Art of Betrayal (47 page)

An escape plan had first been devised when Gordievsky returned to Moscow from Copenhagen in the late 1970s. The plan was kept up to date by Joan, the officer who would attend some of the briefings in London. This was not easy. Brush contact and signalling sites had to be identified in Moscow by people based in London. Moscow in
winter is a very different city from Moscow in summer, and so they had to be workable in both seasons. Contingencies had to be planned for – what if roadworks closed a designated site?

Details of Gordievsky's plan were kept on an LP sleeve in secret writing which he would then have to develop. The idea was to have a signalling spot which was available to Gordievsky every Tuesday night. That spot, near the Ukraine Hotel, had to be passed and watched at exactly the right time by someone from the small MI6 station every week, come rain come shine, and there needed to be a plausible reason for doing so. Even when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched. In fact precisely when Gordievsky was not in town it had to be watched in case the KGB had surveillance on the MI6 officers and associated a deviation from the pattern with the absence of Gordievsky. When he returned in May the KGB watched him every day. At first the surveillance was intense. His tall apartment block was inhabited mainly by fellow KGB officers. They all noticed the arrival of heavy surveillance – sometimes as many as fifteen cars or people outside the apartment and in nearby parking lots and markets. The fact that they were clearly observable was no doubt intended to put Gordievsky under more intense psychological pressure in the hope of forcing errors on his part. He would go jogging and shopping and act normally knowing that he had to be patient and wait for the surveillance to ease before making his move.
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This lasted for weeks.

The signal Gordievsky was to give to MI6 when he was ready needed to be precise and sufficiently unusual in order to avoid the entire complex escape procedure being kicked off by some innocent action misinterpreted. In practice, this meant the signal was mildly absurd, which did not necessarily induce confidence on the part of Gordievsky. A man wearing a particular type of trousers, carrying a particular bag and eating a particular brand of chocolate would walk past Gordievsky to acknowledge that the signal had been received. The first time Gordievsky waited at the point, there was nothing. Had he left too soon? he wondered. He tried again the following Tuesday. This time a man, unmistakably British in his attire, carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar strolled past and looked him in the eye saying nothing.

One of Gordievsky's final acts in Moscow was to phone a friend.
He called Mikhail Lyubimov and said he would like to meet him on Monday. Lyubimov noticed a confidence to his friend's voice that was in sharp contrast to the nervous wreck who had appeared in his apartment only a few weeks earlier. They agreed to meet at Lyubimov's dacha in Zvenigorod an hour outside Moscow where he was taking a break. Gordievsky knew the phone was bugged but also asked an odd question. Did his old friend remember a short story by Somerset Maugham called ‘Mr Harrington's Washing'? The reference was a risky joke. ‘I knew the KGB was not bright enough to work it out.' The story by Maugham, a former British Secret Service officer, involved a plan to escape from Russia over the border with Finland.

The Gordievsky escape plan at the end of the Cold War mirrored the plan hatched during Harrington's escape during the days of the Bolshevik Revolution in that it required a risky crossing of the border into Finland. In case his family was coming, two cars were needed, each driven by one of the MI6 officers in the Embassy. They would leave Moscow on Friday and stay overnight in Leningrad before going over to Finland on Saturday. The pretext was one of the officers' wives needing some specialist, but not too serious, medical treatment in Helsinki which had led the two families to decide to make a weekend trip together. Phone calls were made to London to establish the cover story. The first problem was an unfortunate coincidence. A new British ambassador was due to fly in that very Friday and he was going to have a welcome reception for staff. Would two of his staff really miss the opportunity to attend? So they would have to leave afterwards and drive through the night to make the rendezvous. The Ambassador was also briefed on the escape plan, and he was highly reluctant. He could just see his first week in the job being marked not by the usual introductions but by a huge diplomatic row as two of his staff were caught smuggling a spy out of the country. It could be the shortest posting in Foreign Office history. But he was overruled. The plan required political clearance and this had gone to the highest level.

