The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  I asked Bearden about all those how-to recruitment stories. It was ‘largely bullshit’, he replied. ‘Imagine a locker room full of guys and each of them trying to tell how many girls they’ve screwed – that’s sort of the recruitment thing … “Man, I got one”.’

  He then added, ‘It was the middle-school, testosterone-driven thing that you have to have done it all yourself. Did I get X who was a communist to change his mind? No. All that mattered was that he provided huge amounts of intelligence.’

  Was any spy in this particular battleground actually recruited deliberately? I had spent a while going through a long list of spy cases by then. On the CIA scorecard, the only one I could identify as a deliberate recruit was a Soviet diplomat named Aleksandr Ogorodnik, code-named Trigon.

  ‘Yes,’ Bearden replied. ‘I’ll give it. It was because an operation was run; he didn’t just drop a note into the car. There weren’t many others, maybe a couple of others.’

  The CIA got to Trigon while he was in Columbia after discovering that he had a mistress. The mistress, who loved him, was then recruited, believing that spying would allow her to live with Trigon. After returning to Moscow and joining the Soviet foreign ministry, Trigon filed some supposedly invaluable intelligence.

  ‘But his intelligence was not necessarily acted on or believed,’ said Bearden.

  Recruitment of spies, according to those involved, always required a long-drawn-out process in which access could be maintained to the target. The reason why almost all Soviet agents were walk-ins was because of, as someone else involved put it, ‘the near impossibility of developing personal contact with target personnel because of the stringent defensive security measures of the Soviet state’. But if all the recruitment training that CIA officers got was thereby redundant, was the agency’s campaign against the Soviets essentially incompetent?

  Not at all, according to Bearden. The heart of the business was not recruiting but rather ‘running spies’, the handling of active agents. And there he remained fiercely proud – though oddly as proud of his comrades in the KGB.

  ‘My point is everybody talks about the recruitment being the biggest deal. You know what? Most are volunteers. The biggest deal is being able to securely handle people in Moscow under the noses of the entire second chief directorate [the KGB’s department for internal security and counterintelligence] – like we did until they were betrayed.

  ‘I don’t think there are many modern exceptions to the rule that the only time the Soviets caught a spy was when that spy was betrayed by our side, your side [the British], or the Germans. That’s pretty much a fact. It’s true for us [US] too. The FBI almost never caught a spy unless someone betrayed them.’

  In Moscow, huge resources were devoted to tailing US diplomats, and Soviet citizens had little freedom. Yet, even so, the CIA ran spies under the KGB’s nose, which was a ‘stunning accomplishment’, said Bearden.

  What gave tension to the spy game was that so much effort and preparation went into vital contacts that might last seconds and, if they went wrong, could prove fatal for the agent. For the CIA officers posted as ‘diplomats’ in the embassy in Moscow, making it work involved elaborate choreography.

  Bearden explained, ‘There is a scheduled brush contact – [passing a secret written message by “accidentally” brushing past someone in a public street] – or brief encounter with an agent – with Adolf Tolkachev, say – for nine o’clock on Friday night. Today is Monday. Today and tomorrow, we’ll be finding out who of my four people here are looking free … Then you start an orchestrated thing to break someone loose – and I might not know until Thursday who’s free. And then you’re going to be off, make cover stops all over the place, plan your whole day to where they [the KGB] don’t know you’ve disappeared at six o’clock – you could go black [evade surveillance] in Moscow on Friday evening, and they never caught you.’

  Then it was the meet: ‘You might be saying, “How are you doing? How’s your son? Here’s the medicine for him. This is the stuff you said you’d get, the microfilms … This Monday we’re going to take care of that…” Because I’m his only contact with what he thinks is the human race at this point. In this moment he’s a superman – he is above the world, that’s it. This may be the most important three, four, five minutes of his life … they might also be his last.’

  Bearden’s words begin to slow. He is starting to turn inward, thinking of the ones who survived this entire saga only to be shot because of betrayal by Ames. In total there were thirty-six, including ten who were executed.40 In court, Ames admitted compromising ‘virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me’.41

  We then turned to the point of our meeting. Was it all worth it? From reading The Main Enemy, the book Bearden wrote with journalist James Risen, I had got the impression that in his career fighting the KGB he had collected plenty of scalps, but it wasn’t clear what good really came of it.

  Looming largest for Bearden was the covert CIA war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in which he had played such a key role when he was chief in Islamabad. ‘That sped up the dissolution of the USSR greatly,’ he said.

  I replied that, true as this might or might not be, it did not count. I was trying to assess the value of espionage – the business of spying and betrayal – not covert action.

  Ever since its formation, the CIA had always been a mix of intelligence gathering and action. What critics often missed was that it always was – and remains today – the tool of the American president. The agency did what he wanted and, by and large, each president was tempted to use the CIA to fight some secret wars. After the Second World War, the nuclear threat meant that the Soviets could not be engaged in a conventional war. But they could be confronted around the world by the secret efforts of a secret agency. Covert action gave the president a lever to pull, an option short of the kind of overt military action that could escalate into nuclear war. Even covertly, however, the CIA could do little directly behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, the opportunities lay in undecided space, the unoccupied countries of the world that might swing either way in their loyalties. That is why insiders sometimes semi-seriously referred to the CIA operations division as ‘the Department of the Third World’.

