The KGB secretly plotted to attack the UK at the height of the Cold War by polluting Scotland’s coastline with radioactive waste, it was revealed this weekend.
Masterminded by a Soviet spy based in London, the plan involved dumping nuclear waste into Holy Loch on the Clyde, which was a crucial base for US nuclear-armed submarines.
The proposed attack was designed to fracture the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with America, by falsely implicating the US military in a devastating radioactive incident, and to stoke Britain’s anti-nuclear movement.
Details of the shocking plot have been unearthed from declassified FBI files by security expert Richard Kerbaj and are revealed in an explosive book about the extraordinary life of Oleg Lyalin, a Soviet agent who defected from the KGB in 1971.
Lyalin claimed to be a ‘knitwear’ specialist with Russia’s trade delegation in London. But in reality he was a spy attached to Department V, a top secret KGB unit tasked with assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage.
A heavy-drinking partygoer engaged in a string of extramarital affairs, Lyalin defected, aged 33, after his wife secretly told his Soviet colleagues that he was a liar and a cheat and that he was dissatisfied with his work for the KGB.
During his debriefing by MI5 he revealed how he had been tasked by Moscow with drawing up plans for a series of attacks to destabilise the UK and spread panic if a war looked imminent.
Lyalin’s bombshell revelations led to the UK’s expulsion of 105 suspected Soviet intelligence officers from Britain – the largest ever such expulsion by a single country and a turning point in MI5’s fight against Soviet spy networks during the Cold War.
The KGB agent’s dramatic defection came at the height of the Cold War, with the West and the Soviet Union locked in an arms race amid fears of nuclear conflict.
Official MI5 files on Lyalin remain under lock and key in Britain. However, information the Security Service passed to the FBI has now been unearthed by Kerbaj after painstaking research.
A file with hundreds of pages of intelligence reports and memos related to Lyalin’s defection gathered dust in an FBI warehouse until it was declassified in 2018.
One three-page FBI report, written in September 1971 and stamped ‘Secret’, revealed how ‘Lyalin revealed that on one occasion a proposal was submitted to headquarters for an operation to contaminate Holy Loch with radioactive material with a view to implicating US Naval forces’.
Holy Loch, a sea loch 25 miles from Glasgow, was used by the US Navy as a ballistic missile submarine base between 1961 and 1992.
Home to up to ten submarines carrying Polaris nuclear missiles, a floating dry dock and a depot ship, it was the epicentre of protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Crucially, unlike other KGB plans designed to sow chaos after the outbreak of war, the plot to poison Scottish waters would have been launched during peacetime.
The Kremlin had already targeted the base, obtaining a secret submarine manual in 1967, which led to the arrest and jailing of three KGB agents.
In his book, entitled The Defector, Kerbaj writes that the KGB ‘believed they could stoke the ongoing fears held by anti-nuclear protesters, who had been warning for years about the potential release of radioactive debris from the nuclear submarines in the Firth of Clyde’.
CND and other anti-nuclear protesters had established a camp on Holy Loch and tried to intercept US support ships using kayaks.
In May 1961, Michael Foot, one of the founders of the CND who later became Labour Party leader, led 2,000 people in a huge protest against the submarines in nearby Dunoon. Around 350 protesters were arrested later that year during another big demonstration.
The declassified FBI documents reveal how Lyalin’s audacious proposal required approval from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, Mr Kerbaj said: ‘The KGB’s sabotage plots that Lyalin revealed to MI5 played a key role in Britain’s decision to expel 105 Soviet spies in 1971. There’s no doubt that the KGB’s central objective was to damage the “special relationship”.
‘And there’s a strong chance that the Soviet spy agency had gamed out the risks associated with the radioactive plot, including the way it could harm the environment and potentially kill innocent people, and decided that such risks would be worth taking in the interest of destabilising the US-UK alliance. The Kremlin would also have been hoping to inflame anger from anti-nuclear protesters towards the British government’s decision to allow the US Navy to set up the base in Holy Loch.’
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the former commander of Britain’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, said the attack would have spread panic and dealt a huge psychological blow to the UK.
‘No doubt if they were trying to do this they would have tried to spread as much contamination as possible. I think in the short term, psychologically, it would be
horrific. People would be absolutely terrified. You just mention the “nuclear” word and people assume Armageddon.
‘If this was spent nuclear fuel from a submarine reactor then it is not highly enriched and it would be relatively easy to clean up but Holy Loch would be shut and Dunoon and other nearby towns would probably have to be evacuated. Psychologically, it would create huge amounts of turmoil.’
During several lengthy debriefings in an MI5 safe house, Lyalin also warned that the KGB was plotting to destroy railways, including flooding the London Underground, sabotage food supplies and assassinate high-profile politicians.
