Chapter 22

Aldrich Ames: the spy who hunted spies

‘You have to bring the cat back into the house!’. In intelligence jargon this enigmatic phrase means that when you have found a significant leak in the security system, the weak link has to be identified as soon as possible and the person responsible identified.

The cat in question in this chapter is Aldrich Ames. He was only revealed as a spy very late on and before his arrest in 1994 had plenty of time to cause serious damage. It could be said that he inflicted the most significant incursion into one of the world’s biggest intelligence agencies; the CIA.

The case caused a scandal in the United States and even today has ruined many people’s confidence in the CIA; a confidence that had already been shaken as a result of previous spectacular failures. In the case of Aldrich Ames, however, it reached its nadir: this was an agent who worked for the KGB, then for the SVR after it took over from the KGB following the collapse of the USSR, who at the same time was working as the head of counterintelligence within the CIA. In short, the man charged with uncovering moles, was actually a mole himself!

When Ames was unmasked, he confessed and was given a life sentence. Case closed? Not exactly. His file still contained secrets as the CIA did not want the public to know the full extent of the damage caused by this extraordinary spy. Was there something even more shameful hidden away? The case itself is complicated, full of twists and turns, double movements, manipulations and betrayals. It was a case worthy of the best spy novels and a real ‘Russian doll’: the more you delve into the dark record, the more new and disturbing elements you find inside.

On 22 February 1994, the residents of a quiet street in Arlington, a residential city in Virginia, were awoken by unprecedented police activity: not just police, but federal agents. Under the lenses of the television cameras, the FBI searched a well-to-do house in Randolph Street and emerged with a couple in handcuffs: Aldrich Ames and his wife, Maria del Rosario. The neighbourhood was stunned. As far as the residents were concerned, Ames was a State Department official and a nobody, they did not know he was one of the most important men in the CIA, not to mention the head of counterintelligence and the man responsible for protecting the agency against any outside interference.

The first announcement from the FBI spokesperson revealed that this spy hunter was actually a spy himself and had been an agent for the Soviets and now the Russians. The ‘bastard’, as he was labelled in the press, had been responsible for handing over US agents, who were later arrested and shot after being denounced to the enemy.

The revelation of the affair could not fail to cause alarm as it was rare to give so much publicity to the arrest of such a character: as far is possible, discretion is always the preferred method by the secret services. You keep your dirty laundry within the family before sending the person in question to prison, especially if the matter risked smearing the agencies’ reputation.

The second astonishing moment came with the intervention of the FBI. The logical step would have been for the CIA agents to confront Ames first and conduct an internal investigation before possibly entrusting the mole to the federal police. There had always been a rivalry between the two services and this was a question of jurisdiction. In principle, the CIA only handles foreign affairs, with the FBI responsible for internal security. Yet this has not always been the case and the CIA often waded into cases that it had no initial involvement in, such as Watergate. Likewise, the FBI never gave up on the opportunity to encroach on the CIA’s business.

Information on Ames’ treachery soon began to filter trough from the FBI. He had become a Soviet agent in 1985. But how? Very simply, he was short of money and basically just knocked on the door of the USSR’s embassy in Washington and offered his services in return for payment.

Ames was already working for the CIA at the time, but did not yet hold the prestigious position of head of counterintelligence. However, he was still a key CIA agent and it is hard to imagine that a US spy would present himself like that at the Soviet embassy: a diplomatic building that was under constant surveillance by the Americans. They knew who went in and who came out, so his actions certainly demonstrate a senseless lack of judgement. Not to mention the fact that there were other ways of contacting the enemy: there was always a Soviet diplomat or representative from an eastern country present at diplomatic receptions, inaugurations, film premieres etc. As at least half of these individuals were agents, it was easy to engage in the most mundane conversations without attracting attention.

What is also astonishing is the curious picture painted of Aldrich Ames by the American press, after using the information supplied by the CIA and FBI. He was described as a lazy man who thought only of money and drank like a fish. It was true that some spies were not always sober: the famous Cambridge Spies, for example, were known to drink more than their fair share! Ames was presented as a pathetic character and almost incompetent. Under such conditions, it was hard to see how he had achieved such a level of high office, which was incredibly sensitive in nature. Naturally, the institution’s bureaucracy, the incompetence of some officials, or just an ‘I don’t give a damn’ attitude can also be called into question. However, this would not stick for long, after all, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence was not just a minor figure!

