CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter

by Clarence Ashley III

  It is also worth recalling that, if all else fails, the first telephone signal should be interpreted as an early warning. In fact, when the U.S. Embassy received that signal at nine o'clock the morning of 2 November, the people there immediately sent a message to headquarters to that effect. They did not even attempt to service the dead drop until that afternoon. General Cabell had some very anxious moments trying to determine if the Soviets were contemplating an attack on the U.S. Of course, they were not, and there were no other indications from Strategic Air Command or any other alert command. One theory, then, is that Penkovsky decided to cooperate, to a point, and then, by misleading his captors on the meaning of the telephone signals, bring down a rain of nuclear explosions on Moscow, taking everybody and the whole system with him. Bombs away.

  PART IV

  The Reluctant Warrior

  CHAPTER 16

  Turkish Rondo

  Following his active participation in the Penkovsky affair, George was given a promotion and made a special assistant to the Soviet Division chief. He then was assigned the task of developing other Soviet prospects that might appear to the Agency in the West, convincing them to work with the CIA. If one were vulnerable, or could be made so, George would explore whatever opportunities might exist for the Agency. Usually the contact would lead to no benefit, but on some occasions the CIA would gain. Of course, there was always the danger of receiving wrong information from an informant. Sometimes informants were intentionally misleading, as in the case of a double agent; in other cases the informants might lack accurate knowledge of the subject or even be wrong in their assessments of facts. These things can be very confusing. For example, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB officer, defected to the CIA in late 1961. He brought with him a great deal of high-level intelligence as well as false notions and suspicions that ultimately caused so much damage to the Agency apparatus that the CIA would have been better off without his defection.

  On other occasions, things might just go right. One of the first such cases involving George came in August of 1961. Mikhail A. Klochko, a well-known specialist in water chemistry, a member of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, and the head of the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry in Moscow, defected to the West. To the chagrin of the KGB, he simply stepped away from a conference in Ottawa. Before Klochko had left the Soviet Union, he had sold his antique grand piano to the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in order to arrive in Canada with some cash, not wishing to appear as a beggar when he asked for asylum. Predictably, the KGB criticized the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for not reporting the sale of the piano before the defection. It had never occurred to the president that Klochko was thinking of defection because, as a scientist, he was focused on scientific matters rather than on political ones. The KGB, of course, would never have given Klochko an exit visa had they suspected anything. When he visited Canada, however, it was after his wife had died, so they had lost what they called the "long tail" (leash) on him. Klochko's defection caused Canadian-Soviet relations to remain on edge into early 1962, when another candidate agent appeared. George successfully recruited this new prospect while in Canada, the CIA made arrangements for future contact, and the newly acquired agent went back to his job in the USSR. George's contact was a precursor to a longtime relationship that eventually worked well for the Agency. The man's identity never became known to those outside of the U.S. intelligence community and its cooperatives.

  In the spring of 1962, George traveled to Geneva, where a member of the Soviet KGB had volunteered to cooperate with American intelligence and to sell valuable intelligence information. The Agency needed an expert Russian speaker immediately to assess the significance of what was offered. This series of events initiated the Nosenko saga, which culminated in probably the worst failure in the history of the clandestine services group at the CIA.

  In late 1962, George went to Ankara to see if he could approach a Soviet officer about whom the Agency knew quite a bit. The man was compromising himself through liquor, illicit relations with women, and activities for which he could be heavily censored by his organization. George recalled, "That involved Malia Natirbov, my old friend from New York City childhood days. He was in here last week. He'll be back in ten days. Right now he is visiting the village in Circassia where his father was born and where his family originates.1 This small settlement of about twelve thousand inhabitants traces its name and history to the fifteenth century, when it was called Natir Aul. "Aul" means village. Russification of its name today makes it Natirbova. It is near another village called Anapa, on the Black Sea, just east of Yalta and west of Krasnodar. This is not far from Stavropol, where, you might remember, Penkovsky's grandfather was a judge, and Rostov, where his father was killed fighting the Bolsheviks as a lieutenant in the White Army. The people in that village want Malia to return and be their mayor. His father was a government minister there under the last tsar and Malia's greatgreat-grandfather, Prince Natirbov, founded Natirbova Aul. Of course, Malia's family all left Russia during the last days of the revolution."

  I interrupted, "I'm so sorry that I never could convince you to return to St. Petersburg for a visit."

  "What would I do, stare at tombstones? They're all dead-the Bolshevik Revolution."

  George's story contains a lesson that is not well understood by many. His message, simply, is that the Western world could have an excellent avenue into understanding and negotiating with the Muslim world by utilizing its association with Turkey, a secular state with an overwhelmingly Muslim population. He began to fill me in on the Turkish side of the world. It was late 1962. He was in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, to perform what he called a hatchet job. He was to see if he could subordinate, with appropriate influence, a Soviet intelligence officer working in the Soviet Embassy, by framing him with a lady friend. It should be easy to do this because the man was a bad boy. He had girlfriends when he shouldn't; he got drunk when he shouldn't.

