Daughters of the KGB (25 page)

Kazimierz Leski became a respected naval architect in Holland by his mid-twenties, designing two Polish submarines – Orzeł and Sep – for the Nederlandsche Vereenigde Scheepsbouw Bureaux in the Hague before returning to Poland, where he learned to fly and joined the Polish Air Force just before the German invasion of 1939. Shot down a few days later, he was taken prisoner by Soviet troops, but managed to escape although wounded in the crash and made his way across the new Soviet–German demarcation line to reach Warsaw. After joining the Home Army, he was still unfit for guerrilla warfare in the forests and founded instead an intelligence-gathering network, spying on the German troops and forging links with expatriate Poles in Western Europe, through which he made contact with the Polish government-in-exile in London.

In 1941 Leski made his first, highly risky journey to France, disguised as a Wehrmacht lieutenant. Fluent in several languages including German and still suffering from his wounds, he decided to travel more comfortably in future – in first class accommodation as a major general, using the alias Julius von Halmann to collect intelligence on German operations and fortifications. He also found time to smuggle some detainees out of German prisons such as the infamous Pawiak in Warsaw, where 100,000 Poles were held, 40 per cent of them executed there and the others sent to extermination camps. In the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, Leski fought as an infantry commander, although holding no formal commission. When the survivors of the uprising surrendered, he escaped again and became commander of the clandestine Wolnosc I Niezawisłosc – Freedom and Independence – anti-communist partisans in Gdansk.

His pre-war experience of shipbuilding saw him entrusted with the reconstruction of the shipyard there, which had been extensively demolished by the retreating Germans, and his work was recognised in August 1945 by the provisional government’s highest award. Later the same day, Leski was charged by the secret police with attempting to overthrow the regime and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Although this was reduced to six years, in 1951 he was charged with having collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. Placed in solitary confinement, he was brutally tortured. In 1956, with Bierut replaced by Gomułka, Leski was freed, aged 44, but was still under suspicion and, although elected to the Polish Academy of Science and holding patents on several inventions, denied an academic chair for his work in computer analysis. Not until the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 did this incredibly brave and resourceful man publish his memoirs, which deservedly became a bestseller in Poland.

Michal Goleniewski was in every way the equal of his illustrious predecessors. Born in 1922 in an area of eastern Poland that is now in Belarus, he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Polish army in 1955. After receiving a doctorate in political science at the University of Warsaw in 1956, he was appointed head of the Technical and Scientific Department of MBP from 1957 to 1960. In this position he was also reporting to the KGB and in 1959 he became a triple agent, feeding both Polish and Soviet material to the CIA under the code-name ‘Sniper’ without revealing his true identity, using anonymous notes left in dead letter boxes. In April 1959 the CIA informed British counter-espionage agency MI5 that ‘Sniper’ had revealed the existence of a SB informant in the Royal Navy, with a name that he had overheard just once. It sounded to him like ‘Huiton’. ‘Sniper’ also passed over some documents coming from ‘Huiton’ which made it possible to narrow down his place of work. In addition, ‘Sniper’ reported a top-level Soviet penetration of MI6 – which turned out to be the mole George Blake. Fortunately, ‘Sniper’s rank was so high that he learned just in time when the KGB first heard of a mysterious CIA source inside SB, and was able to make his, obviously well-prepared, escape with his mistress to West Berlin at the end of 1960. Once in the West, they were immediately flown to Ashford Farm in Maryland for debriefing, in which he revealed a number of other SB or KGB sources inside NATO forces and intelligence agencies. After his defection, Goleniewski was sentenced by a Polish court to death in absentia.

‘Sniper’ brought no documents with him, but had already established his bona fides with the stream of leaks while he was still in place, and also revealed the whereabouts of several caches of photographic and other material for eventual retrieval by CIA agents. Given US citizenship, he was placed in a witness protection programme and could have gently faded away from risk. Unfortunately, like many multiple agents, Goleniewski also lived a fantasy life, claiming that he was really the
tsarevich
Crown Prince Alexei, who had miraculously survived the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family. Eventually, he embarrassed his employers too much with this play-acting and he was put out to grass in 1964.

