Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Intelligence from another Soviet agent (whom I’ll discuss later) had already put Bokhan under suspicion when Ames fingered him. On May 21, 1985, the GRU ordered its officer back to Moscow, telling him his eighteen-year-old son was having problems at his military academy in Kiev. Refusing to believe that explanation, Bokhan fled to the United States with the help of the CIA.

  Many others weren’t so lucky, including Vladimir Piguzov, whom the CIA recruited in Indonesia in the 1970s and code-named JOGGER, and Vladimir Potashov, code-named MEDIAN, a KGB officer working under cover in Moscow’s prestigious USA and Canada Institute. Potashov began spying for the CIA after approaching U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown during his visit to Moscow in 1981. Potashov was arrested and executed along with nine others betrayed by Ames. Piguzov was eventually pardoned by President Boris Yeltsin.

  5

  Rick Ames showed us how porous the United States was. You didn’t find 20 spies inside the CIA or the NSA or FBI. You found one or two. You found more in the KGB because it was corrupt. The KGB was a good spy organization but a corrupt system. And thank God. Because they had us for lunch with the amount of intelligence they had. The United States was penetrated very broadly but not very deeply. Lots of agencies were losing secrets, but they didn’t have huge penetrations.

  —David Major, retired FBI supervisory special agent and former

  director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council

  If the number of CIA agents in the KGB caused dismay, Ames’s information about American eavesdropping operations inside the Soviet Union simply astounded. In 1985, the CIA was juggling several highly complex, technologically advanced, ingenious operations. One had begun in 1979, when, poring over spy satellite photographs, the Americans noticed a construction project near Yasenevo. The CIA narrowed down the possibilities until correctly guessing it was a top secret communications line to a nuclear weapons research institute at Krasnaya Pakhra, in a town called Troitsk twenty-five miles southwest of Moscow. We built the underground communications line to evade their eavesdropping on wireless communications. The CIA had been trying to penetrate the institute for years.

  Working jointly with the NSA, the CIA began developing ways of accessing the cable and eventually settled on an operation similar to IVY BELLS. The agency code-named it TAW, the twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It planned to clamp a tap on the cable while the project remained under construction. Unlike IVY BELLS, however, the completed communications line wouldn’t be easily accessible. Special bunkers sealed with locked metal doors barred maintenance access points. In turn, security alarms and special Sixteenth Directorate KGB guards protected the structures.

  The CIA planned to work around the problem by running wires from the tap to a recording device hidden nearby. After building a mockup of the site and training operatives to retrieve and replace tapes, it successfully installed the device in a construction trench. Officers routinely collected tapes from the recording device for five years.

  Unbelievably, the CIA also installed eavesdropping devices disguised as tree branches near research installations. The “branches” beamed information back to Langley via satellite.

  For its sheer imagination, however, what Ames told us about operation ABSORB amazed us. By the early 1980s, the Americans had essentially located all our permanent ground-based nuclear missile installations. What they didn’t know, especially after we began developing MIRVs (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) that could hold up to ten warheads, was how powerful the weapons were that each site could launch.11

  While the United States was building highways in the 1950s—largely spurred by the security need for a national transportation network—the Soviet Union laid railroad track for the same reason. The CIA knew that most nuclear missiles were manufactured in the Soviet west and then shipped on the Trans-Siberian railroad to the Far East for installation in sites aimed at the United States. The CIA developed a plan to smuggle a complex Geiger counter into a train car. Traveling past missile-laden trains on the Trans-Siberian line, the device would count the number of warheads inside by registering the tiny amount of radiation each weapon emitted. By 1983, the CIA had spent almost $50 million on the project. In a test run, the agency hid high-tech cameras behind a fake wall inside a shipping container sent by a Japanese company from the far east port of Vladivostok across the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The cameras snapped photos of oncoming trains, many of which were carrying hardware from military manufacturing plants.

