Modalidades del Comercio Electrónico

revelations smacked of self-aggrandizement, a not-uncommon

70

ANATOLI GOLITSIN 71

tendency by defectors to exaggerate their own knowledge and importance in order to boost their credentials—and qualify for the kind of lavish payments grateful counterintelligence agencies can pay to useful sources.

To test Golitsin's claim about KGB penetration of NATO, it was decided to present him with several documents, in which a number of cleverly forged papers were included. If he really had the knowledge he claimed he had, he should be able to spot the difference. To the shock of his audience, Golitsin treated the test as though it were child's play. "Deception," he announced in his heavy Slavic accent as he put aside one of the forged documents. Within a half hour, Golitsin scanned his way through the docu- ments; unerringly, he was able to spot the fake ones. Asked how he had managed this feat by only rapidly scanning the pile of papers, Golitsin replied simply, "Because, as I've told you, I've already read these documents in Moscow."

With that, Anatoli Golitsin passed into espionage legend. Over the next two years, he was to uncover scores of KGB agents and assets in the Western world, resulting in a roster of damage unequalled by any other KGB defector. But, as things turned out, the damage he caused was not limited to the KGB; he was also to cause grave damage within the very Western intelligence agencies he professed to aid.

There was nothing in Golitsin's background to indicate his eventual role as any kind of wrecker, much less against the KGB. Born in 1926 of Ukrainian peasants, his record showed a typical profile for a loyal KGB careerist: military school, member of the Komsomol (Communist party youth movement), army artillery school, Communist party membership, transfer to military coun- terintelligence, and recruitment by the KGB. Clearly, he was a man early on regarded as an up and comer, for the KGB sent him to its High Intelligence School—the agency's graduate school for future senior espionage executives—and then posted him in 1953 to one of its most important outposts, Vienna. After a two-year tour, he returned to Moscow Center to work as a case officer in one of the KGB's most sensitive areas, the Anglo-American De- partment (where he saw the top-secret NATO documents while learning of the KGB's extensive penetrations of their Western opponents). In 1961, he was sent to another key KGB post, Hel- sinki, where on a snowy evening that December, he showed up at the U.S. embassy with his wife and seven-year-old daughter and announced he wanted to defect.

72 THE STORM PETRELS

Although Golitsin did not know it, the CIA was not entirely surprised by his defection. Seven years before, another KGB of- ficer operating in Vienna, Peter Deriabin, had defected. During his debriefing, his CIA handlers took him through a standard exercise for defectors: an analysis of all the other KGB officers he knew at the Vienna station, noting which ones he thought were susceptible to eventual defection or possible turning by the CIA. Deriabin picked out fellow KGB officer Golitsin. Despite his un- blemished record, Deriabin pointed out that Golitsin was in fact regarded by Moscow Center as a royal pain in the neck. Arrogant, with overweening ambition, Golitsin had a tendency to aggravate his superiors. Some years before, while in Moscow, he had actually proposed a plan to reorganize the entire Soviet intelligence struc- ture—a plan that placed himself somewhere near the apex. Gol- itsin, Deriabin reported, was regarded as insufferable and also possibly dangerous. Deriabin predicted that Golitsin, with his am- bitions thwarted, would at some point defect to the other side.

Deriabin turned out to be right. Golitsin, fundamentally, was an intelligence chameleon. He was in the intelligence game for the pure excitement and intrigue it offered; whether he was work- ing for the KGB, the CIA, or MI6 was of little consequence, so long as he was playing a key role. In later years, this mindset would be of some significance, but at least in the early stages of his defection, Golitsin was nothing short of sensational.

Thanks to his work in the KGB's Anglo-American Depart- ment, Golitsin had an overview of many of the agency's assets in the West. Among them was H. A. R. Philby, whom Golitsin finally, and positively, identified as a long-term KGB mole. It was Golit- sin's clinching evidence that led MI6 to a final confrontation with Philby, who understood he now faced evidence he could never refute, and he fled behind the Iron Curtain.

Of more immediate operational interest, Golitsin then be- gan blowing other KGB assets. Three of the more interesting in- volved deep penetrations whose revelation caused dismay among Western counterintelligence agencies, since they had no clue that such hemorrhages were taking place.

One involved John Vassall, a homosexual clerk in the British Admiralty, who had been recruited in 1953 when he was posted to Moscow. He was caught in a classic so-called "honeytrap" op- eration: the KGB set him up with a male prostitute (known as a "raven" in Soviet intelligence parlance), photographed the re- sult, then threatened to show the photographs to Vassall's supe-

ANATOLI GOLITSIN 73

riors unless he agreed to work for the KGB. Vassall made available to the KGB a wide range of classified material that came across his desk, most productively when he worked in NID and saw re- ports of British Naval intelligence.

In a similar honeytrap operation, the KGB had ensnared John Watkins, a Canadian diplomat and homosexual who agreed to work for the KGB when he was posted to Moscow as Canada's ambassador in 1958. As an asset, he was almost perfectly placed, since he could provide top-level diplomatic messages from Can- ada and other countries. (A subsidiary, and possibly even more important, benefit was that access to such traffic enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to find "cribs" that helped them break Western dip- lomatic ciphers).

The third, and most damaging of all, involved Georges Pa- ques*, French attache to NATO, a secret Communist who had been recruited in 1946. He passed on high-level material from both NATO headquarters and the French government.

