Art of Betrayal (48 page)

Margaret Thatcher began to treat Gordievsky as an occasional adviser. At their first meeting, she expressed her gratitude for his work and then began to ask what more he could tell her about Gorbachev, how to handle him and what the pressure points were. (The only time a meeting with Thatcher did not go well was in 1989 when she asked Gordievsky what he thought the Soviet position would be on the unification of Germany, and the Prime Minister, deeply hostile to it, did not like his answer that Moscow would find it hard to oppose.) Her views were not necessarily changed by Gordievsky, but he provided her with the ammunition and confidence to make her case for how to deal with the Soviet Union and how much pressure to apply.

Another visitor arrived by helicopter at the Fort in September. Bill Casey, the buccaneering head of the CIA, came down to the Fort specifically to see Gordievsky. Reagan was about to meet Gorbachev in Geneva for one of the superpower summits that dictated the course of the Cold War and wanted a breakthrough on arms reductions. Casey sat in front of Gordievsky with a yellow-and-blue CIA notebook scribbling away like a schoolboy until he asked if he could use a tape recorder. The American spoke in a thick accent and mumbled, which meant that C, also present, had occasionally to translate. He had come to take part in a role-playing game. ‘You are Mr Gorbachev,' he said, pointing to Gordievsky, ‘and I am Mr Reagan. We would like to get rid of nuclear weapons, starting with a large number of strategic weapons. To inspire confidence, we will give you access to Star Wars,' the latter comment referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative designed to shoot down missiles and the source of much Soviet angst. ‘What do you say?' asked Casey.

Gordievsky leant back in his seat. ‘Nyet.'

‘Why, why?' asked Casey.

‘I don't trust you. You will never give us anything,' Gordievsky replied. By chance the last meeting he had attended in Moscow was about the upcoming Geneva talks in which the KGB had said that there was no point trusting the US since it had no desire for serious agreement.
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‘What should we do?' asked Casey. The Kremlin will believe you
only if you drop Star Wars, Gordievsky explained. Impossible, said Casey, it was the President's pet project. Gordievsky, like many in MI6, held to a tough line and suggested keeping going with Star Wars, arguing that the Soviet Union would never be able to keep up technologically and would eventually be forced to give in. Later Gordievsky would also go to the Oval Office of the White House to meet Reagan in person and on a subsequent visit would meet President George H. W. Bush.

Gordievsky was the star turn at a conference at Century House for officials across Whitehall and spoke to senior military chiefs. He was a valuable tool for building MI6's reputation. The year of debriefing generated a set of extraordinarily detailed reports. A fifty-page briefing entitled ‘Soviet Perceptions of Nuclear Warfare' had a particular influence.
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Even the sceptics about intelligence in the Foreign Office sat up and listened. Rodric Braithwaite, the young private who had sat with headphones clamped over his ears in the cellar in Vienna in the early 1950s, had risen through the ranks of the Foreign Office to become ambassador to Russia by the closing years of the Cold War. He remained somewhat doubtful of the output of the organisation that he had declined to join but saw the value of its star agent. ‘What Gordievsky described was the kind of terror the Russians felt facing us,' he explained. ‘Something which if you have ever been in Moscow you would have perceived but if you are Prime Minister or President you hadn't the remotest idea of. You would have thought these villainous people are trying to nuke us tomorrow and you never thought they were terrified that we were going to nuke them tomorrow.' It was not so much the originality of Gordievsky's analysis that was influential, Braithwaite argues, as its provenance. Information acquired secretly is often privileged over the same information acquired openly – the sight of ‘Top Secret' written across the top of a paper often leads the reader to assume it must be true and more true than something acquired openly. ‘There was nothing mysterious about those Russian attitudes … [but] it came from a source which they had to accept because of Gordievsky's personal background. Reagan and Thatcher were prepared to listen to it.'
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Gordievsky remained driven. All he cared about was his work and getting his family out. The latter proved a problem. The Soviets had no idea where Gordievsky had gone until MI6 decided to tell them a
few weeks later. London was not a suitable location, it was decided, and so Gerry Warner went to Paris and asked his station chief to engineer a meeting with a non-KGB member of the Soviet Embassy at a plush club. The Soviet Scientific Counsellor duly arrived. On the manicured lawn, Warner was introduced. ‘We've got a message for the head of your KGB station,' Warner began. The man went white as a sheet. ‘You're looking for Gordievsky. We've got him. We'd like his family.' The poor counsellor staggered off in shock. The reply from Moscow was an emphatic no. A death sentence was passed
in absentia
against Gordievsky. Reuniting the former KGB man with his family became a priority for the British government right up to the Prime Minister, who would raise the issue regularly with Gorbachev at their summits.