  So life in the CIA or the KGB was mostly not about pure spying. It was a market for influence. In any one nation, the job ‘was more about making that country ours instead of theirs. It denied them that piece on the chessboard, and in the end he who had the most pieces won. It was about “country management” so that I don’t get any surprises out of that country,’ explained Bearden.

  As to whether all this Cold War covert action did any good, much has already been said, not least in the epic study by Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes. That book – which portrayed decades of missteps, bloody failures and counterproductive actions – caused fury in the CIA, which suggested in a rare, if not unheard of, public statement regarding a book about the agency that Weiner had repeatedly distorted history: ‘Backed by selective citations, sweeping assertions, and a fascination with the negative, Weiner overlooks, minimizes, or distorts agency achievements.’42

  I shall not comment here on who is right. I only add a small criticism: that Weiner rather left the impression that bloody intervention, coup plotting and so on were all the CIA did. He forgot the business of spying: the function of the intelligence agency to recruit agents and gather protected information.

  On the value of Cold War espionage, Bearden thinks the jury is still out. In the CIA versus KGB battle, ‘If either one or both had decided not to play the game, would it have made any difference to the outcome? Probably not.’

  What is certain, he said, was there was too much mutual obsession. The ‘recruitment of intelligence officers by the KGB and CIA became easy … We all knew each other’s phone numbers. But what we did was turn that into the main activity, into the belief that if you recruit a KGB officer he’ll tell you who the spies are.’

&
nbsp; The question he asked himself, in his sceptical way, was whether, in the history of the West, human intelligence had really been the basis for a major policy development by a president or prime minister, particularly as human intelligence was often disbelieved. His curious answer – and he was not the only one to make this case – was that, in what he called ‘reverse-perverse’ logic, when it came to Cold War spying’s biggest achievements, it was spying against America that had made the most positive difference.

  In Bearden’s view, even the nuclear spies did some good. ‘Stalin would have been hysterical about the American burgeoning nuclear development if he hadn’t penetrated the entire Manhattan Project with a whole array of people.’ Julius and Ethel Rosenberg kept Stalin from doing ‘something goofy. That betrayal of the US probably saved us a huge war.’

  He also mentioned the Stasi agent Topaz, real name Rainer Rupp, who was Markus Wolf’s man inside NATO. When, in 1983, NATO had mobilized its forces for a ten-day pan-European exercise, code-named Able Archer, including a simulation of the highest level of nuclear alert, it was people like Topaz who convinced the octogenarian Kremlin leadership that all those military manoeuvres were not a build-up to a nuclear first strike.43

  On the reverse side, he was not saying there were no successes. ‘I still believe that, on the whole, the stuff Tolkachev gave us provided a commercial advantage to General Dynamics that meant our fighter aircraft for the next two generations performed better than anything. Because we literally sat in on the Soviet design efforts.’ But so much other intelligence work was ‘grossly inefficient’ – a huge effort for little result.

  On balance, was it worth it? It was the question Bearden said he asked himself constantly, particularly thinking about those who died. In Tolkachev’s case, for instance, ‘was his accomplishment worth him dying?’ For now, it was a question Bearden did not want to answer.

  * * *

  From Philby to Tolkachev, the great spies of the Cold War illustrated some of the tremendous skills that intelligence agencies had developed to operate traitors covertly within an enemy camp. Those involved took pride in their spying coups, even as they were ashamed by the betrayals of certain colleagues and even if many, like Bearden, harboured doubts about what had been achieved.

  Above all, human intelligence emerged as a frustrating business – a resource-hungry, time-consuming and usually fruitless pursuit at constant risk of backfiring. Some countries existed happily without even engaging in it. But while its impact was usually slight, occasionally, at a very crucial moment, human intelligence could provide the golden arrow, the piece of information that, if it could be corroborated and used correctly, might be decisive, as it was for Stalin with the designs he stole for the atomic bomb.

  As we have seen, some of the lessons of Cold War espionage were universal, from the intrinsically fragile nature of intelligence based on human treachery to the need for corroboration or verification to set against this weakness.

  There were also aspects of this period that were special, not least the totalitarian nature of Soviet society and hence the strict limits to meaningful contact between Soviet and Western citizens. These restrictions gave little opportunity for the sort of prolonged contact that might have resulted in successful recruitment, so that when agents were recruited the difficulty of control and communication meant that doubts inevitably crept in as to whether agents had been compromised or not. But, though operating in the Soviet bloc was unique, there were parallels for future spying. In the twenty-first century, as the CIA tried to recruit spies in training camps for terrorists in remote mountain areas, for instance, its officers faced the same fundamental problem of how to trust and direct spies who were barely seen and barely known.

