A Brief History of the Spy

by Simpson, Paul

  The Soviet leadership began to publicly support Castro: ‘We shall do everything to support Cuba in her struggle,’ Khrushchev proclaimed in July 1960, adding ominously, ‘Now the United States is not so unreachable as she once was.’ Suspecting that Americans could be thrown off the island shortly, three CIA technical officers were sent into Cuba in August to put surveillance devices into an enemy embassy, but when that proved impossible they were captured during their attempt to bug the New China News Agency. They would stay in Cuban jails throughout the dramatic events of the next three years.

  John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in January 1961. The incoming president was informed of the plot against Castro, and the plan to promote regime change in Cuba. The briefing suggested ‘Moscow had put in place a puppet ruler who . . . promoted dissent in Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama and the Dominican Republic in order to surround the southern United States with Communist satellites.’ Buoyed by their previous successful regime changes in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA intended to land their trained exiles near Trinidad in southern Cuba, close to anti-Castro groups, and set off an uprising.

  The new president wasn’t so keen. Kennedy did not want his term of office to begin with an American-sponsored invasion, and he insisted that the exiles land at the Bay of Pigs, a hundred miles from their original target. He also scaled back the air support that the CIA intended to provide, removing the initial air strike, and postponing the second until after it was clear the invasion had succeeded. CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell felt this would seriously jeopardize the outcome, but his hands were tied.

  Launched on 17 April 1961, the invasion was a catastrophic failure, with hundreds of the Cuban exiles killed or captured, and thousands on both sides injured. Kennedy took full responsibility publically: ‘There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan . . . What matters is only one fact, I am the responsible officer of the government.’ Behind the scenes, he accepted Allen Dulles’ resignation as DCI of the CIA, and Richard Bissell resigned after he was demoted. An internal CIA report castigated the Agency for ‘exceed[ing] its capabilities in developing the project from guerrilla support to overt armed action without any plausible deniability’ and its ‘failure to realistically assess risks and to adequately communicate information and decisions internally and with other government principals.’

  This didn’t mean that the US government’s desire to see Castro removed from power disappeared, and in November 1961, Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, whose aim was to ‘help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime’, through ‘a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962’. This was masterminded by the administration’s Attorney-General, Kennedy’s brother Robert.

  Over the next few years, assorted plans to assassinate Fidel Castro were drawn up by the CIA, many of these focusing on the dictator’s trademark cigars. At different times, they considered lacing them with hallucinogenic drugs, poisons, depilatory chemicals and even explosives! To cover their tracks, the agency contemplated an alliance with the Mafia: documents declassified in 2007 recount meetings between a CIA go-between, Robert Maheu, and mob bosses Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, with Giancana suggesting that ‘some type of potent pill that could be placed in Castro’s food or drink would be much more effective’.

  The NSA increased its surveillance of Cuba greatly, generating nearly six thousand reports during the six months from April 1962. However, as the NSA’s own history points out, the events of that autumn ‘marked the most significant failure of SIGINT to warn national leaders since World War II’. Equally, they would prove that one man in the right place can dramatically alter the course of world history.

  That man was Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a GRU officer who actively spied jointly for the CIA and MI6 from spring 1961 until his arrest at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Penkovsky had approached American authorities in Moscow after the Powers trial, but his overtures were rebuffed. Penkovsky was eventually brought on board by a British businessman with links to MI6, Greville Wynne. The material Penkovsky was able to provide gave both British and American intelligence an insight into the workings of the KGB and the GRU, and the sometimes tetchy relationship between the two. He also passed over technical information on the Soviet war machine, especially with regard to their missile and rocket-launching capabilities, and suggested that Premier Khruschev may not be as willing to push the world to nuclear war as his rhetoric might suggest.

