Showing posts with label M. Show all posts
Showing posts with label M. Show all posts
Thursday, November 11, 2010
MUKHABARAT
The generic Arabic term for security and intelligence organization, a mukhabarat is to be found in many countries, including Egypt and Syria. During Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror in Iraq, his Mukhabarat was an essential instrument of terror, responsible for the collection of foreign intelligence as well as the maintenance of a comprehensive security apparatus, usually headed by a member of his Tikriti clan, for a long period by Saddam’s younger half-brother, Barazan.
MOTORIN, SERGEI
Code-named GT/GAUZE by the Central Intelligence Agency, Major Motorin was blackmailed into cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in early 1982 following his participation in an illegal transaction involving duty-free goods that was spotted by surveillance. He was selected as one of Vitali Yurchenko’s four KGB escorts on his flight home on 6 November 1985 and was arrested on his arrival at Sheremetyevo Airport, having been identified as a spy by Aldrich Ames.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
MOSSAD
An abbreviation for Le’Modi’in Ule’Tafkidim Meyuhadim (“Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks” in Hebrew), the Mossad is the best-known Israeli intelligence service, with a reputation for ruthless efficiency, and is charged with preventing attacks against the country. Created in 1948 by a Shai veteran, the Latvian-born and British-trained Boris Guriel, Mossad came into formal existence in 1951 under another experienced, British-trained Shai officer, Reuven Shiloah. As Israel has never enjoyed diplomatic links with its principal adversaries, the Mossad has been handicapped in its overseas operations by being entirely dependent on illegals to collect intelligence in Algeria, Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Lebanon. This lack of protection for its personnel under the terms of the Vienna Convention has left them vulnerable to arrest while carrying out unavowed Israeli government policies. In recent years, the arrest of Mossad personnel in Cyprus in November 1998, Switzerland in February 1998, and New Zealand in March 2004 has illustrated the risks run by the Mossad’s dependence on staff officers operating under nonofficial cover. The imprisonment for six months of Elia Cara and Uriel Zoshe Kelman in Auckland in July 2004 after they had pleaded guilty to passport fraud was a demonstration of the Mossad’s need to acquire third-country documentation, in this case for a third Mossad agent, Zev Barkan, to travel to target countries.
Mossad’s reliance on illegals was demonstrated by the cases of Wolfgang Lotz, who was imprisoned in Egypt in 1964, and Eliahu Cohen, who was arrested in Damascus and executed in May 1965. Both were Jews who had developed elaborate covers to conceal their pasts and enable them to pose as businessmen in Arab countries. A counterbalance to the perceived disadvantage of a lack of diplomatic sanctuary is the existence of a unique, sympathetic worldwide Diaspora that can be called upon to offer emergency or other support should the need arise, although the Mossad is careful not to jeopardize the standing of local Jewish communities nor incriminate its membership, which collectively is always vulnerable to reprisals.
Mossad’s great advantage has been the degree of support given by successive governments to clandestine operations, even when they fail and the blowback results in major political embarrassment. The Mossad’s impressive reputation is based in part on the successful execution of daring, high-risk operations, such as the abductions of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and Mordechai Vanunu in 1986, and credit given the organization for the accomplishments of others, such as the rescue from Entebbe, Uganda, of 96 Israeli hostages in July 1976, a coup achieved by Aman. In 1966 Mossad suborned a Syrian pilot to fly his MiG-21 fighter to Israel, and in 1971 it was identified as the recipient of thousands of Mirage blueprints stolen by a Swiss aeronautical engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, who had been paid $200,000 for them, thus allowing the Israelis to develop their own advanced version of the interceptor. Following the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972, the Mossad also demonstrated its ruthless quality by tracking down and assassinating the Black September terrorists responsible for the atrocity.
The Mossad’s headquarters, as disclosed by a renegade trainee case officer—Victor Ostrovsky, who wrote By Way of Deception—are located inside a large secure compound at Glilot Junction, a residential area north of Tel Aviv, and consist of an operations and a headquarters directorate. The operations branch, headed by the Mossad’s deputy chief, consists of Kesaria, the principal “combatants” section, which includes the assassination unit Kidon; Neviot, formerly Keshet, which is directed against static targets and installs technical collection systems in buildings; Tsomet, which handles all non-Israeli agents abroad; Tevel, the political reports and research unit; and other technical sections. The headquarters directorate encompasses planning and support.
The public’s perception of the Mossad as an efficient organization with an effective global reach is not shared by others in the international intelligence community, as was demonstrated by a classified Central Intelligence Agency assessment of Israeli intelligence capabilities recovered from the U.S. embassy in 1979. Although shredded, the document was reconstructed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iranian students, and it cited numerous operation failures and lapses in operational tradecraft and was particularly scathing about the Lillehammer incident, in which a Moroccan waiter was murdered in Norway when he was incorrectly identified as a Black September terrorist, and the bungled assassination of Khaled Meshal in Amman.
While the Mossad attracts criticism for indulging in assassination as a declared instrument, many of its operations, particularly against the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, have proven effective in reducing the incidence of suicide bombings inside Israel.
While Israel—with its unusual combination of race, nationality, and religion in its population and its precarious geopolitical status—generally can rely on intense loyalty, Mossad has suffered hostile penetration, although probably not all the cases identified have been publicized. The only example officially acknowledged is that of Ze’ev Avni, who wrote an autobiography, False Flag, in which he described some of his covert work for Mossad.
The directors of Mossad have been Reuven Shiloah (1951–52), Isser Harel (1952–63), Meir Amit (1963–68), Zvi Zamir (1968–74), Yitzhak Hofi (1974–82), Nahum Admoni (1982–90), Shabtai Shavit (1990–96), Danny Yatom (1996–98), Efraim Halevy (1998–2003), and Meir Dagan (2003– ).
