The Sword and the Shield

^TEN THE MAIN ADVERSARY Part 1: North American Illegals in the 1950s

One of the most remarkable public appearances ever made by a Soviet illegal took place on November 6, 1951, when “Teodoro B. Castro” attended the opening in Paris of the Sixth Session of the United Nations General Assembly as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation. Castro was, in reality, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (variously codenamed MAKS, ARTUR and DAKS),¹ a Lithuanian Jew whose main previous expertise had been in sabotage and assassination. He had trained saboteurs during the Spanish Civil War, taken a leading role in the operations to kill Trotsky in Mexico and had run a wartime illegal residency in Argentina which specialized in the sabotage of ships and cargoes bound for Germany.² While in Argentina, Grigulevich had begun to develop an elaborate Latin American legend for use after the war.³

Late in 1949, Grigulevich and his wife, Laura Araujo Aguilar (a Mexican illegal agent codenamed LUIZA), set up an illegal residency in Rome. Posing as Teodoro Castro, the illegitimate son of a dead (and childless) Costa Rican notable, Grigulevich established a small import-export business to provide cover for his intelligence work. In the autumn of 1950 he made the acquaintance of a visiting delegation from Costa Rica which included the leading Costa Rican politician of his generation, José Figueres Ferrer, head of the founding junta of the Second Republic which had restored constitutional government and later President of the Republic in 1953-8 and 1970-4. Grigulevich’s success in winning Figueres’s confidence must have exceeded his wildest expectations. Hoodwinked by Grigulevich’s fraudulent account of his illegitimate birth, Figueres told him they were distant relatives. Thereafter, according to Grigulevich’s file, he became the friend and confidant of the future president, using the Centre’s money to invest with him in an Italian firm importing Costa Rican coffee.⁴

In October 1951, under his cover name Teodoro Castro, Grigulevich was appointed Costa Rica’s chargé d’affaires in Rome. A month later he was chosen as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation to the Sixth Session of the UN General Assembly at its meeting in Paris. During the assembly he was introduced to the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden—but not, apparently, to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Vyshinsky.⁵ Vyshinsky’s usual oratorical style at international gatherings was tedious and longwinded. On this occasion, however, he arrived with a caged dove, intended to represent the innocent victims of imperialist aggression, then proceeded to speak with the brutal sarcasm for which he had been infamous as prosecutor during the show trials of the Great Terror. Referring to a speech by President Truman on arms limitation, Vyshinsky declared in the course of a lengthy diatribe, “I could hardly sleep all night last night having read that speech. I could not sleep because I kept laughing.”⁶

Among the other targets for Vyshinsky’s sarcasm was the Costa Rican delegation. One of the motions debated by the General Assembly was the call by the Greek delegation for the return to Greece of the children evacuated to the Soviet Bloc during the Greek civil war. At Acheson’s request, the Costa Rican delegation agreed to support the motion. Doubtless to his extreme embarrassment, Grigulevich was chosen to draft a speech in favor of it to be delivered by Jorge Martínez Moreno. He did his best to limit the offense to the Soviet delegation by somewhat vacuous rhetoric which emphasized “the anxiety and the interest with which [the Costa Rican] delegation had always considered any threat liable to endanger the peace of the world,” and congratulated the UN Special Committee on the Balkans “for its work of observation and conciliation, thanks to which… although the Balkans remained a danger, at least world peace had been safeguarded.” The Soviet delegation was unimpressed. Probably unaware of Castro’s real identity, Vyshinsky condemned the speech as the ramblings of a diplomatic clown.⁷

Vyshinsky’s denunciation, however, did nothing to damage Grigulevich’s diplomatic career. On May 14, 1952 he presented his letters of credence as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Costa Rica in Rome to the Italian president, Luigi Einaudi. According to his file, Grigulevich was on good terms with the American ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, and his successor, Claire Boothe Luce, and successfully cultivated the Costa Rican nuncio to the Vatican, Prince Giulio Pacelli, a nephew of Pope Pius XII. Grigulevich had a total of fifteen audiences with the Pope. He also made friends with one of Italy’s leading post-war politicians, the Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi (Prime Minister, 1945-53), who gave him a camera inscribed “In token of our friendship.”⁸

Grigulevich’s astonishing transformation from Soviet saboteur and assassin into a popular and successful Latin American diplomat, combined with the initial success of “Willie” Fisher’s illegal residency in providing “supersecret” nuclear intelligence from the United States,⁹ seemed to vindicate the Centre’s early Cold War strategy of attempting to recreate the age of the Great Illegals. The role of the post-war illegals was considered to be potentially even more important than that of their illustrious predecessors. If the Cold War turned into hot war, as the Centre thought quite possible, Soviet embassies and the legal residencies they contained would have to be withdrawn from NATO countries, leaving the illegals to run wartime intelligence operations.

