The spy who came to the West

What one intelligence officer supplied, and how to judge what it was worth

A The most valuable intelligence of the late Cold War was supplied not by a machine but by a middle-ranking officer who had decided, over a period of years, that the system he served was indefensible. He had joined the Soviet foreign intelligence service in the early 1960s, partly because his father and brother had served before him and partly because it offered the rarest privilege available to a Soviet citizen, which was to live abroad. What he found abroad was the beginning of the problem: the societies he had been trained to regard as decaying were visibly more prosperous and more free than his own, and the discrepancy was not the sort that can be unlearned.

B Two political events completed the process. The building of a wall through the middle of a European capital in 1961 struck him as an admission that a state had to imprison its own population; the crushing of a reform movement in Czechoslovakia seven years later, while he was serving in Denmark, removed any remaining possibility that the system might correct itself from within. He made no immediate move, and the interval is worth noting: a decade separated his private conclusion from his first act, which is the ordinary pattern rather than the exception. Intelligence services recruit disaffected officers by identifying them long before they act, and he was identified by a Western service, approached carefully, and began providing material in 1974.

C What made him exceptional was neither access nor daring but position. He was not a technician photographing documents; he was an officer of the service itself, rising steadily, and what he could supply was not merely information but interpretation. He explained how his organisation actually worked, which of its reports the leadership believed, and what its analysts were being told to look for. A photograph of a document tells an adversary what a service knows. An officer of that service can tell them what it thinks, which is considerably more useful and very much rarer. He also identified officers of his own organisation working under diplomatic cover in several countries, and named those who had been recruited on the other side, though the second category was handled with great care: acting on such information too promptly is the surest way to reveal that one has a source.

D The most consequential single contribution concerned a misunderstanding that has since become a case study. In the early 1980s the Soviet leadership, elderly and genuinely frightened by Western rhetoric, initiated a standing intelligence operation to detect preparations for a surprise nuclear attack, and instructed its officers abroad to report indicators — the lighting of government buildings at night, the movements of senior officials, activity at blood banks. In 1983 a large NATO command exercise, involving realistic procedures for the release of nuclear weapons, was read in Moscow as a possible cover for the attack itself. He was able to tell his handlers both that the operation existed and that the fear behind it was sincere rather than propaganda, and the information reached the highest levels of Western government, where it altered the tone of subsequent policy. The most striking feature of the episode, in retrospect, is that neither side was behaving unreasonably given what it believed. One was conducting a rehearsal; the other was watching an adversary rehearse the opening moves of the attack it had been told to expect, and reporting what it had been instructed to look for.

E His position in London, where he had been posted and was on the point of being confirmed as head of the station, ended abruptly in 1985 when he was recalled to Moscow. He went, which required a particular kind of nerve, and was interrogated under drugs at a country house without confessing. Released but plainly under suspicion, he activated an escape plan that had been prepared years earlier and never used, involving a signal given by standing at a particular place with a shopping bag, a rendezvous at a spot near the Finnish border, and a concealed compartment in the boot of a diplomatic car.

F The escape succeeded, and it succeeded on details that sound implausible until one considers how carefully they had been designed. Border guards used dogs to check vehicles; the wife of one of the officers involved distracted them by changing a baby's nappy on the roof of the car and dropping crisps to the dogs. He was sentenced to death in absentia, a sentence never rescinded, and lived for decades afterwards under protection in England, writing and advising. His family, left behind, were permitted to join him only after six years of diplomatic pressure, which is a reminder that the costs of such a decision are not confined to the person who takes it.

G Assessing what such a source is worth is harder than the narrative suggests. The material he supplied did not win anything; it did not shorten the confrontation or produce a decisive advantage in the way that a captured codebook might. What it did was correct a picture. Western governments had assumed their opponents understood them to be defensive; the intelligence established that they did not, and that a routine exercise could therefore be read as an attack. Preventing a misunderstanding is an achievement that leaves no evidence behind, which is why the value of the whole episode continues to be argued about by people who agree on every fact in it.