The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  After Kopatzky was briefly imprisoned for drunken driving in 1954, his name was changed by the CIA to “Igor Orlov,” so that his criminal record would not appear on his application for US citizenship.4 In 1957, with his cover as a CIA (but not Soviet) agent largely blown in Berlin, Orlov was taken to Washington with his family and given further operational training by the Agency. He then returned to Europe to take part in various CIA operations in Germany and Austria.5 In 1960 the CIA at last began to suspect that “Orlov” was working for the KGB. A later damage assessment at the Centre concluded that the extraordinary number of KGB officers who had been in direct contact with him—over twenty during the last decade—might have helped to place him under suspicion.6 In order to prevent Orlov defecting before the case against him had been established, the CIA promised him a new job with the Agency in Washington, sacked him on his arrival in January 1961 and began an intensive investigation.7 Orlov made contact with his new Soviet controller, I. P. Sevastyanov, an operations officer at the Washington residency, got a job as a truck driver and heard nothing for several years from either the CIA or the FBI. In 1964 he bought a picture-framing gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, paid for in part, no doubt, by his earnings from the KGB.8

  By the time he opened his gallery, Orlov may well have felt confident that the case against him could never be proved. His confidence evaporated in the spring of 1965 when the FBI arrived on his doorstep, spent several days searching his home, questioned his wife Eleonore and summoned him to take a polygraph test. Orlov seems to have panicked. Under surveillance and unable to make covert contact with the KGB, he went into the Soviet embassy on 16th Street through a rear door, vainly hoping to enter unobserved.9 The Washington residency arranged with him an exfiltration plan which was agreed to by Moscow. Encouraged by “Abel’s” star rating as a master spy and his American lawyer’s affectionate memoir of him, the Centre intended to turn the exfiltration into a publicity stunt. It planned a press conference in Moscow at which Orlov would be presented as a Soviet illegal who had performed heroic deeds behind the German lines on the eastern front during the Second World War and later penetrated the CIA. Orlov would then publish his life story, which would be used as an “active measure” to glamorize the KGB and denigrate its Main Adversary.10

  The plan, however, had to be called off. Orlov’s wife flatly refused to go to Moscow with their two young sons, so he decided to tough it out in Washington.11 Though the FBI kept the “Orlov” file open, they were never able to prove a case against him. Their investigation, like that of the CIA, however, was based on one false assumption. After his defection in December 1961, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn had provided some clues which helped to confirm suspicions about Orlov. Golitsyn correctly said that a Soviet spy whose real surname began with a K had been active in Berlin and West Germany, but wrongly said that his codename, rather than his real name, was SASHA. The CIA and FBI both wrongly concluded that Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Kopatzky, alias “Igor Orlov,” was agent SASHA.12 Orlov’s KGB file shows that he was at various stages of his career successively ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD, but never SASHA, and that he remained a Soviet agent until a few years before his death in 1982. After a press article in 1978 claimed that Orlov was a Soviet spy, the KGB broke off contact with RICHARD.13 In 1992, ten years after Orlov’s death, the Gallery Orlov, run by his widow, was still described by a Washington guide as “a hangout for espionage writers.”14

  West Berlin and West Germany, where Kopatzky (aka Orlov) had first offered his services to the KGB in 1949, were the KGB’s most successful recruiting grounds for disgruntled US military personnel. The most important was probably Robert Lee Johnson, codenamed GEORGE, a disaffected army sergeant and part-time pimp in West Berlin.15 In 1953 Johnson and his prostitute fiancée, Hedy, crossed into East Berlin and asked for political asylum. The KGB, however, persuaded Johnson to stay in the West, earn a second salary by spying for the Soviet Union and pay off his old scores against the US army. Despite his involvement in prostitution, alcohol abuse and gambling (not to mention espionage), Johnson succeeded in gaining employment as a guard from 1957 to 1959 at missile sites in California and Texas, where he purloined documents, photographs and, on one occasion, a sample of rocket fuel for the KGB.16

