to work for MI5 before his arrest on a drink-driving charge in August 1971 triggered the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence professionals operating in London under various official covers. Another, perhaps rather less significant Soviet was Artush Hovanesian, who slipped over the Turkish frontier in July 1972, but changed his mind a couple of months later and returned home, accompanied by his young wife. His value lay in the KGB border watch-list, which he had brought with him.
In conclusion, Brook-Shepherd gave an account of two important cases, being Arkadi Shevchenko, the Soviet diplomat based at the United Nations headquarters who was granted political asylum in New York in April 1978. However, Brook-Shepherd appeared unaware that Shevchenko had spied for the CIA for the previous three years. In a curious postscript to Shevchenko’s defection, it became the catalyst for another when the GRU’s Vladimir Rezun was assigned the task in Geneva of tracking down Shevchenko’s son Gennadi, a junior diplomat, and escorting him to Moscow. Though a series of mishaps, Rezun failed in his mission, so he decided with his wife, Tatiana, also a GRU officer, to defect rather than carry the blame. Accordingly, both Rezuns defected spontaneously to the British.
Brook-Shepherd’s final case study was that of the KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who was exfiltrated from Moscow in July 1985. However, on this occasion Brook-Shepherd received minimal cooperation from SIS, partly because Gordievsky was undergoing a prolonged debriefing, but also because his wife and two daughters were under what amounted to home arrest in Moscow, effectively hostages to ensure the defector did not embarrass the Kremlin.
In retrospect, and with the benefit of declassified MI5, FBI and CIA files, Brook-Shepherd must be acknowledged as a pioneer in his chosen field, although with hindsight he can be seen to have perpetuated some popular myths. For example, he mistakenly attributed the VENONA triumph as having been accomplished by ‘analyzing the remains of a Red Army code-book found on the Finnish battle-front.4’ Since the National Security Agency had declassified most aspects of the VENONA programme in 1995, three years before The Storm Birds was published, Brook-Shepherd should have known better then to peddle a long-discredited cover-story for one of the greatest cryptanalytical triumphs of all time.
In another momentary lapse Brook-Shepherd recalledhow Konstantin Volkov, the NKVD deputy rezident in Istanbul had approached the British in August 1945 and attempted to open negotiations for his defection, offering a list of disclosures in return for his resettlement in England with his wife, Zoya. Brook-Shepherd explained that among much else, Volkov had ‘offered to name 314 Soviet agents in Turkey and 250 Soviet agents in Britain’.5 Subsequently this assertion would be reproduced, word for word, by numerous other historians and commentators, although Volkov’s actual letter had been couched in rather different terms and had included an offer to reveal:
1. List of 314 agents of the Intelligence Directorate of the NKGB in Turkey. This list includes active agents and also agents on ice. On some agents there are official descriptions.
2. List of employees of military and civilian intelligence services of Great Britain known to NKGB. [The] List includes about 250 official and secret employees of mentioned service of whom there are descriptions.6
Thus, far from claiming possession of a list of ‘250 Soviet agents in Britain’, Volkov had described a list of British intelligence personnel, with no suggestion they were Soviet spies. This is a colossal misrepresentation, so how could it have happened? Why did nobody question the very idea that there were 200 Soviet agents in Britain? Compared to the dozen or so spies mentioned in January 1940 by a previous defector, Walter Krivitsky, Volkov’s claim should have appeared downright fanciful.
Brook-Shepherd never explained the source of his information about Volkov, or the circumstances in which he had read the crucial letter, but Cram’s endorsement was enough for it to be taken at face value, as described by Brook-Shepherd. Furthermore, Brook-Shepherd had not been the first to misquote Volkov’s offer. In Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, released in 1978, Philby’s Observer colleague Patrick Seale said,
Among the secrets he promised to bring over were the names of three Soviet agents working in Britain,: two, he claimed, were in the Foreign Office, and the third was head of a counter-espionage section in London.7
Volkov, of course, never claimed he knew the actual names of the varying number of Soviet spies supposedly active in England; Seale never explained his source for his Volkov material, but evidently it was not the same as the one relied upon seven years later by Brook- Shepherd, who makes no comment on the discrepancy.
