The spy and the traitor 0-3

INTRODUCTION

May 18, 1985

For the KGB’s counterintelligence section, Directorate K, this was a routine bugging job.

It took less than a minute to spring the locks on the front door of the flat on the eighth floor of 103 Leninsky Prospekt, a Moscow tower block occupied by KGB officers and their families. While two men in gloves and overalls set about methodically searching the apartment, two technicians wired the place, swiftly and invisibly, implanting eavesdropping devices behind the wallpaper and baseboards, inserting a live microphone into the telephone mouthpiece and video cameras in the light fixtures in the sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen. By the time they had finished, an hour later, there was barely a corner in the flat where the KGB did not have eyes and ears. Finally, they put on face masks and sprinkled radioactive dust on the clothes and shoes in the closet, sufficiently low in concentration to avoid poisoning, but enough to enable the KGB’s Geiger counters to track the wearer’s movements. Then they left, and carefully locked the front door behind them.

A few hours later, a senior Russian intelligence officer landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on the Aeroflot flight from London.

Colonel Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky of the KGB was at the pinnacle of his career. A prodigy of the Soviet intelligence service, he had diligently risen through the ranks, serving in Scandinavia, Moscow, and Britain with hardly a blemish on his record. And now, at the age of forty-six, he had been promoted to chief of the KGB station in London, a plum posting, and invited to return to Moscow to be formally anointed by the head of the KGB. A career spy, Gordievsky was tipped to ascend to the uppermost ranks of that vast and ruthless security and intelligence network that controlled the Soviet Union.

A stocky, athletic figure, Gordievsky strode confidently through the airport crowds. Inside him, though, a low terror bubbled. For Oleg Gordievsky, KGB veteran, faithful secret servant of the Soviet Union, was a British spy.

Recruited a dozen years earlier by MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service, the agent code-named NOCTON had proven to be one of the most valuable spies in history. The immense amount of information he fed back to his British handlers had changed the course of the Cold War, cracking open Soviet spy networks, helping to avert nuclear war, and furnishing the West with a unique insight into the Kremlin’s thinking during a critically dangerous period in world affairs. Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had been briefed on the extraordinary trove of secrets provided by the Russian spy, though neither the American president nor the British prime minister knew his real identity. Even Gordievsky’s young wife was entirely unaware of his double life.

Gordievsky’s appointment as KGB rezident (the Russian term for a KGB head of station, known as a rezidentura) had prompted rejoicing among the tiny circle of MI6 officers privy to the case. As the most senior Soviet intelligence operative in Britain, Gordievsky would henceforth have access to the innermost secrets of Russian espionage: he would be able to inform the West about what the KGB was planning to do, before it did it; the KGB in Britain would be neutered. And yet the abrupt summons back to Moscow had unsettled the NOCTON team. Some sensed a trap. At a hastily convened meeting in a London safe house with his MI6 handlers, Gordievsky had been offered the option to defect and remain in Britain with his family. Everyone at the meeting understood the stakes: if he returned as official KGB rezident then MI6, the CIA, and their Western allies would hit the intelligence jackpot, but if Gordievsky was walking into a trap he would lose everything, including his life. He had thought long and hard before making up his mind: “I will go back.”

Once again, the MI6 officers went over Gordievsky’s emergency escape plan, code-named PIMLICO, that had been drawn up seven years earlier in the hope that it would never have to be activated. MI6 had never exfiltrated anyone from the USSR before, let alone a KGB officer. Elaborate and hazardous, the escape plan could be triggered only as a last resort.

Gordievsky had been trained to spot danger. As he walked through the airport, his nerves ragged with internal stress, he saw signs of peril everywhere. The passport officer seemed to study his papers for an inordinate length of time before waving him through. Where was the official who was supposed to be meeting him, a minimal courtesy for a KGB colonel arriving back from overseas? The airport was always stiff with surveillance, but today the nondescript men and women standing around apparently idly seemed even more numerous than normal. Gordievsky climbed into a taxi, telling himself that if the KGB knew the truth, he would have been arrested the moment he set foot on Russian soil and already on his way to the KGB cells to face interrogation and torture, followed by execution.

As far as he could tell, no one followed him as he entered the familiar apartment block on Leninsky Prospekt and took the elevator to the eighth floor. He had not been inside the family flat since January.

The first lock on the front door opened easily, and then the second. But the door would not budge. The third lock on the door, an old-fashioned dead bolt dating back to the construction of the apartment block, had been locked.

But Gordievsky never used the third lock. Indeed, he had never had the key. That must mean that someone with a skeleton key had been inside, and on leaving had mistakenly triple-locked the door. That someone must have been the KGB.

The fears of the previous week crystallized in a freezing rush, with the chilling, paralyzing recognition that his apartment had been entered, searched, and probably bugged. He was under suspicion. Someone had betrayed him. The KGB was watching him. The spy was being spied upon by his fellow spies.

Chapter 1

THE KGB

Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. Gordievsky was a child of the KGB.

The KGB—the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security—was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The direct successor of Stalin’s spy network, it combined the roles of foreign- and domestic-intelligence gathering, internal security enforcement, and state police. Oppressive, mysterious, and ubiquitous, the KGB penetrated and controlled every aspect of Soviet life. It rooted out internal dissent, guarded the Communist leadership, mounted espionage and counterintelligence operations against enemy powers, and cowed the peoples of the USSR into abject obedience. It recruited agents and planted spies worldwide, gathering, buying, and stealing military, political, and scientific secrets from anywhere and everywhere. At the height of its power, with more than one million officers, agents, and informants, the KGB shaped Soviet society more profoundly than any other institution.

To the West, the initials were a byword for internal terror and external aggression and subversion, shorthand for all the cruelty of a totalitarian regime run by a faceless official mafia. But the KGB was not regarded that way by those who lived under its stern rule. Certainly it inspired fear and obedience, but the KGB was also admired as a Praetorian guard, a bulwark against Western imperialist and capitalist aggression, and the guardian of Communism. Membership in this elite and privileged force was a source of admiration and pride. Those who joined the service did so for life. “There is no such thing as a former KGB man,” the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin once said. This was an exclusive club to join—and an impossible one to leave. Entering the ranks of the KGB was an honor and a duty to those with sufficient talent and ambition to do so.

Oleg Gordievsky never seriously contemplated doing anything else.

His father, Anton Lavrentyevich Gordievsky, the son of a railway worker, had been a teacher before the revolution of 1917 transformed him into a dedicated, unquestioning Communist, a rigid enforcer of ideological orthodoxy. “The Party was God,” his son later wrote, and the older Gordievsky never wavered in his devotion, even when his faith demanded that he take part in unspeakable crimes. In 1932, he helped enforce the “Sovietization” of Kazakhstan, organizing the expropriation of food from peasants to feed the Soviet armies and cities. Around 1.5 million people perished in the resulting famine. Anton saw state-induced starvation at close quarters. That year, he joined the office of state security, and then the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Stalin’s secret police and the precursor of the KGB. An officer in the political directorate, he was responsible for political discipline and indoctrination. Anton married Olga Nikolayevna Gornova, a twenty-four-year-old statistician, and the couple moved into a Moscow apartment block reserved for the intelligence elite. A first child, Vasili, was born in 1932. The Gordievskys thrived under Stalin.

When Comrade Stalin announced that the revolution was facing a lethal threat from within, Anton Gordievsky stood ready to help remove the traitors. The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 saw the wholesale liquidation of “enemies of the state”: suspected fifth columnists and hidden Trotskyists, terrorists and saboteurs, counterrevolutionary spies, Party and government officials, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia, Poles, Red Army soldiers, and many more. Most were entirely innocent. In Stalin’s paranoid police state, the safest way to ensure survival was to denounce someone else. “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 informers whispered, the torturers and executioners set to work, and the Siberian gulags swelled to bursting. But as in every revolution, the enforcers themselves inevitably became suspect. The NKVD began to investigate and purge itself. At the height of the bloodletting, the Gordievskys’ apartment block was raided more than a dozen times in a six-month period. The arrests came at night: the man of the family was led away first, and then the rest.

It seems probable that some of these enemies of the state were identified by Anton Gordievsky. “The NKVD is always right,” he said: a conclusion both wholly sensible and entirely wrong.

A second son, Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky, was born on October 10, 1938, just as the Great Terror was winding down and war was looming. To friends and neighbors, the Gordievskys appeared to be ideal Soviet citizens, ideologically pure, loyal to Party and state, and now the parents to two strapping boys. A daughter, Marina, was born seven years after Oleg. The Gordievskys were well fed, privileged, and secure.

But on closer examination there were fissures in the family façade, and layers of deception beneath the surface. Anton Gordievsky never spoke about what he had done during the famines, the purges, and the terror. The elder Gordievsky was a prime example of the species Homo Sovieticus, an obedient state servant forged by Communist repression. But underneath he was fearful, horrified, and perhaps gnawed by guilt. Oleg later came to see his father as “a frightened man.”

Olga Gordievsky, Oleg’s mother, was made of less tractable material. She never joined the Party, and she did not believe that the NKVD was infallible. Her father had been dispossessed of his water mill by the Communists; her brother sent to the eastern Siberian gulag for criticizing collective agriculture; she had seen many friends dragged from their homes and marched away in the night. With a peasant’s ingrained common sense, she understood the caprice and vindictiveness of state terror, but kept her mouth shut.

Oleg and Vasili, separated in age by six years, grew up in wartime. One of Gordievsky’s earliest memories was of watching lines of bedraggled German prisoners being paraded through the streets of Moscow, “trapped, guarded, and led like animals.” Anton was frequently absent for long periods, lecturing the troops on Party ideology.

Oleg Gordievsky dutifully learned the tenets of Communist orthodoxy: he attended School 130, where he showed an early aptitude for history and languages; he learned about the heroes of Communism, at home and abroad. Despite the thick veil of disinformation surrounding the West, foreign countries fascinated him. At the age of six, he began reading British Ally, a propaganda sheet put out in Russian by the British embassy to encourage Anglo-Russian understanding. He studied German. As expected of all teenagers, he joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League.

His father brought home three official newspapers and spouted the Communist propaganda they contained. The NKVD morphed into the KGB, and Anton Gordievsky obediently followed. Oleg’s mother exuded a quiet resistance that only occasionally revealed itself in waspish, half-whispered asides. Religious worship was illegal under Communism, and the boys were raised as atheists, but their maternal grandmother had Vasili secretly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and would have christened Oleg, too, had their horrified father not found out and intervened.

Oleg Gordievsky grew up in a tight-knit, loving family suffused with duplicity. Anton Gordievsky venerated the Party and proclaimed himself a fearless upholder of Communism, but inside was a small and terrified man who had witnessed terrible events. Olga Gordievsky, the ideal KGB wife, nursed a secret disdain for the system. Oleg’s grandmother secretly worshipped an illegal, outlawed God. None of the adults in the family revealed what they really felt—to one another, or anyone else. Amid the stifling conformity of Stalin’s Russia, it was possible to believe differently in secret but far too dangerous for honesty, even with members of your own family. From boyhood, Oleg saw that it was possible to live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.

Oleg Gordievsky emerged from school with a silver medal, head of the local Komsomol, a competent, intelligent, athletic, unquestioning, and unremarkable product of the Soviet system. But he had also learned to compartmentalize. In different ways, his father, mother, and grandmother were all people in disguise. The young Gordievsky grew up around secrets.

Stalin died in 1953. Three years later he was denounced, at the 20th Party Congress, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Anton Gordievsky was staggered. The official condemnation of Stalin, his son believed, “went a long way towards destroying the ideological and philosophical foundations of his life.” He did not like the way Russia was changing. But his son did.

The “Khrushchev Thaw” was brief and restricted, but it was a period of genuine liberalization that saw the relaxation of censorship and the release of thousands of political prisoners. These were heady times to be young, Russian, and hopeful.

At the age of seventeen, Oleg enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. There, exhilarated by the new atmosphere, he engaged in earnest discussions with his peers about how to bring about “socialism with a human face.” He went too far. Some of his mother’s nonconformity had seeped into him. One day, he wrote a speech, naive in its defense of freedom and democracy, concepts he barely understood. He recorded it in the language laboratory and played it to some fellow students. They were appalled. “You must destroy this at once, Oleg, and never mention these things again.” Suddenly fearful, he wondered if one of his classmates had informed the authorities of his “radical” opinions. The KGB had spies inside the institute.

