A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  However, much as this may have been a misuse of the spies’ work, it is clear that Johnson’s administration was looking for a trigger to begin the war, and as the NSA themselves pointed out, ‘Had the 4 August incident not occurred, something else would have.’

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  The latter half of the sixties was, to a large degree, a time when spies engaged in the Cold War got on with their business. There weren’t many events that caused major changes to the way espionage was carried out — to the extent that many histories of the period touch on the Vietnam War, and the continuing hunts within the security services for KGB moles as revealed by Golitsyn, but mention little else.

  This is slightly ironic, given that this is the era when spies were at the forefront of popular culture: the James Bond movies, based increasingly loosely on the novels by Ian Fleming, were released virtually annually in the sixties. They gave rise to many imitators, including the Matt Helm film thrillers featuring Dean Martin as the sort of self-promoting agent that no self-respecting agency would want near them (but whose weaknesses they would be more than happy to take advantage of to blackmail him), and the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which predated glasnost with its partnership of American agent Napoleon Solo (a pre-Hustle Robert Vaughn) and Russian Illya Kuryakin (NCIS’ David McCallum). (The CIA even includes memorabilia from the series in its museum at Langley, Virginia, USA.) The backlash to these over-the-top adventures gave rise to the more realistic novels of John le Carré, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Adam Hall (the Quiller series). Le Carré had served in the British security services in the post-Second World War period, although he acknowledged that he was one of those whose covers would have been blown by Kim Philby before the defection of Burgess and Maclean removed him from office.

  The KGB assisted in the removal of Nikita Khruschev from office in 1964 and the rise to power of Leonid Brehznev. Shelyepin found himself sidelined, with Yuri Andropov promoted to Chairman of the KGB in 1967. For them, the sixties were a period of re-entrenchment, to make up for the loss of the spy rings thanks to the various defectors.

  Although they weren’t able to infiltrate an agent into either MI5 or MI6, the KGB were active in Britain during the decade. One of their most useful men was Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who worked as a clerk at the Greater London Council motor licensing department. Recruited in 1967, Abdoolcader had access to the number plates of the cars of all the MI5 and Special Branch vehicles, so any surveillance carried out by the security services on the London residency personnel was immediately compromised.

  Following on from their success in penetrating the Manhattan Project two decades earlier, Moscow Centre targeted scientific and technological personnel, creating a new ‘Directorate T’ specifically to deal with the new intelligence field. Some agents may have had lucky escapes, thanks to the difficulties that the security services faced in proving their case. Dr Guiseppe Martelli, who had worked at the Atomic Energy Authority, was arrested in 1963 but, even though he was found with one-time pads and other spy tools, MI5 were unable to gain a conviction, since they couldn’t provide evidence that he had been in contact with those who had access to classified information. Two workers at the Kodak factory accused of selling film-process material to the East German intelligence agency, the HVA, were similarly acquitted in 1965. It seems probable that a number of similar cases didn’t get to court — according to Oleg Gordievsky, the Directorate T records indicate those that ended in conviction were only ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

  Two cases were successfully prosecuted during this decade in Britain. Frank Bossard, a project manager at the Ministry of Aviation, was recruited by the GRU around the time that he was transferred to working on guided weapons in 1960. Until he was betrayed by the testimony of GRU officer and CIA asset Dimitri Polyakov in 1965, he was regularly leaving film of classified documents in dead letter boxes in return for cash.

  Douglas Britten, described as ‘a good actor and an accomplished liar’ by a Security Commission following his conviction, also betrayed secrets for cash. Recruited in 1962, he tried to break off contact during his posting to the listening stations on Cyprus in 1966, but was then blackmailed by his KGB controller with a photo showing him receiving payments from the Soviets. He was transferred back to RAF Digby in Lancashire, where the KGB pressured him to provide more information. Britten was photographed visiting the Soviet consulate, arrested, and although he cooperated with MI5, he was sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment.

  Nicholas Praeger also worked assiduously for the Eastern bloc during the sixties, although he was turned and handled by the Czech intelligence agency, the Státní Bezpeènost (StB). A committed Communist, Praeger was a top radar technician with access to secret material by the time he was recruited by the StB in 1959. His value to the StB increased after he left the RAF, and joined the English Electric Company, which was working on radar-jamming equipment aboard British nuclear strike bombers. Moscow described his information as ‘the best intelligence yet provided by the StB’. When StB officer Josef Frolik defected to the West in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year (leaving from a secret holiday camp for secret agents in Bulgaria!), he gave his interrogators sufficient information to help identify Praeger, who was eventually arrested and convicted in 1971.

  The StB were instrumental in turning important people in other professions too: they found that British politicians and trade unionists were more susceptible to a friendly approach from a Czechoslovak than a Russian, usually maintaining that the mistrust between London and Prague was unjustified. Once they received payment for their time writing about promoting new links, they belonged to the StB.

