Great Spies of the 20th Century

back his documents. Gordievsky took a taxi to his Moscow apartment, where there was further evidence that his home had been searched. Luckily, there were no compromising objects or documents hidden away, except some works by Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, Gordievsky was worried: he was clearly under suspicion and the next day, he had even more proof of the fact. He had come to Moscow in order to meet the most important members of the KGB, and yet they prevaricated, giving the most ridiculous excuses for not meeting. Then a week later, a KGB car came to collect him, taking him to a dacha owned by service and located a few miles from Moscow. Several senior KGB officers were there waiting for him, including a colonel from the counterintelligence department.

Gordievsky was not questioned immediately and they first ate and drank - alcohol of course. Despite his misgivings, it was difficult for him to refuse a toast, although he was not to know that his drink had been drugged. In a daze, he was submitted to a barrage of questions from the KGB, which to begin with centred on his collection of banned books in his apartment. They also told him that they knew everything about his family life, including the conversations that he had had with his wife and children. Even under the influence of drugs, Gordievsky realised that his house had been bugged and his interrogators soon came to their main point and accused him of being a spy for the British. Despite his weakened state, he denied the accusations several times, before eventually slipping into unconsciousness. He woke up the following day, still in the dacha. He feared for his life when the counterintelligence officer reappeared and proceeded to interrogate him further, particularly on how he spent his time in London. Suddenly, however, the questions stopped and Gordievsky was escorted home.

It was clear that the KGB had no hard evidence, only their suspicions, and since there was no way for Gordievsky to escape, they intended to take their time in retrieving his confession. This must have meant that Aldrich Ames had not given them enough specific information on him and so they had no choice but to keep him on a leash. They even announced that his functions abroad had been terminated and that his wife and children would be returning to the USSR. However, as soon as his family returned to Moscow, they became hostages and Gordievsky was trapped. He knew that sooner or later he would be forced to confess and so his only chance was to escape, which was hardly an easy task when he was under constant surveillance by the KGB.

The British secret services came to his rescue after Gordievsky managed to make contact with them. One day, after setting up a series of false leads, Gordievsky was out jogging when he got into a van that had been hired by the British. Hidden under a secret floor, he managed to cross the border into Finland. Unfortunately, his family remained in the USSR, but now that he had escaped, he was able to be of invaluable service to the West.

Chapter 23

Hanssen: the man who never laughed

They called him ‘the Undertaker'. He was a big man, with a waxy face, always dressed in a black suit and who struggled to smile, never mind laugh. Married to a devout woman, he was a family man and a conservative Catholic: he would not have missed celebrating Sunday Mass in his little church in the residential suburb ofVienna,Virginia, for the world.

What was his profession? His neighbours assumed that the quiet man who drove a battered Ford Taurus must have been a humble civil servant in the federal government, but they knew little else. ‘The Undertaker' was not very forthcoming: hello, good evening. That was it. Every evening he walked his dog in one of the suburban parks, alone. Always alone.

The amazement was confounded when it was revealed on 18 February 2001 that Robert Philip Hanssen was an FBI agent and had been arrested for espionage after handing over secret documents to the KGB and then the SVR for the previous fifteen years. This spy hunter had actually been a spy himself. The story seemed to be a perfect replica of the Aldrich Ames case, a man who was also a spy hidden at the heart of the CIA and who was also a counterintelligence expert.¹¹⁹

However, if this new case sent shockwaves through the US intelligence community, not to mention the federal government, it was because that despite the end of the Cold War, the secret services in Russia were as active as ever. The Hanssen affair was regarded as a real humiliation for the FBI, but have all the secrets been revealed?

With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Americans had hoped there would be a lull on the espionage front: after all, Russia was now a friend and it was believed that its state of decay would force many eastern spies to stand down, at least temporarily. But this did not happen.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the general disintegration that followed in eastern Europe forced the CIA to change its tactics and it consequently renounced the use of field agents for the benefit of computers. Many ‘illegal' posts that were set up abroad were closed down and the CIA instead chose to rely on its own surveillance systems, as well as those of the NSA (National Security Agency). The rest is common knowledge: without any contacts on the ground, the central office sank under a mountain of paperwork and unfortunately proved unable to prevent acts of terrorism, such as the attacks on New York in September 2001.

This evolution had actually been initiated in the mid-1970s, when the government decided to moralise the CIA's activities by prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders and the collaboration with men of dubious pasts. So in principle, any dirty tactics were now over. However, intelligence