Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Once he had begun work as a KGB illegal, however, Korsakov quickly became disillusioned. In January 1980, while undergoing further training in Moscow, he secretly entered the United States embassy, identified himself as an illegal, gave the identities of a number of other KGB officers (among them Artur Viktorovich Pyatin, head of Line N (illegals support) in Washington) and was debriefed by the CIA station. Since Korsakov was nominally a West German citizen, it was decided to transfer him secretly to the embassy of the FRG to arrange for his exfiltration. Mitrokhin’s notes do not record whether the KGB had observed him entering the American embassy, but they were waiting for him when he arrived at Moscow airport to return to the West. After lengthy interrogation, Korsakov was sent to the Kazanskaya psychiatric hospital, where, like a number of prominent Soviet dissidents, he was falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic. 46

THIRTY YEARS AFTER the beginning of the Cold War, the Centre’s grand strategy for a powerful chain of illegal residencies running American agent networks as important as those during the Second World War had little to show for an enormous expenditure of time and effort. At the end of the 1970s, following a string of previous failures, Valoushek’s illegal residency was under the (albeit imperfect) control of the FBI and Korsakov was preparing to defect.

Particularly galling for the Centre was the fact that probably the most remarkable penetration of the Main Adversary by an illegal during the Cold War was achieved not by the KGB but by its junior partner, the Czechoslovak StB. In 1965 two StB illegals, Karl and Hana Koecher, arrived in New York, claiming to be refugees from persecution in Czechoslovakia. Fluent in Russian, English and French as well as Czech, Karl Koecher found a job as a consultant with Radio Free Europe while studying first for a master’s degree at Indiana University, then for a doctorate at Columbia. Among his professors at Columbia was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later became President Carter’s National Security Adviser. All the time, he posed as a virulent anti-Communist, even objecting to the purchase of an apartment in his East Side building in New York by the tennis star Ivan Lendl—simply because of Lendl’s Czech origins. In 1969, a year before gaining his PhD, Karl Koecher was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Wagner College, Staten Island. Hana, meanwhile, worked for a diamond business which gave her regular opportunities to travel to Europe and act as courier for the StB. The Koechers may also have been the most sexually active illegals in the history of Soviet Bloc intelligence, graduating from “wifeswapping” parties to group orgies at New York’s Plato’s Retreat and Hell Fire sex clubs which flourished in the sexually permissive pre-AIDS era of the late 1960s and 1970s.

With the blessing of the StB, the Koechers later revealed some of their colorful careers to the Washington investigative journalist Ronald Kessler. 47Karl Koecher’s KGB file, however, reveals that he withheld important details. In 1970 he was summoned back to Prague to take part in an StB active measure designed to unmask alleged CIA operations using Czech emigrés. Koecher, however, was too attached to his swinging lifestyle to leave New York, refused to return and for the next four years broke off contact with the StB. 48In 1971 he succeeded in becoming a naturalized US citizen; his wife was granted citizenship a year later.

Karl Koecher seems to have devised a plan to mend his fences with the StB by penetrating the CIA. In 1973 he moved to Washington and obtained a job as translator in the Agency’s Soviet division, with a top secret security clearance. His chutzpah was such that only three weeks later he demanded a better job:

My present position is by no means one which would require a PhD. I am interested in intelligence work, and I want to stay with the agency and do a good piece of work. But I also think that it would only be fair to let me do it in a position intellectually far more demanding than the one I have now…

Probably as a result of his complaints, Koecher was later asked to write intelligence assessments based on some of the Russian and Czech material which he translated and transcribed from tape recordings.

Sex in Washington struck Koecher as even more exciting than in New York. In the mid-1970s, he later claimed nostalgically, Washington was “the sex capital of the world.” The Koechers joined the “Capitol Couples,” who met for dinner at The Exchange restaurant on Saturday evenings before moving on for group sex in a hotel or private house, as well as becoming members of a private club of Washington swingers at Virginia’s In Place, about ten of whose members worked for the CIA. Hana, blonde, attractive and ten years younger than her husband, later boasted that she had had sex with numerous CIA personnel, Pentagon officials, reporters from major newspapers and a US Senator. The organizer of “Capitol Couples” remembered her as “strikingly beautiful; warm, sweet, ingratiating; incredibly orgasmic.” Karl, however, “was a bit strange… The women he was with said he was a terrible lover, very insensitive. His wife was everything he wasn’t.” 49

In 1974, having penetrated the CIA, Karl Koecher renewed contact with the StB, which consulted the KGB about whether to reactivate him. Henceforth he became a KGB agent with the codename RINO, as well as being an StB illegal. The Koechers’ adventures in Washington sex clubs are unlikely to have provided the StB and KGB with more than compromising information and gossip about Washington officials, most of it of no operational significance. Far more important was the classified Soviet and Czech material translated by Karl Koecher for the CIA which he forwarded to the KGB. Andropov personally praised his intelligence as “important and valuable.” 50In 1975 Koecher left full-time Agency employment, but continued on contract work, based in New York. Among the subjects of his assessments was the decision-making process in the Soviet leadership. 51

In 1975 Koecher supplied the KGB’s New York residency with highly rated intelligence on CIA operations against the Soviet Union in the Third World. As well as arranging meetings in New York, his KGB case officers also met him in Austria and France. 52Among his most important counter-intelligence leads was evidence that the CIA had recruited a Soviet diplomat. Following an apparently lengthy investigation, the KGB identified the diplomat as Aleksandr Dmitryevich Ogorodnik, then working in the American department at the Foreign Ministry. Soon after his arrest in 1977, Ogorodnik agreed to write a full confession but complained that the pen given him by his interrogator was too clumsy for him to use. As soon as he was given his own pen back, he removed a concealed poison capsule, swallowed it before the guard could stop him and died in the interrogation room. 53

In the early 1980s the Koechers were themselves betrayed by a CIA agent in the StB. Arrested in 1984, they returned to Czechoslovakia less than two years later as part of a deal which allowed the imprisoned Russian dissident Anatoli Shcharansky to emigrate to Israel. According to a newspaper report, as they crossed the Glienicker Bridge from West Berlin to East Germany:

With his moustache and fur-lined coat, Karl F. Koecher looked like nothing so much as a fox. His wife, Hana, wore a mink coat and high white mink hat. Blonde and sexy, with incredibly large blue eyes, she looked like a movie star.

“The KGB thinks highly of me,” Karl Koecher later boasted to Ronald Kessler. 54There was a curious sequel to the Koechers’ espionage careers in the West. In 1992 Hana succeeded in obtaining a job in the commercial section at the British embassy in Prague. She was sacked two years later after a Czech journalist revealed her background. 55