The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre Review
O leg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war. For 11 years, he spied for MI6. That he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time was remarkable. Even more phenomenal was that in summertime 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. Information technology was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries. It went some way towards exorcising the Cambridge spies, who a generation before had travelled in the reverse direction.
Gordievsky has told the story of his own improbable survival in a gripping 1995 memoir, Next Terminate Execution. It charts his recruitment by the KGB, where his older brother Vasili served equally a deep-cover "illegal", and Gordievsky's growing disillusionment with the grayness totalitarian globe of 1960s Moscow. At that place were stages in his journey. At an early on age he learned German. He began reading western newspapers. And so as a KGB trainee he spent six months in Eastward Berlin. He arrived just as the Berlin Wall went up, and woke one morning to the sound of tanks rumbling past the Soviet embassy.
But information technology was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that propelled Gordievsky towards the west and, as he put information technology, determined "the form of my own life". By this point Gordievsky was a inferior spy abroad, working for the KGB's commencement directorate, and living in Copenhagen. He resolved to fight the communist system from the inside. His offset tentative step was to call his then wife Yelena from an diplomatic mission telephone bugged past the Danes, and to declare: "They've done it! I only don't know what to do." He expected an approach from western intelligence. It didn't materialise.
Ben Macintyre'southward wonderful The Spy and the Traitor complements and enhances Gordievsky'southward offset-person account. It reveals the dramatic role played past MI6 in recruiting and cultivating a serving KGB insider – and keeping him alive confronting the odds. Gordievsky's British contacts were a colourful bunch. Some were upper-grade cold war adventurers. Others were gifted working-class linguists recruited from Oxbridge. Women played a crucial part. All realised Gordievsky was unique.
Macintrye had no admission to MI6's athenaeum, which remain surreptitious. But he has interviewed all of the former officers involved in the case, who tell their stories for the first time. He spoke extensively to Gordievsky, who is now 79 and living in the home counties – a remarkable figure, "proud, shrewd and irascible". The event is a dazzling non-fiction thriller and an intimate portrait of loftier-stakes espionage.
Gordievsky'due south double life started after a junior MI6 officer saw his name while leafing through a personnel file. It was 1970. A Czechoslovak spy, Standa Kaplan, had defected to Canada. Asked if he knew anybody who might be of interest to western intelligence, Kaplan threw out a few names, including that of Gordievsky, who was a friend from the KGB academy, enlightened of the drawbacks of communism, and not then unlike from him, he said.
In 1972 Gordievsky went back to Kingdom of denmark for a second tour. MI6 was waiting. One forenoon its local head of station approached him while he was playing badminton at a suburban sports club. Lunch followed. Gordievsky's manner during these early on encounters was oddly calm, leading the Brits to wonder if they were the victims of a classic KGB "dangle". Actually, Gordievsky had already decided to switch sides – a betrayal Macintyre calls "whole-souled" and "righteous".
Gordievsky would go on to meet his British handlers once a month; he didn't want money and said he was spying out of ideological conviction. Cassettes of these conversations were sent back to London in a diplomatic purse. Gordievsky, MI6 discovered, was a star nugget. He had a prodigious memory and thorough noesis of current and former KGB operations. At lunchtimes he would slip out of the diplomatic mission and mitt over microfilm strips to his case officer for copying. These were Moscow's secret instructions.
After three years, Gordievsky had to go back to Moscow. It was at this tricky point that MI6 came up with a program to smuggle him out of the USSR, should the demand arise. Its author was "Veronica Price" – a senior intelligence officer, working out of Century House, MI6'due south unattractive HQ. The plan was chosen PIMLICO. London decided not to make contact with Gordievsky once he was domicile – too risky – but to have a process in place if he raised the warning.
The program was simple, and almost comic. At seven.30pm on Tuesdays British officers would watch a bread shop next to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a diplomatic complex. In an emergency, Gordievsky would plough upwardly wearing a grayness cap and holding a plastic Safeway bag. The MI6 officer would walk by him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat. This betoken would trigger a program to smuggle Gordievsky into Finland in the kick of a diplomatic car. A refresher memo was concealed in an OUP edition of Shakespeare's sonnets.
After a long period of no contact MI6 was delighted when Moscow sent Gordievsky to London. In the meantime, he had learned English and closely studied the KGB's British files. The book'south near contentious section concerns Michael Foot whom, Macintyre writes, the KGB cultivated for 2 decades. According to Gordievsky the KGB made regular payments to Pes in the 1950s and 60s, up until the Prague Spring. The cash went to fund the magazine Tribune. Macintyre writes that Foot wasn't a Soviet spy. However, he does view him every bit "stunningly naive".
In the summertime of 1982 Gordievsky moved to London and began regular meetings at a Bayswater safety house with his MI6 handlers. For an extraordinary catamenia he was briefing British and Soviet spies – and Margaret Thatcher, who referred to him equally "Mr Collins". MI6 boosted Gordievsky's career by feeding him real, depression-form intelligence and by removing rival spies who threatened to expose him. There were shut shaves, including an approach to the Soviet embassy by Michael Bettaney, a renegade MI5 loner. Betrayal eventually came from a venal CIA officeholder, Aldrich Ames, who tipped off Moscow – Ames is the traitor of the book's title.
Macintyre touches merely briefly on the unprecedented "download" of data given by Gordievsky to the west. It included details of the KGB's attempts to influence western elections through "active measures". In 1985 the KGB circulated a tiptop secret "personality questionnaire". Information technology set out the characteristics it was looking for in a potential agent: narcissism, vanity, greed and marital infidelity. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet authorities invited a prominent American, Donald Trump, to visit Moscow.
Thirty years on, Gordievsky's successful escape still seems incredible. Summoned dorsum to Moscow, he survived a KGB interrogation, despite being drugged. He raised the alarm with his supermarket handbag and gave his minders the slip. 2 cars driven past MI6 officers and their wives got him across the border. It was a hair-raising journey featuring a KGB pursuit, a evil-smelling nappy and a handbag of crisps. Gordievsky was forced to get out his second wife Leila and their two children behind in the USSR. They were reunited six years afterwards but the marriage didn't survive.
In later life, Gordievsky has been cantankerous and reproving. His accusations over the years take proved controversial and his claims have been interpreted very differently past the right and left in Britain. Just there is no dubiety that he played a profound role in undermining the Soviet system, not least by explaining the paranoia and fantastical thinking inside the KGB to western policymakers and agencies. His two books on Soviet intelligence operations with historian Christopher Andrew are invaluable. Gordievsky remains under sentence of death. He knows all too well the KGB'south view of treachery, and that his enemies play a long game.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/19/the-spy-and-the-traitor-by-ben-macintyre-review
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