by Paul Simpson
Yurchenko had served in the KGB for a quarter of a century, and was privy to a lot more information than he passed over to the CIA. However, he did give them enough to identify both Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton as Soviet spies, and passed on a warning regarding the danger facing Oleg Gordievsky (not realizing that he was already safely in Britain). Although Pelton was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, Howard evaded his FBI surveillance and reached Moscow. He died in slightly mysterious circumstances in 2002.
The last straw for Yurchenko was the release of information he had passed over regarding Nicholas Shadrin, aka Nikolai Artmanov, a former Soviet Baltic Fleet captain who had defected to the West in 1959, and eventually ended up as a triple agent. Realizing his treachery, the KGB had kidnapped Shadrin in Vienna in December 1975, but unfortunately he died during transportation behind the Iron Curtain. His widow filed a suit against the US government, and Yurchenko’s revelations about Shadrin’s real fate — his work for the CIA had been public knowledge since 1978 — were included in the Agency’s papers handed over as part of the court case, which were then released to the media.
On 2 November, Yurchenko persuaded his CIA handler to take him shopping, during which time he called the KGB residency at the embassy. He then went for a meal and asked his handler if the agent would shoot him were he to get up and walk out. ‘We don’t treat defectors that way,’ the CIA man replied. Yurchenko left the table and went straight to the Soviet embassy.
Although the KGB knew exactly what Yurchenko told the CIA during his debriefing, since Aldrich Ames was one of those involved in his interrogation, they allowed him to claim that he had been kidnapped and drugged, and not been a willing party to anything. Public denunciations of the CIA followed; the Agency retaliated by claiming that Yurchenko had been executed, and his family charged for the bullets. Yurchenko promptly appeared in an interview from Moscow with German television to point out he was ‘live and kicking’. All that was certain was that, in the words of a Life magazine article from the following September, the questions raised by his defection and return ‘threatened to again pry open a Pandora’s box of suspicions and troubles’ within the CIA.
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Defections went both ways during the summer of 1985. Three weeks after Yurchenko crossed from East to West, Hans Joachim Tiedge, a top West German counter-intelligence officer went the other way. The alcoholic officer — whose deputy at the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (West German counter-intelligence) was also a spy for East Germany — defected ‘because of a hopeless personal situation, but of my own free will’, according to the handwritten note he released shortly afterwards. Tiedge had been searching for East German and Soviet moles in West Germany, but instead had been in a position to tip them off that they were under investigation. At least three agents fled to the East in the weeks before Tiedge’s defection, and one of Chancellor Kohl’s secretaries, Herta-Astrid Willner, would follow a few weeks later, believing that she would no longer be protected. On 23 August, four days after Tiedge took a train to the East, East German authorities claimed that they had arrested 170 West German spies in East Germany as a result of information supplied by Tiedge.
According to Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf (who claimed in 1997, rather disingenuously, that Tiedge hadn’t worked for the GDR prior to his defection), Tiedge had a computer-like memory, despite his alcoholism, and was able to pass on copious details on plans, personnel and operations. According to one official estimate, between his time in the West, and the information he gave during his debriefing, he compromised 816 different operations. Unsurprisingly, an atmosphere of mistrust grew between the West Germans and the other Western intelligence agencies as a result, even after Heribert Hellenbroich, Tiedge’s boss, was fired shortly after the defection for keeping Tiedge on the job despite his evident problems.
Tiedge fled from East Germany to Moscow in 1990, shortly before German reunification, and despite the statute of limitations for his crimes expiring, did not return to the former West Germany before his death in April 2011.
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As well as the embarrassment caused by the re-defection of Vitaly Yurchenko, November 1985 saw the revelation of the activities of naval intelligence officer Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was arrested outside the Israeli embassy after his spymasters there refused to help him. Sentenced to life imprisonment, his case became a cause célèbre in Israel, leading to tension between Washington and Tel Aviv. However, the case is not as clear-cut as many would like it to be.
Pollard’s superiors in the intelligence community, four retired Navy admirals, pointed out in an article in the Washington Post in December 1998 that:
We, who are painfully familiar with the case, feel obligated to go on record with the facts regarding Pollard in order to dispel the myths that have arisen from this clever public-relations campaign aimed at transforming Pollard from greedy, arrogant betrayer of the American national trust into Pollard, committed Israeli patriot.
Pollard pleaded guilty and therefore never was publicly tried. Thus, the American people never came to know that he offered classified information to three other countries before working for the Israelis and he offered his services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel. They also never came to understand that he was being very highly paid for his services — including an impressive nest egg currently in foreign banks — and was negotiating with his Israeli handlers for a raise as he was caught. So much for Jonathan Pollard, ideologue!
Pollard initially applied to work for the CIA in 1977, but was turned down because of drug use at university. Two years later he began working for the US Navy Investigative Service and despite lying repeatedly about his background and his abilities, he was given a high security clearance. This was downgraded after concerns were expressed about his behaviour, but he threatened legal action to have it restored. The Commander of Naval Intelligence himself, Admiral Sumner Shapiro, wanted Pollard fired or at the very least have his security clearances revoked, but Pollard was able to persuade a psychiatrist that he was OK. He was returned to the high classification in 1982.
