A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  Their fear was magnified by the NATO exercise ABLE ARCHER 83, which was held between 2 and 11 November. Its stated aim was to practise nuclear-release procedures, but the Soviets genuinely believed that it would be used as a cover for a real first strike. According to Sir Geoffrey Howe, then British Foreign Secretary, Gordievsky ‘left us in no doubt of the extraordinary but genuine Russian fear of real-life nuclear strike’. It was clearly time to tone down the rhetoric: reassuring signals were sent by Washington and London to Moscow. Yuri Andropov’s death in February 1984 no doubt helped alleviate the tension (his successor, Chernenko, wasn’t quite so paranoid about a first-strike).

  The publicity given to the KGB resident Arkadi Guk as a result of Bettany’s trial in 1984 gave MI5 the excuse to declare him persona non grata, and aid Gordievsky’s elevation a stage further (the downside was that the British head of station in Moscow was kicked out from the Soviet Union). Gordievsky continued to pass information through to MI6, assisting with Margaret Thatcher’s preparations for Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Britain at the end of the year. It seemed as if Gordievsky’s star was still in the ascendant, particularly when the KGB decided to appoint him as Guk’s successor in January 1985. However, his luck was about to run out.

  * * *

  While much of the free world’s intelligence agencies were concentrating on the heightened level of Soviet activity, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service found themselves once more the subject of some unwanted publicity.

  On 11 November 1983, the final day of ABLE ARCHER 83, the ASIS began training a team in various elements of tradecraft, including close-quarters combat, surveillance, medical skills and methods for illegal entry. As an exercise, the team were instructed to carry out an armed rescue of a supposed defector, John, and his brother Michael. It all went badly wrong, ending up in an operation that was described in an official report as ‘poorly planned, poorly prepared and poorly coordinated’.

  To begin with, guns were removed from a secret armoury without authorization. Then the trainees lost contact with John and the supposed foreign agents with whom he was consorting. They had to be told to go to the upmarket Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne, where they exceeded their instructions by using a sledgehammer to break down the door of the room in which John and his colleagues were meeting. When the hotel manager, Nick Rice, investigated, the trainees’ team leader got in a fight with him in the elevator — whereupon Rice called the police. The team leader then released the supposed foreign agents, who had been handcuffed as part of the exercise, and raced to meet the rest of his team who were ‘abducting’ John from the hotel. The Sheraton staff were not impressed, and although the trainees and John claimed they were from ASIS, took the car licence number and reported it. Police stopped the car and arrested the occupants.

  The resultant publicity led to local paper the Sunday Age revealing the names of five of the agents involved in an article headlined ‘The Sheraton Shambles’, which provoked a court case over whether the government had the right to release agents’ names (it was effectively agreed that they did indeed have the right, but shouldn’t exercise it). ASIS Director-General John Ryan refused to cooperate with the police enquiry, but he resigned after being held responsible by a Royal Commission for authorizing the operation. In the end, no charges were brought against any of the agents. The Federal government paid over A$300,000 in settlement to the Sheraton and its staff.

  * * *

  The Australians weren’t the only ones to bungle during this time. The case of Richard Miller once again demonstrated that not everything in the spy world goes according to plan.

  Miller has the distinction of being the first KGB spy to be caught within the FBI, and possibly the most incompetent agent within either agency. He joined the Bureau in the early sixties, and quickly gained a poor reputation, trying to obtain goods from stores by showing his FBI badge, and even stealing and selling information from the Bureau on behalf of a local private investigator. According to a scything attack on the FBI in Washington Monthly in 1989, by 1982, Miller had ‘a personnel file filled with doubts about his job performance… A psychologist examined Miller and told the FBI that he was emotionally unstable and should be nurtured along in some harmless post until retirement.’

  This harmless post turned out to be with the counter- intelligence unit in Los Angeles, where in 1984 he came to the attention of low-level KGB agent Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a Russian émigré. Miller was seduced and asked to find out the location of Soviet defector Stanislav Levchenko. This he was unable to do, but he did pass across an FBI manual stating the sorts of intelligence that the Bureau was looking for. Ogorodnikova was known to the FBI, and they began watching Miller to see if there was potential to use him as a double agent.

