by Paul Simpson
On Christmas Day 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, with KGB Alpha Anti-Terrorist assault commandos at their head, disguised as Afghans. In an echo of CIA actions in the sixties, they broadcast radio messages purporting to come from the government, calling for Soviet assistance. This the Soviets duly provided, creating a new regime — and the KGB helped the Afghans to set up a more organized Security Service, the Khedamat-e Etela’at-e Dawltai (KHAD) ‘to protect democratic freedoms… as well as to neutralise… the plots hatched by external enemies of Afghanistan’. In practice this meant the Soviets taught their new pupils the worst excesses of torture.
The KGB had anticipated that the invasion would go like earlier such incursions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Like many before — and since — they underestimated the will of the Afghan people. Instead of a quick and easy operation, KGB officers would be bogged down in Afghanistan for the next decade and as a result of the invasion, relations between East and West would hit a new low. Spies on all sides of the Cold War would be affected.
10
THE EMPIRES STRIKE BACK
The first half of the eighties was a time of mounting tension. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had led to the US and others boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and when the former Governor of California Ronald Reagan was voted into the White House later that year, the anti-Soviet rhetoric was dialled up.
In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, in March 1983, Reagan made reference to an ‘evil empire… [who] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.’ The Soviet news agency TASS responded that Reagan ‘can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-communism’. The militaries in both West and East were built up. At the same time as the ‘evil empire’ speech, Reagan authorized the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) (commonly known as ‘Star Wars’ after the George Lucas film), which the new Soviet leader Yuri Andropov said ‘put the entire world in jeopardy’.
Politically, the Soviet Union went through major changes. Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was succeeded by KGB Chief Andropov — but he too would die in office, a mere two years later. Konstantin Chernenko, a crony of Brezhnev’s, followed for a short time, then on his death, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed in March 1985. Although it wasn’t clear to anyone at the time, Gorbachev’s policies would lead to the end of the Cold War.
The stakes were raised for the intelligence agencies on either side of the Iron Curtain, with the CIA changing course once more and increasing the amount of HUMINT (human intelligence) on which they were relying (partly caused by the blows to SIGINT abilities following Ronald Pelton’s defection in 1980). However 1985 would prove to be a watershed in the espionage game, with a series of recruitments and betrayals by both sides.
Ronald Reagan appointed a new DCI when he took office: William J. Casey, who had served as chief of secret intelligence in Europe for the OSS in World War II. He was the president’s campaign manager, and was the first DCI to be given a seat as a fully participating Cabinet member. He and Reagan shared a similar view of the Soviet threat, and as DCI, Casey wanted to strengthen analysis, revive covert actions in the service of foreign policy, strengthen counter-intelligence and security, and improve clandestine espionage operations. The appropriations for the CIA rose by 50 per cent in the first three budgets of the Reagan administration, and Casey presided over a resurgence in HUMINT. He also took the Agency into areas that had been deemed dangerous during the seventies, with support for anti-Communist insurgent organizations in developing countries — leading to the Iran-Contra scandal that would dominate Reagan’s second term of office.
One of the great successes of Casey’s period in charge of the CIA came from Operation CKTAW. This was a wiretap on the communications lines that ran underground between the Soviet Ministry of Defence in Moscow and the Krasnaya Pakhra Nuclear Weapons Research Institute, in the closed city of Troitsk, twenty-three miles from the centre of the capital. Phone, fax and teletype material could all be accessed from the cables.
The cable-laying was spotted by a KH-11 satellite pass in 1976, and over the next two years, CIA agents in Moscow identified a manhole along the Warsaw Boulevard as the best access point. At the same time, scientists from the Agency’s Office of Development and Engineering created a collar that could be placed around the cable to tap the information. By 1979, they were ready to identify which was the best cable to access with the collar, and Office of Technical Services technician Ken Seacrest was sent to Moscow to enter the manhole. This required him to elude any watchers and risk standing thigh-deep in cold water for a couple of hours beneath the manhole as he tested the different cables. Once the line from the Weapons Research Institute was identified, a permanent tap was set up, which operated successfully until the spring of 1985.
This helped to make up for the sources of SIGINT that were betrayed to the Soviets by former NSA operative Ronald Pelton when he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1980, desperately in need of money to cover his growing debts. As well as giving up details on Operation Ivy Bells, he told them about the Vortex satellites that were intercepting microwave radio-relay systems; the amount of material coming from a joint NSA-CIA listening post in the Moscow embassy, code-named Broadside; and about the seven most highly classified intelligence operations that the NSA were currently working on. He even revealed the existence of fake tree stumps containing electronic bugs which were placed by CIA operatives near Soviet military installations. Worst of all, he gave them details of every Russian cypher machine that the NSA had been able to crack — leading to the Soviets changing their systems.
