A Brief History of the Spy (25 page)

When writing to support a reduction in the thirty-year prison term to which Lonetree was sentenced, his commanding officer, General Alfred M. Gray Jr., wrote that the young marine wasn’t motivated by ‘treason or greed, but rather the lovesick response of a naive, young, immature and lonely troop in a lonely and hostile environment’. Lonetree had fallen for the charms of Violetta Sanni, a Russian girl who worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he was posted as a guard. Despite rules prohibiting fraternization with members of the opposite sex in a Communist country, they began an affair.

Lonetree fell head first into the honey trap, and began providing Violetta’s ‘Uncle Sasha’ (KGB agent Alexei Yefimov) with photographs and floor maps of the embassy, as well as details of American agents. When he was posted to Vienna in mid-1986, he continued to supply information willingly to Uncle Sasha. That December though, he reconsidered what he was doing, and after contemplating suicide, confessed. Although it seemed at the time as if his actions had led to the deaths of around twenty CIA agents, it later transpired that the names he passed had already been supplied to the Soviets by Aldrich Ames. Lonetree’s thirty-year sentence was reduced to fifteen and he was freed on parole in 1996.

James W. Hall III was a very different proposition. His career as a spy for both the Stasi and the KGB was brought to an end following the debriefing of an East German defector, Dr Manfred Severin, who mentioned an American soldier who had provided multiple documents. Hall admitted his guilt to Severin and an FBI agent posing as a Soviet contact in December 1988, bringing to an end a six-year period working for the Communists.

Hall was recruited to the Stasi in 1982 by Huseyin Yildirim, an auto-mechanic at the US Field Station in Berlin, although he had made contact with the KGB a couple of weeks earlier. He would claim later that his motives were purely financial: ‘I wasn’t terribly short of money,’ he told the FBI agent who arrested him. ‘I just decided I didn’t ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I’m not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else.’

During his time in Berlin, and later Frankfurt, Hall provided documents regarding electronic eavesdropping operations carried out by the Americans to Yildirim or KGB officers, and was paid in dollars or German marks. There was concern at the time of his arrest that Yildirim might have been running a spy ring out of the Berlin Field Station: ‘We are
looking at the potential – and it’s so far just potential – that this could be the Army’s Walker case,’ one investigating officer said, during preparations for Yildirim’s trial; current assessments agree that Hall caused as much damage during his six years as Walker did in eighteen.

Hall admitted that he delivered between thirty and sixty documents to his handlers, which led to a programme designed to exploit a Soviet communications vulnerability uncovered in the late seventies being rendered useless, as were plans to disrupt electronic commands and surveillance. ‘Without commenting on the specifics, it appears that Hall did very serious damage,’ Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time. Some of the material he provided, such as the National SIGINT Requirements List, enabled Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf to ‘take relevant countermeasures’ against American plans.

Hall was court-martialled and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment; Yildirim received a life sentence, with the FBI telling his lawyer in 1997 that they ‘think it is not inappropriate for him to rot in prison. They say his work might not have caused physical harm to Americans, but he hurt a lot of Americans by contacting them, so that they lost security clearances and ruined their careers.’ He was, however, released in 2004, and on his return to Turkey, boasted of his affairs during his spying missions.

Huseyin Yildirim was by no means the first spy to brag about his career after retiring or being forcibly removed from the game. Robert Hanssen claimed that he was inspired as a child by Kim Philby’s interesting take on his career in his book
My Secret War
(although this was clearly another of Hanssen’s fabrications: he was actually twenty-four when the KGB spy’s book was published). Some career retrospectives have become the authoritative sources on events – Victor Cherkashin’s book on handling Ames and Hanssen provides perspective
that no one else could have had; Oleg Gordievsky’s account of his interrogation shows the way in which the KGB operated against one of their own. One book, however, became the cause of considerable problems for the British government.

