Next morning, Krassilnikov introduced me to the other rezidentura officers. The brand-new anti-CIA counterintelligence group he headed was part of the larger Line KR, the rezidentura’s counterintelligence department. There were four of us, including an officer responsible for counteracting American operations in Beirut’s large Armenian community. Besides us, only the rezident was informed of the anti-CIA group’s existence.
As part of his duties as Line KR chief, Krassilnikov directed operations against the SIS. He’d set up a good network of agents and was running successful surveillance and eavesdropping operations. We had a leg up on the SIS because Kim Philby, who’d defected to Moscow from Beirut only a year earlier, gave us a recent rundown of SIS operations and some by the CIA. Philby had lived in Lebanon since 1956, working as a correspondent for The Economist and The Observer. But he maintained links to British intelligence, despite overwhelming suspicions he was the “third man” who had helped his fellow Cambridge Five agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escape to Moscow in 1951.
My cover would again be a cultural attaché post. I’d be the sole officer conducting counterintelligence against the Americans, trying to expose and undermine their attempts to penetrate the KGB. Krassilnikov told me the other operations officer in the anti-CIA group was inexperienced and too timid to do his job properly, which was not unusual. Unlike the Americans, whose lifestyle at home was closer to Beirut’s, Russians took longer to adjust. Krassilnikov would be counting on me, which, I supposed, accounted for his apparent delight to see me at the Damascus airport.
He also informed me that I’d have to start from square one. We had no agents, operations, or contacts to go up against the Americans. I’d have to find an apartment for my family, buy a car and get to work making contacts and cultivating agents who might penetrate the CIA. My work was obviously cut out for me. The CIA was especially well plugged into Beirut. On top of the Americans’ generally easygoing nature, which gave them an advantage in the city’s permissive environment, a number of the agency’s officers spoke good Arabic. While we had to work hard to recruit agents, they seemed to fall into the CIA’s lap.
Beirut’s half-Muslim, half-Christian population generated an atmosphere that differed from the capitals of other Middle East states such as Syria or Saudi Arabia, where Islamic traditions dominated. Its noisy, crowded downtown, packed with markets and street vendors, lit up at night with neon signs. Fashionable crowds flocked to expensive hotels, restaurants, cafés, bars, discos, cabarets, clubs and casinos. Traffic was a nightmare—there were essentially no police. You could operate however you wanted. The Lebanese appeared not to care.
2
Beirut was a wonderful place to do our business. It wasn’t a country, it was a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. It was a country in which you could ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon. And if you were in the espionage and intelligence business, you had access to the PLO, Fatah, Black September, the KGB, the Czech intelligence service, the Polish intelligence service and international banking. Everything a government would want to know about other people’s activities that were of interest to intelligence agencies was available in one way or another in Beirut in those days. And it could all be done while sitting on the porch at the St. Georges Hotel and drinking fine wine and eating delicious food.
—John MacGaffin, former CIA deputy director
for operations, posted in Lebanon 1969–1972
Beirut was a very seductive environment. It was freewheeling. The Middle East is a place where you grease people’s palms every time you turn around. It’s a way of life there. We found the Soviets got seduced by that every now and then. They became very interested in money and all kinds of things their government wouldn’t have appreciated them doing. That’s why I went there—to work specifically against the Soviets and East Europeans—because we felt the environment was favorable to us.
Haviland Smith, CIA Beirut station chief, 1966–1969
The KGB rezident, on his last posting before retirement, didn’t much care about the day-to-day bothers of counterintelligence. That left Krassilnikov, who proved to be an excellent mentor, effectively in charge of my work. Urging me to operate as independently as I wanted, he offered solid operational advice but never raised his voice to subordinates, much less imposed his opinions. He believed the best training came from relying on one’s wits and determination to get the job done. (Not surprisingly, Rem Sergeevich rose to head the SCD’s American department as one of the KGB’s great generals. In 1985, when I was busy handling Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen in Washington, he acted on their intelligence. The major operations he planned at that time took out the CIA’s main agents and operations in the Soviet Union.)
I began frequenting the glamorous Casino du Liban and other nightspots popular with all kinds of foreigners. Many of the customers were men posted to Beirut without their wives. If diplomats were usually reserved in their behavior, businessmen weren’t. Out for a good time, they gravitated toward strip bars, loud music and crowds. Gilded Arab youth, come to relax in the permissive environment, helped pack the discos.
I started following Americans home to large, new apartments not far from the U.S. embassy. My attempts to understand Americans would serve me well in Washington many years later, not least in convincing Aldrich Ames to reveal more secrets than he was initially willing to. Poring over embassy directories, I annotated them with basic information about my potential targets. Then I began approaching some of them. I started by using a “foreign flag” cover, posing as a Yugoslav. My legend—the story behind my assumed identity—was that I’d worked in Australia and was now employed by an oil-rich Saudi sheikh.
