Original subtitles

DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES

Paranoia emerged all the time.

Once, my wife and I were on leave from Moscow

and we went to a small Irish island.

And I remember walking round the cliffs of this island

with my wife.

And I said, "I think I'm under surveillance."

And I said to myself, "I must be mad! This is Ireland."

I mean, this is not Moscow.

But I still had this very strong sense that I was under surveillance,

and I couldn't place it until I looked over into the sea

and there were about 50 seals that had popped up

and were following one from the sea.

That sort of stayed with one,

the fact that you knew you were being watched

but you didn't quite know how.

This is the story of a critical moment in the Cold War...

..told not just through the politicians...

..but hidden figures.

There was complete misunderstanding on either side.

It's very difficult to determine whom you can trust.

As the Soviet Union faced off with the West in the early 1980s...

..three secret agents played a dangerous game from the shadows...

..seeking to win the upper hand

while the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.

These are their stories...

..told in their own words...

After 11 years of secret work, maybe I developed paranoia.

..testimony pieced together from interviews over the years...

It was actually the greatest intelligence operation

of the Cold War.

..and never-before-heard recordings...

..revealing the deadly intrigues

at the heart of the battle between East and West.

These kind of jobs are a bit like being actresses and actors,

where you're busily performing

for an audience you're not quite sure about.

Look, this is a war.

A secret war.

1982 was a time when people in Soviet Union still believed

in the reality of nuclear war.

Confrontation between West and East was very serious.

Sometimes it was not only

iron curtains,

it was like an iron sphere.

This is a dangerous time for the Soviet Union.

Almost 40 years into the Cold War...

..the economy is overstretched,

the military is unexpectedly entrenched in Afghanistan,

and support for communism is faltering.

The Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev, is stockpiling nuclear arms

in a show of strength against the West.

But there's a more subtle weapon, too.

Secret intelligence.

The head of the Soviet intelligence service is Yuri Andropov.

The KGB have been running the Russian life for years.

Andropov was getting more and more convinced of the menacing West.

He was a full-blown KGB person

who thought that it's either us or them,

and basically it'd better be them.

He started Operation RYaN.

Operation RYaN is a running tally of all possible signs that the West

is getting ready for nuclear attack.

Andropov believes that once his chart is full,

the Soviet Union should be ready to retaliate.

There is a chart for "Americans said this"

and "the Brits said that",

somebody was caught here,

and a plane crossed that border.

And I think, in Andropov's mind, he was absolutely convinced

that nuclear confrontation is coming.

And so Andropov is using every resource to keep close watch

on his adversaries.

Being a skilled intelligence officer, a spy,

life was exciting.

It was thrilling.

It was romantic.

I was thrilled by being involved in specific KGB operations,

like dead letterboxes.

Oleg Gordievsky is a very highly qualified intelligence officer.

He's like royalty, because he was born in a family working for KGB.

His brother working for KGB.

KNOCK ON DOOR

I think he was a good example of Soviet intelligence service.

Soviet Union always keen to put agents all around the world.

The KGB never sent abroad unmarried men.

I was married to my second wife, Leila, and we had two children.

I wanted to get abroad as soon as possible.

I wanted to participate in some daring operations.

Oleg Gordievsky is being sent across the Iron Curtain to London

to help understand British intentions.

NEWSREEL: President Reagan's vast limousine has just drawn up here

outside the Norman Porch, having come from Buckingham Palace.

This is going to be the first time that an American president

has addressed both Houses of Parliament here at Westminster.

The Cold War was a view of the world

where you had a totalitarian empire,

run out of Moscow...

..and Western countries, led by the United States,

facing off against each other.

It was an ideological battle, and the competition

really was for security,

and it was pretty much that way

since the early '50s.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have joined forces in a new approach

to the hostile East that is feeding Andropov's every suspicion.

Ronald Reagan had met Maggie Thatcher and was amazed

that they thought alike.

Prime Minister Thatcher, who really did, despite her uptight bearing

and her hairdo, really loved to be with Ronald Reagan.