MI5 officer Peter Wright’s
Spycatcher
attracted considerably more attention as a result of the government’s actions than its not particularly well-written pages deserved. After his retirement in 1976, embittered at being awarded a lower pension than he felt he deserved, the former MI5 agent moved to Tasmania and cooperated with British writer Chapman Pincher’s exposé of British intelligence in
Their Trade is Treachery
, published in 1981. This rehearsed Wright’s beliefs that Sir Roger Hollis had been a KGB agent. He then appeared in a
World in Action
television documentary on 16 July 1984, publicly accusing Hollis. Both were in breach of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act and an agreement on his retirement ‘never to disclose anything I knew as a result of my employment, whether classified or not’.

Wright worked on his own book, and although some publishers were put off by warnings from the government, Heinemann decided to put the book out through their Australian subsidiary. Determined to stop it by whatever legal means necessary, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, began proceedings in Australia. This unfortunately meant that Havers had to admit, solely for the purposes of the court case, that Wright’s allegations were accurate. This undermined the case for publication not being in the public interest, particularly since Hollis had helped to set up the Australian security service, the ASIO.

The government’s case wasn’t helped by its official position that it still refused to acknowledge the existence of MI6 – which led to a surreal moment where Sir Robert Armstrong had to agree that the service had existed while Sir Dick White was head of it (since he had volunteered that information in
an earlier answer), but could not admit it had any prior or subsequent existence! Many agreed with Wright’s co-author,
World in Action
director Paul Greengrass’ assessment of the case: ‘It became a great set-piece encounter – conflict, really – trying to define where the boundaries lay between the government’s desire to protect national security and our right as citizens to know what is done in our name.’ Unsurprisingly, the government lost the battle, and
Spycatcher
, with its allegations about a plot against Harold Wilson, and considerable manipulation of the facts, was published in Australia and America.

Apart from allowing an insight into the mindset of some of those employed by MI5 during the height of the Cold War, the
Spycatcher
Affair did have one very important consequence: it was clear that it was impossible for the government to continue maintaining that the security services MI5 and MI6 didn’t exist. The Security Service Act of 1989 was the first in a number of Acts of Parliament that eventually put both services on a full constitutional footing.

Greengrass later went on to great fame in the fictional spy world as director of the second and third films based on Robert Ludlum’s spy Jason Bourne, as well as the drama documentary
United 93
, about the third plane involved in the 9/11 hijackings.

The first major Eastern bloc spy captured in Britain after the expulsion of the twenty-five Soviet illegals identified by Oleg Gordievsky was Dutchman Erwin Van Haarlem. He only came to light when MI5 followed a member of the Soviet Trade Delegation whom they (probably wrongly) suspected of being a GRU officer and saw him behave furtively on Hampstead Heath before entering a local pub. Half an hour later a second man searched an area of ground on the heath before entering the same pub. MI5 followed this other man and identified him as Van Haarlem, a self-employed art dealer,
who was actually in Britain working for the Czech secret service.

Special Branch raided Van Haarlem’s flat on 2 April 1988, and caught him red-handed, in the middle of receiving a transmission from Prague. He admitted he was Czech, and produced his one-time cipher pads. One of the main witnesses at his trial was future MI5 head Stella Rimington (referred to as Miss J) who explained that MI5 believed Van Haarlem was a sleeper agent, ready for a front-line role in time of war.

It turned out that Van Haarlem wasn’t the spy’s real name, even though an Erwin Van Haarlem had been abandoned in Prague, aged six weeks, in 1944. The baby’s mother had tracked the man down using that name in 1978 and he had pretended to be her son. However, DNA testing proved that they were not in fact related: the spy had adopted the name prior to leaving Czechoslovakia in 1974.

The judge at his trial, at which he was found guilty of committing an act preparatory to espionage, noted, ‘I address you by the name Van Haarlem, although I am convinced it was not yours at birth,’ adding, ‘I have not the least doubt you are a dedicated, disciplined and resourceful spy and I have equally no doubt that had you not been caught you would in future years have done whatever your Czech controllers required you to do, however harmful that might have been to our national interests. Those interests and freedoms we must jealously guard.’ He was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1989, but was deported to Prague after serving five. MI5 discovered his true name was Václav Jelinek; the real Van Haarlem was eventually reunited with his mother, unaware that his identity had been stolen after he had changed his own name some years earlier.

