Spy Swap

The Humiliation of Russia's Intelligence Services

Nigel West

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526792143
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geheimdienst & Spionage

On Monday, 4 March 2019, Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia collapsed in the centre of Salisbury in Wiltshire. Both were suffering the effects of A-234, a third-generation Russian-manufactured military grade Novichok nerve agent. As three suspects, all GRU officers, were quickly identified, it was also established that the door handle to the Skripals’ suburban home had been contaminated with the toxin. Whilst the Skripals had lived in the cathedral city for the past seven years, what Sergei’s neighbours did not know was that he had once been a colonel in the Russian Federation’s military intelligence service. Back in July 1996, he had been posted under diplomatic cover to Madrid where he was subsequently cultivated by Pablo Miller, an MI6 officer operating as a businessman under the alias Antonio Alvares de Idalgo. Sergei’s recruitment by Miller was one of many successes achieved by Western agencies following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These counter-intelligence triumphs had their origins in a joint FBI/CIA project codenamed COURTSHIP which was based on the rather risky tactic of making an approach to almost any identified KGB or GRU officer, in almost any environment – a technique known as a ‘cold pitch’. It soon yielded results; within five years COURTSHIP had netted about twenty assets. Codenamed FORTHWITH, Sergei was betrayed in December 2001. Arrested in 2004, he was convicted of high treason in Russia, but was subsequently included in a prisoner swap in July 2010 and brought to the UK. The journey to the attempt on his life had begun. The Vienna spy swap was the culmination of a CIA plan to free a specific individual, Gennadi Vasilenko, who had been the Agency’s key mole inside the KGB since March 1979. To acquire the necessary leverage, the FBI swooped on a large network in the United States, bringing to an end a surveillance operation, codenamed GHOST STORIES, that lasted ten years.Anxious to avoid further embarrassment over the arrests, Vladimir Putin personally authorised an exchange, unaware of Vasilenko’s true status. It was only after the transaction had been completed, and two further Russian spies were exfiltrated from Moscow, that the Kremlin learned of Vasilenko’s value, and the scale of the deception. For the very first time, a Russian government had been persuaded to release four traitors and send them to the West. The humiliation was complete.As Spy Swap reveals, Putin’s retribution would manifest itself in a quiet Wiltshire market town.

Chapter I

Recruitment

The COURTSHIP programme, based on the rather risky tactic of making an approach to almost any identified KGB or GRU officer, in almost any environment, a technique known as a ‘cold pitch’, soon yielded good results. Within five years this joint venture had netted about twenty assets, most of whom admittedly were that most prized commodity, the self-recruited walk-in.

The situation regarding the treatment of potential defectors had become so serious under the previous regime that one prospect, Yuri Loginov, a Directorate S illegals support officer, had been thrown to the wolves. He had tried to defect while on a training mission to Finland but had been persuaded by the CIA’s Richard Kovich to remain in post so as to increase his value, but when he reappeared subsequently, on an assignment to South Africa in 1967, the ever-suspicious Angleton had arranged for his arrest and interrogation by the local security apparatus, the Bureau of State Security. Fluent in Czech and English, he was taken into custody as a Canadian of Lithuanian extraction named Edmund Trinka.

Prior to his arrest in Johannesburg, Loginov had attended a rendezvous in Nairobi where he had provided the CIA with an account of his Directorate S activities and detailed the local rezidentura, headed by Gennadi Bekhterov. Critically, in one of his debriefing sessions Loginov, code-named AE/ GUSTO, had asserted that Nosenko’s defection had been entirely genuine and had caused consternation in Moscow. This unwelcome item served to undermine Loginov’s credibility and when Angleton concluded that he was actually part of an elaborate deception scheme, he authorised the release of his debriefing record, which was presented as his confession to the South African police.

Loginov’s information was sufficiently detailed to persuade his KGB controllers that he had volunteered a very incriminating statement containing details that only he could have known. In it he revealed that his wife Nira was also a KGB officer who had bungled a mission to Cuba. He disclosed that he had travelled to West Germany on the Kiel Canal hidden in the captain’s cabin aboard a Soviet vessel, the Kamenski. He named his KGB handlers as Yuri Modin (alias Yuri Lyudin), Vitali Pavlov (alias Nikolai Kedrov), and Konstantin Frolov. These specifics were intended to embarrass the KGB and demonstrate that Loginov had co-operated with his captors, but stop short of revealing his history of contact with the CIA.

