A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  One of the KGB’s more successful agents travelled around Europe using seduction and romance as a weapon to gain information from unsuspecting targets. Ex-Metropolitan Police Detective Sergeant John Symonds had gone on the run in 1972 while awaiting trial at the Old Bailey on charges of corruption, and had approached the KGB via the Soviet embassy in Rabat. ‘I was taught how to be a better lover,’ he told the BBC in 1999. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t a very good one before, I don’t know. But it was very pleasant. I was taught by two extremely beautiful girls. That was quite an interesting part.’ After this training, he was sent to Bulgaria where he seduced the wife of a West German official; Africa, where he targeted women at the American and British missions; Moscow, India, Singapore, and Australia. Eventually when he could no longer turn his good looks to his advantage, he decided to surrender to British justice. He made no mention of his espionage activities, and was simply charged with corruptly taking £150 from a London criminal. Although he later tried to persuade the British authorities of his KGB work, he wasn’t believed and his spying activities only came to light when Vasili Mitrokhin passed over his material from the KGB archives in 1992. However by then, he had been given immunity from prosecution in return for giving evidence in other cases. As of this writing, a movie based on his exploits is in pre-production.

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  Although the official policy of the KGB since the early sixties had been to use assassination sparingly as a weapon, there were times that it was deemed necessary. Moscow Centre assisted the Bulgarian secret service, the Duzhavna Sigurnost, with the murder of a particularly troubling dissident intellectual, Georgi Markov. The assassination has entered into folklore for its method: Markov was stabbed with poison concealed within the tip of an umbrella.

  Earlier in his career, Markov had been a protégé of the Bulgarian President, Todor Zhivkov, but he had defected to Britain in 1969. Working for the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe and German station Deutsche Welle, Markov verbally attacked Zhivkov. In early 1978, the head of the DS, General Dimitar Stoyanov, requested help from Moscow, and reluctantly KGB chief Yuri Andropov agreed that the KGB would provide the means for the assassination, but not the agent to carry it out. ‘Give the Bulgarians whatever they need, show them how to use it and send someone to Sofia to train their people. But that is all,’ he ordered the Operational Technical Directorate.

  Rather than use a poisoned jelly rubbed on Markov’s skin (which was tried unsuccessfully on another émigré), or a poison within his food, the KGB scientists decided to use a small ball containing ricin, which was derived from castor plant seeds. They created a pellet and inserted it in the tip of a specially modified umbrella — bought by the KGB residency in Washington, its American origins designed to place the Soviets one step further removed from the operation — and given to the agent chosen. Although there is some question over this, it is generally believed that Francesco Giullino, a Dane of Italian extraction who had been recruited as an agent in 1970, was responsible.

  On 7 September 1978, as he was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London to head to the BBC radio headquarters, Bush House, Markov felt a sting in his thigh. Turning, he saw a stranger pick up an umbrella he had apparently dropped, then get in a taxi. That night Markov fell dangerously ill, and he died in hospital on 11 September.

  A post-mortem examination by scientists at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down discovered the metal pellet that had contained the poison, but none had survived contact with Markov’s blood stream. A process of elimination resulted in the deduction that ricin had been involved, based on the symptoms Markov presented and the toxicity of the tiny dose that the pellet would have contained. Another émigré, Vladmir Kostov, had been similarly attacked in Paris, but the pellet had failed to release the ricin.

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  Reeling from the effects of the various Congressional committees, the CIA underwent a period of retrenchment and reorganization in the late seventies. It was under considerably more scrutiny than previously. A new broom was required, and, as the CIA’s own description of William Colby’s replacement George H.W. Bush points out, ‘Having as DCI a politically skilled leader who had served in Congress fit the unprecedented circumstances of the moment.’

  Future president Bush senior was appointed as DCI in November 1975, and served until the arrival of the Carter administration in January 1977. Bush was not a career spy: ‘I walked in [to the CIA in 1975] untutored in the arts of intelligence,’ he recalled when opening the George Bush Center for Intelligence in 1999. ‘You had every reason to be suspicious of this untutored outsider who had, though he came out of a non-political post in China, spent a lot of my time in partisan politics. I understood the anxiety and concerns on Capitol Hill about that. But this Agency gave me their trust from Day One.’

  President Ford issued new executive orders that created a new command structure for foreign intelligence-gathering and was described by the White House as ‘the first major reorganisation of the Intelligence Community since 1947’. He also imposed a specific ban on assassinations. A new Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was established, followed by a House committee during President Carter’s tenure.

  However, the new president brought in Admiral Stansfield Turner as DCI, who proved to be a divisive head, emphasizing technical intelligence and SIGINT over agents in the field. The ‘Halloween massacre’ in which 82 °CIA employees were given notice was Turner’s way of continuing the house clearing that had actually begun under James Schlesinger back in 1973, but this was far more drastic. Described as insensitive by some Agency observers, this saw 147 career officers take early retirement, seventeen sacked, and most of those who had served since the OSS days and the institution of the CIA in 1947 removed. Turner himself would come to regret the action: ‘In retrospect, I probably should not have effected the reductions of 820 positions at all, and certainly not the last 17,’ he wrote in 2005.

