Deception

by Edward Lucas

  Another possibility is that the KGB had tried to recruit Mr Koppel. That would explain the hotel-style treatment at the Lubyanka. But he would have been an unlikely plant: with Operation Jungle being wound up, anyone connected with it would be coming under great scrutiny. SIS would be well aware that ‘Karl’ and his partisans had been phoneys all along. Even if he went along with the KGB plan, the likelihood of anyone trusting Mr Koppel with any more secrets was minimal. Indeed, SIS treated him and the other returning agents with suspicion: some of them complained about regular and intrusive surveillance from counter-intelligence officers. Mr Koppel insists, moreover, that the KGB gave him no instructions or contact in London. His name later appeared on a list of fugitives wanted by the Soviet authorities, which suggests that he failed to follow any instructions the KGB had given him.

  Until I outlined them to him, Mr Koppel was apparently unaware of the full extent and nature of the deception surrounding his mission. He had not read Red Web. But his faith in Rebane remains undimmed to this day (indeed the legendary Estonian commander was a guest of honour at his wedding in 1960). ‘You told me “take no initiative”,’ he said to his boss wryly. Rebane responded coolly: ‘I am a soldier, not a trained intelligence officer.’ In any case, espionage was the last thing on Mr Koppel’s much-burdened mind. He moved to the countryside, becoming a British citizen, recovering from a near-breakdown and putting all thoughts of Estonia aside. Only in the 1990s did that change. The three surviving Estonians of SIS – Kiik, Koppel and Urm – made themselves known to the newly established Estonian embassy in London. An official there at the time recalls receiving a phone call, in which an anonymous voice asked: ‘How does my Estonian sound? You see I haven’t spoken it for thirty years.’ Along with other veterans of the partisan war, they received military decorations from their reborn country.46

  After intense persuasion SIS also acknowledged its historical debt, inviting the three men to a champagne reception in 3, Carlton Gardens, where the service entertains foreign guests and the eternal ‘Major Halliday’ interviews graduate recruits.bl It is just a stone’s throw from the Ryder St office where their controllers had botched and bungled their mission. In the presence of senior British and Estonian officials, they were given replica statues of the commando memorial at Auchtermuchty on the slopes of Ben Nevis, where the agents of Operation Jungle had trained forty years previously. The figurine shows three men in pre-war battledress, bunched together, alert and watching, over an inscription reading ‘United We Conquer’.† SIS added ‘Never Forgotten’. After Britain’s amnesia towards its debts in the Baltic, that could seem like wishful thinking. It is all the more poignant given the efforts that the authorities in Estonia were making to help British intelligence, for the third time in ninety years.

  10

  The Upside Down World

  In early 1990, an unusual delegation began touring the spy agencies of Western Europe. It comprised the senior security officials of Czechoslovakia – a country where communist power had collapsed only weeks previously. The scruffy trio were more at home in the smoky cafés of the dissident cultural scene than in the taciturn and besuited world of espionage. But the message they bore from their country’s new leadership was simple: a request for the greatest possible cooperation. Not only did they want help in building up new security and intelligence services, untainted by the communist past. They wanted defectors to return in glory, and for any of their citizens working undercover for Western spy agencies to come out into the open and receive medals.

  The world had turned upside down. Security and intelligence had been both the citadel of communist power and the spearhead of outside attempts to breach it. Now the communist system’s spooks were defeated while their Western counterparts blinked bewildered over the silent battlefield. Shortly after the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in November 1989 I was one of the first outsiders to visit the Prague headquarters of the feared StB secret police.bm I had been the only newsman in Prague for the English-speaking media before the collapse of the regime. The building (a former theological college confiscated by the communists) had long been a source of fascination to me. It lay on the way to the airport, with a roof marked by distinctive antennae; the headquarters of a KGB front organisation was near by. It had a grim air to it: this was where the nastiest people in the country cooked up their witches’ brew of blackmail and betrayal, where husbands and wives were set to spy on each other under threats of reprisals against their children, each wracked by guilt but believing that doing so was a necessary sacrifice. I had heard tales of torture in the cellars, and of the ever-present role of ‘advisers’ from Moscow – the ultimate bosses of the Czechoslovak communist state. Only weeks before any attempt to enter the building would have resulted in instant arrest. Now the regime was defeated; instead of scurrying past, I marched boldly in.

