Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “Okay. I’m game,” Cooper finally said. “When do I start reading?”

  “In an hour,” said Molloy. “Want to grab a coffee? I’m having one.”

  Chapter 36

  The Central Intelligence Agency's reading room for the Soviet Section was accessible through the third floor, south wing, at Langley. Cooper, bearing a pass bestowed upon him by Brett Molloy, made his way through a gloomy light-green corridor that led through several doors and then down a second corridor with a conspicuous closed-circuit camera.

  He was met at the end of the last hallway by a U.S. Marine sergeant. The guard abruptly stashed his reading material. When he was close enough, Cooper read the young soldier's name: James W. Bernard.

  Bernard was seated at a steel desk. Bernard took Cooper's pass. He made an internal phone call that took five minutes, including a ring back.

  Then, “You're limited to Section D, Alcove Sixty-five through Sixty-seven,” Bernard said, returning the phone to its cradle. “You aware of that, sir?” His gaze rose to meet Cooper's.

  “Is Section D part of ‘Soviet Registry'?” Cooper asked.

  “I only check authorizations, sir,” Sergeant Bernard continued. “I'd be subject to court-martial for going back there unless directly ordered. How many reference requests do you need, sir?” He motioned to some yellow requisition slips. “There's a limit of four, thank you, sir.”

  “Give me four.”

  Onto the slips, the marine filled out Cooper's name, plus the date and time. He tore off stubs and fed them into a file. “See the archivist next, please, sir,” Sergeant Bernard said.

  He indicated two swinging doors which were padded with brown leather and which stood motionless behind him. Sergeant Bernard indicated that Cooper could pass through them. When Cooper pushed through the doors into the windowless main reading room, the archivist therein, Morris Ludlow, raised his eyes. Cooper was not happy to see him. He remembered the archivist from his previous assignments here.

  Ludlow peered critically above his glasses. He held Cooper in his glare. In the tight confining chamber, there were three dozen reading tables—no fronts, no drawers, just legs and tops—before him, four rows of nine flat open surfaces, about half a dozen of which were occupied by readers. All desks faced the front of the chamber, where the archivist sat at a larger desk on low platform, giving the room the tone and feel of a study hall at a boarding school.

  Cooper’s memory raced back to the reports he'd written on this same agency in the early 1960s, and the names that had then passed through his typewriter. The same names had passed through Margot's father’s memory the night in Westchester in the last weeks of his life.

  Popov and Goleniewski.

  James Jesus Angleton.

  Golitsyn. Nosenko.

  “Yes?” Ludlow asked. He was either an old man with a young face or a middle-aged man with an old body. His white hair, craggy face and crooked head gave him the bearing of an old New England parson working on a Lenten sermon.

  “I have authorization for a section of files,” Cooper said. He had memorized the numbers. He wrote them on the requisition slips.

  Ludlow took the slips. He wrote their numbers, the time and date and Cooper's name into his log. Then Ludlow rose to his feet. “Follow me,” he said. Ludlow appeared arthritic. He led Cooper to Alcove 65 of Section D. There, on wide metal shelves, files stood row after row in sealed unmarked folders of various colors—pinks, greens, blues, yellows, beiges, occasionally separated by a wire panel. Ludlow found the four files Cooper had requisitioned. He replaced the files with Cooper's requisition slips.

  “You know the rules?” Ludlow asked. “No cameras. No notes. No tape recorders. If I see behavior I don't like I revoke your reading privileges. Everything better be back in here in the same order when you return the file, or you sit and wait for the security officer. Had to call security twice last week for theft.”

  “I know the rules,” Cooper said.

  “I hope so,” Ludlow said. He shoved the file shut. “Take Reading Table Twelve,” he said. He pointed to a table beneath a surveillance where no one else was sitting. Table Twelve was beneath a surveillance camera.

  Cooper seated himself and opened the material. Thereupon began the long task of reconciling his memory of Popov and Golitsyn from several years ago to the official version that was now before him.

