Dani Garavelli: From Russia with love

The tale of the lothario MP and his affair with a beautiful Russian certainly sounds like the stuff of spy novels

IN MANY ways he was the ideal candidate for a Cold War-style honeytrap. His long-standing sympathy for Russia and his string of extra-marital affairs would have made Mike Hancock, MP and member of the Defence Select Committee, an attractive proposition for an intelligence service hoping to infiltrate the corridors of Westminster.

Add to this the bewhiskered Liberal Democrat MP’s predilection for younger women and it is clear he would have been an easy target for a beautiful Russian spy bent on winning his trust.

Of course, it has not yet been proven that his former parliamentary assistant, 26-year-old Katia Zatuliveter, with whom Hancock had a tempestuous four-year affair, was indeed an agent sent by Moscow. MI5 is convinced that, like Anna Chapman, one of ten Russians unmasked as spies in the US last year, she embarked on the relationship with the sole intention of obtaining a prized House of Commons pass and gleaning information she could pass on to her handlers.

And yet, diaries written by Zatuliveter, copies of which have been shown to the deportation hearing she is currently facing, describe her passion for the MP, who is old enough to be her grandfather, in unguarded, almost gushing terms.

The apparent sincerity of these entries begs an intriguing question: is the young woman fighting to stay in the UK the stuff of countless spy dramas, a calculating seducer prepared to toy with the emotions of Hancock and a string of European politicians and diplomats in exchange for information? Or is she in fact like a character from romantic fiction, an undercover agent who fell in love with the man she was supposed to be exploiting?

Whatever, the pair seemed destined to pay a high price for their relationship. Tonight fans of TV spy drama Spooks will watch as the consequences of the love affair between fictional head of MI5 Counter-Terrorism Harry Pearce and Russian spy Elena Gavrik are played out in the season finale. Back in the real world, the fall-out from Hancock’s liaison is already being felt. While, unlike Pearce, the 65-year-old MP is unlikely to be handed over to the CIA, he last week resigned from the Defence Select Committee and Zatuliveter may yet be sent back to her native land – a move that would put pressure on Anglo-Russia relations which are just beginning to thaw after the chill caused by the murder of dissident spy Alexander Litvinenko four years ago.

Hancock’s fascination with Eastern Bloc countries had been the subject of Westminster gossip long before Zatuliveter walked into his life. The MP, whose Portsmouth South constituency is home to a naval base, made frequent visits to former Soviet states and had been described as extremely pro-Russian by fellow members of the Council for Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly. Indeed, so concerned was Labour’s former Europe Minister, Chris Bryant, by Hancock’s “pro-Putin and pro-Medvedev position” that he spearheaded the move to replace him as head of the Commons’ cross-party Russian group.

Eyebrows were also raised at the succession of young women from former Soviet states who accompanied him to informal business meetings. Ukranian MP Serhiy Holovaty said he had “openly protested” about the women’s presence at one meeting of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (Alde), where private discussions were taking place.

By this time, Hancock had several decades of inappropriate liaisons behind him. He and his wife Jacqui, a former machinist he married in 1967, are a political force in Portsmouth. He was once leader of Hampshire County Council and a Lord Mayor of Portsmouth; she is a Liberal Democrat councillor for Portsmouth City Council.

But their status as a power couple did not stop Hancock embarking on a succession of affairs. As far back as the 1980s, Hancock had a six-year relationship with his constituency secretary Daphne Sparshatt, who believed he would eventually marry her. Then, there was mother-of-three Lib Dem councillor Liz McCann, whose marriage to accountant Eugene broke up as a result of their affair.

Upsetting though these liaisons proved, they at least involved no potential abuse of position. In 1990, however, a letter was sent to the then party leader Paddy Ashdown after concerns were raised about Hancock’s friendship with Daniela Aura Dobre, a 19-year-old he met on a trip he made to Bucharest in his capacity an officer for the charity Mencap. More recently it was revealed he intervened to help another young Russian girl, 25-year-old Ekaterina Paderina, stay in Britain after she ran into visa problems in the late 1990s.

Against this background it is fair to assume the appointment of Zatuliveter as Hancock’s personal assistant came as little surprise to those who knew him.

The pair are believed to have met five years ago when she was working for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. They began an affair in June 2006 and when she travelled to Britain five months later, he gave her a £250-a-month job as his intern. It is alleged that by then Zatuliveter, whose father, Andrei, recruits wealthy students for enrolment to private schools and universities and whose sister Polina is married to a British businessman, had already been recruited by the Russian intelligence services as a honeypot.