  Johnson’s most productive period as a Soviet agent began in 1961 when he was stationed as a guard in the US Armed Forces Courier Centre at Orly Airport, near Paris, one of the main nerve centers in the classified military communications system. Over the next two years he handed over 1,600 pages of top secret documents to his controller. Among them were ciphers and daily key-tables for the Adonis, KW-9 and HW-18 cipher machines; the operational plans of the US armed forces command in Europe; documents on the production of American nuclear weapons; lists and locations of targets in the Soviet Bloc; US intelligence reports on Soviet scientific research, aviation and missile development; and SIGINT evidence on the state of readiness of the East German Air Force. Collectively the documents provided an extraordinary and highly classified insight both into American forces in Europe and into what they knew about the forces of the Warsaw Pact.17 Johnson was finally arrested in 1964 after a tip-off from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko.18

  IN THE UNITED STATES itself the most remarkable KGB walk-ins during the Eisenhower presidency were two employees of the National Security [SIGINT] Agency, 31-year-old Bernon F. Mitchell and 29-year-old William H. Martin. On September 6, 1960, in Moscow’s House of Journalists, Mitchell and Martin gave perhaps the most embarrassing press conference in the history of the American intelligence community. The greatest embarrassment was the public revelation that NSA had been decrypting the communications of some of the United States’ allies. Among them, said Martin, were “Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic [Egypt and Syria], Indonesia, Uruguay—that’s enough to give a general picture, I guess.”19

  Though the defection of the two NSA employees was a spectacular publicity coup, Mitchell’s KGB file reveals that it fell some way short of the Centre’s expectations.20 Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell had been recruited by NSA in 1957 despite admitting to six years of “sexual experimentations” up to the age of nineteen with dogs and chickens. His gifts as a mathematician were presumably thought more important than his farmyard experiences. During Martin’s positive vetting, acquaintances variously described him as irresponsible and an insufferable egotist but—like his friend Mitchell—a gifted mathematician. Politically naive and socially inadequate, Mitchell and Martin were seduced by the Soviet propaganda image of the USSR as a state committed to the cause of peace whose progressive social system could offer them the personal fulfillment they had failed to find in the United States.21

  In December 1959, Mitchell flew from Washington to Mexico City, in defiance of NSA regulations, entered the Soviet embassy and asked for political asylum in the USSR, giving ideological reasons as the motive for his action.22 The KGB residency made strenuous attempts to persuade him to stay on inside NSA as a defector-in-place, but without success. Mitchell agreed to a secret meeting with another KGB officer in Washington but maintained his insistence on emigrating to the Soviet Union with Martin. Once there, however, he promised to reveal all he knew about NSA.

  On June 25, 1960, at the beginning of three weeks’ summer leave, Mitchell and Martin boarded Eastern Airlines flight 307 at Washington National Airport, bound for New Orleans. There, after a brief stopover, they took another flight for Mexico City, stayed the night at the Hotel Virreyes, then caught a Cubana Airlines plane to Havana.23 In July they were exfiltrated from Cuba to the Soviet Union. KGB codebreakers were disappointed in the amount of detailed knowledge of NSA cryptanalysis possessed by Mitchell and Martin. Their most important intelligence, in the Centre’s view, was the reassurance they were able to provide on NSA’s lack of success in breaking current high-grade Soviet ciphers.24 However, the KGB similarly remained unable to decrypt high-grade US cipher systems.25

  Security was so lax at NSA’s Fort Meade
headquarters that no attempt was made to track Mitchell and Martin down until eight days after they had been due to return from their three-week vacation. Inside Mitchell’s house NSA security officers found the key to a safe deposit box, which Mitchell had deliberately left for them to find. Inside the box in a nearby bank they found a sealed envelope bearing a request, signed by both Mitchell and Martin, that its contents be made public. The envelope contained a lengthy denunciation of the US government and the evils of capitalism and a bizarre eulogy of life in the Soviet Union, including the claim that its emancipated women were “more desirable as mates.”26

