Since the end of World War Two, the Russian Trade Delegation in Highgate has befuddled locals and enraged successive British governments. What’s really going on inside the compound’s walls?
On 8 May 2024, the UK government announced the expulsion of the Russian defence attaché Maxim Elovik. In a statement to Parliament, the then-Home Secretary, James Cleverly, alleged that Elovik was an ‘undeclared military intelligence officer’ and announced that the the compound where he worked, ‘the trade and defence section in Highgate’, would be stripped of its diplomatic privileges. If you didn’t concentrate too hard, it sounded like the government might even seize the premises and auction it off to help fund the defence of Ukraine.
For years, the Trade Delegation’s premises and personnel enjoyed the inviolable status that comes with diplomatic privilege: immune from prosecution, postal search and council tax. In the cold war, it was known as ‘Little Moscow’ and often featured in accounts of the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions that were common fare before the fall of the wall. These have been revived in recent years, along with the old intrigue. After the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal seven years ago, a helicopter was seen hovering over the complex for weeks on end.
To many local residents, this brooding complex of modern buildings has long been a source of intrigue and mystery. For many years, it has been widely rumoured to host a large number of Russian spies among its hundreds-strong staff. The compound is vast, but set within densely planted grounds that obscure most of the buildings from sight. A high wall rings the perimeter. Over the years, the Soviets (and latterly the Russians) picked up a slew of properties in the nearby streets of NW5 and N6: Dartmouth Park Road, Hill Way and Oakeshott Avenue. Residents in these streets often wonder whether the Russian delegation was responsible for their terrible phone signal. One local remembered climbing into his neighbour’s garden to get his ball back, and discovering a huge satellite dish on the lawn.
During the Londongrad era – we can argue over the exact dates, but mine run from when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in June 2003 to when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 – the ‘Little Moscow’ moniker spread to cover much of the surrounding area. Where once there might have been quiet Russian couples who kept scrupulously to themselves, or simply abandoned buildings, there was now a new class of invisible residents. Behind looming walls and tinted windows were the oligarchs who had bought up many of the area’s most desirable houses. The storied editor Diana Athill once asked a taxi driver if he ever picked up any of her new neighbours. ‘No, but I often drive their cooks,’ he replied.
It may seem strange that a large complex of buildings belonging to the Russian state was not only still in operation two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, but was playing host to an alleged bevy of spies within spitting distance of the men’s pond lawns. Like anyone else who has looked out from Parliament Hill and seen the Russian rippling above the tree tops, I have long wanted to know what kind of trade deals were really being struck behind the deep thickets of greenery.
Standing outside the walls of the mysterious compound, it’s easy to assume that the men and women inside see the whole chessboard, where we see only a set of dirty brick walls, a set of burglar spikes and an impenetrable thicket of native trees. But as the secret history of Russia’s north London outpost shows, things may not be quite so simple.
In the early hours of 31 August, 1971, an extremely drunk Russian man was pulled over by police officers not far from Warren Street Tube station. In the car with him was a blonde woman. After a short conversation, the woman left and the man addressed the officers. He gave his name as Oleg Lyalin, his address as the Russian Trade Delegation in Highgate and his occupation as KGB officer. Finally, he astonished them by saying he was a double agent and giving the name of his MI5 handlers.
Lyalin was a Russian intelligence officer who had begun an affair with one of his KGB colleague’s wives shortly after arriving in London. Earlier that year, British intelligence had broken into her residential building and filmed the couple having sex. When the Brits confronted Lyalin with the kompromat, he agreed to swap sides in exchange for a safehouse where they could continue the affair. Over a series of debriefings, Lyalin gave the names of 120 active Russian spies stationed in London, many of whom had diplomatic immunity.
