The biggest Soviet defector walks into a Hampshire pub.
The Merry Harriers is not an ordinary country pub. Starting as a beer house in the reign of Elizabeth I, it is situated on the crossroads of long-redundant trackways, on one side of which had been the village’s ancient fish ponds. When they dried up as the result of an ill-thought-out irrigation scheme, the village of Hambledon uprooted a mile or so to the south, leaving the pub and the church as isolated reminders of what once was. It was in the same family for 40 years before we bought it, and was used as the setting for the soft-porn film The Ups and Downs of a Handyman in 1976. Isolated in the depths of the Surrey Hills, it is, to use an overwrought cliché, ‘steeped in history’.
But it’s only 45 minutes from London Waterloo. Sales reps knew the pub as a good place for a long lunch due to the patchy mobile signal. Couples who may not want to be seen together would arrive in two cars, seek out the most secluded table in the garden, then disappear after lunch in one car for a few hours before returning to collect the other vehicle. Damon Hill was a low-key regular: I enjoyed setting fiendishly difficult F1 questions on quiz night to catch him out. Local MP, Jeremy Hunt, would dine unnoticed. Rick Parfitt would write off the odd Porsche on the way home. Chris Evans, Rusty Egan, John Bird and the inspirational Simon Weston all stood at my bar. It was almost like running a pub in Soho.
None of this, however, quite prepared us for one particular arrival. It was a warm spring day in early 2009. An imposing grey-haired man strode up the steps, and pushed open the door. It had just gone 11am, and we had taken a delivery of flowers a few minutes before. They lay spread on the table nearest the door.
‘Are you open?’ he asked brusquely in a strong Russian accent. ‘Yes,’ I replied. His response took me by surprise. ‘Then why is all this rubbish on the table?’ My explanation seemed to satisfy him and I received a surly nod as acknowledgement. ‘Then I will have a large Oban. If not Oban, a large Dalwhinnie. 15 years old.’
Clearly, this was a man who knew his whisky. We chatted a little more – I don’t recall what about – but he downed his drink reasonably quickly and left, returning to the car park where two men in suits had been waiting patiently for him. I had no idea at the time that that man was Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel, the most significant Soviet defector of all time and a man often credited with averting World War Three, after he alerted MI6 that their training operation ‘Able Archer’ had been mistaken by the Soviets as a real escalation into nuclear war. This was a man appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George by the Queen, an honour shared with his fictional colleague, Commander James Bond.
We remained unaware of his identity, but he became a lunchtime regular. He always drank whisky, often in the company of younger women. Not in a licentious way – these women seemed professional and often appeared to be interviewing him. Gradually, he became far more relaxed in his environment and was charming and charismatic as often as he was grumpy (After his death, Ben Macintyre mentioned how much he had loved English pubs). During one interview, he suddenly stood up and shouted angrily, ‘You cannot speak to me like that. I am Oleg Gordievsky’. He was persuaded to continue the interview only after another large Oban was produced.
The story of his defection – codenamed Operation Pimlico – is straight out of a Le Carré novel. If Oleg wanted to escape Moscow, he had to turn up at a certain bakery on a Tuesday at 7:30pm carrying a Safeway carrier bag. To confirm that his signal had been received, an MI6 officer would walk past him carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar. From there, arrangements were made that led to a dramatic journey ending with Oleg being smuggled over the Finnish border in the boot of a car with the KGB in hot pursuit. Right at the border a team of sniffer dogs were only rebuffed by the wife of one of the British diplomats, who used the scent of a dirty nappy to throw them off.
We couldn’t claim to be friends with Oleg. And when he claimed that a leg injury he sustained was as a result of the Russian state trying to poison him, my wife believed it was more likely to have been the outcome of an Oban-induced fall on the steps in the pub garden, from which she had rescued him. We both knew him well however – he could be proud, irascible, kind, distant, charming, rude, brooding and funny, all in the same lunchtime.
Then, in the winter of 2009, my uncle died. As next of kin and executor of his will, I had to take a few days off to sort his affairs. When I returned to the pub, Oleg beckoned me over. ‘I am sorry to hear about your uncle,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew him. He was a very brave man’. Strangely, I wasn’t entirely surprised.
Uncle Vic was born Albert Victor Stoneley. He had never spoken about the war. I knew he had been a Desert Rat, and I knew he had been in Normandy soon after D-Day, where he had been Major David Niven’s driver, as part of the clandestine unit GHQ Liaison Regiment, better known as ‘Phantom’. It was when we tried to access his service records that anomalies began to arise. I had a fascinating email exchange with the Ministry of Defence, who originally told me that I could see them after nine weeks. When I enquired again after 12 weeks, I got a reply stating that for ‘reasons of national security’, his records would not be available until 2034, or later if deemed necessary by the powers that be. My Freedom of Information Act request was denied for the same reason. Many of those who served in ‘Phantom’ had their records classified until 2004, but how could the service records of an enlisted Rifleman be so threatening to the state?
After service, he returned to his old job as a theatrical outfitter at Archie Nathan’s on Wardour Street, but left suddenly after three months, stating that he could no longer work indoors following his life in the army. He became a postman and worked the ’embassy round’ delivering mail in West London. Turning down several offers of promotion, he remained on this round until his retirement despite living on the other side of the capital. He had delivered the mail to – among others – the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens almost every working day from 1947 until 1984.
The week before Oleg spoke those words to me, I had been staying in Vic’s Nunhead council flat, situated opposite the sprawling Victorian cemetery, going through a lifetime of stuff. Not much stuff for 91 years to be honest – bits of Copenhagen Blue porcelain (he had been stationed in Denmark when he was demobbed), a Page 3 clock featuring Linda Lusardi, a John Player Special ashtray, Haynes car manuals and so on. But two things puzzled me.
He and his wife rarely went out and she never worked (‘a simple soul’ according to my undiplomatic grandmother) yet her wardrobe was full of designer gowns, much of it evening wear. Elizabeth Arden, Norman Hartnell, Yves Saint Laurent. This postman must have had another income and a life we knew nothing about. Secondly, there was a chest of drawers that fuelled my curiosity. As I opened each drawer, hundreds of letters sprang out. From circulars offering double glazing and credit cards to personal letters, each drawer was rammed with envelopes addressed to my uncle and every one had been carefully slit open, marked in the top right-hand corner with the date that it was received and carefully filed in order in the drawers. Was my uncle waiting for some sort of message all these years?
The last time we saw Oleg was probably in 2016. He seemed sad. His wife had divorced him in the 90s, unable to cope with the fact that he had lived a double life that she had not been a party to. She had returned to Russia, something he could never do. His mother had died, refusing to believe he was a traitor and he had not had the opportunity to explain his actions to her. He was estranged from his daughters who remained in the UK but no longer used his surname. He was lonely and his opinions were no longer sought by journalists.
What was the connection between Oleg and Vic? Perhaps they only knew of each other? And what was Vic’s role? Perhaps he was just paid to observe mundane changes in routine or personnel. Or to chat to lower-ranking officials who might be showing covert enthusiasm for a Western lifestyle? Or to pass and receive messages? We will probably never know.
We have a photo of Vic on his only visit to the pub. Smiling, strikingly handsome and upright for a man in his late eighties, he is standing at the bar with a mischievous grin, pouring his favourite Imperial Russian Stout, specially brought in for the occasion. Unsurprisingly, there are no photos of Oleg in his favourite English pub.
