Circle of Treason (18 page)

During the short life of this operation, Vorontsov produced one item that resonated throughout the U.S. government. He gave Sellers a packet of what is commonly known in intelligence circles as “spy dust” and whose scientific initials are NPPD. This is an invisible chemical agent used by the KGB to track the whereabouts of CIA Moscow Station personnel. We had known about the substance since at least the 1960s, but now we had a sample that could be submitted for analysis. Early tests suggested that NPPD was mutagenic, or possibly even carcinogenic. The media picked up the story and had a field day. The State Department protested that its personnel were being poisoned. However, the story eventually died down as there was no evidence that anyone had been harmed, and the Soviets loudly decried the possibility.

For various reasons, we did not meet with Vorontsov after the spring of 1984. The next meeting was scheduled for 10 March 1986 in a Moscow alleyway. When Sellers appeared, he was arrested by a squad of KGB officers, and taken to the KGB central offices at the Lubyanka. A few hours later he was released, when the U.S. embassy was able to establish his diplomatic immunity to Soviet satisfaction. Sellers was declared persona non grata and expelled from the Soviet Union.

As an aside, when Sellers was arrested he had with him a list of questions to ask Vorontsov. Prominent among them was: “What happened to Raoul Wallenberg?” This was an unanswered forty-year-old question, which had long obsessed Swedish officialdom and some senior members of the U.S. government, including Director Casey. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat assigned to Budapest toward the end of World War II who was responsible for saving a large number of Jews. When the Red Army rolled into the capital, Wallenberg disappeared. Over the years there were persistent rumors that he was still alive in a Soviet prison, unlikely as that may have been. Anyway, Casey, perhaps more attuned to political realities than to current priorities, insisted that the matter be broached. That such a question might be asked of a defector who is being debriefed at length in a Washington safehouse is understandable. That precious time in a Moscow alleyway under highly dangerous circumstances was to be taken up by this venerable enigma is much less so. (As it happens, Wallenberg had died in 1947 in prison. The Soviet government finally admitted to this in 1989, although not everyone accepts their story.)

Vorontsov was executed. It was only through the protest note issued by the Soviet government that we were finally able to identify the mysterious Stas. The note provided Vorontsov's true surname.

THINGS BEGIN TO GO WRONG

T
HE SPRING OF
1985 saw the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In March Konstantin Chernenko died, and Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The era of glasnost and perestroika was about to begin. This year has also been dubbed the “Year of the Spy” because of events that were publicly aired at the time, such as the arrest of U.S. Navy communications technician John Walker and his ring, the defection/redefection of Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko, and the flight of Edward Lee Howard. Little did anyone know, however, that fifteen years would pass before we learned just how much of a Year of the Spy it had really been.

While things were changing in Moscow, it was still too early for the CIA, and SE Division specifically, to alter its priorities. Work against Soviet and East European targets was being carried out as usual. At this point, we were feeling very proud of ourselves. Over the years we had built up our stable of reporting sources and had uncovered many of the USSR's major secrets. We had been so successful against the KGB and the GRU that it was no exaggeration to say that we knew more about these organizations than any individual officer in them. We had no idea that we were headed for disaster.

The first intimation that something might be wrong occurred in late May. (Throughout the following narrative, we have tried to make a distinction between when an event occurred, and when we learned about it.
This is an important differentiation because the KGB was trying to conceal what was going on from us, and sometimes succeeded. Therefore, a person could be arrested in 1985 and we might not hear about it until more than a year had passed.) Sergey Ivanovich Bokhan, the GRU officer who had been working for us in Athens, told us that he had been recalled to Moscow to take care of a problem involving his son. We suspected that he might be under suspicion and advised him to defect, which he did.

The next month our unease was appreciably heightened. On 13 June Moscow Station CIA officer Paul Stombaugh was arrested by the KGB on the street as he was attempting to meet with Adolf Tolkachev, who had volunteered to the CIA in Moscow in 1977 and had provided reams of highly important information. Although we did not know it at the time, he had been arrested on the 9th.

The next noteworthy event was the defection of Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko, a senior KGB CI officer, in Rome on 1 August. He was immediately brought to the United States and was considered an especially valuable defector, because he had previously served in the KGB residency in Washington, DC. Among the important reporting he provided was some information about a former CIA officer who had volunteered to the KGB after being dismissed from the Agency. He had been debriefed by the KGB at length in Vienna in the fall of 1984. Although Yurchenko did not know the man's name, it was almost immediately evident that he was describing Edward Lee Howard. Howard had worked in SE Division's branch responsible for operations inside the Soviet Union until May 1983, when he was unceremoniously dismissed because a polygraph examination indicated extensive drug use, alcohol abuse, and petty theft.
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According to Yurchenko, Howard had told the KGB everything he had learned while assigned to the internal Soviet operations component. This included an imprecise lead to an “angry colonel” in Budapest who was working for the CIA. Based on Howard's reporting, we realized that he was describing the case of GRU officer Vladimir Vasilyev.

Another KGB CI investigation related to us by Yurchenko involved a spy camera that the KGB had found in a recreation room in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco a few years previously. An extensive inquiry was undertaken, later bolstered by some vague reporting from Howard. Eventually the field of suspects had been narrowed to a very few. One of those was Boris Nikolayevich Yuzhin, a KGB officer under TASS cover.
This was disturbing news. Yuzhin had been recruited by the FBI in the 1970s. The CIA had supplied the spy camera, which indeed Yuzhin had lost in the Soviet consulate. Yuzhin had returned to Moscow in 1982. His FBI handlers did not want the CIA to run him in the Soviet Union, and he had not been issued any means of internal communication. Luckily for him as it turned out, there was no damning evidence that a KGB investigation could uncover.

