The Craft of Intelligence (18 page)

The double agent is the most characteristic tool of counterespionage operations, and he comes in many guises. In an area like West Germany, with its concentration of technical and military installations, both those of the West Germans and of the NATO forces, there is a flood of agents from the Soviet bloc spying on airfields, supply depots, factories, United States Army posts,
etc.
Many are caught. Many give themselves up because they have found a girl and want to say with her or simply because they find life in the West more attractive. Such men become double agents when they can be persuaded to keep up the pretense of working for the Soviet bloc under Western “control.” The ones who are caught often agree to this arrangement because it is preferable to sitting in jail for a couple of years.

The aim is to build up the agent, allowing him to report back to the bloc harmless information, which is first screened. It is hoped that the Soviets will then give him new briefs and directives, which show us what the opponent wants to know and how he is going about getting it. Sometimes it is possible, through such an agent, to lure a courier or another agent or even an intelligence officer into the West. When this happens, one has the choice of simply watching the movements of the visitor, hoping he will lead to other agents concealed in the West, or of arresting him, in which case the operation is naturally over, but has succeeded in neutralizing another person working for the opposition.

A more valuable double is the resident of a Western country who, when approached by an opposition intelligence service to undertake a mission for them, quietly reports this to his own authorities. The advantages are obvious. If the Soviets, for example, try to recruit a Westerner, they must have something serious in mind. Secondly, the voluntary act of the person approached, in reporting this event, points to his trustworthiness. The target of Soviet recruitment will usually be told by his own intelligence authorities to “accept” the Soviet offer and to feign cooperation, meanwhile reporting back on all the activities the Soviets assign him. He is also provided with information which his principals desire to have “fed” to the Soviets. This game can then be played until the Soviets begin to suspect their “agent” or until the agent can no longer stand the strain.

The case of the late Boris Morros, the Hollywood director, was of this kind. Through Morros, who cooperated with the FBI for many years, the Soviets ran a network of extremely important agents in the United States, most of them in political and intellectual circles. This operation led to the apprehension of the Sobles, of Dr. Robert Soblen and numerous others.

“Surveillance” is the professional word for shadowing or tailing. Like every act of counterespionage, it must be executed with maximum care lest its target become aware of it. A criminal who feels or knows he is being followed has limited possibilities open to him. The best he can hope for is to elude surveillance long enough to find a good hiding place. But an intelligence agent, once he has been alarmed by surveillance, will take steps to leave the country, and he will have plenty of assistance in doing so.

The purpose of surveillance in counterespionage is twofold. If a person is only suspected of being an enemy agent, close observation of his actions over a period of time may lead to further facts that confirm the suspicion and supply details about the agent’s mission and how he is carrying it out. Secondly, an agent is rarely entirely on his own. Eventually he will get in touch, by one means or another, with his helpers, his sources and perhaps the people from whom he is taking orders. Surveillance at its best will uncover the network to which he belongs and the channels through which he reports.

Surveillance was largely responsible for the British success in rounding up five Soviet agents in the Lonsdale ring in January, 1961. Harry Houghton, an Admiralty employee, was suspected of passing classified information to an unidentified foreign power. Scotland Yard tailed Houghton to a London street, where he met another man so briefly that it was impossible to tell for certain whether anything had passed between them or whether they had even spoken.

However, the fact that both parties acted furtively and seemed extremely wary of surveillance convinced the British that they were on the right track. The Yard split is trained men into two teams to follow the suspects separately. This eventually led them, after many days of tireless and well-concealed surveillance, to a harmless-looking American couple who operated a secondhand book store. Their role, if any, could not be immediately ascertained.

On a later occasion Houghton came up to London again, this time with his girl friend, who worked in the same naval establishment. Again under surveillance, the two of them, walking down the street carrying a market bag, were approached from the rear by the same man whom Houghton had met previously. Just as this fellow was about to relieve Houghton and the girl of the market bag, which was clearly a prearranged method for passing the “goods,” all three were arrested. The unknown man was Gordon Lonsdale, the Soviet “illegal” with Canadian papers who was running the show.

A few hours later, the harmless-looking American booksellers met the same fate. They were being sought by the FBI for their part in a Soviet net in the United States and had disappeared when things had become too hot for them. In London they had been operating a secret transmitter to relay Lonsdale’s information to Moscow.