Mossad’s reliance on illegals was demonstrated by the cases of Wolfgang Lotz, who was imprisoned in Egypt in 1964, and Eliahu Cohen, who was arrested in Damascus and executed in May 1965. Both were Jews who had developed elaborate covers to conceal their pasts and enable them to pose as businessmen in Arab countries. A counterbalance to the perceived disadvantage of a lack of diplomatic sanctuary is the existence of a unique, sympathetic worldwide Diaspora that can be called upon to offer emergency or other support should the need arise, although the Mossad is careful not to jeopardize the standing of local Jewish communities nor incriminate its membership, which collectively is always vulnerable to reprisals.
Mossad’s great advantage has been the degree of support given by successive governments to clandestine operations, even when they fail and the blowback results in major political embarrassment. The Mossad’s impressive reputation is based in part on the successful execution of daring, high-risk operations, such as the abductions of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and Mordechai Vanunu in 1986, and credit given the organization for the accomplishments of others, such as the rescue from Entebbe, Uganda, of 96 Israeli hostages in July 1976, a coup achieved by Aman. In 1966 Mossad suborned a Syrian pilot to fly his MiG-21 fighter to Israel, and in 1971 it was identified as the recipient of thousands of Mirage blueprints stolen by a Swiss aeronautical engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, who had been paid $200,000 for them, thus allowing the Israelis to develop their own advanced version of the interceptor. Following the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972, the Mossad also demonstrated its ruthless quality by tracking down and assassinating the Black September terrorists responsible for the atrocity.
The Mossad’s headquarters, as disclosed by a renegade trainee case officer—Victor Ostrovsky, who wrote By Way of Deception—are located inside a large secure compound at Glilot Junction, a residential area north of Tel Aviv, and consist of an operations and a headquarters directorate. The operations branch, headed by the Mossad’s deputy chief, consists of Kesaria, the principal “combatants” section, which includes the assassination unit Kidon; Neviot, formerly Keshet, which is directed against static targets and installs technical collection systems in buildings; Tsomet, which handles all non-Israeli agents abroad; Tevel, the political reports and research unit; and other technical sections. The headquarters directorate encompasses planning and support.
The public’s perception of the Mossad as an efficient organization with an effective global reach is not shared by others in the international intelligence community, as was demonstrated by a classified Central Intelligence Agency assessment of Israeli intelligence capabilities recovered from the U.S. embassy in 1979. Although shredded, the document was reconstructed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iranian students, and it cited numerous operation failures and lapses in operational tradecraft and was particularly scathing about the Lillehammer incident, in which a Moroccan waiter was murdered in Norway when he was incorrectly identified as a Black September terrorist, and the bungled assassination of Khaled Meshal in Amman.
While the Mossad attracts criticism for indulging in assassination as a declared instrument, many of its operations, particularly against the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, have proven effective in reducing the incidence of suicide bombings inside Israel.
While Israel—with its unusual combination of race, nationality, and religion in its population and its precarious geopolitical status—generally can rely on intense loyalty, Mossad has suffered hostile penetration, although probably not all the cases identified have been publicized. The only example officially acknowledged is that of Ze’ev Avni, who wrote an autobiography, False Flag, in which he described some of his covert work for Mossad.
The directors of Mossad have been Reuven Shiloah (1951–52), Isser Harel (1952–63), Meir Amit (1963–68), Zvi Zamir (1968–74), Yitzhak Hofi (1974–82), Nahum Admoni (1982–90), Shabtai Shavit (1990–96), Danny Yatom (1996–98), Efraim Halevy (1998–2003), and Meir Dagan (2003– ).
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
MOSCOW STATION
During the Cold War, one of the front lines was in the Soviet capital, where the Central Intelligence Agency and Secret Intelligence Service maintained stations in their respective embassies and attempted to conduct operations, despite heavy surveillance from the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. In the immediate postwar era, the CIA decided not to establish a station in Moscow, but when in 1953 that policy was reversed, the results were disastrous. The first CIAofficer dispatched to the capital, Edward Ellis Smith, had fought in Europe during World War II, and afterward had worked in G-2 military intelligence in Washington, D.C. He learned Russian and in 1948 had been assigned to Moscow under assistant military attaché cover. In September 1950, when he returned to Washington, Smith joined the CIA and was to be the very first CIA officer sent to Moscow working under semiofficial cover. His mission was to prepare dead drops for Maj. Piotr Popov, the CIA’s first source inside the GRU. Popov was a walk-in who had volunteered to spy while he had been posted to Vienna, but the CIA needed a method of communicating with him upon his return to Moscow.
However, Smith succumbed to the attractions of Valya, his very alluring Soviet maid, and was compromised in a classic honeytrap and blackmailed by the KGB. Then Paul Garbler was dispatched to replace him. Smith was obliged to resign from the CIA, despite having confessed his failings, and Garbler did not have any more success in attempting to run the CIA’s only GRU source.
The U.S. embassy in Moscow has long been the target of Soviet espionage, particularly the fifth floor, which accommodated the CIA station and the 300-square-foot “yellow submarine” metallic box in which the most sensitive work was undertaken. In 1952 an ingenious device was discovered concealed inside the Great Seal of the United States that had been presented to the ambassador, Averell Harriman, and placed over his desk. The resonance apparatus required no independent power supply but simply resonated at a particular frequency when bombarded with microwaves (see SATYR). The resulting lowlevel transmissions were picked up by the KGB nearby, and the equipment continued in operation until the seal was examined in 1952. Since then, the embassy has experienced almost continuous technical surveillance, although it took a tip from a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, in May 1964 to find no less than 40 bugs hidden inside the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors, which had been added in 1953 shortly before the building was occupied.
