Art of Betrayal (44 page)

The city that Gordievsky watched out of the window of the Embassy car that crawled through the traffic from Heathrow in June 1982 was a world away from the clean, compact openness of Copenhagen. It was big, smelly, sprawling and dirty. Where Lyubimov had been enthralled by his London of the 1960s, Gordievsky was initially shocked by the country to which he had offered his loyalty but in which he had never set foot. That year unemployment had topped three million for the first time since the 1930s as Thatcherism began to bite. But the Iron Lady's popularity had skyrocketed thanks to victory against Argentina in the Falklands War that spring.

Gordievsky never had any doubts he was following the right path ideologically. But it was his personal ties that introduced the only moments of intensely private questioning. He was arriving in London with his second wife and two daughters. He had embarked on his
clandestine life as a British agent when his first marriage was on the rocks. Now, he sometimes looked at his wife and daughters and occasionally wondered where his path would lead. ‘What have I done? How do I get out of this?' he thought to himself. He knew there was no way out. Sometimes he felt the urge to tell his wife. One time he was bitterly criticising some decision in Moscow and she told him to stop. ‘You cannot do something about it,' she said. ‘Maybe I can do something. Maybe one day you will see that I was able to do something about it,' he replied. He nearly went further but stopped himself. Her mother and father worked for the KGB. What if she betrayed him? Even if she would not do that, would it not be safer for her not to know in case she was ever questioned? He never shared these moments of doubt with his MI6 case officers and they never suspected.
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On his second night in London, he went to a phone box and called a number. A tape recording was waiting on the other end. If an agent surfaces anywhere in the world there is usually an attempt initially to reconnect him with his old case officer even if he has moved on. The next time Gordievsky called, his last handler from Denmark answered and they met in Sloane Street. He was to meet in the lobby of a hotel and then follow him to his car. They then drove to a safe flat in Bayswater. The man explained that he was now posted abroad but had come back to pass Gordievsky over to his new case officer.

Like handing over a priceless vase, the process of passing an agent from one officer to another is a delicate procedure. Agents rely on their handlers as the only person they can confide in, and so poor chemistry, as Gordievsky had encountered at the start, can lead to a stumble and perhaps a fall. Gordievsky's new case officer was only in his mid-thirties but with the first hint that the dark hair was receding. He was a details man who had a natural empathy and an understanding of Russian which meant Gordievsky took to him straight away.

John Scarlett has never publicly confirmed that he was the officer assigned to Gordievsky. MI6 has never even formally acknowledged that Gordievsky was its agent. It never publicly confirms or denies the identity of anyone who has spied for it for a simple, utilitarian reason. While the CIA will always be able to offer more cash to
lure potential spies motivated by money, the British argue that they maintain their own competitive niche in the spies' marketplace by offering something that some spies may treasure even more highly than money – the promise of secrecy and of never revealing their identity. This, oddly, applies even when an agent identifies themselves publicly and, in Gordievsky's case, even after they receive an honour from the Queen, a CMG for ‘services to the security of the United Kingdom', the same honour, it was noted at the time, that James Bond received in fiction.
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Scarlett, a doctor's son, had grown up in South London and read history at Oxford before joining MI6 in 1971. His first posting was to Nairobi where a letter from Shergy, then head of personnel, informed him that he had been chosen to learn Russian before being sent to the Soviet Union, a sign that he was being fast-tracked and that those above him thought he had what it took to play by Moscow Rules. ‘Running agents in the old Soviet Union was an extremely difficult thing to do and it was very stressful and it could be very exciting,' Scarlett explained in a BBC interview.
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‘There was huge attention to detail, very careful case management, very careful tradecraft, very careful planning. So it was not easy.'

