By 1971, Helms had finally recognized that the CIA’s Soviet Division needed shaking up. He turned to David Blee, an old Middle East hand, to fix it. Blee had made his mark in the Third World; in Delhi, he had orchestrated the 1967 defection and flight to freedom of Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. Blee didn’t want to leave his job as chief of the CIA’s Near East Division and protested that he had no experience in Soviet affairs, but Helms told him that was exactly why he wanted him. Soviet operations had to have fresh blood, and Blee, a careful bureaucrat but an outsider, was being given the cover by Helms to take on Angleton.
When Blee arrived in his new office on the CIA’s fifth floor, he found a note from Angleton waiting for him, inviting him down for a chat. Angleton, still chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, had been stunned that an outsider was taking over Soviet operations, and when Blee arrived in his darkened office, Angleton told him that he had no business whatsoever in his new job.
Blee’s years in the Middle East had given him a pragmatic sense of how to run spy cases, and he could tell instinctively that the Soviet Division had lost its way. To steer the division out of its dark corner, he cleaned house, moving out longtime managers who defended the old methods and replacing them with officers who were new to the division and had not been infected by the Angleton paranoia. Blee was careful never to directly confront the counterintelligence chief; he just went his own way without asking permission.
Soon, Gerber’s report on volunteers found its way to Blee’s desk. Blee thought its analysis made perfect sense and promptly decided to change the agency’s policies on Soviet volunteers. They were to be vetted professionally and then welcomed, not shunned. Wherever possible, they were to be persuaded to remain in place and spy from behind the Iron Curtain.
Blee named Barry Kelly, a red-haired, freckled Irishman who had served with him in the Middle East, to take over as Moscow chief and gave him orders to dust off the old files and air the place out. He was given a list of Soviets who had previously offered to collaborate with the CIA but had been dismissed or ignored for years. Kelly was told to try to resume contact, and before long he was transforming Moscow operations as dramatically as Blee was changing SE Division as a whole.
Blee also sent Havilland Smith, one of his key aides, on a whirlwind tour of the CIA’s overseas stations to convince skeptical case officers around the world that sanity had returned to Soviet operations and that it was safe once again to go after Russians. Blee’s new open-door policy quickly bore fruit, and within a few years the CIA had developed a remarkable stable of agents behind the Iron Curtain, virtually all of them volunteers.
The CIA’s paralysis during the 1960s had masked the fact that, just below the radar screen of upper management, young case officers had been busy modernizing espionage techniques, improvising new means to communicate safely and securely with spies behind the Iron Curtain. They had been frustrated that they hadn’t been able to put much of this new “tradecraft” to use during the previous decade, but now Blee’s revolution meant that their tactics could be put to the test.
Havilland Smith was one of them. Among the first CIA case officers to be stationed permanently behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1950s, Smith had returned from Prague and Berlin determined to take advantage of the opposition’s greatest weakness, rigid orthodoxy. Given high-level approval in the early 1960s to develop new tricks for case officers working inside the Soviet bloc, Smith began consulting magicians to learn about techniques of misdirection and practiced the new tactics on the streets of Washington. He folded what he learned into the newly developing concept of operational tradecraft, perfecting what became one of the CIA’s standard methods for passing messages, the so-called brush pass.
Smith’s greatest contribution was a concept that came to be known among CIA officers as “moving through the gap.” He realized that by carefully planning a surveillance detection route in a hostile city, a well-trained case officer walking a meticulously timed route, turning street corners successively, could create a lengthening gap between himself and the trailing surveillance. Eventually, he would be out of sight of the surveillance teams for a few brief moments. Messages or packages could then be laid down or picked up undetected from dead drops at carefully predetermined points on an operational run. The gap might last only a few brief seconds, but for a well-trained case officer, that might be long enough.
Certainly the tradecraft was never foolproof, and when an operation went sour, the CIA always worried that a street-level slipup was to blame. It was easier to blame bad tradecraft than to hunt for a betrayal from within, particularly among CIA officers who had been so disgusted by Angleton’s witch-hunts.
In fact, for years after Ogorodnik committed suicide and his last case officer, Marty Peterson, was ambushed in a knockdown melee beside the Moscow River, the CIA believed that some tradecraft mistake—not a KGB penetration of the CIA—was responsible. A series of unexplained incidents in 1977 actually convinced CIA Director Stansfield Turner that the agency’s Moscow operations were fatally flawed by poor tradecraft. Ogorodnik and Peterson’s explosive arrests were followed by the exposure of GRU Colonel Anatoli Filatov, GTBLIP, who had spied for the CIA while stationed in Algiers. He was arrested after he returned to Moscow, where he was caught trying to load a dead drop. His CIA case officer, Vincent Crockett, was eventually rolled up as well.
In the midst of these losses, a disastrous and suspicious fire broke out in the U.S. embassy. Soviet firemen, probably sent by the KGB, arrived to put out the flames. They were blocked from gaining access to