There was a certain magnetism, a certain glory to him.

And she felt that tingling.

My Lord Chancellor...

..speaking for all Americans, I want to say how very much at home

we feel in your house.

Ronald Reagan said that Soviet communism will lie, cheat and steal

to advance its mission around the world.

That was the idea that Ronald Reagan had

to delegitimise the Soviet Union.

The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us.

We see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion

and conflict around the globe

to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit.

In 1982, the Soviet Union had

something like 33,000 nuclear weapons.

We had something like 22,000.

Way too many and way too scary.

Even before he became president,

Ronald Reagan said, "The Cold War will end

"and I know how it's going to end.

"We win and they lose."

The march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism

on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies

which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

That speech, it was offensive,

and it was actually offensive to a lot of people.

A lot of people I remember saying, "Who the hell are you to tell us

"that we're the heap of history?"

Closer cooperation between the UK and the US is exactly what Andropov

has been looking out for.

But in a cold war,

getting proof of what the other side is thinking is key.

The craft of intelligence is very ancient.

We need to know the intentions

and capabilities of those

who have an intent to harm us.

At this period of the Cold War,

both sides were monitoring very closely the other.

This is a very typical one of my wife and my aunt

eating ice cream in the snow outside the Bolshoi Theatre.

I'm Raymond Asquith and I was head of our SIS station in Moscow

in the early 1980s.

Civil servants are all signatories of the Official Secrets Act,

and what's not in the public domain is really not for discussion by us.

Our station in Moscow was quite a small one.

The whole apparatus of control and surveillance

was very sophisticated.

I mean, they used to paint radioactive paint

on the bottom of our cars, you know, in order to track us.

We were thin on the ground, really.

It was extremely hard for outsiders to discover anything significant

about Soviet political intentions.

CHATTER OVER COMMS

As British agents seek inside access to Moscow's intelligence service,

Oleg Gordievsky joins Russian agents in London.

London was one of the major cities

where Soviet espionage was going on.

The KGB quarters in London, it's called a station.

KGB station is located in the Russian Embassy.

My name is Alexander Vassiliev.

I am a Russian journalist, writer,

espionage historian

and also ex-KGB intelligence officer.

That London job was extremely advantageous for Gordievsky.

It means that he was trusted and that he was a decent operative,

and it was good for him.

You must understand the nature of the KGB intelligence service.

Everything is top secret.

I wasn't supposed to write anything on an ordinary paper.

We had special notebooks for this.

So anything you write in your top-secret notebook...

..immediately becomes top secret.

There were only a few people above Gordievsky in the station.

One of them is the station chief, Arkadi Guk.

General Guk, he was a big, fat man.

He was not able to speak good English,

so he could not do anything.

He could not write. He only was able to sign.

Gordievsky was supposed to spend most of his time, nine to five,

in the embassy, doing his official job,

and then after that he became a spy.

Other job was to get British secrets...

..especially secrets concerning Britain's foreign policy.

It was a very good career move for Gordievsky.

But the British counter-intelligence service MI5 is considered

one of the most professional services in the world.

So I'm pretty sure he knew that it wouldn't be a picnic for him.

British intelligence is watching closely to stop Soviet spies

from getting access to political plans and military capabilities.

MI5 has a specialised team, known by insiders as "the watchers".

There was lots of locking away of everything and shredding

and then burning and then re-shredding and re-burning.

It added to the sort of glamour that what we were doing

was very secret, and we were therefore rather special.

My name's Miranda Ingram

and I worked for the security service MI5 in the early '80s.

We spent a few days with Special Branch.

We were learning how to spot a tail, I think.

The person who was head of training and the person who trained me

was a man called Michael Bettaney.

My course is Oxbridge.

But he was northern working class.

We had both got posted to K, which was the top job everyone wanted,

because it was against the Russians.

Michael, I suspect, is quite glad to get onto K Desk.

The MI5 agents are there to monitor Russians in London,

identify active agents and track their activities.

That was a very popular job,

because the Russians are very good spies,

so it was intellectually fulfilling,

but also, morally, it was very straightforward.

