Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

Josef Stalin died in March 1953, and during the inevitable power struggle in the Kremlin, Beria expanded the power of the state security organs under his control, bringing the MGB into the Ministry of the Interior (the MVD). Perhaps unwisely, he ordered a reorganization of the MVD network in East Germany, and in the absence of nearly a thousand officers, an uprising took place that the newly promoted General Fadeykin failed to handle properly.

Beria had overplayed his hand, and on 26 June he was accused of being an ‘imperialist agent’ by the ruling Presidium. He was tried, convicted and executed for working for British intelligence, supposedly ever since he had worked in Baku in 1919 when the area was under British control.

While the MGB still formed part of the MVD, a foreign assassination mission went disastrously wrong. Operation Rhine was designed to eliminate Georgi Sergeevich Okolovich, a Ukrainian émigré living in West Germany. Instead of killing him, however, the assassin, Nikolai Kholkov, defected to the West; he was one of five agents who would transfer allegiance in the first few months of 1954, with defections from the Tokyo and Vienna residencies, as well as two in Canberra in April 1954.

By that time, the KGB had been reorganized one last time. Removed from the MVD, but downgraded to committee status, the KGB was attached to the Council of Ministers to keep it under some form of control — the post-Stalin leadership was determined that it would never have the unbridled power that its predecessors had enjoyed. That wouldn’t stop it from becoming one of the most ruthless intelligence agencies in the world.

In the press, in Parliament, in the United Nations, from the pulpit, there is a ceaseless talk about the rule of law, civilized relations between nations, the spread of democratic processes, self-determination and national sovereignty, respect for the rights of man and human dignity.

The reality, we all know perfectly well is quite the opposite and consists of an ever-increasing spread of lawlessness, disregard of human contract, cruelty and corruption. The nuclear stalemate is matched by the moral stalemate.

It is the spy who has been called on to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests.

Men’s minds are shaped of course by their environments and we spies, although we have our professional mystique, do perhaps live closer to the realities and hard facts of international relations than other practitioners of government. We are relatively free of the problems of status, of precedence, departmental attitudes and evasions of personal responsibility, which create the official cast of mind. We do not have to develop, like Parliamentarians conditioned by a lifetime, the ability to produce the ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile. And so it is not surprising these days that the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.

That’s the way that MI6 regarded the work of the spy in the late fifties, in this circular by George Young, who was part of the joint MI6/CIA operation to remove Mossadegh from Iran, as well as the abortive coup against Egyptian President Nasser, and would later become Vice Chief of the service. It’s the background against which Ian Fleming created master spy James Bond. It wasn’t a world of glamour or mystique, just people doing their jobs to gain the information necessary to keep the world on an even keel.

It wasn’t just those in the West who saw it that way. Interviewed by CNN in 1998, after the collapse of Communism, East German spy chief Markus Wolf pointed out:

At that stage of the twentieth-century European history, developments at times bordered on a hot war, and that’s why I think that if something positive can be said about the work of the intelligence services, it’s that through their work they may have avoided this going over the threshold to a hot war…

I’m pretty sure that the intelligence services on the whole, and the spies both in the East and the West, tended towards a more realistic assessment of the balance of power than that of politicians and military leaders; so that actions, or even adventurous actions which could easily have led to an escalation [of tension] or even to a war, would have been desisted from.

The CIA were still intent on blocking Communism wherever they thought that it might gain a foothold. Building on their perceived successes in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, they sought to take a lead role in Vietnam, following the 1954 United Nations resolution that divided that country in preparation for national elections in 1956. The difference between their previous operations and working in Vietnam derived primarily from the nature of the country. As the CIA’s own history points out: ‘In the territory south of the 17th parallel, which Americans at first called Free Vietnam, there existed neither a sense of nationhood nor an indigenous administration… The 17th parallel designated a truce line, not an international boundary, and the entirely provisional entity lying south of it was supposed to disappear after national elections in 1956.’ Effectively, rather than backing one side against another, they were trying to create a country.

The CIA had been active in Vietnam since 1950, trying to boost French efforts against the Communist insurgent organization, the Viet Minh, and now they put Colonel Edward Lansdale in as a ‘kingmaker’, much the same role as he had played in the Philippines where his actions had helped stave off the Communist political movement, the Hukbalahap, from taking power. Lansdale told CIA Director Allan Dulles that his goal was to build a ‘political base’ in Indochina which, if successful, would ‘give CIA control [of the] government and change [the] whole atmosphere’. This would be focused around Ngo Dinh Diem, a certified anti-Communist and Catholic who had lived in New York from 1951–53.

The CIA put a lot of effort into backing Ngo Dinh Diem, who became prime minister in 1954. Lansdale helped to train the Vietnamese National Army, and ran a propaganda campaign to encourage the country’s Roman Catholic population to move into Diem’s part of Vietnam, using the slogan ‘God has gone south’.

Diem called a referendum in October 1955, the campaign for which was characterized by dirty tricks. Even though his advisers were convinced that Diem would win comfortably and oust the sitting head of state, former Emperor Bao Dai, there was still massive electoral fraud, with Diem winning 133 per cent of the vote in Saigon. (The US State Department congratulated him on running the referendum ‘in such an orderly and efficient manner’!) Diem went on to proclaim himself president of the Republic of Vietnam — and, at least initially, it did seem as if this was another job well done by the CIA.

Things weren’t doing so well in the heart of Communism itself. There wasn’t a CIA officer stationed at the Moscow embassy for the first six years of the Agency’s life, and when the State Department finally reluctantly agreed for one to be put in place in 1953, the first head of station, Edward Ellis Smith, was seduced by his MGB maid. (He wasn’t well regarded by his peers, ‘his work was not only worthless, but much had been fabricated’, the CIA’s chief of operations in the Soviet bloc division would later comment.) According to the KGB, a dozen embassy personnel admitted succumbing to the temptations of State Security’s ‘swallows’ before being sent home in disgrace over the next few years. The KGB didn’t need to worry that much about the Americans’ activities anyway: during the building of the new US embassy in 1953, key rooms were bugged during the night when no American guards were keeping watch on the building site.