The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (4 page)

Over time, Angleton’s suspicions seeped into the CIA’s Soviet division. The poisonous distrust and second-guessing became serious obstacles to espionage operations inside the Soviet Union. Neither potential agents nor positive intelligence could get past him. The Moscow station was small, only four or five case officers, and they were exceedingly cautious, spending a great deal of time preparing dead drop sites—just in case there would be a spy. One case officer spent two years in the Moscow station without ever meeting a real agent. Robert M. Gates, who entered the CIA as a Soviet specialist in 1968 and later rose to become CIA director, recalled that “thanks to the excessive zeal of Angleton and his counterintelligence staff, during this period we had very few Soviet agents inside the USSR worthy of the name.”
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A younger generation of CIA case officers—who joined the agency in the 1950s and chafed under the restrictions created by Angleton—wanted to lead the agency out of lethargy and timidity. Burton Gerber was among them. A lanky, curious boy, he grew up in the prosperous small town of Upper Arlington, Ohio, during World War II. Each morning, he delivered the
Ohio State Journal
, a morning paper in Columbus, on his bicycle. While his mother made breakfast at 5:15 a.m., he folded each of the hundred papers and tucked them in a sack for his route. He often read the front-page stories from the war. He was thirteen years old in 1946, infused with a spirit of patriotism, and he often wondered what life was like in those distant lands he read about on the front page. He was determined to see for himself. He went to Michigan State University in East Lansing on a scholarship and earned a degree in international relations. He considered joining the foreign service, but in the late spring of 1955, the final quarter of his senior year, he agreed to an interview with a CIA campus recruiter. The CIA in those days was not discussed, nor was much known about it. The recruiter could not tell Gerber anything about the job, but would he be interested? Gerber said yes, took the application back to his fraternity house, filled it out, and mailed it in. Before year’s end, Gerber had joined the CIA at twenty-two years old. After a brief, temporary stint in the army, he was trained by the CIA for espionage work and then sent to Frankfurt and Berlin.
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Berlin was a cauldron of espionage on the front lines of the Cold War. The Berlin Operations Base, known as BOB, sat in the middle of the largest concentration of Soviet troops anywhere in the world. The CIA sought to recruit Soviets as agents or defectors, but it was hard, painstaking work. Meanwhile, one of the biggest operations of the base was technical: a clandestine 1,476-foot-long underground tunnel into the Soviet sector in East Berlin used to place wiretaps on Soviet and East German military communications cables. A huge volume of calls and Teletype messages was intercepted; 443,000 conversations, 368,000 of them Soviet, were transcribed by the United States and Britain. The wiretaps worked from May 1955 until uncovered in April 1956.
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Gerber had been taught the traditional methods of handling human espionage agents—finding and filling dead drops, handling letters with secret writing, sending and receiving signals, and making surveillance detection runs. In Berlin during the 1950s, the common method for espionage was to coax sources from the East to come to a safe house in West Berlin for debriefing, as Kisevalter had done with Popov. It depended on the source’s having freedom to move from East to West, which was possible until the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. A whole new set of obstacles then confronted the intelligence officers: how to run agents at a distance. The CIA still had little experience in the closed societies of the Soviet bloc. The agency’s thinking at headquarters was dominated by veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II intelligence agency, who had carried out daring paramilitary exploits during the war but believed that impersonal methods, such as dead drops, were safest.

A dead drop is a method of exchanging messages and intelligence in a secret location, known to the agent and the handler, who leave materials and pick them up from the concealed spot but never see each other. To the new generation of officers who joined the CIA after the war, the dead drop seemed to be the epitome of caution. They were restless and impatient and began to innovate and experiment with new methods. The Berlin base became a laboratory for running spies on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Instead of just inviting agents to a safe house, the officers created more imaginative techniques for espionage to penetrate forbidden zones.

