CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter

by Clarence Ashley III

  "The third time was for technical reasons, and very sound ones. I would excerpt from each typed page: (a) the target person, (b) the operation, (c) the technique, and (d) anything of intelligence value. She then would make extra copies, and we would put this information-that is, the names of the individuals and all of the categories associated with them-into notebooks. The notebooks would be annotated numerically progressive, from meeting to meeting to meeting. For five years and eight months they were catalogued: meeting number so and so on such and such date. Every individual was indexed alphabetically by name so that we could trace, at will, any human being mentioned during that period in any one of the meetings that I had with Popov. With this store and wealth of information, I also could transcribe an extra copy of the material, having the finest technical equipment available to man. It was just like movie production equipment. This was equipment bought for use in the tunnel but not needed. Instead of wasting it, I had a couple of units in my room. I could electrically transcribe one tape after another to ship back to headquarters for reference, or for the predilection of the curious muttonheads back home who may or may not listen to them and who may or may not be doing any work. But they had them anyway.

  "This was only for Popov. It had nothing to do with the tunnel. Nevertheless, Harvey became curious about some of the tunnel take that was perplexing him, and one day he came down to my office with a query. He said, `George, you know about the tunnel; I told you. You are sworn to secrecy, right?' `Sure, of course,' I answered. `You can help me, George. I need clarification now and then. I think that they are screwing up in London with their translations. We have a whole battery of people there who don't know what the hell they are doing or listening to. Some of this is contradictory. Maybe your book on Popov has reference to some of these names. Please look them up in your records, which you have so scrupulously listed, and see if you can reconcile some of the names, locations, and/or functions. I think there is a major screw-up or at least a minor mistake. Let me know what you can find out.'

  "That was where I might get involved, and only in such cases, with the tunnel operation. He was right. Something strange appeared to be happening with some KGB personnel up in Stralsund, a German seaport city directly north of Berlin on the Baltic. We were receiving transmissions of conversations from people there who were not ordinarily expected to be in that area. Shortly thereafter, however, I solved his puzzle. I said, 'Harvey, do you have a sense of humor?' 'I think so,' he answered. 'Are you a hunter?' I asked. 'Yes,' he replied. 'A duck hunter?' 'Yeah,' he said. I finally told him, 'Well, these KGB people are on vacation and they're up at this Stralsund location and they're hunting ducks. It's raining like hell, but it's warm. It's not duck weather. Their allowable leave has expired and they are begging for some more time so that they can bring home some ducks and share them with their buddies. They are telephoning for permission. That is why, although they are KGB, they don't spell out their function. After all, they are on vacation.' He said, Jeez, take them off this list and put them where they belong. Let's straighten this out.'

  "That was the kind of identification that I did for him from time to time. It was not earthshaking. It wasn't that important, but it helped to eliminate some of the confusing traffic that came with the more useful intercepts. Actually, this type of nonsense came with some repetition. But there are always reasons for the anomalies. There will be an explanation why someone swipes a typewriter from another person's office and tries to camouflage its disappearance. (That particular dialogue also came through on the tunnel tapes, as they were providing an explanation of the act of one of their petty thieves.) Things like that happen in life, and just because an intelligence officer listens to an intercepted conversation and screams, `I got something,' doesn't mean that it is so important. It may be something as innocuous or irrelevant as the duck hunt. But a guy like Harvey, who is trying to do a job as the base chief, must investigate all intercepts, just to keep things straight. He must see opportunity in every curiosity and investigate it to make sure that nothing of value slips away. So, he came to me and said, `Does this make any sense?' Sort of like the gold in the soap.

