The son of a Chicago policeman, Hanssen had 25 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was weeks away from his retirement when he was arrested in February 2001 as he placed a rubbish bag filled with classified documents in a dead drop in a park in Northern Virginia. He came from a troubled background and—in spite of his appearance of being a family man, happily married with six children, and an active member of his Roman Catholic church, where he attended meetings of Opus Dei—Hanssen was a psychiatric textbook case of contradictions. While his colleagues at work joked that he had the appearance of an undertaker, he led a bizarre private life dominated by sexual fantasies, which he posted on a sordid internet site under his own name, and a year-long relationship with a Washington, D.C., stripper whom he took on an official visit to Hong Kong. Tormented by demons, Hanssen hid a videocamera in his bedroom and taped his bedtime escapades with his wife, which he then showed to a male friend.
A right-winger and an ardent gun collector, but with a heavy mortgage and six children at private schools, Hanssen later claimed to have been a Jekyll and Hyde personality motivated by fear of failure and anger at being passed over for promotion and not having had his talents recognized by the FBI. In fact the Bureau had acknowledged his computer and accounting skills, but had failed to link him to the mole that a post–Aldrich Ames damage assessment had concluded was still active. As a Soviet counterintelligence analyst, Hanssen knew how to exploit the Bureau’s limitations and, like Ames, had sufficient grasp of the tradecraft to take the appropriate precautions to avoid detection. He was considered a computer genius and constantly monitored the systems to spot tell-tale traces of any sensitive, compartmented surveillance operations that might have endangered him. Unlike Ames, Hanssen was not the subject of routine polygraph tests to retain his security clearances and took care to protect his identity from his Soviet contacts, although doubtless they quickly worked out that he was a senior FBI officer, if not his actual name.
Hanssen compromised up to 6,000 pages of highly classified documents and was responsible, in his very first letter in October 1985, for tipping off the KGB to the existence of two FBI recruits inside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., Sergei Motorin and Valeri Martynov, both of whom were promptly recalled to Moscow and executed. In addition he named Boris Yuzhin, who was sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp, and implicated Gen. Dmitri Polyakov, a GRU retiree who had volunteered his services to the FBI in New York in January 1962 when he had been deputy rezident. Code-named TOP HAT, Polyakov avoided discovery until he was named by Hanssen, after which he was executed for treason.
The person who eventually sealed Hanssen’s fate was a retired KGB officer to whom the FBI had been alerted by a source code-named AVENGER. Having provided the clues that led to the arrests of Earl Edwin Pitts and David Nicholson, the FBI pressed AVENGER for information that would assist their major mole hunt, code-named GRAY SUIT, which was intended to find the spy who must have operated in parallel with, but in isolation from, Ames. The FBI’s principal suspect, code-named GRAY DECEIVER, was a veteran CIA counterintelligence officer, Brian Kelley, who had spent much of his career studying Soviet illegals and, most recently, had tried to entrap Felix Bloch. Instead of supplying the information himself, AVENGER recommended another source who in October 2000 had access to original documents from the KGB’s “Ramon Garcia” file, together with a tape of one of the spy’s brief, two-minute telephone contacts with his handler in Washington, Aleksandr Fefelov, in August 1986.
The voice on the tape turned out to be that not of Kelley, but of Hanssen, who was then promptly code-named GRAY DAY and placed under intensive surveillance.
The final linchpin proved to be one of the original plastic trash bags that Hanssen had left at a dead drop, from which the FBI laboratory succeeded in lifting two latent fingerprints. Being caught in the act of filling a dead drop was the final part of a lengthy surveillance operation supervised personally by the FBI director, Louis Freeh, who knew Hanssen and his family and even worshipped in the same church.
The damage assessment analyzing the scale of Hanssen’s betrayal amounted to a veritable catalog of the nation’s most treasured secrets, including MONOPOLY, the tunnel dug under the Soviet compound at Mount Alto, packed with National Security Agency equipment to eavesdrop on Russian conversations; and the “continuity of government” contingency plans to protect the president and his staff in deep bunkers in the event of a nuclear conflict. Hanssen supplied a copy of The FBI’s Double Agent Program, which summarized every current operation, and the 1987, 1989, and 1990 versions of the annual National Intelligence Program, which set out interagency plans and objectives. Incredibly, Hanssen even revealed to the KGB that one of their most impressive defectors, Viktor Sheymov, was now using the alias “Dick Shepherd” and ran a successful computer software company in Washington, D.C. He also disclosed documents circulated by the director of central intelligence—Stealth Orientation and volume 2 of Compendium of Future Intelligence Requirements—and others from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, including two nuclear war assessments for the 1990s, The Soviet Union in Crisis: Prospects for the Next Two Years; a copy of the National HUMINT Collection Plan; and a technical survey of measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) capabilities.
Information about the FBI’s mysterious source code-named AVENGER emerged in May 2003 with the conviction in Moscow of Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, a 52-year-old former KGB colonel who allegedly had been lured back to Russia in November 2002 after his emigration to the United States. Zaporozhsky was accused of having helped the FBI to find Ames and Hanssen, and after a trial that lasted two and a half months, was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment in June 2003. According to a statement released upon his conviction, Zaporozhsky, formerly the deputy chief of the First Department of Directorate K until his premature retirement in 1997, had been living in Cockeysville, Maryland, with his wife Galina when he was ensnared. The SVR claimed that Zaporozhsky had contacted the CIA in 1995 and then left the country illegally three years later, supposedly to take up a position with the Walter Shipping Company, described as an FBI front.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
HAMBLETON, HUGH
A Canadian academic who worked as a NATO intelligence analyst and spied for the KGB between 1956 and 1961, Hambleton came from a left-wing, intellectual family and was identified as a Soviet agent in 1961 by Anatoli Golitsyn. He would later work at the London School of Economics and at Laval University in Quebec, but was not prosecuted, even when his home was raided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Although he had been warned that he might be arrested if he visited England, Hambleton flew to London on a visit in June 1982 and was charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Acts. He was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and eventually deported to Canada.
HAINAN INCIDENT
In March 2001 an American EP-3 Orion flying a routine signals intelligence collection mission off the coast of the People’s Republic of China was intercepted by a pair of J-8 jet fighters, one of which accidentally collided with the U.S. plane. The pilot succeeded in landing the badly damaged aircraft on Hainan Island where Chinese troops arrested the crew of 24 and examined the sophisticated intercept equipment. After 11 days of tense diplomatic negotiations, the crew was released and the plane was dismantled, packed into two huge cargo planes, and flown back to the United States.
GUNNERSIDE
The code name assigned by the Special Operations Executive to a plan to infiltrate saboteurs into Norway in February 1943 to destroy the hydroelectric plant at Vermork upon which the Nazis were dependent for the production of heavy water, a commodity thought to be an essential moderator in an atomic pile when achieving a chain reaction.
GUNMAN
An American code name for the investigation conducted in 1984 into the discovery that a consignment of IBM Selectric typewriters had been intercepted by the KGB while consigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow and fitted with miniature transmitters that recorded each keystroke. The typewriters were used in the embassy until the transmitters were found and removed.
GUILLAUME, GUNTER
Aclose friend and one of three personal assistants to German chancellor Willi Brandt, for whom he worked in his private office; he was also a long-term mole run personally by Markus Wolf, the legendary chief of the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), who had recruited him and his wife Christel 18 years earlier.
Guillaume had arrived in West Germany as a refugee in 1956, four years after he had joined the East German army as a loyal Communist party member and had served as an officer with the rank of captain. He had also been trained as an agent, and when he settled in Frankfurt, supposedly as an authentic refugee, Guillaume joined the Social Democratic party (SDP) as a voluntary worker before becoming a full-time party functionary. In 1970 he expressed the wish to become a civil servant in Bonn and, having sailed through a security check that failed to reveal his service as an officer in the East German army, was appointed to the economic and social affairs staff of the Chancellery. Soon afterward, Brandt had picked him to act as his link to the SDP, and he maintained an office both in the party’s headquarters and in the Palais Schaumburg. For the next three years Guillaume enjoyed access to the very highest classifications of secret information and passed it back to Wolf, who shared it with Moscow. As well as material about West Germany’s foreign policy and relations with NATO, Guillaume passed on details of Brandt’s rather exotic extramarital affairs which, at that time, were completely unknown to the public.
The spy’s run of luck ended when suspicions were raised about the existence of a top-level mole with direct access to Brandt, and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) launched an investigation. Exactly how the BfV got onto Guillaume remains a matter of speculation, and much of what has been written about the case, including by Wolf himself, has suggested that the BfV initiated an investigation after a study of illicit East–West communications found traces of an illegal code-named GEORG who had completed several missions in the 1950s. Allegedly a detailed analysis of contemporary decrypted East German wireless traffic had revealed a message, dating back to April 1957, in which a source known as “G.G.” had been sent birthday greetings. Supposedly this clue had led the BfV mole hunters to conduct a lengthy trawl for anyone with the same birthday, and eventually the field had narrowed to Guillaume’s son Pierre. “G.G.” was somehow linked to the missions undertaken by GEORG, and both agents were tentatively identified as Guillaume, who was placed under intensive surveillance.
Gunter Nollau, the BfV’s counterintelligence chief briefed his interior minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on 29 May 1973 and informed him that Guillaume was the subject of an investigation. Wolf was probably told about this much later by his star mole in the BfV, Klaus Kuron (who had offered to spy for the HVA in 1982 and continued undetected until the collapse of East Germany in 1989), but instead of moving Guillaume away from access, no action was taken, and this inertia led to Nollau’s subsequent resignation. Thus, much to everybody’s embarrassment, Guillaume was allowed to continue spying for 11 months before he was finally confronted and was even allowed to accompany Brandt on his holiday to his hideaway retreat at Hamas, Norway. During these final months Christel reported that she thought she was being watched, but Wolf did not take much notice of this warning, on the assumption that agents often develop a healthy degree of paranoia, and failed to extract his two agents before they were finally confronted by the BfV. Wolf was also influenced, he admitted later, by Christel’s new job as an aide to Georg Leber, Brandt’s defense minister. Whatever the source of the initial tip, Guillaume came under intensive surveillance, which he also spotted. He was arrested by the BfV on 24 April 1974, provoking a major political scandal that led to Brandt’s resignation just 12 days later. When the police burst into his house, Guillaume did not attempt to deny he was a spy—indeed, he identified himself proudly as an officer and citizen of the German Democratic Republic and demanded the appropriate, respectful treatment! He was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment in Rheinbach prison, outside Bonn, and Christel received eight. Suffering from kidney disease, he was released in October 1981 in a spy swap and returned as a hero to East Germany, where he died in April 1995.
According to the KGB rezident in Karlshorst, Sergei Kondrashev, the information from Guillaume, whose code name was HANSEN, was “of such extraordinary importance” that the KGB’s chairman, Yuri Andropov, often passed it personally straight to Andrei Gromyko, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev’s foreign minister. An officer messenger then waited for him to read the material, “information of the best quality on the situation in Germany and on discussions with the Western powers,” and returned it to the KGB’s headquarters. After Guillaume’s exposure Brezhnev wrote a personal note to Brandt denying any personal knowledge of the espionage, but few believed him because he too must have been one of his recipients and beneficiaries.
Certainly, in political terms, Guillaume was in a position to reassure the Soviet bloc that détente was not a ruse and to supply crucial reports in 1973, when a potentially damaging political split had developed over policy between the Nixon administration in the United States and Washington’s European partners in NATO. The case established Wolf’s almost mythological reputation, and in January 1974 he was awarded East Germany’s most coveted decoration, the Karl Marx medal, while his minister of state security, Erich Miekle, was appointed to full membership of the Politburo.
Guillaume had arrived in West Germany as a refugee in 1956, four years after he had joined the East German army as a loyal Communist party member and had served as an officer with the rank of captain. He had also been trained as an agent, and when he settled in Frankfurt, supposedly as an authentic refugee, Guillaume joined the Social Democratic party (SDP) as a voluntary worker before becoming a full-time party functionary. In 1970 he expressed the wish to become a civil servant in Bonn and, having sailed through a security check that failed to reveal his service as an officer in the East German army, was appointed to the economic and social affairs staff of the Chancellery. Soon afterward, Brandt had picked him to act as his link to the SDP, and he maintained an office both in the party’s headquarters and in the Palais Schaumburg. For the next three years Guillaume enjoyed access to the very highest classifications of secret information and passed it back to Wolf, who shared it with Moscow. As well as material about West Germany’s foreign policy and relations with NATO, Guillaume passed on details of Brandt’s rather exotic extramarital affairs which, at that time, were completely unknown to the public.
The spy’s run of luck ended when suspicions were raised about the existence of a top-level mole with direct access to Brandt, and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) launched an investigation. Exactly how the BfV got onto Guillaume remains a matter of speculation, and much of what has been written about the case, including by Wolf himself, has suggested that the BfV initiated an investigation after a study of illicit East–West communications found traces of an illegal code-named GEORG who had completed several missions in the 1950s. Allegedly a detailed analysis of contemporary decrypted East German wireless traffic had revealed a message, dating back to April 1957, in which a source known as “G.G.” had been sent birthday greetings. Supposedly this clue had led the BfV mole hunters to conduct a lengthy trawl for anyone with the same birthday, and eventually the field had narrowed to Guillaume’s son Pierre. “G.G.” was somehow linked to the missions undertaken by GEORG, and both agents were tentatively identified as Guillaume, who was placed under intensive surveillance.