According to NCIS investigator Ronald Olive, Pollard tried to sell secrets around this time to Pakistan and South Africa; during Pollard’s trial, an Australian Royal Navy officer, who had been part of a personnel exchange, alleged that the American had tried to pass him confidential documents, although Pollard denied this. What is certain is that in 1984 he became friendly with Israeli Air Force colonel Aviem Sella, and began passing information on to him (in exchange for cash and jewellery), including satellite imagery and details on new weapons systems in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Photos of Palestine Liberation Organisation residences were also passed across, which were very helpful to the Israelis during their September 1985 attack on the terrorist organization. A forty-six-page document was prepared for Pollard’s trial by Caspar Weinberger, the US Secretary of State for Defence, detailing what Pollard had given to the Israelis, including analysis of twenty key documents, one of which was a complete guide to American SIGINT.
Pollard’s espionage activities came to light when coworkers noticed that he was leaving the office with packages of materials, and his supervisor found files on his desk that didn’t correlate with the work he was meant to be doing. During the questioning that followed, Pollard was able to get a message to his wife Anne that told her to remove any classified documents from the house before it was searched. She gave these to a next-door neighbour, who, unfortunately for the Pollards, grew suspicious and contacted Navy Intelligence. Pollard was followed to the Israeli embassy, where he tried to gain asylum but was turned away; the FBI arrested him. Anne Pollard managed to alert Colonel Sella, who left the US with his team of agents before the FBI could capture them. Anne Pollard was arrested; Pollard agreed to cooperate in a plea bargain for a lesser sentence for his wife. She served three years of a five-year term; he remains incarcerated.
Although the Israelis originally claimed he was part of a r
ogue operation, they have subsequently admitted he was working for them, and urged his release. However, the American government remains committed to his imprisonment: as naval intelligence legal adviser Spike Bowman wrote in The Intelligencer in their Winter/Spring 2011 issue, ‘[Pollard] was neither a US nor an Israeli patriot. He was a self-serving, gluttonous character seeking financial reward and personal gratification. Without doubt, he is intense and intelligent, but also arrogantly venal, unscrupulous and self-obsessed.’
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The other big surprise for the American public in The Year of the Spy was the arrest in November of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a translator for the CIA, who had been spying for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC’s activities in the US are less well-known than those of their Soviet counterparts, but they were also interested in military and technological advances.
Chin was one of two spies within Western intelligence who were exposed by one of the few agents that the CIA managed to gain within the PRC. Yu Zhensan was the adopted son of Kang Sheng, the Soviet-trained head of the PRC Ministry of State Security Foreign Bureau (MSS), and began providing information to the Agency in 1984. He revealed the existence of a PRC spy within the CIA but the only clue he had was that on one occasion, the agent, of Asian origin, had been delayed prior to a flight to Hong Kong to meet a handler. This was enough for the FBI, who were able to trace the specific flight and identify Chin from the passenger list.
From 1952 to 1981 Chin was an employee of the CIA, working in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service; he had spent the previous decade with the US Army liaison office in China, where he had come to the attention of the MSS. In 1952, he received his first payment from the MSS for information concerning the location of Chinese POWs in Korea and the type of intelligence information that American and Korean intelligence services were seeking from the POWs. Between then and his retirement in 1981, Chin was able to pass over thousands of secret documents to the MSS from his posts in Okinawa (Japan) and California, and at the CIA Langley headquarters. Between 1976 and 1982, he was providing photographs to MSS couriers in Toronto, Hong Kong and London and continued travelling to the Far East to meet handlers up until March 1985.
No hint of suspicion attached itself to him — he was even awarded a long and distinguished service medal in 1980 — because he was very careful over the money he was given by the PRC, purporting to be a gambler for high stakes and investing in property in Baltimore to explain his income. He is believed to have been paid over a million dollars during his career. Chin was found guilty in February 1986 of spying for China and tax evasion, but before sentencing he committed suicide in his cell.
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While Aldrich Ames was a useful asset for the Soviets within the CIA, the other recruit who joined the KGB during the tail end of 1985 would prove to be one of their best agents, giving them access to the FBI’s counter-intelligence efforts periodically between then and his capture in 2001. Robert Philip Hanssen was described by David Major, the former director of counter-intelligence at the US National Security Council and Hanssen’s direct superior from 1987 onwards, as ‘diabolically brilliant… He knew everything we knew about what the Soviets did — and we knew a lot about how they operated. He also knew what we did. So he could operate within the cracks.’
Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976, and three years later was assigned to the New York field office helping to create an automatic database to track Soviet intelligence officers — and promptly became one himself, volunteering his services to the GRU via their front organization, AMTORG. In return for cash, he provided the Soviets with information regarding Dmitiri Polyakov’s espionage activities for the CIA (which the GRU chose to ignore), as well as a list of Soviets that the FBI suspected were spies in the US.