We spied on them. They spied on us.

Michael Bettaney, he was very kind,

intelligent, quite academic.

He was quite old-fashioned. He was very well dressed

and well mannered.

Conscientious.

By the early '80s...

..spirits were fairly high.

I was aware that we had identified quite a lot of spies.

You might have the letters opened, see where they were going,

who they were meeting.

Russians are very good.

So they don't slip up on the phone.

So it was almost exclusively talking about what white goods to buy

on the Tottenham Court Road to take back to Moscow.

An awful lot of it!

Well, I've got various newspaper cuttings,

but also photos with Mrs T.

Margaret Thatcher was uncompromising in her dislike of socialism

and of communism, and that was what drove her.

I look so young and innocent.

My job was really to make sure

that 10 Downing Street worked well

for the Prime Minister.

Yes, OK, certainly. Margo!

Margaret Thatcher was fascinated by intelligence.

Part of it was the glamour,

but also, she liked to collect as much information as possible,

and intelligence was one of the sources.

There was a special box in Number 10 known as "stripey",

because it had a red stripe across a blue box,

and there would have been regular reports

of anything which became known about Soviet activity in the UK.

What the Prime Minister doesn't know

is that her intelligence service has a very special resource in play.

There was a number of secrets in my life.

In Britain, I was supposed to be just an official,

civilian official of the Soviet state.

Meanwhile, I was a KGB spy...

..spying against Britain.

But Oleg Gordievsky has an even bigger secret.

Gordievsky was recruited as a double agent

while working in Denmark in the 1970s...

..but was summoned back to Moscow, and all contact went cold.

His British handlers have been waiting four years to hear from him.

You can imagine...

..a combination of anticipation

and delight,

but on the other hand, the realisation that this would be

an extraordinarily sensitive operation to run.

A completely unparalleled situation.

I would be regarded by the Soviet state

as a traitor and a criminal.

There are some things that I really cannot go into.

I know you'll understand the nature of what we're talking about.

When Oleg arrived in London in 1982,

it was invaluable

to have the views of an insider

in the Russian Embassy in London

who knew the meaning of everything that was happening.

I hated the communist system.

I wanted to fight against it.

I was euphoric about working not for a tyranny,

but for a democratic state.

He was very, very intellectually disciplined.

He knew all the tricks of the trade.

They're not all very good, but some of them are,

and he was.

I knew so much about the crimes of the communist power

against the Russian people

and the peoples of other territories -

Lithuanian, Ukrainian -

that I simply would have regarded myself as not an honest person

if I wouldn't be fighting against that system.

It's a huge risk for Oleg,

because Soviet Union, it was a death sentence

for all people who betrayed their own country.

What I know about Oleg,

he was very balanced and very strong.

Some people have their own destiny.

My name is Marina Litvinenko.

I'm a British citizen,

and I live in the country even after my husband was killed.

It would be very, very few people anywhere who knew about Oleg.

You don't want anybody at any stage

to betray the source

because accidents happen.

Usually things are very, very carefully contained.

Only people who need to know.

That's a great principle - need to know.

You have to keep completely tight

to a very few people.

Only eight people in the country have been told about Gordievsky.

But MI5's watchers are always on the tail of Russians in London

so could accidentally blow his cover.

Two of Michael Bettaney's colleagues at K Desk

are let into this highly sensitive operation

at a highly sensitive time.

A specially extended Nine O'Clock News with Michael Buerk.

President Brezhnev, ruler of Russia for nearly two decades, is dead.

For the Soviet people tonight, five days of mourning begin.

For leaders who've grown old in his shadow,

the chance of ultimate power.

Who will take over?

Brezhnev was there for 18 years.

There was a whole generation

that didn't know how to deal with the death of a leader.

The Communist Party decides

to promote someone with a very clear agenda.

Andropov becomes, from the KGB, the head of the Soviet Union.

He was quite a terrifying man.

He came out of the apparatus of control,

and he then ran the Soviet Union as a very controlled environment.

