A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  * * *

  Manoeuvres against the Soviets had major repercussions for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1956, when a mission to investigate the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze while moored in Portsmouth Harbour went badly wrong. It would lead to questions in the Houses of Parliament, and, some claim, the relocation of the U-2 spy flights from Lakenheath in Norfolk, in the east of England, to Weisbaden in West Germany. It has often been blamed for the resignation of the head of MI6 later that year, although the official history of MI5 notes that the decision for Sir John Sinclair to step down at this point had been taken two years earlier. And it was the inspiration for one of James Bond’s more seemingly outrageous missions as recorded in the book and movie Thunderball.

  The Navy wanted more information about the propeller design of the Soviet cruiser, which had brought Khruschev on an official visit to the UK. MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott hired a freelance frogman, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, to carry out the mission. The Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, was keen to promote friendly relations with the USSR, and had ordered MI5 and MI6 not to carry out operations against the Soviets during the visit, so he was highly embarrassed when the Soviet sailors reported seeing a frogman wearing a diving suit around the ship on 19 April 1956. That it was Crabb, there is no doubt — but he was never seen again.

  The Soviets made political capital out of the incident, with Khruschev making reference to ‘underwater problems’ in a press conference. Despite attempts by the security services to throw reporters off the scent by claiming Crabb was diving three miles away, eventually Eden had to come clean: ‘As has already been publicly announced, Commander Crabb was engaged in diving tests and is presumed to have met his death whilst so engaged,’ went the official note from the Foreign Office. ‘The diver, who, as stated in the Soviet note, was observed from the Soviet warships to be swimming between the Soviet destroyers, was presumably Commander Crabb. His approach to the destroyers was completely unauthorised and Her Majesty’s Government desire to express their regret at the incident.’ Added Eden in the House of Commons, ‘It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.’

  It may not have been in the public interest to reveal what happened, but in fact no one knew for sure exactly what did occur. A headless, handless body was identified as Crabb in June 1957 and buried in his place, but the man who made the identification admitted later he had been coerced by the security services. Crabb may have been brought aboard the Ordzhonikidze and died in their sickbay. There were claims that he was taken to Russia and worked in the Soviet Navy. Even when papers released under the Freedom of Information Act suggested that there was a second diver with Crabb, they shed no further light on the mystery.

  * * *

  The CIA weren’t the only intelligence agency in favour of pro-active regime change during this time. The Suez crisis, which brought about the fall of Sir Anthony Eden, and caused major difficulties for the Anglo-American relationship for years, proved that such plans don’t always work out.

  The usual accounts of the crisis note that it was precipitated by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal in July 1956. Eden saw this as the act of a fascist dictator and as he proclaimed at the time, ‘we all remember only too well what the cost can be in giving in to fascism’. Three months later, Israel invaded Egypt via the Sinai peninsula; this led to French and British forces landing, apparently to separate the combatants — but coincidentally with the aim of forming a peacekeeping force around the Suez Canal, taking it out of Nasser’s hands. However, after pressure from both the US and the USSR at the United Nations, a ceasefire was declared and the foreign troops had to leave. Nasser survived.

  However, as a CIA memorandum from April — three months before the nationalization of the canal — shows, MI6 wanted to take far more drastic action against Nasser much earlier, since he had ‘accepted full scale collaboration with the Soviets. Nasser has now taken the initiative for the extension of Soviet influence in Syria, Libya, and French North Africa. Nasser must therefore be regarded as an out-and-out Soviet instrument. MI6 asserted that it is now British government view that western interests in the Middle East, particularly oil, must be preserved from Egyptian-Soviet threat at all costs.’

  Their plan to achieve this was threefold:

  Phase one — complete change in government of Syria. MI6 believes it can mount this operation alone, but if necessary will involve joint action with Iraq, Turkey, and possibly Israel. Phase two — Saudi Arabia. Believe MI6 prepared to undertake efforts to exploit splits in Royal Family and possibly hasten fall of King Saud. Phase three — to be undertaken in anticipation of violent Egyptian reaction to phases one and two. This ranges from sanctions, calculated to isolate Nasser, to use of force, both British and Israeli, to tumble Egyptian government. Extreme possibilities would involve special operations by Israelis against Egyptian supply dumps and newly acquired aircraft and tanks, as well as outright Israeli attack on Gaza or other border areas.

  The Foreign Office didn’t share MI6’s view that there would be a group of Egyptians who would rise up against Nasser, and indeed when the invasion happened — at the same time as the Russians were dealing with the Hungarian uprising — the expected internal revolt failed to materialize. MI6’s plan to assassinate Nasser with nerve gas was never put into effect. And when President Eisenhower, perhaps hypocritically given the CIA’s penchant for regime change elsewhere in the world, made it clear that ‘We believe these actions to have been taken in error, for we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes,’ it was evident that the attempt to retake the canal, let alone remove Nasser, was over.