  By decision no. 295 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dated August 11, 1960, Mitchell and Martin were given political asylum and monthly allowances of 500 roubles each—about the same as their NSA salaries and well above Soviet salary scales.27 In the autumn Mitchell was given a job in the Institute of Mathematics at Leningrad University; Martin began doctoral research at the same institute. Both defectors quickly put their beliefs about the desirability of Soviet mates to the test. Mitchell married Galina Vladimirovna Yakovleva, a 30-year-old assistant professor in the piano music department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Martin, who changed his name to Sokolovsky, married a Russian woman whom he met on holiday on the Black Sea.28

  Within a few years the Centre found both Mitchell and Martin considerably more trouble than they were worth. Predictably, both defectors rapidly became disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union. Martin, whom the Centre regarded as the more impressionable of the two, was gullible enough to believe a tale concocted by the KGB that they had both been sentenced in absentia to twenty years’ hard labor by a closed session of the US Supreme Court. He was eventually shown a bogus copy of the judgment in order to persuade him to put all thought of returning home out of his mind. Mitchell was more skeptical and by the 1970s appeared determined to leave. As chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov gave personal instructions that under no circumstances was either Mitchell or Martin to be allowed to go, for fear of deterring other potential defectors from the West. In a further attempt to deter Martin he was shown an article by Yuri Semyonov in Izvestia claiming that American agents had been found in possession of poison ampoules, and was led to believe that these were intended for Mitchell and himself. Mitchell correctly suspected that the story had been fabricated by the KGB. Galina Mitchell was also anxious to leave, but the KGB put pressure on her mother to persuade Galina to change her mind. After their applications for visas had been rebuffed by Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the United States, the Mitchells told the Soviet authorities on March 29, 1980 that they had given up their attempts to emigrate.29 But there were persistent reports afterwards that Mitchell was still trying to leave.30

  FOR MOST OF the Cold War, the Washington and New York legal residencies had little success in providing the intelligence from inside the federal government which had been so plentiful during the Second World War. Their limitations were clearly exposed during the two years before the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

  The vacuum left by the lack of KGB high-grade political intelligence from the United States was partly filled by dangerous nonsense from elsewhere, some of which reflected the paranoid strain in Soviet analysis. On June 29, 1960 the KGB chairman, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, personally delivered to Khrushchev an alarmist assessment of American policy, based on a misinformed report from an unidentified NATO liaison officer with the CIA:

  In the CIA it is known that the leadership of the Pentagon is convinced of the need to initiate a war with the Soviet Union “as soon as possible”… Right now the USA has the capability to wipe out Soviet missile bases and other military targets with its bomber forces. But over the next little while the defense forces of the Soviet Union will grow… and the opportunity will disappear… As a result of these assumptions, the chiefs at the Pentagon are hoping to launch a preventive war against the Soviet Union.

  Khrushchev took the warning seriously. Less than a fortnight later he issued a public warning to the Pentagon “not to forget that, as shown at the latest tests, we have rockets which can land in a pre-set square target 13,000 kilometers away.”31

  Moscow followed the presidential elections of 1960 with close attention. Khrushchev regarded the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, as a McCarthyite friend of the Pentagon hawks, and was anxious that Kennedy should win. The Washington resident, Aleksandr Semyonovich Feklisov (alias “Fomin”), was ordered to “propose diplomatic or propaganda initiatives, or any other measures, to facilitate Kennedy’s victory.” The residency tried to make contact with Robert Kennedy but was politely rebuffed.32

