The Main Enemy Page 3
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Washington, D.C., 0700 Hours, June 14, 1985
Burton Gerber took deep personal pride in the fact that the CIA was running more highly placed agents inside the Soviet Union than at any other time in its history. Better than anyone else at Langley, Gerber knew just how far both he and the agency had come.
Life had never been particularly easy for Burton Gerber. He often told the story of how, as a young boy growing up in Columbus, Ohio, during World War II, he would track the progress of the Allied armies through the military maps in the local newspaper that he delivered to his neighbors. He became fascinated with world events and yearned to earn his stripes in the next war. But since major wars seemed to be spaced about a generation apart, he calculated that he’d come of age in a time of peace. A career in the CIA, clandestinely fighting the Cold War and rolling back the Soviet threat, became an attractive alternative.
Gerber helped put himself through Michigan State by working the night shift at an auto plant, racing back across Lansing to campus every night to study for the next day’s tests. After college, he served a stint in the Army before moving on to the CIA. Married but childless, he’d been supported in his steady rise up the American intelligence bureaucracy by his wife, who had been a CIA employee herself and thus understood the demands of the job. Like many other CIA wives, she often got involved in secret operations in support of her husband and his agents.
During his formative years as a case officer in Eastern Europe, Gerber had witnessed the agency’s early, amateurish, and often bungled attempts at spying against the Soviet Union, the fleeting successes invariably ending in deadly failure. He had also endured the destructive “sick-think” of the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton. Fortunately, he had been overseas as the worst of the Angleton paranoia played out in the 1960s. He’d heard the rumors, of course, the hushed whispers that made the rounds from one outpost to another, about Soviet cases going bad. But when he finally got back to headquarters in the summer of 1970, he got a heavy dose of the ugly truth.
The whole awful story was there, laid out before him in file folders that he could spread neatly across his desk. As he read, page after page seemed to explode with another bombshell, another scandal. The story was fascinating, terrifying, astonishing. Lives had been ruined, and the story had the power to claim more. As he read on, Burton Gerber was forced to doubt what he thought he knew about the institution he loved, almost above all else.
Gerber was a leading member of a new generation just beginning to transform the CIA into a professional intelligence service, the first to be tempered by long, hard, operational experience, much of it behind the Iron Curtain. Gerber and other young CIA officers like him had already logged more time operating against the Soviets and their Eastern European surrogates than any of their older bosses, who were veterans of the Office of Strategic Services—the wartime predecessor to the CIA. That generation had come of age in a less complicated era, blowing up German trains during World War II.
As they rose through the ranks, Gerber and his generation were bringing back an up-close-and-personal feel for the KGB and its Eastern European proxies, a streetwise know-how that had been lacking in the early CIA. Middle American graduates of state universities and the military, they brought a more democratic face and a sense of professionalism to a service that for years had lived off the amateurish enthusiasm of its elitist founding fathers, whose notions of secret keeping or secret stealing had been shaped by Yale and Skull and Bones.
Gerber was a driven man who was fascinated by the intricacies of espionage. By 1970, he had risen to the middle ranks in the CIA’s Soviet Division, joining the cultlike world of Soviet counterintelligence. He was one of the very few people with access to information about the agency’s most sensitive operations against Moscow, including the sordid tale of a KGB officer who had defected to the United States, only to be held incommunicado for three years, including more than two years in a nightmarish prison custom-built by the CIA. Never arrested or charged with any crime, he was kept in solitary confinement, not allowed to read or write. For a time, lights in his ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell were kept on twenty-four hours a day, to disorient him and prevent him from developing a regular sleeping pattern. The defector’s name was Yuri Nosenko, and his case became enmeshed in a witch-hunt within the upper echelons of the CIA that had not yet run its course as Gerber read the files.
