Circle of Treason (2 page)

A note about transliteration: The majority of the Russian names have been translated from the Cyrillic using the National Geographic Board on Geographic Names. This was the standard used by the CIA's Directorate of Operations during the period under discussion. However, in a few instances where the individual has carved out an identity in the West we have used the transliteration preferred by this individual. Therefore, we use Gordievsky, not Gordiyevskiy and Andrei, not Andrey, Poleshchuk.

The CIA's Publications Review Board (PRB) is responsible for clearing any texts written by former CIA officers. They require the following disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author's views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

In general our experience with the PRB has been a frustrating one. Although more than 90 percent of the disputed issues were eventually resolved in our favor, and the book below reads essentially as it was originally conceived, it took us more than three long years to come to terms. Some of the requests for deletions were valid and we made them without quibbling, but, in our view, others stemmed from flaws in the process itself.

Finally, we could not have written this book without some help from our former colleagues. We consulted Dick C, Myrna Fitzgerald, Bob Fulton, Burton Gerber, Walt Lomac, Len and Faith McCoy, Dan Payne, Jack Platt, Andrei and Svetlana Poleshchuk, Paul Redmond, Dick Stolz, Diana Worthen, and some others who prefer to remain anonymous. This includes those who graciously provided access to their personal archives. All of them have our gratitude. We owe a special vote of thanks to Gary Grimes, who plowed through our numerous drafts and offered balanced commentary.

JEANNE'S STORY

O
CTOBER
1954. T
HE
K
OREAN
W
AR WAS OVER
, and we had not yet become embroiled in Vietnam. I had graduated from the University of Connecticut in the spring. The job fair representatives who visited the campus during my senior year included one from the CIA. He spoke very vaguely about what the Agency did, but indicated that there would be possibilities for travel. This was what I wanted to hear. A typical product of the 1950s, I thought only in passing about equal rights for women and had no overriding visions of a rewarding professional career. My major goal was to work and live abroad, preferably in Europe.

The representative told me that the only openings he had for women were clerical, and he urged me to acquire secretarial skills. Thus after graduation I went to business school and learned how to type and take shorthand while awaiting the call from the CIA to tell me if I had been accepted.

When that call came, I took the train to Washington. My first assignment was in the unclassified typing pool, where a group of newly hired young women typed 3×5 cards listing North Korean scientists, as their names appeared in professional journals. Probably we got a lot of the names wrong, but it didn't seem to matter. We were marking time until we were called for our polygraphs and, if we passed, given a real assignment. I did pass, after having a philosophical argument about whether
Chiang Kai-shek was a boon to China, and whether one could characterize the Communists as agrarian reformers. My answers must have been reasonably orthodox; in any event I had studied Far Eastern history in college, and knew more about the subject than my examiner.

As part of the assignment process, I was asked if I would be interested in serving overseas and, if so, where. “Europe” was my first answer, but the personnel officer successfully got me to add that I would not rule out a posting in some other part of the world. Shortly thereafter, my assignment came through: the Near East and African Division.

After I had worked there for a short time, the personnel officer offered me a position as an administrative assistant in an outpost in French West Africa. I did not know where it was, and neither did the personnel officer, but we hunted it down on a map. And, after mulling it over for a day or two, I said I would go.

In those days, a woman's educational background and linguistic accomplishments meant nothing. I minored in German in college, with six years of that language under my belt. I also had two years of French, but my command of it was pretty shaky. However, the only criterion was the ability to type, and that I could certainly do.

Fortunately, there was a hitch in the assignment, so I got to spend almost a year in Washington before heading overseas. My friends and I were all short of money, but managed to do our share of sightseeing and partying. In those days the CIA was located in World War II temporary barracks downtown, along the reflecting pool between Constitution and Independence Avenues, so we were right in the thick of things. I traveled by bus to work and, in those more innocent days, while waiting at the bus stop on Constitution to go home, I would sometimes see President Eisenhower on the golf green behind the White House practicing his putting. Among my most pleasant memories is taking my ice skates to work in the winter, and skating on the reflecting pool during my lunch hour.

Two agreeable years in West Africa followed. I had an excellent Chief of Station, John Edwards. A Harvard-educated gentleman of the old school and a veteran of World War I and World War II, he had spent the interwar years in France or Francophone countries in Africa and spoke polished French. Under his tutelage my French became reasonably fluent. He was an indulgent boss and let me do a lot of traveling around West Africa. My longest and most adventurous trip was by train to Bamako,
Mali, and then by boat around the northern bend of the Niger River, with stops at exotic places like Mopti, Djenne, and Timbuktu.

The West African tour also gave me a different perspective on life. For the first time, being white put me in the minority. This struck me when I first got off the plane and it took a while before I became comfortable with the concept.

However, once I settled in I enjoyed Africa so much that I asked for a second assignment there. This time East Africa was my destination.

The East African post had its pleasant aspects. At an altitude of more than seven thousand feet, the climate was excellent and flowers bloomed year-round. Also, we were above the zone of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and similar tropical health hazards. Sometimes we took a weekend break, going down the edge of the Great Rift Valley to the Red Sea to swim and snorkel. It was a hazardous two-hour journey, over a narrow road with more than one hundred hairpin turns, but the views were magnificent. Often we encountered baboons and dik-diks (a tiny gazelle), on the way and giant manta rays were a common sight once we reached the sea.