The team who debriefed him were able to confirm a little of what the Russians were doing in London. Lyalin was part of a sabotage unit involved in baroque contingency planning for the outbreak of war: one plan involved sprinkling poison gas capsules along Whitehall in the event of armed conflict. Many of the spies Lyalin identified would already have been known to the intelligence agencies, but his defection (and his reliable list) seems to have provided cover for the UK government to act. Even then the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, attempted diplomacy, asking his Soviet counterpart if he would withdraw some of his spies from London. ‘The Soviet Union does not use spies,’ the minister replied.
The idea that foreign envoys should enjoy special protection seems to predate our earliest written records of it: Herodotus invokes it as a timeless principle. Diplomatic protections are underwritten by the simple principle of reciprocity – whatever you do to us, we’ll do to you. It was an 18th century Anglo-Russian fracas that led these protections to be codified in English law, after a Russian envoy of Peter the Great was arrested by English bailiffs. Victorian imperial rivalries gave way to outright ideological hostility in the 20th century, a state of affairs not helped by Britain’s leading role in the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918 (an event that has been entirely forgotten in the west, but which is still taught in Russian schools). By the mid-1920s, the impoverished, fledgling Soviet Union had established a well-staffed Trade Delegation in central London. In 1927, the British violated their diplomatic statusby mounting a full-scale police raid of the premises. For two years, diplomatic relations ceased entirely.
By the end of World War Two, the Trade Delegation had moved to around Highgate. Over the next few decades, the size of the Russian mission in London seemed to grow out of all proportion to its task. In 1955, the Trade Delegation was already being expanded to include a large block of flats. In 1960, residents on the nearby Holly Lodge Estate reported receiving letters offering to buy their houses. ‘We must have central heating,’ the delegation’s legal adviser told the press. ‘English people like very much the cold. This is not so much to our liking.’ Two years later, another block of 48 flats was erected to house the expanding mission. The press quickly became interested in this institution, which carried ‘a remarkably large staff given the moderate volume of Anglo-Soviet trade’.
Inside Britain’s intelligence services, there was rising panic about the number of official Russians in London and the state’s ability to monitor them. Both MI5 and MI6 had been completely penetrated by the Cambridge Five, a ring of well-educated British men who spied for the Soviet Union during and after World War Two. Both institutions were struggling on in a complicated state of denial and stasis. Inside MI5, routine vetting still didn’t begin until the mid-60s. Instead, new recruits were required to sit in a windowless room with a box of tapes and listen to spymaster Guy Liddell, whose career was ended by the scandal, recite an official history of the organisation that consisted of one glorious success after another.
In the early 70s, it took nine MI5 officers to effectively watch one person of interest. The Soviet diplomatic corps in Britain totalled more than 550 people –more than in any other western country. In his memoir Spycatcher, MI5 officer Peter Wright describes the ‘watchers’ MI5 installed opposite the embassy, slumped at the window day and night. Their job was to cross-reference people going in and out with a bound, three-volume book containing the names and photos of all the Russians in the UK. What with people changing their names and haircuts and beards and moustaches, it was becoming hard to tell who was actually in the country.
Unable to penetrate diplomatic premises other than through party walls or during construction work, much depended on remote surveillance. British bugs fed through to a transcription team of elderly Russian ladies who decorated their section on the seventh floor of MI5 with orthodox icons and, per Wright, ‘considered themselves artists’. Not far away was the postal section, where 20 men sat at a desk steaming open envelopes, each with his own official kettle.
The Lyalin affair ended with the public expulsion of 105 Soviet diplomats from the UK. For several years afterwards, precious little news came in or out of Little Moscow. In 1983 though, a Northern Irish glazier called Bill Graham approached journalists with an extraordinary story. Four years earlier, he said, MI6 had helped him secure a contract to reglaze the entire Trade Delegation complex. His story turned out to be true. In 1979, Graham was approached by a friend in the police intelligence unit, known as Special Branch, and asked if he would meet someone about a job.
