19
Nikolai’s Yulia was dead and gone. Staley had given him proof it was the KGB. His mother had been arrested and stripped of all property by the KGB. He was in a rage, and, in his way, he was hurt. What about the loyalty he had pledged to the KGB and the Party? So far, it was a one-way street. It had taken so much from him, so thoughtlessly, without regard to him as a real person, that he had finally reached the end of his rope. He made a decision. He was going to give the British every last piece of intelligence he could lay his hands on. At the moment he’d made this decision, he realized that his loyalties had shifted. He might not be British, but maybe that would happen one day. Whatever else, he was no longer Soviet. His own country had turned its back on him.
On a warm day in late July 1961, Nikolai appeared as a nondescript man wearing nondescript clothes, ordering coffee from a small café in central London and carrying it outside to a white steel table. He sat down and opened the newspaper. He slowly stirred his coffee with a spoon. The restaurant was full since it was the noon hour, and some people were standing outside along the fence, eating their sandwiches and laughing. Nikolai studied the crowd over his newspaper, looking for KGB surveillance--he knew KGB faces when he saw them, but this time it was all clear.
Soon, another nondescript man, Franklin Bolling, appeared outside, balancing a coffee in a saucer and a sandwich on a plate. He approached the first man’s table and nodded at the extra chair. “May I?”
“Help yourself.”
Bolling sat down and began eating his sandwich and sipping his tea. “Would you pass me the sugar?”
Nikolai passed the sugar and, as he did, dropped an aluminum container of microfilm into Bolling’s hand. The exchange took one second to complete. Bolling wolfed down his sandwich and abruptly left.
Once off the square, Bolling turned up a flight of stairs, flew up to the landing, and let himself into the first flat. There, he fired up a copier about the size of a Bible and pulled the microfilm slowly through the copier face. Then he waited, counting the minutes.
Thirty minutes later, the same two men did a brush-by exchange as they passed in front of the shoe store window. Now, Nikolai had the film returned and was on his way back to the station with it inside his pocket, where Bolling had planted it.
After dozens of brush-bys and drops, Bolling and Nikolai met at the safe house to discuss a month later.
“Is it helping?” asked Nikolai somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Bolling couldn’t help beaming. “Is it ever! You have given us a river of documents every day. We’ve never had so much information from one source. There is so much information on spies and agents and illegals, and where they operate, we’ve had to bring in extra agents to handle the deluge. But don’t stop! Don’t think for a minute it’s too much!”
“We have to be extremely careful. Our drops are the most dangerous moment in the whole game. If a KGB officer were to witness, he would shoot me on the spot. So we need to become more creative.”
“We’ll set up a dead drop. We’ll set up one for each day of the week. That way, we can alternate, so we repeat the same handoff two weeks apart. Does that help?”
“Agree. A dead drop might be that much friendlier. But the time is still thirty minutes with you. I must return before my lunch hour is up.”
“Understood.”
Nikolai knew that with every exchange, he was risking his life. One slip-up—just one—and he was dead. Imagine, he thought, a KGB officer caught outside headquarters with microfilm so top secret it was transported by diplomatic bag. He had to shake his head and pinch himself at times. Was he really doing this? He was. Would he continue? He would, and even more of it. But still, he was terrified. He would return each time to the embassy shaking and sweating head to toe. He kept his hands in his pockets the first hour after so his coworkers didn’t notice him shaking.
The contact sites varied: a phone booth, a toilet, a filling station, a drugstore magazine display, a dentist’s outer office, a grocery store bathroom. They changed it every day.
As the rezident’s deputy, Nikolai had access to hundreds of documents containing code names, operations, directives, and a 150-page report outlining all Soviet intelligence efforts in Britain. The volume was enormous, and London was now underwater. The information was still painstakingly distributed, sometimes to MI5 and sometimes the British homeland intelligence agencies if it affected national security. Other than MI5, only the Brits received Britain-specific ULYSSES files.
The gap closed between Bolling and Nikolai Semenov. The Russian knew MI5 was watching him. He knew they were recording him, even against their earlier promises they would not. However, he still identified every KGB officer, every illegal, and every source feeding the KGB’s greedy mouth. Bolling convinced Nikolai to accept money in the form of underground deposits into a secret Semenov account in London that would be available to him should he ever decide to defect to Great Britain. The time would come when Nikolai would most likely defect.
But until then, documents would continue to swamp the Brits.
20
In August 1961, Bolling approached Emma Magnuson concerning the escape plan.
“My boss is going to ask me about the percentages. What are we talking about here, as far as chances of the plan of escape working? Forty percent? Sixty percent?"
She grimaced. "Ten percent. Maybe only five."
"Really? That's all?"
She tapped her pen on her pad of paper. "All of Russia is a prison. No one comes, no one goes without special written permission.”
“Make it better. Director’s orders.”
Emma took on the assignment. She had to make it fit Nikolai and Sasha. She was a Cambridge graduate in political science with a second degree in political geography. Her skill was movements across the face of the earth, particularly the overt movement of spies from country to country, city to city, and town to town.
Bolling set up a working meeting. He watched her work to see how it was done.
"First, we begin with the seaports. What if we forged a seaman's documents? What if we get that seaman listed on a crew bound for neutral soil?"
"Makes sense," Bolling said, "as long as the Russian Coast Guard doesn't board it and shoot everyone who looks suspicious."
"Let's see," she said, opening and marking her place in three books. "It appears that Soviet security on the waterfront and ports and even ships themselves is even tighter than airports and automobile crossings."
"Don't forget," Bolling added, "that official Russian documents require watermarks. Impossible to forge. What about a private boat to carry Nikolai and Sasha across the Black Sea to Turkey? Or the Caspian Sea to Persia? Or Finland to Stockholm?"
"Back to your Coast Guard again. They're thick as thieves along the Baltic. I've even heard horror stories about spies who get discovered and tossed overboard."
"So that's out."
"Airports? There's a ferry from Turku to Stockholm. I rather like that."
"By way of Helsinki. Perhaps Moscow to Leningrad, Leningrad to Tallinn, Tallinn to Helsinki.”
"Let's see. He takes a train, a bus, a ferry, a car, a ferry, a jet plane. But there’s one problem. The Soviet Union officially closed the ferry between Tallinn and Helsinki. One exception is this: the Silja Line out of Helsinki is allowed to dock one ferry a week at Tallinn and load and transport back to Helsinki. It’s a commercial exception to allow trade, sales, teachers, and remote workers to travel back and forth on Sunday afternoons.”