British Embassy, Vilnius, March 1992
The receptionist, a young Lithuanian woman, opened the British Embassy’s door. A grubby, lean old man, unshaven and poorly dressed, was standing in front of her. He wanted to see a member of diplomatic staff. He had important information. Please wait in the reception area, she said. She motioned to a space on the left of the entrance where some chairs had been placed.
The old man glanced at the newly bought furniture and rugs. He had never been to Britain and knew little about it other than what he had read in the files. These had painted a picture of a country of class oppression and stuffy tradition. A certain coldness of character was said to mark the people out.
The British Embassy may have looked impressive on the outside but inside it was a fledgeling operation held together on a shoestring, a warren of small rooms. Britain’s Ambassador, Michael Peart, had been given just a week’s notice to set up an embassy a few months earlier. He had initially run everything out of room 602 at a local hotel until he discovered an art gallery in a grand old house and persuaded his superiors to quickly snap the building up before anyone else did.
Just a few weeks before the old man walked in, the Union flag had been hoisted up on a snowy day in the new embassy grounds. Half a dozen members of staff looked proudly on. The transition for the building, like the new country, was haphazard. The electricity supply was so weak that when the Ambassador’s wife switched on the cooker inside the residence which was also situated in the grounds, the heaters inside the main embassy building switched off.
The old man tried to hide his disappointment when a dark-haired, young woman walked into the reception room and greeted him. He assumed that, once again, he was not being taken seriously. As a woman, she could not be a spy or diplomat or anyone important, he thought. But he knew he had to try to make her understand.
He did not know but fortune had smiled on him in the form of this junior diplomat. She was temporarily posted to the embassy as Second Secretary. Still in her twenties, she had spent time in Moscow and spoke good Russian.
The man introduced himself. He said his name was Yurasov. A lie but a necessary one. He could not yet trust anyone with his true name.
What came next was the moment upon which so much would hinge. As it does so often, it came down to two people sat in a room across from the other, each trying to work the other one out. Were they worth taking seriously?
Yurasov’s first impression was that despite being young, and he would later admit rather attractive, the woman had an air of competence. And he had little choice. He would speak.
He explained he wanted to talk to a representative of the British Special Services. This was the usual way Russians refer to spies.
There was no representative of the special services in the embassy, the woman explained. It was the truth. She was not a spy, just a regular diplomat. And the embassy was too new, the terrain still too uncertain for there to be a permanent presence from British intelligence.
The old man seemed introverted and guarded in the way he answered questions. But there was also an intensity to him. It felt as if he was tightly wound, with layers of densely packed emotion and secrets lying just beneath his placid exterior.
In his mind, he was unsure how much of himself to reveal. But he did not have long and so took the plunge. He said he had worked for the KGB for close to forty years.
In itself, that claim was not much to go on. There were many people who claimed to be KGB who were walking into embassies in those days. Some of them really were KGB. Some were not. And anyway, the KGB was a vast organisation– hundreds of thousands of people, some of them just border guards, little more than thugs, with nothing to offer.
Yurasov went on. He was a former member of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the elite department that spied on the rest of the world. That was interesting but also seemed somewhat far-fetched. Officers of the First Chief Directorate were the smooth-talking men who had been trained to charm their targets. This strange man did not seem to fit that profile. But he pressed on. He had important information. He had written a number of volumes about the KGB’s work. Like a travelling salesman, he had brought samples with him. Would she like to see them?
Now it was the young woman’s turn to make a judgement. The man looked unassuming and a little odd. And yet she sensed in front of her was something more than yet another person on the make, trying to escape a Russia that was spiralling out of control. Instinct told her to take a chance.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” he said.
It was 24 March 1992 and a profoundly unequal exchange was about to take place. She would give him tea. He would give her the secrets to the world.
The old man went to his bag and began to rummage around. The impression of a tramp lingered as bread, spicy sausages and clothes were pulled out. Then came the papers.
The tea arrived. While he sipped, she read. His first reader, a crucial reviewer, slowly realised that what she held in her hands looked more interesting than the usual dross people tried to pass off.
Her Russian meant she could see it appeared to be material related to the KGB. That was interesting. But there was a problem. These were not actual KGB files. There were none of the markings or stamps to indicate they were official documents. They were simply typed notes. Anyone could have written them. They could easily be made-up. And they were hard to understand, not really organized the way you would expect.
She was no intelligence officer and there was no way she could verify the material or be sure of its value. It came down to what she thought of the man.
She gently probed as to how he had come by what seemed to be secret material. ‘That’s my secret,’ he would say when asked. He was evidently not comfortable talking about himself.
The truth was that he was anxious, unsure of whether he was being taken seriously and whether the value of what he was offering was understood. It was not just notes. They were a history. A history of filth. He could not say how he came to have it though. How do you steal an archive? He would not reveal that yet. He needed a commitment first.
He explained to the woman that what was in front of her was only a sample. He had much more. Volumes on Australia and Canada. And on operations in Britain itself.
He knew what he was doing—dangle something tempting. He had carefully selected which files to bring with him based on what he knew would interest those in the West. He wished to get this information into the hands of the right people, he said, but it had to be on his terms. He handed over a letter to explain.
Yurasov said he had to return to Moscow that afternoon on the overnight train. Time was short. So what was the young woman to do?
The British had their own guidance for diplomats about walk-ins, including instructions not that different from the Americans to be more skeptical in the current times. But she decided she would take a chance on him. If he could give a date when he might be able to return to Lithuania then she might be able to arrange for someone to meet him.
He said he could be back the following month on 7 April. With that, the papers went back in the bag beneath the sausages. He could return to being a peasant heading home. He walked out through the door and back into the cold.
Once Yurasov had left the building, the Second Secretary went to see the Ambassador. There was something about the grizzled visitor that made her think he was genuine. The Ambassador trusted her judgement and together agreed they should act on it. That meant telling London. This was easier said than done.
There was no way of sending back a sensitive message without the risk of the Russians intercepting it.An embassy normally has a secure communications room where clerks can send encrypted messages. But the embassy at Vilnius was too new even for that. It made do with a single, unsecured telex machine which sat next to the temperamental kettle. There was no way of sending back a sensitive message without the risk of the Russians intercepting it. And that might mean trouble for the strange old man.
So that meant a journey. The Ambassador agreed that the Second Secretary would head to Berlin—the nearest large embassy where a secure line could be used to contact London.
And so a few days later, towards the end of March, once she had made her journey, a message spat out of a teleprinter inside a grubby twenty-story building in Lambeth, South London. The place looked so decrepit that many of its occupants liked to joke that it would not have looked out of place in the Soviet Union.
This was Century House, home of the Secret Intelligence Service, known officially to the few on the inside as SIS but to almost everyone outside its walls as MI6.
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