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  Although analysts and electronic intelligence would form the backbone of Turner’s plans for the Agency, the CIA still used and needed spies. Dimitri Polyakov continued to be a highly effective asset for the Agency within the GRU until 1980, despite his cover being blown by traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen a year earlier when he first made contact with Soviet intelligence; the GRU simply refused to believe that such a high-ranking officer would commit treason. When Polyakov realized he was being investigated, he chose, albeit reluctantly, to retire.

  Another recruit, Alexsandr Ogorodnik, would turn out to be one of the CIA’s most useful agents within the Soviet Union itself, while the identity of his handler in Moscow would surprise many working for the KGB.

  Ogorodnik was recruited while stationed in the Soviet Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1973. His dislike of the Soviet system, combined with a taste for the high life, as well as complications with his local mistress, made him a good choice as a spy. Rapidly trained in tradecraft before his recall to Moscow, Ogorodnik was provided with the latest in miniature cameras, the T-50. This was only an inch and a half long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter, and could shoot up to fifty exposures on its fifteen-inch film. Ogorodnik, now code-named Trigon, was given the camera within an expensive-looking pen, supplied to the CIA by a leading manufacturer working under secret contract.

  Trigon’s first assignment occurred while he was still in Bogotá, photographing a Soviet policy paper on China — the first time that a CIA agent had ever been able to do this within a Soviet residency. According to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, it was ‘the most important piece of intelligence he had read’ while in office.

  Ogorodnik was recalled to Moscow in 1975, and insisted on receiving a suicide pill from the CIA before he left. This was reluctantly agreed to by senior officials at Langley and concealed within another pen. Once back in the Soviet Union, Ogorodnik was subject to the usual scrutiny that any returning diplomat received from the KGB, but once this had become less rigor
ous, he began working for the CIA once more.

  His handler was Martha D. Peterson, who became known as ‘The Widow Spy’, the first female CIA case officer ever posted to Moscow. The KGB used very few women as spies — they were useful as bait for honey traps or if they were already in position as secretaries with access to confidential material, but at various times there were specific prohibitions within the KGB against their recruitment as agents — so didn’t consider that Peterson could be there as a CIA handler.

  In spring 1977, communications between Peterson and Trigon broke down, and the Soviet failed to respond to a request for a meeting. However, there was a reply to an alternate signal, which indicated that Trigon would collect a package at a predetermined spot. On 15 July, Peterson headed to the Krasno Gluhovsky Bridge crossing the Moskva River and filled the dead drop with material for Trigon. As she left, she was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka for questioning. After a short time, she was released because of her diplomatic immunity, declared persona non grata and thrown out of the country.

  Trigon was already dead. Karl Koecher had seen documents that indicated that a Soviet diplomat was working for the CIA, and informed the KGB. They had carried out a lengthy investigation, and eventually arrested Ogorodnik. He agreed to write a confession, but asked to use his own pen, as the interrogator’s was too clumsy. Swiftly he removed the capsule, and was able to kill himself before the guard in the interrogation room could stop him.

  MI6 were also running an agent within the Soviet Union by this stage. Oleg Gordievsky, whose files on the KGB would prove to be a treasure trove of information when he eventually defected, signed up in 1974. Embittered by the actions of the KGB during the Prague Spring in 1968, he noted in his autobiography that ‘Until the early 1970s I clung to the hope that the Soviet Union might still reject the Communist yoke and progress to freedom and democracy.’ He told the BBC in 2009, ‘I was approached by MI6 but in a way I provoked that approach. I realised slowly that this was a state that was worse than Hitler’s Germany.’ Gordievsky was stationed in Denmark at the time and would become as useful to the West as Oleg Penkovsky had been in the previous decade — particularly when he was posted to London as the KGB resident in 1982.

  The CIA and FBI ran an agent jointly based at the United Nations for over two years. Arkady Shevchenko was a senior Soviet diplomat who had risen to Under Secretary-General at the United Nations for Political and Security Council Affairs. He had been seduced by the glamour of the West during his first posting to New York in 1958 but when he contacted the CIA in 1975 aiming to defect, he was persuaded to remain in position and act as a spy. Over the next three years, he passed over details of Soviet policy on every major issue, and as a lifelong specialist in arms control, he was able to provide key insight into Soviet negotiating strategy for the disarmament talks that were carried out by President Carter and Premier Brezhnev. Understanding the import of a summons back to Moscow in March 1978 for consultations and ‘discussion of certain other questions’, he was extracted by the CIA. During his debriefing he learned that his wife had been repatriated to Russia and had died in Moscow — he remained convinced until his death twenty years later that the KGB killed her.

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  The NSA had a notable success throughout the seventies with Operation Ivy Bells, a joint project between the agency and the US Navy. This was another cable-tapping similar to the operations in Vienna and Berlin during the fifties. However, rather than digging a tunnel beneath the roads of a busy metropolis, a pod was placed beneath the surface of the Sea of Okhotsk, between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Siberia, tapping into the cables that carried unencrypted traffic between the submarine base at Petropavlovsk to Soviet Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostock. The operation came to a sudden halt in 1981 when a Soviet navy salvage ship lifted the pod off the seafloor, thanks to the information supplied by a former NSA operative, Ronald Pelton.