L’Événement du Jeudi:

[From a Pentagon report in early 1996]

The life of Aldrich Ames, the son of an alcoholic CIA agent stationed in Rangoon (Burma), was nothing but one long blunder. After studying history and expressing a vague interest in comedy, his father forced him to enter the CIA as a junior employee. In his first post to Ankara in 1971, his boss described him as being ‘ lazy, scatter-brained and not fit for the life of an operative stationed abroad’, adding ‘he needs a quiet position, far from the front line of the Cold War.’ Ames was also an alcoholic and was often being picked up from out of the gutter. He sometime lost confidential documents and missed important secret meetings. In 1981 he was sent to Mexico: a nest of KGB spies. It was there he met and fell in love with Maria del Rosario, a 29-year-old, penniless, middle-class Columbian. In 1983 he was appointed the CIA’s head of Soviet counterintelligence, which was an incredibly sensitive post and completely above his level. However, he did speak fluent Russian and after the endorsement of Professor Tournesol, his superiors were convinced that he was actually a hidden genius.

So who was Ames exactly? He was born in the early 1940s and his father, as well as being a teacher, also worked for the secret services. He wanted his son to join the CIA after completing his studies in 1963, although Ames had only managed two years in a history department where he had hardly shone. However, this perfectly average American was to become one of the greatest spies of the century.

Aldrich Ames initially held several junior positions, including an international one in Ankara. After a calamitous beginning, he quickly returned to Langley, near Washington, where the CIA’s headquarters are located. His private life was not much better: he had made a good marriage to the heiress of a large East Coast family, but his life was very disorderly and he regularly went out drinking. It was so bad that one day his wife left him, even taking all the furniture from the house with her.

For safety reasons such events should have attracted the attention of his superiors, as an agent who led such a hectic life risked becoming a target for the enemy; and it is likely that the KGB had ad their eye on him for a while. However, the watershed for this future mole came in 1981, when Ames was appointed to Mexico and as usual, began to behave in a detestable manner. Not only did he continue to drink, but he chose for his companion in debauchery a Soviet diplomat who had been posted to Mexico, and who was the kind of man who naturally belonged in the KGB. Once again, his actions should have attracted the attentions of his superiors: his drunkenness was common knowledge and on several occasions, the Mexican police had to take him home.

However, Ames apparently started making amends when he met a charming university graduate from a good family from Bogotá. She was attached to the Columbian embassy and her name was Maria del Rosario Dupuy. No doubt thanks to Ames, she was recruited by the CIA and ordered to infiltrate the group of Cuban students who resided in Mexico. Straight away one might have asked the question that if this young woman was already familiar with the world of intelligence, would she not already belong to some other agency?

Aldrich and Maria quickly became lovers and they later married after Aldrich had had divorced his wife. He returned to the USA in 1983 and suddenly the career of this humble agent took off into the stratosphere when he was offered one of the most sensitive and prestigious positions within the agency: head of CIA’s counterintelligence.

In the intelligence service, the rule is to compartmentalise activities to prevent a mole from destroying an entire office. The only exception to this is the department in charge of counterintelligence. The head of such a department is practically the only person to know not only the identity of external sources, i.e. agents operating abroad, but also those operating on home soil. They are able to check every single file because part of their role is to root out moles wherever they may be.

Another responsibility of this very select group was to evaluate the importance of a defector and to determine whether or not they were genuine, or actually an enemy agent. Indeed, a false defector may engage in a form of systematic misinformation in order to try and convince his new employers that there were no moles within his department. They may even lead them down the wrong path so that honest and hardworking agents are dismissed, and the agency itself begins to self-destruct. Finally, counterintelligence must monitor those suspected of being double agents. They would first need to distil some genuine information in order to obtain the enemy’s trust, before then progressing onto more damaging and toxic manoeuvres.

As it was the only department to have access to all records and sources, the infiltration of a mole in a counterintelligence department was therefore the ultimate goal for any enemy intelligence service.

