Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Kopatzky was employed at one of the focal points of American intelligence operations. The CIA’s West Berlin station was situated only a few miles from the greatest concentration of Soviet forces anywhere in the world. One of Kopatzky’s chief tasks was to find East German women willing to have sex with Soviet soldiers and act as CIA agents. By taking an active part in the station’s attempt to recruit Soviet personnel and encourage defections, he was able to find numerous opportunities to sabotage its operations. Among the wealth of intelligence which Kopatzky provided were the identities of more than a hundred American intelligence officers and agents in East Germany; some were arrested while others were turned into double agents. He also assisted a number of KGB operations to “dangle” bogus agents intended to deceive the CIA station. In 1952 he helped to organize the bogus defection of Soviet agent VIKTOR, who was later employed by the Voice of America radio station and supplied what Kopatzky’s file terms “valuable information.” 3

After Kopatzky was briefly imprisoned for drunken driving in 1954, his name was changed by the CIA to “Igor Orlov,” so that his criminal record would not appear on his application for US citizenship. 4In 1957, with his cover as a CIA (but not Soviet) agent largely blown in Berlin, Orlov was taken to Washington with his family and given further operational training by the Agency. He then returned to Europe to take part in various CIA operations in Germany and Austria. 5In 1960 the CIA at last began to suspect that “Orlov” was working for the KGB. A later damage assessment at the Centre concluded that the extraordinary number of KGB officers who had been in direct contact with him—over twenty during the last decade—might have helped to place him under suspicion. 6In order to prevent Orlov defecting before the case against him had been established, the CIA promised him a new job with the Agency in Washington, sacked him on his arrival in January 1961 and began an intensive investigation. 7Orlov made contact with his new Soviet controller, I. P. Sevastyanov, an operations officer at the Washington residency, got a job as a truck driver and heard nothing for several years from either the CIA or the FBI. In 1964 he bought a picture-framing gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, paid for in part, no doubt, by his earnings from the KGB. 8

By the time he opened his gallery, Orlov may well have felt confident that the case against him could never be proved. His confidence evaporated in the spring of 1965 when the FBI arrived on his doorstep, spent several days searching his home, questioned his wife Eleonore and summoned him to take a polygraph test. Orlov seems to have panicked. Under surveillance and unable to make covert contact with the KGB, he went into the Soviet embassy on 16th Street through a rear door, vainly hoping to enter unobserved. 9The Washington residency arranged with him an exfiltration plan which was agreed to by Moscow. Encouraged by “Abel’s” star rating as a master spy and his American lawyer’s affectionate memoir of him, the Centre intended to turn the exfiltration into a publicity stunt. It planned a press conference in Moscow at which Orlov would be presented as a Soviet illegal who had performed heroic deeds behind the German lines on the eastern front during the Second World War and later penetrated the CIA. Orlov would then publish his life story, which would be used as an “active measure” to glamorize the KGB and denigrate its Main Adversary. 10

The plan, however, had to be called off. Orlov’s wife flatly refused to go to Moscow with their two young sons, so he decided to tough it out in Washington. 11Though the FBI kept the “Orlov” file open, they were never able to prove a case against him. Their investigation, like that of the CIA, however, was based on one false assumption. After his defection in December 1961, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn had provided some clues which helped to confirm suspicions about Orlov. Golitsyn correctly said that a Soviet spy whose real surname began with a K had been active in Berlin and West Germany, but wrongly said that his codename, rather than his real name, was SASHA. The CIA and FBI both wrongly concluded that Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Kopatzky, alias “Igor Orlov,” was agent SASHA. 12Orlov’s KGB file shows that he was at various stages of his career successively ERWIN, HERBERT and RICHARD, but never SASHA, and that he remained a Soviet agent until a few years before his death in 1982. After a press article in 1978 claimed that Orlov was a Soviet spy, the KGB broke off contact with RICHARD. 13In 1992, ten years after Orlov’s death, the Gallery Orlov, run by his widow, was still described by a Washington guide as “a hangout for espionage writers.” 14

West Berlin and West Germany, where Kopatzky (aka Orlov) had first offered his services to the KGB in 1949, were the KGB’s most successful recruiting grounds for disgruntled US military personnel. The most important was probably Robert Lee Johnson, codenamed GEORGE, a disaffected army sergeant and part-time pimp in West Berlin. 15In 1953 Johnson and his prostitute fiancée, Hedy, crossed into East Berlin and asked for political asylum. The KGB, however, persuaded Johnson to stay in the West, earn a second salary by spying for the Soviet Union and pay off his old scores against the US army. Despite his involvement in prostitution, alcohol abuse and gambling (not to mention espionage), Johnson succeeded in gaining employment as a guard from 1957 to 1959 at missile sites in California and Texas, where he purloined documents, photographs and, on one occasion, a sample of rocket fuel for the KGB. 16

Johnson’s most productive period as a Soviet agent began in 1961 when he was stationed as a guard in the US Armed Forces Courier Centre at Orly Airport, near Paris, one of the main nerve centers in the classified military communications system. Over the next two years he handed over 1,600 pages of top secret documents to his controller. Among them were ciphers and daily key-tables for the Adonis, KW-9 and HW-18 cipher machines; the operational plans of the US armed forces command in Europe; documents on the production of American nuclear weapons; lists and locations of targets in the Soviet Bloc; US intelligence reports on Soviet scientific research, aviation and missile development; and SIGINT evidence on the state of readiness of the East German Air Force. Collectively the documents provided an extraordinary and highly classified insight both into American forces in Europe and into what they knew about the forces of the Warsaw Pact. 17Johnson was finally arrested in 1964 after a tip-off from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. 18

IN THE UNITED STATES itself the most remarkable KGB walk-ins during the Eisenhower presidency were two employees of the National Security [SIGINT] Agency, 31-year-old Bernon F. Mitchell and 29-year-old William H. Martin. On September 6, 1960, in Moscow’s House of Journalists, Mitchell and Martin gave perhaps the most embarrassing press conference in the history of the American intelligence community. The greatest embarrassment was the public revelation that NSA had been decrypting the communications of some of the United States’ allies. Among them, said Martin, were “Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic [Egypt and Syria], Indonesia, Uruguay—that’s enough to give a general picture, I guess.” 19

Though the defection of the two NSA employees was a spectacular publicity coup, Mitchell’s KGB file reveals that it fell some way short of the Centre’s expectations. 20Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell had been recruited by NSA in 1957 despite admitting to six years of “sexual experimentations” up to the age of nineteen with dogs and chickens. His gifts as a mathematician were presumably thought more important than his farmyard experiences. During Martin’s positive vetting, acquaintances variously described him as irresponsible and an insufferable egotist but—like his friend Mitchell—a gifted mathematician. Politically naive and socially inadequate, Mitchell and Martin were seduced by the Soviet propaganda image of the USSR as a state committed to the cause of peace whose progressive social system could offer them the personal fulfillment they had failed to find in the United States. 21