A Brief History of the Spy (24 page)

No hint of suspicion attached itself to him – he was even awarded a long and distinguished service medal in 1980 – because he was very careful over the money he was given by the PRC, purporting to be a gambler for high stakes and investing in property in Baltimore to explain his income. He
is believed to have been paid over a million dollars during his career. Chin was found guilty in February 1986 of spying for China and tax evasion, but before sentencing he committed suicide in his cell.

While Aldrich Ames was a useful asset for the Soviets within the CIA, the other recruit who joined the KGB during the tail end of 1985 would prove to be one of their best agents, giving them access to the FBI’s counter-intelligence efforts periodically between then and his capture in 2001. Robert Philip Hanssen was described by David Major, the former director of counter-intelligence at the US National Security Council and Hanssen’s direct superior from 1987 onwards, as ‘diabolically brilliant . . . He knew everything we knew about what the Soviets did – and we knew a lot about how they operated. He also knew what we did. So he could operate within the cracks.’

Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976, and three years later was assigned to the New York field office helping to create an automatic database to track Soviet intelligence officers – and promptly became one himself, volunteering his services to the GRU via their front organization, AMTORG. In return for cash, he provided the Soviets with information regarding Dmitiri Polyakov’s espionage activities for the CIA (which the GRU chose to ignore), as well as a list of Soviets that the FBI suspected were spies in the US.

His work for the GRU came to an end in 1981 after he was caught by his wife writing to the Soviets; he confessed to his priest, and passed the monies the GRU had given him to charity. Hanssen was transferred to Washington that year, where he headed up a unit analysing the FBI’s data on Soviet activities, and coordinating projects against them.

Hanssen returned to New York in 1985 as supervisor in counter-intelligence, operating against the Soviet mission at the UN, as well as the consulate. Ten days after his arrival in the Big Apple, he wrote to Victor Degtyar, a middle-level
intelligence officer at the Washington residency. He enclosed a letter for KGB resident Victor Cherkashin, in which he asked for $100,000 for a box of documents of classified and top-secret material that would shortly be delivered to Degtyar’s private address, and revealing the names of three spies (all of whom, although he was unaware of it at the time, had already been betrayed by Aldrich Ames). When Cherkashin received the promised documents, they showed how valuable this anonymous spy would be.

Because he knew so much about both American and Soviet tradecraft, Robert Hanssen wasn’t prepared to fall in line with the usual KGB methodology regarding dead drops and rendezvous. He dictated how they would be handled, operating, as David Major noted, ‘within the cracks’. He made the KGB come to dead drops near his own home so that their actions were minimised – as Cherkashin admiringly notes in his autobiography, ‘All we had to do was drop our package and make a signal.’ He also refused to reveal his identity – the first time Cherkashin knew Hanssen’s name was when he was arrested in 2001.

Money didn’t seem to be his underlying motive (although he would tell his interrogators something different after his capture); Cherkashin considered that Hanssen liked showing off his expertise, and ‘was either unhappy with his job or simply bored’. He certainly didn’t see this – at that stage at least – as a long-term arrangement: ‘Eventually, I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)’, Hanssen wrote shortly after making contact. Hanssen deliberately avoided communication with Cherkashin through the spring and early summer of 1986 after becoming overly suspicious of a mention of the KGB resident in a defector’s debriefing, and dropped in and out of contact over the next fifteen years. It would be a long time before he might need an escape plan. As it transpired, Robert Hanssen was only five weeks away from retirement when he was eventually caught.

In June 1985, President Ronald Reagan told the American people that they were ‘in a long twilight struggle with an implacable foe of freedom’. Very few people would have predicted at the end of The Year of the Spy that within six years the KGB would be no more, the Cold War would be over, and the intelligence services of the West would find their future role under discussion.

During the late eighties, the KGB continued its policy of misinformation, planting propaganda stories that would influence other countries’ views of America and the CIA. The CIA’s involvement in the Iran–Contra affair suggested that the dark times of the sixties might be returning. The game of Spy vs Spy seemed to be at its height, with the trade-offs of the Daniloff affair equivalent to some of the ill-matched spy swaps of the earlier decades. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms – coupled with some genuine accidents, such as the one that led to the end of the Berlin Wall – meant that the era of the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe was drawing to a close.

*  *  *

Spreading lies and disinformation about the Main Enemy was not a new tactic for the KGB; through front organizations and receptive writers, they had propagated many false theories over the years, such as Soviet agent Joachim Joesten’s book
Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy
, published in 1964 about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1982 Moscow Centre had tried to discredit the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, with a story planted in the British
New Statesman
magazine which suggested strong ties between her and the then-pariah South African regime (although the documents backing this up hadn’t been checked properly – the spelling of the word ‘priviously’ (
sic
) was a giveaway.) This was written by journalist Claudia Wright, who would later push other Soviet propaganda lines, such as her statement in the Dublin
Sunday Tribune
in 1989 that KAL 007 ‘the Korean Airlines jumbo jet, shot down by the Soviet Air Force six years ago today, was on a spy mission for the US’.

These operations, known as ‘active measures’, became more prevalent in the late eighties, despite Chairman Gorbachev’s claim in July 1987 that ‘We tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ In one of Yuri Andropov’s last decrees as Chairman of the KGB in 1982, he stated that it was the duty of all foreign intelligence officers, no matter which department they were part of, to participate in active measures. It was an area that was often ‘sub-contracted’ to satellite states, such as East Germany. As Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, director of Department X (disinformation) of East German foreign intelligence, once said, ‘Our friends in Moscow call it ‘‘dezinformatsiya’’. Our enemies in America call it ‘‘active measures’’, and I, dear friends, call it ‘‘my favourite pastime’’.’

