Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (21 page)

I was particularity interested in a Russian Foreign Ministry officer who reportedly had shown signs of disaffection on an earlier assignment. I tried a number of ploys to get to him. I knew he was a fan of the band Chicago, which was coming to the city for a performance. I obtained tickets and invited the official and his wife. His KGB controllers allowed them to go, but he clearly was instructed to beg off any follow-on socializing after the performance. We all enjoyed the show immensely, but the entire auditorium was a mist of marijuana smoke. No doubt, we all ended up with a bit of a contact high.

We learned shortly thereafter that the officer was returning to Moscow, and we decided to make an unusually forward advance. I arranged to drop by his apartment unannounced when we knew he would be alone. The intent was not to pitch him but rather to allow him an opportunity to step forward if, in fact, he was disaffected. He handled my arrival smoothly. We shared his bottle of Courvoisier, and as Russians tend to do, he waxed philosophical about the meaning of life and human nature. While the conversation was deliberately oblique, I’m sure he understood why I was there and was telling me between the lines that he was contented enough with his lot in life and that I should not expect him to show up on my doorstep anytime soon.

We were not above using artifice to curry favor. My colleague Brad Handley had a famous cousin, Peter Benchley, author of the book
Jaws
, on which the blockbuster movie is based. Back in 1975, we arranged a special showing of the film for our Soviet counterparts and told them we were able to get a copy of the movie, still in its first run, only because of Brad’s relationship with Benchley. Brad had another great in, this one with the international community: he played rugby. His team was well-known and played regularly, which put Brad in contact with a whole different group of people. He often told me what a rich source of potential targets this was and urged me to join him. Finally, one day in the elevator, he implied, not so subtly, that if I didn’t join him in the scrum, it was because I was just another “empty suit” case officer. This hit the right button, and I soon found myself on the rugby pitch, at the bottom of a scrum where the Australian beside me had a French opponent by the neck of his jersey and was yelling, “If you bite me one more time, I’m going to smash in your teeth.” I knew I was in the right operating environment!

These occasions were often diverting, but they were never just for fun. We would all have our targets, and we would plan in advance our method of approach. If one of us was rebuffed, another would move in, and there was always a plan C and plan D. We planned meticulously and left nothing to chance. When it came to seducing and recruiting potential assets, we considered and reconsidered every detail and always had contingencies. All this would have been invisible to the uninitiated, but Brad saw it from the inside. On those occasions when Pat and the children were able to join me, we were, for all appearances, just energetic hosts—throwing parties, arranging special entertainment, organizing outings. Each occasion, though, was carefully devised to build a strategic social network and to cement relationships in the international diplomatic community in the hope that eventually we would persuade our new friends to become agents.

I don’t think I was fooling the KGB. The Russians were working us the same way we were working them. We made it a habit of crashing each other’s National Day celebrations, usually going along with an embassy official who had been officially invited. Once they spotted me, the KGB officers would take turns making a beeline for me to offer a toast, hoping that the repetitive vodka shots would get me intoxicated. You play that game only once. On one occasion, I spotted the Russian embassy code clerk, the most protected target in the mission, and quickly headed toward him. Almost like a Western wagon train, a group of KGB officers suddenly appeared and literally formed a human circle to block my talking to him. Too bad—that would have made for an interesting report for both of us the next day.

The KGB’s Golden Boys were also very active. One of their tactics was for one of them to ride the same bus that a number of female U.S. embassy staff used. One male KGB agent boarded the same bus each day but didn’t sit down beside his target right away; he sat in various spots for several days, until there was a natural opportunity to sit next to the U.S. embassy employee. Little by little, he followed up on the light banter until it seemed natural to suggest a rendezvous, with the objective being a sexual tryst that would lay the groundwork for the ultimate goal: a pitch for classified information. All his careful planning was for naught, however. He had hit up the wrong employee. She reported the incident immediately, and we were able to gracefully break off the relationship and alert other members of the staff to this clever technique. It’s not hard to imagine that this ploy didn’t always fail.

