The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

Gordievsky decided he had to alert MI6 that he was in trouble and needed to get out. He planned to initiate the brush contact at St. Basil’s Cathedral to pass the MI6 agent a note. In addition, he had made the anguished decision to go alone, partly because he felt he couldn’t fully trust Leila to keep his secret. A dedicated citizen and daughter of a KGB general, she’d likely turn him in. When she and the girls left to vacation with her family at a summer resort, he secretly said goodbye to them forever. Then, on the last Sunday in June, Gordievsky spent three hours engaged in “dry-cleaning,” or making sure to lose all surveillance, before ending up at Red Square. He wrote out a note while locked in a bathroom stall before heading to the cathedral. There his heart sank when he saw the stairway he was supposed to use blocked off, with a sign saying the upper floors were closed for renovation.

In mid-July, Gordievsky decided to try to implement PIMLICO. As he prepared his Tuesday visit to the bread shop at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, he got two phone calls. One was his father-in-law inviting him to dinner that night. He could never be in both places on time, but he accepted, knowing that the KGB, listening in, would send its surveillance team there, so he might be under less scrutiny at the bread shop; he’d just arrive late for dinner and face whatever pique that caused his father-in-law. Then his friend Lyubimov called to invite him to his dacha the following week. Gordievsky would be gone by then, but he accepted this invitation too, hoping to trick the KGB into thinking he was making plans to stick around.

At four o’ clock, he left home and spent nearly three hours “dry-cleaning” before showing up at the bread shop with his Safeway bag. Roy Ascot and his wife, Caroline, were passing by on the way to dinner when he spotted Gordievsky’s bag. The KGB was heavily tailing Ascot, and he knew that any departure from his route would sound alarms. It was 10 minutes past the appointed time, and he feared that his deputy, Arthur Gee (whose turn it was to check the spot), had missed him. Gee, however, had also seen Gordievsky’s bag and quickly parked at his home nearby before setting out with his own gear to acknowledge the signal. Finding Gordievsky, he took a Mars Bar out his Harrods bag and walked by him eating it while flashing eye contact. It worked.

The next day, Gordievsky headed to the train station to buy a ticket, again ditching surveillance through evasive measures. He had successfully done this now several times, in part because Viktor Grushko was using his own surveillance team, which he used to following Chinese diplomats, in an effort to limit the embarrassing news of Gordievsky to his own department. Had Grushko used the Seventh Directorate, the section dedicated to surveillance, the tail would have been harder to lose. This later aided Gordievsky during PIMLICO as well.

When news of the signal hit MI6 headquarters in London, the team launched into action. After a series of meetings, some members flew to Finland to prepare for Gordievsky’s arrival there. By coincidence, the new British ambassador to the Soviet Union, Bryan Cartledge, was arriving that Thursday, and a welcoming reception would be held Friday evening at the embassy. This meant that the plan must be altered, as the MI6 staff members would need to attend the reception; if they departed for a shopping trip to Finland Friday afternoon as the plan called for, the KGB would find it highly unusual.

Thus, a new plan was devised. Arthur Gee’s wife, Rachel, pretended to have hurt her back, and she voiced her pain frequently in the apartment so that the KGB bugs would pick it up. It would develop into a need to see a specialist in Helsinki, and the Ascots would offer to accompany them. They’d attend the reception briefly before saying their goodbyes and taking their leave. When Cartledge was informed of the plan just days before his arrival, he complained that it was too risky and should be canceled. If they were caught, he’d be expelled before his ambassadorship had even begun, creating a stain on his résumé. The final decision went all the way to the prime minister. At that moment, Margaret Thatcher was on her annual visit to Balmoral Castle with the queen. A phone call was too risky, so her private secretary was dispatched to make the trip in person. When he finally reached her, she quickly gave her okay: Gordievsky “had done the West a great service, and now that he was in danger, Britain must do everything in its power to save him, whatever the diplomatic repercussions” (269).

The author shifts to a format of headed sections giving the time and date of the actions over the two days that PIMLICO was carried out. Despite unforeseen setbacks and hurdles, the plan went forward as devised. Caroline Ascot and Rachel Gee packed what they needed for their purported trip to Finland. Trunk space had to be reserved for Gordievsky, so their “luggage” consisted of travel bags stuffed with cushions that could be folded flat when empty. They also packed a picnic lunch because that was their pretext for stopping at the pull-off area that would serve as the rendezvous point.

