The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-FOUR COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN Part 1: After the Magnificent Five

Soviet intelligence operations in Britain from the 1930s onward fall into three distinct phases. First, there was a golden age, begun by the Great Illegals, during which the KGB collected better intelligence (even if it did not always understand it) than any other hostile intelligence agency in British history. Next came a silver age during the 1950s and 1960s, which included fewer—though still substantial—intelligence successes. The third phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, qualifies, at best, as a bronze age, successes. The third phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, qualifies, at best, as a bronze age, with few major successes and some spectacular failures.

The golden age of Soviet intelligence operations in Britain came to an end in 1951 with the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow and the recall of Philby from Washington.¹ The files noted by Mitrokhin, however, reveal for the first time that one major ideological agent recruited in the mid-1930s, Melita Norwood (HOLA), continued to operate after the demise of the Magnificent Five.² From March 1945 onward, while working in the research department of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, she had been able to provide intelligence on the TUBE ALLOYS project to build Britain’s first atomic bomb.

After the Second World War there was a recurrence of the wartime rivalry between NKGB and GRU for control of Norwood. Her first post-war controller was an NKGB/MGB officer at the London residency, Nikolai Pavlovich Ostrovsky. During the Committee of Information (KI) period in the early Cold War, however, when the MGB and GRU combined their foreign intelligence services, Norwood had two GRU controllers: Galina Konstantinovna Tursevich and Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Oleynik. In April 1950, following the conviction of the atom spy Klaus Fuchs and the MI5 interrogation of SONYA, the wartime GRU controller of both Norwood and Fuchs, Norwood was temporarily put “on ice” for fear that she might have been compromised. Contact, however, was resumed in 1951. Within about a year, following the demise of the Committee of Information, control of Norwood was reclaimed by the Centre from the GRU.³

In October 1952, a few months after Norwood returned to the MGB, the first British atomic bomb was successfully tested on the Monte Bello islands off the north-west coast of Australia, hitherto known chiefly for their pearl divers and shipwrecks. Stalin had been far better briefed on the construction of the bomb than most British ministers. Attlee never allowed discussion of the TUBE ALLOYS project by his whole cabinet, later claiming censoriously that “some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” Churchill was amazed, after winning the 1951 election, to discover that Attlee had concealed the 100-million-pound cost of the atomic bomb from both Parliament and most of his ministers.⁴

Over the next twenty years Norwood had seven different controllers: six officers of the KGB London residency (Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Belov, Georgi Leonidovich Trusevich, Nikolai Nikolayevich Asimov, Vitali Yevgenovich Tseyrov, Gennadi Borosovich Myakinkov and Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev) and one illegal (BEN). For security reasons Norwood actually met her controllers only four or five times a year, usually in the suburbs of south-east London to hand over the documents she had been collecting.⁵

The rivalry between the Centre and the GRU for control of Norwood during the Second World War and the early Cold War—decided in both cases in the Centre’s favor—gives a clear indication of her importance as an agent. According to her file, some of the ST which she supplied “found practical application in Soviet industry.” (Mitrokhin’s notes, alas, give no further details.) In 1958 HOLA was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Two years later she was rewarded with a life pension of 20 pounds a month, payable with immediate effect, despite the fact that she was twelve years off from retirement at the Non-Ferrous Metals Association. Norwood, however, was an ideological agent who did not work for money. After her retirement she refused further payment, saying she had enough to live on and did not need it.⁶

Norwood also acted as agent-recruiter. The only recruit identified in Mitrokhin’s notes, however, is the civil servant HUNT, whose cultivation Norwood began in 1965. In the fourteen years after HUNT’s recruitment in 1967, he provided ST and intelligence on British arms sales (on which no further details are available). In the late 1970s the London residency gave him 9,000 pounds to found a small business, probably in the hope that he could use it to supply embargoed technology.⁷

SO FAR AS is known, no Soviet agent recruited after the Second World War ever penetrated the British intelligence community quite as successfully as Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. Within a few months of Philby’s dismissal from SIS in June 1951, however, the MGB began the recruitment of another SIS officer, the 29-year-old George Blake, né Behar. Blake had been born in Rotterdam of a naturalized British father (by origin a Sephardic Jew from Constantinople) and a Dutch mother who called their son George in honor of King George V. During the Second World War Blake served successively in the Dutch Resistance and in the Royal Navy, before joining SIS in 1944. There was much that SIS had failed to discover about its new recruit, notably the influence on him of his older cousin, Henri Curiel, co-founder of the Egyptian Communist Party, a man—according to Blake—with “immense charm and a dazzling smile [which] made him very attractive, not only to women, but to all who met him.” In 1949 Blake was posted by SIS to South Korea, working under diplomatic cover as vice-consul in Seoul. A year later, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, he was interned by the invading North Koreans.⁸

In the autumn of 1951 Blake handed his captors a note, written in Russian and addressed to the Soviet embassy, saying that he had important information to communicate. At a meeting with Vasili Alekseyevich Dozhdalev of the KGB, he identified himself as an SIS officer and volunteered to work as a Soviet agent. Following a favorable assessment by Dozhdalev, the London resident, Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), traveled to Korea to complete Blake’s recruitment as agent DIO-MID, and arranged to meet him in the Netherlands after the end of the Korean War. According to Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev, who became Blake’s controller in Britain in October 1953, the Centre considered him so important that no other member of the London residency was permitted to know either DIOMID’s identity or the fact that he worked for SIS.⁹

KGB files give Blake the credit for two major successes during the 1950s. First, his intelligence—together with previous information from Philby and that supplied by Heinz Felfe,¹⁰ a Soviet agent in the West German BND—is said to have made possible the “elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR in 1953-5.”¹¹ In his memoirs, published in 1990, Blake claimed that he had betrayed almost 400 Western agents in the Soviet Bloc, but insisted that none had come to any harm—an improbable assertion swiftly denied by, among others, Oleg Kalugin. According to Blake, some of those he betrayed “are today taking an active part in the democratic movements of their respective countries in eastern Europe.” Many more, however, were executed in the 1950s.¹²

Blake’s second major achievement as a Soviet agent was to alert the Centre to one of the most remarkable Western intelligence operations of the Cold War—the secret construction of a 500-meter underground tunnel from West to East Berlin built to intercept landlines running from the Soviet military and intelligence headquarters in Karlshorst. At a meeting with his controller on the top deck of a London bus in January 1954, Blake handed over a carbon copy of the minutes of an SIS—CIA conference on the tunnel project, codenamed operation GOLD. Blake was posted to the SIS Berlin station in April 1955, one month before the tunnel became operational. The Centre, however, dared not interfere either with the tunnel’s construction or with its early operations for fear of compromising Blake, who had established himself as by far its most important British agent.