  The CIA prepared to do the same with its Geiger counter, called a radiation detection device. It sent a container to Japan rigged with complex technology hidden inside a shipment of ceramic vases to be delivered to Hamburg.12 (The KGB later called ABSORB the “porcelain operation.”)

  By then, however, Ames had already exposed the project. Although he failed to provide the shipping details, by the time the rigged container arrived at the Far East port of Nakhodka in February 1986, the SCD’s Krassilnikov was heading an effort to blanket our ports and stations with surveillance. The CIA cargo was scheduled to be loaded on a train bound for Leningrad, all the way west across the Soviet Union’s vast expanse. But KGB officers intercepted the container before it left Nakhodka. Inside, they found cameras, sensors and computer equipment. The technology was designed to register radiation levels, record the location of readings and peg them to images snapped by camera lenses through ventilation slits in the container’s side.13 The apparatus also included radar detection devices to collect information about Soviet air defenses. It was an astounding project, both for the guts it took to put it in motion and its complexity.

  Krassilnikov wanted to publicize his success in foiling the CIA mission as part of the propaganda effort against the United States. We had recently used Yurchenko’s defection to maximum effect, and Operation ABSORB would give us even more ammunition. But the KGB leadership quashed the idea to protect Ames, who had enabled us to thwart the CIA’s investment of many years of research and development costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

  6

  More cases continued to unfold during the Year of the Spy. In the summer of 1985, a handful of officers at the CIA began to realize their agency was suffering serious problems. Among the leaders was Paul Redmond, an independent-minded, quick-tempered Harvard University graduate from Boston who ran clandestine operations for the SE division.

  When he defected in August, Yurchenko seemed to explain why several American agents had disappeared: Edward Lee Howard. But at that critical time, Bearden in the SE division found it difficult to ascertain what director Bill Casey thought about the matter. During a meeting in Casey’s office in early August, Bearden pointed out that the CIA had handled Howard’s firing badly. “Maybe we deserved it,” he said. “We fired him and he was seething with revenge.”

  “How could we deserve it?” snapped SE division chief Gerber, who resented Casey’s close relationship with Bearden, whom many saw as a cowboy. Gerber’s subordinates considered him a bureaucratic-minded hard driver. But they also looked up to him as a deep-thinking intellectual. “How could we deserve treason?” he asked.

  The enigmatic Casey then seemed to make light of Howard’s betrayal, saying mistakes were inevitable. “It only hurts for a day,” he offered.

  In September, however, Redmond and others in the CIA began to suspect the KGB had another source. Agents Howard couldn’t have known about were also being wrapped up. But events moved too quickly. Far from figuring out what was hitting them, the agency’s Soviet hands had enough trouble simply staying abreast of what was happening to their assets.

  In October, CIA agent MILLION failed to show up for a scheduled meeting. MILLION was Gennady Smetanin, a GRU lieutenant colonel posted to Portugal. Cryptonyms usually stand for something; the CIA came up with Smetanin’s after he approached the defense attaché’s office in the Lisbon U.S. embassy in 1983 asking to be paid $1 million for his services. He claimed to have stolen that amount
from the GRU rezidentura and had to return it. A polygraph test indicated he was lying, but he confessed and the CIA signed him up anyway.

  Smetanin went on to become a shining example of the CIA’s professional handling. Not a top-ranking officer, he had limited access to secret information and probably didn’t provide the United States with much useful intelligence. But the CIA hoped he’d become a valuable source after promotions would give him access to better information. For that reason—and also because he obviously had an experienced handler—the CIA did a good job of communicating with him. It proved to us that the Americans had learned the lessons of the Penkovsky case. They kept meetings secret, conducting them in safe houses. They thoroughly checked rooms for eavesdropping devices and always provided backup sites for meetings. And they gave Smetanin and his wife Svetlana—who also spied for the CIA—U.S. passports, false identities and disguises in case they had to escape.

  But, as I’ve already said, even the best handling couldn’t protect against enemy spies. The GRU recalled Smetanin to Moscow in August, requesting he begin a scheduled home leave early. Complying, he and his wife were arrested as they stepped off a train in Moscow.