We also ran some interesting technical operations, including one that nearly ended in disaster. A senior Communist leader from Central America came to town and we were able to install an audio device in his hotel room. Not a great idea in retrospect, since he was sexually ambitious and spent most of his time frolicking in bed with his mistress. Our bug produced no intelligence whatsoever. At one point, the interaction with the mistress became rather vigorous, and the bed actually broke. We heard the mistress screech, “A bug!” and we thought the audio device had been exposed. After a few moments of panic, it became clear that she had seen, in fact, an insect! In another case, our “tech op” went smoothly from a technical standpoint but failed for the worst of reasons. Our technical staff had manufactured a sophisticated voice-activated audio device to be installed in the ambassador’s office in an unfriendly embassy. It was a masterpiece of craftsmanship, and we were able to observe from a discreet distance its flawless installation. But it never worked. We wrongly assumed that it had somehow been picked up by their “sweep team,” the team that searches a room for such devices. We later learned from a defector that the unfriendly government had a penetration agent in the government service who had alerted them to the device.

Setbacks, of course, are as much a part of the game as successes, and they serve a purpose. There was the time we imported a “locks-and-pick man” to gain entrance to the apartment of a high-value target who was on temporary duty. I don’t know how one becomes a specialist in picking locks, but this man was very good at it. In my office, he demonstrated his dexterity with a range of complicated door locks. There didn’t seem to be any kind of lock that could keep him out. But when we got to the actual door we needed unlocked, he was stymied. During his unsuccessful attempt, our surveillance had to keep in view the corridors and the target himself for over twenty minutes, which seemed like a lifetime, with the man exposed in the hallway, working to no avail. He was dejected by the experience, as was the entire team. Nevertheless, we gave it a go a few days later, and it worked like a charm. That operation proved very successful.

Recruiting Soviet agents was a primary focus for us in Buenos Aires, where there was a substantial Soviet Bloc delegation because of the agricultural trade between the two countries. One of the station’s senior case officers had met the East German chargé d’affaires at several parties, and I encouraged him to work on the relationship. The case officer was skeptical. The East Germans were among the best. Succeeding with an East German—well, it was tougher than succeeding with a Soviet. And this official was a typical hard-core operative.

Defection is a mysterious calculation, with a cost and a benefit to all involved. My best information on what it must be like for the defector comes from Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the CIA in 1964. Nosenko changed sides just as the CIA was trying to determine whether there was a Soviet connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a scenario that would have had grave political consequences. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in Russia, and there were suspicions that Oswald had been recruited by the KGB. Nosenko, though, told his debriefers that he had handled Oswald in Russia and that Oswald had been surveilled by the KGB but never recruited because he wasn’t considered bright enough and was deemed mentally unstable.

I had the opportunity to have dinner with Nosenko when he visited Argentina during my tour there. During the dinner I asked him how he had been able to make the decision to leave behind his country and his family so suddenly. He said that he had been thinking about defecting to the West for years and that his own situation had become so desperate that he couldn’t stand it anymore. Once he made up his mind, he said, he realized that he would have to forget about his family for their sake and just walk away and never look back.

“I simply had to cut out my heart and go on living,” he said.

Nosenko’s case also shows what can happen when you become the poster child for the excesses of counterintelligence paranoia. Nosenko was locked in solitary confinement by the CIA for three years and interrogated by officers who were convinced he was lying and that he was actually a KGB plant meant to sow disinformation.
1

Nosenko’s imprisonment is often blamed on the famously distrustful chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Nosenko actually was held by the Agency’s Soviet Division, but the suspicions about his motives no doubt grew from Angleton’s convoluted and controversial theories about Soviet espionage strategy. Angleton had been heavily influenced by an earlier Russian defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had claimed that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA and that its agents were manipulating the Agency to get it to advance the KGB’s agenda unknowingly. He said in essence that all other defectors were part of this plot.

