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BOOK: A Secret Life

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CROSSING THE LINE

ONE AUGUST DAY in 1972, a German employee of the U.S. Embassy in Bonn was sorting through the morning mail when an airmail letter caught his eye. It was postmarked August 11, three days earlier, from Wilhelmshaven, a port on Germany’s North Sea coast. The front of the envelope was addressed in large letters, written in blue felt-tip pen:

U.S.A. AMBASSY BONN

EXPRESS

The clerk opened the envelope and found another inside, this one addressed to the U.S. military attaché. He carried both envelopes to the office of the defense attaché and handed them to a warrant officer. The warrant officer opened the inner envelope, found a letter, and turned everything over to the army attaché, who at the time was the embassy’s senior military officer. The officer, a pipe-smoking colonel, read the letter and walked to the front of the embassy compound, where the CIA station chief was based.

The seven-story American Embassy in Bonn, which was located just south of the city, overlooked the Rhine and had been built on stilts, to protect against floods. To one CIA officer there, the 1950s-era structure looked like a hulking prefab barracks. Several hundred Americans worked in the embassy, of whom about one-third were from the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Bonn Station was a critical hub, overseeing smaller bases in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and, of course, Berlin, where East and West were in the closest physical proximity, and where CIA officers could meet their sources, debrief and polygraph them, and look them in the eye.

Bonn Station was led by John P. Dimmer Jr., a red-haired, slightly built Down-Easter from Portland, Maine. Dimmer was the son of a deep-sea fisherman from Newfoundland who, as Dimmer liked to say, fished in the days of iron men and wooden ships. Dimmer, who was fifty-two, had the same strong constitution as his father but had no interest in following his father’s line of work. Self-confident and bookish, he became the Maine state spelling champion at age twelve. In 1942 he earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine and went on to serve in the Army. After World War II, he ran a POW camp for 10,000 German war criminals and security suspects. His posting in Bonn was the culmination of a CIA career of more than two decades, most of which he had served overseas.

That August, while most Europeans were on holiday, Dimmer and his staff were preparing for the Munich Olympics, which were just a few weeks away. Hundreds of Soviet and East bloc athletes were expected to attend, and among them, the CIA knew, would be KGB spies.

That morning, Dimmer was in his office, reviewing the usual stack of incoming cables and reports at his wooden L-shaped desk, when his secretary appeared to announce a visitor. The army attaché entered and handed Dimmer the envelopes. Dimmer thanked him and began to read the letter, which was handwritten in garbled English.

Dear Ser,

I’m sorry for my English.

I am an foregen MAF from Communistische Kantry. I want to meet (secretly) with U.S. Army Officer (Lt Colonel, Colonel) 17 or 18, 19.08 in Amsterdam or 21, 22 in Ostenda.

It have no many time. I am with my camrade end they kan’t know.

The writer said he would telephone the U.S. Embassy military attaché upon his arrival in Amsterdam. Whoever answered “must speak Russian or Polish,” the writer added.

The letter was signed “P.V. ”

Dimmer had no idea what P.V. stood for, but he sent a cable to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, recommending that Bonn Station try to make contact with P.V. The cryptic initials “MAF” might stand for “man,” he wrote, and the postmark suggested that the writer might be a seaman. His itinerary―Amsterdam followed by the port of Ostend in Belgium―suggested the writer was headed west. But why? Dimmer had guessed there might be a sporting event, perhaps related to the Olympics, in one of those cities, but a cursory check turned up nothing.

At headquarters in Langley, the cable arrived on the desk of David Blee, the chief of the Soviet Division.
¹

Fifty-five years old, balding, and austere, Blee was the quintessential gray man. He could have passed for a professor of electrical engineering at any university in the United States. To his subordinates, he appeared aloof at times, but he had a sardonic wit and was known as a free thinker who was not afraid to challenge the common wisdom.

The CIA director, Richard Helms, had asked Blee to take over the Soviet Division a year earlier. He was an unconventional choice, never having served in Moscow or, for that matter, anywhere in Eastern Europe. But Helms had been determined to make some changes. A decade earlier, one of the CIA’s most prized agents, Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) colonel who had turned over thousands of pages of highly classified Soviet documents that helped the Kennedy administration decipher the capabilities of Russian weaponry during the Cuban missile crisis, had been arrested and executed by Moscow. Since then, the CIA’s operations in Moscow had been virtually moribund. In Blee’s view, this was because the CIA hadn’t yet recovered from the influence of James J. Angleton, the notorious director of counterintelligence in the 1960s who became convinced that Moscow had penetrated the CIA, and that any Russian volunteer had to be a Moscow-controlled plant.

Under Angleton, old sources were cut off, and walk-ins, as volunteers were known, were rejected. At least one was betrayed by the CIA and sent back to the Soviet Union, where it is believed he was executed. Robert M. Gates, a former director of the CIA, has written that “thanks to the excessive zeal of Angleton and his counterintelligence staff, during this period we had very few Soviet agents inside the USSR worthy of the name.”

Blee had had a distinguished career in the CIA as an expert on the Middle East. A native of San Francisco and a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, he had operated in the agency’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). During World War II, he served behind enemy lines, dropped secretly by submarine on an island off Thailand to monitor the Japanese fleet. Blee joined the CIA at its founding in 1947 and served as station chief in South Africa, Pakistan, and India, where in the mid-1960s his officers whisked Svetlana Stalin out of the country after she walked into the embassy seeking political asylum. In 1968 he took over the CIA’s Near East Division.

