Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Britain, it bears repeating, had been deemed the Main Adversary of Soviet intelligence until after the war, when the distinction passed to the United States. The venerable British intelligence service, the world’s most experienced, was especially active in Russia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That forced the Second Chief Directorate’s English department to work hard to devise countermeasures. One major operation involved feeding double agents to the SIS in the Baltics, where the British service had been especially successful in developing a network of agents after the war. By the time I joined the department, the British had realized they were being had, and their operation was winding down.

  The British embassy was housed in an opulent mansion that once belonged to prominent nineteenth-century merchant Pavel Kharitonenko. The building stood on an embankment of the Moscow River directly opposite the Kremlin. Infiltrating the embassy’s sections—administrative, communications, political, cultural, press, security and so on—required different approaches for each. We monitored diplomats’ activities, trying to establish the identities of their local contacts by using agents, surveillance and eavesdropping equipment. The department’s main task was to determine whether meetings between British personnel and Soviets were above board or indicated the SIS was trying to set up contacts. For instance, it was known that their press attachés met with Soviet editors, journalists and publishers. We knew part of their work consisted of asking their Soviet contacts why, for example, certain articles on Soviet–British relations had been written. But if they began inquiring about people or affairs outside the scope of their professional activities (e.g., about contacts in the defense or foreign affairs ministries), they would immediately raise suspicions and become targets of our “active measures.”

  If a diplomat came under suspicion, we’d first debrief his (it was almost always a man) contact to collect more information. We’d also use Soviet contacts to pass along disinformation to the other side. Then we’d step up monitoring the target, installing eavesdropping equipment where he lived or worked to find out whether the target was in the SIS or simply had displayed imprudent curiosity.

  The next task was damage control: cutting off the target from all possible access to classified or otherwise sensitive information. If we suspected the diplomat of being an intelligence officer, we’d also watch for recruitment attempts on his part. But we wouldn’t close in. First, we’d try to control the target’s intelligence activities. If it turned out that he was making a recruitment pitch or already handling one or more agents, we’d play an operational game. We’d study the target while continuing to feed him false information and fake agents. However, while reports of suspicious behavior by British embassy staff came in regularly, large-scale operations were rare.

  The next stage was to turn intelligence officers into assets for our side. That involved ascertaining their likes and dislikes, political leanings and backgrounds. It also included studying their activities to find weaknesses—prostitutes, say, or gambling—and the best ways of taking advantage of them. If a target seemed recruitable, we’d usually try to goad him into working for us by means of money and sex. A common form of blackmail involved setting up targets for “hard currency speculation”—illegally exchanging foreign currency for rubles.

  The most successful cases involved “swallows,” male or female agents sent to seduce targets. A foreigner who became sexually involved with a swallow could be confronted with secret photographs or recordings. He could also be subjected to scandal. A swallow would claim pregnancy and demand an abortion, or fictitious outraged family members would surface to threaten action. Then a marginally involved benevolent figure—I or another counterintelligence officer—would offer to intervene and provide rescue, only to ask for certain favors later in return. Those favors, of course, involved obtaining information about the British embassy or SIS. The trick was to develop targets into agents through progressive involvement in the spying game.

  We didn’t have to look far for blackmail scenarios. One British diplomat had sex with prostitutes in a car. (Given the difficulty of booking hotel rooms, he wasn’t the only one. Taxi drivers even had pimping networks.) We investigated him and found he was married, then took photographs and confronted him with the evidence. In that case, however, the ploy didn’t work. The target refused to collaborate, reported our attempt to the ambassador and was sent back to England. Many of our efforts ended similarly.

  One of my agents, whom I’ll call Larissa, was an attractive, twenty-five-year-old, English-speaking blonde who worked for UpDK—the state agency that provided housing, furniture, food and most other services to Moscow’s foreign embassies. Larissa met foreign diplomats and staff in several embassies, including the British. A committed, professional agent, she could turn on her considerable charm at will. As with most of my agents, I regularly debriefed her in apartment safe houses, the kind rented by the KGB all over the city. (I couldn’t meet with agents in public, nor could they be seen entering KGB buildings.) During one such meeting, Larissa reported that an employee of the British embassy’s administrative section had shown an interest in her. Back at Lubyanka, I looked up our files on the man. A forty-year-old married diplomat, he’d been serving in Moscow for two years. I’ll call him Edward Johnson. We’d had nothing unusual on him; his interest in Larissa was the first crack.

  As a matter of course, I asked Larissa to write a detailed report on Johnson for our files. I also instructed her to respond to his flirtation to find out whether he was really keen on her or simply joking around. We monitored the several dates she organized. I didn’t know whether I had enough incriminating evidence to try to take advantage of him or whether he had access to information of any importance. But when Larissa reported that he’d become infatuated with her, I decided to try to entrap him. It was worth a try, Larissa agreed.

