A Brief History of the Spy

same day, Zakharov was allowed to leave America, having pleaded no contest to the charges. While the summit went ahead, the twenty-five Soviet delegates were still expelled; in retaliation, on 19 October, the Soviets kicked out five US diplomats. Two days later, the US sent home fifty-five more Soviets — allegedly to bring about parity between the size of the respective missions in the countries. A day later the Soviets expelled five more Americans.

But the rules of the game meant that nobody would admit the reality of what had happened. Daniloff was quite clear that he had not been swapped since as far as he was concerned there was no comparison between the two situations. ‘In my case, the investigation into the charges against me was concluded,’ he stated bluntly. ‘There was no trial, and I left as an ordinary free American citizen. In Zakharov’s case, there was a trial, and he received a sentence. I do not believe that these two things are in any way equivalent.’ Although some dissidents were released in the Soviet Union at the same time as Zakharov left the US, it was clear to all neutral observers that this was as much a swap as the handovers between KGB and CIA in Berlin had been during the sixties.

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Both John Walker and Jonathan Pollard had targeted the Navy; other branches of the US military fell victim to Soviet agents during the late eighties. In 1987, United States Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree was the first marine convicted of spying against the US; two years later, Warrant Officer James W. Hall III, who described himself as ‘a traitorous bastard, not a Cold War spy’, was found guilty of betraying hundreds of secret documents to both the Stasi and the KGB.

When writing to support a reduction in the thirty-year prison term to which Lonetree was sentenced, his commanding officer, General Alfred M. Gray Jr., wrote that the young marine wasn’t motivated by ‘treason or greed, but rather the lovesick response of a naive, young, immature and lonely troop in a lonely and hostile environment’. Lonetree had fallen for the charms of Violetta Sanni, a Russian girl who worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he was posted as a guard. Despite rules prohibiting fraternization with members of the opposite sex in a Communist country, they began an affair.

Lonetree fell head first into the honey trap, and began providing Violetta’s ‘Uncle Sasha’ (KGB agent Alexei Yefimov) with photographs and floor maps of the embassy, as well as details of American agents. When he was posted to Vienna in mid-1986, he continued to supply information willingly to Uncle Sasha. That December though, he reconsidered what he was doing, and after contemplating suicide, confessed. Although it seemed at the time as if his actions had led to the deaths of around twenty CIA agents, it later transpired that the names he passed had already been supplied to the Soviets by Aldrich Ames. Lonetree’s thirty-year sentence was reduced to fifteen and he was freed on parole in 1996.

James W. Hall III was a very different proposition. His career as a spy for both the Stasi and the KGB was brought to an end following the debriefing of an East German defector, Dr Manfred Severin, who mentioned an American soldier who had provided multiple documents. Hall admitted his guilt to Severin and an FBI agent posing as a Soviet contact in December 1988, bringing to an end a six-year period working for the Communists.

Hall was recruited to the Stasi in 1982 by Huseyin Yildirim, an auto-mechanic at the US Field Station in Berlin, although he had made contact with the KGB a couple of weeks earlier. He would claim later that his motives were purely financial: ‘I wasn’t terribly short of money,’ he told the FBI agent who arrested him. ‘I just decided I didn’t ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I’m not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else.’

During his time in Berlin, and later Frankfurt, Hall provided documents regarding electronic eavesdropping operations carried out by the Americans to Yildirim or KGB officers, and was paid in dollars or German marks. There was concern at the time of his arrest that Yildirim might have been running a spy ring out of the Berlin Field Station: ‘We are looking at the potential — and it’s so far just potential — that this could be the Army’s Walker case,’ one investigating officer said, during preparations for Yildirim’s trial; current assessments agree that Hall caused as much damage during his six years as Walker did in eighteen.

Hall admitted that he delivered between thirty and sixty documents to his handlers, which led to a programme designed to exploit a Soviet communications vulnerability uncovered in the late seventies being rendered useless, as were plans to disrupt electronic commands and surveillance. ‘Without commenting on the specifics, it appears that Hall did very serious damage,’ Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time. Some of the material he provided, such as the National SIGINT Requirements List, enabled Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf to ‘take relevant countermeasures’ against American plans.

Hall was court-martialled and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment; Yildirim received a life sentence, with the FBI telling his lawyer in 1997 that they ‘think it is not inappropriate for him to rot in prison. They say his work might not have caused physical harm to Americans, but he hurt a lot of Americans by contacting them, so that they lost security clearances and ruined their careers.’ He was, however, released in 2004, and on his return to Turkey, boasted of his affairs during his spying missions.

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Huseyin Yildirim was by no means the first spy to brag about his career after retiring or being forcibly removed from the game. Robert Hanssen claimed that he was inspired as a child by Kim Philby’s interesting take on his career in his book My Secret War (although this was clearly another of Hanssen’s fabrications: he was actually twenty-four when the KGB spy’s book was published). Some career retrospectives have become the authoritative sources on events — Victor Cherkashin’s book on handling Ames and Hanssen provides perspective that no one else could have had; Oleg Gordievsky’s account of his interrogation shows the way in which the KGB operated against one of their own. One book, however, became the cause of considerable problems for the British government.

MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher attracted considerably more attention as a result of the government’s actions than its not particularly well-written pages deserved. After his retirement in 1976, embittered at being awarded a lower pension than he felt he deserved, the former MI5 agent moved to Tasmania and cooperated with British writer Chapman Pincher’s expose of British intelligence in Their Trade is Treachery, published in 1981. This rehearsed Wright’s beliefs that Sir Roger Hollis had been a KGB agent. He then appeared in a World in Action television documentary on 16 July 1984, publicly accusing Hollis. Both were in breach of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act and an agreement on his retirement ‘never to disclose anything I knew as a result of my employment, whether classified or not’.

Wright worked on his own book, and although some publishers were put off by warnings from the government, Heinemann decided to put the book out through their Australian subsidiary. Determined to stop it by whatever legal means necessary, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, began proceedings in Australia. This unfortunately meant that Havers had to admit, solely for the purposes of the court case, that Wright’s allegations were accurate. This undermined the case for publication not being in the public interest, particularly since Hollis had helped to set up the Australian security service, the ASIO.

The government’s case wasn’t helped by its official position that it still refused to acknowledge the existence of MI6 — which led to a surreal moment where Sir Robert Armstrong had to agree that the service had existed while Sir Dick White was head of it (since he had volunteered that information in an earlier answer), but could not admit it had any prior or subsequent existence! Many agreed with Wright’s co-author, World in Action director Paul Greengrass’ assessment of the case: ‘It became a great set-piece encounter — conflict, really — trying to define where the boundaries lay between the government’s desire to protect national security and our right as citizens to know what is done in our name.’ Unsurprisingly, the government lost the battle, and Spycatcher, with its allegations about a plot against Harold Wilson, and considerable manipulation of the facts, was published in Australia and America.

Apart from allowing an insight into the mindset of some of those employed by MI5 during the height of the Cold War, the Spycatcher Affair did have one very important consequence: it was clear that it was impossible for the government to continue maintaining that the security services MI5 and MI6 didn’t exist. The Security Service Act of 1989 was the first in a number of Acts of Parliament that eventually put both services on a full constitutional footing.

Greengrass later went on to great fame in the fictional spy world as director of the second and third films based on Robert Ludlum’s spy Jason Bourne, as well as the drama documentary United 93, about the third plane involved in the 9/11 hijackings.

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