DESPITE THE EARLY Cold War success of Grigulevich and Fisher, the mood in the Centre at the beginning of the 1950s was anything but triumphalist. As a result of the identification of Soviet spies in the VENONA decrypts, following the earlier revelations by Bentley, Chambers and Gouzenko, the Centre had to set about rebuilding almost its entire American agent network while operating under far closer FBI surveillance than ever before.¹⁰ It could no longer count on significant help from the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which during the Second World War had assisted Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration, the intelligence community and the MANHATTAN project.¹¹ In 1949 Gene Dennis, the CPUSA general secretary, and ten other party leaders were tried on charges of advocating the forcible overthrow of the federal government. Dennis and nine of the defendants were sentenced to five years in jail, the eleventh was jailed for three years, and all the defense attorneys were found in contempt of court. After the Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1951, more than a hundred other leading Communists were convicted on similar charges. For most of the decade the Party was forced into a largely underground existence.¹²

The Centre was also greatly exercised by the unprecedented publicity given to Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. On January 24, 1950 Klaus Fuchs began confessing his wartime espionage at Los Alamos to his British interrogators. The next day, in New York, Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for perjury in denying espionage charges before a Grand Jury. On February 2 Fuchs was formally charged in London, and the menace of Soviet atomic espionage burst on to the front pages of the American press. A week later the previously little-known Wisconsin senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, falsely claimed to have the names of 205 State Department Communists who were “shaping” American foreign policy. Despite his outrageous inventions and exaggerations, McCarthy rapidly won a mass following. He did so because he succeeded in striking a popular chord. To many Americans the idea of an “enemy within,” given plausibility by the convictions of Hiss and Fuchs (followed a year later by those of the Rosenbergs), helped to explain why the United States, despite its immense power, seemed unable to prevent the onward march of world Communism and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nuclear superpower. As late as January 1954 opinion polls found 50 percent of Americans with a favorable opinion of McCarthy and only 29 percent opposed to him.

President Truman’s claim in 1951 that “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy” was, in the long run, to be proved right. McCarthy ultimately did more for the Soviet cause than any agent of influence the KGB ever had. His preposterous self-serving crusade against the “Red Menace” made liberal opinion around the world skeptical of the reality of Moscow’s secret intelligence offensive against the Main Adversary. Even Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed one after the other in the same electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing Prison in 1953, were widely believed to have been framed. It took some years, however, for the Centre to grasp the enormous propaganda advantages of McCarthyism. At the time the Centre was chiefly concerned by the increased difficulties created by “spy mania” in the United States for its attempts to recruit and run new American agents.

McCarthyism reinforced the Centre’s belief in the importance of expanding its illegal presence on the territory of the Main Adversary. While legal residencies based in official Soviet missions were inevitably subject to increasingly sophisticated FBI surveillance, illegal residencies could operate freely so long as they remained unidentified. Since his arrival in the United States in 1947 “Willie” Fisher (MARK) had attracted no suspicion whatsoever—despite the fact that his agent, Theodore Hall, was interrogated by the FBI in 1951 after his identity was disclosed by the VENONA decrypts.¹³ The Centre also took seriously the possibility that illegal residencies might have to take over all intelligence operations if war or other crises led to the expulsion of Soviet missions and legal residencies. The preparations for a major expansion of the illegal residencies were enormously detailed. In 1954 the Illegals Directorate drew up plans for a network of 130 “documentation agents” whose sole responsibility was to obtain birth certificates, passports and other documents to support the illegals’ legends.¹⁴ Operations officers specializing in illegal documentation were posted in twenty-two Western and Third World residencies, as well as in China and all Soviet Bloc KGB liaison missions.¹⁵

There were, however, more serious obstacles than the Centre was willing to acknowledge than the expansion of its illegal networks. The age of the Great Illegals—brilliant cosmopolitans such as Deutsch and Maly, able to inspire others with their own visionary faith in the future of the Soviet system—had gone, never to return. Turning Soviet citizens brought up in the authoritarian, intellectually blinkered command economy of Stalin’s Russia into people who could pass as Westerners and cope successfully with life in the United States was to prove a daunting, as well as time-consuming, business. Recruiting high-flying ideologically committed American agents was also vastly more difficult during the Cold War than during the 1930s or the Second World War. The Soviet Union had lost much of its appeal even to young radical intellectuals alienated by the materialism and injustices of American society. It was deeply ironic that when McCarthy’s self-serving campaign against the Red Menace was at its height, Soviet penetration of the American government was at its lowest ebb for almost thirty years.

The Centre was further hampered by its own cumbersome bureaucracy, complicated during the final years of the Stalinist era by the rise and fall of the Committee of Information (KI) as the overseer of Soviet foreign intelligence.¹⁶ In the course of the Cold War, the organization of the Illegals Directorate changed eight times, and the role assigned to it was modified on fourteen different occasions.¹⁷ Aleksandr Korotkov, the head of the directorate during the first decade of the Cold War, had no experience of life in the West and little understanding of the problems faced by illegals in the United States. Few of his grandiose plans for illegal operations against the Main Adversary were ever realized.

Throughout the 1950s, the Centre struggled to establish even one more illegal residency in the United States to add to that of Fisher. The first attempt to found a second residency collapsed in ignominious failure, the recall in 1951 of Makayev (HARRY), the intended resident, and the disappearance of 9,000 dollars of KI funds. The next attempt was more cautious. Using a strategy which it was later to repeat, the Centre decided to send a potential illegal resident to Canada, wait until he was well established, and only then move him on to the more difficult terrain of the Main Adversary. The first Soviet illegal to use Canada as a staging post for the United States was the 30-year-old Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik (codenamed HART), who landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 1951 with instructions to take up residence in Montreal.

Brik had the great advantage of a bilingual education. From 1932 to 1937 he had been a pupil at the Anglo-American School in Moscow,¹⁸ subsequently spending several years in New York, where his father worked for Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission in the United States,¹⁹ before returning to serve in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. In 1948 Brik was instructed to cultivate Western pupils at his old school in order to test his suitability for intelligence work in North America. Having succeeded in that exercise to the Centre’s satisfaction, he began a two-year training course in 1949, covering ciphers, secret writing, use of short-wave radio, selection and use of dead letter-boxes, anti-surveillance precautions and methods of intelligence collection. Brik was also taught the trade of a watchmaker in order to enable him to start a small business in Canada. ²⁰

For his journey to Canada, Brik adopted the identity of a Canadian “live double,” Ivan Vasilyevich Gladysh (codenamed FRED), recruited in July 1951 specifically to provide cover for him. On instructions from the Centre, Gladysh crossed the Atlantic to Britain, then traveled through France and West Germany to Vienna, where he met Brik. In Vienna Gladysh briefed Brik on the details of his life in Canada and his journey to Europe, then gave him his Canadian passport. Brik pasted his own photograph in the passport in place of Gladysh’s and set off across the Atlantic.²¹ After landing at Halifax, Brik took a train to Montreal and went to the station lavatories. On one of the cubicle doors he saw the chalk mark he had been told to expect. He went inside, removed the top of the cistern and found taped to the underside the birth certificate and other documents belonging to another “live double,” David Semyonovich Soboloff.²² Soboloff (codenamed SOKOL) had been born in Toronto in 1919 but at the age of sixteen had emigrated with his family to the Soviet Union. In 1951 he was working as a teacher at the Magnitogorsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute. For the remainder of his time in Canada Brik became David Soboloff. In July he obtained a passport in his name.²³

Brik succeeded in persuading the Centre that there was no realistic possibility of establishing himself as a watchmaker in Montreal, and that he should open a oneman photographic studio instead. While in Montreal, he was instructed to begin making plans for emigration to the United States.²⁴ Brik, however, proved an even more disastrous choice than Makayev as the potential head of an illegal American residency. Without telling the Centre, in October 1953 he began a passionate affair with the wife of a Canadian soldier living in Kingston, Ontario.²⁵ In order not to break contact with her, Brik persuaded the Centre that it would be premature for him to move to the United States. Before long he admitted to his lover that he was a Russian spy living under a false identity and tried to persuade her to leave her husband. She refused but begged him to go to the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and make a voluntary confession.²⁶

In November 1953 Brik gave in to his lover’s pleas and telephoned the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. Terry Guernsey, the head of the diminutive B (Counter-intelligence) Branch of the RCMP Security Service, decided to run Brik (codenamed GIDEON by B Branch) as a double agent in order to uncover as much as possible about Soviet intelligence operations in Canada. GIDEON proved unusually difficult to run, particularly when his lover broke off their affair, and his drinking ran periodically out of control. On one occasion, after consuming more than a bottle of Old Tom gin, he rang the Montreal Gazette and, to the horror of the RCMP officer monitoring his telephone calls, said in a drunken slur, “I’m a Russian spy. Do you want a story?” Like the Ottawa Journal which had turned away Gouzenko in September 1945, the Gazette failed to realize it was being offered the spy story exclusive of the decade and dismissed the caller as a drunk.²⁷

Until the summer of 1955 it did not occur to the KGB that the illegal HART (Brik) might now be a double agent. Once it was satisfied that he had successfully established his bogus identity and cover profession in Montreal, the Centre proceeded to the next stage in his development as an illegal resident whose main role would be as an agent controller. Between 1951 and 1953 the Ottawa legal residency, spurred on by Moscow’s criticism of its inertia since the defection of Gouzenko, recruited eleven agents (all apparently fairly low-level) with the assistance of the Canadian Communist Party. Five were Communists and most supplied scientific and technological intelligence.²⁸ By transferring some of the agents to an illegal controller, the Centre hoped to overcome the problems created by the RCMP security service’s surveillance of the Ottawa embassy.

By the time the KGB realized that Brik was under RCMP control, it had put him in touch with five agents. Three were male: LISTER, a Toronto Communist of Ukrainian origin born in 1919; LIND, an Irish-Canadian Communist employee of the A. V. Roe aircraft company, also resident in Toronto; and POMOSHCHNIK, the Communist owner of a radio and television sales and service business in Ottawa.²⁹ The intelligence supplied by LIND included plans for the CF-105 Avro Arrow, then among the most advanced jet fighter aircraft in the world.³⁰ Brik also knew the identities of EMMA and MARA, two female agents used as “live letterboxes” (LLBs) for communications with the Centre. EMMA, who had been recruited while studying at the Sorbonne in 1951, took the Canadian External Affairs Ministry entrance examination, but was unsuccessful. In 1954 she opened an arts and crafts shop in Quebec. MARA was a French fashion designer, born in 1939, the co-owner of a furniture shop in Paris who was used as an LLB for KGB communications from Canada.³¹

The Centre later concluded that Brik had betrayed all five of the agents with whom he had been put in contact. He was unaware, however, of the identity of Hugh Hambleton, ultimately the most important of the agents recruited by the Ottawa legal residency in the early 1950s. Hambleton had been born in Ottawa in 1922 and had spent some of his childhood in France, where his father was a Canadian press correspondent. During the Second World War he served as an intelligence officer with the Free French in Algiers and, after the Liberation, in Paris, before becoming French liaison officer with the US army’s 103rd Division in Europe. In 1945 he transferred to the Canadian army and spent a year based in Strasbourg analyzing intelligence on occupied Germany, and interrogating prisoners-of-war. Unsurprisingly, the post-war years seemed dull by comparison. “To be important, to have people pay attention to you,” he once said, “that is what counts in life.”³² The KGB gave him the recognition which he craved.

Hambleton’s KGB file reveals for the first time that he emerged from the war as a committed Communist and was talent-spotted by the Centre’s “Canadian friends.” Harry Baker, one of the Canadian Communist leaders, picked him out at Party meetings and later vouched for his ideological reliability. Another Party member, codenamed SVYASHCHENIK (“Priest”), carried out background checks on him. In 1952 Hambleton was recruited as a Soviet agent by the Ottawa resident, Vladimir Trofimovich Burdin, and given the codename RIMEN (later changed to RADOV). Two years later Hambleton moved to Paris where he began postgraduate research in economics at the Sorbonne. In 1956 he gained a job in the economics directorate of NATO, whose headquarters were then on the outskirts of Paris. Over the next five years Hambleton handed over what his KGB file describes as “a huge quantity of documents,” most of which were assessed by the Centre as “valuable or extremely valuable in content.”³³ Though Brik was unaware of his existence, Hambleton was eventually betrayed twenty years later by another Soviet illegal.³⁴

Early in 1955, probably as part of its preparations to transfer Brik to the United States, the Centre made plans to move another illegal resident, codenamed ZHANGO, to Canada. ZHANGO was a 49-year-old Russian, Mikhail Ivanovich Filonenko, who had been given the genuine birth certificate, and had assumed the identity, of Joseph Ivanovich Kulda. Born on July 7, 1914 in Alliance, Ohio, Kulda had emigrated to Czechoslovakia with his parents in 1922. Filonenko’s wife, Anna Fyodorovna (codenamed successively MARTA and YELENA), took the identity of Mariya Navotnaya, a Czech born on October 10, 1920 in Manchuria. Anna was Czech on her father’s side; before marrying Filonenko she had spent two years in Czechoslovakia perfecting her grasp of the language and improving her legend. Posing as Czechoslovak refugees, the Filonenkos were initially unsuccessful in their applications for Canadian visas, but with the help of the UN Refugees Commission (later the UNHCR) gained entry to Brazil in 1954.³⁵ In 1955 the Centre made plans to move Filonenko on to join Brik in Canada, where he was to have the new codename HECTOR. Brik duly informed the RCMP of HECTOR’s planned arrival.³⁶

The KGB was saved in the nick of time from a major intelligence disaster, which, it believed, would have included the arrest and show trial of Filonenko, by a walk-in to the Ottawa residency. On July 21, 1955 a heavily indebted 39-year-old RCMP corporal, James Morrison, who for some years had taken part in surveillance of the Ottawa embassy, got in touch with Burdin’s successor as resident, Nikolai Pavlovich Ostrovsky (codenamed GOLUBEV), and reported that Brik had been “turned” eighteen months earlier. He was acting, he claimed, out of sympathy for the USSR and a desire to prevent a repetition of the Gouzenko affair which had done so much damage to Soviet-Canadian relations ten years earlier. Morrison’s request for 5,000 dollars, however, provides a better indication of his motives.³⁷ Unknown to Ostrovsky, he had already been caught embezzling RCMP funds with which he hoped to pay off the debts caused by his taste for high living. Remarkably, instead of being sacked, Morrison was allowed to refund the money he had stolen. Ironically, he was to use money from the KGB to repay the RCMP.³⁸

The Centre initially suspected that the intelligence from Morrison (later code-named FRIEND) was an elaborate “provocation” by the RCMP, but decided to interrogate Brik in Moscow. Fortunately for the KGB, it had already been decided in June that Brik would travel to the Soviet Union for a holiday and reunite with his wife later in the summer.³⁹ Though understandably nervous at the thought of returning to Moscow, he appears to have been confident of his ability to continue to outwit the KGB.⁴⁰ Before leaving Canada, Brik was briefed by Charles Sweeny of the RCMP and Leslie Mitchell, the SIS liaison officer in Washington, and asked to find out what he could about the fate of Burgess and Maclean, as well as to identify as many KGB officers as possible during his visit. They told him that if he needed assistance in Moscow it would be provided by the British SIS, since Canada had no foreign intelligence service. He was given details of one rendezvous point with an SIS officer, the location of two dead letter-boxes and signal sites to indicate when a DLB had been filled. If it became necessary to arrange an escape, SIS would leave in a DLB a short-wave radio, money, a pistol with silencer, false Soviet passports for himself and his wife, the internal travel documents needed to go to the town of Pechenga near the Soviet-Norwegian border and a map showing where to cross the frontier.⁴¹

The Centre took great care not to arouse Brik’s suspicions before his departure. His first stop, arranged in June, was in Brazil, where he was due to meet Filonenko (HECTOR) on August 7. Filonenko was warned not to attend the meeting, but the prearranged rendezvous was kept under KGB observation. When Brik arrived on August 7, the KGB watchers reported that he had two companions, thus providing strong circumstantial evidence that he was now a double agent. Apparently undeterred by Filonenko’s failure to meet him, Brik continued to Moscow via Paris and Helsinki. The residents in both capitals were ordered to give him a friendly welcome and discuss with him the travel arrangements for his return to Canada. A KGB strong-arm man was, however, sent to Finland in case Brik had any last-minute doubts about going to Moscow. If necessary, a Soviet agent in the Finnish police agreed to arrange for his expulsion to the Soviet Union.⁴²

On August 19, 1955 Brik arrived at Moscow airport and was immediately arrested. He at first denied that he was a double agent, but his file records that he subsequently broke under “pressure” and “told all.”⁴³ His confession confirmed everything reported to the Ottawa residency by James Morrison (FRIEND), who was then paid the 5,000 dollars he had asked for. Morrison volunteered for further payment what the Centre considered “valuable” information about the organization, personnel and operations of the RCMP and, in particular, its security service.⁴⁴

On September 4, 1956, at a closed session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, Brik was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The fact that he escaped the death penalty was presumably due to his cooperation in what his file describes as “an operational game.” Brik was not allowed to meet any member of the SIS station in the Moscow embassy, probably for fear that he would blurt out what had happened to him, but instructed to arrange a rendezvous which he did not keep. By keeping the rendezvous site under surveillance, the KGB was able to identify Daphne (later Baroness) Park, the member of the British embassy who turned up there, as an SIS officer. During the “operational game” Brik was allowed to live at home with his family in order to try to give SIS the impression that he was still at liberty. The KGB discovered, probably by bugging his apartment, that he tried unsuccessfully to persuade his wife to flee abroad.⁴⁵

Morrison continued for three years to work as a Soviet agent. Including the 5,000 dollars he received for betraying Brik, he was paid a total of 14,000 dollars by the KGB. The Centre, however, became increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the information he supplied. In September 1955 Morrison was posted to Winnipeg as part of a unit investigating drug smuggling from the United States, and lost much of his previous access to RCMP intelligence. His last meeting with a Soviet controller took place on December 7, 1957. Morrison asked for help in paying off a debt of 4,800 dollars. The deputy resident in Ottawa, Rem Sergeevich Krasilnikov (ARTUR), however, paid him only 150 dollars and told him that he would need to arrange a transfer to Ottawa and get better access to RCMP intelligence if he wished to earn more money. Morrison failed to turn up to his next pre-arranged meeting with Krasilnikov and broke off further contact with the KGB. In 1958 the Ottawa residency discovered from press reports that Morrison had been dismissed from the RCMP and given a two-year suspended sentence for fraud.⁴⁶

Though Morrison’s warning in 1955 had helped to contain the damage done to KGB operations by Brik’s twenty-one months as a double agent, that damage was none the less considerable. The Centre was forced to abandon its plan for a second illegal residency in the United States based on Brik and Filonenko. In addition to betraying five KGB agents, Brik had also identified to the RCMP a number of KGB officers in the Ottawa legal residency, all of whom were withdrawn from Canada.⁴⁷

ANOTHER PLAN BY the Centre to establish a further illegal residency in the United States also collapsed in the mid-1950s. The intended illegal resident was Vladimir Vasilyevich Grinchenko (codenamed RON and KLOD), who had taken the identity of Jan Bechko, the son of a Slovak father and a Ukrainian mother. Since 1948 Grinchenko and his wife, Simona Isaakovna Krimker (codenamed MIRA), had been based in Buenos Aires, where in 1951 they had gained Argentinian citizenship. In 1954 the Centre planned to transfer them to the United States. At the last moment, however, it was discovered that the FBI had obtained Grinchenko’s fingerprints while he was working as an agent on a Soviet ship visiting North America. Grinchenko was hurriedly redeployed to France, where, a few months later, his career as an illegal was ended by what his file describes as “a gross breach of security.” In August 1955 his Argentinian passport, French residence permit, student card and expense account were all stolen from his hotel room in Paris. So was the photograph of, and a letter in Russian from, another KGB illegal codenamed BORIS. Both Grinchenko and BORIS were hurriedly recalled to Moscow.⁴⁸

Though the Centre did not yet realize it, its one established American residency was by now also in trouble. Unlike Makayev (HARRY), Brik (HART) and Grinchenko (KLOD), “Willie” Fisher (MARK), the illegal resident in New York, was a paragon of both self-discipline and ideological dedication.⁴⁹ His chief assistant, Reino Hayhanen, however, was to prove even less reliable than Brik.

Hayhanen had taken the identity of a “live double,” Eugene Nikolai Maki, who had been born in the United States in 1919 to a Finnish-American father and a New York mother, and at the age of eight had emigrated with his parents to the Finnish-speaking Soviet Republic of Karelia. In 1938 Maki had been arrested on suspicion of espionage but had been released, given the codename DAVID and employed by the Interior Ministry to inform on the families of other Karelian victims of the Terror. In 1949 Maki surrendered his birth certificate to Hayhanen, who spent most of the next three years in Finland taking over Maki’s identity with the help of a Finnish Communist, Olavi Åhman, who had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1939.⁵⁰

On October 20, 1952 Hayhanen, now codenamed VIK, arrived in New York on board the Queen Mary, and spent most of the next two years establishing his new identity, collecting his salary from dead letter-boxes in the Bronx and Manhattan and periodically drawing attention to himself by heavy drinking and violent quarrels with his Finnish wife Hannah.⁵¹ The Centre, doubtless unaware of Hayhanen’s disorderly behavior, sent him congratulations on his “safe arrival” in a microfilm message hidden inside a hollowed-out nickel. Like Makayev a year or so earlier, Hayhanen mislaid the nickel, which in the summer of 1953 was used, possibly by Hayhanen himself, to buy a newspaper from a Brooklyn newsboy. The newsboy accidentally dropped the nickel in a stairway and was amazed to see it break in two and a minute microfilm drop out. He handed both the coin and the microfilm to the New York police, who passed them on to the FBI. Though it was some years before the number groups in the microfilm message could be decrypted, the fact that they had been typed on a Cyrillic typewriter helped to alert the Bureau to the presence in New York of a Soviet illegal.⁵² It is highly unlikely that VIK informed the Centre that the coin and microfilm were missing.

In the summer of 1954 Hayhanen at last began work as Fisher’s assistant. One of his first tasks was to deliver a report from a Soviet agent in the United Nations secretariat in New York, a French economist codenamed ORIZO, to a dead letter-box for collection by the New York legal residency. ORIZO’s report probably concerned two American nuclear physicists whom he had been instructed to cultivate.⁵³ The report, however, never arrived.⁵⁴ Doubtless alarmed at this breach of security, ORIZO asked to stop working for the KGB, but was ultimately persuaded to carry on.⁵⁵

Though disturbed by the weakness of Hayhanen’s tradecraft, Fisher failed to grasp that he was an alcoholic fraudster who posed a serious threat to the future of his residency. During a visit to Bear Mountain Park in the spring of 1955, Fisher and Hayhanen buried 5,000 dollars which Hayhanen was later supposed to deliver to the wife of Morton Sobell, a convicted Soviet spy and member of the Rosenberg spy ring, who had been sentenced to thirty years in jail. Hayhanen later reported, “I located Helen Sobell and gave her the money and told her to spend it carefully.” In fact, he kept the 5,000 dollars for himself.⁵⁶

Early in 1956 the police were called to the home of the “Makis” home at Peekskill in Hudson Valley, where they found both Hayhanen and his wife drunk; Hayhanen had a deep knife wound in his leg, which he claimed was the result of an accident. Later that year he was found guilty of drunken driving and had his license suspended. In January 1957 Hayhanen was due to return to Moscow on leave. Initially, he could not bring himself to go, fabricating a series of stories to justify his delay. He first told Fisher that he was being tailed by three men, then claimed that the FBI had taken him off the Queen Mary, on which he had booked a passage.The unsuspecting Fisher told Hayhanen to leave the country as soon as possible to escape FBI surveillance and gave him 200 dollars for his travel expenses. On April 24 Hayhanen set sail aboard La Liberté for France. Arriving in Paris on May Day, he made contact with the KGB residency and was given another 200 dollars to complete his journey to Moscow. Four days later, instead of returning to Russia, he entered the American embassy in Paris, announced that he was a KGB officer and began to tell his story.⁵⁷

Though the KGB did not discover the defection until August, it warned Fisher, probably in late May or early June, that Hayhanen had failed to arrive in Moscow, and instructed him as a precaution to leave the United States, using a new set of identity documents. Fisher disobeyed his orders and stayed.⁵⁸ He was arrested early on the morning of June 21 while staying in a New York hotel on East 28th Street and flown to the Alien Detention Facility in McAllen, Texas, for questioning.⁵⁹ After a few days spent stonewalling his questioners Fisher finally admitted that he was a Russian who had been living under false identities in the United States, and gave as his real name that of a deceased friend and KGB colleague, Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. The Centre, Fisher knew, would realize what had happened as soon as it saw the name Abel on the front pages of the American newspapers.⁶⁰

FISHER’S ARREST MARKED a major strategic defeat for KGB operations against the Main Adversary. The Centre’s early Cold War strategy in the United States had been based on the creation of an illegal network which would run major agents such as Hall and Philby, and eventually penetrate the administration to approximately the level achieved during the Great Patriotic War. Fisher’s failure, however, appears to have left the KGB without a single illegal residency in the United States. Instead of adopting a more realistic strategy with far more limited aims, the Centre persisted with its plan to revive the era of the Great Illegals and blamed its initial failure on a series of operational errors.

The Centre’s investigations of the cases of Makayev (HARRY), Brik (HART) and Hayhanen (VIK) all revealed flaws in the selection of the first generation of Cold War illegals. Hayhanen’s file in the KGB archives contains many warning signs which should have been evident well before he was despatched to the United States in 1952. In both the Soviet Union and Finland he had a record for getting into debt and borrowing money, as well as for unusually complicated sexual liaisons. Though already married in the Soviet Union, Hayhanen entered into a bigamous marriage in Finland—without informing the Centre beforehand—with Hannah Kurikka, with whom he later lived in the United States. The report on Hayhanen prepared for the leadership of the KI in 1949, however, glossed over his character weaknesses and insisted that his operational failings would be rectified during training. Mitrokhin noted after reading Hayhanen’s file in the KGB archives:

Hayhanen’s Russian wife was informed of his defection, divorced him and went back to her maiden name, Moiseyeva. In 1957 the chairman of the KGB received a letter from a woman named M. M. Gridina asking for news of Hayhanen, who, she said, was the father of her 12-year-old son. The KGB was less frank with Gridina than with Moiseyeva. She was told that the KGB had never employed Hayhanen and did not know his whereabouts, but had heard rumors that he had committed a serious crime against the Soviet state and was wanted by the police. Gridina replied that she would tell her son that his father had been killed fighting the Germans during the Great Patriotic War.⁶² In fact, Hayhanen died in the United States in 1961. At the time it was alleged that he had been killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike; in reality he seems to have died from cirrhosis of the liver.⁶³

On November 15, 1957 the 55-year-old “Rudolf Abel” was sentenced to thirty years in jail. His American lawyer, James Donovan, was struck by “Abel’s” “uncanny calm” as he listened to what was, in effect, a life sentence: “This cool professional’s self-control was just too much for me.”⁶⁴ “Abel’s” wife, Ilya, who had last seen her husband when he returned on leave to Moscow in the summer of 1955, made less attempt to disguise her feelings. She wrote bitterly to the Centre that it was not simply a question of waiting for twenty-five or thirty years but “I do not know if my husband will ever return.” For the past seven years she had worked as a harpist in a circus orchestra; however, when she criticized the KGB after her husband was jailed, she was made redundant on the pretext that the orchestra no longer needed a harpist. The Centre rejected Ilya “Abel’s” pleas for help in finding another job, but granted her a pension of 51 roubles a month.⁶⁵

At Atlanta Penitentiary, in Georgia, where “Rudolf Abel” had been sent to serve his sentence, he became friends with two other convicted Soviet spies. He played chess with Morton Sobell, whose wife had failed to receive the 5,000 dollars embezzled by Hayhanen.⁶⁶ “Abel” also received a number of small favors from Kurt Ponger, an Austrian-born American in the penitentiary’s dental section who had been sentenced in 1953 to a term of five to fifteen years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit espionage while serving in the US army in Austria. Ponger’s file in the KGB archives reveals that he had been a Soviet agent since 1936, but that after his arrest the Centre had wrongly concluded that he was a double agent whose arrest had been deliberately staged by the Americans in order to discredit the Soviet Union in Austrian public opinion. “Abel” had no doubt that Ponger was a genuine Soviet agent and later tried to persuade the KGB to give Ponger financial assistance after he was freed in September 1962.⁶⁷

“Abel” served only just over four years of his sentence. On February 10, 1962 he was exchanged on the Glienicker Bridge, which linked West Berlin with Potsdam, for the shot-down American U-2 pilot Gary Powers.⁶⁸ The exchange was treated by the KGB as a major operation, codenamed LYUTENTSIA, coordinated by Vladimir Trofimovich Burdin, the former resident in Ottawa. An undercover KGB group was stationed in West Berlin to watch for signs of American military activity in the area of the bridge. On the bridge itself, hidden in the offices of the East German Customs Service, was a KGB armed operational group. Close at hand, but also out of view from the Western side of the bridge, was another armed group which had accompanied Powers from Potsdam for the exchange. At the Soviet checkpoint, a specially trained officer from the 105th Regiment was put in command of a detail of submachine gunners. The East Germans provided a reserve unit of twenty men armed with submachine guns and grenades.⁶⁹

The Centre congratulated itself on the fact that its absurdly large, concealed military presence had gone almost unobserved.⁷⁰ “Abel’s” lawyer was more impressed by the fact that the American guard who accompanied his client on to the bridge was “one of the largest men I have ever seen. He must have been six feet seven inches tall and weighed perhaps three hundred pounds.”⁷¹ After the exchange of “Abel” for Powers, the Glienicker Bridge became famous during the Cold War as the “Bridge of Spies.” The KGB file on operation LYUTENTSIA records that its total nonmilitary cost (food, train tickets, hotel bills, various items for “Abel” and his wife and daughter, and a celebration dinner) came to 5,388 marks 90 pfennigs. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, did not share the Centre’s satisfaction at the success of the operation. He complained to the Soviet ambassador, Pervukhin, on February 15 that his government had not been adequately informed and that the failure to include East German police among Powers’s escort showed lack of respect for the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic. Ulbricht followed his verbal protest with a diplomatic note citing other Soviet slights.⁷²

In the United States, “Abel’s” paintings and prints became collectors’ items. The Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy, asked the Soviet embassy to find out whether “Abel” would be willing to give the US government a portrait of his brother, President Kennedy, which he had painted in Atlanta Penitentiary, and allow it to be hung in the White House. The Centre suspected a plot. The proposal to display “Abel’s” portrait in the White House was, it believed, a provocation, though it was not certain what exactly it was intended to provoke. Robert Kennedy’s request was turned down.⁷³

“Abel” received an unpublicized hero’s welcome on his return to Moscow, being received in turn by Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny, chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakharovsky, head of the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate, and General Pyotr Ivashutin, head of the GRU.⁷⁴ At Semichastny’s prompting, “Abel” wrote to Khrushchev to thank him personally for the supposed part he had taken in securing his release: “…I am especially touched by the fact that, amidst the great variety of your Party and governmental concerns, you found the time to think about me as well.”

Though it suited the Centre, for the sake of its own reputation in the Party hierarchy, to portray “Abel’s” mission to the United States as an operational triumph by a dedicated Chekist, brought to a premature conclusion only by an act of treachery for which he bore no responsibility, it was well aware that in reality he had achieved nothing of real significance. He had been arrested in 1957 only because he had disobeyed instructions to leave the country after Hayhanen had failed to return to Moscow.⁷⁵

The Centre took advantage of the fact that “Abel” was portrayed in the American media as a master spy of heroic stature. That impression was strengthened by the sympathetic portrayal of him in Strangers on a Bridge, an account by his lawyer of his trial, imprisonment and exchange for Powers published in 1964. Donovan made clear that he “admired Rudolf as an individual,” and quoted Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961, as telling him, “I wish we had three or four just like him in Moscow right now…” He ended his book by printing a letter “Abel” had sent him from Moscow, enclosing two rare, sixteenth-century, vellum-bound Latin editions of Commentaries on the Justinian Code. “Please accept them,” “Abel” wrote, “as a mark of my gratitude for all that you have done for me.”⁷⁶

All this was music to the Centre’s ears.⁷⁷ The myth of the master spy Rudolf Abel replaced the pedestrian reality of Fisher’s illegal residency. The inconvenient lack of heroic exploits to celebrate was glossed over by the assurance that, though there were many of them, they remained too secret to celebrate in public.⁷⁸ The real “Willie” Fisher, however, became increasingly disillusioned. After his return to Moscow, he was given a chair in a corner of the FCD Illegals Directorate but was denied even a desk of his own. When a friend asked him what he did, he replied disconsolately, “I’m a museum exhibit.”⁷⁹