The Greatest Traitor (31 page)

He flew out to Beirut with his family on Saturday, 17 September 1960, glad to be away from the complex, murky, compromised world of espionage, and looking forward to academic life.

14

The Unmasking

A
t around 5.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 4 January 1961, a call was put through to the emergency telephone number at the CIA’s Operations Base in Berlin. The caller, who did not identify himself, told the switchboard operator that he was ringing on behalf of Mr Kowalski. He informed her that his client would be arriving at the agreed meeting place – the American Consulate on Clayallee – in half an hour’s time. He also asked the telephonist to tell the reception committee that Mrs Kowalski would be accompanying her husband, and that particular consideration should be given to her. This was the moment that CIA counter-intelligence officers had been anticipating for over two and a half years. They were finally about to come face-to-face with their brilliant source within Soviet Bloc intelligence, the man who had signed his first, anonymous letter to them back in April 1958 as
Heckenschütze
(Sniper).

Sniper had already told them much from his position embedded deep in the heart of Soviet intelligence, and the CIA had also briefed their MI5 and SIS colleagues in London about him, not least because he had revealed that there were two KGB moles within British intelligence.

Managing a defector like this, especially in such a high-profile case, was a hugely nerve-wracking affair, fraught with peril. In this instance the dangers were increased because Sniper was not on home territory. He had contrived an operational mission to Berlin from Warsaw where, as a ‘stranger’, despite his lofty status, any surveillance would be far more difficult to evade. Sniper also suspected that he was being watched more closely than usual. The KGB believed there was a ‘pig’ (traitor) in the organisation, more likely than not in Polish intelligence, and had asked Sniper, of all people, to investigate, but that did not mean they were not also investigating him.

Tense but full of anticipation, David Murphy, head of the CIA’s Berlin station, and his new deputy, John Dimmer, started to enact the plan they had prepared several days earlier. Military police guarded the Consulate as unobtrusively as possible. Inside, microphones and recorders had been carefully installed in the room where the first introductions would be made. A safe house, to which Sniper would then be taken prior to his flight from the country, had been readied; a car was parked near the front entrance of the consulate. Murphy had selected a Polish-speaking officer to drive the vehicle, so he could pick up any interesting snippets of conversation between Sniper and his wife.

At 6.06 p.m. a West Berlin taxi pulled up outside the front door of the consulate. A burly, barrel-chested man with a large flourish of a moustache, somewhat like a nineteenth-century cavalry officer, stepped out with a small bag in his hand. A slim woman, also carrying a bag, accompanied him. The couple were quickly ushered into the building and taken down the corridor to the consular office. There, they were told they would be offered asylum in the United States, but only if they clearly identified themselves and agreed to be debriefed by the authorities. Sniper then revealed that the woman with him was not his wife but his mistress – a 31-year-old East Berliner named Irmgard Margareta Kampf. Having received guarantees that Irmgard would be treated well, she left the room, and Sniper proceeded to identify himself fully to the CIA.

He was not called ‘Kowalski’. In fact he was 38-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Michaū Goleniewski and had, until January 1958, been deputy chief of Polish counter-intelligence. As he laid out his credentials, the depth and breadth of his intelligence work, for friend and foe, became apparent. At that time, Goleniewski still held a senior position in the Polish Intelligence Service, as head of its scientific and technical section. Unofficially, he was also the KGB’s source within Polish intelligence, supposedly keeping tabs on any incompetence or deviance from the Moscow line. As Goleniewski talked, the American officers in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was clear that this was indeed Sniper and that he was ‘the real deal’.

The CIA’s plan had been to escort the couple to a safe house for a few hours, then to proceed to Wiesbaden Air Base for the trip back to America at 10 p.m., but Goleniewski and Kampf were physically exhausted and emotionally shattered, and it was thought best to delay the trip until 7 a.m. the following morning. Goleniewski assured his handlers that colleagues would not start to miss him until the evening of 5 January, a full day later.

