The Craft of Intelligence (19 page)

The defection of a staff intelligence officer of the opposition is naturally a break for Western counterintelligence. It is often the equivalent, in the information it provides, of a direct penetration of hostile headquarters for a period of time. One such intelligence “volunteer” can literally paralyze the service he left behind for months to come. He can describe the internal and external organization of his service and the work and character of many of his colleagues at headquarters. He can identify intelligence personnel stationed abroad under cover. Best of all, he can deliver information about operations. Yet he may not know the true identity of a large number of agents for the reason that all intelligence services compartmentalize such information. No one knows true identities except the few officers intimately concerned with a case.

The West has been singularly fortunate in having many such defectors come over to its side in the course of recent history. In 1937 two of Stalin’s top intelligence officers stationed abroad defected rather than return to Russia to be swallowed up in the purge of the NKVD, which followed the purges of the party and of the Army. One was Walter Krivitsky, who had been chief of Soviet intelligence in Holland. He was found dead in a Washington hotel in 1941, shot presumably by agents of the Soviets who were never apprehended. The story that he committed suicide seems most unlikely. The second was Alexander Orlov, who had been one of the NKVD chiefs in Spain at the time of the Civil War. Unlike Krivitsky, he has managed to elude Soviet vengeance and has published a number of books, one on Stalin’s crimes and another on Soviet intelligence.

An early postwar Soviet defector was Igor Gouzenko, whom I mentioned earlier. Gouzenko was a military intelligence officer in charge of codes and ciphers in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. Thanks in some measure to clues he brought with him, part of the international atomic spy ring which the Soviets had been running during and after the last years of the war was uncovered.

Following the liquidation of Beria shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, it was clear to officers of the Soviet Security Service that anyone who had served under him was in jeopardy. The new regime would not feel sure of the loyalty of old-timers who knew too much. The new regime could also make itself more popular by going through the motions of wiping out the hated secret police of a previous regime and quietly putting its own loyal adherents in their places.

Among the major defectors to the West at that time were Vladimir Petrov, whom I have just mentioned; Juri Rastvorov, an intelligence officer stationed at the Soviet mission in Japan; and Peter Deriabin, who defected from his post in Vienna. All these men had at some time been stationed at intelligence headquarters in Moscow and possessed valuable information that went far beyond their assignments at the time they defected. Deriabin later told his story in a book called
The Secret World
.

In recent years, two defections of a special kind have involved Soviet intelligence personnel employed on assassination missions. Nikolay Khokhlov was sent from Moscow to West Germany in early 1954 to arrange for the murder of a prominent anti-Soviet émigré leader, Georgi Okolovich. Khokhlov told Okolovich of his mission and then defected. At Munich in 1957, Soviet agents tried without success to poison Khokhlov. In the fall of 1961, Bogdan Stashinski defected in West Germany and confessed that on Soviet orders he had murdered the two Ukrainian exile leaders Rebet and Bandera some years earlier in Munich.

In 1959, Soviet diplomat Aleksandr Kaznacheev defected in Burma, where he had been stationed in the embassy. While Kaznacheev was not a staff member of Soviet intelligence, he was a “coopted worker” and was used in intelligence work whenever his position as a diplomat enabled him to perform certain tasks with less risk of discovery than his colleagues in the intelligence branch. His candid book describing what went on in the Soviet embassy in Rangoon
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has done a great deal to debunk the picture of Soviet skill and American incompetence previously impressed on the American public in the book
The Ugly American
.

The latest and one of the most advertised defections of a Soviet intelligence officer took place in early February of 1964, when an “expert” attached to the Soviet delegation to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Yuri I. Nossenko, disappeared from view and was reported some days later by our own State Department to have requested asylum in the United States. Nossenko was a high-ranking staff officer of the KGB, presumably well-versed in security as well as in scientific matters. It was somewhat amusing in this case that the Soviets went to the Swiss police, before the official U.S. announcement was made, to ask for help in locating their missing man. They would hardly have done that in Stalin’s day. It was tantamount to their saying: please help us keep our personnel under control, since we can’t do it ourselves.

All the important intelligence “volunteers” have not been Soviets. Numerous high-ranking staff officers have defected from the satellite countries and were able to contribute information not only about their own services but about Soviet intelligence as well. Whatever impression of independence European satellite governments may try to give, they are, in matters of espionage, satrapies of the U.S.S.R. When agents of the satellite services come over to the West, they are a window on the policies and plans of the Kremlin.

Joseph Swiatlo, who defected in Berlin in 1954, had been chief of the department of the Polish intelligence service which kept tabs on members of the Polish Government and the Polish Communist party. Needless to say, he knew all the scandal about the latter, and the Soviets had frequently consulted with him.