One of my favorite perches was a bar whose female American bartender turned out to be intelligent, friendly and knowledgeable about her regular customers. I tipped generously for useful information, such as where they worked—one, for example, as a professor at the American University; another for Goodyear tires. All this came in friendly conversation, ostensibly to pass the time. Then I advanced to staging meetings. If I wanted to get to know someone by “accident,” I’d come when there was a chance a target would be there alone. Single bar patrons are often lonely. I’d strike up conversations and pose questions. I met one American by asking him to recommend where to buy music—a choice I immediately regretted because it required feigning enthusiasm for popular Western groups. In order to talk about the music, I had to do more research, which included listening to it. Two tedious months of that passed before I realized the contact was useless.
I picked up tidbits this way. One American who worked as an engineer installing telephone lines informed me the equipment his company used came fitted with special outlets for CIA tapping devices. Another technician happened to work for American intelligence. I arranged to pay him $100 for an eavesdropping bug, the kind used to monitor Soviet embassy personnel.
3
Rem and I waltzed around for three years in Beirut. I liked Krassilnikov a lot; he was a good friend and I enjoyed my relationship with him. It was a bantering affair. The people in headquarters told me it was unique, almost strange for its time, that both of us acknowledged who we were to each other. I was very comfortable with that and with him. I was looking to see whether there was any indication that he might be interested in us—and I got absolutely none. So I never pitched him. I tried to make his life as miserable as I could, but I never pitched him. At the same time, I made it very clear by everything that I said and did that I wouldn’t be amenable to any kind of overture from him. It didn’t seem to matter to him.
I knew Cherkashin as an attractive young case officer, but I didn’t see much of him because I didn’t want to establish a relationship that Krassilnikov would be able to manipulate. With Cherkashin, it was all sort of cocktail party chatter.
—Haviland Smith, CIA Beirut station chief, 1966–1969
A downtown bowling club was especially popular with the American community. The U.S. embassy hired it out tw
o nights a week. It would be an ideal place for me to study the Main Adversary’s personnel—the only trick would be to gain admittance on the right days. Suppressing my dislike for bowling, which I found dull, I asked to meet the club owner. The meeting went better than I’d expected. When I professed a heartfelt desire to learn, the owner offered to coach me himself.
I started taking lessons several nights a week. In time, I bowled well enough for my coach to recommend playing with others. To my great luck, he also invited me to watch the Americans play. That enabled me to observe them socializing and practice communicating socially, which would later prove useful. Like listening to Western pop music, however, bowling proved a dead end for my purposes. The bowlers tended to stick together in their groups, which made it almost impossible to develop contacts among individuals. So I gave up that game too.
In general, trawling around the city’s nightspots was a workintensive, inefficient process that yielded few results. It helped to start that way, but as time went on and I began developing a network of agents, I spent increasingly less time on the streets.
My best agents were local Lebanese. Despite Beirut’s ostensible alignment with Washington, many Lebanese sympathized with the Soviet Union, largely because Moscow supported hard-line Arab states such as Syria in opposing U.S.-backed Israel and later Egypt. I made contacts with the Lebanese army’s counterintelligence wing, the Second Bureau (or Deuxième Bureau, as it was known), and cultivated a handful of agents, including businessmen and policemen. They in turn recruited other agents, most of whom never knew they were working for the KGB.
It soon became clear that the CIA recruited more aggressively than we did. Among the agency’s most outgoing operatives in Beirut was named Haviland Smith. A talented, independent and confident officer, he’d often show up at Soviet embassy events and receptions to introduce himself to Soviet staff. It was evident to everyone—he never seemed to hide that—that he was CIA. That was very different from the way I acted. Although I chatted with Smith several times, Krassilnikov was his main interest. The two often met in the city’s watering holes, each gleaning information, looking for personality cracks to exploit. It was an unusual case. Each respected the other, and neither made any headway recruiting the other. That relationship was strikingly similar to a later one that would develop between a CIA officer and a KGB officer during my time in Washington.
Among the agents I recruited was a local U.S. embassy employee with a large family who needed an outside source of income. The embassy wouldn’t have looked kindly on his having a second job, so I came to his rescue. Posing as the Yugoslav, I secretly employed him to buy office supplies and run errands for me. He came to depend on the money I paid him and didn’t raise an eyebrow over my request for a list of embassy staff (ostensibly for the Saudi sheikh to use for lobbying purposes). In time, that agent provided physical descriptions of each embassy staff member, and also his estimate of which ones worked for the CIA. Eventually, my slow upping of the quality of information I wanted from him alerted the likable Lebanese man to what was going on. Never questioning my motives, however, he remained a valuable source, helping me positively identify several U.S. intelligence officers.
Foreign flag cover came with pitfalls, however. Even chance encounters with CIA officers or agents was usually enough to blow the cover—they certainly did their homework. False identities were also difficult to justify to agents. They’d eventually want to know why a businessman needed ongoing access to information on the CIA. Exposure could also lead to diplomatic problems—the Yugoslavs likely wouldn’t have been thrilled with my choice of cover. After some time, we decided to stop using foreign flags in Beirut.
4
KGB and CIA officers understood each other’s side on a personal level. You could meet for a drink together, laugh over a joke and leave. There were never feelings of malice and operations were never conducted on a personal level.
