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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 3: AELADLE For its code names, the CIA uses combinations of two letters, known as digraphs, to indicate geographic or other subjects. Soviet defectors or agents-in-place were given the digraph AE, followed by a code name. Anatoly Golitsin was christened AELADLE. [1] From the start, AELADLE was trouble. Some of his information, it is true, was to prove valuable to the CIA. But Golitsin made it clear to his handlers that he considered himself a man of supreme importance who was almost alone in fully understanding the nature of the Soviet menace. He had little patience for dealing with underlings. To a degree, all defectors are troublesome. Cut off from their homeland, their culture, their language, and often their families, Soviet and other defectors from Eastern Europe frequently had understandable psychological difficulties in adjusting to their new environment. In some cases, they were unstable, or impulsive to begin with, or they might not have taken the usually irrevocable and often dangerous step of changing sides in the Cold War. Their motives were varied. Many were seeking a way out of failed marriages. Others left for ideological reasons. Some were frustrated in their careers -- the motive that Golitsin gave -- and still others were simply attracted to the affluent lifestyle of the West. More often than not, defectors came over for a mixture of these or other reasons. And almost none were free of complaints, problems, and demands. Having said that, by all accounts Anatoly Golitsin was in a class by himself. Early on, he demanded to see President Kennedy, who declined. Golitsin also demanded, unsuccessfully, to deal directly with J. Edgar Hoover. Although blocked in his efforts to gain access to the Oval Office, Golitsin wrote a letter to President Kennedy and insisted that it be delivered to the Chief Executive. To pacify Golitsin, the CIA assigned its most celebrated Russian- speaking operative, George G. Kisevalter, to meet with the defector. A huge man, well over six feet, built like a linebacker, Kisevalter was nicknamed "Teddy Bear" inside the CIA. Born in St. Petersburg, the son of the Czar's munitions expert, Kisevalter had the deceptively innocent face of a friendly bartender. His appearance and demeanor concealed a quick mind, combined with an encyclopedic memory and a distaste for pretension in any of its forms. Among the Soviet division's field operators, Kisevalter was first among equals. He was the CIA case officer who handled the agency's two premier spies: Lieutenant Colonel pyotr Popov of the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence service), who was the first Soviet intelligence officer ever recruited by the CIA, and GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, whom Kisevalter had personally met and debriefed during Penkovsky's three trips to the West in 1961. [2] Howard J. Osborn, then head of the Soviet division, called Kisevalter in to give him his delicate assignment. "They didn't want the letter to go to the President," Kisevalter said. "Golitsin was a loose cannon; nobody knew what he would say or do. It was embarrassing to have him write to the President. They sent me to accept the letter; I was authorized to promise to deliver it to the President." But Kisevalter's real mission was to find out what was in the letter "and if it was not innocuous, to stop it." Kisevalter met Golitsin at an unmarked CIA building on E Street, across from the State Department. Golitsin was already seated at a desk when the CIA man arrived, and he sat down across from the defector. "I was acting friendly," Kisevalter related. "'Let's speak Russian,' I said. 'Let me see your letter.'" Golitsin handed it across the desk. "The letter said, 'In view of the fact that the President who has promised me things through his brother, Robert, may not be President in the future, how can I be sure the United States government will keep its promises to me for money and a pension?'" Kisevalter glared at Golitsin. "I said, 'You S.O.B. You're a first-class blackmailer. This is shan tazh! [the Russian word for blackmail]'" Shaken by Kisevalter's reaction, Golitsin changed his mind and demanded the letter back. Oh, no, Kisevalter said. You want it delivered to the President, I'll deliver it. Kisevalter grinned as he recalled the moment. "Golitsin jumped up on top of the desk and then jumped down on my side and we began wrestling for the letter. I let him win." [3] *** Anatoly Golitsin had first come to the attention of the CIA seven years before he defected in Helsinki. In 1954, when the KGB officer Peter Deriabin had defected in Vienna, he had named Golitsin as someone who might be vulnerable to recruitment by the CIA. At the time, Golitsin was a young counterintelligence officer working in Vienna. Deriabin was said to have told his debriefers that Golitsin had an exaggerated idea of his own importance and was disliked by his colleagues. The two KGB men were to meet again, under unusual circumstances. For security reasons, the CIA goes to great lengths to keep Soviet defectors apart in the United States. But sometimes things go wrong. "Golitsin's safe house