CKTAW itself was revealed to the Soviets by a former CIA employee, Edward Lee Howard, who had been dismissed from the Agency in May 1983 after failing a polygraph test prior to taking up a new posting in Moscow. Unfortunately, by that stage he was already privy to a considerable amount of information about CIA activities in Russia, including CKTAW — one of the reasons for his firing was that he admitted to cheating during exercises regarding access to the manhole. That summer, he wrote to the Soviet embassy in Switzerland proposing a meeting with a KGB officer to hand over ‘interesting’ information. The KGB turned him down. In October that year, he considered whether to volunteer information directly to the Soviets at the Washington embassy, but ultimately decided against it. He moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he became involved in a major fight and was put on probation for five years. Around the same time, the KGB reconsidered his application, and he was advised to travel to Vienna to meet a handler. Despite a probation prohibition on leaving the States, he went to Europe, where he passed on documents and information on CIA operations in September 1984 and then again in April 1985. Howard was himself betrayed by a defector from East to West, Vitaly Yurchenko that year, but he managed to evade the FBI, fleeing to Moscow, where he died in 2002.
Howard was also responsible for the end of the life of a major CIA asset in Russia, scientist Adolf Tolkachev. In an odd mirror of the career of his betrayer, Tolkachev also tried unsuccessfully to approach the other side’s intelligence agencies before being taken seriously. Describing himself as a ‘dissident at heart’ (to the extent that at one point he discussed with the CIA the possibility of passing some of his salary from the Agency to the dissident movement in Russia), Tolkachev was a systems engineer at the Scientific Research Institute of Radio who had a top-secret clearance and decided to offer his services to the opposition. His first attempt in January 1977 — dropping a letter into an American’s car — failed because by chance he had chosen the head of the CIA station in Moscow, and his offer seemed too good to be true. He tried on three more occasions, but each time he was ignored. That December he passed through a note containing some details on Soviet aircraft; that calling card proved to be effective, and in February 1978 communications were begun. A risky p
ersonal meeting between Tolkachev and CIA handler John Guilsher took place on New Year’s Day 1979 and over the next eighteen months, a system was established. Tolkachev was provided with a camera and was able to supply hundreds of rolls of 35mm film to his CIA contacts, sometimes even taking documents home to photograph them when security was less stringent, other times taking the chance of filming them at his office.
Despite KGB suspicions about leaks from the Institute, Tolkachev refused to stop his activities, and his case officer noted, ‘This is indeed a man who is driven to produce, by whatever means he deems necessary, right up to the end, even if that end is his death.’ On more than one occasion, he had to ditch his spy equipment because the KGB seemed to be closing in, but then he would return to work as normal. In January 1985, he had his last meeting with his handlers, where he passed over what he said was information on a new Soviet fighter aircraft. The pictures were unreadable. The next meetings were abandoned because of surveillance, but on 13 June, the case officer went to the meeting, and was arrested by the KGB. Tolkachev had been in their hands since April; he was executed at some point between then and September 1986.
A memo in March 1979 to then-DCI Stansfield Turner described Tolkachev’s material as ‘of incalculable value’. At the time of his death, the Washington Post called him ‘one of [the] CIA’s most valuable human assets in the Soviet Union’. Perhaps the best indication of his effectiveness as a spy is that it took five years after his death for all of the information he passed back to Langley to be fully evaluated.
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Tolkachev wasn’t the only spy within the KGB run by Western intelligence during this period. Code-named Farewell, Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, who claimed that he hated the Soviet leadership for its ‘vulgarity, corruption, brutality, unrelenting self-advancement and failure to help the Russian people’, was able to supply over four thousand documents to French intelligence during the summer of 1981. This led to one of the more ingenious counter-espionage operations of the eighties.
Vetrov was a technical officer at the KGB, charged with evaluating Western technology that was obtained by Section T. The information that he passed on included the names of Soviet agents in American and European laboratories, government agencies and factories, as well as details of many other agents in place. Most helpfully for the West, it listed the technological requirements that these agents were seeking to fulfil.
French President Mitterand passed details of Vetrov to President Reagan in July 1981 and CIA DCI Casey suggested preparing faulty equipment that the Soviet agents could obtain. A cooperative effort between the CIA and the FBI led to major problems for the Soviets with the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, resulting in a huge explosion, as well as many bugs within other projects, such as stealth aircraft, space defence and tactical aircraft. Even the Soviet Space Shuttle was based on a rejected NASA design. Finally, once the fake information had been passed back to Moscow, the CIA informed the relevant governments of the agents’ existence, and over two hundred were detained.
Vetrov himself was arrested in February 1982 after murdering a stranger in a Moscow park and attempting to kill his mistress, a KGB secretary. His espionage activities were discovered during the investigation, and he was executed.
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Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only new leader in the Western world. May 1979 saw the arrival in 10 Downing Street of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. One of her earliest encounters with the spy industry came with the public revelation of Anthony Blunt’s treachery. Blunt had confessed his role to MI5 in 1964, but was granted immunity from prosecution and had naively believed that he would hear no further about it. He, perhaps unwisely, tried to prevent the publication of Andrew Boyle’s book The Climate of Treason, which detailed his activities under the pseudonym Maurice; Private Eye magazine revealed his legal action, and ten days later, Mrs Thatcher made a statement to the House of Commons, confirming Blunt’s treachery. Literally within minutes of the announcement, Blunt’s knighthood was stripped from him. He died in 1983, a year after Oleg Gordievsky had told the British that John Cairncross was the Fifth Man, although that information wouldn’t become public knowledge until Gordievsky’s history of the KGB was published in 1990.