  When Johnson began to press Larissa to have sex, we procured a suitable apartment and stuffed it with eavesdropping bugs and hidden cameras. When she took him there for a night of lovemaking, she told him the flat belonged to a friend. The following day, I thought we had enough material on the diplomat to make an approach, but English department chief Markelov disagreed, saying it would be better to compromise Johnson doing something actually illegal. So it was back to the drawing board while Larissa and Johnson continued their meetings. Several days later, I instructed her to tell him that a friend of hers was traveling abroad and wanted to buy hard currency. Johnson agreed to sell some pounds.

  I showed up as the friend. Dark-haired Johnson was tall, slim and strikingly good-looking in his well-tailored suit. I could understand Larissa’s willingness to take part in the operation. His aristocratic bearing made me wonder why he agreed to take risks. Was his life too boring? Did he dislike his wife? Or did naïveté about how our system worked give him a false sense of security? From Larissa, I knew Johnson took socializing seriously. He was visibly relaxed. He met Russians regularly and told some jokes to break the ice with me. I decided to help in that too. Finding a bottle of vodka in the kitchen, I poured a couple of shots. We toasted and got down to business. Hidden cameras snapped away as we exchanged money. We drank more vodka. Then I thanked him and left the couple to get on with their more exciting business—which was also photographed.

  A month later, Markelov ordered me into action. Larissa informed Johnson that I’d returned from my trip abroad and wanted to thank him and return a favor if I could. He agreed to see me, and we three met at the apartment again.

  “Thanks so much for helping me, Edward,” I said. “It would have been difficult for me to buy anything because we’re only allowed a pinch of foreign currency, even abroad.” For good measure, I added some self-pity. “We’re always being watched, you know.” Johnson was completely taken in. I almost felt sorry for him.

  A loud knock sounded at the door. Larissa got up to open it. Two men in gray suits entered. Johnson turned ashen. One of the men introduced himself in Russian while the other translated. “
I’m an officer of the state security committee! We have information that you have engaged in an illegal activity in the Soviet Union, involving the sale of hard currency!”

  Johnson looked back at me with questioning eyes, but it was clear he still had no inkling I was involved. The officer addressed Larissa and me: “Will both of you please leave the room now while I speak to Mr. Johnson?” We quickly got up. My colleagues then sat down and outlined their proof to the incredulous Johnson, showing the photos of him together with me. To strengthen their argument, they announced their knowledge of a “moral” lapse on his part—and handed over pictures of him and Larissa cavorting in bed.

  The operation proved to be a failure. Johnson never informed his embassy about what had happened, but he cut off Larissa and soon returned to England. His case was typical of the kind of operation the SCD conducted at the time. I often found the work dull, but I knew it was a necessary part of protecting the Motherland—and I felt privileged to be serving the KGB.

  4

  Political events moved quickly after Stalin’s death. Lavrenty Beria was arrested and executed by Stalin’s deputies, who feared the secret service chief would unleash his terror on them. Then came talk of Stalin’s deplorable extremes and the need for change. Hindsight often makes past events appear obvious, but at the time, the country’s future was unclear. I perceived Stalin as he was presented to the public by the Soviet propaganda machine: the one person who could give us a better life. Countless newspaper articles, television programs and billboards told us that with the onset of the Cold War, only he could protect us from our enemies in the West. But the Soviet Union was moving on. By the late 1950s, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization was in full swing. It began with his famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956, when he first publicly denounced Stalin and attacked his cult of personality. Khrushchev had to fend off an attempt to unseat him in 1957, but by 1959 he was consolidating his rule, based on his policy of reforming the Party.

  One of Khrushchev’s moves was to pardon thousands of Gulag inmates, who left Stalin’s camps and streamed home. Another was to transform Soviet intelligence. Departments and counterintelligence operations such as SMERSH had been empowered to interrogate and kill traitors on the spot. By the time I began working at the KGB, however, the service was a different organization. To erase evidence of its excesses under the Lenin and Stalin regimes, the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1959 ordered the security service to burn archived files on those arrested and later rehabilitated or otherwise deemed innocent. Officers in each section, including me, were ordered to destroy files with no operational or historical value. Among the documents I culled were multivolume files from the 1950s on Vladimir Schneiderov, a well-known film director. They included KGB reports alleging he had made anticommunist statements. The evidence was obviously false. No real information discredited the eminent director.

  In another typical example, a file from the 1930s contained a death certificate stating that a peasant named Ivanov had been arrested, sentenced to death and executed for counterrevolutionary activities. Several pages along, I found another certificate, stating that the wrong Ivanov had been accused, but that the matter was closed because the right one had also been arrested and shot. I wondered how it had been possible for human life to have been treated in that cavalier way. (Much later, I came to believe it was a great mistake to execute the spies I myself helped expose. Most never provided information in any way damaging to our national security, just names and information the CIA or SIS likely already knew something about—yet they were shot!) Of course it’s easy to condemn Soviet excesses in retrospect. Although I found many mistakes of the 1930s deplorable, I also felt they were unavoidable in building the foundation of the Soviet state. The harsh measures reflected the rough conditions of the time. Russia was an uneducated country, most of it run by peasants. There was little chance the state’s problems would be solved in a civilized way.