  * * *

  1957 would see the end of another of the KGB’s assets in the United States, Colonel Rudolf Invanovich Abel — although he would be known by many names, including his birth name William Fisher, Emil Goldfus, and Martin Collins. His arrest by the FBI in June that year, and their discovery of ‘virtual museums of modern espionage equipment’ in his workplace and hotel room, which ‘contained shortwave radios, cipher pads, cameras and film for producing microdots, a hollow shaving brush, cufflinks, and numerous other ‘‘trick’’ containers’ would lead to his conviction for conspiracy to obtain and transmit defence information to the Soviet Union.

  Giving the FBI the name Abel during his interrogation was probably a move designed to let his KGB controllers know his situation, a typical act by this veteran operative, who had spent years in Soviet intelligence before the Second World War prior to entering the US in 1948, as code name Mark. He was involved with the Volunteer network of atomic spies that operated out of New York, but had to rein back his activities following the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The arrival of a new assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in October 1952, was supposed to mark a new phase in his career, but in fact would lead to disaster for Abel. Häyhänen was not a good agent, misusing KGB funds, losing important reports, and even mislaying one of the hollowed-out coins in which information was transmitted. This coin found its way into the hands of the FBI, who spent years trying to decode the message within.

  At the start of 1957, Abel demanded that the KGB recall Häyhänen to Moscow, but his assistant decided instead to defect, fearing for his life if he returned to the USSR. He claimed asylum at the Paris embassy, stating, ‘I’m an officer in the Soviet intelligence service. For the past five years, I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help.’ The CIA station officers thought he was drunk or delusional, but eventually passed him back for interrogation by the FBI. Searches of Häyhänen’s home found another hollowed-out coin, and the KGB officer gave his interrogators enough information to allow the original message from 1953 to be decoded.

  Häyhänen was also able to give the FBI sufficient information to identify a number of Soviet agents, including Army Sergeant Roy Rhodes, code-named Quebec
; UN delegate Mikhail Nikolaevich Svirin, who had already returned to the USSR; and Rudolf Abel, code-named Mark. Abel was arrested on 21 June, but initially refused to give any information to his captors, in the end only providing his ‘real’ name and demanding to be deported.

  Abel would only serve five years of his thirty-year sentence; in 1962 he was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960. Although he lectured on intelligence work to Russian school children and did some work in the Illegals Directorate, Abel became disillusioned in the years before his death in 1971 — perhaps because he realized that for all that he had propaganda value to the KGB for not breaking under interrogation, he had done little to advance the cause. KGB records indicate that his nine-year stint in New York had little practical effect, since he had failed to set up a new network.

  * * *

  Some KGB agents were successes, almost despite themselves. One such was Robert Lee Johnson, an army sergeant and part-time pimp, who had tried to cross into East Berlin in 1953 to ask for asylum for himself and his prostitute fiancée. The KGB persuaded him to remain in the US Army, and for three years, he provided them with low-grade information. In 1956, he left the army, cut his connections with Moscow, and tried to make his fortune in Las Vegas. This failed, and in January 1957, the KGB reactivated him, giving him $500 and telling him to enlist in the US Air Force. Johnson was turned down, but was able to sign up again with the US Army. Over the next few years, he passed over photographs, plans and documents, and when he was transferred to the Armed Forces Courier Centre at Orly Airport in France, he was able to access a triple-locked vault. His methods seem like something from a Bond film: Johnson used a key for the first lock taken from a wax impression; he found a copy of the combination for the second in a wastepaper basket; and the KGB provided him with a portable X-ray device which allowed him to crack the combination for the third. This allowed him to pass over cypher systems, the locations of the nuclear warheads in Europe and defence plans for both the US and NATO. He was eventually caught following testimony provided by the defector Yuri Nosenko.

  The late fifties saw other Soviet agents move into stronger positions around Europe: in France from 1958 onwards, Georges Pâques had access to defence documents including the entire NATO defence plan for Western Europe; he would continue to provide information until 1963. Canadian economist Hugh Hambleton was also working for the Russians inside NATO between 1957 and 1961, and provided so much material that the KGB had to provide a black van equipped with a photographic laboratory so that it could be speedily copied. Hambleton, who was recruited in 1951, would eventually work for Moscow for thirty years before he was arrested.

  In West Germany, Soviet agent Heinz Felfe became head of the Soviet counter-intelligence section of the BND — a similar role to that held by Kim Philby in the UK a decade earlier. Enquiries from the CIA and other agencies for information held by the BND gave Felfe, and thus Moscow, an insight into their operations. The damage that he achieved was considerable (although perhaps not as great as he claimed in his self-serving autobiography, released in the mid-eighties): ‘Ten years of secret agent reports had to be re-evaluated: those fabricated by the other side, those subtly slanted, those from purely mythical sources,’ pointed out one CIA officer.

  British naval clerk John Vassall penetrated the British Admiralty, and was blackmailed into working for the KGB after attending a homosexual party set up by Moscow Centre. On his return to the UK, he was able to provide his handler with thousands of highly classified documents covering naval policy and weapons development. He continued working for the Soviets for five years until his lifestyle attracted suspicion, and he was arrested for espionage.

