The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-FIVE COLD WAR OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITAIN Part 2: After Operation FOOT

Despite Moscow’s public expressions of righteous indignation after the expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers from London in September 1971, the Centre knew that it had suffered a public relations disaster. The centerpiece of its active measures campaign to turn the tables on British intelligence and discredit the British expulsions was the former rising star of SIS, Kim Philby. Philby, however, was in no fit state to be seen in public. Since the publication of his memoirs in 1968, the KGB seemed to have no further use for him and Philby roamed round Russia on a series of almost suicidal drinking bouts which sometimes left him oblivious of where he was, uncertain whether it was night or day. During the early 1970s he was slowly pulled back from alcoholic oblivion by Rufa, “the woman I had been waiting for all my life.”¹

Though the Centre judged, no doubt correctly, after operation FOOT that Philby was still in no condition to give a press conference, it used a lengthy interview with him in Izvestia on October 1, 1971 to denounce the “slanderous allegations” in the “right-wing bourgeois British press” that the Soviet officials expelled from London had been engaged in espionage. In striking contrast with the far more sophisticated tone of Philby’s memoirs published three years earlier, the interview regurgitates a series of stereotypical denunciations of British “ruling circles:”

Philby can scarcely have composed these turgid platitudes himself. The probability is that they were simply submitted to him by the KGB for signature. Philby added to them some personal memories of the anti-Soviet “psychological warfare” conducted by British intelligence—though there was a certain irony to his claim that “SIS did not interrupt their subversive operations against the Soviet Union even at the time of the war against Hitler’s Germany.”² In reality, the lack of evidence of anti-Soviet subversion in the wartime SIS reports provided by Philby had led the Centre to suspect him of disinformation.³ The fact that Philby identified SIS officers, real and alleged, who had been stationed in the Middle East since he had defected from Beirut in 1963 is further evidence that much, if not all, of his interview was scripted for him by the Centre.⁴ Among the British intelligence officers in Beirut identified in his interview was the young David Spedding who, a quarter of a century later, became chief of SIS.⁵

So, far from limiting the damage done by the London expulsions, Philby’s interview turned into another public relations fiasco. Tass was promptly sued for libel by four prominent Lebanese citizens named in the interview as British agents: Robert Abella, editor-publisher of the Beirut weekly Al Zaman; Dori Chamoun, son of former President Camille Chamoun; Emir Farid Chehab, former Lebanese security chief; and Ahmed Isbir, a deputy in the Lebanese parliament.⁶ The Soviet ambassador in Beirut sought to distance his government from the law suit by declaring that the whole affair was “purely journalistic” and that “the Soviet Union as a state had no connection with it.” He quickly backtracked, however, when the head of the Tass bureau in Beirut, Nikolai Borisovich Filatov, was included in the law suit, claiming that Tass was “a government news agency” and that Filatov was covered by diplomatic immunity.⁷ To make matters worse, the Communist lawyer chosen by the embassy to act for Tass was believed by the Centre to be an SIS agent.⁸ Before the case came to trial the Beirut residency withdrew Filatov and his family to Moscow.⁹ In May 1972 the Tass Lebanese bureau chief, Raymond Saadeh, who was unable to claim diplomatic immunity, was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay damages of 40,000 Lebanese pounds to each of the plaintiffs—a sentence later reduced on appeal to a fine of 1,000 and damages of 10,000 Lebanese pounds each (a total of about 6,000 pounds sterling). Tass was further humiliated by being ordered to report the judgment against it. The story appeared in The Times under the headline, “Tass ordered to pay for libel by Mr. Kim Philby.”¹⁰

The miserable sequel to Philby’s Izvestia interview did little either to persuade Philby that the KGB any longer had a serious use for his talents or to assist in his rehabilitation. When Oleg Kalugin met him for the first time at the beginning of 1972, a month after Philby’s marriage to Rufa, he found “a wreck of a man:”

Over the next few years Kalugin and other Young Turks within the FCD gradually succeeded in rehabilitating Philby, using him to devise active measures and run seminars for young officers about to be posted to Britain, Ireland, Australasia and Scandinavia. Kryuchkov and the FCD old guard, however, remained suspicious of Philby and refused to allow him into Yasenevo.¹¹ Philby’s lack of status continued to rankle with him. He liked to give Western journalists the impression that he was Colonel—or even General—Philby of the KGB. In reality, he remained agent TOM.

