the Hungarian uprising — the expected internal revolt failed to materialize. MI6’s plan to assassinate Nasser with nerve gas was never put into effect. And when President Eisenhower, perhaps hypocritically given the CIA’s penchant for regime change elsewhere in the world, made it clear that ‘We believe these actions to have been taken in error, for we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes,’ it was evident that the attempt to retake the canal, let alone remove Nasser, was over.
1957 would see the end of another of the KGB’s assets in the United States, Colonel Rudolf Invanovich Abel — although he would be known by many names, including his birth name William Fisher, Emil Goldfus, and Martin Collins. His arrest by the FBI in June that year, and their discovery of ‘virtual museums of modern espionage equipment’ in his workplace and hotel room, which ‘contained shortwave radios, cipher pads, cameras and film for producing microdots, a hollow shaving brush, cufflinks, and numerous other ‘‘trick’’ containers’ would lead to his conviction for conspiracy to obtain and transmit defence information to the Soviet Union.
Giving the FBI the name Abel during his interrogation was probably a move designed to let his KGB controllers know his situation, a typical act by this veteran operative, who had spent years in Soviet intelligence before the Second World War prior to entering the US in 1948, as code name Mark. He was involved with the Volunteer network of atomic spies that operated out of New York, but had to rein back his activities following the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The arrival of a new assistant, Reino Hayhanen, in October 1952, was supposed to mark a new phase in his career, but in fact would lead to disaster for Abel. Hayhanen was not a good agent, misusing KGB funds, losing important reports, and even mislaying one of the hollowed-out coins in which information was transmitted. This coin found its way into the hands of the FBI, who spent years trying to decode the message within.
At the start of 1957, Abel demanded that the KGB recall Hayhanen to Moscow, but his assistant decided instead to defect, fearing for his life if he returned to the USSR. He claimed asylum at the Paris embassy, stating, ‘I’m an officer in the Soviet intelligence service. For the past five years, I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help.’ The CIA station officers thought he was drunk or delusional, but eventually passed him back for interrogation by the FBI. Searches of Hayhanen’s home found another hollowed-out coin, and the KGB officer gave his interrogators enough information to allow the original message from 1953 to be decoded.
Hayhanen was also able to give the FBI sufficient information to identify a number of Soviet agents, including Army Sergeant Roy Rhodes, code-named Quebec; UN delegate Mikhail Nikolaevich Svirin, who had already returned to the USSR; and Rudolf Abel, code-named Mark. Abel was arrested on 21 June, but initially refused to give any information to his captors, in the end only providing his ‘real’ name and demanding to be deported.
Abel would only serve five years of his thirty-year sentence; in 1962 he was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960. Although he lectured on intelligence work to Russian school children and did some work in the Illegals Directorate, Abel became disillusioned in the years before his death in 1971 — perhaps because he realized that for all that he had propaganda value to the KGB for not breaking under interrogation, he had done little to advance the cause. KGB records indicate that his nine-year stint in New York had little practical effect, since he had failed to set up a new network.
Some KGB agents were successes, almost despite themselves. One such was Robert Lee Johnson, an army sergeant and part-time pimp, who had tried to cross into East Berlin in 1953 to ask for asylum for himself and his prostitute fiancee. The KGB persuaded him to remain in the US Army, and for three years, he provided them with low-grade information. In 1956, he left the army, cut his connections with Moscow, and tried to make his fortune in Las Vegas. This failed, and in January 1957, the KGB reactivated him, giving him $500 and telling him to enlist in the US Air Force. Johnson was turned down, but was able to sign up again with the US Army. Over the next few years, he passed over photographs, plans and documents, and when he was transferred to the Armed Forces Courier Centre at Orly Airport in France, he was able to access a triple-locked vault. His methods seem like something from a Bond film: Johnson used a key for the first lock taken from a wax impression; he found a copy of the combination for the second in a wastepaper basket; and the KGB provided him with a portable X-ray device which allowed him to crack the combination for the third. This allowed him to pass over cypher systems, the locations of the nuclear warheads in Europe and defence plans for both the US and NATO. He was eventually caught following testimony provided by the defector Yuri Nosenko.
The late fifties saw other Soviet agents move into stronger positions around Europe: in France from 1958 onwards, Georges Paques had access to defence documents including the entire NATO defence plan for Western Europe; he would continue to provide information until 1963. Canadian economist Hugh Hambleton was also working for the Russians inside NATO between 1957 and 1961, and provided so much material that the KGB had to provide a black van equipped with a photographic laboratory so that it could be speedily copied. Hambleton, who was recruited in 1951, would eventually work for Moscow for thirty years before he was arrested.
In West Germany, Soviet agent Heinz Felfe became head of the Soviet counter-intelligence section of the BND — a similar role to that held by Kim Philby in the UK a decade earlier. Enquiries from the CIA and other agencies for information held by the BND gave Felfe, and thus Moscow, an insight into their operations. The damage that he achieved was considerable (although perhaps not as great as he claimed in his self-serving autobiography, released in the mid-eighties): ‘Ten years of secret agent reports had to be re-evaluated: those fabricated by the other side, those subtly slanted, those from purely mythical sources,’ pointed out one CIA officer.
British naval clerk John Vassall penetrated the British Admiralty, and was blackmailed into working for the KGB after attending a homosexual party set up by Moscow Centre. On his return to the UK, he was able to provide his handler with thousands of highly classified documents covering naval policy and weapons development. He continued working for the Soviets for five years until his lifestyle attracted suspicion, and he was arrested for espionage.
Not everything went according to plan for the KGB. After the fiasco caused by Nikolai Kholkov’s failure to kill Okolovich and the assassin’s subsequent defection in 1954, an attempt on the Ukrainian Vladimir Poremsky failed the following year when his prospective killer told the West German police of his mission. The KGB couldn’t even kill Kholkov; an attempt on his life using radioactive thallium failed.
One assassin working for the KGB’s ‘wetworks’ section, Department 13, did chalk up some successes. Bogdan Stashinsky used a cyanide gas-spraying gun to assassinate two Ukrainian emigres, Lev Rebet in October 1957 and Stepan Bandera, two years later. However, Stashinsky’s German-born wife persuaded him into a change of heart and they defected to the West in Berlin, a day before the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. He stood trial for the murders, but, as BND chief Reinhard Gehlen explained in his autobiography: ‘The court identified Stashinsky’s unscrupulous employer [KGB Chairman Alexasandr] Shelyepin as the person primarily responsible for the hideous murders, and the defendant — who had given a highly credible account of the extreme pressure applied to him by the KGB to act as he did — received a comparatively mild sentence.’ As a result of Stashinsky’s defection and the very public trial, the Kremlin reconsidered the use of assassination as a weapon. Contrary to the belief of spy thriller writers, ‘wet affairs’ became a last resort for the Kremlin in the early sixties, rather than standard operating procedure.
While agents in place continued to make a valuable contribution to the espionage activities of the American intelligence community during the late fifties, their work was supplemented by two other sources — the advent of the spy-plane program, and the increased use of cryptographics, courtesy of the newly established National Security Agency.
The early fifties saw the ‘Reds under the Bed’ scares, fomented by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and despite his downfall, there were many who believed that the Soviet Union was considerably stronger than it actually was. All the various agencies had to make estimates, and inevitably used worse case scenarios as the basis for these. The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 did nothing to quell those fears — not only could the Russians launch missiles at the US from their various territories around the world, but they could now do so from space as well.
The CIA’s Project Aquatone went a long way to dealing with the queries raised by the various other agencies. As a CIA report written a few days after the initial operation pointed out, ‘Five operational missions have
