|
MOLEHUNT |
|
Chapter 14: Trinidad As the first chief of the MOSCOW station, Paul Garbler had every reason to believe that headquarters was pleased with his performance. He had handled the contacts with Penkovsky as instructed, managed to keep a low profile, and had the wit to copy the Cherepanov papers before they were politely handed back to the KGB. Midway through his tour, he received word that he had been promoted. Garbler and his wife, Florence, celebrated with champagne and caviar. In February 1964, as his assignment in the Soviet Union was winding down, Garbler flew out of Moscow to meet with David Murphy, the chief of the Soviet division, who was on a trip to Western Europe. Murphy offered him a top job back at headquarters as deputy chief of the division. But he would start out, temporarily, as chief of operations. Garbler accepted on the spot. With a few days of holiday on his hands, he went skiing alone in Zurs, Austria, early in March. Although an accomplished skier, Garbler lost his balance and took a spill, suffering a head injury that left him with headaches and partial paralysis on his left side, in his arm and leg. He was taken to a hospital in Wiesbaden, West Germany. In the hospital, he was visited by Hugh Montgomery, who had been his deputy was in Moscow but had been expelled the previous year in the fallout over the Penkovsky case. "Montgomery didn't come to Wiesbaden to wish me well," Garbler said. "There was none of that. I sensed that Hugh was there to see if I was rational, since I had landed on my head. And he said, 'Dave Murphy doesn't want you to go back to Moscow. Why don't you just come home?' I said I walked into the Moscow job and I intended to walk out, not on a stretcher." Garbler soon recovered and returned to his post in Moscow. In June, he flew back to Langley to take up his new job as operations chief in the Soviet division. But he harbored lingering suspicions about the accident. "I was in good health, I played on the embassy hockey team. I thought somebody had slipped me something." Garbler wondered whether the somebody might have been General Gribanov, the chief of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, who had the responsibility of watching and compromising U.S. diplomats stationed in Moscow. "I knew Gribanov had been traveling," Garbler said. "I checked carefully on the movements of General Gribanov. We found he had traveled to Innsbruck and St. Anton, Austria, less than three weeks before I got to Zurs." The CIA was not able to determine what the KGB general was doing in Austria. And there the trail ended; Garbler could not establish that he had been drugged. And he had other problems to deal with. Almost from the start, things did not go well back at headquarters. Garbler did not slip easily into the role of a gray bureaucrat. He clashed with Pete Bagley, the division's counterintelligence officer. As a former chief of station in Moscow, Garbler did not hesitate to voice his opinions. Late one evening, there was a flare-up with another officer in the Soviet division over a cable being prepared to alert some thirty CIA stations around the globe. The cable said that the KGB had approached the CIA to work in tandem against the Chinese. Garbler challenged the accuracy of the cable and asked to see the evidence. The officer who prepared it said "the best report came from Rocky Stone in Katmandu." He handed Garbler the transcript of a bugged conversation between Howard E. "Rocky" Stone, the station chief in Nepal, and the KGB resident. "I read the transcript. The Soviet KGB man says, 'Your Scotch is great, Chivas Regal, the best.' The CIA man says, 'The zakuski are wonderful-what about working with us against the Chinese?' The Soviet ducks any response. I was appalled. This was the evidence!" Garbler went back to the officer. "I asked, 'Is this the best you have?' He said yes. I said, 'That's terrible, there's nothing to it.' He said, 'You haven't been here long enough. That's what Dave wants. Don't make waves.' "The next day I said to Dave Murphy, 'Do you really want to send this?' Murphy replied, 'It's just possible I made a mistake, you don't belong on my team.' I was out. Pete Bagley had a straight line to be deputy chief and I was looking for a job." In time, as it turned out, Bagley did become deputy chief of the Soviet division. It seemed to Garbler that there was "something weird" about his rapid fall from grace in the Soviet division, but he chalked it up to normal bureaucratic infighting. And, after all, he quickly moved to another assignment, with Murphy's help. "To give Dave his due, he got me a good job as