A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  One of the significant values of inside data, whether documentary or provided by an agent in place, is that it permits the further evaluation of the information collected from other sources, and of the conclusions based on the analysis of all the previously existing data. The possibility that the product of any operation is contaminated with deception must be factored into the evaluation of every intelligence collection effort. Because deception operations are complex and sensitive, most intelligence services restrict deception to strategic objectives. There was no evidence of deception in the vast product of either the tunnels in Vienna or the more comprehensive Berlin project. When Blake was arrested in 1961 a retrospective examination of the tunnel material was initiated. Obviously the entire tunnel product could not be reevaluated, but a study was made of the strategic data. Again, no indication of deception was found.

  Within the KGB, knowledge of the Blake operation was restricted to the senior officers directly involved. Former KGB officers who handled the Blake operation have denied that any knowledge of the Berlin tunnel, or the security threat it posed, was ever transmitted by the KGB to the Soviet military. These counterintelligence officers are equally convinced that knowledge of the Berlin and Vienna tunnels was also withheld from the ultra-secret KGB office responsible for strategic deception operations. This is a vivid example of the value Russian intelligence has always placed on protecting agents in place.

  If there is evidence of deception in the GOLD material, it has not surfaced as of this writing.

  Given the vast amount of valuable data we took from the tunnel, it is fair to ask how KGB counterintelligence officers could allow the operation to continue as long as it did before finding a plausible way of closing it down without compromising George Blake. The only explanation for this apparent trade-off is that Blake had moved from the assignment he had at the time the tunnel was being planned, and the KGB officers had no idea of the amount or value of traffic we were handling. I doubt that anyone in Moscow imagined that the tunnel routinely consumed so many hundred rolls of tape a day, or that a total of 368,000 Soviet conversations were recorded.

  Before he was exposed, George Blake was apparently a competent intelligence officer, with average career prospects. As an SIS officer under diplomatic cover, Blake was taken prisoner in South Korea when the North Korean forces occupied Seoul in June 1950. He remained in North Korean and Russian hands until the prisoners were repatriated via the USSR in April 1953. After what appears to have been a routine questioning about his captivity, Blake’s security clearances were restored and he was assigned a job that gave him full access to the planning of the Berlin tunnel.

  Blake’s interest in communism as an adult was ironically tweaked when he studied a handbook written by the SIS senior expert on Marxist theory and communist practices. While he was in captivity, one of the very few books available to Blake was Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. This book and Blake’s dislike of a competitive society, contempt for the British class system* and for American foreign policy, and a deep religious conviction, combined with the severe hardship of POW life, were apparently enough to convince him that Marx’s theory “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need” as interpreted by Stalin was the way to go.

  In autumn 1951, Blake asked his Korean captors to arrange a meeting with a Russian officer. This was done, and Blake volunteered his services to the USSR. He was interviewed at some length by a KGB officer who recruited him as an agent in place in the British service. Like so many other important agents, Blake was literally a walk-in.*

  Blake’s history illustrates a security dilemma. Should an intelligence service continue to employ staff members or agents who are known to have been in hostile hands for any length of time? If they are to remain employed, should they be granted full security clearances? The easiest answer is that of an oncologist: if tissue is possibly malignant, the safe solution is to remove it. In security practice, this has a marked downside. The problems any captured staff employee or agent faces in maintaining morale and a measure of security discipline under hostile interrogation and brutal treatment are obvious. The fact that no matter how bravely and securely a captive responds, the knowledge that even if he survives the ordeal his career is at an end is not calculated to stiffen resistance.

  In my opinion the only reasonably fair solution is a policy that guarantees former prisoners a career-long employment in nonsensitive work, with the promise of promotion parallel to others of his grade and relative competence. This compromise is not likely to satisfy every prisoner who planned a career in secret intelligence, but it can be made more tolerable by a system of bonuses based on the severity and length of imprisonment.

  Compassion notwithstanding, George Blake should not have been returned to duty with a full security clearance.

  *In a personal letter to me, Sir Dick White, a former chief of MI-5 and SIS, observed that he thought Blake was partially motivated by his feeling that he would never be accepted as a social equal by his British colleagues because he was foreign born.

  *George Blake, No Other Choice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 286.

  Chapter 14

  —

  WITHIN THE GATE

  Sometime after I left the Agency, David Frost convinced me to sit down with him for what turned out to be an extended interview. David is a master of his craft, and along with allowing me to get a few things off my chest, he prompted me into an observation I had not thought to make. We were deep in our conversation when David asked what, as DCI, had worried me most. He appeared to be as surprised by my instant response as by my answer.

  A recurring nightmare, I said, was that I would come into the office one morning and learn that someone in the Agency had been recruited by the KGB.* What’s more, I continued, rarely a day passed that I got to the bottom of my in-box without some reflection on the apparent fact that the Agency was the only major intelligence service in the non-communist world that had not suffered a damaging penetration by the KGB or its subordinate communist services.

