Farewell (32 page)

Such measures, however, would have required a serious plan and the means to implement it. Which would have been feasible for the KGB residency in Paris, with its dozens of operatives on the ground, or even by the CIA in one of the Eastern Bloc capitals. The DST did not have a single officer in Moscow. Its operational style went against all the rules of the trade, whether it was a conscious choice on the DST’s part or imposed by circumstances, assuring its success for a while. The other side of the coin, though, was bound to become apparent in cases where the DST simply did not have the means to respond to an unforeseen situation.

In fact, Marcel Chalet and Raymond Nart learned only a few months later what had happened to their precious mole.

Since the director of the DST had informed George Bush about the details of the affair, a steady collaboration had been established between the French services and the CIA. The American agency had first given them the Minox, and then an even smaller miniature camera. At the beginning, the CIA had to recover the films, they said, because only they could process the rolls in their labs. Raymond Nart used, soon after that, a specialized lab in Boullay-les-Troux, eighteen miles southwest of Paris, in order to become independent from his American “friends” and to be able to recover the snapshots directly. Since about 80 percent of the documents were about American technologies or facilities, it took Raymond Nart time to separate and compile all of the “Made in the USA” data from the documents gathered by the Farewell operation. When the DST started transmitting the information, meetings with CIA correspondents in Paris became more frequent. It was during one of those encounters that Nart eventually found out about what had happened to Vetrov.

“One day,” Nart remembers, “Chalet called me and said, ‘I have our CIA friend visiting here, plan on a lunch. We might get some news about Farewell.’”

Chalet liked meeting in restaurants, for gastronomic reasons, certainly, but also because this way he knew he was not tapped, and the background noise was good for scrambling conversations. When they all met at the restaurant—the Fermette Marbeuf in the eighth district, not far from the Champs-Elysées—Chalet was in the company of the CIA correspondent, a certain Wolf. The three men chatted for a few moments about this and that, and then Chalet turned to the American: “Alright, you may now say the name.”

As we learned earlier, Chalet did not know Farewell’s real name. Before letting the correspondent reveal anything on a source, he wanted to make sure they were indeed talking about the DST mole.

“Vladimir Vetrov,” answered the CIA agent.

Nart nodded to confirm, looking distressed, aware that the secret of the most precious mole the French secret services ever had was now in the open. Then the American told them the details of what happened to Vetrov. Actually, a CIA mole had provided them with a KGB internal log where the tragedy involving two of their colleagues was briefly recorded, one of them being a lieutenant colonel. Informed by the DST of the mole’s disappearance, the CIA had no difficulty putting two and two together.

Without truly admitting to it, the loss of Farewell was very difficult to accept for the two DST executives. As it was, the two men had not considered Vetrov’s prolonged silence “significant,” as the DST boss put it, possibly in an effort to keep denying the obvious. Even years after the facts, Chalet and Nart continue thinking that at the time the CIA correspondent did not sound that “categorical.”

In any case, in Chalet’s opinion, Vetrov’s arrest for a crime of passion did not change a thing in his instructions of absolute prudence to protect the source: “I still firmly thought that this affair had to be completely mothballed, processed with the most extreme prudence, kept perfectly secret from all other members of the alliance, and lead to no evasive action. That’s all. Those were my personal views.”
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Unfortunately for Vetrov, Marcel Chalet would not be able to remain the guardian of those principles much longer since he was scheduled to retire the following November. The French counterintelligence chief’s leaving was quite untimely. He was forced, at a critical moment for the source, to abandon an affair that provided “the strongest emotions of his career.” All he could do was to urge his young successor, Yves Bonnet, to observe the utmost prudence. Yves Bonnet, formerly prefect in Mayotte, replaced Chalet in December 1982.

Chalet’s retirement only accentuated the feeling of having lost this “French connection,” already perceptible in the field. Chronologically, it marked the transition of the Farewell dossier from its gathering phase to its exploitation phase. From this perspective, the affair was just starting, and in that sense, Farewell had already accomplished his “Great Work.”