Gunter Nollau, the BfV’s counterintelligence chief briefed his interior minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on 29 May 1973 and informed him that Guillaume was the subject of an investigation. Wolf was probably told about this much later by his star mole in the BfV, Klaus Kuron (who had offered to spy for the HVA in 1982 and continued undetected until the collapse of East Germany in 1989), but instead of moving Guillaume away from access, no action was taken, and this inertia led to Nollau’s subsequent resignation. Thus, much to everybody’s embarrassment, Guillaume was allowed to continue spying for 11 months before he was finally confronted and was even allowed to accompany Brandt on his holiday to his hideaway retreat at Hamas, Norway. During these final months Christel reported that she thought she was being watched, but Wolf did not take much notice of this warning, on the assumption that agents often develop a healthy degree of paranoia, and failed to extract his two agents before they were finally confronted by the BfV. Wolf was also influenced, he admitted later, by Christel’s new job as an aide to Georg Leber, Brandt’s defense minister. Whatever the source of the initial tip, Guillaume came under intensive surveillance, which he also spotted. He was arrested by the BfV on 24 April 1974, provoking a major political scandal that led to Brandt’s resignation just 12 days later. When the police burst into his house, Guillaume did not attempt to deny he was a spy—indeed, he identified himself proudly as an officer and citizen of the German Democratic Republic and demanded the appropriate, respectful treatment! He was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment in Rheinbach prison, outside Bonn, and Christel received eight. Suffering from kidney disease, he was released in October 1981 in a spy swap and returned as a hero to East Germany, where he died in April 1995.
According to the KGB rezident in Karlshorst, Sergei Kondrashev, the information from Guillaume, whose code name was HANSEN, was “of such extraordinary importance” that the KGB’s chairman, Yuri Andropov, often passed it personally straight to Andrei Gromyko, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev’s foreign minister. An officer messenger then waited for him to read the material, “information of the best quality on the situation in Germany and on discussions with the Western powers,” and returned it to the KGB’s headquarters. After Guillaume’s exposure Brezhnev wrote a personal note to Brandt denying any personal knowledge of the espionage, but few believed him because he too must have been one of his recipients and beneficiaries.
Certainly, in political terms, Guillaume was in a position to reassure the Soviet bloc that détente was not a ruse and to supply crucial reports in 1973, when a potentially damaging political split had developed over policy between the Nixon administration in the United States and Washington’s European partners in NATO. The case established Wolf’s almost mythological reputation, and in January 1974 he was awarded East Germany’s most coveted decoration, the Karl Marx medal, while his minister of state security, Erich Miekle, was appointed to full membership of the Politburo.
GT/VILLAGE
Central Intelligence Agency code name for an undisclosed spy who, after being betrayed by Aldrich Ames, was recalled to Moscow from the Soviet consulate in Surabaya, Indonesia, in March 1986 and executed.
GT/EASTBOUND
Central Intelligence Agency code name for an undisclosed spy betrayed by Aldrich Ames. The spy was presumed arrested after his CIAcontact, Erik Sites, was ambushed in May 1986 as he attempted to make contact with him in a Moscow park.
GRU
Originally known as the Third Department of the Red Army’s General Staff, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—the Soviet military intelligence service—was created in October 1918 but adopted that title only in June 1942. Like its NKVD counterpart, the GRU operated parallel foreign intelligence collection channels, one based on local rezidents, usually working under cover posts in the military attaché’s offices, with another reliant on illegals. The West’s knowledge of this organization was revealed by a defector, Walter Krivitsky, who had been the GRU’s illegal rezident in The Hague until September 1937. Further information was imparted by Vladimir Rezun, who defected to the Secret Intelligence Service in June 1978 while under United Nations cover in Geneva; later he was to write several not entirely accurate accounts of the GRU under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov, leading some to suspect that he had not been their only author.
GROUPEMENT DE CONTRÔLES RADIOÉLÉCTRIQUE (GCR)
France’s signals intelligence organization, based at Domme in the Dordogne, with intercept stations located at French military installations overseas. During the Cold War there were others at Bahrsdorf in the Harz mountains, at Appen in Hamburg, and at Landau. The French did not share their product with the U.S. National
Security Agency, with the exception of data collected at a station at Berlin’s Tegel airport, which was also shared with the German Bundesnachrichtendienst.
Security Agency, with the exception of data collected at a station at Berlin’s Tegel airport, which was also shared with the German Bundesnachrichtendienst.
GRENADA
The invasion of this Caribbean island in October 1982 by a supposedly multinational force led by the United States to restore democracy was an intelligence-led event following the arrival of Cuban troops and an expansion of the airport. Aerial reconnaissance showed the runway was being extended with Cuban support to 9,000 feet, and the suspicion was that Grenada had been earmarked as a regional base for long-range Soviet aircraft. The assassination of Marxist prime minister Maurice Bishop acted as the catalyst for American
intervention and a large U.S. naval task force seized the island, much to the dismay of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose government had not been informed of the plan to occupy a Commonwealth country.
The U.S.-led invasion was supported on the ground by a single Central Intelligence Agency officer, a woman who distinguished herself by taking a sample of the runway to measure the depth and determine whether it could sustain landings by heavy-lift aircraft. The operation succeeded, but at a cost of 19 killed and 115 wounded, some by friendly fire, and the loss of three helicopters shot down by unexpectedly efficient antiaircraft fire.
intervention and a large U.S. naval task force seized the island, much to the dismay of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose government had not been informed of the plan to occupy a Commonwealth country.
The U.S.-led invasion was supported on the ground by a single Central Intelligence Agency officer, a woman who distinguished herself by taking a sample of the runway to measure the depth and determine whether it could sustain landings by heavy-lift aircraft. The operation succeeded, but at a cost of 19 killed and 115 wounded, some by friendly fire, and the loss of three helicopters shot down by unexpectedly efficient antiaircraft fire.
GREAT BRITAIN
Although Britain’s various intelligence organizations can be traced back to the Elizabethan era, the modern security and intelligence structure is based on the separation of responsibilities established during World War I when the Home and Foreign departments of the Secret Service Bureau evolved into the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), leaving the Admiralty with the supervision of signals interception and decryption. In 1919 signals intelligence was passed to the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and continued under SIS’s umbrella until 1946 when, as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), it moved from Bletchley Park to Eastcote and was placed under the control of the Foreign Office. Accordingly, the United Kingdom now maintains three principal intelligence agencies—MI5, SIS, and GCHQ—with a total budget in excess of a billion pounds. Now based at Benhall in Cheltenham, GCHQ employs more staff than the other two agencies combined, although exact strengths are not published.
During World War II numerous other agencies enjoyed a brief existence, including the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which conducted resistance and sabotage operations in Nazi-occupied territory, and British Security Coordination, which acted as an umbrella for MI5, SIS, SOE, and the Political Warfare Executive in New York.
None survived significantly into the postwar era, although regional representative organizations were maintained in the Middle East (Security Intelligence Middle East and the Inter-Services Liaison Department), Far East (Combined Intelligence Far East), Iraq (Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq), and the Aden Intelligence Centre.
During World War II numerous other agencies enjoyed a brief existence, including the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which conducted resistance and sabotage operations in Nazi-occupied territory, and British Security Coordination, which acted as an umbrella for MI5, SIS, SOE, and the Political Warfare Executive in New York.
None survived significantly into the postwar era, although regional representative organizations were maintained in the Middle East (Security Intelligence Middle East and the Inter-Services Liaison Department), Far East (Combined Intelligence Far East), Iraq (Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq), and the Aden Intelligence Centre.
GRAY DECEIVER
The Federal Bureau of Investigation code name for the mole thought to have existed within the U.S. counterintelligence community following the arrest of Aldrich Ames in February 1994. The FBI investigation, code-named GRAY SUIT, was convinced that the spy was a veteran Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer, Brian Kelley, but he turned out to be Kelley’s neighbor, Robert Hanssen.
GOUZENKO, IGOR
A GRU cipher clerk based at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, Gouzenko defected in September 1945 and delivered 109 documents from the referentura to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) identifying a large number of GRU spies active in Canada. A royal commission was appointed to review the documents, cross-examine Gouzenko, and take evidence from the suspected spies, and its report was subsequently published.
Seventeen members of the exposed GRU network were prosecuted, of whom nine were convicted of espionage. Gouzenko, his wife, and children were resettled in Canada and occasionally made public appearances to defend themselves from criticism. With help from his RCMP interpreter, he wrote Fall of a Titan and his wife published Before Igor, and their story was turned into a movie.
Seventeen members of the exposed GRU network were prosecuted, of whom nine were convicted of espionage. Gouzenko, his wife, and children were resettled in Canada and occasionally made public appearances to defend themselves from criticism. With help from his RCMP interpreter, he wrote Fall of a Titan and his wife published Before Igor, and their story was turned into a movie.
GOTT, RICHARD
Aleft-wing British journalist and author of several books on the liberation movements of Latin America, Gott, the son of a World War II general, was identified by Oleg Gordievsky as a long-standing agent of influence run by the London rezidentura.
Then working as the literary editor of the Guardian, Gott acknowledged that he had held clandestine meetings with KGB officers in London and Vienna and had failed to declare payments from them. He resigned from his newspaper but continues to contribute articles periodically.
Then working as the literary editor of the Guardian, Gott acknowledged that he had held clandestine meetings with KGB officers in London and Vienna and had failed to declare payments from them. He resigned from his newspaper but continues to contribute articles periodically.
GORDIEVSKY, OLEG
A “line PR” political reports specialist of the Third Department of the KGB’s elite First Chief Directorate, which covered Scandinavia and Great Britain, Gordievsky was disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and had been warned of his future behavior because of his affair with his secretary.
Gordievsky had been a member of Mikhail Luibimov’s rezidentura in Copenhagen since October 1972, on his second tour of duty in Denmark as press attaché, and was pitched by the Secret Intelligence Service station commander, Robert Browning, whom he had encountered casually at a local squash club.
Quite apart from producing a veritable bonanza of highly relevant information from the very heart of the Third Department, Gordievsky’s survival represented SIS’s essential integrity, proving that the organization could run a successful penetration into the KGB without fear of compromise. Gordievsky was responsible for a series of Soviet expulsions. The first to go, in December 1982, was a naval attaché, Capt. Anatoli Zotov of the GRU, and he had been followed a month later by Vladimir Chernev, ostensibly a translator at the International Wheat Council. Finally, in April 1983, three diplomats and a correspondent, Igor Titov, had been expelled. All had been fingered by Gordievsky, who had given the SIS a comprehensive analysis of the KGB’s rezidentura, thus allowing MI5 to concentrate its limited resources on the best targets.
Gordievsky’s knowledge extended far beyond the Third Department, and he revealed that his brother had trained as an illegal for deployment by Directorate S into West Germany. He also knew where his contemporaries had been posted, and his information was a contributor to the West’s efforts to curb the KGB. The positive identification of a Soviet diplomat as an intelligence professional can be of immense value to an overstretched security apparatus unsure of which target to concentrate on, and the statistics of Soviet expulsions worldwide began to escalate markedly in 1983, when 111 officials were declared persona non grata from 16 countries during the first eight months of that year. Between 1978 and August 1983 a total of 316 espionage suspects were removed from 43 countries, a figure that might have indicated to a vigilant analyst in Moscow that the KGB had sprung a leak. If the tips had been traced back to the SIS, doubtless the KGB would have conducted a mole hunt to trace the culprit.
On 17 May 1985, having been named the rezident designate, Gordievsky was unexpectedly summoned home to Moscow, supposedly for consultations, but he was very suspicious and agreed only when he had been assured by his SIS handler at an emergency meeting that there was no reason to believe he was in any danger. However, upon his arrival he realized his apartment had been searched, and when he reached KGB headquarters at Yasenevo, he was accused of being a spy. He denied the accusation and resisted his interrogators, who used drugs in an attempt to extract a confession, but although the KGB had been tipped off to his dual role, there was apparently not sufficient evidence to justify an arrest. Although under heavy surveillance, Gordievsky was able to shake off his watchers while jogging in a park at the end of July and make contact with the SIS, sending an emergency signal requesting a rescue. The ostensibly innocuous signal was nothing more elaborate than Gordievsky appearing on a prearranged street corner, at a particular time, carrying a shopping bag, but it was received and promptly relayed to London.
The distress signal prompted the SIS chief, Christopher Curwen, to fly to Scotland immediately to brief Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was then staying with the queen at Balmoral, while the Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe was visited at Chevening in Kent.
When informed of the need for their permission to undertake the perilous act of removing Gordievsky from Moscow under the watchful eyes of the KGB, both approved the plan, and arrangements were made for him to be exfiltrated to Finland by the Moscow station commander, Viscount Asquith, in his Saab. He acted as a good Samaritan, escorting a pregnant member of the embassy staff for medical treatment in Helsinki, while Gordievsky climbed aboard at a rendezvous outside Leningrad and was driven over the frontier at Viborg. Once in Finland he was greeted by the Helsinki commander, Margaret Ramsay, and then driven to Tromsø, Norway, for a flight the next day from Oslo to London. He was then accommodated briefly at a country house in the Midlands, where he was visited by Curwen, and then put up at Fort Monkton for a lengthy debriefing, lasting 80 days, conducted by the SIS’s principal Kremlinologist, Gordon Barrass. Among Gordievsky’s other visitors was Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, who was flown down to the
fort for a lunch hosted by Curwen.
Gordievsky had been a member of Mikhail Luibimov’s rezidentura in Copenhagen since October 1972, on his second tour of duty in Denmark as press attaché, and was pitched by the Secret Intelligence Service station commander, Robert Browning, whom he had encountered casually at a local squash club.
Quite apart from producing a veritable bonanza of highly relevant information from the very heart of the Third Department, Gordievsky’s survival represented SIS’s essential integrity, proving that the organization could run a successful penetration into the KGB without fear of compromise. Gordievsky was responsible for a series of Soviet expulsions. The first to go, in December 1982, was a naval attaché, Capt. Anatoli Zotov of the GRU, and he had been followed a month later by Vladimir Chernev, ostensibly a translator at the International Wheat Council. Finally, in April 1983, three diplomats and a correspondent, Igor Titov, had been expelled. All had been fingered by Gordievsky, who had given the SIS a comprehensive analysis of the KGB’s rezidentura, thus allowing MI5 to concentrate its limited resources on the best targets.
