Art of Betrayal (31 page)

Penkovsky played it by the book. His moral decay was due to alcoholism and frustration over his job. ‘I lost the road, stumbled at the edge of an abyss and fell,' he explained in a dull, monotonous voice. The crowd became silent at this, its bloodlust finally sated by seeing the walking corpse in front of it. ‘I deceived my comrades and said that everything was well with me, but in fact everything was
criminal, in my soul, in my head, and in my actions.'
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Wynne listened to the translation, headphones pressed to his ears.

Penkovsky talked and perhaps told the KGB everything in return for his family's safety. But the Soviets tried to cover up just how damaging he had been and how well connected he was. They also tried to sow division between the British and Americans, claiming that the Americans in Paris had tried to cut out the British. When he recounted his meeting with Janet Chisholm in the park – ‘I patted the child on the cheek, stroked him on the head and said, “here is some candy for you, eat it'” – the crowd uttered ‘noises of indignation' at the idea that innocent children had been dragged into the midst of this degradation.
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He admitted he had worn the uniforms of a British and an American colonel. ‘Which did you like better?' he was scornfully asked.

‘I did not think about which I liked better,' he replied.
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By the end of the trial, Penkovsky looked a wreck. Unshaven, his eyes darted back and forth as if looking for a way out. But there could be no doubt about the verdict. ‘Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky: guilty of treason to the Motherland, to be shot to death.' The crowed jeered and clapped. Women clambered on benches to catch sight of the traitor's reaction. Penkovsky stood silent.
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Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was taken out of Moscow to a flat and barren land. He reached the gloomy Vladimir prison in twilight with the rain pouring. His moustache was shaved off and he was placed in a cell with an old oil drum for a toilet. Others also paid a price. General Ivan Serov was demoted and fired as head of Russian military intelligence. Marshal Varentsov – the man who thought of Penkovsky as his son – became Major General Varentsov and was expelled from the Central Committee. How he looked back on his sixtieth birthday is easy to imagine.

Penkovsky is believed to have been shot on 16 May 1963 and then cremated. His wife – who had never known he was a spy – was simply handed a death certificate.
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Rumours – probably untrue – surfaced that he had been cremated alive in front of other officers to send a message about the fate of traitors.

Penkovsky may not quite have been ‘the Spy who Saved the World' as some claimed. But he was the spy who helped save MI6 and the CIA. Both organisations were reeling when he walked through the
door of Room 360. Blake had just been exposed as a traitor for the British, while the CIA had just days earlier embarked on the catastrophic Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba which ultimately cost Allen Dulles his job as director. Penkovsky's manic, messianic spying generated 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Within it were the first real insights into Soviet intentions and capabilities at a time when the Cold War had yet to settle into a stable pattern of mutually assured destruction and when fears of missile imbalances and crises in places like Cuba, the Congo and Berlin threatened all-out war. Penkovsky allowed the spies to show the policy-makers that what they did mattered and could make a difference.

The Penkovsky case, even though it ended tragically, represented a ray of hope for the British Secret Service. After all the disasters and betrayals of Blake and Philby, all the frustrations of Albania and the Baltics, the dead agents and the probing questions from Whitehall mandarins, it was a sign that it could – at least for a while – successfully run a valuable agent even in the hardest possible place and provide intelligence that was genuinely valued. The case did not just restore confidence, it also set a marker for a new professionalism in the service, an end to the era of Robber Barons and crazy operations. Perhaps there was a light at the end of the tunnel from the horrors that had gone before.

Dick White wanted a professional service – one that did not engage in hare-brained mini-wars and pointless bravado but quietly and skilfully acquired secrets, one that could put the past behind it. The shy but determined Shergy was the man who would help deliver it. With Penkovsky his model, Shergy would create a nucleus of staff in MI6's Sov Bloc division who over the coming decades worked their way outwards and upwards through the organisation instilling such concepts as ‘need to know' and focusing on the careful collection of intelligence. These officers would become known as the ‘Sov Bloc master race', a term often employed by their colleagues from other parts of the service who felt a touch put out by the arrogance of those who felt they were the elite.