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the mass expulsions of September 1971, most of the London residency’s agents were put on ice. The Centre calculated that the residency would be unlikely to resume normal operations, even on a reduced scale, until mid-1974 at the earliest.¹²

The much reduced number of KGB and GRU officers in London found themselves under considerably tighter surveillance. On September 17, 1971, Abdoolcader, the KGB agent in the GLC motor licensing department, was arrested after a tip-off from Lyalin, who had been his case officer for the previous two years. In his wallet was a postcard addressed to Lyalin, giving the latest registration numbers of MI5 surveillance vehicles. Abdoolcader was jailed for three years.¹³

With the previous resident, Voronin, declared persona non grata and known intelligence officers refused British visas, a junior Line KR officer, Yevgeni Ivanovich Lazebny, who had the cover position of security officer at the Soviet trade delegation and had somehow escaped expulsion, was made acting resident. During his fourteen months in charge, Lazebny tried to preserve his cover by keeping his office at the trade delegation and visiting the embassy each day to supervise the work of the residency. ¹⁴

Though out of his depth when it came to running intelligence operations, Lazebny insisted on elaborate and time-consuming security precautions which further complicated the life of the residency. No one was allowed to enter the residency wearing an overcoat for fear that it might be used to conceal material being smuggled in or out. Briefcases, bags and packages were also forbidden, and the shoes of operations officers were X-rayed for bugs or any hidden compartments. All mail and furniture bought or repaired locally were also X-rayed. The embassy administrative officer, M. V. Loshkarov, was disciplined for placing a bulk order at a London store for electric lamps which Lazebny feared might be bugged. Oil cans, batteries, even knots in woodwork, were regularly inspected to make sure they contained no bugs or secret compartments.¹⁵

At the end of 1972 Lazebny was succeeded as resident by the Latvian Yakov Konstantinovich Lukasevics (alias “Bukashev”),¹⁶ who continued to insist on elaborate security procedures. In 1971-2 the residency received agent reports that MI5 had a source either among the officials of the Soviet trade delegation or among the inspectors of industrial equipment. Though a time-consuming hunt for the traitor continued until 1976, it yielded no result. It was eventually concluded that the agent reports might have been planted by MI5 to distract the residency from its operational priorities. The residency’s fears of British penetration had, however, some foundation. An extensive network of bugging devices was discovered at the trade delegation, which contained outposts of both the KGB and GRU residencies.¹⁷

Following the 1971 expulsions, Cuban and east European intelligence services were asked by the Centre to help plug the intelligence gap in London.¹⁸ The KGB also sought to compensate in some degree for its diminished residency by expanding its agent network among the diplomats and staff of the London embassy. By 1973 nineteen members of the embassy were listed in Centre files as KGB agents, among them the ambassador’s deputy, Ivan Ippolitov.¹⁹ Some of the KGB officers who were expelled from, or denied entry to, Britain, were redeployed to Commonwealth capitals with substantial British expatriate communities—notably Delhi, Colombo, Dar-es-Salaam, Lagos and Lusaka.²⁰ The files seen by Mitrokhin record few major recruitments of British agents by the redeployed officers. In 1974, however, three operations officers in an east African residency—S. S. Sarmanov, G. M. Yermolev and N. T. Krestnikov—were given awards for recruiting a British journalist, TOM, and his wife IRENE. TOM and IRENE, however, proved of limited usefulness. Early in 1976 TOM moved to Asia and was briefly used to report on other Western residents. He failed, however, to gain access to any classified information and in April 1976 Kryuchkov decided to break operational contact with him.²¹

THE FIRST SECTION of the London residency to resume something like normal operations after the 1971 expulsions, albeit slowly and on a reduced scale, was Line X (ST). During 1972 plans were made to renew contact with six of its most highly rated agents: the veteran Melita Norwood (HOLA) in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, first recruited in 1937; ACE, an aeronautical engineer; HUNT, a civil servant recruited by Norwood; YUNG, an aeronautics and computer engineer; NAGIN, a chemical engineer; and STEP, a laboratory assistant.²² Though Mitrokhin’s notes give only an incomplete account of how the six agents were reactivated, it is clear that it was a lengthy business, probably preceded by prolonged and painstaking surveillance to ensure that none was under MI5 observation. Contact with HUNT was not re-established until 1975, and even then it was thought safer to use a French agent, MAIRE, rather than an operations officer from the London residency, as his controller.²³

When contact was renewed with Melita Norwood in London in 1974, it was discovered that she had retired two years earlier. Since she no longer had access to classified material, regular contact was discontinued. HOLA, however, retained a high reputation in the Centre as probably its longest-serving British agent with a highly productive record which included intelligence on the British nuclear program. She seems to have remained throughout her career a true believer in the Soviet Union. During a visit to Moscow with her husband in 1979, forty-two years after her original recruitment, she was offered a further financial reward but declined, saying she had all she needed to live on.²⁴

