Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  Warsaw would provide a key testing ground for rising stars of the service and the team that ran the agent over a period of nearly three years included two future deputy chiefs of MI6 and one chief, Colin McColl. They supplied the clerk, codenamed ‘Beneficiary’, with a Minox camera and met him regularly at a heavily curtained British Embassy flat (a small Union Jack on the front door was the signal to enter).

  To talk to him there, they used a strange device known as a hushaphone. This looked like an adapted doctor’s stethoscope with a speaking and listening mask at each end. The two parties to a conversation would speak through it to ensure their words could not be picked up by bugging devices. Money and a good time proved to be Beneficiary’s only motivation. MI6 were somewhat surprised when they developed the film from his camera and found pictures of ciphers mixed up with those of his unclothed ‘girlfriend’, pictures he explained he would like back. He spent freely on drink and prostitutes and a fancy car. Empty champagne bottles accumulated outside his house. Neighbours began to notice. Making an agent aware of the risks did not always make them unwilling to take more risks. One day he explained that he thought it would be a good idea to approach a colleague to join the spy ring. The team said no, realising that if the colleague refused it would probably be game over. He said it was too late. The team had to decide whether or not to meet the agent the next time, knowing he might have been compromised. He was Kaczmarzyk was arrested at one of the expensive restaurants he had begun to frequent in August 1967. At the same time an MI6 officer was arrested along with his secretary. The press reported that ‘spy documents and sketches’ were found in her handbag. In her flat, the secret police found a hardback copy of the latest James Bond book. Unfortunately that edition included what purported to be secret maps tucked into the back cover. The secret police were convinced they were real secret maps and gave the poor secretary a particularly hard time. After a four-day trial, Kaczmarzyk was sentenced to death and was killed by firing squad at a military fort.128

  Beneficiary burned brightly but only briefly. Shergy’s protégés on the Czech desk secured a longer-running agent codenamed ‘Freed’, eventually a major in the Czech Security Service, the StB. Freed’s real name was Miloslav Kroča. He had begun his career hunting saboteurs in industry before going to Moscow for training with the KGB. Like Penkovsky, his career had stuttered, partly for personal reasons. A new girlfriend in Moscow led to a divorce and a black mark against his name as well as financial strains. In the early 1960s he managed to secure promotion to work on operations against the British. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the British Secret Service. Recruiting an opposing intelligence officer in such a position was a huge coup in terms of classic spy-versus-spy counter-intelligence. Freed knew all the details of operations against Britain and had access to Czech records. His career prospered with the help of MI6. Poor health, perhaps due to the stress of his double life, took its toll over the years and eventually he died of a heart attack. Only then was his betrayal discovered in spring 1976. Where Beneficiary was mildly crazy and reckless, Freed was cerebral and cautious and survived much longer. Freed’s sudden death meant that Czech investigators never knew the full scale of his betrayal. Their investigative files reveal that they were unsure when he started spying for the British; certainly it was by 1969, but some wondered if it was as early as 1962. They did establish, though, the identity of the MI6 officer who was handling Freed at the time of his death. Richard Dearlove was spotted arriving at a number of locations to meet Kroča before he realised he had died. The Czech investigators established that Dearlove, whom they codenamed ‘David II’, organised meetings both in Prague and in a forest outside the city. The StB spent much time puzzling over where Freed might have secreted payments from the British, a mystery only solved with Ml6’s help after the end of the Cold War.129 The successes of Beneficiary and Freed would help launch careers. Insiders say there were other successes in those years which have remained secret, not least because unlike these two, the other agents remained alive. Together the cases would be vital for Shergy as he began to fight his own internal battles against those who saw the shadow of Philby and other moles still haunting the service.