Gordievsky’s knowledge extended far beyond the Third Department, and he revealed that his brother had trained as an illegal for deployment by Directorate S into West Germany. He also knew where his contemporaries had been posted, and his information was a contributor to the West’s efforts to curb the KGB. The positive identification of a Soviet diplomat as an intelligence professional can be of immense value to an overstretched security apparatus unsure of which target to concentrate on, and the statistics of Soviet expulsions worldwide began to escalate markedly in 1983, when 111 officials were declared persona non grata from 16 countries during the first eight months of that year. Between 1978 and August 1983 a total of 316 espionage suspects were removed from 43 countries, a figure that might have indicated to a vigilant analyst in Moscow that the KGB had sprung a leak. If the tips had been traced back to the SIS, doubtless the KGB would have conducted a mole hunt to trace the culprit.
On 17 May 1985, having been named the rezident designate, Gordievsky was unexpectedly summoned home to Moscow, supposedly for consultations, but he was very suspicious and agreed only when he had been assured by his SIS handler at an emergency meeting that there was no reason to believe he was in any danger. However, upon his arrival he realized his apartment had been searched, and when he reached KGB headquarters at Yasenevo, he was accused of being a spy. He denied the accusation and resisted his interrogators, who used drugs in an attempt to extract a confession, but although the KGB had been tipped off to his dual role, there was apparently not sufficient evidence to justify an arrest. Although under heavy surveillance, Gordievsky was able to shake off his watchers while jogging in a park at the end of July and make contact with the SIS, sending an emergency signal requesting a rescue. The ostensibly innocuous signal was nothing more elaborate than Gordievsky appearing on a prearranged street corner, at a particular time, carrying a shopping bag, but it was received and promptly relayed to London.
The distress signal prompted the SIS chief, Christopher Curwen, to fly to Scotland immediately to brief Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was then staying with the queen at Balmoral, while the Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe was visited at Chevening in Kent.
When informed of the need for their permission to undertake the perilous act of removing Gordievsky from Moscow under the watchful eyes of the KGB, both approved the plan, and arrangements were made for him to be exfiltrated to Finland by the Moscow station commander, Viscount Asquith, in his Saab. He acted as a good Samaritan, escorting a pregnant member of the embassy staff for medical treatment in Helsinki, while Gordievsky climbed aboard at a rendezvous outside Leningrad and was driven over the frontier at Viborg. Once in Finland he was greeted by the Helsinki commander, Margaret Ramsay, and then driven to Tromsø, Norway, for a flight the next day from Oslo to London. He was then accommodated briefly at a country house in the Midlands, where he was visited by Curwen, and then put up at Fort Monkton for a lengthy debriefing, lasting 80 days, conducted by the SIS’s principal Kremlinologist, Gordon Barrass. Among Gordievsky’s other visitors was Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, who was flown down to the
fort for a lunch hosted by Curwen.
GOLITSYN, ANATOLI
A KGB officer working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Golitsyn defected to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1961 and proved to be one of the most influential defectors of the Cold War. As well as identifying several Soviet spies active in the West—including Hugh Hambleton, Georges Pacques, and Elsie Mai, a Finn inside the local British consulate—and extensive penetration of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) in France with a spy ring code-named SAPPHIRE, he also revealed the existence of a sophisticated disinformation scheme intended to mislead the West about the Kremlin’s long-term objectives. His interpretation of Moscow’s Machiavellian strategy was articulated in his book New Lies For Old, and Leon Uris based his novel Topaz on Golitsyn’s revelations of the SAPPHIRE network. Under the sponsorship of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, he was resettled in Florida and encouraged to visit Allied security and intelligence agencies to advise on countermeasures.
Golitsyn was to become controversial because the adherents of his theories, including James Angleton, gave him unprecedented access to operational files in a search for moles, and the subsequent investigations disadvantaged the careers of several intelligence professionals, including Peter Karlow, David Murphy, and Alexander Sogolow, who came under suspicion. Golitsyn also propagated the idea that the KGB would dispatch false defectors to discredit him, and acceptance of this led to the lengthy interrogation of Yuri Nosenko in 1964, although the only evidence to suggest the KGB ever adopted such a risky tactic was the example of PROLOGUE.
After his daughter died in 1974, Golitsyn contemplated suicide, but then pursued his theories with even greater vigor. He denounced Courtney Young and Guy Liddell of MI5 and Harold Shergold of the Secret Intelligence Service as Soviet moles and claimed that Oleg Penkovsky had been a skillful KGB manipulation from the outset.
He also identified Isaiah Berlin, Sir Rudolf Peierls, and Victor Rothschild as British VENONA spies and named Averell Harriman and the veteran CIA case officer George Kisevalter as long-term KGB agents.
Furthermore, he named the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire’s deputy chief as a spy, code-named GARMASH, and insisted Dmitri Polyakov (TOP HAT) and Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA) had been deliberately planted on the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Originally from the Ukraine, Golitsyn had met Josef Stalin and Georgi Malenkov in 1952 when he was a 26-year-old lieutenant and had undergone a political transformation when Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes in February 1956. Two years later, after a spell in a counterintelligence section dealing with the United States, he participated in the abduction in Vienna of Tremmel, the leader of an émigré organization, and in 1960 was posted to Helsinki, whence he eventually defected.
Golitsyn was to become controversial because the adherents of his theories, including James Angleton, gave him unprecedented access to operational files in a search for moles, and the subsequent investigations disadvantaged the careers of several intelligence professionals, including Peter Karlow, David Murphy, and Alexander Sogolow, who came under suspicion. Golitsyn also propagated the idea that the KGB would dispatch false defectors to discredit him, and acceptance of this led to the lengthy interrogation of Yuri Nosenko in 1964, although the only evidence to suggest the KGB ever adopted such a risky tactic was the example of PROLOGUE.
After his daughter died in 1974, Golitsyn contemplated suicide, but then pursued his theories with even greater vigor. He denounced Courtney Young and Guy Liddell of MI5 and Harold Shergold of the Secret Intelligence Service as Soviet moles and claimed that Oleg Penkovsky had been a skillful KGB manipulation from the outset.
He also identified Isaiah Berlin, Sir Rudolf Peierls, and Victor Rothschild as British VENONA spies and named Averell Harriman and the veteran CIA case officer George Kisevalter as long-term KGB agents.
Furthermore, he named the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire’s deputy chief as a spy, code-named GARMASH, and insisted Dmitri Polyakov (TOP HAT) and Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA) had been deliberately planted on the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Originally from the Ukraine, Golitsyn had met Josef Stalin and Georgi Malenkov in 1952 when he was a 26-year-old lieutenant and had undergone a political transformation when Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes in February 1956. Two years later, after a spell in a counterintelligence section dealing with the United States, he participated in the abduction in Vienna of Tremmel, the leader of an émigré organization, and in 1960 was posted to Helsinki, whence he eventually defected.
GOLENIEWSKI, MICHAL
In 1961 Goleniewski, a senior Polish intelligence officer, defected to the Central Intelligence Agency, providing the most spectacular information. As a self-motivated spy, he had supplied information anonymously, and when he finally fled Poland with his girlfriend, he came with an impressive “meal ticket”
because he had knowledge of KGB operations as well as Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) activities. The key to his success had been his dual role as a KGB asset inside the SB, trusted implicitly by both. As a consequence of his information, several spies were arrested in the West, including the Secret Intelligence Service turncoat George Blake, and Harry Houghton, then working on highly classified submarine detection systems at the Royal Navy’s Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland. Unfortunately Goleniewski’s value rapidly diminished upon his arrival in the United States in January 1961 with his demand to be known as the tsarevich, Prince Alexei Romanov, son of Tsar Nicholas II. Realizing his credibility would plummet if he were allowed to give evidence to the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee, as had been requested, the CIA humored his eccentricities and kept him away from Congress.
because he had knowledge of KGB operations as well as Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) activities. The key to his success had been his dual role as a KGB asset inside the SB, trusted implicitly by both. As a consequence of his information, several spies were arrested in the West, including the Secret Intelligence Service turncoat George Blake, and Harry Houghton, then working on highly classified submarine detection systems at the Royal Navy’s Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland. Unfortunately Goleniewski’s value rapidly diminished upon his arrival in the United States in January 1961 with his demand to be known as the tsarevich, Prince Alexei Romanov, son of Tsar Nicholas II. Realizing his credibility would plummet if he were allowed to give evidence to the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee, as had been requested, the CIA humored his eccentricities and kept him away from Congress.
GLADIO
The code name for the NATO stay-behind organization that had been trained and equipped to collect intelligence and generally harass the enemy in the event of a Soviet invasion and occupation of Italy. Similar contingency plans had been prepared across Central Europe, and they became controversial for two reasons. First, in the Italian example, the vetting procedures employed to screen the volunteers had necessarily excluded leftists, and the candidates accepted for the program included some radical right-wing extremists who were suspected of having allowed weapons and matériel to pass to terrorist groups with whom they were sympathetic. For example, the Bologna Railway Station bombing in August 1980, in which 85 people died, is an atrocity believed to have been carried out by terrorists using GLADIO explosives. In Belgium, too, there was evidence of similar equipment falling into the wrong hands and being used for criminal and political purposes.
The second embarrassment was the extension of NATO’s training program to volunteers from neutral countries, including Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland. Each country had its own stay behind arrangements, but the issue was to prove controversial in Helsinki, where the organization was a cell-based structure known as Stella Polaris; in Stockholm, where an arms cache was discovered stored in the cellars of a radio station owned by a right-wing political activist; and in Bern, where the military unit designated P-26 had been authorized and controlled by the chief of staff without the knowledge of his ministers or the Conseil d’Etat.
The second embarrassment was the extension of NATO’s training program to volunteers from neutral countries, including Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland. Each country had its own stay behind arrangements, but the issue was to prove controversial in Helsinki, where the organization was a cell-based structure known as Stella Polaris; in Stockholm, where an arms cache was discovered stored in the cellars of a radio station owned by a right-wing political activist; and in Bern, where the military unit designated P-26 had been authorized and controlled by the chief of staff without the knowledge of his ministers or the Conseil d’Etat.
GIDEON
Canadian Security Service code name for a KGB illegal posted to Montreal, posing as a photographer named David Soboloff, who surrendered himself to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in November 1953 because he had fallen in love with the wife of a Canadian soldier and wanted political asylum. He was persuaded to act as a double agent, revealing the identity of his handlers, but when he was recalled to Moscow in October 1955 he failed to hold a rendezvous, as arranged. with his British contacts. He had been betrayed by an RCMP mole, Gilles Brunet, and disappeared for 15 years into Lefortovo prison. In 1990 he walked into the British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, and was exfiltrated by Secret Intelligence Service and Canadian Security Intelligence Service personnel to Ottawa, where he was given $1 million compensation and resettled with his Russian wife.
GIBRALTAR
ABritish possession since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Rock of Gibraltar occupies an important strategic position at the entrance to the Mediterranean and has a large dockyard and, since 1941, an airfield. During World War II Gibraltar was a vital link on the sea route to Malta and Alexandria and accommodated both an MI5 defense security officer and a Secret Intelligence Service station. It acted as a base for Special Operations Executive activities overland into southern Spain or by caique to southern France, and MI9 received evaders at the frontier for transfer to England.
After World War II the interior of the Rock, extensively tunneled over many decades, provided secure accommodation for a SOSUS terminal that monitored Eastern Bloc submarine transits and surface movements through the natural choke point.
After World War II the interior of the Rock, extensively tunneled over many decades, provided secure accommodation for a SOSUS terminal that monitored Eastern Bloc submarine transits and surface movements through the natural choke point.
GERMANY
Prussian military doctrine emphasized the necessity of collecting good intelligence, and in 1866 Wilhelm Stieber, then editor of the Prussian Police Journal, was appointed Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm’s chief spymaster; he undertook a secret mission to London to investigate the activities of émigré radicals, among them Karl Marx. His request for assistance from Scotland Yard was met with a horrified rejection.
It was the kaiser’s spymaster Walther Nicolai who is often credited with having established the first modern European intelligence agency, and it was certainly as a consequence of concerns about the activities of his agents that Great Britain and France established counterespionage departments. He and Gustav Steinhauer, a former Pinkerton detective, pioneered modern intelligence collection techniques and gained considerable notoriety following the publication of numerous books in the interwar period describing their exploits.
Following the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s intelligence activities were restricted to counterespionage conducted by the Abwehr, but following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Capt. Konrad Patzig and his successor, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, supervised the development of a decentralized collection agency based on Germany’s military districts, each assigned overseas targets; Hamburg concentrated on Great Britain and the United States. However, the Abwehr became a refuge for anti-Nazis and in February 1944, following a series of embarrassing high-level defections, Canaris was placed on permanent leave and the Abwehr was absorbed into the Reich Security Agency, which included the parallel Nazi intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Following the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler, Canaris was arrested, along with several of his Abwehr subordinates and later he was executed, most probably at Flossenburg in February 1945.
After the German surrender, the Allies expressed considerable interest in maintaining the German military intelligence networks in Eastern Europe, managed by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen; his offer to continue his organization’s operations under American sponsorship was eagerly accepted and led to the establishment of the Federal German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) at Pullach, outside Munich, in April 1956. The BND is presently headed by Dr. August Hanning, who replaced Dr. Hans-Georg Geiger in 1998. A corresponding internal security apparatus, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), had been established in Cologne in December 1950 under Dr. Otto John, and both organizations remain in existence despite having experienced significant hostile penetration from the KGB and the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. The BfV is headed by Heinz Fromm, who replaced Peter Frisch in June 2000.
It was the kaiser’s spymaster Walther Nicolai who is often credited with having established the first modern European intelligence agency, and it was certainly as a consequence of concerns about the activities of his agents that Great Britain and France established counterespionage departments. He and Gustav Steinhauer, a former Pinkerton detective, pioneered modern intelligence collection techniques and gained considerable notoriety following the publication of numerous books in the interwar period describing their exploits.