was out in the woods," George Kisevalter recounted. "He needed a haircut, so they took him into town. Golitsin is walking down the street in Vienna, Virginia, toward a barber shop on Maple Avenue and Deriabin comes out of the barber shop and greets him like a long-lost friend. The security people almost died." [4] According to biographical details released by the CIA and by British intelligence, Anatoly Golitsin was born near Poltava, in the Ukraine, in 1926, but moved to Moscow seven years later. At the age of fifteen, while a cadet at military school, he joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. In 1945, the year World War II ended, Golitsin joined the Communist Party and transferred from an artillery school for officers in Odessa to a military counterintelligence school in Moscow. He was graduated in 1946, joined the KGB, and while working at headquarters attended night classes to earn a college degree in 1948. He took advanced intelligence courses for two years, then worked for about a year in the KGB section that dealt with counterespionage against the United States. He was posted to Vienna by the KGB in 1953, under diplomatic cover as a member of the staff of the Soviet High Commission. He targeted Soviet emigres for a year, then worked against British intelligence. When he returned to Moscow in 1954, he attended the KGB Institute for four years and earned a law degree. For a year, he worked in the KGB's NATO section. Then, in 1960, he was assigned to Finland. [5] "He caused trouble for the KGB before he ever defected," according to Don Moore, a former senior FBI counterintelligence official. Tall, white-haired, genial, and shrewd, Moore headed the FBI's Soviet counterintelligence operations for seventeen years. Golitsin, Moore said, had wanted to reorganize the KGB, "and he tried the same thing with us. He would have liked to have run the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, too, if we'd let him." When Moore met Golitsin for the first time, it was just after the CIA's U -2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been captured and jailed by the Russians, was traded for the imprisoned Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on a bridge in Berlin on February 10, 1962. Abel, a full colonel in the KGB, was an "illegal," a spy who operates without benefit of diplomatic cover. He had worked as an artist and photographer in Brooklyn. Arrested after his alcoholic assistant turned himself in to the CIA, Abel had been serving a thirty-year sentence in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. [6] As the FBI's top counterspy against the Soviets, Moore wanted to meet Golitsin, the defector who had so impressed the CIA. Moore asked Sam Papich, the longtime FBI liaison man at the CIA, to accompany him to a hotel in downtown Washington that the agency had chosen as the site for the secret meeting. "The CIA brought Golitsin to a room in the Mayflower," Moore said. "He was stocky, gruff, shorter than I am, about five foot nine or ten. He was convinced we didn't release Abel for Powers unless we had doubled Abel. We hadn't. 'When he gets back over, the KGB will turn him,' Golitsin said." Moore, who respected Abel as a clever, case-hardened professional, knew there was no chance in the world that Abel would ever become a double agent and work for American intelligence as the price of his release. But in the Mayflower meeting, the FBI man had gained some insight into Golitsin's conspiratorial thinking. Not only was the Russian convinced that Abel had been doubled against the Soviets, but he was sure that the KGB would discover this and play him back against the CIA. "His messages to you -- give them to me and I will tell you what they mean," Golitsin told Moore. "How can you tell?" Moore asked, playing along. "Oh, I can tell." Remembering the encounter, Moore smiled and said: "That was typical Golitsin." *** For the CIA's Soviet division and the Counterintelligence Staff, however, the problems of handling Golitsin were less significant than assessing the substance of his information. Golitsin might have an overblown idea of his own importance, he might demand to see the President and J. Edgar Hoover, but that could be managed. After all, a previous defector, Michal Goleniewski, had provided what proved to be extremely valuable information to the CIA, even though he eventually became persuaded that he was the czarevich, the GrandDuke Alexei, son of Czar Nicholas II, and, as such, the last of the Romanovs and heir to the crown of Imperial Russia. [7] Two years before Golitsin's defection in Helsinki, the CIA station in Bern, Switzerland, received a series of letters, fourteen in all, from someone who appeared to be a Soviet-bloc intelligence officer. The letters were signed "Sniper." Late in 1960, Sniper defected in West Berlin and identified himself as Michal Goleniewski, an officer in the Polish intelligence service. The information he provided in his letters enabled the British to arrest Gordon Lonsdale, a KGB agent posing as a Canadian jukebox salesman in England, who had recruited Henry Frederick Houghton and his spinster girlfriend, Ethel Elizabeth Gee, both of whom worked at the Portland Naval Base, near Southampton, a