A case of this kind was that of Heniz Felfe, a senior officer of the West German intelligence service, who was caught by his own colleagues and superiors in November, 1961, after having betrayed what he knew of their work to the Soviets ever since he had joined the service over ten years before. In 1945 Felfe had been a rather junior member of the foreign arm of the Nazi security and intelligence service. He hailed from a part of Germany which came under Soviet occupation after the war was over. He had been captured and interned in Holland by the Allies and after his release tried to settle in West Germany. He went through the de-Nazification process but had great difficulties finding a job to his liking. Eventually, armed with questionable credentials and letters of recommendation he had talked some innocent people into giving him, he applied for a police job, the only kind of work he knew. In the rather confused atmosphere of the Allied-sponsored German civil service, he got a job in a minor office of the counterintelligence section. Later it turned out he had been helped to the job by certain German officials who themselves were under Soviet pressure.
During this period, Felfe himself became a Soviet agent, having fallen into Soviet clutches while on a secret trip to his home area of East Germany. The man who led the Soviets to him was a friend, also a former SS man, who had made his bargain with the Soviets at an even earlier date. Felfe, in turn, recommended others of similar ilk. The price of all this was cheap for the Soviets—past sins were forgiven and a little money and protection were offered for the future. But a sword hung over the heads of these people, and they knew it would fall if they betrayed the Soviets. The Soviets picked up all the old SS men they could find. Most of them were guaranteed to be ambitious and utterly unprincipled. A few would be clever enough to work their way up the ladder of the West German civil service. Felfe was one of these, and the Soviet investment paid off handsomely.
The case of Felfe was one of Soviet recruitment based on a Nazi past. The KGB, however, is just as ready to use old and hidden Communist connections where the victim to be recruited is working in the West and where his future is dependent upon creating the impression that he has had nothing to do with Communism. Such were the facts in the important case of Alfred Frenzel, a prominent member of the West German parliament (Bundestag), to which he was first elected in 1953. For some years he served on the parliamentary committee which dealt with matters of German defense, and in this capacity he had access to information relating to the build-up and equipment of the West German military forces and NATO plans therefor.
Frenzel had originally come from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. There for a time he had been a member of the Communist party; in fact had been thrown out of the party under the accusation of embezzling party funds. All this was well known to the Czechoslovak secret service.
Frenzel, like so many of his fellow Sudeten Germans, became a refugee in West Germany in the postwar days. He entered politics there, had considerable success and felt that he had securely buried the past. When the Czechoslovak secret service approached him in the mid-1950s and threatened to ruin his career with a full disclosure of his Communist affiliations unless he cooperated, Frenzel easily succumbed. He was an ideal “set-up” for recruitment, a man in a prominent and sensitive political position with a secret and rather lurid Communist past: disclosure spelled ruin for him. Here, as in the Felfe case, the Soviets could offer him financial help and protection. For some five years prior to October, 1960, when he was arrested, he had been working for the Czechoslovak secret service and, through them, for the Soviets; and his intelligence masters saw to it that he produced “the goods” to compensate for the protection and favors granted.
There were also several cases of recruitment in West Germany based upon evidence that the victims had had abortions in the Eastern zone before fleeing westward. This vulnerability was carefully tabulated and used. It was thus that Rosalie Kunze, the secretary of Admiral Wagner, Deputy Chief of the German Navy, was recruited by the Soviets. In some cases, doctors who in their East German past had committed illegal operations were followed and became targets for recruitment when they came to West Germany.
But such displaced rootless vagrants of postwar Europe are only one type of agent that Soviet intelligence is looking for. Among those who still have home and country the Soviets will search out the misfits and the disgruntled, people in trouble, people with grievances and frustrated ambitions, with unhappy domestic lives—neurotics, homosexuals and alcoholics. Such people sometimes need only a slight nudge, a slight inducement to fall into the practice of treason. Sometimes entrapment is necessary, sometimes not.
