Art of Betrayal (34 page)

And now there was Golitsyn. ‘In the tense and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories,' recalled Wright. Golitsyn's talk of penetrations and the fact that he appeared to have seen recent material from the Security Service, including one of Wright's technical papers, reinforced the growing convictions of Martin and Wright. Golitsyn had nothing on Hollis or Mitchell specifically. ‘The vast majority of Golitsyn's material was tantalizingly imprecise,' Wright wrote in retrospect. ‘It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsyn's clear propensity for feeding his information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood.'
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Dick White had told Martin to go and see Hollis and explain his doubts about Mitchell, but not about the MI5 chief himself. Martin spent half an hour explaining his theory. Hollis, the son of a bishop and a dour and dry man, had listened quietly, barely saying a word. Martin described how ‘his face drained of colour and with a strange half-smile playing on his lips'.
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Hollis did not demur but said he would think it over. He knew he had little choice but to countenance an investigation. His former boss Dick White, the senior figure in British intelligence, had already called him.
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Why did the two chiefs go along with it? For White and Hollis, the fear of penetration was real but so was the fear of missing it and, even more important, of being accused of having missed it deliberately. A few days later Martin had been summoned to see Hollis again and told to begin. Soon afterwards he had met Wright and they began to compare notes.

Who watches the watchers? How could MI5 investigate its own top men? It could not, since Graham Mitchell had oversight over all
operations. So Wright and Martin explained to de Mowbray that it had been agreed with Dick White that MI6 would instead undertake the surveillance and that he was to be in charge. Thus began one of the stranger episodes in the history of British intelligence which occasionally edged into farce. In all, forty members of MI6 staff were engaged in spying on the number two of their sister organisation. These were not trained ‘watchers' of the type MI5 employed to carry out surveillance on the streets of Britain. These were officers, technicians and mainly secretaries who had either not been tutored in the arts of surveillance at all or had only the most rudimentary education. They were run out of an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square. Time was short since Mitchell was due to retire in six months. He would be tracked from MI5 headquarters to Waterloo station, where two women would follow him on to his train. One summer's evening the women followed him in the hope that he was leaving something incriminating in a dead drop. There was nothing. De Mowbray frequently did the tailing himself as the two men had never met. One evening, de Mowbray was remaining close behind for fear of losing his man in the rush-hour mêlée. Mitchell suddenly stopped, turned and faced de Mowbray. He stared directly at him. Seconds ticked by. Then he turned again and walked off. He knew what was going on. Mitchell was old-school establishment, Winchester and Oxford, and his hobbies included yachting and chess. On one occasion, de Mowbray raced down to the south coast in a fast car driven by an MI6 colleague to where Mitchell was taking part in a chess tournament also attended by some Russians. All of the surveillance drew a blank. A hole was drilled in Mitchell's office wall to allow a small camera to capture him at work. Three women from MI6 took it in turns to watch him. It was a surreal experience, as Mitchell often sat in front of the camera picking his teeth. The strain of knowing that he was under suspicion began to take its toll on him. He would mumble in a way which made it hard to make out his words.
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The women watched as his eyes became dark and sunken. When people were in the room he carried on as usual, but when he was alone a tortured look came over his face. His phone was tapped and de Mowbray would listen in to the calls of senior MI5 officers and despair of what he saw as the poor quality of those leading the organisation. ‘Are we on the right man?' the team wondered.

There was an awkward problem for those who believed that British intelligence had been penetrated at the highest level. Its name was Oleg Penkovsky. Mitchell and Hollis were among the few to have known about Penkovsky's betrayal. If either was a Soviet plant, then surely they would have told their masters and Penkovsky would never have been able to spy for so long and hand over so much material. There was only one way around this conundrum for the molehunters. Penkovsky himself must have been a plant by the Soviets. Some reasoned he was planted from the beginning. Others believed that he had genuinely betrayed his country before being turned as a double agent towards the end after being betrayed by the British mole. Wright began to bury himself in the files; forwards and backwards he went, poring over the fragments of this and every other case, convinced there was a dark secret.

