This is the extraordinary story of a KGB officer who defected in London. It is mainly about the Russian spy, with a short account about what little is known about his agent who lived in Cricklewood.
Most of his files at the National Archives have not been released, but Christopher Andrew who wrote the authorized history of the MI5, provided some details of the case in his book ‘The Defence of the Realm’. Books by Nigel West and others, as well as newspaper articles, have been used to piece the story together which sounds like something straight out of a spy novel.
The Trigger
On 30 August 1971, at 1.30 in the morning, PC Charles Shearer and PC George Paterson were on duty in a police panda car. When they came into the Tottenham Court Road, they saw a Hillman car in front of them which did not have its lights on and was being driven erratically. They decided to follow and pulled the car over in a side street near Warren Street Tube station.
The driver was quite belligerent when he got out the car, very unsteady on his feet and obviously drunk. There was a blonde woman passenger and after a short conversation she left in a cab. The man said to the constables, ‘You cannot talk to me, I am a KGB officer’. The officers did not believe him and arrested him. They took him to the nearby Tottenham Court Road police station where he refused to give a breath test or a urine sample. He was held in a cell at Marlborough Street to appear before a magistrate in the morning. He gave his name as Oleg Lyalin and his address as the Russian Trade Delegation in West Hill Highgate. Then he amazed the police by asking them to contact his British security handlers, Tony Brooks and Harry Wharton of the joint MI6/MI5 London Station.
Lyalin’s hearing on 30 September in Number One Court, Marlborough Street, lasted only long enough for him to be reported absent by the bailiff. He had been taken to a safe house in Sussex by MI5 and the charges were dropped.
British security services had recruited Oleg Lyalin in February 1971. MI5 watchers had previously spotted Lyalin coming out of an apartment building with his secretary Irina Teplyakova. The watchers tracked Lyalin’s movements and discovered that he and Irina were having an affair. They broke into the building and secretly filmed them making love. In return for his co-operation, Lyalin only asked for access to a safe house where he and Irina could continue their relationship. He was given one in Fulham.
For months security officers debriefed Lyalin in a series of meetings. He said he was unhappy with his marriage and his progress in the KBG. He was also disillusioned by the behaviour of his fellow KGB officers in London who were falsifying their expenses.
Operation FOOT
Lyalin’s defection was followed by the expulsion of 105 of the 550 Soviet officials from Britain on 24 September under Operation FOOT. It was not the cause of the operation which had been considered for some time previously because of the large increase of Soviet officials, but it was triggered by Lyalin.
The estimates of KGB intelligence personnel in London were 15 in 1950 and 120 in 1970. In 1968 the British had restricted the number of soviet officials at the embassy to a total of 148, but the Russians easily overcame this by increasing the number of working wives as well as using other cover agencies such as the TASS news agency and Aeroflot. MI5 needed nine watchers for each person under observation and their resources were being stretched to breaking point, which is what the Russians intended.
Operation FOOT was discussed on 25 May at a meeting chaired by PM Ted Heath, who was taking a much tougher approach to Russia than that of Harold Wilson. Heath took exception to the extent of Soviet espionage in Britain which in his words was, ‘as blatant as it was widespread’.
Those present at the meeting included the Director-General of MI5, Martin Furnival-Jones and Sir John Rennie, the head of SIS/MI6, together with representatives of various ministries. The plan had a twofold purpose, to reduce the number of Soviet personnel in England and to disrupt the KGB. In early August 1971 Heath approved the plan. Before the expulsion, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Home Secretary, had tried a diplomatic approach. But when the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko had visited Britain and was asked to reduce the staff in London, he said with a completely straight face, ‘The Soviet Union does not have spies’.
The expulsion was planned for October 1971, but Lyalin’s defection announced in the press caused the timetable to be moved forward a month. On 24 September the Foreign Office told the Russians they had two weeks to withdraw the 105 intelligence officers named on a list. The government had to show the public that they had the Soviet espionage threat well in hand. On 10 October about 80 Russians sailed on the SS Baltika from Tilbury to Leningrad. Heath’s gamble paid off, and the Russian retaliation was only to expel 18 British diplomats and businessmen from Moscow.
The Background
After his KGB training, Lyalin, his wife and six year son, were sent to London in April 1969. He began affairs with several women in London including his attractive secretary, Irina Stetsenko who was married to Anatoly Teplyakov, a fellow KGB officer at the London rezidentura in the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. They had an eight year old son.
Lyalin wrongly believed that his cover as a knitwear representative for the Russian Trade Delegation had been blown soon after his arrival in London, when he was met by his predecessor Vladislav Savin, whom he assumed was being followed by MI5 watchers. In September 1970 police from Kentish Town had tried to contact Lyalin at the Trade Delegation in Highgate. In fact this was about a minor incident, and they just wanted to confirm his address. But in his mind this was Special Branch checking on him.
 |
| Russian Trade Delegation, Highgate |
In May 1971 after an argument, his wife was observed by A4 officers, the MI5 watchers, standing in front of Lyalin’s car trying to stop him from driving away. He was summoned by the head of Russian security in London to explain the incident and told forcefully about the scandal which would occur from his divorce.
