Among the most effective of the foreign intelligence officers to be fired was Aleksandr Makowski, the officer who had been in charge of the special branch spying on Solidarity and its ties to the CIA. Czempinski made a special plea to the vetting committee on Makowski’s behalf, but his work against Solidarity was simply too much for the new government to swallow.
Prague, March 1990
Oldrich Cerny was surprised when Jiri Krizan, Havel’s first national security adviser, asked him to walk with him in the gardens around Prague Castle, the seat of government. “We have to get rid of the intelligence service, and we need your help,” Krizan told Cerny quietly. “We have all of these old Communists and we have to move them out. Havel wants you to do it,” Krizan added.
“All right,” Cerny said. “When do you want me to start?”
“Right now,” Krizan said. “We are five minutes late for a meeting with British intelligence.”
The first halting efforts by the new Havel government to reform the security services had been a failure, and now Havel was turning to Cerny to help clean up the mess.
The StB had been formally dismantled in February and its officers told not to report for work until they could be vetted by a commission set up by the new government. A counterterrorism unit was virtually the only branch of the foreign intelligence service that was kept intact. But something was needed in place of the old security services, so the Havel government had initially created an organization called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy. To staff the new office, the government brought back officers who had been purged by the regime after the crackdown in 1968, on the assumption that if the Communists had gotten rid of them, they must not be all bad.
But the new organization quickly proved to be a mess. Given a new lease on life, these old hands started doing what they knew best from the 1960s—targeting the Americans and the British. What was worse, some units, most notably surveillance teams, hadn’t gotten the word yet that they were supposed to be out of business. So StB surveillance teams were still trailing CIA and MI6 officers around Prague in early 1990, as if there hadn’t been a revolution.
Krizan wanted Cerny to come in and start over. He would take the lead in creating a new intelligence service, one suited to a new, pro-Western democracy. Cerny would be joined in this daunting task by Jan Ruml, a ponytailed dissident appointed by Havel to be deputy interior minister in charge of intelligence. They would create a much smaller organization than had existed under the Communists and staff it with fresh blood, young people with no background in intelligence matters. Czechoslovakia was going to start again with a blank slate.
Before they could start fresh, however, the new government had to figure out what to do with the old files of the StB and Sprava One. While some of the files had been destroyed by the Communists on their way out, much of the archives was still intact, including an index card system that provided reference points to registry books identifying agents, their contacts within the intelligence services, and their operational targets dating back as much as forty years. The files showed that StB had had some ten thousand active informants and agents at one time and had thoroughly penetrated every branch of federal and local government. To avoid a witch-hunt within the ranks of the new government, files that were still active at the time of the Velvet Revolution were destroyed. Only old, closed files were retained and scrutinized.
Rumors abounded through Prague in the early days of the Havel government that former StB officers were planning a comeback and that they might plan a coup to topple Havel and reinstate the Communist regime. But closer scrutiny showed that the rumors had been fueled by the simple fact that a few old StB officers were getting together regularly in taverns around Prague to drink, swap stories, and get out of the house. To the relief of Cerny and others around Havel, it quickly became apparent that the StB was dead and that there was no chance that a Czech version of the Odessa network—the near mythical organization of former SS officers that faded into the fabric of postwar Germany—would emerge to threaten the new democracy.
Once they began to dismantle the old apparatus, Cerny and Ruml turned their attention to developing new relations with the British and the Americans. The CIA had not played any role with the dissidents during the Velvet Revolution, but now the Czechs wanted the CIA to help ensure that their communications were secure and that President Havel was adequately protected. So the CIA provided new communications gear and helped train Havel’s bodyguards; Britain’s MI6, meanwhile, agreed to provide field training for the new Czech intelligence officers.
The Czechs also worked with the Americans and British to clear their books of old sleeper agents burrowed deep into Western society. The FBI and CIA asked the new Havel government and its slimmed-down foreign intelligence service to recall longtime “illegal” agents who had been sent to the United States by the Communists years earlier. At the end of the Cold War, the Czechs had about twenty sleeper agents in place around the world, including several in the United States and Britain. They had never been activated; the Communists had planned to turn these illegals loose in case of a major crisis or war with the West.
But these illegals had been in place in their new “cover” lives for so long that some seemed to have forgotten they were spies, not Little League coaches. When the new Czech officials tried to recall them, two or three of the sleeper agents in the United States simply refused, saying that they were Americans now, with families and lives they didn’t want to abandon. In Britain, one or two also refused to come home. The Havel government decided that they should be left alone to live their new lives, especially since none of them had ever really done any damage against the Americans or the British.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Early 1990
Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, the CIA had covertly provided funding for magazines, academic journals, and books published in Western Europe by expatriates from the Soviet empire.
