"The Spy and the Traitor"

[fiefoe]

This is a very gripping spy story and Ben Macintyre told it well. It's despiriting to think that we might be heading into yet another era when the best line of communication between nations is maintained by a brave double agent.

• “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away,” said Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD. “When you chop wood, chips fly.”
• the stream of East Germans fleeing to the West through West Berlin had reached a torrent. By 1961, some 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20 percent of the entire population, had joined the mass exodus from Communist rule.
• The KGB’s “Red Banner” elite training academy, deep in the woods fifty miles north of Moscow, was code-named School 101, an ironic and entirely unconscious echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the basement torture chamber
• Each illegal had to be sustained, instructed, and financed, requiring a complex arrangement of signal sites, dead drops, and brush contacts. Britain was seen as particularly fertile ground for planting illegals, since there was no system of identity cards in the country, and no central registration bureau. West Germany, America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were all prime targets.
• (A KGB dentist had drilled several unnecessary holes in his teeth before he left Moscow, which meant Molody could simply open his mouth and point out the KGB-made cavities to confirm his identity to other Soviet spies.)
• But the most famous Soviet spy in semiretirement was British. Kim Philby had been recruited by the NKVD in 1933, rose up the ranks of MI6 while feeding vast reams of intelligence to the KGB, and finally defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963, to the deep and abiding embarrassment of the British government.
• she would improve his chances of promotion, and he was her passport out of Moscow. This was a KGB marriage of convenience, though neither admitted it to the other.
• He was astounded by the range of books available in the first library he entered, but even more surprised to be allowed to borrow as many as he wanted and to keep the plastic bag he took them away in.
• Bach, Handel, Haydn, Telemann—composers he had never been allowed to hear in Soviet Russia. There was a very good reason, he reflected, why ordinary Soviet citizens were not permitted to travel abroad: who but a fully indoctrinated KGB officer would be able to taste such freedoms and resist the urge to stay?
• Lyubimov wrote: “He indisputably stood out among his colleagues as a result of his excellent education, thirst for knowledge, love of reading, and, like Lenin, visits to public libraries.”
• The West missed the signal. Gordievsky reached out, and nobody noticed. In the torrent of material intercepted and processed by the Danish security service, this small but significant gesture passed undetected.
• spying seldom goes exactly according to plan. In the wake of the Prague Spring, Gordievsky sent a veiled message to Western intelligence, which was not spotted. The Danish intelligence service attempted to ensnare him, based on a false premise, and missed by a mile. Each side had made an approach, and neither had connected.
• Bromhead had forgotten almost all his Russian; he spoke only a smattering of Danish and a very little bit of German—the language he had used to order around German POWs was not, in these circumstances, very suitable. Gordievsky spoke fluent German and Danish, but no English at all. “We managed at a superficial level,” said Bromhead.
• But it was a “cock-up” that, in the long run, worked. Gordievsky was concerned when weeks passed without an effort by Bromhead to renew contact, then dismayed, then quite angry, and finally oddly reassured. The pause gave him time for reflection. If this had been a dangle, MI6 would have moved much faster. He would wait. Give the KGB time to forget the contact with Bromhead. In spying, as in love, a little distance, a little uncertainty, an apparent cooling on one side or the other can stimulate desire.
• But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.
• All spies need to feel they are loved. One of the most powerful forces in espionage and intelligence work (and one of its central myths) is the emotional bond between spy and spymaster, agent and handler... There has never been a successful spy who did not feel that the connection with his handler was something more profound than a marriage of convenience, politics, or profit: a true, enduring communion, amid the lies and deception.
• The Russian euphemism for the summary death sentence was vyshaya mera, “highest measure”:
• At his urging she read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle, depicting the dark brutality of Stalinism. “He gave me books from his library. I took it to my heart, this waterfall of truth. He educated me.”
• The overzealous young officer was commended for his perceptiveness and then “fobbed off” with a vague explanation as to why the lead was not worth pursuing. Not for the first time, a security service had, by its diligence, very nearly wrecked an ongoing case.