Frederick Forsyth¹¹⁴

Each intelligence service has within it a team whose mission is to check the reliability of everyone else, which obviously makes it unpopular. This counterintelligence team has three functions: first, it assists and presides over the debriefing of all enemy defectors in order to determine whether they are genuine, or part of some kind of Machiavellian plan. Using the cover of providing some useful information, a false defector can, in fact, systematically spread more lies by persuading his new employers that there is no traitor amongst them, or guiding them to a multitude of false leads and dead-ends. In this case, an intelligently led ‘transplant’ can result in many sterile years full of vain, pointless efforts. Counterintelligence will then keep an eye on those in the enemy camp who, without letting slip that they’ve changed sides, will agree to ‘collaborate’, but are in fact still working as double agents. Sticking with his superior’s orders, the double agent would then provide his enemy with some genuinely reliable information in order to gain his trust, thus allowing him to sow the seeds of confusion. Finally, the counterintelligence department must constantly check to ensure that its own camp has not been infiltrated and that there are no traitors within its ranks.

Being the head of counterintelligence was therefore a key role, not to mention the overwhelming responsibilities involved. So why was such a job entrusted to an alcoholic with a disreputable past, whose performances up to that point had been merely average and who had only previously held junior positions? There are only two possible explanations: the first is that Aldrich Ames had powerful connections within the agency. However, if this were true then why was he only receiving such a job offer now, when his career had otherwise taken a relatively mundane path? Perhaps there was someone at the top of the hierarchy who felt the sudden need to put Ames in this position? An interested party who were perhaps seeking to hide their own wicked behaviour? The second option does not necessarily contradict the first in suggesting that if Ames was appointed to such an important position, it was because after so many years of mediocrity, he had suddenly demonstrated his skills to his superiors by providing them with firsthand information on eastern countries. The result? He unexpectedly rose in their estimations and so when the time came to appoint a new department chief, his name was among those on the list of possible candidates. The question remains though: how did he get this firsthand information and did he only secure it in order to move his way up the career ladder?

If the second example is correct, then the KGB could well have been the one to provide the information. After all, if you want to get the big fish, then you have to have to send out the smaller fish as bait first in order to catch them! This second explanation also negates the incredible story that suggests Aldrich Ames knocked on the door of the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1985, as he actually became the head of counterintelligence two years earlier, in 1983 and in all likelihood, he was already a spy when it happened.

For now, let us stick with the official version; the one given to the public after Ames’ arrest. In 1985, Ames, now the head of CIA’s counterintelligence, was in financial difficulty. He was recently divorced and had to pay alimony to his ex-wife, while Maria del Rosario on the other hand, who had now ceased working for the CIA, hated living frugally. Ames had to somehow think of a way to get more money, even later saying after his conviction that he had thought about robbing a bank.

And so one day in April 1985, he simply walked up to the Soviet embassy and asked to speak with the head of the KGB’s branch in Washington. The resident, as they are known, was obviously an agent with diplomatic cover and when introduced, Ames explained that he was willing to betray his country for money, lots of money. As a pledge, he offered the KGB agent the names of three Soviet double agents who had passed on information to the CIA. The Russian understood the value of the information and in return, immediately gave Ames a few thousand dollars and the two men agreed to quickly establish further contact, with the promise that Ames would be paid handsomely for any further information provided.

Ames quietly exited the embassy, regardless of the presence of the FBI cameras and several further appointments followed, which took place at a fashionable restaurant in Washington. Prudently, the KGB chief sent a junior agent, even though, according to the official version given after Ames’ arrest, the American never showed any particular discretion at the meetings: whenever Ames was due to meet with his case officer, he would just shove all the original documents that he wanted to hand over in a plastic bag, without even taking the precaution of making photocopies, before quietly leaving the office, jumping in his car, and leaving Langley with all the classified documents on the seat next to him. Upon delivering the information to the agent in the restaurant, he would be given his reward. And what a reward it was, amounting to several million dollars in all. When considering the parsimonious nature of the Soviets, this was a considerable amount that surely must have justified the importance of the information handed over.

Some of his colleagues in the CIA began to ask questions, but Ames always had the answers: his wife had inherited a legacy and he had made several very successful investments with the money. The tax office was naturally hardly satisfied with such explanations, but Ames somehow managed to slip through the net and until his arrest, had no concerns at all about what he was doing.

Even more surprising was the attitude of the Soviets, who knew full-well that their mole might attract suspicion if he continued to randomly spend the money they were paying him. Yet his expensive lifestyle did not seem to worry them, nor did the manifest lack of judgement he continued to display. A clear example of this behaviour was uncovered after his arrest, when secret Pentagon papers containing the personal list of CIA agents was found in a box in his wardrobe. Worse still, the FBI agents also found a wealth of information stored on the hard drive of his computer. It was clear that the curious spy had kept hold of everything, evidently believing that he was untouchable!

