Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Golitsin told of penetrations everywhere—in the United States, England, France, Germany, Austria, Canada, Australia, and on and on. Alerted to this new source, security officers from friendly intelligence services all over the world flocked to Washington to question Golitsin. He told the Canadians about a homosexual ambassador to the Soviet Union who had been blackmailed into working for the KGB, and he also warned the British about a “ring of five” Soviet agents.

  Burgess and Maclean undoubtedly were two members of the “ring of five,” and Philby was the leading candidate for the third. With all the circumstantial evidence against him, Philby must have been laboring under a tremendous psychological burden, particularly after George Blake was sentenced to forty-two years for spying. When Nicholas Elliott, the MI6 station chief in Beirut, confronted him anew with the evidence against him, Philby finally broke and gave what one officer described as “a very limited confession.” Elliott flew to London for consultation about the next move, leaving Philby a free man in Beirut. On January 23, 1963, nearly twelve years after Harvey had first pointed an accusing finger, Philby fled to the Soviet Union. A year later, Sir Anthony Blunt, curator of the royal art collection, confessed to having spied for the Soviets during the war and to having helped Burgess and Maclean escape in 1951. Blunt did not have to follow Philby into exile. He was granted immunity in return for his confession. Meanwhile, security officers intensified their search for a fifth man, concentrating on several members of MI5 who had known Burgess. The deeper they dug, said one British investigator, the more Golitsin’s “ring of five” looked like a “ring of twenty-five.”

  Angleton’s search for Soviet spies in the CIA’s ranks was not meeting with such spectacular results. According to Golitsin, the KGB had a source named SASHA who had penetrated the Agency’s German-based operations. “Right in the middle of the SB [Soviet bloc] Division there was a staff officer named Sasha,” a onetime head of the division recalled. Not only did the name match, but the description fit as well. In the early 1950s, the CIA’s Sasha had been stationed in Germany running operations against the Soviet Union with Russian émigrés. “At first everyone became frantic,” the division chief said, “but then cooler heads prevailed and said, ‘Forget it, no one’s going to name an agent by his true name.’ ” Besides, Golitsin had a better lead to source SASHA’s true identity. He could not recall his name precisely, but he was certain that it began with the letter “K.” An investigation of CIA officers whose names began with “K” and who had served in Germany failed to uncover any Soviet agents, although it did result in the resignation of one officer for mishandling of Agency funds.

  Even as Angleton pressed the hunt for SASHA, Golitsin raised the specter of another, more deadly penetration of the Agency. He told of a trip made to the United States in 1957 by V. M. Kovshuk, head of the American Embassy section in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. Kovshuk was too senior an officer to be dispatched to the United States unless it was a mission of the greatest import, Golitsin said. He suggested that Kovshuk had come to meet with a high-level mole, someone who had been recruited while serving in Moscow and who was now assigned to CIA headquarters in a sensitive position.

  Golitsin warned Angleton that the Soviets would attempt to prevent the CIA from discovering the true purpose of Kovshuk’s mission by sending disinformation agents to deflect the investigation. Golitsin’s warning was quite specific. He predicted that the Soviets would send false defectors from both the KGB and the GRU. Within a few months of Golitsin’s defection, as if he had known of their plans, one KGB officer and one GRU officer, both ostensibly members of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations, contacted the FBI and volunteered their services as spies against their country. The two agents were christened SCOTCH and BOURBON. The FBI was ecstatic over its sudden success. Angleton waited for the plot to unfold.

  In June of 1962 a third Soviet agent, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer with the Soviet delegation to disarmament talks in Geneva, contacted the CIA and offered to sell information for 900 Swiss francs. Nosenko said he needed the money to replace KGB funds he had squandered on a drinking spree. Pete Bagley, a CIA case officer stationed in Bern, rushed to Geneva to handle the Agency’s latest “walk-in,” and a second officer, George Kisvalter, flew in from Washington to serve as interpreter.

