operative Ronald Pelton when he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1980, desperately in need of money to cover his growing debts. As well as giving up details on Operation Ivy Bells, he told them about the Vortex satellites that were intercepting microwave radio-relay systems; the amount of material coming from a joint NSA-CIA listening post in the Moscow embassy, code-named Broadside; and about the seven most highly classified intelligence operations that the NSA were currently working on. He even revealed the existence of fake tree stumps containing electronic bugs which were placed by CIA operatives near Soviet military installations. Worst of all, he gave them details of every Russian cypher machine that the NSA had been able to crack — leading to the Soviets changing their systems.
CKTAW itself was revealed to the Soviets by a former CIA employee, Edward Lee Howard, who had been dismissed from the Agency in May 1983 after failing a polygraph test prior to taking up a new posting in Moscow. Unfortunately, by that stage he was already privy to a considerable amount of information about CIA activities in Russia, including CKTAW — one of the reasons for his firing was that he admitted to cheating during exercises regarding access to the manhole. That summer, he wrote to the Soviet embassy in Switzerland proposing a meeting with a KGB officer to hand over ‘interesting’ information. The KGB turned him down. In October that year, he considered whether to volunteer information directly to the Soviets at the Washington embassy, but ultimately decided against it. He moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he became involved in a major fight and was put on probation for five years. Around the same time, the KGB reconsidered his application, and he was advised to travel to Vienna to meet a handler. Despite a probation prohibition on leaving the States, he went to Europe, where he passed on documents and information on CIA operations in September 1984 and then again in April 1985. Howard was himself betrayed by a defector from East to West, Vitaly Yurchenko that year, but he managed to evade the FBI, fleeing to Moscow, where he died in 2002.
Howard was also responsible for the end of the life of a major CIA asset in Russia, scientist Adolf Tolkachev. In an odd mirror of the career of his betrayer, Tolkachev also tried unsuccessfully to approach the other side’s intelligence agencies before being taken seriously. Describing himself as a ‘dissident at heart’ (to the extent that at one point he discussed with the CIA the possibility of passing some of his salary from the Agency to the dissident movement in Russia), Tolkachev was a systems engineer at the Scientific Research Institute of Radio who had a top-secret clearance and decided to offer his services to the opposition. His first attempt in January 1977 — dropping a letter into an American’s car — failed because by chance he had chosen the head of the CIA station in Moscow, and his offer seemed too good to be true. He tried on three more occasions, but each time he was ignored. That December he passed through a note containing some details on Soviet aircraft; that calling card proved to be effective, and in February 1978 communications were begun. A risky personal meeting between Tolkachev and CIA handler John Guilsher took place on New Year’s Day 1979 and over the next eighteen months, a system was established. Tolkachev was provided with a camera and was able to supply hundreds of rolls of 35mm film to his CIA contacts, sometimes even taking documents home to photograph them when security was less stringent, other times taking the chance of filming them at his office.
Despite KGB suspicions about leaks from the Institute, Tolkachev refused to stop his activities, and his case officer noted, ‘This is indeed a man who is driven to produce, by whatever means he deems necessary, right up to the end, even if that end is his death.’ On more than one occasion, he had to ditch his spy equipment because the KGB seemed to be closing in, but then he would return to work as normal. In January 1985, he had his last meeting with his handlers, where he passed over what he said was information on a new Soviet fighter aircraft. The pictures were unreadable. The next meetings were abandoned because of surveillance, but on 13 June, the case officer went to the meeting, and was arrested by the KGB. Tolkachev had been in their hands since April; he was executed at some point between then and September 1986.
A memo in March 1979 to then-DCI Stansfield Turner described Tolkachev’s material as ‘of incalculable value’. At the time of his death, the
Tolkachev wasn’t the only spy within the KGB run by Western intelligence during this period. Code-named Farewell, Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, who claimed that he hated the Soviet leadership for its ‘vulgarity, corruption, brutality, unrelenting self-advancement and failure to help the Russian people’, was able to supply over four thousand documents to French intelligence during the summer of 1981. This led to one of the more ingenious counter-espionage operations of the eighties.
Vetrov was a technical officer at the KGB, charged with evaluating Western technology that was obtained by Section T. The information that he passed on included the names of Soviet agents in American and European laboratories, government agencies and factories, as well as details of many other agents in place. Most helpfully for the West, it listed the technological requirements that these agents were seeking to fulfil.
French President Mitterand passed details of Vetrov to President Reagan in July 1981 and CIA DCI Casey suggested preparing faulty equipment that the Soviet agents could obtain. A cooperative effort between the CIA and the FBI led to major problems for the Soviets with the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, resulting in a huge explosion, as well as many bugs within other projects, such as stealth aircraft, space defence and tactical aircraft. Even the Soviet Space Shuttle was based on a rejected NASA design. Finally, once the fake information had been passed back to Moscow, the CIA informed the relevant governments of the agents’ existence, and over two hundred were detained.
Vetrov himself was arrested in February 1982 after murdering a stranger in a Moscow park and attempting to kill his mistress, a KGB secretary. His espionage activities were discovered during the investigation, and he was executed.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only new leader in the Western world. May 1979 saw the arrival in 10 Downing Street of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. One of her earliest encounters with the spy industry came with the public revelation of Anthony Blunt’s treachery. Blunt had confessed his role to MI5 in 1964, but was granted immunity from prosecution and had naively believed that he would hear no further about it. He, perhaps unwisely, tried to prevent the publication of Andrew Boyle’s book
Gordievsky’s importance in the early eighties cannot be underestimated. He had been passing information to MI6 since 1974, while continuing to rise in the KGB. He had come very close to discovery in 1978 when Kim Philby was asked to look over a file regarding the arrest of a KGB asset in Norway, elderly secretary Gunvor Haavik, whom Gordievsky had told MI6 about while stationed in Copenhagen. Philby’s reaction was that there must be a mole within the KGB, but luckily for Gordievsky the topic was not pursued.
In January 1982, a visa request was sent by the Soviets for Gordievsky to enter Britain as a ‘counsellor’ at the embassy — in fact, he was a senior KGB political officer at the residency. Once in Britain he was handled jointly by MI5 and MI6, and was able to pass over details of a new joint KGB-GRU operation set up by KGB chief Yuri Andropov in May 1981, code-named Ryan (derived from the Russian acronym for the phrase Nuclear Missile Attack). The Soviet Politburo fervently believed that the United States and NATO were preparing for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and Operation Ryan was set up to collect intelligence on these plans. According to Gordievsky, while many residencies and KGB officers did not believe that such plans existed, they weren’t willing to say as much to Moscow, so exaggerated the importance of events, which in its turn prompted requests for more information. Thatcher and Reagan’s rhetoric was making the Soviets even more paranoid than they already were. The importance attached to Operation Ryan reports by the Kremlin gave Gordievsky, and thus the West, an indication of how threatened the Soviets felt at any given time.
With access to a lot of the relevant documentation regarding the London residency’s operations, Gordievsky was able to provide information on current KGB agents in the UK. He noted that union leader Jack Jones, who had been regarded as an agent by the Soviets between 1964–1968, as well as MP Bob Edwards were both now regarded as of little significance. The KGB were interested in supporting peace movements, such as the Campaign
