|
MOLEHUNT |
|
Chapter 8: Roadshow By the fall of 1962, Anatoly Golitsin had worn out a succession of case officers in the Soviet division; it was one reason he was turned over to James Angleton. "The division got tired of him," said Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy, in explaining the decision. According to another former CIA officer, the feeling was mutual. "Golitsin was furious at the Soviet division. They were pushing him hard. He'd run out of gas and they kept pushing him." As Pete Bagley, the former Soviet division counterintelligence officer, noted, yet another reason for the switch was the nature of what Golitsin was saying; there were moles not only in the CIA, the Soviet defector charged, but in other Western services as well. And it was the CI Staff that had responsibility for liaison with those foreign services. Since Golitsin alleged that British intelligence had been penetrated, Angleton some months earlier had invited Arthur Martin, a senior MI5 counterintelligence officer, to visit Washington and interview the former KGB man. Martin was not only impressed with Golitsin, he eventually persuaded him to come to England. According to a veteran CIA officer who had served in London, "The real romance began in England. The man who started it all was Arthur Martin. He became infatuated with Golitsin's ideas. Arthur took the entire family over to England -- Golitsin, his wife, and daughter. He said to Angleton, 'I guarantee this man's security.'" Angleton may not have bargained for Golitsin's departure, but it would have been awkward to say no, given the long-standing, if sometimes strained, "special relationship" between U.S. and British intelligence. And Angleton did not want to cross Golitsin; if he stood in Golitsin's way, he might risk losing him for good. In Britain, Golitsin acquired his British code name, KAGO. He was handled by Martin; Peter Wright, later to achieve worldwide fame by selling MI5's secrets in his book Spycatcher; and Stephen de Mowbray, an MI6 officer. Golitsin arrived in England in March 1963, shortly after Harold Wilson had become the leader of the opposition Labor Party. It was a time of enormous political upheaval in England, and spies were at the root of the trouble. In January, Kim Philby had confessed in Beirut to being a Soviet agent, and then fled to Moscow, providing dramatic public confirmation of what the British government had consistently denied -- that he was a Soviet mole in MI6. The government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was reeling from the Profumo scandal, in which it was revealed that Christine Keeler, a call girl, had shared her favors with John D. Profumo, the secretary of state for war (who was married to actress Valerie Hobson), and with Captain Eugene Ivanov, the assistant Soviet naval attache, who was in reality an agent of the GRU. It mattered not that Profumo would hardly have been interested in discussing military secrets in bed with Keeler, who in turn would supposedly whisper them to Ivanov. It was a marvelous scandal, involving a naked swimming party at Cliveden, Lord Astor's estate (where Profumo first glimpsed Keeler au naturel), "society doctor Stephen Ward," another call girl named Mandy Rice-Davies, and, of course, the cabinet minister and the spy. Fleet Street fulfilled to the maximum its solemn obligation to keep the British public informed; the London newspapers overlooked no detail of the Profumo scandal. But all of this threatened to be topped when Anatoly Golitsin blew into town. With the encouragement of his British counterintelligence handlers, he concluded that Harold Wilson was a Soviet mole. Scotty Miler confirmed that Golitsin had dropped this bombshell after arriving in Britain. "Golitsin would not tell us what he told the British. But yes, that was what Golitsin said, that Wilson was a Soviet agent." Golitsin appears to have reached this startling conclusion about the leader of the British opposition party by a chain of reasoning that was, to say the least, indirect. Shortly before Golitsin's arrival in England, Hugh Gaitskell, then the head of the Labor Party, had died prematurely. Some six weeks earlier, Gaitskell had called on the Soviet embassy in London about a visa for a pending trip to the Soviet Union. He was offered, and drank, a cup of coffee. Peter Wright has said that Arthur Martin told him Gaitskell had died of a mysterious virus diagnosed as lupus, a tropical disease rare in temperate climes. Wright said that he went to Porton Down, Britain's chemical and biological warfare laboratory, to investigate whether the KGB might have poisoned the British political leader. He also consulted with Angleton, who sent him a translation of an obscure Soviet scientific paper which reported that the Russians had developed a chemical to induce lupus in experimental rats. But Wright concluded that Gaitskell, not being a laboratory rat, would have had to have ingested an enormous quantity of the chemical to have contracted the disease, unless, of course, the Soviets had developed a more powerful drug since the publication of the Soviet paper seven years earlier. [1] When Golitsin learned of the suspicions in MI5 over Gaitskell's death, he put it together with gossip he said he had heard inside the KGB before he defected, rumors that the KGB's Department 13, its gruesomely named Department of Wet Affairs, was planning to assassinate a Western leader in order to get its own agent in place as his successor. Wilson had been elected Labor's leader on February 14, less than a month after Gaitskell's death. To Golitsin, it was all clear. The British had very likely implanted the idea of Wilson's treachery with Golitsin, according to another former CIA officer. "I think the British tried out a lot of ideas on him. 'Would you think it possible Wilson was a spy?' they asked, and they linked it to the Gaitskell business. Golitsin when he came to us was a very ignorant man, but he learned. He sucked things up. He would say, 'That's very likely.' 'I think I heard something about this.' He picked up these ideas and embroidered them." Golitsin's speculations were to have repercussions in England for more
than a decade. Harold Wilson was elected Prime Minister in 1964, and
some time afterward, according to Peter Wright, Angleton made a special
trip to London to see Edward Martin Furnival Jones, MI5's
counterespionage chief, to warn him that "Wilson was a Soviet agent."
