Art of Betrayal (38 page)

6

COMPROMISING SITUATIONS

T
he early 1960s were a golden age for the small army of Soviet spies plying their trade in Britain. The liberalism of the Swinging Sixties had yet to take hold and the spies knew how to exploit the yawning gap between the stuffy external world of the bowler-hatted establishment and its seedy underbelly of sex and greed. Their tools were the dark arts of provocation and blackmail. It was into the strange but exhilarating surroundings of London that Mikhail Lyubimov, a twenty-six-year-old Russian intelligence officer, was plunged when he arrived in 1961. The Beatles were still waiting to release their first album and London was still shrouded in a dense, filthy smog on winter mornings. The only reason for his assignment was the shape of his face. ‘I had a very British look,' he explains. ‘Long faced, a little bit like a good horse. And the chief of the KGB department said, “You are very good for England.” My fate was decided like this.'
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The arbitrariness of the decision was typical of the peculiar bureaucracy of the KGB's Moscow Centre.

Lyubimov was garrulous, erudite and talented, although some of his KGB contemporaries considered him a touch over-ambitious. The Soviet Union was relaxing somewhat after the death of Stalin in 1953, but it was still a society largely closed off to foreign influences and his initial understanding of Britain had come from reading the carefully approved literature kept on a special shelf at the Moscow Institute for International Relations. It portrayed Britain as a decadent, decaying empire in which the poor were exploited by capitalist overlords. Victory was inevitable and Lyubimov's mission was to hasten the overthrow of this system, specifically by burrowing into the heart of the establishment and recruiting members of the Conservative Party to become agents of the Soviet state. ‘I came full of enthusiasm and because of this horse-like look I was just directed at
the Conservative Party,' he remembers. For Lyubimov, who had been expecting to go to the rather quieter venue of Finland, the bright lights of London offered their own delights. It was a plum posting – a chance to enjoy life in the West – and it began an enduring fascination for all things British, leaving him an Anglophile with a twist, a man who with some guilt enjoyed English literature and Scotch whisky but who also revelled in subverting the country that produced them.

The posting to London also presented the opportunity to work against the KGB's oldest foe, to take part in the latest chapter of that long intelligence duel dating back even before the 1917 Revolution and do battle with the enemy which had been trying to destroy the great socialist experiment through its plots. The KGB knew the British were cunning and dangerous. But Russians also believed themselves to be just a little bit smarter, and the London Residency of the KGB was its glittering prize, the place out of which Philby and the others had been run in the glory days. ‘Like a banquet table laden with caviar, sturgeon and bottles of vodka, it was overflowing with valuable agents, who had, at various times, permeated every pore of the British establishment,' Lyubimov recalls.
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Lyubimov's cover was as a press attaché at the Embassy. On arrival, his first task was to buy a pinstriped suit. It was a stretch on his meagre KGB salary, but looking the part was important. Money was tight. He walked everywhere in London not just as part of a ‘dry cleaning' procedure to rid himself of any surveillance but because London taxicabs were so shockingly expensive. He was at the bottom of the pile in the Embassy, so he shared a flat just off Kensington High Street. Though he liked Britain, he retained his socialist beliefs and quietly fumed at the stratified divisions of the British class system which were everywhere. When his wife was due to give birth, he chose a hospital in the East End because he had more faith in the obstetricians there than in those who served the bourgeoisie. He preferred Marks and Spencer to Harrods, although he found the latter a useful place to slip his tail using the lifts, side exits and crowds. He would enjoy seeing the flushed, panting faces of his pursuers. He would then put on his best ‘arrogant' English expression on the bus to blend in.
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Next, Lyubimov began frequenting London's smoke-filled clubs
to start meeting the right kind of people. As if he were a child with his face pressed against the glass of a sweet shop, every Tory, every toff, every member of the establishment was a potential target. The annual Conservative Party Conference was, to him, a veritable nirvana. In 1962 it was hosted in the sleepy North Wales seaside town of Llandudno. Amid the fading Victorian bed-and-breakfast guesthouses, Lyubimov cut a swathe through the twinset-and-pearl Conservative ladies and the moustached Conservative gentlemen enjoying their time away from home. ‘I went to the parties. I even danced with the Conservative members,' he recalls. ‘Females. Not males.' At night, though, he locked his room, fearing that a British ‘provocation' might try and hop into his bed.