By the time the KGB staged an “accidental” discovery of the tunnel in April 1956, operation GOLD had yielded over 50,000 reels of magnetic tape recording intercepted Soviet and East German communications. The intelligence yield was so considerable that it took over two years after the end of the operation to process all the intercepts. Though the FCD was able to protect its own communications, it was curiously indifferent to the interception of those of the rival GRU and of Soviet armed forces. There is no evidence to support past claims that the intelligence generated by operation GOLD was muddied by significant amounts of KGB disinformation. CIA and SIS intelligence reports on the operation contained important new information on the improved nuclear capability of the Soviet air force in East Germany; its new fleet of bombers and twin-jet radar-equipped interceptors; the doubling of Soviet bomber strength and the creation of a new fighter division in Poland; over one hundred air force installations in the USSR, GDR and Poland; the organization, bases and personnel of the Soviet Baltic Fleet; and installations and personnel of the Soviet atomic energy program. In the era before spy planes and spy satellites (the first U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union did not occur until July 1956), this intelligence was of particular value to a West still ignorant about much of the capability of the Soviet armed forces.¹³

One of the messages intercepted in the Berlin tunnel revealed the existence of a Soviet agent working for British intelligence in Berlin, but it was not until 1961 that evidence from the Polish SB defector Michał Goleniewski identified the agent as Blake.¹⁴ Blake was sentenced to forty-two years in jail but served only five before escaping from Wormwood Scrubs with the help of three former inmates who had befriended him, the Irish bomber Sean Bourke and the peace protesters Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. On October 22, 1966 Blake knocked a loosened iron bar out of his cell window, slid down the roof outside and dropped to the ground, then climbed over the outer wall with a nylon rope ladder thrown to him by Bourke. Hidden in the Randle family dormobile, Blake was driven to East Berlin, where a fortnight later he was joined by Bourke. Once in Moscow, Blake and Bourke rapidly fell out. Blake writes in his memoirs that, “Arrangements were made for [Bourke] to return to Ireland.”¹⁵ He does not mention, and may not have known, that on the instructions of Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, Bourke was given before his departure a drug designed to cause brain damage and thus limit his potential usefulness if he fell into the hands of British intelligence. Bourke’s premature death in his early forties probably owed as much to KGB drugs as to his own heavy drinking.¹⁶

WHILE RUNNING BLAKE as an agent inside SIS during the 1950s, the KGB also had ambitious plans to recruit leading British politicians. Among the targets recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was Tom Driberg, Labor MP, journalist, member of Labor’s National Executive from 1949 to 1974 and party chairman in 1957-8.¹⁷ In 1956, shortly after Burgess and Maclean gave the first press conference since their flight to Moscow, claiming to have come to Moscow “to work for the aim of better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West,” Driberg provided the opportunity for his own recruitment by requesting an interview with Burgess.¹⁸ The two men had become friends during the War—brought together by common interests which included, according to Driberg’s biographer, “contempt for the bourgeoisie” and “healthy appetites for alcohol and young men.”¹⁹ With the approval of the KGB, Burgess agreed to the interview, doubtless informing the Centre that Driberg was one of the most promiscuous homosexuals in British public life.

Whenever it saw an opportunity, the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) went to great pains to compromise foreign diplomats and Western politicians visiting Moscow by using female or male “swallows” to seduce them, photographing their sexual liaisons and then blackmailing them into “cooperation.” A year before Driberg visited Moscow, for example, John Vassall, a homosexual clerk in the office of the British naval attaché at the British embassy, had been lured to a party organized by the SCD. Soon afterward, Vassall recalled:

For the next seven years, while working at the Moscow embassy and at the Admiralty in London, Vassall handed over thousands of highly classified documents on British and NATO weapons development and naval policy.²⁰

As a compulsive “cottager” in public lavatories, Driberg proved even easier to recruit than Vassall. Instead of being compromised by an elaborate SCD sexual entrapment, Driberg obligingly compromised himself. During his visit to Moscow he discovered, to his delight, “a large underground urinal just behind the Metropole Hotel, open all night, frequented by hundreds of questing Slav homosexuals—standing there in rigid exhibitionist rows, motionless save for the hasty grope and the anxious or beckoning glance over the shoulder—and tended only by an old woman cleaner who never seemed to notice what was going on.”²¹ If the cleaner failed to notice the distinguished British visitor to the urinal, the KGB undoubtedly did not. Among Driberg’s sexual partners on that or subsequent evenings in Moscow was an agent of the Second Chief Directorate. Soon afterward, Driberg was confronted with “compromising material” on his sexual encounters (probably photographs similar to those shown to Vassall) and recruited as agent LEPAGE.²² Somewhat absurdly, in view of the use of blackmail, Driberg’s file alleges that “ideological affinity,” going back to his teenage membership of the Communist Party, played a subsidiary part in his recruitment.

