To the Centre it must have seemed that Rudenko had penetrated one of the innermost sanctums of the capitalist system, which the Rockefeller family had seemed to epitomize for three generations. Nelson’s second wife, “Happy,” said of him in the mid-1960s, “He believed he could have it all. He always had.” The six square miles of Nelson’s Westchester estate were one of the world’s most valuable properties and contained some of the most spectacular art treasures in any private collection. Theodore White once offered to exchange his Manhattan townhouse on East 64th Street for a single Tong Dynasty horse from the Westchester collection.28 Though Rudenko’s occasional visits to Westchester impressed the Centre, however, they achieved nothing of significance.
Penetrating the houses of the great and good appears to have become almost an end in itself for Rudenko, even though his access to some of new York’s most distinguished pianos failed to give him any intelligence access. Among the well-known musicians whose pianos he tuned was the world’s most famous pianist, the Russian-born Vladimir Horowitz, who for the past twenty years had lived on East 94th Street near Central Park. In 1965, after a twelve-year hiatus caused by a mixture of psychiatric problems and colitis attacks, Horowitz had returned to the concert platform at the age of sixty-two, becoming, with Luciano Pavarotti, one of the two most highly paid classical musicians in the world. The recital instrument which he chose for his comeback was the Steinway concert grand numbered CD 186, which had to be tuned to an exact 440-A with a key pressure of 45 grams instead of the usual 48 to 52.29
Overimpressed by Rudenko’s access to the pianos of new York’s celebrities, the Centre made detailed plans for him to become head of a new illegal residency whose chief targets would be the US mission to the United Nations and a New York think tank, concentrating on relatively junior employees with access to classified information—in particular, single women whose loneliness made them sexually vulnerable and poorly paid employees with large families who were open to financial inducements.30
Just as the new residency was about to be established in New York, however, the Centre noticed what Rudenko’s file refers to as “irregularities” and “suspicious behavior” and lured him back to Moscow in April 1970 for what he was probably told were final instructions before beginning work. Exactly what the Centre suspected is not known, but, since Rudenko was interrogated under torture, it may well have feared he was working as a double agent for the FBI. What he revealed was much less serious, but bad enough to end his career as an illegal. Soon after arriving in Hamburg in 1961, Rudenko had met BERTA, a 32-year-old ladies’ hairdresser, whom he had suggested recruiting as a Soviet agent. The Centre refused and ordered him to break off all relations with her. During his interrogation in 1970, Rudenko admitted that he had secretly defied his instructions, married BERTA and taken her with him to New York. Worse still, he had taken down radio messages from the Centre and decoded them in her presence. Her parents had discovered that he was a spy, but believed he was working for East Germany. Rudenko also admitted that he was having an affair with a female accountant (codenamed MIRA) in Pennsylvania.31
As part of the Centre’s damage limitation exercise it instructed Rudenko to write to both BERTA and MIRA letters designed to convince both of them and, if necessary, the FBI that he had left the United States because of the breakdown of his marriage. He told BERTA that he had found it impossible to live with her any longer and urged her not to waste time trying to track him down since she would never find him. In the letter to MIRA, Rudenko was allowed to express his love for her and pain at their separation within what his file quaintly describes as “permissible bounds” and his pain at the separation from her. But, he explained somewhat unconvincingly, his sudden departure from the United States had been the only way to escape from his wife. Both letters were posted by the KGB in Austria, giving no other indication of where Rudenko was living.32
THE SUCCESSIVE FAILURES of Makayev (HARRY), Brik (HART), Hayhanen (VIK), Grinchenko (KLOD), Bitnov (ALBERT), Blyablin (BOGUN) and Rudenko (RYBAKOV) underscored the Centre’s difficulty in finding illegals capable of fulfilling its expectations in North America. Fisher/“Abel” (MARK) was, in many ways, the exception who proved the rule. He was able to survive, if not actually succeed, as an illegal resident in the United States because of a long experience of the West which went back to his Tyneside childhood, an ideological commitment which probably predated even the Bolshevik Revolution and a thirty-year career as a foreign intelligence officer, most of it under Stalin, from which he had emerged scarred but battle-hardened. Other Cold War illegals in the United States were psychologically less well prepared for the stress of their double lives. All had to come to terms with a society which was strikingly different from the propaganda image of the Main Adversary with which they had been indoctrinated in Moscow. Unlike KGB officers stationed in legal residencies, illegals did not work in a Soviet embassy, where they were constantly subject to the ideological discipline imposed by the official hierarchy. They also had to cope with a much greater degree of personal isolation, which they could diminish only by friendships and sexual liaisons which were liable to undermine their professional discipline. No wonder that some illegals, like Rudenko, had affairs which they tried to conceal from the Centre; that others, like Hayhanen, took to drink and embezzlement; and that others, like Bitnov, found it difficult to survive in an alien market economy.