The only downside to this tour was that I did not get on with my boss, and there were only the two of us. Anyway, despite the after-hours and weekend adventures, I was beginning to have enough of working in Africa. As my tour wound to its end, I was offered a job in yet another African post. The duties would be the same clerical and administrative ones that I had been carrying out for years, only this time I would also be expected to be the Chief of Station's interpreter because the designated officer did not speak French!

By now I had developed some rudimentary career goals, and this did not sound like it would be a satisfying assignment. Furthermore, it was the African component's policy (freely expressed in those days) not to promote women above GS-07. I had attained that grade long ago. Looking for advancement, I sought a job outside of Africa, and found one—in Helsinki, Finland. Not only would this give me the opportunity to see a different part of the world, the job was rated as GS-09, one of the few such slots available to women then, although the situation was beginning to change.

Operationally, Finland was much more active than the African posts where I had served. Because the country bordered the USSR, the CIA in
Helsinki concentrated all its efforts on the Soviet target—a target on which I now began to gain some expertise. My routine duties included keeping the REDCAP notebook—a comprehensive listing of all the Soviet officials in the country—up to date. I developed some familiarity with Russian names, organizations, career patterns, indications of intelligence affiliation, and like details. Moreover, I became personally involved in a controversial and fascinating case, which was a hallmark of the Angletonian era. (James Jesus Angleton, of whom much will be said below, was Chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff from 1954 until 1974.) In December 1961, KGB counterintelligence officer Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, with his wife and small daughter, appeared on the doorstep of CIA Station Chief Frank Friberg and announced his unalterable intention to defect. Friberg, an intelligent and decisive officer, immediately contacted Steve W and me.

Friberg gave us our marching orders. Steve was to take the passports of the Golitsyn family to the Embassy and issue them U.S. visas. Luckily, Steve was able to do this without raising any immediate questions. I was told to go to the office and get cash for the travel of Frank and the Golitsyn family. Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties, and therefore I could get into the strongbox where we kept our money.

I immediately drove to the office, opened the strongbox, pulled out wads of currency without counting, and then proceeded as fast as I could to the airport where Frank had told Steve and me to meet him. Because this was December, snow was piled up along the streets. I recall driving up and over a cement tram stop in my Volkswagen beetle in my haste. Luckily no policeman was around to observe this illegal and bonejarring maneuver.

Steve drove up to the departure terminal with the Golitsyn passports, and I arrived with money for their tickets and other expenses. Friberg and the Golitsyns then emplaned for Stockholm, on their way to Frankfurt and then the United States. Needless to say, my accountings did not balance that month, but Headquarters wrote off the rather large discrepancy without a murmur.

We will return to the Golitsyn story in later chapters. For now it suffices to mention that, at first, Golitsyn was debriefed by the Soviet Bloc Division at Headquarters but soon came into the hands of the CI staff.
We in Helsinki became more and more frustrated because Golitsyn had served for over a year in Helsinki and could tell us a great deal about KGB activities in Finland, yet this did not seem to be a major thrust of the debriefings and the debriefers seemed to know little about things Finnish. Eventually, much later, we got one long debriefing report that contained answers to some of the questions we had asked, but significant gaps remained.
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Two items of information provided by Golitsyn allowed me to assess my budding skills as a counterintelligence analyst. I won one and lost one. In the first case, one of the Embassy components had wanted to hire a young woman as a secretary. She had a Russian émigré background. Further, she seemed overskilled for the position she was to fill. I advised against hiring her, and while there was some heartburn she was not brought on board. According to Golitsyn, she had indeed been sent by the KGB to penetrate the Embassy.

In the second case, we had learned that one of the Finnish employees of the U.S. embassy had made an unreported trip to Leningrad. He would have needed a Russian visa and Golitsyn, who was under consular cover, was the logical person to have issued it. We then learned that Golitsyn had traveled to Leningrad at the same time as our employee. Putting two and two together, and getting five, we called in the employee, questioned him about his trip, and eventually saw to it that he was fired. Now we learned from Golitsyn that the employee had been loyal while employed. Golitsyn had tried to recruit him in Leningrad, but had been turned down. Unfortunately, after we fired him, he changed his mind, recontacted Golitsyn, and told the KGB officer everything he could about what he had learned during his Embassy employment.

I spent more than four years in Helsinki. Late in my tour, it became obvious that professional career possibilities for women were opening up. Women were permitted to apply for the Career Training course, the gateway to officer status. There were limitations, however. In the Directorate of Operations (DO), women were accepted for only two career tracks—analyst or reports officer. We were not allowed to take the long course that teaches one to become an operations officer, and we were barred from paramilitary training. And there was no parity in numbers. We were seven women out of a total class of sixty-six.

Nonetheless, it was a rewarding and broadening experience. Given my interest in the Soviet target, perhaps the highlight of my training was the
three-hour spellbinding lecture given by George Kisevalter concerning his participation in the Popov case. (Petr Semenovich Popov was a GRU officer who volunteered to us in Vienna in 1953. Kisevalter, a fluent Russian speaker and a legend throughout his career, was one of his handlers.)
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