After attempts were made to blacken the name of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, came under attack. The KGB had been treating him as an
enemy since 1971 for his anti-Communist tendencies, and in December 1984 they began further measures designed to tar him as a reactionary. President Reagan’s speech to the European Parliament in May 1985 was heckled as an active measure. Forged letters were used to bolster the impression of an out-of-control American government: CIA director William Casey apparently planned to overthrow Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1987; in January 1988 documents suggested President Reagan gave instructions to the NSA to destabilize Panama. South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha referred to a secret and sinister agreement with the US in a letter he supposedly sent in 1989.

The most potentially damaging active measures were stories about medical experiments carried out by the Americans. The story that the Aids virus was manufactured during a genetic engineering experiment at Fort Detrick, which had been the home of the US biological weapons’ programme, first appeared in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper,
Patriot
, in 1983, but was really ignored until it was magnified in the Russian
Literaturnaya Gazeta
in October 1985. This new version was then followed by a report from a retired East German biophysicist (and Stasi informant), Professor Jacob Segal, which ‘demonstrated’ that the virus had been artificially synthesized. Segal genuinely believed his theory, despite it being discredited, and pushed it until his death in 1995. His hypothesis was reported as fact by British newspapers the
Sunday Express
and the
Daily Telegraph
the following year, and indeed continues to be quoted to this day by conspiracy theorists.

In August 1987, Soviet officials formally denied that they considered Aids to be an American creation, but by then the story had become established, particularly in the Third World. In March 1991, a letter to the Zimbabwean
Bulawayo Chronicle
stated that not only had the United States invented Aids, but that the CIA had exported ‘Aids-oiled condoms’ to other countries in 1986!

A later variant of the same Aids story suggested that it had been created as an ethnic bioweapon by the Americans, targeting non-whites. This was partly a continuation of the KGB’s attempts to foment racism at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics where offensive letters supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan were sent to African and Asian countries promising their athletes ‘a reception you’ll never forget’.

One particular active measure gained some recognition from the European Parliament, who passed a motion condemning trafficking in ‘body parts’ in which Latin American children were butchered to provide organs for sick Americans. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses were taken in by this one, publishing the story in their magazine
Awake
in 1989 to an audience of eleven million people in fifty-four languages. Although far more is known about active measures now than at the time of the Cold War, perusal of the world’s papers today indicates that the KGB’s successor, the SVR, is still hard at work peddling skewed versions of reality.

The sometimes byzantine nature of the spying game in the late eighties is amply demonstrated by the Daniloff case from August-September 1986, which saw the Soviets falsely accuse Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist, of spying in Russia mere days after one of their own agents at the UN was arrested by the FBI, in what
Time
magazine described as ‘a risky game of tit for tat’. Played out against the backdrop of the plans for the first summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland later that year, the affair saw the eventual swap of Daniloff for Gennady Zakharov (even if neither side would admit that that is what it was at the time).

The Soviet agent, a physicist working at the United Nations, had been cultivating a Guyanese resident of New York, known only as CS or Birg, who worked at a defence contractor. What Zakharov didn’t realize was that Birg had
been working with the FBI for three years, ever since the initial contact. When he handed Birg $1,000 in exchange for three classified documents, the FBI were waiting. A few days later, Daniloff, who had spent the previous five and a half years as a correspondent for the
News & World Report
, met with a friend, Misha, in the Lenin Hills of Moscow; Misha gave him a sealed packet with some press clippings in – or so Daniloff thought. In fact, as he discovered when the KGB arrested him on the street and took him to Lefortovo prison, they were photos of soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan. As one paper at the time explained, ‘The KGB has trumped up a case against [Daniloff] that is literally a mirror image of the case against Zakharov.’ Although Daniloff and Zakharov were released after a fortnight into the custody of their respective embassies, the threat against the American continued; when Zakharov faced charges of spying, so did Daniloff.

Part of the problem was that the KGB did have some very slight cause for concern about Daniloff. A letter had been passed to him by a dissident Russian Orthodox priest back in January 1985 for onward transmission to CIA DCI William Casey. Daniloff had given it to the Second Secretary at the US Embassy. According to the KGB, this was proof that he was working with the CIA.

After many days of tense discussions, during which the summit due to be held in Reykjavík in mid-October looked likely to be cancelled if the stalemate wasn’t resolved, and the US threatened to send home two dozen Soviet delegates from the United Nations, the Soviets finally agreed to release Daniloff on 30 September. The same day, Zakharov was allowed to leave America, having pleaded no contest to the charges. While the summit went ahead, the twenty-five Soviet delegates were still expelled; in retaliation, on 19 October, the Soviets kicked out five US diplomats. Two days later, the US sent home fifty-five more Soviets – allegedly to bring about parity between the size of the respective missions in the
countries. A day later the Soviets expelled five more Americans.

But the rules of the game meant that nobody would admit the reality of what had happened. Daniloff was quite clear that he had not been swapped since as far as he was concerned there was no comparison between the two situations. ‘In my case, the investigation into the charges against me was concluded,’ he stated bluntly. ‘There was no trial, and I left as an ordinary free American citizen. In Zakharov’s case, there was a trial, and he received a sentence. I do not believe that these two things are in any way equivalent.’ Although some dissidents were released in the Soviet Union at the same time as Zakharov left the US, it was clear to all neutral observers that this was as much a swap as the handovers between KGB and CIA in Berlin had been during the sixties.

Both John Walker and Jonathan Pollard had targeted the Navy; other branches of the US military fell victim to Soviet agents during the late eighties. In 1987, United States Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree was the first marine convicted of spying against the US; two years later, Warrant Officer James W. Hall III, who described himself as ‘a traitorous bastard, not a Cold War spy’, was found guilty of betraying hundreds of secret documents to both the Stasi and the KGB.