by David Wise
Bloch was one of the first to telephone Jirousek after she advertised in the Kurier, giving her measurements and her address and phone in the Lassallestrasse, near the Prater and its famous giant Ferris wheel, depicted in the film The Third Man. *
Bloch would come to see her on Saturday mornings for a couple of hours, she recalled. She would always be dressed in leather costume and boots, with a whip. “He came every week, or almost every week, for seven years. He did not want regular sex. He only wanted to be beaten and humiliated.” She would beat him, she said, “sometimes with my hands and sometimes with a whip.”
For these services, Bloch paid her about $200 a week, or $10,000 a year, she said, which would add up to some $70,000 over seven years. She knew he was an American diplomat and had the impression that he was frustrated in his career and felt he deserved to be the ambassador. “He’s complicated and it is hard to get to know him, he has a contact problem with people. It was very difficult to begin a conversation with him.”
Bloch’s preference for kinky sex would be of no relevance but for the fact that the FBI suspected he might be selling secrets to the KGB to pay for his weekly visits to Tina Jirousek, and perhaps others before her, when he was stationed in East Germany in the 1970s. The FBI brought Jirousek to Washington and put her up at a Ramada Inn in northern Virginia while she testified twice to a federal grand jury investigating Bloch.
Although Bloch could not easily have afforded to pay for his Saturday morning visits on his foreign service salary, he came from a moneyed background, so the investigators’ theory that he might have sold secrets for sex was plausible but not necessarily persuasive.
Felix Stephen Bloch was born in Vienna in 1935. His parents were Jewish and got out with Felix and his twin sister in 1939, a year after the Nazis marched into Austria. The family settled in Manhattan, where his father prospered in the paper export business. Bloch and his sister were raised as Presbyterians.
He joined the State Department in 1958 as an intelligence specialist. A year later he married Lucille Stephenson, whom he had met in Italy when they were both graduate students in Bologna. Diplomatic postings followed in D.üsseldorf, Caracas, West and East Berlin, and Singapore.
Bloch was sent to West Berlin in 1970. In the fall of 1974, the United States established diplomatic relations with East Germany and Bloch was assigned to East Berlin. The Blochs, by now with two daughters, moved to Pankow, a suburb of East Berlin. Bloch traveled to Leipzig several times. It was a period that the FBI scrutinized with special care as it delved into Bloch’s past.
Unlike many foreign service officers who try to keep the CIA at arm’s length, Bloch cooperated with the intelligence agency during his tour in Singapore. “Bloch was always courteous and helpful,” recalled David T. Samson, who served in the Singapore station in the mid-1970s, when Bloch was in the embassy. “I even got him involved in an operation. The East German news agency had a correspondent there who obviously worked closely with the KGB. I introduced Bloch to him in September 1975 so that Bloch could develop this guy. Bloch was willing to do that for us.”
In 1980, Bloch was sent to his native Vienna, where he was in his element. A tall, bald, compact man with an almost military bearing, Bloch seemed the perfect diplomat in Vienna, fluent in German and close to a number of Austrian officials, although he chafed under two successive ambassadors who were political appointees. He and his wife had a spacious house in Oberdöbling, one of Vienna’s best neighborhoods. An opera and art lover, he collected the paintings of Gustav Klimt.
When Vice President George Bush visited Vienna in 1983, Bloch was the official in charge of the visit. He met Bush at the airport, and the photo album the Blochs carefully kept contained several pictures of a smiling Vice President Bush and Felix Bloch.
But while Bloch lived stylishly as second in command of the American embassy, as he glided through the endless round of diplomatic cocktail parties and receptions, there was another man present in Vienna, dispatched there as an illegal by the KGB, who moved in an entirely different world. He called himself Reino Gikman, although that was surely not his true name. Following standard KGB procedure for illegals, he had acquired the birth certificate in Finland of the real Reino Gikman, who was probably long dead, and stepped into his skin.