  Chapter 37

  Facts, Frank Cooper now reminded himself as he began his reading. He did a quick search for the names of Rudawski, David Charles and Pavel Lukashenko. He came up empty on David Charles and Pavel Lukashenko. He found a thin file on Rudawski. He set it aside. Then he settled into a thick file on Popov and Goleniewski, the intrigue he had covered as a reporter several years earlier at the Daily News. The Portland Spy Ring, a stellar example of the use of Soviet agents operating in a foreign country but without the cover of their embassy.

  The biggest secret of the 1960s. That's what Margot Bradford's father had promised.

  Cooper spent the rest of the day plus the next morning on the first dossier he had requisitioned. Gradually, like a repressed memory, the old names came to life. Blake. Lonsdale. The Krogers. In short, defector Michal Goleniewski had blown several of the highest-level operations launched by the KGB against American and British interests.

  Yet James Angleton, the Idaho-born Yale graduate who had by now become the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, had insisted that the Goleniewski defection was a put-up job. Goleniewski's defection was allowed by the Soviets so that a greater issue—or truth, or istina—would not be revealed: that a Soviet superspy had penetrated the CIA somewhere near its own top level or at the Presidential level. Or so went Angleton’s theory.

  “If such a mole existed,” noted one of the deputy directors of the CIA reviewing the file in the summer of 1964, “he doesn't exist anymore. And if he did exist he had to have been as American as burger and fries, as wholesome as white bread.” Cooper mused upon the metaphor. The author was identified only as “GTH31761,” and signed off with “Cheers!”

  The biggest secret of the 1960s. A Soviet mole in the CIA or in the top echelon of the United States government? The inside dope on the JFK assassination? Well, that would work, too. A combination of both? Honi soit qui mal y pense. Shame on he who thinks ill of it.

  Cooper requisitioned four more related files. The first file began with a KGB major named Anatoly Golitsyn, who, in 1961, walked into the US Embassy in Helsinki and defected. Over the months that followed, Golitsyn appeared to confirm Angleton's darkest fears.

  Golitsyn spoke of a Soviet agent with the code name of ‘Sasha’ who had been planted within the CIA. Golitsyn warned that subsequent Soviet defectors would arrive to discredit him soon after he began to talk. He also spoke of Soviet agents across the globe. Officers from friendly intelligence services beat a path to Langley, Virginia, to hear what Angleton's new songbird had was chirping. He was chirping plenty. Golitsyn warned of a “ring of five” at the highest levels of Britain's MI5. A note in the file dated July 12, 1967 suggested that Burgess, Philby, and Maclean were among the five Golitsyn had held in mind.

  “Also included,” Golitsyn wrote, “is a leading British art historian who in 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, did confess to having been a Soviet spy. He had been a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.”

  A subsequent notation confirmed that the British historian had been named, but his identity had been redacted. The file continued with another dozen “probable” names and two dozen “suspects.” The latest entries were recent: August of 1968. Philby, now living in Moscow with a new Soviet wife, would have been pleased: seven years after his defection, the CIA was still trying to assess the ongoing damage he had caused.

  Cooper read a summation memo written in December 1967, again by “GTH31761.”

  Soon after Golitsyn defected, Golitsyn demanded thirty million dollars to or
ganize counterintelligence networks in the West, plus a meeting with President Kennedy. He was turned down for the money. But James Angleton secured for Golitsyn a meeting with Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General of the United States. Cooper read the exchange of letters between Angleton and R.F.K. Golitsyn was short-tempered and arrogant. This led to friction.

  "What good is knowing all the names in the KGB if you don't understand what they do?” Golitsyn barked at his interrogators.

  And worse, “It is a fucking lousy A.G. who doesn't personally understand the full nature of the Russian threat,” Angleton had ranted in reference to the Attorney General. “Nothing is beneath these Russian barbarians: from murder to disinformation. Wake up! Our source should meet with Jack, your smarter, better-looking big brother.”

  “I understand the threat perfectly well, Jim,” an acerbic Robert Kennedy had written back in his own hand. “You call me about it seven times a week. You send me obnoxious memos three times a day, despite my deep personal affection for you. So how could I not understand? Frankly, it’s a bore. I have suspicions about your defector. But I'll meet with your Russian love interest, anyway.”

  “My love to Ethel,” Angleton replied in the end, the code words to the Attorney General to indicate that he agreed. The thread was complete for the time being.