The limits of Khrushchev’s reformism were brutally demonstrated in 1956 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to put down a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule. Despite the all-embracing Soviet censorship and propaganda, news of the crushed rebellion filtered back to Russia. “All warmth disappeared,” Oleg recalled of the ensuing clampdown. “An icy wind set in.”

The Institute of International Relations was the Soviet Union’s most elite university, described by Henry Kissinger as “the Russian Harvard.” Run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was the premier training ground for diplomats, scientists, economists, politicians—and spies. Gordievsky studied history, geography, economics, and international relations, all through the warping prism of Communist ideology. The institute provided instruction in fifty-six languages, more than any other university in the world. Language skills offered one clear pathway into the KGB and the foreign travel that he craved. Already fluent in German, he applied to study English, but the courses were overenrolled. “Learn Swedish,” suggested his older brother, who had already joined the KGB. “It is the doorway to the rest of Scandinavia.” Gordievsky took his advice.

The institute library stocked some foreign newspapers and periodicals that, though heavily redacted, offered a glimpse of the wider world. These he began to read, discreetly, for showing overt interest in the West was itself grounds for suspicion. Sometimes at night he would secretly listen to the BBC World Service or the Voice of America, despite the radio-jamming system imposed by Soviet censors, and picked up “the first faint scent of truth.”

Like all human beings, in later life Gordievsky tended to see his past through the lens of experience, to imagine that he had always secretly harbored the seeds of insubordination, to believe his fate was somehow hardwired into his character. It was not. As a student, he was a keen Communist, eager to serve the Soviet state in the KGB, like his father and brother. The Hungarian Uprising had caught his youthful imagination, but he was no revolutionary. “I was still within the system but my feelings of disillusionment were growing.” In this he was no different from many of his student contemporaries.

At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits. Oleg could be gregarious, attractive to women, and flirtatious. His looks were bluntly handsome, with hair swept back from his forehead and open, rather soft features. In repose, his expression seemed stern, but when his eyes flashed with dark humor, his face lit up. In company he was often convivial and comradely, but there was something hard and hidden inside. He was not lonely, or a loner, but he was comfortable in his own company. He seldom revealed his feelings. Typically hungry for self-improvement, Oleg believed that cross-country running was “character building.” For hours he would run, through Moscow’s streets and parks, alone with his thoughts.

One of the few students he grew close to was Stanislaw Kaplan, a fellow runner on the university track team. “Standa” Kaplan was Czechoslovakian and had already obtained a degree from Charles University in Prague by the time he arrived at the institute as one of several hundred gifted students from the Soviet bloc. Like others from countries only recently subjugated to Communism, Kaplan’s “individuality had not been stifled,” Gordievsky wrote years later. A year older, he was studying to be a military translator. The two young men found they shared compatible ambitions and similar ideas. “He was liberal-minded and held strongly sceptical views about communism,” wrote Gordievsky, who found Kaplan’s forthright opinions exciting, and slightly alarming. With his dark good looks, Standa was a magnet to women. The two students became firm friends, running together, chasing girls, and eating in a Czech restaurant off Gorky Park.

An equally important influence was his idolized older brother, Vasili, who was now training to become an “illegal,” one of the Soviet Union’s vast global army of deep undercover agents.

The KGB ran two distinct species of spy in foreign countries. The first worked under formal cover, as a member of the Soviet diplomatic or consular staff, a cultural or military attaché, accredited journalist or trade representative. Diplomatic protection meant that these “legal” spies could not be prosecuted for espionage if their activities were uncovered, but only declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. By contrast, an “illegal” spy (nelegal, in Russian) had no official status, usually traveled under a false name with fake papers, and simply blended invisibly into whatever country he or she was posted to. (In the West such spies are known as NOCs, standing for non-official cover.) The KGB planted illegals all over the world, who posed as ordinary citizens, submerged and subversive. Like legal spies, they gathered information, recruited agents, and conducted various forms of espionage. Sometimes, as “sleepers,” they might remain hidden for long periods before being activated. These were also potential fifth columnists, poised to go into battle should war erupt between East and West. Illegals operated beneath the official radar and therefore could not be financed in ways that might be traced or communicate through secure diplomatic channels. But unlike spies accredited to an embassy, they left few traces for counterintelligence investigators to follow. Every Soviet embassy contained a permanent KGB station, or rezidentura, with a number of KGB officers in various official guises, all under the command of a rezident (head of station in MI6 parlance, or station chief to the CIA). One task facing Western counterintelligence was working out which Soviet officials were genuine diplomats and which were really spies. Tracking down the illegals was far harder.

The First Chief Directorate (FCD) was the KGB department responsible for foreign intelligence. Within this, Directorate S (standing for “special”) trained, deployed, and managed the illegals. Vasili Gordievsky was formally recruited into Directorate S in 1960.

The KGB maintained an office inside the Institute of International Relations, staffed by two officers on the lookout for potential recruits. Vasili mentioned to his bosses in Directorate S that his younger brother, proficient in languages, might be interested in the same line of work.

Early in 1961, Oleg Gordievsky was invited in for a chat, and then told to go to a building near the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, where he was politely interviewed, in German, by a middle-aged woman, who complimented him on his grasp of the language. From that instant, he was part of the system. Gordievsky did not seek to join the KGB; this was not a club you applied to. It chose you.

Gordievsky’s time at the university was nearing an end when he was sent to East Berlin for a six-month work-experience posting, as a translator in the Russian embassy. Thrilled at the prospect of his first trip abroad, Gordievsky’s excitement spiked when he was called into Directorate S for a briefing on East Germany. The Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic was a Soviet satellite, but that did not make it immune from the attentions of the KGB. Vasili was already living there as an illegal. Oleg readily agreed to make contact with his brother and carry out a few “small tasks” for his new, unofficial employer. Gordievsky arrived in East Berlin on August 12, 1961, and traveled to a student hostel inside the KGB enclave in the suburb of Karlshorst.

Over the previous months, 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.

Gordievsky awoke the next morning to find that East Berlin had been invaded by bulldozers. The East German government, prompted by Moscow, was taking radical steps to stanch the flow: the construction of the Berlin Wall was under way, a physical barrier to cut off West from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany. The “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” was, in reality, a prison perimeter, erected by East Germany to keep its own citizens penned in. More than 150 miles of concrete and wire, with bunkers, anti-vehicle trenches, and chain fencing, the Berlin Wall was the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain, and one of the nastiest structures man has ever built.

Gordievsky watched in horrified awe as East German workers tore up the streets alongside the border to make them impassable to vehicles and troops unrolled miles of barbed wire. Some East Germans, realizing that their escape route was closing fast, made desperate bids for freedom by clambering over the barricades or attempting to swim the canals that formed part of the border. Guards lined up along the frontier with orders to shoot anyone attempting to cross from East to West. The new wall made a powerful impression on the twenty-two-year-old Gordievsky: “Only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise and stop them fleeing to the West.”

But Gordievsky’s shock at the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall did not prevent him from faithfully carrying out the orders of the KGB. Fear of authority was instinctive, the habit of obedience ingrained. Directorate S had provided the name of a German woman, a former KGB informant; Gordievsky’s instructions were to sound her out and establish if she was prepared to continue providing information. He found her address through a local police station. The middle-aged woman who answered the door seemed unfazed by the sudden arrival of a young man holding a bunch of flowers. Over a cup of tea, she made it clear that she was prepared to continue cooperating with the KGB. Gordievsky eagerly wrote up his first KGB report. Only months later did he realize what had really happened: “It was I, rather than she, who was being tested.”

That Christmas he linked up with Vasili, who was living under a false identity in Leipzig. Oleg did not reveal to Vasili his horror at the construction of the Berlin Wall. His older brother was already a professional KGB officer, who would not have approved of such ideological wavering. Just as their mother had concealed her true feelings from her husband, so the brothers kept their secrets from each other: Oleg had no idea what Vasili was really doing in East Germany, and Vasili had no clue what Oleg was really feeling. The brothers attended a performance of the Christmas Oratorio, which left Oleg “intensely moved.” Russia seemed “a spiritual desert” by comparison, where only approved composers could be heard, and “class hostile” church music, such as Bach’s, was deemed decadent and bourgeois, and banned.

Gordievsky was profoundly affected by the few months he spent in East Germany: he had witnessed the great physical and symbolic division of Europe into rival ideologies; he had tasted cultural fruits denied to him in Moscow; and he had started spying. “It was exciting to have an early taste of what I might do if I joined the KGB.”

In reality, he already had.

Back in Moscow, Gordievsky was told to report for duty at the KGB on July 31, 1962. Why did he join an organization enforcing an ideology he had already started to question? KGB work was glamorous, offering the promise of foreign travel. Secrecy is seductive. He was also ambitious. The KGB might change. He might change. Russia might change. And the pay and privileges were good.

Olga Gordievsky was dismayed to learn that her younger son would be following his father and brother into the intelligence service. For once, she openly voiced her anger at the regime and the apparatus of oppression that sustained it. Oleg pointed out that he would not be working for the internal KGB but in the foreign section, the First Chief Directorate, an elite organization staffed by intellectuals speaking foreign languages, doing sophisticated work that required skill and education. “It’s not really like the KGB,” he told her. “It’s really intelligence and diplomatic work.” Olga turned away and left the room. Anton Gordievsky said nothing. Oleg detected no pride in his father’s demeanor. Years later, when he came to understand the full scale of Stalinist repression, Gordievsky wondered whether his father, now approaching retirement, had been “ashamed of all those crimes and atrocities committed by the KGB, and simply afraid to discuss the work of the KGB with his own son.” Or perhaps Anton Gordievsky was struggling to maintain his double life, a pillar of the KGB too terrified to warn his son against what he was getting into.

In his last summer as a civilian, Gordievsky joined Standa Kaplan at the institute’s holiday camp on the Black Sea coast. Kaplan had decided to stay on for an additional month before returning to join the StB, Czechoslovakia’s formidable intelligence service. The two friends would soon be colleagues, allies in espionage on behalf of the Soviet bloc. For a month, they camped under the pines, ran every day, swam, sunbathed, and discussed women, music, and politics. Kaplan was increasingly critical of the Communist system. Gordievsky was flattered to be the recipient of such dangerous confidences: “There was an understanding between us, a trust.”

Soon after his return to Czechoslovakia, Kaplan wrote a letter to Gordievsky. In among the gossip about the girls he had met and the fine time they would have together if his friend came to visit (“We’ll empty all the pubs and wine cellars in Prague”), Kaplan made a highly significant request: “Oleg, might you have a copy of Pravda with Yevtushenko’s poem about Stalin?” The poem in question was “Heirs of Stalin” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a direct attack on Stalinism by one of Russia’s most outspoken and influential poets. The poem was a demand that the Soviet government ensure that Stalin would “never rise again” and a warning that some in the leadership still hankered for the brutal Stalinist past: “By the past, I mean the neglect of the people’s welfare, false charges, the jailing of the innocent…‘Why care?’ some say, but I can’t remain inactive. / While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth.” The poem had caused a sensation when it was published in the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and had also been reprinted in Czechoslovakia. “It had a powerful effect on some of our people, with a certain tinge of discontent,” Kaplan wrote to Gordievsky. He said he wanted to compare the Czech translation to the original Russian. But in reality Kaplan was sending a coded message of complicity to his friend, an acknowledgment that they shared the sentiments expressed by Yevtushenko and, like the poet, would not remain inactive in the face of Stalin’s legacy.

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 where the Party breaks a prisoner’s resistance by subjecting him to his worst nightmare.

Here Gordievsky and 120 other trainee KGB officers would be inducted into the deepest secrets of Soviet spycraft: intelligence and counterintelligence, recruiting and running spies, legals and illegals, agents and double agents, weapons, unarmed combat and surveillance, the arcane arts and language of this strange trade. Some of the most important instruction was in surveillance detection and evasion, known as “dry-cleaning,” or proverka in KGB jargon: how to spot when you were being followed and dodge surveillance in a way that would appear accidental rather than intentional, since a target that is obviously “surveillance aware” is likely to be a trained intelligence operative. “The intelligence officer’s behavior should not cause suspicion,” the KGB instructors declared. “If a surveillance service notices that a foreigner is blatantly checking for a tail, it will be stimulated to work more secretly, more tenaciously, and with more ingenuity.”