  That October, Ogorodnikova wanted Miller to travel to Europe with her, to meet with her KGB superiors, and at this point Miller approached his superiors, saying he was trying to infiltrate the Soviet network. The Bureau believed that he only did this because he had spotted the surveillance, and fired him — then arrested him for espionage, as well as Ogorodnikova and her husband. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage; Ogorodnikova was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, her husband to eight. Miller claimed he was working on behalf of the Bureau to penetrate the spy ring; the jury disbelieved him and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. A mistrial was declared on technical grounds and at a second trial in 1990, he was found guilty again and sentenced to twenty years, reduced to thirteen. Ogorodnikova spent years battling deportation to Russia before escaping to Mexico with a new husband.

  Although Miller’s low-scale treason would be regarded as a blot on the FBI’s record, it became increasingly unimportant as the events of 1985 unfolded — a year described by the American press as ‘The Year of the Spy’.

  11

  THE YEAR OF THE SPY

  ‘We should begin by recognizing that spying is a fact of life,’ President Ronald Reagan told the American people during his radio address to the nation on 29 June 1985. ‘The number and sophistication of Soviet bloc and other hostile intelligence service activities have been increasing in recent years… During the seventies, we began cutting back our manpower and resources and imposed unnecessary restrictions on our security and counter-intelligence officials. With help from Congress we’ve begun to rebuild, but we must persevere.’

  Reagan’s call to arms followed the arrest of John Anthony Walker, the retired Naval officer whose spy ring had been passing material to the Soviets for eighteen years. It was the first openly acknowledged move on the American side in The Year of the Spy, but the following twelve months would see both parties in the Cold War discover agents within their own borders — sometimes as a result of new assets being developed within the opposition. The problems the Americans faced on that front were compounded by the discovery of agents working against them on behalf of China, Ghana and Israel.

  * * *

  ‘This has been an extraordinary year in the international espionage trade,’ Maria Wilhelm wrote in an October 1985 article for People magazine. The Walker case shocked America, partly because it seemed to demonstrate an incompetence on the part of the country’s counter-intelligence services in failing to apprehend him — or his brother Arthur, son Michael, and friend Jerry Whitworth, all of whom were part of the group — over such a long period. Certainly the Walker ring was one of the most useful sets of assets that the Soviets possessed within the United States — according to Vitaly Yurchenko, whose own defection from and subsequent rapid return to the KGB was another of the year’s key events, the information that they provided over the years enabled the Soviets to decipher over a million top-secret messages.

  Walker’s spying activities were brought to an end in part thanks to a tip-off from his own ex-wife, Barbara. She had been aware of his spying for the Soviets for many years, and had threatened to expose him on countless occasions, but had never taken the final step. Eventually, when their marriage came to
an end (and possibly in annoyance that Walker had tried to recruit their daughter into the spy ring), she contacted the FBI in April 1985. Former KGB agent Victor Cherkashin denied that her report triggered the arrest, and suggested that an FBI spy within the KGB based at the Washington residency, Valery Martynov, overheard discussion about Walker’s activities during a trip home to Moscow, and reported this back to his handlers.

  Whatever prompted the FBI to begin the surveillance, Walker was arrested on 20 May when he dropped a number of documents for collection by the Soviets; his handler, embassy official Alexei Tkachenko, was posted back to Moscow a few days after the arrest. His colleague Jerry Whitworth, brother Arthur and son Michael were also arrested. John Walker agreed to testify against Whitworth in return for his son receiving a lesser sentence; he, Whitworth and Arthur Walker were sentenced to life imprisonment, Michael receiving a twenty-five year term.

  * * *

  Around the time that Walker’s wife was informing the FBI about her husband’s spying, CIA counter-intelligence officer Aldrich Ames was beginning his treasonous career for the KGB, which would last for the next nine years. Initially using the alias Rick Wells, Ames requested $50,000 from the Soviets in return for information on CIA operations, which, once they saw what he was willing to provide, they gladly gave. Victor Cherkashin was put in charge of handling ‘Wells’, and quickly deduced that they had potentially struck gold: not only did ‘Wells’ have access to good material, but he was actually the CIA’s chief of Soviet counter-intelligence!