In 1978 a tunnel was discovered under the chancery in Tchaikovsky Street, and plans were made to build an entirely new building at a site nearby. However, the new construction, built by Soviet contractors, was dogged by frequent discoveries of eavesdropping devices embedded in the very fabric of the structure.
In 1984 more bugs were found inside typewriters used in the embassy, but knowledge of how they had been planted did not emerge until December 1986 when a U.S. Marine, Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree, approached Jim Olson, the CIAstation chief in Vienna, and confessed to having allowed KGB personnel into the classified areas of the embassy in Moscow at night. Lonetree had been the victim of a honeytrap conducted by a KGB agent, Violette Seina, while he had been posted to Moscow between September 1984 and March 1986.
Seina previously had worked at the embassy as a locally employed telephonist and translator, but her genial “Uncle Sasha” was actually a skilled KGB officer, Aleksei G. Yefimov, who manipulated the young native American and persuaded him to compromise classified information.
Lonetree’s confession resulted in the detention of six other marines, including Corporal Arnold Bracey, who was suspected of having had several affairs with various Soviet women. In the end, the charges against all except Lonetree were dropped, and he was convicted in August 1987 in a military court on 12 counts of espionage and collaborating with the Soviets to supply floor plans of the embassies in Moscow and Vienna and identifying U.S. intelligence personnel. Lonetree was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment, but following a further, detailed inquiry by the Naval Investigative Service, it was concluded that the KGB never did gain access to the embassy, and his sentence was cut in May 1988 to 25 years, in 1992 to 20 years, and then to 15 years. Finally, he was released in February 1996.
A year later, in July 1997 former director of central intelligence James R. Schlesinger completed a review of security procedures at the embassy in Moscow and recommended that the top three floors of the new embassy be rebuilt and that a new, six-floor annex be constructed to accommodate a high-security unit. It was not until May 2000 that the new embassy was completed, having been dismantled and rebuilt at a cost of $240 million, nine years after Boris Yeltsin’s chairman of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, had handed over to the U.S. ambassador, Robert S. Strauss, the blueprints to the KGB’s entire bugging system. In the new facility, the top two floors, reserved for the use of the National Security Agency and CIA, had been replaced with four ultrasecure floors.
CIA station chiefs in Moscow have included Hugh Montgomery, Barry Kelly, Jack Downing, Robert Fulton, Gus Hathaway, Carl Gebhardt, Murat Natirboff, Dick Stolz, Michael Cline, and Burton Gerber
However, Smith succumbed to the attractions of Valya, his very alluring Soviet maid, and was compromised in a classic honeytrap and blackmailed by the KGB. Then Paul Garbler was dispatched to replace him. Smith was obliged to resign from the CIA, despite having confessed his failings, and Garbler did not have any more success in attempting to run the CIA’s only GRU source.
The U.S. embassy in Moscow has long been the target of Soviet espionage, particularly the fifth floor, which accommodated the CIA station and the 300-square-foot “yellow submarine” metallic box in which the most sensitive work was undertaken. In 1952 an ingenious device was discovered concealed inside the Great Seal of the United States that had been presented to the ambassador, Averell Harriman, and placed over his desk. The resonance apparatus required no independent power supply but simply resonated at a particular frequency when bombarded with microwaves (see SATYR). The resulting lowlevel transmissions were picked up by the KGB nearby, and the equipment continued in operation until the seal was examined in 1952. Since then, the embassy has experienced almost continuous technical surveillance, although it took a tip from a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, in May 1964 to find no less than 40 bugs hidden inside the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors, which had been added in 1953 shortly before the building was occupied.
In 1978 a tunnel was discovered under the chancery in Tchaikovsky Street, and plans were made to build an entirely new building at a site nearby. However, the new construction, built by Soviet contractors, was dogged by frequent discoveries of eavesdropping devices embedded in the very fabric of the structure.
In 1984 more bugs were found inside typewriters used in the embassy, but knowledge of how they had been planted did not emerge until December 1986 when a U.S. Marine, Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree, approached Jim Olson, the CIAstation chief in Vienna, and confessed to having allowed KGB personnel into the classified areas of the embassy in Moscow at night. Lonetree had been the victim of a honeytrap conducted by a KGB agent, Violette Seina, while he had been posted to Moscow between September 1984 and March 1986.
Seina previously had worked at the embassy as a locally employed telephonist and translator, but her genial “Uncle Sasha” was actually a skilled KGB officer, Aleksei G. Yefimov, who manipulated the young native American and persuaded him to compromise classified information.
Lonetree’s confession resulted in the detention of six other marines, including Corporal Arnold Bracey, who was suspected of having had several affairs with various Soviet women. In the end, the charges against all except Lonetree were dropped, and he was convicted in August 1987 in a military court on 12 counts of espionage and collaborating with the Soviets to supply floor plans of the embassies in Moscow and Vienna and identifying U.S. intelligence personnel. Lonetree was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment, but following a further, detailed inquiry by the Naval Investigative Service, it was concluded that the KGB never did gain access to the embassy, and his sentence was cut in May 1988 to 25 years, in 1992 to 20 years, and then to 15 years. Finally, he was released in February 1996.
A year later, in July 1997 former director of central intelligence James R. Schlesinger completed a review of security procedures at the embassy in Moscow and recommended that the top three floors of the new embassy be rebuilt and that a new, six-floor annex be constructed to accommodate a high-security unit. It was not until May 2000 that the new embassy was completed, having been dismantled and rebuilt at a cost of $240 million, nine years after Boris Yeltsin’s chairman of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, had handed over to the U.S. ambassador, Robert S. Strauss, the blueprints to the KGB’s entire bugging system. In the new facility, the top two floors, reserved for the use of the National Security Agency and CIA, had been replaced with four ultrasecure floors.