center for antisubmarine research. MI5 had trailed Lonsdale to suburban Ruislip, where two Americans, Morris and Lona Cohen, who were living in England under the names Peter and Helen Kroger, used a high-frequency transmitter to send the naval secrets to Moscow. [8] The Cohens, too, were arrested, and all five went to prison. [9] Goleniewski has also been credited with providing the information that led the British to unmask and arrest George Blake, an MI6 agent working for the Soviets who had served time in a North Korean prison camp, then worked for British intelligence in Berlin. [10] Goleniewski is said to have provided additional leads that led to the arrest in 1961 of yet another top Soviet agent, Heinz Felfe, the head of Soviet counterespionage for the West German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND). Felfe was a key subordinate of the BND's chief and founder, the reclusive ex-Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. Since this deluge of counterintelligence information had come from a single Polish defector only a year before Golitsin's arrival, the CIA was understandably eager to hear every scrap that Golitsin, an actual KGB defector -- not merely an officer of a satellite service -- could summon up from his memory. Beginning, of course, with his warning of a mole inside the CIA itself. But his charges went far beyond that. Other Western services, he warned, were a Swiss cheese of Soviet penetration, being nibbled away from within by KGB moles. In time, Golitsin claimed that, in addition to the United States, the Soviets had penetrated the intelligence services of Britain, France, Canada, and Norway. In the beginning, the Soviet division interrogated Golitsin, as was the normal practice when the agency acquired a KGB defector. But there was constant friction. Golitsin, for example, clashed bitterly with Donald Jameson, one of the officers in the division who spoke fluent Russian and specialized in working with Soviet defectors. By October 1962, it was clear that Golitsin had become totally disenchanted with his handlers. For one thing, the division had declined to accede to his demand that he be given millions of dollars to run counterintelligence operations against the Soviet Union. "Golitsin said to me and to others that he wanted ten million," Jameson recalled. "He said NATO was incapable of protecting itself from Soviet penetration. The only way it could be protected would be to create a special security service that he would run, reporting essentially to nobody. To do that he wanted this sum, ten million. The money was to ensure his independent control over this thing." [11] According to Pete Bagley, who was in charge of counterintelligence for the Soviet division, the decision was finally made to turn Golitsin over to James Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. "Jim got Golitsin about October of '62, around the time I was coming into the division," Bagley said. "Golitsin's demands exceeded what the division could do for him. He wanted to see the President. I suppose we could have recruited Jack Kennedy, but he had other jobs to do. As a last resort he (Golitsin) was turned over to the CI staff. And also because his statements were all about penetration, not only of the U.S., but of Britain, France, Norway. And CI staff was responsible for liaison with those services." It was finding the mole supposedly burrowing inside the CIA itself, however, that became the primary preoccupation -- obsession might be a more apt word -- of James Angleton. The debriefings of Golitsin were intense, and went on for months. As the investigation grew and spread far beyond Peter Karlow to include literally dozens of suspects, the demands on Angleton's staff, and that of the Office of Security, were overwhelming. By 1964, Angleton realized he needed more manpower just to handle the "Golitsin serials," as he called the burgeoning files created by the debriefings of the KGB man. Angleton brought in Newton S. Miler, who was then the CIA station chief in Ethiopia, to help run the mole hunt. It was not his first assignment for Angleton; he had worked on the CI staff, dealing with Soviet counterintelligence, from 1958 to 1960. A tall (six foot one), tough-looking man, with a deliberate manner, "Scotty" Miler had blunt, thick features and the face of a county sheriff or a motorcycle cop, which was deceptive, because he was a thoughtful man with a good deal more depth than his roughhewn appearance might suggest. The son of a meat-packer in Mason City, Iowa, Miler had joined the Navy's V-12 program during World War II at Dartmouth, where he graduated with a degree in economics in 1946. He joined the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), a forerunner of the CIA, which sent him to China. When the agency was created by Congress in 1947, Miler was absorbed into it. He worked as a case officer overseas for thirteen years, in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines. When Angleton brought Miler in from Addis Adaba, he assigned him the title of deputy chief of "special investigations," the euphemism that Angleton gave to the mole hunt. The work was carried out by a unit of the Counterintelligence Staff known as the Special