[2] Angleton would not name his source, but the allegation was filed by
MI5 under the code name OATSHEAF. Wilson was defeated in 1970 but
reelected to a second term as Prime Minister early in 1974. It was then,
That may be, but it is clear that MI5 extensively investigated both Wilson and his associates. Beginning in 1953, Wilson had made several trips to the Soviet Union, representing various British business interests. These visits had not escaped the notice of British intelligence. According to Don Moore, who headed Soviet counterintelligence for the FBI at the time, "Golitsin's theory was anyone who spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union had to have been recruited. Wilson spent time in the Soviet Union. But you must differentiate between Golitsin's theories and what he knew. What he knew was solid and useful. His theories were something else." MI5 investigated two of Wilson's political supporters, Rudy Sternberg and Joe Kagan, both Jews of Central European origin who had come to England and made their fortunes. Sternberg, an Austrian by birth, imported fertilizer and other products from East Germany. Kagan, a Lithuanian, was a raincoat manufacturer from Huddersfield whom MI5 suspected of leaking secrets he had gleaned from Wilson to a Soviet intelligence officer in London. After only eighteen months in office during his second term, Wilson suddenly resigned in March 1976. His decision, according to the British journalist David Leigh, came after a "blazing confrontation" with Sir Michael "Jumbo" Hanley, the head of MI5, in which Wilson correctly accused the security service of plotting against him. [3] Did M15, spurred by Golitsin and Angleton, ultimately succeed in driving a British Prime Minister from power? The picture is fuzzy, but enough evidence has emerged to suggest that something very much like that may have happened. The story gained enough currency that, thinly disguised, it was even turned into a television drama. [4] But quite aside from the Wilson plot, Golitsin's trip to England in the spring of 1963 was even more memorable for helping to trigger Britain's own mole hunt, which became much more highly publicized than the CIA's search for traitors, although it was ultimately to prove as inconclusive. The first tallyho in the British mole hunt had sounded earlier in the year after Philby's dramatic escape to Moscow. On a trip to Washington in January 1963, not long before Golitsin's departure for England, Arthur Martin met with the FBI's Don Moore and Anthony Litrento, a street-smart agent who was the bureau's leading expert on Soviet illegals. Martin announced portentously that he had just received word that Philby had confessed in Beirut. Moore recalled Litrento's reaction. "'Do you have him in custody?' Tony asked. 'I don't know,' said Martin. 'If you don't, he'll be gone tomorrow,' said Litrento. And by God he was." In the wake of the Philby disaster, Golitsin told the British that he had heard talk in the KGB of a "Ring of Five," a group of Soviet spies inside British intelligence. The first four members of that notorious group were easy enough to identify. All had gone to Cambridge University, where they were presumably recruited. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had fled to Moscow in 1951, Kim Philby had followed suit early in 1963, and Anthony Blunt, a former MI5 officer, was already under suspicion as the fourth man. [5] But who was the fifth man? Arthur Martin and Peter Wright were convinced at first that the mole was Graham Mitchell, the deputy director of MI5. Later, the two counterintelligence officers decided the mole was none other than Sir Roger Hollis, the director-general of MI5. The former CIA officer who served in the London station had no doubt of Golitsin's key role in all this. "The British mole hunt was a direct result of Golitsin," he said. "Golitsin said there was a mole at a high level in British intelligence. Graham Mitchell was the first person Golitsin fingered." MI5 secretly installed a closed-circuit television camera and wiretaps in Mitchell's office and observed him for weeks. As a suspect, he was given the code name PETERS. During the investigation, Arthur Martin, the British equivalent of Angleton, flew to Washington to coordinate MI5's mole hunt with the FBI and the CIA. "Arthur came over," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who met with Martin. "It was very hush-hush. He would only talk one-on-one. At the time they were analyzing Graham Mitchell. Mitchell was under surveillance and would sometimes sit with his head on his desk. Arthur thought that meant he was a spy, sitting and thinking, 'Oh my God, they know about me.' For chrissake, the guy was just taking a nap after lunch!" Mitchell, fifty-seven when he became the target of his own security service, was an upper-class Englishman, educated at Winchester and Oxford, who limped from an encounter with polio but was a superb yachtsman and chess champion. He had worked closely with Hollis in MI5 during the war, and when Hollis became the director in 1956, Mitchell was appointed as his deputy. After fifteen months, the mole hunters had come up empty-handed. Mitchell retired, and his case was closed, for the moment. But the problem remained; was there a mole in the house? If not Graham Mitchell, might it be the director himself? To investigate these sensational suspicions, a joint MI5-MI6 unit, the oddly named FLUENCY committee, was created, with Arthur Martin as its chairman. [6] Its members toiled in secrecy for five years but failed to prove that their own boss, Roger Hollis, or his former deputy, Graham Mitchell, was a Soviet spy. Hollis, who was a month younger than Mitchell, was the son of the bishop of Taunton, and