The Soviets are, of course, well aware of the fact that persons with moral and psychological weaknesses do not make the best agents. They only use them where there is nothing better available. They would prefer the ideologically motivated people and still keep on the lookout for them.
If the postwar world presented the Soviets with a somewhat different breed of spies from the ideological types they had concentrated on in earlier years, it also presented them with brand new targets—NATO, for example. For a time at least, this was perhaps the most important target, representing as it does a powerful coalition of forces the Soviet considers potentially hostile. The lure of NATO’s structure from the point of view of Soviet intelligence is the access all its members have to important military secrets of the major participants. It is not necessary to recruit an American to get at American secrets we share with NATO. At the same time, of course, the overall plans of NATO itself are of prime importance to the Soviets. A Belgian, Frenchman or German serving with NATO can get his hands on both kinds of secrets.
On July 7, 1964, the Frenchman, Georges Paques, who had been deputy press chief at NATO headquarters in Paris before his arrest in 1963, was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason to France. Since NATO itself is neither a sovereign entity nor a judicial body, a man cannot be tried by NATO itself or condemned for being treasonable to it. But the fact is that Paques did a great deal of damage to France, America and NATO by passing documents, chiefly of a political-military nature, concerning all three to the Soviets, including, it is reported, Allied military contingency plans for Berlin, NATO force goals and other NATO military matters. He stated before the court that he did so in order to avert war, “to assure France’s survival” and “to try to save mankind.”
He professed to detest everything American and saw NATO as an “American dominated institution.” He claimed that there was nothing treasonable to France in betraying American secrets to the Soviets. The French court did not accept this cleverly contrived excuse and furthermore felt he had also betrayed enough French secrets to deserve a heavy penalty. The prosecutor actually asked for the death penalty, but the court gave a life sentence. Paques’ subtle defense was in all likelihood a divisive tactic suggested by the Soviets themselves. It made him appear quasi-innocent in the eyes of some people in France. Also the appeal to anti-American sentiments was secretly pleasing to some French quarters.
An interesting point in the Paques case is that the man does not appear to have been a Communist, although his wife and some of her relatives were at one time. Politically Paques himself was known as a rightist of a rather extreme sort. Of course, this may have been a protective pose. In any case, there is no history here of an earlier intellectual flirtation with Marxism. This was not because of any intellectual shortcomings on Paques’ part. On the contrary, he was an intellectual snob who looked down on the mental capabilities of some of the Soviet spymasters with whom he dealt over the years. The most recent of these, Vasily Vlasov, First Secretary of the Soviet embassy in Paris, was apparently regarded by Paques as his intellectual equal, and the Soviet benefited accordingly from Paques’ cooperation. This illustrates the point that an intelligence service can get more out of an agent by putting someone next to him who is in tune with him and whom he can respect intellectually. The Soviets apparently put up with Paques’ intellectual vani
ty, since his contributions to their knowledge made him more than “tolerable,” to say the least.
A more exclusively military than political case was that of the Swedish Colonel Stig Wennerstrom, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Swedish tribunal in May, 1964. Here again, as in the Paques case, the betrayal was threefold. Wennerstrom passed to the Soviets some Swedish, American and even NATO military secrets, which came into Swedish hands even though Sweden was not a member of NATO.
In the course of this service to the Soviets he was secretly made a Soviet citizen and promoted to the rank of major general in the Soviet army (though he rose no higher than a colonel in the service of his own country). It is a rather interesting trick of the Soviets, which costs them nothing, that among other forms of payment, they bestow upon their best agents not only Soviet citizenship (which may be taken up if the agent is forced to flee to the Soviet Union or goes there to spend his retirement years) but also a military rank, a calculated piece of flattery which no doubt appears to frustrated opportunists like Wennerstrom to be a tangible reward even though they may never get a chance to wear the uniform that goes with the rank—at least not in public.