At Wiesbaden the next morning, Murphy and Dimmer handed Goleniewski over to the care of Howard Edgar Roman, a 44-year-old officer and a good friend of Director Allen Dulles, who had been studying the Sniper information since it first started flowing in 1958.

Once they had touched down on American soil and the debriefings began, it became clear that the Soviets were running a small army of moles, with sources in West Germany, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, France and America. One was Israel Beer, close confidante of Prime-Minister David Ben-Gurion; another was Irvin Scarbeck, a US State Department official, blackmailed after Polish agents took compromising pictures of him with his mistress in Warsaw; a third was Colonel Stig Wennerstrūm, the Swedish air attaché in Washington, but also a general in the KGB. Then there was Heinz Felfe, the counter-intelligence chief of the BND, who had been exposing West Germany’s agents in the Eastern Bloc for more than a decade. Finally, there were the British moles.

In April 1959, a little less than two years before he first began to debrief Goleniewski, Howard Roman flew to London. There, in the fourth-floor conference room in Broadway, he addressed a group of SIS and MI5 officers, telling his startled audience: ‘Sniper says the Russians have got two very important spies in Britain; one in British Intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy.’ LAMBDA 2 (the Navy ‘mole’) would be more difficult to track down, Roman informed them. Sniper’s intelligence was that this individual had worked in Warsaw in 1952 and had been blackmailed into espionage after Polish State Security uncovered his activities in the black market. On LAMBDA 1, however, Sniper had provided more specific clues.

The mole in British Intelligence had seen, and then passed on to the KGB, three identifiable SIS documents. One was a section on Poland from ‘R6’, the annual report circulated to all SIS stations, summarising the intelligence gained by the Service, country by country, region by region. The second was an excerpt from ‘RB’, another SIS annual survey sent to all stations abroad, outlining the latest scientific and technical research and operations. The third was the ‘Watch List’ for Poland, which detailed those Polish nationals who SIS thought worth approaching to recruit. These documents narrowed the hunt down to SIS employees in Berlin and Warsaw. The task was obvious – draw up a list of those officers at the two stations who had access to all three documents, and then begin to eliminate them one by one.

That list comprised just ten officers but an inquiry led by Terence Lecky, Head of SIS’s counter-intelligence branch, failed to pin the disclosure on any of them. Indeed, according to Peter Wright, MI5’s chief scientific adviser, who attended Roman’s briefing that day in April, Lecky came up with a completely different explanation for the breach. ‘The records of all ten were investigated, and all were exonerated, including George Blake,’ Wright recalled many years later. ‘Blake, MI5 and MI6 concluded, could not possibly be a spy. The best explanation for the leak, in the absence of any credible human candidate, was a burglary at an MI6 station safe in Brussels, which had taken
place two years before.’ Wright’s own relentless, obsessive investigation into the penetration of Britain by Soviet intelligence led him down one or two rocky paths of conspiracy theory, but he remains a good source on the workings of British intelligence, and there is no reason to doubt his memory on this case.

In April 1960, when all of the Berlin and Warsaw staff had been cleared, SIS officially informed the CIA that the burglary was the source of Sniper’s LAMBDA 1. The case remained closed for six months, but Blake was by no means out of the woods, and anyway, Goloniewski was not the only threat at hand. In a bar in Berlin, on the evening of 15 October, an apparently harmless celebration drink was unravelling in a way that would have far-reaching consequences for Blake.

Horst Eitner (‘Mickey’), his wife Brigitte and a couple of friends had decided to hold a party to mark the fifth anniversary of Brigitte’s release from a labour camp in Siberia. It was a typical night’s carousing for the Eitners: they and their drinking partners downed bottles of liqueur, brandy and prosecco before continuing about town, first at the nearby Kūnstler Café bar, and later at the Bierquelle pub on Schlūterstrasse. By midnight the party was becoming progressively more inebriated. The Eitners were a volatile couple at the best of times, frequently arguing and fighting with each other, the disputes usually fuelled by alcohol. More often than not their rows would fizzle out and a heartfelt reconciliation would follow, until the next session. This occasion was different: Brigitte was angered by the attention the naturally flirtatious Horst was paying to her girlfriend, and something snapped.

