The Defector by Richard Kerbaj is about Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer, and his British spies in the Cold War.
A bungling Russian agent avoided detection by MI5 at the height of the Cold War despite letting slip his identity and botching spy jobs, a new book reveals.
Siroj Abdoolcader, a Malaysian national who despised Britain, escaped being unmasked because MI5 was so overwhelmed with Kremlin spies in the late 1960s that it failed to identify even the most amateurish and reckless among them.
The book, The Defector, reveals the inside story of Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer whose bungling agents, including Abdoolcader, were only exposed when he defected in 1971 and lifted the lid on his operations.
Abdoolcader provided Lyalin, his KGB handler, with registration numbers of MI5 surveillance vehicles through his job at the licensing department at London county council.
This enabled the Russians to divert them with “false flag” missions so they could conduct their spying activities elsewhere, undetected by the vehicles.
Lyalin sought to give Abdoolcader a bigger role only to be frustrated by his incompetence. One task was to befriend a female Ministry of Defence official, named Marie Theresa Richardson.
“Lyalin believed that because Richardson ‘was born in India’, she would somehow be willing to betray her British employer and be a ‘likely contact’,” writes Richard Kerbaj, the author.
Abdoolcader decided to adopt an Indian name – Siroj Ali – to try to ingratiate himself with her. In a phone call to arrange a meeting, however, his story quickly unravelled, and on failing to convince her about his assumed name, switched his story and committed the “greatest espionage faux pas” of all by revealing his identity.
“He told her his real name and place of work, passing himself off as the friend of Siroj Ali,” says the book.
Yet, despite the blunder by the clumsy agent, Lyalin maintained his belief that Abdoolcader would improve.
It was not to be. “Far from accumulating espionage victories as he and his handler had hoped, Abdoolcader kept proving to be largely incompetent, including when asked to organise a basic dead drop in a vehicle parked in Portsmouth, on the English south coast,” the book states.
“Lyalin must have been left scratching his head in dismay when Abdoolcader returned from the mission with the suitcase in hand, because he ‘couldn’t find the car’.”
Compounding his setbacks in the field was Abdoolcader’s reckless disregard for concealing his community sympathies and collaboration with the KGB.
His apartment in Cricklewood, north-west London, was littered with Communist literature, a biography of British turncoat Kim Philby by his wife called The Spy I Loved, and documents listing the registration numbers of MI5 vehicles.
Abdoolcader was, however, not the only struggling agent. Others recruited by Lyalin included Constantinous Martianou and Kyriacos Costi, Cypriot-born brothers-in-law, who were tailors moonlighting as spies.
Costi was useless at learning Morse code and Martianou, a field operative “who cleared dead drops” for the KGB, failed to recruit any local officials, which had been one of his central tasks.
After multiple lessons and tutorials, Lyalin decided to send Costi on a six-week Italian holiday to escape his Morse code drills for some sunshine on the continent.
On his return, Costi later recalled: “At first after my holiday he didn’t show any annoyance, but afterwards he started getting fed up with me because I couldn’t learn decoding”.
Kerbaj writes: “In its push to expand its reach in Britain, the KGB seemed more interested in increasing its number of agents than ensuring that they were the right fit. It somehow believed that such recruits would shed their intellectual deficiencies by learning on the job.”
There were 550 Soviet officials in the United Kingdom in 1971 – more per capita than in any other Western nation, including the United States. Of those officials, about 200 were suspected spies.
Lyalin, who lived the high life while in London, decided to defect after he was arrested for drunk-driving early in the morning of August 31, 1971.
He offered to disclose information about KGB activities in exchange for a new life with Irina Teplyakova, his Russian secretary, with whom he had begun an affair.
Lyalin’s disclosures led to the expulsion of 105 Soviet spies from Britain in September 1971, the biggest purge of Kremlin spies by any one country to this day.
The Defector, by Richard Kerbaj, is to be published on September 4