  “And Jack’s love to all the pretty women he can get his horny ultra-liberal Hibernian hands on!” was scribbled in the margin in smirking amusement, again from GTH31761. Cooper marveled at GTH31761’s temerity as well as the way he was able to helicopter over the document. “Cheers!”

  With access to the President's brother, Golitsyn made a convincing case that a KGB penetration, code-named ‘Sapphire,’ was operating within the French cabinet. With Angleton standing as Golitsyn's character reference, President Kennedy sent a personally signed warning to President de Gaulle. It took years, but the warning got results. The biggest fish in the ‘Sapphire’ ring arrived safely back in the USSR. The agent received a promotion and a fistful of Commie medals. One double agent in Paris was thrown to his death out a top floor window in Paris to keep him quiet. But the operation was broken. Once again, the city of Paris came off as a nest of spies. And Golitsyn's information had been excellent.

  Cooper again was struck by the thoroughness of a side entry in 1967:

  {The unmasking of the network bore some delicious fruits. ‘Sapphire’ is now known in a spy film and spy fiction as TOPAZ by Leon Uris, a fine American and close friend of this agency. Here in Langley we all loved Paul Newman and EXODUS, also. Cheers! GTH31761.}

  Golitsyn’s yield looked excellent again in 1962 when, almost like clockwork, two more Soviet agents defected. Two were from the Soviet United Nations delegation in New York. They were coded ‘Gin’ and ‘Vodka’ by the FBI and AE/SALT and AE/PEPPER by the CIA.

  Both, as Golitsyn had predicted, sought to discredit Golitsyn. But on Cooper’s third day into the files, he came to the file’s main event: the defection in 1964 by KGB Lt. Col. Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko was known in the files as AE/’Foxtrot’.

  Nosenko, who had been feeding information to the CIA since 1962, claimed to have firsthand knowledge that the KGB was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. He further insisted that the KGB had never successfully penetrated the CIA. But Golitsyn convinced Angleton that Nosenko was another false defector. Angleton sided with Golitsyn, despite the fact that virtually all other aspects of Nosenko's information turned out to be good.

  “This is crap! Giveaways! Worthless pap!” screamed a strangely intemperate memo from Angleton to the director in 1965. Angleton claimed that Nosenko's fables led to “small fish” only. Not long afterward, dissenting opinions began to appear in the file.

  “So this is a small-time fish?” angrily wrote analyst Viktor Chyshychi from Eastern Bloc Information Analysis in 1966. The message was to the Director in the unmistakably fractured English of a post-WWII recruit. “Then please, sir, where's the damned 'big time'? To give away all that ‘Foxtrot’ has, where is he then the king tuna that he's protecting? Tell us that!”

  It was a noble sentiment, almost poetic in its sub-grammatical Born-in-the-USSR phraseology. But Angleton no longer cared to respond—perhaps because he couldn't produce the big-time mole, SASHA, that Golitsyn had “confirmed” for him. And Victor Chyshychi had his critics also, not the least of which being GTH31761, who wrote. “Victor should stick to running his delicatessen in (REDACTED). Someone should set him up with some Russian-studies co-eds from Georgetown University. That would keep him quiet. Cheers!”

  Angleton, perhaps irrationally, never relented from his disbelief of Nosenko. Nor did he waver in his conviction that a Soviet mole had penetrated the CIA. And when he couldn't find sabotage from outside the CIA, he turned within it with a vengeance, particularly upon Nosenko.

  Nosenko’s defection also seemed to have been motivated in part by his fondness for Western culture. He also said he needed money to repay some KGB money he had lost in Geneva after a night with a prostitute and a bottle of vodka in 1962, those two twin demons of undercover assignments. So he gave his American handlers vital information about Soviet agents who had penetrated American and European embassies. He dished tales about microphones that Russians had planted in the American Embassy in Moscow.

  Cooper leaned forward as he read. The greatest secret of the 1960s.