  Nosenko “took about an hour and a half before each meeting in order to be sure that he was not being tailed,” according to John Hart, who later examined the case in detail. “This countersurveillance measure consisted of visiting a number of bars, in each of which he had a drink. He had one scotch and soda in each of four or five bars.” When Nosenko arrived at the CIA safe house for his meeting with Bagley and Kisvalter, “he was then offered further liquor, and he continued to drink throughout the interrogation,” Hart said. “I must tell you honestly that at all these meetings I was snookered,” Nosenko later confided to Hart.

  Kisvalter, who had been born in the former tsarist capital, St. Petersburg, conducted the interrogation. Nosenko said that he had joined the KGB in 1953 as a member of the Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for the surveillance and recruitment of foreigners in Moscow. He had risen steadily within the directorate until in 1962 he was named deputy chief of the Seventh Department, in charge of operations against American tourists. Among other things, Nosenko revealed that the walls of the American Embassy in Moscow were honeycombed with electronic listening devices and that the KGB had recruited a homosexual employee of the British Admiralty.

  On June 11 Bagley cabled headquarters: “Subject has conclusively proved his bona fides. He has provided info of importance and sensitivity. Willing to meet when abroad and will meet as often and as long as possible [until] his departure [from] Geneva on 15 June.” At his final meeting with Bagley and Kisvalter, Nosenko warned them not to make any effort to recontact him in Moscow. Given his firsthand knowledge of KGB surveillance operations there, that seemed like a reasonable precaution. After providing Nosenko with a phone number and a password he could use whenever he wanted to get in touch, Bagley rushed to Washington, still flushed with the prospect of a major penetration of the KGB. “We had a big meeting here on Saturday, and Bagley thought he had the biggest fish of his life,” Angleton said. “I mean he really did. And everything I heard from him, however, was in direct contrast from what we had heard from Golitsin.”

  Golitsin had suggested that V. M. Kovshuk, head of the KGB’s American Embassy section, had come to the United States in 1957 to meet with a high-level Soviet penetration agent. Nosenko said the purpose of Kovshuk’s trip was to contact an agent named ANDREY, an American serviceman who had been recruited by the KGB while serving in Moscow. ANDREY hardly sounded like a high-level penetration of the CIA. Remembering Golitsin’s prediction that the KGB would send false agents to undermine his information, Angleton assumed that ANDREY was a straw man set up by Nosenko to lead the CIA away from the true purpose of Kovshuk’s mission.

  Nosenko, code-named AE/FOXTROT, had an all-too-reassuring answer to one other mystery: the blowing of Popov. At first the CIA had assumed that the FBI’s heavy-handed surveillance of Popov’s agent Tairova had been the cause of his undoing. But George Blake, the KGB’s man inside MI6, claimed he had known about Popov long before the Tairova incident. Then Golitsin had raised the specter of a well-placed KGB source inside the CIA capable of blowing Popov or any other agent. Now Nosenko was maintaining that the KGB had found out about Popov through its routine surveillance of American personnel in Moscow. As Nosenko told it, the KGB had followed an American diplomat to a dead drop and then staked it out until the unfortunate Popov came along to empty it. Nosenko’s story fit nicely with a message Popov had passed to his CIA contact, Russell Langelle, at their final meeting. Popov had thrust upon Langelle six pages of notes scribbled on toilet paper, warning that his work for the CIA had been detected by KGB surveillance and that he was at that very moment under KGB control. Given the circumstances, the CIA had discounted Popov’s note a
s a piece of disinformation fabricated by the KGB to disguise its real source. Besides, the diplomat was certain he had not been followed. Nosenko, however, provided new credibility for Popov’s message. He even had an explanation for why the diplomat was so certain he had not been trailed. The KGB had applied a chemical substance to the diplomat’s shoes that left an invisible trail that was easily followed at a distance, Nosenko explained. The chemical, which gave off a scent that could be detected only by a dog, had been applied to the diplomat’s shoes by the Russian maid who cleaned his apartment.