chief, foreign intelligence, Western European division." In 1965, after Garbler had worked in his new post for several months, a major reorganization took place inside the DDP. The Central and Western European divisions were merged into a new European division (EUR), headed by Rolfe Kingsley, a senior officer who had been chief of station in Copenhagen and Ottawa. Early in 1966, Kingsley selected Garbler to be chief of operations in the new division. He sent the nomination up to Desmond FitzGerald, the deputy director for plans. Two weeks later, Garbler said, Kingsley called him into his office, all smiles. He showed him the memorandum he had sent to the DDP. It had come back with a notation penciled on the margin by FitzGerald: "Excellent choice, I agree." For Garbler, it was a prestigious new job at the center of the agency's operations in Europe. He put the unfortunate experience in the Soviet division behind him and settled into his new post. Three weeks later, on a Friday evening, a shaken Kingsley summoned Garbler to his office. "He told me Tom K. wanted to see me right away." Thomas H. Karamessines was FitzGerald's deputy. It was late, and Garbler remembered his steps echoing in the almost deserted building as he made his way to Karamessines's office. What could Tom K. possibly want? Karamessines, a short, stocky man with black horn-rimmed glasses, was ill at ease. But he came quickly to the point. He and FitzGerald had been talking about it most of the afternoon, and they had reached a decision. The agency had a new responsibility for Garbler, Karamessines said. "We're sending you down to the Farm." The Farm! Garbler was staggered; Karamessines might as well have said Siberia. It made no sense; Garbler pointed out that the DDP had just agreed to his appointment as chief of operations for all of Europe. "We need someone with your operational experience to motivate the trainees," Karamessines replied smoothly. "We're lucky to have you." Garbler managed to ask how soon he was needed at the Farm. "Within a week," Karamessines said. Garbler, years later, still remembered the anger that rose within him. "I asked myself, what the hell was going on? What about my family? We'd bought a house believing we would be in the Washington area for at least three years. My wife was deep in plans for decorating it. My daughter had just been placed in school. What was I to tell them?" Garbler argued with Karamessines for an hour. His demand to see either FitzGerald or the director of the CIA was turned down. He could refuse the assignment, Karamessines finally told him, only if he resigned. After fifteen years in the CIA, Garbler had too much of a career investment to quit. Dutifully, but puzzled, he went off to Williamsburg, where he spent the next two years as deputy director of the Farm, working with young trainees. All the while, he kept expecting word from headquarters that a terrible mistake had been made. The other CIA officers on the staff at Camp Peary were quick to realize that something odd was going on with Garbler, and they shunned him, lest something rub off on them. "It was as if I had contracted leprosy," Garbler remembered. Two years to the day, Garbler was back in the office of Karamessines, who was by now the DDP. The chief of clandestine operations was upbeat; he had discussed Garbler's next assignment with Richard Helms, the new CIA director. Garbler was really going to like his new job. "Great," said Garbler. With his background as chief of station in Moscow, perhaps he had been selected for was in one of the major Eastern-bloc countries. Or maybe a senior post had opened up back in the Soviet division. "We're sending you to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad," Karamessines said. Garbler was stunned. Karamessines, like a travel agent selling passage on the Titanic, cheerily extolled the advantages of Garbler's new post. The situation in the Caribbean was "very bad." Dick Helms was greatly concerned. The agency needed a reliable, experienced man as station chief in Trinidad. Garbler was incredulous. "I couldn't believe this was happening," he said. He had visited the island once, years before, on an aircraft carrier, and knew that the major preoccupation of the residents was the annual carnival. "I had worked for years to learn my trade in Soviet operations. What was I going to do in Trinidad?" Outraged, Garbler protested the decision, marshaling all his arguments, demanding to know the real reason for his exile. In return, Karamessines provided only soothing replies. Garbler was being assigned to one of the agency's most important nerve centers in