The next morning an anonymous brown package was delivered to the Embassy, addressed to the Ambassador personally. It contained photographs of Grigovin in bed. That evening Special Branch sighted the KGB man being escorted onto an Aeroflot plane. We did send a report to the MI6 station in Moscow advising them to keep an eye out for him in case he had second thoughts and managed to make contact. But we never heard from Grigovin again.
Defections are always tinged with tragedy, but none was as sad as the case involving a young man called Nadiensky - the defector who changed his mind. He worked for the shipping section of the Trade Delegation, and we identified him early on as a KGB officer. He was a quiet man, and his only claim to fame was that his wife was related to a senior Soviet official in the Politburo. He first came to our attention when the Watchers saw him meet a girl in a London park.
Initially all effort went into the girl. The Watchers tracked her home, and she was identified as a secretary in a minor government agency with no access to classified material. Michael McCaul went to see the girl, and asked why she was meeting a Soviet official. She convinced him that Nadiensky had no interest in her for espionage purposes. They were in love, and she had no idea that he was involve with the KGB. She said he was not at all how she imagined Russians. He was a romantic and rather frightened man, who talked constantly of making a new life for himself in the West.
Once again D1 (Operations) and D4 met to consider the best course of action. We decided to ask the girl to continue the affair normally, while we planned an approach to Nadiensky. It was obvious that the operation could not be sustained over the long term. The girl was already under great stress, and it seemed likely that she would soon betray herself. But the prize was a considerable one. Although Nadiensky himself was a low-level officer, almost certainly co-opted for the duration of his posting in London, he had enormous propaganda value. This was the time of Stalin's daughter Svetlana's defection, and we knew the embarrassment it would cause the Russians to have a relative of one of their senior politicians seek asylum in the West.
On the following Sunday Nadiensky was due to visit Harwich on official business. He was accompanying some Soviet sailors to their ship, which was due to sail that night, and he applied routinely for permission from the Foreign Office to leave the 80-kilometer restriction which is imposed on all Eastern Bloc diplomats. McCaul sat in his car outside Harwich docks with a team of Watchers and waited for Nadiensky to emerge. As he walked past, McCaul called him by name. He hesitated momentarily.
"We know about the girl..." hissed McCaul, "we know you want to stay. Get in the car quickly, and we can talk!"
Nadiensky looked up and down the street and then, seizing his moment, ducked into the back of the car. McCaul drove straight to my house in Essex. We gave him tea, and tried not to talk too much. We had the bird, but it was important not to panic him.
"I hear you want to join us...?" I began, when Nadiensky had adjusted to his surroundings.
He nodded, at first nervously, and then decisively.
"We believe you've been co-opted?" I queried.
He gulped his tea.
"The KGB, you mean?" he asked in good English.
"We assumed you were," I went on.
"You have no choice," he flashed suddenly with some bitterness, "if they want you to work for them, they simply order you. You have no choice."
I ran through the arrangements we could make. There would be safety and protection, a pension, and later perhaps a job. There would be a short meeting with the girl, but then he would have to work hard for some months.
"For British Security I know," he said. He half smiled. He knew the game, co-opted or not.
That evening we drove Nadiensky to a safe house near Wimbledon, and armed guards were posted inside with him. Twelve hours later the Foreign Office received a request from the Soviet Embassy asking if they had any information concerning the whereabouts of a certain junior diplomat who had disappeared while returning from a routine visit to Harwich.
The Foreign Office Northern Department had already been alerted to the defection of Nadiensky by the Deputy Director-General, then F.J.. The Foreign Office treated the matter as they treated all matters which were likely to upset the Russians, as something to be avoided at all costs. They immediately sent an official down to the safe house to interview Nadiensky. He was asked if he was applying voluntarily, and whether he wanted to speak to anyone at the Soviet Embassy. He confirmed his decision was voluntary, and told him he had no wish to speak to any Russians. The Foreign Office broke the news to the Soviet Embassy.
Immediately Nadiensky's wife was seen leaving for Moscow. The following day the Soviet Embassy demanded that the Foreign Office arrange for Nadiensky's wife to be able to speak to him on the telephone from the Soviet Union. At first Nadiensky did not wish to speak to her, and we were very unhappy at this blatant attempt to pressure a man already under great strain. But the Foreign Office insisted on protocol.
The call was only the first of many which the Russians insisted on over the next four days. Mostly it was Nadiensky's wife, but other relations took their turn in tearfully pleading with him to reconsider his decision.
"Think of us," they told him, "think of the ruin and scandal that will befall us."
Nadiensky began to wilt visibly. Over in Whitehall the Foreign Office and MI5 practically came to blows. Why did the Foreign Office allow these calls, we wanted to know, when the Russians never allowed access to our people, like Greville Wynne, when they were arrested in Moscow. But the Foreign Office, with little regard for our priorities, and none for Nadiensky's interests, sat on the niceties of the diplomatic trade.
"We cannot deny the family humanitarian access," they said.
On the fourth day Nadiensky told us he had decided to go back. It was causing too much trouble for his family. McCaul tried to point out the dangers, but it was futile. He was like a patient on the operating table, hovering between life and death, and now we could feel him gently slipping away.
"Are you sure you want to go back?" I asked Nadiensky when I last saw him, shortly before he went back.
"What I want no longer matters," he said without emotion. "I have done my duty by my family."
Fatalism was Nadiensky's only refuge. He was one of the many faceless victims of the Cold War, his life ground down between the two great secret armies which face each other West and East.
But if it was our own fault that we had stumbled into the maze of intelligence provided by defectors, we desperately needed a way out. Angleton opted for blind faith in Golitsin to lead him to safety. In one way it made sense to turn to the architect of the maze to help us find a way out. But although I began as a fervent admirer of Golitsin and all his theories, by the end of the 1960s I was beginning to have my doubts.
The problem was Golitsin's obsession with his "methodology." He claimed that if he was given access to the files of Western intelligence services it would trigger associations in his memory which could lead him to spies. The theory was that since so much of the intelligence he saw in Dzherzhinsky Square was bowdlerized, in other words, source-disguised to protect the identity of the agent supplying the KGB, if he read the files he might be able to seize on points of familiarity with the material he had seen in the KGB Registry.