Following the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s intelligence activities were restricted to counterespionage conducted by the Abwehr, but following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Capt. Konrad Patzig and his successor, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, supervised the development of a decentralized collection agency based on Germany’s military districts, each assigned overseas targets; Hamburg concentrated on Great Britain and the United States. However, the Abwehr became a refuge for anti-Nazis and in February 1944, following a series of embarrassing high-level defections, Canaris was placed on permanent leave and the Abwehr was absorbed into the Reich Security Agency, which included the parallel Nazi intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Following the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler, Canaris was arrested, along with several of his Abwehr subordinates and later he was executed, most probably at Flossenburg in February 1945.
After the German surrender, the Allies expressed considerable interest in maintaining the German military intelligence networks in Eastern Europe, managed by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen; his offer to continue his organization’s operations under American sponsorship was eagerly accepted and led to the establishment of the Federal German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) at Pullach, outside Munich, in April 1956. The BND is presently headed by Dr. August Hanning, who replaced Dr. Hans-Georg Geiger in 1998. A corresponding internal security apparatus, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), had been established in Cologne in December 1950 under Dr. Otto John, and both organizations remain in existence despite having experienced significant hostile penetration from the KGB and the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. The BfV is headed by Heinz Fromm, who replaced Peter Frisch in June 2000.
GERHARDT, DIETER
A South African naval officer, Commander Gerhardt was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in January 1983 while attending a mathematics course at Syracuse University and was flown to Pretoria, where he was convicted of treason and sentenced in December to life imprisonment. He had been a walk-in to the Soviet embassy in London in 1960, volunteering to sell NATO secrets while on attachment to the Royal Navy, and had been recruited by the GRU. At the height of his naval career, Gerhardt had commanded the Simonstown naval base near Cape Town.
His second wife, Ruth Johr, who was Swiss and supposedly had been provided by the GRU, was convicted of having acted as his courier and sentenced to 10 years.
The existence of a mole in South Africa had been suspected since the KGB illegal Yuri Loginov had been dispatched to the country, but he had been intercepted and arrested in 1967. At the time of his recruitment, Gerhardt, who claimed to have been motivated by the internment during World War II of his German father, had been married for eight years to an Englishwoman, Janet Coggin, with whom he had three children. In 1999 she wrote an account of her experiences, The Spy’s Wife, in which she claimed that she had refused her husband’s invitation to become a spy, too, and had divorced him before moving to Ireland.
His second wife, Ruth Johr, who was Swiss and supposedly had been provided by the GRU, was convicted of having acted as his courier and sentenced to 10 years.
The existence of a mole in South Africa had been suspected since the KGB illegal Yuri Loginov had been dispatched to the country, but he had been intercepted and arrested in 1967. At the time of his recruitment, Gerhardt, who claimed to have been motivated by the internment during World War II of his German father, had been married for eight years to an Englishwoman, Janet Coggin, with whom he had three children. In 1999 she wrote an account of her experiences, The Spy’s Wife, in which she claimed that she had refused her husband’s invitation to become a spy, too, and had divorced him before moving to Ireland.
GEHLEN, REINHARD
The son of a German army officer, Gehlen joined his father’s regiment in 1918, and in 1936 was transferred to the General Staff where he played a key role in planning the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation BARBAROSSA, which occurred in June 1941. The following year Gehlen was placed in charge of Foreign Armies East, the military intelligence organization collecting information on the Russian Front. He was dismissed in April 1945, and after the war, Gehlen offered his services, and what was left of his networks, to the U.S. forces. He began his collaboration with the United States in February 1946 and the relationship was formalized in 1949 following the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1956 his organization was renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and he was its president until he retired in 1968, releasing his memoirs in 1971.
Gehlen proved a controversial figure, not least because his staff included several former Nazis and had been penetrated at a high level by the KGB. In October 1961 Hans Felfe was identified by a Polish defector, Michal Goleniewski, and was imprisoned for espionage. He had worked for the Sicherheitsdienst during the war and in November 1951 had joined Gehlen’s organization, having been recruited as a Soviet spy two months earlier.
In 1956 his organization was renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and he was its president until he retired in 1968, releasing his memoirs in 1971.
Gehlen proved a controversial figure, not least because his staff included several former Nazis and had been penetrated at a high level by the KGB. In October 1961 Hans Felfe was identified by a Polish defector, Michal Goleniewski, and was imprisoned for espionage. He had worked for the Sicherheitsdienst during the war and in November 1951 had joined Gehlen’s organization, having been recruited as a Soviet spy two months earlier.
GAVRILOV CHANNEL
In 1983, at the request of the chief of the KGB’s Counterintelligence Directorate, Anatoli Kireyev, a covert link named after a 19th-century Russian poet was established with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, represented by Burton Gerber. An initial meeting was held in Vienna, and thereafter the channel was used for the CIA to give an assurance that the arrested American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was not associated with the CIA and to request the KGB’s assistance in finding the Beirut station chief, William Buckley, who had been abducted in March 1984.
GAMMAGUPY
Code name for the National Security Agency interception of Kremlin radiotelephones installed in the Soviet leadership’s limousines, compromised by a Washington Post article on 16 September 1971.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
FSB
The Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service) is the Russian successor to the KGB’s Third 
Chief Directorate. In 1992 President Boris Yeltsin appointed Mikhail Barsukov as its head, but replaced him in 1995 with Nikolai Patrushev. The FSB retains responsibility for counterespionage and counterterrorism, counter drug and people trafficking, and some anti corruption operations.
FRONT
An entity that supplies cover to conceal a clandestine operation. Fronts may be commercial, journalistic, or some other expedient that enables intelligence personnel to perform their duties without attracting unwelcome attention or adverse surveillance. Fronts may also be backstopped to ensure that they offer effective protection.
Fronts are routinely exploited by all intelligence agencies, although uniquely the Central Intelligence Agency refers to their own wholly owned subsidiaries as “proprietaries.” Among the best-known fronts have been the Federated Press of America, developed by the Soviets between the wars to provide journalistic cover to their agents operating in London and Paris; the Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company, formed before World War II by the GRU in Brussels; and the Four-Square Laundry, created by the British army in Belfast to assist in surveillance and the acquisition of household linen for forensic testing.
Political fronts, being organizations with ostensibly laudable, harmless objectives, act in much the same way. Many intelligence agencies have created, sponsored, or covertly supported pressure groups, unions, or bodies with cultural objectives to pursue their own narrow interests, which may range from the dissemination of propaganda to the penetration of other larger organizations. Among the organizations now known to have been manipulated by external intelligence interests are the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the Tribune.
Fronts are routinely exploited by all intelligence agencies, although uniquely the Central Intelligence Agency refers to their own wholly owned subsidiaries as “proprietaries.” Among the best-known fronts have been the Federated Press of America, developed by the Soviets between the wars to provide journalistic cover to their agents operating in London and Paris; the Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company, formed before World War II by the GRU in Brussels; and the Four-Square Laundry, created by the British army in Belfast to assist in surveillance and the acquisition of household linen for forensic testing.
Political fronts, being organizations with ostensibly laudable, harmless objectives, act in much the same way. Many intelligence agencies have created, sponsored, or covertly supported pressure groups, unions, or bodies with cultural objectives to pursue their own narrow interests, which may range from the dissemination of propaganda to the penetration of other larger organizations. Among the organizations now known to have been manipulated by external intelligence interests are the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the Tribune.
FROLIK, JOZEF
A Czech Statni Bezpecnost (StB) officer who defected to England in 1968, Frolik identified as spies several of his former contacts, from when he had been based in London under labor attaché cover, among them three members of Parliament—Sir Barnett Stross, Will Owen, and John Stonehouse—and trade union leaders Jack Jones and Ted Hill. He also named Nicholas Prager, a former Royal Air Force radar technician, as a valuable agent codenamed MARCONI, and Prager was convicted and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. Frolik was resettled in the United States but returned to Great Britain to give evidence against Owen, who was acquitted of having breached the Official Secrets Act, but later made a private confession of his espionage.
FRANCE
Prior to World War II the principal French intelligence agencies consisted of the Deuxième Bureau, headed by General Gauché, and Col. Louis Rivet’s Service de Renseignements. After the collapse in June 1940, Charles de Gaulle created a new organization in London, the Bureau Centrale de Renseignements et d’Action, headed by André Dewavrin, alias Colonel Passy. It was amalgamated in January 1942 with Captain Lagier’s Service Action, and in November 1944 became the Direction Générale des Études et de Recherche. After the war Dewavrin was appointed the first chief of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) but was arrested on embezzlement charges and replaced in 1946 by a socialist politician, Henri Ribière. In April 1982 the SDECE was renamed the Direction Générale de Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) following a series of scandals that implicated the Elysée Palace in high-risk clandestine operations and drug smuggling.
Top-level political interference in French intelligence operations has been a characteristic of the DGSE, and the two internal security agencies, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) and the police Renseignements Generaux, have frequently undertaken illegal investigations of the political opponents of successive presidents. Such activities had become institutionalized to the point of establishing a secret telephone-tapping center, located under Les Invalides in Paris, which monitored targets nominated by the president’s private office.
Top-level political interference in French intelligence operations has been a characteristic of the DGSE, and the two internal security agencies, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) and the police Renseignements Generaux, have frequently undertaken illegal investigations of the political opponents of successive presidents. Such activities had become institutionalized to the point of establishing a secret telephone-tapping center, located under Les Invalides in Paris, which monitored targets nominated by the president’s private office.
FORTITUDE
Allied code name for the deception campaign designed to conceal the true objective of Operation OVERLORD, the invasion of France on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Certainly the most comprehensive and sophisticated undertaking of its kind ever attempted, the operation consisted of FORTITUDE NORTH, intended to imply an imminent threat to Norway, thereby tying up valuable Axis troops there, and FORTITUDE SOUTH, which conveyed the impression that the Allies intended to land in the Pas-de-Calais a couple of weeks after a diversionary feint in Normandy.
Conceived by Roger Hesketh and executed by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s deception staff, FORTITUDE passed information about a nonexistent First U.S. Army Group, commanded by Gen. George Patton, assembling in East Anglia in anticipation of an invasion to be launched from Dover. The real forces, concentrated in the west of England, were heavily camouflaged, while Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance flights were allowed to photograph what appeared to be huge numbers of aircraft, tanks, and landing craft in East Anglia—all of whichwere rubber and plywood dummies. Bogus wireless traffic was generated to support the deception, and supposedly indiscreet newspaper stories were published indicating the presence of foreign troops in the southeast. In addition, MI5’s double agents inundated the enemy with reports of men and armor moving toward the Channel ports, with the final touch being given by GARBO, who transmitted a message on the eve of the assault warning that an imminent, minor attack on Normandy would be followed a fortnight later by a massive offensive across the shortest stretch of the English Channel.
Enemy documents recovered after the war proved that the Germans had accepted a greatly exaggerated Allied order of battle, including the First Army Group, and had readily believed that the Pasde-Calais had been D-Day’s true objective, to the point that the First SS Panzer Division had been prevented from counterattacking in Normandy and was ordered back to the Franco-Belgian border on D+3.
Conceived by Roger Hesketh and executed by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s deception staff, FORTITUDE passed information about a nonexistent First U.S. Army Group, commanded by Gen. George Patton, assembling in East Anglia in anticipation of an invasion to be launched from Dover. The real forces, concentrated in the west of England, were heavily camouflaged, while Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance flights were allowed to photograph what appeared to be huge numbers of aircraft, tanks, and landing craft in East Anglia—all of whichwere rubber and plywood dummies. Bogus wireless traffic was generated to support the deception, and supposedly indiscreet newspaper stories were published indicating the presence of foreign troops in the southeast. In addition, MI5’s double agents inundated the enemy with reports of men and armor moving toward the Channel ports, with the final touch being given by GARBO, who transmitted a message on the eve of the assault warning that an imminent, minor attack on Normandy would be followed a fortnight later by a massive offensive across the shortest stretch of the English Channel.
Enemy documents recovered after the war proved that the Germans had accepted a greatly exaggerated Allied order of battle, including the First Army Group, and had readily believed that the Pasde-Calais had been D-Day’s true objective, to the point that the First SS Panzer Division had been prevented from counterattacking in Normandy and was ordered back to the Franco-Belgian border on D+3.
FOLEY, FRANK
Having joined the Secret Intelligence Service after fighting and being wounded with his regiment in World War I, Maj. Frank Foley was posted to Berlin under Passport Control Officer cover in 1920. His task was to represent SIS, liaise with the local authorities, monitor the subversive activities of the Indian nationalists based in Germany, and recruit useful agents. His star source was a disaffected Comintern agent, Johann de Graff, later known as Jonny X, but increasingly his time was dedicated to handling an increasing number of visa applications from Jews seeking to reach Palestine. In 2003 Foley’s distribution of entry permits, which saved many thousands of lives from the Holocaust, was acknowledged at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Foley remained at his post until the outbreak of war, when he was withdrawn and posted to Norway, where he played a vital role in the evacuation by maintaining a radio link with England. Later he would interrogate Rudolf Hess, following his unexpected arrival in May 1941, and represent the SIS on the Twenty Committee. After the war Foley returned to Berlin to work with the Control Commission. He died in May 1958.
Foley remained at his post until the outbreak of war, when he was withdrawn and posted to Norway, where he played a vital role in the evacuation by maintaining a radio link with England. Later he would interrogate Rudolf Hess, following his unexpected arrival in May 1941, and represent the SIS on the Twenty Committee. After the war Foley returned to Berlin to work with the Control Commission. He died in May 1958.
