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The exact details of the way in which the Soviet Union’s intelligence services were alerted to the activities which had so troubled Britain’s Prime Minister is more difficult to piece together. Soviet involvement had begun many weeks earlier and certainly it was the reason behind a long two-part radio message beamed in the early evening of Easter Sunday, 15 April 1979, to the USSR embassy main building on the east side of 16th Street, Washington DC. This unexpected radio transmission required the services of the senior Russian cipher clerk who was enjoying an Easter dinner with Russian friends in a private room at the Pier 7 restaurant on Maine Avenue waterfront near the Capital Yacht Club. He was collected from there by an embassy car.

Intercepted by the National Security Agency, and decoded by its ATLAS computer at Fort George Meade, Maryland, that Sunday evening radio traffic provided the first recorded use of the code name that Moscow had given this operation – Task Pogoni. The written instructions issued in 1962 by the GRU, and later given to the KGB and armed forces, order that the choice of such code names must be such that they do not reveal either the assignment or the government’s intention or attitude, and add a supplementary warning that the code names must not be trivial or of such grandeur that they would attract ridicule should the operation go wrong. And yet, as the NSA translators pointed out in their ‘pink flimsy’ supplementary, Moscow’s choice of code word was revealing.

Literally pogoni means epaulette, but for a citizen of the USSR its implications go deeper than that. Not only can it be used to mean a senior personage or ‘top brass’; it is a symbol of the hated reactionary. ‘Smert zolotopogonnikam!’ cried the revolutionaries, ‘Death to the men who wear gold epaulettes!’ And yet the possible overtones in this choice of the KGB code name can be taken further than that; for nowadays the senior Russian military men who control one of the USSR’s rival intelligence organizations (the GRU) again wear gold epaulettes.

How Yuriy Grechko interpreted the code name assigned to this new operation is not recorded. Grechko – a senior KGB officer – was at the time the USSR’s ‘legal resident’. Using diplomatic cover, it was his job to keep himself, and Moscow, informed on all Soviet espionage activities in the USA. In seniority Grechko ranked a close second to the ambassador himself, and he was there solely to keep all the covert operations and ‘dirty tricks’ entirely separated from official diplomatic business. This made it easier for the ambassador to deny all knowledge of such activities when they were detected by the US authorities.

Grechko was shown in the diplomatic listings as a naval captain third rank, working in the capacity of assistant naval attaché. He was a short man with dry curly hair, blue shiny eyes and a large mouth. His only memorable feature was a gold front tooth which was revealed whenever he smiled. But Grechko did not smile frequently enough for this to compromise his clandestine operations. Grechko was a man who exemplified the Russians’ infinite capacity for melancholy.

It was difficult to reconcile Grechko’s diplomatic listing with his appearance and life-style. His expensive handmade suits, his gold watch, pearl tie-pin, the roll of paper money in his hip pocket, the availability of sports cars and his casual working day all suggested to those men in Washington who are employed to study such details that Grechko was a KGB man, but at this date it was not realized that he was the ‘legal’ – the senior espionage administrator in the embassy.

Since Grechko’s movements were restricted, he summoned his senior secret agent to Washington. It was contrary to the normal procedures, but his radioed instructions had stressed the urgency of his task. Grechko therefore took a trip that morning to the Botanic Gardens on the other side of the Anacostia River. He took his time and made quite sure that he was not being followed when he returned downtown to keep his appointment at the prestigious Hay-Adams Hotel which commands a view across Lafayette Square to the White House.

Mr and Mrs Edward Parker met Grechko at the 16th Street entrance to the hotel where Grechko had booked a table in the name of Green. Edward Parker was a thick-set, bear-like man, with Slavic features: a squarish jaw, wavy grey hair fast becoming white, and bushy eyebrows. He towered over his Japanese wife and Grechko, whose hand he shook with smiling determination. Parker, prepared for Chicago weather, was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat, although Washington that day had temperatures in the high fifties with some sunshine.

Grechko gave Fusako Parker a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and smiled briefly. She was in her middle thirties, a beautiful woman who made the most of her flawless complexion and her doll-like oriental features. She was dressed in a button-through dress of beige-coloured wool, with a large gold brooch in the shape of a chrysanthemum pinned high at the collar. To a casual observer, the three luncheon companions looked typical of the rather conservatively dressed embassy people who crowd into Washington’s best restaurants.

Parker was an importer of components for cheap transistor radios. These were mostly manufactured and partly assembled in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, where the labour forces were adroit enough to do the work but not yet adroit enough to demand the high wages of the USA and Europe. In this role Parker travelled freely both in the USA and abroad. It was perfect cover for the USSR ‘illegal resident’. Parker was the secret spymaster for the Russian operations in America, with the exception of certain special tasks controlled from the Washington embassy and the extensive ‘Interbloc’ network centred on the United Nations in New York City.

It was 2.20 by the time Grechko finished his cheesecake. When they ordered coffee and brandy, Mrs Parker asked leave to depart to do some shopping before returning to Chicago. Grechko and Parker agreed to this, then the two men began their business discussion.

Parker had been planted in North America for nearly twelve years. His English was more or less faultless and he had easily assumed the bluff and amiable manner of the successful American man of business. Yet Parker had been born a citizen of the USSR and had served for three years with the KGB First Main Directorate’s Scientific and Technical Section before his US assignment. Now he listened with care and attention as Grechko talked rapidly in soft Russian, telling him of the priority that had been given to Task Pogoni. Parker was empowered to assign any of his sleepers to active duty. Such freedom of decision had only five times before been given to the American resident during Parker’s tour of duty. Similar powers had now been provided to the residents in Bonn, Paris and London.

Furthermore, Grechko confided, the First Main Directorate had assigned control to ‘Section 13’. Both men knew what that meant. Although since 1969 it had been renamed the Executive Action Department, what old-timers still call Section 13 of the KGB First Main Directorate handles ‘wet business’ (mokrie dela), which is anything from blackmail through torture to murder. The section was at that time headed by the legendary Stanislav Shumuk, a man highly regarded by the Communist Party’s Administrative Organs Department, from which the KGB is actually controlled. Shumuk would reputedly go to any extreme to provide results.

Parker did not reply. Grechko sipped his black coffee. It was unnecessary to point out that failure could result in unpleasant consequences for both men. After that they resumed conversation in English. It mostly concerned the mechanical problems that Parker had experienced with his wife’s car, which was still under warranty. Parker noticed, not for the first time, that Grechko was a miserable sort of man. It contradicted the stories he had heard about him, and Parker wondered why Grechko should become so despondent only with him.

Mr and Mrs Parker flew back to Chicago on the evening flight. Yuriy Grechko kept an appointment with his girlfriend, a Russian citizen employed by the Trade Delegation. In the early hours of the following morning he was heard arguing loudly with her in a motel where they spent the night just across the state line in Virginia. Grechko had been drinking heavily.