The pressure would eventually work and his family would come to Britain as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the final release brokered by Rodric Braithwaite. But it was too late. His decision not to tell his wife that he was working for British intelligence had shielded her when she was interrogated. But it had also left her bitter at never having known the truth. She left him as soon as she made it back to Britain. His daughters barely remembered him.
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Gordievsky had followed his beliefs, but in doing so he had paid a heavy personal price.

As the Cold War began to draw to its unexpected close, MI6, like Gordievsky, remained sceptical about Gorbachev. Throughout the Cold War, it saw one of its roles as preventing political leaders being taken in by Soviet rhetoric. There was a desire to force politicians to face uncomfortable truths. ‘It is always a temptation for anybody to choose the easier course and it is always a temptation if somebody is saying “I am a friend of yours and I don't mean any harm” to accept that,' argues Gerry Warner. ‘But if you are being told all the time by a microphone in your ear that it is totally untrue and that he's holding a knife behind his back and he's about to kick you where it hurts, the temptation is less to trust him. And that is the kind of way in which I think it would have been very easy both for Conservative and Labour governments throughout the Cold War to choose the easy option if they hadn't been constantly reminded of what was going on.' As the politicians, and particularly the Prime Minister, started to invest more heavily in Gorbachev and his reforms, MI6 endeavoured
to continue this function. Some critics felt that rather than reflecting the underlying intelligence it was the product of a deeply ingrained MI6 culture in which the service struggled to believe that the Soviet Union could change and be anything other than an implacable enemy.

Ammunition for its hawkish position of not being too quick to trust Gorbachev came from one defector right at the end of the Cold War. A very scared Vladimir Pasechnik contacted the British Embassy in Paris during a 1989 visit to France. The Foreign Office were eventually persuaded it was worth getting him out. A scientist who worked on the Soviet's secret biological weapons programme, he revealed that the USSR was secretly developing chemical and biological weapons such as VX, sarin and plague, including strains designed to survive Western antibiotics. The reports were met with intense resistance at first from the Foreign Office and Whitehall as they indicated that Gorbachev was evading treaty commitments. The Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Percy Cradock, personally came to speak to the defector to convince himself of the veracity of the information.
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Cradock and others in the intelligence world remained sceptical that Gorbachev was really changing the Soviet Union, believing that his reforms were cosmetic and not perceiving the way in which they would start to gather a momentum of their own which took events beyond those planned by the leadership.

Gordievsky's first words out of the car boot – ‘I was betrayed' – had also been enough to send shudders down the spine of a Secret Service which thought it had just emerged from the wilderness of mirrors of the molehunt. There was the question that is asked after every blown operation. Was there another traitor? Another Philby? It took a decade following the escape to understand that there was indeed another traitor. But he was not British. At the moment that Gordievsky was returning to his drugged interrogation in Moscow, the CIA was watching its own slow-motion horror movie. Its entire network of what the agency's more cynical operators called ‘assets' was being rolled up one by one in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Agents were being recalled back to Moscow or disappearing off its streets or having ‘accidents'.

It had taken a few years to shake off the Angleton-induced paralysis that had hobbled the recruitment of Soviet spies, but by the early
1980s the agency had hoovered up a good selection of sources. Perhaps, however, Angleton and his fellow believers would, on one level, be proved right. For all their obsession with a mole within their garden, the CIA finally acquired one soon after it stopped looking.