  Penkovsky visited London with a trade delegation in summer 1961 and returned to the Soviet Union that autumn. The KGB began to suspect there was a leak in spring 1962 after observing Janet Chisholm, the wife of the British station head, receiving a package from an unidentified man. Surveillance on Western embassies showed Penkovsky making an unauthorized, and un-cleared visit to a British embassy reception – which one of Penkovsky’s drinking friends, head of the GRU and former KGB chief General Serov would later try to excuse – and then in July he was seen visiting Wynne in his hotel room, and taking standard precautions to avoid being overheard (turning on the taps and the radio). Penkovsky’s apartment was searched and bugged.

  By this time, the situation in Cuba had escalated. Khruschev had taken Kennedy’s inaction during the Bay of Pigs crisis – in particular, not sending troops in to back up the Cuban exiles when it was clear that things were going wrong – to indicate that he lacked a strong backbone. He therefore decided that the Soviet Union would install missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy would have to accept it as a fait accompli. Soviet scientists travelled to Cuba under cover of an agricultural delegation, and began constructing the sites.

  New CIA Director John A. McCone was suspicious of the Soviet activity that was revealed by the NSA signal tapping as well as by agents on the ground. This included a report from the French intelligence’s Washington chief of station, Thyraud de Vosjoli, who had visited the Cuban capital, Havana, and noted that four to six thousand Soviet military personnel had arrived there since the start of July. This prompted a U-2 mission that confirmed that the Soviets had brought Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) to the island. Unfortunately, a release of information to the Washington Post by the State Department resulted in the Russians adopting radio silence, severely denting the NSA’s ability to gain further information about their activity – which meant that the imminent arrival of nuclear ballistic missiles aboard merchant ships steaming towards Cuba was not picked up by the NSA. Based on the information they did have, they believed that Khruschev was telling the truth: ‘The Soviet Union is supplying to Cuba exclusively defensive weapons intended for protecting the interests of the Cuban revolution.’

  That was all to change on 14 October when the first overflight of the island in six weeks revealed the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles, which had actually arrived over a month earlier. President Kennedy was briefed early the next morning, and for the next few days, the ultimate game of brinkmanship took place between him and Nikita Khruschev. The information that Penkovsky provided had assisted in the identification of the missile sites, and in reading Khrushchev’s character.

  Other spies would also play their part in the crisis. A KGB agent in Washington, journalist Georgi Bolshakov, had built a relationship with Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, and this was used by Khruschev as part of the attempt to blindside the Americans. President Kennedy regarded the communications as a private hotline to Khrushchev, and felt that he had been personally betrayed when the truth about the missiles was revealed.

  As the crisis reached its climax, with Kennedy preparing for an invasion of Cuba, which was pretty certain to lead to nuclear war if the Soviets reacted militarily, the KGB Resident in Washington, Aleksandr Feklisov, rang an ABC reporter, John Scali, whom he knew had access to the White House. He passed on a message: if the Soviets removed their missiles, would the US pledge not to invade Cuba? It was the first move in the negotiations that would bring the crisis to a resolution, with Khrushchev sending a persona
l letter shortly after that in similar terms which officially started the endgame (albeit one that still came perilously close to going wrong, when a Soviet SAM downed a US plane, and the US Navy depth-charged a Soviet submarine that was carrying a tactical nuclear warhead).

  Penkovsky and Greville Wynne did not see the resolution of the crisis as free men. Seen handling a forged passport at his flat, Penkovsky was arrested; Wynne was apprehended in Budapest a few days later. Both were tried; Penkovsky was shot and Wynne was eventually exchanged for Gordon Lonsdale in 1964. Penkovsky’s friend, General Serov was dismissed from the GRU and committed suicide shortly afterwards.

  Also coming to a head during the latter part of 1962 was a scandal that would lead to the resignation of the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, the following June. This involved the Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, who for a time was sleeping with the same call girl, Christine Keeler, as Profumo. There were concerns that Dr Stephen Ward, who acted as Keeler’s pimp, had manipulated a situation whereby Profumo might pass ‘pillow talk’ regarding nuclear secrets to Keeler that could be of use to the Soviets. Challenged about this, Profumo initially denied there had been any impropriety in his relationship with Keeler, but later admitted he had lied to the House of Commons, and in accordance with the then-prevalent code of behaviour, he resigned his position.