Convinced of his own invulnerability, Aldrich Ames had managed to cause more damage than any other spy - a fact he was only too willing to boast about after his arrest, while at the same time showing no signs of remorse and even declaring himself as the spy of the century. However, such vanity does not quite match up with the real personality of the super-spy he claimed to be. In this business, discretion is the key and the greatest spies have never revealed their true identity. Would Rudolf Abel, or at least the man known by this name, have made such sensational statements? No. In this respect, the man who was the head of Soviet espionage in the United States throughout the 1940s and 1950s was silent on the subject, even after his arrest, and returned to the USSR with his secrets intact. Even the spies who published their autobiographies did so at the request of their superiors for propaganda reasons, while at the same time, carefully concealing all the most interesting details. As a result, there is something in the Ames case to suggest that he was not the quite the spy he claimed, or rather pretended, he was.

As the head of counterintelligence, Ames had access to the files of American agents who working in the USSR and other eastern countries. In other words, Soviet citizens who were working for the CIA. The American agency was certainly well endowed with a significant number of double agents: much more so than the KGB had in the US or other western countries. The time of disinterested spies who were working out of sympathy for the communist regime had long gone and the USSR of Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko was struggling to generate any enthusiasm for the cause. Forget about the idea of working for the honour of your country: agents now wanted to be paid and recruiting suitable candidates had become much more difficult and uncertain.

Yet thanks to Ames, the Soviets had the upper hand in the 1980s. He gave them names, and even if the names did not appear in full, he gave them enough detail about the agents in question to ensure that they were easily recognisable. In total, the KGB managed to flush out a good fifteen American or western agents, who were promptly arrested, interrogated and then shot without further ado.

Christopher Andrew and Vassili Mitrokhine¹¹⁵

Aldrich Ames, who approached the KGB offering his services in 1985, had worked for the CIA for eighteen years. In the space of two months he would betray twenty agents working in the West (especially in the US), including Dmitri Polyakov, a general in the GRU who worked for both the FBI and CIA for over twenty years. He also gave up Adolf Tolkachev, an electronics specialist who had provided excellent information on Soviet avionics, as well as at least eleven KGB and GRU agents around the world, the majority of which would be shot. Together, these agents were part of the most successful infiltration of the Soviet Union by the West since the Bolshevik Revolution. Greed was the main motivation behind Ames’ actions and after his arrest nine years later, he had already received nearly $3m (probably a record in the history of Soviet espionage) from the KGB and its successor, with a further $2m still promised to him.

Not all the American spies given up by Ames were arrested and at least two were able to escape. One of them, a KGB officer stationed in Athens, was suddenly recalled to Moscow on the pretention that his son was seriously ill. Doubting that this was true, the man contacted the CIA representative in Athens and managed to flee to the United States. The other agent to escape the net was Oleg Gordievsky, whose story is discussed at the end of this chapter.

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were no fundamental changes to the nature of espionage, although official contact was made for the first time in 1987 between the head of the KGB, Kryuchkov, and the heads of the CIA. The intention behind this was to coordinate actions in a number of areas, such as drugs and terrorism. However, when Kryuchkov came to the United States to meet with his American counterparts, he must have been laughing up his sleeve, fully aware that the CIA had been infiltrated at the highest level by its own agents!

In the West, the intelligence agencies were quick to let go any spies who were no longer in contact, no doubt the result of them being exposed or arrested. What especially troubled the CIA, however, was the simultaneity of the arrests and the Soviets had no doubt made an error in making the joint arrests. Yet it was not the KGB’s decision to do so, but Gorbachev who had personally given the order to arrest the spies who were at risk of exposing their mole, Aldrich Ames. Paradoxically, he was right: the CIA initially was convinced it had a mole in its midst and made a list of the 200 agents who would have access to the files of those spies stationed in the East. Among one of the more prominent names on the list was that of Aldrich Ames. This was not the first time he had come under suspicion and yet each time before he had managed to get away with it - even successfully beating the lie detector on two occasions.

Thousands of records were scrutinised by CIA agents. However, and this is the paradox of the whole affair, as the head of counterintelligence, Ames also found himself on the side of the investigators and so could easily escape any traps he risked falling into. He was thus able to continue with his dirty work, along with the one or two others who were protecting or manipulating him.