Against this, it has to be remembered that his information led to the unmasking of two important spies in Britain. In 1951 a former Royal Navy master-at-arms named Harry Houghton was posted as a civilian assistant to the office of the naval attaché in the British embassy in Warsaw. It apparently passed unnoticed by the embassy security staff that Houghton was an alcoholic and was financing an extravagant lifestyle by selling on the black market both Western goods and medical supplies, which made him vulnerable to blackmail by the SB. When Houghton’s wife complained to his superiors about domestic abuse, he was posted back to Britain in 1952 and sent to the top secret research facility at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment in Portland. Warnings by his wife that he had brought restricted documents home for an unknown purpose were treated as the bitter allegations of an abused wife, although it should have been obvious Houghton was again living well beyond his means. After, or maybe before, his divorce in 1956 Houghton seduced a filing clerk at the base named Ethel Gee and used her to access files, photocopies of which were passed by him to Polish agents working for the KGB. At the beginning of each month Houghton travelled to London, handed over his material to a contact and received payment in cash.

Examination by MI5 of the naval documents ‘Sniper’ had passed revealed that they came from the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland. Houghton was an immediate suspect because of his excessive drinking and expensive lifestyle. Placed under surveillance at work and on his trips to London, he enabled his followers to identify contacts afterwards referred to as ‘the Portland Spy Ring’. On 7 January 1961 Scotland Yard Special Branch officers arrested Houghton, Gee and a man purporting to be a Canadian businessman with the name Gordon Lonsdale – who was actually a KGB deep-penetration agent named Konon Molody – to whom Houghton was handing material in a brush pass on Waterloo Bridge. At the same time US citizen Morris Cohen and his wife, Leontina, who ran an antiquarian bookselling business, using the names Peter and Helen Kroger, were also arrested. At their modest suburban bungalow in Ruislip, searchers found a burst transmitter whose extremely brief transmissions were difficult to detect, plus much other espionage equipment used to process and send back to Warsaw and Moscow the material from Houghton.

His defence in court was that he had been having an affair with a woman involved in his black market operation during his time in Warsaw. Told by SB officers that she would go to jail if he did not cooperate, he started handing over material, but claimed that he only gave them what was already in the public domain. Unimpressed, on 22 March 1961 the court sentenced both Houghton and Gee to fifteen years in prison. With remission, they were released on 12 May 1970 and married the following year. Also in March 1961 Molody, refusing to reveal his real identity, was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. However, three years later, on 22 April 1964, he walked across the Glienicke Bridge to Potsdam while British businessman Greville Wynne walked the other way in one of the many spy swaps carried out at the bridge. Leontina Cohen received a sentence of twenty years and her husband, Morris, got twenty-five years. In 1969 they too were released early, in exchange for a British teacher of Russian named Gerald Brooke, who had served four years in a hard-regime labour camp for unwisely smuggling anti-Soviet material into the USSR.

Although the officers of KGB, the Stasi and other communist security organisations were supposed to lead morally blameless lives, sexual blackmail was so common that it had its own jargon: the entrapment of a man in this way by a glamorous woman was called a honey-trap. Irving Scarbeck was a popular 38-year-old clerical officer in the US embassy in Warsaw with an impeccable service record. In 1959 he rented an apartment in which to meet his 22-year-old mistress Urszula Dische, who may, or may not, have been working for SB. A few months later, Scarbeck was confronted with photographs of them in bed and threatened that they would be shown to his wife and children, who were also in Warsaw. To save Urszula from arrest by the SB, he handed over an unknown number of classified documents and also arranged her escape to Western Germany, where he continued to send her money. Arrested by the FBI when on home leave in summer 1961, Scarbeck confessed all and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of six years in jail, which was later softened by making the sentences concurrent. One of the luckier exposed spies, Scarbeck had a wife who forgave his infidelity. He was paroled in 1966.

An important Polish agent exchanged across the Glienicke Bridge was Marian Zacharski. Between 1977 and 1981 the cover of this Polish agent, who brought his wife and daughter with him to the United States, was his job as president of the Polish–American Machinery Company. A former student of business studies, he revelled in making profitable contracts for the sale of his machines. Although various FBI sources considered that Polish spies were after technical and commercial intelligence, rather than military secrets, Zacharski was caught when buying, allegedly for $200,000 classified documents relating to the Patriot, Phoenix and Hawk missiles; radar installed in the F-15 fighter; stealth radar; US Navy sonar equipment and the M1 Abrams tank – all from a single debt-ridden employee of the Hughes Aircraft company in California.

