The Defence of the Realm (134 page)

Probably no British prime minister has ever followed the case of a
British agent with as much personal attention as Mrs Thatcher devoted to Gordievsky. In October 1984 she expressed concern at the strain he must be under after ten years as a British agent, supposing that he might ‘jump at any time', and sought assurances that he and his family would be well looked after when he decided to defect. The Prime Minister emphasized her concern for Gordievsky as an individual – not just as an ‘intelligence egg layer'.
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Gordievsky expressed his warm appreciation when the Prime Minister's concern was reported to him by his case officer.
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The insights into Soviet policy provided by Gordievsky's intelligence were of particular importance to Mrs Thatcher in December 1984 during the visit to Britain of Mikhail Gorbachev, heir apparent to the ailing Konstantin Chernenko, at the head of a delegation from the Supreme Soviet – a visit which proved to be a turning point in Soviet–British relations. To assist Gordievsky in writing briefs during the visit which would impress both Gorbachev and the Centre, his case officer showed him the brief prepared by the FCO for Sir Geoffrey Howe. Gordievsky later recalled:

We knew that Gorbachev was reading what we wrote with close attention, because one morning, after we had included a flattering paragraph about his wife, Raisa, which recorded how [British] people had admired her, he made his first and only correction, crossing out five lines, to leave only two lines of modest, matter-of-fact tribute, and adding a note: ‘It is very dangerous to make other members' wives jealous.'
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Gorbachev's visit began a slow thaw in the glacial Soviet–British relations of the early Thatcher era. ‘His personality', Margaret Thatcher later recalled, ‘could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet
apparatchik
.'
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‘I like Mr Gorbachev,' she told the press. ‘I think we can do business together!' The Prime Minister must also have been reassured by the knowledge that the best-informed political briefing provided to Gorbachev during his visit came from a dedicated, long-serving British agent in the KGB.

