A Brief History of the Spy

by Simpson, Paul

  The CIA’s Project Aquatone went a long way to dealing with the queries raised by the various other agencies. As a CIA report written a few days after the initial operation pointed out, ‘Five operational missions have already proven that many of our guesses on important subjects can be seriously wrong, that the estimates which form the basis for national policy can be projections from wrong guesses, and that, as a consequence, our policy can indeed be bankrupt.’

  Project Aquatone involved a pilot flying at 70,000 feet above the Soviet Union, photographing everything that he could see. After President Eishenhower gave the go-ahead in November 1954, a special plane, the U-2, was devised by Lockheed engineer Clarence Kelly Johnson, and in July 1955 became the first to be tested at the Groom Lake facility in Nevada – now better known as the conspiracy-inspiring Area 51. A new camera was developed by James Baker and Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, with the resolution necessary to gain detailed information from the air.

  The first flight took off from Wiesbaden in West Germany on 4 July 1956, and despite Khruschev ordering it to be shot down, it carried out five of its seven allotted missions, providing information on the Soviet Navy’s Leningrad shipyards as well as causing a drastic revision of the armed forces’ estimates of Soviet bomber strength and the military’s state of readiness. For the rest of the decade, the CIA would maintain the cover story that the missions were purely of a scientific nature, all the while improving the U-2’s capabilities, and working on a new plane, Project Oxcart, which could supersede it.

  Although the U-2 would continue in active operational service for a further fifty years – and is still in use today by the US armed services – the program of overflights across the Soviet Union came to a sudden halt on 1 May 1960, when the twenty-fourth mission, flown by Captain Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. The wreckage of the plane was put on display by the Russians, and Powers was the subject of a show trial. He would only serve two years of his sentence, before being swapped for KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel.

  As far as CIA DCI Allen Dulles was concerned, the U-2 project ‘was one of the most valuable intelligence-collection operations that any country has ever mounted at any time, and . . . it was vital to our national security’. It also had the added benefit that ‘It has made the Soviets less cocky about their ability to deal with what we might bring against them.’

  The U-2 program may have become public as a result of Powers’ crash, but another aspect of the intelligence community that was becoming increasingly valuable would remain secret for considerably longer – the National Security Agency (NSA), based from 1956 onwards out of Fort Meade, near Washington DC. Whereas now the NSA’s address and phone number come up in a Google search, in the fifties this well-funded signal intelligence service was so secret that those insiders aware of it would joke that its acronym stood for ‘No Such Agency’.

  Although the combined British and American SIGINT (signal intelligence) codebreakers had achieved some success in the years immediately after the Second World War in reading then-current Soviet codes, the Kremlin’s decision on Friday 20 October 1948 to change all of their codes and cypher machines created what has been described as ‘perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history’. Black Friday, as it quickly came to be known, marked the start of an eight-year period when there was little knowledge about what was going on inside the Soviet Union, only alleviated by the U-2 missions. The codebreakers had been able to decipher the North Korean signals during the war there, providing invaluable information that saved many lives during the early part of that conflict, but it became clear that there were too many different agencies all carrying out their own code-breaking activities. President Truman created the NSA in 1952 to coordinate the collection and processing of communications intelligence, with the secretary of defence as the government’s executive agent for all SIGINT activities, taking the new agency outside the jurisdiction of the CIA.

  Black Friday’s effect continued to be felt through the early years of the NSA, with the agency not picking up on Stalin’s death or the subsequent uprising in East Berlin in spring 1953. By 1955, the lack of ability to crack the highest-grade Russian codes was causing serious concern. However, when the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis sprang up simultaneously, the NSA was able to provide sufficient information for President Eisenhower to take action to help defuse the situations and not overreact – they knew about Soviet tank movements on the Hungarian borders, and the Israeli/British/French plans regarding Egypt.

  The NSA cooperated with the CIA over the U-2 missions, monitoring Soviet air-defence transmissions, and even intercepting communications from their radar operators who were tracking the planes – giving the CIA real-time information on the missions’ progress. They could also deduce the size of the Soviet air force from the nature of the force sent up to intercept the spy plane. The relationship grew a little cooler following the downing of Captain Powers’ plane: the NSA insisted that Powers was much lower than he claimed, although the official report would back Powers’ story, much to the annoyance of the NSA.

  Unsurprisingly, the NSA became a prime target for the KGB. Although all the Soviet operations would take advantage of ‘walk-ins’ (Western volunteers prepared to betray their country, rather than agents infiltrated into position), the NSA became the target of a major plan by KGB chief Alexsandr Shelyepin, who set up better coordination between the relevant directorates with the Security service and established a Special Section whose primary objective was to collect intelligence on cypher systems of particular interest to the Soviet cryptanalysts.