Being able to make contact with an agent without being watched—or even while under surveillance—is central to every clandestine operation. In Western spy parlance, an officer or agent operating undetected is said to have gone “black.” In test after test, the KGB students would be sent off to link up with a specific person at a precise location, drop off or pick up information, try to identify whether and how they were being followed, throw off the tail without appearing to do so, and arrive at the designated place spotlessly dry-cleaned. Surveillance was the responsibility of the KGB’s Seventh Directorate. Professional watchers, highly trained in the art of tailing a suspect, would take part in the exercises, and at the end of each day the student trainee and the surveillance team compared notes. Proverka was exhausting, competitive, time-consuming, and nerve-shredding; Gordievsky found he was very good at it.

Oleg learned how to set up a “signal site,” a secret sign left in a public place—a chalk mark on a lamppost for example—that meant nothing to a casual observer but would tell a spy to meet at a certain place and time; how to make a “brush contact,” physically passing a message or item to another person without being spotted; how to make a “dead-letter drop,” leaving a message or cash at a particular spot to be picked up by another without making direct contact. He was taught codes and ciphers, recognition signals, secret writing, preparation of microdots, photography, and disguise. There were classes on economics and politics, as well as ideological tuition to reinforce the young spies’ commitment to Marxism-Leninism. As one of Oleg’s fellow students observed, “These clichéd formulas and concepts had the character of ritual incantations, something akin to daily and hourly affirmations of loyalty.” Veteran officers, who had already served abroad, gave lectures on Western culture and etiquette to prepare recruits for understanding and combating bourgeois capitalism.

Gordievsky adopted his first spy name. Soviet and Western intelligence services used the same method for choosing a pseudonym—it should be close to the real name, with the same initial letter, because that way if a person addressed you by your real name, someone who only knew you by your spy name might well assume he or she had misheard. Gordievsky chose the name “Guardiyetsev.”

Like every other student, he swore eternal loyalty to the KGB: “I commit myself to defend my country to the last drop of blood, and to keep state secrets.” He did this without qualms. He also joined the Communist Party, another requirement of admission. He might have his doubts—many did—but that did not preclude him from joining the KGB and the Party with wholehearted commitment and sincerity. And, besides, the KGB was thrilling. So, far from being an Orwellian nightmare, the yearlong training course at School 101 was the most enjoyable period of his young life, a time of excitement and anticipation. His fellow recruits were selected for their intelligence and ideological conformity, but also for the spirit of adventure common to all intelligence services. “We had chosen careers in the KGB because they held out the prospect of action.” Secrecy forges intense bonds. Even his parents had little idea where Oleg was or what he was doing. “To make it into service in the FCD was the concealed and open dream of the majority of young officers of state security, but only a few were made worthy of this honor,” wrote Leonid Shebarshin, who attended School 101 at around the same time as Oleg and would end up a KGB general. “The…work united intelligence officers in a unique camaraderie with its own traditions, discipline, conventions, and special professional language.” By the summer of 1963, Gordievsky had been fully adopted into the KGB brotherhood. When he swore to defend the Motherland to his last breath and his last secret, he meant it.

Vasili Gordievsky was working hard for Directorate S, the illegals section of the FCD. He had also started to drink heavily—not necessarily a drawback in a service that prized the ability to consume vast amounts of vodka after work without falling over. An illegals specialist, he moved from place to place under different aliases, servicing the undercover network, passing on messages and money to other hidden agents. Vasili never told his younger brother what he was doing, but he hinted at exotic locations, including Mozambique, Vietnam, Sweden, and South Africa.

Oleg hoped to follow his brother into this exhilarating undercover world overseas. Instead, he was told to report to Directorate S in Moscow, where he would be preparing documentation for other illegals. Trying to mask his disappointment, on August 20, 1963, Gordievsky climbed into his best suit and reported for work at KGB headquarters, the complex of buildings that stands near the Kremlin, part prison, part archive, the bustling nerve center of Soviet intelligence. At its heart stood the sinister Lubyanka, a neo-Baroque palace originally built for the All-Russia Insurance Company, whose basement housed the KGB torture cells. Among KGB officers, the KGB control center was known as “the Monastery” or, more simply, “the Center.”

Instead of going undercover in some glamorous foreign location, Gordievsky found himself shuffling paper, “a galley slave” filling out forms. Each illegal required a fake persona, with a convincing backstory, a new identity with complete biography and forged paperwork. 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. Placed in the German section, Oleg spent his days creating people who did not exist. For two years, he lived in a world of double lives, sending counterfeit spies into the outer world and meeting those who had returned.

The Center was stalked by living ghosts, heroes of Soviet espionage in their dotage. In the corridors of Directorate S, Gordievsky was introduced to Konon Trofimovich Molody, alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” one of the most successful illegals in history. In 1943, the KGB had appropriated the identity of a dead Canadian child named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale and given it to Molody, who had been raised in North America and spoke faultless English. Molody/Lonsdale settled in London in 1954 and, posing as a jovial salesman of jukeboxes and bubblegum machines, recruited the so-called Portland spy ring, a network of informants gathering naval secrets. (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.) A tip-off from a CIA mole had led to Molody’s arrest and conviction for espionage, although even at his trial the British court was uncertain of his real name. When Gordievsky met him, Molody had just returned to Moscow after being swapped for a British businessman arrested on spying charges in Moscow. A similarly fabled figure was Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, the illegal whose spying in the US had earned him a thirty-year sentence before he was exchanged for the downed U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962.

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. He now lived in a comfortable flat in Moscow, attended by minders, “an Englishman to his fingertips,” as one KGB officer put it, reading the cricket scores in old copies of The Times, eating Oxford marmalade, and frequently drinking himself into a stupor. Philby was revered as a legend within the KGB, and he continued to do odd jobs for Soviet intelligence, including running a training course for English-speaking officers, analyzing occasional cases, and even helping to motivate the Soviet ice hockey team.

Like Molody and Fisher, Philby gave lectures to starstruck young spies. But the reality of life after KGB espionage was anything but happy. Molody took to drink and died in mysterious circumstances on a mushroom-picking expedition. Fisher became deeply disillusioned. Philby attempted to kill himself. All three would end up celebrated on Soviet postage stamps.

To anyone who cared to look closely (and few Russians did), the contrast between the myth and reality of the KGB was self-evident. The Center was a spotlessly clean, brightly lit, amoral bureaucracy, a place at once ruthless, prissy, and puritanical, where international crimes were conceived with punctilious attention to detail. From its earliest days, Soviet intelligence operated without ethical restraint. In addition to collecting and analyzing intelligence, the KGB organized political warfare, media manipulation, disinformation, forgery, intimidation, kidnapping, and murder. The Thirteenth Department, or the “Directorate for Special Tasks,” specialized in sabotage and assassination. Homosexuality was illegal in the USSR, but homosexuals were recruited to entrap gay foreigners, who could then be blackmailed. The KGB was unapologetically unprincipled. Yet it was a prudish, hypocritical, and moralistic place. Officers were forbidden to drink during working hours, though many drank prodigiously at all other times. Gossip about the private lives of colleagues swirled around the KGB, as in most offices, with the difference that in the Center scandal and tittle-tattle could destroy careers and end lives. The KGB took an intrusive interest in the domestic arrangements of its employees, for no life was private in the Soviet Union. Officers were expected to get married, have children, and stay married. There was calculation as well as control in this: a married KGB officer was considered less likely to defect while abroad, since his wife and family could be held as hostages.

Two years after joining Directorate S, Gordievsky concluded that he was not going to follow in his brother’s footsteps as a deep-cover spy posted abroad. But Vasili himself may have been the main reason Oleg was rejected for illegals work: according to KGB logic, having more than one family member abroad, and particularly having two in the same country, might be an inducement to defect.

Gordievsky was bored and frustrated. A job that had seemed to promise adventure and excitement had turned out to be humdrum in the extreme. The world beyond the Iron Curtain he had read about in Western newspapers seemed tantalizingly out of reach. So he decided to get married. “I wanted to go abroad as soon as possible and the KGB never sent unmarried men abroad. I was in a hurry to find a wife.” A woman with German language skills would be ideal, since they might then be posted to Germany together.

Yelena Akopian was training to be a German teacher. She was twenty-one, half Armenian, intelligent, dark-eyed, and sharply witty. She was a master of the one-line put-down, which he found attractive and alluring, for a time. They met at the home of a mutual friend. What sparked between them had less to do with passion than a shared ambition. Like Oleg, Yelena longed to travel abroad, and imagined a life far beyond the confines of the cramped flat where she lived with her parents and five siblings. Gordievsky’s few previous relationships had been brief and unsatisfying. Yelena seemed to offer a glimpse of what a modern Soviet woman might be, less conventional than the female students he had met before, with an unpredictable sense of humor. She pronounced herself a feminist, although in 1960s Russia the term was strictly limited. He told himself that he loved her. They got engaged, Gordievsky later reflected, “without much real thought or self-examination on either side,” and then married, without fanfare, a few months later, for reasons that were less than romantic: 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.

Late in 1965 came the break Gordievsky had been waiting for. A slot opened up for a post running illegals in Denmark. His cover job would be that of a consular official dealing with visas and inheritances; in reality, he would be working for “Line N” (standing for nelegalniy, or illegals), responsible for the operational fieldwork of Directorate S.

Gordievsky was offered the job, managing a network of undercover spies in Denmark. He accepted with alacrity and delight. As Kim Philby observed after he was recruited into the KGB in 1933: “I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.”

Chapter 2

UNCLE GORMSSON

Oleg and Yelena Gordievsky landed in Copenhagen on a glittering frosty day in January 1966 and entered a fairy tale.

As one MI6 officer later remarked: “If you had to choose a city to demonstrate the advantages of Western democracy over Russian communism, you could hardly do better than Copenhagen.”

The capital of Denmark was beautiful, clean, modern, rich, and, to the eyes of a couple newly emerged from the drab oppression of Soviet life, almost impossibly alluring. Here were sleek cars, shiny office buildings, smart designer furniture, and smiling Nordic people with magnificent dentistry. There were teeming cafés, bright restaurants serving exotic food, shops selling a bewildering array of goods. To Gordievsky’s famished eyes, the Danes seemed not just brighter and more alive, but culturally nourished. 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. There seemed to be very few policemen.

The Soviet embassy consisted of three stucco villas on Kristianiagade in the northern part of the city, more like a grand gated hotel than a Soviet enclave, with immaculate sweeping gardens, a sports center, and a social club. The Gordievskys moved into a newly built apartment with high ceilings, wooden floors, and a fitted kitchen. He was allocated a Volkswagen Beetle and a cash advance of $700 every month for entertaining contacts. Copenhagen seemed to be alive with music: 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?

Of the twenty officials in the Soviet embassy, just six were genuine diplomats, while the rest worked for the KGB or the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. The rezident, Leonid Zaitsev, a charming and conscientious officer, seemed oblivious to the fact that most of his underlings were incompetent, lazy, or crooked, and usually all three. They expended far more energy on fiddling their expenses than actually spying. The broad remit of the KGB was to cultivate Danish contacts, recruit informants, and target possible agents. This, Gordievsky swiftly realized, was “an invitation to corruption,” since most officers simply invented their interactions with Danes, falsified bills, made up their reports, and pocketed their allowances. The Center does not appear to have noticed the anomaly that few of its personnel in Copenhagen spoke good Danish, and some spoke none at all.

Gordievsky was determined to show that he was not like the rest. Already proficient in Swedish, he set about learning Danish. His mornings were spent processing visa applications, in obedience to his cover job in the consulate; the spying began at lunchtime.

The KGB illegals network in Scandinavia was patchy. Much of Gordievsky’s work was administrative: leaving money or messages at dead drops, monitoring signal sites, and maintaining clandestine contact with the undercover spies, most of whom he never met face-to-face or knew by name. If an illegal left an orange peel under a specific park bench, this meant “I am in danger,” whereas an apple core indicated “I am leaving the country tomorrow.” These complex arrangements sometimes descended into farce. At one signal site, Oleg left a bent nail on a windowsill in a public toilet to indicate to an illegal that he should pick up cash at a predetermined dead-drop site. The answering signal from the undercover agent, acknowledging that the message had been received, was a beer bottle cap left in the same place. On returning to the spot, Oleg found the cap from a bottle of ginger beer. Was ginger beer, in spy signaling, the same as ordinary beer? Or did this have another meaning? After an intense all-night discussion with colleagues back at the rezidentura he reached the conclusion that the spy did not see any difference between one bottle cap and another.

In Denmark, births and deaths were registered by the Protestant Church and recorded by hand in large ledgers. With the help of a skilled forger from Moscow, any number of new identities could be fabricated from scratch by altering church records. He began cultivating clerics to gain access to the registers and organizing burglaries at various churches. “I was breaking new ground,” he said later. The church registers of Denmark contain a number of Danes entirely invented by Oleg Gordievsky.

