by Paul Simpson
The most potentially damaging active measures were stories about medical experiments carried out by the Americans. The story that the Aids virus was manufactured during a genetic engineering experiment at Fort Detrick, which had been the home of the US biological weapons’ programme, first appeared in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper, Patriot, in 1983, but was really ignored until it was magnified in the Russian Literaturnaya Gazeta in October 1985. This new version was then followed by a report from a retired East German biophysicist (and Stasi informant), Professor Jacob Segal, which ‘demonstrated’ that the virus had been artificially synthesized. Segal genuinely believed his theory, despite it being discredited, and pushed it until his death in 1995. His hypothesis was reported as fact by British newspapers the Sunday Express and the Daily Telegraph the following year, and indeed continues to be quoted to this day by conspiracy theorists.
In August 1987, Soviet officials formally denied that they considered Aids to be an American creation, but by then the story had become established, particularly in the Third World. In March 1991, a letter to the Zimbabwean Bulawayo Chronicle stated that not only had the United States invented Aids, but that the CIA had exported ‘Aids-oiled condoms’ to other countries in 1986!
A later variant of the same Aids story suggested that it had been created as an ethnic bioweapon by the Americans, targeting non-whites. This was partly a continuation of the KGB’s attempts to foment racism at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics where offensive letters supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan were sent to African and Asian countries promising their athletes ‘a reception you’ll never forget’.
One particular active measure gained some recognition from the European Parliament, who passed a motion condemning trafficking in ‘body parts’ in which Latin American children were butchered to provide organs for sick Americans. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses were taken in by this one, publishing the story in their magazine Awake in 1989 to an audience of eleven million people in fifty-four languages. Although far more is known about active measures now than at the time of the Cold War, perusal of the world’s papers today indicates that the KGB’s successor, the SVR, is still hard at work peddling skewed versions of reality.
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The sometimes byzantine nature of the spying game in the late eighties is amply demonstrated by the Daniloff case from August-September 1986, which saw the Soviets falsely accuse Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist, of spying in Russia mere days after one of their own agents at the UN was arrested by the FBI, in what Time magazine described as ‘a risky game of tit for tat’. Played out against the backdrop of the plans for the first summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland later that year, the affair saw the eventual swap of Daniloff for Gennady Zakharov (even if neither side would admit that that is what it was at the time).
The Soviet agent, a physicist working at the United Nations, had been cultivating a Guyanese resident of New York, known only as CS or Birg, who worked at a defence contractor. What Zakharov didn’t realize was that Birg had been working with the FBI for three years, ever since the initial contact. When he handed Birg $1,000 in exchange for three classified documents, the FBI were waiting. A few days later, Daniloff, who had spent the previous five and a half years as a correspondent for the News & World Report, met with a friend, Misha, in the Lenin Hills of Moscow; Misha gave him a sealed packet with some press clippings in — or so Daniloff thought. In fact, as he discovered when the KGB arrested him on the street and took him to Lefortovo prison, they were photos of soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan. As one paper at the time explained, ‘The KGB has trumped up a case against [Daniloff] that is literally a mirror image of the case against Zakharov.’ Although Daniloff and Zakharov were released after a fortnight into the custody of their respective embassies, the threat against the American continued; when Zakharov faced charges of spying, so did Daniloff.
Part of the problem was that the KGB did have some very slight cause for concern about Daniloff. A letter had been passed to him by a dissident Russian Orthodox priest back in January 1985 for onward transmission to CIA DCI William Casey. Daniloff had given it to the Second Secretary at the US Embassy. According to the KGB, this was proof that he was working with the CIA.
After many days of tense discussions, during which the summit due to be held in Reykjavík in mid-October looked likely to be cancelled if the stalemate wasn’t resolved, and the US threatened to send home two dozen Soviet delegates from the United Nations, the Soviets finally agreed to release Daniloff on 30 September. The same day, Zakharov was allowed to leave America, having pleaded no contest to the charges. While the summit went ahead, the twenty-five Soviet delegates were still expelled; in retaliation, on 19 October, the Soviets kicked out five US diplomats. Two days later, the US sent home fifty-five more Soviets — allegedly to bring about parity between the size of the respective missions in the countries. A day later the Soviets expelled five more Americans.
But the rules of the game meant that nobody would admit the reality of what had happened. Daniloff was quite clear that he had not been swapped since as far as he was concerned there was no comparison between the two situations. ‘In my case, the investigation into the charges against me was concluded,’ he stated bluntly. ‘There was no trial, and I left as an ordinary free American citizen. In Zakharov’s case, there was a trial, and he received a sentence. I do not believe that these two things are in any way equivalent.’ Although some dissidents were released in the Soviet Union at the same time as Zakharov left the US, it was clear to all neutral observers that this was as much a swap as the handovers between KGB and CIA in Berlin had been during the sixties.