Pawel Monat had been Polish military attaché in Washington from 1955 to 1958, after which he had returned to Warsaw and was put in charge of world-wide collection of information by Polish military attachés. He served in this job for two years before defecting in 1959. We will hear more of him later on.

Frantisek Tisler defected in Washington after having served as Czech military attaché there from 1955 to 1959. The Hungarian secret police officer, Bela Lapusnyik, made a daring escape to freedom over the Austro-Hungarian border in May, 1962, and reached Vienna in safety, only to die of poisoning apparently at the hands of Soviet or Hungarian agents, before he could tell his full story to Western authorities.

The Chinese defector, Chao Fu, who had been serving as the “security officer” in the Red Chinese embassy in Stockholm until he “disappeared” in 1962, was one of the first openly publicized cases of a defection from the Chinese Communist State Security Service. There are others.

What has brought these men and others over to our side is naturally a matter of great interest, not only to Western intelligence, but to any serious student of the Soviet system and of Soviet life. Gouzenko, for example, has told how he was gradually overcome by shame and repugnance as he began to realize that the U.S.S.R., while a wartime ally of Britain, Canada and the United States, was mounting a massive espionage effort to steal scientific secrets. This moral revulsion eventually led to his defection.

The postwar defectors were not in a similar situation because the Soviets after 1946 were no longer even pretending to be our friends. Every Soviet official was well indoctrinated on this point and could not easily survive in his job if he had any soft feelings about the “imperialists.” Nevertheless, feelings akin to those which stirred Gouzenko seem to have moved others. Most defectors have suffered some kind of disillusionment or disappointment with their own system.

When one studies the role the intelligence services play in the Soviet world and their closeness to the centers of power, it is not surprising that the Soviet intelligence officer gets an inside look, available to few, of the sinister methods of operation behind the façade of “socialist legality.” To the intelligent and dedicated Communist, such knowledge comes as a shock. One defector has told us, for example, that he could trace the disillusionment which later led to his own defection back to the day when he found out that Stalin and the NKVD, and not the Germans, had been responsible for the Katyn massacre (the murder of about ten thousand Polish officers during World War II). The Soviet public still does not know the truth about this or most of the other crimes of Stalin. But once a man is aware of realities, “loss of faith” in the system within which he is working, coupled often with personal disappointments, seems to be the powerful driving factor in defections.

The names mentioned here by no means exhaust the list of all those who have left the Soviet intelligence service and other Soviet posts. Some of the most important and also some of the most recent defectors have so far chosen not to be “surfaced,” and for their own protection must remain unknown to the public. They are making a continual contribution to the inside knowledge of the work of the Soviet intelligence and security apparatus and to exposing the way in which the subversive war is being carried on against us by Communism.

The United States in particular has always been a haven for those seeking to leave tyranny and espouse freedom. It will always have a welcome for those who do not wish to continue to work for the Kremlin.

In intelligence, the term “deception” covers a wide variety of maneuvers by which a state attempts to mislead another state, generally a potential or actual enemy, as to its own capabilities and intentions. Its best-known use is in wartime or just prior to the outbreak of war, when its main purpose is to draw enemy defenses away from a planned point of attack, or to give the impression that there will be no attack at all or simply to confuse the opponent about one’s plans and purposes.

As a technique, deception is as old as history. Notable instances come down to us from Homer and Thucydides: the Trojan horse that led to the fall of Troy and the strategy of the Greeks attacking Syracuse in 415
B.C.
In the latter case the Greeks infiltrated a plausible agent into the ranks of the Syracusans, lured them to attack the Greek camp at some distance from the city and meanwhile put their whole army on board ship and sailed for Syracuse, which was left practically undefended.

During the kind of peace we now call Cold War, various other forms of deception, including political deception, are being practiced against us by the Soviets, often involving the use of forgeries. Deception took an even less subtle form in Cuba when the Soviets, while vigorously denying any complicity in installing their intermediate-range or offensive-type missiles, were caught in the act.

As a strategic maneuver, deception generally requires lengthy and careful preparation. Intelligence must first ascertain what the enemy thinks and what he expects, because the misleading information which is going to be put into his hands must be plausible and not outside the practical range of plans that the enemy knows are capable of being put into operation. Intelligence must then devise a way of getting the deception to the enemy. Success depends on close coordination between the military command and the intelligence service.