One scheme, which was deemed far-fetched by MI5, would have involved KGB agents scattering colourless poison capsules along Whitehall that would kill anyone who stepped on them.
Lyalin also handed MI5 a 13-page file, with 54 photos, detailing a sabotage plan in which KGB agents would be landed on the Yorkshire coast before heading inland to infiltrate RAF Fylingdales, a base jointly operated by the British and Americans to provide early warning of a ballistic missile attack.
In his book, Kerbaj writes that after arriving in Britain two years earlier Lyalin had focused on identifying locations around the country ‘including Hayburn Wyke, a small cove on the North Yorkshire coast that could be used by Soviet saboteurs as dropping zones for sea and airborne landings’.
Department V specialised in abduction, sabotage and assassination, and was known as the ‘wet affairs’ department because of its effectiveness in ‘liquidating’ enemies. Recruits underwent training in ‘small arms, jujitsu, code, wireless, driving, surveillance’ and among its top priorities was the targeting of Soviet defectors.
The unit was created in October 1966 to replace the KGB’s 13th Department, which was regarded as Stalin’s hit squad.
Agents from the 13th Department were believed to have been behind the unexplained ‘suicide’ of Soviet spymaster Walter Krivitsky, who defected to the US shortly before the Second World War but was found in a hotel room in Washington DC in 1941.
The extraordinary activities of Department V hugely influenced the efforts of Vladimir Putin’s spies to eliminate enemies in the UK, including the poisoning of dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 with radioactive polonium and the failed bid to kill double agent Sergei Skripal with Novichok nerve agent.
Lyalin grew up in Pyatigorsk in southern Russia before studying marine engineering in Odessa, which is now in Ukraine. He was recruited by the KGB aged just 18 and in 1967 underwent a six-month course at Department V’s academy in Golitsyno, a town 25 miles west of Moscow.
In his book, Kerbaj describes the spy academy as ‘an adventure park tailored for adrenaline junkies with a bent for sabotaging the West’, with recruits taught ‘lessons on bomb making and parachuting into enemy territory’.
In one of his training exercises, Lyalin and six others were tasked with breaking into a facility that represented a western factory, rocket base or power station.
‘He learned about “partisan warfare, including organising a small army from a small group, and how to maintain security and prevent penetration by the local secret services of army intelligence”, a document outlining Lyalin’s training reveals,’ Kerbaj writes.
Sent undercover to the UK in 1969, Lyalin was regarded as a ‘natty dresser’ who loved splurging on ‘French cuisine and Champagne’ in expensive restaurants in London’s Soho. According to one restaurateur he ‘thought nothing of picking up an £80 tab’ – equivalent to more than £1,000 today.
Although married to his second wife, Tamara, and with a six-year-old son Alexander, the spy had a tangled love life with a string of women, including the wife of one of his trade mission colleagues.
On April 21, 1971 he walked into Hampstead police station in north London and told the duty officer he had information to share. Kerbaj reveals that MI5 had been unaware that the KGB even had Department V agents operating in London until Lyalin’s approach.
Four months later his defection, along with one of his lovers, took place within days of him being arrested for drink driving. Given a new identity, he died at his home in an undisclosed location in England in 1995.
By Mark Hookham
THE US Secret Service feared the KGB could assassinate the President, Prime Minister and Queen by poisoning the water supply at Chequers during a historic meeting.
The Defector, by security expert Richard Kerbaj, reveals how the White House took extraordinary precautions ahead of a meeting between Richard Nixon and Edward Heath at the Prime Minister’s grace-and-favour home in October 1970.
Queen Elizabeth was also invited to join the two leaders, marking her first ever visit to the 16th-century manor house in Buckinghamshire.
Unwilling to accept UK safety assurances, the US Security Service arrived a fortnight ahead of the meeting to undertake their own security assessment.
They were, however, alarmed to be told by Mr Heath’s head of security that the mansion’s water supply was believed to come from a spring on a nearby hill. The spring fed a water tank which in turn supplied the residence. Concerned over the ‘protracted route’ the water took, the Americans initially said three security guards should be stationed at key points ‘to prevent a potential poisoning of the supply’.
This plan was then discounted as too risky and instead the White House decided that it would fly in its own bottled water from the US.
But in a farcical blunder, Kerbaj details how staff at Chequers forgot about the approved water and used the mansion’s normal supply. ‘It was not until that evening, shortly after Nixon’s departure, that Chequers’ staff realised they had committed a major security breach when a cook raised questions about the bottled water stored in the kitchen.
‘It turned out that they had completely forgotten to enact the special security measures and had served him normal water instead.’