His love life became even more complicated by an affair with an English woman. On 27 August Lyalin had a ‘particularly frank discussion’ with his British handlers about the three women in his life, indicating that Irina was willing to stay with him in England. Just three days later, events were accelerated by his arrest on the evening of 30 August.
In his book ‘Spycatcher’ Peter Wright who worked for MI5, describes how he was woken at 3am and told to come into the office to get the poison antidotes he kept in his safe. He gave them to Tony Brooks who rushed off to the cells to sit with Lyalin and make sure the Russians did not try to poison him. He was then taken to a safe house.
A letter to Lyalin from a friend in Moscow saying his wife was unhappy was misdirected to the head of KGB security in London. Lyalin was told that he was being recalled to Moscow, and ordered to collect his things from work, but surprisingly he was not provided with an escort. On 2 September, he seized the opportunity and gathered his papers from his home and office safe. The next day MI5 arranged for his defection along with Irina, after his English lover refused to leave her husband.
During his lengthy debriefings in the safe house Lyalin gave detailed information about his role as a KGB officer in Department V (sabotage). The Soviets had not engaged in industrial sabotage in the UK during peacetime, but they were planning to create a crisis in the advent of war. The operations were aimed to demoralize the civilian population and disrupt the political and economic life of the country. Lyalin’s task was to visit and select sites for eventual seaborne and paratroop landings and make contingency plans. These included an attack on the early warning station at Fylingdales in Yorkshire, bombs to flood the Tube network in London, and most bizarrely, poison gas capsules to be crushed by people walking in the Whitehall corridors.
There was a small network of agents equipped with a radio transmitter already in existence, and plans to sabotage railways.
Siroj Abdoolcader, the man from Cricklewood
Lyalin gave details of three of his agents. He said that in 1967 his KGB predecessor Savin had met Siroj Abdoolcader apparently by accident in a pub and then recruited him as an agent. Abdoolcader was the son of a very distinguished Malaysian barrister. In 1957 Siroj had arrived in London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn but had failed his exams and was working as a clerk in the GLC department of vehicle licensing. For payments up to £100, Abdoolcader was asked by the Russians to check the license plates of the cars used by the MI5 watchers. Although some of these were held in a special file which he could not access, this knowledge meant the Russians knew all the A4 vehicles.
When Savin was recalled to Moscow, Lyalin took over the work with Abdoolcader who continued to work in the licensing department after it was taken over by the Department of the Environment. In addition to providing information, in February 1970 Abdoolcader had been asked to befriend Miss Marie Richardson who was the PA to the Royal Navy’s Deputy Director of Support in Portsmouth. It was thought that Abdoolcader might be able to seduce the Asian-born Marie Richardson, but this failed.
Abdoolcader lived with his wife in Anson Road Cricklewood. On 17 September 1971 he was arrested at County Hall by DCI Fryer. He was found with a postcard addressed to Lyalin giving further details of A4 surveillance cars. At the Old Bailey on 8 February 1972, he pleaded guilty and was jailed for three years. After serving his sentence, he and his wife Levane (Lavinia) went to Australia, and in 1980 they were living in Punchbowl, a suburb of Sydney. He was a shipping clerk, and she was a teacher. They stayed in Australia and Siroj died in 2018 in Padstow Heights, near Sydney.
The Cypriot tailors
Two other agents of Lyalin were Kyriacos Costi and his brother-in-law Constantinos Martianou. They were Cypriot-born tailors who lived in Finsbury Park, North London. When DCI Fryer and other Special Branch officers raided Costi’s house at 44 Upper Tollington Park, they found him wearing headphones listening to a radio signal from Moscow with code pads on his table. After pleading guilty at their trial, Costi was sentenced to six years and Martianou received four years.
Lyalin’s later life
Lyalin was the first Soviet intelligence agent to defect since World War II. It was a huge embarrassment to the Soviet authorities and he and Irina were forced into hiding for fear of KGB retaliation. Oleg underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance. According to John Alexander Symonds, known as the KGB Romeo Spy, he was asked by the Russians to find Lyalin and assassinate him. It seems there were several unsuccessful attempts to find him.
 |
| Photo of Oleg Lyalin in later life |
Oleg and Irina married under new names - which I could not find. Then they secretly moved to Bournemouth, but the relationship only lasted a few years. Lyalin died in the north of England in February 1995 after a long illness. It is not known what happened to Irina and she may have returned to Russia.
Operation FOOT was the single biggest expulsion of Soviet diplomats during the Cold War by any country. It very successful and had a major and long-term effect on the KGB’s ability to collect information in London.
Comments
Post a Comment