After spending time in Germany to build his cover, he came to Vienna in 1979, lived obscurely in a hotel for five years, and then moved into a modest gingerbread cottage in Hietzing with a widow named Helga Höbart. Supposedly a computer salesman for IBM, which he was not, “Gikman” was a regular at Kern’s, a Gasthaus in the Wallnerstrasse, heavy on pork schnitzels and beef, where many people who worked in the nearby government offices ate lunch.
The FBI suspected that Gikman was Bloch’s KGB control in Vienna, but neither the FBI nor the Austrian federal police were able to establish that the two had ever met there. Bloch told me that he had never known Gikman in Vienna but had met him in three other European cities, where he knew him as “Pierre Bart.”*
Around 1986, Gikman was said to have been spotted by Austrian military counterintelligence entering the back door of the Soviet embassy in Vienna. This information made its way to the CIA, which opened a file on Reino Gikman and began tracking his activities.
In July 1987, Felix Bloch returned to the United States and a job at the State Department. Two years later, on April 27, 1989, U.S. intelligence overheard a telephone call between Reino Gikman and Bloch. The FBI opened a file on Bloch the next day. Because Bloch was now back on U.S. soil, the case was handed off by the CIA to the bureau.
The next month, Bloch flew to Paris and checked into the Hôtel Pullman St.-Honoré, a small, elegant right-bank hotel. Early on the evening of May 14, he strolled down the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a street lined with some of the world’s most expensive shops, carrying a black airline-type bag with a shoulder strap. He stopped to look in the shop windows, perhaps studying the reflections in the glass to see if he was being followed.
And he was. At the request of the FBI, agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French counterintelligence service, were on him. At the Hôtel Meurice, across from the Jardins des Tuileries, he walked through the ornate, chandeliered lobby to a small bar in the rear. Gikman, the man he said he knew as “Pierre Bart,” was waiting for him there.
The KGB illegal was a big, heavyset man, close to six feet, with dark hair, a beard, and a mustache. Gikman/Bart and Bloch had whiskies, then moved downstairs to the hotel’s opulent Restaurant le Meurice, a place of dark-paneled wood, red walls, and hovering waiters. The French counterintelligence agents were close by. The DST secretly photographed the pair, both in the bar and in the restaurant.
Bloch placed his bag under the table. The two men chatted over wine and dinner. It was an expensive meal, but Gikman picked up the check. Bloch was first to leave the restaurant. When Gikman/Bart left, he was carrying the bag. Soon afterward, the DST videotaped him entering his budget-priced hotel, the Saphir, near the Gare de Lyon.
Eight months later, I sat in Bloch’s apartment in the Kalorama section of Washington. His little white dog, Mephisto, kept trying to jump into my lap. By that time, Bloch had been questioned intensively by the FBI. He had denied passing any documents to the Soviets or receiving any money. He had also checked Mephisto’s collar, looking for FBI bugs, but did not detect any.
I asked him about the man he had dined with in Paris. “He was someone I knew as a stamp collector,” he said. “I knew him as Pierre Bart. I don’t know the name Gikman.” And what was in the bag that he had left under the table in Paris? “Stamps were in the bag. Albums and pages of stamps.”
That, at least, is also what Bloch told the FBI. Bloch, to be sure, had an extensive stamp collection in red leather albums, which he pulled from a bookcase and spent some time enthusiastically showing to me. He had, he said, been collecting stamps since childhood.
On May 22, 1989, eight days after Bloch met Gikman/Bart in Paris, Robert Ha
nssen told the KGB that the FBI was investigating Bloch and Reino Gikman.
Something very interesting happened after that. Although Moscow now knew that the FBI was on the case, and despite the risks, it permitted Gikman to meet again with Bloch in Brussels six days later, on May 28. Bloch was then in Belgium on official State Department business.
A few days later, early in June, Reino Gikman disappeared from Vienna. Helga Höbart was devastated. The friendly Finn had suddenly vanished from their house and from the Hofräte-Stammtisch, the bureaucrats’ table, at Kern’s. Gikman, pulled out of Vienna by the KGB, had gone to ground in Moscow.