First, she tried to ring ‘Temple’, their SIS contact who had taken over from Blake. When she failed to reach him, she walked into the nearest police station in Charlottenburg and blithely informed the officer on duty that her husband was spying for the Russians. She would later say this was merely carrying out a plan she had been thinking about for some time: she was tired of her husband’s spy work and constantly urging him to get a normal job. The bitter memories of
Siberia, together with the alcohol, and yet another of Horst’s perceived infidelities, had just provided the spur.

Her husband was arrested immediately, at 6 a.m., while still in the Bierquelle.

In the early days of the interrogation that followed, he admitted that he had done some espionage work, but claimed it was only for the Gehlen organisation. During separate questioning, however, Brigitte told the police a very different story and, gradually, Horst was forced to confess to his work for both SIS and the KGB. The German authorities established that he had tape-recorded conversations in his flat with British agents, had photographed them with a small camera, and had then handed over the recordings and photographs to the Russians. As details of his work as a double agent began to emerge, so SIS officers joined the investigation. They could verify Eitner’s claim that he was a British agent but, more importantly, needed to know which secrets he had betrayed to the Russians and who else, if anyone, was involved in his treachery.

The first interrogation the Service conducted with Eitner took place a week after his arrest. Further sessions followed early in January 1961, and then a third series towards the end of March. The officers could never be sure of what he was telling them as truth, lies and fantasy all came tumbling out in equal measure. Eitner tried to play the patriot card: he had never done anything to harm Germany, he was merely fighting the enemies occupying his country. He told his questioners Germany was too much in thrall to the Americans; at the same time, he denied being a Communist. On another day, he said that he was relieved to have been arrested because his briefs would have gone on getting bigger and more wide-ranging and he could have done great damage – especially to the English.

Eventually, there came a claim that made his questioners prick up their ears: Eitner said he wanted to make a statement that could lead them to another person who had links to the KGB. A year or so earlier, he told his interrogators, a Russian intelligence officer had told him
they knew of one leading agent working for them who had a vital role in the English Secret Service. That, combined with Eitner’s account of his relationship with the man he knew only as ‘Max de Vries’, led the SIS officers to wonder about George Blake’s activities in Berlin. They were all too aware of his reputation as a successful agent-runner, but if what Eitner was telling them about ‘Max’ was anywhere near the truth, then Blake’s methods were, at best unorthodox, and at worst, dangerous. Either way, after many hours interrogating Eitner, it was now time to get some answers from his handler.

At about the same time, in January and February 1961, SIS officers on the Soviet desk back in Broadway, having pored over new evidence from Goleniewski in great detail, were now all but certain of the identity of LAMBDA 1. The trail led them back to George Blake and so to the Lebanon.

The small village of Shemlan, situated twenty miles from Beirut, stands 2,500 feet above sea level and commands breathtaking views. The city is displayed below like a shimmering carpet, the Lebanese coastline stretches out languidly to the West, and the crystal-clear, infinite blue waters of the Mediterranean lie beyond. Life has not always been quite so tranquil in Shemlan, a Christian Maronite community right on the border of the homeland of the Druze, its fierce religious and political rival. The director’s office at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS) was blown up during the Suez crisis, fortunately without the director in it. Early in July 1958, during the Lebanese Civil War, Kemal Jumblatt’s Druze forces attacked the village and MECAS students were forced to evacuate, at first to the neighbouring village of Souk El Gharb, and then to Beirut.

By the time George Blake arrived to join the forty or so others on the Arabic course at MECAS, all was calm. In the autumn of 1960, the inhabitants lived in low, white terraced houses spread out along the winding road heading up towards Mount Lebanon. Village life centred around the grocery store and the butcher’s shop, and a bar
with a few rough tables and chairs where the locals would sit in time-honoured fashion in the cool of the evening, sipping their
arak
and nibbling on a plate of
mezze.
Resentment over Suez and the perceived British rejection of the Arab cause bubbled up occasionally in some quarters, but by and large, in the halcyon seclusion of the hillside, there was little to bother the students.