Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The most important and best-paid French ST agent during the 1970s identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was ALAN (also codenamed FLINT and TELON), an employee of a defense contractor (codenamed AVANTGARDE). ALAN was a walk-in. In 1972 he went to the Paris embassy, explained that he was earning 7,000 francs a month, needed extra money to buy a house (possibly a second home) in the 150,000-200,000 francs price range and was willing to sell his firm’s secrets. Over the next six years he provided technical documentation and parts of missile guidance systems, laser weapons, detection systems for high-speed low-flying targets and infrared night-vision equipment for tanks, helicopters and other uses. ALAN’s file records that his ST “fully met the requirements of the highest authorities [Politburo].” 116In December 1974 his controller, Boris Federovich Kesarev, a Line X officer at the Paris residency, was recommended for the Order of the Red Star in a citation signed personally by Andropov. 117ALAN was paid over 200,000 francs a year, 118but was dismissed by his firm in 1978 on suspicion of passing its secrets to a Western intelligence service. The KGB appears to have escaped suspicion. 119

Apart from ALAN’s intelligence, the French ST most highly rated by the Centre probably concerned France’s Ariane rocket and its fuel, Cryogäne. 120From 1974 to 1979 a French engineer, Pierre Bourdiol, recruited by the KGB in 1970, was employed on the Ariane project by SNIAS, the predecessor of the state-owned aerospace group Aerospatiale. 121Probably in 1979 or 1980, agent KARL, a specialist in electromagnetism, succeeded in obtaining further intelligence on Ariane from an unidentified subsource. KARL was paid a salary of about 150,000 francs a year and received bonuses of over 30,000 francs in 1979 and 1980. 122In 1982 KARL recruited NIKE, another highly rated Line X agent, who worked in one of the laboratories of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques. NIKE was enlisted under false flag, believing he was in the pay of a foreign firm. His file records that his information “satisfied priority requirements” of Directorate T. 123

Just as Line X operations in France reached their apogee in the early 1980s, they were compromised by a French agent inside Directorate T, Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), who had been stationed at the Paris residency from 1965 to 1970. Vetrov was an ardent Francophile, deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system, and resentful at his treatment by Directorate T which had transferred him from operations to analysis. In the spring of 1981 he sent a message, via a French businessman returning from Moscow, to the DST headquarters in Paris, offering his services as a spy. Over the next year Vetrov supplied over 4,000 documents on Soviet ST collection and analysis. The FAREWELL operation came to an abrupt end after a brutally bizarre episode in a Moscow park in February 1982 whose explanation still remains unclear. While drinking—and probably quarreling—with a KGB secretary with whom he was having an affair, Vetrov was approached by a KGB colleague. Startled, and perhaps fearing that his double life had been discovered, he stabbed his colleague to death. When his lover tried to run away, Vetrov stabbed her too, probably to prevent her revealing what had happened, but she survived to give evidence against him. Though Vetrov began a twelve-year sentence for murder at Irkurksk prison in the autumn of 1981, it was several months before the KGB began to suspect that he was also guilty of espionage. Vetrov wrote his own death sentence with a confession which concluded, “My only regret is that I was not able to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to France.” 124

Vetrov’s documents added enormously to Western intelligence services’ knowledge of Soviet ST operations. 125In July 1981, two months after he became president, Franáois Mitterrand personally informed Ronald Reagan of the documents being received from FAREWELL. Soon afterwards, Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST, visited Washington to brief Vice-President George Bush, a former Director of Central Intelligence, in greater detail. The first public disclosure of Vetrov’s material followed the discovery early in 1983 that bugs in the teleprinters of the French embassy in Moscow had been relaying incoming and outgoing telegrams to the KGB for the previous seven years. Mitterrand responded by ordering the expulsion from France on April 5, 1983 of forty-seven Soviet intelligence officers—the largest such exodus since operation FOOT in Britain twelve years earlier. Many of those expelled, in particular the Line X officers, had been identified by Vetrov. When the Soviet ambassador, Yuli Vorontsev, arrived at the Quai d’Orsay to deliver an official protest, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson reduced him to silence by producing one of the KGB documents on ST operations supplied by Vetrov. 126

THOUGH THE KGB residency in Rome ran less than half as many agents as its counterpart in Paris (just over twenty in the mid-1970s as compared to about fifty in France), 127the pattern of agent recruitment in the two countries was broadly similar. Immediately after the Second World War Soviet intelligence succeeded, with the assistance of the Communist Party leadership, in penetrating a number of major ministries in both Italy and France. By the 1970s, however, a majority of the best-paid Line PR agents run by the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists rather than civil servants.

As in France, the post-war popularity of the Communist Party and the brief period of Communist participation in government created the best opportunities Soviet intelligence was ever to enjoy in Italy for agent penetration. 128Like JOUR, probably the most important of the post-war French recruits, DARIO, the longest-serving and probably the most valuable Italian agent, worked in the foreign ministry, where he had recruited his first three female agents before the Second World War. On his return to the ministry after the war, he recruited two more female typists: TOPO (later renamed LEDA), whom he married, and NIKOL (later INGA). 129

For most of the next three decades DARIO was instrumental in obtaining a phenomenal amount of classified foreign ministry material. 130During the mid-1950s he succeeded in recruiting three further female agents: VENETSIANKA, who was on the staff of the Italian embassy in Paris; OVOD, on whom Mitrokhin’s notes provide no further information; and SUZA, who worked for the diplomatic adviser to President Giovanni Gronchi and gained access to a wide variety of ambassadors’ reports and other classified foreign ministry documents. 131During the early 1960s DARIO’s wife LEDA met her case officer from the Rome residency once a week in cinemas and other locations in the city. As she shook hands with him, she passed over a microfilm of the classified foreign ministry documents she had photographed during the previous week. 132

In 1968 the Centre decided to put DARIO “on ice,” and awarded him a pension for life of 180 hard currency roubles a month. Four years later, however, it reactivated him in order to cultivate a female cipher officer in a foreign embassy and another typist at the Italian foreign ministry, who appears to have been given the codename MARA. 133In March 1975, forty-three years after DARIO’s recruitment, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Red Star. He subsequently collected his pension at regular intervals by traveling abroad either to the Soviet Union or to some other country. 134

After the Second World War the Rome residency also successfully penetrated the interior ministry, thanks chiefly to DEMID, a ministry official recruited in 1945 who acted as agent-recruiter. 135DEMID’s first major cultivation inside the ministry was a cipher clerk codenamed QUESTOR, who agreed to supply information on the contents of the classified telegrams which he enciphered and deciphered. QUESTOR, however, believed for several years that his information was being passed by DEMID not to Soviet intelligence but to the PCI, and refused to hand over the ciphers themselves. Late in 1953 the Rome residency decided to force the pace and instructed DEMID to offer QUESTOR 100,000 lire for the loan “for a few hours” of the code and cipher books used by the ministry. QUESTOR accepted. On March 3, 1954 DEMID finally told him that he was working not for the PCI but for the KGB, and obtained a receipt from him for the 100,000 lire. Soon afterwards QUESTOR was handed over to the control of STEPAN, an operations officer at the Rome residency, to whom he supplied a phenomenal range of official ciphers to which he succeeded in gaining access. Among them were those of the prefectures, the finance ministry, central and regional headquarters of the carabinieri, Italian diplomatic missions abroad, the Italian general staff and the military-run foreign intelligence service, SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate). QUESTOR also obtained interior ministry lists of Italian Communists, foreign nationals and others who were under surveillance by the Police security service ( Pubblica Sicurezza ). 136