Then, just after 6 A.M. on June 22, Bloch received a telephone call at his apartment in Washington from a man who identified himself as “Ferdinand Paul.” But the person who called him, Bloch told me, was Pierre Bart. The FBI was listening.
The man told Bloch that he was calling “in behalf of Pierre” who “cannot see you in the near future” because “he is sick.” The caller added, pointedly: “A contagious disease is suspected.” The man then told Bloch: “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.”
Bloch said he hoped the disease was not serious. He wished the caller well and hung up.
To the listening FBI agents, the telephone call was clearly a warning to Bloch that his contacts with the KGB had been discovered. Worse yet, it meant that someone inside U.S. intelligence might have tipped off the Russians. When Bloch arrived at the State Department that day, he was summoned to the office of Ambassador Robert E. Lamb, the assistant secretary for diplomatic security.
Three FBI agents were waiting for Bloch. They questioned him for two and a half hours, confronting him with the surveillance photographs of both Bloch and Gikman taken in the restaurant in Paris.
The questioning went nowhere. Bloch denied to the agents that he had sold secrets to the Soviets or had ever met Gikman in Vienna. According to Bloch, “After a while they said, ‘This is a lot of bullshit. Tell us the truth.’ ‘You can accept it or not,’ I said.” Bloch surrendered his black diplomatic passport and his blue regular passport. His building pass was revoked and he was placed on administrative leave.
The agents followed Bloch home. The next day he was questioned again for several hours. He turned over the key to his apartment to the FBI, which removed a briefcase, address books, photo albums, slides, checkbooks, files, and bank and investment records. For the next six months, he was never to be without close surveillance by FBI agents, working in three shifts round the clock.
None of this was yet known to the public. But James Bamford, working on the ABC News investigative team in Washington, learned of the FBI probe*
On July 21, John F. McWethy, the State Department correspondent for ABC News, broke the sensational story that Bloch, a State Department official, was under investigation by the FBI as a suspected Soviet spy. Within minutes, the State Department confirmed the ABC account, naming Bloch as the subject of an FBI inquiry into “illegal activities” involving “a foreign intelligence service.” A security breach “has occurred,” the department added. The statement was highly unusual, since Bloch had not been charged with a crime.
For weeks thereafter, Bloch became the center of a media circus. On television night after night he appeared on the evening news, sometimes walking Mephisto, trailed by reporters, cameramen, and FBI agents. As he passed by, children greeted him as “Mr. Spy.”
Bloch was in excellent physical shape; he had always walked for exercise and he led the reporters and the counterspies on some memorable treks in the heat, including a twenty-two-mile hike in early August that left one female FBI agent with bleeding feet.
When Bloch drove from his apartment, the press cars following the FBI cars following Bloch’s car were reportedly being followed by Soviet cars. The FBI quietly put a stop to that; the Russians dropped out of the caravan.
The bureau, hoping to overhear something useful, had bugged Bloch’s silver-gray Mercedes when he took it to the dealer for servicing in suburban Maryland. But Bloch had assumed his phones were tapped, his car and apartment bugged. His conversations with his wife in the Mercedes were unexceptional.
The FBI was utterly frustrated. Clearly, someone had tipped off the KGB, and that in turn had led to the cryptic warning telephone call to Bloch. But lacking evidence, and with Bloch sticking to his story about simply giving stamps to Pierre Bart, the FBI was stymied. There was no basis to make an arrest.
Early in December, Bloch was in New York shopping at Macy’s with his usual FBI entourage. He went uptown to have lunch at the Waldorf Grill, then to his parents’ apartment. His mother, who was watching his back, was the first to notice. She looked out at the street. “There’s no one there,” she told him. It was true; that afternoon the FBI surveillance suddenly ended. There no longer seemed any point.
Hanssen, from his vantage inside the Soviet analytical unit, had continued to funnel information about the Bloch case to the KGB. In August, he had provided a floppy disk with additional details about the FBI investigation.