• How could British intelligence take advantage of what Gordievsky was revealing without burning him? <> From the start, MI6 opted to play the long game. Gordievsky was still a young man. The information he supplied was excellent, and it would only improve with time and promotion.
• this was a convention, not a legal rule, and Soviet border guards felt little compunction in searching any car that aroused suspicion. Still, it was a small gap in the fortified wall surrounding Russia: a spy hidden inside a diplomatic car might conceivably slip through this chink in the Iron Curtain.
• Safeway bags bore a large red S, an immediately recognizable logo that would stand out in the drab Moscow surroundings. Gordievsky had lived and worked in the West, and there would be nothing particularly remarkable about his holding such an object. Plastic bags were prized, especially foreign ones.
• Meanwhile two MI6 officers driving a diplomatic car would have set off from Moscow and spent the night in Leningrad. The precise timings were dictated, and complicated, by Soviet bureaucracy: official permission to travel had to be obtained two days before departure, and special export license plates needed to be attached to the diplomatic car. The garage performing this function was only open on Wednesdays and Fridays.
• He would immediately climb into the trunk of the car, where he would be wrapped in a space blanket to deflect the infrared cameras and heat detectors believed to be deployed at Soviet borders, and given a tranquilizer pill.
• Gordievsky had secretly detested all that his father stood for—the blind obedience to a cruel ideology and the cowardice of the Homo Sovieticus. But he had also loved the old man, and even respected his obstinacy, a trait they shared. Between father and son, love and deception ran in tandem.
• the novels of Somerset Maugham. A British intelligence officer during the First World War, Maugham brilliantly captures the moral fogginess of espionage in his fiction. Gordievsky was particularly taken with the character of Ashenden, a British agent sent to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution: “Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness,” wrote Maugham. “People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them.”
• Agent BOOT was the Right Honorable Michael Foot, distinguished writer and orator, veteran left-wing MP, leader of the Labour Party, and the politician who, if Labour won the next election, would become prime minister of Britain. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had been a paid KGB agent.
• “The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust,” Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.
• British, it was said, had built a special tunnel under Kensington Palace Gardens in order to install bugging equipment beneath the embassy; electric typewriters were banned, on the grounds that the sound of tapping might be picked up and deciphered
• Gordievsky now found himself working inside a miniature Stalinist state, sealed off from the rest of London, an enclosed world of roiling distrust, petty jealousies, and backbiting. “The envy, the vicious thinking, the underhand attacks, the intrigues, the denunciations, all these were on a scale that made the Center in Moscow seem like a girls’ school.”
• Gordievsky’s powers of recall were different. He was not just consistent, but progressive and accreting... Gordievsky’s memory was pointillist, a series of dots that, when joined up and filled in, created a massive canvas of vivid color. “Oleg had a great gift for remembering conversations. He recalled timing, context, wording…he wouldn’t be steered.”
• Armstrong would later find himself the key witness in the “Spycatcher trial,” the British government’s failed attempt to block the publication of Peter Wright’s revelatory memoir. He coined the phrase “economical with the truth.” He certainly appears to have been most economical in distributing the truth about Michael Foot... He did not tell a soul. <> Having been passed the unexploded bomb, the cabinet secretary put it in his pocket, and kept it there, in the hope that Foot would lose, and the problem would defuse itself.
• In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-day invasion force would land at Calais,
• The oddest injunction was to monitor “the level of blood held in blood banks,” and report if the government began buying up blood supplies and stockpiling plasma... The Kremlin, however, assuming that capitalism penetrated every aspect of Western life, believed that a “blood bank” was, in fact, a bank, where blood could be bought and sold. No one in the KGB outstations dared to draw attention to this elemental misunderstanding. In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous than revealing your own ignorance is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.
• To prepare for the time when he might have to drug his own daughters at the moment of exfiltration, Veronica Price produced a syringe and an orange for him to practice administering injections. Every few months, he would weigh his daughters, the weights would be reported to the MI6 station in Moscow, and the dosage in the waiting syringes would be adjusted accordingly.