On 16 April 1985, CIA officer Aldrich Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. He had told his superiors he was trying to recruit an agent, but he was the one doing the betraying. By the time of a third meeting at a hamburger joint in Georgetown on 13 June, Ames was receiving a shopping bag of money. He was extremely well placed as the head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet division. He was the man who had identified Gordievsky for the CIA and who held exactly the same position in the agency that Philby once held in MI6. It meant he saw all the files and knew all the agents.

Ames's treachery seemed to explain Gordievsky's near-demise. Not everyone was sure. Ames claimed he did not give any agents' identities away until his 13 June lunch, by which time Gordievsky had already been recalled to Moscow. But he might have given away just enough to draw suspicion on to Gordievsky and it might explain why Gordievsky was interrogated but never arrested. The KGB may have had only a tip-off and not concrete evidence, making the situation similar to Philby's initial questioning in 1951 after Burgess and Maclean had fled, when the evidence was strong but essentially circumstantial. It may also have been that one of Gordievsky's sharper colleagues in London noticed that he was producing lots of reports during the Gorbachev visit but without meeting many contacts. A new head of division in Moscow who had never liked Gordievsky may have ordered an investigation.
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Ames's treachery was not discovered until 1994. Gordievsky and Ames even met face to face in 1989, Gordievsky not knowing that he was shaking hands at Langley with the man who might nearly have killed him. It had all been about the money – $2 million in all. Where the early British traitors had been ideological, the CIA's traitors were utterly venal. The damage was the same. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the head of the CIA's Soviet division learnt everything from CNN because he had no agents left to report to him on what was unfolding.
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Just like MI6 in the 1950s, the CIA was institutionally unwilling to accept the idea that it might be penetrated. Just as Angleton had warned, it was manipulated by KGB double agents
and deception operations. But its failure to deal with the problem was itself a legacy of Angleton. The memory of what he had done was so painful that counter-intelligence had become a backwater for careers, and no one, but no one, wanted to start that whole molehunting business again. The result was inevitable and catastrophic. It was not just Ames either. Five current or former CIA officers betrayed their country in the decade after Angleton left.
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Intelligence and counter-intelligence exist in a natural tension. If one dominates the other, then trouble arrives soon afterwards. The CIA was plunged into a bad place full of suspicion internally and was mistrusted around Washington.

Philby and Gordievsky bookended the Cold War – one side's hero, the other's villain. Recruiting an officer from the other side is always relished deeply because of the opportunities it provides for quickly uncovering the other side's secrets and subverting their work. But with Gordievsky there was also the sense of payback for the betrayal that had so scarred MI6 decades earlier. There were one or two other spies of an importance approaching that of Gordievsky but whose names have never come to light, insiders say. They maintain that over the course of the Cold War the British Secret Service ran somewhere between forty and eighty agents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and lost only a handful, Penkovsky among them.

Gordievsky's afterlife was happier than Philby's in many ways. He was given the kind of status and access that Philby had craved but never received. He lived in a well-heeled suburban town with none of the cravings for home that plagued Philby, none of the complexities or doubts over his actions. In Moscow, their mutual friend Mikhail Lyubimov still celebrates the life of one old comrade by meeting on Philby's birthday with his widow and others who knew him. The ageing band gathers every year at Philby's old flat to drink vodka and whisky and celebrate his life. But the taste for espionage has long ago faded. ‘When I started my career I liked espionage very much and I was enthusiastic,' Lyubimov recalls wistfully. ‘But by the end of my career I became disappointed. I came to the conclusion that it does more harm than good.' The betrayer had become the betrayed.

Lyubimov will have no truck with those who liken the betrayal of Philby to that of Gordievsky. ‘It is different because Philby never worked for the MI6 actually,' he argues, using a logic only a spy can
really understand. ‘He worked for the Soviet Union. He many times himself told me, “Look, they consider me to be a double agent. I am not a double agent. I worked only for the Soviet Union.” How could he be a traitor if since from the very beginning he worked for the Communists? What did he betray? Gordievsky is a traitor. This is clear because he worked for the KGB, then he went to the British side.'
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Gordievsky has no time for the accusations of a betrayal. ‘The betrayal question is pointless because it was a criminal state,' is his answer. ‘The most criminal element of the criminal state was the KGB. It was a gang of bandits. To betray bandits … was very good for the soul.'
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