Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  This was the first agent Popov had ever dispatched to the United States, and Kisvalter wished he had never been told about it. The FBI would have to be brought in on this one, and Hoover would probably want to arrest her. The GRU would want to know what had gone wrong, and Popov would inevitably fall under suspicion. Together, Kisvalter and Harvey composed a cable to Washington, tearing up three drafts before arriving at a version that sufficiently conveyed the delicacy of the situation without being insulting. In Washington, John Maury, head of the Soviet Bloc Division, took the cable to Dulles with a plea that the Bureau be kept at arm’s length. Dulles was sympathetic but said the FBI had to be informed. “We later got bootlegged copies of the surveillance reports which showed that a dozen FBI agents had followed her from the moment she got off the plane,” a CIA officer said.

  Special teams of agents brought in from Chicago watched as Tairova stepped off her Air France flight at New York’s Idlewild Airport, exchanged her francs for dollars, took a bus to the East Side of Manhattan, hailed a cab to Grand Central Station, and rode a subway to a hotel in the Bronx. The next day, while she was out, agents broke into her room and searched her suitcase, finding, just as Popov had said, the $20,000. The break-in was conducted with great care, but, said Kisvalter, “a trained intelligence agent is going to know when somebody goes through her suitcase no matter how carefully it is done.” Tairova knew it, and the FBI agents knew she knew it. Why else would she take the escalator to the third floor of a midtown department store, walk down to the second, and ride the elevator up to the fourth floor? But the surveillance continued. FBI agents sat in a movie theater in Yonkers as she waited for her “husband,” and followed the couple to his Manhattan apartment. The apartment was bugged, the phone was tapped, and an observation post was set up across the street. Tairova and her mate abruptly vanished. On the same day, a barber aboard the S.S. United States who was to serve as their courier between dead drops in New York and Paris jumped ship in Le Havre.

  As predicted, a GRU inspector called on Popov in Berlin. The Tairova woman was claiming she had been blown from the start, the inspector said, and Popov was one of only three persons in a position to have done that. Popov was furious. The least the FBI could have done was arrest Tairova, he fumed to Kisvalter, but the Bureau had let her get away and now there was a witness against him in Moscow. Popov’s only recourse was to blame Tairova. She had probably gotten cold feet and was trying to cover her cowardice, he told the inspector. The man from the GRU appeared placated, but not so the KGB. Popov was informed that the KGB had conducted countersurveillance of the entire episode and was able to confirm Tairova’s story. Popov prayed that the KGB was bluffing.

  He was recalled to Moscow for further questioning. Should he go back and try to brazen it through, or defect to the West? Popov remained confident that he could pull it off. The KGB seemed more upset over the discovery that he kept a mistress than over the Tairova case. “He considered that to be the prime reason for his recall to Moscow,” a CIA officer said, “and we, of course, hoped that the girl friend was the real reason he was being recalled.”

  In Moscow the CIA maintained contact with Popov through Russell Langelle, an intelligence officer serving under diplomatic cover in the American Embassy. Meetings in Moscow were not the convivial affairs they had been in Berlin, where Kisvalter and Popov could sit securely in a safe house and talk for hours over food and drink. In Moscow there were no safe houses, no sanctuaries from KGB surveillance. Between twenty and thirty KGB observations posts ringed the American Embassy. A CIA officer could be certain that KGB footpads would pick him up each time he ventured forth. To remain unobserved, meetings could last only a few seconds, long enough to exchange a message, a roll of film, or a word of encouragement.

  Langelle continued to exchange messages with Popov throughout the summer of 1959, but the quality of his intelligence had fallen off—an almost certain sign that he had come under KGB control. The CIA could only hope that Popov’s access to vital information was more limited in Moscow than it had been in Berlin, or that Langelle had not been able to develop the same rapport with him as Kisvalter had. That faint hope vanished on the morning of October 16, 1959, when Popov and Langelle were caught in the act of passing notes on a crowded Moscow bus. Langelle was seized by five men, wrestled into a waiting car, and driven to a nearby building, where he was accused of spying against the Soviet Union and threatened with imprisonment or worse if he did not cooperate. After nearly two hours of KGB threats and blandishments, all of which he greeted with stony silence, Langelle was released.