CIA station chiefs in Moscow have included Hugh Montgomery, Barry Kelly, Jack Downing, Robert Fulton, Gus Hathaway, Carl Gebhardt, Murat Natirboff, Dick Stolz, Michael Cline, and Burton Gerber
MOSCOWRULES
The specialist tradecraft developed for Central Intelligence Agency personnel assigned to the Soviet Union. Officers who underwent the dedicated countersurveillance course, run by Jack Platt, were known as “pipeliners.” One graduate of the course, Edward Lee Howard, is known to have compromised many of the techniques taught in it. Because of the intensity of surveillance conducted against all suspect foreigners during the Cold War, most Soviet sources were run in the more relaxed security environments of third countries, obliging agents in Moscow to leave innocuous “sign-of-life” signals to indicate their continued freedom and future travel plans.
MONTESINOS, VLADIMIRO
A graduate of the Chorrillos military academy’s 1966 artillery class in Lima, Peru, Montesinos was an ambitious officer whose lackluster military career came to an end in March 1977 when he was imprisoned for two years, convicted of leaking classified information. After his release and his dismissal from the army, Montesinos qualified as a lawyer and gained a reputation for successfully defending drug smugglers. In 1990, following the surprise election of Alberto Fujimori as Peru’s president, Montesinos became his national security adviser, and although Julio Salazar Monroe was the titular director of the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), he effectively ran that, too.
During the decade Montesinos exercised control over the SIN, he pulled off two impressive successes. The first, in September 1992, was the capture of Dr. Abimael Guzman, the Marxist academic who led the feared Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement. Following an extraordinary series of lengthy interviews with Montesinos, he was persuaded to publicly renounce the organization and abandon his support for terrorism. The second was the rescue in April 1997 of 71 hostages who had been held in the Japanese ambassador’s residence for more than three months by a group of 14 Maoist terrorists. In a daring rescue, all the terrorists were shot dead, and only one hostage was killed, allowing Montesinos to claim credit for the raid.
Fujimori was reelected in 1995, but his victory in April 2000, despite the constitutional limit of two terms, was open to doubt as a million more people voted than were registered. Montesinos was accused of having rigged the polls. Worse, one of his collection of compromising videos was stolen, showing him in the act of bribing a politician with $15,000. Over the years Montesinos had been suspected of involvement with the notorious military death squads that had roamed Lima and of blackmailing judges, money laundering, influence peddling, participating in drug deals with the Colombian cartels, tapping the telephones of critics, demanding kickbacks from arms sales, salting away $48 million cash in Swiss bank accounts, running an illegal slush fund, working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and using his battalion of ZEUS bodyguards like a private army to exert pressure on the media and his opponents. All would turn out to be true, although few realized the scale of his corruption.
According to the parliamentary commission that investigated Montesinos’s activities, he had misappropriated more than a billion dollars and distributed a proportion of it to cronies, girlfriends, drug smugglers, and arms dealers. Proof of his misconduct would come from his vast library of audio- and videotapes, each compromising a politician, judge, or general.
The eventual fall of Montesinos was spectacular. Dismissed by President Fujimori, he fled the country but was refused political asylum by Panama. He went on the run and underwent plastic surgery in Caracas, but was eventually betrayed in Venezuela and returned to Lima to face trial in July 2002, when he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Meanwhile Fujimori also fled the country and took refuge in Japan, where his parents had emigrated from originally. After his trial, incarcerated in the prison block he had constructed to accommodate Dr. Guzman, Montesinos identified his CIA contacts and claim that SIN had undertaken numerous joint technical surveillance projects on local Eastern Bloc embassies and visiting targets.
During the decade Montesinos exercised control over the SIN, he pulled off two impressive successes. The first, in September 1992, was the capture of Dr. Abimael Guzman, the Marxist academic who led the feared Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement. Following an extraordinary series of lengthy interviews with Montesinos, he was persuaded to publicly renounce the organization and abandon his support for terrorism. The second was the rescue in April 1997 of 71 hostages who had been held in the Japanese ambassador’s residence for more than three months by a group of 14 Maoist terrorists. In a daring rescue, all the terrorists were shot dead, and only one hostage was killed, allowing Montesinos to claim credit for the raid.
Fujimori was reelected in 1995, but his victory in April 2000, despite the constitutional limit of two terms, was open to doubt as a million more people voted than were registered. Montesinos was accused of having rigged the polls. Worse, one of his collection of compromising videos was stolen, showing him in the act of bribing a politician with $15,000. Over the years Montesinos had been suspected of involvement with the notorious military death squads that had roamed Lima and of blackmailing judges, money laundering, influence peddling, participating in drug deals with the Colombian cartels, tapping the telephones of critics, demanding kickbacks from arms sales, salting away $48 million cash in Swiss bank accounts, running an illegal slush fund, working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and using his battalion of ZEUS bodyguards like a private army to exert pressure on the media and his opponents. All would turn out to be true, although few realized the scale of his corruption.
According to the parliamentary commission that investigated Montesinos’s activities, he had misappropriated more than a billion dollars and distributed a proportion of it to cronies, girlfriends, drug smugglers, and arms dealers. Proof of his misconduct would come from his vast library of audio- and videotapes, each compromising a politician, judge, or general.
The eventual fall of Montesinos was spectacular. Dismissed by President Fujimori, he fled the country but was refused political asylum by Panama. He went on the run and underwent plastic surgery in Caracas, but was eventually betrayed in Venezuela and returned to Lima to face trial in July 2002, when he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Meanwhile Fujimori also fled the country and took refuge in Japan, where his parents had emigrated from originally. After his trial, incarcerated in the prison block he had constructed to accommodate Dr. Guzman, Montesinos identified his CIA contacts and claim that SIN had undertaken numerous joint technical surveillance projects on local Eastern Bloc embassies and visiting targets.