FLAVIUS
Code name for an MI5 surveillance operation conducted in March 1988 that resulted in the deaths of three well-known Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists—Danny McCann, Seán Savage, and Mairéad Farrell—in Gibraltar. Savage was a bomb maker who had served a month in prison in 1982; McCann, imprisoned for two years for possession of a detonator, had shot two Special Branch officers dead and wounded a third in a bar in August 1987; and Farrell had served 10 and a half years for a hotel bombing in 1976. The three were members of a team of four bombers who planned to detonate a massive car bomb in the center of Gibraltar at the Changing of the Guard. With many tourists there, the atrocity would have claimed many lives, but MI5 had been monitoring the movements of the team since they left republican West Belfast, Northern Ireland, carrying false travel documents. All four were seen conducting a reconnaissance of their intended target. Their parking of a suspect vehicle, a white Renault 5, nearby was assessed—erroneously as it later turned out—to be a remotely controlled device that would be initiated by a wireless signal. As three of the terrorists walked toward the border with Spain after parking the car, a four-man 22nd Special Air Service patrol, believing they had been spotted, opened fire on the three, killing them. It later emerged that the trio were unarmed and were not equipped with a remote detonator. The real car bomb was found 30 miles away in an underground parking garage in Malaga; it had been packed with a record 145 pounds of
Semtex explosives, with an unattached timer and detonator set to the precise time of the guard change in Gibraltar.
Semtex explosives, with an unattached timer and detonator set to the precise time of the guard change in Gibraltar.
FERRET
Clandestine flights conducted during the Cold War to test Soviet and other hostile countries’ radar response to incursions of their airspace. The objective was to penetrate the hostile territory, monitor the local air defenses, and identify the location of radar stations, surface-to-air missile sites, and airfields operating interceptor aircraft. Ferret flights into Soviet airspace resulted in the loss of 12 aircraft and 69 aircrew between 1945 and 2000. A further 81 Americans died in incidents involving North Korean and Chinese air defenses over the same period, and in 1992 the National Security Agency confirmed that 64 cryptographers had died on air reconnaissance missions during the Cold War.
FELLOW TRAVELER
A Communist sympathizer who is not a formal, card-carrying member of the party, but who exercises influence to assist the party’s objectives.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI)
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into existence, under that title, as part of the Department of
Justice in 1935, it did not enter the counterespionage field until January 1938 when MI5 provided leads regarding Sergeant Gunther Rumrich, the FBI’s first case of Nazi espionage in the United States. A Sudetan German who had become a naturalized American citizen, Rumrich—a deserter from the U.S. Army who had absconded with the sergeants’ mess funds from Fort Missoula, Montana—confessed under interrogation that he had been recruited as a spy by Germany in May 1936 and ever since had communicated with his controller in Wilhelmshaven through a Mrs. Jessie Jordan in Scotland. In addition, he named the other members of his network, including two couriers working on the SS Europa and four other spies, among them an aircraft mechanic and a draftsman working for the Sikorsky plant at Farmingdale, New York.This case was followed in 1940 by a lengthy investigation into the contacts of a reluctant Nazi spy, William Sebold, who led the FBI to a large network in New York headed by Fritz Duquesne. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s considerable success in breaking up Duquesne’s organization, which resulted in more than 30 convictions, mostly from guilty pleas, encouraged him to negotiate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s consent to the establishment of a Special Intelligence Service to counter an Axis threat from Latin America.
The FBI was late to appreciate the scale of the threat of Soviet espionage and only learned of the true role of the NKVD rezident in New York, Vasili Zubilin, after he had been denounced in an anonymous letter mailed to the FBI in August 1943 by his deputy, Vasili Mironov. Having previously demonstrated considerable complacency in its assessment of the Soviet Union’s efforts to build a network in the United States and recruit agents, the FBI mounted a vast surveillance operation to link the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) membership to espionage directed from Moscow. Initially the evidence came from CPUSA defectors, including Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley, but their testimony was to overlap with wiretap evidence, surveillance reports, and VENONA intercepts. Both of the FBI’s first major postwar Soviet espionage cases, those of Amerasia in 1945 and Judith Coplon in 1949, were compromised by legal constraints on the admissibility of wiretap evidence.
Following the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, several FBI Special Intelligence Service veterans moved to the new organization, and the FBI was left with an overseas network of legal attachés (legats) based at U.S. embassies. Although the agency with the lead role in counterespionage, the FBI deliberately avoided developing a cadre of dedicated counterintelligence personnel and instead moved staff around from law enforcement to national security duties.
The FBI has experienced hostile penetration. A spy recruited in the New York Field Office and handled in 1968 by the KGB’s Oleg Kalugin was identified after his retirement but never charged with a crime. In October 1984 Richard Miller, a special agent with 20 years’ experience in the elite Foreign Counterintelligence squad in California, was arrested and charged with selling classified information to the KGB.
A year later the FBI closed in on Randy Miles Jeffries, a former support employee who had worked for the Bureau between 1978 and 1980. Jeffries had been spotted entering the Soviet Military Office in Washington, D.C., in December 1985 and was quickly identified as a messenger employed by the Acme Reporting Company, the stenographic firm contracted to record and provide transcripts of the closed hearings of the House Armed Services Committee. He was approached at home by an FBI special agent posing as a Soviet intelligence officer, who obtained confirmation that the former addict with a conviction for possession of heroin had given the Soviets a sample of 60 pages of a classified transcript on the procurement of military nuclear systems. A further meeting was arranged in a hotel, where Jeffries was arrested. A search of his home revealed that he had removed material intended for destruction and had smuggled it out of the building with the intention of selling it to the Soviets for $5,000.
Jeffries admitted that, using the code name DANO, he had passed the Soviets transcripts concerning nuclear weapons, the vulnerabilities of U.S. computer and telephone systems, and information about the Trident submarine. In March 1986 he was sentenced to between three and nine years of imprisonment.
In October 1991 another former FBI employee, Douglas Tsou, went on trial, accused of having contacted the government of the Republic of China in 1986 and disclosed the identity of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence officer who had been recruited by the FBI. The unnamed PRC officer had approached the FBI in Taiwan, and Tsou passed this information on to a Taiwanese representative in Houston. Originally from Taiwan, Tsou had emigrated to the United States in 1949 and become a naturalized citizen 20 years later, going to work for the FBI in San Francisco in 1980. According to the prosecution, Tsou had passed huge quantities of classified information to Taiwanese contacts throughout the six years he had worked for the Bureau. Convicted on one count of espionage, Tsou was sentenced in January 1992 to a 10-year federal prison term.
In December 1996 Earl Edwin Pitts, a 43-year-old FBI special agent with 13 years’ experience, was arrested at the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, and in June 1997 was sentenced to 27 years in prison. The prosecution conceded that all the material he had compromised had been below the level of Top Secret, so he did not have to face a life sentence.
The cases of Miller, Jeffries, Tsou, and Pitts all paled into insignificance when compared to the damage inflicted by Robert Hanssen, who was arrested in February 2001 and in July the same year sentenced to life imprisonment.
In April 2003 a recently retired FBI supervisory special agent, James J. Smith, was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with gross negligence, having allowed a known Chinese agent, Katrina Leung, whom he had been handling, to copy classified documents. However, the charges against Smith were dropped, and this had the effect of the compromising Leung’s prosecution, which was dismissed.
Clearly the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been vulnerable to hostile penetration by both the Russians and the Chinese, but in the post-9/11 political environment, the National Security Division’s priorities have been terrorist oriented, leaving the organization to fight a turf war in Washington, D.C., to retain a responsibility for counterintelligence and counterespionage operations.
FAPSI
The Russian acronym for the Russian Federation’s principal signals intelligence organization, Federalnoie Agentsvo Pravitelsvennoi Sviazi i Informatsi (Federal Agency for Government Information and Communications), formerly the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate. Western knowledge of this highly secret agency is largely based on information supplied by a defector, Viktor Sheymov, who was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in 1980. He had joined the unit in 1971 and his defection was not disclosed until 1992.
FAPSI’s two principal overseas intercept bases, at Lourdes in Cuba and at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, were closed in December 2001 and February 2002, respectively, on grounds of cost. The site at Lourdes had been opened in 1964 and was run jointly by FAPSI’s Third Directorate and the GRU’s Sixth Directorate; it had employed an estimated 1,100 personnel at an annual cost of $300 million.
FAPSI’s two principal overseas intercept bases, at Lourdes in Cuba and at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, were closed in December 2001 and February 2002, respectively, on grounds of cost. The site at Lourdes had been opened in 1964 and was run jointly by FAPSI’s Third Directorate and the GRU’s Sixth Directorate; it had employed an estimated 1,100 personnel at an annual cost of $300 million.
FAMILY JEWELS
The term applied to a list of highly compromising projects originally drawn up on instructions from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger a few days before he was replaced by William Colby in May 1973 in an effort to identify past abuses of the Central Intelligence Agency’s charter. The final catalog amounted to 693 closely typed pages and was disclosed to the congressional Armed Forces Committee in open session during Colby’s confirmation hearings. Some of the items listed were connected with the recent Watergate scandal, but others were ancient history, dating back to the Office of Security’s decisions to tap the telephone of journalist Jack Anderson to trace his sources, to intercept incoming and outgoing Soviet mail, and to run training courses for certain domestic and foreign police forces. Also mentioned were plots to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Rafael Trujillo and evidence that Richard Helms may have misled Congress when he had denied any Agency involvement in overthrowing the Chilean government.
The result of Colby’s disclosures was a climate of distrust of the CIA and the introduction of congressional oversight intended to prevent the CIA from acting independently and without the approval of the relevant Senate and House committees.
The result of Colby’s disclosures was a climate of distrust of the CIA and the introduction of congressional oversight intended to prevent the CIA from acting independently and without the approval of the relevant Senate and House committees.
FALSE FLAG
The recruitment of a source by a case officer who misrepresents his own allegiance. This expedient may be the only way of acquiring cooperation, and it was a favorite strategy of intelligence agencies that would not otherwise expect active assistance from targets. For example, in the early 1950s Israel’s Mossad ran a false-flag office in the Federal Republic of Germany with the assistance of Ze’ev Avni to cultivate Germans employed on missile development projects in Egypt. Similarly, Robert Thompson posed convincingly as a Central Intelligence Agency officer in East Berlin to persuade NATO diplomats to collaborate in what he claimed were highly secret operations.
FALSE DEFECTOR
An individual who purports to be a defector offering valuable information to an adversary while in fact retaining his or her original loyalty. This unusual concept was first promulgated by Anatoli Golitsyn, who warned that following his own defection to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1961 attempts would be made to discredit him by the dispatch of other defectors from the KGB who would bear elaborately fabricated information. No such person was ever identified, although Yuri Nosenko underwent a lengthy interrogation when discrepancies were discovered in his declared background.
The only known example of the KGB deliberately dispatching an officer to the West posing as a defector was Oleg Tumanov, who does not appear to have been used as a conduit for disinformation but simply as a penetration agent; he succeeded in his low-level objective of being accepted as genuine and then gaining a job with Radio Free Europe in Munich before redefecting. However, according to Oleg Kalugin, Tumanov was never a false defector, but simply someone who changed his mind.
The only known example of the KGB deliberately dispatching an officer to the West posing as a defector was Oleg Tumanov, who does not appear to have been used as a conduit for disinformation but simply as a penetration agent; he succeeded in his low-level objective of being accepted as genuine and then gaining a job with Radio Free Europe in Munich before redefecting. However, according to Oleg Kalugin, Tumanov was never a false defector, but simply someone who changed his mind.
FALKLANDS CONFLICT
The unexpected seizure of the Falkland Islands or Islas Malvinas in April 1982 by the Argentine junta led by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri was a failure of intelligence brought about by the Secret Intelligence Service’s inability to collect intelligence in Buenos Aires and Argentine guile in not deploying troops monitored by GCHQ. In 1981 the Argentine government had misinterpreted the public announcement that the Royal Navy intended to withdraw HMS Endurance, GCHQ’s sole signals intelligence collection platform in the area, from the South Atlantic, and this led to the mistaken assessment that Great Britain would not fight to recover the disputed islands if there was an invasion. The junta also miscalculated that the United States would remain neutral in any conflict and that the Soviet Union would veto any resolution critical of Argentina.
During the conflict, which was never formally declared a war in order to avoid declarations of neutrality from strategically important countries in West Africa, the SIS conducted an effective operation to prevent Argentina from acquiring any further reloads of the lethal French-built Exocet missile, and GCHQ intercepted enemy wireless traffic which disclosed the exact location and strength of the occupation forces. A landing by British troops, followed by a swift advance to the capital, Port Stanley, resulted in a humiliating surrender of the garrison, which—following the loss of the cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror—was isolated from the mainland and supported only by Argentine aircraft.
Following the liberation of the Falklands, a committee of inquiry headed by Lord Franks investigated the failure of intelligence, and the British government’s lack of advance notice of Argentine aggression, but only part of the final report was published.
The prosecution of the war was studied with interest by military analysts, as it was the first occasion in which a surface vessel had been sunk by a nuclear submarine (except in practice on exercise), the first time the Royal Navy had engaged an enemy since the Korean War, and the first time a nuclear submarine had been bombed
(albeit accidentally by returning Argentine aircraft jettisoning ordnance before landing) by aircraft. The loss of HMS Sheffield to a debilitating internal fire carried by cable ducts following an Exocet missile attack prompted a redesign of wiring aboard all naval vessels.
During the conflict, which was never formally declared a war in order to avoid declarations of neutrality from strategically important countries in West Africa, the SIS conducted an effective operation to prevent Argentina from acquiring any further reloads of the lethal French-built Exocet missile, and GCHQ intercepted enemy wireless traffic which disclosed the exact location and strength of the occupation forces. A landing by British troops, followed by a swift advance to the capital, Port Stanley, resulted in a humiliating surrender of the garrison, which—following the loss of the cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror—was isolated from the mainland and supported only by Argentine aircraft.
Following the liberation of the Falklands, a committee of inquiry headed by Lord Franks investigated the failure of intelligence, and the British government’s lack of advance notice of Argentine aggression, but only part of the final report was published.
The prosecution of the war was studied with interest by military analysts, as it was the first occasion in which a surface vessel had been sunk by a nuclear submarine (except in practice on exercise), the first time the Royal Navy had engaged an enemy since the Korean War, and the first time a nuclear submarine had been bombed
(albeit accidentally by returning Argentine aircraft jettisoning ordnance before landing) by aircraft. The loss of HMS Sheffield to a debilitating internal fire carried by cable ducts following an Exocet missile attack prompted a redesign of wiring aboard all naval vessels.