also Oxford-educated. In his youth, he had spent several years working for a tobacco company in China in the 1930s before joining MI5, a fact that gave the mole seekers endless grounds for speculation and suspicion. Shanghai was known to be a nest of Communist spies between the wars. Perhaps Hollis had been recruited in China by the Soviets. Perhaps, like Philby, he was a long-term Soviet penetration agent in British intelligence. But none of this could be proven. In 1965, Hollis retired, but the investigation only intensified. He was given the code name DRAT, which may have unintentionally reflected the frustration of the mole hunters over their inability to prove their case. It never seemed to end. Mitchell was hauled out of retirement, interrogated and cleared again. In 1970, MI5 renamed its counterespionage arm K Branch, and the mole hunters were placed in a new section designated K7. That same year, Hollis was brought back for interrogation at a safe house in London as Peter Wright, in another building, listened in on headphones. Both the CIA and the FBI were informed of the progress of the British mole hunt. "We were kept reasonably well privy to what they were finding," the CIA's Scotty Miler said, "because it had a direct bearing on the security of U.S. intelligence. We were aware the British investigations were going on. Angleton worked with [Maurice] Oldfield, Wright, Hanley, Dick White, whoever was in charge." The difficulty was, MI5 wasn't finding very much. Sir Roger Hollis died of a stroke in 1973, along with his secret, if he had one. In 1981, when the fact of the Hollis investigation became public, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a statement in Parliament gingerly clearing Hollis. [7] Graham Mitchell died in 1984, by which time his private ordeal as PETERS had also become public knowledge. If no fifth man could be positively identified, some of the mole hunters had nevertheless believed that he was John Cairncross, a former MI6 officer who had confessed years earlier to having been a Soviet agent during World War II. Cairncross was allowed to resign and not prosecuted. But it was an unrepentant Anthony Blunt who had named Cairncross to MI5 interrogators, and there was doubt that Blunt would have revealed the name of a high-level spy. Moreover, Cairncross left the government after he fell under suspicion in 1951. In 1990, he denied that he was the so-called Fifth Man, but a year later he said that he was. [8] The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, who had been named the KGB resident in London, added a postscript to the British mole hunt in 1990. He reported that two of the KGB's senior British specialists -- who were presumably in a position to know the identity of their agents in England -- had dismissed the reports about Hollis as untrue. [9] Anatoly Golitsin had succeeded in turning British intelligence upside down, and in the process helped to create a cottage industry of mole hunters in England, whose books have been published, and eagerly read, on both sides of the Atlantic. If he was a boon to publishers, he was, in the end, less valuable to British intelligence. But a major reason that Golitsin's charges could not simply be ignored was the awful truth of the Philby case. Philby had, after all, at one time been head of the Soviet section of MI6. That being so, it was surreal, but not impossible, to believe that even the head of MI5 could have been a traitor. Although Golitsin is sometimes credited with providing leads that confirmed Kim Philby's role as a high-level Soviet mole, Philby had fled to Moscow weeks before Golitsin's arrival in London. Golitsin, it is true, had warned CIA in 1962 of moles in the British intelligence services, but by that time, Philby had already been under suspicion for more than a decade. As a result, Golitsin's contribution to the Philby case, if any, remains marginal at best. But whatever high drama surrounded Golitsin's sojourn to England took an unexpectedly farcical turn in July 1963. It began when the London Daily Telegraph learned of the presence in England of an important Soviet defector. John Bulloch, a reporter for the newspaper, attempted to check the story with the government, thereby alerting British officials. Next, a "D notice" was issued on the evening of July 11 requesting that the press refrain from mentioning the defection. A peculiarly British institution, the D notice system has no equivalent in the United States. Under it, the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee, a joint government-press group, issues advisory warnings to the British press that news about certain kinds of information -- military secrets, intelligence, codes, and communications intercepts, for example -- may be protected under Britain's Official Secrets Act. The notice, therefore, can be disregarded at the risk of breaking the law. [10] What was unusual about the D notice issued in this instance, however, was that it named the defector -- or purported to -- thereby alerting all of Fleet Street to the story. But the notice, in what appeared to be a half-baked attempt at throwing the hounds off the scent, gave the defector's name as "Anatoli Dolnytsin." On Friday, Tom Lambert, the New York Herald Tribune correspondent in London, learned the name, now circulating among British reporters. When the newspaper's Washington bureau sought to check further, the CIA urgently requested that the story be killed. It was too late to stop the flood tide. In London, John Bulloch and his editors decided to go with the story, despite the D notice, and published it on July 13, using the defector's altered name as it had been given in the notice. [11] The other London papers wrote the story as well, and the wire services spread it around the globe. In Washington, CIA officials were thunderstruck by the British leak. They angrily accused the British of deliberately floating the story by means of the D notice in order to divert attention from the Profumo sex scandal. Dismayed and angered by the uproar in London, Golitsin packed his bags and took the first available flight back to Washington. British security officials immediately suspected that the original leak to the Daily Telegraph had been "put out by the Americans" to force Golitsin back to Langley. [12] The entire episode did nothing to strengthen relations between MI5 and