After the Allies had driven the Germans out of North Africa in 1943, it was clear to all that their next move would be into southern Europe. The question was where. Since Sicily was an obvious steppingstone and was in fact the Allied objective, it was felt that every effort should be made to give the Germans and Italians the impression that the Allies were going to by-pass it. To have tried to persuade the Germans that there was to be no attack at all or that it was going to move across Spain was out of the question, for these maneuvers would not have been credible. The deception had to point to something within the expected range.

For quick and effective placement of plausible deception directly into the hands of the enemy’s high command, few methods beat the “accident,” so long as it seems logical and has all the appearances of being a wonderfully lucky break for the enemy. Such an accident was cleverly staged by the British in 1943 before the invasion of Sicily, and it was accepted by the Germans at the time as completely genuine. Early in May of that year the corpse of a British major was found washed up on the southwest coast of Spain near the town of Huelva, between the Portuguese border and Gibraltar. A courier briefcase was still strapped to his wrist containing copies of correspondence to General Alexander in Tunisia from the Imperial General Staff. These papers clearly hinted at an Allied plan to invade southern Europe via Sardinia and Greece. As we learned after the war, the Germans fully believed these hints. Hitler sent an armored division to Greece, and the Italian garrison on Sicily was not reinforced.

This was perhaps one of the best cases of deception utilizing a single move in recent intelligence history. It was called “Operation Mincemeat,” and the story of its execution has been fully told by one of the main planners of the affair, Ewen Montagu.
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It was a highly sophisticated feat, made possible by the circumstances of modern warfare and the techniques if modern science. There was nothing illogical about the possibility that a plane on which an officer carrying important documents was a passenger could have come down, or that a body from the crash could have been washed up on the Spanish shore.

Actually, the body of a recently dead civilian was used for this operation. He was dressed in the uniform of a British major; in his pockets were all the identification papers, calling cards and odds and ends necessary to authenticate him as Major Martin. He was floated into Spain from a British submarine, which surfaced close enough to the Spanish coast to make sure that he would reach his target without fail. And he did.

“Overlord,” the combined Allied invasion of Normandy, in June, 1944, also made effective use of deception—in this case not an isolated ruse but a variety of misleading maneuvers closely coordinated with each other. They succeeded, as is well known, in keeping the Germans guessing as to the exact area of the intended Allied landing. False rumors were circulated among our own troops on the theory that German agents in England would pick them up and report them. Radio channels to agents in the French underground were utilized to pass deceptive orders and requests for action to back up the coming Allied landings; it was known that certain of these agents were under the control of the Germans and would pass on to them messages received from the Allies. Such agents therefore constituted a direct channel to the German intelligence service. In order to make the Germans think that the landings would take place in the Le Havre area, agents in the vicinity were asked to make certain observations, thereby indicating to the Germans a heightened Allied interest in fortifications, rail traffic,
etc.
Lastly, military reconnaissance itself was organized in such a way as to emphasize an urgent interest in places where the attack would not come. Fewer aerial reconnaissance sorties were flown over the Normandy beaches than over Le Havre and other likely areas. Rumors were spread of a diversionary attack on Norway to prevent a concentration of forces in the North of France.

There are essentially two ways of planting deceptive information with the enemy. One can stage the kind of accident the British did in Spain. Such accidents are plausible because they do, after all, frequently occur solely as a result of the misfortunes of war. History is full of instances where couriers loaded with important dispatches fell into enemy hands. The other way is to plant an agent with the enemy who is ostensibly reporting to him about your plans as the Athenians did at Syracuse. He can be a “deserter” or some kind of “neutral.” The problem, as in all counterespionage penetrations, is to get the enemy to trust the agent. He cannot simply turn up with dramatic military information and expect to be believed unless he can explain his motives and how he got his information.

A wholly modern deception channel came into being with the use of radio. For example, a parachutist lands in enemy territory equipped with a portable transmitter and is captured. He confesses he has been sent on a mission to spy on enemy troop movements and to communicate with his intelligence headquarters by radio. Such an agent stands a good chance of being shot after making this confession; he may be shot before he has a chance to make it. The probability is high, however, that his captors will decide he is more useful alive than dead because his radio provides a direct channel for feeding deception to the opponent’s intelligence service. If the intelligence service which sent the agent knows, however, that he has been captured and is under enemy control, it can continue to send him questions with the intent of deceiving the other side. If it asks for a report on troop concentrations in sector A, it gives the impression that some military action is planned there. This was one tactic used by the Allies in preparation for the Normandy landings.