  Ames also identified the “angry colonel” about whom Edward Lee Howard had informed us. The American agent’s name was Vladimir Vasiliev. The GRU colonel volunteered to work for the CIA in Budapest and operated under the cryptonym ACCORD. He too was arrested.

  In November, the CIA lost track of yet another agent. KGB Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Varennik worked in the Soviet embassy in Bonn under cover as a Tass correspondent. In April 1985, he approached the CIA in Vienna, saying he needed money. He was recruited under the cryptonym FITNESS. According to the CIA, Varennik warned the agency that the KGB planned to damage relations between Washington and Bonn by bombing U.S. personnel in Germany and blaming local radical terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof or Red Army Faction gangs.

  President Reagan allegedly took a special interest in intelligence about KGB sabotage operations, which also resonated loudly among other members of his administration. Bearden writes that Casey took “the darkest stories of the Soviets at face value. Arguing against him could be dangerous for a CIA officer’s career.”14

  If discussions of a plot to stage explosions in Bonn did take place in Karlshorst, they were more likely generated not from above—as Varennik was said to have claimed—but by a young officer such as Varennik himself. Aspiring officers often proposed ambitious plans in order to get noticed; I did the same myself. But the KGB’s managers considered use of terror unacceptable. Although the Soviet Union aided national liberation movements and other groups that committed terrorist acts, Soviet intelligence itself didn’t resort to terror.

  Mobilization in case of war would be something else. For that, the KGB planned sabotage and other fifth column actions. We trained special forces for diversion operations and, as already mentioned, deposited supply caches in various countries. The KGB held annual meetings to discuss updating war mobilization plans. But the intelligence leadership would have ruled out the type of peacetime proposals Varennik is said to have described. Had we really planned acts of terror, discussions about them would have been highly secret. They would have taken place in Moscow, not Berlin, and lower-ranking officers such as Varennik wouldn’t have been privy to the debates.

  Ames provided no precise intelligence about Varennik, requiring the Center to conduct its own significant analysis. That was often the case. Ames frequently gave indirect information, either confirming what we already knew or sparking new drives to identify agents. Varennik was arrested after his exposure. The KGB recalled his wife and children to Moscow several days later, telling them he’d slipped on ice and hurt himself.

  Ames also exposed Major Sergei Vorontsov, a counterintelligence officer in the local Moscow branch of the SCD. The gruff, street-smart officer contacted the CIA in February 1984 by dropping a letter through the window of an embassy car. Code-named COWL, Vorontsov told the CIA about practices we employed to track American agents in Moscow, including use of a chemical substance the KGB had developed decades earlier to track targets in Moscow. The CIA called it spy dust.

  The uncommon substance contained nitrophenyl pentadien (NPPD), which could be used in small amounts. The KGB placed the chemical where targets were likely to come into contact with it. Traces would stick to anything they touched. If we wanted to confirm whether a KGB officer was meeting a CIA operative, for example, the chemical could be deposited on the passenger seat of the Russian’s car. If it later showed up anywhere the American had been, we knew we had our man (or woman). The CIA long suspected we used the chemical, having found traces of it on one of its officers. But the agency wasn’t sure until Vorontsov provided a sample. After his defection, Yurchenko also confirmed the substance’s existence. Shortly thereafter, in April 1985, the CIA decided to inform Moscow embassy employees about the news. It raised a media stink. The Americans feared NPPD was carcinogenic—which was potentially true.

  Vorontsov also told the CIA about Father Roman Potemkin, a KGB operative working under cover as an Orthodox priest. (Most of the Orthodox hierarchy was in some way connected to the KGB at the time.) Potemkin had tried to win the confidence of American journalist Nicholas Daniloff—Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report—by claiming to oppose Soviet religious oppression. When Daniloff showed the CIA a letter of technological information sent to him and addressed to the agency, the CIA contacted the priest—mistakenly thinking he’d written it. Nothing came of the exchange, but Daniloff later found himself at the center of an international scandal. Set up by a source of his who gave him photographs of the Afghan war, he was arrested and imprisoned. That was Moscow’s reply to the FBI’s arrest of a Soviet physicist at the United Nations on spying charges.

