Espionage Files: The Spy Who Went Into the Cold

 

Kim Philby is without a doubt one of the most notorious traitors in U.S. and British Intelligence History.

Numerous books, films and documentaries have been done about him over the past 3 decades. John Le’ Carre, Robert Littell and numerous other spy authors have based characters on Philby and the notorious “Cambridge 5”.

A BBC Documentary currently on Netflix right now called The Spy Who Went Into the Cold is an in-depth different kind of documentary on Philby that focuses more on the duplicitous nature of the man and how for decades he fooled some of the most well-trained intelligence officers in the world in MI6 and the CIA.

It is a study as much in the duplicity of human nature as it is the nasty business of Espionage.

If you are a Cold War or Intelligence buff, I highly recommend it.

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

Cold War and Espionage Files: The Last Casualty of the Cold War

 

Cold War Memories: The Last Casualty

In March of  ’85 I had a chance to go hang out in Copenhagen for a week with some friends. Buffoonery was the only thing on the agenda and my travel partner and I were masters of it.

It had been months since either of us had been able to relax so this was a well-deserved and much needed break. A good time was had by all and reluctantly, we made the 10-hr train ride home. We rolled up to the Bahnhof in Frankfurt hung-over, unshaven and unbathed.

Two of our group, were waiting for us at the Bahnhof. Heiney greeted me with words I hoped to never hear “jemand ist aus dem Nest gefallen” – “Someone fell out of the nest.” My butt puckered and things got serious all of a sudden. It meant we were getting reports of someone down in the East. Just saying those words in German still makes my palms sweat.

“WHO? WHERE?”   Was my first response – He said no one knew; it was all unconfirmed but it was DDR(Communist East Germany) and no one had heard from a two man team who were making a double transit through DDR to get some pictures of what we thought was a vaguely disguised Forward Area Aviation Refueling Point.

The guys would have been on their way transit DDR when the incident took place. I asked if they had missed a check-in and was told, NO. They made their last scheduled contact and shouldn’t make contact again till they got to the West.

“Are we sure it was Jürgen and the Turk… DO WE KNOW ANYTHING?” Heiney told me that I knew exactly as much as he did. The report filtered out that morning via another NATO intelligence group.

Information trickled down to us over the next 24 hours but the reports were beginning to make less sense with every new revelation. The initial report said two operators we caught and fired on, with one of them being killed.

Shortly thereafter we heard it was uniformed Soviet sentries who actually fired on someone in American uniforms. American Uniforms? – That just made no sense at all.

My boss looked at me like I was supposed to know something – “Are the Amis saying anything about you guys being at war?” Only a few months had passed since Reagan’s “We begin bombing in five minutes” speech. It shook our allies pretty hard.  I could see how the Boss could be a little edgy, but I didn’t have a clue; so I told him so. “How would I know? I work for you”

“American uniforms?” That couldn’t be right; the only uniformed personnel we had in DDR were unarmed USMLM inspectors and embassy guards. No one in their right mind would fire on them. I was beginning to have some hope that the reports were wrong but they kept coming in every few hours as the information was disseminated.

We had been home for almost 36 hours. Finally Commo called saying that Jürgen had reported in via phone relay and they were on the way… 5 hours max.

I can remember feeling guilty for thinking –  “At least it wasn’t one of mine.”

The afternoon of March 27^th, 1985 we received an official communiqué from Bonn informing us that an American officer had been killed near the Soviet tank barn at Ludwigslust.

Normally they would never fire on a uniformed USMLM inspector but apparently Major Nicholson uncovered something that the Russians couldn’t allow to be compromised.

The Soviets claimed they fired warning shots – I don’t believe them.

A few days later I figured out that I knew Major Nicholson… well to say I “knew him” is a stretch, but I did meet him a handful of times, always in Berlin; usually at a café out by Wansee or at the Gedankmal Kirche.  Meetings never lasted longer than about 10 mins, just a cup of coffee and the exchange.

I knew him as Nick. I’m not even sure he knew I was American; my English had an odd accent at the time. No one ever pegged me as an Ami; they usually guessed Czech or Romanian. I won a lot of bar bets with people trying to guess my nationality.

Nick had a driver who fooled me though – his German was perfect to the point I was sure he was German; then someone told me different. He would have heard my accent in German, so he probably knew I was American. He also warned me to not engage the Major in Racket ball – he was looking for new meat and had just offered me a game if I was up for it.

These guys were part of a U.S. Army Unit that served as the “U.S. Military Liaison Mission” – USMLM. They were assigned to roam the enemy’s back yard and do things that tended to really piss off the Soviets.

They would take pictures of secret locations, Soviet military facilities and maneuvers. They were part of a series of treaties and agreements made post WW2 that allowed each of the four WW2 victors to keep tabs on the others. The idea was that each side could, via observation, confirm that the other side was keeping true to arms control and other agreements.

I have no issue with sneaking around the enemy’s back yard, and stealing his stuff… but these guys did it – figuratively speaking – with a strobe light on their heads, wearing dayglow pink BDUs with an Emergency Locator Transmitter squealing their location to the bad guys in real time.

