Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Early in 1979, using a reference he had forged himself, Symonds at last succeeded in obtaining an Australian passport in the name of his dead double, Raymond Everett. Soon afterward, he caught a flight to Rome, from where he traveled to Vienna by train to meet his KGB controller. By now, however, Symonds had become seriously confused by the complications of acquiring a new Australian identity. Unwilling to risk using his new Australian passport, he strapped it to his leg beneath his sock and traveled instead on the bogus British passport he had come to Australia to replace. Once in Vienna, he handed over the new passport to his controller, then returned to Moscow via Belgrade. 92

After his return to Moscow, Andropov, Kryuchkov and Grigori Fyodorovich Grigorenko (head of the Second Chief Directorate) jointly approved a plan for Symonds to cultivate a secretary at the British embassy, posing once again as a Canadian businessman. His target on this occasion was ERICA, a friend of his earlier target VERA, whom he had first met five years earlier. The operation failed—partly, perhaps, because of Symonds’s increasingly run-down appearance. Symonds’s file records that “his physical characteristics did not appeal to ERICA.” 93

The failed cultivation of ERICA appears to have been Symonds’s last operation as a Romeo agent. His file notes that, since his return from Australia, he had become more and more difficult to handle and resentful of what he claimed was the KGB’s lack of trust and interest in him. A medical report on Symonds prepared without his knowledge concluded that he was emotionally unstable, suffering from a psychological disorder and had become hypersensitive and inconsistent in his judgments. In 1980 Symonds left Moscow for Sofia, intending to marry his current girlfriend, “Nellie.” The couple, however, soon fell out and Symonds requested permission to leave for western Europe. Before the Centre had replied to his request, Symonds succeeded in making his own way to Vienna and thence to Britain. 94In April 1980, accompanied by his solicitor, he surrendered himself to the Central Criminal Court, which had issued a warrant for his arrest for corruption eight years earlier. 95

The Centre’s main fear after Symonds’s return was that he might reveal his career as a KGB agent. Should he do so, it was decided to dismiss his revelations as fantasy. The Bulgarian medical authorities were asked to prepare a certificate stating that he was mentally deranged. 96The certificate, however, was not needed. At his trial, in which he conducted his own defense, former Detective Sergeant Symonds made no reference to his Soviet connection, which remained completely unknown to the prosecution. Instead, he claimed that he had spent eight years on the run from crooked senior detectives who had threatened to kill him if he gave evidence in court. Symonds was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on three charges of corruptly obtaining a total of 150 pounds from a London criminal. The prosecution offered no evidence on five further counts of corruption. Symonds was indignant at the verdict. “I decided to return, hoping to have a fair trial,” he told the court. “I have not had a fair trial and that is all I have to say.” 97

AT ALMOST THE moment that Symonds returned to England in 1980 to face trial, Lukasevics left for Moscow at the end of his eight-year term as London resident. The Centre, unimpressed by his performance, concluded that he had made inadequate progress in rebuilding the residency’s agent network after the 1971 expulsions and banished him to his native Latvia. 98Lukasevics’s successor, the heavy-drinking Arkadi Vasilyevich Guk (codenamed YERMAKOV), is remembered by Oleg Gordievsky, who served under him, as “a huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning.” He owed his overpromotion to London resident largely to the British policy of refusing visas to known, and more able, Soviet intelligence officers. Guk’s naturally suspicious mind gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories: among them the conviction that many of the advertisement hoardings on the London Underground concealed secret look-out posts from which MI5 kept watch for KGB officers and other suspicious travelers. 99

During Guk’s first year as resident, a series of operations officers were sent home in disgrace. In 1980 Yuri Sergeyevich Myakov (codenamed MOROZOV), who had been posted to London three years earlier, was recalled for an allegedly serious breach of security: showing KGB material to the GRU residency without first gaining Guk’s approval. 100In 1981 Guk also insisted on the recall of Aleksandr Vladimirovich Lopukhin, an operations officer working in London under cover as correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda since 1979, whom he denounced for unsatisfactory performance, keeping himself apart from Soviet colleagues and preferring a Western lifestyle. 101Also in 1981 the head of Line N (Illegals Support), Anatoli Alekseyevich Zamuruyev (codenamed ZIMIN), who had occupied a cover position in the secretariat of the Cocoa Organization since 1977, was declared to be mentally ill and sent back to Moscow. 102

When Oleg Gordievsky arrived in London as a Line PR officer in the summer of 1982, he found the residency a “hotbed of intrigue.” For the previous eight years he had been SIS’s most important penetration agent inside the KGB. His presence in London eventually compromised almost all residency operations. In 1983 Gordievsky was promoted to head of Line PR and deputy resident. On being appointed resident-designate in January 1985, he was able to fill in most of the remaining gaps in his knowledge of the KGB’s British operations.

Among the intelligence passed by Gordievsky to MI5 was information on the attempt by one of its own officers, Michael Bettaney, a disaffected alcoholic in the counter-espionage directorate, to volunteer as a Soviet agent. On Easter Sunday 1983 Bettaney put through Guk’s letter-box in Holland Park an envelope containing the case put by MI5 for expelling three Soviet intelligence officers in the previous month, together with details of how all three had been detected. Bettaney offered to provide further information and gave instructions on how to contact him. Guk thus found himself presented with the first opportunity for a quarter of a century to recruit an MI5 or SIS officer. His addiction to conspiracy theory, however, persuaded him to look the gift horse in the mouth. The whole affair, he suspected, was a British provocation. The head of Line KR, Leonid Yefremovich Nikitenko, who was reluctant to disagree with the irascible Guk, concurred. Gordievsky said little but informed SIS.

In June and July, Bettaney stuffed two further packets of classified information from Security Service files through Guk’s door, unwittingly providing what Guk believed was clinching evidence of an MI5 provocation. Understandably despairing of Guk, Bettaney decided to try his luck with the KGB in Vienna instead. He was arrested on September 16, a few days before he planned to fly out. Guk’s reputation never recovered. Shortly after Bettaney was sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment the following spring, Guk himself was declared persona non grata by the British authorities. 103

Guk’s four, somewhat incompetent years as London resident included the most dangerous phase of operation RYAN. The whole of Line PR in London were skeptical about the Centre’s fear that NATO was making plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. None, however, were willing to risk their careers by challenging the alarmist assumptions on which RYAN was based. As a result, the residency’s chief priority from 1981 until at least the early months of 1984 was the preparation of fortnightly reports on its search for non-existent evidence of NATO preparations for nuclear aggression. The Centre’s alarmism reached its peak in November 1983 during the NATO exercise ABLE ARCHER, which it feared might be used to begin the countdown to a first strike. In his annual review of the work of the London residency at the end of 1983, Guk was forced to admit “shortcomings” in obtaining intelligence on “specific American and NATO plans for the preparation of surprise nuclear missile attack against the USSR.” During the early months of 1984, helped by reassuring signals from London and Washington, the mood in Moscow gradually lightened. In March Nikolai Vladimirovich Shishlin, a senior foreign affairs specialist in the Central Committee (and later an adviser to Gorbachev), addressed the staff of the London embassy and KGB residency on current international problems. He made no mention of the threat of surprise nuclear attack. The bureaucratic momentum of operation RYAN, however, took some time to wind down. When the London residency grew lax in the early summer of 1984 about sending its pointless fortnightly reports, it received a reprimand from the Centre telling it to adhere “strictly” to the original RYAN directive. 104