Spy wars : moles, mysteries, and deadly games

326 Pages·2007·1.43 MB·English

by  Bagley

Spy Wars
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Spy Wars
moles, mysteries,
and deadly games
Tennent H. Bagley
Yale University Press New Haven & London
A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton
McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright ∫ 2007 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Aster Roman by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bagley, T. H. (Tennent H.), 1925–
Spy wars : moles, mysteries, and deadly games / Tennent H. Bagley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 2. Soviet Union. Komitet gosudarstvennoi
bezopasnosti. 3. Intelligence service—Soviet Union—History. 4. Espionage, American—
Soviet Union. 5. Bagley, T. H. (Tennent H.), 1925– 6. Intelligence officers—United States—
Biography. 7. Intelligence officers—Soviet Union—Biography. I. Title.
JK468.I6B345 2007
327.1247073—dc22
2006036953
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Part OneA Defector Like No Other
1. Walk-in 3
2. Getting Under Way 10
3. A Visit to Headquarters 19
4. En Route 28
5. New Job, Under Clouds 51
6. Bombshell 63
7. Popov’s Ghost 68
8. Defection 80
9. Impasse 92
Part TwoDeadly Games
10. ‘‘Guiding Principle’’ 105
11. Deceiving in Wartime 112
12. Postwar Games 118
13. Symbiosis: Moles and Games 133
Part ThreeHidden Moles
14. Dead Drop 147
15. Code Clerks 156
16. Connections 163
Part FourConfrontation
17. Crunch Time 177
18. Face-off 183
Part FiveToo Hot to Handle
19. Head in the Sand 197
20. Lingering Debate 209
Part SixLate Light
21. Hiding a Mole, KGB-Style 223
22. The Other Side of the Moon 231
23. Boomerang 238
Appendix A A KGB Veteran’s View of Nosenko 247
Appendix B A Myth and Its Making 256
Appendix C Self-deception—Bane of Counterintelligence 265
Appendix D Glossary 278
Notes 291
Index 307
Preface
Like millions of others I was riveted to my TV screen in late 1989 watching
young Germans exuberantly hacking away with hammers and picks at the
Berlin ‘‘wall of death.’’ They were breaking down the most visible symbol of
the Cold War—and opening up an opportunity I had never foreseen.
Long years had passed since my retirement from CIA, but old ques-
tions still nagged. The nation—and History—had been ill-served in certain
encounters between CIA and KGB. In the meantime the truth had been
buried under layers of lies so often repeated that they had become conven-
tional wisdom. Now those gaps opening in the Wall foreshadowed an early
end to the Cold War—and suggested a way to dig the truth back out. After
the Second World War veterans had met with wartime foes to compare
tactics and see their battles through the enemy’s eyes. If the Cold War was
really ending, might KGB veterans loosen up the same way? Their side of
old events could break out some of the buried truth.
Two years later the Soviet Union collapsed and the opportunity loomed
large. I grabbed it, knowing that if I didn’t go after the answers to certain
old questions, no one would. The American intelligence community had so
unequivocally supported falsehood—and lost so much by doing so—that if
any CIA people still remembered, they would probably prefer to let this
sleeping dog lie.
It wasn’t mere curiosity. I was sure that that old blanket of lies was
covering traitors in our midst. More than one American intelligence officer
viii PREFACE
before Aldrich Ames had betrayed CIA’s secret helpers inside the Soviet
bloc—and got away with it. More than one American code clerk before the
infamous treason of Navy communicator John Walker had compromised
America’s secret ciphers—and got away with it. Today practically no one in
the West is aware that they even existed.
At that late date I suppose I might have relaxed and taken comfort
from the thought that our side won the Cold War despite their treason. The
passage of time had probably eroded whatever damage they had done. Or
had it? Maybe, instead, as had happened throughout history, old spies
had led the enemy to others in a continuum of treason that might still be
active today.
Either way, any history of the Cold War that ignored the role these
traitors played would remain distorted and incomplete.
So I set out on my own, with no reference to my former employers,
toward former Soviet bloc intelligence and counterintelligence officers
who might be willing to throw light on those old mysteries. Step by step,
year after year through the 1990s, I worked my way slowly from an in-
troduction here to a visit there, sent letters, traveled to one place and
another—including Russia—and sat with Eastern veterans at European
roundtables discussing our Cold War.
Luck rode with me. I managed to get in through the door that opened
when the Soviet Union collapsed and, before it began to close again early
in the new century, to talk with almost twenty Soviet bloc intelligence
veterans, a few during their visits to the West but most of them in the
former Soviet bloc. I visited some of their apartments, was invited to offi-
cial premises (even to see the luxurious bathroom in the Moscow residence
of the infamous wartime and postwar Smersh leader Victor Abakumov),
and had a look at Dzerzhinsky’s statue after it had been lifted away from in
front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters.
These Chekist veterans, knowing that I had supervised CIA’s work
against them, reacted in different ways. One senior KGB general bared his
teeth. When my European journalist companion mentioned some recent
East-West roundtable discussions of Cold War espionage, this old Chekist
snapped his disapproval of any such openness. He turned to me. ‘‘Remem-
ber,’’ he said darkly, ‘‘we are still working against you.’’
He was telling it straight. Though the KGB’s name has changed (not
for the first time) its main elements remain intact in the same buildings,
with the same mindset and many of the same objectives. As another high
official affirmed—years after the collapse of the Soviet Union—‘‘the KGB is
PREFACE ix
not dead.’’ It still hides its assets and significant parts of its history. Until
its files are opened no one can tell the full story of our old skirmishes in
the dark—and it will not open these files. The fall of the Soviet Union in
1991 caused hardly a hiccup in the KGB’s handling of penetration agents
inside American intelligence, like Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. To-
day it stiffly denies that it had any other such spies or that it broke Amer-
ica’s codes before or after the Walkers’ treason. It hides the advantages it
gained and the tricks it played, for it still needs those advantages and uses
those tricks.
But some Chekist veterans had turned the page and spoke with can-
dor. They seemed pleased and intrigued by the opportunity to talk with a
known former adversary familiar with the people and incidents and pro-
cedures of their past. They responded spontaneously even to detailed ques-
tions (posed in a neutral context), confident that as a professional I would
not ask them to betray their undiscovered spies in the West. Their answers
cast priceless light on hidden activities of our past.
Some, in fact, were trying as I was to bring old mysteries out of the
dark. True, most of the memoirs and histories that the KGB and its vet-
erans published after the Cold War differed little from what they had been
pumping out for decades, rehashing and exalting their known successes,
telling little new and exposing no recent secrets. But some Moscow mem-
oirs, either published without official imprimatur or cleared inattentively,
gave fresh insights into their past operations.
Over the course of ten years I thus succeeded in digging out at least the
broad outlines of the buried truth. Satisfied with that and aware that I
would never get all the answers I sought, I might just have laid it all away
on a shelf. But in September 2001 came the shock of 9/11—and some basic
questions it raised.
The first question was relatively easy: How did we fail to detect it in
advance? One obvious answer lies in the near-impossibility of infiltrating
spies into tiny groups of closely related and fanatic alien terrorists—a task
more difficult even than ours, in my time, of penetrating the near-seamless
security barriers of the Soviet regime.
A second question, however, looms larger: Why did the American intel-
ligence community fail to properly assess the information it did have? This
stirred old memories. In the answer to that question lay some of the same
defects that had buried truth in my time. I saw the same group-thinking,
the same bureaucratic resistance to unpleasant warnings, the same inabil-
ity to think outside the box of comfortable assumptions, the same refusal