In the note, the man said he wanted to “discuss matters” on a “strictly confidential” basis with an “appropriate American official.” The note said nothing about who he was or what he wanted to talk about, but he sketched out a detailed plan for the next step, suggesting either meeting at a Metro stop—the underground subway—or in a car.6
Fulton was apprehensive. It was not unusual for Soviet citizens to give notes to Americans, and many American diplomats who left car windows open a crack in the summer found messages slipped through them. But Fulton had learned to be careful. The KGB often attempted to lure CIA officers with dangles. Sometimes, the trap was so crude it could easily be dismissed, but others were harder to detect. The KGB had a long history of skillful deceptions. They would lure a CIA officer to a meeting, then the officer would be ambushed, declared persona non grata, and expelled.
Every move of the Moscow station was coordinated with headquarters. Fulton told headquarters that the note from the man at the gas station conveyed a “carefully thought out” plan for a meeting but provided few details. The note “is conspiratorial, which might suggest some intel background,” he wrote. Fulton said he was “very much aware” the approach could be a KGB dangle, and he would like to have a better idea of what the man wanted. Fulton said he would signal to the man that he was interested in the “car” option but not hold a personal meeting just yet. If the man was a dangle, Fulton did not want to put his foot into a trap.
But Fulton was also intrigued. The note had a ring of authenticity to it. Fulton thought if he took the first step, perhaps the man would come back with more information. He drove his car to the spot the man had mentioned, but he didn’t see the man anywhere. Later, CIA headquarters said they did not want to pursue the contact, fearing it was a trap, and instructed Fulton to do nothing more.7
On February 3, the man appeared again. This time, he approached Fulton’s car on a street very close to the embassy at 7:00 p.m., after dark. Fulton happened at that moment to be sitting in his car with the engine running. There was a Soviet militia post nearby, but the car was obscured by a high snowbank along the street. The man’s face appeared at the driver’s side window, and he tapped on it. When Fulton rolled down the window, the man dropped a note into the car. He then turned and left. No one was following him.
The note again proposed a signal and a meeting. The man said the signal should be delivered on the next evening, by parking the car on a nearby street. Fulton sent a cable to headquarters, saying the man’s motives were “still not clear,” so he did not respond.
Two weeks later, on February 17, Fulton left the embassy around 6:45 p.m. and, as he approached his car, noticed the man leave a phone booth that was nestled in the shadows of an apartment building, about thirty feet away. Fulton was climbing into the car when the man approached him.
“What do you want?” Fulton asked.
The man said he wanted to give Fulton another note. He tossed a folded letter into the car, turned on his heel, and quickly left. Fulton saw no one around, got in his car, and calmly drove home. He saw no one following him.
When he opened the letter, Fulton found four handwritten pages. He sent a rough translation to headquarters the next morning. The man wrote that he realized why his repeated requests were being ignored. “My activities may have brought suspicion,” he said, adding that he understood full well the CIA was fearful of being trapped by the KGB. But, the man added, if he had wanted to do that, he could have done so already. This was not his intent or his method. “I’m an engineer and not a specialist in secret matters,” he said, promising to provide more information about himself to dispel the mistrust but urging the CIA to handle his next message very carefully. “I work in a closed enterprise,” he said, which meant a secret Soviet facility, probably related to defense or military work. In order to pass notes, the man wrote, he had been waiting for hours at more than one location to find just the right moment, a time-consuming and stressful vigil. He implored the CIA to make it easier and to show up for his next note on the following Friday.
Fulton asked CIA headquarters for permission to go ahead. He was impressed by the man’s tenacity. He told headquarters that the risk wasn’t great to park his car on the street and wait for the man to thrust an envelope through the window. The man “has essentially already done this twice,” he said, and the KGB could have ambushed them earlier if they had wanted to.
