Tit-for-tat expulsions deplete diplomatic and press corps

Press, 2 June 1989, Page 8

Tit-for-tat expulsions deplete diplomatic and press corps

Although i am actually taking a quick breather between Peking and Moscow. I write with emotion and trepidation and a touch of anger of a kind peculiar to all Western correspondents in Russia. That damned old game of tit-for-tat, with the expulsion of Russian spies from a Western country being bloody-mindedly matched by the mirror-like kicking out of British diplomats and journalists, has just begun all over again. As a Russian-speaker who does not pull punches and is anyway due to leave in two months, I heaved an enormous sigh of surprise and relief, mingled with genuine sorrow at the bad luck of some of my closest friends, to find I was not in the first batch of British victims.

recipe for relaxed late night drinking sessions. So, living in a foreigners’ “ghetto” with a policeman by the gate noting our movements round the clock, we invevitably forge close relations with our fellow inostrantsi.

The dynamic new British ambassador, Mr Rodric Braithwaite, will be infuriated. Among his enforced leavers are Mr Mike Anderson, the embassy’s sole expert on agriculture, a crucial topic we all know too little about at gumboot level, and Dr Adam Noble, a refreshingly adventurous Oxford D.Phil. in Soviet literature who sees as many plays and films as any Muscovite, the sort of cultural pundit whose knowledge is invaluable in Communist countries, where theatre and film trends can still convey vital if enigmatic political messages.

My “Daily Telegraph” predecessor, poor Robin Gedye, was less lucky. He caught it three weeks after he arrived in 1985, shortly after the K.G.B. resident in London, Oleg Gordievski, had defected and fingered some 25 Russian spies, including some journalists, whose expulsion led to the reciprocal removal of the same number of Moscow-based Britons. In several similar cases over the past three years, the tit-for-tat has often lasted several rounds, with deep holes being made in the staff of affected embassies and press corps. So I am not out of the wood yet. If Mrs Thatcher pulls out another half dozen Russians, I could be on the homeward plane in a fortnight. My entire family will be very sad, for we are deeply fond of Russia and many Russians, ghastly as their system and its effects on the Russian persona are.

On a more personal level, we will lose dear friends in the family of the distinguished 8.8. C. radio correspondent, Jeremy Harris, who rarely misses a trick and lives eight floors up, under the floor traditionally kept empty supposedly for monitoring equipment. He is, incidentally, one of those utterly independent spirits who could not be a spy if he tried. For our inseparable two eldest sons, a day apart in age, and coming up to four, it will be their first heartache.

But bribery, blackmail, snooping and appeals to guilt or ideology — all the stuff of espionage — can still provide invaluable gemstones for the statesman or strategist making delicate decisions. Think of the spy at Willi Brandt’s shoulder, Soviet agents who worked on the American A-bomb, or a certain

One of my two other colleagues being chased out, Angus Roxburgh of the “Sunday Times” is the finest Russian speaker in the English-speaking press corps, having spent years with headphones monitoring Soviet broadcasts for the 8.8. C. at Cavers-

Though it has become easier during my time to enjoy friendships with Russians, it is still tricky. Most of them assume they are watched and bugged when they visit our flat: not the best

After Mrs Thatcher expelled 11 Russians for spying, the Soviet Union expelled 11 Britons. Xan Smiley, of the “Daily Telegraph,” reports

ham, while the doughty lan Glover-James, the former "Daily Telegraph” man who conquered Soviet logistics to open an office for 1.T.N., was confined to a boxsized room in a hotel for over a year, sometimes without water, while those wonderfully efficient Russian bureaucrats tried to find him a flat.

I also have a special spot for Major Nigel Shakespear, surely the tallest of all Gurkhas, and the fourth generation of his family collaterally descended from the Bard, to serve in that celebrated regiment. Few British soldiers manage to delve, as he and his wife have done, into real Russian life. Followed literally wherever they go, as most Western military types still are, he cannot have had the privacy to suborn even a Russian cockroach, of which there are thousands in our ghetto, but he was on the way to knowing a fair bit about the Russian mind — no bad skill for a N.A.T.O. soldier. Of course, we all have spies. It is fashionable to say these days they are a waste of time: satellites can photograph every number plate in Minsk or Manchester. Technology it is said has replaced the safe drop, invisible writing and the irresistible ballerina from the Bolshoi.

Mr Philby who nearlv became head of MI6.

The other popular error is the equivalence by which Western and Eastern spying is often judged. Irrespective of ideological preference, there are three big differences here.

One is the sheer size of the operation. The K.G.8., including its border troops (whose job is still mainly to keep their own people in rather than enemies out), is reckoned to number at least 600.000, many times the highest estimate of any N.A.T.O. secret service.

Second, it is far easier for Soviet agents to move around in the West without raising eyebrows. Our societies simply lack the sort of in-built controls still prevalent east of the Iron Curtain: that web of internal passports, special permits for residents in such cities as Moscow, police surveillance on the specially marked cars all foreigners must travel in, that requirement for many Soviet citizens to “report back” on meetings with foreigners. Third and most important, a Soviet person is still obliged to co-operate with the K.G.B. if told to, otherwise he risks trouble and the loss of such privileges as travel abroad.

An indiscreet scientist gave me a tiny example. Before he went to America he was told to compile a list of everyone to whom, he gave a visiting card, and was roundly castigated afterwards when he said he had given the whole lot out in two days and could not remember a single recipient. With us, thankfully,

MI6 requests for "a little help, old boy" can be answered by a crisp refusal with no fear of reprisal. Quite rightly. Western secret service excesses are pilloried in our press. It is a massive difference. What it means is that the K.G.B. is still a vast and feared organisation of which all Soviet people remain deeply conscious. Not that it is all bad, these days.

Undoubtedly a strong K.G.B. lobby supports Mr Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform and modernisation, perhaps even a fair dose of glasnost. But it certainly wants its men to be as active as ever in stealing the Western technology the U.S.S.R. so desperately needs and still, no doubt, a core of ideological K.G.B. crusaders believes capitalism must be defeated with a little subversion to help things along. The silliness of the current ding-dong is that it does Mr Gorbaciev no real good. Since I have been in Moscow, there have been at least eight such tits-for-tat, every single one started by a Russian being caught out, not to mention the hostage-taking of an American correspondent, , Mr Nick Danilov, when a K.G.B. agent in New York was caught red-handed.

The mirror-like reprisal told it all: the Russians barely bother to keep a straight face when they lie that Messrs Harris, Noble, Roxburgh, Shakespear et al are spies. Everybody knows they are mere pawns, whose victimisation is meant to show the world that Mother Russia cannot be pushed around with impunity. But is it not about time Mr Gorbachev, if he is the honest man we want him to be, simply takes his spies quietly home when they are caught out — and that we play by similar rules. As it is, his country just goes on looking like a posturing bully with a secret service that is still far too big for its boots.