the Caribbean. Helms wanted him there. Once again, Karamessines reminded Garbler that he could always resign if he did not want the assignment. By now, Garbler was sure there was a conspiracy against him in the agency, although he did not suspect the reason. When he left Karamessines, he went directly to the office of Howard J. Osborn, the chief of the Office of Security. An old friend of Garbler's, Osborn said yes, he knew of the appointment. The security chief admitted, Garbler said, that sending him to Trinidad was a bit like "assigning Dick Helms to run the incinerator." He laughed and bantered with Garbler. But he shed no light on what was really going on. At age fifty, Paul Garbler, former dive-bomber pilot, Berlin operative at the height of the Cold War, and the first CIA chief of station in Moscow, swallowed his pride and went off to Trinidad for four years. Midway through his tour, Garbler finally learned the truth. A DDP officer who was an old and close friend arrived in Trinidad on agency business, and stayed with Garbler at his home. After dinner, Garbler invited his colleague into the study, which had been swept for electronic bugs only a few days earlier by CIA technicians. Garbler turned up the stereo anyway. After several cognacs, the visiting CIA man put security aside and confided in his old friend. Headquarters wanted Garbler out of the way, he said, because he was suspected of being a spy for the Soviet Union. He was believed to be a Soviet mole inside the CIA. He had been sent to Trinidad so he would be cut off from access to secret operations and classified documents involving the Soviets. There was a moment during World War II that Garbler often remembered. He was flying his Navy Helldiver in terrible weather on a mission to Japanese-held Chichi Island, in the far Pacific, and Grafton B. "Soupy" Campbell, the squadron leader, was having trouble finding a way through the thick cloud cover. The planes were running low on fuel, and if they did not attack soon, they would not make it back to the carrier. Suddenly there was an opening in the clouds below, and Garbler and all the other pilots got on the radio at the same instant. In unison, they yelled, "Dammit, Soupy, dive!" Now, almost thirty years later, with the carnival music of Trinidad blaring on his hi-fi, the clouds had parted once again for Garbler. Finally, he understood. *** At the time, Garbler was unaware that an intense hunt for penetrations was underway within the CIA. Nor did he yet know how or why the agency had come to focus on him as a major suspect. The key, of course, was Igor Orlov, whom Garbler had called "the little man" when he had run him in Berlin almost two decades earlier. But how did the mole hunters get from Orlov to Garbler? Garbler, after all, did not have a name that began with the letter K. Ed Petty, a former member of the Special Investigations Group, explained what had happened. Within the SIG, he said, there was general agreement that Orlov was Golitsin's "Sasha." Bruce Solie had reached that conclusion after studying the Berlin operational files. "But there was a problem. They went to Golitsin. 'You said it was a staff penetration,' they said. 'This guy [Orlov] was never a staff officer.' Golitsin came up with this theory. 'The Russians are running Orlov, and doubling the agents run by Orlov, and their real target is your staff officers. You can be sure among officers who ran Orlov you will find one or more serious penetrations. The Russians will have gone to them, the CIA staff officers, and said, "We control your network, you had better cooperate with us or your careers go down the drain." I could never understand how Angleton or anybody bought the logic. [1] "Upwards of a dozen case officers had handled Orlov and they all came under suspicion. They were all gone over with a fine-tooth comb." Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy and a key member of the SIG, defended the decision to broaden the investigation. "You have to make a presumption that if Igor Orlov was a spy, he in turn would recruit some of the people he was associated with," Miler said. "From a CI point of view you have to assume one spy may recruit another." Not only were all of the case officers who ran Orlov investigated, he continued, "but also other agency people he might have known or socialized with."
But Miler insisted that the mole hunt was not solely the responsibility
of the SIG. Others played a part as well. "The Counterintelligence
Staff," he said, "did not do the investigations. We did the research. OS
[the Office of Security] did the investigation if it became a good case.
