Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

Despite KGB suspicions about leaks from the Institute, Tolkachev refused to stop his activities, and his case officer noted, ‘This is indeed a man who is driven to produce, by whatever means he deems necessary, right up to the end, even if that end is his death.’ On more than one occasion, he had to ditch his spy equipment because the KGB seemed to be closing in, but then he would return to work as normal. In January 1985, he had his last meeting with his handlers, where he passed over what he said was information on a new Soviet fighter aircraft. The pictures were unreadable. The next meetings were abandoned because of surveillance, but on 13 June, the case officer went to the meeting, and was arrested by the KGB. Tolkachev had been in their hands since April; he was executed at some point between then and September 1986.

A memo in March 1979 to then-DCI Stansfield Turner described Tolkachev’s material as ‘of incalculable value’. At the time of his death, the Washington Post called him ‘one of [the] CIA’s most valuable human assets in the Soviet Union’. Perhaps the best indication of his effectiveness as a spy is that it took five years after his death for all of the information he passed back to Langley to be fully evaluated.

Tolkachev wasn’t the only spy within the KGB run by Western intelligence during this period. Code-named Farewell, Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, who claimed that he hated the Soviet leadership for its ‘vulgarity, corruption, brutality, unrelenting self-advancement and failure to help the Russian people’, was able to supply over four thousand documents to French intelligence during the summer of 1981. This led to one of the more ingenious counter-espionage operations of the eighties.

Vetrov was a technical officer at the KGB, charged with evaluating Western technology that was obtained by Section T. The information that he passed on included the names of Soviet agents in American and European laboratories, government agencies and factories, as well as details of many other agents in place. Most helpfully for the West, it listed the technological requirements that these agents were seeking to fulfil.

French President Mitterand passed details of Vetrov to President Reagan in July 1981 and CIA DCI Casey suggested preparing faulty equipment that the Soviet agents could obtain. A cooperative effort between the CIA and the FBI led to major problems for the Soviets with the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, resulting in a huge explosion, as well as many bugs within other projects, such as stealth aircraft, space defence and tactical aircraft. Even the Soviet Space Shuttle was based on a rejected NASA design. Finally, once the fake information had been passed back to Moscow, the CIA informed the relevant governments of the agents’ existence, and over two hundred were detained.

Vetrov himself was arrested in February 1982 after murdering a stranger in a Moscow park and attempting to kill his mistress, a KGB secretary. His espionage activities were discovered during the investigation, and he was executed.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only new leader in the Western world. May 1979 saw the arrival in 10 Downing Street of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. One of her earliest encounters with the spy industry came with the public revelation of Anthony Blunt’s treachery. Blunt had confessed his role to MI5 in 1964, but was granted immunity from prosecution and had naively believed that he would hear no further about it. He, perhaps unwisely, tried to prevent the publication of Andrew Boyle’s book The Climate of Treason , which detailed his activities under the pseudonym Maurice; Private Eye magazine revealed his legal action, and ten days later, Mrs Thatcher made a statement to the House of Commons, confirming Blunt’s treachery. Literally within minutes of the announcement, Blunt’s knighthood was stripped from him. He died in 1983, a year after Oleg Gordievsky had told the British that John Cairncross was the Fifth Man, although that information wouldn’t become public knowledge until Gordievsky’s history of the KGB was published in 1990.

Gordievsky’s importance in the early eighties cannot be underestimated. He had been passing information to MI6 since 1974, while continuing to rise in the KGB. He had come very close to discovery in 1978 when Kim Philby was asked to look over a file regarding the arrest of a KGB asset in Norway, elderly secretary Gunvor Haavik, whom Gordievsky had told MI6 about while stationed in Copenhagen. Philby’s reaction was that there must be a mole within the KGB, but luckily for Gordievsky the topic was not pursued.

In January 1982, a visa request was sent by the Soviets for Gordievsky to enter Britain as a ‘counsellor’ at the embassy — in fact, he was a senior KGB political officer at the residency. Once in Britain he was handled jointly by MI5 and MI6, and was able to pass over details of a new joint KGB-GRU operation set up by KGB chief Yuri Andropov in May 1981, code-named Ryan (derived from the Russian acronym for the phrase Nuclear Missile Attack). The Soviet Politburo fervently believed that the United States and NATO were preparing for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and Operation Ryan was set up to collect intelligence on these plans. According to Gordievsky, while many residencies and KGB officers did not believe that such plans existed, they weren’t willing to say as much to Moscow, so exaggerated the importance of events, which in its turn prompted requests for more information. Thatcher and Reagan’s rhetoric was making the Soviets even more paranoid than they already were. The importance attached to Operation Ryan reports by the Kremlin gave Gordievsky, and thus the West, an indication of how threatened the Soviets felt at any given time.

With access to a lot of the relevant documentation regarding the London residency’s operations, Gordievsky was able to provide information on current KGB agents in the UK. He noted that union leader Jack Jones, who had been regarded as an agent by the Soviets between 1964–1968, as well as MP Bob Edwards were both now regarded as of little significance. The KGB were interested in supporting peace movements, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and trying to gain influence over it, but MI5 operations over the next few years would demonstrate that, much as they might wish to try to run the CND, the Soviets were only really able to create a confidential contact with the 94-year-old peace activist and founder of the World Disarmament Campaign, Lord Brockway, who was in no position to give them any practical assistance.

Former GCHQ employee Geoffrey Prime’s treason came to light in 1982 when he was arrested for sexually abusing under-age girls and his wife handed police his spying equipment. This was followed the next year by the arrest of Michael Bettany, an MI5 officer who put a parcel of top-secret information through the door of the KGB Resident, Arkadi Guk, on Easter Sunday, 3 April 1983. This included information explaining exactly why three members of the Soviet staff had been declared persona non grata the previous month (although it unsurprisingly didn’t mention that Igor Titov had been removed from the UK in order to allow Gordievsky to be promoted), as well as an offer of further secrets. Guk, a paranoid alcoholic described by Gordievsky as ‘a huge bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning’, believed this was an entrapment by MI5 and ignored the letter.

In June, the residency received a document listing the KGB and GRU staff in London. When Gordievsky revealed this to his British handlers, they realized that there was a mole within MI5; Guk still believed it was an MI5 plot and didn’t make any moves towards Bettany. MI5 set up a molehunt, codenamed ELMEN, which quickly focused on Bettany, who was acting increasingly strangely. Taking a risk, since they could not prevent him leaving the country if he resigned from the Security Service, the ELMEN team (nicknamed the Nadgers) brought Bettany in for questioning. After a day and a half of interrogation, Bettany elected to confess.