  "That was my only involvement with the tunnel. I had nothing to do with what they took or the recording of it. A battery of people did the interpretations for us and the Brits inside a white building in London. I was in the CIA premises in Berlin. Our building was part of a West German army facility; Berlin Base it was called. It was a former German army barracks. We were under U.S. Army cover. It was located near Berlin Dahlem, a local district on Clayallee, a major boulevard. The tunnel was out on the edge of town. I never was there.4

  "I remember another story about our existence there in Berlin. It's about Sam Wilson. He was not a West Pointer like Peer de Silva but came up through the ranks. I believe they call his kind a 'mustang.' Sam and Peer knew each other but they were not too close, according to Peer. In the army, as you know, they have this date of rank business. I suppose there might have been a certain amount of competitive and professional jealousy. In my days of engineering we didn't have that. We were proud to see a fellow professional do well, better than we perhaps, even become famous; that was good as well. I suppose that the regular army is a different society. Wilson and de Silva both were graduates of a small Russian language institute in Regensburg, Germany. Sam had become fairly fluent in Russian while Peer struggled with the language.

  "This was after the war, during the occupation. Anyway, during the course of his career, Wilson was assigned to CIA for a tour. He was a major in the army at that time, 1956. Indirectly, he helped service Popov for me while working for Bill Harvey, running back and forth between Berlin and Frankfurt with encrypted messages. The CIA's European headquarters then were in Frankfurt, where they had the capacity to decipher these messages. They made plenty of mistakes there too. Those were their mistakes and had nothing to do with Sam. He did his duty, running back and forth. In addition, he did many other things for Harvey. He helped me a lot of the time, but mainly he worked for Harvey in the Berlin tunnel operation and in other areas.

  "Wilson had a wife who was the nervous type. At the time, she seemed excessively worried about him. I remember her as a very attractive lady, but I can't recall that I knew much about their personal relationship. Often the four of us, the Wilsons and the Kisevalters, went out together and played bingo. We played at a place called the Harnack House, an officer's club for our military forces in Berlin. Ferdi tended to be very lucky. Whether or not they were there, she would win for them as well as for its by hollering, 'Bingo.' She would win nice prizes like expensive silver sets. In those days a dollar was a big thing; a mark was not.

  "One night we were playing bingo and Sam was called during a game to go somewhere on an errand for Harvey. He excused himself and took off. Later on, his wife, still sitting at our table, became very upset, almost hysterical. Ferdi was concerned and asked her, 'What's the matter? What's the trouble?' The wife then started complaining. She didn't understand why Sam had to take off like this, and of course there was no way that I could explain operational things to her.

  "Eventually, Sam returned and we started home. Sam was driving the QP car that we had borrowed for the evening. Now remember, it Quasi-Personal car is one owned by the station and used mostly for operational activities. This one was not assigned to any one individual. As we were humping along, accidentally the glove compartment of the car popped open and there she saw, laid out in front of her, a glorious array of condoms. She glared at her husband, this, that, and whatever. I tried to explain to her that this was not his car; it was a QP car. It could have been used by anybody, as we shared these vehicles. 'He didn't know what the hell was in it!' Ferdi couldn't explain anything because she didn't understand anything. It was a stationowned car that we had borrowed for the night because he knew that he would have to run an errand for Harvey during the course of the evening. He didn't have any idea what might be in the thing. He was not guilty of anything. She was blam
ing the unfortunate guy for the wrong reason and he was completely innocent! The poor

  Ferdi was there in Berlin all of the time that George was there. She did a lot of work for the Agency. For example, when a Soviet agent came over with a German wife and child, Ferdi would baby-sit the woman and the child in a safehouse. She was obviously a nonAmerican by her appearance and not to be suckered into high prices, etc., so she would bird-dog exotic places for Agency people to rent, using her Germanic background. She did a lot of what might be termed "auxiliary staff work," critical in making things work. It was all goodwill. She didn't get paid. As George said, "I was high ranking enough. We didn't need more money. We were having the time of our lives." At this point, George probably would have paid money to work with the Agency.