the CIA. But the upshot was that James Angleton had his prize defector
back in his hands. Before Golitsin captivated Arthur Martin and helped to launch the mole hunt in England, he had warned his CIA handlers of penetrations inside French intelligence as well. The French security services were a fertile ground for his charges. The word "byzantine" does not do justice to the complex and checkered history of the French spy agencies. French intelligence had a reputation for dirty tricks and even criminal activity long before the French secret service blew up the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship, in New Zealand in 1985, killing a photographer. The ship, which had planned to protest French nuclear tests at a South Pacific atoll, was sunk by the French external service, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE). The service acquired that name under President Francois Mitterrand, but it had been known before that as the Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contrespionnage (SDECE). Most French people know it better as "la Piscine," or the swimming pool, the nickname for its headquarters in northeast Paris. [13] To American intelligence officials, the SDECE was known in shorthand as "S-deck." The French spy agency was involved in the 1950s and 1960s in a series of murders in Algeria of supporters of the independence movement. The agents recruited by French intelligence officers around the world were traditionally known as "honorable correspondents," but many were anything but honorable, including gangsters, ex-convicts, and mercenaries among their ranks. One unit of the SDECE, the Service Action, functioned as a hit squad. The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) is responsible for internal security and counterintelligence, and is roughly equivalent to the FBI. Its headquarters, too, are in Paris, at 7 Rue Nelaton not far from the Eiffel Tower. Golitsin warned that Soviet moles had burrowed into the French secret service and the French government, possibly even into the cabinet of President Charles de Gaulle. The warning was taken seriously enough that President Kennedy sent a letter to de Gaulle to alert him to the charges. De Gaulle dispatched General Jean-Louis de Rougemont, of the Deuxieme Bureaux, the French military intelligence service, as a special envoy. He flew to Washington, met with Golitsin, returned to Paris, and reported to the Elysee Palace. As a result of his mission, the head of the SDECE, General Paul Jacquier, and the director of the DST, Daniel Doustin, sent a joint team of debriefers to Washington to meet with Golitsin, to whom the French gave the cryptonym MARTEL. Golitsin claimed that there was, within the SDECE, a ring of half a dozen Soviet spies, code-named SAPPHIRE. He seemed to have considerable knowledge of the organization and operations of the French service. "Golitsin was a pro-French Soviet," said a former CIA officer familiar with the defector's charges. "He had a kind of affection for the French, although he'd never lived there. He had a large list of twenty-five or thirty leads, not names, but very thin leads. And he kept talking about how a senior KGB official had referred to their agents in France as sapphires, in other words, a collection of jewels." The allegations about SAPPHIRE did not improve the already rather brittle relations between the French service and the CIA. The agency's counterintelligence officers were dismayed at the thought that CIA secrets shared with the SDECE might have seeped back to Moscow through the French. As the French CI officers continued to debrief Golitsin, the impression grew within the CIA that French intelligence was shot through with Russian spies. "The whole French thing was a mess," the former CIA man said. "Some of the leads pointed to personalities in S-deck who'd been involved in operations with us and about whom there had been some suspicion, but no proof. Jim [Angleton] weighed in against these people, and it caused a lot of friction. Golitsin was saying there were moles in the Elysee, in the French government, and in French intelligence, who could influence French policy." From Angleton's vantage point, the French services did not seem to be moving aggressively to weed out Golitsin's supposed nest of spies. The CIA suspected the French were more interested in covering up the potential political scandal than in finding and punishing the moles. But in France, Golitsin's allegations did lead to accusations against two prominent political figures, Jacques Foccart and Louis Joxe, and a diplomat, Georges Gorse. Foccart, who became a member of de Gaulle's inner circle during the general's exile in London during World War II, was a member of the French cabinet and a high-level adviser to de Gaulle on intelligence affairs when he fell under suspicion as a result of Golitsin's warnings. In the press, Foccart was accused of having organized the barbouzes, the bearded ones, a shadowy group of criminals who carried out the terrorist attacks in Algeria, and of being the Soviet mole described by Golitsin. Foccart denied the