  If what Nosenko said was true, neither Kovshuk’s mission nor Popov’s capture had anything to do with Soviet penetration agents. Angleton didn’t believe it—and neither did Bagley, once he was, as one officer said, “taken in hand by Angleton, who made all of the Golitsin material available to him.” Exposed to Golitsin’s information for the first time, Bagley began to see Nosenko in a different light. “Alone, Nosenko looked good,” he recalled. “Seen alongside [Golitsin] … Nosenko looked very odd indeed…. Nosenko’s information tended to negate or deflect leads by [Golitsin].” After a weekend spent poring over the files in Angleton’s office, Bagley flew to New York for a meeting with Golitsin himself. In the name of security Bagley disguised Nosenko’s identity by telling Golitsin that new information had come to the CIA through the mails. Golitsin laughed at Bagley’s ruse and said the CIA was obviously in touch with a live source sent by the Russians to counteract him. By the time he returned to Switzerland, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was a provocation, part of a desperate Soviet attempt to sidetrack the hunt for the mole.

  Undeniably, something was wrong. The Popov and Goleniewski operations, the CIA’s two best penetrations of Soviet intelligence, had been terminated within a year of each other. The Goleniewski case, in particular the leak to the KGB of the CIA’s planned recruitment of the Polish intelligence officer in Switzerland, argued convincingly for the existence of a mole, a fear that Golitsin confirmed. Within six months of Golitsin’s defection three Soviet intelligence officers—SCOTCH and BOURBON in New York and Nosenko in Geneva—had volunteered to serve as agents in place. Another “walk-in,” Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, was busy handing over 10,000 pages of highly classified documents on Soviet missiles. Suddenly, in the spring of 1962, the CIA was awash with penetrations of Soviet intelligence—more at one time than during its entire history. It strained credulity to think that all of these volunteers were genuine, particularly if the CIA was as deeply penetrated as the Goleniewski case indicated and as Golitsin said. The mole inside the CIA would have warned Moscow Center about these traitors and they would have been silenced as swiftly as possible—that is, if they were genuine. If they had been dispatched by the KGB in the first place, there would be no need to silence them.

  Of the four—SCOTCH, BOURBON, Nosenko, and Penkovsky—only Penkovsky was silenced. He had had his first meeting with Western intelligence on the night of April 20, 1961, at the Mount Royal Hotel in London. He had been trying desperately to make contact for some time, stopping American and Canadian tourists on the streets of Moscow and asking them to relay a message, but his bold overtures had only aroused suspicions of a Soviet provocation. Finally, in the course of his official duties, Penkovsky met a British businessman named Greville Wynne, who specialized in arranging the exchange of trade delegations between East and West. As a GRU officer, Penkovsky had no interest in trade. His job was to insert as many intelligence operatives as possible into the Soviet delegations and supervise their work during their visits to the West. Penkovsky confided in Wynne, saying he must talk to people in the West “to tell them what conditions in the Soviet Union are really like.” Wynne agreed to carry a letter to British intelligence, and when Penkovsky arrived in London at the head of a Soviet trade delegation, representatives of MI6 and the CIA, including the ubiquitous George Kisvalter, were waiting to greet him.

  Outfitted with a Minox miniature camera and a transistor radio receiver, Penkovsky returned to Moscow to begin his work for the West. In May, Wynne flew to Moscow to resume his trade talks with the Soviet government. As his official host, Penkovsky met Wynne at Sheremetyevo Airport and during the drive into the city handed him twenty rolls of exposed film. That evening Penkovsky visited Wynne in his room at the Metropol Hotel and was given a packet of thirty fresh rolls of film. During the summer, Penkovsky paid another official visit to London and for nearly a month met regularly with Kisvalter and his MI6 counterparts. During this second stay in London, he was introduced to Janet Chisholm, the wife of an attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow and mother of three children, who would serve as his secret contact with the West in the coming months. Back in Moscow, Penkovsky happened upon the Chisholm children one day as they played in a sandbox along one of the city’s broad, tree-lined boulevards. While Mrs. Chisholm watched from a nearby bench, a smiling Penkovsky gave the children a box of candy drops and walked on. Inside the box were four rolls of exposed film.

  Penkovsky worked at a feverish pace, meeting openly with American and British officials at diplomatic functions in Moscow and secretly with Kisvalter during a Soviet trade visit to Paris. He would pass on photographs of top-secret documents in his brush encounters with Mrs. Chisholm or simply deposit them in a variety of dead drops scattered about Moscow. The West would acknowledge receipt of the film with a short radio transmission that Penkovsky could pick up on the receiver he had been given earlier in London.

