Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  FitzGerald had supported Harvey against Wyatt, but at the same time he had concluded, in the words of the officer who accompanied him, that “Harvey was not in a condition to continue as chief of the station…. He was sick and coming apart at the seams.” FitzGerald cabled a lengthy report to Helms, and Helms ordered Harvey relieved of command. “I got the job of going back to Rome and relieving Bill Harvey,” FitzGerald’s companion said. “FitzGerald was very happy he didn’t have to do it…. It was a night I shall not soon forget.” For seven hours he sat across from Harvey, explaining that he was through. “Harvey was drinking brandy with a loaded gun in his lap … paring his nails with a sheath knife.” Harvey never threatened him, but the barrel of the gun was always pointing directly at him.

  The cable from the chief of station announcing that he would be returning to Washington went out to all CIA installations in Italy on the Ides of March. There was not the slightest hint that Harvey was going home in disgrace. He threw a farewell party for himself in the ballroom of the Rome Hilton complete with a flowing fountain of champagne, an excessive display by any standard and particularly for a supposedly anonymous CIA man. “By God, he was going to make a success out of this thing even if it wasn’t,” one disapproving officer said.

  At CIA headquarters in Washington, Helms convened a meeting of FitzGerald, Angleton, and Lawrence “Red” White, the Agency’s executive director, to decide what to do with Harvey upon his return. The idea was to find “something he could work at on his own time where he wouldn’t have anybody to supervise or any operations to run,” one participant in the meeting said. He was placed in charge of something called the Special Services Unit, where his job was to study countermeasures against electronic surveillance. FitzGerald told Harvey he hoped this would be only a brief interlude until he could regain his health and return to the front lines. “Red” White was assigned to watch over him.

  “You and I have never had any problems,” White said to Harvey. “As far as I’m concerned, the slate is clean.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed the Agency in any way,” Harvey responded. “If I ever embarrass you or the Agency again, I will resign.”

  Before long, “we began finding gin bottles in his desk drawer,” one of the CIA’s most senior officers said. White called in Harvey, who reminded him of what he had said about resigning the next time he embarrassed the Agency.

  “That would probably be the best thing to do,” White said.

  “At your pleasure,” Harvey replied.

  He was finished.

  The Great Mole Hunt

  9

  The downfall of Harvey, the CIA’s most aggressive clandestine operator, was symbolic of the fate that had befallen the Agency’s espionage operations against the Soviet Union. Both were totally incapacitated. Operations were “dead in the water,” a member of the Soviet Bloc Division said, brought to a standstill by Golitsin’s warning that a KGB mole had penetrated to the highest levels of the CIA. David Murphy, head of the Soviet Bloc Division, sent a message to all CIA stations, directing them to pull back from their clandestine Soviet sources. Since they had all been blown by the mole, any sources still cooperating with the CIA must be under KGB control, Murphy warned.

  The CIA would continue to observe the Soviet Union as closely as possible, but it would no longer attempt to penetrate the Kremlin. The Agency continued to collect and analyze the great masses of data that even a closed society spews forth—wheat crops and missile silos were still photographed by reconnaissance satellites; Western businessmen returning from Russia were still debriefed; official delegations to and from Moscow were still logged in and out; Pravda, Izvestia, and all the other Soviet publications were still translated into English. But the effort to recruit an agent who could give meaning and form to all the other data, who could reveal the designs and intentions, the motives and methods of the Soviet government, had all but ceased. The KGB had emasculated the CIA. Or had the CIA emasculated itself? Was the mole or the fear of the mole to blame?

  “Golitsin comes out and says there’s a penetration,” a disbelieving officer recalled, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The next step is that nothing can happen in the United States government that the KGB doesn’t know within twenty-four hours.” Murphy was overreacting, his critics said, swallowing the double think propounded by Angleton and Bagley and playing right into the KGB’s hands. One member of the Soviet Bloc Division became so incensed that he accused Murphy of being a Soviet agent.

