Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

Adhering to a suggestion from Sniper, the CIA opened a mailbox in West Berlin where Sniper could address future messages. Similarly, Sniper was assigned a letter drop in a public lavatory in Berlin's Tiergarten.

  The information from Sniper was exasperating. Often, he had names wrong or was misinformed on locations. But occasionally he would let loose a casual line or two, almost in passing, that would lead to a pot of gold. An example: Sniper maintained that the KGB had taken over a Warsaw Pact operation from the Poles, with the payoff being the placement of a spy within the British Admiralty. Sniper wrote that the spy's name began with an “H,” and that “H” had originally been recruited by the Poles while assigned to the office of the British Naval attaché in Warsaw. That narrowed the field to Sam Houghton, a clerk at the Portland Naval base.

  MI6 was notified. In June 1960, surveillance teams from Scotland Yard observed Houghton and his girlfriend, Ethel Gee, hand a package to a jukebox salesman named Gordon Lonsdale in front of London's Old Vic Theatre. Scotland Yard observed four additional meetings over the next six months. After each rendezvous, agents trailed Lonsdale to a working-class suburb of London called Ruislip. There he visited the home of Helen and Peter Kroger.

  Christmas 1960 neared. Sniper, in the holiday spirit, wanted to fully defect. He would bring with him a wife and access to “extensive material” that he promised would be of interest to the West.

  News of the defection went to the highest levels of Langley. Yet there were more skeptics than believers. Allen Dulles pronounced Sniper “a bunch of crap” and advised his agents in Berlin not to spend too much time waiting for him. Nonetheless, Sniper materialized in West Berlin at the start of the Christmas holidays, accompanied by his mistress instead of his wife. He identified himself as Michal Goleniewski, an officer in Polish intelligence. Goleniewski had also worked for the Soviet KGB. He had planned his journey well. He would not be missed until after the long Christmas weekend. Even more significantly, in a hollow tree trunk outside of Warsaw, Goleniewski had stashed microfilm of hundreds of pages of Polish and Russian intelligence documents, including extensive lists of names of operatives in the West.

  Cooper rubbed his eyes as he read. It was now past two a.m.

  CIA operatives flew the Pole to the Azores on a military aircraft. There Goleniewski and his lady friend whiled away the time pumping nickels into slot machines at the local USO club while their aircraft refueled. Then Goleniewski was flown to Washington. A CIA team met him and escorted him in a well-armed three car motorcade to a safe house in the Virginia countryside.

  With the defector safely in the United States, the hammer was about to come down for what London's Fleet Street would quickly name the Portland Spy Ring. On the first Saturday in January 1961, a pair of Scotland Yard detectives, a man and a woman, followed Sam Houghton and Ethel Gee as they strolled along Waterloo Road. Before the Old Vic Theatre, they encountered their “friend,” Lonsdale. Ethel Gee was carrying a straw bag. Lonsdale asked if he might carry it for her. When the bag changed hands, Scotland Yard pounced. They arrested Houghton, Gee, and Lonsdale. An hour later, a meticulous search began of the home of their friends the Krogers, the happy suburbanites out in Ruislip.

  Found were a one-time code pad concealed in a cigarette lighter, a one hundred fifty-foot antenna wired through the rafters of the house, and, beneath a trapdoor in the kitchen, a high-frequency transmitter tucked into a hidden chamber. When the Krogers were booked, a set of their fingerprints was sent to Scotland Yard's Criminal Records office. Funny thing: a matching set had been on file since 1957. The Krogers had previously been known as Morris and Lona Cohen of New York City. Their prints had been found in the apartment of Rudolph Abel, head of a Soviet spy network in the United States. The Cohens had been on the FBI's wish list since 1951 when they were named as accomplices of the Rosenbergs.

  The farther Cooper read, the deeper the intrigue. Lonsdale wasn't even Lonsdale: According to his Canadian passport and his work permit in the United Kingdom, Lonsdale had been born in Ontario in 1924. Within a few days, however, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had located another thirty-six-year-old Lonsdale, working in Canada. The RCMP obtained Lonsdale's medical records—the real Lonsdale child had been circumcised shortly after birth. The man in London, observers readily agreed, had not been. Or at least not yet. The man in London was eventually identified as one Conon Molody, an officer in Soviet intelligence, who had stolen the Lonsdale identity. A team of British interrogators soon visited the safe house in Virginia, where Goleniewski described the physical appearance and location of a double agent in Berlin who worked for Her Majesty's government but supplied information to the Soviets.