  One key agent was Labour politician Will Owen, about whom his fellow MP Leo Abse said later, ‘Owen certainly did his best to rape his motherland.’ Recruited in 1954, he was known as ‘Greedy bastard’ by his StB controllers, interested solely in the fees and free holidays in Czechoslovakia he could get. Owen passed over highly secret material on the British Army of the Rhine and the British portion of NATO until he too was betrayed by Frolik.

  John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who infamously faked his own suicide in 1974, worked for the StB for an extended period of time, although he denied that he was an agent when accused by MI5, following Frolik’s defection. Frolik claimed that Stonehouse ‘put [the StB] in a position to know a great deal about certain British military and counter-intelligence operations’, but at the time that was the only real evidence against him. A later defector, code-named Affirm, confirmed in 1980 that Stonehouse had been working for the Czechs, but the StB had been disappointed by the amount of intelligence he was able to provide once he became a minister.

  The StB had their hands full with Tom Driberg, who was a double or triple agent, also working for MI5 and the KGB. An MP since 1945, and even chairman of the Labour party for a year, Driberg was able to provide his various masters with information about the habits of MPs, which could be used to blackmail them. Known as ‘Lord of the Spies’ when elevated to the peerage in 1975, he claimed to MI5 that he only ever passed harmless stuff to his Communist contacts.

  A fourth MP, code-named Gustav by the StB, has never been properly identified; some claim that Frolik’s description matched Sir Barnett Stross, who died in 1967, but it has been pointed out that any information he was in a position to pass on could as easily have been obtained openly from the Transport & General Workers’ Union headquarters at Transport House in London.

  In June 2012, as this book was being written, Conservative minister Raymond Mawby’s career working for the StB through the sixties was uncovered: code name Laval was first contacted in 1960 at a cocktail party at the Czechoslovakian embassy. His weakness was money: ‘His leisure time he spends in bars… and also loves gambling,’ one Czech agent noted. ‘While playing roulette and other games he is willing to accept a monetary ‘‘loan’’ which was exploited twice.’ Mawby was the only Conservative MP known to work for th
e Eastern bloc, passing over details of key members of the party as well as official and handwritten floor plans of offices at the House of Commons. The relationship only ended in 1971 after a number of Eastern bloc agents were thrown out of the UK: ‘Considering the worsening operational conditions in Great Britain and after evaluating dangerous signals… we are forbidding all contacts with him,’ states a note in his file.

  The StB didn’t confine its operations to the United Kingdom. In October 1968, a rash of apparent suicides in West Germany could be linked to the discovery of a spy ring run by the Czech security service. On 8 October, Major-General Horst Wendland, the deputy chief of the BND, shot himself in his office; it was later confirmed that he had been working for the StB. The same day, his friend Rear-Admiral Hermann Lüdke, the deputy head of NATO’s logistics division, was found dead on a private hunting estate, shortly after the discovery of photographs of top-secret documents taken by him with a Minox camera of the sort used by the Eastern bloc services. Incredibly, they had been found by a darkroom assistant alongside holiday snaps that Lüdke was having developed. Within a few days, Colonel Johannes Grimm, who worked in the German Defence Ministry, was found fatally shot; Gerald Bohm, also in the Defence Ministry, was found drowned in the Rhine river; Edeltraud Grapentin, a liaison with the Information Ministry, died from an overdose of sleeping pills; and Hans-Heinrich Schenk, a researcher at the Economics Ministry, was found hanged in an apartment in Cologne.

  Nor were the StB the only agency outside the KGB to run agents in the West. Markus Johannes Wolf, the head of the East German HVA (also known as the Stasi) was an expert at spying on his own people within the German Democratic Republic, but was renowned for the penetration programme that he ran for over a generation within West Germany. According to a defector in 1958, Wolf had two to three thousand penetration agents already in place at that point. One particularly successful tactic was using agents to seduce secretaries in key positions: in the mid-fifties, Irmgard Römer, who worked at the Bonn Foreign Office, was passing copies of telegrams to embassies to her seducer, Carl Helmers. In 1967, Leonore Sütterlein, another secretary at the Foreign Office, was convicted of passing over 3,000 classified documents to her husband, who was in reality a KGB officer; Sütterlein committed suicide when she learned he had married her simply to recruit her. Other secretaries at the Science Ministry and at the embassy in Warsaw were convicted, but many of Wolf’s best agents went undetected.

  Wolf’s greatest agent’s most important coup took place following the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor of West Germany in 1969. Some years earlier, Stasi agent Günter Guillaume had apparently defected from the East, and built up a successful cover, working for the Social Democrat Party. He was elected to the Frankfurt city council in 1968, and when Brandt came to power, Guillaume went to work for his office. Within a few years, he would become Brandt’s most trusted aide — and able to pass back through Wolf to Moscow key details of the Federal Republic’s future plans.