  On January 5, 1962, the first shadow crossed his path. During another hurried rendezvous with Mrs. Chisholm, Penkovsky spotted a car following him the wrong way down a one-way street. In April his Soviet superiors told him that a scheduled trip to the United States would have to be postponed. The surveillance became heavier and heavier until on July 5 at a meeting with Wynne in Moscow’s Peking Restaurant the two men were literally surrounded by KGB agents. The end came on November 2. The phone rang in the Moscow apartment of Alexis Davison, an Air Force doctor assigned to the American Embassy. When Davison answered, the caller hung up. A short time later, the phone rang in the apartment of Hugh Montgomery, a CIA officer under diplomatic cover in the embassy. When Montgomery answered, the caller hung up. That was Penkovsky’s signal that the dead drop on Pushkin Street, a matchbox taped behind a radiator in the entrance to an apartment building, was ready to be emptied. Davison confirmed the signal by checking a certain lamppost on Kutuzov Prospect. The black mark was there. Richard Jacobs, another CIA officer serving under diplomatic cover, headed for the radiator on Pushkin Street—and straight into a KGB trap. Eight British diplomats and five American officials were expelled from the Soviet Union. Wynne was apprehended by Soviet authorities in Budapest, flown to Moscow, and locked in Lubyanka prison. Penkovsky was shot.

  Murder Corrupts

  6

  The counterintelligence maelstrom stirred by the fear of a Soviet mole had barely begun to swirl within the CIA when a crisis of major proportions struck from without. On April 17, 1961, just three days before George Kisvalter was to meet for the first time with Oleg Penkovsky, the Agency suffered the greatest debacle in its history with the abortive landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Even as Kisvalter was sitting down with Penkovsky in a London hotel room, an enraged John F. Kennedy was ordering both a full-scale shake-up of the CIA and a renewed effort to overthrow Fidel Castro.

  “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” a secret eyes-only memo signed by the President’s brother Robert warned. “If you can’t stand up to Castro,” Kennedy had said during his presidential campaign, “how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” His rhetoric took on a grim reality during two days of face-to-face meetings with Khrushchev in Vienna. “He just beat the hell out of me,” a dazed Kennedy was quoted as saying afterward. “I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts…. Until we r
emove those ideas, we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”

  Kennedy began by getting rid of Allen Dulles. “Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures,” the President said. “I must have someone there with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I will be getting the exact pitch. I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department…. Bobby should be in CIA.”

  It was too early in his administration to be shuffling his cabinet, so the President brought in the hard-driving John McCone, a straitlaced, right-wing California businessman, to head the CIA. McCone moved at once to replace the collegial “old boy” atmosphere of the Dulles era with a strict, managerial regime. One of his first acts was to rip out an intercom system that had allowed senior officers to interrupt the Director at his desk with urgent matters. “Jolly John,” as the crusty McCone was quickly dubbed, also had the door that connected his office directly with the Deputy Director’s sealed off, ordering that the job be done overnight so that Marshall Carter would find a blank wall when he reported for duty the next morning. Realizing what had happened, Carter placed a fake hand on his newly paneled wall, as if it had been lopped off when the door slammed shut for the last time.

  With similar decisiveness, McCone moved to wall off the lingering effects of the Bay of Pigs. Dulles’s Deputy Director, Charles Cabell, had already been removed, the Deputy Director for Operations, Richard Bissell, seemed certain to follow, and the survivors were jockeying for position in the new order of things. Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s Inspector General, saw a chance to rehabilitate a career that had been cruelly stunted. In 1952, at the age of thirty-five, Kirkpatrick had been slated for the number-two job in the Operations Directorate. Helms, Angleton, Harvey—they all would be working for him. But Kirkpatrick had been stricken by polio. For eight months he had lain in a hospital bed and watched helplessly as his job went to Helms. When finally able to return to work, Kirkpatrick was confined to a wheelchair, with only partial use of his right arm. To add to his torment, he was shunted aside to the Inspector General’s office, a post divorced from operations and forever off the upward path. “The IG staff wasn’t the way to go to fame and glory,” one officer said. “It was where you put somebody who had blotted his copybook somewhere along the way.”