  The double agent, the British soon deduced, was a man named George Blake.

  Blake was the son of a naturalized British subject, a Sephardic Jew from Egypt, and a Dutch mother. He had been named George in honor of George V and had become the MI6 station chief in Seoul in 1946. Communist insurgents had captured him in 1948 and he had spent three years in a Korean prison. Released in 1951, he had come home to London with a stopover in Moscow. At the time, the director of counterintelligence of MI6 had been Kim Philby.

  MI6 agents confronted Blake over Easter weekend of 1961. Cooper winced when he came to the next part, however. Blake's arrest put a completely different spin on the Popov operation, an operation that Cooper had thought he had understood.

  In 1955, the CIA had briefed a British liaison officer in Berlin on the existence of Popov. The British officer had stashed several memoranda concerning Popov in an embassy safe. Blake drew the task of locking the safe each night. Hence, he had daily access to the safe's contents. The FBI's clumsy handling of the Irena affair in New York, the CIA thus concluded, had not been the actual compromise of the Popov affair. Blake had been. But the FBI had allowed the KGB to terminate Popov without discovering Blake.

  To Cooper, all of this began to make sense. Not just the Portland ring and not just George Blake and his network had been compromised by Goleniewski. There had also been a German, Heinz Felfe, of the West German intelligence service. Yet James Jesus Angleton, the head of the counterintelligence division within the CIA, insisted that Goleniewski was a disinformation agent. A setup by the Soviets.

  Cooper continued to read. “Whatever his faults,” wrote another CIA Soviet expert in a hotly conflicting opinion, “Goleniewski is the best defector we've ever had.”

  Angleton continued to disagree. All of this chilled Cooper as he continued through the final pages of Goleniewski and as he labored to work Lukashenko into the puzzle.

  Cooper drew back from the pages before him. He had finished the body of the printout.

  He closed his files. For several minutes, he stared out his window into the night sky of Manhattan. Then Lukashenko's words, related by Margot's father, echoed again. The greatest secret of the sixties. What was it? What had Lukashenko known of? Penetration of the CIA? A spy within the cabinet of the President Kennedy? Lukashenko's proposed defection had been compromised, perhaps sustaining its own dire prophesy.

  And compromised when? Cooper wondered. Almost immediately, he realized, after Washington had been alerted. The logic circled back into the theories of James Jesus Angleton. Angleton had argued strenuously that the Soviets had a high penetration agent somewhere in Washington in the 1960s, and somewhere indeed high in the Kennedy administration.

  But where? And, of course, who? He continued to stare at the wall. The red LED on the time printout on his clock radio blipped from 2:35 to 2:36 a.m.

  Cooper left his bedroom, his mind churning too rapidly for the hour. He retrieved a bottle of beer from the kitchen then settled into a club chair in the living room.

  He finished his beer. He looked through the half-shaded window and wondered who was watching him in return. Then he returned to his bedroom at quarter to three. The room was quiet. His neighbors had conked out.

  Cooper climbed into bed and was asleep immediately.

  Chapter 22

&nb
sp; George Wallace was on a roll in Wisconsin and Illinois. At a venue in Milwaukee, a group of young demonstrators attended his rally, a mixed group of blacks and whites who called themselves NAACP youth commandoes. As Wallace tried to speak, they taunted him with shouts of “Fascist!” and “Bigot!” Wallace then turned on the hecklers when the pacing of the evening was just right.

  “You know who are the biggest bigots?” Wallace asked, looking at his adversaries and jutting his jaw out from behind his podium. “They’re the ones who call other bigots.” As usual, a mood of impending violence permeated the crowd. None followed within the arena on this night. But things were different at the next stop, Cicero, Illinois.

