Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Shortly after Khrushchev had sent his second letter, Soviet air defense in Cuba, apparently as a result of a failure in the chain of command, shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing the pilot. Khrushchev panicked. Reports that Kennedy was to make a speech on national television at noon on October 28 wrongly persuaded him that the President might be about to announce an invasion of Cuba. Khrushchev gave in and accepted Kennedy’s terms: a unilateral withdrawal of “all Soviet offensive arms” from Cuba. To make sure his message reached Kennedy in time, he ordered it to be broadcast over Radio Moscow. 48

THE HUMILIATION OF the Soviet climbdown at the end of the missile crisis, which led two years later to Khrushchev’s overthrow in a Kremlin palace coup, was strengthened in the Centre by the discovery of a series of penetrations by, and defections to, the CIA. In December 1961 a KGB officer, Major Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn, walked into the American embassy in Helsinki and was exfiltrated to the United States. In September 1962 the KGB arrested GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who for the past eighteen months had been providing high-grade intelligence to the British and Americans. 49

The damage report on Golitsyn produced the usual stereotyped denunciation of his motives. Since it was impossible to criticize either the KGB or the Soviet system, it followed that the basic cause of all defections was the moral failings of the defectors themselves—in particular, “the virus of careerism” unscrupulously exploited by Western intelligence services:

The treason of Golitsyn, an ambitious and vain man, provides a typical example of a person representing the tribe of careerists. In the mid-1950s he reacted painfully to a demotion in his position: he could not tolerate having his mistakes and blunders pointed out and commented on. Emphasizing his exceptional qualities, he said that only bad luck had prevented him from becoming a highly successful senior officer during the Stalin period. [Late in 1961] Golitsyn made persistent attempts to learn the contents of the evaluation written on him for Moscow, which was negative. The [Helsinki] Residency believes that he succeeded in learning its essence and, knowing from the experience of others that he could expect a serious talk in the personnel department and a demotion in rank, he defected to the United States. 50

Like all defectors, Golitsyn was given an insulting codename—in his case, GOR-BATY (“Hunchback”). 51Measures taken to discredit him included the arrest of a Soviet smuggler (codenamed MUSTAFA), who was persuaded to implicate Golitsyn in contraband operations across the Finnish border. An article in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya on September 27, 1962 condemned Golitsyn’s (fictitious) involvement with smugglers. 52

Despite the Centre’s attempt to belittle Golitsyn, the damage assessment after his defection concluded that he had been able to betray a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the “Lines” (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents. 53Between January 4 and February 16, 1962 the Centre sent instructions to fifty-four residents on the action required to limit the damage to current operations. For the time being, all meetings with important agents were to be suspended and contact limited to “impersonal means” such as dead letter-boxes. 54

As well as providing important intelligence on KGB methods and leads to a number of Soviet agents, however, Golitsyn also confused the CIA with a series of increasingly extravagant conspiracy theories. He persuaded the head of the CIA counter-intelligence staff, James Angleton, that the KGB was engaged in a gigantic global deception, and that even the Sino-Soviet split was a charade to deceive the West. Golitsyn was later to maintain that the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was also a KGB description. 55It did not occur to the Centre that Golitsyn’s defection, by infecting a small but troublesome minority of CIA officers with his own paranoid tendencies, would ultimately do the Agency more harm than good.

In November 1963 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Cherepanov of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (internal security and counter-intelligence), sent the American embassy in Moscow a packet of highly classified papers dealing with the surveillance and entrapment of diplomats and other foreigners in Russia, together with a note offering his services to the CIA. In the ambassador’s absence, the deputy head of mission feared that the documents were part of a KGB provocation. Though the head of the CIA station was allowed to photograph the documents, the originals, despite his protests, were returned to the Russians. Cherepanov fled from Moscow but was arrested by KGB border guards on the frontier with Turkestan on December 17, 1963. He admitted during interrogation that the operational secrets he had revealed to the Americans included the use of “spy dust” ( metka ), special chemicals applied to suspects’ shoes to facilitate tracking. Cherepanov was sentenced to death at a secret trial in April 1964. The Centre’s damage assessment of the case concluded:

It is not possible to determine why the Americans betrayed Cherepanov. Either they suspected that his action was a KGB provocation or they wanted to burden the KGB with a lengthy search for the person who had sent the package to the embassy. 56

Though the CIA was not responsible for Cherepanov’s betrayal, it was shortly to make another, even more serious error. In February 1964 Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a KGB officer serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva, who had begun working for the Agency in June 1962, defected to the United States. Nosenko’s CIA debriefers, however, wrongly concluded that he was a KGB plant. 57

Unaware of the CIA’s horrendous misjudgement, the Centre regarded Nosenko’s defection as a serious setback. Its damage assessment began with the usual character assassination, claiming that Nosenko (henceforth codenamed IDOL), had been infected—like Golitsyn—with the “virus of careerism:”

Nosenko, who lusted for power, did not hide his ambitions and obtained a high position. The leadership of Department 1 at Headquarters will not forget Nosenko’s hysterical reaction when he was informed of their plans to promote him from deputy chief to chief of section [ otdeleniye ]. “The chief of the directorate has promised that I will replace the head of the department [ otdel ],” he shouted shamelessly. The characteristics of careerism were evident in many curious facets of his life. When he became the deputy chief of another department, Nosenko was ashamed of his rank [KGB captain], which was below that normally associated with his position. He would return unsigned any documents with “Captain” on them, and would only sign documents on which his perceptive subordinates had not indicated his rank. 58

Throughout the Cold War, the KGB had much greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) on the Main Adversary than penetrating the federal government. In 1963 the ST department of the FCD was given enhanced status as Directorate T. 59Most of its tasking came from the Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was responsible for overseeing weapons production, 60and was obsessed with American armaments and advanced technology—almost to the exclusion of the rest of the world. In the early 1960s over 90 percent of

VPK requirements concerned the Main Adversary. 61Among the American ST obtained by the KGB during these years was intelligence on aircraft and rocket technology, turbojet engines (from a source in General Electric), the Phantom jet fighter, nuclear research, computers, transistors, radio electronics, chemical engineering and metallurgy. 62ST agents in the United States identified in Mitrokin’s notes (though with few details of their accomplishments) include: STARIK and BOR (or BORG), who worked as research scientists for the US air force; URBAN, identified by Mitrokhin as a department head at Kellogg (probably the M. W. Kellogg Technology Company in Houston), who had served as an agent since 1940; 63BERG, a senior engineer probably employed by Sperry-Rand (UNIVAC); 64VIL, who worked for the chemical manufacturers Union Carbide; FELKE, an agent in Du Pont de Nemours, the chemical, biomedical and petroleum conglomerate; USACH, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, which carried out government research on nuclear energy, high-energy physics and electronics; and NORTON of RCA, which manufactured electronic, telecommunications and defense equipment. 65