When he's marched into the General Secretary of the Communist Party...

..it's a coming-of-age moment.

Because of the Krushchev name, my great-grandfather,

when Andropov became the head of the Soviet Union...

..my family was simply terrified,

because he's the KGB head.

Khrushchev dismantled,

or as much as he could,

he dismantled the KGB after Stalin's death.

So Andropov, as my mother was convinced,

was going to come back at us, at the family, with a vengeance.

And, you know, there was even a talk

that the gulags are going to be reinstated.

He's going to push forward certain policies,

including international policies.

Now he is leader of the Soviet Union,

Andropov's Operation RYaN charts

are taken from the KGB backrooms to the heart of Soviet policy.

It was Andropov's obsession, those charts that we talked about.

He did think that confrontation

and particularly nuclear confrontation

with the United States can happen.

And so the Soviet Union has to be

completely and utterly prepared to push that button.

All eyes are now on Reagan in this uncharted new landscape.

Reagan was adamant

that he's not going to deal with those red...red bastards.

So, for him, Andropov was that icon that he imagined.

And for Andropov, Reagan was that icon,

the cowboy who is going to destroy the Soviet Union,

because he was playing in all these films like John Wayne.

Reagan and Andropov, in some ways, found each other.

Neither of them would back off.

Reagan, of course, was going to whip it up

and show those Russkies.

When they're such mirror images,

then of course it would be

obviously a cycle of animosity.

This was the moment when we were really scared of the nuclear war.

That really stayed with me as the scariest time

that I've ever experienced in my life in the Soviet Union.

The opposing sides in the Cold War could not be further apart.

Now Britain's double agent is their best chance

at understanding where Andropov's paranoia is leading.

After some time, I started to spirit authentic KGB documents

out of the KGB premises, which was a great risk for life.

So it was not just me telling them and briefing the British officials

but also producing real, authentic KGB documents.

You should always be slightly on edge.

The mistakes are endless that you could make,

and if you get relaxed,

that's when you make them.

One day, the head of station, a KGB general...

..drove past me when I was crossing the road.

It was very dangerous.

It turned out that he was such a poor driver

that he simply failed to see me.

Gordievsky is now firmly established as a high-value asset,

and so MI6 make a decision.

It was in December 1982, as I recall...

..that MI6 needed to tell the Prime Minister

that they had a source but it was highly secret.

Good morning, good morning. Happy Christmas to you all. Same to you.

Wonderful to be here. Mrs Thatcher, lovely to see you.

We weren't told the name.

It's lovely to see you here. Wonderful to be here.

We weren't even told the position.

The spirit of peace and goodwill! Thank you, Prime Minster.

She would have recognised the importance

of protecting this asset very, very carefully...

Good afternoon.

..partly, I think, for the glamour of it,

but partly for real necessity.

She would have not wanted to know the real name

and would have invented a name that she could use.

The inner circle who know about Gordievsky is growing.

But Britain's advantage over the Soviets must be kept secret.

Two months later, Gordievsky provides crucial intelligence,

revealing that the new Soviet leader

has pushed Operation RYaN to the foreground.

We were instructed to watch for signs of special activities

during the day and particularly by night.

Lit windows of the Ministry of Defence

and the Foreign Office.

The American Embassy working overtime

until early morning hours.

What Oleg Gordievsky really brought

was an inside understanding

of what Operation RYaN was really about.

It was showing a paranoia.

But the paranoia was real.

As soon as they were receiving reports,

the number of crosses was slowly, slowly growing,

which was making the point, "Yes, they're preparing!"

When two sides don't know one another,

they both misread signs.

You can see how dreadful things can happen

by that kind of misunderstanding.

Despite Andropov's suspicions,

the West has no plans for a nuclear attack.

So they will watch and wait

and protect their source at all costs.

The decision not to tell the Americans about Gordievsky

would have been because this was such a valuable asset

that you would want to protect it as much as possible,

illustrated by the fact that

Margaret Thatcher didn't even know his name or his position.

Without Gordievsky's insights,

Reagan is not thinking about the Soviets' true state of mind.

