The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  2. See above, chapter 6.

  3. k-13,370.

  4. k-13,267; k-26,194. The two other leading members of the Costa Rican delegation to Rome were Francisco Orlich, Minister of Public Works, and Daniel Oduber, ambassador in Paris (later president of Costa Rica from 1974 to 1978, and in 1980 deputy chairman of the Socialist International). Grigulevich appears to have won their confidence, too; his wife was received by them when she visited Costa Rica in 1952. On Figueres’s role in restoring constitutional government in Costa Rica, see Bird, Costa Rica, ch. 10.

  5. k-13,267.

  6. Acheson, Present at the Creation, pp. 580-1.

  7. k-13,267; t-7,12; vol. 6, ch. 5, part 1. United Nations, Official Records of the General Assembly Sixth Session, Ad Hoc Political Committee, p. 20.

  8. k-13,267.

  9. See above, chapter 9.

  10. The VENONA decrypts led to very few arrests of Soviet spies, largely because SIGINT was considered too secret to be used in court, even in closed session. Even had it been used, it would have been open to a variety of legal challenges.

  11. See above, chapters 7-8.

  12. Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, ch. 4.

  13. See above, chapter 9.

  14. The Illegals Directorate planned a network of 28 “documentation agents” in Austria, 24 in East Germany, 24 in West Germany, 15 in France, 13 in the United States, 12 in Britain, 12 in Italy, 10 in Canada, 10 in Belgium, 9 in Mexico, 8 in Iran, 6 in Lebanon and 6 in Turkey (vol. 6, ch. 5, part 4). The large number of agents in Germany and Austria reflected the high proportion of Soviet illegals posing as refugees from East Germany.

  15. Operations officers specializing in illegal documentation were posted to the legal residencies in New York, Washington, Ottawa, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, London, Paris, Rome, Brussels, The Hague, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, Tehran, Beirut, Calcutta, Karachi and Cairo. Those posted to New York were M. N. Korneyev, V. N. Danilin and A. M. Tikhomirov. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 4.

  16. See above, chapter 9.

  17. vol. 7, ch. 11, item 2.

  18. vol. 8, ch. 8.

  19. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, p. 34.

  20. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 5-6.

  21. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 7.

  22. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, p. 34.

  23. Soboloff’s father had left Canada to work at Magnitogorsk in 1931. David and his mother followed in 1935. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 7.

  24. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, pp. 38-40.

  25. Though the KGB file noted by Mitrokhin names HART’s lover, it seems unfair to identify her.

  26. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 14, 18.

  27. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, pp. 44-53, 66-7. Interviews by Christopher Andrew with Terry Guernsey in Toronto, October 1991.

  28. vol. 8, ch. 2. On the Centre’s criticisms of the Ottawa residency see above, pp. 180-1.

  29. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 9.

  30. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, pp. 53-4.

  31. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 9. On EMMA, see also k-8,82.

  32. On Hambleton’s career prior to his recruitment, see Heaps, Hugh Hambleton, Spy; Granatstein and Stafford, Spy Wars, ch. 8; Barron, KGB Today, ch. 9.

  33. vol. 8, ch. 8; vol. 8, app. 1, item 87.

  34. See below, chapter 12.

  35. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  36. vol. 8, ch. 8; vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  37. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 11, 20.

  38. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, pp. 64-71.

  39. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 10,20.

  40. Sawatsky, For Services Rendered, p. 27.

  41. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 14.

  42. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 10, 12.

  43. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 13.

  44. vol. 8, ch. 8, paras. 15, 20.

  45. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 16. Remarkably, HART survived fifteen years’ imprisonment (five in solitary confinement, three in a normal prison cell and seven in labor camp), and was later exfiltrated to the West by SIS. He now lives in Canada.