  Our glum guide showed little enthusiasm for his task. All other employees, he droned, had been sent home to await instructions. I slipped away from the tour party of other nosy Westerners and roamed the unguarded offices, opening doors at random and browsing through files and card indexes. I hoped, not very realistically, to find some trace of the StB officers who in the past year had snooped on me, tried to recruit me, and bullied my friends. But the echoing corridors were not as deserted as they seemed. Around one corner I found an armoured door with an intercom. I pressed it. A peremptory voice asked me to identify myself. ‘I’m a British journalist – can I come in?’ I replied cheekily. Lucifer in the Vatican would have had a less frosty reception. Seconds later, my hosts crossly whisked me away. ‘He was trying to get to the cipher room,’ one muttered to the other. I was puzzled. If the service was dead, who was sending messages, and about what? As I was to find out, toppling communism was one thing, uprooting its structures another.

  Well before the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, the battle lines had softened. As early as 1986, the CIA and KGB had set up a spooks’ back-channel at a meeting in Vienna: the aim was to have a practical, depoliticised way of avoiding crises and misunderstandings, and to explore cooperation on subjects of common interest such as terrorism.1 It later developed to include agreement about the treatment of defectors and haggling over spy swaps. After the Berlin Wall fell in October 1989, British, American and French spies found themselves hobnobbing with their Soviet counterparts, comparing notes on the troubling prospect of German unity. Milt Bearden, a top CIA man dealing with Eastern Europe, listened sympathetically as his KGB counterpart bemoaned the fact that he would soon need a visa to visit a city that his forebears had liberated from fascism at such enormous cost. In some cases, old foes went into business: setting up security companies or, in the case of two station chiefs from Berlin, KGB and CIA respectively, co-authorship.2

  As the Kremlin lost its grip, the fringes of the former Soviet Union became a perfect springboard for spying on its core. The borderlands from Tallinn to Tbilisi, formerly a hostile operating environment, were now friendly and rewarding. Moreover, as the stick and the carrot of the Soviet system disappeared, the costs and risks of spying had never been lower. Treachery had once led not just to dismissal and imprisonment, but quite likely to death. The change came quickly. The last Western agent to be executed in the Soviet Union was the idealistic Dmitri Polyakov, a retired GRU major-general, in 1988.3 But by 1989 the regime had largely lost its power to terrify. It could still blackmail, but the murderous fire in the belly of the system lit by Lenin in 1917 was all but extinguished. The intricate system of privileges used as rewards – access to a better shop, spacious housing, higher education for a child, maybe even a trip to a foreign country – was no longer attractive. With a bit of hard currency, the humblest individual could buy a better lifestyle than the system could offer its most favoured servants.

  The ideological climate had changed too. For those with vestigial loyalties to the old regime, it was hard to stay motivated as its day of judgement loomed. Treating the West as a predatory enemy had been a bulwark of the Sovie
t mentality. Now the ‘capitalist camp’ was a valued partner, lending money and sending food aid. In the former satellite states, people were positively eager to help anyone wanting to bury the vestiges of the ‘evil empire’. Even inside the most senior and sensitive parts of the state, the collapse of morale corroded loyalty.

