A Brief History of the Spy (15 page)

Nor were the StB the only agency outside the KGB to run agents in the West. Markus Johannes Wolf, the head of the East German HVA (also known as the Stasi) was an expert at spying on his own people within the German Democratic Republic, but was renowned for the penetration programme that he ran for over a generation within West Germany. According to a defector in 1958, Wolf had two to three thousand penetration agents already in place at that point. One particularly successful tactic was using agents to seduce secretaries in key positions: in the mid-fifties, Irmgard Römer, who worked at the Bonn Foreign Office, was passing copies of telegrams to embassies to her seducer, Carl Helmers. In 1967, Leonore Sütterlein, another secretary at the Foreign Office, was convicted of passing over 3,000 classified documents to her husband, who was in reality a KGB officer; Sütterlein committed suicide when she learned he had married her simply to recruit her. Other secretaries at the Science Ministry and at the embassy in Warsaw were convicted, but many of Wolf’s best agents went undetected.

Wolf’s greatest agent’s most important coup took place following the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor of West Germany in 1969. Some years earlier, Stasi agent Günter Guillaume had apparently defected from the East, and built up a successful cover, working for the Social Democrat Party. He was elected to the Frankfurt city council in 1968, and when Brandt came to power, Guillaume went to work for his office. Within a few years, he would become Brandt’s most trusted aide – and able to pass back through Wolf to Moscow key details of the Federal Republic’s future plans.

The KGB played its part in dealing with ‘internal’ unrest within the Soviet bloc, notably during the Prague Spring of 1968, when liberalization in Czechoslovakia (so-called ‘socialism with a human face’) was deemed to be a threat to the Soviets. As negotiations and discussions went on between Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubček, the Czech leader, Andropov’s KGB were paving the way for a Soviet takeover. Although this ended up being military in nature, in June 1968 KGB reserve officer Mikhail Sagatelyan made various recommendations to the Kremlin based on a visit he had made to the country the previous month. In particular, he suggested creating a ‘pro-Soviet faction’ within the Czechoslovak leadership, which would oust Dubček (‘a lesser evil than a military invasion,’ according to Sagatelyan).

The KGB had already increased their presence within Czechoslovakia, and now carried out two operations: Progress and Khodoki. Progress saw KGB agents, including future CIA spy Oleg Gordievsky’s brother, pose as Westerners making contact with opposition groups in Czechoslovakia; Khodoki involved agents fabricating proof that the opposition was planning an armed coup – thereby giving the USSR a pretext to come to the government’s aid.

Andropov genuinely believed that Western agencies were trying to promote the political changes that Dubček was
proposing. He even discarded a report from his trusted resident in Washington, Oleg Kalugin, which stated clearly that the CIA were not involved based on documents which he had seen. Where hard evidence didn’t exist, the KGB invented it, using their agents to ‘discover’ arms caches and promote unrest.

The Red Army, supported by units from other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia on the night of 20 August 1968, removing Dubček from power. Unfortunately, the opposition to Dubček’s policies was nowhere near as strong as the Kremlin had believed, and in the end he was returned to power, albeit on a very tight leash from Moscow, with a heavy KGB presence in the country monitoring for signs of disquiet.

The Prague Spring’s conclusion had two major repercussions within the spy world: the Brezhnev Doctrine, formally stated in September 1968, noted that while each country had a right to take ‘its own separate road to socialism’, their policies mustn’t damage either socialism in their own country, or anywhere else. If such damage did occur, the Soviet Union had ‘an internationalist duty’ to ‘act in resolute opposition to the anti-socialist forces’. This would keep the KGB busy for the next twenty years. The other result was its personal effect on Oleg Gordievsky; the way in which the Prague Spring was dealt with by Moscow would be a motivating factor in his decision to work with the CIA.

Although the CIA’s primary activities during the second half of the sixties were involved with the conflict in south-east Asia, they also continued with their intelligence-gathering missions against the Communist countries. The decade saw a number of technological advances, with improvements in the quality of listening devices and the other paraphernalia of espionage – some of these prompted by the wilder ideas seen on TV shows like
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
or
Mission:
Impossible.
According to the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), they would need to bring in extra telephone assistance to cope with the calls that would come from agents following the broadcast of these shows.

One project that the TSD invested some time in was nicknamed ‘Acoustic Kitty’, which, although it sounds like something from an episode of spy spoof
Get Smart
, genuinely involved transmitters being implanted into cats. Feral felines were common to the region where a targeted Asian head of state was holding private meetings. The idea was to embed a power source, transmitter, microphone and antenna into an animal, with the mike going in the cat’s ear, the transmitter at the base of the skull, and the antenna woven into its fur. Once the go-ahead was given, the operation took an hour to perform, and the audio quality was adequate. Chances are, though, the technician who thought of the idea wasn’t a cat owner, since Acoustic Kitty refused to go where the CIA wanted it to, despite training. A CIA memo closing down the project noted: ‘Our final examination of trained cats . . . convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs . . . The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it.’

A rather more conventional spy worked for the CIA for nearly twenty-five years and was described as a jewel in the crown by more than one senior member of the agency. Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov was a GRU agent who had worked as a member of the Soviet mission at the United Nations, and run illegal agents into West Germany during a posting in Berlin.

Initially offering his services to the FBI as a counterintelligence source during his second stint at the UN in 1961 and working with them for a year, he was handed over to the CIA before he returned to Russia in 1962. Polyakov didn’t appear to be motivated by money: he accepted no more than
$3,000 a year, and mostly took that in the form of tools, fishing gear or shotguns. According to one CIA case officer who worked with him for fifteen years, Polyakov ‘articulated a sense that he had to help us out or the Soviets were going to win the cold war, and he couldn’t stand that. He felt we were very naive and we were going to fail.’ It’s also been suggested that he felt disillusioned when he was refused permission to allow his son to enter a New York hospital for life-saving treatment and the boy died.