And so the investigation into the mysterious mole failed, although there were still those in the CIA who wanted to take it further, even suggesting a thorough investigation into the financial situations of all the suspects, in order to see whether or not they had received any secret ‘donations’. However, an important figure in the CIA objected to this, on the grounds that it would violate the rights of those agents involved, before observing that by continuing to hunt the alleged mole, there was a risk of resurrecting the witch hunt climates of the 1960s and 1970s, which at the time had profoundly weakened the agency. The fact remains that if these financial investigations had been carried out, then Aldrich Ames could well have been exposed as he would no doubt have been unable to justify the dramatic improvement in his lifestyle.

The objector also persuaded the best brains of the CIA to give up on their hunt for the mole on the following grounds: if the Soviets had conducted this series of simultaneous arrests, it was no doubt as a result of information obtained from a mole within the CIA,. However, they would not have taken such a risk if the mole was still active in case the mole in question was unmasked. The conclusion must therefore be that the mole was no longer operational and so the counterintelligence agents began to search through the files of traitors who had already been identified, such as those who had been denounced by the defector, Yurchenko.¹¹⁶ One of these men had already managed to escape back to the USSR, so perhaps it was he who was behind the wave of arrests in Moscow. Consequently, the search for the mole was temporarily abandoned, which is why, ironically, Gorbachev was right to order the mass arrests of all American spies.

This high-ranking and persuasive CIA objector can only have been the mysterious protector behind Aldrich Ames: a super-spy who has never been revealed and today enjoys a peaceful existence somewhere in Europe, having had a brilliant career as the head of the CIA, especially thanks to his Soviet friends. Yet the activities of this CIA mole did not end with the denunciation of the spies in Moscow: he was also responsible for the failure of dozens of CIA operations and also participated in several cases of providing misinformation.

Genovefa Etienne and Claude Moniquet¹¹⁷

Beyond the exceptional size of the case, what is really interesting about Aldrich Ames is that, after being recruited by the KGB in 1985, he was still working for the democratic Russia of Boris Yeltsin in 1991: clearly the regimes may change, but the spies remain the same. Moscow never denied Ames’ activities and General Mikhail Kolesnikov, the Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces, said after Ames’ arrest that he had ‘worked for Russia in the United States’ and had ‘protected Russian interests by unmasking Russian spies who had passed information back to the US’. For the CIA, the most worrying aspect was that Aldrich Ames had managed to stay in his position for so long and was thus able to continually thwart any security investigations, including the sacrosanct lie detector tests, which the men and women of the agency were regularly required to sit. According to James Woolsey, the CIA Director, what was even more serious was that Ames ‘did not have access to all the information that would have allowed the KGB to expose US agents in recent years’. There had to have been other moles within the CIA. In any case, this particular situation cost two of the agency’s top executives their jobs: Deputy Director of Operations, John McGaffney and the Director of Near East Operations, Frank Anderson.

And so the CIA once more began its search for the mole and the suspicion soon fell on Ames, but also on whoever was protecting him. Aware of the situation, the Russians decided to take matters into their own hands: they sacrificed Ames in order to protect the identity of the other man who, in their eyes, was far more important.

The head of counterintelligence, who continued to display a shocking lack of judgement, was obviously doomed and the Russians had no hesitancy in denouncing him. Sometimes in the world of intelligence, as in life, you have to make drastic choices: and the Russians had no qualms in doing so. The Americans then began to play their own game after suspecting that there had to be another man even higher than Ames. However, in order not to create an even bigger scandal, they pretended to believe that he was the only mole. So as to hide the truth, they declared that it was his lifestyle that had attracted the attentions of the FBI and even invented the absurd story of him going to the Soviet embassy to offer his services.

Édouard Sablier¹¹⁸

The Ames affair clearly exposes the weaknesses within the CIA and thousands of files will have to be opened in order to see the full extent of the damage. Any operations that Ames was privy to, whether near or far, are hopelessly compromised. All CIA agents, as well as those in other security organisations, who were stationed in Russia are now probably unusable. The anger expressed by Congress is a major threat to not only the future of central intelligence, but also for future relations with the new Russia: ‘we are not carrying the can for the Russians so that traitors like Ames can make millions’, proclaimed a Republican congressman from New York in the House of Representatives. Another declared that ‘given the magnitude of assistance the Russians are asking us and others for, it is incredible that they can still find the money to pay their spies’.

