Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The youthful head of Line PR, Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, spent “countless hours” in his cramped office in the Washington residency sifting through the mass of material provided by Lipka and choosing the most important documents for cabling to Moscow. 12Lipka’s motives were purely mercenary. During the two years after he walked into the Washington embassy, he received a total of about 27,000 dollars, but regularly complained that he was not paid enough and threatened to break contact unless his remuneration was increased. Lipka eventually did break contact in August 1967, when he left NSA at the end of his military service to study at Millersville College in Pennsylvania and probably concluded that his loss of intelligence access made it no longer worth his while maintaining contact with the Washington residency. To discourage the KGB from trying to renew contact, Lipka sent a final message claiming that he had been a double agent controlled by US intelligence. In view of the importance of the classified documents he had provided, however, the KGB had no doubt that he was lying. Attempts by both the residency and illegals to renew contact with Lipka continued intermittently, without success, for at least another eleven years. 13

Only a few months after Lipka ceased working as a Soviet agent, the Washington residency recruited another walk-in with access to SIGINT. The most important Cold War agent recruited in Washington before Aldrich Ames walked in in 1985 was probably Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the Commander of Submarine Forces in the Atlantic (COMSUBLANT) in Norfolk, Virginia. Late in 1967 he entered the Soviet embassy and announced, “I’m a naval officer. I’d like to make some money and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.” Despite his junior rank, Walker had access to very high-level intelligence—including the key settings of US naval ciphers. The sample batch of his material, which he brought with him to the embassy, was examined with amazement by Kalugin and the Washington resident, Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin. According to Kalugin, Solomatin’s “eyes widened as he leafed through the Walker papers. ‘I want this!’ he cried.” Walker, they later agreed, was the kind of spy who turns up “once in a lifetime.” Enabling Soviet codebreakers to crack US navy codes, claims Kalugin, gave the Soviet Union “an enormous intelligence advantage” by allowing it to monitor American fleet movements. 14

Walker, described in a fitness report from his commanding officer in 1972 as “intensely loyal” with “a fine sense of personal honor and integrity,” found photographing top secret documents and cipher material with a Minox camera in the COMSUBLANT communications center so easy that he was later to claim, “K Mart has better security than the Navy.” He went on to form a spy-ring by recruiting a naval friend, Jerry Whitworth, and his own son and elder brother. 15For Kalugin the greatest surprise of both the Lipka and Walker cases was their revelation of “how incredibly lax security still was at some of the United States’ top secret installations.” 16

After the foundation in 1968 of the ultra-secret Sixteenth Department to handle SIGINT material collected by the FCD, Walker was transferred to its control and thus no longer figured on the Washington residency’s agent list. 17Solomatin, however, was careful to ensure that he retained personal oversight of the running of what became the Walker family spyring throughout the extraordinary eighteen years of its existence. 18The reflected glory of the Lipka and Walker cases was to win Solomatin the Order of the Red Banner and, later, promotion to deputy head of the FCD. Kalugin’s career also benefited; in 1974 he became the FCD’s youngest general. 19

Most walk-ins were less straightforward than Lipka and Walker. During the 1970s KGB residencies, especially that in Mexico City, had to deal with a growing number of “dangles”—double agents controlled by the US intelligence community who offered their services as Soviet agents. One of the most successful dangles was MAREK, a master sergeant of Czech descent at the Fort Bliss army base in Texas, who visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico in December 1966 and offered information on electronic equipment used by the US army. Recruited in June 1968, he had numerous meetings over the next eight years with a grand total of twenty-six case officers in Mexico, West Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Austria. In May 1976, however, the KGB learned from the former CIA officer Philip Agee (PONT) that MAREK was a US dangle, run in a joint CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency operation of which he had personal knowledge. 20

By the late 1970s a special Pentagon panel was selecting classified documents which were given to American dangles, mostly non-commissioned officers selected by the DIA to strengthen their credibility as Soviet spies. As well as providing a potential channel for disinformation in a conflict or crisis, large amounts of KGB time and energy were wasted in distinguishing dangles from genuine walk-ins. The most successful of the real Soviet recruits, Aldrich Ames, said later that the refusal of the Red Army to release classified documents made it impossible for Soviet dangles to compete with those of the United States:

Even if a document were of no real value, no one in the Soviet military was willing to sign off on releasing it, knowing that it was going to be passed to the West. They were afraid that a few months later, they would be called before some Stalin-like tribunal and be shot for treason. 21

Throughout the Cold War the main weakness of the Washington residency was its inability to recruit agents able to provide high-level political intelligence from within the federal government. At the end of the 1960s, however, it had one non-agent source to which it attached great importance. A line PR officer, Boris Sedov, operating under cover as a Novosti journalist, had succeeded in making contact with Henry Kissinger while he was still a professor at Harvard University. According to Kalugin, “ We never had any illusions about trying to recruit Kissinger: he was simply a source of political intelligence.” When Kissinger became an adviser to Nixon during the 1968 election campaign, he began to use Sedov to pass messages to Moscow that Nixon’s public image as an unreconstructed Cold War warrior was false and that he wanted better relations with the Soviet Union. After Nixon’s election victory, Brezhnev sent personal congratulations to him via Sedov together with a note expressing the hope that together they would establish better US—Soviet relations. While the presidential campaign had been underway, the long-serving Soviet ambassador, Anatoli Dobrynin, had tolerated Sedov’s secret contacts with Kissinger. Once Nixon entered the White House and Kissinger became his National Security Adviser, however, he insisted on taking over the back channel to the Kremlin himself. 22

When Kissinger took over as Secretary of State in 1973, Dobrynin became the only ambassador in Washington who was allowed to enter the State Department unobserved via the underground garage. 23The Washington residency complained to the Centre that Kissinger had forbidden his officials to meet members of the Soviet embassy outside office hours, thus making it impossible for residency officers to develop contacts of their own within the State Department and “check Kissinger’s true intentions when negotiating with Ambassador Dobrynin.” 24During his twenty-three years in Washington from 1963 to 1986, Dobrynin’s access to a series of major policy-makers from Dean Rusk under Kennedy to George Shultz under Reagan was never equaled by the Washington residency. 25

Line PR at the New York residency had no success in recruiting “valuable agents” within the US administration either. The United Nations, however, was a much softer target. Of the more than 300 Soviet nationals employed in the UN Secretariat, many were KGB and GRU officers, agents and co-optees. KGB officers operating under diplomatic cover became the trusted personal assistants to successive UN secretaries-general: Viktor Mechislavovich Lesiovsky to U Thant, Lesiovsky and Valeri Viktorovich Krepkogorsky to Kurt Waldheim and Gennadi Mikhaylovich Yevstafeyev to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. 26The KGB made strenuous attempts to cultivate Waldheim in particular, arranging for the publication of flattering articles about him in the Soviet press and selecting a painting of Samarkand by a Soviet artist which was personally presented to him by Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky when he visited the USSR. 27