Polyakov was posted to Rangoon, Burma, and was able to assist the US war effort in Vietnam by passing over the GRU’s details on the Chinese and Vietnamese military forces, as well as revealing the identity of the GRU spy in the British Ministry of Aviation, Frank Bossard. His material would continue to influence American policy through the following decade, notably with its insight into the relationship between Russia and China, which had deteriorated through the sixties.

Discussion of the US military’s role during the Vietnam War will often turn to darker actions, such as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai. The CIA’s reputation was not enhanced when news reached the American public about the abuses carried out in the name of Operation Phoenix, although it wasn’t all negative. Many US servicemen and their families were extremely grateful to the Agency for their work in establishing contact between prisoners of war and their homes.

The purpose of Operation Phoenix was to root out supporters of the Viet Cong, otherwise known as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The Viet Cong wanted to ‘overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists’, and to all intents and purposes were carrying out the wishes of the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi. They carried out acts of violence and terrorism against government employees and anyone assisting those
they regarded as the enemy, which at times could include medical personnel.

The Viet Cong carried out what became known as the Tet Offensive in early 1968, attacking more than a hundred towns around South Vietnam. They even mounted a commando raid on the US embassy in Saigon. They hoped that an urban uprising would follow, but it didn’t, and between forty thousand (the US estimate) and seventy-five thousand (the Viet Cong’s own figure) of their own troops were killed, as compared to around six thousand American and South Vietnamese. Although this was presented as a major defeat for the Americans by the anti-war media in the States, it was equally devastating for the Viet Cong, whose infrastructure was weakened, and numbers depleted to such a level that they were unable to ever fully regroup: ‘We failed to seize a number of primary objectives. We also failed to hold the occupied areas. In the political field we failed to motivate the people to stage uprisings,’ the Viet Cong themselves admitted. However, as Richard Nixon pointed out: ‘Though it was an overwhelming victory for South Vietnam and the United States, the almost universal theme of media coverage was that we had suffered a disastrous defeat. The steady drumbeat of inaccurate stories convinced millions of Americans that we had lost a major battle.’

Operation Phoenix had already been in existence prior to the Tet Offensive, but went into overdrive afterwards. Created as the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program as part of the general Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program (CORDS), it was quickly renamed Phoenix (or Phung Hoàng in Vietnamese). MACV Directive 381-41 of 9 July 1967 established it with the aim of attacking with a ‘rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach to target key political leaders, command/control elements and activists in the VCI’. In essence, it was similar to previous CIA operations, a struggle for the hearts and minds of the
Vietnamese, so that they chose to turn against the Communists. It therefore needed to be carried out by the Vietnamese themselves.

Oversight committees operating at national, corps and district levels agreed the framework within which the Phoenix teams could operate, and set quotas. At the provincial level were teams, usually comprised of trained South Vietnamese soldiers, who would ascertain who was involved with the Viet Cong, and ‘neutralise’ them. This didn’t necessarily mean they were killed: it was recognized that that sort of heavy-handed operation could be counter-productive, and of course, dead Viet Cong couldn’t provide useful intelligence. According to a CIA report in 1969:

The Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) Program in South Vietnam forms an investigative and paramilitary attack upon the covert communist apparatus in South Vietnam. PRU teams, currently totalling approximately 4,200 men, operate in 44 provinces of South Vietnam. PRU are based in their home areas and operate in teams of 15–20 men. They are presently advised and supported by 101 US military advisors and seven CIA personnel. CIA funds the PRU and retains overall administrative control of the project for the US Government.

The official remit of Phoenix was:

. . . the collection of intelligence identifying these members; inducing them to abandon their allegiance to the VC and rally to the government; capturing or arresting them in order to bring them before province security committees or military courts for lawful sentencing; and as a final resort, the use of reasonable force should they resist capture or arrest where failure to use such force would result in the escape of the suspected VCI member or would result in threat of serious bodily harm to a member or members of the capturing or arresting party.

The problem was that there were many occasions where those carrying out the Phoenix program went beyond their orders, leading to the belief that Phoenix was a cover for assassination (although obviously there was a grey area between targeted kills of Viet Cong operatives and assassinations.) Interrogations could be brutal – K. Barton Osborn, who was connected to Phoenix in 1968, described the techniques in graphic detail to a Congress subcommittee in 1971, and called Phoenix a ‘sterile depersonalized murder program . . . I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation.’

The CIA wanted to pull out of the program and leave it in South Vietnamese hands as early as 1969, in part because it didn’t really fit with their intelligence-gathering mission any more. The program was run by William Colby, who had been Chief of Station in Saigon; it officially came to an end shortly after he returned to Washington as Executive Director of the CIA in 1971 and Congress began investigating the abuses. As far as Colby was concerned, despite the problems that he acknowledged had occurred, it was a success; as he explained in a 1981 television interview: ‘I have heard several references to North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese communists who account, who state that in their mind the most, the toughest period that they faced in the whole period of the war from 1960 to 1975 was the period from 1968 to ’72 when the Phoenix Program was at work.’

The CIA was instrumental in assisting with information about prisoners of war being held during the Vietnam War. Future Vice-Presidential candidate James Bond Stockdale (yes, that really was his name) was shot down in September 1965 and spent the next seven years as a prisoner. During that time he developed a code that he used in letters home to his wife, which gave the identities of some of the men held with him. US Naval Intelligence originally handled communications with Stockdale, using a letter from his wife to secretly
send him invisible carbon paper – although they warned him that if he was caught, he would be treated as a spy.