Fulton realized there would be doubts at headquarters. They might well ask, wasn’t it rather unlikely that a Russian man in Moscow, without any help at all, would have singled out the CIA’s station chief to deliver a note? At the time of the first note in January, the United States had just expelled a KGB officer at the United Nations—could this be the setup for retaliation? Still, something about the man led Fulton to think he was genuine. Fulton told headquarters he believed the man had chosen him by coincidence at the diplomatic gas station and probably memorized the car’s license number, and thus it was “not unusual” that he would continue to seek him out. Fulton said he would “under no circumstances” proceed to other sites that could be a trap.8
Headquarters was wary and told Fulton not to give the man a signal.
Just a few months later, in May 1977, the man approached Fulton for the fourth time. He had been hiding in a phone booth near Fulton’s car and was carrying a package. Fulton saw KGB guards nearby, so he did not take the package.
The man banged on Fulton’s car to get his attention.
Fulton ignored him, as headquarters instructed.9
By the summer, Fulton’s tour was over. The new chief of the Moscow station was Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, who brought a different style. He had grown up in southern Virginia and never lost his slight accent, with its gentle rolling r’s, or his gentleman’s manners, which combined with a powerful sense of mission. Hathaway, fifty-three years old, served in Berlin for the CIA in the late 1950s and later in Latin America and had a hard-charging way about him, a zeal for operations.
All through the spring and early summer of 1977, the Moscow station struggled with setbacks in the Ogorodnik case. A hollow log was left for him in February, but he did not show up. He emplaced a dead drop on schedule in April, but when the station’s technical officers opened it, they concluded it was put together by someone else. His photography, usually perfect, seemed careless.
Hathaway wanted to recontact Ogorodnik and get the operation back on track. The CIA sent the agent a message by a coded shortwave radio broadcast, instructing him to leave a signal with a small red mark on a “Children Crossing” traffic sign if he was ready for another dead drop.
Early on the morning of July 15, 1977, Peterson drove by the sign, and the mark was there, but something didn’t look right. It was bold, cherry red, as if it had been deliberately stenciled. A real agent doesn’t have time to stencil a signal like that. She went to the station and told the others what she had seen. The signal was there, yes, but it seemed odd. Peterson suggested that someone else place the next drop. She had a knot in her stomach. The stenciled mark should have made Hathaway more cautious, but it didn’t. He was eager to keep going.
That day, Peterson worked her usual day hours at her cover job. At 6:00 p.m., she went to the station and reviewed the operations plan at the small conference table in Hathaway’s office. Then she went home, changed into comfortable clothes, a summer blouse and platform sandals, and pulled back her hair, streaked with blond. She would never look like a Russian, but she wanted to blend in as much as possible. She attached a tiny CIA radio receiver that detected KGB transmissions to her bra with Velcro. She connected the neck loop antenna and then inserted a very small wireless earpiece, entirely concealed by her hair.
By car, she went on a long, winding surveillance detection run around town, designed to flush out any KGB monitors. She parked her car, entered the subway, changed at three stations, and exited at the sports stadium just as a crowd wa
s leaving a soccer game. She slipped into the crowd, finally arriving at the site for the dead drop, located in a small stone tower on a railroad bridge spanning the Moscow River.
She walked up forty stairs to a point on the bridge where she had left packages for Ogorodnik before. In her bag was a piece of crumbly black asphalt that had a hidden compartment inside holding messages and a miniature camera for Ogorodnik. At 10:15 p.m., barely dusk in Moscow during the summer, Peterson left the chunk of black asphalt in a narrow square window in the stone tower of the bridge, pushing it exactly one arm’s length from the edge. She began to descend the steps when she saw three men in white shirts rushing toward her. She had nowhere to escape and wasn’t about to jump into the river. Grabbed by the men, she felt a jolt of anger that it was the KGB. A van pulled up, and more men clambered out. Peterson kicked one of them hard, but they restrained her. A KGB officer began to take flash pictures. Then, groping her, they discovered the radio receiver but didn’t know how to peel apart the Velcro. Next, they produced the black asphalt chunk they found in the tower. Peterson insisted, loudly, that she was an American citizen, they should call the embassy, they could not detain her. “Let me go!” she shouted. One of the KGB men said, “Please keep your voice down.” Peterson kept repeating the embassy phone number. Finally, they got the radio receiver off the bra and found the neck loop. However, they never discovered the small wireless earpiece.