By 1974 Line X at the London residency had nine operations officers (seven fewer than before operation FOOT), headed by the deputy resident, Oleg Aleksandrovich Yakimov, and had successfully resumed contact with most of the Line X agents put on ice in September 1971.²⁵ The most productive of the reactivated agents was, almost certainly, the aeronautical engineer ACE, recruited in the late 1960s.²⁶ By the time he died in the early 1980s, ACE’s product file consisted of about 300 volumes, each of about 300 pages. Most of these 90,000 pages consisted of technical documentation on new aircraft (among them Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011), aero-engines (including Rolls-Royce, Olympus-593, RB-211 and SNEY-505) and flight simulators. ACE’s material on the flight simulators for the Lockheed L-1011 and Boeing 747 were the foundation for a new generation of Soviet equivalents. ACE also recruited under false flag (probably that of a rival company) an aero-engine specialist codenamed SWEDE. Remarkably, ACE was paid a monthly salary of only 225 pounds, raised to 350 pounds in 1980.²⁷

Despite the exclusion from Britain of known KGB and GRU officers, the KGB was still able to send Line X agents and “trusted contacts” from Soviet universities to Britain on scientific exchanges and for postgraduate or postdoctoral research in engineering and the natural sciences. Most went either to universities and polytechnics in the London area or to Oxford and Cambridge.²⁸ “Targets of operational interest,” where it was hoped that KGB agents and trusted contacts could identify potential recruits, included Churchill College, King’s College, St. Catharine’s College and Trinity Hall at Cambridge University; Magdalen, Queen’s and Trinity Colleges at Oxford; King’s College, University College, the London School of Economics, the School of Oriental and African Studies and the School of Slavonic Studies at London University.²⁹

Some of the Soviet scientists who came to conduct research in Britain were KGB officers. In May 1975, for example, Dr. Hugh Huxley of the British Medical Research Council’s molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge invited Academician Frank, director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Biophysics Institute, to send a member of his institute to carry out research at the laboratory. Unknown to Huxley, the invitation was misappropriated by the KGB. The scientist sent to Cambridge was Valeri Vasilyevich Lednev of Directorate T.³⁰ At about the time Lednev embarked on his British assignment, the head of Directorate T, Mikhail Lopatin, who had been in charge of ST collection in Britain in the mid-1960s, arrived in London to advise the residency on the expansion of Line X operations.³¹

Though not comprehensive, Mitrokhin’s notes suggest that there were fewer new British Line X recruits during the 1970s than in the decade before operation FOOT. The earliest post-FOOT recruit definitely identified by Mitrokhin is CHRISTINA, who was recruited in 1973—probably in the Soviet Union.³² It is unclear from Mitrokhin’s notes whether four other Line X agents operating in Britain in the early 1970s were recruited before or after the mass expulsion of KGB and GRU officers.³³ Because of the difficult operating conditions in London, at least six (probably more) Line X agents either met their case officers outside Britain or were controlled by other European residencies.³⁴

The most important British ST agent recruited during the decade after operation FOOT was, almost certainly, Michael John Smith (codenamed BORG), a Communist electronics engineer.³⁵ The secretary of the Surrey Communist Party in the early 1970s, Richard Geldart, recalls Smith as an “out-and-out Tankie”—a hardline supporter of the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks: “Not to put too fine a point on it, he was the total nerd. There was socializing going on, but he was not part of it.”³⁶ A Line X officer at the London residency, Viktor Alekseevich Oshchenko (codenamed OZEROV), made initial contact with Smith in a pub near Smith’s flat at Kingston-on-Thames after a trade union meeting held in May 1975 before the referendum on British membership of the EEC. On instructions from Oshchenko, Smith left the Communist Party, ceased trade union activity, became a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph, joined a local tennis club and—as his operational file quaintly puts it—“endeavored to display his loyalty to the authorities.”

In July 1976, helped by bureaucratic confusion in MI5, caused by the remarkable coincidence that the Surrey Communist Party contained another Michael John Smith, he gained a job as a test engineer in the quality assurance department of Thorn—EMI Defense Electronics at Feltham, Middlesex. Within a year he was working on the top secret project XN-715, developing and testing radar fuses for Britain’s freefall nuclear bomb.³⁷ The KGB passed the documents on project XN-715 provided by Smith to N. V. Serebrov and other nuclear weapons specialists at a secret Soviet military research institute codenamed Enterprise G-4598, who succeeded in building a replica of the British radar fuse. Smith’s intelligence, however, seemed too good to be true. Serebrov and his colleagues were puzzled as to how Smith had been able to obtain the radio frequency on which the detonator was to operate. This information, they believed, was so sensitive that it should not have appeared even in the top secret documents on the design and operation of the detonator to which Smith had access. Armed with a knowledge of the radio frequency, Soviet forces would be able to create radio interference which could prevent the detonator from operating. One possibility which occurred to the specialists was that the frequency supplied by Smith might be merely a test frequency which would not be used in actual military operations. But they remained suspicious of the extent of the detailed highly classified information which Smith had been able to supply.³⁸