  Ames had joined the CIA in 1962 as a trainee, and served at the Ankara station, as well as in Mexico, where he was one of those who handled Aleksandr Ogorodnik’s training. In New York he helped look after Arkady Shevchenko, before transferring back to the Agency’s headquarters at Langley, where his job was to meet with Soviet embassy officials to look for potential defectors. This gave him the perfect cover for visiting his new paymasters — so long as the meetings didn’t attract attention by being too long.

  In June 1985, Ames passed over a list of virtually every CIA asset within the Soviet Union; as a direct result, thanks to this confirmation of Edward Lee Howard’s earlier information, Adolf Tolkachev’s fate was sealed. Major-General Dmitri Polyakov had retired from the GRU in 1980 to his dacha in the countryside; following Ames’ list, he was arrested, and, as he had predicted to one of his CIA case officers, his eventual resting place was a ‘Bratskaya mogila’, an unmarked grave. He was executed on 15 March 1988.

  Ames’ information also ended the career of Valery Martynov, who was working for both the FBI and the CIA within the KGB’s Washington residency. A target of the FBI’s Operation Courtship, which was set up to recruit Soviets in the capital during the early eighties, Martynov was able to pass disinformation back to his Soviet bosses and give the Americans accurate data on the Soviet activities within the residency. Although he had come under suspicion during 1984, there was insufficient evidence for the KGB to act against him until Ames included him in his list. He was sent back to Moscow, ostensibly as a guard for the returning defector Yurchenko, and taken straight to Lefortovo prison. He was executed around September 1987.

  Another American agent within the Soviet residency was also betrayed by Ames: Sergei Motorin, who had already been rotated back to Moscow. Motorin had been turned by the FBI after he was photographed trying to pay for some electronic equipment with cases of vodka in a Maryland store in 1980, and, like Martynov, was used to feed the Soviets false information. Arrested in Moscow, he was shot.

  Among the others Ames betrayed, Colonel Leonid Polishchuk had originally been enlisted by the CIA in 1974 when stationed in Nepal; he had dropped out of contact for many years before being assigned to Lagos, Nigeria, in February 1985, where the Agency approached him once more. After being named by Ames, he was arrested when he went back to Moscow to arrange the purchase of an apartment; in a successful effort to misdirect the CIA, the KGB claimed that they had stumbled on a CIA officer loading a dead drop in Moscow, and they had arrested the man who went to collect the money from it.

  A GRU officer working for the CIA escaped the same fate. Colonel Sergei Bokhan had been employed by the Agency for a decade, while based in Athens, Greece. He had informed them about various attempts to sell military secrets to the Soviets, including the manual for a spy satellite and the plans for a Stinger missile. Summoned back to Moscow in May 1985, a month after Ames’ initial contact with the KGB, supposedly because his son was having problems at the military academy, he defected to the US.

  GRU Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Smetanin, codename Million, was ‘a shining example of the CIA’s professional handling’, according to Victor Cherkashin, but the Agency was powerless when his details were passed to the KGB by Ames. Based in Lisbon, Portugal, he and his wife Svetlana worked for the CIA from 1983 onwards. They weren’t particularly useful agents at this point in their careers, but were an investment for the future — which was short-lived. In August 1985, Smetanin was ordered back to Moscow for an early home leave, and he and his wife were arrested on arrival.

  Ames was also able to pass over details of various intelligence-gathering operations within the Soviet Union, including CKTAW, already revealed by Edward Howard, and Operation Absorb, an ingenious scheme to monitor the movement of nuclear warheads by tracking the tiny amounts of radiation that they emitted.

