Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  There was an awkward problem for those who believed that British intelligence had been penetrated at the highest level. Its name was Oleg Penkovsky. Mitchell and Hollis were among the few to have known about Penkovsky’s betrayal. If either was a Soviet plant, then surely they would have told their masters and Penkovsky would never have been able to spy for so long and hand over so much material. There was only one way around this conundrum for the molehunters. Penkovsky himself must have been a plant by the Soviets. Some reasoned he was planted from the beginning. Others believed that he had genuinely betrayed his country before being turned as a double agent towards the end after being betrayed by the British mole. Wright began to bury himself in the files; forwards and backwards he went, poring over the fragments of this and every other case, convinced there was a dark secret.

  Golitsyn first heard of the Penkovsky case in early 1963 when an MI6 officer in Washington said the service had just lost a valuable agent in Moscow.31 He was in England when the show-trial in Moscow took place. How could Penkovsky be genuine? Golitsyn wondered. He told Martin he wanted to see Dick White. At the meeting, Golitsyn asked to see the Penkovsky file. A few weeks later he was taken to the MI6 annexe office at Carlton Gardens and ushered into a grand chandeliered room. Two precious volumes were laid before him. For days he devoured them, taking notes watched by an MI6 officer and a security guard. Golitsyn then asked to take the files out. The request was granted. By his own account, he would sit in London’s public parks and squares reading one of the most sensitive files held by British intelligence until they were handed back at the end of the afternoon. Golitsyn became convinced that Penkovsky was a plant sent as part of a ‘master plot’. Among the reasons was that Penkovsky had proposed a particular woman as a courier. Golitsyn said that he knew her as the wife of a colleague and that he had been told she was involved in a KGB operation by General Oleg Gribanov, the chief of the Second Directorate. Golitsyn told Peter Wright what he had found. Wright at first strongly disagreed (although he later changed his mind) and told him there were people in MI6 who had made their careers on Penkovsky. He mentioned Harry Shergold and warned that he would be furious.

  In the summer of 1963, the presence of a Soviet defector, wrongly named as Dolitsyn, found its way into the British press. Golitsyn believed the story came from the Russians but many others thought that it was Angleton determined to get his man back on his side of the Atlantic. By the time Golitsyn returned to Washington, he had been bled dry of his original intelligence, but he had come up with a new way of making himself useful. He said that if he was allowed to study the actual in-house intelligence files, it would trigger associations in his mind and allow him to recollect and piece together new leads based on the fragments in his memory. Angleton and others were convinced of the possibilities of what Golitsyn grandly described as his ‘methodology’. Angleton had backed Penkovsky’s bona fides but, fascinated by Golitsyn, he agreed for select aspects of the case to be shared, though never the whole file – the Americans were not as trusting as the British. Golitsyn still found aspects of Penkovsky’s career and his access to secrets that he considered suspicious. Penkovsky’s offer to blow up buildings in Moscow, Golitsyn thought, was simply to gauge whether there was any interest in the West in such schemes and then control any resulting plans. Golitsyn surmised that the Cuban crisis had been ‘deliberately provoked by the Soviets to get the deal they wanted’ and they had used Penkovsky to pass accurate information to the Americans to ensure that a bargain could be done. The theory may have been aided by the Soviet Ambassador to the UN who, probably hoping to minimise the embarrassment of the betrayal, told a Western diplomat that Penkovsky ‘is very much alive and was a double agent against the Americans’.32 The officers who handled Penkovsky were furious with the aspersions cast on someone they saw as a good man who had paid the ultimate price. Joe Bulik was called into Angleton’s office to have the theory presented to him that not just Penkovsky but all his other agents from 1960 were plants. ‘I was so angry I just turned and left and we never spoke again,’ he recalled later.33

  When Peter Wright in London produced a paper claiming that Penkovsky was a plant, he showed it to Maurice Oldfield. ‘You’ve got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there’s a lot of K’s and Gongs riding high on the back of Penkovsky,’ referring to the knighthoods and honours the celebrated operation had produced. Shergy was, as predicted, furious. ‘Harry Shergold … practically went for me at a meeting in MI6 one day,’ Wright wrote. ‘What the hell do you know about running agents?’ he snarled. ‘You come in here and insult a brave man’s memory and expect us to believe this?’34 The fury was so intense that it stuck in the mind of one conspiratorially minded molehunter. Surely Shergy couldn’t be bad as well? But Shergy understood what was taking place and was playing his own game.

  After Golitsyn had returned to Washington, he began to pursue the idea that the Soviet Union was undertaking a ‘master plan’ of ‘strategic deception’ to fool the West and its intelligence agencies. Just before he left Moscow, Golitsyn said he had heard talk of a massive deception and disinformation campaign. He says another officer told him of plans to finish with the United States once and for all.35 The plot included fooling the West that there was greater disunity in the East than was really the case. For instance, Golitsyn maintained that the split between the Soviet Union and China was in fact a charade, as was that between the Soviets and Tito’s Yugoslavia.36 The master plan would be perpetuated by the agents placed everywhere in Western governments and especially their intelligence services whose careers and whose judgements would be bolstered by defectors. The whole operation was being controlled by an inner core of the KGB. The rest of the KGB knew nothing about it and everything they did could be compromised as part of the plot. Anything that fitted this theory was true, anything that did not support it had been planted as part of the master plot and therefore provided proof of its existence. This was a worldview which, once accepted, was internally coherent and explained everything. It was a faith and one that Angleton placed his trust in.

  Western intelligence was, Angleton said, trapped in a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ designed like a fairground trick to bend and shape the truth so that the observer would become disoriented and lose any sense of proportion. Angleton had borrowed the phrase from a friend of his, the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, whose words, like an intelligence puzzle, required deciphering by the knowledgeable and were open to many interpretations. Only a truly sharp counter-intelligence mind could see the truth of the KGB’s intentions, Angle-ton thought, and Dick White agreed. In their eyes the KGB was all-powerful, ever cunning and infallible, the stuff of nightmares. It had fooled MI6 in the 1920s with its fake émigré group, the Trust, and in the late 1940s in Albania. There were no coincidences, no room for missteps from the other side.

  As with buses, the CIA found that having waited ages for a defector, two came at once. Yuri Nosenko would pay a heavy price for arriving just after Anatoly Golitsyn. In early summer 1962, he approached an American delegate at an arms-control meeting in Geneva. He shook hands and checked that no one else was in earshot. ‘I would like you to help me with contact with CIA people. You see I have some problems. It’s a private matter.’37 At an apartment the well-built man in his mid-thirties with a slight hunch asked for a scotch and then told the first officer he met, Pete Bagley, that he was a KGB officer who had got into money problems. Bagley spoke little Russian and Nosenko little English, but the KGB man explained that he had no desire to defect since he still had family in the Soviet Union (his father was at one point minister for shipbuilding). But he needed 250 dollars in Swiss francs, a pathetically small sum, and would be willing to meet CIA officers on later trips anywhere but Moscow. The truth, which Nosenko did not reveal at the time, was that he had been over-excited by his first taste of freedom outside the USSR and had taken a prostitute back to his hotel room. He had woken up the next morning to find his wallet missing. Inside were his 250 dollars�
� worth of KGB expenses which he needed to account for.38

  Kisevalter came out and joined Bagley for a second meeting at which Nosenko, having had one drink before and another during the meeting, explained how Kisevalter’s former agent Pyotr Popov, first recruited in Vienna, had been caught. It had not been through a traitor as some suspected but through surveillance of an American Embassy official in Moscow posting a letter. He also said he knew a little about a spy in the British Naval Attaché’s office in Moscow who had been blackmailed over his sexuality (another reference to John Vassall).39 Nosenko had worked on targeting American officials, journalists and tourists in Moscow and said he also knew about the first CIA man in Moscow in the 1950s who had been targeted over his affair with a KGB maid. Bagley kept asking for more, Nosenko remembered, hungry for every scrap of intelligence. He said he also knew that the KGB had recruited an American officer in Germany–codenamed ‘Sasha’.40 They agreed that if he made it out again he would send a telegram to a US address signed ‘George’. Two days after sending it, he would meet his contact in front of the first cinema listed in the local phone book in the city from which the telegram was sent.41 The two CIA officers returned on separate planes, one carrying the tapes, the other their notes. Just in case.42

  When Bagley got back to Washington, he talked to Angleton about Nosenko. The counter-intelligence chief then inducted him into the secret of Golitsyn’s defection six months earlier. Two defectors one after another was a little odd. What was interesting was the overlap between the two, for instance on the spy in the British Naval Attaché’s office. They also both talked of a senior KGB officer coming to the US on an unexplained visit. Nosenko’s account seemed to explain it away as the targeting of a low-level official, while Golitsyn believed it might have been linked to the mole within the CIA. Golitsyn also differed in other areas, for instance over how Popov was caught. Golitsyn thought there was a high-ranking spy in the CIA, Nosenko thought Sasha was just an army captain. Angleton and Bagley agreed there was something suspicious going on. Golitsyn himself had warned that the KGB would send others after him to try and muddy the waters. Could this be what was happening? Was Nosenko part of the KGB’s grand deception strategy unfolding and an attempt to protect its mole within the agency itself? ‘Nosenko will mutilate the Golitsyn leads,’ Angleton told Bagley, as if talking about a weed corrupting the purity of one of the orchids that he bred in his spare time.43 Anyone who followed Golitsyn and who did not back his case would be seen by Angleton as a false defector sent to confuse. That was the case with Nosenko, it was decided.

  Nosenko resurfaced in Geneva in January 1964. It was a cold night and the first cinema in the phone book was closed. Bagley, in disguise, brushed past the Russian who was waiting outside and handed a note with the location for their meeting.44 ‘Yuri has a bit of a surprise for us,’ Kisevalter told Bagley when he arrived. In a strangely emotionless and mechanical voice, Nosenko declared he was now ready to defect.45 ‘I don’t want to go back,’ he said.46 Bagley and Kisevalter were not keen on the idea. Nosenko said the KGB was on to him, although it seemed strange that he had been let out of the country if it was. At a second meeting, he claimed to have received a telegram recalling him home. ‘I just defected now; this day, this hour, this minute, I just defected,’ he told them.47 He provided details of microphones hidden in the US Embassy in Moscow and also dropped a sensational bombshell. He said that in his job working on Americans in Moscow he had personally been responsible for the file on Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had assassinated President John F. Kennedy just two months earlier. Oswald was a former marine and radar operator who had tried to defect in the USSR before returning to the US and who had more recently been in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. When he was named as the assassin, Nosenko explained, the Soviet leadership demanded all files relating to him to be flown to Moscow immediately by military plane.48 The KGB had thought Oswald a nuisance – he had even tried to slash his wrists to get attention – and so it had decided he was mentally unstable and not even worth debriefing. The KGB had had nothing to do with the assassination, Nosenko now explained.49 This revelation meant that debriefing Nosenko was vital. The timing was remarkable. And suspicious, some thought. Was it really plausible that the KGB had not been interested in Oswald? Had Nosenko now been sent by the KGB to divert attention from the truth that it had assassinated an American president?

  Nosenko was brought to the US by the CIA in February 1964 and taken to the attic of a house in the suburbs of Washington DC. Word went out that he must be broken. He was grilled by CIA officers after being denied sleep for up to forty-eight hours. ‘At times the interrogation descended into a shouting match,’ recalled Bagley.50 One tape recording is said by a former CIA officer to include Nosenko mumbling ‘From my soul, I beg you to believe me’ and a voice screaming ‘That’s bullshit’ again and again.51 The hope was to secure a confession that he was a plant and then send him back to the Soviet Union. Nosenko said he believes he was administered drugs, possibly LSD, an indication that Sidney Gottlieb’s methods might have been in play. Others have disputed the idea that drugs were used. His treatment foreshadowed the way in which the CIA treated suspects of a different time after 11 September 2011. He never had access to a lawyer or any legal process. He was shackled and blindfolded and taken on a plane. He thought he was being sent back to Moscow but was in fact taken to a specially built facility at the Farm, the CIA’s training establishment in rural Virginia. He was kept in a concrete cell watched by a camera, with no pillows, blankets, air conditioning or heating. ‘To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was a hell,’ he would later recall.52 To occupy his mind, he would fantasise that he was a submariner or a pilot or a fireman carrying out heroic deeds. At night he would talk in his sleep in character, confusing the guards.53 In his interrogation and polygraph, Nosenko was not helped by the fact that he was a drinker and that he had lied about his rank and exaggerated his importance. Among his falsehoods was the claim that a telegram had forced him to defect. None of this helped his case within the CIA.54 His knowledge was patchy in some areas where it should have been stronger. He had come from a very privileged background but had consistently under-achieved, flunking various exams, and had tried to hide this from the CIA.55 Was he a loser or a cunning double agent? Some officers invested their career in arguing that Nosenko was a plant and that there was a high-level penetration. Golitsyn was also allowed to review Nosenko’s file and, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded that his rival was indeed a plant. The head of the CIA was originally convinced that Nonsenko was a plant, but by 1966 doubts were beginning to creep in and further reviews were ordered.56

  There was a growing and disturbing suspicion in some parts of the CIA that Nosenko might be innocent. There were also concerns over the legality of his detention.57 Some of his guards even found his treatment troubling, telling Kisevalter of their concerns when he went down to the camp to work as an instructor.58 But what should be done? The way he had been treated could cause a scandal. Pete Bagley wrote some notes which included the options of ‘liquidating the man’ or ‘render[ing] him incapable of giving a coherent story’. He always maintained that these were his private scribbling, in which he was venting his frustration and that there was never any serious intent to kill Nosenko.59 Eventually, Nosenko would be released and rehabilitated. In all he had been held for a total of 1,277 days. Years later he called up Angleton on the phone. ‘I have nothing more to say to you,’ Angleton said. ‘And Mr Angleton, I have nothing further to say to you,’ Nosenko replied.60

  The molehunts on either side of the Atlantic moved largely in parallel, but their paths sometimes crossed. The British molehunters understood they had allies in the CIA and would occasionally use this as a bargaining chip. On one occasion, they issued an ultimatum to Hollis saying they would resign unless he told the Americans about the investigation into Mitchell. Hollis performed the drearily familiar ritual of flying over to Washington to tell the Americans
that there might be yet another leak, this time no less than his number two. The President was informed.61 The CIA was getting worried about the British. Teams were sent over – sometimes with the knowledge of British intelligence but sometimes without – to look into their cousins and see how bad things were. One report in 1965 said MI5 was suffering from poor organisation and leadership.