Graham was a Northern Irish Protestant with a background as a military policeman and bodyguard, who had done small jobs for Special Branch before, though never against the IRA, he claims. (The Fence was unable to locate Bill Graham for interview). At the first meeting, he was taken to a hotel in Pimlico where he sat with a standard lamp angled into his eyes while a silhouette with a Home Counties accent apologised for the fuss. After some friendly overtures (‘We’ve laid on a few cans’), the silhouette explained that MI6 kept tabs on all contractors used by the Soviets in London and the contract was coming up to reglaze the Trade Delegation.
In his book Break-in: Inside the Soviet Trade Delegation, Graham describes driving through the front gates of 33 Highgate West Hill and parking up by the glass double doors and ornamental waterfall. ‘We know the prices of aluminium and other materials,’ the Russian delegate told Graham when he arrived. He said they needed the window casings replaced in iroko, an expensive hardwood, and that each member of the team would be assigned a guard to watch them throughout the job. But the interview was just a formality.
To stretch the Russian watchers, Graham told his men to work on four rooms at a time. They started in the ‘hotel’, the residential section of the complex. Rooms were basic: a single bed, a plain dresser and wardrobe. Cooking and cleaning facilities were communal. The guards were soon bored out of their minds. Graham would take documents off the premises for covert photography; sometimes MI6 sent a photocopier in a van to meet him. When his men saw him leaving at 11am, he says they would chuckle, knowing he was ‘nipping out’ for a pint.
In Break-in, Graham describes uncovering a small string of intelligence treasures: a Rolls-Royce engine manual; a list of dos and don’ts for Soviet citizens abroad; a map with radar stations ringed in pen. Intelligence officers in trade postings were often focused on stealing industrial secrets, rather than gaining access to politically influential people. (An almost respectable 7.25% of Soviet industrial intelligence was British-derived in the 1970s and 80s.)
Graham describes one man who went out dressed in radically different clothes every day: a tailored suit one day and workman’s overalls the next. When the time came to reglaze his room, he says they found the cupboard stuffed with different costumes. Graham stole the address section of his diary. His handlers told him they had identified him as Anatoli Pavlovich Zotov, expelled in 1982.
Zotov’s expulsion is the one moment where Graham’s account crosses over from the secret world into the world of verifiable history. It’s also one of the few moments he himself knows what uses his intelligence is being put to, or even what it means. Multiple times a week, he was debriefed at obsessive length by his handler, Jay, who fed him a continuous stream of beers, ‘so he could drain the last drop of information’. The handler seemed preoccupied with a huge book of names and photos, whose accuracy, he explains, was perpetually imperilled by the Russians.
What seems to have kept Graham going was the thirst for information itself. We imagine spies as partaking of the secret omniscience of states, but Graham understood himself as a specialised part in a larger machine, held and pinioned with his face to the world, shouting back to where a huge mechanism clicked and whirred in the dark. Sometimes Graham’s handler would dangle a clue about what one of his targets was really up to. ‘It was information like that which kept me going,’ he writes. Far from all-knowing, most active agents are more like men pressing buttons that feed signals through to places they can’t see. Perhaps they get a signal back, but even then, they might not know what it meant.
When the different pieces of intelligence come together, the reality they describe is often banal. ‘It’s quite easy – it’s not 100% – but the majority of spies, their activities are known to the other side,’ explained Mikhail Bogdanov when I reached him by FaceTime recently.
Bogdanov was a KGB officer in the cold war, trained by Kim Philby and stationed in London as a journalist during the 1980s. Like his colleagues, he filed his reports from inside a bug-proof Faraday cage on the top floor of the embassy – a requirement that would have made his real job obvious to anyone watching. ‘A journalist should come to the embassy maybe one or two times a month,’ he told me. ‘What can I say about the guy who comes every day because he has to go to the rezidentura to file reports?’
Bogdanov remembered fondly both his generous expense account and the smell of perfumed soap, but he also remembered bad food, general discomfort and strange foreign habits. ‘It’s very damp, you know – it’s watery, the smell,’ he told me when I asked what he had felt about how the British lived. ‘Not enough heating – always saving on heating and water.’ He didn’t understand why the British didn’t eat mushrooms, living in such a rainy country.