Getting an agent out of Moscow was about as risky an operation as one could ask for. Getting caught in the act could have major diplomatic repercussions at just the time when the Prime Minister was working hard to improve relations with Gorbachev. As a result, the decision on whether or not to go ahead was one for Margaret
Thatcher herself to take. The problem was that when the moment came she was not in Downing Street. She was up in Scotland staying at Balmoral Castle undertaking one of the Prime Minister's regular visits to the Queen. The conversation could not be held on the phone in case of interception, so Thatcher's Foreign Affairs Adviser Charles Powell had to race to Heathrow to catch a flight to Aberdeen and then take a car to Balmoral to seek approval. On arrival, the Queen's aides were none too amused when he explained that he could not tell them why he had come and what was so urgent. For all the risks, Thatcher had no doubt that the escape plan had to be put into action. ‘We have an obligation and we will not let him down,' Thatcher remarked. The escape plan was always high risk. There were people at Century House who thought a trap would be waiting. Surveillance was heavy and the fear was that Gordievsky had been broken and it was a provocation, much like the arrest of the American after clearing Penkovsky's dead drop a quarter of a century earlier.

A stunning summer sunrise on Saturday morning greeted the two cars as they drove towards Leningrad. There was a mix of fatalism and excitement as the two officers set out with their families. There was the knowledge that, succeed or fail, it was the end of their time in Moscow. Expulsion was inevitable, but it would be faced either while basking in the glow of a daring escape or, more likely, having been caught in the act. The pessimists gave the plan about a one-intwenty chance of working. Everything had to go right. Cumulatively the chances of one thing going wrong that would throw all the timings were high. Surveillance vehicles followed them almost all of the way. They had to reach the designated spot close to the Finnish border at exactly the right moment – not too early or too late, so when they had some time to kill they visited a monastery, still under surveillance. As they drove out of Leningrad, city surveillance handed over to provincial. They would need to be shaken off somehow. A stroke of luck helped. All the cars on the highway were stopped for ten minutes to allow a convoy of tanks to pass. Time was ticking by. Once the tanks had passed, the drivers floored the accelerator. A gap opened up with the surveillance cars behind still coming out of the queue of traffic.

The two cars pulled off the main road into a layby in a forest to have a picnic. The surveillance cars, now desperate to catch up, roared
past. As the picnic items were unpacked and the tea was being poured, a smelly-looking tramp got out of a ditch. ‘Which car?' he said.

Gordievsky had slept with the doors of his Moscow flat barricaded on Thursday night, fearing arrest. On Friday afternoon he had shaken off his surveillance on the way to the Leningrad station. Police were everywhere, inducing panic before he remembered there was a large festival taking place. He slept fitfully on the overnight train, eventually falling out of his bunk after taking sedatives. Next was another train taking him close to the border and then a bus journey before a walk. As he located the agreed spot, he waited among the tall conifers with mosquitoes gnawing at him. He was way too early and walked back into the nearby town to kill time before returning and sipping a bottle of beer hidden in the grass. These were the hardest moments. As he waited, he became nervous that he had missed the car. He knew it would not come back. He walked out on to the road. ‘Stop, this is madness,' he told himself, and went back to wait in the heat and the undergrowth. At last came the sound of the cars and he peered at the people getting out. The last time he had seen one of them was eating a Mars bar on a Moscow street.

Gordievsky was bundled into the boot of the Ford Cortina (the smaller of the two cars), and a heat-reflecting blanket was put over him to fool any infra-red sensors. He was given a bottle to urinate into and some pills to calm him down. He gulped one down straight away. The cars made their way to the border crossing. As diplomatic cars, they should have been exempt from being searched. There had been despair a week before when a British military attaché had allowed his trunk to be searched for fear it had set a precedent. If a search was demanded, the cars would refuse and head back to Moscow. Later the team would realise they had forgotten even to lock the boot. No agent had ever been exfiltrated successfully from Russia since the start of the Cold War. At that moment in Century House in London, the Foreign Office adviser to MI6, gathered with senior staff, looked at his watch. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, they're about to cross the border. I think it would be appropriate to say a prayer.'