In the meantime, he set about recruiting informants, agents, and clandestine couriers. “That’s the main purpose of our life here,” Zaitsev told him. After months of cultivation, working under the alias “Gornov” (his mother’s maiden name), he persuaded a schoolteacher and his wife to act as a “live letterbox,” passing messages to and from illegals. He befriended a Danish policeman, but after a few meetings began to wonder whether he was recruiting the man, or if it was the other way around.

Less than a year after his arrival in Copenhagen, Gordievsky was joined by a KGB officer of a very different stamp from the others. Mikhail Petrovich Lyubimov was a booming, cheerful, highly intelligent Ukrainian whose father had served in the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. Lyubimov had graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations four years ahead of Gordievsky, and then wrote a thesis for the KGB entitled English National Character and Its Use in Operational Work. In 1957, on KGB orders, he seduced an American girl at the World Youth Festival in Moscow. Four years later, he was deployed to Britain as a Soviet press attaché, while recruiting informants within trade unions, student groups, and the British establishment. He spoke English with a fruity upper-class accent, larded with old-fashioned Britishisms (What ho! Pip pip!), making him sound like a Russian Bertie Wooster. Lyubimov had developed a fascination for all things English, or, more accurately, the aspects of English culture that he liked: whisky, cigars, cricket, gentlemen’s clubs, tailored tweed, billiards, and gossip. British intelligence nicknamed him “Smiley Mike.” The British were the enemy, and he adored them. In 1965 he had tried and failed to recruit a British cipher clerk, and the intelligence service promptly attempted to recruit him. When he declined the offer to spy for Britain, he was declared persona non grata and sent back to Moscow—an experience that did nothing whatever to dent his rampant Anglophilia.

At the end of 1966, Lyubimov was posted to Copenhagen as chief of political intelligence (the “PR Line,” in KGB nomenclature).

Gordievsky took to Lyubimov immediately. “It is not the winning that counts but playing the game,” Lyubimov boomed, as he regaled the younger man with tales of his life in Britain, recruiting spies while sipping Glenlivet in paneled clubrooms. Lyubimov adopted Gordievsky as his protégé and said of the younger man: “He impressed me with his splendid knowledge of history. He loved Bach and Haydn, which inspired respect, particularly compared to the rest of the Soviet colony in Denmark, who spent all their time on fishing trips, shopping, and amassing as many material possessions as they could.”

Just as Lyubimov had fallen in love with Britain, so Gordievsky found himself smitten by Denmark, its people, parks, and music, and the liberty, including the sexual freedom, that its citizens took for granted. The Danes had an open attitude toward sex, progressive even by European standards. One day Oleg visited the city’s red-light district, and on a whim entered a shop selling pornographic magazines, sex toys, and other erotica. There he bought three homosexual porn magazines and took them home to show Yelena. “I was just intrigued. I had no idea what homosexuals did.” He placed the magazines on his mantelpiece, an open exhibition of a freedom unavailable in Soviet Russia.

“I blossomed as a human being,” he wrote. “There was so much beauty, such lively music, such excellent schools, such openness and cheeriness among ordinary people, that I could only look back on the vast, sterile concentration camp of the Soviet Union as a form of hell.” He took up badminton and found that he loved the game, particularly relishing the game’s deceptive element. “The shuttlecock, slowing down in the final few seconds of flight, gives a player a chance to use his wits and change his shot at the last moment.” The last-minute change of shot was a skill he would perfect. He attended classical-music concerts, devoured library books, and traveled to every corner of Denmark, sometimes on spy business, but mostly for the sheer pleasure of being able to do so.

For the first time in his life, Gordievsky felt that he was not being watched. Except that he was.

The Danish Security and Intelligence Service, the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, or PET, was tiny but highly effective. Its stated duty was to “prevent, investigate, and combat operations and activities that pose a threat to the preservation of Denmark as a free, democratic, and safe country.” PET strongly suspected that Oleg Gordievsky posed just such a threat, and from the moment the young Russian diplomat with a taste for classical music arrived in Copenhagen, it had been keeping an eye on him.

The Danes routinely monitored Soviet embassy personnel, but lacked the resources for round-the-clock surveillance. Some of the telephones inside the embassy were bugged. KGB technicians, meanwhile, had successfully penetrated the PET radio networks, and a listening post within the embassy routinely picked up messages passing between the Danish surveillance teams. Yelena Gordievsky was now working for the KGB alongside her husband, listening to these messages and translating them into Russian. As a result, the KGB could often work out the positioning of PET surveillance cars, and establish when its officers were free of surveillance. Each suspected KGB officer had a code name: Gordievsky was referred to in PET radio messages as “Uncle Gormsson,” a reference to a tenth-century king of Denmark, Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson.

The Danish security service had little doubt that Gordievsky (alias Gornov, alias Guardiyetsev, alias Uncle Gormsson) was a KGB spy working under diplomatic cover.

One evening Oleg and Yelena were invited to dinner by their policeman friend and his wife. While they were out, PET entered their flat and planted listening devices. Gordievsky had been somewhat suspicious of the invitation from the Danish couple and so, in accordance with his School 101 training, he had taken the precaution of squeezing a blob of glue between the hall door and its frame. When they returned from dinner, the invisible glue seal had been broken. From then on, Gordievsky was careful about whatever he said at home.

The mutual snooping was erratic and piecemeal, on both sides. KGB officers, trained in the art of dry-cleaning, frequently managed to slip off the Danish radar. But, just as often, Gordievsky and his colleagues believed they had successfully gone “black” when they had not.

Either PET was monitoring Copenhagen’s red-light district or the Danes were shadowing Gordievsky, because he was spotted entering the sex shop and buying homosexual porn magazines. A married Russian intelligence officer with a taste for gay porn is vulnerable, a man with secrets who might be blackmailed. The Danish security service made a careful note, and passed on this interesting nugget of information to selected allies. For the first time in Western intelligence files, a question mark appeared alongside Gordievsky’s name.

Oleg Gordievsky was evolving into a most effective KGB officer. 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 only cloud on his horizon was his marriage, which seemed to be wilting as fast as his cultural inner life was blooming. A relationship begun with little warmth grew steadily chillier. Gordievsky wanted children; Yelena, emphatically, did not. A year into the posting, his wife revealed that before leaving Moscow she had aborted a pregnancy without consulting him. He felt deceived, and furious. A fierce bundle of energy, he found his young wife strangely passive and unresponsive to the new sights and sounds around them. He began to feel that his marriage was “one more of convention than love” and his “feeling of emptiness” grew steadily stronger. Gordievsky described his attitude toward women as “respectful.” In reality, like many Soviet men, he had old-fashioned ideas about matrimony, and expected his wife to cook and clean without complaint. A skilled KGB translator, Yelena insisted there were “better things for a woman to do than housework.” Oleg might be open to many of the new influences in Western society, but he drew the line at women’s liberation; what he called Yelena’s “anti-domestic tendencies” became a source of increasing frustration. He took a culinary course, hoping to shame Yelena into doing more cooking herself; she either did not notice or did not care. Her one-line retorts, which he had once found witty, now merely irritated him. When he felt he was in the right, Gordievsky could be obdurate and inflexible. To work off his frustration, he ran every day in Copenhagen’s parks, alone, for hour after hour, returning home too exhausted to quarrel.

While cracks were appearing in the marriage, seismic upheavals were taking place within the Soviet bloc.

In January 1968, Alexander Dubček, the reformist first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party, set about liberalizing his country and loosening the Soviet yoke by relaxing controls on travel, free speech, and censorship. Dubček’s “Socialism with a Human Face” promised to limit the power of the secret police, improve relations with the West, and eventually hold free elections.

Gordievsky observed these events with rising excitement. If Czechoslovakia could loosen Moscow’s grip, then other Soviet satellites might follow suit. Within the Copenhagen KGB rezidentura opinion was sharply divided over the significance of the Czech reforms. Some argued that Moscow would intervene militarily, as it had done in Hungary in 1956. But others, including Gordievsky and Lyubimov, felt certain the Czech revolution would flourish. “Oleg and I were sure the Soviet tanks would not go into Prague,” wrote Lyubimov. “We bet a whole crate of Tuborg.” Even Yelena, usually so politically disengaged, seemed galvanized by what was happening. “We saw Czechoslovakia as our one hope for a liberal future,” wrote Gordievsky. “Not only for that country but for our country as well.”

Back at Moscow Center, the KGB viewed the Czech experiment in reform as an existential threat to Communism itself, with the potential to tip the balance of the Cold War against Moscow. Soviet troops began massing on the Czech frontier. The KGB did not wait for the Kremlin’s signal and set about combating the Czech “counterrevolution” with a small army of spies. One of these was Vasili Gordievsky.

As one brother watched with mounting enthusiasm as the Prague Spring bloomed, the other was sent to nip it in the bud.

Early in 1968, more than thirty KGB illegals slipped into Czechoslovakia, with orders from the KGB’s chief, Yuri Andropov, to sabotage the Czech reform movement, infiltrate “reactionary” intellectual circles, and abduct prominent supporters of the Prague Spring. Most of these agents traveled disguised as Western tourists, since it was assumed that the Czech “agitators” would be more likely to reveal their plans to apparently sympathetic foreigners. Among the targets were intellectuals, academics, journalists, students, and writers, including Milan Kundera and Václav Havel. It was the largest intelligence operation the KGB had ever mounted against a Warsaw Pact ally.

Vasili Gordievsky traveled on a false West German passport under the name Gromov. The older Gordievsky brother had already demonstrated his mettle as a KGB kidnapper. Yevgeni Ushakov had been operating as an illegal for several years in Sweden, mapping the country and deploying a network of subagents in anticipation of a possible Soviet invasion. But in 1968 the Center concluded that this spy, code-named FAUST, had developed a persecution complex and had to be removed. In April 1968, Vasili Gordievsky drugged Ushakov and then successfully exfiltrated him via Finland to Moscow, where he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, then later released and fired from the KGB. Vasili was awarded a KGB medal for “impeccable service.”

The next month, he and a KGB colleague set out to kidnap two of the leading émigré figures in the Czech reformist movement: Václav Černý and Jan Procházka. A distinguished literary historian, Professor Černý had been sacked from Charles University by the Communist regime for speaking out in defense of academic freedom. Procházka, a writer and film producer, had publicly denounced official censorship and demanded “freedom of expression.” Both were living in West Germany. The KGB was convinced (wrongly) that the pair headed an “illegal anti-state” group dedicated to “subverting the foundations of socialism in Czechoslovakia,” and must therefore be eliminated. The plan was simple: Vasili Gordievsky would befriend Černý and Procházka, convince them that they were in imminent danger of assassination by Soviet hitmen, and offer a “temporary hiding place.” If they refused to come voluntarily, they would be subdued using “special substances,” then handed over to operatives from the Special Actions department of the KGB and driven across the border into East Germany in the trunk of a car with diplomatic license plates—by diplomatic convention, such vehicles were usually not subject to search. The plan did not work. Despite Gordievsky’s urgings, Černý refused to believe “that he was in any greater danger than usual”; Procházka was accompanied by a bodyguard, and spoke only Czech, which Gordievsky did not understand. After two weeks of trying, and failing, to persuade the Czech dissidents to come with him, Gordievsky aborted the kidnapping.

Vasili Gordievsky, alias Gromov, then crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and joined the small, highly trained gang of Soviet illegals and saboteurs posing as tourists. Their task was to mount a series of “provocation operations,” intended to give the false impression that Czechoslovakia was about to erupt in violent counterrevolution. They distributed false evidence suggesting that Czech “rightists,” backed by Western intelligence, were planning a violent coup. They fabricated inflammatory posters calling for the overthrow of Communism, and planted arms caches, wrapped in packages conveniently marked “Made in the USA,” which were then “discovered” and denounced as proof of an imminent insurrection. The Soviet authorities even claimed to have discovered a “secret American plan” to take over the Communist government and install an imperialist stooge.

The older Gordievsky brother was at the forefront of KGB efforts to defame and destroy the Prague Spring; like his father, he never questioned the rectitude of what he was doing.

Oleg had no idea his brother was in Czechoslovakia, let alone of the skullduggery he was perpetrating. The brothers never discussed the subject, then or later. Vasili guarded his secrets, and Oleg, increasingly, guarded his. As spring turned to summer, and the march toward a new Czechoslovakia seemed to gather pace, Gordievsky insisted that Moscow would never intervene militarily. “They can’t invade,” he declared. “They won’t dare.”