At the British embassy in Moscow, a couple of scares occurred. In mid-afternoon, for example, a member of the embassy staff arrived from a trip to Finland with the news that the border guards had demanded to search his car. He’d allowed it, even letting their dogs sniff around it. Ascot was incensed. The guards hadn’t broken any laws in demanding this, but they had broken with convention, and Ascot was prepared to protest mightily if they attempted it with his and Gee’s cars. He forged a letter of protest by the new ambassador and brought it to show the guards if needed.

At four o’ clock, Gordievsky set off on a “dry-cleaning” route before heading to the train station, where he took the overnight train to Leningrad. He had a top bunk in a four-bunk sleeper car. After eating a small supper, he took some sedatives and fell asleep. In the early hours of Saturday, he woke up on the bottom bunk with a pounding headache and blood on his clothes. Another passenger explained that when the train had braked hard, Gordievsky had fallen out and hit his head. The sedatives had prevented him from waking up during it all. He went out into the corridor to get some fresh air, realizing what a mess he looked like.

Meanwhile, the Ascots and Gees had started their journey as planned, in two separate cars. They detected no tail at first and had a sinking feeling they were being set up, as it all seemed too easy. Because they assumed that the cars were bugged, they had to keep up the charade of Rachel’s aching back and couldn’t converse freely. Soon they picked up a surveillance car, which followed them all the way to downtown Leningrad before vanishing when they stopped at a hotel for breakfast. Ascot remained in his car, pretending to sleep in case the KGB returned. Sure enough, agents came along, trying to look inside their cars. Each time, Ascot pretended to wake up suddenly and scared them off. He now assumed that they’d be followed all the way to the border.

When Gordievsky got off the train, he took a bus headed for the Finnish border. He got off at the post marking 836 miles from Moscow and found the turnout. He was four hours early. After hiding in the bushes, he started getting bitten by mosquitoes and decided that he had time to hitchhike into the border town of Vyborg, 16 miles away, for breakfast. It was incredibly risky—as Macintyre notes, “with hindsight, very nearly insane” (285). At a café in town, he ordered fried chicken and two bottles of beer. Finally relaxing, with food and drink, he suddenly felt very tired and slipped off into sleep. He awoke with a start at one o’ clock, panicky, feeling that the three well-dressed men now in the café were watching him. He paid and started back along the highway, which was now virtually free of vehicles. Afraid of being late and missing his only chance to escape, he broke out into a run along the road. Finally, a truck came along and he got another ride. Getting out in the middle of nowhere, he lied that he had a romantic tryst with a woman at a dacha in the woods nearby. He made it back to the bushes in the turnout and waited.

As the Ascots and Gees made their way north of Leningrad, the surveillance picked up: Both police and KGB cars escorted them, in front and behind. Ascot had no idea what to do if they remained like that when he came to the turnout. Usually, he just ignored any surveillance, but he knew that was making it too easy for those tailing him. From experience, he knew that the KBG hated it when MI6 agents made surveillance obvious, as if mocking the KGB. Thus, he slowed his car down, and Gee, following, did the same, until they were traveling only about 30 miles per hour. The driver of the front surveillance car got impatient and zoomed off ahead, pulling in behind them a bit down the road. With no one in front, Ascot then gunned his engine. The two foreign-made embassy cars had much more power than the little Soviet Lada KGB cars, and they opened a wide gap. As they turned a corner, however, they all had to stop when they came upon a military convoy crossing the road.

Only 10 kilometers from the turnout, this was their final chance. When the convoy finally cleared, Ascot floored it with Gee following close behind. At 85 mph, they opened up a half-mile lead on their tail. When they got to the turnout, Ascot braked hard, pulled in, and came to an abrupt stop, Gee following suit. There they waited. When it was clear that the surveillance cars hadn’t seen them and had kept going, the two couples started to follow the steps of the plan. Just then, Gordievsky emerged from the bushes and asked, “Which car”? (292).

Gordievsky was quickly spirited into the trunk of Gee’s car with a few supplies and a space blanket. He was to strip to his underwear and wrap himself with the blanket to try to prevent an infrared scan from detecting his body heat. However, between his sweat, bloody clothes, and beer breath, a more likely threat was the border guards’ dogs sniffing him out. Just up the highway, they passed their surveillance convoy, now parked on the side of the road conferring about what had happened. The agents jumped into their cars and resumed their tail. Coming to the border, the PIMLICO team faced five checkpoints, three Soviet and two Finnish. They sailed through the first two checkpoints without even having to show their documents. At the third, they parked the cars next to each other as the men lined up at customs and immigration to fill out paperwork.