MOLE
Although this term, as applied in an espionage context, dates back to Francis Bacon, the modern usage originated with novelist John le Carré, himself a former Secret Intelligence Service officer, and applies to a particular type of penetration agent, a mainly (but not exclusively) Cold War phenomenon. Theoretically, the mole burrows deep underground and deliberately maneuvers itself into a position where it can inflict maximum damage. This implies a spy already recruited before entering the employment of a target organization, which may not necessarily be an intelligence agency. According to this narrow definition, classic examples include Olga Gray and the Cambridge Five in England, Georges Pacques in France, Gunter Guillaume in Germany, George Trofimoff in the U.S. Army, Ian Milner in Australia, and Arne Treholt in Norway. Another definition, widened to include those who volunteered their services after they had gained access to classified information, would include John Walker, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, Oleg Penkovsky, Dmitri Polyakov, Gilles Brunet, Ric Throssel, and Stig Wennerstrom. Accordingly, the term may be applied to exceptionally damaging spies who may have acted out of variety of motives.
MK/ULTRA
The Central Intelligence Agency code name for a research program conducted jointly with the U.S. Army, beginning in May 1952 and concluding in February 1970, to study interrogation and manipulation techniques. MK/ULTRA funded more than 140 separate projects in the experimental field of parapsychology in various locations, working with volunteers. The object was to develop, test, and evaluate techniques that were later labeled “mind control,” in an effort to create countermeasures, but the program was included in a list of possible abuses declared to Congress. Many of the hypnotic and psychedelic methods tested were condemned by the Rockefeller Commission.
MITROKHIN, VASILI
In March 1992 Mitrokhin, age 69, walked into the British embassy in Riga and asked to see a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service. He had arrived on the overnight train from Moscow and spoke no English, but explained that he had joined the KGB in 1948, and that from late 1956 until his retirement in 1984 he had been in charge of the KGB’s archives at the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters at Yasenevo. For the previous 25 years, since the premature conclusion of his only overseas assignment, to Israel, he had supervised the tens of thousand of files that had been accumulated by the world’s largest and most feared intelligence agency, and he had taken the opportunity to read many of the most interesting ones. For 12 of those years, and much of his retirement, he reconstructed his own version of what he regarded as the most significant dossiers, documenting Josef Stalin’s crimes and the many misdeeds committed in the name of Soviet Communism. For most of his career, he said, he had been disenchanted with the Soviet system, had listened to Western radio broadcasts, and read dissident literature.
In 1972, when he was made responsible for checking the First Chief Directorate files being transferred from the old headquarters in the Lubyanka Prison to the KGB’s modern building on the outskirts of Moscow, he embarked on an illicit history of the Soviet Union’s most secret operations. Mitrokhin asserted that he had simply copied the original files and walked out of the heavily guarded KGB compound with his handwritten notes stuffed into his socks. He had then rewritten a detailed account of the files from his scraps of paper into exercise books and other convenient binders, which he had hidden in a milk churn concealed under his country dacha. In return for political asylum for himself and his family, he offered his entire collection, amounting to a full six cases of documents. He returned to Riga on 9 April with more samples of his handiwork and was met by SIS officers who examined some 2,000 sheets of his archive and scrutinized his party membership card and his KGB retirement certificate.
Acknowledging the authenticity of what he had shown them, a further appointment was made two months hence to meet the man now code-named GUNNER by the SIS, and on 11 June he returned to Riga carrying a rucksack containing yet more material.
Mitrokhin subsequently made a second journey to Riga on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, accompanied by his wife and son, and an SIS officer later visited his empty dacha outside Moscow and recovered his secret hoard of papers and carried them undetected to the British Embassy. Now code-named JESSANT, no official announcement was made of Mitrokhin’s defection, and in the chaos of 1992, his disappearance from the Russian capital probably went unnoticed.
In the months that followed, numerous counterintelligence operations were mounted across the globe. Near Belfauz, Switzerland, booby-trapped caches of weapons and covert radio equipment were dug up in the forest. In Tampa, Florida, retired U.S. Army colonel George Trofimoff was approached by Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents posing as Russian intelligence officers, to whom he admitted in a secretly videotaped meeting lasting six hours that he had spied for the Soviets for 25 years since his recruitment in Nuremberg in 1969; code-named ANTEY, MARKIZ, and KONSUL in Mitrokhin’s files, Trofimoff was the most senior U.S. Army officer ever charged with espionage. In Australia a senior Australian Security Intelligence Organisation analyst was identified as a long term source for the KGB, although he was not arrested. In a Virginia motel, Robert Lipka, a former National Security Agency cryptographer, code-named DAN by the KGB, was arrested; in September 1997 he was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. The information supplied by Mitrokhin was considered so valuable that the CIA paid the SIS an estimated $1 million for his assistance. Ironically, the CIA had rebuffed his original approach to them in Riga, on the grounds that his material was of only historical and not current operational relevance. Mitrokhin’s offer to the CIA’s station in Riga had been rejected by the local station chief who never received a reply to a cable to the CIA’s SE Division.
Mitrokhin’s files were transformed into two books, the first of which was published in 1999 as The Mitrokhin Archive with Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University. It identified Melita Norwood and John Symonds as having been important Soviet agents. The second volume was released in 2005, two years after Mitrokhin’s death.
In 1972, when he was made responsible for checking the First Chief Directorate files being transferred from the old headquarters in the Lubyanka Prison to the KGB’s modern building on the outskirts of Moscow, he embarked on an illicit history of the Soviet Union’s most secret operations. Mitrokhin asserted that he had simply copied the original files and walked out of the heavily guarded KGB compound with his handwritten notes stuffed into his socks. He had then rewritten a detailed account of the files from his scraps of paper into exercise books and other convenient binders, which he had hidden in a milk churn concealed under his country dacha. In return for political asylum for himself and his family, he offered his entire collection, amounting to a full six cases of documents. He returned to Riga on 9 April with more samples of his handiwork and was met by SIS officers who examined some 2,000 sheets of his archive and scrutinized his party membership card and his KGB retirement certificate.