On the night of August 20, 1968, 2,000 tanks and more than 200,000 troops, principally Soviet but with contingents from other Warsaw Pact countries, rolled across the Czechoslovakian frontiers. There was no hope of opposing the Soviet juggernaut, and Dubček called upon his people not to resist. By morning, Czechoslovakia was an occupied country. The Soviet Union had emphatically demonstrated the “Brezhnev doctrine”: any Warsaw Pact country attempting to renounce or reform orthodox Communism would be brought back into the fold, by force. The Prague Spring was over, and a new Soviet winter began.

Oleg Gordievsky was appalled and disgusted. As angry Danish protestors gathered outside the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen to denounce the invasion, he felt a deep shame. Witnessing the building of the Berlin Wall had been shocking enough, but the invasion of Czechoslovakia offered even more blatant proof of the true nature of the regime he served. Alienation from the Communist system turned, very swiftly, to loathing: “This brutal attack on innocent people made me hate it with a burning, passionate hatred.”

From the telephone in the corner of the embassy lobby, Gordievsky called Yelena at home, and in a torrent of expletives damned the Soviet Union for crushing the Prague Spring. “They’ve done it. It’s unbelievable.” He was close to tears. “My soul was aching,” he later recalled, but his mind was clear.

Gordievsky was sending a message. He knew that the embassy phone was bugged by the Danish security service. PET was also eavesdropping on his home telephone. Danish intelligence would surely pick up this semisubversive conversation with his wife and take note that “Uncle Gormsson” was not the unquestioning cog in the KGB machine he appeared to be. The telephone call was not exactly an approach to the other side. Rather, it was a hint, an emotional brush contact, an attempt to make the Danes, and their allies in Western intelligence, aware of his feelings. It was, he later wrote, a “first, deliberate signal to the West.”

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.

As the grim news from Czechoslovakia sank in, Gordievsky’s thoughts turned to Stanislaw Kaplan, his outspoken friend at university. What must Standa be feeling as the Soviet tanks rolled into his country?

Kaplan was outraged. After leaving Russia, he had worked at the Ministry of the Interior in Prague before joining the Czech state intelligence service, the StB. His dissident sympathies carefully concealed, Kaplan watched the events of 1968 with bleak dismay, but said nothing. The crushing of the Prague Spring prompted a wave of mass emigration, and some 300,000 people would flee Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion. Kaplan began collecting secrets and prepared to join them.

Gordievsky’s tour of duty in Denmark was approaching its end when a telegram arrived from Moscow: “Cease operational activity. Stay to make analysis but no more operations.” Moscow Center had concluded that the Danes were showing an unhealthy level of interest in Comrade Gordievsky, having probably worked out he was a KGB officer. Radio intercepts showed that, since his arrival, he had been tailed, on average, every other day, more than any other member of the Soviet embassy staff. Moscow did not want a diplomatic incident, so for his final months in Copenhagen Gordievsky was put to work researching a KGB manual about Denmark.

Gordievsky’s career, and conscience, was at a crossroads. His anger over events in Czechoslovakia simmered, but had yet to cohere into anything approaching a decision. Leaving the KGB was unthinkable (and probably impossible), but he wondered whether he might be able to switch from running illegals and join Lyubimov in the political-intelligence department, work that seemed more interesting and less squalid.

Gordievsky trod water, professionally and personally: he carried out his consular duties, bickered with Yelena, nursed his secret antipathy for Communism, and gorged himself on Western culture. At a party in the home of a West German diplomat, he fell into conversation with a young Danish man, who was exceptionally friendly and evidently quite drunk. The Dane seemed to know a lot about classical music. He suggested they go on to a bar. Gordievsky politely declined, explaining that he needed to get home.

The young man was an agent of the Danish intelligence service. The conversation had been the opening gambit in an attempted homosexual entrapment. Prompted by Oleg’s apparent taste for gay pornography, the Danes had set a honeytrap, one of the oldest, grubbiest, and most effective techniques in espionage. PET was never quite sure why it failed. Had the highly trained KGB officer spotted the attempted seduction? Or perhaps the honey in the trap was simply not to his taste. The true explanation was simpler. Gordievsky was not gay. He had not realized he was being chatted up.

Outside fiction, 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. And now Gordievsky was going home.

The Soviet Union he returned to, in January 1970, was even more repressive, paranoid, and dingy than the one he had left three years earlier. The Communist orthodoxy of the Brezhnev era seemed to leech away all color and imagination. Gordievsky was repelled by his own homeland: “How shabby everything seemed.” The queues, the grime, the suffocating bureaucracy, fear, and corruption stood in grim contrast to the bright and bountiful world he had left in Denmark. The propaganda was ubiquitous, officials alternately servile and rude, and everyone spied on everyone else; the city stank of boiled cabbage and blocked drains. Nothing worked properly. Nobody smiled. The most casual contact with foreigners provoked immediate suspicion. But it was the music that gnawed at his soul, the patriotic mush blaring out of loudspeakers on every street corner, written to Communist formulas, bland, booming, and inescapable, the sound of Stalin. Gordievsky felt under daily assault from what he called this “totalitarian cacophony.”

He was sent back to Directorate S, while Yelena got a job in the Twelfth Department of the KGB, the section responsible for bugging and eavesdropping on foreign diplomats. She was assigned to the unit listening in on Scandinavian embassies and diplomatic personnel, and promoted to lieutenant. The marriage was now little more than a “working relationship,” though they never spoke about their work, or discussed much of anything else in the grim flat they shared in east Moscow.

The next two years were, in Oleg’s words, “an in-between, inconsequential time.” Although he had been promoted and was better paid, his job was little different from the one he had left three years before, preparing identities for illegals. He applied to learn English, hoping this might lead to a posting in the United States, Britain, or one of the Commonwealth countries, but was told there was no point, since the Danes had apparently identified him as a KGB officer, and it was therefore unlikely he would be sent abroad to a Western country. Morocco was a possibility. He began learning French, with little enthusiasm. Sunk in the gray conformity of Moscow, Gordievsky suffered acute cultural withdrawal symptoms. He was restless, resentful, increasingly lonely, and stuck.

* * *

In the spring of 1970, a young British intelligence officer was leafing through a “personal file” that had recently arrived from Canada. Geoffrey Guscott was slightly built, bespectacled, multilingual, highly intelligent, and dogged. More George Smiley than James Bond, he already had the look of an avuncular university tutor. But appearances could not have been more deceptive. According to one colleague, Guscott “probably personally inflicted more damage on Soviet intelligence than anyone else in history.”

Brought up in southeast London, the son of a printer who had left school at fourteen, Guscott had a working-class background that set him apart from the majority of MI6 officers. He won a scholarship to Dulwich College, and then a place at Cambridge to read Russian and Czech. On graduation in 1961, a letter arrived from out of the blue, inviting Guscott to a meeting in London. There he met a cheery veteran of British intelligence who described his experiences as a wartime spy in Vienna and Madrid. “I had a yen to travel, and it seemed to me exactly what I wanted to do,” recalled Guscott. At the age of twenty-four, he was enrolled in Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, known to itself as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, but referred to by just about everyone else as MI6.

In 1965, Guscott was posted to Czechoslovakia, as the tide of reform was beginning to rise. For three years he ran a spy code-named FREED, an officer in the Czech intelligence service, and by the time of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was back in London, responsible for the recruitment of Czech officials, both inside and outside Czechoslovakia. The Soviet invasion sent the Czech desk into overdrive. “We had to grab every opportunity we could.”

The file on Guscott’s desk, code-named DANICEK, concerned the recent defection of a junior officer named Stanislaw Kaplan from the Czech intelligence service.

Kaplan had taken a holiday in Bulgaria soon after the Prague Spring. There he had vanished, before reappearing in France, where he formally defected to the French intelligence service. Kaplan explained that he wished to settle in Canada. The Canadian intelligence service had a close relationship with MI6, and an officer was sent from London to debrief the defector. The Canadians undoubtedly informed the CIA of Kaplan’s defection. The young Czech officer was eager to cooperate. By the time it landed on Guscott’s desk, the DANICEK dossier was several inches thick.

Kaplan was described as intelligent and forthright, “a cross-country runner who enjoyed the opposite sex.” He brought useful details about the workings of Czech intelligence, and his years as a student in Moscow. As a matter of routine, defectors were asked to identify anyone they knew of potential interest to Western intelligence. Kaplan’s file contained around a hundred names, mostly Czechoslovakian. But five of the “personalities” listed by Kaplan were Russians, and one of these stood out.

Kaplan described his friendship with Oleg Gordievsky, a fellow long-distance runner destined for the KGB, who had evinced “clear signs of political disillusionment.” During the Khrushchev Thaw, the two friends had discussed the limitations of Communism: “Oleg was a man who was not closed off, a thinking man who was aware of the horrors of the past, a person not so different from him.”

Guscott cross-referenced the name and found that an Oleg Gordievsky had been sent to Copenhagen in 1966 as a consular official. Relations between PET and MI6 were close. The Danish intelligence file on Gordievsky indicated that he was almost certainly a KGB officer, probably providing support to illegals. Nothing could be pinned on him directly, but he had evaded surveillance several times in a way that suggested professional training. He had made suspicious contact with a policeman and several priests. A bug planted in his apartment revealed that his marriage was in trouble. His visit to a sex shop and his purchase of gay pornography had prompted “a clumsy blackmail attempt,” without result. Gordievsky had returned to Moscow in January 1970 and vanished into the maw of the Center, doing heaven knew what.

Guscott made a note in the Gordievsky file that if this able, elusive, possibly gay KGB officer who had once harbored freethinking ideas reappeared in the West, he might be worth approaching. Oleg was “flagged” as a “person of interest,” and given the code name SUNBEAM.

In the meantime, Britain had KGB spies to deal with closer to home.

On September 24, 1971, the British government ejected 105 Soviet intelligence officers, the largest expulsion of spies in history. The mass eviction, code-named Operation FOOT, had been brewing for some time. Like the Danes, the British closely monitored accredited Soviet diplomats, journalists, and trade representatives, and had a clear idea which were authentic and which were spies. The KGB had become ever more brazen in its espionage, and MI5, the British Security Service, was itching to strike back. The trigger was the defection of Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer posing as the representative of the Soviet knitwear industry. So, far from selling Communist cardigans, Lyalin was the most senior representative of the KGB’s Thirteenth Department, the sabotage section responsible for drawing up contingency plans in the event of war with the West. He was given the MI5 code name GOLDFINCH, but he sang like a canary: among the secrets he revealed were plans to flood the London Underground, assassinate key figures in British public life, and land a sabotage team on the Yorkshire coast. These revelations furnished the pretext MI5 had been waiting for. Every known spy was kicked out, and one of the largest KGB stations in the world was reduced, overnight, to naught. The KGB would spend the next two decades struggling to restore the rezidentura to its former potency.

Operation FOOT took Moscow completely by surprise and provoked consternation within the First Chief Directorate. With its headquarters at Yasenevo, near Moscow’s outer ring road, the department responsible for foreign intelligence had undergone rapid expansion under Brezhnev, multiplying from 3,000 officers in the 1960s to more than 10,000. The mass expulsion was seen as a major debacle. The head of the section responsible for Britain and Scandinavia was sacked (the two regions were, for historical reasons, lumped together in the KGB departmental structure, along with Australia and New Zealand) and replaced by Dmitri Yakushin.

Known as the “Gray Cardinal,” Yakushin was an aristocrat by birth but a Bolshevik of conviction, a committed Communist with the airs of a nobleman and a voice like a pneumatic drill. He had fought in a tank regiment during the war, specialized in pig husbandry at the Soviet Agriculture Ministry, and then transferred to the KGB, rising to become deputy head of the American department. Unlike most of the senior KGB brass he was a cultured man who collected rare books and spoke his mind, very loudly. Gordievsky’s first brush with the Gray Cardinal was extremely alarming.

One night, listening in secret to the BBC World Service, Gordievsky learned that Denmark, in a carry-over effect from Operation FOOT, had expelled three of his former colleagues, KGB officers working under diplomatic cover. The next morning he mentioned the news to a friend in the Danish section. Five minutes later, his telephone rang, and a deafening blast echoed down the line: “Comrade Gordievsky, if you insist on spreading rumors around the KGB about alleged expulsions in Demark, you will be PUNISHED!” It was Yakushin.