Blee was astonished when Helms assigned him to head the Soviet Division in 1971. He told Helms he knew nothing about the Soviet Union and didn’t want the job.

Helms replied: “‘Don’t argue with me. I’ve made up my mind. . . . Besides, I’ve tried everything else. I want to put somebody in that job who doesn’t know anything about it.’. . . Helms wasn’t getting the product he wanted out of Soviet operations,” Blee recalled.

Blee began by traveling to Moscow on a tourist passport, the first time a CIA officer of his rank had visited the Soviet capital. It was a useful journey. He had expected, for example, to find few automatic elevators in Moscow buildings, but they were practically everywhere, and he discovered that many of the control panels were covered by a piece of plywood. Blee decided that the space behind the wood would make a perfect “dead drop” in which the CIA and its agents could hide messages for one another.

At Langley, Blee surrounded himself with officers from outside the Soviet Division, including some who had been involved in running operations in Eastern Europe, an area where Angleton had not meddled. Blee believed that the ideal place to recruit Russians was not in Moscow, Berlin, or even Warsaw, but in places like Africa, Europe, South America, or wherever Moscow sent its diplomats and spies before they returned home. Blee’s staff quietly got in touch with several former sources who had been cut off during the Angleton years, and some renewed their ties with the agency. “He told us, ‘Recruit ’em, and run ’em,’” said Clair George, one of the officers brought in by Blee.

Blee’s approach caused some tension in the division, including at least one heated exchange in a conference room when he berated a senior officer who had suggested that a particular plan wouldn’t work. Blee felt the trouble with the old guard was that “they thought they knew everything―and they were wrong. I’m convinced that if we are reasonably skeptical we can figure out whether somebody is giving us a line. People say they want to work for you; let’s find out what they can do.”

When the cable about P.V. arrived at headquarters, Katharine Hart, chief of the Division’s Reports and Requirements Staff, expressed skepticism that an Eastern European seaman, as Dimmer had suggested P.V. might be, was likely to emerge as a valuable source on the Soviet Union. “There’s nothing he can tell us that I don’t have covered already,” she told Blee.

But Blee ordered Bonn Station to move expeditiously to set up a meeting with P.V. After approving the operation, he left the details to his staff at Langley and in Bonn. Blee liked to say that the problem with Allen Dulles, a veteran of the OSS, a founding father of the CIA, and its director under Eisenhower, was that he knew too much and became overly involved in operations. Blee laughed as he once imitated the gifted Dulles wading into the minutiae of setting up a secret meeting with an agent.

“Why don’t you tell him to meet under an apple tree instead of a pear tree?” Dulles would say. “The apple trees have all their leaves at that time of year.”

In Bonn, Dimmer summoned Walter Lang,
²a forty-five-year-old officer serving under U.S. Army cover who specialized in Soviet operations. Lang had grown up in Springfield, Illinois, where he once planned to sell Monroe calculating machines, as his father had. But after working in army intelligence in the Korean War, he changed his mind. He had served with the CIA in Munich, Berlin, and Bonn. Lang, whose business card read “US Army Program Evaluations Group,” had an office in the rear of the embassy where, as he liked to point out, his view of the Rhine was better than that of the big shots out front.

Dimmer described the assignment to Lang and the need for secrecy. “I want ‘zero’ on this,” he cautioned. He said that they would also need a CIA operative fluent in Russian. Lang suggested an Estonian officer based in Hamburg. He was known as Wally
^†and had worked with Lang before. Dimmer approved.

Wally came to Bonn. He and Lang were close, and when he was in town, he usually stayed with Lang in Plittersdorf, about a mile and a half up the Rhine. A robust fifty-three years old, Wally was six feet, two inches tall and weighed 225 pounds. He had a full head of wavy silver hair and wore gold-rimmed glasses over a bronzed face. Wally would never become a chief of station―he was inept at administration and a poor manager―but his reputation as a street officer was unrivaled. He projected serenity and self-assurance and knew how to make a source feel comfortable. When Stalin had captured the Baltic nations, Wally was an officer in the Estonian Navy. His unit was lined up, and each soldier was offered two choices: Join the Red Army, or be shot. Wally chose to survive, but he was consumed with hatred for the Soviets and vowed to work against them.

When Hitler invaded Russia, Wally deserted the Russian Army and joined the German forces. He was commissioned as a captain in Hitler’s army, but as soon as an opportunity presented itself, he deserted again and fought the Nazis as part of the Danish underground. After the war, Wally joined the newly created CIA and became involved in Soviet operations in Eastern Europe.

For the P.V. operation, Wally was given a cover name: Lt. Col. Henry P. Morton, U.S. Army Management and Planning Unit, Frankfurt, Germany. He became known as Colonel Henry.

The newly named Colonel Henry Morton and his partner, Walter Lang, took the train to The Hague. They carried suitcases and were dressed like tourists. They didn’t know where P.V. would surface. He had said he would call the U.S. Embassy in Amsterdam, but the United States had only a consulate there. Because P.V. might not have known that, Henry rented a car and drove to the consulate, where he waited in case P.V. called there. Lang, meanwhile, remained at the embassy in The Hague, waiting for a call in the defense attaché’s office.

On Thursday, August 17, neither man heard from P.V. Friday began uneventfully as well. Then, at 4:30 P.M. in The Hague, the switchboard operator passed a call to Lang, telling him that a Russian-sounding man had asked about a letter to Bonn.

Is this P.V.? Lang asked in English.

The caller hung up.

Five minutes later, the phone rang again.

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