  Once George and Ferdi gave a cocktail party at their place in Berlin. George was standing in a group talking with Joe Skura, Ben Pepper, and Douglas Stuart, a Marine Corps major. Joe noticed that Ben, who was a graduate of Princeton, was wearing his school tie. Joe remarked to him, "Well, the tiger roars tonight, huh?" Ben said, "Yeah," and laughed it off. Doug then said, "Oh, I also am a Princeton graduate." So Ben and Doug began comparing their scholastic backgrounds. Skura sarcastically remarked, "I wasn't aware that I was in such a presence, an Ivy League congregation." George leaned over and, talking out of the side of his mouth, murmured, "Don't tell anybody, but I also am an Ivy Leaguer." At this, Doug burst out in disbelief, "What! You, George?" George, always slovenly dressed, had a tremendous gut that usually was peppered with cigarette ashes. He looked so silly, hardly like Ivy League material. Doug was completely amazed. George said, "I'll show you something." He then took the group upstairs to his study, and there on the wall, in addition to his master's degree in civil engineering from Dartmouth, were awards and commendations for his work on projects such as the Merrit Parkway in Connecticut. There were framed letters from prominent Dartmouth classmates such as Governor Rockefeller. Doug, Ben, and Joe were duly impressed and amazed.5

  In March of 1957, Popov sent to George the text of a speech made by Marshal Georgi Zhukov, then the first deputy minister of defense and a genuine hero of the Soviet Union ever since World War II. This speech was delivered to a group of senior Soviet officers stationed in East Germany with Popov in attendance and dealt with strategies for military conflict in Germany. It was extremely interesting to the CIA. Routinely, the CIA people forwarded the text of the speech to the British SIS, where George Blake again had an opportunity to sense that the CIA had a highly placed penetration. Whether or not Blake actually alerted the Soviets to the leak, the KGB did find out that Zhukov's speech had been passed on to the CIA. This prompted them to investigate the source of the leak. Popov would have been on the list of those attending the speech and could have been suspected.

  Once, Popov said to George, "You know, I found out a very interesting thing, which is not exactly in my backyard, but I know that you would like to hear of it. It has to do with nuclear submarines." George asked, "What do you know and how do you know it?" Popov then told George his story.

  "We have a naval section in East Berlin, and in it we have the chief of the Naval Division of Intelligence, a captain. He is interested in everything to and from the West regarding Bremerhaven and Amsterdam-all of the American traffic that flows in and out, as well as everything British that flows in and out. As I was walking down the hall I overheard him talking to his unit. I am not a part of his particular group, but when I passed his open door, he stopped me and said, `Come in; sit down. You can be a witness to this.' He was furious, and his speech reflected his anger during the entire meeting with his unit. He continued, `There is no justice in our system! Can you imagine this happening? I just came back from Moscow, where I heard about this. Here I am a naval captain, I graduated number one in my class, and this idiot, a naval captain who is a dumbbell of the first order, becomes an admiral ahead of me.'

  "I replied to the captain, `Why? How?' The captain continued, `The dummy had leave. He went from Moscow to Leningrad. He got drunk. He missed his train going back to Moscow, so he was delayed. But as he was in the act of catching the next train, some naval personnel stopped him. They said to him, "Captain, this is fortuitous. We are so glad we found you before you took your train back. We need you here. We are missing a senior member, a naval captain, for a shakedown cruise of a new nuclear submarine that was just floated down the White Sea Canal from Severodvinsk, to be outfitted at Leningrad. We must perform sea trials in the Gulf of Finland. We need you aboard for the shakedown cruise." So, this dumbbell, because he got drunk and missed the train, is detained to go on a shakedown cruise, as the senior officer. As a result of this he launches this sub and gets promoted to admiral. Can you imagine the injustice in this world? What stupidity.' That was his story and I believe it to be true."

  George picks up the story: "Naturally, we immediately cabled this information in to Washington. Who is our customer agency to receive this? The U.S. Navy. Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy has some mavericks. One of them was Admiral Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine force. Well, frequently, he liked to scream his head off, usually for more money to spend on more submarines; so, he rushes to Congress, pounds the table, demands that appropriations immediately be increased, since the Soviets have now launched number so-and-so nuclear submarine.