Fortuitously, Angleton’s suspicions did not extend to Eastern Europe. He didn’t seem to care or pay much attention, although the Soviet satellite states were setting up secret police organizations modeled on the KGB and its predecessors.
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The back alleys of Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, and other cities of Eastern Europe became a proving ground for younger CIA case officers. They invented new ways to conduct espionage in “denied areas,” as the CIA called them. The methods were important, but even more significant was the mind-set. Gerber had been inspired to do the most important job of the day, which was to fight communism and the Soviet Union. He and his classmates, on their first tours abroad, did not want to sit in their chairs. They were not intimidated by the Iron Curtain. They had chosen espionage as a career and disdained passivity. Gerber always disliked the term “denied areas.” Denied to whom? Not to him, nor to his classmates.

Not to Haviland Smith, either. When he arrived at the Berlin base in 1960, he was full of ideas and became a pioneer in the new thinking that he had first developed in Prague.

A graduate of Dartmouth, Smith served in the Army Security Agency as a Morse code and Russian-language intercept officer from 1951 to 1954 and was later in the graduate program in Russian studies at the University of London, where he did a few odd jobs for the CIA. Smith had a very high language aptitude and spoke French, Russian, and German. He joined the CIA in 1956 and was selected for a tour in Czechoslovakia. While he was deep in language training, headquarters suddenly asked him to take over as Prague station chief in 1958. His predecessor wasn’t particularly active and left abruptly. When Smith arrived in March, he had functioning Czech-language ability but little preparation for the kinds of clandestine operations he wanted to undertake. He hadn’t been trained in the tradecraft of espionage—how to mail secret letters, select and load dead drops, detect and deal with surveillance, or conduct an agent meeting—in a hostile, surveillance-heavy environment. Smith would have to figure it out for himself.
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Smith discovered there were dozens of sophisticated radios in the Prague station, and his army intercept experience proved useful. He found the radio frequency used by the Czech security service in their surveillance vehicles monitoring the U.S. embassy and was able to break their voice codes. If Smith had to put down a dead drop or mail a letter, he turned on the radio first, then ran a tape recorder to capture the broadcasts. He put down the drop or message, then went back and checked the tape. If he was under surveillance while filing the drop, he aborted the operation. If there was no evidence of surveillance, he signaled the agent to pick it up. “Prague was a perfect place for the kinds of operations we were contemplating,” he recalled. “A beautiful old baroque city, it was untouched by war. It was full of narrow, old streets, arcades, and alleys.” Through trial and error, Smith found that most of the time he was under surveillance. Once, he thought he was free but discovered he was being watched by twenty-seven different vehicles. He was shocked and became convinced that whatever espionage he could carry out would have to be done under surveillance. He just could never assume he was free. This was an important early lesson for working in “denied areas.”

Smith began to experiment. He sought to establish regular, observable patterns of behavior that would lull the surveillance teams into complacency. He became a slow, careful driver with the purpose of convincing the Czech surveillance that whenever he went out, on foot or in a car, they already knew what he was up to and left him alone. He went to get a haircut at 10:00 a.m. every other Tuesday, then returned directly to the office, driving slowly. After six months, he realized that no surveillance was on him for the haircut ride, so long as he wasn’t away more than forty-five minutes. Smith always drove his babysitter home each evening, a forty-minute ride. After a while, the surveillance tired of that, too. Smith had created two opportunities for operational activity—a gap—and he might be able to squeeze in the time for a mailing, a dead drop, or something else. In those rigid, careful routines, Smith discovered a behavior of the secret police that had not been realized before. They could be lazy, orthodox, and conventional. The illusionist might deceive them.

Even with this knowledge, however, Smith was restless. The patterns might create a gap, but they were still too rigid. He wanted more flexibility, to be able to carry out a headquarters instruction on the shortest possible notice even when under surveillance. This led him to push the concept of the gap even harder. He found that it was possible, walking or driving the back alleys, to create momentary visual blackouts. He could disappear for a very brief period in a way that would seem normal to the watchers and, if done properly, would allow him enough time to make a brush contact, mail a letter, or put down a dead drop while completely out of sight. The idea was simple: he turned corners. When he was being followed on foot, two brisk right turns around a block would string out the surveillance to the point where he would be completely out of sight from the moment he turned the second corner until the lead watcher caught up and came around the same corner—maybe only fifteen to thirty seconds. That was enough.