Brook-Shepherd’s error would be repeated in the 2010 authorised history of the Security Service, The Defence of the Realm8, by Christopher Andrew, who remarked that ‘the most reliable account of Volkov’s attempted defection is in Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s Storm Birds.’ According to Andrew, Volkov ‘under brutal interrogation in Moscow before his execution … confessed that he planned to reveal the names of no fewer than 314 Soviet agents, probably including Philby.’9 Since Brook-Shepherd’s figure of ‘250 Soviet agents in Britain’ was an invention, Andrew’s version is sheer embroidery, and is partly responsible for Ben Macintyre’s statement in his 2014 biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends, that Volkov had offered to ‘furnish the names of 314 Soviet agents in Turkey, and a further 250 in Britain’.10 Surprisingly, an equally flawed version would find its way into the paperback edition of another official history, MI6 by Keith Jeffery, who added an entire chapter to his magisterial history. According to Jeffery, Volkov had
offered to provide ‘a list of the NKGB Intelligence in Turkey numbering 314 men’ together with ‘a list of the known regular NKGB agents of the military and civil intelligence in Great Britain’, comprising about 250 known and less well known agents.11
Thus, Brook-Shepherd’ original, mistaken assertion, that Volkov possessed a list of ‘250 Soviet agents in Britain’ when he had been referring to British personnel, not Soviet spies, had escalated to 250 ‘known and less well known’ Soviet spies! To create even further muddle, in 1999 Vasili Mitroknn’s archive, edited by Christopher Andrew, gave what purported to be an insider’s view of the Volkov incident, based not on Volkov’s letter, but his confession, allegedly extracted ‘under interrogation in Moscow before his execution’.12 Supposedly Volkov had admitted to having ‘planned to reveal the names of no fewer than 314 Soviet agents’ but, according to Mitrokhin, had not mentioned they were all in Turkey. What about the other agents in Britain?
Brook-Shepherd’s misrepresentation of the Volkov letter included the false assertion that ‘of the agents in Britain, two, he claimed, worked in the Foreign Office. Seven more ‘inside the British intelligence system.’ However, the relevant passage of the actual document reads rather differently:
In some cases there are duplicates or photocopies which were given to us by NKGB who are employees of the British intelligence organs and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain. Judging by the cryptonyms there are nine such agents in London.
Subsequent writers have simply copied Brook-Shepherd’s error and, in 1990, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky asserted in their KGB: The Inside Story, that
Among the most important war-time Soviet agents, he claimed, were two in the Foreign Office and seven ‘inside the British intelligence system’.13
A decade later, as MI5’s authorised historian, Christopher Andrew, made much the same statement in The Defence of the Realm:
Volkov revealed that among the most highly rated British Soviet agents were two in the Foreign Office (no doubt Burgess and Maclean) and seven ‘inside the British intelligence system’.14
Curiously, Andrew cites The Mitrokhin Archive as his source for this mistaken statement, the relevant passage reading:
Among the most highly rated Soviet agents, he revealed, were two in the Foreign Office (doubtless Burgess and Maclean), and seven inside the ‘British intelligence system’.15
Thus, having originally relied on Brook-Shepherd for his account of the Volkov letter, Andrew had credited the same information to Mitrokhin, giving the appearance of validation. In reality, of course, Andrew had relied on Mitrokhin to corroborate his earlier mistakes. As for Macintyre, he cited Jeffery and Andrew as sources in his 2014 biography of Kim Philby when he stated that
Among the Soviet spies in important positions in Britain, he revealed, were seven in the British intelligence services or the Foreign Office.16
Exactly how Brook-Shepherd came to make his original mistakes, which others would replicate remains unclear, but the damage had been done, and the fiction would be perpetuated in innumerable books, such as Stalin’s Agent by Boris Volodarsky17, Richard Kerbaj in The Secret History of the Five Eyes18 and Tim Milne in Kim Philby.19
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During the Cold War, the phenomenon of the intelligence defector became an important part of the counter-intelligence conflict in which the principal adversaries sought to persuade potential defectors to remain in place for as long as possible before making the overt act that would result in long-term resettlement in a host country. Defectors became the principal currency of the counter-espionage profession, with virtually every major spy of the era having been originally identified by an inside source. Although the security authorities, especially in the United States and Britain, have sought to convey the impression that spies are often caught ‘by the vigilance of colleagues’, or by the use of routine precautions, such as polygraph tests, and background screening, the reality is very different. The overwhelming number of spies arrested in the post-war era in the United States were compromised by a tip given by a defector (or a defector in development). The same goes for the United Kingdom, where the Security Service actively propagated the myth that spies, such as William Marshall in 1952, Harry Houghton in 1961 and Michael Bettaney in 1982, had been exposed due to impressive sleuthing, rather than sheer chance in the first example, and a mole inside the KGB’s London rezidentura in the second. Marshall, a young radio operator employed by the Diplomatic Wireless Service, had been contaminated when an off-duty MI5 watcher happened to notice a known Soviet intelligence officer, Pavel Kuznetsov, taking a stroll in Kingston-upon-Thames, west London. The encounter was not part of any organised surveillance, but the initiative taken by the watcher led him to witness what was intended to have been a clandestine rendezvous. Kuznetsov’s tradecraft had been immaculate, so MI5 promoted the impression that the officer was not a victim of misfortune, but the target of a well-established investigation.
Two issues quickly emerge during any prolonged study of post- war defectors. Firstly, the art of handling such tricky customers was developed during the Second World War, with the classic model being example of Erich Vermehren, the Abwehr officer whose decision to switch sides in January 1944 – which would have the most profound consequences for the organisation – had been driven by his deep commitment to Roman Catholicism, which he could not reconcile with the regime. The second common denominator is the amount of either deliberate or accidental misinformation that has obscured the truth of the dramas that will be examined. Only with the benefit of recently declassified files can we now re-evaluate the eight case histories that follow.