OS, the DCI [the Director of Central Intelligence], chief of CI, and the
DDP would know about it. In almost every instance of a referral to the
FBI the DCI gave the approval." Once the SIG had focused on Garbler, the counterintelligence men dug into his file and found additional information to feed their growing suspicion. In Korea, for example, where Garbler had served as assistant naval attache and as President Rhee's pilot, he had played tennis, the mole hunters triumphantly discovered, with George Blake. Blake, who was captured and imprisoned under harsh conditions when the North Koreans overran Seoul, was later unmasked as a Soviet agent inside MI6. As the "evidence" mounted against Garbler -- including the discovery that his father had emigrated from Russia and his mother from Poland -- the CI Staff became persuaded that the former chief of the Moscow station was a Soviet spy. The CIA referred the Garbler case to the FBI. *** In Trinidad, after Garbler had learned he was a suspected Soviet mole, there was little he could do except serve out the rest of his tour . Stuck in Port-of-Spain, more than two thousand miles from headquarters, he could not even begin the process of trying to clear his good name. There was time to brood and think, time to despair. Although he now knew why he had been sent to the Caribbean, he tried to make the best of it. Trinidad was, after all, an island paradise. Rum and sunshine were abundant. Garbler liked the people; he found them hedonistic and unpredictable, but also generous and kind. Among them he made many lasting friends, both black and white. But for the better part of nine years, he now realized, he had been shunted into blind alleys, cut off from the mainstream in the CIA, and finally isolated under the coconut palms, a suspected traitor to the country he loved and had served all of his adult life. Garbler reviewed the last half-dozen years, reevaluating events in the light of what he now knew. What might have seemed bureaucratic errors or innocent events took on new meaning. It was like seeing a movie over again, this time knowing the plot. He thought back to Moscow. Was it possible that the agency's suspicions, of which he had still not officially been informed, had begun there? In Moscow, Garbler had been told almost nothing by headquarters about developments in his most important case, that of Oleg Penkovsky. If he was already under suspicion, headquarters would have told him as little as possible. He remembered when he was recovering from his ski accident in the hospital in Wiesbaden and Hugh Montgomery, his deputy chief of station in Moscow, had paid him a visit. At the time, he had thought that Montgomery had been sent by David Murphy, the division chief "to report to Murphy whether I had enough marbles left to return to Moscow and run the station." But in retrospect, Garbler wondered whether Montgomery's true purpose was "to see if I was carrying KGB money in my pajamas." Garbler had been determined to return to his post in Moscow. "The bunglers at headquarters may have thought my insistence on returning was linked to my need to see my KGB handler one more time, if for no other reason, to get instructions for future contact in the U.S. Murphy would infer from my position that I had to go back and satisfy the people who were controlling me from the other side." In 1972, when his tour in Trinidad ended, Garbler returned to headquarters and immediately made an appointment with William v. Broe, the CIA inspector general. A complaint to the inspector general, Garbler knew, would earn him the displeasure of Karamessines, the deputy director for plans, but at this point, Garbler had nothing to lose. Garbler told his story to Broe, whom he was certain already knew it. He had achieved senior status in the DDP at age forty-five, Garbler said, and could normally have looked forward to another fifteen years of increased responsibility. Instead, he had been sidetracked, the victim of invisible charges that he had never been told about officially. Garbler demanded to know why, if he was a suspect, he had not been informed. Broe did not respond, but promised to talk to Karamessines, who then wrote a memorandum praising Garbler's sterling performance in Trinidad, but making no mention of the mole charge. But Garbler's protests had some effect; after nine years as an unperson in the CIA, he was partially rehabilitated and in 1973 sent to Stockholm for three years as chief of station. The knowledge that he had been suspected by his own service of omitting espionage for the Soviet Union had placed a terrible strain on both Garbler and his wife, Florence, and their daughter. In the midst of Garbler's fight to clear his reputation he was awakened one night from a deep sleep by his wife. "Paul," she said, "I've never asked you this, and I know it's not true. But now I want to hear it from you. Did you ever spy for the Russians?" "Christ, hell no, you know I didn't," Garbler said. Garbler had still not been told officially that he was a suspected mole. He had never been given a chance to confront his faceless accusers. Sweden was a pleasant assignment, but Garbler was not ready to give up. In December 1976, after he returned from Stockholm, he wrote to the inspector general again. This time, he demanded an inquiry. _______________ Notes: 1. Some former CIA officers thought that Golitsin had not warned of moles in the CIA when he defected, but only about two years later. Donald Jameson, for example, who had been an officer in the Soviet division, remembered taking Golitsin to dinner in August 1962 at the home of former CIA director Allen Dulles in Georgetown. "Dulles said, 'The thing that interests me most is, do you know of any penetrations in the CIA?' Golitsin said no. Dulles knocked on wood, on the table, and Golitsin did, too." But Golitsin was telling his CIA debriefers a different story. The evidence is clear that Golitsin spoke of moles from the start. Even before he arrived in Washington, he told Frank Friberg that he had seen information that had leaked from "high inside the CIA." At the outset, he warned of a penetration named Sasha. And he disclosed that the KGB knew about the CIA's effort to copy the Soviet bug in the Great Seal. By January 15, 1962, within four weeks of Golitsin's defection, and as a result of his leads, wiretaps were in place on Peter Karlow, and a full-fledged FBI and CIA investigation of Karlow was under way. The mole hunt reached an even greater level of intensity in 1963 and afterward as it spread from Orlov, and beyond Karlow to other staff officers.
|
|