Moscow and the Soviet Union lay at the heart of Scarlett's career and eventually provided his path to the top of the service. But his cover was blown early, according to Russian reports.
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On his arrival in Moscow he inherited an agent in the Soviet navy. Unfortunately, the officer was a plant under Soviet control being used to identify members of the MI6 station. Having your cover as an MI6 officer blown when still in your twenties is normally a minor disaster, restricting your ability to carry out undercover assignments. When Scarlett had to go back behind the Iron Curtain to meet an agent he had to go in disguise and under so-called natural cover, posing as someone else rather than working as a diplomat. On one occasion, he went in disguise to meet an agent in a claustrophobically small safe flat. ‘The agent arrived. He was very nervous, understandably, so my job was to make him less nervous,' Scarlett recounted later. ‘I explained that in order to be doubly, doubly sure that we weren't under any observation – which in itself was a bit disconcerting for him to think that we might be – we went into the bathroom and then to make doubly, doubly sure that the bathroom was covered as well
I turned on the taps and had the running water going on in the background. And after about three minutes I realised that he was sweating profusely and I was beginning to too and I thought, “I knew he was nervous, I didn't realise he was going to be that nervous.” Then of course I noticed that I had boiling hot water coming out of the taps and the place was absolutely sweltering.' With a turn of the hand, Scarlett became the spy who turned on the cold and finished the meeting.

The problem of being a Russian specialist already identified by the enemy ended up working to the advantage of Scarlett in the early 1980s. It had made him the ideal officer working out of the London station to deal with a Russian-speaking KGB officer who was arriving in the capital. It was the kind of assignment that could make a career. Dealing with Penkovsky had required quick-footed improvisation by MI6. That operation had been mounted in a rush at a time when the amateurism of the past had yet to be fully excised. Shergy's legacy was that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the professionalism he had engendered had been institutionalised and MI6 was able to run a valuable agent like Gordievsky for close to a decade. For those engaged in the task there was also a clandestine thrill beyond the ins and outs of the intelligence produced. This, they felt, was payback for Philby.

For Scarlett and every other officer who sat in a room with him listening to secrets pouring out, Gordievsky was the best agent they ever dealt with. ‘It is quite likely the agent is taking a great risk and a great chance and he's placing a great deal in the hands of the case officer so he has to trust him,' Scarlett later noted when discussing such relationships. ‘He has to have confidence in his judgement; he has to have confidence in his ability to run the matter securely … the case officer has to have an adequate degree of expertise in the subject with which he is dealing and of course he has to be backed up – as he is – by teamwork … All successful operations are the result of teamwork, although of course when it comes to it, it may well be that the meeting itself takes place between the individual case officer and the individual agent.'
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Running Gordievsky was a full-time job but one carried out with back-up.

The meetings with Gordievsky largely took place in a safe flat in Bayswater, West London. Gordievsky would arrive by car during his
lunch-hour bearing whatever documents he had removed from the Embassy in nearby Kensington. A few sandwiches and a bottle of beer would be waiting on the table alongside a tape recorder. They only had an hour, so a support officer, known to Gordievsky as Joan, would photograph and copy the documents while Scarlett and Gordievsky talked in Russian. The support officer was a crucial member of the team and offered a subsidiary relationship so that an agent was not overly dependent on one person. Joan was in the Daphne Park mould. She had joined as a secretary before becoming a general officer. A genteel, Home Counties exterior masked a steely determination and a deep expertise in tradecraft. Scarlett, and others later, would defer to her on the details as she organised the timings, transport and logistics. She remained when Scarlett moved on after two years, and Gordievsky would eventually owe much to her.

The nerves always came for Gordievsky as the meeting approached its end and he knew it was time to return to the Embassy. Security was the primary concern. ‘John would ask me, “Where's the car? Is it in the basement underneath or did you leave it in the street?'” he later recalled. Gordievsky would sometimes have to admit sheepishly he had left it in the street. The security worries were real even in London. One day as he left, he saw the big black car of his KGB Resident drive past. Gordievsky returned to the Embassy fearing that he would be questioned, but he had not been spotted. Scarlett and Gordievsky would meet once a week, although there was much debate in Century House over whether that was too often. As with Penkovsky, there was a tension between the desire to extract as much as possible from such a unique source and the awareness that every meeting – even in London – carried a risk.