Counterintelligence, like most branches of intelligence work, has many technical resources, and one among them has been responsible in the past for uncovering more concealed intelligence networks than any other single measure. This is the interception and locating of illegal radio transmitters, known as “direction-finding,” or D/Fing for short. It employs sensitive electronic measuring devices which, when mounted on mobile receivers, in a car or truck, can track down the location of a radio signal by indicating whether the signal is getting stronger or weaker as a mobile receiver weaves around a city listening to what has already been identified as an illegal transmitter.

Every legal radio transmitter, commercial or amateur, in most countries today is licensed and registered. In this country the call signal and the exact location of the transmitter are on record with the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC monitors the air waves at all times as a law-enforcement procedure. This leads to the uncovering of enthusiastic “ham” radio operators who haven’t bothered to get a license. It also leads to the discovery of illegal agent transmitters. The latter are usually identifiable because their messages are enciphered and they do not use any call signal on record.

Monitoring of a suspicious signal may also reveal that the operator has some kind of fixed schedule for going on the air, and this almost unfailingly points to the fact that he is transmitting to a foreign headquarters by prearrangement. At this point the D/Fing process begins. The main difficulty of tracking is that the illegal operator usually stays on the air, for obvious reasons, only for very short periods. As the mobile D/F experts try to trace his signal across a large city on air waves crowded with other signals, he suddenly finishes, goes off the air, and there is nothing the D/Fers can do until he comes on again some days or weeks later. If the Soviets are behind the operation, the transmission schedule, while fixed, may follow a pattern that is not easy to spot. Also, the transmitting frequency may change from time to time. The only solution is for the D/F headquarters to listen for the suspicious signal all the time and to keep after it. But here, too, the technicians have invented new improvements to foil and outwit each other. The latest is a high-speed method of transmission. The operator does not sit at his telegraph key sending as fast as he can. He prerecords his message on tape, then plays the tape over the air at breakneck speed, too fast for any ear to disentangle. His receiving station at home records the transmission and can replay it at a tempo which is intelligible. If the illegal operator is on the air for only twenty or thirty seconds, the D/Fers are not going to get very far in their attempt to pinpoint the physical location of the transmitter.

During World War II, before the invention of these high-speed techniques, the efficiency of D/Fing on both sides was responsible for some very dramatic counterintelligence work. In the famous Operation Northpole, British intelligence headquarters in London was in touch with the Dutch underground by radio. The Dutch center radioed intelligence on German military matters to London and also made arrangements by wireless with London to have further personnel and equipment air-dropped into Holland. From 1942 to 1944 the British, complying with the requests and arrangements proposed by the various Dutch underground radio transmitters, dropped large amounts of weapons and supplies into Holland at prearranged drop areas. Many of the bombers which delivered the men and the goods were shot down shortly after the drops, but at least their valuable cargo had reached the people who needed it. So it was at first thought in England. Actually, in late 1941 and early 1942, counterintelligence units of the German
Abwehr
stationed in Holland succeeded by D/F in locating a series of illegal radio transmitters of the Dutch underground and in capturing some of the operators. The Germans gradually substituted their own operators by blandly informing London that the old operator was not in good shape and the “underground” had supplied some new ones. This was counterintelligence at its wiliest. Playing the part of the Dutch underground on the air, the Nazis sucked into their maw many of the valiant volunteers and much of the equipment which was intended for their own destruction, thus effectively neutralizing part of the underground effort. This also accounted for the bombers being shot down after and not before they had delivered their supplies. Nazi control of Northpole was finally ended when two of the captured agents succeeded in escaping and in reaching England.

German D/Fing, which was at all times excellent, must also in great measure be given the credit for the initial breakthrough which caused the downfall of the major Soviet networks in Europe during World War II. By mid-1941, radio interception stations of German counterintelligence had recorded and examined a sufficient number of enciphered messages emanating from what were obviously illegal transmitters in Western Europe to realize that an extensive Soviet network was pumping information out of the German-occupied territories. The German D/Fing was dogged, unremitting and systematic. The Soviets, it is true, made the job easier for the Germans by requiring their operators to transmit for very long periods of time, since the intelligence to be reported was vital and extensive.