More than a decade later, in November 2000, he revisited the Bloch case in a long letter to the KGB. In the letter, he attacked a fellow FBI counterintelligence agent and cited Bloch as an example of why he had refused to meet the KGB overseas. That might reveal his identity, he wrote, but his anonymity was “my best protection against betrayal by someone like me working from whatever motivation, a Bloch or a Philby.”*
Hanssen knew that in May 1989 Donald E. Stukey, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, had been sent to Paris to work with the DST in covering the meeting of Bloch and the KGB illegal at the Hôtel Meurice. Stukey was an experienced and well-respected FBI agent. As a former chief of the Soviet section for seven years, he had outranked Hanssen and found him annoying. Now Hanssen, without mentioning Stukey by name, unleashed a vituperative attack on him in his message to Moscow. Although the letter covered a number of matters, it read in part:
Bloch was such a shnook.… I almost hated protecting him, but then he was your friend, and there was your illegal I wanted to protect. If our guy sent to Paris had balls or brains both would have been dead meat. Fortunately for you he had neither. He was your good luck of the draw. He was the kind who progressed by always checking with those above and tying them to his mistakes. The French said, “Should we take them down?” He went all wet. He’d never made a decision before, why start then. It was that close. His kindred spirits promoted him. Things are the same the world over, eh?
After Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, the letter was among the material made public by the FBI. Stukey, who retired from the bureau in 1996, was not amused at Hanssen’s abusive description of him as someone unable to make decisions. “I’ve never been accused up to now of being unable to make decisions,” he said.
Bloch was not arrested in Paris for good reason, Stukey added. “It was early in the investigation, so we weren’t ready to move in. And we didn’t want them [the French] to. The French did not have a case against Bloch, he had not broken their laws, so they had no cause to arrest him in any event.
“We were case-building then. At that time, we didn’t even know if a crime was being committed. To say we were going to make an arrest was patently absurd. Either he [Hanssen] was trying to impress his Soviet handlers or he did not understand the situation. We were working closely with the Department of Justice and trying to wrap this up in the U.S. We thought it was U.S. classified information he was passing. We don’t make arrests without the authority of the Justice Department. We did not have authority from the internal security section of the Justice Department to make an arrest.”
The FBI was determined to find the source of the tip-off to the KGB, the person who had told the Russians about the Bloch investigation so they in turn could warn him. The failure to make a case against Felix Bloch was a constant, nagging reminder to the FBI of an enormous unsolved problem. It stuck in the bureau’s craw and would not go away.
Beyond any other episode, th
e Bloch case made it apparent that someone on the inside, with access to highly sensitive files, had alerted the KGB. That source had to be found. For more than a decade the FBI and the CIA worked to uncover the penetration. They had Robert Hanssen’s mole study, of course, to provide the necessary historical background.
There were several false starts, and the bureau went down the wrong trail for three years, mistakenly suspecting an innocent CIA officer. But, as events would make clear, the compromise of the Bloch case eventually led to the arrest of Robert Hanssen. It was the unexplained tip-off to the KGB and the subsequent warning telephone call to Bloch that drove the mole hunt for a decade to its ultimate, dramatic conclusion.
Felix Bloch was dismissed by the State Department and deprived of his pension of more than $50,000 a year. He was never arrested for espionage, never indicted or charged. He moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked for a while bagging groceries. He was arrested twice for shoplifting food, the first time at the grocery where he worked. Bloch had wheeled a cart filled with chicken noodle soup, coffee, frozen catfish, and other items out to his Mercedes without bothering to pay.
There are a number of retired foreign service officers living in the area, and because Bloch had never been charged with espionage, he was asked to one of their Foreign Service Day reunions and came. But after his first shoplifting arrest he was not invited back. His wife filed for divorce.
He spent one night in jail after his first arrest, but in both cases was sentenced to perform community service. He volunteered at the local Red Cross chapter, where he put in long hours and impressed the director. By 2001, when Robert Hanssen was apprehended, Bloch was working as a city bus driver, wearing a blue uniform.