Acknowledging the authenticity of what he had shown them, a further appointment was made two months hence to meet the man now code-named GUNNER by the SIS, and on 11 June he returned to Riga carrying a rucksack containing yet more material.
Mitrokhin subsequently made a second journey to Riga on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, accompanied by his wife and son, and an SIS officer later visited his empty dacha outside Moscow and recovered his secret hoard of papers and carried them undetected to the British Embassy. Now code-named JESSANT, no official announcement was made of Mitrokhin’s defection, and in the chaos of 1992, his disappearance from the Russian capital probably went unnoticed.
In the months that followed, numerous counterintelligence operations were mounted across the globe. Near Belfauz, Switzerland, booby-trapped caches of weapons and covert radio equipment were dug up in the forest. In Tampa, Florida, retired U.S. Army colonel George Trofimoff was approached by Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents posing as Russian intelligence officers, to whom he admitted in a secretly videotaped meeting lasting six hours that he had spied for the Soviets for 25 years since his recruitment in Nuremberg in 1969; code-named ANTEY, MARKIZ, and KONSUL in Mitrokhin’s files, Trofimoff was the most senior U.S. Army officer ever charged with espionage. In Australia a senior Australian Security Intelligence Organisation analyst was identified as a long term source for the KGB, although he was not arrested. In a Virginia motel, Robert Lipka, a former National Security Agency cryptographer, code-named DAN by the KGB, was arrested; in September 1997 he was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. The information supplied by Mitrokhin was considered so valuable that the CIA paid the SIS an estimated $1 million for his assistance. Ironically, the CIA had rebuffed his original approach to them in Riga, on the grounds that his material was of only historical and not current operational relevance. Mitrokhin’s offer to the CIA’s station in Riga had been rejected by the local station chief who never received a reply to a cable to the CIA’s SE Division.
Mitrokhin’s files were transformed into two books, the first of which was published in 1999 as The Mitrokhin Archive with Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University. It identified Melita Norwood and John Symonds as having been important Soviet agents. The second volume was released in 2005, two years after Mitrokhin’s death.
MISSILE GAP
The accidental overestimate by the United States of Soviet missile strengths prior to 1962 was corrected by photographic reconnaissance conducted by CORONA satellites, which demonstrated that in 1960 the Soviets possessed only four of the SS-6 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) designated Sapwood by NATO. The exaggeration, deliberately propagated by Nikita Khrushchev, suggested a comparative Soviet advantage over the Americans in ICBMs, a political imbalance that was to become known as the “missile gap” until it was disproved by aircraft reconnaissance and satellite imagery, backed by information from Oleg Penkovsky.
MINISTERIUM FÜR STAATSSICHERHEIT (MfS)
The official title of the East German security and intelligence apparatus often known as the Stasi. Created in October 1949 with the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the MfS was an efficient instrument of repression, which by its dissolution in 1990 had 70,000 uniformed and civilian employees, with an estimated 173,000 paid informers.
Monday, November 8, 2010
MINCEMEAT
MI5 code name for an ingenious deception operation conducted in April 1943 to persuade the enemy that the impending Allied amphibious operation in the Mediterranean would be directed against Sardinia and the Balkans, when the real objective was Sicily.
The body of “Major Martin,” a supposed British Royal Marines courier with a briefcase containing secret documents attached to his wrist, was deposited off the coast of Spain near Huelva by the submarine HMS Seraph in the expectation that the material would pass into the hands of the German intelligence service. In fact, the cadaver was of a Welsh-born London tramp, Gwyndyr Michael, who had died of drinking a toxin. As planned, the contents of his attaché case were examined by the enemy.
Conceived by an MI5 officer, Charles Cholmondeley, and inspired by a similar event that had occurred in 1941 when a Catalina aircraft carrying a French officer had crashed off the Spanish coast, causing classified documents to fall into enemy hands, MINCEMEAT was supervised by a naval intelligence officer, Ewen Montagu. Whether the Nazis ever believed Martin’s documents is open to debate, but Axis reinforcements were sent to Greece in an apparent response to the information acquired from Spain.
The postwar publication of an indiscreet but fictional version of this episode in Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, who had held ministerial responsibility for MI5 in 1943, prompted press interest, and a Daily Express journalist, Ian Colvin, traced the grave of “Major Martin” in Huelva. This disclosure persuaded the government to commission Montagu to publish an authorized account of the operation as The Man Who Never Was in 1953, which was made into a movie in 1956.
The body of “Major Martin,” a supposed British Royal Marines courier with a briefcase containing secret documents attached to his wrist, was deposited off the coast of Spain near Huelva by the submarine HMS Seraph in the expectation that the material would pass into the hands of the German intelligence service. In fact, the cadaver was of a Welsh-born London tramp, Gwyndyr Michael, who had died of drinking a toxin. As planned, the contents of his attaché case were examined by the enemy.
Conceived by an MI5 officer, Charles Cholmondeley, and inspired by a similar event that had occurred in 1941 when a Catalina aircraft carrying a French officer had crashed off the Spanish coast, causing classified documents to fall into enemy hands, MINCEMEAT was supervised by a naval intelligence officer, Ewen Montagu. Whether the Nazis ever believed Martin’s documents is open to debate, but Axis reinforcements were sent to Greece in an apparent response to the information acquired from Spain.
The postwar publication of an indiscreet but fictional version of this episode in Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, who had held ministerial responsibility for MI5 in 1943, prompted press interest, and a Daily Express journalist, Ian Colvin, traced the grave of “Major Martin” in Huelva. This disclosure persuaded the government to commission Montagu to publish an authorized account of the operation as The Man Who Never Was in 1953, which was made into a movie in 1956.