EXPULSIONS
Under the terms of the Vienna Convention, the only sanction available to a host country that suspects a foreign diplomat has abused his or her privileges is a declaration of the diplomat as persona non grata with a requirement to leave within a specified period. Expulsions may be ordered on an individual basis or occasionally in larger groups, an example being Operation FOOT in 1971 following the defection of Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer based in London who revealed the extent of the intelligence professionals operating under diplomatic cover.
EXFILTRATION
The process of the clandestine removal of an individual from a particular country. Exfiltration may require either that the regular exit controls be duped, by use of false documents and disguises, or evaded altogether. Examples of the former include the rescue of American diplomats from hiding in Tehran in 1979 when the U.S. embassy had been occupied by Iranian radicals, and the exfiltration of Ryszard Kuklinsky and Oleg Gordievsky, who were driven out of Poland and the Soviet Union, respectively, in black operations by intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover.
EPSILON
The code name for a British operation conducted at the end of World War II at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, in Cambridgeshire, to extract information from 10 captured German physicists. The scientists were accommodated for six months in a large country house that had been wired for sound, and the most private conversations conducted among the detainees were recorded for analysis. The transcripts proved the enemy had not come close to developing an atomic bomb, had not misled their interrogators, and had been shocked by the news that the Allies had dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
ENORMOZ
The Soviet code name for the joint NKVD and GRU operation conducted against the Manhattan Project, with the intention of acquiring Anglo-American atomic secrets and thereby assisting the development of a Soviet weapon. Supervised personally by Lavrenti Beria, ENORMOZ was initiated in 1940 following information received from the rezidentura in London indicating that the War Cabinet in Great Britain had decided to embark on a major research program to produce a viable device. Technically unqualified Soviet personnel in London encouraged their sources to supply further material, but in 1943 their colleagues in New York and San Francisco were able to exploit agents, usually members of the Communist Party of the United States of America, who submitted reports on highly classified work then under way at Oak Ridge, Berkeley, Chicago, and Los Alamos in the United States. The full extent of ENORMOZ became evident only with the declassification in 1995 of the VENONA texts, which identified the code names of more than 40 participants, among them Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Ted Hall.
ENIGMA MACHINE
A cipher machine developed by Arthur Scherbius in Germany in 1923 and made available commercially to banks and other financial institutions on the continent. It was adapted by the German military in 1928, and various versions of the electromechanical device were developed and distributed until May 1945. An estimated 40,000 Enigma machines were manufactured for use by the Germans, and it was used as the model for the British equivalent, the TypeX machine.
Boasting an unbreakable cipher generated by passing an electrical current through three moving, interchangeable rotors, each with 26 starting positions, and a complex plug board, the Enigma was a portable, easy-to-use machine which, when operated properly, offered an unprecedented level of security. Mere possession of a machine, without a knowledge of the exact settings chosen for a particular text, made a solution practically impossible, Nevertheless, work undertaken by the Polish Cipher Bureau before World War II indicated that certain intrinsic flaws (such as the inability of the machine to select an identical letter of the alphabet as a substitute) and common operator errors could be exploited with the assistance of perforated sheets of paper acting as a rudimentary computer to calculate the original settings of the rotors. Study of the Enigma and a reconstruction of the plug-board wiring enabled British cryptographers to read some Luftwaffe traffic in 1940, building on a coup with Abwehr signals achieved in 1939 after compromised hand ciphers had been found to have been reencyphered on the Abwehr’s Enigma circuits.
Access to the enemy’s Enigma ciphers gave the Allies a tremendous advantage, which shortened the conflict by an estimated two years. The sanitized summaries, distributed on a very limited basis and code-named ULTRA, had a significant impact on the war, especially in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, the search for the Kriegsmarine’s surface raiders, and the success of D-Day.
When the Germans recovered British TypeX machines at Dunkirk in 1940, they recognized them as modified Enigma machines and, believing their ciphers to be impregnable, assigned only a handful of cryptographers to work on the British machine cipher traffic. In contrast, more than 15,000 people based at Bletchley Park concentrated on the Enigma traffic.
At the end of the war GCHQ refurbished many of the enemy’s captured Enigma machines and distributed them to Commonwealth and other countries as a secure means of communication. When Fred Winterbotham revealed the scale of GCHQ’s cryptographic success in The ULTRA Secret (1974), some were still in use by the Nigerians and the Swiss military.
Boasting an unbreakable cipher generated by passing an electrical current through three moving, interchangeable rotors, each with 26 starting positions, and a complex plug board, the Enigma was a portable, easy-to-use machine which, when operated properly, offered an unprecedented level of security. Mere possession of a machine, without a knowledge of the exact settings chosen for a particular text, made a solution practically impossible, Nevertheless, work undertaken by the Polish Cipher Bureau before World War II indicated that certain intrinsic flaws (such as the inability of the machine to select an identical letter of the alphabet as a substitute) and common operator errors could be exploited with the assistance of perforated sheets of paper acting as a rudimentary computer to calculate the original settings of the rotors. Study of the Enigma and a reconstruction of the plug-board wiring enabled British cryptographers to read some Luftwaffe traffic in 1940, building on a coup with Abwehr signals achieved in 1939 after compromised hand ciphers had been found to have been reencyphered on the Abwehr’s Enigma circuits.
Access to the enemy’s Enigma ciphers gave the Allies a tremendous advantage, which shortened the conflict by an estimated two years. The sanitized summaries, distributed on a very limited basis and code-named ULTRA, had a significant impact on the war, especially in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, the search for the Kriegsmarine’s surface raiders, and the success of D-Day.
When the Germans recovered British TypeX machines at Dunkirk in 1940, they recognized them as modified Enigma machines and, believing their ciphers to be impregnable, assigned only a handful of cryptographers to work on the British machine cipher traffic. In contrast, more than 15,000 people based at Bletchley Park concentrated on the Enigma traffic.
At the end of the war GCHQ refurbished many of the enemy’s captured Enigma machines and distributed them to Commonwealth and other countries as a secure means of communication. When Fred Winterbotham revealed the scale of GCHQ’s cryptographic success in The ULTRA Secret (1974), some were still in use by the Nigerians and the Swiss military.
ENGULF
A British code name for a technical breakthrough in which sound recorded on listening devices planted inside the communications room of target embassies assisted cryptographers to read the traffic generated on cipher machines. This methodology proved effective against the Egyptian embassy in London during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and was exploited in a refinement code-named STOCKADE, which helped break French diplomatic codes.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
EMBASSIES
The highest status of a diplomatic mission is the embassy, headed by an ambassador, largely replacing the prewar distinction between legations, headed by ministers, and the more senior embassies. Embassy buildings, including the ambassador’s residence, come under the protection of the Vienna Convention and invariably conceal an intelligence function, both human and technical.
Many diplomatic premises contain clandestine intercept equipment to enable skilled operators to eavesdrop on local targets, and the telltale antennas may be disguised as flagpoles or hidden inside fiberglass radomes to prevent detection from neighboring structures.
Intelligence personnel assigned to embassies mask their true role by adopting diplomatic cover, although internally the Soviet organization was known as the rezidentura, with the British and American equivalents being called stations.
Many diplomatic premises contain clandestine intercept equipment to enable skilled operators to eavesdrop on local targets, and the telltale antennas may be disguised as flagpoles or hidden inside fiberglass radomes to prevent detection from neighboring structures.
Intelligence personnel assigned to embassies mask their true role by adopting diplomatic cover, although internally the Soviet organization was known as the rezidentura, with the British and American equivalents being called stations.
ELLIS, DICK
Born in Australia in 1895, C. H. “Dick” Ellis joined the Secret Intelligence Service in Paris in 1923, after graduating from the Sorbonne. He was posted to Istanbul briefly and then was attached under Passport Control Office cover to Berlin, where he also wrote articles for the Morning Post. In 1938 he was brought back to Great Britain to supervise the technical coverage of the German embassy’s telephone lines. Curiously, within a short period of his appointment, Ribbentrop’s staff began to exercise uncharacteristic discretion in their telephone conversations. He was later dispatched to Liverpool to establish a mail censorship center, and in 1940 was appointed deputy to William Stephenson at British Security Coordination in New York.
After the war Ellis acted as controller Western Hemisphere and controller Far East, and upon his retirement in 1953 returned to Australia to advise on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. However, in 1966, following a lengthy investigation codenamed EMERTON, William Steedman confronted him with the allegation that he had sold SIS secrets to the Nazis through a contact in Paris before the war. Ellis made a limited confession, admitting his links to the Germans and claiming to have been kept impossibly short of money, but denying that he had ever succumbed to pressure from the Soviets, although he acknowledged it was likely they had learned of his treachery.
The fact that the SIS had first learned from Walter Schellenberg in 1945 that a man named Ellis had betrayed the organization, but had failed to identify him for two decades, was a major embarrassment for the SIS. Ellis was never charged with any offense and died at his home in 1975.
After the war Ellis acted as controller Western Hemisphere and controller Far East, and upon his retirement in 1953 returned to Australia to advise on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. However, in 1966, following a lengthy investigation codenamed EMERTON, William Steedman confronted him with the allegation that he had sold SIS secrets to the Nazis through a contact in Paris before the war. Ellis made a limited confession, admitting his links to the Germans and claiming to have been kept impossibly short of money, but denying that he had ever succumbed to pressure from the Soviets, although he acknowledged it was likely they had learned of his treachery.
The fact that the SIS had first learned from Walter Schellenberg in 1945 that a man named Ellis had betrayed the organization, but had failed to identify him for two decades, was a major embarrassment for the SIS. Ellis was never charged with any offense and died at his home in 1975.
ELECTRONIC INTELLIGENCE (ELINT)
A specialized category of technical signals intelligence that includes the collection, processing, and signals or traffic analysis of information acquired from electronic media, usually radio, wireless, or radar emissions.
EICHMANN, ADOLF
The abduction of Eichmann, a former senior Nazi officer, from his home in Buenos Aires in May 1960 by a Mossad team led by Isser Harel was an intelligence coup that helped establish the organization’s reputation for undertaking daring, highrisk missions and pulling them off successfully. Eichmann had sought refuge in Argentina after World War II, changed his name to Ricardo Klement, and found work at a local Mercedes-Benz factory.
He was traced by the Israelis, who were determined to place him on trial for war crimes committed during the Holocaust, and was abducted outside his home on Garibaldi Street by a Mossad team that included Zvi Milchman. Eichmann was held for 10 days in a nearby safe house, where he was interrogated to see if he knew the whereabouts of Dr. Josef Mengele. He did not, so he was drugged to make him appear drunk, dressed in the uniform of an El Al steward, and taken aboard an airliner bound for Israel.
Considered an architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann was tried in April 1961, convicted of crimes against humanity, and hanged in May 1962. Harel later wrote an account of the operation, The House on Garibaldi Street, and Milchman, who adopted the name Peter Melkman, wrote Eichmann in My Hands.
He was traced by the Israelis, who were determined to place him on trial for war crimes committed during the Holocaust, and was abducted outside his home on Garibaldi Street by a Mossad team that included Zvi Milchman. Eichmann was held for 10 days in a nearby safe house, where he was interrogated to see if he knew the whereabouts of Dr. Josef Mengele. He did not, so he was drugged to make him appear drunk, dressed in the uniform of an El Al steward, and taken aboard an airliner bound for Israel.
Considered an architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann was tried in April 1961, convicted of crimes against humanity, and hanged in May 1962. Harel later wrote an account of the operation, The House on Garibaldi Street, and Milchman, who adopted the name Peter Melkman, wrote Eichmann in My Hands.
ECHELON
Code name for a signals intelligence discrimination program developed by the National Security Agency and GCHQ that identifies individual target telephone numbers from data streams exchanged between ground stations and geostationary communications satellites. The computer program isolates and analyzes the embedded electronic signals that identify and route international calls, making it possible to concentrate recording resources on specific numbers.
EAST GERMANY
Although a geographically small and economically insignificant state, the East German regime sustained a disproportionately large intelligence apparatus that included the notorious Stasi—an abbreviation of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS; Ministry of State Security)—which employed 90,000 personnel and ran an estimated 150,000–180,000 informants. Within the Stasi, the largest branch was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the overseas collection agency headed until 1986 by Markus Wolf, with a staff of 4,000, and then by Werner Grossmann. Although the HVA concentrated primarily on the Federal Republic of Germany, achieving considerable success in infiltrating agents into the government, it also operated worldwide, often as a surrogate for the KGB, with representatives posted overseas under diplomatic cover, with a special interest in Zanzibar.
Following the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, the Stasi’s massive headquarters on the Normannenstrasse were looted, and a special commission, headed by Joachim Gauck, was created to process the vast collection of files and to declassify them. Keys to the most sensitive, encrypted dossiers were deposited in Moscow to keep them from falling into Western hands, but they were promptly sold to the Central Intelligence Agency, which code-named them ROSEWOOD. When word leaked to the Federal Republic that the CIA had acquired the ROSEWOOD data, a formal request was made for access to them, to which George Tenet eventually acceded in 2003.
Following the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, the Stasi’s massive headquarters on the Normannenstrasse were looted, and a special commission, headed by Joachim Gauck, was created to process the vast collection of files and to declassify them. Keys to the most sensitive, encrypted dossiers were deposited in Moscow to keep them from falling into Western hands, but they were promptly sold to the Central Intelligence Agency, which code-named them ROSEWOOD. When word leaked to the Federal Republic that the CIA had acquired the ROSEWOOD data, a formal request was made for access to them, to which George Tenet eventually acceded in 2003.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
DUQUESNE, FRITZ
An extraordinarily colorful character whose career bordered on the bizarre, Duquesne claimed that he had once been young Winston Churchill’s jailer and had witnessed British troops maltreat his mother and sister during the Boer War. Originally from the Cape Colony in South Africa, where allegedly he had spied against the British, Duquesne claimed in a sensational book—The Man Who Killed Kitchener: The Life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne, written by journalist Clement Wood and published in New York in 1932—that he had been responsible for the loss of the cruiser HMS Hampshire in the North Sea in June 1916, while the ship was carrying Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener to Petrograd. Although the British Admiralty had always believed that the cruiser had hit a mine, Wood reported that Duquesne had slipped aboard, disguised as a Russian officer, to signal a U-boat waiting to torpedo her and then had made his escape before she sank.