For the next twelve years, Driberg was used both as a source of inside information from the Labor National Executive and to promote active measures.²³ The importance of his role within the Labor Party may well have been exaggerated by the Centre, especially after he became party chairman in 1957. “Even before he held this post, whose nature often misleads foreign observers,” writes the political commentator Alan Watkins, “Driberg was assumed by several Russian politicians to be leader of the Labor Party. This was on account partly of his great episcopal manner, and partly of his ability to get on well with Russians.”²⁴ Driberg was, none the less, wonderfully placed to report to his controller on both the evolution of Labor policy and the rivalries within the Party leadership. His mixture of political information and gossip was so highly rated by the KGB that it was passed on to the Politburo.²⁵

Driberg’s first active measure as agent LEPAGE was the publication in 1956 of a disingenuous study of Guy Burgess which concluded that he had never been a Soviet agent. At the time Driberg was temporarily out of the Commons, working as a freelance journalist, seriously short of money and being hounded by his bank manager. The book on Burgess brought him more money than anything else in his writing career, including the then-astounding sum of 5,000 pounds for its serialization in the Daily Mail.²⁶ After his initial meeting with Burgess in Moscow, Driberg went back to London, drafted in about a month a short biography entitled Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, then returned to Moscow to go through the proofs. “Presumably,” he wrote later, “Guy had shown each chapter to his colleagues or superiors.”²⁷ The proofs, in other words, had been carefully vetted by the KGB.

Driberg later described how, during their evenings together in Moscow, he had seen Burgess “getting a bit sozzled on vodka.” The KGB, however, would tolerate no reference to Burgess’s alcoholism. Driberg’s biography thus quotes Burgess as saying that, despite his previous heavy drinking in the West, he no longer drank vodka in Moscow except—improbably—as “the best cure for an upset stomach:” “You know, Tom, living in a Socialist country does have a therapeutic effect on one.” Driberg praised the “passionate sincerity” of Burgess’s convictions and “his courage in doing what he thought right” to work for “better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West.” Burgess and Maclean, claimed Driberg, had been the victims of British media attacks as outrageous as “the extreme excesses of the McCarthy witch hunt” in the United States:

While it was “silly for Western Socialists to defend every action of the Soviet Government,” the achievements of Soviet industrial democracy deserved to be better known in the West. Driberg extolled the example of a Party meeting he had attended in a Moscow machine-tool factory:

The propaganda impact of Driberg’s book was somewhat spoiled by the fact that, just as it was published in November 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising. His KGB file records, however, that he continued to be used for KGB active measures.²⁹ Though Mitrokhin’s summary of the file gives few details, the Centre probably considered Driberg’s main use as an agent of influence to support the campaign within the Labor Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament. At the Scarborough party conference in October 1960, the left proved strong enough to pass two unilateralist motions, despite the impassioned opposition of Hugh Gaitskell, party leader, who implored his supporters to “fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love.” Doubtless to the Centre’s delight, Driberg was made a member of the “Committee of Twelve,” appointed by the NEC to draft a new defense policy. Though Gaitskell complained that Driberg was behaving on the committee “like a tired snake,” his supporters pushed through a pro-NATO and antiunilateralist policy later adopted by the 1961 party conference, which reversed the vote at Scarborough a year earlier.³⁰

It is unlikely that, after the publication of his biography of Guy Burgess, the KGB had any major subsequent influence on Driberg’s speeches and articles—though it doubtless tried to claim some of the credit for his denunciation of the British nuclear deterrent and America’s role in Vietnam. Driberg’s campaigns on these and other left-wing causes sprang from conviction rather than KGB dictation. His main usefulness to the Centre probably lay in enabling it to boast to the Politburo that it had an agent at the heart of the Labor leadership who would probably figure in the next Labor government.

The Centre was doubtless deeply disappointed when there was no place for Driberg in the government formed by Gaitskell’s successor, Harold Wilson, after the Labor election victory of 1964. Wilson distrusted him too much to think of making him a minister.³¹ Together with Ian Mikardo, Driberg formed the left-wing Tribune Group, which opposed many of Wilson’s policies from the back benches. After Wilson won an increased majority in 1966, however, the Tribune Group’s protests became less effective. The Daily Express compared the impact of a protest organized by Driberg and Mikardo against a proposed wage freeze to that of “a piece of wet cod dropping in a snowdrift.”³² Driberg began to try to distance himself from the KGB, end secret contacts and limit himself to official meetings with Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. When the KGB tried to increase pressure on him, he broke off contact altogether in 1968.³³

Agent LEPAGE’s decision—in KGB jargon—to “refuse to cooperate” may have been related to his worsening health. In January 1968, while on a tour of Cyprus as chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party, he had a minor heart attack. Though warned that the attack might have been triggered by “overdoing it” sexually, Driberg insisted on inviting Cypriot youths into his hospital bed. Later in the year, after his return to London, he spent several further months in hospital with a detached retina, becoming blind in one eye. At the end of 1970, he decided to retire at the following election.³⁴

It is uncertain whether Wilson ever learned from MI5 that Driberg was a Soviet agent. He was, however, informed in the late 1960s that a defector from the Czechoslovak StB, Josif Frolik, had reported that Driberg had been in the pay of the StB.³⁵ Frolik claimed that the StB had been warned off by the KGB on the grounds that Driberg was “their man.”³⁶ Mitrokhin’s brief summary of Driberg’s file contains no reference to a Czech connection. But his notes on the file of another agent in the Labor Party, the journalist Raymond Fletcher, who served as MP for Ilkeston from 1964 to 1983, record that he was involved with the StB as well as the KGB.

When Fletcher (codenamed PETER) was recruited by the London residency in 1962,³⁷ he was preparing a scathing attack on Conservative defense policy, published in the following year under the title £60 a Second on Defense, which called for major defense cuts and the abandonment of the British nuclear deterrent. Fletcher ridiculed most of the security measures designed to prevent British defense secrets reaching the Soviet Union. “Classification,” he declared, “is more a device for concealing incompetence than for concealing information from a potential enemy:”

Shortly before his election as Labor MP in 1964, the Centre learned that Fletcher was also “cooperating” with the StB. On this occasion, instead of warning off the Czechs—as allegedly happened in the case of Driberg—the KGB seems to have broken off contact with Fletcher. The Centre was also disturbed by a report from the Polish SB that a letter in the possession of the British Communist Party appeared to show (almost certainly wrongly) that Fletcher had been “cooperating” since 1957 with the CIA.³⁹

A few months before his death in 1991, Fletcher admitted that during the 1960s he had contacts at the Czechoslovak embassy in London whom “it was later claimed were intelligence personnel,” but that he had thought “I was safe because I reported all my contacts to Goronwy Roberts at the Foreign Office.” MI5, he implied, thought differently. They were, he declared, “a complete bunch of bastards” who “tried to break my nerve and nearly broke my spirit.”⁴⁰ If, as Fletcher believed, MI5 did have him under surveillance, his KGB file suggests that they had some reason to do so.