  "On the next day, Rickover's speech was published in the Star, Washington's evening newspaper. We explained to the good admiral that this information is classified. We don't like to have this information published in the open press for all to read. Such action tends to compromise its source-our agent, in this case. This could cause a massive search over there to determine from where this information might have been leaked. Such actions just don't do our sources any good. The admiral apparently understood some of this logic but not all of it. So he retracted the story with Congress. The Star also printed his retraction on the next day, just to reemphasize the stupidity, I suppose. When we found out in Berlin this had happened, we said, `We don't need enemies with friends like this. Look what we have: blabbermouths, no matter what rank.' So, we had to live with this. Luckily, the remoteness of our access to the information, requiring the checking out of somebody's remark about an incident in Leningrad, by way of Moscow, that reached a Berlin naval section and was overheard by an army officer, is not that easy to trace. So we don't think that we had a result that was calamitous from that particular faux pas. But it shows you what can happen and often does happen in intelligence."6

  Happily for the CIA, in June of 1957, Popov was transferred to Karlshorst, Germany, near Berlin. In his new assignment, his stature went up. He was now a lieutenant colonel and on his way to becoming a full colonel. Previously, he had done considerable favors in Vienna for the chief of what they called the "illegals operations" of Soviet Intelligence. When that same chief was transferred to Berlin, he spotted his old friend Popov and had him brought into the headquarters of Eastern European Soviet Intelligence, which is in Karlshorst, an enclave of Berlin. Within what was then called the Karlshorst Compound were almost all of the Soviets operating out of that region. It was the Soviet center for Germany, where their people lived and worked-a city within a city. Popov's new job was very significant. He was part of the Strategic Intelligence Operational Group and was privy to 288 operations that he told George about. The Agency couldn't "roll them all up" (stop these operations) because to do so would reveal that there had been penetrations into the Soviet service. The CIA was very careful in handling this information; it was extremely valuable.

  In addition, Popov was the dispatching officer in charge of sending "illegals" abroad. An illegal, in this case, was a Soviet national pretending to have a different nationality. He or she would be provided with complete documentation, from birth certificate and passport to everything necessary to establish apparent residency and citizenship in the target country. After entering that country, the illegal could operate freely without much fear of detection.

  One su
ch illegal was a very attractive young lady, a Russian who had all of the documentation she needed to pass as a citizen of Austria. She then went to Constantinople as a modiste. She ran a millinery shop-hats, dresses, etc., for ladies-but she also operated a safehouse there. Because she had the store, she ostensibly had a reason for being in Constantinople, and she also had all of the proper paperwork, the legitimate documentation, of a Turkish resident. The CIA Berlin people knew her real name and essentially everything about her because Popov had dispatched her to Turkey. They knew through him what she was doing, but they did not know all of the details since her operation was in Turkey and not in their Berlin day-to-day interest. They passed on what they knew of her to their people running the Turkish desk. There were also others who went to other countries whom they knew of through Popov.

  George continued, "Popov also made us shudder about penetrations of our own. I had once asked Popov, `Have you ever heard of instances where people would be meeting here in your East Berlin area for operations elsewhere in other countries?' He said, `Not offhand, but if I hear of such I will let you know.' One day, he said, `Hey, remember that question you asked me? I found one. You won't like this. This guy Sklavits with the anchor tattoo, he is going to Vienna, for agent operations. He has met with Western intelligence people there. They believe he is working with them but he has come back and reported on them. I found out who some of the people were but not all of them.'

  "The proof came the next week. While the chief of that Soviet operation was lecturing his unit, he pointed to Popov and said, `You listen carefully, Popov. This may one day apply to you.' He continued, `Sklavits is being reported on by a double agent of ours in the KGB. Sklavits is meeting a guy that he thinks is Western who is really KGB! Always treat your agent like your own brother; don't let on that you realize that he is not playing ball with you, because maybe he is being reported on by our penetration of his service! Do you understand, you dopes? Sometimes you have to keep a stiff upper lip and treat your agent like you really believe him, because you are getting all the poop on him anyway through other penetrations that we have.' `Yes, sir,' said Popov.