  By “penetration,” I meant that no staff member of the Agency was known to have been recruited as an agent by any hostile intelligence service. On the operational level we encountered our share of foreign agents ostensibly loyal to the Agency who had been doubled against us, and who were in the employ of, and loyal to, adversary services. Double agents of this sort are a constant operational concern, but most can be detected, and sometimes exploited, by routine tradecraft procedures. Penetration at the staff level—the traitor within the gate—is a security problem of the utmost importance.

  From the end of World War II to the time I retired from the Agency, the long and continuing string of espionage arrests and prosecutions in this country and abroad was ample evidence of how successfully the KGB and GRU had penetrated their foreign targets. Soviet counterintelligence was no less effective in penetrating the Western intelligence and security services. Among the European agencies publicly known to have been penetrated by the KGB or GRU were the British, West German, Italian, Swedish, and French. These counterintelligence operations ran parallel to the agents the Russians had established in the United States—in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and State Department—and in the military, foreign offices, industries, and research laboratories of the other countries of significant interest to the Politburo. Beneath the well-publicized spy trials, there existed a mass of classified data that amply reinforced my conviction that Soviet intelligence was indeed a formidable threat.

  There is an equally substantial body of evidence that the Soviet services had instructed, honed, and polished the intelligence and security organizations of their Eastern European allies. As had the KGB, these smaller services capitalized on the prewar experience of Communist Party underground activists and the surviving veterans of wartime intelligence and resistance operations. The espionage skills, area knowledge, language facility, and security acumen of the veteran operatives were immense assets. The experience gained in life-a
nd-death field operations cannot be replicated in any training school. While directing and monitoring the work of its satellite cohort, Soviet intelligence protected its investment by recruiting agents within each of the Eastern European services, and in position to ensure that nothing—good or bad—was withheld from Moscow.

  By 1950, the KGB, GRU, and Eastern European espionage and security services had combined to form the most experienced, and the largest, peacetime intelligence apparatus in modern history.

  In the United States, data provided by defectors from the various communist intelligence services, information gathered in CIA penetration operations, FBI security activity, and that of other agencies and the military had over the years exposed penetrations of the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, and National Security Agency. In my time, as far as we could determine, only CIA had remained invulnerable. Our security procedures were sound and as effective as we could make them. But were they good enough?

  As a colleague has reminded me, “Any intelligence chief who tells his president, prime minister, or politburo that his service is not penetrated either is a fool or has not read the literature. The most any chief can say is that ‘at the time I left my desk, I knew of no such penetration.’ ”

  There is only one sure answer to the question of penetration and that rests in the files of the opposing intelligence services.

  As we studied the KGB and its history, it became apparent that for all of its experience and competence, there were serious weaknesses in the Soviet intelligence services. Some of the failings were endemic, the sort that can be found in the secret police of any dictatorship—notably the political rigidity and the harsh internal discipline that lead to dishonest reporting, and sometimes to defection. Other weaknesses reflected the economic, political, and social shortcomings of the Soviet system. From the early days of the Russian Revolution and the Cheka to the collapse of the USSR and the revamping of the KGB and GRU, dropouts and defectors have characterized Russian intelligence. And small wonder. The service was built on a brutal heritage.

  The Great Terror, as the purges Stalin unleashed in 1934 and which had subsided by 1940 have come to be known, hit the intelligence services as hard as it struck the military, the Communist Party, and all of Soviet society. Along with liquidating or sending some 50 percent of the Red Army officer corps, including three field marshals and thirteen three-star generals, to the gulag, Stalin played no favorites. The NKVD itself fell victim. Stalin struck hardest at the domestic and headquarters elements of his intelligence and security forces trapped within the USSR. Between 1934 and 1938, two NKVD chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and his successor, Nikolai Yezhov, were removed and liquidated. In 1937 alone the NKVD executed over three thousand of its own officers.* (This figure includes a large number of NKVD domestic security personnel who had little or nothing to do with the espionage apparatus.)

  Most of the operatives stationed abroad must have had some idea of what was happening to their comrades at home, but station chiefs, case officers, and some deeply covered agents accepted the “routine orders” to return to Moscow. This pruning of the organization might have suggested to the rank and file that although there were likely to be frequent openings at the top, the overall career prospects in the NKVD were pretty grim. Not so. The wonder is that in the face of the evidence of what was going on in Moscow, so very few of the operatives abroad could bring themselves to flee or strike back at the system that seemed so determined to destroy them.

  By the time the bloodletting ended, Stalin had done more damage to his foreign intelligence and security apparat than the combined counterintelligence forces of his enemies, antagonists, and sometime allies had been able to accomplish up to the end of World War II.