  The CIA was also learning from Penkovsky. ‘Who are the people that dream of power and glory, and, not only frustrated in these dreams but perhaps even ridiculed in their daily lives, become so bitter as to turn their backs on family, friends and nation?’ That question was posed to colleagues by a CIA officer soon after Penkovsky. ‘The single, self-evident observation is that the enormous act of defection, of betrayal, treason, is almost invariably the act of a warped, emotionally maladjusted personality,’ the officer continued. ‘It is compelled by a fear, hatred, deep sense of grievance, or obsession with revenge far exceeding in intensity these emotions as experienced by normal reasonably well-integrated and well-adjusted persons … a normal, mature, emotionally healthy person, deeply embedded in his own ethnic, national cultural, social, and family matrix just doesn’t do such things.’130

  What made someone like Penkovsky take such crazy risks? The unbalanced nature of such spies, the CIA officer argued, was reflected in his own experience of agents.

  All of them have been lonely people … [who] have manifested some serious behaviour problem – such as alcoholism, satyriasis, morbid depression, a psychopathic pattern of one type or another, an evasion of adult responsibility… It is only mild hyperbole to say that no one can consider himself a Soviet operations officer until he has gone through the sordid experience of holding his Soviet ‘friend’s’ head while he vomits five days of drinking into the sink.

  A retired MI6 man agrees. ‘Most agents were unattractive people. Half were nasty characters who you wouldn’t want to spend much time with. It was a very strange relationship when you meet them in some woods and he hands you some Minox and begins telling you about his life.’

  ‘Normal people aren’t traitors,’ Dick White once declared. One recommended CIA strategy was to look for the ‘emotionally weak, immature and disturbed fringe elements’ seeking revenge for real or imagined slights. They should be investigated using telephone taps and the gossip of wives and by watching the small signs of irritation and professional or personal jealousy at social events. These irritations could even be encouraged by an officer who got close but who would do so while avoiding polemics and political evangelism. Watching the response to a carefully planted question about how promotions work in the Soviet military might be one way. The aim of the contact is to ‘awaken resentments and anxieties, to plant ideas, to make oneself a sympathetic friend … The process is one of pinning the blame for his intense personal dissatisfactions on the regime.’ In a final aside, the officer also suggests looking for the ‘unique vulnerabilities of middle age … The period of life from say age 37 on shows the incidences of divorce, disappearance, alcoholism, infidelity, suicide, embezzlement … because it’s a time when men take stock’ and the result is often ‘traumatic in the extreme’. ‘Nobody ever defected because they were happy,’ a CIA psychologist decided after studying the files, including that of Penkovsky.131

  Most of the spies Britain and the US ran in the Cold War were walk-ins, like Penkovsky, rather than the result of careful cultivation. But still the hope was that spies could be recruited through careful preparation leading to an approach. ‘Ideally you should have got to know the person so you have built up some sort of trust and you are much more likely to get a yes if you have done that,’ explains Colin McColl. ‘The cold approach is very, very dicey. It has worked.’132

  The CIA took an especially aggressive attitude, trying to hoover up as many sources as it could, while the British were more selective even though they understood the same dynamic. But there was a fear which haunted intelligence officers from both services when it came to targeting Soviet officials. The fear was betrayal from within. In the immediate aftermath of Penkovsky’s capture no one knew how or why it had gone wrong or who was to blame. They feared
the worst. The poison injected into the system by Philby and Blake was worming its way deep and inducing a delirium. The distrust was not just between Britain and America but within each service. What if a newly recruited agent was betrayed by a traitor? Or what if a new agent had in fact been planted by the KGB as part of some fiendish master plan with the connivance of someone on the inside? Such a fear could be paralysing and its chill was about to reach into the heart of the service. The era of the molehunts was dawning.

  5

  THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

  Anatoly Golitsyn broke into a cold sweat when a colleague announced that all the staff inside the KGB Residency in Helsinki would have to be searched.1 It was Friday night in the Finnish capital and everyone wanted to get home. But a secret telegram had gone missing. Golitsyn did not have the telegram but he did have a dozen other secret documents surreptitiously stashed in his inside pocket. The missing telegram was found. Golitsyn, a short, heavyset man with black hair and an intense look, walked calmly out into the dark and cold of a Helsinki evening with snow deep on the ground. It was the middle of December 1961.