Those émigré publications had told the truth to generations of Eastern Europeans and Soviets starved for real information. They had provided glimpses of banned literature and in many cases kept history alive for persecuted minorities. The CIA-backed publications had never had to publish false propaganda; all they had to do was tell the truth to people who lived under regimes built on lies and fabrications. The covert program to smuggle news and literature to people inside the Soviet bloc was one of the CIA’s greatest—and noblest—success stories of the Cold War.
Poland had served as a case study in the power of information. Along with the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church, the CIA had helped provide the Solidarity movement with the resources it needed to get its message out during the dark days of martial law, when it was forced underground.
For persecuted minority groups inside the Soviet Union, meanwhile, literature and other works funded by the CIA provided objective national histories. Over the years, the CIA had perfected the art of smuggling books to those groups. The agency seeded Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with copies of the Bible, The Gulag Archipelago, and other great works, sometimes in the form of tiny books that could easily be hidden from the authorities.
Émigré publishers in Paris and other Western cities, with the quiet backing of the CIA, had fervently kept alive dreams of freedom for Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. By the 1980s, some had added videos to their lineup, producing documentaries, music videos, and other programs that could be purchased in stores in Western Europe and then smuggled back into the East.
Many of the émigrés working with the CIA had turned gray-haired waiting, patiently, in exile. But now, suddenly, freedom had come. Overnight, their once banned publications could be purchased openly at newsstands in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest.
By early 1990, the CIA realized that it was time to end its financial support for the émigrés. For the people in the agency who had provided the support for the émigré publishers, this would be a bittersweet parting. They would have to say good
-bye to men and women who had endured through long, lean years when there was little evidence that their publications were having any impact.
For the Eastern Europeans, ending their secret relationships with the CIA was relatively easy. Many of them were already planning to move back home and set up shop as open and legitimate publishers. They no longer needed the agency.
It was harder for the émigrés from the Soviet Union, however. Revolution had not yet swept through Moscow. Even some officials in the CIA’s Propaganda and Political Action Staff, which handled the covert support for the expatriate publications, were reluctant to shut down the Soviet programs so quickly. The ideological battle against Communism had gone on for so long that it was difficult just to declare victory suddenly and turn out the lights. But the programs cost the CIA millions and the agency could no longer justify the expense.
Soon, CIA officers all over Western Europe were quietly seeking out their contacts with the émigré publishers, passing along the message many of them had been waiting forty years to hear: Time to go home.
Lisbon, March 1, 1990
Ryszard Tomaszewski, the Polish Rezident in Lisbon, had handled important American operations during his career in the Polish foreign intelligence service, which was precisely why John Palevich, the officer known as “Mr. Poland” within the DO, had identified him as the right man to approach to see if the Poles were ready for a new relationship with the CIA.
The sweeping changes across Eastern Europe in late 1989 had convinced the CIA—and officials in SE Division in particular—that it was time to establish contact with the intelligence services of the newly democratic governments just then breaking free of the Soviet orbit. Hungary had come first, with an initial meeting in Vienna between CIA and Hungarian intelligence officers. The CIA now wanted to build on its new ties with Budapest by developing liaison relationships in other capitals, including Warsaw and Prague.
An approach in Washington was ruled out, in part because that would force the CIA to include the FBI, and the agency wanted this contact to be unilateral—and discreet. A direct contact in Poland was also rejected, for fear of exposing CIA officers serving in the Warsaw Station if the approach was rebuffed.
Paul Redmond, the deputy chief of SE Division who was helping to coordinate the efforts to contact the Eastern Europeans, decided to try to use the Hungarian model with the Poles, contacting them through one of their foreign residencies on neutral ground.
But which one? The CIA had over the years obtained a wealth of detailed information about the Polish foreign intelligence service—Department I of the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrzynych, Ministry of Internal Affairs—and so knew plenty about the personalities and backgrounds of many of the Polish officers serving around the world.
The Rezidents in Rome and Lisbon seemed like good candidates. The Rome Rezident had actually studied at Harvard and was quite familiar with Americans. But he was more likely to be under heavy surveillance from the local internal security service, and the CIA didn’t want any other country, even the Italians, to find out about the approach. So Palevich flew to Lisbon to personally knock on Ryszard Tomaszewski’s door.
But when Palevich went to the Polish embassy and introduced himself to Tomaszewski as a representative of the Director of Central Intelligence, the Polish intelligence officer immediately went on the defensive. Palevich told him that he had come with instructions to open an intelligence dialogue with the Polish service and that Tomaszewski had been selected as the intermediary to pass this message to Warsaw. Convinced this was some sort of American provocation, Tomaszewski maintained that he was a diplomat, a representative of the Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and thus was in no position to talk to Palevich about anything of the kind. It was clear that Tomaszewski had not yet received any guidance from the new government in Warsaw about whether to consider the Americans friends or adversaries.
Palevich realized that Tomaszewski suspected he was wearing a wire, making him even more guarded and tense. Getting nowhere with the Pole, Palevich tried a new tack. “Do you have a camera?” he asked.
