THE DAY AFTER HE WAS sworn in as general Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev was told that Ronald Reagan “is trying persistently to capture the initiative in international affairs, to create an image of America as a country that is purposefully striving to improve relations with the Soviet Union and to improve the global political climate,” in the words of his propaganda chief and close advisor, Alexander Yakovlev. Gorbachev was ambitious to meet Reagan as an equal; it would be “in the national interest of the Soviet Union. We should agree to it, but without haste. We should not help create an impression that it is Reagan solely who pushes the buttons of world development.”1
Reagan himself inched forward. A Soviet defector confirmed to him that his country’s leaders nursed an odd feeling that the US might actually be a threat to their existence.2 The president was willing to confide in his diary that Weinberger and Casey were increasingly at odds with his policy on just about every subject, and even resolved to tell both men to defer in their pronouncements to Shultz (who was very, very frustrated by the pushback he was getting for all of his efforts). As the historian James Graham Wilson has noted, Reagan’s aversion to confrontation and his familial loyalty to Weinberger and Casey was too strong, probably to the president’s own detriment.3 He would continue to equivocate at critical moments, but in one sense his silence spoke louder than his actions: he allowed Shultz to make a lasting imprint on his policy, and in doing so, he convinced the Soviets that the Secretary of State spoke for him, and not the legacy interests of the Pentagon or the CIA or the nuclear priesthood. “I wanted them to know that we were looking at them realistically, and wanted them to know that the only way we were going to have agreement was on the basis of deeds, not words,” Reagan said.4
Oleg Gordievsky arrived in Moscow with a shadow. He could tell by the subtle differences in body language that came with each interaction. At the border, the guard inspecting his passport had to make a phone call. That was never a good sign. He found that his apartment had been burgled, probably to sneak in surveillance bugs. He could not sleep his night back. He all but knew he was caught; he kind of wanted the KGB to just get on with it and confirm it to him. And he wondered, of course, who had betrayed him.5
Still, when he showed up at KGB headquarters the next day, he was asked to organize his mind around a briefing about Britain once again, and he allowed himself a tiny hope that he was being paranoid. A few days went by. Then he got a call from a superior: “Two people want to speak with you about high-level agent penetration of Britain,” he was told. It was too sensitive to discuss at headquarters, so they would go somewhere else. The day was hot and sticky, as Gordievsky remembers it, when he showed up at a cottage in the suburbs of Moscow. He was served a sandwich and a spot of brandy.
Then he woke up, in his underwear and a vest, barely able to remember what had happened. He was under interrogation. His chief inquisitor was the head of the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate, its internal counterspy arm. Strangely, he was driven back to his home. The next day, he showed up at work—as if nothing had happened. But now he was led into an office there and told that while they knew he had been deceiving them—“if you only knew what an unusual source we heard about you from!”—he could keep his job in the KGB, albeit not in an operational role.
At this point, Gordievsky had no idea what to think. If they had the goods on him, they would not have let him go. If they knew he was a traitor, he would have been beaten—and not clumsily drugged at a cottage somewhere. He assumed that he would be under heavy surveillance—perhaps the KGB needed to catch him in the act before it could justify the arrest of the London resident—but had no one to bounce ideas off of. He was alone on an island in the middle of Moscow.6
A few days later, his wife, Leila, returned with his children. “I’m afraid I’m in big trouble. We can’t go back,” he told her.
Leila: “What do you mean?”
Oleg: “We can’t ever go back to London.”
Leila: “Why on earth not?”
He lied to her. It was stupid KGB intriguing, he said.
His children, knowing very little of Moscow, began to pine for England. He found this heartbreaking.
Gordievsky began to realize that he had a choice to make. If he stayed with his family, he would certainly be killed, and they might be imprisoned. If he escaped, he’d live, and he might never see them again, but he could probably use his life as a bargaining chip to keep them alive, too.
For the past seven years, SIS case officers in Moscow risked their lives to check a signaling point that had been dedicated solely to help Gordievsky begin his escape. Even when he was in London, the spot was watched, because the KGB officers who were watching the SIS officers could not associate a “deviation from the pattern with the absence of Gordievsky,” the historian Gordon Corera later wrote.7
To signal the British, Gordievsky would have to stand near a lamppost with a Safeway shopping bag at precisely 7:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. For days, he worked on a plan to get to the spot without surveillance. When Tuesday came, he found himself there—and no one seemed to see him. What he gotten wrong? Had the British abandoned him? He tried again a week later, and waited twenty-four agonizing minutes before he saw the countersignal—a very obviously British man carrying a shopping bag. The two men looked at each other, and Gordievsky begged for help, only with his eyes.
He would have to trust that the signal had been passed correctly. Either way, he was going to execute its next steps. Within a week, he would be dead, or he would be free. The plan involved a maze of what Gordievsky called “dry cleaning”—shaking surveillance in the heart of Moscow—and using fake identity cards to take train trips to different locations.8
He ended up near “a large stone in the forest” somewhere south of Finland.
He waited there for hours.
And then the funny-looking man with the Harrods bag drove up in a car, accompanied by two women. Gordievsky packed himself into the trunk and found bottles of water, an empty bottle in case he had to pee, and sedatives.
The British had been tracked by the KGB, too, and the team had to move quickly.
At a checkpoint near the border, a guard maneuvered a canine around the car. It had sniffed out Gordievsky.
But one of the women—the wife of an SIS officer—thought quickly and fed the dog some chips while the guard wasn’t looking. The dog’s concentration was now elsewhere.
Hours later, the car stopped, and the trunk popped open.
“Awkwardly I scrambled to my feet, my trousers hanging down. All round stood the glorious, soaring, clean pines of a Finnish forest.”
He saw his SIS case officers.
He was free.9
For the first time ever—or since—a Western spy had been smuggled out of Moscow.