He steps up his strategy to scare them into backing down

with a brazen new stance.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

In 1983, I was arms control director.

Ronald Reagan gives his speech

before the evangelicals, of all people...

..saying that the Soviet Union is "the evil empire,

"the focus of evil in the modern world".

The Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared

that the only morality they recognise

is that which will further their cause,

which is world revolution.

Ronald Reagan felt that there was a tendency in the world

to equate the two sides.

They're both to be blamed for the Cold War,

they're both to be blamed for all these nuclear weapons,

there's a moral equivalence between the two.

Ronald Reagan was saying there's no moral equivalence.

Let us pray for the salvation

of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness.

They are the focus of evil in the modern world.

APPLAUSE

Most Soviet people, including Andropov,

believed that there could be a nuclear attack from the West.

By the way, the Soviet Union never bombed anyone with A-bombs.

The Americans did it twice.

You know, somehow in the Western media,

the Soviets are presented like, you know, paranoid people.

Excuse me!

Look from our point of view at America.

Reagan's approach is to openly and expensively arm Europe

as a way to force the increasingly impoverished Soviets to back down.

The Defence Secretary told NATO that we would be prepared to have

160 cruise missiles based here in Britain.

The main base is to be Greenham Common near Newbury,

where 76 of the missiles will be stored.

The cruise missile can carry any size of nuclear warhead,

and with a range of 1,700 miles,

the ones soon to be based at Greenham Common

could reach as far as Moscow.

Margaret Thatcher was always a firm supporter

of the policy of nuclear deterrence.

In the mid-1980s, it was very much a disputed matter.

There were many people who were very anxious

about the danger of nuclear weapons.

Of course, this coincided

with the deployment of nuclear missiles to Europe

and the basing of them in the UK.

She felt that that was necessary for the safety of Europe.

She knew it was going to be opposed.

As protests gained momentum,

KGB agents seized the opportunity to impress Andropov back at home.

The KGB office in London

was claiming credit with Moscow

for having organised

the Greenham Common protests.

They couldn't organise a soapbox in Hyde Park as a protest,

let alone, you know,

a massive, massive spontaneous protest

like Greenham Common.

And, of course, that eventually blew back to the Conservative government,

and certain Conservative politicians at the time

started to accuse Greenham Common women of being funded by Moscow.

And so they got tarred unjustly at the time

as being sort of puppets of Moscow.

Internal memos are shared within the Government

as the rumour takes hold.

The British secret service quietly starts surveillance

on the peace movement at Greenham Common.

The use of watchers to keep control at home

sits uneasily with Michael Bettaney.

I think Michael was becoming increasingly unhappy

that domestic surveillance as such was being expanded.

Who checks on what the spies are doing?

Who spies on the spies?

Because we were beginning to see MI5 as a microcosm of society

and a society that he was growing more and more disillusioned with.

I got on with him very well

because I very much liked his sense of humour.

And he was quite interesting to talk to.

He liked talking to me about Russian culture,

Russian literature, Russian music.

He didn't really want to hear all the realities

of the day-to-day hardships of the Soviet citizens.

And he'd sometimes make odd little comments,

you know, about, I don't know, how wonderful Russia was or something,

that I took to be ironic but perhaps weren't, in retrospect.

Michael Bettaney, he became more and more disillusioned

with British governmental policies.

He then decided communism was a better path for mankind.

I think he was a man still looking and still searching for...

..the meaning in his life.

Michael Bettaney pushes a letter through the letterbox

of General Arkadi Guk,

offering his services.

I think he was probably more interested

in hurting the Establishment than...

..giving secrets to the Russians.

It just seemed like something out of a novel,

like a sort of John le Carre thing

that you didn't expect to happen in the real world.

You didn't really expect people

to be approaching the Russians and fixing dead letterboxes,

no, even despite all our training.

It did seem rather extraordinary.

When that letter arrived in Arkadi Guk's flat,

I'm pretty sure he was suspicious

because he had huge experience as a counterintelligence officer.

So he was extremely careful.