Oleg feared the sack. Instead, a few days later, after the BBC report was confirmed, the Gray Cardinal summoned him to his office and got straight to the point, at around a hundred decibels. “I need someone in Copenhagen. We have to rebuild our team there. You speak Danish…How would you fancy working in my department?” Gordievsky stammered that he would like nothing better. “Leave it to me,” Yakushin bellowed.

But the head of Directorate S declined to let him go, with the pettiness typical of a boss determined to retain a member of staff just because another boss has tried to poach him.

There matters rested, frustratingly, until Vasili Gordievsky, the brother who had gotten him into the KGB, helped to speed Oleg’s promotion by the radical expedient of dropping dead.

Vasili had been drinking heavily for years. In Southeast Asia he contracted hepatitis and was advised by doctors never to touch another drop of alcohol. But he continued, and swiftly drank himself to death at the age of thirty-nine. He was given a full military funeral by the KGB. As three KGB officers fired automatic weapons in salute, and the flag-draped coffin was lowered into the floor of the Moscow crematorium, Gordievsky reflected how little he had really known about the man he called “Vasilko.” His mother and sister, clutching each other in grief and awed by the turnout of KGB dignitaries, knew even less. Anton wore his KGB uniform and told everyone he was proud of his son’s service to the Motherland.

Oleg had slightly feared his mysterious older brother. He remained entirely unaware of Vasili’s illegal activities in Czechoslovakia. The brothers had seemed outwardly close, but in reality they had been separated by a wide gulf of secrecy. Vasili died a decorated KGB hero, and Oleg’s stock rose accordingly, providing a small “moral lever” in his efforts to pry himself out of Directorate S and into Yakushin’s British-Scandinavian section. “Now that my brother had died as a result of his work for Directorate S, it would be hard for the boss to refuse my request.” With extreme reluctance, the illegals section let him go. The Soviets applied for a Danish visa, stating that Gordievsky would be returning to Copenhagen as second secretary at the Soviet embassy; in reality, he was now a political-intelligence officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate—the post formerly occupied by Mikhail Lyubimov.

The Danes could have turned down the visa, since Oleg was a suspected KGB officer. Instead, they decided he should be allowed to return, and watched closely. London was informed.

The question of his sexuality was raised again. Gordievsky, it seemed, had not reported the homosexual approach made two years earlier. Had he done so, MI6 surmised, he would probably not have been sent abroad a second time because, in the distorted thinking of the KGB, any officer targeted by Western intelligence was immediately rendered suspect. MI6 assumed that Oleg had decided to conceal the attempted seduction, when he had merely failed to notice it. “The presumption was that he had kept it to himself,” wrote one officer. If Gordievsky was hiding a guilty secret from his bosses, and if Standa Kaplan was right about his political leanings, the Russian might be worth another approach.

MI6 and PET prepared a welcoming reception.

Chapter 3

SUNBEAM

Richard Bromhead was Our Man in Copenhagen, and didn’t much mind who knew it.

The MI6 head of station in Denmark was an old-fashioned, public school–educated Englishman, a cheerful, back-slapping fellow who referred to the people he liked as “complete darlings” and those he did not as “prize shits.” Bromhead was descended from poets and adventurers. The family was pedigreed and penniless. He attended Marlborough College, then performed National Service in Germany, where he found himself in charge of 250 German prisoners in a former camp for British POWs. (“The Kommandant was an Olympic rower. Charming chap. We had a ball.”) He went to Cambridge University, studied Russian, and claimed to have forgotten every word the moment he left. He was turned down by the Foreign Office, then failed to get a job in a bakery, decided to become an artist, and was living on onions in a run-down London flat and drawing pictures of the Albert Memorial when a friend suggested he apply for a job in the Colonial Office. (“They wanted me to go to Nicosia. I said: ‘Lovely. Where’s that?’ ”) In Cyprus, he wound up as private secretary to the governor, Hugh Foot. (“It was great fun. There was an MI6 officer living in the garden, lovely chap, recruited me.”) Inducted into “the Firm,” he was posted first to the UN in Geneva under deep cover, and then to Athens. (“Place immediately broke out in revolution. Ha, ha.”) Finally, in 1970, at the age of forty-two, he was appointed senior MI6 officer in Copenhagen. (“I was supposed to go to Iraq. Not sure what happened.”)

Tall, handsome, and immaculately tailored, always ready for a joke and another drink, Bromhead swiftly became a familiar figure on the Copenhagen diplomatic-party circuit. He referred to his clandestine work as “mucking about.”

Richard Bromhead was one of those Englishmen who put a great deal of effort into appearing to be a lot stupider than they really are. He was a formidable intelligence officer.

From the day he arrived in Copenhagen, Bromhead set about making the lives of his Soviet adversaries a misery. In this project he joined forces with the deputy head of PET, a jocular lawyer named Jørn Bruun, who “delighted in actively harassing Bloc—and especially Russian—diplomats and other staff, in ways which cost practically nothing and were virtually undetectable.” To assist in what Bromhead called his “teasing operations,” Bruun allocated him two of his best officers, Jens Eriksen and Winter Clausen. “Jens was small with a long fair mustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.”

One of their chosen targets was a known KGB officer named Bratsov. Whenever this man was followed into a particular Copenhagen department store, Clausen would commandeer the loudspeaker system and announce: “Would Mr. Bratsov of KGB Ltd. please come to the information desk.” After the third such summons, the KGB sent Bratsov back to Moscow. Another victim was a keen young officer in the KGB station who tried to recruit a Danish MP, who promptly informed PET. “This MP lived in a town that was two hours’ drive from Copenhagen. We would get him to call up the Russian and say: ‘Come here immediately, I’ve got something frightfully important to tell you.’ The Russian would then drive to the home of the MP, who filled him full of vodka and fed him lots of nonsense. He would then drive back, pretty squiffy, file a long report for the KGB, and finally get to bed at six in the morning. Then the MP would call him up at nine and say: ‘Come here immediately, I’ve got something frightfully important to tell you.’ Eventually the Russian had a nervous breakdown and packed it in. Ha, ha. The Danes were super.”

Gordievsky’s visa was approved. Bromhead was instructed by MI6 to get close to the new arrival and, when the moment seemed right, sound him out. PET would be kept informed of developments but agreed that the case should be run in Denmark by MI6.

Oleg and Yelena Gordievsky arrived back in Copenhagen on October 11, 1972. It felt like a homecoming. The enormous Danish undercover cop nicknamed Obelix discreetly followed them out of the arrivals hall.

In his new role as a political-intelligence officer, Gordievsky would no longer be running illegals, but actively gathering secret intelligence and trying to subvert Western institutions. In practice this meant seeking out, cultivating, recruiting, and then controlling spies, contacts, and informants. These might be Danish government officials, elected politicians, trades unionists, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, or anyone else with privileged access to information of interest to the Soviet Union. They might even, ideally, work in Danish intelligence. As in other Western countries, a few Danes were committed Communists, prepared to take orders from Moscow; others might be willing to trade intelligence for money (the grease that oils the wheels of so much espionage), or susceptible to other forms of persuasion, coercion, or inducement. In addition, PR Line officers were expected to undertake “active measures” to influence public opinion, sow disinformation where necessary, cultivate opinion formers sympathetic to Moscow, and place articles in the press that painted the Soviet Union in a positive (and often false) light. The KGB had long excelled in the dark art of manufacturing “fake news.” Under KGB taxonomy, foreign contacts were classified in order of importance: at the top was an “agent,” someone who consciously worked for the KGB, usually for ideological or financial reasons; below that was a “confidential contact,” a person sympathetic to the Soviet cause, willing to help clandestinely, but possibly unaware that the friendly man from the Soviet embassy worked for the KGB. A grade below that were numerous more open contacts, people whom Gordievsky, in his cover role as second secretary, would be expected to meet anyway in the course of his work. There was a wide gulf between a confidential contact, who might merely be approachable and sympathetic, and a spy prepared to betray his country. But one could evolve into the other.

Gordievsky slipped easily back into Danish life and culture. Mikhail Lyubimov had returned to Moscow to a senior role in the British-Scandinavian section, and Gordievsky stepped into his shoes. This new form of intelligence work was exciting but frustrating; Danes are almost too nice to be spies, too honest to be subversive, and too polite to say so. Every attempt to recruit a Dane bumped into an impenetrable wall of courtesy. Even the most ardent Danish Communists balked at treachery.

But there were exceptions. One was Gert Petersen, leader of Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party and later a member of the European Parliament. Petersen, code-named ZEUS and categorized as a “confidential contact” by the KGB, passed on classified military information gleaned from Denmark’s Foreign Policy Committee. He was well informed, and very thirsty. Gordievsky was startled, and rather impressed, by the quantity of beer and schnapps he was able to consume at KGB expense.

The new rezident in Copenhagen, Alfred Mogilevchik, appointed Gordievsky as his deputy. “You’ve got the brains, the energy, and the ability to deal with people,” Mogilevchik told him. “Also, you know Denmark and speak the language. What else do I need?” Gordievsky was promoted to major.

Professionally, Gordievsky was gliding smoothly upward through the KGB ranks; internally, he was in turmoil. Two years in Moscow had exacerbated his alienation from the Communist regime, and returning to Denmark had deepened his dismay at Soviet philistinism, corruption, and hypocrisy. He began to read more widely, collecting books that he would never have been permitted to own in Russia: the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Maximov, and George Orwell, and Western histories that exposed the full horror of Stalinism. News filtered through of Kaplan’s defection to Canada. His friend had been tried in absentia by a Czechoslovakian military court for revealing state secrets and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Gordievsky was shocked, but also left wondering whether the West had registered his cry of protest after the Prague Spring. If so, why was there no response? And if Western intelligence did ever try to sound him out, would he accept or reject the advance? Gordievsky later claimed that he was primed and waiting for a tap on the shoulder from the opposition, but the reality was more complicated than memory, as it almost always is.

Back on the diplomatic-party circuit, Gordievsky frequently spotted the same tall, affable Englishman.

Richard Bromhead had two photographs of Gordievsky, both supplied by the Danes, one taken covertly during his previous posting and the latest from his visa application.

“It was a stern face that I had studied, but not unpleasant. He looked hard-bitten and tough and I could not imagine how, even in the circumstances the London report had described, anyone could have thought him to be homosexual. Nor did he look like a man it would be easy for a Western intelligence officer to approach, in any sense.” In common with others of his time and class, Bromhead believed that all homosexuals behaved in certain ways that made them easy to identify.

Their first direct encounter took place at the Copenhagen town hall, a redbrick edifice called the Rådhus, at the opening of an art exhibition. Bromhead knew that a Soviet delegation would attend. As a regular at the “diplomatic lunch club,” where real diplomats and spies intermingled, he had made the acquaintance of several Soviet officials. “I was on quite good terms with a horrible little man who came from Irkutsk, poor chap.” Bromhead spotted the diminutive Irkutskian among a group of Soviet diplomats that included Gordievsky, and sauntered over. “Without seeming to put any special emphasis on it, I was able, while greeting them, to include Oleg in the general greeting. I didn’t ask his name, and he didn’t volunteer it.”

The two men fell into a halting conversation about art. “When Oleg spoke, the sternness disappeared,” wrote Bromhead. “He had a ready smile, with a genuinely humorous aspect to it, often lacking in other KGB officers. The new arrival seemed natural and genuinely amused by life. I liked him.”

Bromhead reported back to London that the target had been contacted. The main problem was communication. 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.

The Soviet, British, and American embassies backed onto one another, in an odd diplomatic triangle, separated by a graveyard. Despite the frigidity of the Cold War, there was considerable social interaction between Soviet and Western diplomats, and over the following weeks Bromhead contrived to be invited to several parties attended by Gordievsky. “We nodded to each other over the heads of fellow guests at a few diplomatic receptions.”

Recruiting a rival intelligence officer required a complicated pas de deux. Too obvious an approach would scare Gordievsky away, but too subtle a signal would be missed. MI6 wondered if Bromhead had the delicacy needed for this kind of dance. “He was very gregarious, but a bit of a bull in a china shop, and well known in the Soviet embassy, where he’d been identified as MI6.” Characteristically, Bromhead simply decided to throw a party and invited Gordievsky, along with some other Soviet officials. “PET produced a lady badminton player. The thinking was that this lady and Gordievsky would have a common interest.” Lene Køppen was a student dentist who would go on to win the world title in ladies singles badminton. She was extremely pretty, and entirely unaware she was being used as bait. The approach was “not necessarily sexual,” according to one MI6 case officer. But if Gordievsky turned out to be heterosexual, and badminton led to bed, then so much the better. It didn’t. Gordievsky had two drinks, chatted briefly and inconsequentially with Køppen, and left. As Bromhead had predicted, the Russian was proving friendly but unapproachable, socially, sportingly, and sexually.

