But both the hat and the Safeway shopping bag were Oleg Gordievsky’s only links to those who might save him from the faceless executioner he knew would be waiting for him in that special dark corridor in the basement of Lefortovo Prison.
Counting the seconds as he trembled at the curb, exposed and vulnerable, Gordievsky prayed that someone from the SIS station would perform the promised nightly drive-by of this tiny pinpoint on the Moscow city map and see him as prescribed in his emergency instructions. If a British officer did spot him, that would set in motion an SIS plan to rescue him and get him out of the country.
The nightmare had begun shortly after Gordievsky’s summons from London to KGB Center in Moscow a month earlier. It was certainly not a development he thought menacing, though all sudden recalls are unsettling to Soviet intelligence officers who have “turned.” In this case, Gordievsky had been expecting a recall at some point so that headquarters could confirm his formal appointment as Rezident of the KGB’s London Station.
Through a series of well-choreographed expulsions of KGB officers in London, Gordievsky’s handlers had maneuvered their star agent into position to take over the top job in the United Kingdom. The previous acting KGB chief in London, the brilliant counterintelligence careerist Leonid Nikitenko, had weeks earlier been ordered out of Britain in the escalating spy wars between London and Moscow.
Since the time he had first volunteered to spy for the British while serving in Denmark more than a decade earlier, Gordievsky had provided London with a wealth of information. His most sensitive piece of intelligence came when he warned London that the aging KGB leadership believed that the new American President, Ronald Reagan, was preparing to launch a nuclear war. In 1981, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov had told a KGB conference that the United States was preparing for a nuclear strike against the USSR. Moscow Center took the threat seriously and soon sent out orders to KGB residencies in NATO countries to look for signs of a pending attack. Code-named RYAN—a Russian acronym for a nuclear missile attack—the operation reportedly became the KGB’s top intelligence priority by 1982.
RYAN was the product of Moscow’s paranoia about Reagan. Andropov, with little exposure to the West, seemed convinced that Reagan was such an extremist that he was willing to destroy the world in the name of his right-wing ideology. Gordievsky told the British about RYAN and Moscow’s exaggerated fears of Reagan. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally briefed Reagan on RYAN and its implications.
Still, NATO went ahead with “Able Archer,” a nuclear launch exercise, in November 1983, simulating the actual procedures the NATO allies would use at the start of a nuclear war. Only later did the United States learn how badly Able Archer had shaken the Soviets. The KGB reported back to Moscow that NATO was on actual alert, and Soviet forces were placed on alert status as well. The volatile combination of Able Archer and RYAN had created one of the worst nuclear scares since the Cuban missile crisis—and Washington didn’t even know it until after it was over.
The British decided to hide Gordievsky’s identity from the Americans, but that didn’t stop the CIA from trying to figure out where London was getting its information. Burton Gerber was determined to identify the British source and assigned the SE Division’s chief of counterintelligence, Aldrich Ames, to puzzle it out. By March 1985, Ames thought he had the answer—Gordievsky. Ames sent a cable to the CIA’s London Station asking whether Gordievsky fit the profile. The answer was yes, and the CIA concluded—without being officially told—that Gordievsky was a British mole.
When Gordievsky arrived in Moscow in mid-May, his confidence evaporated. He immediately discovered that his apartment on Leninsky Prospekt in southwest Moscow had been surreptitiously searched. Were it not for a few subtle traps he had laid out, he might never have known it had been entered.
A few days later, he was taken to a KGB dacha a few kilometers from the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters, where he was fed drug-laced brandy and interrogated by KGB counterintelligence specialist General Sergei M. Golubev, the KGB officer who by the end of the Cold War would be the man most identified with Moscow’s use of drugs and poisons against the enemies of socialism. Then, without further explanation, Gordievsky had been told that while he could continue his service in the KGB, his London posting had been terminated. He was free to take a month’s leave.