—Yuri Kotov, KGB political intelligence officer, stationed in Israel
1965–1967, Lebanon 1967–1968, Egypt 1968–1971
We targeted Soviets through agents who had access to them. It didn’t matter who they were. Western diplomats, Lebanese, American businessmen. Anybody the Soviets were interested in, we were automatically interested in. Any time we found somebody in touch with a Soviet of interest to us, we would see whether or not we could talk to that person and get him going for us. We were fairly successful. The Soviets were out moving around. Since they were doing that, it gave us the opportunity to get some pretty good looks at them. Ten years earlier, they didn’t do anything anywhere. They were all holed up in their embassies, terrorized by the Stalin era and not prepared to talk to anybody in the West by themselves.
If you can generalize about nationalities, the Soviets were not a flexible people. They were pretty programmed and to be set loose in the absolutely freewheeling environment of Beirut was sometimes rather shocking for them. But they had opened up. By that point there was a different Soviet abroad. It was the golden youth. They were educated Soviet officials, most of whom were the progeny of politically important people in the Soviet Union. They did what they damn well pleased. And they were very interesting to us because a lot of them had ideas their fathers had never even considered. It was the beginning of the opening up of Soviet man in effect. That made it a heck of a lot easier for us to get at them.
—Haviland Smith, CIA Beirut station chief, 1966–1969
Beirut was an excellent training ground. I ran operations planting eavesdropping devices in U.S. institutions and CIA officers’ apartments, generating propaganda in the local press and conducting liaisons with agents—all of which provided valuable experience that would serve me well for the rest of my career. (Not all the operations were entirely successful. The Americans detected eavesdropping devices planted inside electricity cables in the U.S. embassy.)
I even learned to speak French thanks to an agent code-named PATRIOT, a Lebanese businessman who became one of my most productive agents. On first meeting him, I assumed PATRIOT spoke no English or German—which I’d studied in Leningrad—and addressed him in the broken French I’d picked up talking to local journalists. PATRIOT was gracious enough to compliment me on my language abilities, which turned out to be not nearly good enough. I hired a teacher, practiced hard and my French eventually became passable. When the end of my tour approached several years later, I invited PATRIOT to dinner with the KGB officer who’d be taking over his handling. The new man was trained in English and French, and just as we were sitting down to eat, he asked PATRIOT which he preferred using. To my astonishment, PATRIOT replied that either was fine. His English turned out to be perfect.
PATRIOT was a Soviet sympathizer who supported Moscow’s role countering U.S. influence in the Middle East. Recruited by my predecessor, he never accepted a single kopek for his services, and even insisted on paying for some of our meals together. Tall, dark-haired and handsome, the playboy businessman found an obvious thrill in working for the KGB. He was one of the few agents I ran who knew he was working for Soviet intelligence. PATRIOT never refused to participate in an operation, no matter how risky. His name is on a list of especially valued agents at the foreign intelligence museum in the Center.
With many contacts among the local staff of the U.S. embassy, PATRIOT often recruited agents independently. He also had good contacts in the Lebanese army, including the counterintelligence wing, the Deuxième Bureau, which we knew collaborated with the CIA and French intelligence. PATRIOT’s almost intuitive understanding of the complicated, shifting allegiances of Beirut politics made him an astute judge of possible recruits and operations. So I believed him one sunny day when we were drinking beers after lunch in a café overlooking the sea. He told me that a contact of his in the Deuxième Bureau had mentioned something worth pursuing. “My friend Hamid says the American embassy has rented a downtown apartment,” he said. “The lease is under a false Lebanese name, and no one lives there. There’s a cleaning woman
who comes around once a week. I guess since they work with the CIA, they’re not really interested in the information—but it’s been offered to us if we want to act on it.”
“Can you find out what goes on there?” I asked. “Could it possibly be a CIA safe house?”
“I’ll try to find out.”
I wondered why Hamid would have told PATRIOT about the apartment. Surely he didn’t think it interested PATRIOT for his own purposes. “Does Hamid know your affiliation? I mean did you tell him?” I asked.
“No,” PATRIOT replied.
“You’re sure? Is there any way he could have found out some other way?”
“I suppose he could have easily guessed.”
If Hamid had worked out PATRIOT’s allegiances, that would mean the Deuxième Bureau was playing a double game with the CIA and the KGB. Whatever the motives, the opportunity was too good to pass up. I had the apartment put under surveillance. Sure enough, an agent soon noticed a man we’d identified as working in the office of the U.S. military attaché entering the apartment with different people on several occasions. That backed up the theory that the apartment was used as a safe house. Using my agents inside the embassy, the next step was to identify the man, whom I labeled MARS. It wasn’t too difficult. I’d already surmised that since the Deuxième Bureau knew about the apartment, there was a good chance the American was an intelligence contact with the Lebanese. If true, the setup would be highly unusual. It was the first time we’d come across a CIA officer operating under cover of a military attaché office—a circumstance John MacGaffin, the CIA officer assigned to follow me in Beirut, still denies.
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