Investigations Group, or SIG. [12] While the term "special investigations" included other, unspecified "sensitive matters," Miler said, "the main thing we were doing was the search for penetrations. That was the primary thing." By 1990, many years after he had retired from the CIA, Scotty Miler was living in Placitas, New Mexico, in a home that he and his wife had built in a remote area of the rolling, dry hill country north of Albuquerque. He had long since tried to put the mole hunt behind him. But, once found, he was willing to talk about it, and about the nature of counterintelligence, at length, and in considerable detail. He chain smoked constantly as he talked. Was it really true that Golitsin tried to identify the mole by a letter of the alphabet? As was his style before responding to most questions, Miler took a drag on his filter cigarette, paused, and looked off into the distance for a moment. "Yes," he replied. "He said the man's name began with the letter K." But Golitsin had offered more detail than that, Miler continued. "He said Sasha had operated primarily in Berlin. But also in West Germany, and other areas of Western Europe. He did not know whether Sasha was a [CIA] contract officer or a staff officer. He also said the penetration had a Russian or Slavic background.13 He gave other indications of operations that had been compromised. So we began going through the files, who was involved in what and where. Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together." But Golitsin, according to Miler, did not confine himself to the clues about the elusive Sasha. He also provided other indications that the CIA might harbor a mole. Golitsin told the CIA of a visit to the United States in 1957 by V. M. Kovshuk, the head of the KGB's American embassy section. [14] As the name implied, the section's target was the U.S. embassy in Moscow. "Golitsin said Kovshuk would only have come to meet a high-level penetration in the United States government, possibly in the agency. Golitsin was able to identify a photo of Kovshuk." Checking its files, the FBI confirmed that Vladislav Mikhailovich Kovshuk, using the name Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov, had indeed been assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington for ten months, from early in 1957 to the fall of that year. [15] Moreover, Golitsin warned, the KGB -- knowing that he had defected and that he knew of Kovshuk's missionto America -- would attempt to deflect the CIA from the true purpose of the visit. It might seem entirely plausible that there could be other explanations for the visit to America of the mysterious V. M. Kovshuk. As a specialist in running operations against Americans, he might, for example, simply have wanted to travel to the United States, to increase his knowledge of the country that was his target. A Washington assignment was also attractive for obvious reasons. Even for a ranking KGB official, a trip to the West was a plum, a chance to get out of the oppressive atmosphere of Moscow and see the world, and, not incidentally, to shop for luxuries unavailable in the Soviet Union. But to the CIA counterintelligence officers, prompted by Golitsin, the Kovshuk trip took on a much more sinister connotation. It could, after all, mean a mole. That possibility could not be ignored. To the trained counterintelligence mind, every fragment, every detail, no matter how tiny or trivial, may have possible significance in unraveling a larger deception by the enemy. Sometimes, of course, the CI officers turn out to be right. Sometimes they are wrong. Often, they never know. On just such gossamer threads, the Counterintelligence Staff gradually wove the full-blown theories of a penetration -- or worse yet, penetrations -- of the CIA that were to consume the agency over two decades. And no one was better at spinning and weaving the most intricate patterns, at detecting the complex plots of a clever and relentless Communist foe, at perceiving the delicate strands and synapses that might be invisible to the less experienced eye, than the chief of the Counterintelligence Staff himself, James Jesus Angleton. _______________ Notes: 1. For a new identity to enable Golitsin to start life in America, the CIA also gave Golitsin the name John Stone. His British code name was KAGO. 2. Kisevalter's prestige within the agency was so great that it probably saved him from becoming a suspect himself. His name, after all, began with K, he had a Slavic background, and he had served in Germany. 3. Although the President did not see Golitsin, his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, did meet with him. George Kisevalter heard the tape of part of the conversation between Robert Kennedy and Golitsin. "I needed a translator for Bobby Kennedy," Kisevalter said. "His Boston accent was impossible to decipher. Golitsin was claiming, 'I was made promises in the name of the President.' Robert Kennedy said he would tell his brother." 4. After the chance meeting, Golitsin and Deriabin wanted to see each other, so the CIA arranged a meeting in a motel between Deriabin, Golitsin, and Golitsin's wife, Irina. The CIA bugged and taped the meeting, but didn't learn much. According to Kisevalter, Golitsin asked Deriabin, "How much are you getting?" Irina Golitsin "complained we lost everything we owned" and Deriabin angrily reprimanded her for voicing such material concerns. 