The New Spymasters (10 page)

A final observation here is that spying must be a weapon of last resort.

The benefits of successful spy missions may be outweighed by the costs of spying that goes wrong. Against all the theft of technical secrets that helped the different sides with their arms race there were many failures, not just the death by execution of so many agents – whether Volkov, Penkovsky, Polyakov or Tolkachev – but the constant atmosphere of tension and distrust that spy games could engender.

Perhaps the most instructive case was an East German operation that showed the cost of recruiting an agent without thought for the consequences. It led to the resignation of West German chancellor Willy Brandt and showed the cost of spying for spying's sake.

Günter Guillaume, codenamed Hansen, and his first wife, Christel, were officers in the East German foreign intelligence service, the HVA, who were sent in 1956 to infiltrate the West German leadership. They pretended to have escaped from East Germany and set up, with HVA money, a café in Frankfurt. Both joined Brandt's Social Democratic Party (SPD), for whom Christel became a secretary in the local headquarters. Over a number of years, Günter worked himself up the party ranks, eventually becoming chairman of the Frankfurt SPD and a member of the city council.
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In 1969, following Willy Brandt's election as West Germany's first SPD chancellor, and after successfully managing the election campaign of a local minister, Guillaume asked if there might be a position for him in the Chancellery. After a short time in a minor position there, he moved up to become Brandt's most trusted aide and one of the very few who accompanied him and his family on holiday. The Soviets, via the Stasi, now had direct access to Brandt's thinking, correspondence and policymaking.

By May 1973, West German counterintelligence had begun to suspect the Guillaumes of being HVA spies. Despite this, they did not alert Brandt to their suspicions and just put Christel under surveillance.
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It wasn't until March 1974 that Günter also started to be watched, and a month later both husband and wife were arrested on suspicion of espionage.

The political scandal that resulted from this threatened to bring down the SPD coalition government. Not only had the Chancellor trusted a spy as his aide and confidant, but rumours began circulating that Guillaume had been collecting compromising information, and possibly photos, of the married Chancellor with various women, as well as information about his heavy drinking. By resigning, Brandt saved the government, but not himself.

Brandt had been the architect of a policy of East–West rapprochement that was in the interests of East Germany. As Markus Wolf, the HVA chief, later acknowledged, the operation had ‘unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen'.
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote to Brandt, apologizing that the HVA ‘contributed to the extremely negative political events that led to your resignation in 1974'.
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Wolf's problem was that he became too good. Spying was used without enough thought, instead of being reserved for securing the sort of secrets that really mattered.

*   *   *

If the nature of the spy business is frequently portrayed wrongly, so too is the character of the Cold War's real warriors: the intelligence officers at the heart of the business. And while the profession's achievements are often aggrandized, many of its greatest characters, the top spymasters, are remarkably candid about their limitations. The best of them consider counterintuitive thinking an article of faith.

For a frontline perspective on spying's value, as well as to learn more about how Cold War spies were really recruited, it was worth spending time with some of the greats of anti-Soviet espionage. One of the most thoughtful was the former head of the CIA's Soviet section, Milton Bearden. Meeting him involved a drive out to a favourite haunt of ex-spies, the Ritz Carlton Hotel at Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia.

Bearden was a legend whose name I had first heard mentioned in Germany in the 1990s. He was credited then for Operation Rosenholz (Rosewood), the operation that led to the CIA acquiring, as the Berlin Wall tumbled, a list of almost all the Stasi's agents abroad, winning him the Federal Cross of Merit from the German state.
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I learned later that Bearden, then station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, had also been one of the key figures in running the CIA covert war in Afghanistan. When he returned to headquarters, he ran the agency's wider war as chief of the agency's Soviet section. He retired from the CIA in 1994, devastated by the discovery that one of his officers, Aldrich Ames, had betrayed them all.