The women chatted while they waited, eyeing the border guards and their sniffer dogs going up and down the parked cars belong to Russians and Finnish tourists. The Ascots had brought along the youngest of their children, Florence, who was just an infant. She was being fussy, which helped create a diversion, and Caroline held her outside, talking to Rachel through the window of the Gees’ car. When the dogs approached, Rachel picked up a bag of cheese and onion crisps (potato chips), imported from Britain for the embassy shop, handed one to Caroline, and dropped a few on the ground. She offered one to a sniffer dog, which “had almost certainly never smelled anything like cheese and onion crisps before” (297). As the dog chewed on the crisp, its handler pulled it away.

The other dog was beginning to sniff around the trunk that contained Gordievsky. Thinking quickly, Caroline laid Florence on the trunk and changed her diaper, “which the baby, with immaculate timing, had just filled” (298). She then dropped the dirty, stinky diaper on the ground next to the dog, which moved away. Finally, the men returned with the required paperwork, and shortly afterward a border guard came with their passports—everything now ready for the final leg of the journey. They passed the last border checks and finally entered Finland. The Gees changed the music from the rock ‘n’ roll that had been playing to Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia to signal to Gordievsky that they had made it.

A little past the border, they met the team members waiting there, MI6 and Danish PET agents, who helped Gordievsky exit the trunk and gave him clean clothes to wear. Gordievsky then got in the car with Simon Brown and Victoria Price, filling them in as they drove. While refueling at a gas station, they called London headquarters and gave the signal that the mission was successful. After stopping in Helsinki for dinner, they drove on northward toward a remote border with Norway. Crossing over, they spent the night at a hotel near Hammerfest Airport, and flew the next morning to London via Oslo.

In England, Gordievsky stayed for four months at a guest suite at Fort Monckton, a training base for MI6. At first, he was overcome with a sense of loss for his family, and MI6 began preparations to privately negotiate with the Soviets to try to get them out. In addition, the agency had to deal with how to manage the news about Gordievsky’s defection publicly. Relations with the Soviet Union were especially tricky, as the news risked torpedoing the thaw between the two countries brought about by Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. At Fort Monckton, Gordievsky participated in extensive debriefing sessions with officials including William Casey, head of the CIA. Casey met with Gordievsky in September for advice about Ronald Reagan’s first summit with Gorbachev that November. Again Gordievsky had a hand in shaping Cold War history. Later, he traveled to the US and met with officials from the State and Defense Departments. He even met Aldrich Ames at CIA headquarters. No one yet knew that Ames was working for the Soviets and was the one who betrayed Gordievsky.

After internal debate, Britain decided to quietly approach a Soviet diplomat in France to try to broker a deal for the Soviets to release Gordievsky’s family. The Soviets, however, would have none of it, so in September Britain went public with the news of Gordievsky’s defection and expelled KGB agents that Gordievsky had identified. In response, Ambassador Cartledge was called into the Foreign Ministry in Moscow for a scolding and told of British diplomats who had to leave. In all, each side expelled 31 diplomats in the fallout.

In Moscow, Leila was subjected to intense interrogation and presumed guilty as well. She was shocked upon hearing the truth about her husband and maintained her innocence. However, her life was turned upside down, as she was effectively put under house arrest. She changed her daughters’ last name to her maiden name to try to shield them somewhat from any negative effects. Gordievsky continued to mourn for them, saying that his life had no meaning without them, and British officials assured him that they’d keep working to bring them to Britain.

In the KGB, many top officials involved in Gordievsky’s case passed the buck, while the lowest rung on the ladder—the surveillance team—bore the brunt of the punishment. The Leningrad KGB, which was responsible for surveillance, was eviscerated. Even future Russian leader Vladimir Putin was affected: As a young KGB officer in the Leningrad office, he saw some of his superiors lose their jobs. In late 1985, the KGB concluded its trial of Gordievsky, sentencing him to death.

Gordievsky traveled extensively, meeting with Western allies and dispensing advice about dealing with the Soviets. Eventually, he was set up in a safe house in a London suburb, living under an assumed name and constant police protection. He met Margaret Thatcher, who had relied so much on his anonymous advice earlier in her tenure as prime minister. Finally, in 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Leila and her daughters were allowed to go to Britain, where they reunited with Gordievsky. Due to the strain over the years and the lack of trust that had developed between him and Leila, Gordievsky’s marriage didn’t last. They divorced in 1993.

Macintyre closes the book with a rundown of what happened to each major player involved in Gordievsky’s spying and escape. In addition, the author explains how Aldrich Ames was caught and arrested in 1994, when his lavish lifestyle raised a red flag about the source of his income.