Illegals had also to face unreasonable, and ultimately impossible, expectations from the Centre. Until almost the end of the Cold War, no post-war Soviet leader, KGB chairman or foreign intelligence chief had either any personal experience of living in the West or any realistic understanding of it. Accustomed to strong central direction and a command economy, the Centre found it difficult to fathom how the United States could achieve such high levels of economic production and technological innovation with so little apparent regulation. The gap in its understanding of what made the United States tick tended to be filled by conspiracy theory. The diplomat, and later defector, Arkadi Shevchenko noted of his Soviet colleague:
Many are inclined to the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States. They themselves, after all, are used to a system ruled by a small group working in secrecy in one place. Moreover, the Soviets continue to chew on Lenin’s dogma that bourgeois governments are just the “servants” of monopoly capital. “Is not that the secret command center?” they reason.33
However much the Centre learned about the West, it never truly understood it. Worse still, it thought it did.
THE CENTRE’S FAITH in the future of illegal operations in the United States was remarkably unaffected by the many failures and disappointments of the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the 1970s the Centre still had high hopes of KONOV and DOUGLAS. It also had remarkably ambitious projects for the next decade. A plan drawn up in the late 1960s envisaged establishing and putting into operation between 1969 and 1975 ten illegal residencies in the United States, two in Canada, two in Mexico, and one each in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. For use in wartime and other major crises it was also planned to create five “strategic communications residencies” to maintain contact with the Centre if legal residencies were unable to operate: two in the United States, one in Canada and two in Latin America.34
This visionary program was to prove hopelessly optimistic. The 1970s produced another crop of serious setbacks in illegal operations in the United States—among them the collapse of the illegal residencies of KONOV and DOUGLAS. When KONOV and EMMA swore their oaths of allegiance as American citizens in 1970, their neighbors apparently regarded them as a model married couple. In reality, the increasing friction between them had begun to affect their operational effectiveness. In 1971 they flew to Haiti to be divorced, but informed only the Centre and their New York lawyer. On their return they still contrived to keep up appearances as a married couple by living together in their New Jersey apartment. EMMA, however, asked the Centre
to find her a new partner. In October 1972 KONOV was recalled to Moscow, where he died three years later. EMMA was dismissed from the KGB.35
Valoushek’s career as the illegal DOUGLAS was to end a few years later in even greater ignominy. His first assignment in the United States, to penetrate the Hudson Institute, was wholly unrealistic. As Valoushek later complained, had he been able to use his real identity and mention his postgraduate degrees from Charles University, Prague, and Heidelberg, he might have made contact with senior members of the Institute. But posing as photographer and cameraman without higher education he had no worthwhile opportunity to do so.36 In 1970, unreasonably dissatisfied with Valoushek’s progress, the Centre took him off the Hudson Institute assignment.37
The Vaklousheks’ elder son, Peter Herrmann, born in 1957, had a brilliant school academic record and was expected to have opportunities to recruit within American universities that his parents did not. In 1972 Valoushek revealed his true identity to Peter, told the Centre he had done so and said that his son was ready to join the KGB. Moscow accepted the offer and agreed to pay Peter’s university fees. In the summer of 1975, shortly before entering McGill University in Montreal, Peter began training in Moscow and started his career as an illegal with the German codename ERBE (“Inheritor”). In 1976 he moved from McGill to Georgetown University, where he was instructed to report on students whose fathers had government jobs (especially if they had character flaws which could be exploited), as well as on “progressive” students and professors opposed to the imperialist policies of the United States. He was also told to try to find a part-time job in the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, make friends with Chinese students and discover as much as possible about them.38
By the end of the academic year, Peter Herrmann’s brief career as a teenage illegal was over. Early in May 1977 Valoushek was arrested by the FBI and given the choice of being charged with espionage, together with his wife and son, or of working as a double agent. He later told the espionage writer John Barron that after his arrest he worked as a double agent under FBI control for over two years until the Bureau discontinued the operation. “Rudi [Valoushek] gave us his word and he kept it,” the FBI told Barron. “We must keep our word to him.” On September 23, 1979 an unmarked furniture van removed all the contents of the “Herrmann” household in Andover Road, Hartsdale. The Valoushek family left to start new lives elsewhere under new identities.39
Valoushek’s KGB file, however, gives a very different account of his relations with the FBI. For well over a year after his arrest, he included deliberate errors and warning signs in his messages to the Centre as an indication that he was working under instructions from the FBI. The KGB failed to notice that anything was wrong until it was warned by an agent early in October 1978 that Valoushek had been turned. Soon afterwards the Centre summoned him to a meeting in Mexico City with the Washington deputy resident, Yuri Konstantinovich Linkov (codenamed BUROV). The FBI told him to keep the rendezvous in order to continue the double agent deception. Valoushek began his meeting with Linkov by admitting that he and his family had been under Bureau control since the spring of the previous year. He suspected that he had been betrayed by LUTZEN, who had defected in West Germany in 1969.40 He complained that he had done his best to warn the Centre, but that no one had paid attention to his warnings. A subsequent investigation by the counter-intelligence department of the FCD Illegals Directorate uncovered an extraordinary tale of incompetence. A series of warnings and deliberate errors in Valoushek’s communications since May 1977 had been overlooked and messages he had posted to the residencies in Vienna and Mexico City had simply been ignored.41