Within days he had spotted the first surveillance. Gordievsky was convinced he was followed to a health spa in Semyenovskoya, about a hundred kilometers south of Moscow. He had apparently held his own in the interrogations, although he still had no recollection of the details. KGB counterintelligence didn’t seem to have the goods on him, not just yet, but the noose was tightening. The KGB had to be acting on a well-founded suspicion, and it would only be a matter of time before they had what they needed for the perversely legalistic Soviet system to charge him with espionage. What had gone wrong? The question had eaten away at him since he had returned to Moscow. Had the displaced Nikitenko become suspicious?
After what seemed like an eternity, but in reality was no more than three or four minutes, Gordievsky eased back from the curb and fell into the flow of pedestrians heading toward the Kievsky metro station. His only thought was a fervent hope that the British had seen him. He would not know for three more weeks that he had left a minute too early.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 1330 Hours, June 18, 1985
Paul Stombaugh had managed to dodge the Washington press corps since his expulsion from Moscow and arrival in Washington two days earlier. CIA security officers had escorted Paul and Betsy and Rusty, their seven-year-old son, around the reporters waiting at Dulles International Airport and registered them under an assumed name at a Washington hotel. Burton Gerber visited the Stombaughs in their hotel room that first night and said all the right things. He assured them he shared their sense of personal and professional loss in the Tolkachev operation and he knew they had done their best to keep Adolf Tolkachev alive. It was just another reminder of the risks associated with the business, he told them soothingly. Both Paul and Betsy Stombaugh could see in his eyes that Gerber meant every word, that he felt the loss as a human tragedy as well as an intelligence setback.
Now, two days later, Stombaugh was sitting in Gerber’s fifth-floor corner office undergoing his first real debriefing. On the couch next to him sat Paul Redmond, chief of USSR operations, a notepad in his lap. Jim Olson, the taciturn chief of the SE Division’s operations group, which oversaw all activities inside the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, sat in the corner. Gerber sat below a framed pencil etching of a pack of wolves in the wild on the wall behind him. It was sparingly entitled Wolves.
Gerber listened intently as Stombaugh finished his account of the ambush and arrest in Moscow four days earlier.
“After we arrived at Dzerzhinsky I was trundled up the elevator and shoved into a holding room with the two KGB men who had ridden with me in the van. They still held on to my arms, even while we went up the elevator.” Gerber had learned from the CIA medics that Stombaugh’s shoulders had been severely stressed. Full recovery might take up to a year. “They only let go a couple of minutes while they had me strip to my undershorts. After that they sat on either side of me and held my arms again while we waited, I guess, for the others to set the cameras up in the adjoining room.”
“Anyone else come in to talk to you?” asked Redmond.
“Nobody. I finally told the two goons that they really didn’t need to hold on to my arms anymore. I wasn’t going anywhere and they could relax.”
Gerber said nothing, but there was an intensity in his eyes that told Stombaugh he was taking in every word.
“The two guys looked at each other for a second, and then just shrugged and let go of my arms. And that was that. Then after a while another one I hadn’t seen before came in from the adjoining room and told me to put my pants and shirt on and come with him.”
“Any name?” Redmond asked.
“No. No nam
es. I didn’t exactly feel like I was in a position to ask.” Stombaugh quickly regretted his last comment and hoped he didn’t sound flip. He glanced over at Gerber but read nothing in the man’s face.
“We’ll take a look at the mug books and see if you can make any of them out,” Redmond said, making a note on his pad.
“At any rate,” Stombaugh continued, “when I went next door they had everything I’d been carrying laid out on tables. It was all there, the rubles, stacked, but no longer banded—they must have counted—the cameras, the books, medicines, eyeglasses, the tape recorder. Photographers were snapping away at me and the materials I was carrying until an older man with white hair told me to sit down while he stood across the desk from me. He was the senior man. Everybody deferred to him. He looked at me for a second or two without saying anything, for dramatic effect, I think, then quietly asked me to explain what I was doing with all that stuff.
“I told him I was an American diplomat and that I wasn’t required to answer any of his questions. I said I wanted my embassy notified of my whereabouts immediately, and that he knew the rules.”