Nosenko began meeting with CIA officers in 1962, defected in 1964, and brought with him the answer to the most pressing question facing the CIA at the time. Was Moscow behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? The Warren Commission had concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, but inside the CIA, officials still brooded over his Soviet connections. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union after serving in the Marines, including a stint at an intelligence-gathering post in Japan, and then, in a bizarre twist, had returned to the United States with a Russian wife shortly before shooting the President. The CIA had not made public its doubts about Oswald—in fact, it had shared few of its concerns with the Warren Commission—but the truth was that the agency had been unable to determine one way or another whether Oswald had been working for the KGB. The question hung in the air at Langley, and when Yuri Nosenko finally came to the United States, the agency was still trying to figure out whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a real-life Manchurian Candidate.
Nosenko said he had the answer. The KGB wasn’t behind Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, the KGB had been so concerned about Oswald’s past and the appearance of Soviet ties that it had searched its own records and couldn’t find any evidence that he was working for them.
Yet by the time Nosenko told the CIA what he knew, the agency had already decided he had been sent across to lie. Angleton was convinced Nosenko was a double agent and persuaded others at the CIA that he’d been sent by Moscow to tie them in knots about Oswald and dozens of other sensitive cases. He was encouraged in his paranoia by an earlier KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had told Angleton that every defector after him would be a double agent. It was the perfect story for Golitsyn to tell—it ensured his continued influence, even after he had run out of secrets to reveal. But to believe Golitsyn was to descend willingly into a swamp of paranoia and confusion. For years, Nosenko was locked away in his specially constructed prison at “the Farm,” the agency’s training center at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, quarantined like a deadly virus.
With his power base secure thanks to his close relationship with CIA Director Richard Helms, Angleton had managed to co-opt key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB. Soon, case officers trying to recruit agents from behind the Iron Curtain had to jump through hoops to convince Angleton and his acolytes that their cases were worth pursuing. Those who persisted or challenged the prevailing paranoia were in danger of coming under suspicion of being Soviet agents themselves.
Angleton was certain that the Soviets had penetrated the CIA and launched a mole hunt that lasted for years, ruining one career after another. Ultimately, the investigation turned on its own, and Angleton himself came under scrutiny as a possible Soviet spy. The Salem witch trials had come to CIA headquarters.
The end result of these mind games was virtual paralysis in the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union throughout much of the 1960s. The last great Soviet agent to work for the CIA without facing Angleton’s paranoid scrutiny was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a top aide on the Red Army general staff who spied from 1960 until his arrest in 1962. One of the most important spies in CIA history, Penkovsky was the first to pull back the shroud on the Soviet high command and reveal that the Kremlin was operating on bluster and hollow threats. He helped show the West that the supposed missile gap was a myth and that the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability was woefully inadequate to challenge the United States. Penkovsky’s information helped give President Kenn
edy the edge over Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet many of the major cases in the years after Penkovsky were challenged by Angleton. The counterintelligence chief set the bar so high that CIA officers around the world simply stopped targeting Soviets, knowing that these cases would ultimately go nowhere. Worse, recruiting a Russian might bring them under suspicion. Developing a Soviet as a recruitment target would inevitably lead to a confrontation with Angleton’s people. The clear implication was always that the case officer in the field couldn’t know what part the case played in the broader KGB “monster plot” to deceive the CIA.
By the time Gerber read the files, the agency was in the process of trying to forget, even cover up, the whole sordid Nosenko affair. But Gerber could see the broader effects of the Angleton excesses. Not only had case officers largely stopped trying to target Soviets, the Soviet Division had also been turning away dozens of “volunteers,” Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States. The Golitsyn-fed paranoia had convinced the CIA that these volunteers were in fact KGB provocateurs seeking to turn the agency inside out.