Immediately after Valoushek’s warning to the KGB in Mexico City in October 1978, the KGB warned Hambleton that contact with his controller would be temporarily broken for security reasons. Instead of being told that Valoushek had defected, however, he was simply given a vague warning that “progressive” people and organizations were under increased surveillance. He was instructed to destroy all compromising materials and to deny everything if he was questioned. In case of emergency, he was advised to escape to East Germany. Hambleton, however, remained confident that he had covered sufficient of his tracks to prevent a case from being brought against him. In June 1979 he sent a confident message to the KGB in secret writing, saying that there was no cause for alarm.42
At 7:15 a.m. on November 4, 1979 RCMP officers arrived at Hambleton’s Quebec City apartment with a search warrant. For the next two and a half years there was extensive press speculation and numerous questions about Hambleton in the Canadian parliament, but no Canadian prosecution. On March 3, 1980, the first day of the new Trudeau administration, the FBI made an apparent attempt to force its hand by producing Valoushek (under a pseudonym) for a press conference at Bureau headquarters, where he publicly identified Hambleton as one of his agents. Hambleton shrugged off the charges. Though appearing to revel in detailed descriptions of his secret contacts with Moscow by short-wave radio and other hocus pocus, he insisted that he was not a spy: “A spy is someone who regularly gets secret material, passes it on, takes orders, and gets paid for it. I have never been paid.”43 According to Hambleton’s KGB file, however, between September 1975 and December 1978 alone he was paid 18,000 dollars.44 In May 1980 the Canadian Ministry of Justice, apparently convinced that there was still insufficient evidence, announced that Hambleton would not be prosecuted. Thereafter media interest in the case gradually died down. Two years later, however, Hambleton was arrested during a visit to London, tried under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to ten years in jail.45
Valoushek’s intended successor as illegal resident in the United States was probably Klementi Alekseyevich Korsakov, codenamed KIM, born in 1948 in Moscow to a Russian father and a German mother. Korsakov’s mother, who died in 1971, had herself been a KGB illegal, codenamed EVA. Korsakov seems to have been selected as a potential illegal while still a child and, like his mother, was given bogus identity documents by the East Germans. According to his legend, Korsakov was Klemens Oskar Kuitan, an illegitimate child born in Dalleghof in 1948. Like many other Soviet illegals, he and his mother posed as East German refugees, entering West Berlin in 1953 and moving to the FRG a year later. In 1967, at the age of eighteen, Korsakov obtained a West German passport. After his mother’s death, he spent several years in Vienna, first at an art school, then taking an advertising course, while simultaneously training secretly for illegal intelligence work. In 1978, after two transatlantic trips to familiarize himself with life in the United States, he moved to New York.
Once he had begun work as a KGB illegal, however, Korsakov quickly became disillusioned. In January 1980, while undergoing further training in Moscow, he secretly entered the United States embassy, identified himself as an illegal, gave the identities of a number of other KGB officers (among them Artur Viktorovich Pyatin, head of Line N (illegals support) in Washington) and was debriefed by the CIA station. Since Korsakov was nominally a West German citizen, it was decided to transfer him secretly to the embassy of the FRG to arrange for his exfiltration. Mitrokhin’s notes do not record whether the KGB had observed him entering the American embassy, but they were waiting for him when he arrived at Moscow airport to return to the West. After lengthy interrogation, Korsakov was sent to the Kazanskaya psychiatric hospital, where, like a number of prominent Soviet dissidents, he was falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic.46
THIRTY YEARS AFTER the beginning of the Cold War, the Centre’s grand strategy for a powerful chain of illegal residencies running American agent networks as important as those during the Second World War had little to show for an enormous expenditure of time and effort. At the end of the 1970s, following a string of previous failures, Valoushek’s illegal residency was under the (albeit imperfect) control of the FBI and Korsakov was preparing to defect.
Particularly galling for the Centre was the fact that probably the most remarkable penetration of the Main Adversary b
y an illegal during the Cold War was achieved not by the KGB but by its junior partner, the Czechoslovak StB. In 1965 two StB illegals, Karl and Hana Koecher, arrived in New York, claiming to be refugees from persecution in Czechoslovakia. Fluent in Russian, English and French as well as Czech, Karl Koecher found a job as a consultant with Radio Free Europe while studying first for a master’s degree at Indiana University, then for a doctorate at Columbia. Among his professors at Columbia was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later became President Carter’s National Security Adviser. All the time, he posed as a virulent anti-Communist, even objecting to the purchase of an apartment in his East Side building in New York by the tennis star Ivan Lendl—simply because of Lendl’s Czech origins. In 1969, a year before gaining his PhD, Karl Koecher was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Wagner College, Staten Island. Hana, meanwhile, worked for a diamond business which gave her regular opportunities to travel to Europe and act as courier for the StB. The Koechers may also have been the most sexually active illegals in the history of Soviet Bloc intelligence, graduating from “wifeswapping” parties to group orgies at New York’s Plato’s Retreat and Hell Fire sex clubs which flourished in the sexually permissive pre-AIDS era of the late 1960s and 1970s.
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