The most important British politician identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin as a target for KGB recruitment was Harold Wilson. Given the extent of his contacts with the Soviet Union, unusual for a Western politician in the early years of the Cold War, Wilson was an almost inevitable target. As President of the Board of Trade and the youngest member of the Attlee cabinet from 1947 to 1951, Wilson had been actively involved in promoting East—West trade. He increased that involvement during Labor’s thirteen years in opposition after 1951. His Tribune pamphlet In Place of Dollars, published in 1952, urged the government to relax controls on “strategic” exports to the Soviet Bloc and ignore the inevitable American protests which would follow. In May 1953, two months after the death of Stalin, he became the first major British politician to visit Moscow since the Berlin crisis five years earlier. There he renewed his acquaintance with Anastas Mikoyan, with whom he had established friendly relations during visits in 1947, and held wide-ranging talks with the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. On his return to London, Wilson addressed a special meeting of the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP) and was congratulated by Attlee on a “magnificent inside report” on post-Stalin Russia.⁴¹ Wilson’s information on British politics seems to have been rated equally highly by the Russians. According to his KGB file, it was passed on to the Politburo.⁴² There is, however, no indication that any of Wilson’s conversations with Soviet officials (some, inevitably, undercover KGB officers) was any more confidential than his talk to the PLP.

During his years in opposition Wilson accepted a series of consultancies with firms trading with the Soviet Union, which paid him, on average, about 5,000 pounds a year.⁴³ According to his KGB file, one of the firms with which Wilson was involved breached the COCOM embargo on “strategic” exports.⁴⁴ Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler, accepts that this was probably the case: “The export of many items was forbidden; inevitably a grey area grew up in which trading might or might not be illegal. Some of Wilson’s associates strayed into that area or even beyond it.”⁴⁵ The high value placed by the KGB on Wilson’s political gossip, together with the dubious nature of some of his business contacts, probably explain the Centre’s decision in 1956 to give him the codename OLDING and open an “agent development file” in the hope of recruiting him. The file records, however, that, “The development did not come to fruition.”⁴⁶

Allegations that Wilson was ever a KGB agent derive not from credible evidence but from unfounded conspiracy theories, some of them elaborated by the KGB officer Anatoli Golitsyn, who may have known of the existence of the “agent development file” and claimed after his defection in December 1961 that Wilson was a Soviet mole. When Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, Golitsyn developed the bizarrely improbable theory that he had been poisoned by the KGB to enable Wilson to succeed him as Labor leader. Sadly, a minority of British and American intelligence officers with a penchant for conspiracy theory—among them James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5—were seduced by Golitsyn’s fantasies.⁴⁷ Wright went on to devise several conspiracy theories of his own, among them the claim that thirty MI5 officers later conspired against Harold Wilson.⁴⁸

Far from using Wilson as an agent or confidential contact after he became prime minister in 1964, the London residency commissioned articles attacking various of his policies by an agent codenamed DAN, recruited in 1959, who contributed to the left-wing weekly Tribune. DAN’s file records that he published material given him by the KGB and wrote articles on “theses” devised by Service A, the active measures section at the Centre. Though Mitrokhin’s brief notes on the file do not record whether DAN received regular payment, they do mention that in February 1967 he was given a “reward” of 200 pounds.⁴⁹

The most prominent British journalist targeted by the Centre during the early years of the Cold War to be identified in the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin was Edward Crankshaw. From the start of the Cold War until some years after his retirement in 1968, Crankshaw was Britain’s most authoritative commentator on Soviet affairs. During the Second World War he had served for two years with the British Military Mission in Russia. In 1947 he was “half-flattered, half-bullied” by the editor of the Observer, David Astor, into returning to Moscow as the paper’s Russian and East European correspondent. For the next generation, he kept up what he called “a continual running commentary on what I thought the Russians were up to” in the Observer, its globally syndicated Foreign News Service, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and “lectures and broadcasts all over the place.”⁵⁰ Crankshaw’s voluminous “running commentary,” diffused around the world, was a source of continuous annoyance to both the Kremlin and the Centre. “There is only one group of people in the world today,” he wrote in 1951, “which is actively and deliberately… committed to the downfall of our society: the group of Russians who form the government of the Soviet Union.”⁵¹

The KGB tried various methods of bringing pressure on Crankshaw to modify his views—all without success. Some of the methods used were attempts to exploit his sexual liaisons in Moscow. Though “slight and gentlemanly in appearance,” according to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, “Crankshaw controlled a wild and independent nature.”⁵² While serving with the wartime military mission, he had lived with the artist T. S. Andreyevskaya and her friend E. S. Rosinevich. In 1948 both were arrested, forced to confess to being British spies and sent to labor camp.⁵³ Crankshaw was not intimidated, but the fate of the two women may well have inspired a moving description by him in 1948 of others who suffered similar fates:

In 1959 photographs were taken of Crankshaw while engaged in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “sexual frolics.”⁵⁵ If the photographs were shown to Crankshaw, as was usual in such cases, he was, once again, not intimidated—although the episode may have helped to inspire his reminder in the Observer that past atrocities committed by the KGB remained “part of the present:”

Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he gave his approval for an operation designed either to blackmail Crankshaw by using the photographs taken in 1959, and perhaps on other occasions, or to discredit him by sending them to the Observer. The operation, however, was abandoned at the urging of the London residency, which no doubt calculated correctly that Crankshaw would not give way to blackmail and that his editor would stand by him.⁵⁷

