Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Cleveland:by the Khipp movie theater.

Indianapolis:by the notice board on Market Street.

Los Angeles:by the newspaper stand “Out of Town Papers” on Las Palmas Avenue; by the entrance to the movie theaters Viltern and Star Theater; by the display windows on Hollywood Boulevard, the furniture store MacMahon Brasses; near the entrance to the Hotel Roosevelt.

Newark:by the Newark train station, on the bench by the monument to Sergeant Donan A. Bazilone.

New Haven:by the Taft Hotel; by the Sherman movie theater.

New York(Bronx) :by the David Marcus movie theater; by the restaurant Savarin; by the display windows of the store Wilma’s Party Center; under the awning of the Middletown Inn Restaurant at 3188 Middletown Road.

Philadelphia:by the Randolph and Stanton movie theaters; by the Silvanna Hotel.

Portland:by the parking lot on the main street; by the Parker movie theater.

Rochester:by the Randolph movie theater.

Sacramento:by the Tower movie theater, and near the advertisements at the café Camilia Lodge.

St. Paul:by the display windows of the St. Paul Hotel; by the Strand movie theater.

San Francisco:by the Metro movie theater on Union Street; by Fosters Restaurant, Simms Café, and Comptons Café (in the downtown area); the Canterbury Hotel.

Seattle:by the movie theater Orpheum Cinema on Fifth Avenue; by the City Motel on Queen Anne Avenue.

Syracuse:by the Cates movie theater.

Union City, New Jersey:by the AP supermarket.

Washington area:the telephone booth by the entrance to the Hot Shoppes Restaurant in the center of Hyattsville, a Washington suburb; by the entrance to the grocery store in the Aspen Hill Shopping Center on Georgia Avenue in Maryland, six miles north of Washington.

In 1966 the lack of high-grade political intelligence from the United States led the KGB Collegium, a senior advisory body headed by the Chairman, to call for a major improvement in intelligence operations against the Main Adversary. The chief method by which it proposed to achieve this improvement, however, was one which had already been attempted unsuccessfully during the 1950s: the creation over the next few years of a network of illegal residencies which would take over the main burden of intelligence operations from the legal residencies in New York, Washington and San Francisco. 1

Not until six years after the arrest of “Rudolf Abel” in 1957 did the KGB succeed in establishing another illegal residency on the territory of the Main Adversary. Though there were brief missions to or through the United States by a number of illegals, the first to have taken up residence who is recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was KONOV, a Muscovite of Greek origin born in 1912, who took the identity of Gerhard Max Kohler, a Sudeten German born in Reichenberg (now part of the Czech Republic) in 1917. KONOV was a war veteran and radio specialist who worked as head of a laboratory in Leningrad until his recruitment by the KGB in April 1955. He spent the next four years in East Germany, working as an engineer, establishing his German cover identity and studying both his next destination, West Germany, and his ultimate target, the United States. The KGB, which specialized in arranged marriages for its illegals, found him a German wife and assistant previously employed by the Stasi, codenamed EMMA, who took the identity of Erna Helga Maria Decker, born on September 2, 1928 near Breslau (now in Poland). 2

In October 1959, posing as East German refugees, KONOV and EMMA crossed to the FRG, where KONOV found work as a radio engineer. In 1962 he began corresponding with American radio and electronics companies and obtained several job offers. After visiting the United States as a tourist, he accepted employment in a company which in 1963 enabled EMMA and himself to obtain immigrant visas. KONOV seems to have been the first post-war illegal sent to the United States to concentrate on scientific and technological intelligence (ST). Specializing in electronic measuring devices, he took part in a number of international exhibitions and—according to his file—made several inventions. KONOV’s ST was so highly rated by the Centre that it won him two KGB awards. On June 20, 1970, after living for seven years in the United States as Gerhard and Erna Kohler, KONOV and EMMA became American citizens, swearing their oaths of allegiance in Newark Courthouse. 3

By the time KONOV entered the United States in 1963, two other KGB illegals were already established in Canada, both intended by the Centre for subsequent transfer to the Main Adversary. Nikolai Nikolayevich Bitnov (codenamed ALBERT) had arrived in Canada in 1961. The basis of the legend painstakingly constructed for Bitnov was a fabricated version of the life history of Leopold Lambert Delbrouck, who had been born in Belgium in 1899, emigrated to Russia with his family at the age of eight and died there in 1946. In the fictitious version of Delbrouck’s career constructed by the Centre, however, Delbrouck had married a Romanian woman, set up home in Gleiwitz in Germany (now Gliwice in Poland) and then moved to Romania, where he died in 1931. While in Gleiwitz, the couple had supposedly had a son, Jean Leopold Delbrouck, whose identity Bitnov assumed. Bitnov’s wife, Nina (codenamed GERA), took over the identity of a “dead double,” Yanina Batarovskaya, who had been born in France in 1928 and died in Lithuania in 1956. 4

Early in 1956, now age thirty, Bitnov moved with his wife to Romania to establish his legend with the help of the Romanian intelligence service, the DGSP. In April 1957, using identity documents forged by the Centre, they succeeded in obtaining passports from the Belgian diplomatic mission in Bucharest. 5Six months later, they moved to Geneva so that Bitnov could enroll in a business school and learn how to operate as a businessman in the West. From late 1958 to the summer of 1961 the couple lived in Liège, establishing Belgian identities and obtaining new passports which, unlike those issued in Bucharest, made no reference to their residence in Romania and were thus less likely to arouse suspicion in North America. In July 1960, the Bitnovs emigrated to Canada. 6

The Centre probably intended that Bitnov should move on after a few years to the territory of the Main Adversary. Initially, however, he was ordered, like Brik (HART) a decade earlier, to establish himself under business cover in Canada. Despite his course in Geneva, however, Bitnov proved a hopeless businessman. First, he invested 2,000 dollars of KGB funds in a business which bought up land with mineral rights and sold them to mining companies. After two years the company went bankrupt. Then Bitnov spent 2,000 dollars purchasing a directorship in a car dealership which went into liquidation only two months later. Unwilling to pour good money after bad into any more of his investment schemes, the Centre ordered him to look for paid employment. After a period on unemployment benefits, Bitnov found a poorly paid job as a bookkeeper which, he complained, left him little or no time for intelligence work. Having achieved nothing of any significance as an illegal, he was recalled to Moscow in 1969. 7The following year, he was given a pension and sent into early retirement at the age of only forty-five. 8The fact that the Centre persevered with Bitnov for so long was further evidence of the strength of its determination to establish a network of illegal residencies in North America.