A Brief History of the Spy (12 page)

By then, though, the KGB had other problems to deal with, as the early years of the sixties brought some of their longest-serving agents’ careers to an end.

There are many ways in which spies’ careers come to a sudden halt: sometimes they’re caught red-handed, carrying out the missions set by their bosses; other times tradecraft errors, either their own or mistakes made by other people, lead to their capture. But probably the worst way to be taken out of action is through betrayal, particularly if it’s by one of your own.

The KGB suffered a number of such setbacks at the end of the fifties and early sixties following assorted defections to the West. Once the FBI, MI5 or the other Western counterintelligence agencies got hold of the information, they would pursue every lead until as many possible Soviet agents were identified. Sometimes this would take time. Unless defectors were particularly well placed, they were unlikely to possess exact details of particular agents, but usually they provided sufficient clues to enable the authorities to put a group under surveillance and then eliminate them from the investigation.

Polish Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Goleniewski juggled being a triple agent between 1959 and his defection in January
1961, working as head of the Technical and Scientific Department of the Polish Secret Service, reporting to Moscow, and also providing information jointly to MI6 and the CIA, which the CIA described as ‘Grade 1 from the inside’. The Americans called him ‘Sniper’; the British knew him as ‘Lavinia’. Even before his defection, he informed his controllers that ‘The Russians have got two very important spies in Britain: one in British Intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy.’ Working from the documents Goleniewski had seen, there were ten potential suspects within MI6 (including ‘rising star’ George Blake), but when investigated all appeared to be in the clear – the most likely source of the papers, so the British believed, was a burglary at the MI6 station in Brussels, and that’s what they told the Americans.

When Goleniewski passed along some more information about the naval spy in March 1960, it was the clue that blew open a complete Soviet spy network, known as the Portland Ring, after the naval base from which the secrets were being extracted. ‘Sniper’ said that the spy’s name was something like ‘Huiton’: this correlated with one Harry Houghton, who was at the time working in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, Dorset, and fitted the other information provided. What followed was a classic example of counterintelligence at work.

Houghton was followed by MI5 operatives (known as Watchers) on his monthly visit to London with his girlfriend, Ethel Gee. There they watched him hand over a carrier bag in exchange for an envelope. MI5 followed the man Houghton had met, whom they believed was a Polish intelligence officer, but hit a snag when they learned that the car he drove was registered to a Canadian importer of jukeboxes named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. At Lonsdale and Houghton’s next meeting, the Watchers overheard Lonsdale say he was heading to America on business; before he left, he deposited a parcel at the Midland Bank. MI5 opened the parcel, and discovered
a treasure trove: ‘The complete toolkit of the professional spy,’ according to case officer Peter Wright. The materials identified Lonsdale as a KGB agent.

Lonsdale was followed on his return to the UK in October, and MI5 discovered he was staying with a New Zealand couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, in the London suburb of Ruislip. The Krogers and Lonsdale were monitored until their arrest in January, shortly before Goleniewski was going to defect.

Far from being innocent booksellers, the Krogers were in fact long-term Russian agents, who, then going by the names of Lona and Morris Cohen, had been part of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project. They had fled to Mexico when the Rosenbergs were arrested and then established a new cover in the UK a few years later. When MI5 raided their home, they found everything from multiple passports to a high-speed radio transmitter and short-wave receiver.

Lonsdale, alias Konon Trofimovich Molody, had joined the NKVD during the Second World War, and had adopted the identity of the deceased Gordon Lonsdale in 1954 when he entered Canada. As well as sending copious material to Moscow from his agents, Lonsdale’s natural business acumen meant that he was actually making a profit for the KGB!

In addition to Houghton, Lonsdale was running a spy inside the Germ Warfare Research Centre at Porton Down (87 miles south-west of London), as well as Melita Norwood, a seemingly innocent secretary who worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. Norwood had provided atomic secrets to the Russians during the Second World War, and would continue to work for the KGB until her retirement in 1972. Nicknamed ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op’, she was acclaimed as one of the KGB’s most important female assets, and remained undetected until Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the West in 1992.

Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but was exchanged in 1964 for Greville Wynne; the Krogers were exchanged in July 1969 for a British anti-subversive held by the KGB. Houghton and Gee received fifteen-year sentences, although they were released in 1970, and married the following year.

The other KGB spy exposed by Goleniewski’s testimony was indeed George Blake, who had evaded suspicion when ‘Sniper’ first mentioned the existence of the mole. Blake, whose real name was George Behar, had joined MI6 in 1948, after studying Russian at Cambridge. He was posted to Seoul in South Korea the following year but was captured by the invading North Koreans. Blake was interrogated by MGB officers, who were allowed access to prisoners of war by Chinese intelligence, and by the time he was repatriated to Britain at the end of the Korean War, he was a Soviet agent. Whether he changed sides because of natural antipathy to the British system or because he was a true Manchurian Candidate and was brainwashed by the Chinese is open to debate: in 2007, he said he wasn’t a traitor: ‘To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.’

Blake’s importance to the KGB can be judged by the fact that even though he warned Moscow about the tapping of the phone lines in Berlin in Operation Gold, they allowed that operation to proceed rather than risk blowing his cover. He was posted to Berlin, where he was in a position to betray numerous British and American operatives, as well as helping to identify the CIA’s man in the GRU, Pyotr Popov. Blake would later admit that he didn’t know exactly what he handed over to the KGB ‘because it was so much’.