  Not everything went according to plan for the KGB. After the fiasco caused by Nikolai Kholkov’s failure to kill Okolovich and the assassin’s subsequent defection in 1954, an attempt on the Ukrainian Vladimir Poremsky failed the following year when his prospective killer told the West German police of his mission. The KGB couldn’t even kill Kholkov; an attempt on his life using radioactive thallium failed.

  One assassin working for the KGB’s ‘wetworks’ section, Department 13, did chalk up some successes. Bogdan Stashinsky used a cyanide gas-spraying gun to assassinate two Ukrainian emigrés, Lev Rebet in October 1957 and Stepan Bandera, two years later. However, Stashinsky’s German-born wife persuaded him into a change of heart and they defected to the West in Berlin, a day before the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. He stood trial for the murders, but, as BND chief Reinhard Gehlen explained in his autobiography: ‘The court identified Stashinsky’s unscrupulous employer [KGB Chairman Alexasandr] Shelyepin as the person primarily responsible for the hideous murders, and the defendant — who had given a highly credible account of the extreme pressure applied to him by the KGB to act as he did — received a comparatively mild sentence.’ As a result of Stashinsky’s defection and the very public trial, the Kremlin reconsidered the use of assassination as a weapon. Contrary to the belief of spy thriller writers, ‘wet affairs’ became a last resort for the Kremlin in the early sixties, rather than standard operating procedure.

  * * *

  While agents in place continued to make a valuable contribution to the espionage activities of the American intelligence community during the late fifties, their work was supplemented by two other sources — the advent of the spy-plane program, and the increased use of cryptographics, courtesy of the newly established National Security Agency.

  The early fifties saw the ‘Reds under the Bed’ scares, fomented by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and despite his downfall, there were many who believed that the Soviet Union was considerably stronger than it actually was. All the various agencies had to make estimates, and inevitably used worse case scenarios as the basis for these. The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 did nothing to quell those fears — not only could the Russians launch missiles at the US from their various territories around the world, but they could now do so from space as well.

  The CIA’s Project Aquatone went a long way to dealing with the queries raised by the various other agencies. As a CIA report written a few days after the initial operation pointed out, ‘Five operational missions have already proven that many of our guesses on important subjects can be seriously wrong, that the estimates which form the basis for national policy can be projections from wrong guesses, and that, as a consequence, our policy can indeed be bankrupt.’

  Project Aquatone involved a pilot flying at 70,000 feet above the Soviet Union, photographing everything that he could see. After President Eishenhower gave the go-ahead in November 1954, a special plane, the U-2, was devised by Lockheed engineer Clarence Kelly Johnson, and in July 1955 became the first to be tested at the Groom Lake facility in Nevada — now better known as the conspiracy-inspiring Area 51. A new camera was developed by James Baker and Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, with the resolution necessary to gain detailed information from the air.

  The first flight took off from Wiesbaden in West Germany on 4 July 1956, and despite Khruschev ordering it to be shot down, it carried out five of its seven allotted missions, providing information on the Soviet Navy’s Leningrad shipyards as well as causing a drastic revision of the armed forces’ estimates of Soviet bomber strength and the military’s state of readiness. For the rest of the decade, the CIA would maintain the cover story that the missions were purely of a scientific nature, all the while improving the U-2’s capabilities, and working on a new plane, Project Oxcart, which could supersede it.

  Although the U-2 would continue in active operational service for a further fifty years — and is still in use today by the US armed services — the program of overflights across the Soviet Union came to a sudden halt on 1 May 1960, when the twenty-fourth mission, flown by Captain Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. The wreckage of the plane was put on display by the Russians, and Powers was the subject of a show trial. He would only serve two years of his sentence, b
efore being swapped for KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel.

  As far as CIA DCI Allen Dulles was concerned, the U-2 project ‘was one of the most valuable intelligence-collection operations that any country has ever mounted at any time, and… it was vital to our national security’. It also had the added benefit that ‘It has made the Soviets less cocky about their ability to deal with what we might bring against them.’

  * * *

  The U-2 program may have become public as a result of Powers’ crash, but another aspect of the intelligence community that was becoming increasingly valuable would remain secret for considerably longer — the National Security Agency (NSA), based from 1956 onwards out of Fort Meade, near Washington DC. Whereas now the NSA’s address and phone number come up in a Google search, in the fifties this well-funded signal intelligence service was so secret that those insiders aware of it would joke that its acronym stood for ‘No Such Agency’.

  Although the combined British and American SIGINT (signal intelligence) codebreakers had achieved some success in the years immediately after the Second World War in reading then-current Soviet codes, the Kremlin’s decision on Friday 20 October 1948 to change all of their codes and cypher machines created what has been described as ‘perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history’. Black Friday, as it quickly came to be known, marked the start of an eight-year period when there was little knowledge about what was going on inside the Soviet Union, only alleviated by the U-2 missions. The codebreakers had been able to decipher the North Korean signals during the war there, providing invaluable information that saved many lives during the early part of that conflict, but it became clear that there were too many different agencies all carrying out their own code-breaking activities. President Truman created the NSA in 1952 to coordinate the collection and processing of communications intelligence, with the secretary of defence as the government’s executive agent for all SIGINT activities, taking the new agency outside the jurisdiction of the CIA.