A lesser and essentially defensive kind of deception involves the camouflaging of important targets. To deceive Nazi bombers during World War II, airfields in Britain were made to look like farms from the air. Sod was placed over the hangars and maintenance shacks were given the appearance of barns, sheds and outbuildings. Even more important, mock-ups were set up in other areas to look like real airfields with planes on them. Elsewhere mocked-up naval vessels were stationed where the real might well have been.

The mounting of strategic deception calls for the close cooperation and high security of all parts of government engaged in the effort. For a democratic government this is difficult except under wartime controls.

For the Soviets, of course, the situation is somewhat easier. With their centralized organization and complete control of the press and of dissemination of information within their country or to foreign countries from the U.S.S.R., they can support a deception operation far more efficiently than we can. Often the Soviets put armaments on display with a certain amount of fanfare in order to draw attention away from other armaments they may have in their arsenal or may plan to have. Sometimes they exhibit mock-ups of planes and other equipment, which may never see the light of day as operational types.

For example, on Aviation Day in July, 1955, in the presence of diplomatic and military representatives in Moscow there was a “fly-by” of a new type of Soviet heavy bomber. The number far exceeded what was thought to be available. The impression was thus given that many more had lately come off the assembly line and that the Soviets were therefore committed to an increasing force of heavy bombers. Later it was surmised that the same squadron had been flying around in circles, reappearing every few minutes. The purpose was to emphasize Soviet bomber production. In fact, they were soon to shift the emphasis to missiles.

Deception can also use social channels. A Soviet diplomat drops a remark in deepest confidence to a colleague from a neutral country at a dinner party, knowing that the neutral colleague also goes to British and American dinner parties. This “casual remark” was contained in a directive from the Soviet Foreign Office. When it is studied in intelligence headquarters somewhere in the West, it is found to agree in substance with something said by a Soviet official at a cocktail party ten thousand miles away. Thus, the two remarks seem to confirm each other. In reality both men were speaking as mouthpieces in a program of political deception which the Soviets coordinate with their ever-shifting plots in Berlin, Laos, the Congo, Cuba and whatever is next on the program.

One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people’s movement was not Communistic, but a social and “agrarian” reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organizations in the West.

The Soviets have centralized the responsibility for planning and launching deception operations in a special department of the State Security Service (KGB) known as the “Disinformation Bureau.” In recent years this office has been particularly busy formulating and distributing what purport to be official documents of the United States, Britain and other countries of the Free World. Its intention is to misstate and misrepresent the policies and purposes of these countries. In June of 1961, Mr. Richard Helms, a high official of the Central Intelligence Agency, presented the evidence of this activity to a Congressional committee. Out of the mass of forgeries available, he selected thirty-two particularly succulent ones, which were fabricated in the period 1957–60.

He pointed out that the Russian secret service has a long history of forging documents, having concocted the
Protocols of Zion
over sixty years ago to promote anti-Semitism. The Soviets have been adept pupils of their czarist predecessors. Their forgeries nowadays, he pointed out, are intended to discredit the West, and the United States in particular, in the eyes of the rest of the world; to sow suspicion and discord among the Western allies; and to drive a wedge between the peoples of non-Communist countries and their governments by promoting the notion that these governments are the puppets of the United States.

The falsified documents include various communications purporting to be from high officials to the President of the United States, letters to and from the Secretary of State or high State Department, Defense Department and USIA officials. To the initiated, these documents are patent fabrications; while some of the texts are cleverly conceived, there are always a great number of technical errors and inconsistencies. Unfortunately, these are not apparent to the audiences for which the letters are intended, generally the peoples of the newly independent nations. The documents are prepared for mass consumption rather than the elite. One of the most subtle, supposedly part of a British Cabinet paper, wholly misrepresented the U.S. and British attitude with respect to trade-union policies in Africa.

A typical Soviet forgery which appeared in an English-language newspaper in India consisted of two spurious telegrams allegedly sent by the American Ambassador in Taipeh to the Secretary of State in Washington commenting on various wholly fictitious proposals for doing away with Chiang Kai-shek. In order to explain how the “telegrams” had fallen into their hands, the Soviets cleverly exploited the fact that a mob had shortly before raided our embassy in Taipeh.

The forgery technique is particularly useful to the Communists because they possess the means for wide and fast distribution. Newspapers and news outlets are available to them on a world-wide basis. While many of these outlets are tarnished and suspect because of Communist affiliations, they are nevertheless capable of placing a fabrication before millions of people in a short time. The denials and the pinpointing of the evidence of fabrication ride so far behind the initial publication that the forgeries have already made their impact in spreading deception. On the other hand, the technique of forgery is not so readily available to Western intelligence in peacetime, for, quite apart from ethical considerations, there is too much danger of deceiving and misleading our own people and our free press.