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Both John Walker and Jonathan Pollard had targeted the Navy; other branches of the US military fell victim to Soviet agents during the late eighties. In 1987, United States Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree was the first marine convicted of spying against the US; two years later, Warrant Officer James W. Hall III, who described himself as ‘a traitorous bastard, not a Cold War spy’, was found guilty of betraying hundreds of secret documents to both the Stasi and the KGB.
When writing to support a reduction in the thirty-year prison term to which Lonetree was sentenced, his commanding officer, General Alfred M. Gray Jr., wrote that the young marine wasn’t motivated by ‘treason or greed, but rather the lovesick response of a naive, young, immature and lonely troop in a lonely and hostile environment’. Lonetree had fallen for the charms of Violetta Sanni, a Russian girl who worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he was posted as a guard. Despite rules prohibiting fraternization with members of the opposite sex in a Communist country, they began an affair.
Lonetree fell head first into the honey trap, and began providing Violetta’s ‘Uncle Sasha’ (KGB agent Alexei Yefimov) with photographs and floor maps of the embassy, as well as details of American agents. When he was posted to Vienna in mid-1986, he continued to supply information willingly to Uncle Sasha. That December though, he reconsidered what he was doing, and after contemplating suicide, confessed. Although it seemed at the time as if his actions had led to the deaths of around twenty CIA agents, it later transpired that the names he passed had already been supplied to the Soviets by Aldrich Ames. Lonetree’s thirty-year sentence was reduced to fifteen and he was freed on parole in 1996.
James W. Hall III was a very different proposition. His career as a spy for both the Stasi and the KGB was brought to an end following the debriefing of an East German defector, Dr Manfred Severin, who mentioned an American soldier who had provided multiple documents. Hall admitted his guilt to Severin and an FBI agent posing as a Soviet contact in December 1988, bringing to an end a six-year period working for the Communists.
Hall was recruited to the Stasi in 1982 by Huseyin Yildirim, an auto-mechanic at the US Field Station in Berlin, although he had made contact with the KGB a couple of weeks earlier. He would claim later that his motives were purely financial: ‘I wasn
’t terribly short of money,’ he told the FBI agent who arrested him. ‘I just decided I didn’t ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I’m not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else.’
During his time in Berlin, and later Frankfurt, Hall provided documents regarding electronic eavesdropping operations carried out by the Americans to Yildirim or KGB officers, and was paid in dollars or German marks. There was concern at the time of his arrest that Yildirim might have been running a spy ring out of the Berlin Field Station: ‘We are looking at the potential — and it’s so far just potential — that this could be the Army’s Walker case,’ one investigating officer said, during preparations for Yildirim’s trial; current assessments agree that Hall caused as much damage during his six years as Walker did in eighteen.
Hall admitted that he delivered between thirty and sixty documents to his handlers, which led to a programme designed to exploit a Soviet communications vulnerability uncovered in the late seventies being rendered useless, as were plans to disrupt electronic commands and surveillance. ‘Without commenting on the specifics, it appears that Hall did very serious damage,’ Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time. Some of the material he provided, such as the National SIGINT Requirements List, enabled Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf to ‘take relevant countermeasures’ against American plans.
Hall was court-martialled and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment; Yildirim received a life sentence, with the FBI telling his lawyer in 1997 that they ‘think it is not inappropriate for him to rot in prison. They say his work might not have caused physical harm to Americans, but he hurt a lot of Americans by contacting them, so that they lost security clearances and ruined their careers.’ He was, however, released in 2004, and on his return to Turkey, boasted of his affairs during his spying missions.
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Huseyin Yildirim was by no means the first spy to brag about his career after retiring or being forcibly removed from the game. Robert Hanssen claimed that he was inspired as a child by Kim Philby’s interesting take on his career in his book My Secret War (although this was clearly another of Hanssen’s fabrications: he was actually twenty-four when the KGB spy’s book was published). Some career retrospectives have become the authoritative sources on events — Victor Cherkashin’s book on handling Ames and Hanssen provides perspective that no one else could have had; Oleg Gordievsky’s account of his interrogation shows the way in which the KGB operated against one of their own. One book, however, became the cause of considerable problems for the British government.
MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher attracted considerably more attention as a result of the government’s actions than its not particularly well-written pages deserved. After his retirement in 1976, embittered at being awarded a lower pension than he felt he deserved, the former MI5 agent moved to Tasmania and cooperated with British writer Chapman Pincher’s exposé of British intelligence in Their Trade is Treachery, published in 1981. This rehearsed Wright’s beliefs that Sir Roger Hollis had been a KGB agent. He then appeared in a World in Action television documentary on 16 July 1984, publicly accusing Hollis. Both were in breach of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act and an agreement on his retirement ‘never to disclose anything I knew as a result of my employment, whether classified or not’.
Wright worked on his own book, and although some publishers were put off by warnings from the government, Heinemann decided to put the book out through their Australian subsidiary. Determined to stop it by whatever legal means necessary, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, began proceedings in Australia. This unfortunately meant that Havers had to admit, solely for the purposes of the court case, that Wright’s allegations were accurate. This undermined the case for publication not being in the public interest, particularly since Hollis had helped to set up the Australian security service, the ASIO.