Tomaszewski took a step backward, bristling, and almost shouted, “No! Why should I have a camera? I am a diplomat!”
In his most soothing voice, Palevich said, “Because you might want a copy of my passport, so that when you report this to the Center they will be able to do a proper trace to confirm my identity and affiliation. Now why don’t you at least photocopy this.” Palevich then handed the man his diplomatic passport, which contained his name and contact information, including his home address and telephone number in Maryland. Tomaszewski took the passport and disappeared briefly. When he returned, he simply handed the passport back to Palevich and told him to leave.
“Would you be so kind as to have your secretary call me a cab?” Palevich asked the badly rattled intelligence officer, trying one last gambit to buy another few minutes.
“No!” Tomaszewski shouted. “Catch a ride with your backup team.” The Polish officer believed that Palevich was only the front man for an elaborate operation to entrap him, and he wasn’t going to fall for this American ambush.
Palevich flew back to Washington the next day, and when he reported in, he had to endure some jokes about the apparent failure of his mission. “It was a good plan, we just sent the wrong man.” Redmond, a Harvard graduate himself, good-naturedly said that he might make the next approach, this time in Rome. He was sure that two Harvard men could sort things out.
Two days later, as Palevich stepped out of the shower in his Maryland home, his telephone rang. It was Tomaszewski, calling from a pay phone in Lisbon. He had been careful not to call from the Polish embassy, in case eavesdroppers from the Portuguese security service overheard the conversation.
Speaking in “commercial terms,” Tomaszewski said he was terribly sorry for the misunderstanding of the previous week and that in fact his home office was very much interested in accepting the proposal. Could further discussions be arranged? It was obvious to Palevich that Tomaszewski had reported the contact to headquarters and had then been thoroughly chewed out for abruptly dismissing the CIA approach.
The opportunity would come quickly, and when it did, Gromoslaw Czempinski and Andrzej Milczanowski would make the most of it.
5
Langley, April 5, 1990
“We’re in the final stages of planning the PROLOGUE exfil,” I said. I was sitting with Dick Stolz in his seventh-floor office. Tom Twetten, the ADDO, was with us.
The case of the mysterious KGB volunteer who had approached Jack Downing on the Red Arrow so long ago had continued to plod along without any resolution of the doubts over whether it was a KGB double agent operation. We had, however, finally confirmed PROLOGUE’s identity, thanks to Sergei Papushin, the defector from the Second Chief Directorate who had been hauled in by the FBI in New Jersey. After he was shown a mug book, he gave us PROLOGUE’s name and position.
It was Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, Papushin said. Zhomov was an officer in the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate, working under Rem Krassilnikov and his deputy, Valentin Klimenko. We decided to give Zhomov a small jolt by letting him know we knew his name. In one of our letters we passed to him on the Red Arrow we opened with “Dear Sasha.” But he was a cool customer and didn’t react.
By the spring of 1990, the handful of CIA officers involved in the case agreed that PROLOGUE was either the CIA’s most important spy in Moscow or an amazingly good KGB dangle. We would have to bring him in from the cold if we were ever to find out which one he was. So several weeks earlier we had told him we were beginning the necessary preparations for an exfiltration, and as part of the process he should give us a handful of passport-size photographs we could use to create an identity for his escape. Within two weeks we had our photographs and a face to go with a name. We could now start working on a detailed plan. But there was a catch. We couldn’t use any really elaborate methods of getting PROLOGUE out bec
ause of the likelihood it was a controlled operation with the specific goal of smoking out our exfiltration methods. We’d have to come up with a way of getting him out without revealing too much about how we did this kind of thing. It was against that backdrop that I decided to brief the seventh floor. I was still hopeful that the PROLOGUE operation was real, but I also had to share with Stolz and Twetten the doubts that many in the SE Division still harbored.
“What has he really given us?” Stolz asked.
“He’s confirmed a lot about the 1985 trouble. And he’s tipped us to some controlled cases they were going to dangle in front of us. And he’s given us some internal documents that tell us what they think of our last few Moscow chiefs.”
“Anything we know for certain would hurt them?” Twetten asked.
“No,” I said.
“Do you think he’s controlled?” Dick Stolz was being the case officer now, the old street man who’d been kicked out of Moscow in the early days and had been running operations against the KGB ever since. He knew how difficult it was to quantify an operation like PROLOGUE.
“Every time we make an exchange with him, I call a meeting of the small compartment of people who know about the case—that’s about five of us. I take a poll on two questions. First, I ask if he’s controlled. About fifty percent of the time we vote that he’s controlled, the other half of the time it goes the other way. And there’s always some changing of positions between polls.”
“What’s the second question?” Twetten asked.
“Whether we should go through with the exfil despite our doubts. The vote is always four to one that we go ahead.”
“What do we lose if he’s bad?” Stolz asked.
“A passport, an unspectacular method of getting him out. That’s about it.”
The Main Enemy Page 47