  The United States immediately protested the treatment of one of its “diplomats” and denied the Soviet allegation that Langelle was a spy. One week later at a news conference in Washington, Langelle was asked, “Why do you think they seized you?” “There is no one single answer to that question,” he replied artfully. Reporters pressed. “Was it part of your job to collect any kind of intelligence on the Soviet Union?” “None whatsoever,” Langelle said.

  As for Popov, an article in Izvestia described the treachery of a “Lieut. Col. P.” and quoted a repentant “P.” as saying, “I am ready for any punishment … for the supreme penalty. I deserve it.” Indeed, said Izvestia, “there are crimes after which it is impossible to live. A bullet at the end of a contemptible life is not only a punishment but also an act of mercy.”

  The CIA was naturally disappointed by the loss of its penetration agent and more than a little upset with the FBI for blowing the case by its heavy-handed surveillance of Tairova in New York. If there was any consolation, it was that a new, bizarre, and even more lucrative source had recently made contact with the CIA.

  The first letter, postmarked Zurich, arrived in Bern in March of 1959, addressed to Henry J. Taylor, the United States ambassador in Switzerland, who immediately turned it over to the CIA station chief. Inside, a second envelope addressed to J. Edgar Hoover contained a single-spaced typewritten letter offering to provide valuable information about Communist espionage operations in the West. The letter was in German and signed “Sniper.”

  “I was asked to examine the letter to see if we could determine what nationality the author was,” said Howard Roman, a German-speaking CIA officer. “I could tell by the syntax that this was not a native German. Since the writing was entirely about Poland, we concluded that we were talking to a Pole.” For his part, Sniper assumed that he was talking to Hoover, since that was whom he had addressed the letter to. “Hoover was mad as hell when he found out we had been opening his mail,” Roman said, “but Hoover agreed to let us handle it as long as we showed the Bureau everything we got from Sniper.”

  No one knew what to make of Sniper. Was he a mental case, a Communist trick, or the real thing? “We analyzed the typewriter in order to determine whether it was of East European make,” Roman said. “We also analyzed the watermarks on the paper. None of this yielded anything that made anybody suspicious.” Angleton was certain that Sniper was some sort of Communist provocation agent, but whatever he was, he could not be ignored. Even if Sniper was a provocation, he would surely give up something of value in order to establish his credibility. “It was the old question,” Roman said. “How much truth is the enemy willing to tell you in order to set you up for the big deception?”

  Following Sniper’s instructions, the CIA placed a small notice in the “personals” column of a Frankfurt newspaper, acknowledging receipt of his letter and commencing a correspondence that was to last for nearly two years. “At the beginning, it was rather a long time between drinks,” Roman said, but as Sniper grew bolder the frequency of his letters increased. In all, there were fourteen. Through notices in the Frankfurt newspaper, the CIA gave Sniper the number of a post office box in West Berlin where he could send his letters and pick up return mail containing requests for additional information hidden in secret writing beneath the text of otherwise innocuous correspondence. A second letter drop was set up in a public bathroom in Berlin’s Tiergart
en. Sniper was also given a phone number to call in case of emergency.

  Sniper’s letters were opened by Harvey’s men at the Berlin base, photographed, and forwarded to Washington for analysis and reply. “The letters were very confusing,” Roman said. “Everybody analyzed them differently.” When an advertisement for a hoola hoop showed up by accident one day in Sniper’s post office box, some of the CIA’s best minds spent weeks trying to catch his drift. According to Roman, “about four percent of the information in Sniper’s letters turned out to be useful.” The rest was indecipherable or of marginal interest. He wrote at great length about a notorious black marketeer who smuggled watches to Soviet military officers in Warsaw and undertook occasional spy missions for both the Russians and the Poles. “I remember one letter which Sniper said he had sent us at great personal risk, warning us that this black marketeer was making a trip to Vienna wearing a wig,” Roman said. Sniper urged the CIA to take an adjoining room at his hotel, drill a hole through the wall, pump an anesthetizing gas into his room, and spirit the scoundrel away. “That was the kind of stuff that took up a lot of room in his letters,” Roman said. “Then suddenly you would get two lines….”