  46. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 20. In January 1964 a KGB officer traveling to Winnipeg with a scientific and cultural delegation and the Igor Moiseyev Folk Dance Group tried to reestablish contact with Morrison, but without success. An investigation by agent ANTHEA then established that he had moved house. The Centre later planned to involve Morrison in the hunt for two illegals, Yevgeni Runge (MAKS) and Valentina Rush (ZINA), who defected to the CIA in Berlin in 1967. But though attempts by the Ottawa residency to locate Morrison continued intermittently until 1974 they were unsuccessful (vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5; vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 21). In May 1986 Morrison was sentenced to eighteen months in jail for offenses against the Official Secrets Act (Granatstein and Stafford, Spy Wars, p. 149).

  47. vol. 8, ch. 8, para. 19.

  48. k-4,207; k-11,130. From 1961 to 1964 Grinchenko worked in Cuba as a consultant to the illegals directorate of the DGI; k-11,130.

  49. On Fisher, see above, chapter 9.

  50. Olavi Åhman (codenamed VIRTANEN) was a veteran of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2; k-27,451.

  51. Bernikow, Abel, chs. 2-3.

  52. The message was finally decrypted in 1957, with the assistance of cipher material given by VIK to the FBI and other material discovered by the Bureau in MARK’s flat after his arrest. Lamphere, The FBI-KGB War, pp. 270-1, 274-5.

  53. k-3,80; k-8,83. ORIZO’s main motivation seems to have been financial. In Paris, he had been paid 40,000 francs a month; Mitrokhin’s notes do not indicate how much he was paid in New York.

  54. k-8,91.

  55. k-3,80. ORIZO continued work as a Soviet agent until 1980.

  56. Bernikow, Abel, pp. 171-2.

  57. Bernikow, Abel, chs. 3-4. Even after his arrest, MARK failed to realize that VIK had never been under surveillance by the FBI. He told his lawyer that “he now believed that Hayhanen had been secretly apprehended in December [1956] by the FBI and had met [him] thereafter on orders from Federal agents” (Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, p. 39).

  58. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  59. Bernikow, Abel, pp. 86-95.

  60. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  61. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  62. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2, n. 11.

  63. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, pp. 179-80; Bernikow, Abel, pp. 242-4.

  64. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, p. 257.

  65. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  66. Bernikow, Abel, pp. 223-4.

  67. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  68. Also on February 10, 1962 Frederic L. Pryor, a Yale student accused of espionage in East Berlin, was released at Checkpoint Charlie.

  69. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  70. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  71. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, p. 418.

  72. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  73. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  74. While in New York “Abel” had sent to Moscow, at the GRU’s request, large-scale maps of American cities. Though this was not a very demanding assignment in the United States, similar maps were unobtainable for Soviet cities.

  75. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  76. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, pp. 275, 414.

  77. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

  78. The SVR, which still propagates the heroic “Abel” myth, claimed in 1995 that, “Secrecy requirements do not yet allow the disclosure of many of the operations in which MARK participated.” Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 156-9.

  79. Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution, pp. 141-2.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Main Adversary

  Part 2

  1. See above, chapter 9.

  2. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2.

  3. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2.

  4. Wise, Molehunt, pp. 186-7.

  5. Murphy, Kondrashev and Bailey, Battleground Berlin, pp. 245-6.

  6. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2.

  7. Wise,
Molehunt, pp. 188-9.

  8. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2. The Gallery Orlov, originally in South Pitt Street, Alexandria, later moved to King Street in the Old Town (Kessler, Undercover Washington, pp. 125-6).

  9. Wise, Molehunt, pp. 191-4.

  10. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2.

  11. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2. Mrs. Orlov said later that her husband had told her the Soviet embassy had agreed to his request for asylum for them and their two young sons (Wise, Molehunt, p. 192).

  12. Wise, Molehunt, ch. 13.

  13. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 2; vol. 6, app. 1, parts 17, 41.

  14. Kessler, Undercover Washington, p. 126.

  15. k-4,136.