  U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz met Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to discuss Daniloff’s arrest. Burton Gerber also used a back channel to the KGB to meet counterintelligence chief Anatoly Kireyev in Vienna about the issue. Daniloff was soon released.

  Meanwhile, Vorontsov was arrested and used to entrap his CIA handler. When an American called Vorontsov’s KGB office at an appointed time in March 1986, Vorontsov was on the other end, ready to arrange a meeting. SCD officers arrested the handler, Michael Sellers, when he showed up to meet his agent, and expelled him from the Soviet Union.

  By early 1986, Redmond was no longer in the minority of CIA officers convinced the agency harbored a mole. In January, SE counterintelligence chief Gus Hathaway—the former Moscow station chief—and SE division head Gerber approached CIA case officer Sandy Grimes about the previous year’s failures. Grimes headed SE operations in Africa at the time but had also handled one of the CIA’s vanished agents, Leonid Polishchuk. Hoping to safeguard agents not yet compromised, Gerber assigned Grimes to handle two new spies recruited in Eastern Europe.15 The same month, Hathaway, Gerber, Bearden and Clair George, chief of CIA covert operations, briefed director Casey about their ongoing losses.

  One of their major theories was that we were intercepting CIA communications. To pinpoint a leak, the CIA sent internal cables about a fictitious agent in Moscow, then monitored communications links to ascertain whether the cables were the source of information to the KGB. Langley sent another series of cables to Moscow’s CIA station falsely claiming that our unpopular rezident in Lagos, Nigeria, was taking part in a fictitious U.S. operation. The Americans then waited to see if the rezident would be summoned to Moscow. He wasn’t.

  The CIA also sent a counterintelligence deputy chief to Moscow to meet the station chief in the CIA’s secret work area on the top floor of the U.S embassy. Dubbed the “yellow submarine,” the cramped enclosure, sealed inside a metallic box floating on cushions of air, had a self-contained power supply. (No electric devices or manual typewriters were permitted inside. That directive came after a 1984 incident, when the CIA discovered we had intercepted thirteen electric typewriters shipped to Moscow and
installed tiny transmitters inside them. Placed in secure areas of the embassy, although not those used by the CIA, the typewriters broadcast every typed word to a listening post outside the embassy.) Testing for KGB penetration of the premises, the two men discussed another fictitious operation against the KGB, but again nothing came of the conversation.

  Early in 1986, Casey asked John Stein, a top CIA officer, to examine files from the SE division for signs of a leak. Stein concluded that the agency had a major problem, but probably not caused by a Soviet agent inside the CIA. At the same time, Casey continued to disregard advice from Paul Redmond and others to launch a mole hunt.

  Meanwhile, Ames underwent polygraph testing in preparation for his posting to Rome. Scheduled for May 2, it was his first since 1976 and he was deeply worried about it. When the test administrator asked him if he’d been pitched by a foreign intelligence service, his negative answer registered fluctuations on the machine. The examiner pressed on, trying to find out why Ames appeared to be lying. Replying to the administrator’s questions, Ames explained that the nature of his work meant he was involved in pitching Soviets. He also claimed to be afraid of possible recruitment attempts in Rome. After the test, the examiner again asked Ames to explain his response. He replied that the question made him nervous because he knew the KGB was always trying to recruit CIA officers. “We know the Soviets are out there somewhere, and we’re worried about it,” he said.

  That seemed to settle it. The examiner accepted Ames’s explanation of his suspicious response and believed he was telling the truth. According to procedure, however, he again tested Ames, asking the same questions about being pitched. This time, Ames responded evenly, registering nothing to indicate he was lying. He was on his way to Rome, thrilled that the KGB had helped him pass the test and evade exposure.