  My work in the archives didn’t last long, for I was soon picked for my first trip abroad. The SCD was tasked with monitoring Soviet delegations abroad, and I was assigned to accompany a group of exchange students who would spend a month in England on a summer program run jointly by the British Council and the Soviet Education Ministry. The language students would be dispersed to various parts of the country, each living with a local family. Since few SCD officers went overseas, I took the assignment as a reward for my hard work. Elated about the trip, I was also under great pressure since I had to provide “security” for all thirty students. It would be up to me to foil any attempts by British intelligence to recruit them.

  Knowing the Soviet media presented life in the West in the worst possible light, I was keen to see what it was really like. As far as operative matters, my task proved impossible. Since the students were sent to different places, two students per family, there was no way to keep track of them. Luckily, nothing unusual took place and everyone returned safely to Moscow. I found London fascinating and the British well-dressed, intelligent and polite. Their standard of living was significantly higher than ours, but I didn’t let that bother me. I was carrying out an important job for my country, and I felt proud to do it.

  5

  Back in Moscow, I occupied my scant free time by going to the theater and visiting museums. In 1958, I met a dark-haired young woman called Elena. She was walking down a corridor in Lubyanka toward a typing office to work on that day’s cable translations. She was twenty years old and beautiful.

  Elena’s path to the KGB started in junior high school, where a teacher advised her to apply to a foreign language institute. With no intention of becoming a teacher, Elena applied to study at the prestigious Vneshtorg, the Soviet foreign trade organization. A course director praised her for scoring well on her entrance exam. “Certain people,” she said, were interested in her. Two years later, Elena was working in Lubyanka.

  I saw her again at a party. To arouse her interest, I asked another woman to dance. When I next spotted Elena, she was heading toward the door with an older officer on her arm. She later told me that he took her out to a restaurant—a rare treat in those days. I knew he had his own apartment, as well as a dacha in the country—almost unheard-of luxuries.

  Realizing my mistake, I was too nervous to approach Elena. Then I fell ill with the flu—luckily, because she visited me and we became friendly. When I recovered sufficiently, I took her out to a restaurant. As we were sitting down, someone gruffly called my name. I turned around to face the man with whom Elena had left the party where I’d danced with someone else. The man glared at me, addressing me with thick sarcasm. “I thought you were sick.” I knew he could make things unpleasant for me at Lubyanka.

  “Oh . . . uh, I am. But I just recovered.” I found my footing quickly. “I’ll be at work tomorrow.”

  “What are you doing here, sick boy?” he shot back, his voice edged with menace.

  “I’m just having a drink. I don’t think there are any laws against that.”

  “Maybe not.” The angry man stared at us before returning to his boisterous friends.

  Later that night, I proposed. Elena’s acceptance made me happier than I had ever been in my life. We married on May 31, 1958, and moved into a room in a communal apartment. Elena’s mother came to live with us, and Elena soon became pregnant with our first child, a son we named Alyosha.

  6

  Without Oleg Penkovsky, we might have been nuked. The reason he’s been called the spy who saved the world is that we knew we could delay [invading Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis]. There was great pressure on [U.S. President John] Kennedy to mount a preemptive attack on Cuba to take out the missiles. Information from Penkovsky helped lead the intelligence community to ascertain that the Cubans were armed with tactical nuclear warheads—and that the generals on the ground had the authority to launch them. Without Penkovsky, we would have invaded. For that they would have nuked us and we would have nuked
them back.

  —David Major, retired FBI supervisory special agent and former

  director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council

  I went through [CIA training at] the Farm and can only say what we young officers were told about Penkovsky. And that was that he was a great patriot and he did what he did because he hated the Soviet Union and did it for Russia.

  —Milton Bearden, former director of CIA’s

  Soviet and East European Division

  It would be stupid to ignore the damage Penkovsky caused to our country. But to call him the “spy who saved the world” . . . is simply absurd.

  —Rem Krassilnikov, former head of the Second Chief Directorate

  American department (KGB protif MI–6, Okhotniki za

  shpionam [Moscow: Sentrpoligraf, 2000], p. 211)

  Moscow’s short, often hot summers end abruptly in late August. By December, the city is blanketed with snow and ice. The one reprieve in the middle of the endless-seeming cold season is the New Year’s celebration, the Soviet equivalent of Christmas in the West. Preparations start in early December and the heavily lubricated festivities continue for many days.

  In 1961, I routinely reviewed some of my cases on December 30, the day before the reveling began. An internal Lubyanka telephone line rang. One of my subordinates, Mikhail Fyodorov, was on the other end. Misha was tracking Roderick Chisholm, a second secretary in the British embassy’s consular section. That was his operating cover; information from George Blake in West Berlin had alerted us that Chisholm, who’d also served in Berlin, was actually the MI6 Moscow station chief. Conveying that the KGB Seventh Directorate, which conducted local surveillance, had reported something unusual, Fyodorov asked what to do.