MILLER, RICHARD
In October 1984, Miller, a Federal Bureau of Investigation 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. His defense was that—while he admitted having been romantically involved with a beautiful, 34-year-old Soviet émigré, Svetlanta Ogorodnikova, who had been resident in the U.S. since 1973—he had suspected that she and her husband, Nikolai, were KGB agents and was acting as a double agent to entrap them. The FBI had long suspected, like the rest of the local émigré community, that Ogorodnikova and her husband
enjoyed links to the KGB, and a surveillance operation code-named WHIPWORM was intended to prove she was a KGB contact agent, or talent spotter, assigned the task of cultivating potential sources. In September 1984, just as the trio were about to be arrested, Miller explained to his superiors that he was engaged on a complex double agent game with the KGB, with the intention of tricking the San Francisco rezident but, after lengthy interrogations, he was disbelieved, and all three were arrested on 3 October 1984.
The prosecution alleged that Miller had offered to sell classified information to the pair for $50,000 in gold and $15,000 in cash, and a large quantity of secret FBI documents was recovered from his home. At the time of his arrest, Miller had been planning to fly to Vienna to meet Ogorodnikova and complete the transaction. When charged, the two Russians pleaded guilty; Nikolai Ogorodnikov was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, his wife to 18. After two trials, at which Ogorodnikova gave evidence against Miller, he was sentenced in February 1986 to 20 years in prison, a term reduced on appeal to 13, which enabled him to be paroled in May 1994.
enjoyed links to the KGB, and a surveillance operation code-named WHIPWORM was intended to prove she was a KGB contact agent, or talent spotter, assigned the task of cultivating potential sources. In September 1984, just as the trio were about to be arrested, Miller explained to his superiors that he was engaged on a complex double agent game with the KGB, with the intention of tricking the San Francisco rezident but, after lengthy interrogations, he was disbelieved, and all three were arrested on 3 October 1984.
The prosecution alleged that Miller had offered to sell classified information to the pair for $50,000 in gold and $15,000 in cash, and a large quantity of secret FBI documents was recovered from his home. At the time of his arrest, Miller had been planning to fly to Vienna to meet Ogorodnikova and complete the transaction. When charged, the two Russians pleaded guilty; Nikolai Ogorodnikov was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, his wife to 18. After two trials, at which Ogorodnikova gave evidence against Miller, he was sentenced in February 1986 to 20 years in prison, a term reduced on appeal to 13, which enabled him to be paroled in May 1994.
MICRODOT
A miniaturized communication system involving the reduction of a photograph to a scale where it can be read only with the aid of a microscope and is therefore easy to conceal. Microphotography was developed in Germany in 1938 and was adopted with enthusiasm by the Abwehr as an alternative secret writing, which was susceptible to detection by random testing. This ingenious solution, patented in 1938 by Zeiss, solved the problem of carrying potentially incriminating documents and messages. Photographing the item and then reducing it in size by a ratio of 200:1 to a microdot required specialist knowledge, training, and equipment but was a major breakthrough in concealed writing, which hitherto had depended on secret inks that could be detected under certain lighting conditions or chemical treatment. The use of microdots was first revealed in the United States by an Abwehr spy, William Sebold, in 1941. Suitably impressed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation hired an optical expert, James E. Dunlop, from the medical laboratory at Johns Hopkins Hospital, to study photo reduction techniques.
Code-named DUFF by MI5 in 1940, microdots continue to be a practical method of conveying large quantities of information without the need for sophisticated equipment.
Code-named DUFF by MI5 in 1940, microdots continue to be a practical method of conveying large quantities of information without the need for sophisticated equipment.
MI5
Created in Great Britain in August 1909 as the Home Department of the Secret Service Bureau and headed by Maj. Vernon Kell, the Security Service—also known as MI5 by virtue of its early cover as a military intelligence branch—established its reputation for quiet efficiency by rounding up a large German espionage organization based in a barber shop in London’s Caledonian Road in August 1914. Between the wars, MI5’s strength was drastically reduced, to the point where in 1939 it was obliged to take on hundreds of officers, secretaries, and clerks to cope with the challenges of alien internment and German spies. The task proved too great for Kell and his deputy, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, and Sir David Petrie was appointed by Winston Churchill to supervise its restructuring. A former Scotland Yard analyst, Capt. Guy Liddell, was promoted to director of counterespionage, and he selected Anthony Blunt as his assistant. By the middle of 1941 MI5 had taken control of the Abwehr’s agents in England and had begun to perfect the art of strategic deception, a tactic that was to prove vital to the success of D-Day.
At the end of the war, MI5 retained a small proportion of its staff to work on countersubversion and run counterintelligence operations against the Soviets, but little was achieved until 1963, when the organization was almost paralyzed by the suspicion that it had suffered hostile penetration at a high level. However, the subsequent mole hunts proved inconclusive, and the only confirmed case of espionage was Michael Bettaney, an inadequate alcoholic who in 1983 volunteered to spy for the KGB’s London rezident but was betrayed by Oleg Gordievsky.
Always a secretive, independent government department, MI5 attracted unwelcome publicity when it attempted to honeytrap Eugene Ivanov with the help of a cabinet minister, John Profumo. In another embarrassment, an MI5 retiree, Peter Wright, collaborated with journalists to prove that MI5’s poor postwar performance could not be attributed to Blunt’s role as a Soviet mole. His controversial book, SpyCatcher, gained wide circulation because of a clumsy attempt to prevent publication in Australia in 1986. Since then the organization has suffered further embarrassment following the resignation in 1996 of a junior officer, David Shayler, who later served a prison sentence for breaches of the Official Secrets Act resulting from unauthorized disclosures to journalists.
