The don and the defector

Phillip Knightley

KGB: THE INSIDE STORY by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky

Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp. 704

The origins of this important book are almost as interesting as its contents. Christ- opher Andrew teaches history at Cam- bridge and is the author of several worthy books and many learned papers on intelli- gence. He is also a presenter of popular TV programmes like the BBC's Time- watch, where he entertains with discourses on subjects like the history of duelling, firing an antique pistol or two to show viewers how it was done.

In recent years he had been researching a major new academic work on intelli- gence, a history of the KGB, to comple- ment his much-praised Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Com- munity. Given the closed nature of Soviet society, Dr Andrew had to rely on a host of secondary sources, largely published in the West, the work of fellow academics, the odd untapped archive, and the recollec- tions of defectors. As he well knows, the latter's books always have to be treated with caution, ghosted as they often are by Western intelligence officers anxious to put their gloss or 'spin' on the matter.

Then, enter left, Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian intelligence officer who was re- cruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as long ago as 1974 and who bravely volunteered to be a 'defector in place' — to stay on in the KGB but all the while report to London. The damage Gordievsky caused Moscow until 1985, when he was `exfiltrated' (the intelligence world has a language of its own), was so great that in KGB circles today he is known as 'Mr G', a play on 'g' for `govno' — in short, 'Mr Shit'. Andrew and Gordievsky got together and discovered how similar their views on the KGB were. Even better, Gordievsky worked while in the KGB on an in-house history of its foreign intelligence arm and had access to large sections of the KGB's archives. A partnership was inevitable and this book is the result. Although Andrew did the writing, the book is a genuine co-authorship in that it carries the imprint of both men.

For his part, Andrew has produced a book that is dauntingly detailed (704 pages of which 161 are notes and diagrams) and therefore not a light read for the train trip to Brighton. The chapters dealing with the early history of the Russian intelligence service show that diligent research and narrative skill that Andrew (with David Dilks) brought to The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Services in the Twentieth Century.

But when we get to more recent events I feel the hand of Gordievsky grow heavier. Gordievsky is an ideological defector, the mirror image of Kim Philby and George Blake. When explaining on television•why he chose the path he did, Gordievsky said that once he had become disillusioned with his country's system of government he felt he could best help his people by working for the opposition intelligence service, exactly the story told by our own traitors.

And, of course, in a sense Gordievsky is still working for SIS, and this book was submitted for official approval before it was published. So there is nothing in it which harms Western intelligence, a great deal which will make it blush with pride, and a smear which can only be described as shameful.

This concerns Harry Hopkins, the American Democrat who supervised the Lend-Lease programme in the second world war and who was probably President Roosevelt's closest adviser. In his first mention in this book, Hopkins is described as 'the most important of all Soviet war- time agents in the United States . . . an agent of major significance'. (These are Gordievsky's recollections of a lecture by a senior KGB officer.) There is then a retreat from this sweep- ing smear. Gordievsky decides that 'Hop- kins had been an unconscious rather than a conscious agent.' (How can anyone be an unconscious agent?) Two pages later we get to the truth of the matter:

Hopkins did not depart from what he saw as American interests . . . 'Since Soviet Russia is the decisive factor in the war', he reported, 'she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friend- ship' . . . Hopkins acted more from deter- mination to prevent a Nazi victory than from a secret commitment to the Communist cause.

So for having made perceptive, accurate assessments of where America's best in- terests lay at a crucial stage in the second world war, solely because those interests happened to coincide with Soviet interests, a patriotic American is slandered and his memory besmirched. If Gordievsky really believes that Hopkins was not a conscious agent then why has he told this story at all?

The answer is that Gordievsky — con- sciously or unconsciously — has picked up his new employer's belief that since the Revolution anyone to the left of Mrs Thatcher could not be trusted, that patriot- ism was the preserve of the Right, and that socialists were all crypto-communists ready to betray their country to a foreign power.

On television Gordievsky has dropped hints that he had MPs through whom disinformation cooked up in Moscow could be delivered on the floor of the House of Commons. If this is true, why does he not name them in this book — a far more interesting exercise than revealing that John Cairncross was the fifth, or the sixth or the tenth man? Who any longer cares?

What we are witnessing in the interna- tional intelligence community at the mo- ment is a gigantic PR exercise as the KGB and the CIA and SIS desperately wheel out their stars and parade their triumphs to try to justify their expensive existence in the world which no longer needs them. The KGB produces George Blake. SIS coun- ters with Oleg Gordievsky. Your move, comrade.

There is nothing wrong with this as long as the reader is made aware of it. That is not Gordievsky's duty — he is a pawn in the game. We can take Dr Andrew's parts of this book on trust because of his record. But, since he is a conscientious academic, I think we could have expected him to have inserted a few caveats into Gordievsky's story, or, better still, to have written the book on his own.

'That's no good — get the Sunday Times!'