Much to his dismay, after two years in gaol, Loginov was returned to the Soviet Union through a spy swap in Germany where he was exchanged in July 1969 for eleven Bundesnachrichtendienst assets freed by the Stasi. Astonishingly, Loginov survived his cool reception in Moscow and was exiled, but not actually imprisoned.1

Under the new administration the CIA offered a warmer welcome to KGB and GRU personnel, and had encouraged ‘walk-ins’ to earn their defection by remaining in their post where they could provide valuable data from inside their organization. These individuals were promised that if they felt endangered, they would be exfiltrated and then resettled in Florida with a house, swimming pool and pension. Among those who took advantage of such an attractive deal was MOTORBOAT, a Bulgarian military intelligence (RUMNO) officer who would prove exceptionally valuable when he passed on details of RUMNO’s participation in May 1981 in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II.

The Washington end of COURTSHIP, based in anonymous offices in the Hayes Building at Buzzard Point, overlooking the Potomac, was the FBI’s CI-4 Squad, targeted against KGB Line KR counter-intelligence specialists at the embassy rezidentura, headed by Dmitri Yakushkin, who had succeeded Mikhail Polonik in 1975. The FBI relied on three sources to identify which Soviet employees were genuine Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and those that were intelligence professionals: physical surveillance, conducted by the FBI’s specialist unit, known as ‘the Gs’ who kept a watch on the Russian staff and their offices; technical surveillance on the Russian premises; and a very secret source, Colonel Boris Piguzov. Code-named JOGGER, he had been a walk-in at the US embassy in Jakarta and had proved his worth in 1979 by betraying a former CIA officer, David Barnett, who had retired from the Agency in 1970 to set up his own business in Indonesia. In desperate need of funds, Barnett had started to sell information to the KGB but had been arrested by the FBI upon his return to the United States. Meanwhile, JOGGER had been appointed to a teaching post at the KGB’s training school, the Andropov Institute, where, as secretary of the local Party branch, he had access to all the personnel files of the graduates. This fortuitous promotion for JOGGER meant the CI-4 Squad enjoyed a valuable method of spotting the new arrivals working for Yakushkin. As for the rezident himself, he was extremely cautious, except in his private life. He had two mistresses, a young teacher working at the embassy school, and an American girlfriend supplied by the FBI. Professionally, he was always on the look-out for provocations, having experienced some embarrassment early in his tenure when three of his subordinates were duped in April 1978 by a double agent, Lieutenant-Commander Arthur Lindberg, in New York offering details of the US Navy’s submarine detection apparatus, and exposed. The operation, code-named LEMONADE by the Naval Investigative Service, caught three KGB officers serving Lindberg’s dead drop on the Jersey Turnpike and resulted in fifty-year prison terms for Valdik Enger and Rudolf Chernyaev who, as employees of the UN Secretariat, were not entitled to diplomatic immunity, although their companion, Vladimir Zinyakin, was released without charge as an accredited member of the Soviet UN mission with the rank of third secretary.2

Thereafter, Yakushkin had shown great reluctance to engage in anything that smelled of entrapment, a handicap that led him to ignore three approaches from a genuine CIA source, Edwin G. Moore, who was a disgruntled retiree formerly employed until three years earlier as a junior clerk in the Office of Research and Reports.3

Yakushkin’s rezidentura, having been targeted by CI-4, would be thoroughly penetrated, for two other members became sources. First, there was Major Sergei Motorin, a Line PR political intelligence expert, whom the FBI’s David Morton would cultivate for two years before he finally succumbed, having been caught bartering embassy duty-free vodka. He was followed by the Novosti press agency correspondent, Colonel Valeri Martynov, a Line X scientific and technical intelligence specialist run by the FBI’s Jim Holt and the CIA’s Rod Carlson. Code-named MEGAS and PIMENTA respectively, neither KGB officer knew that the other was actually a CI-4 asset, and the trio of Motorin, Martynov and Gennadi Vasilenko all acting independently of each other would give CI-4 a unique insight into the KGB’s local activities. All came from different branches with, perhaps most importantly, Vasilenko having a background in Directorate K.

One of those targeted for recruitment in Washington, DC in late 1977 was a suspected KGB officer, a new arrival at the rezidentura who had been flagged by JOGGER as a Line KR counter-intelligence officer. Surveillance showed his talent for volleyball, and Platt, five years older, working under alias and posing as a Pentagon contractor, began the time-honoured process of pre-recruitment cultivation based on a shared passion for the sport and a love of the outdoors. Both, by their natures, were unconventional, rule-breakers and heavy drinkers.