  Two lines reporting that the KGB had muscled in on a Polish operation and taken over a spy inside the British Admiralty. “He never got anybody’s name straight,” Roman related, and this one “came out sounding like a seven-syllable Dutch name.” Sniper’s phonetic rendering of the spy’s name resembled nothing on the Admiralty lists, but he knew that the last name began with the letter H and that “H” had originally been recruited while assigned to the office of the British naval attaché in Warsaw. There was only one “H” assigned to the Admiralty who had also served in Warsaw, and that was Harry Houghton, a clerk at the Portland Naval Base. In June of 1960, agents from Scotland Yard watched as Houghton and his girl friend, Ethel Gee, handed a package to a jukebox salesman named Gordon Lonsdale in front of the Old Vic theater on London’s Waterloo Road. Scotland Yard staked out four more meetings over the next six months, all of them taking place on the first Saturday of the month. After each meeting, agents trailed Lonsdale to the London suburb of Ruislip, where he called at the home of Peter and Helen Kroger.

  Most of Sniper’s leads were not so easy to follow. His tip that the Russians had obtained an MI6 document listing British operational assets in Poland proved particularly difficult. The document could be traced to a finite number of offices in London and Europe, but there were no clues to suggest who in those offices might have given it to the KGB. Unwilling to contemplate the possibility of another Philby, MI6 concluded that the KGB had simply broken into one of the offices and pilfered the document.

  Then, as the year 1960 came to an end, Sniper suddenly dialed the emergency phone number given him by the CIA. “Are you ready to give me and my wife protection?” he asked. Sniper was coming out—if there was a Sniper. No one had as yet laid eyes on this mysterious source. “He spilled so much and we never met the guy,” one officer marveled. Howard Roman and one other officer were dispatched from Washington to greet Sniper when he emerged, but “when Helms sent us off … he made it plain he thought this was a bunch of crap.” Angleton thought so, too. He sent a cable to Berlin telling the base not to waste too much time waiting for Sniper.

  Sniper crossed into West Berlin as advertised—bringing his mistress instead of his wife—and identified himself for the first time as Michal Goleniewski, a high-ranking officer in Polish intelligence who had done double duty as a Soviet agent reporting to the KGB on anything his fellow Poles might try to hide from their Russian mentors. That explained why Sniper had been able to reveal so much about Soviet operations.

  Goleniewski had planned his defection well. In the months before his flight from Warsaw, he had stashed hundreds of pages of photographed documents in a hollow tree trunk that he passed each evening on his way home from work. By defecting at the start of the long Christmas holiday, he had given himself and the CIA a few extra days before his absence would be noticed and the alarm sounded—time enough to signal the lone CIA man in Warsaw to empty the hollow tree. “He must have stashed three hundred pages of Minox film in the hollow tree—lists of names, tables of organization,” Roman said. “There were several hundred names of Polish agents in the documents.”

  With Goleniewski safely in hand, Scotland Yard could move in on the Admiralty spy ring without fear of blowing a source. On the first Saturday in January, a detective fell in behind Lonsdale, Houghton, and Gee as they took their monthly walk up Waterloo Road. When Lonsdale politely offered to carry the lady’s straw shopping basket, Scotland Yard placed the three under arrest. In the suburb of Ruislip, security agents began a search of the Kroger home, finding a hollow-based cigarette lighter containing a onetime code pad with transmission times and frequencies, a 74-foot radio antenna laced through the rafters, and, beneath a trapdoor in the kitchen floor, a 150-watt high-frequency transmitter. The Krogers were arrested, booked, and fingerprinted. A search of the Yard’s Criminal Record Office turned up matching prints belonging to Morris and Lona Cohen of New York City. The FBI had circulated their prints in 1957 after their snapshots had been found among the belongings of Colonel Rudolf Abel, head of a Soviet espionage network in the United States. In fact, the FBI had been looking for the Cohens ever since 1951 as suspected accomplices of the Rosenbergs.