The Centre also seems to have been suspicious of the ease and speed with which a well-known pro-Soviet Communist had been able to gain access to one of Britain’s most highly classified nuclear secrets so soon after going through the motions of leaving the Party and switching from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph. Its suspicions that Smith’s intelligence on the radar fuse might have been a sophisticated deception seem to have strengthened when he told his controller in 1978 that he had lost his security clearance and, for the time being, could no longer provide classified information. (Though Smith did not realize it at the time, MI5 had discovered its earlier error and secretly informed Thorn-EMI of Smith’s Communist past.)³⁹

To try to resolve its doubts the Centre devised a series of tests to check Smith’s reliability. The first test, which Smith seems to have passed, was to remove two packets of secret material from a dead letter-box in Spain. The second, more elaborate check on Smith, personally approved by Andropov and termed in KGB jargon “a psycho-physiological test using a non-contact polygraph,” was conducted in Vienna in August 1979 by Boris Konstantinovich Stalnov and two OT (operational—technical support) officers. Stalnov began with a brief prepared speech, duly entered in Smith’s file:

Smith was then asked over 120 questions and his replies secretly recorded. Subsequent analysis of the recording and Smith’s response to each question persuaded the Centre—doubtless to its immense relief—that he was not, as it had thought possible, engaged in a grand deception orchestrated by British intelligence. Though Smith had been led to suppose that the “psycho-physiological test” was a routine formality, it had never been used before by the KGB outside the Soviet Union. The Centre was so pleased with its success that it decided to use the same method to check other agents. It none the less decided to give Smith a third (and apparently final) test of his “sincerity” by instructing him to remove a container holding two rolls of film from a DLB in the Paris suburbs and to deliver it to a KGB officer in Lisbon.⁴⁰ The KGB would doubtless have been able to detect any attempt by Smith or another intelligence agency to open the container.

From 1979 onward Smith was paid a 300-pound monthly retainer by the KGB. His file also records additional payments for documents supplied by him of 1,600 pounds, 750 pounds, 400 pounds and 2,000 pounds. Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the dates of these payments, they probably relate chiefly to Smith’s two years in Thorn—EMI Defense Electronics.⁴¹ The excitement of working for the KGB, copying highly classified documents, emptying DLBs and going to secret assignations with his case officers in foreign capitals seems to have rescued Smith from his earlier existence as a “total nerd.” A hint of the exotic began to enliven a previously drab lifestyle. In 1979 he got married, took up flamenco dancing, began experimenting with Spanish and Mexican cuisine, and gave dinner parties at which guests were served his homemade wine.⁴²

Smith was so taken with his life as a secret agent that he made strenuous efforts to recover the security clearance he had lost in 1978, even drafting a personal appeal two years later to Margaret Thatcher to intercede on his behalf. “There is a cloud over me which I cannot dispel,” he complained to the Prime Minister. “I have been wrongly suspected and have lost my position most unjustly.” Though Smith seems never to have posted his letter to Mrs. Thatcher, in June 1980 he succeeded in putting his case to an MI5 officer. Smith began by denying that he had ever been a Communist, was confronted with evidence that he had, then apologized for lying and said he had joined the Party only to find a girlfriend.⁴³ Amazingly, Smith’s campaign to recover his security clearance survived even this setback. More amazingly still, a few years later it succeeded.⁴⁴

In 1980 7.5 percent of all Soviet scientific and technological intelligence came from British sources.⁴⁵ As well as providing what it claimed was enormous assistance to Soviet research and development, especially in the military field, Directorate T also prided itself on obtaining commercial secrets which drove down the cost of contracts with Western companies. One British example of which it was particularly proud during the later 1970s was the negotiation of the contract for two large methane production plants with the companies Davy Power Gas and Klîckner INA Industrial Plants.⁴⁶ The original price quoted by the British consortium was 248 million convertible roubles, as compared with the 206 million allocated for the project by the Soviet Council of Ministers. An operation conducted in the Peking Hotel, Moscow, on March 23, 1977 by Directorate T with the assistance of the Moscow KGB, probably based on a combination of eavesdropping and the secret photocopying of company documents, obtained commercial intelligence which—according to a report by the Ministry of Foreign Trade—made it possible to negotiate a reduction of 50.6 million roubles on the price of the contract. On October 24, 1977 Andropov formally commended fifteen KGB officers for their part in the operation. Ironically, the British prime minister, James Callaghan, subsequently wrote to his Soviet opposite number, Alexei Kosygin, to thank the Soviet government for awarding the contract to a British firm.⁴⁷