charges, sued several newspapers, and won. He continued to serve as a minister under de Gaulle and then under President Georges Pompidou. Louis Joxe, the second Frenchman to fall under the long shadow cast by Golitsin, had served as ambassador to Moscow in the early 1950s and held a high post in the French government under de Gaulle. As the minister in charge of Algeria, he had been instrumental in settling the conflict there and establishing Algerian independence in 1962, a fact that made him unpopular among the right wing and may have also explained why he became a target of the French mole hunters. But as in the case of Foccart, when the smoke had cleared, there was no evidence against Joxe, who continued to enjoy the trust of de Gaulle. [14] The diplomat investigated by the French mole hunters, Georges Gorse, had served on missions to the Soviet Union and as ambassador to Tunisia. Golitsin also said that aside from extensive penetration of the French
government, the KGB had a highly placed spy in NATO, who was able to
give Moscow instant access to classified documents, even those marked
"Cosmic," the highest category. The information Golitsin provided has
been credited with unmasking Georges Paques, a Soviet spy inside NATO
headquarters, which was located at the time in Paris. When arrested in
August 1963, Paques was deputy head of the press department. He was
convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment, a term later
reduced to twenty years. If not Paques, who was the spy in NATO? Almost two decades later, although not as a direct result of Golitsin's information, a Soviet spy in NATO was unmasked. He was Hugh George Hambleton, a Canadian economics professor who had worked for NATO from 1956 to 1961. In 1977, the FBI caught and "turned" a KGB illegal, a Czech named Ludek Zemenek, who had entered the United States from Canada and was using the name Rudolph A. Herrmann. He agreed to act as a double agent for the FBI. He revealed to the FBI that one of his contacts was Professor Hambleton, whom the Canadians chose not to prosecute. But Hambleton, who held dual Canadian-British citizenship, unwisely flew to London in 1982, where he was promptly arrested, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. [16] For many years a dramatic story has circulated inside American intelligence agencies of a spy, in addition to Paques, who jumped out the window to his death while being questioned as a result of information supposedly provided to the French by Golitsin. Despite the persistent reports to the contrary, however, the files of the CIA do not reflect that Golitsin provided the information that led to the spy's capture. There actually was such a spy. Colonel Charles de Jurquet d'Anfreville de la Salle "was an agent of the Rumanian secret service and then of the GRU," according to Marcel Chalet, the former head of the DST. [17] Colonel de la Salle was a retired top air force officer, a hero of a joint French-Russian air wing in World War II. In part as a result of his wartime experience, he remained sympathetic to the Soviets. In May 1965, at the Brasserie Lipp, the famed cafe on the Left Bank, de la Salle's girlfriend introduced him to Ion Iacobescu, a spy for the Rumanian secret service, who had a cover job at UNESCO. De la Salle had contacts in electronics firms and was recruited by the Rumanian, to whom he passed along data about French military aircraft. In time, de la Salle was run jointly with the Rumanians by Vladimir Arkhipov, a Soviet diplomat in Paris who was really an officer of the GRU. Facing a recall to Bucharest, Iacobescu defected to England and turned in de la Salle, who was arrested in Paris in August 1969. When questioned at DST headquarters, de la Salle confessed to spying for the Rumanians. He made no mention of the Russians. He asked to return to his apartment to get a file, and two DST officers accompanied him to his home at Ivry-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb. "Going up to his apartment," a former FBI counterintelligence agent said, "a French officer asked him about his Soviet connections. 'I didn't know you knew about that,' de la Salle replied. He went to get a drink or left the room for a minute and jumped out of the kitchen window, landing on a DST car." De la Salle's death was listed as a suicide. The defector who turned him in was Iacobescu, not Golitsin. For the most part, Golitsin's sweeping charges of Soviet infiltration of the French secret service and of the de Gaulle government had few visible results. In 1968, however, the French connection erupted into a major scandal. At its center was Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, who had served as the SDECE's liaison officer in Washington from 1951 until he resigned abruptly in October 1963. De Vosjoli had escaped from Nazi-occupied France during World War II. He made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain and joined de Gaulle's Free French intelligence service in London. In Washington, de Vosjoli, whose SDECE code name was LAMIA, established close relations with the CIA, and with its director of counterintelligence, James Angleton. But as the questioning of Golitsin proceeded, the case began to drive a wedge between the two intelligence services. The S-deck team would obtain fuzzy descriptions of moles from Golitsin, then comb its files in Paris to try to find names to fit the defector's leads. The French would then try out the names in the next session with Golitsin in Washington. "The problem," de Vosjoli wrote, "... lay in the fact that each session with Martel (Golitsin's French cryptonym] was also attended by American representatives, and each time our people dropped a name in front of Martel, that person automatically