Angleton began to see these “moles” everywhere, in what he described—borrowing a phrase from T. S. Eliot—as “a wilderness of mirrors.” He hunted relentlessly for these double agents and destroyed careers along the way, the impact of which I saw in a small way early in my career. I had an instructor at the Farm who impressed me tremendously. I praised his skills to a number of seasoned officers and each time received in response a wince and an indication that something unspecified about the instructor wasn’t quite right. I assumed it might have been a drinking problem or other indiscretion, until I learned years later that Golitsyn had told Angleton that one of the Soviet plants in the CIA was a Slav whose name began with a
K
and ended in
-sky
. My instructor fit that description, as did a few other officers. At the suggestion of the CIA, these officers later sued the U.S. government because their careers had been derailed by Angleton’s suspicion that they were Soviet plants.

Angleton’s paranoia became extreme; he was forced to resign in 1975. But a certain amount of distrust is the fate of any spy. When you are acting covertly, it’s reasonable to assume that the people you are dealing with have motives as murky as your own. It is necessary to triple-think interactions and to keep your antenna up for signs of subterfuge. Why is this person cooperating? Is his information verifiable? Who stands to gain from it?

So it was with this Eastern European. Our case officer cultivated him slowly, aware that he might be working his own angle. Perhaps he thought he could get something out of our officer, even convert him. The officer received no indication he would ever drop his guard, but he kept working him, because you never know. Shortly after I left Buenos Aires for Washington, our persistence paid off. He came to us, asking for help to defect to West Germany.

By then we had repaired relations with the civilian Argentine government following the junta’s fall after the Falkland Islands war. We would have had great difficulty getting him out of the country quickly if the relationship had still been in the state it was in when I arrived.

This and a dozen other operations aimed over the years at Soviet Bloc officers came to mind with a surreal quality as Milt Bearden and I flew to Moscow in June 1991. Even more surreal was the fact that we visited KGB headquarters, toured the KGB museum, and met the head of the KGB. In the museum, black curtains were pulled down over a few exhibits. We were told these were photographs of Americans caught in flagrante delicto.

The other thing that Bearden wanted to do was visit the Silk Road. So we flew to Samarkand, to the land of Genghis Khan. With the Russians, we stayed in the dacha once inhabited by Stalin’s infamous security chief, Lavrentiy Beria. I’m sure it was adequately wired to pick up any indiscreet conversations among our team.

We were traveling with our chief from Moscow and the KGB’s head of counterintelligence—the general who had been responsible for overseeing Aldrich Ames, we would later learn. On their side, there was a Ukrainian colonel plus a couple of midlevel Russian colonels. A senior staff member from the CNC rounded out our delegation. Everywhere we went, there was ritual toasting. The Russians would toast President Bush, so there were Milt and I, toasting Gorbachev. I’m sure if anyone on our counterintelligence staff had gotten word of this they would have concluded we were nothing but spies all along for the Russians.

As part of the trip, our Russian guests arranged a private boat ride on what appeared to be a desolate lake. At midday, the boat anchored close to the beach for an impromptu picnic. Communications among us were less than ideal, because we were speaking in many tongues, including French, German, Spanish, and Russian, depending on where we had served abroad previously. At one point, for an inexplicable reason, our German-speaking CIA officer asked our Russian hosts if one could swim in the “nude” (
nackt
). The German-speaking KGB officer thought he’d asked if one could swim at “night” (
nacht
), to which he casually responded, “Of course.” With that, our officer dropped his swimsuit and ran to the water’s edge stark naked. With a look of horror, and shouting “women and children!” the KGB officer leapt up and ran after the CIA officer. It turned out to be a public beach, and a family was strolling toward us about a hundred yards away. We had a good laugh, and the Russians must have been shaking their heads in disbelief later that night, but we were all reminded how easily miscommunications can happen when working in a foreign language, even by experienced officers. After the lake excursion, we boarded a helicopter to fly over the poppy fields and the Friendship Bridge. The Russian pilot flying along the river explained that we were going to have to fly a little farther west, because the people on the other side, in Afghanistan, had these very dangerous missiles. At that, the KGB general got on the radio and calmly said, “Captain, you don’t need to explain that to these men.”