Circle of Treason (5 page)

These were stressful and demanding times. Not long after the appearance of our GRU source, I was brought into another new operation involving an anonymous write-in to a CIA officer in Bonn. The volunteer, named by us Mister X, dropped a bombshell. Our Soviet sources had been compromised due to a penetration of CIA communications. In exchange for this information and the promise of more, the author demanded that we place $50,000 in a cache or dead drop in East Berlin. The two cases progressed through the summer along with my travel to West Berlin to deliver the second of three packages for Mister X.

Seven months later in March 1987 Gerber and Redmond summarily removed me from my position in the Africa Branch and put me in charge of the Moscow Task Force. The newly formed group was necessitated by the confession of Moscow Embassy Marine Guard Arnold Bracy that he and fellow guard Clayton Lonetree had allowed the KGB entry to the secure areas of the U.S. embassy. Having no choice but to assume that the KGB had accessed Moscow Station records and/or communications gear, the charter of the task force was twofold. We were to determine the nature and extent of Moscow Station holdings during the period in question and inform all affected U.S. government agencies of the potential compromise of their plans, programs, and personnel. The material collected and reviewed numbered in the tens of thousands of pages and the project took one year to complete.

After my task force duty I found myself formally back in the SE CI Group as chief of the Soviet and East European Production Branch, the job Jeanne held in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The most important change I made during my tenure was to formalize the “back room,”
naming Worthen as chief of the Special Projects Section. New sources continued to arrive and each continued to survive. Additionally, we began an exhaustive and long-term project to computerize thirty-plus years of counterintelligence information.

In 1989 I stepped down as chief of the Production Branch, requesting and receiving a part-time position in the Special Projects Section. This was strictly a personal decision. My family had made sacrifices for me and my career over the years. It was time I repaid them by spending more hours on the home front.

By early 1991 I had concluded that it was time for me to resign from the CIA. Redmond had left the division and accepted a position as deputy chief of CIC. Milton Bearden, the chief of SE, and I had completed a running battle about the handling of GTPROLOGUE, a KGB operation designed to mislead us about our losses. Polyakov's execution still bothered me. Frustration had set in and my enthusiasm for the work was waning. I told Redmond of my plans. Two days later he asked me if I would stay for one more assignment. Would I help Jeanne investigate the 1985 losses? Without hesitation I replied that he made me the only offer I could have never refused. Our dead sources deserved advocates and so began my participation in what later became known as the Ames mole hunt.

OVERVIEW OF SE OPERATIONS

F
ROM THE MID
-1960
S
until the end of the Cold War, operations against the Soviet and East European target were carried out under the same general organizational structure. The biggest change came in 1966, when the East European Division merged with the Soviet Russian Division, creating what was called the Soviet Bloc Division. From then on, the structure changed only in minor ways. There was a component targeting Soviets and East Europeans around the world, and another component responsible for our stations and their operations in the Soviet Union and the East European countries. Additionally, there was a centralized reports and requirements component, an operational support component, and a counterintelligence component. This last-named group was responsible for running those operations that involved KGB and GRU officers, although in the late 1970s the division's geographic targeting components assumed responsibility for a number of these cases. Additionally, it provided CI guidance, reviewed selected cases, and produced studies and research papers for various audiences. This is the component in which the authors spent much of their careers.

In December 1961, an event took place that was to have a profound and deleterious effect on operations against the Soviet target. Major Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn (KGB) defected to the CIA in Helsinki. He was a CI officer who, before his posting to Finland, had served at KGB headquarters in a component that worked against the NATO target.
Golitsyn predicted that following his defection to the Americans the Soviets would send false defectors or in-place sources from both the KGB and the GRU to discredit him and his reporting. Further and of more significance, Golitsyn said that the KGB had designed these operations to deflect any U.S. investigations of a high-level penetration of the CIA. Golitsyn had no knowledge of any false defectors in the wings, but he did have the ear of the chief of the CI staff, James Angleton.

Within the CIA a maze of double- and triple-think developed toward all operational activity against the Soviet Union. It was later dubbed the “Monster Plot” and its subscribers were known as the “Black Hats.” According to the Black Hat theory, every CIA or FBI success against the Soviet target was really a KGB success, with the KGB controlling the operations from beginning to end—misleading, confusing, and deceiving the naive Americans.
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This cabal was headed by Angleton and his senior staff, the leadership of SE Division, the leadership of SE Division's CI Group, and the Illegals/Investigations Branch in the SE CI Group managed by Joe Evans and Peter Kapusta.