THE PR AND KR Lines at the London residency appear to have had less success during the 1970s than Line X. The only known Soviet agent within the British intelligence community, Geoffrey Prime of GCHQ, was run not by the residency but by Third Directorate controllers who met him outside Britain.⁴⁸ The most highly placed Line PR agent active during the decade after operation FOOT identified in Mitrokhin’s notes was WILLIAM, a trade union official and former Communist. WILLIAM was recruited during a visit to the Soviet Union by Boris Vasilyevich Denisov, a KGB officer working under cover as a Soviet trade union (AUCCTU) official, and agreed to provide inside information on the TUC and the Labor Party. After a meeting with WILLIAM in London in December 1975, however, his case officer reported that he had become anxious about his role as a Soviet agent. Though reaffirming his desire to help his Soviet comrades, WILLIAM said that he was distrusted by less progressive trade union officials because of his Marxist views and worried that word of his Soviet connection would leak out and damage his chances of becoming leader of his union.⁴⁹ Lacking any really important British agents, Line PR tended to exaggerate the significance of second-rate agents such as WILLIAM and its other sources of inside information on British politics and government policy.

The political contact of which Line PR was proudest was Harold Wilson (codenamed OLDING), who became president of the Great Britain—USSR Association after his resignation as prime minister in 1976. The first secretary at the Soviet embassy responsible for liaison with the association, Andrei Sergeyevich Parastayev, periodically called on Wilson, nominally to discuss its affairs with him. The fact that Parastayev was a KGB agent allowed the residency to claim that it had secured access to the former prime minister. Though not claiming that Wilson was a “confidential contact” (let alone an agent), the residency reported that he freely provided political information.⁵⁰ Mitrokhin’s notes give no examples of what the information comprised, but if Wilson’s observations to Parastayev resembled his private comments to some of his British friends and acquaintances, they would certainly have attracted the attention of the Centre and probably have been passed to the Politburo. Roy Jenkins noted in 1978, for example, that Wilson “did not think there was much future for the [Callaghan] Government, or indeed the Labor Party.”⁵¹

The Centre claimed that disinformation from Service A had been passed to Wilson, probably via Parastayev, with the intention that it should reach the Labor government. ⁵² It is highly unlikely, however, that the disinformation had any significant influence on Wilson, let alone on the Callaghan government. In retirement, though remaining firmly anchored in the Labor Party, Wilson moved steadily to the right. According to his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, by 1977 his dislike of the far left equaled that of “the most conservative of capitalists.”⁵³ Nor did Wilson show great sympathy for Soviet foreign policy. His KGB file reports that, after the invasion of Afghanistan, he canceled a visit to the USSR in his capacity as president of the Great Britain—USSR Association.⁵⁴

By the 1970s Line PR in London, as in other residencies, was supposed to spend 25 percent of its time on active measures⁵⁵ and send annual statistics to the Centre on the number of its influence operations. These totaled 160 in 1976 and 190 in 1977.⁵⁶ During 1977 Line PR officers reported that they had initiated 99 discussions which allegedly “influenced” politicians, journalists and other opinion-formers, and claimed to have successfully prompted 26 public announcements, 20 publications, the sending of more than 20 letters and telegrams, 9 questions in Parliament, 5 press conferences, 4 meetings and demonstrations and 3 television and radio broadcasts. In addition, it had distributed three brochures and one forged document produced by Service A, which was responsible for active measures at the Centre.⁵⁷

In order to gain credit from the Centre, residencies invariably tried to exaggerate the success of their active measures. While working at the Centre, Oleg Gordievsky was told that in 1977 or 1978 the London resident, Yakov Lukasevics, had been asked by Andropov whether his residency possessed the means to influence British policy. “Why yes, we can exert influence,” Lukasevics replied. “We have such channels.” “I do not think you can,” Andropov told him. “I think you are too hasty in answering that question.”⁵⁸ The files noted by Mitrokhin confirm Andropov’s skepticism.