became suspect to the Americans." [18] De Vosjoli said his contacts with American intelligence began to dry up. "The word seemed to be out not to take any chances with the French." [19] In the meantime, during 1962 de Vosjoli set up a French spy network in Cuba, which was feeding information to him in advance of the Cuban missile crisis. In December, de Vosjoli was called back to Paris by the SDECE and, by his account, ordered to set up a network to obtain military and nuclear secrets in America. De Gaulle, increasingly isolated from the United States, wanted his own nuclear weapons, the force de frappe. Moreover, de Vosjoli asserted, he was accused of having fed false information to France reporting that the Soviets had introduced offensive missiles in Cuba, a fact he said the French refused to believe. Golitsin's charges, according to de Vosjoli, were seen by his superiors as part of an American plot to embarrass France. Dismayed by this turn of events, de Vosjoli resigned on October 18, 1963, with a stinging letter to General Jacquier, his chief. Claiming that he feared for his life, he went into hiding. He later told his story to the novelist Leon Uris, who based his best-selling novel Topaz on the affair. [20] In France, the SDECE regarded de Vosjoli as a double agent who had "defected" to the Americans. U.S. intelligence officials do not deny they protected him when he resigned. "De Vosjoli asked for asylum," a former FBI counterintelligence agent said. "S-deck suspected he was already working for Jim Angleton. That may not be far from the truth. Of course he would have worked closely with Angleton, that was his job. Somewhere along the line his allegiance was transformed. He came to realize his own service was unreliable. It stirred up a storm. There was a long inquiry in France." According to a retired CIA officer, "De Vosjoli tried to argue the Angleton case with S-deck. He told them that the agency thinks Golitsin is a reliable defector, and gradually he became the advocate of Angleton and Golitsin, in the view of the French. Later on, Golitsin went over and dealt personally with the French. Met with them on some islands in the Caribbean or somewhere. But that was years later." Angleton's deputy, Scotty Miler, said that the order to gather American secrets was what precipitated de Vosjoli's break with the French service. "De Vosjoli defected from S-deck when he was instructed to begin spying on the United States," Miler said. "Golitsin's information had uncovered Paques and some others. De Vosjoli suspected there was a Soviet penetration in the French service who had influenced them to target S-deck against the U.S. Vosjoli said he would have no part of that." A French official with knowledge of the affair insisted that de Vosjoli's fears for his safety were justified. "De Gaulle decided to kill de Vosjoli and sent Service Action to kill him. De Vosjoli was tipped off and escaped to Mexico." Later, he moved to south Florida. *** In time, the mole hunt spread to Canada as well. Golitsin had only vague leads to Soviet penetration of the Canadian intelligence service, but the Mounties eventually -- and with prompting from the CIA -- focused on their own chief of Soviet counterespionage, Leslie James Bennett. The son of a South Wales coal miner, Bennett had worked in British communications intelligence, and while in Istanbul after World War II, he had met Kim Philby. He emigrated to Canada in 1954, joined the RCMP Security Service, and rose to a position of power that roughly paralleled that of James Angleton in the CIA. [21] During the 1960s, a number of Canadian operations against the Soviets went sour, and Bennett, in an investigation code-named Operation Gridiron, was placed under surveillance for two years. According to one former CIA officer who knew Bennett well and was familiar with the case, "Golitsin was shown Bennett's file, or information about him, and he said, 'Yes, I think he's a Soviet agent.' That was a very powerful factor." Equally important were the suspicions of Bennett voiced by one of Angleton's officers, Clare Edward Petty, who was a member of the SIG, the mole-hunting arm of the Counterintelligence Staff. Petty's reason was labyrinthine. Bennett had asked the CIA to place surveillance on a Soviet KGB man stationed in Canada who was traveling to South America. Soon after, Heinz Herre, the liaison man in Washington for the BND, the West German intelligence service, visited Bennett in Ottawa and mentioned he had recently taken a trip to South America. According to Petty, Bennett remarked that Herre might have run across the KGB man, who was there at the same time. At that, Petty said, "Herre turned white as a sheet," or so Bennett reported back to the CIA. "Bennett had the feeling that Herre was guilty, that maybe Herre and the KGB man had met or traveled together." The CIA, Petty said, "gets hot and bothered and puts Herre under surveillance. A few months later, in the summer, Herre goes to Jackson Hole on vacation and two KGB guys go on the same trip." As Petty saw it, the KGB was trying to frame Herre by sending its officers out wherever Herre was traveling. "It was to make Herre look bad. This technique had happened two or three times with different members of the Gehlen organization." Leslie James Bennett, Petty decided, was part of the KGB plot. "We would not have known anything about Herre's South America trip if Bennett had not informed us," Petty said. It was a dizzying, mind-bending exercise, but according to the former CIA man familiar with the episode, "The Herre incident is what triggered the Bennett case. Jim Angleton played a powerful role. He said push on, press forward. Angleton used all his devious methods to charm the Canadians with