Shergy's mission was to find more Penkovskys. He wanted to identify and target disaffected Soviet officials who could stay in place and spy, rather than drop agents by boat or parachute in the style of the Second World War. This required a different mind-set and
skill-set. One of the young officers drawn into this sub-culture of the service was Gerry Warner. Never one of the club men and something of an outsider, his disillusionment with the quality of work in Burma had led him to decide to quit. One evening just before he planned to leave he was sitting in the small bar in the basement of the service's Broadway headquarters. He overheard a racist and offensive joke and voiced his objection. ‘Who are you?' the man who had told the joke said.

Warner replied, ‘Who are you?'

‘The head of personnel. I've got your file on my desk. Come and see me tomorrow.'

Shergy and the Sov Bloc team were trawling through the personnel files to look for young entrants who might be suited to agent running. Their preference was for people who were ‘clean' and had not worked in the region before and so were less likely to be blown to the Soviets. Warner was one. Another was a young officer just back from Laos called Colin McColl. He, like Warner, had joined after the customary interview with Admiral Woodhouse in which intelligence work had been hinted at but never openly discussed (the Admiral's attractive secretary had also provided an extra inducement for some applicants to join up). After being taught Polish by an eccentric Yugoslav on a barge in East London, Warner was sent to Warsaw under cover as cultural attaché. Here came one of the early successes for Shergy's team.

One day a rake-like young Pole with wispy, thinning hair walked into the British Embassy in Warsaw. His name was Adam Kaczmarzyk, he explained, he was a cipher clerk in the Warsaw Pact HQ and had secrets to pass on. Agents provocateurs were commonplace, but cipher clerks were not normally planted because any ciphers they handed over could quickly be checked by the experts at GCHQ to see if they were genuine or not. Cipher clerks were also highly valued since they had access to all the secret traffic that went through an embassy. Warner took the Ambassador down to a secure room to tell him that he would come up with an operational plan to organise meetings with the potential agent. The Ambassador, whose job was to advise on whether the benefits of recruiting an agent outweighed the political risk of being discovered, was reluctant. The next morning, Warner showed him what the latter assumed to be a draft
of a telegram. In it Warner indicated that the Ambassador had signed off. ‘Quite right, I've changed my mind,' the Ambassador said. This was fortunate as the telegram had already been sent to Shergy. Warner always explained the risks to anyone becoming an agent. ‘I was always a bit anxious about whether the person I was going to ask to work for the British government, for the Queen, was fully conscious of the risks that he or she was taking, whether they were sufficiently mature to know what they wanted to do … And all this was a very intense business. It was as intense a sort of relationship as you could possibly get into and that led on of course to what I think is one of the basic principles of the secret service that the first responsibility of any officer of the service towards his agents is their safety and their security. That is the first basic principle and after that everything else flows.'
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Not all agents would listen though.

Warsaw would provide a key testing ground for rising stars of the service and the team that ran the agent over a period of nearly three years included two future deputy chiefs of MI6 and one chief, Colin McColl. They supplied the clerk, codenamed ‘Beneficiary', with a Minox camera and met him regularly at a heavily curtained British Embassy flat (a small Union Jack on the front door was the signal to enter).