At that time Platt, aged forty-one, was an experienced CIA case officer and ex-Marine Corps officer who had served in Vienna, Vientiane and Paris, but had been withdrawn from his last posting after he had been identified as a CIA officer by a renegade, Philip Agee. Together with some two thousand other officers and agents, Platt’s details had been published by Agee in his exposé, Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, and in a series of magazine articles.4 Disaffected by a broken marriage, Agee had left the CIA in Mexico in 1968 and sold out to the Cuban DGI, having been rebuffed when he first approached the KGB. The Cubans embraced Agee, who became a long-term asset, destroying the careers of hundreds of Operations officers. In Platt’s case the damage was significant because, despite his unorthodox appearance and behaviour, he had a real grasp of the counter-intelligence business. Shortly before his posting to France he had been selected to accompany Yuri Nosenko on a ‘dog-and-pony’ worldwide tour of CIA stations and Allied intelligence agencies during which the defector had delivered lectures, and answered questions, on his eleven years in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate.

The Agee carnage had been unprecedented, and had forced Platt to adopt the alias of ‘Chris Llorenz’, but while he was reporting progress on his cultivation of Vasilenko, his quarry had identified ‘Llorenz’ as Platt, and obtained permission from his Line KR chief at the rezidentura, the wily Viktor Cherkashin, to continue the contact in the hope of making a recruitment. Although Platt routinely worked under alias, the Texan was easily recognizable to the KGB because of his penchant for cowboy clothes and a physical peculiarity: he had lost half of the middle finger of his left hand while in the military.

Cherkashin, who had previously served in Bonn, Vienna, Delhi and Beirut, had come to realise that there was mounting evidence suggesting his own rezidentura had been penetrated. As he later recalled, the FBI seemed to know exactly when and where a KGB operation was planned, and who would be participating. None of the usual KGB tradecraft, of employing regular diplomats co-opted to act as decoys, seemed to distract the FBI surveillance, which manifested an uncanny ability to concentrate its limited resources on the intelligence professionals.5 In particular, the FBI’s distinctive local radio traffic, intercepted by a special signals unit attached to the rezidentura, invariably detected an FBI presence in locations intended for some type of operational activity. Whatever countermeasures he took, inevitably there would be the unmistakable telltale indications of sophisticated frequency-hopping mobile transmissions, communications of the kind associated with the FBI.

While Cherkashin was pondering the challenge of hostile penetration, his subordinate Vasilenko was transferred to Moscow in June 1981, and then in 1984 was posted to Georgetown, Guyana. This meant that during the period of maximum penetration in Washington, Vasilenko was not a candidate for suspicion.

The era of FBI prescience would terminate dramatically on 15 May 1985 when a senior CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, walked into the Soviet embassy and offered Cherkashin the solution to the rezidentura’ s poor performance. In return for a cash payment of $50,000 Ames agreed to a further meeting, the so-called ‘big dump’, on 13 June, at which he provided a list of current cases, but in an exercise in blatant self-preservation he probably named MEGAS and PIMENTA as moles currently operational inside Cherkashin’s rezidentura. Both men would be recalled to Moscow on pretexts, and simply disappear, leaving the FBI to ponder their fate. The KGB took very deliberate steps to conceal the fact that Motorin and Martynov had been arrested, charged with treason and executed. These measures worked, and effectively prevented the CIA from learning about the deaths of some for a year, and others even until 1992.

What made some of the arrests in Moscow so odd was the lengths the KGB went to in order to conceal the exact date on which they had occurred. In the example of Motorin, he had been taped by the FBI as he had telephoned his girlfriend in Washington, DC, assuring her he was alright, months after he had been detained in Moscow. The pattern that emerged was of sources being recalled to Moscow or disappearing while on home leave, and for reasons that intrigued the CIA mole hunters, the KGB evidently had attempted to conceal the undeniable fact that between May and September 1985 the majority of the Soviet/Eastern European Division’s spies had been caught.

Indeed, the KGB used numerous ruses to distract the CIA investigation into its own losses, which was anyway handicapped by the certainty that Edward Howard had betrayed a wealth of secrets. According to Oleg Kalugin, one such was

our man in West Germany who was in charge of cultivating ‘illegals’ – Soviets who spoke German and were to be infiltrated into the West German government, army or intelligence agencies. The turncoat KGB officer was forcibly abducted from West Germany, returned to the USSR, tried, and put to death.6

Another known source of leaks was the Marine guard detachment in the US embassy in Moscow, which had allowed KGB personnel access to sensitive areas in the building. In December 1986 Sergeant Clayton Lonetree confessed to having been honeytrapped into helping the KGB, and Corporal Arnold Bracey admitted to a similar affair, so there was a possibility that listening devices had been installed in the embassy’s comms equipment. The big question was whether the CIA’s 1985 losses were evidence of a dangerous, currently active mole, or could be rationalised by other more mundane explanations. The DDO, John Stein, concluded in a ten-page report that there was no proof of a mole and opined that poor tradecraft had been at the root of each loss, a view that was rejected by the Agency’s counter-intelligence experts. However, it was equally true that not everything could be blamed on Howard’s treachery. After all, Sergei Vorontsov’s recruitment had occurred after he had left the Agency, so he could never have been in a position to compromise him to the KGB.