A packet of cheese and onion crisps was opened as the team waited for their papers to be checked. They fed a few crisps to the dogs that
sniffed vehicles for signs of life in a desperate attempt to throw them off the scent. Another unorthodox method was employed. One of the two families had a baby whom they had taken with them. The dirty nappy of the baby was changed on the car boot with Gordievsky underneath. Inside Gordievsky, unable to take off his jacket in the confined space, was drenched with sweat and struggling to breathe, listening to the odd fragment of Russian spoken in an official voice. As the barrier looked set to rise, the phone in the guard's booth rang. He walked slowly over to answer it. He glanced over at the car. Then he put the phone down and wandered slowly back to the car. More documents please, he said. He checked them and then walked back to the kiosk. The boom swung up and the car gratefully pulled out. A few moments later, Gordievsky heard the ominous, brooding opening notes of Sibelius's ‘Finlandia' come on to the car stereo. He was over the border.

The relief dissipated minutes later when he felt the car stop and then reverse. The boot was flung open. Joan's face stared down on him with a smile. It had been her plan and it had worked. The first words Gordievsky spoke were: ‘I was betrayed.' Five miles from the border, in what still felt like bandit country, a second team including Joan had been waiting for him. One of the officers who had helped deal with his reports in London, had reconnoitred the route while he had been posted to Moscow just before the escape and had now prepared the second half of the plan. Gordievsky changed clothes in the forest. If anyone tried to drive towards them the officer would block the road with his car. ‘You must be very tired but we are so very glad to see you,' he said as he extended his hand to the agent whose reports he had worked on but whom he had never met face to face. Gordievsky shook it but remained quiet, the enormity of what had happened still dawning on him.

A team from Danish intelligence were also waiting. Gordievsky was placed in the boot of one of their cars which headed in one direction while an MI6 officer took the old clothes and documents away in a plastic bag. He signalled back to London from a payphone: ‘Really enjoyed the fishing. It has been a successful trip. And we've had one guest.' There had always been an expectation that Gordievsky's family might be taken out with him and the reference to ‘one guest' was supposed to convey that Gordievsky came out alone, although
there was some confusion on the other end as to whether there was one guest in addition to their agent. The cars carrying the lone guest drove north through the night towards Norway without stopping. As they reached the Arctic Circle the summer sun disappeared for only a few hours before rising again. Eventually they came to Norway's north, and from there a flight to Oslo and then to London brought Gordievsky to his new home.

That morning, Mikhail Lyubimov arrived at Zvenigorod station in good time for the 11.13 a.m. train. His friend did not emerge from the last carriage as he had promised. After a while, he checked the timetable again to see when the trains departed from Moscow. Perhaps there had been some confusion. He waited some more, glancing at his watch. But his friend never came. Lyubimov was left alone on the platform. ‘It was not so easy when you work with a man all your life and he is a traitor,' Lyubimov, who was interrogated over the following days, would reflect. ‘It was not just betraying the Soviet Union. But he betrayed me.' The two friends would never meet or speak again.
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The escape was a humiliation for the KGB. After three or four days, whispered rumours and gossip had gone round its headquarters about the disappearance of the future London Resident. But there was no announcement.
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A few days later the new British Ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. A Soviet official produced a photograph taken just a few days earlier of the Ambassador in full ceremonial uniform surrounded by all his Embassy team as he presented his credentials. The Soviet official placed a finger on the faces of the two MI6 officers who had smuggled Gordievsky out of the country. The Ambassador played innocent but he was told that those two – and others – had forty-eight hours to leave the country.
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Gordievsky was free, but he was not put out to pasture. On his second day in Britain, Chris Curwen – now C, the Chief of MI6 – flew by helicopter to the Midlands country house where Gordievsky had been put up to meet his prize catch. The formality of the country house with its butlers did not suit Gordievsky, who was next taken to the Fort, the service's training facility. The reports officer, who had been waiting in Finland, and others would listen in over a year as he drained his memory bank and talked through the documents he had smuggled out. Supervising the process were more senior officers
including Shergy's Sov Bloc rising stars Colin McColl and Gerry Warner.