While Howard's treason was a terrible blow, in one way it was a comfort. It explained the operational demise of Tolkachev, because Howard had been slated for a Moscow assignment. One of his duties there would have been to handle Tolkachev, and he had read Tolkachev's file. It also more or less explained the possibility that Bokhan was under suspicion when he defected. He had been working for the CIA for many years, since 1975. Therefore Howard could have learned about his case at some point. Further, it explained the anomalies discovered in GTTAW. GTTAW was a technical operation involving a tap into Soviet classified landlines. To service the tap, a Moscow Station officer had to “get black” and then go down a manhole to the tap's location to retrieve the tapes. Howard had been trained to undertake this duty and knew all the details.
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Another tidbit from Yurchenko concerned Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who had been the deputy resident in London. According to Yurchenko, Gordievsky had been recalled in May 1985 because of some suspicions. He had been interrogated but had not confessed and had not been arrested. This was an interesting piece of news. The British, who had recruited Gordievsky in Copenhagen in the mid-1970s, had shared some of his production with the CIA and FBI, but had not identified their source. We, however, had figured out that Gordievsky must have been the person who was supplying the information to the British and encrypted him GTTICKLE. That he had been recalled in May did not, however, unduly concern us because this was not our case and it was, again, an operation that had been running for many years. As some readers may know, the British exfiltrated Gordievsky shortly before Yurchenko's defection. They did not inform us of their noteworthy coup until some time after the event. Today he lives in Great Britain and has made a new life for himself as a successful author and lecturer.

Yurchenko also told us about a secret trip that Viktor Ivanovich Cherkashin, the KGB CI chief in Washington, had made in the spring of
1985. He had eluded FBI coverage and left the United States without their knowledge. Once he got to Moscow he had an interview with the top KGB leadership. Yurchenko did not know the reason for this trip, although he believed it must have been of considerable significance. We in the CIA speculated about this incident. One explanation that seemed plausible at the time was that he had been called to Moscow to discuss the future handling of Howard, who at the time was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In October we learned of another major compromise. KGB CI officer Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk had been arrested when he tried to pick up a dead drop we had put down for him in Moscow. Yet another unsettling event took place that same month. GRU officer Gennadiy Aleksandrovich Smetanin, who had volunteered to the CIA in Lisbon in late 1983, did not return from a scheduled home leave. We never had contact with him again and did not know what had become of him until sometime in the next year. What was especially perturbing about this case was that Howard could not have known about it. It started after he had left the Agency.

In the meantime, the Howard case came to a boil. On 19 September 1985, the FBI interviewed him based on Yurchenko's reporting. He refused to cooperate until he could consult a lawyer. Two days later, he tricked FBI surveillance and fled the country. He is believed to have crossed over into the Soviet Union shortly thereafter, thus making himself available for intensive and extensive KGB debriefings.

In the meantime, Yurchenko re-defected. He left for Moscow in a hail of publicity on 6 November, protesting that the CIA had drugged and kidnapped him. Especially pertinent to the present narrative is that one of the KGB officers assigned to escort him back to the USSR was Valeriy Fedorovich Martynov, who had been recruited by the FBI in early 1982, and was subsequently handled as a joint FBI/CIA asset. He did not return to Washington after his escort duties were finished. The word was out that an old knee injury had flared up and he might need surgery.

The last asset to disappear from our screen in 1985 was KGB Illegals Support specialist Gennadiy Grigoryevich Varenik. Varenik, stationed in Bonn, had volunteered to the CIA in March of that year. He missed a meeting that he was supposed to have had with us in mid-November and we never had contact with him again. Dismayingly, this was a case that had been tightly held and had lasted only a few months.

There was only one reassuring entry in this escalating catalog of disappearances. On 11 December Vladimir Mikhaylovich Vasilyev, the GRU “angry colonel” we had run in Budapest and who had later been reassigned to Moscow, successfully dead-dropped a package to us. The contents were such that no one involved in the operation believed that this could have been a KGB ploy.

Before the year closed, Director Casey was briefed on what we knew to that point about what seemed to be wrong in a broad array of our Soviet cases. He directed John Stein to conduct a study on the subject. Stein was a logical choice because he had served as deputy chief of SE Division, as deputy director for operations, and as inspector general. Furthermore, he was available, marking time until taking up his next assignment as chief in Seoul.

Soviet and East European Division chief Burton Gerber wrote a memorandum to Stein, outlining the problem and listing the cases that he should review. In early 1986, Stein prepared his report. Some recall he concluded that there was no overarching connection between the compromised cases known to us at this time. Each one contained the seeds of its own destruction. Stein himself remembers that he came to the tentative conclusion that a compromise of our communications was the most likely explanation. Unfortunately, despite repeated searches, no copy of this report has ever been found. Thus, what Stein actually said remains a mystery. However, Stein's reference to a compromise of our communications is not surprising because the Walker case was very much on everyone's mind at the time.

John Anthony Walker Jr., a communications specialist in the U.S. Navy, volunteered to the KGB in December 1967. For almost twenty years he provided cryptographic materials to the KGB, eventually involving his brother, his son, and his best friend, Jerry Whitworth. He was arrested in May 1985 by the FBI based on a tip from his wife. This was an extremely damaging case and, despite NSA's assurances to the contrary, many in the CIA were concerned that the KGB might have been able to compromise CIA's secure electronic communications.
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