Wood also claimed that Duquesne had been arrested for espionage during World War I but had escaped from custody. According to his version, he had sabotaged an Allied freighter, the Tennyson, which sank after suffering a catastrophic fire, and then had wriggled out of a murder charge by feigning a nervous illness and slipping out of Bellevue Hospital. He also acknowledged having used the aliases of “Captain Stoughton of the West Australia Horse,” “Piet Niacoud,” and “Frederick Fredericks,” among many others. Since then he had
become a writer, and lived with his mistress, Evelyn Lewis, who was a sculptress from a wealthy Southern family, at West 76th Street in New York City calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. James Dunn,” but he had also volunteered his services to the Abwehr as a professional spy to work against the United States.
Surprisingly, his offer had been accepted and he had established himself in a small, one-room office at 120 Wall Street operating under the name Air Terminal Associates. It was here that he received William Sebold and took delivery of his microfilmed questionnaire, which had been read and copied already by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Soon Sebold was acting as his communicator, and in May 1941, using the call sign CQDXVW2—after several false starts—contact was established with AOR, the Abwehr’s call sign in Hamburg. It was this channel that became Duquesne’s preferred method of sending urgent messages to Germany, instead of through the accommodation addresses in Portugal and Brazil, although he continued to rely on a large team of transatlantic steamship couriers for bulky items that needed delivery to Hamburg.
When he was eventually arrested, Duquesne retained his sense of humor and appeared amused to watch the FBI’s surveillance footage of his incriminating visits to Sebold’s office. A clock on the wall and a flip-over calendar placed on Sebold’s desk made an accurate, verifiable record of every conversation. He said he always wanted to be in the movies, but had been disappointed by his performance. The film was shown in court and proved to be damning evidence.
The leads from the Duquesne case covered the entire country and the hemisphere and resulted in follow-up visits to Cuba, Chile, and Argentina. It was possible to identify other Nazi spies in Mexico, which led to further investigations. Unquestionably it was the most important case of that time and resulted in 19 pleas of guilty and a total of 32 convictions, with Duquesne receiving the longest sentence, 18 years.
Wood also claimed that Duquesne had been arrested for espionage during World War I but had escaped from custody. According to his version, he had sabotaged an Allied freighter, the Tennyson, which sank after suffering a catastrophic fire, and then had wriggled out of a murder charge by feigning a nervous illness and slipping out of Bellevue Hospital. He also acknowledged having used the aliases of “Captain Stoughton of the West Australia Horse,” “Piet Niacoud,” and “Frederick Fredericks,” among many others. Since then he had
become a writer, and lived with his mistress, Evelyn Lewis, who was a sculptress from a wealthy Southern family, at West 76th Street in New York City calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. James Dunn,” but he had also volunteered his services to the Abwehr as a professional spy to work against the United States.
Surprisingly, his offer had been accepted and he had established himself in a small, one-room office at 120 Wall Street operating under the name Air Terminal Associates. It was here that he received William Sebold and took delivery of his microfilmed questionnaire, which had been read and copied already by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Soon Sebold was acting as his communicator, and in May 1941, using the call sign CQDXVW2—after several false starts—contact was established with AOR, the Abwehr’s call sign in Hamburg. It was this channel that became Duquesne’s preferred method of sending urgent messages to Germany, instead of through the accommodation addresses in Portugal and Brazil, although he continued to rely on a large team of transatlantic steamship couriers for bulky items that needed delivery to Hamburg.
When he was eventually arrested, Duquesne retained his sense of humor and appeared amused to watch the FBI’s surveillance footage of his incriminating visits to Sebold’s office. A clock on the wall and a flip-over calendar placed on Sebold’s desk made an accurate, verifiable record of every conversation. He said he always wanted to be in the movies, but had been disappointed by his performance. The film was shown in court and proved to be damning evidence.
The leads from the Duquesne case covered the entire country and the hemisphere and resulted in follow-up visits to Cuba, Chile, and Argentina. It was possible to identify other Nazi spies in Mexico, which led to further investigations. Unquestionably it was the most important case of that time and resulted in 19 pleas of guilty and a total of 32 convictions, with Duquesne receiving the longest sentence, 18 years.
DULLES, ALLEN
The Central Intelligence Agency’s director of central intelligence (DCI) from 1953 to 1961, Dulles was a New York lawyer who had served in the State Department as a diplomat in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He was in Switzerland in both world wars and in 1943, as the Office of Strategic Services representative in Bern, had recruited a German Foreign Ministry official, Fritz Kolbe, who supplied him with copies of secret high-level telegrams. Dulles was mystified by a lack of British enthusiasm for his coup, unaware of ULTRA. After the war, Dulles ran U.S. intelligence operations in Germany from Frankfurt and advised on the reorganization of the newly created CIA before being appointed DCI. He was considered the archetypal intelligence officer and, with his brother John Foster Dulles as secretary of state, exercised considerable influence over U.S. foreign policy, but was forced to resign following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.
DOUBLE AGENTS
The designation given to agents who turn against their original controllers and witch their allegiance to their supposed target. Some agents may arrange for their recruitment by their intended, ultimate target, and whatever their motivation the description remains valid. The fact that a spy happens also to be an intelligence officer does not make him (or her) a double agent, so it is erroneous to apply this term to Kim Philby, George Blake, Geoffrey Prime, Oleg Penkovsky, Aldrich Ames, or Robert Hanssen. In all those cases, the spies were run as agents by a hostile intelligence agency.
Triple agents are usually double agents who are deployed againstan adversary for the precise purpose of having them ostensibly recruited as double agents.
Triple agents are usually double agents who are deployed againstan adversary for the precise purpose of having them ostensibly recruited as double agents.
DONOVAN, WILLIAM
Donovan, a partner in the New York law firm of Donovan, Leisure, was a hugely successful corporate lawyer; the charismatic leader of the “Fighting Irish,” the 69th Infantry Regiment, with whom he had ended World War I as America’s most highly decorated war hero with the Medal of Honor; and in 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s choice to head the Office of Strategic Services. He died in 1959.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
DISINFORMATION
The technique of conveying false information to an adversary. Disinformation, a translation of the Russian word dezinformatsia, was regarded by the KGB as a separate discipline and a key component in a coordinated strategy to achieve specific political goals. Disinformation can include the Soviet use of active measures or dirty tricks, which may include the smearing of political opponents, the fabrication of documents, and the manufacture of bogus news stories prepared for planting into the pages of sympathetic newspapers and journals by compliant journalists. Modern examples of disinformation include the claim that AIDS had originated as an experiment with a dangerous virus conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland; that the Central Intelligence Agency had imported cocaine to destroy disadvantaged black communities in Los Angeles; and, most successfully, that President John F. Kennedy had been the victim of a CIA assassination plot
DISCUS
A small, portable transmitter that could transmit and receive an alphanumeric message, designed by the Central Intelligence Agency to squirt encrypted signals of up to 2,300 characters over distances of up to a mile in a burst transmission lasting less than three seconds in order to minimize the risk from hostile interception. The device, developed in the Short Range Agents Communications (SRAC) project, was first publicly acknowledged as having been used to assist communications between the CIA station in Warsaw and Col. Ryszard Kuklinsky in Poland, but was also used by Adolf Tolkachev in 1979.
DISCRIMINATION
A basic signals intelligence discipline, discrimination is a preliminary signals analysis process applied to raw intercept data to separate them from other material that is not of any intelligence interest. “Discrim,” as it is often known, compares the parameters of new traffic to the frequencies, wavelengths, locations, and call signs of target stations.
DISCARD
When a spy is arrested to attract attention away from an-
other agent, the victim of the deliberate sacrifice is known by coun-
terintelligence professionals as a discard.
other agent, the victim of the deliberate sacrifice is known by coun-
terintelligence professionals as a discard.
DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE (DNI)
A post created in 2005 with the passage of the Intelligence Reform Bill to coordinate the activities of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies, set their budgets, and be responsible for the daily briefing of the president on intelligence issues, largely supplanting the role of the director of central intelligence. President George W. Bush appointed a veteran State Department diplomat, John Negroponte, as his first DNI, with Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, as his deputy.
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE (DCI)
The post of DCI, which has been held by 22 men since Adm. Sidney Souers was appointed in January 1946, was the senior post in the United States intelligence structure until December 2004 when the Intelligence Reform Act introduced the position of director of national intelligence. As well as heading the Central Intelligence Agency, the DCI was responsible for coordinating the activities of 43 separate U.S. intelligence agencies until the consolidation of the Department of Homeland Security, which reduced the total number of U.S. intelligence agencies to 15.
The DCIs have been Rear Adm. Sidney Souers (January–June 1946), Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg (1946–47), Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter (1947–50), Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (1950–53), Allen Dulles (1953–61), John McCone (1961–65), Vice Adm. William Raborn (1965–66), Richard Helms (1966–73), James Schlesinger (February–July 1973), William Colby (1973–76), George H. W. Bush (1976–77), Adm. Stansfield Turner (1977–81), William Casey (1981–87), William Webster (1987–91), Robert Gates (1991–93), James Woolsey (1993–95), John Deutsch (1995–96), George Tenet (1997–2004), and Porter Goss (2004–06).
The DCIs have been Rear Adm. Sidney Souers (January–June 1946), Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg (1946–47), Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter (1947–50), Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (1950–53), Allen Dulles (1953–61), John McCone (1961–65), Vice Adm. William Raborn (1965–66), Richard Helms (1966–73), James Schlesinger (February–July 1973), William Colby (1973–76), George H. W. Bush (1976–77), Adm. Stansfield Turner (1977–81), William Casey (1981–87), William Webster (1987–91), Robert Gates (1991–93), James Woolsey (1993–95), John Deutsch (1995–96), George Tenet (1997–2004), and Porter Goss (2004–06).
DIRECTORATE OF OPERATIONS (DO)
The operational branch of the Central Intelligence Agency, known as the Clandestine Service, was formally titled the Deputy Directorate for Plans (DPP) until it was renamed the Directorate of Operations in 1975. The DPP had been run for years by Richard Helms as deputy to Frank Wisner, who was posted to London in 1958. Wisner was succeeded by Dick Bissell, but when he resigned after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the new director of central intelligence (DCI), John McCone, chose Helms to succeed him. A former journalist, Helms had met Adolf Hitler before World War II and was the consummate intelligence professional, becoming DCI in June 1968.
The deputy director for operations is the CIA’s senior spymaster, and since Helms the post has been held by Desmond FitzGerald, Max Hugel, Tom Karamessines, John Stein, Clair George, Tom Twetton, Ed Juchniewicz, Dick Stolz, and Ted Price.
The deputy director for operations is the CIA’s senior spymaster, and since Helms the post has been held by Desmond FitzGerald, Max Hugel, Tom Karamessines, John Stein, Clair George, Tom Twetton, Ed Juchniewicz, Dick Stolz, and Ted Price.
DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE SÉCURITÉ EXTÉRIEURE (DGSE)
Created in April 1981 following a series of scandals that had hit its predecessor, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the DGSE is France’s principal foreign intelligence agency. It is based at 128 Avenue Mortier, close to a public swimming pool from which it derives its nickname, “La Piscine.” Staffed mainly by military personnel on temporary assignment, the SDECE had acquired a ruthless reputation during the Algerian campaign, when Ahmed Ben Bella’s plane was hijacked in
1955 and Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted a decade later. Allegations from Soviet defectors that the SDECE had been penetrated at high level by the KGB undermined the organization and prompted the defection to the Central Intelligence Agency of Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, the SDECE’s bureau chief in Washington, D.C., who suspected that there was little enthusiasm to root out the Soviet moles.
The French reputation for ruthlessness was enhanced in July 1985 when Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was sabotaged by a DGSE team in Auckland Harbor, a scandal that prompted the resignation of Pierre Lacoste. Following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the DGSE, always active in Francophone Africa, has concentrated on the collection of commercial intelligence in support of French business interests.
The directors have been Henri Ribière (1946–51), Pierre Boursicot (1951–57), Gen. Paul Grossin (1957–62), Gen. Eugene Guibaud (1966–70), Alexandre de Marchenches (1970–81), Pierre Marion
(1981–82), Adm. Pierre Lacoste (1982–85), Gen. Rene Imbot (1985–87), Gen. François Mermet (1987–89), Claude Silberzahn (1989–93), Jacques Dewatre (1993–99), and Jean-Claude Cousseran (1999– ).
1955 and Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted a decade later. Allegations from Soviet defectors that the SDECE had been penetrated at high level by the KGB undermined the organization and prompted the defection to the Central Intelligence Agency of Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, the SDECE’s bureau chief in Washington, D.C., who suspected that there was little enthusiasm to root out the Soviet moles.
The French reputation for ruthlessness was enhanced in July 1985 when Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was sabotaged by a DGSE team in Auckland Harbor, a scandal that prompted the resignation of Pierre Lacoste. Following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the DGSE, always active in Francophone Africa, has concentrated on the collection of commercial intelligence in support of French business interests.
The directors have been Henri Ribière (1946–51), Pierre Boursicot (1951–57), Gen. Paul Grossin (1957–62), Gen. Eugene Guibaud (1966–70), Alexandre de Marchenches (1970–81), Pierre Marion
(1981–82), Adm. Pierre Lacoste (1982–85), Gen. Rene Imbot (1985–87), Gen. François Mermet (1987–89), Claude Silberzahn (1989–93), Jacques Dewatre (1993–99), and Jean-Claude Cousseran (1999– ).