Just how significant the D/Fing technique has been for counterintelligence is clear when one realizes that in this case the Germans had not the slightest clue as to the identity or whereabouts of any of the many Soviet agents who were gathering information of such interest to Moscow that five or more transmitters were keeping the air waves hot with it. Nor could the Germans make the slightest progress in breaking the ciphers used in these messages. The only possible way in which they could hope to close in on this unseen and unknowable spy system was by physically locating the radio transmitters into which the information was being fed. It was also a case of pinpointing a location not merely within a city but within an area of many thousands of square miles.

In a period of a little less than a year, from the fall of 1941 until the summer of 1942,
Abwehr
direction-finding units managed to locate three of the most important Soviet illegal radio stations and to apprehend the personnel of all three (since they were usually taken by surprise while transmitting). Two of the stations were in Belgium and one in France. Once the operators began to talk, and many of them gave out the most vital information about their networks under “persuasion” on the part of the Germans, the latter were, of course, able to get on the track of the agents and informants whose information had kept the radios so busy. With the assistance of one of the operators arrested in Belgium, the Germans tracked down the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack group in Berlin, described in the previous chapter. As in the Northpole case, the Germans kept some of the Soviet radios active for a time and succeeded in fooling Moscow long enough to smoke out further collaborators with Moscow’s unwitting assistance.

As a result of these losses, and because it was by then too dangerous, if not impossible, to establish new illegal radio transmitters in Germany or German-occupied territory, the Soviets concentrated from 1942 onward on making Switzerland their communications base. Since the Soviets had no diplomatic representation in Switzerland, it was again necessary to resort to illegal transmitters. Many of them were eventually located and closed down as a result of Swiss D/Fing.

This account by no means exhausts the whole gamut of human and technical measures which counterintelligence has at its disposal. Much of its basic work is accomplished in the unglamorous area of its files, which constitute the backbone of any counterintelligence effort. One of the greatest advances in the administration of counterintelligence work has been the partial mechanization of file systems, which facilitates the quick and accurate recovery of world-wide counterintelligence information.

While much of the daily work of counterintelligence is laborious and humdrum, its complex and subtle operations are very much like a gigantic chess games that uses the whole world for its board.

The piercing of secrets behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains is made easier for the West because of the volunteers who come our way.

We don’t always have to go to the target. Often it comes to us through people who are well acquainted with it. While this is not a one-way street, the West has gained far more in recent years from volunteers than its opponents have. A reason for this change is the growing discontent with the system inside the Soviet Union, the satellite nations and Communist China, and some relaxation of the controls of Stalin’s day. People know more, and they want more and they travel more.

These volunteers are either refugees and defectors who cross over the frontiers to us or they are people who remain “in place” in order to serve us from within the Communist societies.

Information from refugees is often piecemeal and scattered, but for years it has added to our basic fund of knowledge, particularly about Soviet satellites in Europe. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 sent over a quarter of a million refugees fleeing westward. They brought us up to date on every aspect of technical, scientific and military achievement in Hungary and gave us an excellent forecast of likely capabilities for years to come. Among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have come over from East Germany, other satellites and Communist China since the end of World War II, many have performed a similar service.

The term “defector” is often used in the jargon of international relations and intelligence to describe the officials or highly knowledgeable citizens, generally from the Communist bloc, who leave their country and come to the West. It is, however, a term that is resented, and properly so, by persons who repudiate a society which they leave in order to join a better one.

I do not claim that all so-called defectors have come to the West for ideological reasons. Some come because they have failed in their jobs; some because they fear a shake-up in the regime may mean a demotion or worse; some are lured by the physical attractions of the West, human or material. But there is a large band who have come over to us from Communist officialdom for highly ideological reasons. They have been revolted by life in the Communist world and yearn for something better. Hence, for these cases I use the term “defector” sparingly and then with apology. I prefer to call them “volunteers.”

If the man who comes over to us belonged to the Soviet hierarchy, he may well know the strengths and weaknesses of the regime, its factions, its inefficiencies and its corruption. If a specialist, he would know its achievements in his chosen field. Volunteers may be soldiers, diplomats, scientists, engineers, ballet dancers, athletes and, not infrequently, intelligence officers. Behind the Iron Curtain there are many dissatisfied persons unknown to us who seriously consider flight. Some of them hesitate to take the final step, not because they have qualms about forsaking an unsatisfying way of life, but because they are afraid of the unknowns that await them.