Gerber analyzed the files, going back over fifteen years, files specifically on Soviets who had volunteered in Moscow or elsewhere in the Soviet Union, to test Angleton’s theories. Was there any evidence to support Angleton’s fears? No one had ever dared sift through the CIA’s records to challenge the spy hunter’s assumptions in such a methodical way. The simple but powerful answer was that the sick-think theories didn’t stand up to scrutiny. To Gerber, the facts strongly suggested that the CIA had been turning away one genuine volunteer in Moscow after another, simply out of fear of contamination. The result was that the agency had probably missed out on a gold mine of secrets from citizens of the Soviet empire who had sought to change sides. There would always be dangles and provocations sent against the CIA by the KGB, but that was the cost of doing business. If the CIA was afraid to talk to Soviets, Gerber reasoned, then it might as well close up shop.
Gerber wrote an exhaustive report detailing his findings, concluding that the CIA was killing its chances for success by turning away so many Soviet volunteers. The overwhelming majority of them appeared to be legitimate, and Gerber offered sensible guidelines to ferret out the few who might be dangles. Above all, Gerber concluded, there was no evidence that the Soviets had ever allowed a serving KGB staff officer to approach the CIA as a double agent. Moscow simply didn’t trust them enough. KGB officers who volunteered were almost certainly genuine.
Gerber was proud of his work, which he finished in the spring of 1971, just as Angleton’s power over Soviet operations was about to be tested by an unlikely outsider.
By 1971, Helms had finally recognized that the CIA’s Soviet Division needed shaking up. He turned to David Blee, an old Middle East hand, to fix it. Blee had made his mark in the Third World; in Delhi, he had orchestrated the 1967 defection and flight to freedom of Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. Blee didn’t want to leave his job as chief of the CIA’s Near East Division and protested that he had no experience in Soviet affairs, but Helms told him that was exactly why he wanted him. Soviet operations had to have fresh blood, and Blee, a careful bureaucrat but an outsider, was being given the cover by Helms to take on Angleton.
When Blee arrived in his new office on the CIA’s fifth floor, he found a note from Angleton waiting for him, inviting him down for a chat. Angleton, still chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, had been stunned that an outsider was taking over Soviet operations, and when Blee arrived in his darkened office, Angleton told him that he had no business whatsoever in his new job.
Blee’s years in the Middle East had given him a pragmatic sense of how to run spy cases, and he could tell instinctively that the Soviet Division had lost its way. To steer the division out of its dark corner, he cleaned house, moving out longtime managers who defended the old methods and replacing them with officers who were new to the division and had not been infected by the Angleton paranoia. Blee was careful never to directly confront the counterintelligence chief; he just went his own way without asking permission.
Soon, Gerber’s report on volunteers found its way to Blee’s desk. Blee thought its analysis made perfect sense and promptly decided to change the agency’s policies on Soviet volunteers. They were to be vetted professionally and then welcomed, not shunned. Wherever possible, they were to be persuaded to remain in place and spy from behind the Iron Curtain.
Blee named Barry Kelly, a red-haired, freckled Irishman who had served with him in the Middle East, to take over as Moscow chief and gave him orders to dust off the old files and air the place out. He was given a list of Soviets who had previously offered to collaborate with the CIA but had been dismissed or ignored for years. Kelly was told to try to resume contact, and before long he was transforming Moscow operations as dramatically as Blee was changing SE Division as a whole.
Blee also sent Havilland Smith, one of his key aides, on a whirlwind tour of the CIA’s overseas stations to convince skeptical case officers around the world that sanity had returned to Soviet operations and that it was safe once again to go after Russians. Blee’s new open-door policy quickly bore fruit, and within a few years the CIA had developed a remarkable stable of agents behind the Iron Curtain, virtually all of them volunteers.
The CIA’s paralysis during the 1960s had masked the fact that, just below the radar screen of upper management, young case officers had been busy modernizing espionage techniques, improvising new means to communicate safely and securely with spies behind the Iron Curtain. They had been frustrated that they hadn’t been able to put much of this new “tradecraft” to use during the previous decade, but now Blee’s revolution meant that their tactics could be put to the test.