Gordievsky learned that there had been some offer

but of course didn't know who.

Guk said, "Now, look, that man is sending us

"their information about KGB,

"which means they're sending us what we already know."

It was not real intelligence.

The KGB deliberate over whether the offer is genuine.

Gordievsky can feel danger inching closer.

The potential spy giving away secrets to the KGB was dangerous.

I felt...tremendous pressure.

The nerves were beginning to fail me.

My health started to deteriorate.

I had insomnia...

..and high blood pressure.

I told the British intelligence service.

They started to look for a traitor.

It was really important to identify who this anonymous person was

who was offering secrets

to the Soviet Embassy.

A mole hunt, classic mole hunt.

MUSIC: Newsnight Theme Tune

As British intelligence raced to protect Gordievsky,

a drama is unfolding on the other side of the world

that plays into every paranoia on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Good evening, and our apologies for joining you later than usual.

We had a fire alarm in the building, which fortunately came to nothing.

But now for our programme.

In perhaps the most alarming diplomatic incident

since the Second World War,

a Russian MiG fighter has shot down a civilian airliner.

All 269 people aboard are presumed dead.

The missile attack happened

when the South Korean jumbo jet strayed into Soviet airspace.

The crisis over Flight 007...

Just about half were Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese...

The free world was outraged.

For once, it's no exaggeration to say that Western governments

have been stunned and even a little frightened.

Once the news comes that the Soviets had shot down the Korean airliner,

Ronald Reagan immediately goes on national television

and uses every dirty word for their behaviour

that he can find in the thesaurus.

What can be said about Soviet credibility

when they so flagrantly lie about such a heinous act?

The military in Moscow explain.

"The Korean jumbo was spying, so our missiles brought it down."

Being in the Soviet Union, you've been limited for information.

It was all controlling, all propaganda style.

This was all right.

This was just an aeroplane just crossed the border

and nobody knew what it's going to be,

and this was only way to shut it down.

The Soviet Union becomes very defensive, very quiet

and makes no apologies at all.

So that drove people in the West, especially conservatives like me,

to think, "Boy, they are even worse than we thought they were."

THEY SHOUT

NEWS CORRESPONDENT:

The Soviet people don't know

that there is a major diplomatic crisis,

because they haven't been told.

It was a frightening moment.

But there was so much going on in 1983

that was frightening.

Gordievsky will need to help the British interpret the Soviet mood.

But first, he must watch his own back.

The mole has tried again.

A rather frustrated Michael Bettaney

put a second letter through Guk's letterbox,

in this case enclosing a list

of all the identified KGB officers in London.

Guk was very boastful.

And he was saying things which were unnecessary to say.

He was not supposed to tell me.

The document provides a much-needed clue.

Only someone at K Desk could have access to these details.

Gordievsky's lead takes MI5 to Michael Bettaney's door.

He didn't confess initially.

So they left him to sweat it out overnight

in a safe house with a bottle of whisky.

And the next day he said, "I'll make a clean breast of it."

My name is Helena Kennedy.

I was one of the barristers who was instructed

to act for Michael Bettaney.

I remember that we asked, "Why did you ask for us?"

And he said, "Because I knew you and I knew your work,"

and he made it very clear that he did have informants

inside all these campaigns, in the cases that we did.

Bettaney tells his lawyers that spying on British citizens

like Helena Kennedy and the women of Greenham Common

fuelled his betrayal.

I think that he then felt that he was

party to something that was discreditable,

in fact, to the British state.

He was not going to play that game.

I think he did feel a sense of outrage

that took him down this crazy road.

Once his house was raided by the security services,

they found a large amount of accumulated material

that would never, in normal circumstances,

be sitting in somebody's house.

Michael Bettaney, I don't want to have it on my conscience

that there are people in jail because of my information.

I feel uneasy about it, because I'm a human being

and I've got my conscience and my soul.

The concern of the security services

was that Michael Bettaney had passed information,

information about Gordievsky, to the KGB.

Bettaney's arrest means the KGB has missed a valuable opportunity

to see what the West are really up to.