  Cicero had long had a dubious place in the history of American lawlessness. Al Capone moved to Cicero to escape the reach of Chicago police after building his empire in the windy city. Later on, Cicero gained notoriety as a racial tinderbox. In July of 1951, a race riot erupted in Cicero when a mob of four thousand white people attacked and burned an apartment building at 6139 W. 19th Street that housed the family of Harvey Clark Jr., a black Chicago Transit Authority bus driver who had relocated to the all-white city. Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson called out the Illinois National Guard. The Cicero riot received worldwide condemnation. But the Clarks moved away. The building had to be boarded up.

  In this year, the city had a population of seventy thousand. Not one was African-American. Two years earlier, a seventeen-year-old black youth who came to Cicero looking for a summer job was beaten to death by four white thugs. In September of the same year, the Illinois National Guard had to open fire on a white mob to rescue a non-violent civil rights march. The mob had thrown stones, fireworks, eggs and bottles at the marchers and was preparing to charge them. All things considered, Cicero was a hunky-dory venue for a Wallace rally.

  Wallace began by introducing the people on the podium with him, mostly local supporters. He then mentioned a man named Jim Collins whom he termed “a Negro friend of mine.” The governor said that Jim had just dropped off some money from “Negro supporters in Indiana.” The governor frequently mentioned Jim Collins at rallies these days, obviously to indicate that the governor had supporters of all races. The strange thing was that no one had ever seen “Jim Collins.” In any case, Wallace apologized that Jim wasn’t there that evening. The people attending the rally were dumb enough to believe this.

  “How the hell would you expect him to make it through this crowd?” someone bellowed from the audience. People applauded. Wallace launched into stump speech, which as usual this evening included the line, “I have never in my life made a speech reflecting on the race, creed of any citizen of this country….” As the speech continued, groups of placards waved around the arena. Stand Up For America! Wallace Will Save America! Support Your Police!

  At the same time, five open dissenters, four young women and a single male, held up signs in ballpoint ink. One read, Don’t Let Wallace Turn America into A Police State. They were neatly dressed and didn’t heckle. The crowd turned on them with verbal abuse and then with fists. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man shoved the girls until he had confiscated all the placards and destroyed them. This seemed to settle the crowd. Wallace continued to speak.

  One young supporter, looking for a new target, accosted Marty Friedkin, the reporter from the New York Eagle, who was sitting at the edge of the press section, his desk space marked with his name.

  “Go ahead, Moishe,” the youth said. “Write it all down. We hate Jews too.”

  “What makes you think I’m Jewish?” Friedkin asked.

  “You’re from New York. And you’ve got the Hebe beak.”

  “Actually, I’m from Devonshire. In England. And my nose is smaller than yours.”

  “Why don’t you go stand with those other nigger-lovers, you Jewboy?”

  As a six-foot-six Alabama state trooper gently moved the concerned citizen along, Marty wrote it all down. As he wrote, a beer bottle hit him in the shoulder and shattered on the floor. Two minutes later, a small vial of ink hit him on the skull, thrown by a brave soul several rows back, spilling onto his scalp, shirt and jacket.

  After the rally, some of the media hostiles asked Wallace his opinion of what had happened to the kids who had brought signs. “I’m sorry about it,” he said. “But some folks bring trouble on themselves.”

  Then he told the story about a time when he and his late wife had been trapped in a car by demonstrators and he feared the car would be overturned. He expressed shock that people would be moved to political violence. Yet he gave the same speech in each venue, taunted his opponents and singled out those who opposed him for hate and ridicule. Violence usually followed.

  The next morning Jerry Huddleston accepted some astonishingly large cash contributions from behind the scenes angels. The governor’s financial backers increasingly sensed he could win. Wallace was cruising high in all the polls. He was leading throughout the south and was promising his supporters that a narrow win in four of five breakthrough states like Illinois or Pennsylvania—he only needed 33.34% after all—would propel him to the White House. The only two difficulties that were looming were that Wallace had promised an official American Independent Party convention to nominate him. So far, there was no convention date. Nor was there a Vice President on his ticket. The Governor needed to tend to both problems.

  Someone had a brainstorm.

