Although Miller’s low-scale treason would be regarded as a blot on the FBI’s record, it became increasingly unimportant as the events of 1985 unfolded — a year described by the American press as ‘The Year of the Spy’.
11
THE YEAR OF THE SPY
‘We should begin by recognizing that spying is a fact of life,’ President Ronald Reagan told the American people during his radio address to the nation on 29 June 1985. ‘The number and sophistication of Soviet bloc and other hostile intelligence service activities have been increasing in recent years… During the seventies, we began cutting back our manpower and resources and imposed unnecessary restrictions on our security and counter- intelligence officials. With help from Congress we’ve begun to rebuild, but we must persevere.’
Reagan’s call to arms followed the arrest of John Anthony Walker, the retired Naval officer whose spy ring had been passing material to the Soviets for eighteen years. It was the first openly acknowledged move on the American side in The Year of the Spy, but the following twelve months would see both parties in the Cold War discover agents within their own borders — sometimes as a result of new assets being developed within the opposition. The problems the Americans faced on that front were compounded by the discovery of agents working against them on behalf of China, Ghana and Israel.
‘This has been an extraordinary year in the international espionage trade,’ Maria Wilhelm wrote in an October 1985 article for
Walker’s spying activities were brought to an end in part thanks to a tip-off from his own ex-wife, Barbara. She had been aware of his spying for the Soviets for many years, and had threatened to expose him on countless occasions, but had never taken the final step. Eventually, when their marriage came to an end (and possibly in annoyance that Walker had tried to recruit their daughter into the spy ring), she contacted the FBI in April 1985. Former KGB agent Victor Cherkashin denied that her report triggered the arrest, and suggested that an FBI spy within the KGB based at the Washington residency, Valery Martynov, overheard discussion about Walker’s activities during a trip home to Moscow, and reported this back to his handlers.
Whatever prompted the FBI to begin the surveillance, Walker was arrested on 20 May when he dropped a number of documents for collection by the Soviets; his handler, embassy official Alexei Tkachenko, was posted back to Moscow a few days after the arrest. His colleague Jerry Whitworth, brother Arthur and son Michael were also arrested. John Walker agreed to testify against Whitworth in return for his son receiving a lesser sentence; he, Whitworth and Arthur Walker were sentenced to life imprisonment, Michael receiving a twenty-five year term.
Around the time that Walker’s wife was informing the FBI about her husband’s spying, CIA counter- intelligence officer Aldrich Ames was beginning his treasonous career for the KGB, which would last for the next nine years. Initially using the alias Rick Wells, Ames requested $50,000 from the Soviets in return for information on CIA operations, which, once they saw what he was willing to provide, they gladly gave. Victor Cherkashin was put in charge of handling ‘Wells’, and quickly deduced that they had potentially struck gold: not only did ‘Wells’ have access to good material, but he was actually the CIA’s chief of Soviet counter-intelligence!
Ames had joined the CIA in 1962 as a trainee, and served at the Ankara station, as well as in Mexico, where he was one of those who handled Aleksandr Ogorodnik’s training. In New York he helped look after Arkady Shevchenko, before transferring back to the Agency’s headquarters at Langley, where his job was to meet with Soviet embassy officials to look for potential defectors. This gave him the perfect cover for visiting his new paymasters — so long as the meetings didn’t attract attention by being too long.
In June 1985, Ames passed over a list of virtually every CIA asset within the Soviet Union; as a direct result, thanks to this confirmation of Edward Lee Howard’s earlier information, Adolf Tolkachev’s fate was sealed. Major-General Dmitri Polyakov had retired from the GRU in 1980 to his dacha in the countryside; following Ames’ list, he was arrested, and, as he had predicted to one of his CIA case officers, his eventual resting place was a ‘Bratskaya mogila’, an unmarked grave. He was executed on 15 March 1988.
Ames’ information also ended the career of Valery Martynov, who was working for both the FBI and the CIA within the KGB’s Washington residency. A target of the FBI’s Operation Courtship, which was set up to recruit Soviets in the capital during the early eighties, Martynov was able to pass disinformation back to his Soviet bosses and give the Americans accurate data on the Soviet activities within the residency. Although he had come under suspicion during 1984, there was insufficient evidence for the KGB to act against him until Ames included him in his list. He was sent back to Moscow, ostensibly as a guard for the returning defector Yurchenko, and taken straight to Lefortovo prison. He was executed around September 1987.
Another American agent within the Soviet residency was also betrayed by Ames: Sergei Motorin, who had already been rotated back to Moscow. Motorin had been turned by the FBI after he was photographed trying to pay for some electronic equipment with cases of vodka in a Maryland store in 1980, and, like Martynov, was used to feed the Soviets false information. Arrested in Moscow, he was shot.
Among the others Ames betrayed, Colonel Leonid Polishchuk had originally been enlisted by the CIA in 1974 when stationed in Nepal; he had dropped out of contact for many years before being assigned to Lagos, Nigeria, in February 1985, where the Agency approached him once more. After being named by Ames, he was arrested when he went back to Moscow to arrange the purchase of an apartment; in a successful effort to misdirect the CIA, the KGB claimed that they had stumbled on a CIA officer loading a dead drop in Moscow, and they had arrested the man who went to collect the money from it.
A GRU officer working for the CIA escaped the same fate. Colonel Sergei Bokhan had been employed by the Agency for a decade, while based in Athens, Greece. He had informed them about various attempts to sell military secrets to the Soviets, including the manual for a spy satellite and the plans for a Stinger missile. Summoned back to Moscow in May 1985, a month after Ames’ initial contact with the KGB, supposedly because his son was having problems at the military academy, he defected to the US.
GRU Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Smetanin, codename Million, was ‘a shining example of the CIA’s professional handling’, according to Victor Cherkashin, but the Agency was powerless when his details were passed to the KGB by Ames. Based in Lisbon, Portugal, he and his wife Svetlana worked for the CIA from 1983 onwards. They weren’t particularly useful agents at this point in their careers, but were an investment for the future — which was short-lived. In August 1985, Smetanin was ordered back to Moscow for an early home leave, and he and his wife were arrested on arrival.
Ames was also able to pass over details of various intelligence-gathering operations within the Soviet Union, including CKTAW, already revealed by Edward Howard, and Operation Absorb, an ingenious scheme to monitor the movement of nuclear warheads by tracking the tiny amounts of radiation that they emitted.
One agent who Ames is often accused of betraying is Oleg Gordievsky — even the defector himself says that Ames ‘received his first payment, of $10,000, for putting the KGB on my trail’. However, according to Cherkashin, who was handling Ames, this wasn’t the case: Ames was only asked about Gordievsky at their meeting in June, as corroboration. Whether this was disinformation and Ames did pass over the name a month earlier, or there was another KGB spy within the CIA whose identity has still yet to come to light, Gordievsky’s career as an MI6 agent came to an end in May 1985.
Unexpectedly called back to Moscow, apparently for high-level briefings about his new position as KGB resident in London, Gordievsky was suspicious when he wasn’t met at the airport as he would have expected. He then realized that the KGB had broken into his flat, after a lock that he never used (because he had lost the key)