DIRECTION DE LA SURVEILLANCE DU TERRITOIRE (DST)
France’s internal security agency, created in 1944 and first headed by Roger-Paul Warin, alias Roger Wybot, then age 32. Wybot ran the organization until he was replaced in 1958 by Christian Fouchet, supposedly because President Charles de Gaulle suspected his hotel accommodation in Paris had been the subject of DST surveillance.
Subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior and based in the rue Nelaton near Les Invalides, the DST fulfills counterespionage and counterterrorism roles. In June 1975 two unarmed DST officers, Raymond Doubs and Jean Donatini, were shot dead and Jean Harranz was wounded when they attempted to question Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” at his apartment in the rue Toullier.
In 1979 the DST successfully recruited a KGB Directorate T officer, Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, and ran him in the Soviet Union under the misleading code name FAREWELL, chosen deliberately to attract attention away from the French assistant military attaché who had been assigned the task of handling his communications in Moscow. Vetrov’s value as a source, hemorrhaging scientific and technical data, came to an end when he was convicted of murdering his mistress in November 1982, but his detailed information about the Paris rezidentura enabled the DST to identify 47 KGB officers, who were expelled from France in April 1983.
The other heads of the DST have been Jean-Gabriel Eriau (1959–61), Daniel Doustin (1961–64), Tony Roche (1964–68), Jean Rochet (1968–72), Marcel Chalet (1975–82), Yves Bonnet (1982–91), Philippe Parant (1991–97), and the current director, Jean-Jacques Pascal.
Subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior and based in the rue Nelaton near Les Invalides, the DST fulfills counterespionage and counterterrorism roles. In June 1975 two unarmed DST officers, Raymond Doubs and Jean Donatini, were shot dead and Jean Harranz was wounded when they attempted to question Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” at his apartment in the rue Toullier.
In 1979 the DST successfully recruited a KGB Directorate T officer, Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, and ran him in the Soviet Union under the misleading code name FAREWELL, chosen deliberately to attract attention away from the French assistant military attaché who had been assigned the task of handling his communications in Moscow. Vetrov’s value as a source, hemorrhaging scientific and technical data, came to an end when he was convicted of murdering his mistress in November 1982, but his detailed information about the Paris rezidentura enabled the DST to identify 47 KGB officers, who were expelled from France in April 1983.
The other heads of the DST have been Jean-Gabriel Eriau (1959–61), Daniel Doustin (1961–64), Tony Roche (1964–68), Jean Rochet (1968–72), Marcel Chalet (1975–82), Yves Bonnet (1982–91), Philippe Parant (1991–97), and the current director, Jean-Jacques Pascal.
DIPLOMATIC COURIERS
Officials who carry dispatches between diplomatic missions, enjoying the protection of the Vienna Convention from search and seizure. The function has often been adopted by intelligence personnel as a convenient cover for their overseas travel
DIPLOMATIC BAGS
Consignments exchanged between diplomatic missions and protected from inspection under the terms of the Vienna Convention. Although referred to as “bags,” they may range in size from small packages carried by diplomatic couriers to large containers. To avoid the danger of interception, intelligence agencies often rely heavily on this method of communication for non–time-sensitive material.
DIGRAPH
The term applied in the Central Intelligence Agency for the two-letter prefix attached to the code names of its sources that identifies the internal division within the Directorate of Operations responsible for their management.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (DHS)
Created under the leadership of Governor Tom Ridge and formally established in 2002, DHS was an amalgamation of 20 separate agencies, including the Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs, the Secret Service, the Border Patrol, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. DHS is the United States’ third largest cabinet department, headed by Michael Chertoff.
DENIED AREAS
Hostile environments in which conditions are difficult to conduct conventional intelligence operations. In denied areas, special measures have to be taken to avoid the attention and surveillance of the local security apparatus.
DE MARENCHES, ALEXANDRE
Chief of the French Service deDocumentation et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) from 1970 to 1981, de Marenches was a career intelligence officer who had worked in the Resistance as a courier during the German occupation of France, passing messages across the demarcation line. He later fled to Spain and joined the Free French Forces in Morocco and fought in Italy before being assigned to intelligence duties on Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s staff in London.
De Marenches was appointed the SDECE’s chief in 1970 by the newly elected President Georges Pompidou who was wary of the organization’s dubious reputation for involvement in every kind of illegal activity from drug trafficking to political blackmail. De Marenches conducted a purge to eliminate suspected Soviet moles
and promoted professionalism by concentrating resources on the Middle East and Francophone Africa. During the decade he ran “La Piscine,” de Marenches transformed SDECE into an effective collection agency staffed mainly by military personnel assigned from the armed forces. In his retirement de Marenches coauthored The Fourth World War, in which he articulated the threat from Islamic fundamentalism, and an autobiography.
De Marenches was appointed the SDECE’s chief in 1970 by the newly elected President Georges Pompidou who was wary of the organization’s dubious reputation for involvement in every kind of illegal activity from drug trafficking to political blackmail. De Marenches conducted a purge to eliminate suspected Soviet moles
and promoted professionalism by concentrating resources on the Middle East and Francophone Africa. During the decade he ran “La Piscine,” de Marenches transformed SDECE into an effective collection agency staffed mainly by military personnel assigned from the armed forces. In his retirement de Marenches coauthored The Fourth World War, in which he articulated the threat from Islamic fundamentalism, and an autobiography.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
DELHI INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (DIB)
During World War II Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) evolved from a police organization into a military unit and was responsible for all security intelligence operations in India and the region. The DIB acted as the competent British authority, liaising closely with its counterparts, the Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI) at Habbaniyah, Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) in Cairo, and Combined Intelligence Far East (CIFE) in Singapore.
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DIA)
Established by the United States in October 1961 with a staff of only 25, DIA coordinates all the military intelligence branches under the Department of Defense and now employs more than 4,000 personnel, more than half of whom are civilians. It consists of the National Military Intelligence Production Center, the National Military Intelligence Collection Center, and the National Military Intelligence Systems Center.
The DIA directors have been Gen. Joseph Carroll (1961–69), Gen. Donald Bennett (1960–72), Adm. Vincent de Poix (1972–74), Gen. Daniel Graham (1974–75), Gen. Gene Tighe (January–May 1976 and 1977–81), Gen. Samuel Wilson (1976–77), Gen. James Williams (1981–85), Gen. Leonard Perroots (1985–88), Gen. Harry Soyster (1988–91), Dennis Nagy (September–November 1991), Gen. James Clapper (1991–95), and Gen. Kenneth Minihan (1995– ).
The DIA directors have been Gen. Joseph Carroll (1961–69), Gen. Donald Bennett (1960–72), Adm. Vincent de Poix (1972–74), Gen. Daniel Graham (1974–75), Gen. Gene Tighe (January–May 1976 and 1977–81), Gen. Samuel Wilson (1976–77), Gen. James Williams (1981–85), Gen. Leonard Perroots (1985–88), Gen. Harry Soyster (1988–91), Dennis Nagy (September–November 1991), Gen. James Clapper (1991–95), and Gen. Kenneth Minihan (1995– ).
DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE STAFF (DIS)
Created by Great Britain in 1964 as an amalgamation of the Naval Intelligence Division, Air Intelligence at the Air Ministry, and the Directorate of Intelligence at the War Office, the triservice DIS is headed by a single director. The unit is essentially an analytical organization staffed by personnel on temporary assignment from the services, along with some permanent civilians, and handles intelligence from defense attachés posted overseas and imagery. The director sits on the Joint Intelligence Committee.
DEFECTOR IN PLACE
An oxymoron but nonetheless a term that has entered the intelligence lexicon to describe a spy who opts to remain at his post, supplying secrets to his controllers, rather than physically leaving his or her country and accepting resettlement. The two CIA agents most frequently described as defectors in place are Oleg Penkovsky and Adolf Tolkachev, both of whom turned down the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union and live in the United States under the sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency.
DEFECTOR
Individuals who physically switch sides in a conflict and change their allegiance to an adversary. This has been perceived as pejorative, although invariably the receiving authorities welcome their guest as a hero, whereas a defector will be regarded as a traitor in his or her country of origin.
During World War II, Allied servicemen who threw in their lot with the enemy were described as “renegades.” There were no Allied intelligence defectors to the Nazis, although both victims of the Venlo incident were treated with great suspicion and were thought, wrongly as it turned out, to have been guilty (see BEST, SIGISMUND PAYNE). Some British intelligence personnel actively collaborated with their captors, but the element of duress probably excludes them from this category.
By far the largest group of people regarded as defectors are those Eastern Bloc intelligence officers who, during the Cold War, chose to accept resettlement in the West. Leaving aside the low-level line-crossers, some 40 KGB and GRU officers defected, following the example of Igor Gouzenko, who may be regarded as the first of the Cold War, having accepted resettlement in Canada in September 1945. GRU defectors were outnumbered by KGB defectors, and most opted to seek political asylum in the United States. Indeed, between the receipt of Grigori Tokaev in 1946 and Oleg Lyalin in August 1971, not a single Soviet intelligence defector chose to go to Great Britain. Three that considered doing so—Konstantin Volkov, Ivan
Skripkin, and Yuri Rastvorov—ultimately did not. Volkov and Skripkin were arrested before they could switch sides, and Rastvorov opted to go to the United States at the last minute.
In intelligence terms, among the most significant Soviet defectors were Walter Krivitsky in the prewar era and, during the Cold War, Vladimir Petrov, who defected from Canberra in 1954; Lyalin in London in 1971; Vitali Yurchenko in Rome in 1985; Oleg Gordievsky, who was exfiltrated from Moscow in 1985; and Vasili
Mitrokhin, who arrived in London from Tallinn, Estonia, in 1992.
Each supplied important information, as did Michal Goleniewski, a Polish UB officer who defected in Berlin in 1961; Arkadi Shevchenko, the most senior Soviet diplomat to defect, who was received by the Central Intelligence Agency in New York in 1978; and Gen. Jan Pacepa, the chief of the Romanian Departmentule Informatii Externe, who was resettled in the United States in July 1978.
Defectors are expected to bring a “meal ticket”—information of sufficient importance to earn them a home and pension in the West.
Many defectors find the process of resettlement hard to cope with and contemplate redefection.
The motives of defectors are many, but although most claim they were prompted by ideological reasons, almost all seem to have experienced professional or family setbacks in the weeks and months prior to their decision to switch sides. The one exception was Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB Line N illegals support officer who acknowledges that he feared the consequences of the accidental loss of a vital document in the Tehran referentura where he worked when he approached the British in June 1982. Although Gordievsky asserts that he was influenced by the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, his decision to collaborate with the British did not occur until 1974, soon after he had been told that his career had been compromised by an extramarital affair.
American intelligence defectors to the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War are limited to Victor Hamilton, a National Security Agency cryptanalyst of Arab descent, who took up residence in Moscow in 1963, four years after he had resigned; and Edward Lee Howard, who escaped Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance in 1985 just as his arrest was planned.
British intelligence defectors to the Soviets are rather more numerous and include Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby.
During World War II, Allied servicemen who threw in their lot with the enemy were described as “renegades.” There were no Allied intelligence defectors to the Nazis, although both victims of the Venlo incident were treated with great suspicion and were thought, wrongly as it turned out, to have been guilty (see BEST, SIGISMUND PAYNE). Some British intelligence personnel actively collaborated with their captors, but the element of duress probably excludes them from this category.
By far the largest group of people regarded as defectors are those Eastern Bloc intelligence officers who, during the Cold War, chose to accept resettlement in the West. Leaving aside the low-level line-crossers, some 40 KGB and GRU officers defected, following the example of Igor Gouzenko, who may be regarded as the first of the Cold War, having accepted resettlement in Canada in September 1945. GRU defectors were outnumbered by KGB defectors, and most opted to seek political asylum in the United States. Indeed, between the receipt of Grigori Tokaev in 1946 and Oleg Lyalin in August 1971, not a single Soviet intelligence defector chose to go to Great Britain. Three that considered doing so—Konstantin Volkov, Ivan
Skripkin, and Yuri Rastvorov—ultimately did not. Volkov and Skripkin were arrested before they could switch sides, and Rastvorov opted to go to the United States at the last minute.
In intelligence terms, among the most significant Soviet defectors were Walter Krivitsky in the prewar era and, during the Cold War, Vladimir Petrov, who defected from Canberra in 1954; Lyalin in London in 1971; Vitali Yurchenko in Rome in 1985; Oleg Gordievsky, who was exfiltrated from Moscow in 1985; and Vasili
Mitrokhin, who arrived in London from Tallinn, Estonia, in 1992.
Each supplied important information, as did Michal Goleniewski, a Polish UB officer who defected in Berlin in 1961; Arkadi Shevchenko, the most senior Soviet diplomat to defect, who was received by the Central Intelligence Agency in New York in 1978; and Gen. Jan Pacepa, the chief of the Romanian Departmentule Informatii Externe, who was resettled in the United States in July 1978.
Defectors are expected to bring a “meal ticket”—information of sufficient importance to earn them a home and pension in the West.
Many defectors find the process of resettlement hard to cope with and contemplate redefection.
The motives of defectors are many, but although most claim they were prompted by ideological reasons, almost all seem to have experienced professional or family setbacks in the weeks and months prior to their decision to switch sides. The one exception was Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB Line N illegals support officer who acknowledges that he feared the consequences of the accidental loss of a vital document in the Tehran referentura where he worked when he approached the British in June 1982. Although Gordievsky asserts that he was influenced by the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, his decision to collaborate with the British did not occur until 1974, soon after he had been told that his career had been compromised by an extramarital affair.
American intelligence defectors to the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War are limited to Victor Hamilton, a National Security Agency cryptanalyst of Arab descent, who took up residence in Moscow in 1963, four years after he had resigned; and Edward Lee Howard, who escaped Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance in 1985 just as his arrest was planned.
British intelligence defectors to the Soviets are rather more numerous and include Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby.
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