To talk to him there, they used a strange device known as a hushaphone. This looked like an adapted doctor's stethoscope with a speaking and listening mask at each end. The two parties to a conversation would speak through it to ensure their words could not be picked up by bugging devices. Money and a good time proved to be Beneficiary's only motivation. MI6 were somewhat surprised when they developed the film from his camera and found pictures of ciphers mixed up with those of his unclothed ‘girlfriend', pictures he explained he would like back. He spent freely on drink and prostitutes and a fancy car. Empty champagne bottles accumulated outside his house. Neighbours began to notice. Making an agent aware of the risks did not always make them unwilling to take more risks. One day he explained that he thought it would be a good idea to approach a colleague to join the spy ring. The team said no, realising that if the colleague refused it would probably be game over. He said it was too late. The team had to decide whether or not to meet the agent the next time, knowing he might have been compromised. He was
Kaczmarzyk was arrested at one of the expensive restaurants he had begun to frequent in August 1967. At the same time an MI6 officer was arrested along with his secretary. The press reported that ‘spy documents and sketches' were found in her handbag. In her flat, the secret police found a hardback copy of the latest James Bond book. Unfortunately that edition included what purported to be secret maps tucked into the back cover. The secret police were convinced they were real secret maps and gave the poor secretary a particularly hard time. After a four-day trial, Kaczmarzyk was sentenced to death and was killed by firing squad at a military fort.
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Beneficiary burned brightly but only briefly. Shergy's protégés on the Czech desk secured a longer-running agent codenamed ‘Freed', eventually a major in the Czech Security Service, the StB. Freed's real name was Miloslav Kro
č
a. He had begun his career hunting saboteurs in industry before going to Moscow for training with the KGB. Like Penkovsky, his career had stuttered, partly for personal reasons. A new girlfriend in Moscow led to a divorce and a black mark against his name as well as financial strains. In the early 1960s he managed to secure promotion to work on operations against the British. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the British Secret Service. Recruiting an opposing intelligence officer in such a position was a huge coup in terms of classic spy-versus-spy counter-intelligence. Freed knew all the details of operations against Britain and had access to Czech records. His career prospered with the help of MI6. Poor health, perhaps due to the stress of his double life, took its toll over the years and eventually he died of a heart attack. Only then was his betrayal discovered in spring 1976. Where Beneficiary was mildly crazy and reckless, Freed was cerebral and cautious and survived much longer. Freed's sudden death meant that Czech investigators never knew the full scale of his betrayal. Their investigative files reveal that they were unsure when he started spying for the British; certainly it was by 1969, but some wondered if it was as early as 1962. They did establish, though, the identity of the MI6 officer who was handling Freed at the time of his death. Richard Dearlove was spotted arriving at a number of locations to meet Kroča before he realised he had died. The Czech investigators established that Dearlove, whom they codenamed ‘David II', organised meetings both in Prague and in a forest outside the city. The StB spent much
time puzzling over where Freed might have secreted payments from the British, a mystery only solved with Ml6's help after the end of the Cold War.
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The successes of Beneficiary and Freed would help launch careers. Insiders say there were other successes in those years which have remained secret, not least because unlike these two, the other agents remained alive. Together the cases would be vital for Shergy as he began to fight his own internal battles against those who saw the shadow of Philby and other moles still haunting the service.

The CIA was also learning from Penkovsky. ‘Who are the people that dream of power and glory, and, not only frustrated in these dreams but perhaps even ridiculed in their daily lives, become so bitter as to turn their backs on family, friends and nation?' That question was posed to colleagues by a CIA officer soon after Penkovsky. ‘The single, self-evident observation is that the enormous act of defection, of betrayal, treason, is almost invariably the act of a warped, emotionally maladjusted personality,' the officer continued. ‘It is compelled by a fear, hatred, deep sense of grievance, or obsession with revenge far exceeding in intensity these emotions as experienced by normal reasonably well-integrated and well-adjusted persons … a normal, mature, emotionally healthy person, deeply embedded in his own ethnic, national cultural, social, and family matrix just doesn't do such things.'
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What made someone like Penkovsky take such crazy risks? The unbalanced nature of such spies, the CIA officer argued, was reflected in his own experience of agents.

All of them have been lonely people … [who] have manifested some serious behaviour problem – such as alcoholism, satyriasis, morbid depression, a psychopathic pattern of one type or another, an evasion of adult responsibility… It is only mild hyperbole to say that no one can consider himself a Soviet operations officer until he has gone through the sordid experience of holding his Soviet ‘friend's' head while he vomits five days of drinking into the sink.