Smith also perfected the concept of a brush pass, in which the agent appears at just the right moment in the gap. The agent brushes by the case officer, delivering or accepting a package, then escapes. The secret police would never see the agent on the other end of the brush pass if it worked right; the agent would be gone in a flash. Much depended on finding the right location, with jutting corners to block the line of sight of surveillance and a fast escape path for the agent.

Smith was sent to Berlin next. It was a different kind of city, more spread out, but he still operated in the gap and under surveillance. His ideas suggested a real change was possible from the old days: the ability to run espionage operations in the pressure-cooker environment of closed zones. At the suggestion of headquarters, Smith began to train others in Berlin on his new methods, building in everything he’d learned about working “in the gap.” For years that followed, moving “through the gap” became a watchword and a trusted method for CIA case officers.

In 1963, Smith returned to the United States and set up a course for officers heading to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that incorporated the new tradecraft. But he found there was still caution and timidity in the CIA leadership. Smith was asked to train a Czech intelligence source in the United States. The agent absolutely refused to use dead drops because the incriminating secret messages and film would be out of his hands—and could potentially be discovered by the Czech secret police. When Smith showed him the brush pass method, the agent readily agreed to use it, because he would put his material directly into the hands of the CIA. At headquarters, a request was made to Helms for permission to use the technique operationally in Prague. Without even asking questions about it, Helms refused, saying he had “sores all over his ass” from the Penkovsky case and was not getting involved in “that sort of thing” again, Smith recalled. The Czech agent went to Prague without permission to use the brush pass, and a year went by. Smith hammered away at headquarters, seeking approval. A steady stream of valuable agents was beginning to show up in Eastern Europe, and Smith felt the dead drop routines were completely inadequate.

In 1965, Helms agreed to an experiment. He sent his deputy, Thomas Karamessines, to a demonstration of the brush pass. Smith set it up in the lobby of the grand old Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington. In the demonstration, the brush pass was carried out so deftly that Karamessines missed it. The key had been sleight of hand: a case officer dramatically shook out a raincoat with his left hand just as he handed off a package to Smith with his right. Karamessines saw the raincoat but not the package. Smith had learned this technique from a professional magician. The next day, Helms approved the use of the brush pass in Prague. The Czech agent subsequently passed to the CIA hundreds of rolls of film. The brush pass, with modifications, was later expanded into all of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The younger generation adapted as they went along. David Forden, a case officer who had been tutored by Smith, went to Warsaw and invented a technique using a slowly moving car to slip around corners, in the gap, and exchange packages with agents. It was a sort of brush pass using the car. “I submitted a proposal for what I thought was a valuable tradecraft tool to meet people in areas which were heavy in surveillance against American spies,” Forden recalled. “I got a response from the front office of the division, ‘Risky. Dangerous. Won’t work.’ To which I replied, ‘Look, all this is risky and dangerous. But it will work.’ ” Forden later became the case officer for one of the CIA’s most productive and significant agents, Ryszard Kuklinski, a Polish army colonel who provided critical intelligence on the Warsaw Pact.
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Gerber experimented with an even more radical idea than the brush pass—meeting with an agent personally. The brush pass was a very swift transaction while under surveillance. Gerber’s ambition was to bring off a real meeting with the agent, away from surveillance. Headquarters was aghast, but Gerber thought he could make it work during his next assignment, to Sofia, Bulgaria. The personal meetings wouldn’t be long, and Gerber thought they could be managed with care. A written message passed in a dead drop was limited to what was on the page, but in person Gerber could look in the eyes of the agent, ask a question, absorb the body language and the mood. He also concluded that being a case officer and a station chief meant taking calculated risks. Espionage required going out on a limb. Gerber’s enthusiasm for meeting agents in person never dimmed.