The answer to this is to make it clear that they are welcome and will be safe and happy with us. Every time a newly arrived political refugee goes on the air over the Voice of America and says he is glad to be here and is being treated well, other officials behind the Iron Curtain who were thinking of doing the same thing will take heart and go back to figuring out just how they can get themselves appointed as trade representatives in Oslo or Paris. Short-term visitors to the West from the Soviet bloc would probably volunteer in far greater numbers were it not for the Soviet practice of often keeping wives and children behind as hostages.

Oleg Lenchevsky, the Soviet scientist who sought asylum in Britain in May of 1961 while he was studying there on a UNESCO fellowship, tried in vain to get Khrushchev to permit his wife and two daughters, whom he had left behind in Moscow, to leave the country and join him. His personal appeal, in the form of a letter to Khrushchev, was published in many Western newspapers. Khrushchev, of course, did not relent. He couldn’t because he well knew that if he ever let Lenchevsky’s family out of Russia, it would only set off a wave of defectors with families, all in hopes of the same treatment.

One of Lenchevsky’s reasons for defecting was unusual, but symptomatic enough. He claimed that after years of suppressing his religious feelings he had suddenly felt the need of church and had been relieved to be able to attend services in Britain. He did not mention this in his letter to Khrushchev, but what he did mention was his discovery while in England of the contents of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. Although all the signatories to this declaration, the Soviets included, agreed to its publication in every civilized country of the world, it had never seen the light of day in Soviet Russia. “Surely,” Lenchevsky wrote Khrushchev,

now, thirteen years later, when the liberty, fraternity, equality and happiness of all people have been proclaimed as our ideals in the new program of the Communist party, it is high time to put into practice these elementary principles of interhuman relations that are contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A frequent cause for unrest among scientists, artists and writers behind the Iron Curtain is quite naturally the lack of freedom of inquiry in their fields, the imposition of political theses on their work which even goes so far as to reject ideas that tend to conflict with Marxist views of the world. In some fields an honest Soviet scientist stands in about the same relation to the state as Galileo did to the Inquisition 350 years ago (recant or be punished). The Lysenko controversy was one of the most publicized affairs in which laboratory science and Marxist ideology clashed head on, and Marxism, of course, won. The theories of biologists who opposed Lysenko and genetic findings which emphasized the importance of heredity were rejected by a state which rules that man can be transformed by his environment. The outstanding Soviet chemist, Dr. Mikhail Klochko, a Stalin Prize winner, who defected in Canada in 1961, wrote:

The Soviet Encyclopedia had appeared with an article on physical chemistry written by scientists senior to me, which was both biased and ludicrous. At a meeting I pointed this out. Many persons told me later that although they agreed with me, they thought I should not get into trouble with these powerful men. But this event merely reinforced the conviction I now had that I must leave the Soviet Union if ever I was to achieve my full potentialities as a scientist.
1

I believe that, given a free opportunity to leave, the number of people who today would move out from behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains would be, without exaggeration, astronomical. The total from the end of World War II until the end of 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up, was over 11 million, and most of them had not been given the opportunity to leave; they took it. The available figures, which include war-displaced persons who did not wish to return to their homelands behind the Curtain after the war was over, as well as refugees and defectors, are by area of origin, estimated as follows:

The Communists will go to great lengths to prevent the defection of any person whom they regard as “valuable” to them or of possible use to us. Western scientists at international conferences attended by Soviet and satellite delegations have frequently tried to start friendly conversations with one or another of the members of such delegations decked out as chemists or meteorologists, only to stumble upon the one man who does not know the first word about the subject in which the delegation was supposed to be expert. He is the KGB security man who has been sent along solely for the sake of keeping an eye on the bona fide scientists in the delegation, to see that they don’t talk out of turn and, above all, that they don’t make a break for freedom.

The Chinese Communists carefully limit the amount of fuel in the tanks of their military planes before the latter go on training missions or maneuvers so that a pilot who might take it into his head while aloft to steer for Formosa and freedom cannot reach his goal. Even so, a few years ago one of their pilots happened to make it. The first night after he landed he was put up at a farm out in the country. The next morning he was asked how he had slept during his first night of freedom. He hadn’t slept well, he said, because of the noise. “Noise?” he was asked. “Out here in the country? What noise?” It turned out that the clucking of the chickens had kept him awake. He wasn’t used to it. Barnyard noises apparently are on the wane on the mainland.