Soon – although some might say not soon enough – MI5 had her in its sights; she is believed to have been interviewed six times between 2009 and 2010. It wasn’t until Anna Chapman – or Kushchyenko – was lifted by the FBI last summer, however, that British Security Services upped the ante, ordering her arrest at Gatwick Airport in August. By that time, Zatuliveter had already notched up a string of other liaisons/flirtations involving a Dutch diplomat, a senior UN official and a Nato official.

In December, it was reported that Zatuliveter was facing deportation in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre. Days earlier, she had been arrested on suspicion of espionage after surveillance linked her to someone suspected of working for Russian intelligence.

Zatuliveter denies she was ever a spy – which in itself has raised doubts over her guilt; once caught, spies tend to go quietly to ensure no further intelligence service secrets are revealed. Though some observers claim she had access to confidential documents, Hancock denies she posed any threat to national security.

But MI5 claims it will present evidence of Zatuliveter’s undercover activities at a closed session of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission already under way in a windowless basement of an anonymous building in the centre of London.

To some it may seem surprising that the Kremlin would be interested in targeting a little-known Liberal Democrat MP (when Zatuliveter took up her post Labour was still in power).

But according to Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War, Russian intelligence services are exploiting the over-stretched nature of our counter-intelligence resources to try to extract our military secrets. He says Russian submarines lurk in the waters outside our Trident base in Scotland, hoping to pick up the acoustic signatures of the vessels which carry our nuclear deterrent, while agents try to infiltrate the government’s decision-making process.

The use of “honeypots” to extract information is a tried-and-trusted technique. Most famously, courtesan and exotic dancer Mata Hari was shot by a firing squad during the First World War for spying – although a recent biography suggests she may not have been guilty of espionage. And during the Cold War, the then head of the East German Intelligence Service Markus Wolf came up with the idea of running Romeo agents, attractive men who would go into West Germany to seduce lonely secretaries who worked for government ministers in Bonn.

A mole in an MP’s office could play several roles: she could spot weaknesses in and around Westminster; root out people with money problems or sexual secrets who might be open to bribery or blackmail; or she could exert a degree of influence on parliamentary proceedings.

Some observers have pointed out that the parliamentary questions tabled in Hancock’s name in recent months show a peculiarly detailed interest in the most sensitive parts of Britain’s defences.

In June 2010, for example, he asked about progress on Project Hydrus, a vital part of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme in which almost every detail is highly classified. Four months later, he asked for details of the berths available to the Royal Navy’s submarines in this country and overseas. Hancock has also asked repeatedly about the details of Britain’s military presence in Gibraltar.

On the other hand, Zatuliveter’s diary entries – some of which read as if they were written by a “lovesick teenager” – suggest she was far from a calculating seductress. Her barrister Tim Owen said it was clear that there was “a genuine feeling” between them. But MI5 argued that undercover operatives often had conflicted feelings about the people they were spying on.

“There may be elements that are genuine and there may be other elements that are being directed by RIS [Russian Intelligence Service],” an officer – identified only as ZZ – said from behind a thick curtain.

If the tribunal does find that Zatuliveter was a spy, the Russian authorities will be riled. Alexander Sternik, the chargé d’affaires at the Russian embassy, has already claimed the allegations are a smoke screen to hide Britain’s embarrassment over WikiLeaks allegations.

The country has already expressed concerns about the fairness of the tribunal – which relies on material gathered by secret agencies, is heard largely in secret and is presided over by “three wise men”, one of which is Sir Stephen Lander, former head of MI5.

For Zatuliveter, deportation might not be the end of the world. When they returned to Russia last year, the ten agents unmasked in the US were given good jobs to reward them for their years of service to their country. Indeed, the glamorous Chapman has become something of a celebrity, hosting a Russian TV show called Secrets Of The World.

For Hancock, however, the future looks bleak. After the spy scandal broke, fresh revelations about his personal life surfaced. Allegations made by Les Cummings during the election campaign that Hancock had had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl were found to be false – and Cummings was later fined £500 for making a false statement to affect the return of the election under the Representation of the People Act. But Hancock’s admission that he gave the girl (who was in fact in her late teens) “a kiss and cuddle” did nothing to improve his battered reputation.

On top of this, Hancock was arrested in connection with allegations that he had indecently assaulted a mentally ill constituent who had come to him seeking help to deal with noisy neighbours. Although he denied the claims, the charges were dropped and the commissioner for parliamentary standards decided he had no remit to investigate, Hancock did confess to sending dozens of texts, one of which is alleged to have read: “You are special and sexy to me.”

Although Hancock has ridden out many a storm before, it is difficult to see how his battle-scarred political career could now survive the damning judgment that, for four long years, he had – albeit unwittingly – been feeding Westminster’s secrets to the Russians.