  To the counterintelligence officer there was, quite apart from what Golitsin was saying, “extensive evidence that a mole had penetrated to a sensitive point.” Hadn’t the KGB known about one CIA operation—the planned recruitment of the Polish intelligence officer in Switzerland—within two weeks of its inception? “Popov, Goleniewski, Penkovsky—the best the CIA ever had—all were compromised, and the KGB went to great lengths to mislead us as to the nature and timing of the compromise. In each instance, they gave us several choices.” That was the most disconcerting thing of all. It was as if the KGB knew at any given moment exactly what the CIA was thinking.

  In the spring of 1966, while the CIA and the FBI were still trying to extract from Igor Orlov a confession that he had been the KGB’s source SASHA in Berlin, a second Igor suddenly arrived in Washington with additional evidence against Orlov. The new Igor jumped into the CIA’s lap with an early morning phone call to the residence of Richard Helms, and by one o’clock that afternoon he was closeted with a CIA case officer at an Agency safe house. Igor was not unknown to the CIA. He had briefly flirted with the Agency once overseas. Now, Igor said, he was angling for an assignment to the KGB station in Washington, where he and the CIA could do business on a regular basis. But, he continued, his assignment depended on the success of his present mission, which was to recruit Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet destroyer captain who had defected to the United States in 1959 and was now living in the Washington suburbs and serving as a consultant for the Office of Naval Intelligence. If the CIA would persuade Shadrin to accept recruitment, Igor explained, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

  As proof that he could return a favor, Igor revealed that the suspect Orlov had just paid a visit to the Soviet Embassy, a tidbit confirmed by a review of the Bureau’s photographic surveillance of the embassy. Orlov’s visit did not prove anything. He insisted that he was merely trying to obtain the address of a relative in Russia. But coming on top of all the botched cases with which he had been associated in Berlin, it served to confirm existing suspicions—as if the KGB knew at any given moment exactly what the CIA was thinking.

  The FBI was impressed by Igor’s tidbit. The CIA, Angleton in particular, was convinced that Igor was a KGB trick. Although Igor’s information confirmed Golitsin’s leads to the identity of SASHA, that seemed to be nothing more than the further discrediting of an already suspect source—a “giveaway” designed to establish Igor’s credentials as a prelude to deception. However, both the CIA and the FBI agreed for different reasons to play along with Igor, now code-named KITTY HAWK, and put him in touch with Shadrin. If the FBI was right about Igor, American intelligence could use Shadrin to funnel phony data to the KGB and at the same time promote the career of its new agent KITTY HAWK. As far as the CIA was concerned, feeding an unwitting Shadrin to Igor would at least keep the game alive by allowing the Russians to think that the Agency had fallen for their ploy.

  In order to protect the gambit, Angleton ordered that the KITTY HAWK file be kept from the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division, which he believed to be penetrated by the KGB. The result was that the division of the CIA most directly responsible for the collection of clandestine intelligence reports on the Soviet Union remained ignorant of what the FBI considered to be potentially the most valuable penetration since Penkovsky. Espionage operations against the Soviet Union had indeed gone “dead in the water.” The road map of intelligence had disintegrated into the maze of counterintelligence.

  At the ce
nter of the maze stood Angleton and Golitsin, the chief of counterintelligence and his prize defector—“the Black Knight,” as Angleton was sometimes called, and his charger. Without Golitsin, without Angleton’s championing of Golitsin, the fear of KGB provocation, disinformation and penetration would never have taken control. Angleton was the only officer who possessed the command of fact, the strength of personality, the force of conviction needed to overcome the disbelief that traditionally greeted warnings about Soviet plots. Even so forceful a personality as Harvey had continually been frustrated by what he so long ago had called “the ineffectiveness of the overall Government program in dealing with Communists and Communist espionage.” Angleton would not and could not be ignored. Where Harvey had raged against the Soviet threat with basso profundo and six-shooter, Angleton seduced with a hypnotic blend of brilliance and mystique. Angleton was the Italian stiletto to Harvey’s German Luger. Yet it had been Harvey, the blunt, blustering cop, and not Angleton, the devious, enigmatic counterspy, who had stitched together the case against Kim Philby, the KGB’s prize penetration agent. There, said Angleton’s friends, lay the root cause of his fervor. Never again would he permit himself to be so badly duped. He would trust no one.