Golitsyn first heard of the Penkovsky case in early 1963 when an MI6 officer in Washington said the service had just lost a valuable agent in Moscow.
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He was in England when the show-trial in Moscow took place. How could Penkovsky be genuine? Golitsyn wondered. He told Martin he wanted to see Dick White. At the meeting, Golitsyn asked to see the Penkovsky file. A few weeks later he was taken to the MI6 annexe office at Carlton Gardens and ushered into a grand chandeliered room. Two precious volumes were laid before him. For days he devoured them, taking notes watched by an MI6 officer and a security guard. Golitsyn then asked to take the files out. The request was granted. By his own account, he would sit in London's public parks and squares reading one of the most sensitive files held by British intelligence until they were handed back at the end of the afternoon. Golitsyn became convinced that Penkovsky was a plant sent as part of a ‘master plot'. Among the reasons was that Penkovsky had proposed a particular woman as a courier. Golitsyn said that he knew her as the wife of a colleague and that he had been told she was involved in a KGB operation by General Oleg Gribanov, the chief of the Second Directorate. Golitsyn told Peter Wright what he had found. Wright at first strongly disagreed (although he later changed his mind) and told him there were people in MI6 who had made their careers on Penkovsky. He mentioned Harry Shergold and warned that he would be furious.

In the summer of 1963, the presence of a Soviet defector, wrongly
named as Dolitsyn, found its way into the British press. Golitsyn believed the story came from the Russians but many others thought that it was Angleton determined to get his man back on his side of the Atlantic. By the time Golitsyn returned to Washington, he had been bled dry of his original intelligence, but he had come up with a new way of making himself useful. He said that if he was allowed to study the actual in-house intelligence files, it would trigger associations in his mind and allow him to recollect and piece together new leads based on the fragments in his memory. Angleton and others were convinced of the possibilities of what Golitsyn grandly described as his ‘methodology'. Angleton had backed Penkovsky's bona fides but, fascinated by Golitsyn, he agreed for select aspects of the case to be shared, though never the whole file – the Americans were not as trusting as the British. Golitsyn still found aspects of Penkovsky's career and his access to secrets that he considered suspicious. Penkovsky's offer to blow up buildings in Moscow, Golitsyn thought, was simply to gauge whether there was any interest in the West in such schemes and then control any resulting plans. Golitsyn surmised that the Cuban crisis had been ‘deliberately provoked by the Soviets to get the deal they wanted' and they had used Penkovsky to pass accurate information to the Americans to ensure that a bargain could be done. The theory may have been aided by the Soviet Ambassador to the UN who, probably hoping to minimise the embarrassment of the betrayal, told a Western diplomat that Penkovsky ‘is very much alive and was a double agent against the Americans'.
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The officers who handled Penkovsky were furious with the aspersions cast on someone they saw as a good man who had paid the ultimate price. Joe Bulik was called into Angleton's office to have the theory presented to him that not just Penkovsky but all his other agents from 1960 were plants. ‘I was so angry I just turned and left and we never spoke again,' he recalled later.
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When Peter Wright in London produced a paper claiming that Penkovsky was a plant, he showed it to Maurice Oldfield. ‘You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's and Gongs riding high on the back of Penkovsky,' referring to the knighthoods and honours the celebrated operation had produced. Shergy was, as predicted, furious. ‘Harry Shergold … practically went for me at a meeting in MI6 one day,' Wright wrote. ‘What
the hell do you know about running agents?' he snarled. ‘You come in here and insult a brave man's memory and expect us to believe this?'
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The fury was so intense that it stuck in the mind of one conspiratorially minded molehunter. Surely Shergy couldn't be bad as well? But Shergy understood what was taking place and was playing his own game.