  He had arranged to meet his wife and daughter in a park. When his taxi pulled up, they were nowhere to be seen. Had she changed her mind? Three months earlier he had begun the planning for this day and he had asked Svetlana if she would join him. She was taken aback and uncertain. But she had agreed to follow him with their daughter Tanya. Golitsyn went back to his apartment and found his wife and daughter waiting there, perhaps unwilling to believe what they were about to do.

  The KGB officer called a local number. A man answered and Golitsyn hung up without saying a word. He now knew that the American was at home. Golitsyn had previously met Frank Friberg at a diplomatic reception and decided he must be CIA. Finland was on the Soviet frontier and was a key northern staging ground for spies from both sides. Golitsyn took a few photos, grabbed Tanya’s favourite doll and, telling his daughter they were going to a party, led his family out of the door.

  The fifteen-minute taxi ride to the well-heeled suburb of Westland seemed the longest of the KGB officer’s life. He, his wife and his daughter were silent, lost in their own thoughts about those left behind. If Friberg had gone out since answering the phone then Golitsyn knew he would have to try again over the weekend, the risks growing with every moment that passed. When he rang Friberg’s bell, there was an agonising wait followed by relief when the door swung open.

  Frank Friberg had just been having a shave and getting ready to leave for a cocktail party when his doorbell rang. There was no recognition, only surprise as he stared at the man on his doorstep.2

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Golitsyn, who was wrapped in a thick overcoat and a fur hat.

  ‘No,’ replied Friberg.

  ‘I am Soviet Vice-Consul Anatoly Klimov,’ Golitsyn said, giving the cover name he used in Finland.

  The penny dropped for the American. ‘We know you’re KGB,’ Friberg said.

  The Russian spoke little English and his accent was heavy. Golitsyn kept repeating a word which sounded to Friberg like ‘asool’. It was only when the family came in and Golitsyn wrote it down that he realised the word was asylum.

  Frank Friberg’s hope for a peaceful evening had been shattered and on that evening in Helsinki a fast-burning fuse had been lit beneath the British and American intelligence communities. The stocky Russian was like one of Penkovsky’s satchel atomic bombs – compact and primed to explode in the enemy capital. The radioactive fall-out still tumbles to the ground today. He had a story to tell that would hint at dark conspiracies behind the deaths of political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, a story which would cascade through the corridors of MI6 and the CIA, nearly bringing both to their knees.

  Back in Vienna in the early 1950s, Golitsyn had been singled out by the defector Pyotr Deriabin as a possible target for the CIA because he appeared out of sorts among fellow officers. In Golitsyn’s own account, the disaffection was political and came in 1956 when Stalin’s crimes were exposed by his successor Khrushchev. He believed it was too little, too late and meaningless, and felt strongly that the Party, not Stalin alone, was responsible for what had happened. The strategy he says he had decided upon to maximise his eventual usefulness to the West was clever but also proved hazardous. He would collect as many tidbits of intelligence as he could until he was ready to make his move and then use them to enhance his value to the West. In the late 1950s he attended a training academy and took a risk in selecting as his thesis topic: ‘The Prevention of Betrayals and Defections by Members of Official Organizations, Visiting Delegations and Tourist Groups Abroad’. It allowed him to learn how people got caught when they were doing exactly what he hoped to do. He also spent time working on the NATO desk of the KGB watching and listening. He understood that defectors were coldly evaluated so he mentally filed away every piece of gossip, every file he read, every rumour he heard, knowing that each would buy him a little more importance in the West.