The Angletonian Monster Plot mind-set centered around the purported existence of false Soviet defectors—KGB or GRU officers who pretend to be disaffected and who wish to lead a new life in the West. Many defectors have been so accused, most recently (as far as the authors know) Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko, the KGB CI officer who defected to the CIA in Rome at the beginning of August 1985. Sandy and Jeanne are of the firm opinion that the phony defector is an urban myth that has not existed since at least the end of World War II. The reason is simple and can be summed up in one word—trust. The Soviet leadership could not and would not trust any citizen with knowledge of its “State secrets” enough to have him come totally under our control for more than an exceedingly brief period. Soviet intelligence officers of any rank fell into this category. As we have seen in KGB double agent operations, such “sources” were made available to us only under very limited conditions, and the “source” would describe himself as having only peripheral or infrequent access, despite his KGB connection. In one case the “source” had a duty station outside Moscow and only visited his headquarters on rare occasions. In another case, the “source” was retired and his access was limited to chance conversations with his former colleagues. In a third case, the “source” would make himself available to us for extremely short
periods, claiming that he could only skip out on his colleagues for a few minutes at a time. Understandably from the Soviet viewpoint, the risks inherent in a phony defector operation are enormous. Exposure for whatever reason negates the value of the ruse. At a minimum, failure results in highly valuable grist for U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence, not to mention a propaganda coup.
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Despite the pressures, a few in SE Division did not march to the Angleton drummer. While the division bears the responsibility for its participation in the horrendous treatment of KGB defector Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, and other unforgivable activities, there was one officer who risked his professional future by speaking out against the perceived theory that Nosenko was a false defector. That man was Leonard McCoy, a brilliant division reports officer, who in 1966 not only put his contrary views in writing but also took a career-hazarding stand when he later sent his analysis of Nosenko's bona fides to Helms. He decided on such action despite his division chief's promise that he would be fired if he ever mentioned even the existence of his writings. Thanks to McCoy alone a chain of events was set in motion that eventually led to the vindication of Nosenko and his release from CIA imprisonment. In addition to McCoy, Walter Lomac, Sandy's first branch chief, whose story is told in a subsequent chapter, put principle over career. Each deserves great credit for standing up for justice and common sense regardless of the consequences, which ranged from ridicule to expulsion from the division and a future without promotions.

At the same time, in what is a classic example of doublethink, the message from the SE front office was that the business of the division was to recruit Soviet and East European officials. Case officers were told to concentrate their efforts accordingly. While many in Division management may have swallowed the idea that every contact between our officers or our agents was orchestrated by the KGB and therefore, at best, a waste of time, guidance to the rank and file did not reflect this belief. And, over the years, the Monster Plot theory gradually eroded as it bore less and less connection to reality.

Soviet Bloc operations in the 1960s may have been unduly complicated, involving indirect contacts via an intermediary, known as an “access agent,” or a “transplant,” a CIA officer who showed up in some foreign location in an alias identity to contrive a meeting with a Soviet or East
European target. Audio operations, the insertion of a “bug” in a target's residence, were also in vogue in the early days. Moreover, cold approaches, where we made a recruitment pitch to someone with whom we had no personal relationship, took place from time to time. They were unanimously unsuccessful, and sometimes resulted in physical altercations.

We had always had volunteers and defectors—individuals who approached us. By the mid-1970s, however, we were actively searching for a Soviet or East European official who was disaffected for one reason or another. And instead of cold approaches, we were developing personal relationships with individuals in whom we were interested.

While Moscow Station had opened in the 1960s, and had supported the Popov and Polyakov cases, it did not reach a significant level of operational activity until the next decade. One of the catalysts was Gus Hathaway, who served as chief of station from June 1977 to January 1980. He was followed in this position by Burton Gerber, who held the job until September 1982. Both subsequently became chiefs of SE Division.

At its simplest, the role of Moscow Station was to accept all internal volunteers when they made their initial approach and then separate the wheat from the chaff. What the station had to determine was which volunteers had at least some grasp on sanity, which ones had access to information of importance to the U.S. government, and which ones were “dangles” or “provocations,” false volunteers orchestrated by the KGB and intended to give us some specific piece of disinformation or to tie up our slender resources. The KGB knew that we had had some genuine internal volunteers who were privy to important secrets. The most famous of these was Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy (GRU), who made repeated attempts to approach us in Moscow starting in the summer of 1960. Another internal volunteer of potential importance was Aleksandr Nikolayevich Cherepanov, a KGB officer who provided fifty pages of KGB documents via an intermediary in November 1963. Unfortunately for him, the U.S. embassy in Moscow did not believe his approach was genuine. They turned the documents over to the KGB, although the Station was able to make copies before that happened. Cherepanov tried to flee the Soviet Union but was arrested near the border and later executed.
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Perhaps the most important internal volunteer was Adolf Tolkachev, a scientist with valuable information on Soviet secret research and development projects, who approached us in 1977.

As part of the process of vetting volunteers, in 1971 Burton Gerber, then a young case officer, reviewed all the approaches that had occurred during the previous ten years. His study was published in July of that year and Burton followed it with briefings to various audiences. This study resulted in a more positive attitude toward volunteers because the research revealed that a number of cases thought to be provocations at the time were in fact legitimate. An additional point made was that there were no intelligence officer dangles. (Subsequently there were at least two attempts using intelligence officer dangles to deceive us about Ames' activities. However, in each case the person described himself as not having unfettered access to his organization's secrets.)

Another influential study in the same time frame was written by Ruth Ellen Thomas. It reviewed all the Illegals cases known up to that time, and provided a profile of just what constituted an Illegal. It showed that the classic Illegal, a KGB or GRU staff officer under a false non-Bloc identity, was being phased out in favor of the Illegal Agent, generally a true citizen of a third country. A big part of the new definition was that these “agents” were handled by impersonal means such as enciphered radio messages rather than by direct contact with KGB or GRU personnel. It was this handling method that differentiated them from ordinary agents.