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  In 1974, Harold Wilson returned to 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister, and during the two years before he stepped down in April 1976, seemed to believe that he was the target of an operation by members of MI5. Although the idea was comprehensively dismissed at the time by his successor James Callaghan, the notion of the ‘Wilson plot’ gained some credence a decade later with the publication in 1987 of former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s memoir, Spycatcher (although the credibility of that was itself knocked a year later by Wright himself).

  ‘Is that man mad? He did nothing but complain about being spied on!’ CIA Director George H.W. Bush said of Wilson after a meeting during the last few weeks of the prime minister’s term of office. Wilson certainly was demonstrating paranoid tendencies during this time, seeing conspiracies against himself everywhere. According to MI5’s official history these simply didn’t exist. The Security Service were certainly concerned about some of Wilson’s contacts — notably Joseph (later Lord) Kagan, who was actively being groomed by KGB officers prior to the mass expulsion of Soviet spies in 1971, and Rudy Sternberg, later Lord Plurenden, who many believed was a spy, although there was no concrete proof against him. MI5 of course had a file on Wilson, but this could only be accessed with permission from the Director-General of the Service, Sir Michael Hanley.

  Part of Wilson’s mistrust of MI5 stemmed from his discovery of the Fluency Committee’s investigations of Sir Roger Hollis during the sixties, something of which he wasn’t aware at the time, but felt with hindsight he should have been. The prime minister’s relationship with Hanley deteriorated to such an extent that the Director-General considered resigning. By December 1975, Wilson’s official biography notes that he was convinced there was a plot and he was ‘reasonably certain that elements of MI5 were doing the donkey work, though at what level he did not know’, and he began turning on all the taps in the lavatory before saying anything in there.

  Things weren’t improved when George Young, the former Deputy Chief of MI6, announced in March 1976 that three of Wilson’s ministers were crypto-Communists, and it’s possible that after Wilson was briefed about Young’s right-wing connections, and links to journalist Chapman Pincher, he got his services confused and discussed a plot to discredit him by ‘a very small MI5 mafia who had been out of the Service for some time who still continue their vendetta for no doubt very right wing purposes of their own’.

  Wilson continued to protest he had been the subject of a conspiracy after his resignation, and cooperated with two journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, preparing a story that they printed in the Observer newspaper, which attacked MI5, and included the fact that Wilson had turned to the head of the CIA for help investigating the plot against him. Prime Minister James Callaghan instituted an internal inquiry, then reported to the House of Commons that it was clear there was nothing to the allegations.

  This might have been seen as nothing more than the early onset of the illness that would torment Wilson during his retirement had it not been for Peter Wright’s book, in which it was claimed that thirty MI5 officers had given their approval to a plot against Wilson. Again, this was investigated, and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher categorically denied the allegations: ‘No evidence or indication has been found of any plot or conspiracy against Lord Wilson by or within the Security Service.’

  Talking on documentary programme Panorama in October 1988, Wright admitted that in fact there was probably only one other member of MI5 who wanted to get rid of Wilson, and that his book was ‘unreliable’. However, that didn’t get anything like the publicity of the Observer article, and there are still many who believe MI5 were actively plotting — the book and TV series A Very British Coup suggest how such a plot might have played out.

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  Faith in its country’s security service was also lacking during this time in Australia, with the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), William T. Robertson, forced to resign over the use of an Australian agent in East Timor’s affairs in 1975. ASIS had been established in 1952 as a c
ollector of foreign intelligence, primarily in the Asian-Pacific region, and like MI6 in Britain, it did not officially exist. During the sixties and early seventies it monitored Communist groups and paramilitary groups in Indonesia.

  In the build-up to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, ASIS employed local businessman Frank Favaro to supply information on local political developments. However, he was quite unstable and in September 1975, ASIS fired him. Favaro wanted more money for the work he had done, and wrote to the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and the Foreign Minister, Don Willessee, who stated in Parliament that Favaro was a private citizen who didn’t represent the Australian government in any capacity. When Whitlam realized that ASIS had indeed hired Favaro and risked a charge of interfering in another country’s affairs, without obtaining his authority, he demanded Robertson’s resignation. When Whitlam was removed from office by the Governor General in November 1975, the new prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, claimed that the Robertson sacking was ‘a powerful argument that Whitlam was not fit to govern’.

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  ‘We are bogged down in a war we cannot win and cannot abandon,’ one KGB general admitted privately a few years after the invasion of Afghanistan, noting that the 1979 action had led to their equivalent of the Vietnam War. And, although it wasn’t said publicly, this was the KGB’s fault.

  As well as spying on the ‘Main Adversary’, the KGB was still charged with maintaining order around the Communist countries, and it became clear during 1979 that despite a Communist coup the previous April, the regime of Hafizullah Amin was precarious. The KGB residency in Kabul predicted that an anti-Soviet Islamic Republic (similar to that which had taken power in Iran the previous year) could well replace the regime unless Amin in Afghanistan went. Despite the best efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Talebov to poison him, Amin survived.