Though the photographs of Crankshaw’s “sexual frolics” were never published, similar pictures were used in an active measure codenamed operation PROBA designed to discredit the Conservative MP Commander Anthony Courtney, who had aroused the ire of the Centre by campaigning against the growing size of the London residency.⁵⁸ In 1965 the KGB produced a leaflet containing photographs of Courtney having sex with an unidentified woman, and circulated copies to his wife, other MPs and newspaper editors. Though intended to give the impression that Courtney was having an adulterous affair, the photographs had in fact been taken by the SCD four years earlier during a trip by Courtney, then a widower, to a Moscow trade fair. While in Moscow Courtney had been seduced by an Intourist guide who visited him in a hotel room fitted with a concealed KGB camera. The ensuing scandal, which began with a story in Private Eye, was largely responsible for Courtney’s failure to hold his seat at the 1965 general election.⁵⁹ The KGB file on operation PROBA also claimed the credit for the breakdown of Courtney’s marriage and the failure of his business career.⁶⁰

The KGB’s main targets for sexual compromise operations throughout the Cold War were foreign embassies in Moscow. The files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that few, if any, embassies escaped some degree of penetration by KGB swallows. The most successful seduction within the British embassy during the Brezhnev era, though it achieved far less than the entrapment of John Vassall, was probably that of a 30-year-old married male diplomat codenamed KAREV, who was seduced by his family’s Russian maid, codenamed CH. On KGB instructions, using a stratagem successfully deployed against a number of foreign diplomats, CH pretended to be pregnant and sought KAREV’s help in arranging an abortion, for which she claimed to have received help from an embassy protection officer. KAREV was persuaded to show his gratitude by giving some biographical information on embassy personnel, including the identities of SIS officers working under diplomatic cover. To compromise KAREV further, CH then pretended that she was pregnant again and needed help in arranging another abortion. Soon afterward CH was arrested on KGB instructions for being found in possession of Western currency given her by KAREV. On this occasion KAREV sought the help of a Soviet official, whom he probably realized was a KGB officer, both to arrange the second fictitious abortion and to have charges against CH dropped. Since KAREV’s tour of duty in Moscow was about to end, he was persuaded to agree to a meeting with a KGB officer during his next posting. Once out of Moscow, however, KAREV succeeded in holding the KGB at arm’s length. On being shown his file, Philby advised against attempting to compromise KAREV publicly, as in the case of Commander Courtney, probably because the hand of the KGB would have been too obvious.⁶¹

IN BRITAIN, AS in the United States,⁶² the Centre’s strategy during much of the Cold War was based on the attempt to establish a network of illegal residencies which would prove more difficult for MI5 to monitor than the legal residency at the Soviet embassy, and which could continue to operate if the Cold War turned into hot war. Its first post-war choice of illegal resident was Konon Trofimovich Molody (codenamed BEN), the son of two Soviet scientists, who seems to have been selected in childhood as a potential foreign intelligence officer. In 1932, at only ten years of age, he was sent, with official approval, to live with an aunt in California and attend secondary school in San Francisco, where he became fluent in English before returning to Moscow in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War he joined the NKVD and, according to a stilted official hagiography, “made frequent sorties into the enemy’s rear… brilliantly displaying such qualities as boldness and valor.” After the war Molody took a degree in Chinese and worked as a Chinese language instructor before beginning training as an illegal in 1951.⁶³

Like some of the illegals chosen for postings in the United States, Molody began by establishing his cover in Canada, where he arrived in 1954 using the identity of a Canadian Communist “live double.” MICK, a member of the Central Committee of the Canadian Communist Party, had persuaded the Party member to give him his passport in the previous year when he discovered that it had never been used for foreign travel. Though the live double was told that his passport would be for Party use, MICK passed it to Vladimir Pavlovich Burdin of the Ottawa residency via a senior member of the Canadian—Soviet Friendship Society codenamed SVYASHCHEN-NIK (“Clergyman”).⁶⁴ The Centre replaced the photograph on the passport with that of Molody and gave it to him for his journey to Canada. Once in Canada, Molody obtained a new passport in the name of a “dead double,” Gordon Arnold Lonsdale (codenamed KIZH), who had been born in Cobalt, Ontario, in 1924, emigrated as a child to the Soviet Union with his Finnish mother and died in 1943.⁶⁵ A Canadian Royal Commission later concluded:

In March 1955, Molody traveled to London using his new identity as “Gordon Lonsdale” and enrolled as a student on a Chinese course at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Centre selected SOAS for two main reasons. First, since the course taken by Molody did not lead to a degree, he was not asked to provide the documentation on his previous education normally required of British university students. Secondly, as a qualified lecturer in Chinese and the author of a Russian—Chinese textbook, Molody found little difficulty in coping with the course requirements while spending most of his time establishing the KGB’s first post-war illegal residency in Britain. His main problem at SOAS was the need to conceal from his tutors the fact that they had little, if anything, to teach him.⁶⁷ Molody’s contact in the legal London residency was the Line N (Illegal Support) officer, V. A. Dmitriyev, who provided him with money and instructions from the Centre, as well as microdot letters from his family in Moscow, delivered via dead letter-boxes and at face-to-face meetings.⁶⁸ “When is Daddy coming, and why has he gone away?” asked Molody’s small son Trofim in one letter. “…What a stupid job Daddy has got.”⁶⁹

While at SOAS, Molody began, with the Centre’s approval, to establish a cover profession as a London businessman. Using KGB funds, he set himself up as the director of several companies operating juke boxes, vending machines and onearmed bandits. According to a KGB file, the vending machines included chewinggum dispensers at no fewer than two hundred different sites, thus offering Molody frequent pretexts for journeys in the Greater London area to meet Dmitriyev, the two other members of his residency and his agents. An electronic locking device produced by one of the firms in which Molody was a partner won a gold medal at the 1960 International Inventors Exhibition in Brussels.⁷⁰ In retirement, Molody made the wildly exaggerated claim that he had been the KGB’s first multimillionaire illegal resident. He boasted to a Soviet interviewer:

The radio operators and technical support team in Molody’s illegal residency were the veteran American agents Morris and Lona Cohen (LUIS and LESLEY, collectively known as the DACHNIKI), who had been hastily recalled to Moscow after the arrest of the Rosenbergs.⁷² In May 1954 the Cohens were issued with passports in the name of Peter and Helen Kroger by a Soviet agent at the New Zealand consulate in Paris, Paddy Costello (codenamed LONG), who later became professor of Russian at Manchester University.⁷³ “Peter Kroger’s” cover profession in London was that of antiquarian bookseller. Like BEN, LUIS and LESLEY were extroverts with an active social life. One of their friends in the London book trade later recalled many convivial evenings at their house in Ruislip:

George Blake, who was to meet Konon Molody while both were imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs, later eulogized him as “a perfect example of what an ‘illegal resident’ should be… a man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great cause.”⁷⁵ During his years in London, however, Molody became cynical about the prospects of recruiting a new generation of ideological spies like Blake, inspired by working for a great cause. He later told a Soviet interviewer:

Molody also took a jaundiced view of the kind of Cold War recruits on whom he believed the KGB should concentrate in Britain:

The accounts of Molody’s career released by the KGB and SVR carefully conceal the fact that late in 1958 he was given control of the KGB’s longest-serving British agent, Melita Norwood (HOLA), whose ideological commitment seems never to have wavered over more than forty years. Molody met Norwood for the first time on December 23 and received from her the usual batch of documents from the safes of the Non-Ferrous Metals Association. For reasons not recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes, however, Norwood was returned only two months later to the control of the legal London residency.⁷⁷ Perhaps Norwood was repelled by the signs of Molody’s highliving, womanizing lifestyle. Or perhaps Molody simply lacked the ability to control an ideological agent.

The files on the Molody residency seen by Mitrokhin suggest that it successfully ran only two agents: Harry Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee (codenamed SHAH and ASYA).⁷⁸ Houghton, a former NCO in the Royal Navy, closely resembled Molody’s jaundiced stereotype of the British agent. He worked as a civilian clerk in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, where, helped by Gee, who was employed as a filing clerk, he had easy access to top secret information on antisubmarine warfare and nuclear submarines. Houghton’s later memoirs provide striking evidence of how successfully his controller concealed his low opinion of him. Though Molody, as his Moscow interviews make clear, regarded agents such as Houghton as mildly contemptible moral inadequates, Houghton was pathetically convinced that, from their first meeting, “[t]here was a real camaraderie between us.” Molody deceived Houghton so successfully that he even persuaded him that he regarded going to bed with any of his many girlfriends as “absolutely out.”⁷⁹

Like Blake, Houghton was identified by MI5 as a result of information from the defector Michał Goleniewski. Surveillance of Houghton led to the discovery of “Lonsdale,” who was then followed on a visit to the “Krogers” in Ruislip. A search of the “Krogers’” house uncovered a powerful high-speed radio transmitter used for communications with the Centre and a short-wave radio used for receiving messages from Moscow on high-frequency bands, both hidden in a cavity beneath the kitchen floor; one-time cipher pads hidden in flashlights and a cigarette lighter; a microdot reader concealed in a box of face powder; equipment for microdot construction; a cookery jar containing magnetic iron oxide used for printing high-speed morse messages on to tape; thousands of pounds, dollars and travelers checks; and seven passports.⁸⁰ At their trial in 1961 Molody was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, the Cohens to twenty, Houghton and Gee to fifteen.

Molody was freed in a spy exchange in 1964. His misleading memoirs, published a year later under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” with the approval of the CPSU Central Committee, contained a variety of disinformation—including the pretense that the “Krogers” were entirely innocent. The London residency reported a “negative reaction” to the memoirs by the British Communist Party leadership, on the grounds that they amounted to a formal admission that the Soviet Union engaged in espionage against the West.⁸¹ In 1969 the Cohens were exchanged for the imprisoned British lecturer Gerald Brooke. At a dinner in their honor at a KGB dacha on November 25, 1969, Andropov personally presented them with the Order of the Red Star. Other top brass from the Centre present at the dinner included Sakharovsky, the FCD chief, and Lazarev, the head of the illegals directorate. 5,000 roubles were spent furnishing a Moscow apartment for the Cohens on Malaya Bronnaya, where the same KGB top brass attended a flat-warming party in April 1970.⁸²

The Centre remained anxious, however, to keep the Cohens away from other Western defectors in Moscow—partly because it clung to the fiction that they were Polish and had gone to live in Poland. On June 7, 1971, while returning to his flat from a shopping expedition, Morris Cohen accidentally bumped into George Blake, whom he had first met several years earlier when they were both imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs. The KGB file on the meeting notes that both expressed “genuine joy” at their reunion, exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to arrange another meeting. The Centre, however, separately instructed both Blake and the Cohens to devise pretexts to cancel their arrangement. According to the KGB record of a bugged telephone conversation, Cohen rang Blake to tell him that he was about to go on holiday and would, after all, not be able to meet him in the near future. Blake replied that he quite understood and would himself be leaving for his dacha in a few days’ time. The two men never met again.⁸³ The Cohens, however, retained an honored place in the KGB pantheon. Lona died in 1993 at the age of eighty, Morris two years later at the age of ninety. By order of President Yeltsin, Morris Cohen was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation.⁸⁴

Molody’s career ended less happily. Once back in Moscow, his experience of life in the West made him, like a number of other former illegals, increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. According to Blake:

Molody also took to drink. One Saturday in October 1970 he went on a mushroomcollecting expedition near the town of Medyi with his wife and two friends from the air force. Immediately after his second glass of vodka, he suffered a stroke, lost the power of speech and died a few days later in hospital at the age of only forty-eight.⁸⁶ He lay in state on a funeral bier in the KGB officers’ club while colleagues displayed his large collection of medals on velvet cushions and Andropov and other top brass came to pay their respects.⁸⁷ Shortly before his death, a team of writers commissioned by the Centre had completed, with Molody’s assistance, a new biography of him entitled Special Mission, some extracts of which were published in the Soviet press. In 1972, however, it was decided, with Andropov’s approval, not to publish the book abroad and to suspend publication in the Soviet Union for fear that it would “fan the flames of spymania” in the West.⁸⁸