It was precisely at the time when Vetrov was about to leave for the Gulag in a third-class car with bars on the windows that the Farewell dossier started acquiring its true historical dimension.

There is no evidence that while he was languishing in his cell in the Lefortovo prison Vetrov was aware of the developments the Farewell dossier was already having at the international level. By confiding in the French secret services, Vetrov had chosen first of all the surest way to take his revenge on his own service. As far as seeing his secret dream of destroying the KGB come true, Farewell understood perfectly that France had neither the means nor even the will to accomplish such an ambitious task alone. It would take a close collaboration between the DST and the CIA to make things happen. As one can observe after the facts, major disasters often have their roots in causes that, at first appearance, do not seem connected. Even though the causes of the USSR’s collapse were complex and many, it is tempting to establish a link between the Farewell affair and Ronald Reagan’s election occurring at the same time. The new republican administration did not hesitate to use the information transmitted by Vetrov as a first choice weapon in their arsenal. They had the same objectives as Farewell, but contrary to the modest KGB officer who was then in jail, they had the means to reach those objectives.

The end of the Carter presidency had been marred by the hostage crisis in Teheran that had become the symbol of the United States’ waning influence on the international scene. With Reagan, as he claimed in his campaign ads, “America was back,” and the attitude toward the USSR was about to change radically.

With Republicans coming back to power, men from the Nixon and Ford administrations returned to the White House. Although many of Reagan’s advisers had begun their careers under Nixon, it soon became apparent that the two presidents had a very different approach to USSR relations.

Since the big scare of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, East-West relations had eased up, transitioning to the period of détente at the end of the sixties. To preserve world peace, each bloc agreed to renounce crusades, letting adversaries impose hegemony in their zones of influence. Against this background, President Nixon, and then President Ford, embarked on a subtle strategy with the USSR, using a variety of peaceful coexistence policies (initially a Soviet theory) that could alternate from active to passive according to circumstances. Those policies were very elaborate schemes. They embodied the personality of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a German-born American political scientist of European culture, whose mind thrived on this geostrategic chess game with the Russians.

Kissinger was sincere in his pursuit of détente. That strategy led to the relaxation of trade terms with the Soviet Union. It was assumed that good trade relations could only contribute to international stability and reduce the risks of military escalation. During this period, corresponding to the years of Vetrov’s posting in Paris, the KGB intensified its technological spying.

A few former members of the Nixon administration, including Richard Allen, President Reagan’s first national security adviser, had been in a position to evaluate the limits of peaceful coexistence, and the double-dealing of the Soviets under the cover of détente. “In my opinion,” admits Allen, “the Nixon administration was a catastrophic disappointment, not just because of the ridiculous petty crimes turned into high crimes, but because of the turn to détente as a sort of theology, a theory of the inevitability of better relations with the USSR through inducements to alter its behavior. I believed that this theory was bankrupt.”
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Ronald Reagan personally championed this new resolute attitude of firmness toward the Soviet Union, imposing a more aggressive style. With the new president, there was no more “inevitability of better relations.” The game was about to change. The chess game of détente, a specifically Russian game, would be replaced by the more American poker to be the final game of the Cold War.

As confirmed by many witnesses, in contrast with Nixon’s more “cerebral” style, Reagan operated a lot on instinct and personal conviction. His views were that a system based on individual freedom and a market economy was better than the communist system and, therefore, had to prevail. “Reagan was often underestimated, he was aware of it, and did not mind turning that to an advantage. More importantly, he was able to shape and give substance to ideas that could be viewed as ‘primitive,’” Allen recalls.
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Vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, Reagan’s “primitive ideas” were clear. Long before his famous “Evil Empire Speech,” delivered in March 1983, he made his views known to the world, during his first press conference held at the White House in January 1981. Richard Allen was there, and he remembers the episode vividly:

“Answering a particularly insidious question from a journalist
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who had asked him how he viewed the long-range intentions of the Soviet Union, the president declared frankly that the Russians would continue to lie, cheat, and to commit any crime to achieve their goals. His words cast a chill over the audience, and the whole pack of journalists turned to Alexander Haig, the secretary of state, sitting next to me. Haig’s jaw dropped instantly, meaning an even more reproachful ‘Oh my God.’ Soon after the conference, as we were walking briskly through the arcade of the East Alley of the White House to go back to the West wing, Reagan suddenly turned toward me.

“‘Tell me, Dick, aren’t the Russians lying, cheating, and stealing from us everything they can?’

“‘Absolutely, Mr. President.’

“‘That’s what I thought,’ concluded Reagan.”
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Here again, one can only notice a disconcerting coincidence. Almost to the date, in Moscow, Vladimir Vetrov was about to plunge into his solo adventure, revealing to the West the scope of the theft of technology and of anything that could keep the Soviet economy afloat.

Within Reagan’s administration, and more specifically at the NSC (National Security Council), Allen put together a team that shared totally the president’s views. From that moment on, coexistence between the two blocs was not a given anymore; the Soviet Empire could very well be defeated and dismantled. In 1980, this was still a crazy idea. A new global strategy, referred to by a few NSC members as the “take-down strategy,” was about to be put in place, with the goal of winning the Cold War by strangling the Soviet economy. This strategy was articulated in a secret document, NSDD 75 (National Security Decision Directive). It had many facets, but rested mainly on three pillars.
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First, the White House was to reassert its determination in the military and geostrategic area. This led to the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and to a stronger support of contra-revolutionary movements in Central America, in Angola, and in Afghanistan where the U.S. delivered ground-to-air Stinger missiles to the mujahideens.

Then, the Americans decided, in close coordination with friendly oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf, to significantly increase the oil production in order to drive the price of the barrel down, thereby reducing the source of hard currencies the Soviet Union derived from oil. This oil policy would soon be reinforced by a very restrictive monetary policy adopted by the Federal Reserve Bank, leading to a drop in the price of gold, another significant resource of the USSR.

Finally, Reagan became directly involved in restarting the arms race with the implementation of new, but classic, military programs, including the famous stealth bomber. Above all was the elaboration of the SDI project (the Strategic Defense Initiative; better known under the name of Star Wars). SDI was a formidable technological challenge for the Soviets, since their economy was resting mostly on the military-industrial complex, dependent on stealing Western technology through the KGB Line X. Since Vetrov’s revelations, the Line X network had no secrets anymore for the Reagan Administration.

Actually, even before the Farewell dossier, the American government knew about technological spying by the Soviets. With the easing of restrictions on East-West trade under Nixon and Ford, however, the boundary between theft and legal commerce became fuzzy, especially as the KGB could quite legally buy certain technologies that were sold freely during international trade shows. Against this backdrop, the CIA and the FBI preferred to work on purely political or military intelligence cases.

President Carter was the first to become interested in scientific and technical espionage by the KGB. At his request, the CIA started writing reports such as the Presidential Review Memorandum 31, which treated the topic in fairly general terms. The first embargo measure on advanced U.S. technology was a retaliatory measure against the Soviet Army’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979.

In 1981, with the arrival of a new team in the White House, attention became even more focused. Reagan saw immediately the Soviet window of vulnerability in the area of strategic weapons, confirming that the communist economy was faltering. At the NSC, work started in earnest to monitor the situation closely. Thanks to the Farewell case, one man in particular became one of the most respected among Reagan’s advisers for his opinions. A few words about this character are in order before analyzing his personal contribution to ending the Cold War.

