A globe-trotting dirty dozen

Oleg Gordievsky

UNDERCOVER LIVES: SOVIET SPIES IN THE CITIES OF THE WORLD edited by Helen Womack Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 308 Acouple of years ago the KGB's Trav- el Guide to the Cities of the World was pub- lished in Moscow. In it, 12 KGB officers, mostly retired, gave accounts of their espi- onage travels to various countries of the world and described historical and cultural monuments. It was not especially successful in Russia, readers being put off by the spies' boastfulness. While ordinary Rus- sians lived in poverty, stood in queues for basic purchases, did not have the right to travel abroad and were imprisoned for reading Western literature, KGB officers travelled the world, read and viewed what- ever they wanted, had sizeable expense accounts and ate and drank in the best restaurants. It was unclear just how such squandering of priceless foreign currency belonging to the massed ranks of Soviet taxpayers benefited the Soviet people, since all operations were kept secret. The narrators maintain the secrecy, as they censor themselves' in Helen Womack's words.

This is the paradox and imperfection of post-communist Russia: that those who bankrupted the country, wasting its assets on rockets, state apparatus, propaganda and espionage, have not been called to account. Moreover, the active henchmen of the dictatorship, those spies who devoted their entire lives to undermining Western democracies, present themselves as heroes in their public appearances and memoirs, helped by a multitude of Western journal- ists and writers.

Helen Womack, taking this Russian book as a starting point, interviewed the officers and has written a new English book in which the geographical aspect is toned down (she refers to it as 'travel tips') and greater emphasis is placed on the 'details of their operations around the globe'. I do not think that this has improved the text. It was precisely these 'travel tips', made by well educated and professionally trained KGB officers, that were most striking. As regards 'operations' they are in any case made up to a greater or lesser extent.

Nevertheless there is some interest in this book about the work of the KGB, about the authors themselves, and about the capitals. For example, the author of the section on Washington is, by way of an exception, not an officer but a member of his family: the widow of the former head of the British and later American department, General Dimitri Yakushkin. Yevgeni Pri- makov, head of the KGB Foreign Intelli- gence Service (now called the SVR) for five years, liked the late general very much, and recently appointed his son, also Dim- itri Yakushkin, press secretary to President Yeltsin. The general's widow does not know anything about either the KGB or the USA, and her contribution clearly was included in the book as a curiosity.

A genuinely interesting section is the chapter entitled `Berlin' by Vyacheslav Kevorkov. It includes the back-channel between the KGB leadership and the West German government, or, more precisely, between Yuri Andropov and Chancellor Willy Brandt and his aide Egon Barh, in which General Kevorkov was involved as a negotiator and courier. The author makes no attempt to hide how much he liked the Westerners he worked with and how irked he was by the East German and Soviet communist party apparatchiks. Incidental- ly, this whole story of the KGB's making contact with the Germans has been recounted in detail some time ago in the book Secret Channel which was published with a large circulation in Germany and Russia.

Stories about Russian spies operating in Bangkok, Mexico City, Cairo and Lisbon contain many amusing, typically Soviet anecdotes and details from the life of Sovi- et officials abroad, experiencing the culture shock of coming to an open and pluralistic environment. The sections on Rome, Madrid and Paris are written by the same person, instantly distinguishable as a man not unacquainted with vodka and pretty women and blighted by typical KGB para- noia.

The British reader will naturally be attracted to the chapter on London, written by an old English hand, Mikhail Lyubimov, who has a love-hate relationship with Britain (although, I must admit, the love is greater than the hatred).

With England I fell strangely in love; the more I admired her, the more nervous I felt, literally as if I was doing something shameful, and I admired her more and more. I loved the regatta and Henley and Cheyney Walk, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti had his house and my favourite poet, Algernon Charles Swinbume, also lived. The English were far from being stiff types out of Thackeray although there were a few dreadful snobs but were for the most part open and friendly.

But the young Lyubimov still believed in communism and needed to further his career by 'establishing sources of secret intelligence'.

Everywhere I went I saw Englishmen, indeed there were times when I became distressed at the huge numbers of Englishmen I had still not managed to recruit. Arrogant Tories, privy to top secrets . . . moved in packs down Oxford Street or walked their shampooed dogs, the very sight of which offended those like me, who were struggling for human happiness.

The main 'objects for penetration' were the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office.

The clerks from that institution feared Rus- sians like fire, seeing in every one of us a spy (how right they were!). But the KGB rezident thumped his fist on the table and demanded that we book and recruit these minions. From time to time, in a gloomy mood, I would hang around outside the ministry, on the off-chance that my firebird would sud- denly fly out.

Despite the author's sarcasm about him- self and the KGB, his attempts to recruit the British as secret informers were some- times successful. In the end Lyubimov was expelled from the country for this kind of recruitment by the Labour foreign minis- ter, Patrick Gordon Walker. There were about 120 active and ambitious profession- als like Lyubimov, mainly based in the Soviet embassy in Kensington Palace Gar- dens. In the 1960s, he remembers, we were packed into the building like sar- dines in a tin. I did not even know many of my fellow diplomats, and I could only pity British counter-intelligence having to keep tabs on such a tireless crowd. In 1971 the British lost patience and expelled more than 100 diplomats.

This expulsion, incidentally, was one of the bravest British actions in the whole of the Cold War.

Not one of the contributors is asked what these legions of communist spies were striving so hard for. What was gained? To what did they give their lives? Only Lyubimov poses a similar question. On a recent visit to London in the 1990s he saw a Russian singing a song in Portobello Market in the uniform of a Soviet army colonel.

He plays a guitar, his cap lies on the pave- ment and passers-by toss coins to him. My whole soul is turned inside out. My God, have we come to this?