long lunches and lots of booze." Bennett was an easy target in part because he was a civilian in a paramilitary organization. He almost always wore the same old tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, and he had long hair, which annoyed the spit-and-polish Mounties. With the CIA, the British, and the French busily conducting their own mole hunts, it was almost as if Canada did not want to be left out. By 1970, Bennett had become the target of the RCMP mole hunt. The Canadian surveillance teams feared that Bennett was using carrier pigeons to communicate with the KGB. They trailed him repeatedly from his home to a wooded area where he removed a wire cage from his car trunk. The watchers dared not get close enough to see what Bennett was releasing from the cage, but they feared the worst. It was a hilarious example of how far afield suspicion can lead counterintelligence sleuths; in fact, Bennett was trapping black squirrels in his garden and, kindly, releasing them far from his home. Undaunted, the Mounties tried to spring a clever trap of their own, informing Bennett that a Soviet defector was coming to Montreal for a meeting. It wasn't true, so if the KGB showed up at the meeting site to learn the identity of the defector, it would mean that Bennett had tipped off the Russians, since no one else had been told of the notional meeting. The mole hunters were foiled by a blizzard that hit Montreal that night; in the blinding snow, no one could tell if the Soviets had turned up or not. The RCMP finally confronted Bennett in 1972, subjecting him to a harsh interrogation that proved nothing. Although Bennett passed a polygraph test and maintained under oath that he was never a Soviet agent, he was forced out after eighteen years and moved to Australia. [22] The former CIA officer who knew Bennett said, "This was a Canadian tragedy. A terrible thing was done to this man. He was fired and his wife left him. His life was virtually ended at that point. He was completely innocent." *** When Golitsin flew back to Washington from London, after the D notice disaster had surfaced him, he requested and got a private audience with John McCone, the director of the CIA. "He told McCone a number of things," a former CIA officer said. "One thing he said was that Wilson was a spy and Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB. And other fantastic things. McCone was astonished. He sent off a cable to Hollis." The CIA director asked what on earth was going on. McCone's cable went to Archibald B. Roosevelt, the London station chief, and was taken around to Leconfield House, on Curzon Street, then MI5's headquarters, by Cleveland C. Cram, the deputy chief of station. "Hollis sent back a cable saying, in effect, it's all a lot of baloney," the CIA officer continued. "Hollis said, 'We have no evidence to support these things.' But Angleton kept pounding on the theme that Wilson was a spy." By then, Hollis himself had become a suspect inside MI5, and the British mole hunt was careening out of control. Golitsin's roadshow had been brief, but the effect on British intelligence was devastating, and would reverberate for years. In the CIA, the hunt was gathering momentum. Notes: 1. Peter Wright, Spycatcher, pp. 362-63. Other published accounts say that a postmortem examination of Gaitskell showed he was not a victim of lupus, the full name of which is lupus erythematosus, but of "an immune complex deficiency," the symptoms of which had begun a year before his death on January 18, 1963, and many months before he drank the celebrated cup of coffee at the Soviet embassy. See David Leigh, The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 82-83. 2. Peter Wright, Spycatcher. p. 364. 3. David Leigh, The Wilson Plot, p. 234. 4. In 1988, American public television broadcast a British TV play starring the late Ray McAnally as Harry Perkins, a blue-collar Yorkshireman who becomes Prime Minister of England and the target of schemers in the security service who plot to overthrow him. The play, A Very British Coup, was, of course, fictional, but it was obviously modeled on MI5's efforts against Harold Wilson. 5. Blunt, an art expert and curator of the Queen's paintings, confessed in 1964, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, but had been suspected and questioned by MI5 for many years before that. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed Blunt's identity, and his espionage for the Soviets, in a statement to Parliament in November 1979. Blunt was stripped of his knighthood and died in 1983 at the age of seventy-five. 6. Intelligence code names, like tropical storms, are usually chosen in order from a prepared list. As a rule, therefore, they have no particular relevance to their subject matter. 7. While the investigation "did not conclusively prove his innocence," Mrs. Thatcher said, leaving herself an escape hatch, "... no evidence was found that incriminated him, and the conclusion reached ... was that he had not been an agent of the Russian intelligence service." Statement to Parliament by the Prime Minister, March 26, 1981. 8. Most of the details of Britain's long-running mole hunt have surfaced because of the work of British journalists, academics, and authors. The suspicion of Hollis was first publicized by Chapman Pincher, a leading British journalist specializing in intelligence, in his book Their Trade Is Treachery (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981), and a later work, Too Secret Too Long (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984). As it later emerged, Pincher's source was the former MI5 mole hunter Peter Wright, who had been introduced to Pincher by Victor Rothschild, of the banking family, also a former MI5 officer. Then Wright himself wrote about the search for penetrations, as well as other matters, in Spycatcher. Anthony Blunt was identified by Mrs. Thatcher only after the publication of Andrew Boyle's book Climate of Treason, published in the United States as The Fourth Man (New York: Dial, 1979), which pointed to Blunt without naming him. Blunt's career was chronicled in depth in John Costello's Mask of Treachery (New York: William Morrow, 1988), which nominated Guy Liddell, a former deputy director of MI5, as the unknown Soviet mole. Rupert Allason, a Conservative member of Parliament who writes under the name Nigel West, is the author of several informative books dealing with the period, including Molehunt: Searching for Spies in MI5 (New York: William Morrow, 1989). British historian Christopher Andrew and the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky kept the controversy going by naming Cairncross as the Fifth Man in their book KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). Cairncross, then seventy-six and retired in France, denied it. "I am not the Fifth Man," he said (Washington Post, October 18, 1990, p. A38). But in 1991, Cairncross reversed himself. 'I was made one of the five during the war.' The Mail quoted him as saying. 'I hope this will finally put an end to the 'Fifth Man' mystery." (New York Times, September 23, 1991, p. A8.) 9. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 7-8. 10. As the system worked in 1991, eight standing D notices dealing with broad categories of defense and intelligence information had been issued to the British news media and were kept in a "black folder" by each news organization. In the past, D notices were frequently issued to try to prevent the publication of specific stories. Although that can still be done, no specific D notice had been issued in more than ten years. British journalists and writers often consulted the secretary of the committee, Rear Admiral William A. Higgins, about whether a contemplated article or book might violate the law. So, while the system had evolved and changed, the D notice machinery remained very much in place. 11. The British intelligence services, as part of their apparent attempt to sow confusion, may have chosen the name Anatoli Dolnytsin not only thinly to mask Anatoly Golitsin's true identity but in the hope that the press would assume the defector was Anatoly A. Dolnytsin, who had been stationed in the Soviet embassy in London for three years until September 1961. The Daily Telegraph reported that this Dolnytsin might be the defector, which seemed logical until a Soviet embassy spokesman announced two days later that the staff member in question was a protocol clerk who had not defected and was, at that very moment, back in Moscow at his desk in the foreign ministry. Embarrassed British intelligence officials later put it about that an error had led to the release of the false name, Dolnytsin, in place of the defector's true name. The explanation was implausible, since the real Anatoly Dolnytsin had not defected. 12. Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post War Defectors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 172. 13. The DGSE headquarters is located in a ten-story office building with a checkerboard exterior at 141 Boulevard Mortier, part of the complex formed by the old Tourelles military barracks. The headquarters is just to the south of the Georges Vallerey public swimming pool-named for France's 100-meter 1948 Olympic swimming champion -- which is on the Avenue Gambetta where it intersects the Rue des Tourelles. The spy agency's location close by the swimming pool explains its nickname. 14. Officials in the SDECE itself also fell under suspicion as a result of Golitsin's charges. Among them were Colonel Leonard Houneau, the deputy chief of the spy agency, and Georges de Lannurien, a high-ranking official. 15. Thierry Wolton, Le KGB en France (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986), p. 123. 16. For the most detailed account of the Herrmann-Hambleton case, see John Barron, KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1983). 17. Letter, Marcel Chalet to author, July 19, 1990. 18. P. L. Thyraud de Vosjoli, Lamia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 307. 19. Ibid. 20. Leon Uris, Topaz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). In the novel, Golitsin is "Boris Kuznetov," and de Vosjoli is "Andre Devereaux." The following year, de Vosjoli told his story in Life magazine. He appeared on the cover of the issue of April 16, 1968, photographed from the rear, wearing dark glasses and a homburg that made him look not unlike James Angleton. In the movie version of Topaz, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1969, a French spy for the Soviets goes out the window to his death and lands on a car. This scene, which in some respects closely paralleled the death of Colonel de la Salle, may have helped to reinforce the belief in U.S. intelligence circles that Golitsin was somehow linked to the de la Salle case. 21. At the time, the RCMP was responsible for counterintelligence and counterespionage in Canada, much as the FBI is in the United States. In 1984, responsibility for security and intelligence was transferred from the RCMP to the new Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Although the CSIS had some liaison officers stationed overseas, Canada had no formal external intelligence agency. 22. In 1977, a Canadian journalist, Ian Adams, wrote a best-selling novel entitled S, Portrait of a Spy (Agincourt, Ontario: Gage Publishing, 1977), about a Soviet mole inside the RCMP. Because of the apparent similarity to his own case, Bennett sued Adams and his publisher and won.
|
|