  According to his passport, Gordon Lonsdale had been born at Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Canada, on August 17, 1924—a ruse that held up only as long as it took the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to locate the medical records of the real Gordon Lonsdale. The child born in Canada had been circumcised; the man in custody had not. Lonsdale was a native Russian, Conon Molody, who had spent years training to pass himself off as an amiable Canadian.

  While the British rolled up the Lonsdale network, Goleniewski and his CIA guardians left Germany for Washington. Twenty hours later, after a refueling stop in the Azores, where Goleniewski tasted the pleasures of capitalism by playing the slot machines at the local officers’ club, the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base on the outskirts of Washington. Goleniewski was driven to a safe house in the Virginia countryside, and his debriefing was begun in earnest.

  A team of British interrogators arrived to find out more about how the Russians had obtained that list of MI6 assets in Poland. Goleniewski insisted that the list had not been stolen as MI6 believed but had been given to the Russians by an agent in Berlin. That described a much smaller universe. The number of MI6 men in Berlin at any one time was no more than ten. Their names could be traced through central registry and every reference followed through the paper maze until somewhere amid the trivia and errata of the files a suspicious pattern emerged—like the career of George Blake.

  Born in Holland, the son of an Egyptian Jew, Blake was the “odd man out” in the cliquish world of British intelligence. He had earned his entrance into the club not through ancestry and education, like Philby, but by dint of heroic deeds. As a member of the Dutch underground in World War II, Blake had made his way through Occupied France to neutral Portugal and finally to England with a warning that the Germans, in a classic double-cross operation, were controlling almost every team of British agents dropped into Holland. Several years later, as MI6 station chief in Seoul, Blake had been captured by advancing North Korean troops and had suffered stoically for three years in a Communist prison before returning, once more a hero, to London. A closer look revealed some disquieting anomalies. For one thing, Blake’s cousin, Henri Curiel, was a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party. For another, Blake had spent time in Moscow on his way back to London at the end of the Korean War. When interviewed by security agents, Blake’s secretary recalled that he had occasionally asked her to type an extra copy—for the files, he said.

  Over Easter of 1961, Blake was recalled to London for questioning by Ferguson Smith of MI5. Possessing something less than an ironclad case, Smith piled files high on his desk in an effort to intimidate Blake with the weight
of the evidence against him. It worked, but just barely. “Blake broke at a time when there was hardly another question left to ask him,” one CIA officer said. “If Blake had held out, they would not have had a case.”

  Once he had broken, Blake bragged freely about his treachery. “The amount of damage he was able to do was almost on a monumental scale,” said a CIA officer with intimate knowledge of the case. “This was a guy who had an incredible dedication to getting his hands on whatever he possibly could. Blake was lashing back at British society and British life for injuries, real or imagined. He was determined to wreak maximum vengeance. The Soviets gave him a camera, and he worked to beat hell with the bloody thing,” although “he couldn’t always make it work,” which was probably why he asked his secretary to type an extra copy.

  After a brief trial, conducted almost entirely in secret, Blake was sentenced to forty-two years in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down by a British court. The information that Blake had passed on to the Russians “has rendered much of this country’s efforts completely useless,” the judge said in pronouncing sentence.

  Bill Harvey didn’t need a British judge to tell him that. In December of 1953 he had sat at a conference table in London and discussed plans for the Berlin tunnel with his British counterparts while Blake kept the official minutes of the meeting. “He knew every detail of what we were doing,” said Carl Nelson, the technical mastermind of the tunnel. Nelson could remember arguing with Blake over whether British or American tape recorders should be purchased. “I couldn’t understand why he was giving me such a hard time on the choice of recorders,” Nelson recalled. Now he understood. “He didn’t want to use the good-quality stuff.” Fortunately, at Harvey’s insistence, Nelson had never disclosed to Blake or any British officer his technique for picking out the plain-text artifacts from the coded messages.