After this failure they did not use this method again, but the NSA electronics did offer a significant improvement to the system. The main drawback of the Ivy Bells operation was the delay between the recording of the information and collecting of it, and so the NSA advocated the simultaneous laying of several listening devices on Soviet underwater installations, this time off the northern coast of the USSR. However, instead of collecting the device itself, it would directly transmit the information via a submarine cable that had been laid solely for this purpose and was connected to various outposts. The system would send the information collected as far as Greenland, but must then pass under an ice sheet with a total length of over 1,200 miles. Quite the expensive operation! However, in military matters, even the most astronomical figures were not scary: under Reagan, nothing was too expensive when fighting the USSR.
In was in this context that Yurchenko defected to the United States. Just after he arrived, he gave up the name of some ex-spy and casually told the officers questioning him that there was a mole in the NSA. Immediately, the minds of the CIA went to the failed Ivy Bells operation. Yurchenko stated that the NSA man had contacted him by telephone six years previously, while he himself had been stationed in Washington. He pretended not to know his name, but in reality,Yurchenko was just playing a game of cat and mouse with his interrogators. He knew that all telephone communications from the Soviet embassy were recorded by the Americans, which meant that they would have to search through six years of tape recordings.
The CIA agents immediately began their research and the voice of Yurchenko's mysterious correspondent was identified by their colleagues working in the NSA's Soviet division as being that of Ronald Pelton. He had recently resigned from the NSA and was therefore no longer useful to Russians: exactly like Howard and the other moles that Yurchenko had denounced.
Pelton was easily located and subsequently confessed. Although he had held a rather junior role with the NSA, he nevertheless had had access to highly confidential information. He knew, for example, about the Soviet communications that were being spied on by the US, including the submarine cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. What is more, Pelton had the gift of a good memory: he remembered everything and through his betrayal had provided the Russians with a wealth of information.
So why did Yurchenko put the Americans onto Pelton's trail? The goal must have been to show them that Moscow was fully aware of their electronic submarine spy project, as well as many other relating to President Reagan's famous ‘Star Wars'. For America's CIA and NSA it was a complete disaster and they were now forced to question a number of other projects and even ones already in operation.
Yurchenko had therefore briefly come to the US just for this purpose: to humble the intelligence agencies and put them in a beautiful mess. The rest, especially the humiliation of Reagan in front of Gorbachev, was, so to speak, just the icing on the cake.
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Returning to Moscow on 6 November 1985, accompanied by another KGB officer called Valeri Martinov, Yurchenko left behind a humiliated CIA who, on the eve of the American-Soviet summit, were trying to analyse its mistakes and work out what had happened. Shortly after Yurchenko arrived back in the USSR, rumours began to circulate that he had been executed and according to tradition, his family even received the bill for the bullets that had been used to kill him.The western press enjoyed this story, right up until the point where the dead man reappeared and began giving interviews. From time to time in the years that followed, the KGB would bring him out of the prison where he was supposed to be wasting away.Yet no one ever gave the final true story about his incredible round trip. It is more likely that ifYurchenko was a genuine defector, then he would have known the fate that the KGB reserved for all traitors, no matter what.
Chapter 22
Aldrich Ames: the spy who hunted spies
‘You have to bring the cat back into the house!'. In intelligence jargon this enigmatic phrase means that when you have found a significant leak in the security system, the weak link has to be identified as soon as possible and the person responsible identified.
The cat in question in this chapter is Aldrich Ames. He was only revealed as a spy very late on and before his arrest in 1994 had plenty of time to cause serious damage. It could be said that he inflicted the most significant incursion into one of the world's biggest intelligence agencies; the CIA.
The case caused a scandal in the United States and even today has ruined many people's confidence in the CIA; a confidence that had already been shaken as a result of previous spectacular failures. In the case of Aldrich Ames, however, it reached its nadir: this was an agent who worked for the KGB, then for the SVR after it took over from the KGB following the collapse of the USSR, who at the same time was working as the head of counterintelligence within the CIA. In short, the man charged with uncovering moles, was actually a mole himself!
When Ames was unmasked, he confessed and was given a life sentence. Case closed? Not exactly. His file still contained secrets as the CIA did not want the public to know the full extent of the damage caused by this extraordinary spy. Was there something even more shameful hidden away? The case itself is complicated, full of twists and turns, double movements, manipulations and betrayals. It was a case worthy of the best spy novels and a real ‘Russian doll': the more you delve into the dark