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  The KGB played its part in dealing with ‘internal’ unrest within the Soviet bloc, notably during the Prague Spring of 1968, when liberalization in Czechoslovakia (so-called ‘socialism with a human face’) was deemed to be a threat to the Soviets. As negotiations and discussions went on between Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubček, the Czech leader, Andropov’s KGB were paving the way for a Soviet takeover. Although this ended up being military in nature, in June 1968 KGB reserve officer Mikhail Sagatelyan made various recommendations to the Kremlin based on a visit he had made to the country the previous month. In particular, he suggested creating a ‘pro-Soviet faction’ within the Czechoslovak leadership, which would oust Dubček (‘a lesser evil than a military invasion,’ according to Sagatelyan).

  The KGB had already increased their presence within Czechoslovakia, and now carried out two operations: Progress and Khodoki. Progress saw KGB agents, including future CIA spy Oleg Gordievsky’s brother, pose as Westerners making contact with opposition groups in Czechoslovakia; Khodoki involved agents fabricating proof that the opposition was planning an armed coup — thereby giving the USSR a pretext to come to the government’s aid.

  Andropov genuinely believed that Western agencies were trying to promote the political changes that Dubček was proposing. He even discarded a report from his trusted resident in Washington, Oleg Kalugin, which stated clearly that the CIA were not involved based on documents which he had seen. Where hard evidence didn’t exist, the KGB invented it, using their agents to ‘discover’ arms caches and promote unrest.

  The Red Army, supported by units from other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia on the night of 20 August 1968, removing Dubček from power. Unfortunately, the opposition to Dubček’s policies was nowhere near as strong as the Kremlin had believed, and in the end he was returned to power, albeit on a very tight leash from Moscow, with a heavy KGB presence in the country monitoring for signs of disquiet.

  The Prague Spring’s conclusion had two major repercussions within the spy world: the Brezhnev Doctrine, formally stated in September 1968, noted that while each country had a right to take ‘its own separate road to socialism’, their policies mustn’t damage either socialism in their own country, or anywhere else. If such damage did occur, the Soviet Union had ‘an internationalist duty’ to ‘act in resolute opposition to the anti-socialist forces’. This would keep the KGB busy for the next twenty years. The other result was its personal effect on Oleg Gordievsky; the way in which the Prague Spring was dealt with by Moscow would be a motivating factor in his decision to work with the CIA.

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  Although the CIA’s primary activities during the second half of the sixties were involved with the conflict in south-east Asia, they also continued with their intelligence-gathering missions against the Communist countries. The decade saw a number of technological advances, with improvements in the quality of listening devices and the other paraphernalia of espionage — some of these prompted by the wilder ideas seen on TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or Mission: Impossible. According to the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), they would need to bring in extra telephone assistance to cope with the calls that would come from agents following the broadcast of these shows.

  One project that the TSD invested some time in was nicknamed ‘Acoustic Kitty’, which, although it sounds like something from an episode of spy spoof Get Smart, genuinely involved transmitters being implanted into cats. Feral felines were common to the region where a targeted Asian head of state was holding private meetings. The idea was to embed a power source, transmitter, microphone and antenna into an animal, with the mike going in the cat’s ear, the transmitter at the base of the skull, and the antenna woven into its fur. Once the go-ahead was given, the operation took an hour to perform, and the audio quality was adequate. Chances are, though, the technician who thought of the idea wasn’t a cat owner, since Acoustic Kitty refused to go where the CIA wanted it to, despite training. A CIA memo closing down the project noted: ‘Our final examination of trained cats… convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs… The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it.’

  A rather more conventional spy worked for the CIA for nearly twenty-five years and was described as a jewel in the crown by more than one senior member of the agency. Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov was a GRU agent who had worked as a member of the Soviet mission at the United Nations, and run illegal agents into West Germany during a posting in Berlin.

  Initially offering his services to the FBI as a counterintelligence source during his second stint at the UN in 1961 and working with them for a year, he was handed over to the CIA before he returned to Russia in 1962. Polyakov didn’t appear to be motivated by money: he accepted no more than $3,000 a year, and mostly took that in the form of tools, fishing gear or shotguns. According to one CIA case officer who worked with him for fifteen years,
Polyakov ‘articulated a sense that he had to help us out or the Soviets were going to win the cold war, and he couldn’t stand that. He felt we were very naive and we were going to fail.’ It’s also been suggested that he felt disillusioned when he was refused permission to allow his son to enter a New York hospital for life-saving treatment and the boy died.

  Polyakov was posted to Rangoon, Burma, and was able to assist the US war effort in Vietnam by passing over the GRU’s details on the Chinese and Vietnamese military forces, as well as revealing the identity of the GRU spy in the British Ministry of Aviation, Frank Bossard. His material would continue to influence American policy through the following decade, notably with its insight into the relationship between Russia and China, which had deteriorated through the sixties.

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  Discussion of the US military’s role during the Vietnam War will often turn to darker actions, such as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai. The CIA’s reputation was not enhanced when news reached the American public about the abuses carried out in the name of Operation Phoenix, although it wasn’t all negative. Many US servicemen and their families were extremely grateful to the Agency for their work in establishing contact between prisoners of war and their homes.