Gordievsky’s importance in the early eighties cannot be underestimated. He had been passing information to MI6 since 1974, while continuing to rise in the KGB. He had come very close to discovery in 1978 when Kim Philby was asked to look over a file regarding the arrest of a KGB asset in Norway, elderly secretary Gunvor Haavik, whom Gordievsky had told MI6 about while stationed in Copenhagen. Philby’s reaction was that there must be a mole within the KGB, but luckily for Gordievsky the topic was not pursued.
In January 1982, a visa request was sent by the Soviets for Gordievsky to enter Britain as a ‘counsellor’ at the embassy — in fact, he was a senior KGB political officer at the residency. Once in Britain he was handled jointly by MI5 and MI6, and was able to pass over details of a new joint KGB-GRU operation set up by KGB chief Yuri Andropov in May 1981, code-named Ryan (derived from the Russian acronym for the phrase Nuclear Missile Attack). The Soviet Politburo fervently believed that the United States and NATO were preparing for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and Operation Ryan was set up to collect intelligence on these plans. According to Gordievsky, while many residencies and KGB officers did not believe that such plans existed, they weren’t willing to say as much to Moscow, so exaggerated the importance of events, which in its turn prompted requests for more information. Thatcher and Reagan’s rhetoric was making the Soviets even more paranoid than they already were. The importance attached to Operation Ryan reports by the Kremlin gave Gordievsky, and thus the West, an indication of how threatened the Soviets felt at any given time.
With access to a lot of the relevant documentation regarding the London residency’s operations, Gordievsky was able to provide information on current KGB agents in the UK. He noted that union leader Jack Jones, who had been regarded as an agent by the Soviets between 1964–1968, as well as MP Bob Edwards were both now regarded as of little significance. The KGB were interested in supporting peace movements, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and trying to gain influence over it, but MI5 operations over the next few years would demonstrate that, much as they might wish to try to run the CND, the Soviets were only really able to create a confidential contact with the 94-year-old peace activist and founder of the World Disarmament Campaign, Lord Brockway, who was in no position to give them any practical assistance.
Former GCHQ employee Geoffrey Prime’s treason came to light in 1982 when he was arrested for sexually abusing under-age girls and his wife handed police his spying equipment. This was followed the next year by the arrest of Michael Bettany, an MI5 officer who put a parcel of top-secret information through the door of the KGB Resident, Arkadi Guk, on Easter Sunday, 3 April 1983. This included information explaining exactly why three members of the Soviet staff had been declared persona non grata the previous month (although it unsurprisingly didn’t mention that Igor Titov had been removed from the UK in order to allow Gordievsky to be promoted), as well as an offer of further secrets. Guk, a paranoid alcoholic described by Gordievsky as ‘a huge bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain but a large reserve of low cunning’, believed this was an entrapment by MI5 and ignored the letter.
In June, the residency received a document listing the KGB and GRU staff in London. When Gordievsky revealed this to his British handlers, they realized that there was a mole within MI5; Guk still believed it was an MI5 plot and didn’t make any moves towards Bettany. MI5 set up a molehunt, codenamed ELMEN, which quickly focused on Bettany, who was acting increasingly strangely. Taking a risk, since they could not prevent him leaving the country if he resigned from the Security Service, the ELMEN team (nicknamed the Nadgers) brought Bettany in for questioning. After a day and a half of interrogation, Bettany elected to confess.
There
was little time for congratulation though, since Gordievsky had been reporting that Operation Ryan was reaching a peak. In February 1983, KGB staff had been given twenty tasks to monitor British preparations, which included whether the price paid to blood donors had increased (they’re actually unpaid), and how many lights were being left on at night in government buildings. In August, further tasks were added.
The relationship between East and West seriously faltered after the Soviets shot down a civilian 747, Korean Airlines flight KAL 007, on 1 September 1983, killing all 269 people aboard, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald. The NSA radio facility at Hokkaido in Japan intercepted the transmission from fighter pilot Major Osipovich stating, ‘I have executed the launch… the target is destroyed.’ This recording was released to the public, ratcheting up the rhetoric.
However, this intercept only told part of the story. When the entire conversation was reviewed, it showed that the Soviets thought that they were tracking an American RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, not a Boeing 747, and that the Korean pilots hadn’t responded to tracer bullets fired in front of the airplane. President Reagan went on US television on 5 September to accuse the Soviets of a crime against humanity. The next day the US ambassador to the UN, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, accused them of mass murder. The dispute overshadowed a meeting of foreign ministers in Madrid on 8 September, with Andrei Gromyko suggesting ‘the world situation is now slipping towards a very dangerous precipice’. On 28 September, Yuri Andropov gave a speech from his sick bed that accused the Reagan administration of ‘imperial ambitions’ and wondered ‘whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop’.