Wennerstrom also accrued a tidy fortune from the Soviets, much of which was put aside for him in Russia for later use. Probably the Soviet feared that the temptation to him to use the money might be too great to resist and that heavy spending would give him away. He will, as things now stand, never have the pleasure of spending his Soviet hoard.
On a somewhat lower plane, there was the case in Iceland recently of two Soviet diplomats who were expelled because they tried to pressure a young Icelandic trucker into committing espionage for the Soviet Union. They wanted him to get information for them on the NATO Air Base at Keflavik. What makes the case interesting and symptomatic of the changed times is the fact that the victim, a certain Ragnar Gunnarsson, a man of thirty-two, was a card-carrying Communist and still is—at least he still was in February, 1963.
Yet it was this Communist who refused to submit to Soviet pressure and who informed the Icelandic police of the whole plot and even cooperated with them in trapping the Soviets in the act.
The Soviets had cultivated Gunnarsson for a long time. When he was only twenty-two, he had been invited to the Soviet Union for a three-week tour with eight other Icelandic youths and had been shown the sights at Soviet expense. Later the Soviets tried to cash in on the investment, but they picked the wrong man or, what is more likely, they had yet to learn that times have changed. It is possible now for a Communist not to feel obliged to spy for the Soviet Union and even to take steps to frustrate their espionage. Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and revealed what Soviet espionage was doing in the United States after they had been involved in it themselves for years. By then they were entirely disillusioned and broke with Communism entirely. Gunnarsson refused to commit espionage in the first place, but remained a Communist.
What apparently makes such a state of mind as Gunnarsson’s possible today is the fact that the Soviet Union is no longer the holy matrix of Communism (in the eyes of its adherents), but only a sponsor of it, and one of several sponsors at that. And this seems to have set back the Soviet intelligence services in their search for agents. The ground has been taken away from under the ideological appeal to commit espionage in all but the backward countries.
The case which was exposed in Australia in February, 1963, points more sharply than any other to the failure of the vaunted Soviet service to keep up with a changing world and to manage its business successfully among strangers and in a country where good security practices prevail. The Soviets had suffered an enormous setback in Australia in 1954 when the KGB resident, Vladimir Petrov, defected. One reason he defected was because he saw even at that time that the tasks the KGB had assigned him in Australia were hopeless, that the KGB in Moscow could not understand that Australia in 1954 was not, let us say, like Germany in the late 1920s. And he knew that he himself would be blamed for Moscow’s failure to adjust to a new situation.
His defection and his disclosures of Soviet espionage in Australia caused a break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Australia which were only resumed again in 1959. By this time there was an attempted “new look” to Soviet espionage tactics noticeable in many places. The very man who was sent to head up the reopened Soviet Embassy in Canberra, Ivan Skrypov, was a high KGB official under diplomatic cover, evidence that the espionage task had first priority in Soviet eyes. After all, there was lost time to be made up for. But Skrypov was not the sinister, silent type of the old school. He was a gay blade, a party-giver, a backslapper. His open participation in Australian official life was supposed to mislead everyone as to his true mission. This “new look” also was apparent in the social cavortings of Captain Yevgeni Ivanov, Soviet Deputy Naval Attaché and intelligence officer in London during the early 1960s, who allegedly shared the favors of Christine Keeler with the British Minister of War, John Profumo.
Behind the backs of his genial Australian hosts, Skrypov was going about his real job—to build up a new undercover intelligence apparatus in Australia. In the pursuit of his task he made, however, one serious error. He hired for certain specialized functions an Australian woman who was really an agent of the Australian Security Service. This was the kind of coup on the part of the Australians that the Soviets themselves have tried to practice so often, yet it has rarely been practiced successfully against them, largely because in the past they did not have to rely on strangers and outsiders, and when they did, their own investigative capabilities could usually determine how reliable the agent was, i.e., they tailed him around and checked him out. Here, in a strange land with a strong and watchful security service, however, the Soviets could neither pick up local Communist sympathizers for their work nor could they muster enough “leg-men” and informers to keep track of their main agents. Thus they had to rely on the show of “goodwill” and apparent dedication of their “volunteer.” Their ability to judge behavior was hampered because they were dealing with a species of people foreign to them.