  Khrushchev’s view of Kennedy changed after the CIA’s abortive and absurdly inept attempt to topple Fidel Castro by landing an American-backed “Cuban brigade” at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban débâcle, Kennedy despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, “How could I have been so stupid?”33 The young president, Khrushchev concluded, was unable to control the “dark forces” of American capitalism’s military-industrial complex. 34 At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June, Khrushchev belligerently demanded an end to the three-power status of Berlin and a German peace treaty by the end of the year. The two superpowers seemed set on a collision course. Kennedy said afterwards to the journalist James Reston:

  I think [Khrushchev] did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get in that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me.35

  On July 29, 1961 Shelepin sent Khrushchev the outline of a new and aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary designed to “create circumstances in different areas of the world which would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the United States and its allies, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin’s proposal.” The first part of the plan was to use national liberation movements around the world to secure an advantage in the East-West struggle and to “activate by the means available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments.” At the top of the list for demolition Shelepin placed “reactionary” regimes in the Main Adversary’s own backyard in Central America, beginning in Nicaragua where he proposed coordinating a “revolutionary front” in collaboration with the Cubans and the Sandinistas. Shelepin also proposed destabilizing NATO bases in western Europe and a disinformation campaign designed to demoralize the West by persuading it of the growing superiority of Soviet forces. On August 1, with only minor amendments, Shelepin’s masterplan was approved as a Central Committee directive.36 Elements of it, especially the use of national liberation movements in the struggle with the Main Adversary, continued to reappear in Soviet strategy for the next quarter of a century.

  During the Kennedy administration, however, the role of the KGB in Washington was less important than that of the GRU. In May 1961 GRU Colonel Georgi Bolshakov, operating under cover as head of the Washington bureau of the Tass news agency, began fortnightly meetings with the Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy. Bolshakov succeeded in persuading Robert Kennedy that, between them, they could short-circuit the ponderous protocol of official diplomacy, “speak straightly and frankly without resorting to the politickers’ stock-in-trade propaganda stunts” and set up a direct channel of communication between President Kennedy and First Secretary Khrushchev. Forgetting that he was dealing with an experienced intelligence professional who had been instructed to cultivate him, the President’s brother became convinced that “an authentic friendship grew” between him and Bolshakov:

  Any time that he had some message to give to the President (or Khrushchev had) or when the President had some message to give to Khrushchev, we went through Georgi Bolshakov… I met with him about all kinds of things.37

  Despite Bolshak
ov’s success, GRU intelligence assessment of American policy was abysmal. In March 1962 it produced two dangerously misinformed reports which served to reinforce the KGB’s earlier warning that the Pentagon was planning a nuclear first strike. The GRU claimed that in the previous June the United States had made the decision to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in September 1961, but had been deterred at the last moment by Soviet nuclear tests which showed that the USSR’s nuclear arsenal was more powerful than the Pentagon had realized. The woefully inaccurate Soviet intelligence reports of Washington’s plans for thermonuclear warfare coincided with a series of real but farcically inept American attempts to topple or assassinate Moscow’s Cuban ally, Fidel Castro—actions ideally calculated to exacerbate the paranoid strain in Soviet foreign policy.

  In March 1962 Castro urged the KGB to set up an operations base in Havana to export revolution across Latin America.38 Then, in May, Khrushchev decided to construct nuclear missile bases in Cuba—the most dangerous gamble of the Cold War. He was partly motivated by his desire to impress Washington with Soviet nuclear might and so deter it from further (non-existent) plans for a first strike. At the same time he intended to make a dramatic gesture of support for the Cuban revolution.39

  The Soviet gamble was taken in the belief that Washington would not detect the presence of the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. That belief was mistaken for two reasons. First, high-altitude U-2 spy planes were able to photograph the construction of the missile bases. Secondly, American intelligence analysts were able to make sense of the confusing U-2 photographs because they possessed plans of missile site construction and other important intelligence secretly supplied by Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a spy in the GRU run jointly by the British SIS and the CIA. All the main American intelligence reports on the Cuban bases during the missile crisis were later stamped IRONBARK, a codeword indicating that they had made use of Penkovsky’s documents.40