Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  It was clear that Blake had blown Operation SILVER in Vienna as well as GOLD in Berlin. Despite its problems with Harris tweed and child molestation, the Schwechat tunnel had gone undetected for more than three years until Blake returned from captivity in Korea and was assigned to the unit in charge of the listening operation. Shortly after that assignment, the Russians complained to the Austrian authorities about a fault in the line, and the British quietly removed the tap. In retrospect, the promptness of the Russian complaint following Blake’s return to duty was seen as the first sign that something had happened to him in Korea. When Blake reported the existence of a second tunnel in Berlin, the KGB apparently decided to tread a little more lightly and observe a decent interval in order to protect him.

  It seemed a reasonable trade-off. The KGB would keep its penetration of MI6 and let the CIA and MI6 sink their money and manpower into processing the reams of trivia that came over the wires. After all, one high-ranking CIA officer observed, “the Soviets knew that the tunnel’s chief value was early warning, and they also knew they weren’t going to attack.” In October of 1956, when the Soviet Army moved in to crush the Hungarian revolution, the tunnel might have provided some advance warning, but by then it had been discovered.

  The realization that the Soviets had known about the tunnel carried implications that were distressing in the extreme. What if they had used the tunnel to mount a massive disinformation campaign that gorged the files of the CIA and MI6 with bogus intelligence? That would have strained the capacity of even the KGB, but it certainly seemed possible that on one or two crucial points— the deployment of nuclear weapons, for instance—the Russians could have inserted disinformation into the intelligence stream.

  Such counterintelligence analysis was purely academic—art for art’s sake. As one expert put it, “In practice, any significant leak such as the compromise of the tunnel became almost impossible to handle for simple reasons of manpower.” It was simply not possible to track back over the miles and miles of tape from the tunnel, searching for some piece of Soviet deception. “In the end, you could only speculate anyway,” the expert said. “The people who had handled the tunnel never thought twice about the implications of the tunnel’s being blown from the start. To think seriously about it is not to invest the effort, since it is totally beyond your capabilities. The only thing to do is to take immediate corrective measures and shove the rest of it under the rug.”

  The tunnel was not the only conundrum that the unmasking of George Blake posed for Western intelligence. During his confession Blake boasted that he had told his Soviet handlers all about “Dave Murphy’s big operation in Berlin.” Dave Murphy was head of Soviet operations under Harvey in Berlin, and his big operation had been George Kisvalter’s running of Colonel Popov. That cast a decidedly different light on the Popov affair. The FBI’s surveillance of Popov’s agent Tairova in New York City “was not the cause of Popov’s discovery,” a CIA officer said. “That was just the end play.” The question then became: “At what point was he compromised?” Had Popov, like the tunnel, been blown from the start?

  Further analysis of the case revealed that Blake could have betrayed Popov as early as 1955, when the CIA’s prize agent was transferred by the GRU from Vienna to East Germany. Popov had left Vienna with instructions to recontact Kisvalter as soon as he got to Berlin. However, after six weeks of home leave in Moscow, Popov was assigned not to Berlin but to a GRU unit stationed elsewhere in East Germany. Stranded in the boondocks, he had devised his own plan for recontacting Kisvalter by passing a letter to a member of a British military mission touring East Germany. The British officer dutifully forwarded the letter to MI6 in Berlin, where it landed in a safe used by George Blake.

  Kisvalter refused to believe that Popov had been blown at such an early stage. “Judging from the quality of information we got from Popov long after Blake left Berlin, it couldn’t have been Blake who blew Popov,” he insisted. But the argument over whether the FBI or Blake had been responsible for Popov’s demise obscured a much more fundamental question. Angleton still maintained that Goleniewski was a Soviet provocation agent. If that was the case, then the Soviets had deliberately blown Blake as part of some larger operation. At first blush, Angleton’s scenario was almost too callous and byzantine to contemplate. It meant that the Soviets had given up not only Blake but also Lonsdale and his entire network as well. And that was not all. A third Soviet spy, Heinz Felfe of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency (BND), had also been captured through leads supplied by Goleniewski.