On the other hand, the fate of some who have gone from our side over to the Soviets would not serve as a particularly good advertisement for further defections in that direction. Some of them recently have talked to Western visitors and have admitted, without prompting, that their lot is an unhappy one and that they have no future. The scientific defectors, like the atomic physicist Pontecorvo, who continue to be useful to the Soviets in their technological efforts, seem to fare better than the others, and sometimes even receive high honors, as Pontecorvo did when he was awarded the Lenin Prize. The Burgesses and MacLeans, the Martins and Mitchells, had their day of publicity and then eked out a dull living, some as “propaganda advisers.”

Often “defectors” from the Communist side are not exactly what they seem. Some, for example, have been working as agents “in place” behind the Curtain for long periods of time before defecting and only come out because they or we feel that the dangers of remaining inside have become too great.

People who volunteer “in place” have many ways of doing so, even though the isolation, the physical barriers and the internal controls of the Soviet bloc are all supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It is possible, also, for them to communicate safely with the West in a number of ways—surprisingly enough, even by mail, as long as the address of the recipient looks harmless and the identity of the sender within the bloc remains concealed. Soviet bloc censorship cannot possibly inspect every piece of mail passing to and fro over their borders—the volume is too great. Even if a letter is censored or intercepted, it need give no clue whatever about the identity of the sender if proper security precautions are followed. Various radio stations in Western Europe that broadcast to the Soviet bloc solicit comments and fan mail from listeners and usually supply a postbox to which such mail can be sent. They receive many letters from behind the Iron Curtain. If a volunteer who has mailed out information succeeds later in reaching the West, he then, of course, finds a ready welcome there.

Some very helpful and important defectors have been diplomats or intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. It is, of course, a relatively simple matter for them while posted abroad in a free country to walk out of their jobs one fine day and go to the Foreign Office of the country to which they are accredited or a Western embassy and request protection. In the West, whenever this happens and when the motives of the defecting diplomat appear to be bona fide, the requested protection and material assistance needed until the diplomat can find a new livelihood in his new home are usually granted.

If there is any hesitancy in extending these privileges, it is because the Soviets have from time to time mounted phony defections, which is rather an unsatisfactory way of planting an agent but may have incidental benefits. The phony “defector,” when interviewed by persons in the country to which he has “defected,” may pick up and be able to send back a certain amount of information, especially concerning what is known or not known about his own country. A further and final step in such phony defections is that the defector may eventually “redefect.” One day he will announce that he is disillusioned with the West, that it is not as represented, he repents of his sins and wants to go home even if he is to be punished for his original defection. This provides some propaganda repercussion, is embarrassing to the country of haven, and is a convenient way for the defector, who was really an agent, to return home and report on the information he has been assembling. But this is the exception, and the Soviets have not tried it much lately, chiefly, I think, because it has not worked well. It has usually been possible to discover quite early in the day whether the man was bona fide or not. In some cases, phony defectors have confessed that they were planted.

Soviet and satellite intelligence officers, like the diplomats, also have the advantage of posts and of trips abroad, and some use such occasions to make the break they may long have been contemplating. Their defections are regarded as most serious losses by the Soviets. They may go to great lengths to prevent such defections from happening, even to using violence to force the return of a potential defector, not to mention reprisals of various kinds should the defection succeed or the defector’s family remain under Soviet control.

The reader may recall the sensational news photos in 1954 which showed a Soviet goon squad strong-arming the wife of defector Vladimir Petrov, KGB Chief in Australia, in an attempt to get her on a plane and take her back to Russia against her will. Only the quick intervention of the Australian police saved Mrs. Petrov from being abducted.

For these reasons the defection of intelligence officers is often carried out with much less fanfare than those of more public personages like diplomats or scientists. The Soviet or satellite intelligence officer also usually has the advantage of knowing in some degree how to get in touch with his “opposite numbers” in the West. After all, part of his job was to probe for such information. When he picks up and leaves, it is likely that he will head for a Western intelligence installation rather than for a diplomatic establishment or the nearest police station because he can be fairly certain of his welcome there and that his defection will be handled most securely.