  The Cold War had been an existential struggle, in which ruthlessness generally triumphed over sentiment. The new era provided more complex choices. Was the big prize German reunification on the West’s terms? In that case the priority should be to prop up the faltering regime in Moscow while it did the necessary deals. That would mean going easy on aggressive intelligence collection, which might seem like a further humiliation for the Soviet leadership. Others argued that it was futile to believe that the West could bolster the reformists, who might be out of power at any moment. It was better to press home what might be a temporary advantage. Counter-intelligence services in particular argued hard for the latter. The CIA and SIS both suspected that they had been badly penetrated during the Cold War, but had failed to nail the traitors. The Czechoslovak, East German, Hungarian and Polish spy agencies had all been fearsome adversaries. Now they were in friendly hands, offering a trove of clues about their past activities. With even the KGB in trouble, it had never been easier to track down moles, illegals, double agents and other sources. Indeed KGB officers were queuing – in some cases even literally – to offer their services to Western spycatchers, to the point that the CIA office dealing with defector resettlement complained it could not handle any more. In at least one instance, a would-be KGB defector was told to apply for an American visa through the normal channels.

  But the spycatchers’ needs were only one pile of paper on the desks of the harried spymasters. Their political masters were desperate for more information too. Would the reforms in the Soviet Union continue? What was the likelihood of a coup? Would the USSR break-up? An industry grew up in stealing (or obtaining, depending on your viewpoint) military technology. Electronics, and insights into it, were in particular demand: radar beacons, friend-or-foe identification, encryption technology, nuclear command and control systems, submarine radio systems and the like.4 Amid the haggling of the arms bazaar were more subtle questions. Who was in charge of the nuclear arsenal, particularly the highly portable tactical weapons, some of them no bigger than a suitcase? Were they properly guarded? What capabilities did the Soviet submarine fleet maintain? And what was the state of Soviet signals intelligence? Could it really listen to phone calls in Stockholm? Or Berlin? Or Washington? The pull-out of the Soviet forces from Eastern Germany and the Baltic was a top political priority until 1994. But so was spying on them. Discipline was ragged and corruption colossal. Everything was on sale, from gadgets such as night-vision goggles to humdrum commodities such as petrol – and also military secrets.

  Answering all these questions meant recruiting human assets on a previously inconceivable scale. During the Cold War getting alongside anybody in the Soviet power structures had been a challenge; now even the GRU and KGB were direct targets. Politicians, officials, military officers and spooks were all open to persuasion. Many who had signed up to defend the motherland felt their life’s purpose was lost, or could easily be persuaded to think so. Wages were miserable and paid late; accommodation was abominable. For most, the offer of money was enough. Senior officers worried about their retirement. For those with families, the ability to provide for them trumped loyalty to the motherland. Some found it demeaning to take money, but asked simply for pharmaceuticals: many readers of this book might betray their country for a reliable supply of otherwise unobtainable insulin for a diabetic loved one.

  The contrast with the Soviet years was complete. In the years after the collapse of Operation Jungle and its counterparts, Western intelligence had fared poorly in difficult conditions. For a start, its reputation was in tatters. Kremlin propagandists were cock-a-hoop at the KGB’s triumph (and indeed were still publishing material embarrassing to SIS when the Soviet empire was in its death throes). SIS and the CIA were depicted, not wholly inaccurately, as cynical, incompetent and infested with fascist collaborators.5 The dented credibility made it harder to recruit people, and the KGB’s strength made it far harder to run them. Ferrying agents in and out had been easy when Major Lukaševičs was acting in effect as the travel agent. Thereafter it was dangerous and difficult. Soviet air defences improved, making parachute drops far harder too.