The KGB’s attempts to recruit agents of influence in the British media to use for active measures seems to have met with limited success by comparison with France and some other European countries. The journalist DAN, probably the London residency’s most reliable agent of influence during the 1960s,⁵⁹ broke contact during the 1970s—probably after he was put on ice in the aftermath of operation FOOT. Several attempts by the residency to reactivate DAN failed and he was eventually written off some time in the early 1980s.⁶⁰

Probably the most ambitious scheme devised by the London residency during the 1970s for the recruitment of a prominent agent of influence was targeted on Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, the socialist Bishop of Southwark.⁶¹ In October 1975 Stockwood delivered a public protest against a “Call to the Nation,” jointly issued by Archbishop Donald Coggan of Canterbury and Archbishop Stuart Blanch of York, claiming that it put too much emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and too little on the social injustices which caused so much human misery. The most remarkable feature of Stockwood’s protest, however, was that he chose to make it in the pages of the Communist Morning Star, and that he included in it an extraordinary tribute to the Soviet Bloc:

Sixteen Labor MPs signed a motion “marveling at the innocence” of Stockwood’s understanding of Communist regimes. Another fifty backbenchers supported a motion supporting the archbishops against his criticisms. One told the Guardian, “The Marxists seem now to have penetrated the higher echelons of the established Church.”⁶³ The Soviet embassy, possibly on the initiative of the residency, established what a KGB file describes as “close contact” with Stockwood.

Hopes in the residency of the bishop’s potential for active measures reached their peak when he arranged a dinner party with Gordon McLennan, general secretary of the British Communist Party, as guest of honor, to which, apparently, at least one Soviet official (who, unknown to Stockwood, was a KGB officer) was also invited.⁶⁴ Though Mitrokhin’s note on the dinner is tantalizingly brief, it seems to have been a boisterous evening. Stockwood frequently drank heavily at dinner parties to the extent that his friend Princess Margaret sometimes feared for the furniture at Kensington Palace.⁶⁵ Over dinner Stockwood asked McLennan what the Communist Party thought about the Church of England. McLennan replied that the Church was a “moral force in society,” but regretted that, “Unlike before and during the War, we do not see members of the clergy at progressive meetings and demonstrations.” Stockwood retorted, “We also don’t see you at demonstrations at the Soviet embassy!”⁶⁶ The residency seems to have concluded reluctantly that the Bishop’s tendency to launch into criticisms of the Soviet Union rendered him unsuitable for active measures.

THE EXAMPLES OF active measures noted by Mitrokhin suggest that the residency, in its reports to the Centre, sought to inflate a series of mostly modest successes. A characteristic example was its attempt to claim the credit for an article in the Guardian by Richard Gott (codenamed RON) attacking the role of the CIA in the overthrow of the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973, and denouncing the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet which had seized power after Allende’s death.⁶⁷ Gott later denied reports that he had been a KGB agent, but acknowledged that after the Chilean coup he had been contacted by Yuri Mikhailovich Solonitsyn (who he later realized was a KGB officer) and had “quite a sort of interesting session” with him on Chile, as well as a series of subsequent meetings with both Solonitsyn and Igor Victorovich Titov (also a KGB officer).⁶⁸ While the details of Gott’s articles may sometimes have been influenced by “interesting sessions” with Solonitsyn and Titov, his support for revolutionary movements in Latin America and loathing for American “imperialism” were so well established that he would have required little encouragement from the KGB to denounce either Pinochet or the CIA.⁶⁹

The London residency was equally prone to exaggerate its influence in the House of Commons. It tried to take the credit, for example, for the following parliamentary question put by the Labor MP James Lamond to Fred Mulley, Secretary of State for Defense in the Callaghan government, on February 21, 1978:

There is absolutely no evidence that James Lamond had any conscious link with the KGB. He was, however, vice-president of the World Peace Council (WPC) and appears not to have realized that this was the leading Soviet front organization, devoted to pinning all the blame for the nuclear arms race on Western warmongering. ⁷¹ Lamond’s parliamentary question, which received a noncommittal reply, derived from a much larger WPC campaign against the neutron bomb rather than from a brilliant initiative by the London residency.

The Centre usually responded relatively uncritically to exaggerated claims by residencies of the success of their active measures. It suited the Centre as much as the London residency to be able to inform the Politburo that it was able to inspire questions in the House of Commons and articles in the Guardian.

Despite Line PR’s attempts to inflate the importance of its active measures, it also had some undoubted successes. The Observer and the New Statesman were among a number of British print media taken in during the early 1980s by forged anti-American and anti-South African documents fabricated by Service A.⁷² The Observer printed a bogus memorandum from the Zaire security council under the headline, “US and S. Africa in Angola Plot.”⁷³ The New Statesman published a forged letter from South African military intelligence to Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN, conveying its “gratitude” and referring to a birthday present sent to her “as a token of appreciation.”⁷⁴ As late as 1986, the conservative Sunday Express based its main front page story on reports (also concocted by Service A) that the AIDS virus had originally been developed as part of an American biological warfare program.⁷⁵ Claims that KGB active measures had succeeded in producing significant shifts in British opinion, however, were based on little more than wishful thinking.