Havilland Smith was one of them. Among the first CIA case officers to be stationed permanently behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1950s, Smith had returned from Prague and Berlin determined to take advantage of the opposition’s greatest weakness, rigid orthodoxy. Given high-level approval in the early 1960s to develop new tricks for case officers working inside the Soviet bloc, Smith began consulting magicians to learn about techniques of misdirection and practiced the new tactics on the streets of Washington. He folded what he learned into the newly developing concept of operational tradecraft, perfecting what became one of the CIA’s standard methods for passing messages, the so-called brush pass.
Smith’s greatest contribution was a concept that came to be known among CIA officers as “moving through the gap.” He realized that by carefully planning a surveillance detection route in a hostile city, a well-trained case officer walking a meticulously timed route, turning street corners successively, could create a lengthening gap between himself and the trailing surveillance. Eventually, he would be out of sight of the surveillance teams for a few brief moments. Messages or packages could then be laid down or picked up undetected from dead drops at carefully predetermined points on an operational run. The gap might last only a few brief seconds, but for a well-trained case officer, that might be long enough.
Certainly the tradecraft was never foolproof, and when an operation went sour, the CIA always worried that a street-level slipup was to blame. It was easier to blame bad tradecraft than to hunt for a betrayal from within, particularly among CIA officers who had been so disgusted by Angleton’s witch-hunts.
In fact, for years after Ogorodnik committed suicide and his last case officer, Marty Peterson, was ambushed in a knockdown melee beside the Moscow River, the CIA believed that some tradecraft mistake—not a KGB penetration of the CIA—was responsible. A series of unexplained incidents in 1977 actually convinced CIA Director Stansfield Turner that the agency’s Moscow operations were fatally flawed by poor tradecraft. Ogorodnik and Peterson’s explosive arrests were followed by the exposure of GRU Colonel Anatoli Filatov, GTBLIP, who had spied for the CIA while stationed in Algiers. He was arrested af
ter he returned to Moscow, where he was caught trying to load a dead drop. His CIA case officer, Vincent Crockett, was eventually rolled up as well.
In the midst of these losses, a disastrous and suspicious fire broke out in the U.S. embassy. Soviet firemen, probably sent by the KGB, arrived to put out the flames. They were blocked from gaining access to the most sensitive sections of the embassy, including the CIA’s station—but it was a close call.
Newly appointed to run the CIA by President Carter, Turner became convinced that the rewards from running operations in Moscow weren’t worth the risks. He ordered a total stand-down of the station. The action forced the CIA to break contact with a series of newly recruited agents, some of whom were permanently lost as a result. Just five years after David Blee had brought the SE Division out of the Angleton sick-think, Moscow operations were once again plunged into paralysis.
Turner’s stand-down lasted a year and a half. From 1977 through the fall of 1978, frustrated case officers in Moscow Station did little besides identify new clandestine sites they could use for future meetings with agents—if they were ever allowed to meet agents again. The stand-down would not be lifted until the most persistent Soviet volunteer of the decade—Adolf Tolkachev, the CIA’s most valuable spy since the legendary Penkovsky—made his fourth approach to the CIA, offering the Americans the keys to defeating the Soviet Union in the air wars of the future.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 0845 Hours, June 14, 1985
Paul Redmond walked unannounced into Burton Gerber’s corner office. Gerber was writing on a yellow legal pad. Without looking up, he handed Redmond a stack of Moscow cable traffic and continued writing.
Redmond glanced quickly over Gerber’s shoulder at the small child’s blackboard on which Gerber wrote in white chalk each morning his four- or five-word thought for the day. The board was still clean. As he sat in the chair opposite Gerber’s desk, Redmond began to read the cables. He had seen the initial cable reporting Stombaugh’s arrest the night before. But in the cold light of day, as more detailed cables arrived from Moscow Station, the enormity of the loss sank in.