Peterson was taken to KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, and interrogated. She had a sinking feeling when they brought out the asphalt chunk, removed the four reverse-threaded screws, took off the lid to the hidden cavity, and emptied it in front of her, a technician pulling out each item as the interrogator watched. There was a message for Ogorodnik imprinted in tiny letters on 35 mm film, contact lenses and fluid, rolls of tightly wound rubles, and emerald jewelry. When the big black fountain pen was pulled out, the chief interrogator sharply instructed the technician to put it down and not touch it. His tone suggested that he was aware of the cyanide capsule the CIA had given to Ogorodnik. In fact, Peterson knew this pen concealed a camera, not the cyanide capsule, but she realized very quickly, by the interrogator’s manner, that Ogorodnik had been caught.
She was released later that night, the usual procedure in espionage arrests. The embassy’s consular affairs officer came to get her. His eyes were wide with disbelief; he thought she had been a bureaucrat, not a case officer on the streets. The consular affairs officer drove her to the embassy, and Peterson went immediately to the Moscow station, knowing that shortly she would be declared persona non grata in the Soviet Union. Over the next few hours, well past midnight, sitting in the middle of the station, she recounted the events, sometimes with profanity, as her colleagues listened, and one of them took notes for a cable back to headquarters. The cable was sent out at 3:30 a.m. Moscow time.
Sad, exhausted, and uncertain about how Ogorodnik had been discovered, Peterson had little sleep before she flew out of Moscow the next day, Saturday, July 16.
At headquarters, it was a crushing blow. Ogorodnik was a prized agent, the first to show the Angleton years had finally been left behind. He had been lost, and no one knew why. James Olson, a case officer, recalled the scene at headquarters soon after word reached the Soviet desk. “The entire USSR desk, from the lowest clerk to the crusty old chief, were all crying,” Olson remembered. “It was because we lost trigon. We knew trigon was gone.”10
Peterson later learned that Ogorodnik had been arrested at his apartment. He was stripped to his underwear. Knowing the KGB would be eager to learn every detail of his work with the CIA, he offered to write a confession. They handed him his pen, and he bit down on the barrel with the cyanide capsule inside. He died on the spot, before the KGB could learn any more.11
3
A Man Called Sphere
On the long trip home, Marti Peterson struggled with the unanswered questions. She didn’t know why the case had fallen apart. Her surveillance detection run had been long and thorough, and she had seen no signs of the KGB, yet they were lying in wait at the bridge. Even after they grabbed her, they still didn’t know she was CIA; she had eluded them for two years. So how did they figure out the precise time and place for the dead drop? Was there a slipup? Was there surveillance she didn’t see? A communications leak? Did Ogorodnik make a mistake? Or something worse?1
Peterson left Moscow quickly in the clothes she was wearing the night of the ambush. In Washington, she bought a new dress. On Monday, July 18, less than seventy-two hours after the debacle in Moscow, she walked up the steps to the main entrance of CIA headquarters at Langley. In her new identification photograph taken that morning, she is smiling, a bit hesitantly, her eyes clear and bright. The debriefings revived the same questions she had asked herself about Ogorodnik’s missed meetings, the deteriorating quality of his photographs, the inexplicable events in the forest, and the woman with the ponytail. Then, in a corridor at headquarters, she saw Fulton, her mentor, for the first time since he had left the Moscow station. They embraced and fought back tears, no words to speak the sorrow they felt.