 

They were expected to do good HUMINT while basically flying an “I’M A SPY” flag for all to see – Somehow they pulled it off.

All military liaison mission vehicles bore a distinctive license plate and the men inside were required to be in uniform. They were monitored, harassed, sometimes threatened, limited to travel in certain areas and occasionally threatened with being shot.

Still the men in the field used pure brain power to figure out how to get around Soviet security and do the job they were sent to do. By my time they drove hot SUVs and would find their way to good observation points gather intel, take photos and get out of Dodge before the bad guys showed up.

USMLM inspectors were , for lack of a better term –Legal Spies.  They were the heart of verification during Détente and one of our best tools to keep the Soviets honest.

The Communists had SMLM (Soviet Military Liaison Mission) teams in West Germany doing the same thing, just at much less risk and with much more freedom.

Every incoming American Soldier to Europe was briefed on what to do if they saw a Soviet vehicle but they were easiest to find in downtown Frankfurt. SMLM duty was a reward given to good little communists, they had enough clandestine agents in the west that they didn’t need to work real hard.

USMLM duty, on the other hand, was pretty much limited to the crème of the crop. It took more than just testicular mass to do the job they were asked to do.

Armed with only a camera and some field glasses, Major Nicholson and SSgt. Shatz went into the mouth of the Soviet beast to get a look at what they might have stashed at the tank barn near Ludwigslust.

After shadowing a column of Soviet tanks the pair moved directly to one of the tank barns in the area and Maj. Nicholson proceeded to get some pictures.

A Soviet sentry appeared and fired several rounds at the two Uniformed Americans.

Nick was wounded and although SSgt. Shatz tried to administer medical aid… the sentry held him in the vehicle for more than an hour.

Maj. Arthur D. Nicholson bled to death in an East German forest on March 24^th 1985.

He was the last official casualty of the Cold War.

Many went before him including a French Military Liaison Mission officer who was run down by Soviet Soldiers and killed while observing maneuvers. We kept taking “unofficial” casualties for 2½ more years, right up until the wall came down.

The Cold War was never cold and men like Nick Nicholson and the other USMLM teams are a big part of the reason we survived that dark era – Not just as a nation but as a planet.

Please join me on Thursday March 24^th and tip one in honor of the USMLM teams and Ltc. Arthur D. (NICK) Nicholson – the last Cold War Casualty, it will be the 31st anniversary of his sacrifice for this Republic – Nick was just shy of his 38^th birthday when he fell.

Fratribus Sine Pari.

Read the Original Article at Havok Journal

Espionage Files: Spy vs Spies: Why Deciphering Putin is So Hard for U.S. Intelligence

American intelligence officers are trained to tackle tough targets.

But there are tough targets, and then there’s Russian President Vladimir Putin, who plays his cards so closely that it’s hard for his own advisers to divine what he’s thinking, says Gregory Treverton, chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

“Putin is so isolated that the chances that he might miscalculate and do something rash are top of my list for things I worry about,” says Treverton. “I am fond of distinguishing between puzzles — those things that have an answer, though we may not know it — and mysteries, those things that are iffy and contingent. And so how Putin is going to behave is presumably a mystery, and probably even a mystery to Putin.”

Treverton is not alone in this view.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, commander of NATO forces from 2009 to 2013, says Putin is exceptional in how little he telegraphs.

“He certainly has a cabinet of close advisers,” Stavridis says.”But at the end of the day, the strategic terrain is not on a map somewhere — it’s in between Vladimir Putin’s ears.”

That makes it hard for the CIA and other spy agencies charged with tracking Russian military and economic assets — and with anticipating what Moscow might do next on the conflict in Syria, tensions in Crimea and a wide range of other matters.

Stavridis, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, points to a couple of factors that make Putin such a difficult target.

One is the degree of control he has amassed in his 17 years as either prime minister or president of Russia. You have to look to North Korea, Stavridis says, or to Fidel Castro’s long reign in Cuba to find another ruler who wields such absolute power.

The tools of espionage — phone intercepts, satellite imagery and more — can sometimes overcome such disadvantages, but may be of limited use against Putin: He’s a trained spy himself.

Vladimir Putin joined the KGB in 1975, and was sent to Dresden in East Germany in order to spy on the West during the Cold War. There he learned both near-flawless German and near-flawless spycraft.

“Russia has always had a very strong counterintelligence capability, and Putin would be well-schooled in this,” says John McLaughlin, who served as acting director of the CIA in 2004, during Putin’s first stint as president. McLaughlin says the aides in whom Putin might confide are mostly ex-KGB, too. “The inner circle there would be very conscious of how they communicate, conscious of who meets whom. So it’s a tough environment for intelligence.”

But McLauglin adds that if you can’t peer into Putin’s mind, you still can analyze the realities he’s grappling with, which may inform his actions.