Over the next 20 years, as the Soviet Union imploded and the Russian Federation underwent the trauma of shock therapy, that London – and that Britain – was slowly replaced. As the price of a house increased 20-fold in 30 years, a new city emerged, one that would prove the playground of Russia’s new super-rich class. ‘In the Russian mind, England was a very special place,’ one Russian businessman told me. British law, British courts, British schools, British governance, British property rights – the new Russians thought these were the best available anywhere. ‘Russian legal documents, even within Russian firms, were written for potential British courts,’ he told me.
Around Hampstead Heath, Russians were suddenly buying enormous properties. Mikhail Fridman, co-founder of Alfa group, bought the Victorian estate of Athlone House for £65 million. The sometime owner of Arsenal Football Club, Alisher Usmanov, bought Beechwood House and its 11 acres of gardens for £48 million. For a long time, no one knew who had bought Witanhurst, the second-largest house in London after Buckingham Palace, only that it cost them £50 million and they were remodelling on a truly titanic scale. It took a New Yorker investigation to reveal that the house, whose ownership was registered to a company in the British Virgin Islands called Safran Holdings, ultimately belonged to fertiliser magnate Andrey Guryev. In their pomp, the renovations were said to be costing £2 million a week.
All this came to an end in 2022, when Putin rolled his column of tanks towards Kyiv. Since then, calls have grown louder to seize their frozen assets, along with the Russian government’s properties down the road and the larger pile of Russian state-owned entities in the UK. The total value of the assets frozen by the UK was about £22 billion. Include the rest of Europe and that number rose to over £250 billion.
Almost no one in Britain would oppose the idea. Yet there is a world of difference between freezing and seizing an asset. Freezing an asset simply blocks someone’s access to their money: the money still sits there, doing nothing and accruing interest. Seizing it, on the other hand, means reaching into bank accounts and moving that money somewhere new. For foreign investors (like say, the Gulf states) it might set an alarming precedent that Britain could take your stuff if it disagreed with what you did. The same went for Europe, where systemically important investors in EU treasuries (like, say, China) might rapidly sell them down if they believed their investments were at risk. The upshot is a situation in which everything is known, everyone agrees and no one can act.
It’s been over a year since the Russian Trade Delegation was stripped of its diplomatic privileges. Exactly what that means I don’t know. Someone, appears to still be in there but in all my visits I never saw a car go in or out. The next-door neighbours told me they get on well with the caretaker, even if he seemed unwilling to cut back the ramifying wall of trees that blocks the compound from view at almost every angle. But other than that, they didn’t know their neighbours. In London, who does?
In the streets nearby, the other Russian houses are deserted, their cheap plastic doorbells no longer functional and their gardens overgrown. One resident on the Holly Lodge Estate told me how a house at the end was owned by MI5, who used it to watch the Trade Delegation. But when I rang the bell, an elderly Spanish woman answered and explained she had owned the house for 30 years. Most of the neighbours who might remember their former residents have moved, taking advantage of skyrocketing property prices.
Walking between the frozen mansions of Highgate, a little way up the road, it was hard not to reflect that London’s rise to prominence as a global city has depended partly on its willingness to preserve the property rights of foreign owners, regardless of who those owners are or how they made their money.
Today, the Trade Delegation exhibits unignorable signs of light abandonment. Ivy clogs the plastic gutters of the gatehouse. A horse chestnut tree which has self-seeded just inside the exterior wall is standing to a height of around 15 feet.
Standing in front of its gates, I thought about the overlapping spheres of protective isolation that the compound enjoyed as an emanation of state power. The dark wall topped with burglar spikes, domestic and international law, and beyond that, the threat of reprisal along diplomatic, economic and military axes. Finally, I pressed the one button I could: the bell at the front gate. A signal travelled through to somewhere I couldn’t see. Then someone answered. ‘Close, close,’ said a Russian voice. ‘Please tomorrow.’
