Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

The KGB certainly took his defection seriously: a month later, they sent orders to fifty-four stations worldwide on the actions necessary to minimize the damage, and in November 1962, an order was given for his assassination. There were some within the CIA, including James Jesus Angleton, the counter-intelligence director who interviewed Golitsyn on his arrival in the States, who took his accusations very seriously and called him ‘the most valuable defector ever to reach the West’. Others were far more sceptical. Golitsyn’s theories about the KGB’s activities became ever wilder: he accused British Labour Party leader, later Prime Minister, Harold Wilson of working for Moscow Centre, and claimed that his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell had been poisoned by the KGB in order to secure the position for Wilson. MI5 officer Peter Wright was one of those who believed there was some truth to Golitsyn’s claims about Wilson.

The situation regarding Golitsyn was complicated by the defection of another Russian, Yuri Nosenko, who had worked for Soviet State Security since 1953. After a posting to England, Nosenko started to consider defecting, and in 1960 tried to contact a Western intelligence officer without success. Eventually in 1962 he was recruited by the CIA in Geneva. His information also helped to identify John Vassall and Robert Johnson as KGB agents, and he provided some information on the fate of Pyotr Popov, as well as revealing the existence of the many bugs in the US Embassy planted there during its building in 1953.

Nosenko defected in February 1964, fearing he was under suspicion. Unfortunately for him, his information didn’t tally with that of Golitsyn. The earlier defector had said that the KGB would send false defectors across to try to discredit his testimony, and that’s certainly what Nosenko appeared to be doing. Nosenko was adamant that the KGB did not have a mole within the CIA, no matter what Golitsyn might say.

President Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963, and some within the CIA believed that the Soviets were involved — but Nosenko made it clear that Lee Harvey Oswald, who most believed was the assassin, may have travelled in Russia and been investigated during his time there, but he was not a KGB agent. This may have led to the intense treatment that Nosenko received — as CIA case officer Robert Baer noted, ‘When Nosenko offered a version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn’t fit with the Agency’s corporate view he was sent to solitary confinement at the farm for three years.’ This treatment was so rigorous that it merited a public apology from later CIA DCI Stansfield Turner in 1978: ‘The excessively harsh treatment of Mr Nosenko went beyond the bounds of propriety or good judgment.’

Nosenko was interrogated for three years, and failed two lie-detector tests during this time (although he claimed that a doctor inserted a finger into his anus to stimulate his blood pressure prior to the second one to give a false reading). However, after a change in interrogators, he was released in April 1969.

The after-effect of the two defections was that neither man was fully believed. Both had given important information about Soviet operatives in the West, but there were many questions left unanswered. One of the responses to this was the establishment of the Fluency committee. This was a group of MI5 and MI6 officers, created in November 1964 to investigate all allegations of infiltration of the British security services. The committee met for seven years, and came up with a list of two hundred instances of possible Soviet penetration. These included Dick Ellis, an MI6 employee who had already come under suspicion after Burgess and Maclean’s defection, and had retired as an active agent in 1953. The evidence uncovered seemed to indicate that Ellis had been an agent for Nazi intelligence during the Second World War, and for the GRU and then the KGB. Ellis eventually admitted he had spied for both at the start of the war, but then lied about his contact with Kim Philby, leading the committee to conclude that he had been a Soviet agent for around thirty years.

Peter Wright was the chair of the Fluency committee and made it his life’s work to pursue Roger Hollis, the Director- General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, whom he believed was a Soviet agent. Wright had originally decided that the Deputy Director-General, Graham Mitchell, was the Soviet agent, based on such circumstantial evidence as the placement of dust in his office drawer. The CIA and FBI, as well as the RCMP (who handled intelligence in Canada prior to the establishment of the CSIS) all expressed doubt, and Mitchell was eventually cleared in 1970.

However, Roger Hollis’ actions lay him open to suspicion: he prevented a key interrogation during the investigation into John Vassall; his reports during the Profumo affair were not adequately compiled. In 1964, Anthony Blunt had finally admitted his role in the Philby/Burgess/Maclean spy ring in return for immunity from prosecution, and Wright was convinced there was a Fifth Man who had protected the others. (The Fifth Man’s identity as John Cairncross wasn’t revealed until 1990.) Wright made himself extremely unpopular with his allegations, admitting ‘There was talk of the Gestapo.’

Once he had retired from MI5, Wright wrote his autobiography, Spycatcher , in which he made his allegations about Hollis public. Wright claimed that when Hollis was sent to interrogate Igor Gouzenko in 1945, he had stayed in disguise in case Gouzenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, and Hollis had then tried to persuade Gouzenko not to make further allegations. Based on this shaky evidence, he declared Hollis a traitor.

Now, with access to the KGB records, courtesy of defector Oleg Gordievsky, we know that George Blake was the last key agent that Moscow Centre had within either MI5 or MI6, but at the time what may well have been incompetency was seen as something much worse. The Trend Committee, headed by Lord Trend, investigated Hollis and the Soviet penetration of MI5 in the seventies, and reported that the allegations against Hollis were inconclusive. An internal MI5 report from 1988 noted that the belief in a traitor had persisted for so long because of ‘a lack of intellectual rigour in some of the leading investigators… dishonesty on the part of Wright, who did not scruple to invent evidence where none existed… [and] the baleful influence of Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and coordinated Soviet deception (‘‘disinformation’’) supported by high-level penetration of all western intelligence and security services.’ Couple that with an overwhelming belief that Moscow Centre was a lot more efficient than it really was, and the stage was set for the witch-hunts. As Allen Dulles wrote in 1963: ‘Soviet intelligence is over-confident, over-complicated, and over-estimated.’

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn’t the first time that the United States has gone to war based on inaccurate information supplied to the administration by the intelligence agencies. Sometimes intelligence agencies will choose not to send the White House information that they know will anger the president. The Gulf of Tonkin incident did not play out in the way in which it was initially presented to President Johnson, upon which he based the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 7 August 1964.

Between 1960 and July 1962, the CIA had tried sending teams of trained South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam; these had been unsuccessful. Thereafter, responsibility for actions against the North Vietnamese was transferred to the Defence Department, which began OPLAN34-63, a series of offensives against the North Vietnamese coastline in autumn 1963, and then refined them as OPLAN34A that December (although it seems no one thought to inform the NSA’s Asian desk of the operation.)