  Sherman Kent, head of the CIA’s Board of National Estimates, told colleagues of the time he dropped by Angleton’s office to pick him up for a lunch date. Kent stood in front of Angleton’s desk, waiting for him to lock his papers in his safe. Angleton gathered up the papers from his desk, but before placing them in the safe, he asked Kent to leave the room. Kent realized that Angleton was afraid he might be peering over his shoulder. Another CIA officer recalled the time that Angleton had briefed him on a particularly sensitive case. After swearing the officer to eternal secrecy, Angleton began to describe the case in hushed tones. It sounded very familiar to the officer, and when he peered across the desk, he realized that Angleton was reading from the officer’s own handwritten notes. Friends of Angleton could always pass off such displays by saying that “anybody who works in counterintelligence should be given a few extra points for paranoia.” Besides, a government official told a friend at the CIA, “I don’t agree with a thing Jim says, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What if he’s right?’ ” What if Angleton were right about Golitsin and about the mole?

  Golitsin had already provided the leads that pointed toward Igor Orlov as the prime suspect in the search for SASHA, and he was eager to provide more. According to a CIA officer, “Golitsin’s line became: ‘I gave you this penetration who ruined everything you ever did in Berlin but what the KGB really wants is to get at your own people. Give me a list of your people who ran this agent, and I will find among them the Soviet agents in the CIA.’ ” SASHA’S handlers either had been in league with him from the start or had been recruited by the KGB through SASHA at some point in their relationship, Golitsin contended.

  Angleton gave Golitsin access to the CIA’s files on the case officers who had handled SASHA, about a dozen men in all, and the hunt was on. “This is what I distrust,” one CIA division head said. “How the hell could anybody in his right mind give a KGB officer enough information [from CIA files] to allow him to make a valid analysis?” Said another officer, whose file was among those turned over to Golitsin, “To give Golitsin your personnel files, including going all the way back to your first Personal History Statement which you give when you join the Agency, it seems to me that that’s outrageous, way beyond where Angleton should have gone.” In fact, Angleton went even further in his hunt for the mole. If a man spoke Russian or had served in Moscow or was involved in any of the other cases that had gone sour, his file, too, was given to Golitsin. If Golitsin’s eye picked out a suspicious pattern, the name would be entered in Angleton’s list of “serials,” or leads to possible Soviet agents, and a full investigation would begin.

  Number one on Angleton’s list was Richard Kovich, a case officer of Yugoslav descent assigned to the Soviet Bloc Division. “Golitsin named Kovich on the basis of his analysis of material we supplied him with,” a CIA officer said. To Golitsin, everything about Kovich looked suspicious. He had handled SASHA, he spoke Russian, and he came from Eastern Europe. Kovich also associated openly with known KGB officers, joining them on picnics and family outings in what he maintained was a calculated effort to know the enemy. Angleton and Golitsin put the probability that Kovich was a Soviet agent at 100 percent. From his reading of the file, Golitsin even professed to know the precise moment at which Kovich had been recruited.

  Kovich had been sent to Paris to handle a GRU officer named Federov, who had volunteered his services to the CIA. From the start, Federov had the smell of a Soviet provocation. He said that he was a GRU “illegal” who was being staged through Paris to his ultimate destination in Mexico. The name he gave for his GRU control turned out to be an office partner of Popov’s in East Berlin, but his description of the office did not match that given by the trusted Popov. No sooner had he made contact with Kovich than Federov began to lead him a merry chase. Abandoning his mission to Mexico, he returned to Moscow and reappeared in Paris with the news that he had to go to the south of France to meet with another GRU illegal who was to take his place in Mexico. Kovich trailed Federov south. It was there, Golitsin said, while he was on his own with no one watching his back, that Kovich had been recruited by Soviet intelligence. Once again Federov was recalled to Moscow, this time, he claimed, by way of Frankfurt and Berlin, but the CIA followed him to Bern, down through the Simplon Tunnel to northern Italy, and back to the French Riviera. At his next meeting with Kovich, the now thoroughly suspect Federov announced that he was to be assigned to the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm. Then he returned to Moscow once more, reemerging a short time later in Berlin, but instead of going on to Stockholm, he went back to Moscow and was never heard from again. The most intriguing aspect of the entire affair was that Federov had returned to Moscow for the final time at almost precisely the same moment that Popov had been recalled for the interrogation that led to his final demise. In some way, Federov seemed linked to the end play in the Popov case.

