Great Spies of the 20th Century

between the two countries after the Six Day War. Israel had captured thousands of Egyptian soldiers and at least twelve generals. Tel Aviv accepted their release in exchange for Lotz's wives, thus showing the importance they attached to the Mossad spy. In Egypt, however, it was never officially revealed that Lotz had been a Jewish spy.

Uri Dan

⁵⁰

[In this except, the author Uri Dan, reports to his embassy on his German colleague working at Stern]

Born and raised in Israel, I have not experienced the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but I know that the State of Israel was established so that this would never happen again. When German scientists began to work for Nasser to help produce missiles, scientists who had previously worked for the Third Reich, like any Jew living in Israel, I felt threatened. It was as if the Germans were going to destroy us again.

Vacek went pale. His pallor visibly changed when I addressed him directly:

‘Do you want the death of another Jew, Wolfang Lotz, to rest on your conscience as a German, and on that of your newspaper? Six million by Hitler and one by Stern' . I heard the clink of the silver spoon as it fell from his hands and struck the saucer of his coffee cup. He was furious:

‘You are going to play on the Holocaust as well? Listen to me carefully. I was just an adolescent at the time and feel no connection with what Hitler did. However, your argument is valid and I would not want a man to lose his life because of an article I wrote in my newspaper. I’ll see what can be done.’

Chapter 10

The Spy Who Hid Behind Another

This story has long been touted as one of the biggest espionage cases in France, when Georges Paques, a graduate of the Ecole normale superiure⁵¹ and senior NATO official, was accused of being a Soviet spy. Recruited during the Second World War, he spent two decades providing his KGB the Ecole normale superieure masters with a wealth of information. Arrested in 1963, Paques was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 by the French court. However, in 1968 General de Gaulle commuted his sentence to twenty years; and two years later, the new French president, Georges Pompidou (a fellow graduate of the Ecole normale superiure), granted him a full pardon. This meant that the so-called French ‘spy of the century' actually only served seven years in prison.

This case raises many questions, some of which have yet to be resolved.Yet in order to understand the huge shockwave that the discovery of this Soviet mole caused, one must first take into account the context of the time. Thanks to a KGB agent's defection in the early 1960s, western intelligence agencies were now discovering how their departments had been infiltrated by their enemies in the East. In Britain, for example, the truth about the famous ‘Cambridge Five'⁵² came to light. Men such as Philby and the others who had been recruited by the Soviets before the war and had been patiently gaining access to positions of responsibility in the intelligence or diplomatic services. It was discoveries such as this that sent shockwaves throughout the British intelligence network.

For the time being, France appeared to be curiously out of the way. Had the French intelligence networks escaped being infiltrated? The brutal truth would come from Washington D.C., when President Kennedy revealed the extent of Soviet infiltration in a letter to Charles de Gaulle. Dozens of moles had been uncovered - some even in the French president's own entourage! De Gaulle was furious and demanded an investigation. Prominent names were mentioned in the press and mistrust spread through all levels of government. The sole result of this unrest was the arrest of George Paques, which clearly provided the necessary smokescreen.

In essence, the Paques case can be regarded as a set of Russian dolls: the more you dig, the more layers you uncover, all with increasingly Machiavellian goals. It is a game that begins with a key moment in espionage history: the appearance of Anatoliy Klimov at the US embassy in Helsinki, along with his wife and children, in December 1961, requesting political asylum in the United States. Klimov, whose real name was Anatoliy Golitsyn, was a high-ranking KGB officer and a prominent Soviet figure. Far from being a man of action, this defector was actually an analyst. He had a fabulous memory, and as a result of the high-ranking positions he had held in the KGB, also had a good knowledge of the USSR's activities in the West. His defection was therefore an important event, and the

Americans did not want to waste the opportunity. Golitsyn was quickly transferred to Washington, where the head of the CIA's counterintelligence service, James Angleton, conducted his interrogation.

The result was unexpected: Soviet KGB agents had infiltrated seamlessly into western intelligence agencies, as well as international organizations such as NATO and the UN. It provided definitive proof against Philby and his fellow Cambridge spies. Golitsyn's revelations corroborated with the information obtained through the Venona Project.⁵³ The enormous mass of information contained in the messages, that had been intercepted over the years, could now be deciphered by the Americans, although they could never have imagined that the extent of the infiltration would be so extreme. The end result was cruel, as the revelations now meant their was mistrust between all western intelligence agencies. In the US, for example, the CIA director of intelligence for the Soviet bloc became a suspect, while in Britain, even the head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, found himself caught in the crossfire.

Consequently, the suspicion now entered the minds of some experts that Golitsyn could well be a ‘fake' defector, who had been guided by the KGB to create panic and confusion in the West. The Yourchenko case⁵⁴, for example, which also concerned a fake defector, was a good illustration of this traditional Russian espionage tactic.

However, it would be proved that Golitsyn was without doubt a genuine defector; although