Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Like his predecessor, Lukasevics, Guk tried to compensate for his residency’s failings by exaggerating the success of its active measures. In particular, he sought to take some of the credit for the resurgence of the British peace movement caused by the intensification of the Cold War in the early 1980s. Twenty years earlier, the KGB had been suspicious of the British peace movement, fearing that it might detract from the authority of the World Peace Council. 105During Guk’s years as resident, however, most sections of the peace movement spent more time campaigning against American than against Soviet nuclear weapons. In July 1982 Guk briefed the newly arrived embassy counselor, Lev Parshin, about a mass demonstration in London against the deployment of US cruise missiles. Although a few KGB agents and contacts joined the march, the demonstration had been wholly organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) without any assistance from the residency. Guk, however, assured Parshin, “It was us, the KGB residency, who brought a quarter of a million people out on to the streets!” 106

The main authentic successes of the London residency during Guk’s four years in London were, as during the previous two decades, in scientific and technological intelligence gathering. Between 1980 and 1983 Gennadi Fyodorovich Kotov (codenamed DEYEV), a Line X officer working under cover in the Soviet trade delegation, ran twelve agents and obtained 600 items of ST information and samples. 107Another Line X officer, Anatoli Alekseyevich Chernyayev (codenamed GRIN), who operated under diplomatic cover from 1979 to 1983, obtained 800 items of classified information. He was expelled in 1983 during a round of tit-for-tat expulsions. A Centre report concluded that, despite his expulsion, Chernyayev might not have been definitely identified by MI5 as a KGB officer. 108Its author, however, was unaware that Gordievsky had identified the entire KGB residency.

Following Guk’s expulsion in the spring of 1984, Nikitenko, the head of Line KR, was made acting resident. In January 1985 the Centre decided that he was to return to Moscow in the spring and that the post of resident should go to Gordievsky. And so, when Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary in March 1985, the London residency was at its operational nadir, with an SIS agent about to assume command of it.

Only a month later, however, the Washington main residency achieved one of its greatest post-war triumphs. On April 16 Aldrich Ames, a senior officer in the CIA’s Soviet division, walked into the lobby of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street and handed a guard a letter addressed to the resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov. Ames claims that his original aim was a one-time scam to extract 50,000 dollars from the KGB by revealing the names of three apparent CIA spies in the Soviet Union whom he knew were really double agents controlled by the Centre. Only later, he insists, did he identify Gordievsky and over twenty other genuine Western agents, a majority of whom were shot. According to Viktor Cherkashin, head of Line KR (counter-intelligence) in Washington, however, Ames’s letter of April 16, 1985 included, in addition to the names of the double agents, the identities of two real American agents—one of them a colleague of his in the Washington residency. Both were executed. Though Ames insists that he did not betray Gordievsky until June 13, it is quite possible that he did so earlier. 109

By mid-May 1985 the Centre had reached the alarming conclusion that its resident-designate in London was a British agent—although it remains unclear whether it based that conclusion on intelligence from Ames. On May 17 Gordievsky received a summons to return to the Centre for consultations before formally taking up the post of resident. In Moscow he was drugged and interrogated, but no admission of guilt extracted from him. On May 30 Gordievsky was given a period of leave during which the Centre placed him under constant surveillance, doubtless in the hope that he would be caught making contact with SIS or provide other compromising evidence. He was well aware that, whether or not further evidence was obtained against him, it had already been decided to execute him as a British agent. On July 20, however, Gordievsky was successfully exfiltrated across the Finnish border in the boot of an SIS car—the only escape in Soviet history by a Western agent under KGB surveillance. In October thirty-one Soviet intelligence personnel identified by Gordievsky were expelled from London. Owing to the lack of any more senior candidate, the inexperienced Aleksandr Smagin, formerly KGB security officer at the Soviet embassy, was appointed as the new London resident. 110

The greatest known success of KGB operations in Britain during the Gorbachev era was the reactivation of Michael Smith, probably the most important British Line X agent since the retirement of Norwood. When Mitrokhin last saw Smith’s file in 1984, he had been trying for six years without success to recover the security clearance which had made him such a valuable agent in the Thorn—EMI Weapons Division in 1976-8. By now, the Centre was close to writing him off. The last contact with Smith noted on his file was in March 1983. In 1984 it was decided to put him “on ice” for the next three years. 111In December 1985, however, Smith was taken on as a quality assurance engineer by the GEC Hirst Research Centre at Wembley, in north-west London, where seven months later he was given limited security clearance for defense contracts on a need-to-know basis. 112

In 1990 Line X at the London residency renewed contact with Smith, arranging meetings either in the graveyard of the church of St. Mary at Harrow on the Hill or in the nearby Roxeth recreation park at South Harrow. Security procedures were devised at each site to warn Smith if it was under surveillance. At St. Mary’s church he was told to look for a white chalk line on the vicarage wall near a fire hydrant. If the line was uncrossed, it was safe for him to enter the graveyard. He was also told to look at the church noticeboard. A small green dot, usually on a drawing pin, indicated that the meeting with his case officer was still on; a red dot was a warning to leave immediately. Though Smith had originally been an ideological agent, his motives had become increasingly mercenary. At meetings between 1990 and 1992 he was given a total of over 20,000 pounds for material from GEC defense projects, some of which he spent on an expensive flamenco guitar, a musical keyboard and computer equipment. Smith became increasingly confident and careless. When he was arrested in August 1992, the police found documents on the Rapier ground-to-air missile system and Surface Acoustic Wave military radar technology in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag in the boot of his Datsun. 113

IN THE COURSE of the Cold War, there had been a remarkable transformation in the balance of intelligence power between Britain and the Soviet Union. When the Cold War began, at a time when Britain possessed no major intelligence assets in Moscow, the KGB was still running the Magnificent Five (Blunt, admittedly, on a part-time basis) and had other major agents inside the British nuclear project. So far as is known at present, there were no comparable British agents during the closing years of the Cold War, though it is impossible to exclude the possibility (not, however, a probability) that there may have been a British Ames who has so far gone undetected. SIS, by contrast, attracted a series of KGB officers either as penetration agents or as defectors—among them Oleg Gordievsky, Vladimir Kuzichkin, Viktor

Makarov, Mikhail Butkov and Vasili Mitrokhin. 114Other defectors exfiltrated by SIS included the leading Russian scientist Vladimir Pasechnik, who provided extraordinary intelligence on the vast Soviet biological warfare program. 115There may well have been other agents and defectors whose names have yet to be revealed. On present evidence, during the final phase of the Cold War SIS had clearly the better of its intelligence duel with the KGB.