  Among the defectors were Ignace Reiss, Walter Krivitsky, Alexander Barmine, Lieutenant General Alexander Orlov, Lieutenant General G. S. Lyushkov, Whittaker Chambers, Hedda Massing, and Elizabeth Bentley. Had Reiss and Krivitsky been thoroughly interrogated, and if General Orlov had agreed to disclose what he knew, Western counterintelligence would certainly have identified most of the cadre of spies who were to number among the KGB’s most precious sources—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Duncan Lee, Alger Hiss, and the score of others who have remained unknown. But this was not to happen.

  Reiss was gunned down in Switzerland before he could begin his planned fight against Stalin. After initial contact with French, British, and American officials, Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. His death was declared a suicide, but most probably was an artfully contrived murder. General Lyushkov, an NKVD communications specialist, defected to the Japanese in the Far East and was interrogated jointly with German representatives. General Orlov lived anonymously in the United States until Stalin’s death. Although fiercely opposed to Stalin, Orlov had offered the dictator a deal. As long as Orlov’s family in the USSR was not persecuted, the general would remain silent. After Stalin’s death, Orlov remained loyal to the agents he had dealt with while in the NKVD. Unfortunately, Orlov was so badly handled by his first FBI contacts that in the end he provided only a superficial glimpse of the data he might have been persuaded to offer.

  With the German invasion of the USSR, many of the officers and operatives who had survived were released from the gulag, tidied up, and reemployed. But the problems that faced this older generation of operatives had not been erased. From 1945 throughout my career in the Agency, defectors from the Soviet and satellite intelligence services continued to give us intimate pictures of the Soviet espionage methods and of some of its successful operations. The inside data provided by the defectors helped us develop the means to handle the Soviet and Eastern European walk-ins as agents in place within their own service. These agents—notably Lieutenant Colonel Popov and Colonel Penkovsky, and more than a score of others—provided a wealth of intelligence, with much of the most important data ranging far beyond the counterintelligence information that lay within their immediate reach. We could not, however, uncover hard evidence of any significant penetration of the Agency. In a narrow sense, this was reassuring—apparently our security procedures were working. But “apparently” is not a word that many counterintelligence officers find comforting.

  Counterintelligence (CI) is probably the most misunderstood secret intelligence function. The work itself has suffered as many definitions as there are intelligence services. A recent CIA publication offers a useful but limited definition of counterintelligence: “Information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for, or on behalf of, foreign powers, organizations, persons, or terrorist activities.”* This covers the important defensive security responsibilities of CI, but does not specifically mention counterespionage (CE).

  During World War II, a distinction was usually made between coun-terintelligence and counterespionage. The term “counterespionage” has slipped out of the Agency vocabulary, but I recall it as useful. If we define “counterespionage” as “the penetration of foreign intelligence services, the exploitation of double agents, and support to strategic deception activity,” it separates the essentially defensive aspects of counterintelligence from the aggressive exploitation of hostile intelligence services. This is something I might well have sorted out while still in office. It escaped me, and I must now bow to progress and use the broader term.

  George Washington had as keen an appreciation of counterintelligence as he had of other intelligence disciplines. Aside from its hasty revival during wartime and some periods of political stress, General Washington’s counterintelligence legacy had seriously faded by the outbreak of World War II and the advent of OSS. When OSS was organized, counterintelligence was a component of the foreign intelligence branch. It was only when the British service unveiled ULTRA, one of its great secrets, to OSS and the upper bracket of the American military command that the most aggressive elements of CI came fully back to life.

  I
t was with the advice of the British that a separate OSS CI branch was formed in 1943, and, at the suggestion of a British liaison officer, christened “X-2.” The term was a sly, English sort of wordplay based on the high-level British Twenty Committee, the group which planned and oversaw the strategic deception operations that protected every important Allied military initiative in Europe and the Near East. Two Xs can equal twenty, but, as German intelligence was never to learn, may also symbolize a double cross. (When the Top Secret deception operations were taking final form in London, an OSS officer, exasperated by the security surrounding counterespionage, posed a question: “If X-2 is so damned secret, why does it call attention to itself by picking a code name straight out of a dime novel?” A security-minded X-2 officer whispered that the term had been lifted from the Washington, D.C., public transportation service. The bus line that ran close to the OSS headquarters in Washington was labeled “X-2.”)

  Of the several OSS components that worked with the British in the European theater, none were more closely tied than X-2 and the MI-6 counterintelligence staff in London. Within OSS, no component was more strictly compartmented from other elements than X-2. And of the OSS officers who remained in service with CIA, none were more influenced by their wartime experience and training than the X-2 veterans. Some knowledge of X-2 is necessary to an understanding of how CI developed in the Agency.

  Until 1974, when a memoir was published,* one of the last great secrets of World War II remained classified. The fact that the ULTRA secret was so tightly held governed every aspect of X-2. Top Secret ULTRA was originally a security classification covering deciphered German radio traffic. A handful of British, Polish, Czech, and French cryptanalysts had begun work on German ciphers in the early 1930s. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1939, the British rallied some of these experts and, one step ahead of the Gestapo, slipped them into the UK as an adjunct of the British codebreakers.