The blow to the Soviets in Australia was well deserved. What Skrypov was trying to do through his agent was to set up an illegal residentura for the KGB which would have obviated use of the Soviet embassy for important espionage operations. Thus a high-speed radio transmitter and other materials for clandestine work were passed to the agent for a further party in Adelaide who was later to function illegally. In apprehending Skrypov through their double agent, the Australians put both the legal and illegal apparatus of the KGB in Australia out of business for a long time to come. Whether the Soviets will try a third time to create an espionage apparatus in Australia remains to be seen.
Without wishing to appear overly optimistic, I would hazard the guess that the KGB will for the moment retreat, mete out the appropriate punishments to the officers at fault in this latest fiasco and wait a time before trying again. Then they will probably come up with some entirely new scheme for penetrating the Australian defenses. They will certainly “case the joint” more carefully in the future. What they may realize, though they may never give up, is that in a country which is aware and knowledgeable of Soviet aims and tactics and is willing to make a serious effort to guard itself by maintaining a highly trained, competent security and counterintelligence force, success for the Soviet spy is difficult. This is particularly true of a country like Australia, where indigenous Communism is feeble.
Following the exposure and expulsion of Skrypov by the Australians, the Soviets retaliated, as they often do, by looking around for some way in which they could embarrass the Australians. In general, whenever a Western power catches and expels a Soviet diplomat engaged in espionage or other illegal activities, the Soviets will select a diplomatic representative of that same power in Moscow, more or less at random, although he must be of suitable rank, and declare him persona non grata. This puts a certain
strain on the West, since an adequate replacement must be found.
In the Australian case, the Soviet practice took a rather ludicrous turn. Within the relatively small Australian embassy in Moscow, it was difficult to find a ranking member on whom any trumped-up story could be hung with even minimal credibility. The Soviets eventually selected First Secretary William Morrison, declared him persona non grata and charged him with collecting intelligence and illegally selling foreign clothes to Soviet citizens. This last bit shows that the intelligence charge was so weak the Soviets evidently felt it necessary to tack on an additional complaint just to cover themselves. That a foreign diplomat would engage in the vending of secondhand garments is about as ludicrous a charge as one can imagine. Unfortunately, under diplomatic procedures there is no recourse or appeal when one country declares the diplomat of another persona non grata. Hence this practice is subject to abuse and to exercise by way of retaliation without either rhyme or reason.
If illegals or other agents without diplomatic status are caught and sentenced for espionage, then quite another reciprocal procedure may take place between the Soviets and the Western powers—the exchange of prisoners. The most striking example of this was the exchange in February, 1962, of Francis Gary Powers and another American, Frederic Pryor, held in the Soviet Union on charges of espionage, for the Soviet spy Colonel Rudolf Abel. This had several interesting implications. First of all, it meant the breakdown of Soviet pretensions that they had no responsibility for Abel, a position they took at the time of his arrest, trial and conviction; and secondly, it opened up the possibility that the exchange of spy for spy might become a general practice. I was Director of Central Intelligence when the secret negotiations for the Powers-Abel exchange were initiated, and I approved of them. While I had some misgivings, on the whole, I felt then and feel now that it was a fair exchange and that it was in our own interest to proceed with it under the particular circumstances of this rather unusual case. However, this has tended to create a precedent which may have some unfortunate consequences. The number of Soviet agents in the West, we may assume, greatly exceeds the number of Western agents behind the Iron Curtain. Hence with reasonable competence and vigilance on our part, we are likely at any given time to have in our control more Soviet agents than the number of Western agents that they are detaining. If the idea of swapping agent for agent becomes the practice, the Soviet will be anxious to have a backlog of apprehended agents in their hands. Hence they will be tempted, and will likely succumb to the temptation, to arrest casual visiting Westerners who have nothing whatever to do with intelligence.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 15