The conflict in Syria during 2012 brought the idea of a ‘new Cold War’ back into focus. With the CIA assisting the rebels and the Russians helping to maintain the existing regime, at the time of writing it seemed as if ‘proxy wars’ like those waged in the fifties and sixties are being fought once more, as the ideologies of East and West clashed. But beneath all the rhetoric about a change in Russian attitudes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, did anything really change? Wouldn’t it, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism marked a new phase in the Cold War, which has been fought constantly since then?
It is open to debate as to how much difference there is between the KGB and the agencies that were formed from its members and apparatus. The KGB’s First Directorate — responsible for overseas operations — became the Foreign Intelligence Service, initially headed by Yevgeni Primakov. As its spokesman Yuri Kobaladze pointed out in 1994, their main purpose was information-gathering from overt and covert sources: ‘That does not mean we will stop gathering information on you, and you on us, right? There are friendly states but no friendly intelligence services.’ The Second Directorate eventually became the FSB after Boris Yeltsin disbanded the Ministry of Security following questions about its loyalties during his struggles with the Russian parliament in 1993. Disingenuously, it claimed that it too could close down if the CIA activities in Russia were discontinued.
There was little chance of that. The discovery of Russian spies Aldrich Ames in 1994, and Edwin Pitts and Harold Nicholson two years later — all of whom were willing to work for the KGB’s successors — seemed to justify the pessimistic outlook of some in America who felt that the overt friendliness that was being displayed by the Clinton administration to the former Soviet Union was unwarranted.
FSB Director Nikolai Kovalev commented in 1996 that ‘There has never been such a number of spies arrested by us since the time when German agents were sent in during the years of World War II.’ Around four hundred foreign intelligence staff were either arrested or placed under surveillance in Russia over the previous two years, and the FSB were quick to publicise their successes: Platon Obukhov, a former Russian Foreign Ministry staffer, was arrested in April 1996, for allegedly communicating by radio with a member of the British Embassy staff and passing on political and strategic defence information to MI6. The FSB claimed this was the biggest failure by the British since the time of Penkovsky. Obukhov was sentenced to eight years in prison, but was re-tried in 2002 and sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Vladimir Sentsov was also tried for spying for Britain, and received ten years in jail: the worker at a defence institute was charged with selling technological secrets to MI6.
Strategic Missile Forces Major Dudinka was caught while trying to get $500,000 from ‘a foreign intelligence service’, according to the FSB. He had classified information ready on a diskette, including the command and control system for a missile army. Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Dudin of the FAPSI (the Russian equivalent of the NSA) was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment after making contact with the German BND. Major Dudnik from the Russian Centre for Space Reconnaissance was caught handing top-secret satellite photos over to Israeli intelligence; they were also running an agent inside the GRU, who was arrested too.
The CIA lost an asset only referred to as Finkel in the FSB reports after he was convicted of passing on secret defence research to the Agency for ‘monetary reward’. A former adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also caught by the FSB. Known only as Makarov, he had worked for the CIA since his time at the Soviet Embassy in Bolivia back in 1976, but according to the FSB records, he had only received $21,000 for his efforts.
The FSB weren’t overly keen on the new culture of openness that was supposed to characterize the new Russia. A survey of the Russian press in the mid-nineties shows a number of cases where the FSB arrested people on charges of spying although what they were doing was revealing information publicly, rather than selling it to foreign governments.