Almost everything Gordievsky said during those meetings met the standard of being classed intelligence ‘product'. Scarlett would work through the transcript straight away, often issuing ten reports from each meeting within a day or two, the most urgent ones first which would arrive in Whitehall in-trays. It was as if MI6 had tapped into a rich seam and a gush of intelligence was pouring out which needed to be captured. There had been nothing like it since Penkovsky, but with two crucial differences. Gordievsky lasted much, much longer and was far more emotionally stable, easier to work with and better disciplined. The circle who knew about Gordievsky even
within MI6 was tiny as they worked within a secret unit, even under cover within their own organisation. The reports officer who processed the incoming intelligence and distributed it to others in government was believed by most colleagues to be working on material from Russia.

Gordievsky's insights were in two main areas. One was on the work of the KGB in London, classic counter-intelligence information about the operations of the enemy. The other was politics and strategy in Moscow. When it came to the former, the KGB station in London lacked the scale and swagger it had had in Lyubimov's time, but it still kept itself busy trying to recruit agents and maintain a network of illegals. Before Gordievsky arrived, Lukasevics, the man who had lured Anthony Cavendish's Latvians to their doom after the Second World War, had just left as resident and been replaced by the hulking form of Arkadi Guk. In Gordievsky's eyes he was ‘a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning' who plotted against his own Ambassador while drinking neat vodka.
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Guk ordered his staff not to use the Underground – because, he said, behind the adverts were secret spying booths for MI5. Some officers were even convinced that a tunnel had been dug below to target the Embassy. The obsession with being watched and listened to created the type of deeply paranoid atmosphere that pervaded the CIA in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s. Guk's office had special windows and jamming devices with radio loudspeakers installed in the space between the double glazing. Now and again, KGB technicians from Moscow would come in and strip the offices and then line them again with new substances to repel the bugs. A metal-lined conference room would become unbearably hot when crammed with staff for a meeting. In this environment, seeking out agents in British public life continued with only mixed success and a large degree of healthy exaggeration in reports back to Moscow.

The reality of life and work for the KGB in London was passed on by Gordievsky. ‘The amount of information about the Soviet intrigues of different character was piling on my desk. So I had to select the most important and the most dangerous points and tell them about them orally. Tape recorder was on the table and John Scarlett was … listening.'
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Scarlett would absorb every detail of life within the protected walls of the Residency. ‘You are an extra member
of the KGB Residency,' Gordievsky would joke with Scarlett, a remark that would no doubt have excited the molehunters of the past if they had heard it.

Gordievsky was able to identify a number of agents who were talking to the KGB, although the truth was that the cupboard was pretty bare and the successes were greatly exaggerated in order to enhance officers' careers. Most of the KGB's real spies now focused on technical and scientific intelligence, received in exchange for money. There were also many ‘paper agents' who were kept on the books in order to make officers look busy to Moscow. Additionally, many individuals were listed as ‘confidential contacts', a level below ‘recruited agents'. With a confidential contact, a KGB officer might take someone to lunch and then write up a report on the gossip and information produced, the kind of work diplomats and journalists do all the time. The informant might have no idea the Russian was a KGB officer or that anything they said was being written up. Some might also receive a nice fat envelope now and again, which should perhaps have raised their suspicions. Moscow Centre might also be told that such an agent was being carefully cultivated and was close to being recruited as a proper spy (that point coming when they agreed to secret collaboration with the KGB).
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KGB officers had to fill in immensely long questionnaires on their targets and it could always be claimed that a few more good lunches on expenses were needed before making the final pitch. Gordievsky had learnt from Lyubimov how in London in the 1960s he had recruited contacts and treated them as secret agents, using the ‘paraphernalia' of espionage. ‘Why did you bother with all that cover stuff?' Gordievsky once asked Lyubimov. ‘Why didn't you just have overt relationships with them?' Lyubimov had explained that Moscow expected agents to be treated like that and also that using dead-letter drops made the agent feel that they were important, drawing them into the excitement of being a spy.