After Molody’s death, his long-suffering wife, Galina Ivanovna, who had seen very little of him during his career as an illegal, also took to drink. Over the next few years she was treated several times for alcoholism. In 1976 a monument to Molody costing 2,000 roubles was erected on his grave in Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery, next to that of another well known illegal of the 1950s, William Fisher (alias “Abel”). In the same year, the CPSU Central Committee awarded his widow a pension of 120 roubles.⁸⁹

Mitrokhin saw frequent references in KGB files to visits to Britain made by other Soviet illegals during the twenty years after Molody’s arrest but found no evidence that any fully functioning illegal KGB residency to replace BEN’s was established during that period—though it is possible that such evidence exists in files he did not see. One of the principal candidates chosen to succeed BEN in London appears to have been the comparatively youthful Eduard Ivanovich Koslov (codenamed YEVDOKI-MOV), born in 1934. With the help of the agent RAG, an official in a Belgian commune, ⁹⁰ Koslov obtained identity documents in the name of the non-existent Jean-Louis de Mol, which he used to obtain a Belgian passport in 1961. Over the next few years, he went through an elaborate acclimatization period to strengthen his cover, studying at a Swiss foreign language school, working as an electronic machine operator in Zurich, then in a Stuttgart insurance company. In 1966 he returned to Belgium, took up residence in Dinant and obtained a new passport valid until 1970. Before he could move on to Britain or the United States, however, Koslov aroused the suspicions of the Belgian security service and was hurriedly recalled to Moscow. At the time of his recall, his account in the Banque de Bruxelles (no. A-04-18295) contained 39,000 Belgian francs; the Centre considered it too dangerous to withdraw the money and wrote it off. Unable henceforth to travel in the West, Koslov worked instead on PROGRESS operations in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union, posing as a British, American or Belgian tourist.⁹¹

DESPITE THE APPARENT failure of its attempts to establish a new illegal residency after the arrest of Molody and the Cohens, the KGB’s British operations achieved a series of significant successes during the following decade. The Centre discovered a simple but effective method of making life easier for the London legal residency. Under four successive residents—Nikolai Grigoryevich Bagrichev (1962-4),⁹² Mikhail Timofeyevich Chizhov (1964-6), Mikhail Ivanovich Lopatin (acting resident, 1966-7)⁹³ and Yuri Nikolayevich Voronin (1967-71)—the size of the residency steadily increased. Between 1960 and 1970, KGB and GRU personnel in London grew from about fifty to over 120—more than in Washington or any other Western capital. The intelligence services of other Soviet Bloc countries also rapidly expanded their British operations. The aim, which was partially successful, was to swamp the overstretched MI5 with more intelligence officers than they could hope to keep under effective surveillance.⁹⁴

When the Czechoslovak StB officer Josef Frolik was posted to London in 1964, he was told that “the British service was so short of funds and men that it would be relatively easy to throw off their tails.”⁹⁵ MI5’s job became even harder at the beginning of Voronin’s term as resident, in 1967, when one of his operations officers, Aleksei Nikolayevich Savin (codenamed RUSLAN),⁹⁶ recruited a clerk in the Greater London Council (GLC) motor licensing department, Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who had access to the registration numbers of all Security Service and Special Branch vehicles. A series of sophisticated MI5 mobile surveillance operations was compromised by the ability of the London residency to identify the vehicles used.⁹⁷

The London residency’s greatest successes during the Brezhnev era were in scientific and technological intelligence (ST), particularly in the defense field. In 1967 Lopatin, the residency’s main ST expert in the mid-1960s, became one of the founders of a new FCD Directorate T, specializing in this field and serviced by Line X (ST) officers in residencies abroad. The head of Line X in London from the beginning of 1968 until his expulsion in the summer of 1971 was Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev, a tough but amiable engineer who spoke almost flawless English with a Canadian accent and had a passion for Western hi-fi.⁹⁸

In addition to the veteran Norwood, Mitrokhin’s notes identify at least ten other Line X agents active in the late 1960s: MERCURY, a chemist recruited in 1958;⁹⁹ SAKS, an employee of a British aircraft company, recruited in Germany, probably in 1964, “for material reward;”¹⁰⁰ YUNG, an aeronautical and computer engineer recruited in 1965;¹⁰¹ NAGIN, a chemical engineer recruited in 1966;¹⁰² ACE, an aeronautical engineer recruited in 1967, who supplied voluminous documentation on aero engines and flight simulators;¹⁰³ HUNT, the civil servant recruited by Norwood in 1967;¹⁰⁴ AKHURYAN, a nuclear physicist recruited in 1968;¹⁰⁵ STARIK, an aeronautical design engineer recruited in 1968;¹⁰⁶ DAN, an engineer in the British subsidiary of an American company, recruited in 1969 “for material reward;”¹⁰⁷ and STEP, a laboratory assistant recruited in 1969 for a monthly salary of 150 dollars.¹⁰⁸ Mitrokhin’s notes also identify four further Line X agents operating in the 1970s who may well have been recruited in the 1960s: a virologist, a research scientist in a pharmaceutical laboratory,¹⁰⁹ an engineer at a nuclear reactor,¹¹⁰ and COOPER, who worked in the new products department of a pharmaceutical company.¹¹¹

MI5 was hampered in its response to the upsurge of KGB and GRU ST operations not merely by its own overstretched resources but also by the difficulty (which it was, understandably, not anxious to advertise) of bringing successful prosecutions. Unless it could obtain confessions or catch agents in the act of handing over material, it was usually impossible to secure convictions. Its difficulties were exemplified by the trial in 1963 of Dr. Giuseppe Martelli, a 39-year-old Italian physicist employed for the previous year at the Culham Laboratories of the Atomic Energy Authority. Arrested as a result of a lead from a KGB defector, Martelli was found in possession of a record of meetings with Nikolai Karpekov and other KGB officers, a set of partly used one-time pads for cipher communications hidden inside an ingeniously constructed cigarette case, and instructions for photographing documents. But possession of espionage paraphernalia (unlike housebreaking equipment) is not in itself a crime and Martelli had no official access to classified information, though he was in contact with people who had. Martelli admitted meeting Karpekov, but claimed he was engaged in an ingenious scheme to turn the tables on a blackmail attempt by the KGB. He was acquitted.¹¹²