  Pawing through the files, Golitsin spotted another case that he felt reflected badly upon Kovich. Ingeborg Lygren, who was secretary to the Norwegian ambassador in Moscow and whom Kovich had handled as a CIA agent, had been working for the Russians all along, Golitsin said, suggesting that Kovich could have used her as a go-between with his KGB controllers. The Lygren case became a scandal of major proportions in Norway, although ultimately it would tell more about Angleton than Kovich.

  By the time Golitsin identified Lygren as a Soviet agent, she had returned from Moscow to Oslo and was serving as secretary to the head of military intelligence, Colonel Wilhelm Evang, Norway’s chief liaison with the CIA. Angleton flew to Oslo and told the head of Norway’s internal security service about Lygren without bothering to inform Evang. The resulting flap “buggered up the CIA’s dealing with both services for many years,” the head of the CIA’s Western Europe Division said. Evang and his aides “considered the fact that Angleton had gone to the police and not to Evang a stab in the back. The results were bad as far as liaison was concerned.” Another CIA officer explained that “when you are in such close contact with the head of one service, and you have a security case that goes to the heart of his business, you don’t go to the head of a rival service and then keep the resulting investigation secret from your principal liaison. The way it was handled blackened the name of CIA from then on.” The damage was for naught. Lygren was found innocent, given her job back, and voted an indemnity by the Norwegian parliament. Twelve years later, the real spy, Gunvor Haavik, was caught passing documents to the Russians.

  Golitsin’s identification of Kovich as a Soviet agent proved no more accurate than his naming of Lygren. “Kovich was cleared of any evidence that he was a controlled agent of anybody else,” one of his superiors said. “Nevertheless, he was injured because prior to the time that that determination was made he had
to be removed from an active role in ongoing sensitive operations.” Kovich was transferred out of the Soviet Bloc Division to a deadend job in Central America. “What happened to Kovich was what any professional officer would expect,” his superior said. His career was ruined. Although officially cleared, he remained in limbo, never rising above the rank he held when Golitsin first named him. According to Kovich’s friend, George Kisvalter, “Angleton wiretapped him and blocked any promotions for him for ten years.” Finally, Kovich quit the CIA in disgust.

  Neither Kovich nor any of the other suspects identified by Golitsin were ever told that their loyalty was being questioned. By the time they realized what had happened and demanded a chance to rebut the charge, their careers had been damaged beyond repair. “When do you find out?” one suspect asked rhetorically. “You find out when you’re the oldest living GS-16 in the building. You find out when old colleagues start turning the papers face down on their desk while they’re talking to you, not taking any phone calls when you’re in the office, pretending not to see you in the corridor, and shying away from you in the men’s room.”

  The suspicions sowed by Golitsin spread far beyond individual officers at the CIA to infect all of Allied intelligence. Philippe de Vosjoli, the Washington representative of French intelligence, described Golitsin’s debilitating effect. “Our team would do some preliminary work at home and return to Washington with a number of names, any one of which might fit the necessarily meager network of facts MARTEL [Golitsin’s French cryptonym] had offered. But MARTEL could never answer with absolute assurance either yes or no about any of them. The problem in this for me—and, in fact, for the whole French intelligence system—lay in the fact that each session with MARTEL was also attended by American representatives, and each time our people dropped a name in front of MARTEL, that person automatically became suspect to the Americans. Small wonder, but as the list of clouded reputations lengthened, my professional contacts with the Americans … began to dry up, even on routine matters.”