“And his response?” Gerber asked.
“He went on a tirade. Threw the word diplomat back in my face and asked me if all the spy gear laid out on the table was what American diplomats carried around these days.”
Redmond broke in. “He did this in English?”
“No. We only spoke Russian. But his tirade seemed pro forma, rehearsed, maybe played to the others in the room. There was a lot of sound and fury and what was supposed to pass for anger, but I never saw anything like that in his eyes. He was kind of sad looking, actually, like he knew something I didn’t.”
Gerber shifted his weight, but his eyes held Stombaugh’s. “You can finish all this downstairs, Paul. Now tell me about Father Roman.”
Stombaugh was taken aback by Gerber’s abrupt switch from Tolkachev to the bizarre affair of Father Roman Potemkin. Since he had returned to Washington, no one at the CIA had asked him the most obvious question—not Gerber, not even the famously spooky Paul Redmond. Nobody had asked him if the KGB had tried to “pitch” him, to “turn” him while they had him under their control. And now Gerber had just signaled an end to the debriefing on his arrest by changing the subject to the strange case of Father Roman. Stombaugh knew only the most recent twists in the convoluted case, one whose peculiar beginning went back four years, long before Stombaugh had arrived in Moscow.
In 1981, an unidentified Soviet scientist approached an American journalist in Moscow and handed him a mysterious package. Some time later, the package found its way from the journalist to the CIA. The journalist asked for and received a pledge of secrecy from the agency, which tucked the affair away in a compartment that would remain closed for decades.
The package was an intelligence windfall. Analysts at the CIA’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research examining the 250 pages contained in the package found data on the Soviet strategic weapons program that had until then been the subject of only the most speculative analysis. The level of detail and precision in the documentation could redraw American assessments of Soviet nuclear weapons development, but only if crucial additional data could be acquired. The Soviet weapons experts inside the U.S. intelligence community were unanimous: The information included in the package was simply too sensitive, too revealing, to be disinformation designed to confuse the West. The information was so good, in fact, that the anonymous volunteer held the promise of being one of the most highly prized sources the CIA might ever obtain on the Soviet nuclear target. There were already whispers that the source could do for Soviet nuclear programs what Adolf Tolkachev had done for aviation research and development.
Yet the anonymous source had taken care to omit key details that completed the picture. Those could be gathered only through sustained, clandestine contact with him in Moscow. He had to be recontacted, at almost any cost.
The excitement in the analytical community translated into dismay inside the Directorate of Operations, which was given the seemingly impossible task of finding the mysterious volunteer. The handwritten letter included in the package laid out in imaginative detail how the CIA could meet its author in Moscow, but the date was more than six months past by the time the CIA received the packet. The letter bore neither a signature nor other identifying markers. While the CIA could develop a kind of mental image of the scientist from clues in the package—one hint came from a poem—the agency had no way to track him down. By the time Paul Stombaugh arrived in Moscow in 1984, the case that had held the promise of a second Tolkachev had turned into a frustrating dead end.
But in early 1985, a new letter breathed life into the mystery.
On January 24, 1985, Nicholas Daniloff, Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, arrived in his office at 9:30 A.M. and, as part of his morning routine, opened the yellow mailbox hanging on his door. Inside, he found an unstamped envelope, addressed to him in Russian handwriting with no return address. When he ripped open the envelope, Daniloff found a second envelope, this one addressed to U.S. Ambassador Arthur Hartman. A savvy and seasoned Moscow journalist, Daniloff weighed the probabilities and quickly suspected that the letter was part of a classic KGB ruse to entrap him. After all, there were ample precedents for such provocations, designed to justify leveling charges of espionage against members of the foreign press corps in Moscow. He made a quick decision and set in motion events that would explode onto the front pages a year and a half later.