Andropov's paranoia is now at boiling point

but remains unheeded.

Still unconvinced about how their actions are being read,

Western forces carry on as normal...

..and launch a military exercise,

gathering 40,000 US and NATO troops across Europe,

right on Russia's border.

Able Archer was a normal military exercise by NATO command...

..to prepare NATO forces in Europe

for an attack from the Soviet Union.

But the way it was done was not normal at all.

The nuclear component of the exercise was hyped up.

RADIO COMMS:

Yankee 4 Lima...

The idea of it was,

make this as realistic as you could possibly make it.

For Andropov, it looks like

his Operation RYaN prophecy could be coming true.

They were receiving much more cables during Able Archer.

I knew it was a dramatic moment.

I knew Moscow was nervous.

Daytime, 01.55...

B-52 bombers with nuclear capabilities

now arrive at the US German airbase.

Andropov is watching it unfold from hospital.

But the Soviet people aren't told

about their leader's declining health

as he keeps his hands firmly on the reins of power.

I think KGB people have a different kind of brain

than a politician.

KGB is all about state security.

They are protecting the state

from all this malign interference and influence.

And so if Andropov would get that close

to feeling that the nation is threatened,

why not?

In response, the Soviets get into position.

Nuclear submarines are primed and ready to rise and launch.

Soviet troops are put on a 15-minutes' combat standby.

Andropov, he's dying, but he's clutching that red button.

He really thinks if it's not him, who else?

He's in charge.

But the exercise continues,

unaware that a nuclear confrontation is now just a phone call away.

The prevailing attitude was,

"We're not even thinking about them."

You know, their reaction to all this is something that...

..you know, that doesn't come up, just doesn't come up.

Ultimately, you kind of have this mendacity.

You believe in your own propaganda of your own greatness,

you're in the control of the state.

All Russian and Soviet dictators,

their problem is they always think they're the last line of defence.

While the country is being starved to death,

eliminated, bombed,

destroying others in your wake,

you still think that,

because the greatness of the state

belongs to you, you are in power,

you have the right, if you decide, to destroy it

so nobody else would get it.

Two weeks after it began,

the Able Archer operation wraps up on schedule.

Andropov off is finally persuaded

that this really was just an exercise.

This time.

Western forces pack up their kit,

not realising how close the world could have come to nuclear war.

We knew the times were dangerous.

What we didn't know was even worse than we thought at the time,

and they could press the button

and unleash a nuclear war against the West.

We don't know what's happened in the Kremlin during those days

or especially the last few hours of the drill.

My contribution was to explain that this is dangerous.

You're playing with fire, you simply don't understand

the mentality of the old Russian leaders.

The Able Archer exercise,

the world came very close to nuclear war.

It's important that the agent feels

that the risks they're running are properly recognised.

After the Bettaney case, Margaret Thatcher, through MI6,

sent congratulations to Gordievsky

for helping expose Bettaney.

Little things like that really matter.

Michael Bettaney never knew

about the double identity of Oleg Gordievsky.

Britain's highest-ranking mole is safe...for now.

Bettaney is found guilty of ten charges

under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 23 years in jail.

To be a traitor, to hand over names of people who might end up dead,

that is wrong,

because of the harm he could cause to other people.

And then the people left behind

are working in an atmosphere where they don't know

if they can trust the people they're working with.

He could have done with somebody in his life

that just said, "Oh, come on, stop fantasising

"and let's, you know, go and see a film, or something."

He wrote to me from prison.

"A young sparrowhawk chose my exercise yard for a picnic.

"We looked at each other in mutual amazement.

"Bird puzzled by man in cage.

"But it only lasted for a couple of minutes,

"so I have to try and relive the experience in my imagination."

Our goal was to weaken the enemy

and eventually help the suppressed to rise up

and build another communist nation.

I felt instinctively that my time was running out.

From cyber intelligence

to undercover operatives and so-called honeypots,

the shape of espionage has constantly changed with the times.

For an interactive look at spying's past,

go to the address below

and follow the links to the Open University.