  Even if communications are good, the physical distance, cultural barriers and profusion of intermediaries that lie between the spy and the decision-maker, the person who consumes the intelligence, always make for uncertainty. Kim Philby’s trouble was that his Moscow controllers, and beyond them the Kremlin, operated, mentally and physically, in a world apart. If they had known him better they would have realized that his treachery was genuine and been better able to judge the information he provided.

  Even in the Cold War period, however, there were other theatres of spying where human contact was far more profound, where spies could be actively recruited and their credibility might come not through the verification of information but through a deep understanding of their motives.

  Battlegrounds like this provide evidence of how spies can be run and continue to survive among even the deadliest of enemies.

  Chapter 3

  Friendship

  ‘The reality is that the past is a very, very dark place for everybody’

  – Martin McGuinness, former IRA commander1

  Not all spies provide information that is disbelieved. Not all intelligence gathering has unforeseen consequences. Even during the wasteful years of the Cold War arms race, there were times when the spy agency proved its worth, when human intelligence turned out to be indispensable. Britain’s military campaign in Northern Ireland, which began in 1968 and ended thirty years later, is such an example. Insiders mention the story of one of Britain’s best spies, an agent deep inside one of the most successful terrorist organizations, the IRA, which struck one deadly blow after another against the British state in its campaign for a united Ireland.

  A CIA officer first pointed me in this direction. ‘You gotta look at Ireland. That was a matter of survival for the British, and we learned from them.’ British intelligence came to believe that its HUMINT was so good that it was instrumental in eventually defeating the IRA. Two former senior officers of SIS further tempted me to investigate. ‘The IRA was defeated by penetration,’ said one. The other disagreed in the strongest terms. ‘The IRA was never defeated,’ he insisted. But he too spoke of incredible success at recruiting sources inside that group.

  One particular British spy – code-named Steak Knife – was mentioned as being more valuable than any other, probably saving dozens of lives. His story, and that of the army unit that ran him, controversial though it is, is a case study in how spying really can work. And together with the wider history of how success was achieved in Britain’s own secret ‘war on terror’, it resonates today because of the techniques required in keeping alive a spy inside a group of rebels intent on murder.

  Even though terrorism has changed in the twenty-first century, the Ireland intelligence war set the template. And the truth here is important for all to know, because if we in a democratic society choose to send spies against such deadly enemies, we should be aware of the compromises involved, and the need for society to set limits on these operations.

  Steak Knife’s story also illustrated something of what might be called the lost art of recruitment. In contrast to the pattern set in spying against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and described by Bearden in the previous chapter, few British spies in Ireland were volunteers. Recruitment was carried out by intelligence officers from the army, police and secret services who understood something of the elemental business of persuasion: how to grab the soul of another person and refashion it for a radically different purpose. As will become clear, the recruitment of the very best spies – those who steal secrets from the inner circles of an enemy camp and who do so and remain in place over an extended period – usually relies on a special bond of friendship, one that is established by time and patience. In the rush to respond to the next great threat, whether from the Russians or Islamic terror groups or hackers, we need to ask ourselves if we can afford the time to allow the spies we need to be recruited.

  * * *

  The existence of Steak Knife and allegations about his real identity have been leaked and published before. So have many inaccurate details about him. But with access to several new sources of information, I think we can attempt an account of what really happened. Due to their sensitive former positions, even years later few of the people quoted here can be ide
ntified.

  It makes sense to start the story with one Freddie Scappaticci. He was born in Belfast in 1946, the son of an Italian immigrant, Daniel Scappaticci, who had arrived in the province in the 1920s. A football enthusiast, young Freddie had a trial with Nottingham Forest Football Club, but when that did not work out he became a bricklayer and later a builder. At the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he joined the IRA’s more militant Provisional wing – also known as the Provos or PIRA – which had broken away from the Official IRA in 1969. (The terms IRA and PIRA are often used interchangeably.) PIRA would come to lead the campaign against the British. In 1971, Scappaticci was interned without trial by the British for alleged PIRA membership.

  In May 2003, reports in the press claimed that Scappaticci had in fact been a British agent code-named Steak Knife (whose existence had been revealed four years earlier in the Sunday Times). Shortly after his name was published, Scappaticci appeared at a press conference and issued a statement read by his lawyer. He denied that he was Steak Knife and denied that he had worked for army intelligence or ever been involved in terrorism (although he did later confirm his membership of the IRA). He attacked the media for its ‘reckless and extremely damaging’ articles. The press had shown ‘absolutely no regard to [his] position or the harm such publication’ would do to him and his family.2

  In the light of these denials, it is best just to follow the story of a man of a similar age and description who came to the attention of the British Army and was later code-named Steak Knife (most have spelled the source’s name as Stakeknife, but this is incorrect). At some point in the 1970s, according to British intelligence, this man killed a British soldier, or certainly wounded one. He then rose rapidly to become the commanding officer of the Provisionals’ Belfast Brigade and was friends with a number of the IRA’s rising stars, men like Gerry Adams, who went on to lead Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing. For some reason, Steak Knife then fell out of favour with his commanders. While he retained his connections, he was relieved of his command. This slight was a weakness that made him a target for recruitment.