  16. Barron, KGB, ch. 10. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 464-6.

  17. k-4,136.

  18. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 465-6.

  19. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 144.

  20. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11.

  21. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, pp. 134-40.

  22. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11.

  23. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 141.

  24. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11. From 1960 to 1963 the GRU had an important agent-in-place at NSA, Staff Sergeant Jack E. Dunlap (like Mitchell and Martin, a walk-in). In 1963 Victor Norris Hamilton, a former employee of NSA who had been forced to resign in 1959 because of mental illness, defected to the Soviet Union and gave a press conference much like Mitchell’s and Martin’s in 1960. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 462-4. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, pp. 151-4.

  25. Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” p. 77.

  26. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, pp. 142-3.

  27. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11. Mitrokhin’s notes on the 500 rouble monthly allowance are taken from Mitchell’s file and refer only to him. However, two years later, Martin told a reporter from The New York Times, whom he met in a chance encounter in a Leningrad café, that he had been given the same allowance. Theodore Shabad, “Defector from US Resigned to Soviet Union,” The New York Times (June 24, 1962). Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 148. When Mitchell got a job, he was paid 100 roubles as a monthly salary and another 400 as a subsidy; vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11.

  28. Information on Mitchell from vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11; on Martin from Shabad, “Defector from US Resigned to Soviet,” The New York Times (June 24, 1962).

  29. vol. 6, ch. 11, part 11.

  30. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 149. Martin died in Moscow of acute leukemia in 1986.

  31. The source of the alarmist KGB report of Pentagon plans for a nuclear attack was “a document sent by a[n unidentified] liaison officer with the CIA to his own government” (Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” pp. 51-2). Though General Curtis LeMay, the belligerent head of Strategic Air Command, privately used the language of the pre-emptive strike, this never had any prospect of becoming the policy of the Eisenhower administration. Such language, however, caused some concern among the United States’ NATO allies. The British JIC, though believing it “highly unlikely that, with her democratic method of government and her close ties with other Western nations, [the USA] would ever provoke a war,” concluded in 1954 that it was “just possible that given (a) a more extreme government in the US, (b) increased US lack of confidence in some or all of her Western allies owing to political development in their countries, (c) some sudden advance in the USA in the sphere of weapons, etc., the counsels of impatience might get the upper hand.” JIC(54) 37 (I owe this information to Alex Craig of Christ’s College, Cambridge, currently completing a groundbreaking PhD on the JIC in the early Cold War).

  Recently declassified US documents indicate that, under specified emergency conditions, senior American commanders had “predelegated” presidential authority to use nuclear weapons (Paul Lashmar, “Dr. Strangelove’s Secrets,” Independent, September 8, 1998). It is possible, but by no means certain, that a report of this from the KGB’s source, together with LeMay’s apocalyptic rhetoric, fueled the Centre’s fear of an American first strike.

  32. Feklisov, Za okeanom i na ostrove, pp. 199-201. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 236-40.

  33. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 257ff.

  34. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 242.

  35. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 267ff.

  36. Shelepin to Khrushchev, memorandum no. 1861-Sh (July 29, 1961). Decree no. 191/75-GS. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5. Cf. Zubok, “Spy vs. Spy,” pp. 28-30; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 253-5.

  37. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 278-9; Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 52-4.

  38. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” pp. 155, 168. On American covert action against Castro, see Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 271-2, 274-6, 280.

  39. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” ch. 9.

  40. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 282-90.

  41. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 285-95; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 258-66; Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 52-4.

  42. See above, chapters 7, 8.

  43. Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Mitrokhin’s notes add nothing to this admirable analysis, based on privileged access to SVR files, of KGB sources of political intelligence in Washington during the missile crisis. There is no indication in files noted by Mitrokhin to which Fursenko and Naftali did not have access, notably those on illegals, of any significant source which they have overlooked.

  44. Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” p. 65.

