Answering all these questions meant recruiting human assets on a previously inconceivable scale. During the Cold War getting alongside anybody in the Soviet power structures had been a challenge; now even the GRU and KGB were direct targets. Politicians, officials, military officers and spooks were all open to persuasion. Many who had signed up to defend the motherland felt their life’s purpose was lost, or could easily be persuaded to think so. Wages were miserable and paid late; accommodation was abominable. For most, the offer of money was enough. Senior officers worried about their retirement. For those with families, the ability to provide for them trumped loyalty to the motherland. Some found it demeaning to take money, but asked simply for pharmaceuticals: many readers of this book might betray their country for a reliable supply of otherwise unobtainable insulin for a diabetic loved one.
The contrast with the Soviet years was complete. In the years after the collapse of Operation Jungle and its counterparts, Western intelligence had fared poorly in difficult conditions. For a start, its reputation was in tatters. Kremlin propagandists were cock-a-hoop at the KGB’s triumph (and indeed were still publishing material embarrassing to SIS when the Soviet empire was in its death throes). SIS and the CIA were depicted, not wholly inaccurately, as cynical, incompetent and infested with fascist collaborators.5 The dented credibility made it harder to recruit people, and the KGB’s strength made it far harder to run them. Ferrying agents in and out had been easy when Major Lukaševičs was acting in effect as the travel agent. Thereafter it was dangerous and difficult. Soviet air defences improved, making parachute drops far harder too.
With official paranoia fuelled by the subversion efforts that the West had tried to mount from the mid 1950s onwards, the KGB’s counter-intelligence department commanded colossal clout and resources. The dangers of penetration and dangles were acute. If you recruited an agent, how could you run him safely, or know if he had gone bad? And how could you be sure that the information he passed on to you was sound? According to the best book on the subject, Nigel West’s The Friends,6 SIS gave up trying to run or recruit agents in Moscow because of the ‘impossibly hostile environment’. KGB surveillance meant that even casual social contacts with the locals prompted an unwelcome response. Even routine fieldcraft, such as looking for dead-letter drops and clandestine meeting-places, was ‘a complete waste of time’ thanks to ubiquitous KGB informers. Foreigners were conspicuous, and ‘no sooner was one watcher team shaken off, than another appeared in its place’. Nigel West notes that the CIA station in Moscow ‘had also concluded that running agents in the Soviet capital was an unprofitable business’. This came after one of its star sources, Piotr Popov, was caught in October 1959 in the act of passing a message to his case officer. The American was released. Popov is thought to be the agent mentioned in the earlier chapter on spycraft: fed into a furnace, with his grisly murder filmed for the benefit of new recruits to the GRU. Viktor Sheymov, the most senior KGB officer to defect to America while living in the Soviet Union, spent months in Moscow simply trying to work out how to meet a British or American intelligence officer in order make his offer of help. He eventually found a means of doing so involving a loose window in a cinema toilet in Warsaw.7
If Moscow was difficult, the provinces were even harder to reach. Western spy services maintained a particular interest in the Baltic, which they saw as a potential launch pad for World War Three. Electronic snoopers scoured the airwaves for transmissions to be deciphered and analysed; spy aircraft made high-altitude over-flights. Analysts scoured the Soviet media for clues about infrastructure, demographics and public morale (while Soviet censors tried to ensure that even the most innocuous information could not be pieced together to reveal a secret). Human intelligence continued too, using to the maximum the limited opportunities for tourism and commercial travel in the region. Sailors on merchant vessels during shore leave could keep their eyes and ears open, and empty dead-letter boxes or pass on money. Occasional cultural and sporting events let foreigners visit, mingle and discreetly disappear. But for most visitors, let alone spies, making private contacts was risky to impossible.8
In this intimidating climate, the British and Americans did what they could. From the mid-1960s, under the legendary leadership of Harold Shergood (known as Shergy), MI6 focused on recruiting and running Soviet sources in third countries, or non-Soviet ones inside the Soviet Union. Careful operations involving individual agents replaced the leaky, ramshackle networks of the past. After the fiascos of the 1950s, British intelligence dumped unreliable émigrés, and retired incompetents such as Carr. It trained its officers better in practical spycraft, such as meticulous use of dead-letter boxes and brush contacts. The proper use of forged identities evolved too: technical competence is only one element of success; just as important is the context in which the identity is used. Officers and agents were drilled in anti-surveillance and counter-intelligence procedures. Every clandestine meeting involved fall-back plans. Counter-intelligence scrutiny, once a backwater, became more thorough. Spies could expect to be quizzed about anything new or unusual in their lives, from new neighbours to new lovers. SIS also gained a new quasi-academic side: researchers and experts with a far fuller understanding of the intricacies of Soviet bureaucracy than enthusiasts like Carr, able to piece together the careers of opponents and targets from the most fragmentary clues. These efforts over many years did eventually bear fruit, for SIS with the Czechoslovak Miloslav Kroča (whose daughter received her belated reward in 1990); with Oleg Penkovsky (who was executed)9 and later with Oleg Gordievsky (who was snatched from the KGB’s clutches).10 For the CIA the roll of honour includes spies such as Dmitri Polyakov and the weapons scientist Adolf Tolkachev, executed in 1986.11 However it is notable that (as far as can be judged from published sources) the vast majority of SIS and CIA recruits in the Soviet bloc – who in the period 1960–1990 numbered at most eighty and perhaps as few as forty that were of any use – were volunteers motivated by idealism, rather than recruits achieved by all the costly and risky efforts to pitch and persuade.
As the Cold War ended, many wondered if this expensive and fairly unproductive espionage apparatus was still needed. CNN, not the CIA, had proved the best guide to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coup of August 1991.
We didn’t have any spies in place who could give us much insight into the plans of the East German government or for that matter the intentions of the Soviet leadership,