  In Friberg’s house, Golitsyn was intensely nervous, fearful of discovery. He told the CIA man he wanted to be out of the country that night. There was an 8.15 p.m. flight to Stockholm and he demanded to be on it. Friberg called up one of his officers who quickly came to collect passports and organise visas and flights to New York. As they left the house, Golitsyn went to Friberg’s driveway and pulled out a package of a dozen documents that he had buried in the snow just before ringing the bell.3

  They made it to the airport less than half an hour before the plane was due to take off. ‘We’ve made it. Now we’re safe!’ Golitsyn said to Svetlana. He had spoken too soon. If ever there was a journey to put fear into the heart of an already edgy defector this was it. When he arrived in Stockholm, Golitsyn said he did not want to catch the next flight out because it had originated in Helsinki and he feared being pursued. Friberg secured seats on a US air force plane but it was unpressurised and Tanya began to suffer. Next they went to Frankfurt for a flight via London. As they arrived in London, there was a bomb alert. Golitsyn says he had asked for all the baggage of passengers who had joined the flight in London to be searched in case the KGB had been following him.4 By the time the plane departed from London, fog had enveloped New York and the plane was diverted to Bermuda. From there, Golitsyn eventually made his way to the United States. In all, it had taken four days to get to Washington. During their long and difficult journey, Friberg had found Golitsyn nervous and occasionally prone to recalling the wrong name or place. In contrast to Golitsyn’s claim that his defection was ideological in nature and had been nurtured for five years, Friberg later said he thought it had been in the works for only a year or so.5 The CIA man said he believed it was due to a falling out with the KGB Resident in Helsinki, Golitsyn saying his defection served him right after they had clashed and after he had received a negative evaluation that might lead to demotion. But en route Golitsyn had also begun to offer up just some of the secrets he had been hoarding away. A senior Finn was a KGB agent of influence, he explained, giving away the first of his nuggets. The details he provided in those first few days would easily be enough to prove that he was a real defector and no plant. And he also provided the first elements of his biggest bombshell. He explained one of the reasons he was so nervous was that the KGB had penetrated Friberg’s own organisation, the CIA. In Germany, they had an agent codenamed ‘Sasha’.

  In Washington the hunt would begin for a traitor. The existence of one could explain Popov and Penkovsky being caught and all the other recent disasters. It was known there had been high-level penetrations in Britain and Germany. Why not America? Golitsyn’s information was tantalising but vague. The mole was someone with a Slavic background who had been in Germany. His codename was ‘Sasha’ and his real name began with a ‘K’ was all he could say.

  It was clear that Golitsyn would be hard to handle. He demanded a meeting with the President or the FBI Director (eventually he met Attorney General Robert Kennedy). Penkovsky’s and Popov’s for
mer handler, George Kisevalter, who was originally assigned to deal with Golitsyn, found him exhausting and their relationship soon broke down. Golitsyn had accumulated hundreds and hundreds of fragments of intelligence, some based on files, others on conversations. Sometimes they overlapped and referred to the same person, sometimes they were frustratingly vague. Sorting through it, when so much was at stake, produced chaos.

  Golitsyn’s relationship with his first set of CIA handlers had fractured by late 1962, but his ideas would eventually find refuge in the welcoming arms and fertile mind of James Jesus Angleton. Since his friend Kim Philby had left Washington, Angleton had grown in power within the CIA, becoming head of counter-intelligence in 1954. Counter-intelligence is a specialised discipline which aims to understand and work against an opponent’s intelligence service. Part of it is classic spy-catching or counter-espionage, looking for the Blakes and Philbys who are betraying from within. But there is more to it than that. Spy versus spy, it is the world of double and triple agents and requires a peculiar mind to understand the dizzying complexities of the tricks and games a wily foe may be playing against you, spotting the false agents they may be planting carrying misleading information. This means checking out the agents that others on your side are recruiting and making sure they are legitimate, sometimes to the annoyance of their handlers who may have invested heavily in them. And it involves attacking your opponent in a careful chess game, understanding his intentions and getting inside his operations and subverting them from within and deceiving him. British intelligence had succeeded in this during the Second World War with its Double-Cross System in which German spies landing in Britain were turned to provide false information back to their masters. Philby did something similar, though on a smaller scale, as a penetration agent when it came to Anglo-American operations in Albania, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By getting inside your opponent’s service, you know what he knows, at a stroke destroying the value of all the secret information he has collected and allowing you to mislead him. This was Angleton’s world.