Art of Betrayal by Gordon Corera

Author:Gordon Corera
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2013-03-10T16:35:55+00:00

7

ESCAPE FROM MOSCOW

It was June 1985. As he opened the door of his Moscow apartment, Mikhail Lyubimov did not need to draw on his largely redundant spy skills to realise that something was wrong. Tension was etched on to the face of the old friend who stood on his doorstep. There were too many beads of sweat even for the stifling city heat of a Moscow summer.1 Lyubimov was an outsider now. A second divorce and an independent streak was enough to draw the ire of the hardliners in the KGB who had forced his departure a few years earlier. He had embarked on a new career as a writer.2 But his visitor was still an insider and he was not supposed to be in Moscow. He was supposed to be in London.

The lean KGB officer stepped into the kitchen and turned on the tap. ‘What are you doing?’ Lyubimov asked, thinking that he was trying to drown out any conversation if anyone was listening in. He just needed a drink, the man explained. He was in a bad way. His throat was dry. The vodka came out.

Memories had begun to pierce the fog that enveloped Oleg Gordievsky’s mind and that shrouded events of a few days earlier. The journey to a small guesthouse on the outskirts of Moscow and the offer of some Armenian brandy was clear. But after that there were only brief, malevolent flashes like a dark forest lit up by lightning strikes. There were the faces of the men staring at him and the words ‘confess’ repeated again and again. He had been drugged, he knew. But what had he said? He remembered a kind of euphoria that had come over him after the brandy which left him laughing and arguing and talking expansively with no nervousness or fear. He knew he had been close to breaking. He knew they were on to him.

As the memories slowly fought their way to the surface, Gordievsky had begun to recall more of what had been said.

‘Why do you have all those anti-Soviet volumes – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Maximov and the rest?’ the voice asked him.

‘But of course,’ he heard himself say, ‘as a PR [Political Reporting] Line officer I was supposed to read books like that.’

‘You used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal in this country.’3

There were other accusations that had also seeped into his consciousness before he arrived at Lyubimov’s apartment which he did not now mention to his friend.

‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,’ they had said. ‘We know you were a British agent. You’d better confess.’ Confess, the man said again and again. You’ve already done it, just do it again, they said, talking slowly as if to a child.

‘No, I’ve nothing to confess,’ Gordievsky could recall replying. He did not mention these exchanges, only the books, to his friend. Gordievsky and Lyubimov had bought the banned books together years earlier when their friendship had been forged serving overseas, happier times when both men were rising through the ranks of the KGB.

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