As far as the CIA is concerned, the eighties was the era of DCI William Casey and the Iran-Contra affair, a convoluted saga of deals involving arms shipments to Iran in exchange for the
release of hostages which actually made a profit – and was then illegally used to support the Contra faction in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the law. In the middle of the explosive revelations about the actions of the National Security Council (NSC) and the CIA, DCI Casey was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which effectively incapacitated him at a time when the Agency needed strong leadership.

The Congressional Committees investigating the affair pointed out the fundamental problem at the heart of the Iran-Contra situation: ‘The common ingredients of the Iran and Contra policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law . . . the United States simultaneously pursued two contradictory foreign policies – a public one and a secret one.’

In 1979 the Sandanistas took power in Nicaragua, and despite receiving aid from President Carter, the regime allied itself with the Soviet bloc via Cuba, receiving guns and other material from the Communists. The Nicaraguan Democratic Force (aka the Contras) were created in 1980, and as the Sandanistas started supporting the rebels in El Salvador, the US began to provide support to the Contras, although armed action was prohibited by the president. When President Reagan took office in 1981, he cut all aid to the Sandanistas, and on 1 December, signed an order permitting the CIA to support the Contras with arms, equipment and money. The NSC organized publicity stunts to ensure there was support domestically within the US for the aid to continue.

However, not everyone in Congress was in favour of the CIA’s involvement, which led to Massachusetts Representative Edward P. Boland’s first Amendment in 1982, which barred ‘the use of funds ‘‘for the purpose of’’ overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a war between Nicaragua and Honduras’. This left a loophole which was quickly exploited – third-party funds could be solicited, and general aid could still be provided to the Contras. The CIA assisted with covert actions in Nicaragua, destroying fuel
tanks and mining the harbour. After their role was revealed by the
Wall Street Journal
, Representative Boland pushed through a second Amendment in 1984:

During fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.

Although this was designed to stem the flow of support, it failed. Third-party donations could still be obtained, and the NSC could oversee other activities, since technically they didn’t fall under the definition of prohibited agencies in the Amendment. Colonel Oliver North, on loan to the NSC from the Marine Corps, was placed in charge.

Around the same time, clandestine negotiations were going on with Iran. The fundamentalist Islamic regime that seized power in January 1979 had taken American hostages at various times – but also needed support in their war against Iraq, so required some way of dealing with The Great Satan (as they dubbed America). A communications pipeline was opened via the Israelis in July 1985 so that thirteen days after President Reagan vehemently denounced any idea of giving reward to terrorists – like those in Iran – he was informed of a plan to exchange a hundred anti-tank missiles for some of the American hostages being held. (There are multiple contradictory versions of how much he knew about this and exactly when.) The deals began to go through, and profits from the second were channelled to a front company, known as the Enterprise.

This second deal, in November 1985, was the one that caused the CIA major headaches, as Oliver North involved
them to assist with some logistical problems. What the CIA knew about the nature of the flight and the contents of the shipment that they were helping to supply became the focal point of the discussions. Most within the CIA were unaware that it involved the transport of weapons (which at that point was technically illegal).

In light of the second flight’s problems, it was decided that the arms would be sent directly from the Enterprise to Iran, and President Reagan signed a Presidential Finding authorising such shipments on 17 January 1986. Shortly afterwards, someone came up with the idea of diverting the profits from the arms sales to the Contras – or at least, whatever proportion of the profits that the private businessmen involved would allow to be passed across. Many believe that the scheme was devised by DCI Casey, others that it was Oliver North’s brainwave – a memo North wrote on 4 April 1986, which he failed to shred during his mass destruction of documents when the Iran-Contra affair became public later that year, spells out specifically that monies would be diverted to the Contras. North certainly maintained that he believed that President Reagan was aware of this plan, and approved it.