MI5’s 14 directors-general have been Kell (1909–40), Petrie (1940–46), Percy Sillitoe (1946–53), Dick White (1953–56), Roger Hollis (1956–65), Martin Furnival Jones (1965–71), Michael Hanley (1972–79), Howard Smith (1979–81), John Jones (1981–85), Antony Duff (1985–87), Patrick Walker (1987–92), Stella Rimington (1992–96), Stephen Lander (1996–2000), and Eliza Manningham-Buller (2000– )
At the end of the war, MI5 retained a small proportion of its staff to work on countersubversion and run counterintelligence operations against the Soviets, but little was achieved until 1963, when the organization was almost paralyzed by the suspicion that it had suffered hostile penetration at a high level. However, the subsequent mole hunts proved inconclusive, and the only confirmed case of espionage was Michael Bettaney, an inadequate alcoholic who in 1983 volunteered to spy for the KGB’s London rezident but was betrayed by Oleg Gordievsky.
Always a secretive, independent government department, MI5 attracted unwelcome publicity when it attempted to honeytrap Eugene Ivanov with the help of a cabinet minister, John Profumo. In another embarrassment, an MI5 retiree, Peter Wright, collaborated with journalists to prove that MI5’s poor postwar performance could not be attributed to Blunt’s role as a Soviet mole. His controversial book, SpyCatcher, gained wide circulation because of a clumsy attempt to prevent publication in Australia in 1986. Since then the organization has suffered further embarrassment following the resignation in 1996 of a junior officer, David Shayler, who later served a prison sentence for breaches of the Official Secrets Act resulting from unauthorized disclosures to journalists.
MI5’s 14 directors-general have been Kell (1909–40), Petrie (1940–46), Percy Sillitoe (1946–53), Dick White (1953–56), Roger Hollis (1956–65), Martin Furnival Jones (1965–71), Michael Hanley (1972–79), Howard Smith (1979–81), John Jones (1981–85), Antony Duff (1985–87), Patrick Walker (1987–92), Stella Rimington (1992–96), Stephen Lander (1996–2000), and Eliza Manningham-Buller (2000– )
Sunday, November 7, 2010
MESSAGES PERSONNEL
Acommunications system employed during World War II to send messages to recipients in enemy-occupied territory. Broadcast by the BBC on the regular news bulletins, the messages appeared innocuous, but contained a hidden meaning for the intended addressee. As well as providing a clandestine channel to individuals not in two-way wireless contact with the Allies, the system allowed agents to verify identities.
MENZIES, STEWART
The chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1939 to 1952, Menzies was an Eton-educated Guards officer who had fought in France at Ypres and earned the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross before being posted to Sir John Haig’s headquarters staff at Montreuil. After the war, he joined SIS and headed the military section until his chief, Adm. Sir Hugh Sinclair, fell ill with cancer in 1938 and was incapacitated.
MEINERTZHAGEN, RICHARD
A British staff officer on Field Marshal Lord Allenby’s staff during the Palestine campaign in World War I, Meinertzhagen conceived of a scheme to distract the Turkish defenders away from an intended attack on Gaza City by planting false documents with the enemy. Meinertzhagen approached an enemy patrol and then pretended to accidentally abandon a briefcase, which contained forged documents that purported to contain details of future military plans. The deception was successful and Gaza City was finally captured against minimal opposition because the Turkish garrison had been deployed elsewhere to meet an imaginary threat.
MEASUREMENT AND SIGNATURE INTELLIGENCE (MASINT)
Information derived from the study of data acquired from specific targets, and monitoring any alterations. Satellites in the Heritage series are dedicated to MASINT to track missiles, monitor battlefield developments with infrared sensors, and detect nuclear detonations on Earth and in space with bhangmeters, which analyze X-ray emissions associated with atomic explosions.
MAY, ALLAN NUNN
A Cambridge-educated physicist who had been identified as a spy code-named ALEK in papers purloined from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in September 1945 by the defector Igor Gouzenko, May was placed under surveillance by MI5. An unsuccessful attempt was made to entrap him with an MI5 agent, Klop Ustinov, masquerading as his Soviet contact. May failed to attend the rendezvous in London compromised by Gouzenko and he was arrested. Confronted with the evidence, he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in 1946. He had been a Communist since he was 16 and was completely uncooperative with his interrogators, refusing to name anyone else involved in the Canadian spy ring.
May had arrived in Montreal in 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project, and in January the following year had visited to the MetLab in Chicago, accompanied by a dozen other scientists. He returned in April for a fortnight and was back again at the Argonne Laboratory at the end of August for a three-day conference to discuss the Argonne pile and the planned Montreal pile. His final trip to the United States took place at the end of September 1944, but a proposed stay of a month in the spring of 1945 was vetoed by the Manhattan Project’s security chief Gen. Leslie Groves on the grounds that it was contrary to policy for a single individual to learn too much from different areas of research.
After his release from prison, May returned to live in Cambridge, where he died in 2003. On his deathbed, he made a detailed confession to his family, but never disclosed when he had been recruited as a spy or by whom.
May had arrived in Montreal in 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project, and in January the following year had visited to the MetLab in Chicago, accompanied by a dozen other scientists. He returned in April for a fortnight and was back again at the Argonne Laboratory at the end of August for a three-day conference to discuss the Argonne pile and the planned Montreal pile. His final trip to the United States took place at the end of September 1944, but a proposed stay of a month in the spring of 1945 was vetoed by the Manhattan Project’s security chief Gen. Leslie Groves on the grounds that it was contrary to policy for a single individual to learn too much from different areas of research.
After his release from prison, May returned to live in Cambridge, where he died in 2003. On his deathbed, he made a detailed confession to his family, but never disclosed when he had been recruited as a spy or by whom.
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