  The nature of this operation was pressure from guilt, with an arm twister. It's the traditional way of framing a guy with a girlfriend: We caught you. We will tell on you if you don't cooperate. Cooperate with us and we will get you off the hook. Usually it involves a threat and a bit of financial emolument associated with his moment of embarrassment. Sometimes the threat of future embarrassment will be enough to shock the individual into working for the Agency. If he bites, the CIA has an agent. If it works, fine. If it doesn't work-well, an effort was made. George's role in this was to get the man in a drunken condition, frame him in a compromising situation, and then promise to get him off the hook if he cooperated. In preparing the backdrop for this operation, George had the professional benefit of, the opportunity for an education from, and the genuine pleasure of meeting a Turkish gentleman of exquisite bearing and unusual intellect.

  As a prelude to the story, George reviewed some of Turkey's background for me, recalling that before the beginning of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire extended right into Egypt. The Turks then ruled essentially all of the Near East, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, etc. Since Turkey fought with the Central Powers on the side of Germany during that war, following their defeat they were occupied by the Allies: the Americans, British, French, Italians, and Greeks. The Allies ruled through a set of high commissioners. Sultan Hamid had no powers and was not effective in any way.

  In October of 1918, as the war was ending, there was a Turkish colonel by the name of Mustafa Kemal, who was commanding an army down in the region of Syria. Kemal, a word that means perfection, was ordered to return to Turkey, where he found the country in complete disarray. There was no employment. To make matters worse, a million Russian refugees who had just escaped from the Bolshevik Revolution were living there. Kemal also found that a Greek army occupied Izmir on the coast of Anatolia and that Anatolia was to be partitioned by the Allies.2

  People were looking to Kemal to do something. In time, he set up a provisional government at a loca
tion near Ankara and contemplated what he could do. He then issued a pleasant letter to the Allied high commissioners, advising them that he was taking control of Turkey and suggesting that they exit the region. Although this created a little stir, the allied governments agreed to order their forces out of Turkey. There really was no interest in fighting with the Turks now, so almost everybody went home, all but the Greeks.

  The Greeks had other plans. They wanted to recapture the former Greek territories, which were then controlled by Turkey. So, as the Allies left, the Greeks collected the equipment left behind and prepared to engage Turkey. Eventually, Kemal reorganized his army, re-equipped it, and augmented it with additional troops. There were a great number of Circassians then living in Turkey who had been part of Wrangel's Army. This whole army had exited Russia into Turkey in November of 1920. Gen. Pyotr Nikolaievich Wrangel, a famous White Russian general, had evacuated his army of about 150,000 men from Novorossiysk, which is on the Black Sea, immediately adjacent to Anapa. These people had fought against Russians before and they had fought in the revolution against the Bolsheviks. They were very good fighters and great horsemen. Kemal enlisted the cooperation of many of these Circassians and incorporated them into his armed forces. Both the Greeks and the Turks fought furiously throughout the Asia Minor Peninsula. After some initial setbacks, the Turks turned the tide, and in battle after battle prevailed. Eventually they dominated the Greeks everywhere. By October of 1922, the fighting was over and Turkey had recaptured the critical regions previously occupied by the Greeks.

  Kemal, by then referred to as Kemal Pasha (pasha is Turkish for general), was very pleased with the effective way that the Circassians engaged in the fight. However, because their leader, a General Ertem, had some very big ideas, politically, about his own future in the region, the Turkish general removed him from his command. Sultan Hamid, who Kemal believed had been too quick to cooperate with the Allies, was given his yacht and sent to Egypt. The sultanate, long ago impotent, was abolished. This was in November of 1922. Then, in the next year, the republic of Turkey was proclaimed. Kemal Pasha became its first president.

  Kemal Pasha was more than just a president. He actually was a dictator, albeit a benevolent one. He really had the best interest of Turkey in mind, so he did everything practical to change it into a modern, Western republic. Using his vast prestige and charisma, he instituted reforms to create a modern, secular state. He forced every man to shave off his beard. He told the police that anytime they saw a man wearing a fez, they were to knock it off his head. The women were given more freedom; they were allowed to remove their veils. The most significant of the reforms had to do with the language. Up until that time the Turkish language was composed of Arabic characters, written or printed right to left. Following his reforms, the language was written or printed left to right, using the Latin, or Roman, alphabet.

  Importantly, Kemal separated religion from the administration of the state. The caliphate had provided for a religious as well as secular head of a Muslim state. Now Turkey would be a secular state, although Islam would remain the predominant religion. In addition, he instituted a few changes that affected the practice of Islam. The Muslim world considers Friday the holy day, while the Christian world considers Sunday to be holy. Thursday in the Arab world is like Saturday in the Christian one: that is, it's usually half a workday. Kemal said, "This is ridiculous. The whole Western world considers Saturday and Sunday to be the end of the week. We need to be on schedule with the West. Therefore, from now on, Sunday is the Sabbath." Of course, the religious groups didn't like it, but he just ignored their concern.