  At the time of Nosenko’s defection, the Warren Commission was trying to determine whether Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy in Dallas, November 22, 1963, had acted alone and on his. Nosenko assured his American questioners that Oswald had never been an agent of the KGB, which had considered him unstable and unfit for espionage work. Nor did he have any associates. Nosenko never was named in the commission report. But the theory that there had been a second gunman in Dallas was still given great credibility, both in the CIA and with the American public. Unanswered were questions of where Oswald had obtained his skills as a sniper. In this case, inquiring minds did not want to know.

  Publicly, the American intelligence community bought Nosenko’s account.

  Privately, things were different.

  Instead of being relieved to hear that the Soviets had not been involved in the assassination, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, and others in the spy trade thought Nosenko’s apparent defection was a sophisticated trick. After all, the agency had suffered a series of setbacks, including the unmasking and execution of two Russian intelligence officials who had been spying for the CIA inside the Soviet Union.

  And then what about the ‘convenient’ timing with which Nosenko had come forward to disclaim any KGB links to Oswald? He defected right when the Warren Commission was investigating and trying to draw conclusions on exactly that.

  So Angleton sought redemption. Angleton believed that if the CIA could break Nosenko, the master plot might be revealed — and the Kennedy assassination solved. As Cooper studied the file, he also learned that Angleton had had a timely and resolute ally:

  “Nosenko is not credible!” wrote the diligent GTH31761. “He brings suspicion upon himself. Dismayed by the Russkie system, he says? But under the Bolshevik boot, our hero ‘Nosey’ fared rather well! His father, Ivan, was a naval engineer who became minister for shipbuilding under Khrushchev. And the young Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, our beloved Commie snitch, had private tutors before graduating from select hammer and sickle schools. And how has he been so unfeeling as to be able to leave behind a wife and two young daughters, if we assume the family really existed? Let the best minds of our generation not be destroyed by beatnik madness! I smell a red-assed Menshevik rat with a hammer and on its ass and a pack of lies in his hoary lying mouth. Cheers! GTH31761.”

  The CIA locked up Nosenko in solitary confinement in 1964. He received the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag: scanty meals of weak tea and gruel, a single bare light burning twenty-four hours a day, no human companionship, no fresh air, no books, no ciga
rettes. Over the next sixteen months, all defectors, agents, sources, and the CIA's own staff, were set up for intense scrutiny. Some four-dozen officers in the Soviet Division were labeled as “suspects.” A dozen and a half of them were “seriously investigated.” The only grounds were Angleton's hunches, their Russian surnames, or Golitsyn's vague allegations. Over the ensuing years, three senior CIA officers who learned that investigations into their backgrounds, while proving nothing, had greatly hindered their careers. They sued the agency and received six-figure settlements, the bill going to the usual sucker, the unwitting American taxpayer. No one was safe. CIA field agents found their best recruits discredited, thus making it more difficult to create new recruits. Cooper went through sixteen memos: the Soviet Division was doing absolutely nothing, tied up as it was for many years chasing its own tail.

  “Jim Angleton fell in love with the defector who told him what he wanted to hear,” wrote GTH31761 in 1967. “Poor Jimbo. He couldn't see beyond that. He kept looking for Mr. Big.”

  “Mr. Big.” “Sasha.” The mole. The penetration agent. Golitsyn and Angleton took a final lunge at him, if he existed at all, in a disaster whimsically named Project Brontosaurus.

  “Brontosaurus was Jim Angleton's final undoing, both personally and professionally,” the anonymous GTH31761 testified to a closed U.S. Senate committee on Intelligence. “Like its namesake, it wouldn't fly, it didn't eat meat, it was big and dumb, and it couldn't survive.”

  Brontosaurus: Golitsyn described a man from a wealthy family who had been recruited by the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The place of the recruitment was said to be England while the man was visiting on family business. The Soviet Union had supplied the man a Soviet “wife” by whom he was said to have an illegitimate son. Golitsyn claimed to know the boy personally but, as Cooper searched, the boy's name was not entered in the file.

  Years passed: The agent worked for the Soviet Union while he held several important jobs, elected and appointed, in the United States. Then during the end of the Stalin Era, the man had a falling out with his Soviet controllers. But after Stalin's death in 1953, the man again felt the warmth of the shining light from Moscow. He became a United States ambassador and began supplying information again to the Soviet Union.