A Brief History of the Spy

7 POWER CORRUPTS

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn’t the first time that the United States has gone to war based on inaccurate information supplied to the administration by the intelligence agencies. Sometimes intelligence agencies will choose not to send the White House information that they know will anger the president. The Gulf of Tonkin incident did not play out in the way in which it was initially presented to President Johnson, upon which he based the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 7 August 1964.

Between 1960 and July 1962, the CIA had tried sending teams of trained South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam; these had been unsuccessful. Thereafter, responsibility for actions against the North Vietnamese was transferred to the Defence Department, which began OPLAN34-63, a series of offensives against the North Vietnamese coastline in autumn 1963, and then refined them as OPLAN34A that December (although it seems no one thought to inform the NSA’s Asian desk of the operation.)

The USS Maddox was equipped for SIGINT work and sent into the Gulf of Tonkin on 28 July 1964, reassured by the commander of the SIGINT group in Taiwan that their ship would be in no danger. However, an OPLAN34A raid which took place on 31 July seriously annoyed the North Vietnamese — and they responded by sending three torpedo boats after the Maddox. The Maddox was warned of the impending engagement by NSA intercepts of North Vietnamese orders; when the boats approached, the US ship fired warning shots before the Vietnamese fired. At the end of combat, one of the torpedo boats had been sunk, and the other two damaged.

President Johnson was briefed on the attack the next day, and decided to keep his cool: he ordered the Maddox to resume its mission, albeit guarded by a destroyer, the Turner Joy, and air support. Further OPLAN34A attacks took place the following day, and SIGINT suggested that the North Vietnamese would respond again.

On 4 August, everything seemed to indicate that the Maddox was about to be attacked again. North Vietnamese patrol boats had shadowed them for part of the time, and in the evening, they believed they were being followed by two surface and three air contacts. The Turner Joy and the Maddox opened fire on a radar contact at 9.30 that night, and it seemed as if they engaged in a pitched battle with around six patrol boats.

But while that news electrified Washington, and preparations for airstrikes were made, in the Gulf the captains on the Turner Joy and the Maddox were reviewing the action, and realized that, as Captain Herrick said, ‘Certain that original ambush [on 2 August] was bonafide. Details of action following present a confusing picture.’ In Washington, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that an attack had taken place — based on two NSA intercepts, one stating that a North Vietnamese boat had shot at American aircraft; the other that two planes had been shot down, and two Vietnamese ships had been lost. As the NSA’s own history explained, ‘The reliance on SIGINT even went to the extent of overruling the commander on the scene. It was obvious to the president and his advisers that there really had been an attack — they had the North Vietnamese messages to prove it.’ There was one serious problem though. The messages were timed during the ‘battle’ itself — yet referred to the reaction of the North Vietnamese to its conclusion. It was enough to start the conflict. (With the benefit of hindsight, McNamara accepted that the evidence wasn’t strong enough, and that the attack didn’t happen; based on a number of comments he made, President Johnson had doubts from the start.)

However, much as this may have been a misuse of the spies’ work, it is clear that Johnson’s administration was looking for a trigger to begin the war, and as the NSA themselves pointed out, ‘Had the 4 August incident not occurred, something else would have.’

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The latter half of the sixties was, to a large degree, a time when spies engaged in the Cold War got on with their business. There weren’t many events that caused major changes to the way espionage was carried out — to the extent that many histories of the period touch on the Vietnam War, and the continuing hunts within the security services for KGB moles as revealed by Golitsyn, but mention little else.

This is slightly ironic, given that this is the era when spies were at the forefront of popular culture: the James Bond movies, based increasingly loosely on the novels by Ian Fleming, were released virtually annually in the sixties. They gave rise to many imitators, including the Matt Helm film thrillers featuring Dean Martin as the sort of self-promoting agent that no self-respecting agency would want near them (but whose weaknesses they would be more than happy to take advantage of to blackmail him), and the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which predated glasnost with its partnership of American agent Napoleon Solo (a pre- Hustle Robert Vaughn) and Russian Illya Kuryakin (NCIS’ David McCallum). (The CIA even includes memorabilia from the series in its museum at Langley, Virginia, USA.) The backlash to these over-the-top adventures gave rise to the more realistic novels of John le Carre, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Adam Hall (the Quiller series). Le Carre had served in the British security services in the post-Second World War period, although he acknowledged that he was one of those whose covers would have been blown by Kim Philby before the defection of Burgess and Maclean removed him from office.

The KGB assisted in the removal of Nikita Khruschev from office in 1964 and the rise to power of Leonid Brehznev. Shelyepin found himself sidelined, with Yuri Andropov promoted to Chairman of the KGB in 1967. For them, the sixties were a period of re-entrenchment, to make up for the loss of the spy rings thanks to the various defectors.

Although they weren’t able to infiltrate an agent into either MI5 or MI6, the KGB were active in Britain during the decade. One of their most useful men was Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who worked as a clerk at the Greater London Council motor licensing department. Recruited in 1967, Abdoolcader had access to the number plates of the cars of all the MI5 and Special Branch vehicles, so any surveillance carried out by the security services on the London residency personnel was immediately compromised.

Following on from their success in penetrating the Manhattan Project two decades earlier, Moscow Centre targeted scientific and technological personnel, creating a new ‘Directorate T’ specifically to deal with the new intelligence field. Some agents may have had lucky escapes, thanks to the difficulties that the security services faced in proving their case. Dr Guiseppe Martelli, who had worked at the Atomic Energy Authority, was arrested in 1963 but, even though he was found with one-time pads and other spy tools, MI5 were unable to gain a conviction, since they couldn’t provide evidence that he had been in contact with those who had access to classified information. Two workers at the Kodak factory accused of selling film-process material to the East German intelligence agency, the HVA, were similarly acquitted in 1965. It seems probable that a number of similar cases didn’t get to court — according to Oleg Gordievsky, the Directorate T records indicate those that ended in conviction were only ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

Two cases were successfully prosecuted during this decade in Britain. Frank Bossard, a project manager at the Ministry of Aviation, was recruited by the GRU around the time that he was transferred to working on guided weapons in 1960. Until he was betrayed by the testimony of GRU officer and CIA asset Dimitri Polyakov in 1965, he was regularly leaving film of classified documents in dead letter boxes in return for cash.

Douglas Britten, described as ‘a good actor and an accomplished liar’ by a Security Commission following his conviction, also betrayed secrets for cash. Recruited in 1962, he tried to break off contact during his posting to the listening stations on Cyprus in 1966, but was then blackmailed by his KGB controller with a photo showing him receiving payments from the Soviets. He was transferred back to RAF Digby in Lancashire, where the KGB pressured him to provide more information. Britten was photographed visiting the Soviet consulate, arrested, and although he cooperated with MI5, he was sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment.

Nicholas Praeger also worked assiduously for the Eastern bloc during the sixties, although he was turned and handled by the Czech intelligence agency, the Statni Bezpeenost (StB). A committed Communist, Praeger was a top radar technician with access to secret material by the time he was recruited by the StB in 1959. His value to the StB increased after he left the RAF, and joined the English Electric Company, which was working on radar- jamming equipment aboard British nuclear strike bombers. Moscow described his information as ‘the best