Daniloff and Ruth, his wife, left the U.S. News office immediately by car for the American embassy. Checking constantly for the telltale beige or white Ladas or Zhigulis of the KGB Seventh Directorate, they drove along the Garden Ring Road and through Smolensk Square, pulling up at the U.S. embassy on Tchaikovsky Street. When they had made it past the Soviet militiamen posted at the entrance and arrived safely inside the chancery, they let out a sigh of relief and went to the office of the senior press and cultural affairs officer, Ray Benson. Daniloff turned the package over to Benson, who quickly opened the second envelope while Daniloff stood by. They found a third envelope inside, this one addressed to CIA Director William Casey. Inside was a letter, six or seven pages in length, with dense handwriting in an odd and difficult-to-decipher script. Neither Daniloff nor Benson could make much sense of the letter except that it appeared to relate to weapons research. The word raketa—rocket—appeared repeatedly in the text.
Daniloff felt uneasy as he left the embassy; he sensed the letter spelled trouble. He had told Benson that he assumed the envelope had been left in his mailbox by Father Roman Potemkin, a curious young man who claimed to be a religious activist. Father Roman had suddenly appeared in Daniloff’s life a month earlier, when he came to the U.S. News bureau just before Christmas claiming that he wanted to talk to an American reporter about antireligious oppression in the Soviet Union. Daniloff, fearful of KGB listening devices in his own office, steered Father Roman outside and listened to his story while walking down Kosygin Street through a light snowfall. Father Roman talked about the antireligious campaign the government was mounting during the run up to the one thousandth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Russia in 1988. He said he was a member of something called the Association of Russian Orthodox Youth, an activist organization that worried, by his account, the cautious leaders of the establishment Russian Orthodox Church. He also told Daniloff he had been arrested and sentenced to two years of “corrective” labor for purportedly being involved with stolen church icons.
Daniloff took Father Roman’s phone number and came away from the meeting intrigued—yet also very suspicious. The son of Russian émigrés, Daniloff understood the Russian mind and soul far better than did most American correspondents. Even Father Roman’s name raised red flags—phony Potemkin villages had been created centuries earlier as illusions to trick Catherine the Great. Daniloff knew it wasn’t easy for Russians to obtain the telephone numbers of foreign correspondents in Moscow. B
ut Father Roman said he had asked a friend who knew a secretary in the Foreign Ministry’s press section to provide the name and number of an American correspondent who could speak Russian. Daniloff’s suspicions deepened. It sounded like a lame cover story for someone who had been sent by the KGB. After their December meeting, Daniloff decided to keep his guard up if Father Roman reappeared.
On January 22, Father Roman phoned Daniloff. This time he told him he was sending him information concerning Russian Christian youth. Two days later, the unstamped envelope appeared in his mailbox. Daniloff assumed it was from Father Roman—no one else had told him to expect mail. The letter’s appearance only deepened Daniloff’s suspicions about him and his possible ties to the KGB.
At the embassy he told Benson all he knew about Father Roman, in part to protect himself if he was walking into a Soviet trap.
Sitting in Gerber’s office at CIA headquarters, the SE Division chief again prodded Stombaugh to walk back through the Father Roman story. “Go on, Paul. Let’s start with exactly what happened in March.”
Stombaugh leaned forward and began to tell the part of the story he knew best.
Moscow, 1415 Hours, March 23, 1985
Stombaugh knew he was clean as he negotiated the narrow path through hurriedly shoveled snow in the northeast Moscow suburb. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless cobalt blue, but at ground level, the fresh snow was already turning a dirty gray. A heavy spring snowfall the night before had tied Moscow traffic in knots, giving an edge to the American as he carefully engineered his escape from KGB surveillance. Stombaugh had been on his surveillance detection run since 11:00 A.M. and was convinced he’d been surveillance free from the start and had blended into the flow of Muscovites braving the cold on a brilliant Saturday afternoon. He was dressed in Russian winter clothing, with a fur hat and heavy woolen coat. Stombaugh had learned during the first cold snap after his arrival in Moscow that a case officer seeking anonymity never went out in the cold without a warm hat. The first time he went out bareheaded in the winter, he was stopped three times by helpful babushkas scolding him for not wearing a hat.
The Main Enemy Page 6