• The Center frequently identified prominent “progressives,” such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament campaigner Joan Ruddock and the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, in the belief that with the right approach they might spy for the Soviets.
• In spy jargon such information is known as “chicken feed,” genuine but not seriously damaging information that can be given to an enemy to establish an agent’s bona fides, bulky, filling, but lacking in any real nutritional value. British intelligence had become expert in manufacturing chicken feed during the Second World War
• A spy who volunteers his services is known as a “walk-in,” and is immediately more suspect than one who has been picked out for recruitment. The document revealed only what the KGB already knew, information that was correct but unhelpful: in other words, chicken feed. Once again, it does not seem to have occurred to him that Koba was demonstrating his bona fides by deliberately furnishing information that Guk could verify.
• He immediately grasped the implications: whoever had compiled the list did not know, for certain, that he was a KGB agent; and whoever had passed it on could not know that he was secretly spying for Britain, because if he did, he would have betrayed him to Guk to protect himself from exposure.
• The handful of MI5 personnel indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case would be responsible for finding the internal mole, under the leadership of John Deverell, director of K, MI5’s counterintelligence branch. Working out of Deverell’s office, they were sealed off from the rest of MI5 while they dug, a secret cell within a secret department of a secret organization.
• Looking back over his file, Eliza Manningham-Buller was appalled: “We made Bettaney what he became. He never recovered from Northern Ireland.” He was a man with an accent, wardrobe, and image that was not his own, without family, friends, love, or settled convictions, looking for a cause and doing a job to which he was utterly unsuited.
• Unlike other branches of government, secret services tend to recruit imaginative people who have what Winston Churchill called “corkscrew minds.” If the marks of potential treachery are being clever, eccentric, and inclined to have a few too many drinks, then half the wartime and postwar spies in Britain and America would have been suspect. But in this respect the KGB was different, since it officially frowned on both inebriation and individuality. Gordievsky’s betrayal was invisible because he was sober and outwardly conformist; Bettaney went undetected because he was not.
• Three times, Bettaney had presented the KGB chief with a valuable gift horse; each time, Guk had looked it squarely in the mouth. Intelligence history offers few comparable examples of such an opportunity squandered.
• In an instruction that says much about its own priorities, the KGB instructed its officers to monitor evidence that members of the “political, economic and military elite” were evacuating their own families from London. <> The telegram, passed by Gordievsky to MI6, was the first indication received by the West that the Soviets were responding to the exercise in an unusual and deeply alarming way.
• Both Reagan and Thatcher understood the Cold War in terms of a Communist threat to peaceful Western democracy: thanks to Gordievsky, they were now aware that Soviet anxiety might represent a greater danger to the world than Soviet aggression... ABLE ARCHER marked a turning point, a moment of terrifying Cold War confrontation, undetected by the Western media and public, that triggered a slow but perceptible thaw.
• Politicians treasure classified information because it is secret, which does not necessarily render it more reliable than openly accessible information, and frequently makes it less so. If the enemy has spies in your camp, and you have spies in his, the world may be a little safer, but essentially you end up where you started, somewhere on the arcane and unquantifiable spectrum of “I know that you know that I know…”
• The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union.
• “On the rostrum she wore a black dress and a fur hat, and looked very serious. It was a seductive performance. She had an insight into their psychology. Without Oleg she would have been much tougher. Because of Oleg she knew how best to play her hand. They noticed.”
• Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides: Gordievsky could advise Gorbachev on what to say to Thatcher, while simultaneously suggesting what Thatcher might say to Gorbachev. And if the meeting went well, it would improve Gordievsky’s chances of securing the post of rezident—and the intelligence windfall that this would bring.