  One agent who Ames is often accused of betraying is Oleg Gordievsky — even the defector himself says that Ames ‘received his first payment, of $10,000, for putting the KGB on my trail’. However, according to Cherkashin, who was handling Ames, this wasn’t the case: Ames was only asked about Gordievsky at their meeting in June, as corroboration. Whether this was disinformation and Ames did pass over the name a month earlier, or there was another KGB spy within the CIA whose identity has still yet to come to light, Gordievsky’s career as an MI6 agent came to an end in May 1985.

  Unexpectedly called back to Moscow, apparently for high-level briefings about his new position as KGB resident in London, Gordievsky was suspicious when he wasn’t met at the airport as he would have expected. He then realized that the KGB had broken into his flat, after a lock that he never used (because he had lost the key) had been engaged. Discussions about high-level agent penetration in Britain turned into an interrogation, but Gordievsky revealed nothing, even when the KGB insisted that they had information about him, commenting, ‘If only you knew what an unusual source we heard about you from!’ He was allowed to remain at liberty, so that the KGB could gain further evidence against him, and eventually decided to defect, knowing that he was facing execution. With the aid of future MI6 chief John Scarlett, Gordievsky made his escape across the Russian/Finnish border in the boot of an MI6 car.

  As a result of the information Gordievsky was able to provide in a complete debriefing once in Britain, thirty-one Soviet agents were declared persona non grata and removed from the UK; a similar number of British personnel were sent back from the embassy in Moscow. Over the coming years, Gordievsky would continue to brief the British and Americans on the Soviets’ likely response to situations, such as the American line in the arms reduction negotiations, and give them an insight into the Soviet mindset.

  * * *

  As Oleg Gordievsky was plotting his escape from Moscow, CIA operative Sharon Marie Scranage was counting the cost of passing sensitive information to her boyfriend, Michael Soussoudis, an agent for Ghanaian intelligence. Scranage was the CIA Operations Support Assistant in Accra, and had given Soussoudis details of agents and informants. The CIA noted that ‘damaging information on CIA intelligence collection activities was passed on to pro-Marxist Kojo Tsikata, Head of Ghanaian Intelligence, by Soussoudis who shared it with Cuba, Libya, East Germany and other Soviet Nations’.

  According to a report in the Washington Post on 12 July 1985, Scranage had failed a polygraph test on her return to the US and agreed to cooperate with the FBI to entrap Soussoudis. In November both were found guilty of committing espion
age; Scranage was also convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, set up following Philip Agee’s activities. She served two years; Soussoudis was given a twenty-year sentence suspended on condition he left the US immediately. The Ghanaian agents whose identities were compromised were stripped of their nationality and sent to America. According to female CIA operatives, in the years following, Scranage’s disgrace was regularly held up to them as an example of how easy it is to fall for a honey trap.

  * * *

  The 12 October 1985 People article about the various comings and goings in the spy world that were public knowledge at that point described the previous season as ‘The Spy World’s Frantic Summer’. At the time, it couldn’t have guessed at the outcome of one of the stories it covered, which turned out to be one of the oddest events of the year. Vitaly Yurchenko, described as one of the KGB’s most powerful spymasters, defected to the CIA on 1 August — and three months later defected back to the Soviet Union.

  Whether he was a genuine defector who changed his mind, or a plant used to throw the CIA off the scent of the KGB’s newest recruit Aldrich Ames, has never been totally explained. Victor Cherkashin, in charge at the Washington residency throughout Yurchenko’s sojourn in the West, believed the former, and that rather than shoot Yurchenko for his crimes when he returned to the Soviet Union, the KGB elected to use his survival to confuse the CIA.

  The possible reasons for Yurchenko’s change of heart after his defection were multiple. He believed that he was dying of stomach cancer, and hoped for treatment in the US; he was also in love with the wife of another Soviet official, who was now stationed in Montreal. On both counts, he received surprising news: medical investigations revealed that he only had a stomach ulcer; while the woman he loved told him that she’d loved a KGB colonel, not a traitor, and wanted nothing further to do with him. He also asked that his defection was kept quiet, to protect his wife and children back in Moscow; to his intense annoyance the CIA leaked the story to the Washington Times, eager for some good publicity.