  The situation was complicated by Ward’s behaviour. Initially it seemed as if he was acting for the Soviets, but when MI5 warned Profumo and Ivanov, and Profumo ended his affair with Keeler, Ward offered to try to persuade Ivanov to defect. Certainly Ward was used as a back channel to pass messages between the British Foreign Office and Moscow via Ivanov. But according to Keeler, Ward had been already working for MI5, spotting those foreign diplomats whose sexual behaviour might lend themselves to being blackmailed. MI5’s official history denies this.

  After Profumo’s resignation, Ward was tried for living off immoral earnings; he was found unconscious in his flat before the guilty verdict was delivered – conspiracy theorists believe he may have been killed by one of the intelligence agencies whose secrets he could have revealed in exchange for a lighter sentence. A joint MI5-MI6 working party looked into ‘the possibility that the Russian Intelligence Service had a hand in staging the Profumo Affair in order to discredit Her Majesty’s government’. By the time it reported in the negative, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had resigned through ill health.

  The defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in December 1961 originally looked as if it might be as much of a treasure trove for the counter-intelligence forces of the West as Mikhail Goleniewski’s testimony had been earlier that year. Certainly he provided information that exposed the KGB’s agent in France, Georges Pâques, and ended the careers of Elsie Mai, a Finn who had infiltrated the British consulate in Helsinki, and John Vassall, the spy within the British Admiralty. He also gave further evidence that proved Kim Philby’s involvement as a Soviet agent – faced with this, Philby finally defected to Moscow in 1963 – but the major problem with most of his assertions were that, unlike previous defectors, he didn’t bring evidence that could be checked out. Often his knowledge of operations was vague – such as in France, where he claimed that there was an agent network code-named Sapphire operating within the French intelligence agency, the SDECE – and he seemed to believe that the KGB’s influence had spread everywhere, to the extent that he wouldn’t trust any interrogator who could speak to him in Russian, and maintained that Moscow Centre had a key agent within the CIA.

  The KGB certainly took his defection seriously: a month later, they sent orders to fifty-four stations worldwide on the actions necessary to minimize the damage, and in November 1962, an order was given for his assassination. There were some within the CIA, including James Jesus Angleton, the counter-intelligence director who interviewed Golitsyn on his arrival in the States, who took his accusations very seriously and called him ‘the most valuable defector ever to reach the West’. Others were far more sceptical. Golitsyn’s theories about the KGB’s activities became ever wilder: he accused British Labour Party leader, later Prime Minister, Harold Wilson of working for Moscow Centre, and claimed that his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell had been poisoned by the KGB in order to secure the position for Wilson. MI5 officer Peter Wright was one of those who believed there was some truth to Golitsyn’s claims about Wilson.

  The situation regarding Golitsyn was complicated by the defection of another Russian, Yuri Nosenko, who had worked for Soviet State Security since 1953. After a posting to England, Nosenko started to consider defecting, and in 1960 tried to contact a Western intelligence officer without success. Eventually in 1962 he was recruited by the CIA in Geneva. His information also helped to identify John Vassall and Robert Johnson as KGB agents, and he provided some information on the fate of Pyotr Popov, as well as revealing the existence of the many bugs in the US Embassy planted there during its building in 1953.

  Nosenko defected in February 1964, fearing he was under suspicion. Unfortunately for him, his information didn’t tally with that of Golitsyn. The earlier defector had said that the KGB would send false defectors across to try to discredit his testimony, and that’s certainly what Nosenko appeared to be doing. Nosenko was adamant that the KGB did not have a mole within the CIA, no matter what Golitsyn might say.