The government’s case wasn’t helped by its official position that it still refused to acknowledge the existence of MI6 — which led to a surreal moment where Sir Robert Armstrong had to agree that the service had existed while Sir Dick White was head of it (since he had volunteered that information in an earlier answer), but could not admit it had any prior or subsequent existence! Many agreed with Wright’s co-author, World in Action director Paul Greengrass’ assessment of the case: ‘It became a great set-piece encounter — conflict, really — trying to define where the boundaries lay between the government’s desire to protect national security and our right as citizens to know what is done in our name.’ Unsurprisingly, the government lost the battle, and Spycatcher, with its allegations about a plot against Harold Wilson, and considerable manipulation of the facts, was published in Australia and America.
Apart from allowing an insight into the mindset of some of those employed by MI5 during the height of the Cold War, the Spycatcher Affair did have one very important consequence: it was clear that it was impossible for the government to continue maintaining that the security services MI5 and MI6 didn’t exist. The Security Service Act of 1989 was the first in a number of Acts of Parliament that eventually put both services on a full constitutional footing.
Greengrass later went on to great fame in the fictional spy world as director of the second and third films based on Robert Ludlum’s spy Jason Bourne, as well as the drama documentary United 93, about the third plane involved in the 9/11 hijackings.
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The first major Eastern bloc spy captured in Britain after the expulsion of the twenty-five Soviet illegals identified by Oleg Gordievsky was Dutchman Erwin Van Haarlem. He only came to light when MI5 followed a member of the Soviet Trade Delegation whom they (probably wrongly) suspected of being a GRU officer and saw him behave furtively on Hampstead Heath before entering a local pub. Half an hour later a second man searched an area of ground on the heath before entering the same pub. MI5 followed this other man and identified him as Van Haarlem, a self-employed art dealer, who was actually in Britain working for the Czech secret service.
Special Branch raided Van Haarlem’s flat on 2 April 1988, and caught him red-handed, in the middle of receiving a transmission from Prague. He admitted he was Czech, and produced his one-time cipher pads. One of the main witnesses at his trial was future MI5 head Stella Rimington (referred to as Miss J) who explained that MI5 believed Van Haarlem was a sleeper agent, ready for a front-line role in time of war.
It turned out that Van Haarlem wasn’t the spy’s real name, even though an Erwin Van Haarlem had been abandoned in Prague, aged six weeks, in 1944. The baby’s mother had tracked the man down using that name in 1978 and he had pretended to be her son. However, DNA testing proved that they were not in fact related: the spy had adopted the name prior to leaving Czechoslovakia in 1974.
The judge at his trial, at which he was found guilty of committing an act preparatory to espionage, noted, ‘I address you by the name Van Haarlem, although I am convinced it was not yours at birth,’ adding, ‘I have not the least doubt you are a dedicated, disciplined and resourceful spy and I have equally no doubt that had you not been caught you would in future years have done whatever your Czech controllers required you to do, however harmful that might have been to our national interests. Those interests and freedoms we must jealously guard.’ He was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1989, but was deported to Prague after serving five. MI5 discovered his true name was Václav Jelinek; the real Van Haarlem was eventually reunited with his mother, unaware that his identity had been stolen after he had changed his own name some years earlier.
As far as the CIA is concerned, the eighties was the era of DCI William Casey and the Iran-Contra affair, a convoluted saga of deals involving arms shipments to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages which actually made a profit — and was then illegally used to support the Contra faction in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the law. In the middle of the explosive revelations about the actions of the National Security Council (NSC) and th
e CIA, DCI Casey was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which effectively incapacitated him at a time when the Agency needed strong leadership.
The Congressional Committees investigating the affair pointed out the fundamental problem at the heart of the Iran-Contra situation: ‘The common ingredients of the Iran and Contra policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law… the United States simultaneously pursued two contradictory foreign policies — a public one and a secret one.’
In 1979 the Sandanistas took power in Nicaragua, and despite receiving aid from President Carter, the regime allied itself with the Soviet bloc via Cuba, receiving guns and other material from the Communists. The Nicaraguan Democratic Force (aka the Contras) were created in 1980, and as the Sandanistas started supporting the rebels in El Salvador, the US began to provide support to the Contras, although armed action was prohibited by the president. When President Reagan took office in 1981, he cut all aid to the Sandanistas, and on 1 December, signed an order permitting the CIA to support the Contras with arms, equipment and money. The NSC organized publicity stunts to ensure there was support domestically within the US for the aid to continue.
However, not everyone in Congress was in favour of the CIA’s involvement, which led to Massachusetts Representative Edward P. Boland’s first Amendment in 1982, which barred ‘the use of funds ‘‘for the purpose of’’ overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a war between Nicaragua and Honduras’. This left a loophole which was quickly exploited — third-party funds could be solicited, and general aid could still be provided to the Contras. The CIA assisted with covert actions in Nicaragua, destroying fuel tanks and mining the harbour. After their role was revealed by the Wall Street Journal, Representative Boland pushed through a second Amendment in 1984:
