The Sword and the Shield

The KGB’s chief successes against the Main Adversary during the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61) and John F. Kennedy (1961-3) derived not from its grand strategy for new illegal residencies, which collapsed for several years after FISHER’s arrest, but from a series of walk-ins. The most important was probably a CIA “principal agent” in West Berlin and Germany, Alexsandr (“Sasha”) Grigoryevich Kopatzky, alias “Koischwitz” (successively codenamed ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD), who had offered himself for recruitment by Soviet intelligence in 1949.¹ Trained by the KGB in secret writing and microphotography, he was paid a total of 40,000 West German and 2,117 East German marks during the 1950s, as well as being rewarded for his success with several gold watches.²

Kopatzky was employed at one of the focal points of American intelligence operations. The CIA’s West Berlin station was situated only a few miles from the greatest concentration of Soviet forces anywhere in the world. One of Kopatzky’s chief tasks was to find East German women willing to have sex with Soviet soldiers and act as CIA agents. By taking an active part in the station’s attempt to recruit Soviet personnel and encourage defections, he was able to find numerous opportunities to sabotage its operations. Among the wealth of intelligence which Kopatzky provided were the identities of more than a hundred American intelligence officers and agents in East Germany; some were arrested while others were turned into double agents. He also assisted a number of KGB operations to “dangle” bogus agents intended to deceive the CIA station. In 1952 he helped to organize the bogus defection of Soviet agent VIKTOR, who was later employed by the Voice of America radio station and supplied what Kopatzky’s file terms “valuable information.”³

After Kopatzky was briefly imprisoned for drunken driving in 1954, his name was changed by the CIA to “Igor Orlov,” so that his criminal record would not appear on his application for US citizenship.⁴ In 1957, with his cover as a CIA (but not Soviet) agent largely blown in Berlin, Orlov was taken to Washington with his family and given further operational training by the Agency. He then returned to Europe to take part in various CIA operations in Germany and Austria.⁵ In 1960 the CIA at last began to suspect that “Orlov” was working for the KGB. A later damage assessment at the Centre concluded that the extraordinary number of KGB officers who had been in direct contact with him—over twenty during the last decade—might have helped to place him under suspicion.⁶ In order to prevent Orlov defecting before the case against him had been established, the CIA promised him a new job with the Agency in Washington, sacked him on his arrival in January 1961 and began an intensive investigation.⁷ Orlov made contact with his new Soviet controller, I. P. Sevastyanov, an operations officer at the Washington residency, got a job as a truck driver and heard nothing for several years from either the CIA or the FBI. In 1964 he bought a picture-framing gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, paid for in part, no doubt, by his earnings from the KGB.⁸

By the time he opened his gallery, Orlov may well have felt confident that the case against him could never be proved. His confidence evaporated in the spring of 1965 when the FBI arrived on his doorstep, spent several days searching his home, questioned his wife Eleonore and summoned him to take a polygraph test. Orlov seems to have panicked. Under surveillance and unable to make covert contact with the KGB, he went into the Soviet embassy on 16th Street through a rear door, vainly hoping to enter unobserved.⁹ The Washington residency arranged with him an exfiltration plan which was agreed to by Moscow. Encouraged by “Abel’s” star rating as a master spy and his American lawyer’s affectionate memoir of him, the Centre intended to turn the exfiltration into a publicity stunt. It planned a press conference in Moscow at which Orlov would be presented as a Soviet illegal who had performed heroic deeds behind the German lines on the eastern front during the Second World War and later penetrated the CIA. Orlov would then publish his life story, which would be used as an “active measure” to glamorize the KGB and denigrate its Main Adversary.¹⁰

The plan, however, had to be called off. Orlov’s wife flatly refused to go to Moscow with their two young sons, so he decided to tough it out in Washington.¹¹ Though the FBI kept the “Orlov” file open, they were never able to prove a case against him. Their investigation, like that of the CIA, however, was based on one false assumption. After his defection in December 1961, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn had provided some clues which helped to confirm suspicions about Orlov. Golitsyn correctly said that a Soviet spy whose real surname began with a K had been active in Berlin and West Germany, but wrongly said that his codename, rather than his real name, was SASHA. The CIA and FBI both wrongly concluded that Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Kopatzky, alias “Igor Orlov,” was agent SASHA.¹² Orlov’s KGB file shows that he was at various stages of his career successively ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD, but never SASHA, and that he remained a Soviet agent until a few years before his death in 1982. After a press article in 1978 claimed that Orlov was a Soviet spy, the KGB broke off contact with RICHARD.¹³ In 1992, ten years after Orlov’s death, the Gallery Orlov, run by his widow, was still described by a Washington guide as “a hangout for espionage writers.”¹⁴

West Berlin and West Germany, where Kopatzky (aka Orlov) had first offered his services to the KGB in 1949, were the KGB’s most successful recruiting grounds for disgruntled US military personnel. The most important was probably Robert Lee Johnson, codenamed GEORGE, a disaffected army sergeant and part-time pimp in West Berlin.¹⁵ In 1953 Johnson and his prostitute fiancée, Hedy, crossed into East Berlin and asked for political asylum. The KGB, however, persuaded Johnson to stay in the West, earn a second salary by spying for the Soviet Union and pay off his old scores against the US army. Despite his involvement in prostitution, alcohol abuse and gambling (not to mention espionage), Johnson succeeded in gaining employment as a guard from 1957 to 1959 at missile sites in California and Texas, where he purloined documents, photographs and, on one occasion, a sample of rocket fuel for the KGB.¹⁶

Johnson’s most productive period as a Soviet agent began in 1961 when he was stationed as a guard in the US Armed Forces Courier Centre at Orly Airport, near Paris, one of the main nerve centers in the classified military communications system. Over the next two years he handed over 1,600 pages of top secret documents to his controller. Among them were ciphers and daily key-tables for the Adonis, KW-9 and HW-18 cipher machines; the operational plans of the US armed forces command in Europe; documents on the production of American nuclear weapons; lists and locations of targets in the Soviet Bloc; US intelligence reports on Soviet scientific research, aviation and missile development; and SIGINT evidence on the state of readiness of the East German Air Force. Collectively the documents provided an extraordinary and highly classified insight both into American forces in Europe and into what they knew about the forces of the Warsaw Pact.¹⁷ Johnson was finally arrested in 1964 after a tip-off from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko.¹⁸

IN THE UNITED STATES itself the most remarkable KGB walk-ins during the Eisenhower presidency were two employees of the National Security [SIGINT] Agency, 31-year-old Bernon F. Mitchell and 29-year-old William H. Martin. On September 6, 1960, in Moscow’s House of Journalists, Mitchell and Martin gave perhaps the most embarrassing press conference in the history of the American intelligence community. The greatest embarrassment was the public revelation that NSA had been decrypting the communications of some of the United States’ allies. Among them, said Martin, were “Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic [Egypt and Syria], Indonesia, Uruguay—that’s enough to give a general picture, I guess.”¹⁹

Though the defection of the two NSA employees was a spectacular publicity coup, Mitchell’s KGB file reveals that it fell some way short of the Centre’s expectations.²⁰ Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell had been recruited by NSA in 1957 despite admitting to six years of “sexual experimentations” up to the age of nineteen with dogs and chickens. His gifts as a mathematician were presumably thought more important than his farmyard experiences. During Martin’s positive vetting, acquaintances variously described him as irresponsible and an insufferable egotist but—like his friend Mitchell—a gifted mathematician. Politically naive and socially inadequate, Mitchell and Martin were seduced by the Soviet propaganda image of the USSR as a state committed to the cause of peace whose progressive social system could offer them the personal fulfillment they had failed to find in the United States.²¹

In December 1959, Mitchell flew from Washington to Mexico City, in defiance of NSA regulations, entered the Soviet embassy and asked for political asylum in the USSR, giving ideological reasons as the motive for his action.²² The KGB residency made strenuous attempts to persuade him to stay on inside NSA as a defector-in-place, but without success. Mitchell agreed to a secret meeting with another KGB officer in Washington but maintained his insistence on emigrating to the Soviet Union with Martin. Once there, however, he promised to reveal all he knew about NSA.

On June 25, 1960, at the beginning of three weeks’ summer leave, Mitchell and Martin boarded Eastern Airlines flight 307 at Washington National Airport, bound for New Orleans. There, after a brief stopover, they took another flight for Mexico City, stayed the night at the Hotel Virreyes, then caught a Cubana Airlines plane to Havana.²³ In July they were exfiltrated from Cuba to the Soviet Union. KGB codebreakers were disappointed in the amount of detailed knowledge of NSA cryptanalysis possessed by Mitchell and Martin. Their most important intelligence, in the Centre’s view, was the reassurance they were able to provide on NSA’s lack of success in breaking current high-grade Soviet ciphers.²⁴ However, the KGB similarly remained unable to decrypt high-grade US cipher systems.²⁵

Security was so lax at NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that no attempt was made to track Mitchell and Martin down until eight days after they had been due to return from their three-week vacation. Inside Mitchell’s house NSA security officers found the key to a safe deposit box, which Mitchell had deliberately left for them to find. Inside the box in a nearby bank they found a sealed envelope bearing a request, signed by both Mitchell and Martin, that its contents be made public. The envelope contained a lengthy denunciation of the US government and the evils of capitalism and a bizarre eulogy of life in the Soviet Union, including the claim that its emancipated women were “more desirable as mates.”²⁶

By decision no. 295 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dated August 11, 1960, Mitchell and Martin were given political asylum and monthly allowances of 500 roubles each—about the same as their NSA salaries and well above Soviet salary scales.²⁷ In the autumn Mitchell was given a job in the Institute of Mathematics at Leningrad University; Martin began doctoral research at the same institute. Both defectors quickly put their beliefs about the desirability of Soviet mates to the test. Mitchell married Galina Vladimirovna Yakovleva, a 30-year-old assistant professor in the piano music department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Martin, who changed his name to Sokolovsky, married a Russian woman whom he met on holiday on the Black Sea.²⁸

Within a few years the Centre found both Mitchell and Martin considerably more trouble than they were worth. Predictably, both defectors rapidly became disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union. Martin, whom the Centre regarded as the more impressionable of the two, was gullible enough to believe a tale concocted by the KGB that they had both been sentenced in absentia to twenty years’ hard labor by a closed session of the US Supreme Court. He was eventually shown a bogus copy of the judgment in order to persuade him to put all thought of returning home out of his mind. Mitchell was more skeptical and by the 1970s appeared determined to leave. As chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov gave personal instructions that under no circumstances was either Mitchell or Martin to be allowed to go, for fear of deterring other potential defectors from the West. In a further attempt to deter Martin he was shown an article by Yuri Semyonov in Izvestia claiming that American agents had been found in possession of poison ampoules, and was led to believe that these were intended for Mitchell and himself. Mitchell correctly suspected that the story had been fabricated by the KGB. Galina Mitchell was also anxious to leave, but the KGB put pressure on her mother to persuade Galina to change her mind. After their applications for visas had been rebuffed by Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the United States, the Mitchells told the Soviet authorities on March 29, 1980 that they had given up their attempts to emigrate.²⁹ But there were persistent reports afterwards that Mitchell was still trying to leave.³⁰

FOR MOST OF the Cold War, the Washington and New York legal residencies had little success in providing the intelligence from inside the federal government which had been so plentiful during the Second World War. Their limitations were clearly exposed during the two years before the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The vacuum left by the lack of KGB high-grade political intelligence from the United States was partly filled by dangerous nonsense from elsewhere, some of which reflected the paranoid strain in Soviet analysis. On June 29, 1960 the KGB chairman, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, personally delivered to Khrushchev an alarmist assessment of American policy, based on a misinformed report from an unidentified NATO liaison officer with the CIA:

Khrushchev took the warning seriously. Less than a fortnight later he issued a public warning to the Pentagon “not to forget that, as shown at the latest tests, we have rockets which can land in a pre-set square target 13,000 kilometers away.”³¹

Moscow followed the presidential elections of 1960 with close attention. Khrushchev regarded the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, as a McCarthyite friend of the Pentagon hawks, and was anxious that Kennedy should win. The Washington resident, Aleksandr Semyonovich Feklisov (alias “Fomin”), was ordered to “propose diplomatic or propaganda initiatives, or any other measures, to facilitate Kennedy’s victory.” The residency tried to make contact with Robert Kennedy but was politely rebuffed.³²

Khrushchev’s view of Kennedy changed after the CIA’s abortive and absurdly inept attempt to topple Fidel Castro by landing an American-backed “Cuban brigade” at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban débâcle, Kennedy despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, “How could I have been so stupid?”³³ The young president, Khrushchev concluded, was unable to control the “dark forces” of American capitalism’s military-industrial complex. ³⁴ At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June, Khrushchev belligerently demanded an end to the three-power status of Berlin and a German peace treaty by the end of the year. The two superpowers seemed set on a collision course. Kennedy said afterwards to the journalist James Reston:

On July 29, 1961 Shelepin sent Khrushchev the outline of a new and aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary designed to “create circumstances in different areas of the world which would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the United States and its allies, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin’s proposal.” The first part of the plan was to use national liberation movements around the world to secure an advantage in the East-West struggle and to “activate by the means available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments.” At the top of the list for demolition Shelepin placed “reactionary” regimes in the Main Adversary’s own backyard in Central America, beginning in Nicaragua where he proposed coordinating a “revolutionary front” in collaboration with the Cubans and the Sandinistas. Shelepin also proposed destabilizing NATO bases in western Europe and a disinformation campaign designed to demoralize the West by persuading it of the growing superiority of Soviet forces. On August 1, with only minor amendments, Shelepin’s masterplan was approved as a Central Committee directive.³⁶ Elements of it, especially the use of national liberation movements in the struggle with the Main Adversary, continued to reappear in Soviet strategy for the next quarter of a century.

During the Kennedy administration, however, the role of the KGB in Washington was less important than that of the GRU. In May 1961 GRU Colonel Georgi Bolshakov, operating under cover as head of the Washington bureau of the Tass news agency, began fortnightly meetings with the Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy. Bolshakov succeeded in persuading Robert Kennedy that, between them, they could short-circuit the ponderous protocol of official diplomacy, “speak straightly and frankly without resorting to the politickers’ stock-in-trade propaganda stunts” and set up a direct channel of communication between President Kennedy and First Secretary Khrushchev. Forgetting that he was dealing with an experienced intelligence professional who had been instructed to cultivate him, the President’s brother became convinced that “an authentic friendship grew” between him and Bolshakov:

Despite Bolshakov’s success, GRU intelligence assessment of American policy was abysmal. In March 1962 it produced two dangerously misinformed reports which served to reinforce the KGB’s earlier warning that the Pentagon was planning a nuclear first strike. The GRU claimed that in the previous June the United States had made the decision to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in September 1961, but had been deterred at the last moment by Soviet nuclear tests which showed that the USSR’s nuclear arsenal was more powerful than the Pentagon had realized. The woefully inaccurate Soviet intelligence reports of Washington’s plans for thermonuclear warfare coincided with a series of real but farcically inept American attempts to topple or assassinate Moscow’s Cuban ally, Fidel Castro—actions ideally calculated to exacerbate the paranoid strain in Soviet foreign policy.

In March 1962 Castro urged the KGB to set up an operations base in Havana to export revolution across Latin America.³⁸ Then, in May, Khrushchev decided to construct nuclear missile bases in Cuba—the most dangerous gamble of the Cold War. He was partly motivated by his desire to impress Washington with Soviet nuclear might and so deter it from further (non-existent) plans for a first strike. At the same time he intended to make a dramatic gesture of support for the Cuban revolution.³⁹

The Soviet gamble was taken in the belief that Washington would not detect the presence of the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. That belief was mistaken for two reasons. First, high-altitude U-2 spy planes were able to photograph the construction of the missile bases. Secondly, American intelligence analysts were able to make sense of the confusing U-2 photographs because they possessed plans of missile site construction and other important intelligence secretly supplied by Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a spy in the GRU run jointly by the British SIS and the CIA. All the main American intelligence reports on the Cuban bases during the missile crisis were later stamped IRONBARK, a codeword indicating that they had made use of Penkovsky’s documents.⁴⁰

As the construction of nuclear missile bases in Cuba began, Bolshakov continued to provide reassurance, probably as part of a deliberate deception strategy, that Khrushchev would never countenance such an aggressive policy. When U-2 spy planes revealed the existence of the bases in mid-October, while they were still in the course of construction, thus beginning the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy turned on Bolshakov. “I bet you know for certain that you have your missiles in Cuba,” he remonstrated. Bolshakov denied it. According to Sorensen, “President Kennedy had come to rely on the Bolshakov channel for direct private information from Khrushchev, and he felt personally deceived. He was personally deceived.”⁴¹

At the moment in the Cold War when the Kremlin most urgently needed good intelligence from Washington, the KGB residency was unable to provide it. During the Second World War Soviet agents had penetrated every major branch of the Roosevelt administration. The Centre had been better informed on some important aspects of American policy (notably the MANHATTAN project) than Roosevelt’s vice-presidents or most members of his cabinets.⁴² During the Cuban missile crisis, by contrast, the Washington residency’s sources were limited to agents and contacts in the press corps and foreign embassies (especially those of Argentina and Nicaragua). Some of the intelligence which Feklisov, the resident, sent to Moscow was simply gossip. He had no source capable of penetrating the secret deliberations of EXCOMM, Kennedy’s closest advisers who assembled in the cabinet room on October 16 and met in daily session for the next thirteen days until the crisis was resolved. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, wrote dismissively on several of Feklisov’s telegrams at the height of the missile crisis, “This report does not contain any secret information.”⁴³

The relative lack of influence of the KGB on Khrushchev’s policy during the crisis also reflected the limitations of its chairman. In December 1961 the influential Aleksandr Shelepin had been succeeded as chairman by his less able protégé, Vladimir Semichastny, who knew so little about intelligence and was so unattracted by the post offered to him that he accepted it only under pressure from Khrushchev. Khrushchev made clear that his main reason for appointing Semichastny was to ensure the political loyalty of the KGB rather than to benefit from his advice on foreign policy. There is no sign in any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that Semichastny ever followed Shelepin’s example of submitting to Khrushchev ambitious grand strategies for combating the Main Adversary. During the missile crisis Semichastny had not a single meeting with Khrushchev and was never invited to attend meetings of the Presidium (an enlarged Politburo which for the previous decade had been the main policy-making body).

Nor did Khrushchev ever ask for, or receive from, the KGB any assessment of the likely American response to the placing of nuclear missile bases in Cuba.⁴⁴ As foreign intelligence chief, Sakharovsky seems to have had little insight into American policy-making. Though apparently a competent bureaucrat in the Soviet mold, his first-hand experience of the outside world was limited to Romania and other parts of eastern Europe. His melancholy expression was probably, as one of his subordinates has written, “due to the enormous pressures of the job.”⁴⁵ Among the pressures was the need to conform to the highest standards of political correctness. The FCD rarely submitted assessments save at the specific request of the Foreign Ministry, the International Department of the Central Committee or the Presidium. Most of what it termed its “analyses” were, in reality, little more than digests of information on particular topics which generally avoided arriving at conclusions for fear that these might conflict with the opinions of higher authority. The supreme authority during the missile crisis was Khrushchev himself rather than the Presidium. To a remarkable degree he both determined Soviet policy and, like Stalin before him, acted as his own chief intelligence analyst.⁴⁶

Intelligence did, however, have some influence on Khrushchev’s policy during the final stages of the crisis. On October 25 he indicated to the Presidium that, in order to resolve the crisis, it might ultimately be necessary to dismantle the missile bases in return for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev, however, was not yet ready to make such a proposal. He changed his mind during the night of October 25-6 after a GRU report that US Strategic Air Command had been placed on nuclear alert. Hitherto he had hoped to save face by obtaining the removal of US missile bases in Turkey in return for stopping the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. On the morning of October 26, however, wrongly fearing that an American invasion of Cuba might be imminent, he dictated a rambling and emotional plea for peace to Kennedy which asked for a US guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity but made no mention of the Turkish missile bases. Within twenty-four hours, Khrushchev had changed his mind. On October 27, having concluded that an American invasion was not imminent after all, he sent another letter insisting that the Turkish bases must be part of the deal.⁴⁷

Shortly after Khrushchev had sent his second letter, Soviet air defense in Cuba, apparently as a result of a failure in the chain of command, shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing the pilot. Khrushchev panicked. Reports that Kennedy was to make a speech on national television at noon on October 28 wrongly persuaded him that the President might be about to announce an invasion of Cuba. Khrushchev gave in and accepted Kennedy’s terms: a unilateral withdrawal of “all Soviet offensive arms” from Cuba. To make sure his message reached Kennedy in time, he ordered it to be broadcast over Radio Moscow.⁴⁸

THE HUMILIATION OF the Soviet climbdown at the end of the missile crisis, which led two years later to Khrushchev’s overthrow in a Kremlin palace coup, was strengthened in the Centre by the discovery of a series of penetrations by, and defections to, the CIA. In December 1961 a KGB officer, Major Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn, walked into the American embassy in Helsinki and was exfiltrated to the United States. In September 1962 the KGB arrested GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who for the past eighteen months had been providing high-grade intelligence to the British and Americans.⁴⁹

The damage report on Golitsyn produced the usual stereotyped denunciation of his motives. Since it was impossible to criticize either the KGB or the Soviet system, it followed that the basic cause of all defections was the moral failings of the defectors themselves—in particular, “the virus of careerism” unscrupulously exploited by Western intelligence services:

Like all defectors, Golitsyn was given an insulting codename—in his case, GOR-BATY (“Hunchback”).⁵¹ Measures taken to discredit him included the arrest of a Soviet smuggler (codenamed MUSTAFA), who was persuaded to implicate Golitsyn in contraband operations across the Finnish border. An article in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya on September 27, 1962 condemned Golitsyn’s (fictitious) involvement with smugglers.⁵²

Despite the Centre’s attempt to belittle Golitsyn, the damage assessment after his defection concluded that he had been able to betray a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the “Lines” (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents.⁵³ Between January 4 and February 16, 1962 the Centre sent instructions to fifty-four residents on the action required to limit the damage to current operations. For the time being, all meetings with important agents were to be suspended and contact limited to “impersonal means” such as dead letter-boxes.⁵⁴

As well as providing important intelligence on KGB methods and leads to a number of Soviet agents, however, Golitsyn also confused the CIA with a series of increasingly extravagant conspiracy theories. He persuaded the head of the CIA counter-intelligence staff, James Angleton, that the KGB was engaged in a gigantic global deception, and that even the Sino-Soviet split was a charade to deceive the West. Golitsyn was later to maintain that the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was also a KGB description.⁵⁵ It did not occur to the Centre that Golitsyn’s defection, by infecting a small but troublesome minority of CIA officers with his own paranoid tendencies, would ultimately do the Agency more harm than good.

In November 1963 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Cherepanov of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (internal security and counter-intelligence), sent the American embassy in Moscow a packet of highly classified papers dealing with the surveillance and entrapment of diplomats and other foreigners in Russia, together with a note offering his services to the CIA. In the ambassador’s absence, the deputy head of mission feared that the documents were part of a KGB provocation. Though the head of the CIA station was allowed to photograph the documents, the originals, despite his protests, were returned to the Russians. Cherepanov fled from Moscow but was arrested by KGB border guards on the frontier with Turkestan on December 17, 1963. He admitted during interrogation that the operational secrets he had revealed to the Americans included the use of “spy dust” (metka), special chemicals applied to suspects’ shoes to facilitate tracking. Cherepanov was sentenced to death at a secret trial in April 1964. The Centre’s damage assessment of the case concluded:

Though the CIA was not responsible for Cherepanov’s betrayal, it was shortly to make another, even more serious error. In February 1964 Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a KGB officer serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva, who had begun working for the Agency in June 1962, defected to the United States. Nosenko’s CIA debriefers, however, wrongly concluded that he was a KGB plant.⁵⁷

Unaware of the CIA’s horrendous misjudgement, the Centre regarded Nosenko’s defection as a serious setback. Its damage assessment began with the usual character assassination, claiming that Nosenko (henceforth codenamed IDOL), had been infected—like Golitsyn—with the “virus of careerism:”

Throughout the Cold War, the KGB had much greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) on the Main Adversary than penetrating the federal government. In 1963 the ST department of the FCD was given enhanced status as Directorate T.⁵⁹ Most of its tasking came from the Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was responsible for overseeing weapons production, ⁶⁰ and was obsessed with American armaments and advanced technology—almost to the exclusion of the rest of the world. In the early 1960s over 90 percent of

VPK requirements concerned the Main Adversary.⁶¹ Among the American ST obtained by the KGB during these years was intelligence on aircraft and rocket technology, turbojet engines (from a source in General Electric), the Phantom jet fighter, nuclear research, computers, transistors, radio electronics, chemical engineering and metallurgy.⁶² ST agents in the United States identified in Mitrokin’s notes (though with few details of their accomplishments) include: STARIK and BOR (or BORG), who worked as research scientists for the US air force; URBAN, identified by Mitrokhin as a department head at Kellogg (probably the M. W. Kellogg Technology Company in Houston), who had served as an agent since 1940;⁶³ BERG, a senior engineer probably employed by Sperry-Rand (UNIVAC);⁶⁴ VIL, who worked for the chemical manufacturers Union Carbide; FELKE, an agent in Du Pont de Nemours, the chemical, biomedical and petroleum conglomerate; USACH, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, which carried out government research on nuclear energy, high-energy physics and electronics; and NORTON of RCA, which manufactured electronic, telecommunications and defense equipment.⁶⁵

During the Cold War, unlike the Second World War, the dwindling band of American Communists and fellow travelers rarely had access to the ST sought by the KGB. Most ST agents recruited in the United States seem to have spied for money. Two such mercenary spies were caught by the FBI during the mid-1960s: John Butenko, who worked for an ITT subsidiary which did classified work for Strategic Air Command, and Colonel William Whalen, who provided intelligence on missiles and atomic weapons.⁶⁶ In 1963 the New York residency supplied 114 classified ST documents, totaling 7,967 pages, and 30,131 unclassified documents, totaling 181,454 pages, as well as 71 “samples” of state-of-the-art technology and other items. Washington sent the Centre 37 classified documents (3,944 pages) and 1,408 unclassified documents (34,506 pages).⁶⁷

Some of the best American ST, however, came from residencies outside the United States. Possibly the most important was in the field of computer technology, where the Soviet Union had fallen far behind the West. The experimental Soviet BESM-1, produced in 1953, was judged by a Western expert to be “a respectable computer” for its time, with a capability superior to that of the UNIVAC-1 introduced in 1951. The BESM-2, however, which went into production in 1959, was only a third as fast as the IBM-7094, introduced in 1955, and one-sixteenth as fast as the IBM-7090 of 1959. Because of the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union maintained by COCOM (the embargo coordinating committee of NATO members and Japan), the computers legally imported from the West were barely more powerful than their Soviet counterparts.⁶⁸ During the 1960s the attempt to catch up with Western computer technology was based largely on espionage.

The KGB’s main source of computer ST was, almost certainly, IBM, which manufactured over half the computers in use around the world in the mid-1960s. Within IBM, the most important KGB agent identified in Mitrokhin’s notes was ALVAR, a naturalized French citizen born in Tsarist Russia, whose motives—unlike most Americans in the ST network—may well have been ideological. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving Line X agent, ALVAR had been recruited by the NKVD in 1935. By the 1950s he held a senior post at IBM’s European headquarters in Paris, and in 1958 was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work as a Soviet agent. ALVAR carried on working for the KGB until his retirement in the late 1970s, when he was awarded a Soviet pension of 300 dollars a month in addition to his company pension—a certain sign of the Centre’s appreciation of him.⁶⁹

In the early 1960s the Paris residency supplied intelligence on American transistor manufacture which, according to KGB files, both improved the quality of Soviet transistors and brought forward the start of mass production by one and a half years. It also provided ST on computer networking systems which were later imitated by the Soviet defense ministry.⁷⁰ The most likely source of the intelligence on both transistor production and computer networks was ALVAR. From 1964, however, the Paris residency also had an agent, codenamed KLOD, in Texas Instruments.⁷¹

Among other agents who provided technology and ST from IBM was a Nordic national, codenamed KHONG. From 1960 to 1966 KHONG worked for a European affiliate of IBM, and purchased embargoed materials and samples worth 124,000 dollars, which he passed on to the KGB. In both 1961 and 1962 he was questioned by the local US embassy on the reasons for his purchases, but appears to have satisfied the embassy on both occasions. KHONG’s motives, unlike ALVAR’s, seem to have been mainly financial. He was initially paid 10 percent commission, subsequently raised to 15 percent, on his purchases from IBM. KHONG later worked for the United Nations in a number of countries. The fact that he had a total of twelve controllers during his career as a Soviet agent is evidence that the Centre considered him an important source. By the time contact with him ceased in 1982, a year after his retirement, the KGB had held about 150 meetings with him.⁷²

The Soviet Union often found it more difficult to use than to collect the remarkable ST which it collected from American businesses, most of them defense contractors. In 1965 the Politburo criticized the fact that there was a time lag of two to three years before Soviet industry began exploiting ST.⁷³ Even the computer technology stolen by the KGB did no more than, at best, stabilize the striking gap between East and West.⁷⁴ The gap was not to be explained by any lack of expertise among Soviet scientists and mathematicians. As one Canadian expert wrote in 1968, “Westerners who know Soviet computer scientists can testify to their competence and their thorough knowledge of the field.”⁷⁵ The continued backwardness of the Soviet computer industry, despite the expertise of Soviet scientists and the remarkable ST obtained by the KGB, reflected the cumbersome inefficiency of the Soviet command economy, in which technological innovation had to run the gauntlet of a complex and unresponsive state bureaucracy.

Rather than accept any share of responsibility for the failure to make efficient use of much of the ST acquired from the West, the VPK chairman, L. V. Smirnov, blamed the KGB for not obtaining enough of it. In a letter to the KGB chairman, Semichastny, in April 1965, Smirnov complained that over 50 percent of the top priority ST tasks assigned to the KGB between two and four years earlier had still not been fulfilled. Semichastny replied that steps had been taken to improve the KGB’s ability to meet its assignments, but criticized the VPK for underestimating the current difficulty of collecting ST from American targets. Since some of the same scientific and technological developments were taking place in Britain, France, Japan and West Germany, the VPK should pay greater attention to targets in these countries. ⁷⁶ In the following year groups of Line X officers operating against American targets were stationed in residencies in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Republic and a number of other Third World countries.⁷⁷

Despite Smirnov’s criticisms, the KGB’s performance in ST collection was, on balance, a success story. As Smirnov himself acknowledged, the FCD fulfilled almost half of the VPK’s demanding tasks against the Main Adversary with a few years at most. Measured against the spectacular successes of twenty years earlier, however, when the Centre had received the plans of the atomic bomb—the world’s greatest scientific secret—from two different agents and important nuclear intelligence from several more, even the successes of the early 1960s were bound to seem somewhat disappointing. The decline was irreversible. Most of the Soviet spies who penetrated every major branch of the Roosevelt administration had been ideological agents, seduced by the myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as the world’s first worker-peasant state, pointing the way to a new Socialist society. During the early Cold War, even among American radicals, the vision faded. Most of the successors to the wartime ideological moles were mercenary walk-ins and corrupt employees of defense contractors willing to sell their companies’ secrets.

Though the KGB could not bring itself to accept it, the golden age of the high-flying American ideological agent had gone, never to return.

^APPENDIX SOME FAVORITE KGB YAVKAS (MEETING PLACES) IN THE 1960’S

Baltimore: by the Clayton men’s clothing store on North Avenue.

Boston: the music hall; by the State Hilton Hotel.

Chicago: the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts buildings; by the movie theater on State Street; by the Lake State movie theater; and by the men’s tie store on Randolph Street.

Cleveland: by the Khipp movie theater.

Indianapolis: by the notice board on Market Street.

Los Angeles: by the newspaper stand “Out of Town Papers” on Las Palmas Avenue; by the entrance to the movie theaters Viltern and Star Theater; by the display windows on Hollywood Boulevard, the furniture store MacMahon Brasses; near the entrance to the Hotel Roosevelt.

Newark: by the Newark train station, on the bench by the monument to Sergeant Donan A. Bazilone.

New Haven: by the Taft Hotel; by the Sherman movie theater.

New York (Bronx): by the David Marcus movie theater; by the restaurant Savarin; by the display windows of the store Wilma’s Party Center; under the awning of the Middletown Inn Restaurant at 3188 Middletown Road.

Philadelphia: by the Randolph and Stanton movie theaters; by the Silvanna Hotel.

Portland: by the parking lot on the main street; by the Parker movie theater.

Rochester: by the Randolph movie theater.

Sacramento: by the Tower movie theater, and near the advertisements at the café Camilia Lodge.

St. Paul: by the display windows of the St. Paul Hotel; by the Strand movie theater.

San Francisco: by the Metro movie theater on Union Street; by Fosters Restaurant, Simms Café, and Comptons Café (in the downtown area); the Canterbury Hotel.

Seattle: by the movie theater Orpheum Cinema on Fifth Avenue; by the City Motel on Queen Anne Avenue.

Syracuse: by the Cates movie theater.

Union City, New Jersey: by the AP supermarket.

Washington area: the telephone booth by the entrance to the Hot Shoppes Restaurant in the center of Hyattsville, a Washington suburb; by the entrance to the grocery store in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center on Georgia Avenue in Maryland, six miles north of Washington.