  Wallace announced that it would be impossible to hold a convention because all the pointed-headed intellectuals, hippies, draft dodgers, bureaucrats and long-hairs would make it so difficult “that it would take the armed forces of the United States to hold it on safety.” So there wouldn’t be one.

  As for a Vice President, a further announcement would soon be forthcoming.

  Chapter 23

  Cooper and Molloy met in Washington at the bar of the Hay Adams Hotel on Lafayette Square, diagonally across from the White House. The bar was quiet. At the tables in the rear were a man and a woman at one table, and a man by himself at another. Cooper, when he entered the bar, assumed the latter was Molloy. The veteran CIA man had a perfect view of the room and its entrance.

  The couple consisted of a man who, like Molloy, appeared to be in his mid-fifties. He was holding hands across a table with a much younger woman. She was in her late thirties, pretty with red hair. They had drinks before them and were seated four tables from Molloy.

  Were they at borderline listening range, Cooper wondered, or just out of range? Molloy had an untouched drink in front of him next to a small bowl of nuts. When he saw Cooper, Molloy stood, brushed his hands with a napkin, and extended an iron paw in greeting. “I'm Brett Molloy,” he said. “You're Frank Cooper?”

  Cooper accepted the handshake. Molloy was a husky man about six feet three inches tall, with thinning hair, glasses, and an angular but not unfriendly face. “Yes."

  Cooper seated himself and ordered a beer from a waiter who had been quick to arrive. “How was your trip down from Gomorrah-on-Hudson?” Molloy asked.

  “The train ride went quite well,” Cooper said.

  Molloy turned his attention to his drink, sipping it. Cooper caught a whiff of expensive bourbon. Yet there were a few dull, rounded vestiges of ice cubes remaining in it, meaning it may well have been there for several minutes before Molloy had touched it—and that Molloy wasn't ready to drink until he had company. Cooper noted that the drinks of the man and the woman at the nearby table were in much the same state.

  A waiter appeared with a coaster, a mug, and a clear glass bottle of beer. Molloy spoke with a faded Magnolia-tinged drawl that suggested a birth in Virginia or North Carolina. “So why are you here?” Molloy asked, sipping his bourbon. “What's the story?”

  “I don't have a story. Not yet.”

  “I know your name. Seen your byline. I know what you do. Liberal press. You create trouble.”

  “And you don’t?” Cooper asked.

  “Not in my opinion,” Molloy said. “Nothing personal, you understa
nd, Mr. Cooper. But I had a friend who was up for a federal judgeship. Southern District of New York. You killed his nomination. Judge Frederick Perkins.”

  “Judge Perkins ruled in four cases in which he had conflicts of financial interest. He was also reversed on appeal in more than forty percent of his decisions, usually on misinterpreted points of law or poor instructions to juries. Judge Perkins killed his own nomination.”

  “He and I have a golf date every Saturday. I'll tell him you said so.”

  “Good. You can also tell him that I knew he kept a mistress for six years in Greenwich Village. But out of consideration for his wife and family, I didn't print that part.”

  “You're all heart, aren't you?” Molloy said.

  “First,” Cooper began, “let's correct any misconceptions. I now write for the New York Eagle, Ken Siegelman's tabloid, which means it's not much more liberal than Louis the Fourteenth. I mostly write obituaries now. Maybe someday I'll write yours, so be nice to me and I’ll give you a good sendoff. I came here today to ask you some background questions. Off the record. No attribution. Not even an ‘informed source’ quote.”

  “Okay.”

  “You were in Paris in the spring of 1965,” Cooper said. “You were friendly with a diplomat named Stanley Rudawski.”

  “Who told you that?” Molloy asked.

  “Rudawski, before he died. He also said you were a Soviet specialist.”

  Molloy pondered. “Sure. I knew Rudawski,” he said. “And yes I was and am in the Soviet Section. Where are we going with that?”

  “Mr. Rudawski told me a story which took place in Paris,” Cooper said.

  “I know. I read it.”

  “Rudawski and a man named David Charles attempted to reel in a Soviet defector.”

  “I don’t recall a David Charles.”

  “Charles was running the embassy for a short period. Agency guy. He was confronted by the proposed defection of a Soviet intelligence officer. Does this sound familiar?”