Zacharski and other Polish spies in the US were ‘blown’ by diplomat Jerzy Korycinski, defecting from the Polish delegation at the United Nations, as a quid pro quo when he requested political asylum in the US. Probably his most valuable tip-off was of cipher clerk Waldemar Mazurkiewicz. Mazurkiewicz, also working in the delegation, had both family troubles and a real drink problem. Eager to start a new life, he was given a new identity and placed under a witness protection programme after betraying the Polish and other Soviet bloc codes.

Zacharski was entrapped when FBI officers placed a wire on his carefully cultivated source inside Hughes Aircraft, and he received a life sentence on the day after Poland’s then-Communist government imposed martial law, which can hardly have helped his case. In 1985 he and three other Eastern-bloc agents were traded for twenty-five low-grade Western spies.
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As reward for his services in America, Zacharski was made head of the consumer electronics division of Pewex, a hard-currency chain of stores selling luxury goods to Western diplomats and businessmen – and Poles who had dollars to spend. Although few ‘blown’ intelligence operatives make a success of subsequent careers, Zacharski was an exception, due – so he said – to his business studies in Poland and learning all the lessons of Big Business during his time in the US. Indeed, after becoming president of Pewex, which was privatised at the end of the Communist regime, he lived like an American tycoon: well groomed, smartly suited, with a chauffeur-driven car and a luxurious office in the Warsaw Marriott Hotel. He did however manage to cause more problems in disclosing that the Cold War links between high Polish officials and intelligence officers and the KGB had survived his country’s new identity under President Lech Wałesa. Threatened with prosecution for having spied for Russia over the previous ten years, Prime Minister Jósef Oleksy in turn accused President Aleksander Kwasniewski with corruption, but was forced to resign in 1996 after admitting that his habit of passing restricted Polish government documents to Soviet diplomat Georgi Yakimishin and KGB officer Vladimir Alganov was inappropriate, to say the least.
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Until 1989 this would have been normal; after that date it was effectively treason.

That there was plenty of dirt to dig up was shown by the case of Peter Vogel. Convicted in 1971 for murder, he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, but was released in 1983 during the period of martial law in Poland. Given a passport and allowed to leave the country, he turned up in Switzerland with considerable funds at his disposal. In 1987 there was a warrant for his arrest which was not executed while he was in Poland, but after his return to Switzerland. Extradited to Warsaw, he was granted amnesty and later pardoned by President Aleksander Kwasniewski. Vogel had had dealings with KGB officer Alganov as well as former SB officers who appear to be linked to polo-playing Polish oligarch Marek Dochnal, whose clients have bank accounts operated by Peter Vogel. Deals involved range from a Russian takeover of a refinery in Gdansk to a Polish consortium buying a Siberian coal mine for over $100 million.

Whether Zacharski is involved with them is hard to say. As befits a master spy, he simply disappeared after the scandal that brought down the Oleksy government, first travelling to Switzerland, where he was rumoured to have salted away substantial sums. One certain thing is that he left Poland one step ahead of prosecution for flagrant mismanagement of Pewex, i.e. corruption, and illegal trading in imported motor vehicles. Where are you now, Marian?

It seems that Poland will never know peace for long, simply because of its geographical position. The Russian withdrawal from the country after the implosion of the USSR in 1989 left a number of channels embedded in Polish security organisations and a number of ‘illegals’, who were not known to the Polish security services. So delicate is Poland’s relationship with Russia that a GRU officer lived under deep cover for at least ten years as a salesman dealing in telescopic sights for hunting rifles, and was only identified as Tadeusz J. when he appeared in a court closed to the public in December 2010 after being arrested by Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego (ABW), the current Polish counter-espionage service. As part of his cover, Tadeusz J. had married a Polish woman. Cryptographic equipment and a cutting-edge communications system – transmitting direct to GRU Centre in Moscow and concealed in professionally adapted, commercially available electronic devices – were found in his home when he was arrested after a struggle in February 2009. His feeble defence that he had bought these ultra-hi-tech devices in a street market was rightly rejected by the court, which sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment and a fine equivalent to £10,000. The full extent of his mission was unknown, but it is thought to have had something to do with the now discarded US plans for an eastward-facing missile shield to be built in Poland, over which the Kremlin was hostile.
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