Boris Yeltsin made a key appointment to the FSB in July 1998, when he placed Vladimir Putin in charge as director, a position he held until becoming Acting Prime Minister in August 1999. Putin had served in the KGB between 1975 and 1991, resigning on the second day of the attempted coup that August. His more hardline approach would be cited as the cause of Russia’s sometimes more intransigent attitude during his presidency of the country in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Echoes of the old Cold War tensions flared up more openly from time to time. When retired KGB officer Vladimir Galkin landed at JFK airport in New York in October 1996, he found himself an involuntary guest of the FBI, based on charges that a few years earlier he had tried to gain information on Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme from Data General Corporation. The FBI had caught the men he had been running, but without his testimony they didn’t have a case, so in violation of the unwritten agreement between the CIA and the Russians that former intelligence officers would be left alone, they arrested Galkin. Although the Bureau offered him a choice between thirty years in prison or assistance as a defector, he created a third option, demanding a phone and calling his wife in Moscow. She alerted Russian intelligence, immediately escalating the situation. In response, DCI John Deutch put pressure on the FBI and the Justice Department to drop the charges; Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin personally complained to US Vice President Al Gore. The FBI caved in, which probably saved countless former CIA operatives then working in Russia from problems.
A clear distinction was made between intelligence operatives for foreign countries who had previously been enemies but were now (however loosely) allies, such as Galkin, and those who they ran, whose treacherous activities had not previously come to light. Some of these were uncovered as a result of the incredible and painstaking work carried out by Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to the West in 1992 bringing with him the fruits of his labours in the KGB archives. Over a period of ten years, he made copious notes on classified files, which he concealed in milk churns near his dacha upon his retirement. These gave details on past and present KGB agents, and as they were analysed, provided the basis for numerous arrests around the Western world.
These included former NSA clerk Robert Lipka, who first started working for the KGB in the mid-sixties. According to the head of the Washington residency at the time, who was responsible for assessing the information, Lipka was passing over whatever he got his hands on, some of which was ultra-sensitive, but was mostly of little value. He was motivated by money — payments of $1,000 being standard — which he used to put himself through college. He worked for the KGB until 1974, and then was willing to be reactivated when approached by ‘Russians’ in 1996. MI6, who had access to Mitrokhin’s papers after the CIA turned them down, had passed on a warning to the FBI, who set up a sting operation to catch Lipka.
The Mitrokhin papers also assisted with the eventual arrest of George Trofimov. They gave enough information to identify Trofimov and his KGB handler in 1994, but under Germany’s Statute of Limitations, they could not be charged. It seemed as if he would walk clear but the FBI were determined to get sufficient evidence to arrest him. When Trofimov returned to Florida after his retirement, he was approached by an FBI agent posing as a member of the SVR. Trofimov would later claim that he made up a story of passing information to the KGB to try to gain cash: ‘I can’t explain the logic behind it anymore,’ he told CBS in 2009. ‘My major logic was, I need money, they need a reason to help me. They need a justification, so I’m going to try to provide them with that. And that’s what I did.’ In an unusual twist, one of the star witnesses against Trofimov at his eventual trial in 2001 was the KGB’s Oleg Kalugin, who had described meetings with the American in his memoirs. Still maintaining his innocence, Trofimov was sentenced to life imprisonment.
If the upper echelons of the American agencies had hoped that information from the Mitrokhin archive, coupled with their own trawling of the various Eastern bloc countries’ intelligence agencies’ papers in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism, would mean there were no more nasty surprises coming similar to Aldrich Ames, they were in for a nasty shock in 2001. Robert Hanssen was finally caught red-handed; according to some accounts, his immediate reaction was: ‘What took you so long?’
It was a fair question, and one that was asked at many levels during the inevitable post-mortem. Hanssen had curtailed his own work for the Soviets two weeks before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, shortly after visiting another priest and confessing his sins, as he had a decade earlier. He had warned the KGB that he was about to receive a promotion which would move him ‘temporarily out of direct responsibility’ although he quoted General Patton’s remark before the Normandy invasion: ‘Let’s get this over with so we can go kick the shit out of the purple-pissing Japanese.’ It wasn’t the only time that he would cite the general — and this particular coarse phrase would prove to be Hanssen’s undoing.
Hanssen briefly reactivated contact with the GRU in 1993, interested to see if the information he had previously passed to the KGB had been shared with Soviet military intelligence. However, although he introduced himself as ‘Ramon Garcia’, expecting to be recognized, the GRU man he approached thought it was an FBI