As one of the National Security Council advisers, Gus Weiss was specializing in economic affairs, but his areas of expertise were many. Fascinated by aeronautics since childhood, after graduating from Harvard, he had chosen to focus on the strategic implications of technological innovation. A brilliant mind and an extremely competent specialist, NASA awarded him the Exceptional Public Service Medal for his work. He even received the French Legion of Honor for his collaboration in a joint venture with General Electric and SNECMA, leading to the development of the CFM56 aircraft engines that would equip the first Airbus airplanes.
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In the mid-sixties, Gus Weiss joined the Hudson Institute, where he met Richard Allen. He worked in collaboration with Professor Hermann Kahn, the thermonuclear war theoretician, also known to have inspired the Dr. Strangelove character in Stanley Kubrick’s movie. At the NSC, this even earned him the nickname of “Dr. Strangeweiss,” which could not bother this man known for his strong sense of humor and for practicing self-derision occasionally.

True, Gus Weiss could seem strange, mostly because of his physical appearance. As a youth, he was afflicted by a rare form of alopecia that left him totally hairless. Once he put on his wig and his thick glasses, he could pass for a crazy scientist. However, he owed this reputation of being a bit of an eccentric to his extraordinary intellectual abilities and to his quasi-obsessive research work on neglected topics in industrial espionage.

Richard Allen, who had become his friend, brought him on board as a NSC staffer in the early seventies, during the Nixon presidency. “He was a pure genius,” Allen says, “he perfectly mastered all subject matters.” Weiss was already very interested in technology spying by the Soviets. He even wrote a first memo on the topic, which later was the inspiration for the 1974 NSC Memorandum 247. This was one of the very first texts responding to technology theft and prohibiting sales of powerful computers to Eastern Bloc countries.
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For several years, alone in his Washington office, Gus Weiss continued to inventory industrial espionage cases from the East. Without being able to precisely quantify the phenomenon, he became convinced of its strategic significance and of the Soviet Union’s vulnerability in this area.

In 1981, when Richard Allen came back to the NSC as first adviser, Gus Weiss was among the first to join his team of collaborators. He immediately resumed his work as economic adviser on technology espionage. This time, his activities were fully in line with the Reagan administration’s ideology.

By the end of 1981, when the Farewell dossier landed on his desk, Weiss was both shocked and triumphant, since this information validated all of his previous analyses. With such a treasure in his hands, Dr. “Strangeweiss” started seriously thinking about strategic responses that could be integrated in the global plan of choking the Soviet Union economically.

Respectful of Marcel Chalet’s explicit request, American secret services observed the utmost prudence when using the information from the Farewell file. At this stage of the operation, Vetrov was still active, and nobody wanted to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. In fact, mole arrests and expulsions would start much later.

Gus Weiss had a better idea about using the Farewell dossier in a much more devastating way. The VPK, the organization centralizing technology requests from the military-industrial complex, compiled in what was informally called the Red Book a detailed “shopping list” for each Soviet ministry.

In January 1982, Weiss proposed to William Casey, director of the CIA and personal friend of Ronald Reagan, to put in place a vast plan for sabotaging the Soviet economy by transferring false information to the KGB Line X spies.
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Reagan approved the plan immediately and enthusiastically.

Weiss focused his attention more specifically on the oil and gas industry which, as mentioned earlier, was a sector of the Soviet economy Washington had decided to handle in a special way.

A gas pipeline between Siberia and Western Europe had been in the design phase for many years.
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It was supposed to be commissioned soon. Implementing European technology, this gas pipeline was the source of tensions between the EEC countries and the United States. Europe’s need for energy independence through diversification was in direct conflict with the economic war the Americans had launched against the Soviet Union. Mitterrand and Reagan, just after their honeymoon over the Farewell case, had a serious confrontation on the topic.

Weiss’s plan allowed everybody to agree. He arranged to have software delivered to Line X through a Canadian company. This software was meant to control gas pipeline valves and turbines, and it was delivered with viruses embedded in the code by one of the contractors. The viruses were designed to have a delayed effect; at first the software seemed to work as per the contract specifications.