Back in London, Geoffrey Guscott was now on the Soviet desk. He discussed the SUNBEAM case with Mike Stokes, a senior officer who had been the case officer to Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s most successful Soviet spy to date. Penkovsky was a colonel in the GRU, the KGB’s military counterpart. For two years, starting in 1960, he was run jointly by MI6 and the CIA, supplying scientific and military intelligence to his handlers in Moscow, including the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba—information that enabled President John F. Kennedy to gain the upper hand during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, Penkovsky was caught, arrested, interrogated by the KGB, and, in May 1963, executed. Stokes was a “huge, inspiring physical presence” who knew a great deal about recruiting and running Soviet spies. Together, Stokes and Guscott hatched an ambitious plan: a “litmus test” of Gordievsky’s sympathies.

On the evening of November 2, 1973, Oleg and Yelena had just finished dinner (a joyless, almost silent occasion) when there was a loud knock on the door of the apartment. Gordievsky found Standa Kaplan, his Czechoslovakian friend from university, smiling on the doorstep.

Gordievsky was stunned, and then suddenly very scared.

“Bozhe moi! My God. Standa! What the hell are you doing here?”

The men shook hands, and Gordievsky ushered Kaplan inside, knowing that, in doing so, the game was changing irrevocably. Kaplan was a defector. If one of Gordievsky’s KGB neighbors saw him enter the flat, that alone would be grounds for suspicion. Then there was Yelena. Even if their marriage had been sound, as a loyal KGB officer she might feel obliged to report her husband’s encounter with a known traitor.

Gordievsky poured his old friend a whisky and introduced him to Yelena. Kaplan explained that he was now working for a Canadian insurance company. He had come to Copenhagen to see a Danish girlfriend, found Oleg’s name in the diplomatic list, and decided on a whim to look him up. Kaplan seemed unchanged, the same open face and jaunty manner. But a slight tremor in the hand on the whisky glass betrayed him. Gordievsky knew he was lying. Kaplan had been sent by a Western intelligence service. This was a trial, and a very dangerous one. Was this the long-awaited response to the telephone call placed five years earlier after the crushing of the Prague Spring? If so, who was Kaplan working for? The CIA? MI6? PET?

The conversation was fractured and twitchy. Kaplan described how he had defected from Czechoslovakia, reaching Canada via France. Gordievsky mumbled something noncommittal. Yelena looked anxious. After just a few minutes, Kaplan drained his glass and got to his feet. “Look, I’m disturbing you. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow and we can have a proper talk.” Kaplan suggested a small restaurant in the city center.

Closing the door, Gordievsky turned to Yelena and remarked how strange it was that Kaplan should appear unannounced. She said nothing. “What a funny coincidence that he should turn up in Copenhagen,” he said. Her expression was unreadable, but tinged with apprehension.

Gordievsky arrived deliberately late for lunch, having satisfied himself that he was not being followed. He had barely slept. Kaplan was waiting at a table in the window. He seemed more relaxed. They chatted about old times. Seated at a café table across the road, a well-built tourist was reading a guidebook. Mike Stokes was keeping watch.

Kaplan’s visit had been minutely planned and rehearsed. “We needed a plausible reason for Kaplan contacting him,” said Guscott. “On the other hand, we wanted him to realize he was being tapped up.”

Kaplan’s instructions were to talk about his defection, the newfound joys of living in the West, and the Prague Spring. And then gauge Gordievsky’s reactions.

Gordievsky knew he was being assessed. He felt his shoulders tense, as Kaplan recalled the dramatic events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Gordievsky merely observed that the Soviet invasion had come as a shock. “I needed to be extremely careful. I was walking on the edge of an abyss.” When Kaplan described the details of his defection and his pleasant new life in Canada, Gordievsky nodded in a way that seemed encouraging, without being obvious. “I thought it essential that although I should put out positive signals, I should not lose control of the situation.” He had no idea who had sent Kaplan to test him, and he was not about to ask.

In every courtship, it is important not to appear overeager. But Gordievsky’s caution was more than mere flirtation technique. Though he had wondered whether Western intelligence would contact him following his outburst over events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he was still not entirely sure he wanted to be seduced, or who was wooing him.

At the end of lunch, the two old friends shook hands, and Standa Kaplan disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. Nothing definitive had been said. No declarations or promises had been made. But an invisible line had been crossed. Gordievsky reflected: “I knew that I had given away enough for him to put in a positive report.”

Stokes debriefed Standa Kaplan in a Copenhagen hotel room and then flew back to London to report the results to Geoffrey Guscott: Gordievsky had been surprised by Kaplan’s sudden appearance, but not horrified or angry; he had seemed interested and sympathetic, and expressed his astonishment at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. And, most important, Gordievsky had given no hint that he would file a report to the KGB on his unexpected meeting with a convicted anti-Communist traitor. “This was fascinating. This was what we wanted to hear. Gordievsky was plainly being very cautious, but if he had not reported it, he would be taking a first, big step. We needed to make it clear, without being too obvious, that we were in the market. We needed to engineer a chance meeting.”

* * *

Richard Bromhead was “absolutely bloody freezing.” It was seven in the morning, snow had fallen overnight, and the temperature was minus six. A steel-gray dawn was struggling up over Copenhagen. SUNBEAM seemed most inaptly named. For three successive mornings, at this “ungodly hour,” the MI6 man had sat in his wife’s tiny, unheated car, on a deserted, tree-lined street in the northern suburbs, peering through the fogged windshield at a large concrete building, and wondering if he was getting frostbite.

Danish surveillance had established that Oleg Gordievsky played badminton every morning with a young woman named Anna, a student member of the Danish Young Communists, at a suburban sports club. Bromhead staked out the place, choosing to drive his wife’s inconspicuous blue Austin rather than his own Ford with diplomatic plates. He parked in a spot with a direct line of sight to the door of the club, but kept the engine switched off since the steam from the exhaust might attract attention. On the first two mornings, “Oleg and the girl eventually appeared about 7:30, shook hands, and went to their respective cars. She was young, with short dark hair, athletic and slim but not particularly pretty. They didn’t look as though they were lovers, but I couldn’t be sure. They might simply be prudent in public.”

On this, the third morning of subzero surveillance, Bromhead decided he could stand the waiting no longer: “My toes were completely frozen.” Judging the approximate moment when the game should be over, he entered the club through the unlocked front door. There was no one in reception. Oleg and his partner were almost certainly the building’s only occupants. If he found them in flagrante on the floor of the badminton court, Bromhead reflected, this could be tricky.

Gordievsky was between serves when the British spy came into view. He immediately recognized Bromhead. In his tweed suit and heavy overcoat he looked incongruous in the empty sports complex, and unmistakably British. Oleg raised his racquet in greeting, and then turned to finish the game.

The Russian did not seem surprised to see him. “Perhaps he was expecting me?” thought Bromhead. “Such an experienced and observant officer could well have noticed my car on one of the previous days. Once again, his friendly smile. Then deadly serious application to the game.”

In fact, as he played on, and Bromhead observed from a spectator’s bench, Gordievsky’s mind was whirling. Everything was slotting into place: Kaplan’s visit, the party at Bromhead’s house, and the fact that the genial British official seemed to have been at every social event he had attended in the last three months. The KGB had identified Bromhead as a probable intelligence officer, with a reputation for “extrovert behavior,” and “turning up at embassy parties whether he had been invited or not.” The Englishman’s appearance in the deserted badminton court at this hour in the morning could mean only one thing: MI6 was trying to recruit him.

The game came to an end, Anna headed to the showers, and Gordievsky sauntered over, a towel around his neck, hand outstretched. The two intelligence officers assessed each other. “Oleg displayed no sign of nervousness,” Bromhead wrote. Gordievsky noted that the Englishman, who usually radiated “ebullient self-confidence,” seemed for once deadly serious. They spoke a combination of Russian, German, and Danish, into which Bromhead inserted some incongruous French.

“Would you be able to talk to me, tête-à-tête? I would love to have a private conversation, someplace where we would not be overheard.”

“I would like that,” said Gordievsky.

“It would be very interesting for me to have that sort of conversation with a member of your service. I think you are one of the few who would speak honestly to me.”

Another line crossed: Bromhead had revealed he knew Gordievsky was a KGB officer.

“Could we have lunch?” Bromhead continued.

“Yes, of course.”

“It might be more difficult for you to meet up than for me, so why don’t you name a restaurant that would suit you?”

Bromhead had expected Gordievsky to choose some obscure, discreet rendezvous spot. Instead he suggested they meet, in three days’ time, at the restaurant in the Østerport Hotel, directly across the main road from the Soviet embassy.

As he drove away in his wife’s battered car, Bromhead was elated, but also uneasy. Gordievsky had seemed strangely calm, apparently unperturbed by the approach. He had chosen a restaurant so near his own embassy that a hidden microphone would be able to relay their conversation to listeners across the road. They could be spotted by Soviet officials, who frequently dined at the hotel. For the first time, it struck Bromhead that he might be the target, not the initiator, of an attempted enlistment. “Oleg’s behavior and choice of restaurant made me strongly suspect I was being played at my own game. It was all just too easy. It didn’t feel right.”

Back at the embassy, Bromhead fired off a cable to MI6 headquarters: “For God’s sake, I think he’s trying to recruit me!”

But Gordievsky was merely establishing his cover. He, too, returned to his embassy and asked the rezident, Mogilevchik, “This fellow from the British embassy has invited me to lunch. What do I do? Should I accept?” The question was passed on to Moscow, and an emphatic reply immediately boomed back from Dmitri Yakushin, the Gray Cardinal: “YES! You should be aggressive and not shy away from an intelligence officer. Why not meet him? TAKE AN OFFENSIVE POSITION! Britain is a country of high interest to us.” This was Gordievsky’s insurance policy. Having obtained official permission to go ahead, he could now make “sanctioned contact” with MI6, without the KGB suspecting his loyalty.

One of the oldest gambits in intelligence is “the dangle,” when one side appears to make a play for someone on the other, lures him into complicity, and gains his trust, before exposing him.

Bromhead wondered if he was the target of a KGB dangle. If not, was Gordievsky genuinely trying to recruit him? Should he pretend to be interested, and see how far the Soviets were prepared to go? For Gordievsky, the stakes were even higher. The visit from Kaplan and Bromhead’s subsequent approach might all be part of an elaborate plot, in which he revealed his hand only to be exposed. Yakushin’s blessing provided some protection, but not much. If he fell victim to an MI6 dangle, his career in the KGB would be over. He would be recalled to Moscow. He would doubtless fall victim, retrospectively, to the KGB logic that anyone the other side attempted to recruit was, prima facie, suspect.

James Jesus Angleton, the famously paranoid postwar chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, described the spying game as a “wilderness of mirrors.” Already, the Gordievsky case was reflecting and refracting in strange ways. Bromhead was still pretending to arrange a casual meeting between fellow intelligence officers, albeit on different sides of the Cold War—while wondering if he was being recruited himself. Gordievsky was pretending to his KGB bosses that this was a stab in the dark by British intelligence, a chance encounter leading to lunch—while wondering if MI6 might be planning to stitch him up.

Three days later, Bromhead walked through the cemetery behind the embassies, crossed the busy Dag Hammarskjölds Allé, entered the Østerport Hotel, and took a seat in the restaurant with his back to the window, where he could “keep a close watch on the main entrance to the dining room.” PET had been informed the lunch was taking place, but Bromhead had insisted there should be no surveillance present, in case Gordievsky spotted it and backed out.

“I carefully examined all the other people in the restaurant, to see if I could recognize any other member of the Soviet embassy staff, whose pictures were all filed in our office. Everyone seemed to be an innocent Dane, or an equally innocent tourist. I sat back, wondering if Oleg would come.”

Gordievsky entered the dining room exactly on time.

Bromhead detected “no hint of special nervousness, though his style was intrinsically taut, poised for action. He saw me at once. Had he already been told which table I had reserved? I wondered, as my mind raced into conventional spy fever. Oleg smiled his usual friendly smile and walked over.”