• The CIA, however, was known to have recruited a Swiss watchmaker to develop an ingenious miniature camera hidden inside an ordinary Bic cigarette lighter, which could take perfect photographs when used in conjunction with a length of thread, 111/4 inches long, and a pin. Using a piece of chewing gum, the thread was stuck to the bottom of the lighter; when the pin at the end lay flat on a document, that measured the ideal focal length, and the button on top of the lighter could be pressed to click the shutter.
• An individual spy may be pinpointed by what he produces, but also by what he does not. The intelligence being passed on by the Brits contained little technical or military information, but a great deal of high-grade political intelligence. The probability, therefore, was that he was working in the PR Line of the First Chief Directorate. An agent inside the KGB would undoubtedly have fingered a number of Western spies working for the Soviets. So where had the Soviets recently lost agents? Haavik and Treholt in Norway. Bergling in Sweden. But the most dramatic exposure of a Soviet spy in recent times had taken place in Britain, with the much-publicized arrest and trial of Michael Bettaney.
• Nikitenko was instructed to prepare for his return to Moscow. He was furious at being leapfrogged by an underling with just three years’ experience in Britain, and elaborately insincere in his congratulations.
• Preparing for Operation PIMLICO was one of the most important tasks of the MI6 station: a dedicated escape plan to save a spy who frequently wasn’t there, in readiness for a time when he might be. Every MI6 officer kept on hand, in his flat, a pair of gray trousers, a green Harrods bag, and a stock of KitKats and Mars bars.
• Paradoxically, given its lack of moral restraint, the KGB was an intensely legalistic organization. Gordievsky was now a KGB colonel. He could not simply be detained on suspicion of treachery.
• The next day was played out with the same mixture of inner turmoil and external charade, as was the next. A strange deceptive dance was under way, with both Gordievsky and the KGB pretending to be in step, while waiting for the other to trip up. The strain was unremitting and unshared.
• Of all people Kim Philby, the elderly British spy still living in Moscow exile, came to his aid. “Never confess,” Philby had advised his KGB students. As the psychoactive drug took a grip, Philby’s words came back: “Like Philby, I was denying everything. Deny, deny, deny. It was instinctive.”
• Golubev the interrogator seemed to wake up at this point, and asserted, surreally: “Nonsense. There was nothing wrong with the food. It was delicious. The sandwiches with the salmon roe were excellent, and so were the ones with ham.” <> Gordievsky wondered if he might be hallucinating again. Here he was being accused of treason, and the chief investigator was defending the quality of KGB sandwiches.
• When the senior MI6 officer liaising with the MI5 eavesdropping team was asked how the alarm raised by Gordievsky could possibly have been missed, he offered a quotation from Horace: Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, often translated as “Even Homer nods.” The most highly trained experts can still be caught napping.
• It was easy to spot the KGB vehicles: the brushes of the KGB carwash, for reasons unknown, could not quite reach a spot in the middle of the hood, so each car had a telltale triangle of dirt on the front.
• As Ascot observed: “The Finns had an agreement with the Russians to turn over to the KGB any fugitives from the Soviet Union that fell into their hands.” The term “Finlandization” had come to mean any small state cowed into submission by a much more powerful neighbor, retaining theoretical sovereignty but effectively in thrall.
• They needed a believable emergency. Before leaving home, Gee had passed his wife a note, written on toilet paper: “You’re going to have to get ill,” it read.
• The story is about risk—“man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table”—and getting out in time... It was highly unlikely that the KGB’s eavesdroppers were versed in early-twentieth-century English literature, and even more improbable that they would be able to decipher the clue in less than twenty-four hours. But it was a hostage to fortune nonetheless. <> His rebellion had always been, in part, a cultural one, a defiance of the philistinism of Soviet Russia. Leaving an obscure hint from Western literature was his parting shot, a demonstration of his own cultural superiority.
• The equerry in the gatehouse was on the telephone, conducting a high-level discussion on a matter of considerable royal concern: the queen wanted to borrow the queen mother’s videotape recorder in order to watch Dad’s Army. This was proving hard to arrange. <> Powell tried to interrupt the conversation, but was silenced with a cold look. Cold looks are taught at equerry school.