  With official paranoia fuelled by the subversion efforts that the West had tried to mount from the mid 1950s onwards, the KGB’s counter-intelligence department commanded colossal clout and resources. The dangers of penetration and dangles were acute. If you recruited an agent, how could you run him safely, or know if he had gone bad? And how could you be sure that the information he passed on to you was sound? According to the best book on the subject, Nigel West’s The Friends,6 SIS gave up trying to run or recruit agents in Moscow because of the ‘impossibly hostile environment’. KGB surveillance meant that even casual social contacts with the locals prompted an unwelcome response. Even routine fieldcraft, such as looking for dead-letter drops and clandestine meeting-places, was ‘a complete waste of time’ thanks to ubiquitous KGB informers. Foreigners were conspicuous, and ‘no sooner was one watcher team shaken off, than another appeared in its place’. Nigel West notes that the CIA station in Moscow ‘had also concluded that running agents in the Soviet capital was an unprofitable business’. This came after one of its star sources, Piotr Popov, was caught in October 1959 in the act of passing a message to his case officer. The American was released. Popov is thought to be the agent mentioned in the earlier chapter on spycraft: fed into a furnace, with his grisly murder filmed for the benefit of new recruits to the GRU. Viktor Sheymov, the most senior KGB officer to defect to America while living in the Soviet Union, spent months in Moscow simply trying to work out how to meet a British or American intelligence officer in order make his offer of help. He eventually found a means of doing so involving a loose window in a cinema toilet in Warsaw.7

  If Moscow was difficult, the provinces were even harder to reach. Western spy services maintained a particular interest in the Baltic, which they saw as a potential launch pad for World War Three. Electronic snoopers scoured the airwaves for transmissions to be deciphered and analysed; spy aircraft made high-altitude over-flights. Analysts scoured the Soviet media for clues about infrastructure, demographics and public morale (while Soviet censors tried to ensure that even the most innocuous information could not be pieced together to reveal a secret). Human intelligence continued too, using to the maximum the limited opportunities for tourism and commercial travel in the region. Sailors on merchant vessels during shore leave could keep their eyes and ears open, and empty dead-letter boxes or pass on money. Occasional cultural and sporting events let foreigners visit, mingle and discreetly disappear. But for most visitors, let alone spies, making private contacts was risky to impossible.8

  In this intimidating climate, the British and Americans did what they could. From the mid-1960s, under the legendary leadership of Harold Shergood (known as Shergy), MI6 focused on recruiting and running Soviet sources in third countries, or non-Soviet ones inside the Soviet Union. Careful operations involving individual agents replaced the leaky, ramshackle networks of the past. After the fiascos of the 1950s, British intelligence dumped unreliable émigrés, and retired incompetents such as Carr. It trained its officers better in practical spycraft, such as meticulous use of dead-letter boxes and brush contacts. The proper use of forged identities evolved too: technical competence is only one element of success; just as important is the context in which the identity is used. Officers and agents were drilled in anti-surveillance and counter-intelligence procedures. Every clandestine meeting involved fall-back plans. Counter-intelligence scrutiny, once a backwater, became more thorough. Spies could expect to be quizzed about anything new or unusual in their lives, from new neighbours to new lovers. SIS also gained a new quasi-academi
c side: researchers and experts with a far fuller understanding of the intricacies of Soviet bureaucracy than enthusiasts like Carr, able to piece together the careers of opponents and targets from the most fragmentary clues. These efforts over many years did eventually bear fruit, for SIS with the Czechoslovak Miloslav Kroča (whose daughter received her belated reward in 1990); with Oleg Penkovsky (who was executed)9 and later with Oleg Gordievsky (who was snatched from the KGB’s clutches).10 For the CIA the roll of honour includes spies such as Dmitri Polyakov and the weapons scientist Adolf Tolkachev, executed in 1986.11 However it is notable that (as far as can be judged from published sources) the vast majority of SIS and CIA recruits in the Soviet bloc – who in the period 1960–1990 numbered at most eighty and perhaps as few as forty that were of any use – were volunteers motivated by idealism, rather than recruits achieved by all the costly and risky efforts to pitch and persuade.

  As the Cold War ended, many wondered if this expensive and fairly unproductive espionage apparatus was still needed. CNN, not the CIA, had proved the best guide to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coup of August 1991.

  We didn’t have any spies in place who could give us much insight into the plans of the East German government or for that matter the intentions of the Soviet leadership,