The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

MR. COLLINS AND MRS. THATCHER

The Iron Lady had developed a soft spot for her Russian spy.

Margaret Thatcher had never met Oleg Gordievsky. She did not know his name, and referred to him, inexplicably and insistently, as “Mr. Collins.” She knew he spied from within the Russian embassy, worried about the personal strain he was under, and reflected that he might “jump at any time,” and defect. If that moment came, the prime minister insisted, he and his family must be properly cared for. The Russian agent was no mere “intelligence egg layer,” she said, but a heroic, half-imagined figure, working for freedom under conditions of extreme peril. His reports were conveyed by her private secretary, numbered and marked “Top Secret and Personal” and “UK Eyes A,” meaning they were not to be shared with other countries. The prime minister consumed them avidly: “She would read, word for word, annotate, pose questions, and the papers came back with her marks over them, underlinings, exclamation marks and comments.” In the words of her biographer, Charles Moore, Thatcher was “not above being excited by secrecy in itself and by the romance of espionage,” but she was also conscious that the Russian was furnishing uniquely precious political insight: “Gordievsky’s despatches…conveyed to her, as no other information had done, how the Soviet leadership reacted to Western phenomena and, indeed, to her.” The spy opened up a window into Kremlin thinking, which she peered through with fascination and gratitude. “Probably no British prime minister has ever followed the case of a British agent with as much personal attention as Mrs. Thatcher devoted to Gordievsky.”

While British intelligence had been hunting for Koba, the KGB was working hard to try to ensure that Thatcher lost the 1983 general election. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was “the Iron Lady”—a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she reveled—and the KGB had been organizing “active measures” to undermine her ever since she came to power in 1979, including the placing of negative articles with sympathetic left-wing journalists. The KGB still had contacts on the left, and Moscow clung to the illusion that it might be able to influence the election in favor of the Labour Party, whose leader, after all, was still listed in KGB files as a “confidential contact.” In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.

Had Labour won, Gordievsky would have found himself in a truly bizarre position: passing KGB secrets to a government whose prime minister had once been the willing recipient of KGB cash. In the end, Michael Foot’s earlier incarnation as Agent BOOT remained a closely held secret; KGB efforts to swing the election had no impact whatever, and on June 9 Margaret Thatcher won by a landslide, boosted by victory in the Falklands the year before. Armed with a new

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