By late 1963, Golitsin had divested himself of just about ev- erything he knew concerning specific KGB penetrations in the West. He then moved to the second, and much more controver- sial, part of his postdefection career. It involved something for which he had no hard information, but sufficient suspicions to intrigue his counterintelligence hosts: KGB penetration of West- ern intelligence services.

Golitsin's first hints of KGB moles in Western intelligence had a particular resonance in Britain, where a coterie of MI5 officers, led by Peter Wright and Arthur Martin, had been con- vinced for quite some time that both MI5 and MI6 were pene- trated by the KGB. Further, they believed that the penetration was at a very high level, a super-mole (or several super-moles) who had facilitated the KGB's "ring of five" and subsequently were responsible for the miserable record of British intelligence throughout the first two decades of the Cold War.

Golitsin was lent by the CIA to the British for what had be- come a large in-house investigation code-named FLUENCY. No- toriously tightfisted with money for intelligence operations, the

* Golitsin revealed that Paques was only one of a large ring of KGB moles who had infiltrated nearly every level of the French government. Golitisin's revelation on this score was so alarming, President Kennedy personally wrote to French President Charles de Gaulle to warn him of the operations of the ring, code-named SAPPHIRE by the KGB. The effort by French counterintelligence to track down the ring was the subject of the Leon Uris novel (and Alfred Hitchcock movie), Topaz.

74 THE STORM PETRELS

British nevertheless paid Golitsin $28,000 a month to serve as "consultant" for FLUENCY. Basically, the job entailed review of British intelligence operations, detailed examination of leads re- vealed by defectors, and myriad other clues in an attempt to pin- point which man (or men) had been systematically undermining British counterintelligence against the Soviet Union.

There was much for Golitsin to consider. More than 20 years before, a defecting senior GRU officer, Walter Krivitsky, had warned of KGB moles in British intelligence. Although he did not know their identities, he had a number of clues. For example, he had heard about a "Scotsman of good birth" who was working in the Foreign Office, and an "establishment figure" who was working as a newspaperman in Spain. Even a moderate effort would have tracked down the men behind these clues: Donald Maclean and H. A. R. Philby, but nothing was ever done. There was also the mysterious matter of how Igor Gouzenko had been handled by MI5, and how his warning of a KGB mole in MI5 was sidetracked. Additionally, there was the mystery of how such in- famous KGB assets as Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May had been cleared for top-secret work by MI5 despite their open Communist affiliations (Fuchs had been a member of the German Commu- nist party and May was a leading activist in a notorious Commu- nist-controlled association of scientists and technicians).*

A newspaper story reporting the FLUENCY probe and Gol- itsin's role prematurely ended his work in Britain. Returning to the United States, he passed into the control of the CIA's famed head of counterintelligence, the legendary James Angleton. At that point, for reasons Angleton never made clear, the counter- intelligence chief became a devoted acolyte of Golitisin.

As he had claimed to British intelligence, Golitsin insisted that there was high-level KGB penetration of American intelli- gence as well, specifically in the CIA. According to Golitsin, this super-mole was code-named SASHA, who in turn was supporting a network of similar moles. Many of these moles were involved in Golitsin's crowning theory: a massive and cunning KGB disinfor- mation campaign that had completely misled the West about So- viet capabilities and intentions. (As part of that theory, Golitsin

* The molehunt in MI6 and MI5 was to paralyze British intelligence throughout the 1970s, with little to show for it: Anthony Blunt confessed, naming two other assets, but the "big fish" were never found. Wright was convinced that MI5 Director Roger Hollis was the KGB's "super-mole," but Hollis was finally cleared by the FLUENCY investigation.

ANATOLI GOLITSIN 75

insisted that the Sino-Soviet split was in fact a large-scale decep- tion.)

Angleton proceeded to tear the CIA apart looking for the super-mole, spurred by Golitsin's hints that no one in the agen- cy's Soviet Division could be trusted, especially any who spoke Russian. As a result, CIA operations against the Soviet Union were paralyzed, while the careers of more than 100 CIA officers were blighted by suspicion. This mad hunt reached its nadir in 1964, when another defecting KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko, was illegally detained for nearly three years because Golitsin told Angleton that Nosenko was probably a KGB plant to sow disinformation. (Nosenko had told his debriefers that there was no KGB mole in the CIA, and that, contrary to hints by Golitsin, the KGB had no operational interest in Lee Harvey Oswald when the presidential assassin lived in the Soviet Union).

Golitsin's baleful influence ended in 1974, when Angleton was fired following public revelations of his role in an illegal CIA domestic spying operation. Still, Golitsin had his devotees in both British and American intelligence, and they were ready to help when he produced his magnus opus, a million-word manuscript for a book that turned the Western view of the world upside down. Golitsin wrote that nearly all assumptions about modern history were wrong, for the unbelievably cunning KGB disinfor- mation operation had managed to fool just about everybody. He tried to find a professional writer to convert this mass into a read- able book, but all the writers he approached decided not to par- ticipate, possibly deterred by his insistence on carrying his man- uscript around in a briefcase chained to his wrist. Golitsin's devotees in MI5 and the CIA then sat down and extracted a book from the manuscript, called New Lies for Old. It was published commercially, but sunk without a trace.

Golitsin subsequendy faded from the intelligence scene. Most of his supporters on both sides of the Adantic, including Angleton, had either died or retired. In 1990, living in the U.S. under an assumed identity, Golitisin claimed that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was actually part of a long-term Soviet deception operation. No one, aside from his few remaining acolytes, paid any attention.