  President Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963, and some within the CIA believed that the Soviets were involved – but Nosenko made it clear that Lee Harvey Oswald, who most believed was the assassin, may have travelled in Russia and been investigated during his time there, but he was not a KGB agent. This may have led to the intense treatment that Nosenko received – as CIA case officer Robert Baer noted, ‘When Nosenko offered a version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn’t fit with the Agency’s corporate view he was sent to solitary confinement at the farm for three years.’ This treatment was so rigorous that it merited a public apology from later CIA DCI Stansfield Turner in 1978: ‘The excessively harsh treatment of Mr Nosenko went beyond the bounds of propriety or good judgment.’

  Nosenko was interrogated for three years, and failed two lie-detector tests during this time (although he claimed that a doctor inserted a finger into his anus to stimulate his blood pressure prior to the second one to give a false reading). However, after a change in interrogators, he was released in April 1969.

  The after-effect of the two defections was that neither man was fully believed. Both had given important information about Soviet operatives in the West, but there were many questions left unanswered. One of the responses to this was the establishment of the Fluency committee. This was a group of MI5 and MI6 officers, created in November 1964 to investigate all allegations of infiltration of the British security services. The committee met for seven years, and came up with a list of two hundred instances of possible Soviet penetration. These included Dick Ellis, an MI6 employee who had already come under suspicion after Burgess and Maclean’s defection, and had retired as an active agent in 1953. The evidence uncovered seemed to indicate that Ellis had been an agent for Nazi intelligence during the Second World War, and for the GRU and then the KGB. Ellis eventually admitted he had spied for both at the start of the war, but then lied about his contact with Kim Philby, leading the committee to conclude that he had been a Soviet agent for around thirty years.

  Peter Wright was the chair of the Fluency committee and made it his life’s work to pursue Roger Hollis, the Director- General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, whom he believed was a Soviet agent. Wright had originally decided that the Deputy Director-General, Graham Mitchell, was the Soviet agent, based on such circumstantial evidence as the placement of dust in his office drawer. The CIA and FBI, as well as the RCMP (who handled intelligence in Canada prior to the establishment of the CSIS) all expressed doubt, and Mitchell was eventually cleared in 1970.

  However, Roger Hollis’ actions lay him open to suspicion: he prevented a key interrogation during the investigation into John Va
ssall; his reports during the Profumo affair were not adequately compiled. In 1964, Anthony Blunt had finally admitted his role in the Philby/Burgess/Maclean spy ring in return for immunity from prosecution, and Wright was convinced there was a Fifth Man who had protected the others. (The Fifth Man’s identity as John Cairncross wasn’t revealed until 1990.) Wright made himself extremely unpopular with his allegations, admitting ‘There was talk of the Gestapo.’

  Once he had retired from MI5, Wright wrote his autobiography, Spycatcher, in which he made his allegations about Hollis public. Wright claimed that when Hollis was sent to interrogate Igor Gouzenko in 1945, he had stayed in disguise in case Gouzenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, and Hollis had then tried to persuade Gouzenko not to make further allegations. Based on this shaky evidence, he declared Hollis a traitor.

  Now, with access to the KGB records, courtesy of defector Oleg Gordievsky, we know that George Blake was the last key agent that Moscow Centre had within either MI5 or MI6, but at the time what may well have been incompetency was seen as something much worse. The Trend Committee, headed by Lord Trend, investigated Hollis and the Soviet penetration of MI5 in the seventies, and reported that the allegations against Hollis were inconclusive. An internal MI5 report from 1988 noted that the belief in a traitor had persisted for so long because of ‘a lack of intellectual rigour in some of the leading investigators . . . dishonesty on the part of Wright, who did not scruple to invent evidence where none existed . . . [and] the baleful influence of Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and coordinated Soviet deception (‘‘disinformation’’) supported by high-level penetration of all western intelligence and security services.’ Couple that with an overwhelming belief that Moscow Centre was a lot more efficient than it really was, and the stage was set for the witch-hunts. As Allen Dulles wrote in 1963: ‘Soviet intelligence is over-confident, over-complicated, and over-estimated.’