During the mid- and late 1960s there were only two successful British prosecutions of Soviet spies in Britain. In 1965 Frank Bossard, a 52-year-old projects officer at the Ministry of Aviation was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for passing top secret details of British guided weapon development to the GRU. An investigation after Bossard’s arrest revealed a criminal record which had never been properly investigated. Twenty years earlier he had served six months’ hard labor for fraud. In 1968 Douglas Britten, an RAF chief technician, was also sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for giving the KGB highly classified information from RAF signals units in Cyprus and Lincolnshire. A Security Commission inquiry after Britten’s conviction disclosed Britten’s history of financial problems and his record as an “accomplished liar.”¹¹³

The work of Line X in the London residency was supplemented by KGB officers sent to Britain under cover either as members of trade and scientific delegations or as postgraduate students. Among the KGB postgraduates was A. V. Sharov of Directorate T, who began work for a PhD in engineering at London University in November 1966 and was awarded his doctorate on October 22, 1969. On KGB instructions, Sharov returned to London to take his degree in person in January 1971 and embark on a lecture tour arranged by the Academy of Sciences which was intended by the Centre to enable him to identify possible recruits in the scientific community.¹¹⁴

Probably the most important Line PR postgraduate at a British university in the mid-1960s was Gennadi Fedorovich Titov (codenamed SILIN), who studied at University College, London. Titov went on to become resident in Norway in 1971 at the relatively youthful age of thirty-nine;¹¹⁵ in 1984 he was promoted to the rank of KGB general, and by the time of the 1991 coup ranked third in the KGB hierarchy. KGB officers and agents disguised as students were also used to uncover links between Western church groups and religious minorities in the Soviet Union. In September 1970 ABRAMOV (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes) enrolled at a Baptist college in England, where he made contacts who revealed plans in Sweden and West Germany to smuggle religious literature into Russia by car, hidden in specially constructed secret compartments.¹¹⁶

Since the demise of the Magnificent Five and the arrest of George Blake, the Centre had seen as the main weakness of its British operations its failure to recruit a new generation of young, ideologically committed high-flyers. The simple truth, which the Centre could not bring itself to accept, was that the Soviet Union had lost most of its former ideological appeal. The aging apparatchiks who ruled Brezhnev’s Soviet Union lacked the luster of both the interwar myth—image of the world’s first worker—peasant state and the far more accurate wartime image of the state which had been chiefly responsible for the defeat of Nazism. Most young Western radicals of the late 1960s were attracted not to ideologically servile Communist Parties but to the libertarian movements of the New Left. Moscow, however, refused to accept that this was more than a passing phase. The Centre sought to use the exploits of Kim Philby to inspire a new generation of radical idealists to follow his example.

On his defection to Moscow in 1963, Philby had been dismayed to discover that he held only agent status in the KGB, did not hold officer rank and was not even to be allowed to set foot inside the Lubyanka. For the first five years of his Moscow exile, however, he was kept occupied by long debriefing sessions, helping to ghostwrite the memoirs of Konon Molody (published under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale”) and writing a sprightly but tendentious memoir of his own career as a Soviet agent inside SIS, published in 1968 under the title of My Silent War.¹¹⁷ Philby made no mention of the disappointments of life in Moscow. Instead, he claimed that, “As I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.” Philby concluded his preface with words which were intended to inspire others:

Scarcely had My Silent War been published than an American high school student, inspired by Philby’s example, arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa and offered his services to the KGB. Though aged only sixteen (the youngest Western recruit recorded in the files seen by Mitrokhin), he was signed up in July 1968, with Andropov’s personal approval, as agent SYNOK (“Sonny”)¹¹⁹—the same codename as that which had been given to Philby on his recruitment in 1934.¹²⁰ SYNOK’s file notes that he came from a well-to-do family, had an idealistic commitment to the Soviet Union and was imbued with a romantic notion of intelligence work. After a second meeting with SYNOK in Mexico on October 19, it was decided to train him as an illegal agent. Over the next few months, however, either SYNOK or his parents had second thoughts and he failed to show up at the next pre-arranged rendezvous in London.

It may be a sign of how few other bright, ideologically committed young Westerners were inspired to follow Philby’s example (no others are recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes) that the KGB continued intermittently to try to renew contact with SYNOK for more than a decade. In 1978 a KGB officer discovered from SYNOK’s father that he was in Mexico, but failed to track him down. Two years later, his mother was tricked into revealing that he was in San Francisco and giving his address. In December 1980 the operations officer who had met him in Mexico twelve years earlier wrote to SYNOK in San Francisco, inviting him to another meeting in Mexico and giving an East German cover address to which to reply. When no reply was received, the KGB seems, at long last, to have given up.¹²¹

Though a new generation of Philbys failed to materialize, memories of the Magnificent Five continued to enhance the prestige of the London residency. Even in the Gorbachev era, operations in Britain during the Second World War and the quarter century afterward were still held up as a model for young intelligence officers at the FCD training school, the Andropov Institute. The three main faculty heads in the institute had all made their reputations in the London residency. Yuri Modin, who was in charge of political intelligence training, was a former controller of the Magnificent Five. Ivan Shishkin, head of counter-intelligence, had run Line KR in London from 1966 to 1970. Vladimir Barkovsky, who ran ST espionage training, had specialized in that field in London from 1941 to 1946.¹²²

If the golden age of KGB operations in London had ended with the demise of the Magnificent Five in 1951, the silver age came to an even more abrupt conclusion twenty years later with the defection of Oleg Lyalin and the mass expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers.¹²³ Henceforth MI5 surveillance was no longer swamped by the sheer numbers of Soviet intelligence personnel. Oleg Gordievsky remembers the British operation FOOT as “a bombshell, an earthquake of an expulsion, without precedent, an event that shocked the Centre profoundly.”¹²⁴ According to Oleg Kalugin, “our intelligence gathering activities in England suffered a blow from which they never recovered.”¹²⁵ For the remainder of the Cold War the KGB probably found it more difficult to collect high-grade intelligence in London than in almost any other Western capital.