The CIA mole hunters were to take nearly nine years to identify Aldrich Ames as the source of the SE leaks, in part because the Soviets laid several false trails, including the initially plausible assertion, made in March 1986 through an anonymous source in Germany who turned out to be a KGB-controlled double agent, that the security of the CIA’s communications had been compromised by the successful penetration of its principal radio facility at Warrenton, Virginia. The information, hand-delivered by letter to a CIA officer in Bonn, contained some genuine information about Gennady Varenik, code-named GT/FITNESS, and correctly named his CIA case officer as Charles Leven. An inevitably lengthy investigation had concluded finally that no such breach had occurred, and that the entire tale had been a skilfully constructed ploy. Similarly, another KGB source, Aleksandr Zhomov, code-named GT/PROLOGUE, sold his CIA handlers dozens of supposedly authentic internal SCD documents that seemed to disclose how the KGB’s ubiquitous surveillance on US embassy staff had been responsible for identifying the CIA agents lost in 1985. Once again, Zhomov was finally exposed as an elaborate hoax, presumably intended to divert the CIA from the existence of a well-placed mole within the SE Division.

Lack of confidence at headquarters in Moscow station operations had a long history. In August 1977, when the organization was struggling to survive in the post-Watergate era with a Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, who had banned all activity in the Soviet Union and would decimate morale by firing two hundred Clandestine Service officers in the notorious Halloween Massacre, the Moscow embassy suffered an extensive fire. The classified spaces in the three top-floors were affected after the conflagration had been detonated by a power-surge in an antiquated junction box. The KGB routinely used this tactic to harass the embassy building, and on this occasion attempted to use the inferno as a pretext to enter the sensitive floors. Famously, the station chief, Gus Hathaway, a decorated Second World War veteran, blocked the entrance to his suite of offices and prevented the KGB personnel dressed as firefighters from gaining access to them.

Management of covert operations in the Soviet capital was very high risk and numerous CIA case officers had been caught trying to communicate with assets, among them Marti Peterson, who was the first woman CIA officer deployed to Moscow. She was arrested in June 1977 while attempting to service a dead drop for the diplomat Aleksandr Ogorodnik. Similarly, in later years, Peter Bogadyr, Richard Mueller and Erik Sites were all apprehended by undertaking such assignments. In June 1980 an engineer, Alexei Nilov, was imprisoned on a charge of having spied for the CIA after he had been recruited in Algeria.

* * *

In his eventual confession, traded for a five-year prison sentence for his wife, Ames admitted having betrayed for cash amounting to $2 million more than two dozen CIA spies, among them a pair close to him who were never arrested. Sergei Fedorenko, code-named GT/PHYRRIC, and a scientist code-named BYPLAY originally recruited by the FBI in San Francisco, had been handled by Ames personally in New York. Fedorenko had been run until his return to Moscow in 1977, and both later reported that they had come under sustained KGB surveillance. Fedorenko, who had worked as a subordinate to Arkadi Shevchenko in the UN Secretariat, had suspended contact with the CIA following the arrest in June 1977 of a colleague, Aleksandr Ogorodnik, who had worked in the same department of the Foreign Ministry. He had taken even more precautions, including the destruction of his secret communications equipment, when his colleague at the USA and Canada Studies Institute, Vladimir Potashov, was caught. Despite having been named by Ames, the KGB apparently had been unable to arrest so senior a political figure as Fedorenko, who was to be promoted to one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisers. Like GT/BYPLAY, Fedorenko survived despite Ames’s treachery, and subsequently went to live in the United States, while the scientist chose to stay in Moscow. Ten others suffered confiscation of their assets and the KGB’s traditional execution of a bullet fired at point-blank range in the back of the neck, an unmarked grave and a perfunctory form letter mailed to the next of kin. While the CIA remained anxious to channel financial support to the families of his victims, it was not always possible to do so without jeopardising further innocent lives so, in the case of Adolf Tolkachev’s son Oleg, he was effectively orphaned and forced...