On the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, Peterson entered the large office suite of Admiral Stansfield Turner, the new director of central intelligence, who after four months in the job was still finding his way. Turner had a very forceful public presence, but in private he was cordial and reserved. He sat down at the head of a long conference table, dismissed the CIA officer who had brought Peterson, and motioned to her to take a chair at his right. After she recounted everything that had happened, Turner asked her to accompany him to meet President Jimmy Carter at his regular briefing the next day. There would only be nine or ten minutes to tell her story.
On Tuesday, they entered the Oval Office. On the coffee table in front of Carter, Peterson placed a replica of the black asphalt chunk used to hold the secret messages for Ogorodnik and the CIA’s site sketches, to help illustrate what happened. The president was engrossed by her account. At one point, the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, spoke up, filling in details, such as the name of the agent, Ogorodnik, and the name of the Moscow railroad bridge where she had been ambushed. Brzezinski, whose father had been a Polish aristocrat and diplomat in the anticommunist Polish government before World War II, devoted his career as a professor to chronicling the decline of Soviet communism. He knew perhaps better than anyone in the room how valuable and unusual this spy had been. “I greatly admire your courage,” Brzezinski told Peterson as she was leaving. Ten minutes had stretched to more than twenty. Peterson left the Oval Office alone and had to ask a White House secretary how to find her way out to the street. Later that day, Turner sent her a breezy, handwritten thank-you note. “You are the only person who has stood face-to-face with the KGB and the President of the United States all within three days,” he said. “I admire and congratulate you.”
But privately, Turner was brooding about her expulsion. The events in Moscow meant something was wrong.
Stansfield Turner grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, an affluent small town on the lakeshore north of Chicago with stately homes and tree-lined streets. His father, Oliver, was a self-made businessman who filled the house with books. His mother drilled into him values of honesty and integrity. Turner became an Eagle Scout and president of his high school class, went on to Amherst College, and, after a lobbying campaign by his father, won admission to the U.S. Naval Academy. When he graduated in June 1946, Turner stood at 25th in a class of 841. He was at the top of the class in aptitude for service—qualities of leadership, integrity, reliability, and other traits of a superior officer. But Turner chafed at the academy’s courses, heavily oriented toward engineering, seamanship, and science. His interests ran far beyond. Rather than plunge immediately into a navy career, Turner won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics.2
On returning to the navy, Turner went to sea on destroyers but wa
s impatient with the minutiae of shipboard life. He wanted to think big and be at the center of change. In the 1950s, he was selected by a new chief of naval operations, Arleigh Burke, to put together a group of junior officers to tell Burke what was wrong with the navy and how to fix it, an assignment Turner found exhilarating. Then Turner was selected to work with the whiz kids under Robert McNamara in the 1960s, when systems analysis was all the rage. When Admiral Elmo Zumwalt became the new chief of naval operations in 1970, he put Turner in charge of new initiatives in his first sixty days. Through it all, Turner became convinced the military was hidebound and desperately needed new thinking. He once used systems analysis to study naval minesweeping and showed how it could be done better and faster from a helicopter than from a ship. Yet Turner’s zeal for change often ran headlong into inertia, especially in the Vietnam War years, when military morale and discipline were sapped by defeat and a loss of support at home. Appointed commander of the Naval War College in 1972, Turner seized the opportunity to overhaul the curriculum, making it more rigorous and demanding. Through all his assignments, he preached the virtues of discipline and accountability.
Turner’s class at the U.S. Naval Academy included a somewhat shy and skinny fellow from a backwater peanut farm in Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who also applied for a Rhodes Scholarship but did not get it. Carter stood at fifty-ninth in the class. Carter and Turner did not know each other then. Carter went on to become a nuclear submariner, farmer, and governor of Georgia. In 1973, Turner invited Carter to speak at the war college and was impressed. The following year, in October 1974, they met again at Carter’s offices in Atlanta. Carter fired rapid questions at Turner for half an hour about the state of the U.S. military and the navy. When it was over, Carter said, “By the way, the day after tomorrow, I am announcing that I’m going to run for president of the United States.”
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Page 5