By the end of Bearden's career, the CIA had ballooned, employing around 25,000 people. That included analysts and technical specialists – positions that in the UK, for example, would not come under the auspices of SIS. Officers like Bearden were part of the elite, from the clandestine service that actually ran spies and covert operations. Called various names at different times, including the Directorate of Plans, the Directorate of Operations (DO) and, since 2005, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), this section has always been the heart of the ‘real CIA' and numbered no more than 6,000, including support staff.
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(To compare the British and American agencies, it is important to realize that the CIA's clandestine service is the counterpart of SIS, not the entire CIA. SIS, which is said by insiders to employ between 2,000 and 3,000 people, focuses entirely on running agents and field operations; analysis of its product is carried out elsewhere in Whitehall. But the CIA's DO was also far more action-orientated than SIS, with more ex-military recruits and much wider remit to engage in covert action.)

‘The CIA is the DO,' said Bearden. ‘The rest of it, the analysis, etc. is just Rand Corporation or the Brookings Institution with razor wire around it.'

Like many former CIA case officers I had come to know, Bearden was a big and distinctive man, not someone to blend into the shadows. ‘They ordered these burgers only crocodiles can eat,' said one former officer in the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, recalling his contacts with US intelligence. And in the words of Jack Devine, an old colleague of Bearden and another giant of a man: ‘It's no good hiding away. People have to know where to find you.'

That had been a key lesson for me. As Bearden explained, during the Cold War ‘by and large, it was the job of the intelligence officer to make sure everybody knew his post office box'.

People who wrote books about spies spoke of all their training in recruiting spies, how they were taught to find people's motives and exploit them. But, at least in the Cold War, this training rarely counted for much. Almost all spies of any importance had been ‘walk-ins', volunteers who chose to betray without any prompting or recruitment.

With a very few exceptions on the Soviet side, the West versus East spy game during the Cold War was ‘about the skilful management of volunteers', according to Bearden. ‘You've got people who defect – who defect in place – and they do it for all of the same reasons that drive man: fear, revenge, lust, sex, greed or even something like boredom occasionally. And he makes the decision – it's almost always guys – to become bigger than himself. He becomes a spy. So, if you're Russian, who are you going to spy for – China, Albania? You're going to spy for the main adversary, the main enemy.'

It is worth noting here that while other professional spymasters interviewed by the author agreed with Bearden's assessment about the scarcity of real recruits when operating against the Soviets inside the Eastern bloc (Bearden's main sphere of operations), many argued it
was
possible to make targeted recruits of softer targets in more benign environments, of which more later.

As Bearden correctly described, some of the best spies for the West were forced literally to throw themselves at their erstwhile enemy to get hired. It took Tolkachev thirteen months and six approaches in Moscow – including banging on the CIA chief-of-station's car – before headquarters authorized a meeting. That he became one of the CIA's most valuable agents was thanks only to his determination and persistence.
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I asked Bearden about all those how-to recruitment stories. It was ‘largely bullshit', he replied. ‘Imagine a locker room full of guys and each of them trying to tell how many girls they've screwed – that's sort of the recruitment thing … “Man, I got one”.'

He then added, ‘It was the middle-school, testosterone-driven thing that you have to have done it all yourself. Did I get X who was a communist to change his mind? No. All that mattered was that he provided huge amounts of intelligence.'

Was any spy in this particular battleground actually recruited deliberately? I had spent a while going through a long list of spy cases by then. On the CIA scorecard, the only one I could identify as a deliberate recruit was a Soviet diplomat named Aleksandr Ogorodnik, code-named Trigon.

‘Yes,' Bearden replied. ‘I'll give it. It was because an operation was run; he didn't just drop a note into the car. There weren't many others, maybe a couple of others.'

The CIA got to Trigon while he was in Columbia after discovering that he had a mistress. The mistress, who loved him, was then recruited, believing that spying would allow her to live with Trigon. After returning to Moscow and joining the Soviet foreign ministry, Trigon filed some supposedly invaluable intelligence.

‘But his intelligence was not necessarily acted on or believed,' said Bearden.