“In the case of Russia, you would look at the effect of sanctions, which have been very heavy on them,” McLaughlin says. “The fact that the ruble is now at kind of an all-time low, the fact that they have a serious capital-flight problem.”

There’s also the fact that Putin has spoken openly about his overarching goal of re-establishing Russia as a major world power. It’s up to the CIA and other spy agencies to figure out how he plans next to go about it.

Read the Original Article at NPR

Cold War Files: Gary Powers, The U-2 Spy Pilot the U.S. Did Not Love

Steven Spielberg’s most recent movie, Bridge of Spies, tells the story of a Cold War prisoner exchange between the Soviet Union and the US. The deal allowed US spy plane pilot Gary Powers to return home – but once there he faced a chorus of criticism.

Gary Powers had been in flight for four hours when his troubles began. His spy mission from an American airbase in Pakistan took him over central Russia, where, at more than 70,000 feet above the ground, he believed he was beyond the range of either fighter planes or missiles.

The 30-year-old CIA pilot, a veteran of the Korean war, expected to make his way, without incident, all the way across the Soviet Union to another base in Norway.

But when he was over the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, the unimaginable happened. His U-2 spy plane was hit by a Soviet missile barrage.

“I looked up, looked out, and just everything was orange, everywhere,” Powers recalled.

“I don’t know whether it was the reflection in the canopy [of the aircraft] itself or just the whole sky.

“And I can remember saying to myself, ‘By God, I’ve had it now.'”

 

Shockwaves hit the plane and the controls stopped responding. The blast snapped off a wing and Powers found himself hurtling down to earth in an uncontrollable spin.

What happened next is a tale Powers told to his son, Gary Junior, who was still a boy at the time.

“He thinks about ejecting – that’s the first thing pilots are trained to do – get out of a plane that’s been damaged or crippled,” says Powers’s son.

“But he realises that if he does eject he will sever his legs on the way out. The U-2 cockpit is very small, very tight, very compact. To eject you have to be in the perfect position to clear the airframe.”

Panicked, the pilot frantically tried to get himself into a position to eject safely. But after a moment’s pause Powers remembered there was an alternative escape route – he could simply open the canopy and climb out.

It was his best chance of coming out alive. But when he released the canopy, he was “immediately sucked up half-way out of the airplane”, says his son.

Powers told a 1962 Senate committee hearing that from his position part way out of the aircraft – which was spinning tail-first towards the ground – he had not been able to reach the self-destruct mechanism on the plane’s dashboard.

He was still attached to the cockpit by his oxygen pump but wrestled with it until it broke, leaving him free-falling until his parachute deployed a short time later.

Read the Remainder at BBC

 

Cold War Files: CIA Fooled by Massive Double-Agent Failure

The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.

The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.

“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.

“The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure,” he stated in a journal article published last week.

The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies “wreaked havoc” on the agency, Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as insignificant, and that congressional oversight committees also did not press the agency to reform its vetting processes.

Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the agency in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant.

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence—the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.

Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.

The CIA’s first major double agent failure occurred in Cuba and was revealed by Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987.

Aspillaga revealed that some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.

Later that year, Cuban state television confirmed the compromise in a documentary revealing the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear.

The intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer, who quoted former CIA officer Brian Latell.

In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi.

According to two East German Stasi officers, Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert, operating against CIA without inside sources was difficult.

“Naturally we tried but did not succeed in placing agents in the CIA,” they stated in their 2009 book. “Nevertheless, there was not a single CIA operation on [East German] territory that we were not able to detect using [double agents] and counterespionage operations.”

Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind.”

The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf also wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s “we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.”

“On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans,” Wolf said.

Wolf had been able to identify a CIA officer working in West Germany who was recruiting East Germans and then dispatched double agents to the officer.

Fischer says former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years.

Former CIA Director Robert Gates also said the agency was “duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.

Fischer states that the East German failure was “wall-to-wall,” from the lack of advance warning in 1961 of plans to build the Berlin Wall, to 1989, when cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.

From 1961 to 1989, all CIA intelligence on East Germany was “no more and no less than what Wolf wanted it to know,” he said.

The last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and after its 1991 collapse in Russia.

It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s.

Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass “feed material”—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents.

The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993, when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.

During that period, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA, Aleksandr Zhomov, who fooled the agency into believing he could supply information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980s.

Zhomov, who was paid an estimated $1 million by the CIA, made the fake offer in 1987 and according to Fischer, was dispatched by Moscow in a bid to protect Ames from being discovered as the source of the earlier leak.

In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from “bogus” and “tainted” sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.

The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.

Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.

A major problem for Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of agents to work for the agency. Instead, the CIA was reliant on “walk-ins,” or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations.

Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster.

“The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious,” he said, “not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War.”

The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to “cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents,” Fischer concluded.

“Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause,” he said. “To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly.”

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member, said he was familiar with some of the details on CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new.

“Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it,” said Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show “the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed.”

“What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong,” said deGraffenreid. “And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.”

David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly notes that “intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.”

Read the Original Article at Free Beacon