The Ames case resulted in two important resignations within the CIA: those of Deputy Director of Operations, John McGaffney and the Director of Near East Operations, Frank Anderson. Had one of these men been Ames’ protector? The man who is now retired somewhere in Europe? Another name is mentioned in an article written by Pascal Krop that was published in L’Événement du Jeudi in 1996. The man in question was Milton Bearden, the head of the CIA’s eastern European section, who was accused by one of his colleagues of warning Ames that people were beginning to suspect him: an accusation he later admitted to. Now retired, he lived in Bonn and would soon publish a book on the struggle between the CIA and the KGB.

Gordievsky’s story:

Serious, competent, disciplined and intelligent, this officer had shown himself to be the perfect KGB agent until 1973. He had first worked at the headquarters in Moscow, before being sent to Copenhagen where here was responsible for dealing with the ‘illegals’, i.e. those agents with no diplomatic status. At the end of the 1960s he returned briefly to Moscow, before going back again to Copenhagen, where in 1973, he made contact with the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) of Great Britain. Like General Polyakov, he was acting out of conviction, rather than monetary reasons, because he could not bear the harshness of the regime, nor the lack of democracy and corruption that went with it. As far as the West was concerned, he was an ideal recruit due to the fact that his various positions meant that he had an intimate knowledge of the KGB and its operatives.

After another visit back to the USSR in the early 1980s, Colonel Gordievsky (as he was now), was given the role of KGB Resident-designate in to the Soviet embassy in London: the most important posting after that of Washington. However, in May 1985 he was suddenly ordered back to Moscow, on the understanding that his appointment needed to be ‘formalised’, and where he was due to meet with several KGB bigwigs. There was no reason for him to be wary as the treachery by Aldrich Ames had not yet produced its full effects. Despite this, however, his mind was certainly not at ease as he prepared to make the journey back to Moscow. After all, being recalled so soon after his appointment seemed very strange, but he left anyway, although without his wife and two children

Soon after arriving in Moscow, Gordievsky started to have a bad feeling. The official who examined his diplomatic passport was surprisingly slow and for some reason made a phone call before handing back his documents. Gordievsky took a taxi to his Moscow apartment, where there was further evidence that his home had been searched. Luckily, there were no compromising objects or documents hidden away, except some works by Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, Gordievsky was worried: he was clearly under suspicion and the next day, he had even more proof of the fact. He had come to Moscow in order to meet the most important members of the KGB, and yet they prevaricated, giving the most ridiculous excuses for not meeting. Then a week later, a KGB car came to collect him, taking him to a dacha owned by service and located a few miles from Moscow. Several senior KGB officers were there waiting for him, including a colonel from the counterintelligence department.

Gordievsky was not questioned immediately and they first ate and drank - alcohol of course. Despite his misgivings, it was difficult for him to refuse a toast, although he was not to know that his drink had been drugged. In a daze, he was submitted to a barrage of questions from the KGB, which to begin with centred on his collection of banned books in his apartment. They also told him that they knew everything about his family life, including the conversations that he had had with his wife and children. Even under the influence of drugs, Gordievsky realised that his house had been bugged and his interrogators soon came to their main point and accused him of being a spy for the British. Despite his weakened state, he denied the accusations several times, before eventually slipping into unconsciousness. He woke up the following day, still in the dacha. He feared for his life when the counterintelligence officer reappeared and proceeded to interrogate him further, particularly on how he spent his time in London. Suddenly, however, the questions stopped and Gordievsky was escorted home.

It was clear that the KGB had no hard evidence, only their suspicions, and since there was no way for Gordievsky to escape, they intended to take their time in retrieving his confession. This must have meant that Aldrich Ames had not given them enough specific information on him and so they had no choice but to keep him on a leash. They even announced that his functions abroad had been terminated and that his wife and children would be returning to the USSR. However, as soon as his family returned to Moscow, they became hostages and Gordievsky was trapped. He knew that sooner or later he would be forced to confess and so his only chance was to escape, which was hardly an easy task when he was under constant surveillance by the KGB.

The British secret services came to his rescue after Gordievsky managed to make contact with them. One day, after setting up a series of false leads, Gordievsky was out jogging when he got into a van that had been hired by the British. Hidden under a secret floor, he managed to cross the border into Finland. Unfortunately, his family remained in the USSR, but now that he had escaped, he was able to be of invaluable service to the West.