The KGB’s shortage of major agents in the British media helps to explain why it chose a Danish rather than a British journalist, Arne Herløv Petersen (codenamed KHARLEV and PALLE) for its first major active measure against Margaret Thatcher after she became prime minister in 1979. Originally a confidential contact of the Copenhagen residency, Petersen had been invited to Moscow in the mid-1970s to “deepen the relationship.”⁷⁶ Thereafter he was regularly used as an agent of influence not merely to write articles along lines suggested by his case officers but to publish, also under his own name, articles and pamphlets written in English by Service A. The first of the KGB/Petersen co-productions attacking Thatcher was a 1979 pamphlet, entitled Cold Warriors, which gave her pride of place as Europe’s leading anti-Soviet crusader. The next Petersen pamphlet ghostwritten by Service A, True Blues, published in 1980, was solely devoted to an onslaught on Thatcher. It made the mistake of attempting satire—a weak area of the KGB’s usually heavy-handed active measures—and carried the feeble subtitle “The Thatcher that Couldn’t Mend her own Roof.” The Service A author had an even feebler grasp of English geography, believing Mrs. Thatcher’s birthplace of Grantham in Lincolnshire to be “in the suburbs of London.” Though the Centre appears to have been curiously proud of them, both pamphlets (probably intended chiefly for mailing to British “opinion-formers”) had negligible influence.⁷⁷

THOUGH MITROKHIN HAD unrestricted access to FCD files, their sheer volume meant that his notes on them are bound to contain significant gaps. The possibility thus remains that the KGB had important Cold War British sources not identified by him. It is unlikely, however, that there were many of them. Oleg Gordievsky has confirmed that during his posting to the London residency from 1982 to 1985, which included two years as head of Line PR and a few months as resident-designate, Line PR and, probably, Line KR were running no British agents of major importance.⁷⁸ There remains the possibility of British agents recruited and run by residencies and illegals outside the United Kingdom⁷⁹—a list by Mitrokhin of KGB agents, contacts and “developmentals” (targets under cultivation) includes a tantalizing one-line reference to a British agent run from Karlshorst whose operational file in 1981 ran to fifteen volumes.⁸⁰

The most remarkable British agent identified by Mitrokhin outside the field of ST to have been recruited after operation FOOT was also run by Line KR outside the United Kingdom. Given the codename SCOT, he was a bent London copper: Detective Sergeant John Symonds of the Metropolitan Police, who became probably the most peripatetic of all the KGB’s British agents.⁸¹ The London residency, however, was able to claim no credit for his recruitment.

On November 29, 1969, the day that The Times published photographs of the footprints on the moon of Apollo 12 astronauts, it also carried a front page story headlined “London Policeman in Bribe Allegations. Tapes Reveal Planted Evidence.” Conversations secretly recorded by two undercover Times reporters were said to prove that Symonds and at least two other detectives were “taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence in court, and for allowing a criminal to work unhindered.” Symonds, then aged thirty-three, admitted to the reporters that he was a member of what he called “a little firm in a firm”—corrupt detectives in the pay of criminals such as south London gang boss Charlie Richardson.⁸²

While awaiting trial at the Old Bailey in 1972, Symonds went into hiding for several months, then fled abroad. His KGB file reveals that he used a passport obtained in the name of his girlfriend’s mentally handicapped brother, John Frederick Freeman, and had his passport photograph authenticated as that of Freeman by the mistress of a member of the Richardson gang. In his absence, the two other corrupt policemen identified by The Times were sentenced to six and seven years’ imprisonment. In August 1972 Symonds entered the Soviet embassy in Rabat, told his story, said that his money was running out and offered his services to the KGB.⁸³ To be certain that his story attracted the Centre’s attention, he gave the name of a Special Branch officer guarding the defector Oleg Lyalin, and alleged that he was probably corruptible. Symonds also made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defense, regularly bribed Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Met “to smooth over certain unpleasantness.”⁸⁴ Though Moody was later convicted of accepting huge bribes from the underworld and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, the allegation that Healey was involved in the bribery was wholly fraudulent. The Centre, however, took Symonds’s tall story at its improbable face value.⁸⁵