Gordievsky's briefs doubtless impressed the Centre as well as Gorbachev, almost certainly influencing the decision of the FCD Third Department in January 1985 to recommend his appointment as London resident in succession to Guk.
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Plans considered by Director K to declare Nikitenko, the acting resident,
persona non grata
in order to clear the way for Gordievsky's promotion were abandoned as unnecessary and possibly counter-productive.
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On 28 April, despite unsuccessful lobbying by Nikitenko to press his own claims to succeed Guk, Gordievsky formally became resident-designate.
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The reasons for the Centre's almost simultaneous
realization that Gordievsky was a British agent still remain obscure. Though Aldrich Ames, a Soviet agent in the CIA, betrayed Gordievsky to his controller in Washington, Gordievsky believes that the original KGB lead may have come from another, as yet unidentified, source outside the British intelligence community. On 16 May 1985 he was called back to Moscow, ostensibly for high-level briefings and formal confirmation as resident but in reality for an interrogation intended to secure a confession that he was a long-serving British agent. His last KGB operation on 18 May, the eve of his departure from London, was to leave £8,000 for an illegal codenamed DARIO hidden in a large brick which he deposited on a grassy verge near Coram's Fields children's playground in Bloomsbury.
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DARIO was photographed picking up the brick by a female K Branch officer using a camera concealed in a baby's pram. A week later, immediately after Gordievsky's interrogation in Moscow, the Centre – for the first time in KGB history – recalled all its (apparently underperforming) illegals from Britain, realizing that they had been compromised.
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Despite being drugged by KGB interrogators after his return to Moscow to weaken his defences, Gordievsky did not confess and was allowed to go on leave, doubtless in the hope that he would be caught red-handed contacting British intelligence. Remarkably, Gordievsky succeeded in evading KGB surveillance and, with SIS assistance, escaped across the Finnish frontier.
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On 22 July Gordievsky arrived at Heathrow to be greeted with champagne by a reception committee which included John Deverell, whom he remembers as ‘a man of exceptional intelligence and charm, who became a staunch friend and ally'.
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He spent the next five days at a Security Service safe house in the Midlands where he was visited by ‘C' and questioned about his two months in Russia by Deverell and his SIS case officer. On 27 July Gordievsky moved to an intelligence training centre, where he began a marathon two-month debriefing session. A later Security Service assessment concluded: ‘[Gordievsky]'s commitment to his work with SIS and the Security Service never wavered. He was patient and thorough in dealing with detailed questions at a time of extraordinary tension and anxiety. His judgement and analysis seemed unaffected.'
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Gordievsky's escape, probably the most remarkable of the Cold War, was so extraordinary that the DG, Sir Tony Duff, felt it prudent to send the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, a memorandum to counter suggestions from a small number of Whitehall sceptics that Gordievsky might have been turned into a double agent during his time in Moscow, then deliberately sent back to Britain.
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It was later discovered that for several weeks after Gordievsky's escape
the KGB had no idea what had happened to him and thought he might have committed suicide. Moscow was officially informed of Gordievsky's defection on 15 August without any public announcement in the hope that negotiations could begin to enable his wife and two small daughters to join him in Britain. Following its usual practice with defectors, however, the KGB was determined not to allow Gordievsky's family to leave Russia.
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Preparations thus began for Operation EMBASE, the public announcement of the defection and the expulsion of KGB and GRU officers in London identified by Gordievsky.
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Margaret Thatcher did not want the press statement to ‘mince words'.
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On 12 September, the day the news of Gordievsky's defection (though not as yet of his escape from Russia) was made public, twenty-five Soviet intelligence officers were expelled.
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When the Russians retaliated with twenty-five British expulsions (not all intelligence personnel) from Moscow, Sir Robert Armstrong proposed four further expulsions from London. Mrs Thatcher did not consider this ‘an adequate response' and raised the number to six, once again matched by Moscow.
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The first apparent sighting of a Soviet illegal in Britain after the recall of KGB illegals to Moscow in May 1985 came on 19 April 1986 when a member of the Soviet Trade Delegation suspected (probably wrongly, it was later concluded) of being a GRU officer was followed to Hampstead Heath and seen to behave ‘in a generally furtive manner' before entering the Old Bull and Bush public house. Half an hour later another man appeared and searched an area of ground before he too went into the Old Bull and Bush. The second man was followed to his home address in Friern Barnet, north London, and identified as a forty-year-old Dutch citizen named Erwin Van Haarlem. Initially, Van Haarlem was suspected of being an agent of the GRU ‘legal' residency. As investigations continued, however, it was concluded that he was an unidentified illegal who had taken the identity of the real Erwin Van Haarlem, the illegitimate wartime son of a Dutch mother and a German soldier who had been killed fighting in France. In October 1985, after ten years working for the Hilton hotel group, he had become a self-employed art dealer. This, however, was simply a cover profession which generated very little income; Van Haarlem paid tax on sales he had not made simply to keep up his cover.
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Van Haarlem's main intelligence work as an illegal was to penetrate British supporters of the Jewish ‘refuseniks' in the Soviet Union who were prevented from emigrating to Israel. During a visit to Russia with a refusenik-support group, he impressed his colleagues by the bravado with
which he denounced the KGB and the iniquities of the Soviet system. The KGB's known obsession with monitoring Western support for Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union strengthened the belief that he was an illegal agent (probably Czech rather than Dutch) working for the Russians.
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K Branch later concluded, however, that, though the StB passed all Van Haarlem's intelligence reports to the Soviet ‘friends', he himself had ‘no direct contact with the KGB'.
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A Special Branch raid on Van Haarlem's flat on the morning of Saturday 2 April 1988 caught him, still in his pyjamas, sitting on a stool in the kitchen in the act of taking down a coded message from Prague through an earphone. As the police entered, he leaped to his feet in surprise, knocking over the stool and dropping the earphone, from which the morse transmission from Prague was clearly audible to the officers in the room. Clearly in a state of shock, Van Haarlem made no attempt to keep up the pretence of Dutch nationality, admitted he was Czech, asked for the Czechoslovak embassy to be informed, and produced a bar of soap from a bedroom drawer containing one-time pads for his cipher communications.
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The Van Haarlem case led to the last major espionage trial of the Thatcher era and the first of an illegal since Gordon Lonsdale in 1961. At his trial in February and March 1989, the main Security Service witness was ‘Miss J' (Stella Rimington), described by the judge as ‘a very senior and experienced person involved in intelligence', who explained the role of illegals.
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Court appearances were still very rare for Security Service officers and Rimington found it a disorienting experience. To protect her identity she was permitted what was termed a ‘light disguise' – a curlyhaired wig, make-up which aged her by about ten years, and clothes unlike any in her wardrobe. (When, a few months later, she met the trial judge at a dinner party, he failed to recognize her without the disguise.)
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Rimington told the jury it was unlikely that Van Haarlem had been posted to London simply to report on refusenik-support groups. He was a ‘sleeper' intended for a front-line intelligence role in time of war or East–West crisis when the legal residencies could no longer operate normally. The jury took only three-quarters of an hour to find Van Haarlem guilty of committing an act preparatory to espionage. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
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Van Haarlem had little idea how he had been tracked down. A Service officer who questioned him in prison reported that he ‘showed great ignorance about Security Service practice and displayed signs of paranoia'. Van Haarlem claimed to be well aware that his television had been ‘fiddled' with, that he had been frequently followed by a silver Mercedes, and that Service personnel ‘were in and out of his flat quite often'.
He was wrong on all counts.
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Van Haarlem's real name, the Service discovered, was Václav Jelínek.
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The coded radio message being received by Van Haarlem from the Czech StB as police entered his flat on 2 April 1988.

On 17 May 1988, almost three years after Gordievsky's exfiltration, Director K reported to the Management Board that the Security Service debrief of Gordievsky had finally been completed: ‘It had been the longest and most comprehensive debrief ever undertaken by the Service; over 1300 specific briefs from sections had been answered and 2500 reports issued within the Service.'
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Mrs Thatcher continued to attach great importance to Gordievsky's assessments of Soviet policy. Sir Geoffrey Howe later called him ‘a secret weapon in our drive for better East–West relations': ‘His invaluable (not least because it was so regular) commentary on thinking in the Kremlin . . . played an important part in shaping our own strategy.'
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In the short term the expulsion of thirty-one Soviet intelligence officers in September 1985, following Gordievsky's escape, though less dramatic than Operation FOOT fourteen years earlier, was thought to have temporarily ‘paralysed' the KGB residency in particular and caused the other Soviet Bloc residencies in London ‘to lie low for a while'.
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K Branch realized, however, that, even with Gordievsky's ‘invaluable help' in identifying intelligence personnel, it would only be a matter of time before the KGB and GRU residencies resumed something approaching the level of activity before the expulsions. It reported in June 1988: ‘The KGB has now clawed back to half its pre-expulsion strength. Both residencies are now once again viable intelligence-gathering units and growing more active. While continuing to contain them as far as possible we must also now move to operations to disrupt them.'