Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

However much the Centre learned about the West, it never truly understood it. Worse still, it thought it did.

THE CENTRE’S FAITH in the future of illegal operations in the United States was remarkably unaffected by the many failures and disappointments of the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the 1970s the Centre still had high hopes of KONOV and DOUGLAS. It also had remarkably ambitious projects for the next decade. A plan drawn up in the late 1960s envisaged establishing and putting into operation between 1969 and 1975 ten illegal residencies in the United States, two in Canada, two in Mexico, and one each in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. For use in wartime and other major crises it was also planned to create five “strategic communications residencies” to maintain contact with the Centre if legal residencies were unable to operate: two in the United States, one in Canada and two in Latin America. 34

This visionary program was to prove hopelessly optimistic. The 1970s produced another crop of serious setbacks in illegal operations in the United States—among them the collapse of the illegal residencies of KONOV and DOUGLAS. When KONOV and EMMA swore their oaths of allegiance as American citizens in 1970, their neighbors apparently regarded them as a model married couple. In reality, the increasing friction between them had begun to affect their operational effectiveness. In 1971 they flew to Haiti to be divorced, but informed only the Centre and their New York lawyer. On their return they still contrived to keep up appearances as a married couple by living together in their New Jersey apartment. EMMA, however, asked the Centre to find her a new partner. In October 1972 KONOV was recalled to Moscow, where he died three years later. EMMA was dismissed from the KGB. 35

Valoushek’s career as the illegal DOUGLAS was to end a few years later in even greater ignominy. His first assignment in the United States, to penetrate the Hudson Institute, was wholly unrealistic. As Valoushek later complained, had he been able to use his real identity and mention his postgraduate degrees from Charles University, Prague, and Heidelberg, he might have made contact with senior members of the Institute. But posing as photographer and cameraman without higher education he had no worthwhile opportunity to do so. 36In 1970, unreasonably dissatisfied with Valoushek’s progress, the Centre took him off the Hudson Institute assignment. 37

The Vaklousheks’ elder son, Peter Herrmann, born in 1957, had a brilliant school academic record and was expected to have opportunities to recruit within American universities that his parents did not. In 1972 Valoushek revealed his true identity to Peter, told the Centre he had done so and said that his son was ready to join the KGB. Moscow accepted the offer and agreed to pay Peter’s university fees. In the summer of 1975, shortly before entering McGill University in Montreal, Peter began training in Moscow and started his career as an illegal with the German codename ERBE (“Inheritor”). In 1976 he moved from McGill to Georgetown University, where he was instructed to report on students whose fathers had government jobs (especially if they had character flaws which could be exploited), as well as on “progressive” students and professors opposed to the imperialist policies of the United States. He was also told to try to find a part-time job in the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, make friends with Chinese students and discover as much as possible about them. 38

By the end of the academic year, Peter Herrmann’s brief career as a teenage illegal was over. Early in May 1977 Valoushek was arrested by the FBI and given the choice of being charged with espionage, together with his wife and son, or of working as a double agent. He later told the espionage writer John Barron that after his arrest he worked as a double agent under FBI control for over two years until the Bureau discontinued the operation. “Rudi [Valoushek] gave us his word and he kept it,” the FBI told Barron. “We must keep our word to him.” On September 23, 1979 an unmarked furniture van removed all the contents of the “Herrmann” household in Andover Road, Hartsdale. The Valoushek family left to start new lives elsewhere under new identities. 39

Valoushek’s KGB file, however, gives a very different account of his relations with the FBI. For well over a year after his arrest, he included deliberate errors and warning signs in his messages to the Centre as an indication that he was working under instructions from the FBI. The KGB failed to notice that anything was wrong until it was warned by an agent early in October 1978 that Valoushek had been turned. Soon afterwards the Centre summoned him to a meeting in Mexico City with the Washington deputy resident, Yuri Konstantinovich Linkov (codenamed BUROV). The FBI told him to keep the rendezvous in order to continue the double agent deception. Valoushek began his meeting with Linkov by admitting that he and his family had been under Bureau control since the spring of the previous year. He suspected that he had been betrayed by LUTZEN, who had defected in West Germany in 1969. 40He complained that he had done his best to warn the Centre, but that no one had paid attention to his warnings. A subsequent investigation by the counter-intelligence department of the FCD Illegals Directorate uncovered an extraordinary tale of incompetence. A series of warnings and deliberate errors in Valoushek’s communications since May 1977 had been overlooked and messages he had posted to the residencies in Vienna and Mexico City had simply been ignored. 41

Immediately after Valoushek’s warning to the KGB in Mexico City in October 1978, the KGB warned Hambleton that contact with his controller would be temporarily broken for security reasons. Instead of being told that Valoushek had defected, however, he was simply given a vague warning that “progressive” people and organizations were under increased surveillance. He was instructed to destroy all compromising materials and to deny everything if he was questioned. In case of emergency, he was advised to escape to East Germany. Hambleton, however, remained confident that he had covered sufficient of his tracks to prevent a case from being brought against him. In June 1979 he sent a confident message to the KGB in secret writing, saying that there was no cause for alarm. 42

At 7:15 a.m. on November 4, 1979 RCMP officers arrived at Hambleton’s Quebec City apartment with a search warrant. For the next two and a half years there was extensive press speculation and numerous questions about Hambleton in the Canadian parliament, but no Canadian prosecution. On March 3, 1980, the first day of the new Trudeau administration, the FBI made an apparent attempt to force its hand by producing Valoushek (under a pseudonym) for a press conference at Bureau headquarters, where he publicly identified Hambleton as one of his agents. Hambleton shrugged off the charges. Though appearing to revel in detailed descriptions of his secret contacts with Moscow by short-wave radio and other hocus pocus, he insisted that he was not a spy: “A spy is someone who regularly gets secret material, passes it on, takes orders, and gets paid for it. I have never been paid.” 43According to Hambleton’s KGB file, however, between September 1975 and December 1978 alone he was paid 18,000 dollars. 44In May 1980 the Canadian Ministry of Justice, apparently convinced that there was still insufficient evidence, announced that Hambleton would not be prosecuted. Thereafter media interest in the case gradually died down. Two years later, however, Hambleton was arrested during a visit to London, tried under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to ten years in jail. 45

Valoushek’s intended successor as illegal resident in the United States was probably Klementi Alekseyevich Korsakov, codenamed KIM, born in 1948 in Moscow to a Russian father and a German mother. Korsakov’s mother, who died in 1971, had herself been a KGB illegal, codenamed EVA. Korsakov seems to have been selected as a potential illegal while still a child and, like his mother, was given bogus identity documents by the East Germans. According to his legend, Korsakov was Klemens Oskar Kuitan, an illegitimate child born in Dalleghof in 1948. Like many other Soviet illegals, he and his mother posed as East German refugees, entering West Berlin in 1953 and moving to the FRG a year later. In 1967, at the age of eighteen, Korsakov obtained a West German passport. After his mother’s death, he spent several years in Vienna, first at an art school, then taking an advertising course, while simultaneously training secretly for illegal intelligence work. In 1978, after two transatlantic trips to familiarize himself with life in the United States, he moved to New York.