Bromhead felt a “friendly atmosphere from the start” as they tucked into the Østerport’s excellent Scandinavian buffet. The conversation ranged across religion, philosophy, and music. Oleg made a mental note that his companion had done his homework, and “took trouble to talk about subjects of interest to me.” When Bromhead remarked how odd it was that the KGB deployed so many officers abroad, Gordievsky’s response was “noncommittal.” The Russian mostly spoke Danish; Bromhead replied in a messy mixture of Danish, German, and Russian, a linguistic smorgasbord that made Gordievsky laugh, though “there didn’t seem to be any malice” in his amusement. “He seemed to be totally relaxed, and was obviously aware that we were both intelligence officers.”

When coffee and schnapps had been served, Bromhead asked the crucial question. “Will you have to file a report about our meeting?”

The reply was revealing: “Probably, yes, but I’ll make it a very neutral one.”

Here, finally, was the hint of collusion—not a flash of leg exactly, but the glimpse of an ankle.

Even so, Bromhead left the lunch “more puzzled than ever.” Gordievsky had hinted that he was, in part, concealing the truth from the KGB. But he was also behaving exactly like a man who believed he was the hunter, not the prey. Bromhead sent a memo to MI6 headquarters: “I emphasized my fear that it had been much too easy, and the strong impression I had that he was being so nice to me because he wanted to recruit me.”

Gordievsky also reported back to his bosses; a long, insipid document, concluding that the meeting had “been of interest,” but framed to emphasize “the apparent importance of my own initiative.” The Gray Cardinal was delighted.

And then something quite extraordinary happened: nothing at all.

The Gordievsky case went dead. For eight months there was no contact whatever. Quite why this happened remains a mystery.

In Geoffrey Guscott’s words: “Looking back, you think: ‘How dreadful, the case just went into the long grass for months.’ We were waiting for the Danes to report, waiting for Bromhead to come back. But nothing happened. Bromhead took his eye off it—he was pursuing two or three others and it was such a long shot, you think it is never going to happen.” Perhaps Bromhead’s suspicions had applied the brakes harder than he intended. “If you push too hard, too quickly, it can go wrong,” said Guscott. “When it goes right, it is often because you don’t push.” In this case, MI6 failed to push at all: “It was a cock-up.”

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. In the eight frustrating months that followed lunch at the Østerport Hotel, Gordievsky’s enthusiasm grew.

On October 1, 1974, the tall Englishman reappeared at the badminton court in the dawn light and suggested they meet again. Bromhead’s reason for suddenly reestablishing contact was that he was being redeployed to Northern Ireland as an undercover officer, to conduct operations against the IRA. He would be leaving in a few months. “There was not much time left. I had decided, therefore, to waste no more of it,” Bromhead later wrote, with a briskness that suggests he was fully aware he had been wasting time. They agreed to meet at the SAS hotel, run by Scandinavian Airlines, a brand-new building never frequented by Soviet officers.

Bromhead was waiting at a corner table in the bar area when Oleg arrived. Asterix and Obelix, the two PET agents, had arrived some time earlier, and were sitting at the opposite end of the bar, trying to look inconspicuous behind a potted palm tree.

“With his usual clockwork punctuality, Oleg walked through the door on the stroke of one o’clock. The light was dim in the corner I had chosen, and for a moment Oleg looked around. To prevent him taking too much notice of the surveillants, I rose quickly to my feet. He came straight over, with his familiar smile.”

The atmosphere was immediately different. “I felt it was time I took the initiative,” Gordievsky later recalled. “I was alive with anticipation. He had sensed this, and felt the same.” Bromhead moved first. MI6 had authorized him to indicate that this was more than a flirtation: “After our drinks had been brought, I went straight to the point.

“ ‘You’re KGB. We know you have worked in Line N of the First Chief Directorate, the most secret of all your departments, which is running illegals all over the world.’ ”

Gordievsky did not hide his surprise.

“Would you be prepared to talk to us about what you know?”

Gordievsky gave no reply.

Bromhead pressed on. “Tell me, who is the PR Line deputy in your section, the person in charge of political-intelligence gathering and agent running?”

There was a pause, and then the Russian broke into a broad grin.

“I am.”

Now it was Bromhead’s turn to be impressed.

“I had toyed with the idea of talking about world peace and so on, but my intuition about Oleg told me not to try any such blarney. But everything was still too easy. My suspicious mind was unable to accept this man at face value. My instinct was telling me that he was a remarkably nice person and I could trust him. My training and experience of KGB officers, on the other hand, was screaming caution.”

Another marker had been put down, and both knew it. “All at once we were almost colleagues,” wrote Gordievsky. “At last we began to speak in plain language.”

Bromhead now administered the “acid test.”

“Would you be prepared to meet me, in private, in a safe place?”

The Russian nodded.

Then he said something that flicked an invisible light from amber to green. “No one is aware that I am meeting you.”

After their first encounter, Oleg had informed his superiors and written up a report. This meeting was unsanctioned. If the KGB discovered he had contacted Bromhead and kept it secret, he was doomed. By informing MI6 that he had told no one, he was making his switch of allegiance perfectly clear, and putting his life in their hands. He had crossed over.

“This was a big step,” Guscott later recalled. “It was the equivalent, in adultery, of saying: ‘My wife doesn’t know I’m here.’ ” Gordievsky felt a flood of relief, and a fluttering surge of adrenaline. They agreed to meet again, in three weeks, in a bar on the edge of the city. Gordievsky departed first. Bromhead a few minutes later. Finally, the two Danish undercover intelligence officers emerged from behind a potted plant.

The courtship was over: Major Gordievsky of the KGB was now working with MI6. SUNBEAM was up and running.

In that one cathartic moment, in the corner of a Copenhagen hotel, all the strands of a long-brewing rebellion had come together: his anger at his father’s unacknowledged crimes, his absorption of his mother’s quiet resistance and his grandmother’s hidden religious beliefs; his detestation of the system he had grown up in and his love of the Western freedoms he had discovered; his simmering outrage over the Soviet repressions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Wall; his sense of his own dramatic destiny, cultural superiority, and optimistic faith in a better Russia. From now on Oleg Gordievsky would live two distinct and parallel lives, both secret, and at war with each other. And the moment of commitment came with the special force that was central to his character: an adamantine, unshakable conviction that what he was doing was unequivocally right, a whole-souled moral duty that would change his life irrevocably, a righteous betrayal.

When Bromhead’s report landed in London, the senior officers of MI6 were gathered for a conference at the service’s secret training base in Fort Monckton, a Napoleonic-era fortress near Portsmouth on England’s south coast. At 10 p.m., a small group gathered to consider Bromhead’s report and decide on a course of action. “The question of whether this was a provocation was raised time and again,” said Geoffrey Guscott. Would a senior KGB officer really be willing to risk his life by meeting secretly with a known MI6 operative? On the other hand, would the KGB dare to dangle one of its own officers? After a tense debate, it was agreed to press ahead. SUNBEAM might seem too good to be true, but it was also too good to pass up.

Three weeks later, Bromhead and Gordievsky met in the dark, almost empty bar: both had carefully dry-cleaned themselves en route; both were “black.” Their conversation was businesslike, but halting. The lack of a common language was a serious impediment. The English and Russian spies had established an understanding; they just couldn’t fully understand what was being said. Bromhead explained that since he would soon be leaving Copenhagen, responsibility for handling future meetings would be transferred to a colleague, a senior intelligence officer who spoke fluent German and could therefore converse with Gordievsky more easily. Bromhead would select a convenient safe house in which to meet, make the introductions, and then bow out of the case.

The secretary of the Copenhagen MI6 station lived in a flat in the residential suburb of Charlottenlund. The place was easy to reach by subway, and the secretary would make herself scarce at the appropriate time. Bromhead suggested he meet Gordievsky in the doorway of a butcher’s shop near the flat, at 7 p.m., in three weeks’ time. “The doorway provided a convenient shadow from the bright streetlights. Also, it was difficult to post any watcher near that doorway, without their being clearly visible in the surroundings. By that time of day the place would be deserted, and all the Danes would be cozy and tucked up with their TVs.”

Gordievsky arrived at seven on the dot. Bromhead appeared moments later. After a silent grasping of hands, the Englishman said: “Come, I’ll show you the way.” The safe flat, or “OCP” in spy jargon, standing for Operational Clandestine Premises, was barely two hundred yards away, but Bromhead took a circuitous route, in case anyone was following. “The night was cold, with drifting snowflakes,” recalled Bromhead. Both men were bundled up inside overcoats. Gordievsky was silent, plunged in thought: “I was not afraid of being kidnapped, but I knew that things were now serious: this was the real start of operations. For the first time I was entering enemy territory.”

Bromhead unlocked the door of the flat, ushered Gordievsky in, and poured them both stiff whiskies and soda.

“How long have you got?” asked Bromhead.

“About half an hour.”

“I’m quite surprised you turned up. Are you not running a grave risk seeing me like this?”

Gordievsky paused, and “in a very measured way” replied: “It might be dangerous, but at this moment I do not think it will prove to be so.”

Bromhead carefully explained, in his odd jumble of languages, that he would be flying back to London the next morning and then on to Belfast. But he would return in three weeks, meet Gordievsky in the butcher’s doorway, bring him here to the flat, and introduce his new case officer. A small group of PET officers knew what was happening, but the case would be run exclusively by MI6. For Gordievsky’s safety, Bromhead assured him, only a tiny handful of people inside British intelligence would ever know he existed, and most of these would never learn his real name. In intelligence language, someone made party to a secret operation is “indoctrinated”; the case would involve the smallest number of indoctrinees possible, and would be run under the tightest security since there might be Soviet spies within PET or MI6, ready to report back to Moscow. Even the CIA, the intelligence service of Britain’s closest ally, would be kept “out of the loop.” “With these factors in our favor, we could put our relationship on sound foundations, and begin serious cooperation.”

As he bid Gordievsky farewell, Bromhead reflected how little he really knew about the smiling, apparently nerveless Russian KGB officer who seemed ready to risk his life by colluding with MI6. The question of money had never arisen. Nor had Oleg’s own safety, or that of his family, or whether he wished to defect. They had talked generally about culture and music, but not about politics, ideology, or life under Soviet rule. Gordievsky’s motivation had not been discussed. “I never asked him why he was doing it. There just wasn’t time.”

Those questions were still niggling Bromhead when he arrived the next morning in MI6’s London headquarters. The controller of the Sovbloc division was reassuring. “He was very experienced in KGB matters and suitably cautious, but said this was a unique situation which had to be exploited to the full. It was the first time any KGB officer had responded positively to a British approach ‘from cold.’ ” The Soviets were far too paranoid, he said, to dangle someone with access to real secrets. “They had never offered up a serving KGB staff officer…They just didn’t trust their own not to go off in a relationship with a [Western] case officer.”

The MI6 bosses were optimistic. SUNBEAM could prove to be a breakthrough case. Gordievsky seemed genuine. Bromhead was not so sure. The Russian spy had yet to produce a single shred of useful intelligence, let alone an explanation for what he was doing.

Transferring an agent from one case officer to another is a complex and sometimes fraught process, particularly when the spy is newly recruited. In January 1975, three weeks after leaving Copenhagen, Bromhead was “infiltrated as quietly and anonymously as possible back into Denmark”: he flew to Gothenburg in Sweden, where he was met by the PET officer Winter Clausen. Squeezed into the passenger seat of a Volkswagen alongside Obelix’s “vast and grinning bulk,” he crossed the border into Denmark and checked into a “suitably impersonal and suburban” hotel in Copenhagen’s Lyngby shopping district.

Philip Hawkins, the new handler, flew in from London on a false passport. “You will like him,” Bromhead had told Gordievsky. He was not entirely sure this was true. “I certainly didn’t like him. I thought he was a prize shit.” This was neither accurate nor fair. Hawkins was a barrister by training: severe, precise, and not a bit like Bromhead.

After meeting Gordievsky at the butcher’s shop, Bromhead escorted him to the safe flat, where Hawkins was waiting. Gordievsky took in his new case officer. “He was tall and physically powerful, and I immediately felt ill at ease with him.” Hawkins spoke formal, rather stiff German, and seemed to be eyeing his new agent “in a hostile, almost threatening manner.”

Bromhead shook hands gravely with Gordievsky, thanked him for what he was doing, and wished him good luck. As he drove away, Bromhead felt a mixture of feelings: regret, for he liked and admired the Russian spy, anxiety at the lingering possibility of a KGB plot, and deep relief that, for him, the case was over.

“I was profoundly glad my role had ended,” Bromhead wrote. “I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that I might have constructed a bottomless ‘heffalump trap’ into which my service was clearly determined to plunge headlong.”