  The CIA had long suspected the existence of a leak somewhere in the BND. As early as 1954 a Soviet defector named Peter Deriabin had warned of two KGB agents, code-named PETER and PAUL, inside the BND, and in 1957 the CIA had performed a security analysis of the BND that identified Felfe, chief of counterintelligence operations against the Soviet Union, as a possible penetration agent. The case against Felfe had been too circumstantial to permit any action, and the suspicion had simply festered for two years until Goleniewski started writing his letters. In one of his earliest letters, Goleniewski warned that the Soviets were passing summaries of West German intelligence reports to the Poles, a tip that heightened the CIA’s suspicions about Felfe but again was far too vague to support an outright accusation. One of Goleniewski’s final letters, however, provided some very specific information. He reported that he had heard the KGB’s chief of counterintelligence boast that of six BND officers who had visited the United States in 1956 at CIA expense, two were Soviet agents. A check of the files quickly produced a list of the six BND officers who had been the CIA’s guests in 1956. One of them was Heinz Felfe. That was the break the CIA had been waiting for. Operation DROWZY, as the investigation of Felfe was known, sprang fully awake.

  A tap installed on Felfe’s phone picked up an unusual number of conversations with Hans Clemens, chief of a BND surveillance team in Bonn. Physical surveillance of Clemens suggested that he might be the communicator for a Soviet spy ring. When his movemerits were plotted against the schedule of clandestine Soviet broadcasts, the coincidences were striking. Then, one Friday in November of 1961, Clemens called Felfe to complain that he had been unable to decipher a message. Felfe told him to send the message to him in a registered letter. German security agents intercepted the letter and found a single sheet of paper bearing coded instructions from Felfe’s Soviet case officer. The envelope was resealed and delivered to Felfe on Monday morning. He had the paper in his pocket later that day when he was arrested. Felfe thrust the paper into his mouth, but police wrestled him to the floor and pried it from his jaws before he could swallow.

  Blake, Lonsdale, and Felfe—all had been blown by Goleniewski. “The best defector the U.S. ever had,” one CIA officer called him. Yet Angleton maintained that Goleniewski was a Soviet provocation, a KGB trick designed to lead the CIA into some devilish trap. What could possibly be worth the loss of three such well-placed spies? “It’s hard for me to answer that without knowing the value of what they were trying to protect,” a counterintelligence officer responded.

  The temptation was to dismiss Angleton’s thesis, but a subsequent analysis concluded that Goleniewski had unwittingly allowed himself to be used by the Russians as a conduit for passing selected intelligence to the West. “The key to the Goleniewski case,” a counterintelligence officer explained, “is that the Soviets became aware that somebody was writing these letters. There was a feedback in Goleniewski’s later letters of things he’d learned from the Soviets which reflected things he’d already told us…. The Soviets began inserting corrections into his previous information.” The early letter warning that the Soviets were receiving copies of West German intelligence reports was a lead that heightened the CIA’s existing suspicions of Felfe but was too vague to be of any investigative use. The later letter providing the tip that two Soviet agents had been among a group of six BND officers visiting the United States was a lead that “was so specific and such a sock that it was
suspect.” An analysis done by Howard Roman of Goleniewski’s fourteen letters pointed out that their general content had at first concerned Polish cases but that the focus had gradually shifted to intelligence picked up from the Soviets. “He had been dropped as an agent by the Soviets and this was one thing that was eating at him when he turned to us,” a counterintelligence officer said of Goleniewski. “He was out of favor, but in fairly short order after he began writing to us, they picked him up again, and the content turned around to things the Soviets were telling him, particularly about the British.”