5. These details of Golitsin's background are set forth in his book, New Lies for Old, in the introduction signed by four American and British intelligence officers who had worked closely with Golitsin: Stephen de Mowbray, of MI6, the British external spy agency; Arthur Martin, the Soviet counterintelligence chief of MI5, the British internal security service; Vasia C. Gmirkin of the Soviet division of the CIA; and Newton S. "Scotty" Miler, who was chief of operations of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff under James Angleton. See Anatoly Golitsyn, New Lies for Old (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984), pp. xiii-xvi. 6. I interviewed Moore in his home in northern Virginia. At one point, he led me down to the basement, where he showed me a black-and-white sketch hanging on the wall, entitled "Smith's Bottom, Atlanta." It portrayed a group of poor black women hanging out wash from the back porches of their row houses on a laundry line strung across their yards. The artist was Rudolf Abel. "He could see the scene from his prison windows," Moore said. After the spy trade, a prison official presented the sketch to Moore as a souvenir. 7. In the mid-1960s Goleniewski began writing open letters to CIA director Admiral William F. Raborn and to Richard M. Helms, Raborn's successor, which appeared in fine print as paid advertisements in the Washington Daily News. In the ads, Goleniewski explained that he was the czarevich. All of this was very awkward for the CIA. 8. As Peter Kroger, Cohen had become well known in London's antiquarian book trade, operating from a room in the Strand. The Cohens had been in contact with Rudolf Abel in New York, but disappeared in 1950, turning up four years later in England. 9. The FBI established that Lonsdale was really Conon Trofimovich Molody, who was born in Moscow but brought up in Berkeley, California, by an aunt who passed him off as her son. In 1938, at age sixteen, he returned to Moscow. On April 22, 1964, he was exchanged at the Heerstrasse checkpoint in West Berlin for Greville Wynne, an MI6 agent who had served as a courier for Oleg Penkovsky. 10. So extensive was the damage done by Blake to British and U.S. intelligence that he was sentenced in 1961 to forty-two years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever given in British legal history. In 1966, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison to Moscow, where he took a Russian wife, Ida, fathered a son, Mischa, and was given a dacha by the KGB. In 1989, Blake asserted what Western intelligence had long suspected -- that he had betrayed Operation Gold, the Berlin tunnel the CIA and MI6 had dug in 1955 to wiretap Soviet and East German communications in East Berlin. The tunnel operated for more than a year, until April 1956, but it harvested little information of value. Blake apparently had told the Soviets about it before the excavation began. 11. Jameson remembered Golitsin asking for $10 million. Other former CIA officers thought the figure was even higher. According to one published account, the defector, in his meeting with Robert Kennedy, had asked for $30 million, a request that the Attorney General turned down. See David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 109. 12. The SIG dated back to 1954, when the CI Staff was created. Initially, according to CIA records, the name of the mole-hunting group was the Special Investigation Unit. But no one ever referred to it that way. "We always called it the Special Investigations Group," Miler said. Eventual1y that became official; the name was changed to the Special Investigations Group (SIG) in 1973. 13. There was, Miler explained, a certain ambiguity to Golitsin's claim that the mole had something Slavic in his background. It could mean that "the person himself had a Slavic background, or it could also mean he worked in Soviet operations," Miler said. "In the early days of the mole hunt, because Golitsin had said Sasha had a Slavic background, we confined the search to case officers with Slavic backgrounds. But his [Golitsin's] bona fides had not yet been established, and there was a question of whether he had his information right, so you had to look beyond Slavic case officers. The interpretation we put was he [the mole] had himself a Slavic background but you couldn't rule out the other interpretation." 14. The section was a unit of the American department of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, which watches Soviet citizens and foreigners in the Soviet Union. 15. The FBI takes clandestine photographs of known or suspected Soviet intelligence officers in the United States, and in any case has copies of photos of all Soviet embassy employees from the visas they must obtain to enter the country. Golitsin would have been shown an FBI "mug book" in order to identify Kovshuk/Komarov. In Washington, "Komarov" moved into an apartment building on upper Connecticut Avenue. He had the title of first secretary at the Soviet embassy.
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