His work for the GRU came to an end in 1981 after he was caught by his wife writing to the Soviets; he confessed to his priest, and passed the monies the GRU had given him to charity. Hanssen was transferred to Washington that year, where he headed up a unit analysing the FBI’s data on Soviet activities, and coordinating projects against them.
Hanssen returned to New York in 1985 as supervisor in counter-intelligence, operating against the Soviet mission at the UN, as well as the consulate. Ten days after his arrival in the Big Apple, he wrote to Victor Degtyar, a middle-level intelligence officer at the Washington residency. He enclosed a letter for KGB resident Victor Cherkashin, in which he asked for $100,000 for a box of documents of classified and top-secret material that would shortly be delivered to Degtyar’s private address, and revealing the names of three spies (all of whom, although he was unaware of it at the time, had already been betrayed by Aldrich Ames). When Cherkashin received the promised documents, they showed how valuable this anonymous spy would be.
Because he knew so much about both American and Soviet tradecraft, Robert Hanssen wasn’t prepared to fall in line with the usual KGB methodology regarding dead drops and rendezvous. He dictated how they would be handled, operating, as David Major noted, ‘within the cracks’. He made the KGB come to dead drops near his own home so that their actions were minimised — as Cherkashin admiringly notes in his autobiography, ‘All we had to do was drop our package and make a signal.’ He also refused to reveal his identity — the first time Cherkashin knew Hanssen’s name was when he was arrested in 2001.
Money didn’t seem to be his underlying motive (although he would tell his interrogators something different after his capture); Cherkashin considered that Hanssen liked showing off his expertise, and ‘was either unhappy with his job or simply bored’. He certainly didn’t see this — at that stage at least — as a long-term arrangement: ‘Eventually, I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)’, Hanssen wrote shortly after making contact. Hanssen deliberately avoided communication with Cherkashin through the spring and early summer of 1986 after becoming overly suspicious of a mention of the KGB resident in a defector’s debriefing, and dropped in and out of contact over the next fifteen years. It would be a long time before he might need an escape plan. As it transpired, Robert Hanssen was only five weeks away from retirement when he was eventually caught.
12
THE LONG TWILIGHT STRUGGLE
In June 1985, President Ronald Reagan told the American people that they were ‘in a long twilight struggle with an implacable foe of freedom’. Very few people would have predicted at the end of The Year of the Spy that within six years the KGB would be no more, the Cold War would be over, and the intelligence services of the West would find their future role under discussion.
During the late eighties, the KGB continued its policy of misinformation, planting propaganda stories that would influence other countries’ views of America and the CIA. The CIA’s involvement in the Iran — Contra affair suggested that the dark times of the sixties might be returning. The game of Spy vs Spy seemed to be at its height, with the trade-offs of the Daniloff affair equivalent to some of the ill-matched spy swaps of the earlier decades. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms — coupled with some genuine accidents, such as the one that led to the end of the Berlin Wall — meant that the era of the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe was drawing to a close.
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Spreading lies and disinformation about the Main Enemy was not a new tactic for the KGB; through front organizations and receptive writers, they had propagated many false theories over the years, such as Soviet agent Joachim Joesten’s book Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy, published in 1964 about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1982 Moscow Centre had tried to discredit the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, with a story planted in the British New Statesman magazine which suggested strong ties between her and the then-pariah South African regime (although the documents backing this up hadn’t been checked properly — the spelling of the word ‘priviously’ (sic) was a giveaway.) This was written by journalist Claudia Wright, who would later push other Soviet propaganda lines, such as her statement in the Dubli
n Sunday Tribune in 1989 that KAL 007 ‘the Korean Airlines jumbo jet, shot down by the Soviet Air Force six years ago today, was on a spy mission for the US’.
These operations, known as ‘active measures’, became more prevalent in the late eighties, despite Chairman Gorbachev’s claim in July 1987 that ‘We tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ In one of Yuri Andropov’s last decrees as Chairman of the KGB in 1982, he stated that it was the duty of all foreign intelligence officers, no matter which department they were part of, to participate in active measures. It was an area that was often ‘sub-contracted’ to satellite states, such as East Germany. As Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, director of Department X (disinformation) of East German foreign intelligence, once said, ‘Our friends in Moscow call it ‘‘dezinformatsiya’’. Our enemies in America call it ‘‘active measures’’, and I, dear friends, call it ‘‘my favourite pastime’’.’
After attempts were made to blacken the name of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, came under attack. The KGB had been treating him as an enemy since 1971 for his anti-Communist tendencies, and in December 1984 they began further measures designed to tar him as a reactionary. President Reagan’s speech to the European Parliament in May 1985 was heckled as an active measure. Forged letters were used to bolster the impression of an out-of-control American government: CIA director William Casey apparently planned to overthrow Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1987; in January 1988 documents suggested President Reagan gave instructions to the NSA to destabilize Panama. South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha referred to a secret and sinister agreement with the US in a letter he supposedly sent in 1989.