  Kemal Pasha ruled as the first president of the new republic from 1923 until 1938, when he died. During that period he introduced numerous reforms: legal, social, economic, military, etc. All of them were Western reforms. He was a very powerful president. He became known as Ataturk, the Father of the Republic of Turkey. As Ataturk, he transformed the social mores of the entire country. He also reorganized the army to be a modern, Western army. But the important thing was as follows. He absorbed as much as he could from the West, but he never trusted the West. He always told his political leaders, "Don't trust the West." As a consequence of this, all of the statues raised to his memory face east. In addition, he told the army, "You are the guardians of this country. Anytime there is a problem, political or otherwise, you have to save the country." Now, these two declarations by Kemal Pasha, formerly Mustafa Kemal and later to be known as Ataturk, are very important to our story.

  With this background, George continued, "I was taken to a safehouse to meet with the Turkish intelligence man. He spoke English. I spoke no Turkish. We shook hands and sat down. He was an older man; he was very elegant and very dignified. We respected each other's background. The whole purpose of this meeting was to try and hit it off with him, so I was quite deferential to him.

  "He said, `Look, first let me tell you something of how we fit into the Moslem world, of which we are a part, and how that relates to you Americans. This is important because it is going to be the basis of our cooperation. You Americans must have an understanding of our philosophy, our political motives, our educational and other attitudes and the difference between what you call democracy and what we call democracy.

  "'We are part of the Arabic world, as you put it, but we have a violent disagreement with the Arabs as to how to handle this world. Obviously, as you know, there are differences. First, let me tell you what we don't like about the Arabs, especially what we violently oppose. This idea of Allah being everything is not one of our philosophies. We don't think that Arabic is a modern language. We think that it is completely passe. It is religious, you might say. It is related to the Koran like Hebrew relates to the Old Testament and Greek relates to the New Testament. Historically speaking, the Arabic world might dwell on the romanticism of people such as the Persian, Omar Khayyam: A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou. It is not what we think is important. Specifically, what we don't like about the Arabic state of mind is this: they might think that they have won the battle when the blessing of Allah is dumped upon them as his representative, and they may think that everything else they do will be right. But we don't think so. We think that this is so old-fashioned, so stinking old-fashioned. With that attitude, militarily, one gets pushed aside. One suffers because of it. We are appalled by it and, further, we don't think that it is an accurate reflection of Mohammed. One doesn't win battles because he shouts from the top of a hill that God is on his side. As a further example of our differences with the Arab world, we have removed many of the Arabic words from usage and we have adopted the Latin alphabet as a means of communications. This means we have abandoned the written Arabic language, particularly those of us who are intelligent. Arabic is a cursed, old-fashioned alphabet.' So, these are the fundamentals.

  "The Turkish intelligence man was a handsome, nice-looking guy-like Omar Sharif on the screen. He was representative of all of the Turks that put Turkey back on its feet. They have a fine, brave army. They are not going to be pushed around militarily by anybody in the Arabic world, they say; and in every place in the Moslem world, Turkey is the chief republic. They are the dominating force. They have passed laws that make it illegal to have more than one wife anymore. However, they let the men who already have multiple wives live out their lives that way. You wouldn't want them to have to choose which wives to throw out in the street, would you? You particularly wouldn't try to do that to the politically influential ones, now would you?

  "My Turkish friend went on: `Therefore, it's a different kind of society that we have now. It is different even to the degree that, in the American PX, right here in Ankara, you sell those beautiful copper beaten plates to hang up in front of the door entryway, the ones symbolizing Allah bless us in this house, etc. We do not buy them. We do not believe the idea that they symbolize to be representative of good military thinking. You do not understand why we Turks, in our ideas of democracy here, consider this a violation of g
ood thinking, but we do. That is one difference between us. Also, that is why we disagree with the Arabs, even though we both are Muslims. You have to understand this and the reasons for it, which I have tried to explain to you.' I said to him, `That is a point of view, but why are you talking this way to me?' `Well, you were thoughtful and kind to me,' he continued. `That is why I am telling you this. Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. So, I'm breaking the law. I'm an old man. I'm writ ing in Arabic, which is like shorthand to me; and because of this habit, I can take notes no others can.'

  "Well, that is where the center of gravity was, and this kindled an understanding that would go a long way toward getting cooperation on both sides of the ball game. I scratched my head and tried to comprehend these concepts so that we could understand each other in order to facilitate our future relationship. This much is fundamental: one doesn't have to be too swift to comprehend that we needed to understand each other before we could be successful working together.

  "Now, the execution of these ideas is something else, again. And that was the purpose of my being there, the matter of talking to him in preparation for this frame-up job against the Soviets, of whom we both had a mutual distrust. Honorable relations with the Americans were extremely important to the Turkish. He was satisfied, so we proceeded. When we began preparation for this job, he exhibited a lot of trust in me and allowed me to run the operation in the way that I wanted. We set up a meeting with the Soviet officer within a week. I was completely confident that the operation would succeed when the man agreed to come to our meeting. I knew that he would either cooperate willingly with us or be forced to collaborate because of his love of liquor and sex.

  "Incidentally, the operation went down the drain about a week later, by an act of God. The Soviet officer got drunk. He slid down the banister of the stairway in his own home. He hit the newel at the bottom of the stair rail and his kidneys were severely injured. He was taken by ambulance to the airport and flown out immediately to Moscow for hospitalization. End of operation."