Polyakov also confirmed to his case officers that the split between the two major communist powers, despite this one-off collaboration to help the Vietnamese, was genuine, and was not a manoeuvre designed to deceive the West. Yet this vital piece of information was not enough to satisfy certain CIA analysts, who instead relied on the information given by another Soviet defector, the famous Anatoly Golitsyn, in whom the equally famous James Jesus Angleton (the head of the CIA) had complete confidence.104 Golitsyn had always claimed that the break between Beijing and Moscow was a sham and purely designed to mislead the western powers. It was a sweeping statement that could not fail to cause astonishment and even lead to people doubting Golitsyn's sincerity. This was especially true when you consider that James Angleton, the head of the all-powerful CIA counterintelligence unit until the mid-1970s, immediately regarded all those who contradicted his favourite defector must consequently have been working for the KGB. Polyakov, who Angleton had always been wary of, naturally fell into this category.
Another of Polyakov's important contributions was his denunciation of many Soviet moles who were operating in the West. But were they genuine spies? Returning to Golitsyn, we know that some of the alleged spies denounced by the defector were eventually exonerated because not enough evidence had been found to convict them of anything. On the other hand, those denounced by ‘Top Hat' proved to be genuine spies, which would appear to give credit to the idea that he was operating in good faith. Or at least outwardly it gave this impression, as the history of espionage is full of examples where spies have denounced their own agents in an effort to enhance their credibility and give weight to any information that they handed over to the enemy. These smaller fish had to be sacrificed in order to save bigger ones and a spy who was about to be unmasked was often denounced without any real threat to his existing intelligence networks. In this way, as can be seen in the murder of Thomas de Quincy, espionage itself can almost be regarded as one of the fine arts.
The two moles denounced by Polyakov were actually British subjects. The first, John Vassall, was employed at the Admiralty and was blackmailed by the KGB as a result of his homosexuality. The second, Frank Bossard, worked at the Ministry of Defence as a missile guidance specialist and in all likelihood was tempted into betraying is country for money - Moscow could be very generous to its informants when necessary. Both moles were denounced by Polyakov in the mid-1960s, who handed over the KGB documents, which could only have been sent by these two spies, to his American case officers. The two men were arrested, but the British secret service, who had not been able to uncover the spies themselves, were not too happy about them being unmasked by the CIA. What is more, it could not have happened at a worse time: the shockwaves were still being felt from Philby's betrayal,105 and as a result the US were still suspicious of their British allies. What is more, Golitsyn had declared that the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent, even to the point where he was the subject of ongoing surveillance by the Americans.
The fact that these incidences all happened around the same time inevitably led to significantly cooler feelings between the US and Great Britain, so much so that Harold Wilson planned to remove the CIA station that was based in London. Would such a tactic, undoubtedly favourable to Moscow, be deserving of the sacrifice of the two spies, Vassal and Bossard, who due to their impudence would probably have ended up being caught anyway?
Edward Epstein, the American author of Deception:The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA (1989), pays reference in his book to the Peter Ustinov comedy, Romanoff and Juliet. In one scene, the prime minister of a small European country declares to the Soviet ambassador that the United States is involved in a covert operation. ‘We know they know', the ambassador responds. The prime minister then tells the US ambassador, ‘they know you know', who then replies back, ‘we know they know we know'. The prime minister returns to the Soviet ambassador who proclaims ‘we know they know we know they know'. When the American is told this he counts it all out on his fingers before finally exclaiming, ‘What? They know?!'.
Polyakov also had a key role to play in the sensitive area of chemical and biological weapons and given his high level responsibilities within the Soviet government, it was one subject in which he was very knowledgeable.
In order to gain a clear view on these issues, we must return to the end of the Second World War, when both the Americans and Russians were seriously engaged in the hunt for Nazi brainpower. Among the scientists were experts with advanced research in the fields of chemical and biological weapons, which as we now know, were to have terrible consequences. Never forget that it was a German called Fritz Haber, who had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, who invented the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi death camps. These were highly skilled areas which naturally attracted a lot of attention and both Moscow and Washington each tried to lure the scientists while showing hardly any moral conscience. It was not just the German scientists but also the Japanese who were of interest, such as the sadistic doctors of the notorious Unit 731.
Research concerning the development of chemical and biological weapons was the focus of numerous espionage and misinformation operations. The first aim was to seize the