  Viewed from that perspective, Angleton’s conviction that, witting or unwitting, Goleniewski was a Soviet provocation agent appeared much more plausible than it had at first. Not all the information Goleniewski included in his letters was necessarily fed to him by the KGB for CIA consumption. Some of his most important leads might well have reflected information he learned before he came under Soviet control. Only the Felfe lead looked like a deliberate plant, and the loss of Felfe had by no means been an unmitigated disaster for the KGB. The Felfe case touched off such a scandal in Germany that serious consideration was given to dissolution of the BND, and all that the KGB gave up was a spy who had already fallen under deep suspicion through the defector Deriabin’s warning about PETER and PAUL and the CIA’s security analysis of the BND. There were elements of the case that suggested that once Goleniewski had delivered the Felfe lead, the KGB decided the game was no longer worth all the damage he was doing on his own. In what looked like a deliberate attempt to get him out of its hair, the KGB ordered his travel restricted and enlisted his aid in searching for a penetration agent who he knew could only be himself. Terrified that the KGB was on to him, Goleniewski fled.

  This analysis of the case could not be proved, but one thing was certain. Goleniewski, with or without the knowledge of the KGB, had planted a germ within the body of the CIA that would become a debilitating disease, all but paralyzing the Agency’s clandestine operations against the Soviet Union. The germ was the suspicion that the CIA itself had been penetrated by the KGB, that a Soviet mole had burrowed to the Agency’s core. “Goleniewski was the first and primary source on a mole,” a CIA officer said. According to Roman, “Goleniewski claimed that the Russians talked as though they had penetrated the CIA.” Goleniewski was also convinced that the Russians had found out about him through a leak from the CIA and that he had barely escaped with his life.

  It was possible that his fears were exaggerated. It was also possible that the Russians had found out about him through some other source, perhaps through a penetration of British intelligence, which had worked closely with the CIA on the Goleniewski case. But there was one fact that made the conclusion that the KGB had penetrated the CIA all but inescapable. “A letter Goleniewski wrote us when he was still in Warsaw provided specific evidence that the Soviets knew of our intention to take a specific operational step,” a CIA officer said. “For it to get into Goleniewski’s letter, the Russians had to have told him about it within two weeks of its formulation in Washington.” The operation, a CIA plan to recruit a Polish intelligence officer in Switzerland, “could scarcely have been more tightly held.” How else could the Russians have known of it—unless they had penetrated the CIA?

  The Agency had barely begun to digest the Goleniewski case when in December of 1961 a KGB officer named Klimov appeared without warning at the home of the CIA station chief in Helsinki, handed over a batch of documents, and announced that he wanted to defect.

  Klimov’s name had been Anatoli Golitsin when he had first come to the CIA’s attention in 1954 as a young counterintelligence officer assigned to Vienna. One of his colleagues, Peter Deriabin, had defected and during his interrogation had listed the KGB officers most susceptible to recruitment by the CIA. Golitsin was second on Deriabin’s list. Golitsin’s wife had a loose reputation, Deriabin said, and that could be used to get under his skin. Golitsin was also vulnerable because he had an overblown notion of his expertise and was unpopular with his fellow officers, Deriabin told his interrogators.

  Before the CIA could prepare a recruitment pitch for Golitsin, he was recalled to Moscow for a headquarters assignment in the Anglo-American department of the First Chief Directorate, the branch that conducted espionage operations against targets in the United States and Britain. Later he spent some months in a headquarters unit that processed reports from the KGB’s spies inside NATO. It was during this period, Golitsin later said, that he became fed up with the Soviet system and decided to offer his services to the other side. With that aim in mind, he began searching the intelligence reports for clues to the identities of the KGB’s sources and memorizing the contents of documents pilfered from NATO files.

  Golitsin’s chance came in 1961, when he was given his new identity as Klimov and dispatched with his wife and child to the KGB station in Helsinki. The CIA did not draw the connection between the Golitsin of Vienna and the Klimov of Helsinki and again made no attempt to recruit him. Golitsin finally took matters into his own hands and defected. “It was quite a shock,” a CIA officer said.