As a result of Goleniewski’s debriefing by the CIA after his defection, it was clear that Blake was the mole, and he was arrested in April 1961 when he was summoned back to London from a training course in the Lebanon. J. Edgar Hoover’s reaction to the news was atypically understanding:
‘After all, Christ Himself found a traitor in His small team of twelve.’ Sentenced to forty-two years, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he was awarded an Order of Friendship by former KGB head Vladimir Putin in 2007. At that point Blake was still taking an active role in the affairs of the secret service, according to the head of the Russian SVR, the successor to the KGB.

Goleniewski’s testimony would also be responsible for the downfall of Heinz Felfe within the BND; he was arrested in October 1961 and eventually sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour. Felfe’s legacy, though, was that much of the West German counter-intelligence work over the previous decade had to be deemed suspect, injuring Reinhard Gehlen’s hard-won reputation for backing his own judgement.

The defector himself started to lose some credibility when he began to maintain that he was the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, who most believe had been killed with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1917 at Ekaterinburg. Goleniewski claimed that he gave his date of birth as 1922 to explain why he looked so young (the Tsarevich was born in 1904) since he suffered from haemophilia. Unsurprisingly, the CIA released him from its payroll in 1964, a year after he started making these claims publicly.

While the KGB were losing agents, the CIA was apparently going from strength to strength. The death of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in January 1961 certainly came at a convenient time for the Agency, even if they were not finally responsible for his demise. Lumumba was the first prime minister of the independent Republic of Congo after it gained independence from Belgium, but the tumultuous nature of his administration, and the civil war that quickly broke out there, gave rise to panic in Washington. CIA director Allen Dulles noted that ‘We are faced with a person who is a Castro or
worse. Lumumba has been bought by the Communists,’ and in a memo wrote, ‘In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences . . . for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’

While the CIA were supporting Joseph Mobutu’s faction in the civil war, enter MKULTRA’s chief scientist, Dr Sidney Gottlieb, who was sent to Leopoldville with a plan to arrange for Lumumba’s assassination with poisoned toothpaste. The CIA station chief, Lawrence Devlin, claimed that he refused to carry out the instructions and that after Lumumba was arrested by opposing forces in December, he threw the poison into the Congo River. Some declassified documents suggest that CIA agents assisted with the disposal of Lumumba’s body after his execution on 17 January 1961 – his corpse was certainly never found – but Devlin would later deny any CIA involvement, even after the Belgians admitted their role.

The early part of the sixties would be dominated by the relationship between incoming US President John F. Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khruschev, with the world coming closer to war during that period than at any time since 1945. Although Russian and American tanks would come face-to-face at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin for a perilous sixteen hours on 22 October 1961, shortly after the construction of the wall dividing East and West Berlin, the real flashpoint was Cuba.

The problem there had begun when Fidel Castro took power in the Caribbean island country in 1959. Castro seemed to be an improvement on the previous leader, dictator Fulgencio Batista. He tried to reassure Americans of his good intentions: ‘I know what the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clearly that we are
not Communists; very clearly.’ However, it quickly became clear that he would very easily become a thorn in America’s side, particularly given how close the country was to US shores.

The KGB began dealings with Castro’s chief of intelligence as early as July 1959, sending over a hundred advisers to help overhaul the security and intelligence services, and later that year, Castro began to nationalize American plantations as well as close down lucrative concessions run by the Mafia. In March 1960, President Eisenhower approved a programme of action against the Cuban government, its stated purpose was to ‘bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US in such a manner to avoid any appearance of US intervention’. Anti-Castro Cubans who had fled to Florida were recruited for the cause and started to undergo training.

The Soviet leadership began to publicly support Castro: ‘We shall do everything to support Cuba in her struggle,’ Khrushchev proclaimed in July 1960, adding ominously, ‘Now the United States is not so unreachable as she once was.’ Suspecting that Americans could be thrown off the island shortly, three CIA technical officers were sent into Cuba in August to put surveillance devices into an enemy embassy, but when that proved impossible they were captured during their attempt to bug the New China News Agency. They would stay in Cuban jails throughout the dramatic events of the next three years.

John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in January 1961. The incoming president was informed of the plot against Castro, and the plan to promote regime change in Cuba. The briefing suggested ‘Moscow had put in place a puppet ruler who . . . promoted dissent in Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama and the Dominican Republic in order to surround the southern United States with Communist satellites.’ Buoyed by their
previous successful regime changes in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA intended to land their trained exiles near Trinidad in southern Cuba, close to anti-Castro groups, and set off an uprising.

The new president wasn’t so keen. Kennedy did not want his term of office to begin with an American-sponsored invasion, and he insisted that the exiles land at the Bay of Pigs, a hundred miles from their original target. He also scaled back the air support that the CIA intended to provide, removing the initial air strike, and postponing the second until after it was clear the invasion had succeeded. CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell felt this would seriously jeopardize the outcome, but his hands were tied.

Launched on 17 April 1961, the invasion was a catastrophic failure, with hundreds of the Cuban exiles killed or captured, and thousands on both sides injured. Kennedy took full responsibility publically: ‘There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan . . . What matters is only one fact, I am the responsible officer of the government.’ Behind the scenes, he accepted Allen Dulles’ resignation as DCI of the CIA, and Richard Bissell resigned after he was demoted. An internal CIA report castigated the Agency for ‘exceed[ing] its capabilities in developing the project from guerrilla support to overt armed action without any plausible deniability’ and its ‘failure to realistically assess risks and to adequately communicate information and decisions internally and with other government principals.’

This didn’t mean that the US government’s desire to see Castro removed from power disappeared, and in November 1961, Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, whose aim was to ‘help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime’, through ‘a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962’. This was masterminded by the administration’s Attorney-General, Kennedy’s brother Robert.