Lyubimov was something of a curiosity to those he met. Just as he arrived, Yuri Gagarin had made it into space, boosting Russia's image, so invitations to attend receptions and parties landed at a healthy rate in his in-tray. At that time it was very much in vogue to lecture about the Soviet Union, and Lyubimov would give long talks over cups of tea extolling the virtues of Communism and hoping that someone interesting might perhaps introduce themselves at the end. Among those he got to know (but whom he did not recruit and who did not spill any secrets) were Nicholas Scott, then leading the Young Conservatives, the future
Sunday Telegraph
editor Peregrine Worsthorne and Peter Walker, a newly elected MP.

His real task was to seek out, befriend and then recruit individuals who might be persuaded to provide information to the KGB. From the Conservative Party, he soon broadened out his targets to Labour and to pretty much anyone else. There was lunch with the odd Labour luminary like Dick Crossman who provided good conversation but nothing more. The Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband was regarded as unfit to be approached by the KGB due to his independent thinking. One woman thought about handing over secret documents but gave him nothing. There was a diplomat who promised gold but provided only dross. He followed one Foreign Office official into a pub and tried to strike up a conversation as he munched on a sandwich but with no success. And a girl in Conservative Central Office nearly fainted when he explained that he was a Russian.
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Sometimes on a long drive he would become aware of a car on his tail. Special Branch or MI5, he assumed. Sometimes his tail would appear in the
same pub as him. A man in a beige mac would sit nursing a pint of warm bitter in the lounge bar of a dingy pub. Normally, the watcher and the watched would keep half an eye on one another but avoid direct contact, although on one occasion he got so lost trying to find a hotel that he turned round and asked his watchers for directions. They dutifully obliged. But such contact was the exception. Often he saw nothing He had shaken off his tail. Or perhaps it had never been there.

The truth was that the watchers of MI5's A4 surveillance branch were struggling to contain the massive espionage operation being run out of the Soviet Embassy. In an observation post in a house opposite the main gates of the Embassy, a pair of watchers sat surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups and undertook the mind-numbingly dull task of training their binoculars and cameras on Lyubimov and his colleagues as they walked or drove in and out. These officers spent years of their lives in the tiny room and knew many of the faces instantly but had a three-volume folder of photos to consult if needed. Once they had identified a target, they would radio colleagues who would then pick up the Soviet officials as they headed out into town and follow them on foot or by car. The watchers' movements were co-ordinated from a control room off Regent's Park with a huge street map of London on one wall and a constantly crackling radio. But the watchers simply did not have the numbers to cope with their wily opponents. At least sixty members of the KGB were operating, like Lyubimov, under cover in the Embassy. Dozens more worked for military intelligence, with another contingent based at the Soviet Trade Delegation. More still worked as journalists and members of the press. In all there were around 500 Soviet officials operating in Britain of whom 120 were identified as intelligence officers (the suspected figure was closer to 200). This was more than were based in the US if the United Nations was excluded. The Soviet spies had also learnt, from their agents, every trick and technique the watchers employed and devised their own counter-surveillance routes to evade them. With only minimal surveillance, the Russians were almost entirely free to engage in their pursuit of the powerful and the vulnerable with little impediment. MI5 was swamped.
⁵

But Lyubimov's ambition meant that his cover did not remain
intact for long. ‘Very soon I became well known as a spy in the Conservative Party,' he recalls. ‘I worked very intensively and I was foolish enough at that time to be very active.' At parties he would often be introduced to other guests as ‘the Russian spy, Mr Lyubimov'. He would remain silent or perhaps laugh off the remark. Spying in the early 1960s was taking on a different hue from its past connotations. The association with the Second World War was fading and being replaced not just by a sense of seriousness about the mission when it came to the Cold War, especially during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in autumn 1962 when the world prepared itself for a nuclear exchange, but also by a touch of glamour and even playfulness. Nothing epitomised this more than the arrival that same year on cinema screens of James Bond in the form of
Dr No
. Ian Fleming's creation was taking on a life of its own with President Kennedy citing Bond in his top ten books. Lyubimov met Bond's creator Ian Fleming just after
Dr No
had been finished at a party hosted by Lady Antonia Fraser. ‘We were drinking and discussing world problems. He was a good drinker and we drank a lot of whisky,' Lyubimov recalls. ‘I didn't know that he would be so famous. But actually Bond was never considered to be a serious film in the KGB.' That was only half true since the KGB would later encourage the creation of a Communist answer to Bond to challenge the cultural pre-eminence of 007, but without much success. From 1962 onwards, Bondmania would spread globally and become associated with the new Britain of the 1960s, a very different Britain from the author Ian Fleming's world, taking on an increasingly fantastical air, distant from the realities of both the Cold War and Britain's place in it.