• “No. If the prime minister wishes to tell the queen and the queen wishes to tell you, that is for them to decide. But I am not able to tell you.” <> The royal courtier fumed. If you are a private secretary, there is nothing more galling than another private secretary being more private than you are.
• What Mrs. Thatcher did not know—and never discovered—was that she had authorized an operation that was already under way. Had she declined to approve the escape attempt, there was no way to inform Gordievsky that there would be no one waiting for him at the rendezvous. He would have been abandoned.
• Diplomats were not permitted to drive alone; without a codriver with a valid Soviet license Ascot could not get the official plates; without these plates they could not leave the Soviet Union. PIMLICO was about to founder on a tiny but immoveable rock of Russian bureaucracy. At 11 a.m., an hour before the traffic authorities shut for the weekend, Ascot was still racking his brains for a solution when a package arrived from the Soviet Foreign Ministry containing Caroline’s British license and a new Soviet one.
• About halfway to Leningrad, in the Valdai Hills, the escape team drove into a spectacular dawn that moved Ascot to lyricism: “A thick mist had risen from the lakes and rivers, extending into long belts beside the hills and through the trees and villages. The land slowly coalesced into substantial forms out of these foaming banks of violet and rose. Three very bright planets shone out in perfect symmetry, one to the left, one to the right, and one straight ahead. We passed solitary figures already scything hay, picking herbs, or taking cows to pasture along the slopes and gullies of common land. It was a stunning sight, an idyllic moment. It was difficult to believe that any harm could come out of a day of such beginnings.”
• While they often knew that you knew they were around, what really offended and embarrassed them was when someone deliberately indicated that he had spotted them: psychologically, no surveillance team likes to be shown up by its target as obvious and incompetent. They hate you putting two fingers up, and saying in effect: ‘We know you are there and we know what you’re up to.’ ” On principle, Ascot always ignored surveillance, however overt. Now, for the first time, he broke his own rule... The KGB driver did not like it. The British were mocking him, deliberately impeding progress. “Finally, the nerve of the driver in front broke, and he shot off at top speed. He didn’t like being shown up.” A few miles farther on, the blue KGB Zhiguli was waiting in a side road leading to the village of Kaimovo. It tucked in behind the other surveillance cars. Ascot’s Saab was once again in the lead.
• As the dog circled the car, Caroline Ascot reached for a weapon that had never been deployed before in the Cold War, or any other. She placed Florence on the trunk directly over the hidden spy, and began changing her nappy—which the baby, with immaculate timing, had just filled. She then dropped the soiled and smelly diaper next to the inquisitive Alsatian. “The dog duly slunk off, offended.”
• Arthur and Rachel Gee still could not tell their passenger, in words, that he was free; but they could do so in sound, with the haunting opening chords of a symphonic poem written by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in celebration of his native land. <> They were playing Finlandia.
• Brown opened the trunk of the car. There lay Gordievsky, soaked in sweat, conscious but dazed. “He was semi-naked, in this pool of water: and I immediately felt it was like I was seeing a new-born child in amniotic fluid, and some extraordinary rebirth.”
• Most CIA officers struck Gordievsky as rather formal, even a little suspicious, but this one “seemed different: his face radiated gentleness and kindness. I was so impressed by him that I thought that I had encountered the embodiment of American values: here was the openness, honesty, and decency of which I had heard so much.” <> For a dozen years, Gordievsky had lived a double life, a dedicated professional intelligence officer who was secretly loyal to the other side, playing a part. He was very good at it. But so was Aldrich Ames.
• Though he never succeeded in becoming the Russian Somerset Maugham, Lyubimov wrote novels, plays, and memoirs, and remained a most distinctive hybrid of the Cold War: Soviet in loyalty, old-school English in manner. He deeply resented that he had been used to divert the attention of the KGB at the crucial moment in the escape, and made into what he called, in English, a “red herring.” Gordievsky had outraged his sense of British fair play. They never spoke again.