Symonds spent the next eight years as a KGB agent. Noting that he was “of attractive appearance,” the Centre decided to use him as its first British “Romeo spy,” using seduction and romance, rather than the traditional cruder KGB techniques of sexual compromise and blackmail, to recruit or obtain classified information from a series of female officials. In 1973 Symonds was posted to Bulgaria in order to cultivate suitable targets at Black Sea resorts popular with Western tourists. Symonds’s most important sexual conquest was the wife of an official in an FRG government ministry. Over the next few years he paid a number of visits to Bonn to continue the affair. Intelligence from Symonds’s German girlfriend in 1975 was considered so important by the Centre that it was made the subject of a personal report to Andropov.⁸⁶

Symonds was used by the KGB to attempt the seduction of female officials, mostly Western embassy staff, on four continents. His next assignment, after beginning his affair with the woman from Bonn, was to target women at American and British missions in Africa during the latter part of 1973. At the end of the year, however, he fell ill in Tanzania with what his KGB file describes as “tropical fever,” and had to travel to Moscow for medical treatment. As soon as he had recovered, Symonds was ordered to cultivate a member of the British embassy staff in Moscow, codenamed VERA, who had been observed going for long solitary walks in her spare time. Posing as Jean-Jacques Baudouin, a Canadian businessman attending the 1974 International Polymer Exhibition in Moscow, Symonds succeeded in staging an apparently chance encounter with VERA and striking up a friendship with her. Though Symonds’s file claims that VERA became “attached” to him and gave him details of her next posting as well as her home address in Britain, there is no indication that she passed on to him any more than unimportant personal gossip about some of her colleagues and superiors in Moscow and London. The Centre, however, considered her a potentially valuable source for identifying other, more vulnerable female targets in the British embassy.⁸⁷

In 1976, on KGB instructions, Symonds set out on a long journey which took him from Bulgaria through Africa and India to south-east Asia. In India he cultivated an English woman (codenamed JILL), an Israeli and at least five American women. In 1977, however, while in Singapore pursuing a secretary at a Western diplomatic mission who had been identified as a target for cultivation by the local KGB residency, Symonds believed that he had come under surveillance, took a flight to Athens and returned to Bulgaria. An assessment by Directorate K of Symonds’s work over the previous five years concluded that he had shown no sign of dishonesty in his dealings with the KGB, had obtained material “of significant operational interest” and—but for the fact that his existing travel documents had aroused the suspicion of Western security services—still had considerable potential as a KGB agent. At the request of Kalugin, the head of Directorate K, Kryuchkov instructed the Illegals Directorate to give Symonds a new identity.⁸⁸

The identity chosen for Symonds was that of a “dead double,” Raymond Francis Everett (codenamed FORST), an Australian who had died in childhood during the Second World War.⁸⁹ On July 23, 1978 Symonds flew from Moscow to Tokyo en route to Australasia, carrying a forged British passport in the name of Everett, a genuine birth certificate in the same name and 8,000 US dollars. Once in Australia Symonds was to abandon the British passport and use the birth certificate to obtain an Australian passport in the name of the dead double. Symonds began by spending several months in New Zealand developing his legend so that, once in Australia, he could pose as an Australian who had spent some years in New Zealand.⁹⁰

In November 1978 SCOT traveled to Australia with a group of rugby supporters and began to cultivate Margaret, the manageress of a small travel agency, in the hope that she would provide the necessary reference for his passport application. Symonds’s cynical report on Margaret was probably typical of the way he had sized up the previous women he had been instructed to seduce. Margaret, he claimed, was tall, thin, plain, round-shouldered, had hair on her upper lip and was bound to be flattered by his attentions. Symonds pursued her with flowers, chocolates, presents and invitations to dinner. Unfortunately for Symonds, Margaret was honest as well as unattractive. When he asked her to act as a referee, she refused on the grounds that the law required her to have known him for at least a year. By now Symonds’s money had almost run out. Arrangements for him to receive more money via the Canberra residency broke down and his landlord locked him out when he failed to pay the rent. A female schoolteacher whom he persuaded to put him up also threw him out after a fortnight. At one point Symonds was reduced to spending several nights in a Salvation Army hostel. Eventually, with the help of a French bank in Sydney, he was able to withdraw 5,000 US dollars from a bank account he had opened in the name of Freeman (his first alias) in Senegal.⁹¹

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.⁹⁴ In 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.⁹⁶ The 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.⁹⁸ Lukasevics’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.¹⁰⁰ In 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.¹⁰¹ Also 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

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.¹⁰⁵ During 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.¹⁰⁷ Another 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.¹⁰⁸ Its 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.¹¹¹ In 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.¹¹⁴ Other defectors exfiltrated by SIS included the leading Russian scientist Vladimir Pasechnik, who provided extraordinary intelligence on the vast Soviet biological warfare program.¹¹⁵ There 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.