Lyubimov's successes in recruiting actual agents, rather than just making friends with Conservative MPs, was limited. But one Conservative MP did fall foul of the dark side of the KGB's work in Lyubimov's time although not by his hand. The bluff naval commander Anthony Courtney, who had helped drop Anthony Cavendish's doomed agents off the Baltic coast in the late 1940s, had enjoyed another twist in an eventful career. During his time in Naval Intelligence he had worked closely with MI6, suggesting ideas for using Royal Navy surface craft and submarines for intelligence operations in the Black Sea. Kim Philby had listened with interest.
Courtney would later wonder if that was the moment he first came to the attention of the KGB. But he would almost certainly have been known to them well before that, not least from his time in Moscow during the war and his affair with a dancer.
⁶

Courtney had pressed officials to post him to Moscow but without luck. He had also hoped to join MI6, but a half-offer from the Chief evaporated after others in the service and Foreign Office said they were unsure about him.
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He had retired from the navy short of money and decided to run a consultancy for businesses trading with the Soviet bloc, much like Greville Wynne. He met with the Soviet Trade Delegation in London and threw parties for visiting Russians. He asked to visit Portsmouth with some Russian captains to look at buying old ships and he visited Moscow, dropping in on the State Scientific and Technical Commission that housed Penkovsky. In early 1959, the chance to fulfil a long-standing ambition emerged when the sitting Conservative MP for Harrow East was forced to resign after he was caught engaged in a homosexual act (still illegal at the time) with a member of the Coldstream Guards in St James's Park. The good men and women of Harrow East needed a new representative. ‘An air of horrified prudishness pervaded the atmosphere in the constituency,' Courtney remembered. So the local Conservatives picked a former navy commander who could not possibly let them down.

But Courtney fell for the classic honey trap. During his visits to Moscow he had got to know Zina Volkova, a forty-something beauty with fair hair and hazel eyes, who ran a car service for visiting foreigners. Courtney kept up his business links after entering parliament and in June 1961 he arrived in Moscow for a trade fair. At the airport arriving for the same fair, Greville Wynne was picking up film from Oleg Penkovsky and then heading for his hotel, the Metropol, before going to the Embassy to hand it over to Rauri Chisholm. Courtney meanwhile was having dinner at the National with Zina. His wife had died in March of that year, and after dinner he and Zina retired to his bedroom for a few hours. What Courtney did not realise was that hidden cameras in a hotel room recorded their every embrace. ‘The affair was not a success,' Courtney later remarked of that night with characteristic British understatement. It was to be his downfall.

Courtney had been speaking out in parliament from 1962 about
the free rein given to the likes of Lyubimov in London compared to the harassment of British Embassy staff in Moscow. Why was the Soviet Embassy in London allowed to have Russian chauffeurs while British diplomats in Moscow were forced to employ local drivers and staff, all recruited through an agency clearly under control of the Russian intelligence services? Courtney was drawing attention to a very real vulnerability which would be used to entrap a number of Embassy staff. The relationship between the two countries, he said, ‘called to mind a pair of dancers, a self-satisfied elderly gentleman performing an elegant minuet, oblivious of the fact that his partner was doing the twist'. He was thus a prime target for the KGB. According to Lyubimov, there was an attempt at blackmailing the MP into becoming an agent, something Courtney himself denied.
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Courtney's problem was that the very summer he had dined with Zina in the hotel he had met Elizabeth Trefgarne, the widow of a peer who was to be his new wife. Courtney had told her of the affair, but it still looked rather awkward. At the same time, molehunters decided there was something suspicious about Courtney, particularly the fact that he flew his private aeroplane behind the Iron Curtain. They wanted him investigated, but were blocked.