Recruitment of spies, according to those involved, always required a long-drawn-out process in which access could be maintained to the target. The reason why almost all Soviet agents were walk-ins was because of, as someone else involved put it, ‘the near impossibility of developing personal contact with target personnel because of the stringent defensive security measures of the Soviet state'. But if all the recruitment training that CIA officers got was thereby redundant, was the agency's campaign against the Soviets essentially incompetent?

Not at all, according to Bearden. The heart of the business was not recruiting but rather ‘running spies', the handling of active agents. And there he remained fiercely proud – though oddly as proud of his comrades in the KGB.

‘My point is everybody talks about the recruitment being the biggest deal. You know what? Most are volunteers. The biggest deal is being able to securely handle people in Moscow under the noses of the entire second chief directorate [the KGB's department for internal security and counterintelligence] – like we did until they were betrayed.

‘I don't think there are many modern exceptions to the rule that the only time the Soviets caught a spy was when that spy was betrayed by our side, your side [the British], or the Germans. That's pretty much a fact. It's true for us [US] too. The FBI almost never caught a spy unless someone betrayed them.'

In Moscow, huge resources were devoted to tailing US diplomats, and Soviet citizens had little freedom. Yet, even so, the CIA ran spies under the KGB's nose, which was a ‘stunning accomplishment', said Bearden.

What gave tension to the spy game was that so much effort and preparation went into vital contacts that might last seconds and, if they went wrong, could prove fatal for the agent. For the CIA officers posted as ‘diplomats' in the embassy in Moscow, making it work involved elaborate choreography.

Bearden explained, ‘There is a scheduled brush contact – [passing a secret written message by “accidentally” brushing past someone in a public street] – or brief encounter with an agent – with Adolf Tolkachev, say – for nine o'clock on Friday night. Today is Monday. Today and tomorrow, we'll be finding out who of my four people here are looking free … Then you start an orchestrated thing to break someone loose – and I might not know until Thursday who's free. And then you're going to be off, make cover stops all over the place, plan your whole day to where they [the KGB] don't know you've disappeared at six o'clock – you could go black [evade surveillance] in Moscow on Friday evening, and they never caught you.'

Then it was the meet: ‘You might be saying, “How are you doing? How's your son? Here's the medicine for him. This is the stuff you said you'd get, the microfilms … This Monday we're going to take care of that…” Because I'm his only contact with what he thinks is the human race at this point. In this moment he's a superman – he is above the world, that's it. This may be the most important three, four, five minutes of his life … they might also be his last.'

Bearden's words begin to slow. He is starting to turn inward, thinking of the ones who survived this entire saga only to be shot because of betrayal by Ames. In total there were thirty-six, including ten who were executed.
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In court, Ames admitted compromising ‘virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me'.
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We then turned to the point of our meeting. Was it all worth it? From reading
The Main Enemy,
the book Bearden wrote with journalist James Risen, I had got the impression that in his career fighting the KGB he had collected plenty of scalps, but it wasn't clear what good really came of it.

Looming largest for Bearden was the covert CIA war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in which he had played such a key role when he was chief in Islamabad. ‘That sped up the dissolution of the USSR greatly,' he said.

I replied that, true as this might or might not be, it did not count. I was trying to assess the value of espionage – the business of spying and betrayal – not covert action.

Ever since its formation, the CIA had always been a mix of intelligence gathering and action. What critics often missed was that it always was – and remains today – the tool of the American president. The agency did what he wanted and, by and large, each president was tempted to use the CIA to fight some secret wars. After the Second World War, the nuclear threat meant that the Soviets could not be engaged in a conventional war. But they could be confronted around the world by the secret efforts of a secret agency. Covert action gave the president a lever to pull, an option short of the kind of overt military action that could escalate into nuclear war. Even covertly, however, the CIA could do little directly behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, the opportunities lay in undecided space, the unoccupied countries of the world that might swing either way in their loyalties. That is why insiders sometimes semi-seriously referred to the CIA operations division as ‘the Department of the Third World'.