  The CIA appeared to have been handed a major triumph in the espionage wars. Almost in spite of itself the Agency had latched onto a source who claimed to be capable of exposing Soviet spies throughout the Western world. There was the usual danger that Golitsin might be a KGB disinformation agent and not a bona fide defector, but his handlers quickly satisfied themselves on that score. “The amount of information we got from Golitsin in the first forty-eight hours of his interrogation established in most people’s minds that he was for real,” a CIA officer said. “We knew quite a bit about the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, and we were able to check his information against what we already knew.”

  The biggest problem with Golitsin was not his bona fides but his behavior. Defectors are a notoriously difficult lot to handle, and Golitsin was no exception. “There is no such thing as a normal defector,” a chief of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division said. “He defects for a series of reasons usually having to do with serious psychological problems. There is something wrong with him in the first instance. The fact is that the guy is sick and temperamental. The Canadian government has spent something like seven million dollars trying to settle Gouzenko down. He’s a drunk who would go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he is also a showcase character who fled from terror, and the Canadians don’t want the negative side to get out. He’s been one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Canadian government they’ve ever had, but on the other hand, his information was great.” The United States experienced similar though less costly problems with Goleniewski. According to Howard Roman, “Goleniewski got into quite a psychological tizzy during his interrogations. He used to play Victrola records of old European songs at top volume and drink booze.” Goleniewski would later insist that he was the last of the Romanovs and that Henry Kissinger was a Soviet agent.

  As for Golitsin, he was “diagnosed by a psychiatrist and separately by a clinical psychologist as a paranoid,” said John Hart, a CIA officer who conducted an extensive review of the Agency’s handling of defectors. Peer de Silva, the onetime chief of operations for the Soviet Bloc Division, called Golitsin “a total son of a bitch.” An aide to Angleton put it more delicately: “Golitsin was a very difficult individual to accommodate.” Another counterintelligence officer said that “at first SB [Soviet Bloc Division] handled him, but he just refused to cooperate with a whole series of SB case officers who he insisted were idiots. He demanded access to the highest levels of the U.S. government.” John Hart said that Golitsin “basically insisted that he wanted to deal only with the President of the United States.”

  Finally, Golitsin was handed over to Angleton, commencing one of the most extraordinary relationships in the history of the secret war between the CIA and the KGB. In Golitsin, Angleton found a defector whose dire warnings of Soviet machinations conformed to his own vision of fiendishly subtle KGB plots. According to Hart, Golitsin’s warnings
“centered around the idea that the KGB had vast resources which it was using to deceive not only the U.S. government but other Western governments. This plot was masterminded by something called the KGB Disinformation Directorate, and this KGB Disinformation Directorate was able to deceive the West… because of the fact that it had penetrations at high levels, both within the intelligence services of these countries, including our own, but also in high places in the governments of the various countries.” Coming so soon after the Goleniewski case and the arrests of Blake, Lonsdale, and Felfe, Golitsin’s message was a compelling one, particularly for Angleton.

  “Golitsin became the swami as far as Jim was concerned,” de Silva said. “Angleton made a career out of Golitsin,” a chief of the Soviet Bloc Division added. “He built his whole position on Golitsin.” Assigned the cryptonym AE/LADLE, Golitsin became what one officer called “the prime interpreter of counterintelligence.” Angleton arranged for Golitsin to meet with the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “An Attorney General who does not know the minutiae of the threat is a very poor Attorney General,” Angleton said. Although Kennedy turned down Golitsin’s audacious request for $30 million with which to conduct operations against the Soviet Union, the defector had finally gained the access he craved. When Golitsin warned that a KGB network with the code name SAPPHIRE was operating inside French intelligence and that even the French cabinet had been penetrated, the information was relayed to Paris in the form of a personal letter from President Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle.