The New Spymasters Page 7

  The first is that, in spying, activity is not the same as achievement. You don’t have to take Knightley’s radical view that everything about spying is useless to note that much of it was.

  A secret service is rarely honest to the public about itself. In the Cold War, to justify the arms race of intelligence spending, it served the interests of both sides to aggrandize the achievements of their rivals, the enemy. But, in contrast to much of what has been said in public and made its way into the literature, this was not some golden age of spying. For most of the period, huge amounts of effort were expended recruiting spies whose main value was to provide the secret services with information about each other in what became almost an internal, private war. So, while a culture of secrecy kept the public in the dark – for example, it was illegal in the United States and Britain to publish the names of undercover intelligence officers – Soviet intelligence often had a full briefing about the inside of SIS and the CIA. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviets had Kim Philby in SIS and Anthony Blunt in MI5; by the 1980s they had Aldrich Ames in CIA headquarters and Robert Hanssen in the FBI. On the other side, the West was fully briefed on Soviet intelligence. They had, among others, Oleg Penkovsky and later Oleg Gordievsky in the GRU and KGB respectively.

  Really valuable intelligence might have told political leaders what their enemies or potential enemies were planning or contemplating. But in all the years of superpower confrontation, both sides had a critical lack of political agents. The KGB never did have a spy in the White House. ‘When people say that Soviet intelligence penetrated the higher echelons of Western government, I know that this is not true,’ said Oleg Kalugin, the Soviet general and former head of KGB foreign counterintelligence.22 Nor did the CIA ever have a spy in the Kremlin, as William Colby, the former CIA director, admitted.23

  By way of a caveat, Britain’s star agent-in-place in the late Cold War, Oleg Gordievsky, did deliver valuable political intelligence when he was the KGB station chief in London while also working for SIS. He – and the intelligence he provided – played a pivotal role in making Margaret Thatcher believe and support Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost, which ultimately brought down the communist edifice. His achievement was mainly to deliver understanding, not secrets. ‘No doubt he produced lots of facts to go with this understanding,’ said one insider who observed these events close at hand, ‘but it was in changing Western perceptions of the regime that he seems to have been most influential.’

  The second observation is that spying has proved successful when it was highly focused and politically directed.

  The world is so complex and the future so hard to predict that spy agencies that have tried to do everything, to have spies everywhere, have rarely achieved much, even with a large budget. Stalin, whatever his faults, took the opposite approach to intelligence. He had the gift of marshalling all the resources at his disposal towards a single objective that he defined. Such determination helped the Soviets pull off the espionage coup of the twentieth century: the acquisition of the atomic bomb.

  With more than 200 Americans working as Soviet agents during and after the Second World War, and a series of agents involved at various levels within the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear bombs, the first Soviet bomb tested in 1949 ‘was a copy of the American original tested … more than four years earlier’, Christopher Andrew records.24 One of those blamed for this leak of technology was a German scientist and émigré to Britain, Klaus Fuchs, who confessed to an MI5 interrogator that he had given the Russians ‘all the information in his possession about British and American research in connection with the atomic bomb’.25

  As with much spy literature, discussion on atomic espionage is often shallow, ignoring the strides taken independently by the Soviets’ own weapons programme. Some research suggests the stolen intelligence was used mainly to compare results. But, even so, this would have been critical. Spying was crucial to this strategic shift.

  Hans Bethe, a fellow nuclear physicist, suggested that, by his spying, Fuchs was ‘the only physicist I know who truly changed history’.26 He should also have added the creators of the nuclear bomb, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

  The third observation is that human intelligence has the most effect when it is corroborated or, even better, verifiable. These are technical terms of spy-speak. Corroboration means obtaining the same information independently from other sources. Without such a backup, you are left with ‘single source intelligence’. Verifiable intelligence means information that can be checked. So, for example, a secret agent’s report that a bomb had been planted in a Rome hotel could be corroborated by another agent’s report or by another source of intelligence, such as a bugged telephone. It could be verified if the agent gave other specific information that allowed the actual bomb to be found.

  Corroboration and verification are double-checks on intelligence. And while, as mentioned, a requirement for double-checks will skew what spies provide (at the expense of uncheckable but useful truths), this double-checking has generally proved the only practical way to make human intelligence useful. Few spies have been so brilliant, or so convincing, that their intelligence was ever trusted without being backed up in this way.

  Philby’s story is again instructive. In trying to show why Philby’s intelligence was valuable – despite Moscow’s doubts – some biographers cite the case of the warnings he provided after the Second World War about a programme by the CIA and SIS to insert agents into Eastern Europe and Albania in particular. In a mission known as Operation Valuable, between 1949 and 1954, the West made successive attempts to overthrow a newly established Albanian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, and to restore the esteemed King Zog. But, as a result of tip-offs, most of the Western agents were captured as they landed on the coast or parachuted in and were executed.

  Philby’s role is often cited uncritically here, partly because he boasted about it. Philby became infamous, as one newspaper writer puts it, as the traitor who ‘sent agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain’.27 Philby himself wrote that the ‘agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on murder, sabotage and assassination … To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.’ Yuri Modin, Philby’s NKVD contact in London, also claimed that Philby ‘gave us vital information about the number of men involved, the day and the time of the landing, the weapons they were bringing and their precise programme of action’.28

  But, as most historians concede, Operation Valuable was anyway penetrated from top to bottom by Soviet spies. And whatever value Philby may have delivered had credibility because it was corroborated by those other spies, and indeed by the capture of the agents when they landed. He could be trusted on Albania because he was not a solitary source. On his own, even this master spy counted for little.

  There is research that questions whether Philby even provided details of the agents’ landings – the central claim made by all who have built up his importance. This challenge comes from Albert Lulushi, an Albanian-American author, based on a study of declassified CIA files. Nicholas Pano, a history professor, in a review of Lulushi’s work, concludes that he puts Philby in perspective:

  It demonstrates that although he was knowledgeable of the plans against Albania, he did not have access to the operational plans in Albania. Although he was a factor in the failure of this adventure in Albania, the main factors were the rivalry and divisions among the Albanian émigré groups, the leaks of operational details from these groups, the bureaucratic approach that the CIA and British planners of these operations often took, and the rivalry among different intelligence agencies with interests in Albania at the time.29

  At the time of writing, this evidence is too fresh to be conclusive. But what it underlines is the need for caution in accepting any claim about the immense value of a particular spy, as well as the huge interest that almost everyone has in exaggerating his importance.

  On t
he other side of Cold War spying, there was a clear example of intelligence that made a difference. While US political intelligence in Moscow was often thin, the CIA successfully stole many Russian technical secrets. This had impact because the stolen designs and science could be tested and replicated.

  Adolf Tolkachev, a senior Russian aeronautical scientist who spied for the CIA between 1977 and 1985, gained access to (and was also involved in the design of) radars for the Soviet fighter programme and so helped the US defeat them. According to James Pavitt, the former CIA deputy director for operations, Tolkachev’s spying saved the US billions and ‘ensured us air superiority at a critical juncture of the Cold War’.30 Dmitri Polyakov, a major general in Soviet military intelligence, was another great catch. He spied for nearly twenty years from 1961 and was described by Sandy Grimes, a CIA counterintelligence officer who helped catch Aldrich Ames, as ‘our crown jewel’ and possibly ‘the best source that any intelligence service has ever had’. He passed on specifics of Soviet missiles and other weapons.31 (Unfortunately, the CIA had failed to protect their agents with proper compartmentalization. The need-to-know principle was ignored and too many people knew their identity. Both were betrayed by Soviet agents – Tolkachev by Ames and Polyakov by Hanssen – and executed at the Lubyanka.)

  Pavitt emphasizes the money saved by technical intelligence, but another reason such intelligence was valuable was that it could be tested. The stolen secrets triggered a research programme, not only to learn methods to counteract the Soviet weapons but also to verify that the intelligence was accurate. The cost of verification was one reason why clandestine actions to steal the actual weapons were regarded as even more important. SIS officers pulled these off in Afghanistan and the CIA in Egypt.32

  A final observation here is that spying must be a weapon of last resort.

  The benefits of successful spy missions may be outweighed by the costs of spying that goes wrong. Against all the theft of technical secrets that helped the different sides with their arms race there were many failures, not just the death by execution of so many agents – whether Volkov, Penkovsky, Polyakov or Tolkachev – but the constant atmosphere of tension and distrust that spy games could engender.

  Perhaps the most instructive case was an East German operation that showed the cost of recruiting an agent without thought for the consequences. It led to the resignation of West German chancellor Willy Brandt and showed the cost of spying for spying’s sake.

  Günter Guillaume, codenamed Hansen, and his first wife, Christel, were officers in the East German foreign intelligence service, the HVA, who were sent in 1956 to infiltrate the West German leadership. They pretended to have escaped from East Germany and set up, with HVA money, a café in Frankfurt. Both joined Brandt’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), for whom Christel became a secretary in the local headquarters. Over a number of years, Günter worked himself up the party ranks, eventually becoming chairman of the Frankfurt SPD and a member of the city council.33

  In 1969, following Willy Brandt’s election as West Germany’s first SPD chancellor, and after successfully managing the election campaign of a local minister, Guillaume asked if there might be a position for him in the Chancellery. After a short time in a minor position there, he moved up to become Brandt’s most trusted aide and one of the very few who accompanied him and his family on holiday. The Soviets, via the Stasi, now had direct access to Brandt’s thinking, correspondence and policymaking.

  By May 1973, West German counterintelligence had begun to suspect the Guillaumes of being HVA spies. Despite this, they did not alert Brandt to their suspicions and just put Christel under surveillance.34 It wasn’t until March 1974 that Günter also started to be watched, and a month later both husband and wife were arrested on suspicion of espionage.

  The political scandal that resulted from this threatened to bring down the SPD coalition government. Not only had the Chancellor trusted a spy as his aide and confidant, but rumours began circulating that Guillaume had been collecting compromising information, and possibly photos, of the married Chancellor with various women, as well as information about his heavy drinking. By resigning, Brandt saved the government, but not himself.

  Brandt had been the architect of a policy of East–West rapprochement that was in the interests of East Germany. As Markus Wolf, the HVA chief, later acknowledged, the operation had ‘unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen’.35 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote to Brandt, apologizing that the HVA ‘contributed to the extremely negative political events that led to your resignation in 1974’.36

  Wolf’s problem was that he became too good. Spying was used without enough thought, instead of being reserved for securing the sort of secrets that really mattered.

  * * *

  If the nature of the spy business is frequently portrayed wrongly, so too is the character of the Cold War’s real warriors: the intelligence officers at the heart of the business. And while the profession’s achievements are often aggrandized, many of its greatest characters, the top spymasters, are remarkably candid about their limitations. The best of them consider counterintuitive thinking an article of faith.

  For a frontline perspective on spying’s value, as well as to learn more about how Cold War spies were really recruited, it was worth spending time with some of the greats of anti-Soviet espionage. One of the most thoughtful was the former head of the CIA’s Soviet section, Milton Bearden. Meeting him involved a drive out to a favourite haunt of ex-spies, the Ritz Carlton Hotel at Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia.

  Bearden was a legend whose name I had first heard mentioned in Germany in the 1990s. He was credited then for Operation Rosenholz (Rosewood), the operation that led to the CIA acquiring, as the Berlin Wall tumbled, a list of almost all the Stasi’s agents abroad, winning him the Federal Cross of Merit from the German state.37

  I learned later that Bearden, then station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, had also been one of the key figures in running the CIA covert war in Afghanistan. When he returned to headquarters, he ran the agency’s wider war as chief of the agency’s Soviet section. He retired from the CIA in 1994, devastated by the discovery that one of his officers, Aldrich Ames, had betrayed them all.

  By the end of Bearden’s career, the CIA had ballooned, employing around 25,000 people. That included analysts and technical specialists – positions that in the UK, for example, would not come under the auspices of SIS. Officers like Bearden were part of the elite, from the clandestine service that actually ran spies and covert operations. Called various names at different times, including the Directorate of Plans, the Directorate of Operations (DO) and, since 2005, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), this section has always been the heart of the ‘real CIA’ and numbered no more than 6,000, including support staff.38

  (To compare the British and American agencies, it is important to realize that the CIA’s clandestine service is the counterpart of SIS, not the entire CIA. SIS, which is said by insiders to employ between 2,000 and 3,000 people, focuses entirely on running agents and field operations; analysis of its product is carried out elsewhere in Whitehall. But the CIA’s DO was also far more action-orientated than SIS, with more ex-military recruits and much wider remit to engage in covert action.)

  ‘The CIA is the DO,’ said Bearden. ‘The rest of it, the analysis, etc. is just Rand Corporation or the Brookings Institution with razor wire around it.’

  Like many former CIA case officers I had come to know, Bearden was a big and distinctive man, not someone to blend into the shadows. ‘They ordered these burgers only crocodiles can eat,’ said one former officer in the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, recalling his contacts with US intelligence. And in the words of Jack Devine, an old colleague of Bearden and another giant of a man: ‘It’s no good hiding away. People have to know where to find you.’

  That had been a key lesson for me. As Bearden explained, during the Cold War ‘by and
large, it was the job of the intelligence officer to make sure everybody knew his post office box’.

  People who wrote books about spies spoke of all their training in recruiting spies, how they were taught to find people’s motives and exploit them. But, at least in the Cold War, this training rarely counted for much. Almost all spies of any importance had been ‘walk-ins’, volunteers who chose to betray without any prompting or recruitment.

  With a very few exceptions on the Soviet side, the West versus East spy game during the Cold War was ‘about the skilful management of volunteers’, according to Bearden. ‘You’ve got people who defect – who defect in place – and they do it for all of the same reasons that drive man: fear, revenge, lust, sex, greed or even something like boredom occasionally. And he makes the decision – it’s almost always guys – to become bigger than himself. He becomes a spy. So, if you’re Russian, who are you going to spy for – China, Albania? You’re going to spy for the main adversary, the main enemy.’

  It is worth noting here that while other professional spymasters interviewed by the author agreed with Bearden’s assessment about the scarcity of real recruits when operating against the Soviets inside the Eastern bloc (Bearden’s main sphere of operations), many argued it was possible to make targeted recruits of softer targets in more benign environments, of which more later.

  As Bearden correctly described, some of the best spies for the West were forced literally to throw themselves at their erstwhile enemy to get hired. It took Tolkachev thirteen months and six approaches in Moscow – including banging on the CIA chief-of-station’s car – before headquarters authorized a meeting. That he became one of the CIA’s most valuable agents was thanks only to his determination and persistence.39