After Golitsyn had returned to Washington, he began to pursue the idea that the Soviet Union was undertaking a ‘master plan' of ‘strategic deception' to fool the West and its intelligence agencies. Just before he left Moscow, Golitsyn said he had heard talk of a massive deception and disinformation campaign. He says another officer told him of plans to finish with the United States once and for all.
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The plot included fooling the West that there was greater disunity in the East than was really the case. For instance, Golitsyn maintained that the split between the Soviet Union and China was in fact a charade, as was that between the Soviets and Tito's Yugoslavia.
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The master plan would be perpetuated by the agents placed everywhere in Western governments and especially their intelligence services whose careers and whose judgements would be bolstered by defectors. The whole operation was being controlled by an inner core of the KGB. The rest of the KGB knew nothing about it and everything they did could be compromised as part of the plot. Anything that fitted this theory was true, anything that did not support it had been planted as part of the master plot and therefore provided proof of its existence. This was a worldview which, once accepted, was internally coherent and explained everything. It was a faith and one that Angleton placed his trust in.

Western intelligence was, Angleton said, trapped in a ‘wilderness of mirrors' designed like a fairground trick to bend and shape the truth so that the observer would become disoriented and lose any sense of proportion. Angleton had borrowed the phrase from a friend of his, the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, whose words, like an intelligence puzzle, required deciphering by the knowledgeable and were open to many interpretations. Only a truly sharp counter-intelligence mind could see the truth of the KGB's intentions, Angle-ton thought, and Dick White agreed. In their eyes the KGB was all-powerful, ever cunning and infallible, the stuff of nightmares. It had fooled MI6 in the 1920s with its fake émigré group, the Trust, and in
the late 1940s in Albania. There were no coincidences, no room for missteps from the other side.

As with buses, the CIA found that having waited ages for a defector, two came at once. Yuri Nosenko would pay a heavy price for arriving just after Anatoly Golitsyn. In early summer 1962, he approached an American delegate at an arms-control meeting in Geneva. He shook hands and checked that no one else was in earshot. ‘I would like you to help me with contact with CIA people. You see I have some problems. It's a private matter.'
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At an apartment the well-built man in his mid-thirties with a slight hunch asked for a scotch and then told the first officer he met, Pete Bagley, that he was a KGB officer who had got into money problems. Bagley spoke little Russian and Nosenko little English, but the KGB man explained that he had no desire to defect since he still had family in the Soviet Union (his father was at one point minister for shipbuilding). But he needed 250 dollars in Swiss francs, a pathetically small sum, and would be willing to meet CIA officers on later trips anywhere but Moscow. The truth, which Nosenko did not reveal at the time, was that he had been over-excited by his first taste of freedom outside the USSR and had taken a prostitute back to his hotel room. He had woken up the next morning to find his wallet missing. Inside were his 250 dollars' worth of KGB expenses which he needed to account for.
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Kisevalter came out and joined Bagley for a second meeting at which Nosenko, having had one drink before and another during the meeting, explained how Kisevalter's former agent Pyotr Popov, first recruited in Vienna, had been caught. It had not been through a traitor as some suspected but through surveillance of an American Embassy official in Moscow posting a letter. He also said he knew a little about a spy in the British Naval Attaché's office in Moscow who had been blackmailed over his sexuality (another reference to John Vassall).
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Nosenko had worked on targeting American officials, journalists and tourists in Moscow and said he also knew about the first CIA man in Moscow in the 1950s who had been targeted over his affair with a KGB maid. Bagley kept asking for more, Nosenko remembered, hungry for every scrap of intelligence. He said he also knew that the KGB had recruited an American officer in Germany–codenamed ‘Sasha'.
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They agreed that if he made it out again he would send a telegram to a US address signed ‘George'. Two days
after sending it, he would meet his contact in front of the first cinema listed in the local phone book in the city from which the telegram was sent.
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The two CIA officers returned on separate planes, one carrying the tapes, the other their notes. Just in case.
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