  By 1960, three NSA agents were also working for Moscow but then two cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, who had been based at the NSA for four years, defected during their annual leave in June. Arriving in Moscow that September, they gave a press conference that revealed great swathes about the NSA’s activities, including the embarrassing revelation that the agency wasn’t just focusing their attentions on their enemies. Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic, Indonesia and Uruguay were all specifically mentioned by Martin. It became commonly accepted that the two men were in a homosexual relationship, which had left them open to blackmail. This led to a witch-hunt within the NSA and the enforced resignations of over two-dozen officers who were believed to be ‘sexual deviates’. Oddly, the NSA’s own internal investigations, while noting that ‘Beyond any doubt, no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency’s security program,’ believed that their defections were impulsive, and not caused by blackmail over their sexuality.

  The KGB still had another agent in place: Staff Sergeant Jack Dunlap, the chauffeur to the chief of staff at Fort Meade, who offered his services to the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1960. He became a source of instruction books, manuals, and conceptual and engineering designs for the cypher machines, but he found it hard to deal with his double life, and committed suicide in July 1963. His treachery was only discovered a month after his death.

  By then, though, the KGB had other problems to deal with, as the early years of the sixties brought some of their longest-serving agents’ careers to an end.

  6

  DEFECTIVE INFORMATION

  There are many ways in which spies’ careers come to a sudden halt: sometimes they’re caught red-handed, carrying out the missions set by their bosses; other times tradecraft errors, either their own or mistakes made by other people, lead to their capture. But probably the worst way to be taken out of action is through betrayal, particularly if it’s by one of your own.

  The KGB suffered a number of such setbacks at the end of the fifties and early sixties following assorted defections to the West. Once the FBI, MI5 or the other Western counterintelligence agencies got hold of the information, they would pursue every lead until as many possible Soviet agents were identified. Sometimes this would take time. Unless defectors were particularly well placed, they were unlikel
y to possess exact details of particular agents, but usually they provided sufficient clues to enable the authorities to put a group under surveillance and then eliminate them from the investigation.

  Polish Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Goleniewski juggled being a triple agent between 1959 and his defection in January 1961, working as head of the Technical and Scientific Department of the Polish Secret Service, reporting to Moscow, and also providing information jointly to MI6 and the CIA, which the CIA described as ‘Grade 1 from the inside’. The Americans called him ‘Sniper’; the British knew him as ‘Lavinia’. Even before his defection, he informed his controllers that ‘The Russians have got two very important spies in Britain: one in British Intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy.’ Working from the documents Goleniewski had seen, there were ten potential suspects within MI6 (including ‘rising star’ George Blake), but when investigated all appeared to be in the clear – the most likely source of the papers, so the British believed, was a burglary at the MI6 station in Brussels, and that’s what they told the Americans.

  When Goleniewski passed along some more information about the naval spy in March 1960, it was the clue that blew open a complete Soviet spy network, known as the Portland Ring, after the naval base from which the secrets were being extracted. ‘Sniper’ said that the spy’s name was something like ‘Huiton’: this correlated with one Harry Houghton, who was at the time working in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, Dorset, and fitted the other information provided. What followed was a classic example of counterintelligence at work.

  Houghton was followed by MI5 operatives (known as Watchers) on his monthly visit to London with his girlfriend, Ethel Gee. There they watched him hand over a carrier bag in exchange for an envelope. MI5 followed the man Houghton had met, whom they believed was a Polish intelligence officer, but hit a snag when they learned that the car he drove was registered to a Canadian importer of jukeboxes named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. At Lonsdale and Houghton’s next meeting, the Watchers overheard Lonsdale say he was heading to America on business; before he left, he deposited a parcel at the Midland Bank. MI5 opened the parcel, and discovered a treasure trove: ‘The complete toolkit of the professional spy,’ according to case officer Peter Wright. The materials identified Lonsdale as a KGB agent.

  Lonsdale was followed on his return to the UK in October, and MI5 discovered he was staying with a New Zealand couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, in the London suburb of Ruislip. The Krogers and Lonsdale were monitored until their arrest in January, shortly before Goleniewski was going to defect.

  Far from being innocent booksellers, the Krogers were in fact long-term Russian agents, who, then going by the names of Lona and Morris Cohen, had been part of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project. They had fled to Mexico when the Rosenbergs were arrested and then established a new cover in the UK a few years later. When MI5 raided their home, they found everything from multiple passports to a high-speed radio transmitter and short-wave receiver.

  Lonsdale, alias Konon Trofimovich Molody, had joined the NKVD during the Second World War, and had adopted the identity of the deceased Gordon Lonsdale in 1954 when he entered Canada. As well as sending copious material to Moscow from his agents, Lonsdale’s natural business acumen meant that he was actually making a profit for the KGB!

  In addition to Houghton, Lonsdale was running a spy inside the Germ Warfare Research Centre at Porton Down (87 miles south-west of London), as well as Melita Norwood, a seemingly innocent secretary who worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. Norwood had provided atomic secrets to the Russians during the Second World War, and would continue to work for the KGB until her retirement in 1972. Nicknamed ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op’, she was acclaimed as one of the KGB’s most important female assets, and remained undetected until Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the West in 1992.

  Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but was exchanged in 1964 for Greville Wynne; the Krogers were exchanged in July 1969 for a British anti-subversive held by the KGB. Houghton and Gee received fifteen-year sentences, although they were released in 1970, and married the following year.

  The other KGB spy exposed by Goleniewski’s testimony was indeed George Blake, who had evaded suspicion when ‘Sniper’ first mentioned the existence of the mole. Blake, whose real name was George Behar, had joined MI6 in 1948, after studying Russian at Cambridge. He was posted to Seoul in South Korea the following year but was captured by the invading North Koreans. Blake was interrogated by MGB officers, who were allowed access to prisoners of war by Chinese intelligence, and by the time he was repatriated to Britain at the end of the Korean War, he was a Soviet agent. Whether he changed sides because of natural antipathy to the British system or because he was a true Manchurian Candidate and was brainwashed by the Chinese is open to debate: in 2007, he said he wasn’t a traitor: ‘To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.’

  Blake’s importance to the KGB can be judged by the fact that even though he warned Moscow about the tapping of the phone lines in Berlin in Operation Gold, they allowed that operation to proceed rather than risk blowing his cover. He was posted to Berlin, where he was in a position to betray numerous British and American operatives, as well as helping to identify the CIA’s man in the GRU, Pyotr Popov. Blake would later admit that he didn’t know exactly what he handed over to the KGB ‘because it was so much’.

  As a result of Goleniewski’s debriefing by the CIA after his defection, it was clear that Blake was the mole, and he was arrested in April 1961 when he was summoned back to London from a training course in the Lebanon. J. Edgar Hoover’s reaction to the news was atypically understanding: ‘After all, Christ Himself found a traitor in His small team of twelve.’ Sentenced to forty-two years, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he was awarded an Order of Friendship by former KGB head Vladimir Putin in 2007. At that point Blake was still taking an active role in the affairs of the secret service, according to the head of the Russian SVR, the successor to the KGB.

  Goleniewski’s testimony would also be responsible for the downfall of Heinz Felfe within the BND; he was arrested in October 1961 and eventually sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour. Felfe’s legacy, though, was that much of the West German counter-intelligence work over the previous decade had to be deemed suspect, injuring Reinhard Gehlen’s hard-won reputation for backing his own judgement.

  The defector himself started to lose some credibility when he began to maintain that he was the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, who most believe had been killed with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1917 at Ekaterinburg. Goleniewski claimed that he gave his date of birth as 1922 to explain why he looked so young (the Tsarevich was born in 1904) since he suffered from haemophilia. Unsurprisingly, the CIA released him from its payroll in 1964, a year after he started making these claims publicly.

  While the KGB were losing agents, the CIA was apparently going from strength to strength. The death of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in January 1961 certainly came at a convenient time for the Agency, even if they were not finally responsible for his demise. Lumumba was the first prime minister of the independent Republic of Congo after it gained independence from Belgium, but the tumultuous nature of his administration, and the civil war that quickly broke out there, gave rise to panic in Washington. CIA director Allen Dulles noted that ‘We are faced with a person who is a Castro or worse. Lumumba has been bought by the Communists,’ and in a memo wrote, ‘In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences . . . for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’

  While the CIA were supporting Joseph Mobutu’s faction in the civil war, enter MKULTRA’s chief scientist, Dr Sidney Gottlieb, who was sent to Leopoldville with a plan to arrange for L
umumba’s assassination with poisoned toothpaste. The CIA station chief, Lawrence Devlin, claimed that he refused to carry out the instructions and that after Lumumba was arrested by opposing forces in December, he threw the poison into the Congo River. Some declassified documents suggest that CIA agents assisted with the disposal of Lumumba’s body after his execution on 17 January 1961 – his corpse was certainly never found – but Devlin would later deny any CIA involvement, even after the Belgians admitted their role.

  The early part of the sixties would be dominated by the relationship between incoming US President John F. Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khruschev, with the world coming closer to war during that period than at any time since 1945. Although Russian and American tanks would come face-to-face at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin for a perilous sixteen hours on 22 October 1961, shortly after the construction of the wall dividing East and West Berlin, the real flashpoint was Cuba.

  The problem there had begun when Fidel Castro took power in the Caribbean island country in 1959. Castro seemed to be an improvement on the previous leader, dictator Fulgencio Batista. He tried to reassure Americans of his good intentions: ‘I know what the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clearly that we are not Communists; very clearly.’ However, it quickly became clear that he would very easily become a thorn in America’s side, particularly given how close the country was to US shores.

  The KGB began dealings with Castro’s chief of intelligence as early as July 1959, sending over a hundred advisers to help overhaul the security and intelligence services, and later that year, Castro began to nationalize American plantations as well as close down lucrative concessions run by the Mafia. In March 1960, President Eisenhower approved a programme of action against the Cuban government, its stated purpose was to ‘bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US in such a manner to avoid any appearance of US intervention’. Anti-Castro Cubans who had fled to Florida were recruited for the cause and started to undergo training.