  45. Kalugin, Spymaster, pp. 237-8. Sakharovsky’s melancholy expression is clearly evident in the photograph which accompanies his official SVR hagiography (Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 133-5).

  46. Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” pp. 66, 75, 85n.

  47. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 266-7. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” ch. 14. On October 26, Feklisov, the Washington resident, had two, now celebrated, meetings with the ABC diplomatic correspondent, John Scali, whom he knew had good access to the White House, to discuss ways to end the crisis. Kennedy was convinced that Feklisov spoke for Khrushchev personally. The KGB archives, however, show that he did not. Feklisov played no role either in Khrushchev’s proposal on October 26 to resolve the crisis by an American guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity, or in his attempt on October 27 to trade US bases in Turkey for Soviet missile sites in Cuba. It is possible that Shelepin, who—unlike Semichastny—was a member of the Presidium, had encouraged Semichastny to use a meeting between Feklisov and Scali to try to extract a US proposal to settle the crisis which would make the Soviet climbdown less humiliating. Because of the incomplete nature of KGB files on this episode, together with the conflict of oral evidence between Feklisov, Scali and Semichastny, it may never be possible to establish what led up to the meeting on the Soviet side. Fursenko and Naftali, “Using KGB Documents”; Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” pp. 80-3.

  48. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, p. 267. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” pp. 284-6.

  49. The fullest account of Penkovsky’s career is Schecter and Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World.

  50. vol. 6, ch. 1, part 1.

  51. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 6.

  52. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 6.

  53. vol. 6, ch. 1, part 1.

  54. vol. 2, app. 3.

  55. On Golitsyn’s impact on Angleton and the CIA, see Wise, Molehunt, and Mangold, Cold Warrior.

  56. vol. 1, app. 3; vol. 6, ch. 1, part 1. On the US embassy’s decision to return Cherepanov’s documents, see Wise, Molehunt, pp. 121-3.

  57. See below, chapter 22.

  58. vol. 6, ch. 1, part 1; Nosenko’s codename
appears in vol. 6, ch. 5, part 5.

  59. vol. 2, app. 3.

  60. The VPK also tasked the GRU, the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT), a secret unit in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for External Economic Relations (GKES). Most of the ST it received came from the KGB and GRU. Hanson, Soviet Industrial Espionage; Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 622-3.

  61. k-5,476.

  62. k-5,473.

  63. URBAN may be a post-war codename for the unidentified wartime agent PERS referred to in the VENONA decrypts. On KGB/SVR attempts to confuse identification of PERS, see Albright and Kunstel, Bombshell, pp. 156, 271.

  64. Mitrokhin’s note, in Russian, identifies BERG’s employee as “Consolidated Vacuum.” This is probably a reference to Sperry-Rand (UNIVAC); it is known that UNIVAC computers were high on the list of ST targets (Tuck, High-Tech Espionage, ch. 11).

  65. vol. 6, ch. 6.

  66. Romerstein and Levchenko, The KGB against the Main Enemy, pp. 266-7; Richelson, A Century of Spies, pp. 279-82.

  67. vol. 6, ch. 6.

  68. Judy, “The Case of Computer Technology.”

  69. vol. 6, app. 1, part 27.

  70. k-5,473.

  71. k-5,369.

  72. vol. 6, app. 1, part 39.

  73. k-5,475.

  74. On the time lag between US and Soviet computer technology, see Judy, “The Case of Computer Technology”; and Ammann, Cooper and Davies (eds.), The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, ch. 8.

  75. Judy, “The Case of Computer Technology,” p. 66.

  76. k-5,476.

  77. vol. 6, ch. 6.

  78. vol. 6, ch. 3, part 1; vol. 10, ch. 2, para. 7.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Main Adversary

  Part 3

  1. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 4. The KGB Collegium also proposed establishing networks of illegal residencies to take over the main burden of intelligence operations in Canada, Mexico, West Germany and China.