Tom, I Read 20 Cia Agents Captured, Tortured or Killed Because of Clinton Hijinks.
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London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the meridian of his career. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or master, of the KGB station in the British capital. Moscow seemed to have no clue he'd been secretly working for MI6, the British hush-hush intelligence service, for 11 years.
That Friday, Gordievsky received a cable ordering him to report to Moscow "urgently" to confirm his promotion and meet with the KGB's ii highest officials. "Cold fear started to run down my back," he told me. "Because I knew it was a death sentence."
He'd been back at headquarters merely four months earlier, and all seemed well. Now, he feared, the KGB's counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. Just if he returned home, he could be shot.
His MI6 handlers assured him they'd picked upwards no sign annihilation was wrong. They urged him to go to Moscow, but they also provided him with an escape plan in case he signaled that he was in danger.
Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go.
**********
Athens, May 21, 1985: After the Tuesday-morning time staff coming together at the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind to talk to his dominate, the local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet armed forces intelligence agency.
Every bit the deputy main, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the Us and the other NATO countries. Subsequently they chatted for a while, the rezident said, "By the way, Sergei, this cablevision came in" and tossed information technology over. It said Bokhan's son, Alex, eighteen, was having trouble in military schoolhouse and suggested the deputy take his vacation at present, three months early on, and return to the Soviet Union to deal with him.
Bokhan froze. "Stay calm," he recalls telling himself. "They know."
His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was "Mole." Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 years—and feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for ten. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. But a few days before he had called his brother-in-law in Kiev, where Alex was studying, and been assured his son was doing well.
Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. He decided to leave Athens—but not for Moscow.
**********
Moscow, Baronial iii, 1985: It was 2 a.thou. when Andrei Poleshchuk got dwelling house. The 23-yr-onetime journalist had been working belatedly for Novosti, the Soviet printing bureau. Through the windows of the footing-flooring apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. A big man let him in and flashed a badge.
"Your father's been arrested," the homo said. He would not say why.
Arrested? Impossible. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, nigh recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria.
For months, Andrei had been hoping his begetter would detect him an flat. He had graduated from school and establish a practiced job, and he wanted to live on his own. Housing in Moscow was almost impossible to notice, fifty-fifty for a KGB officer, but old that May, he'd received a seemingly miraculous letter from his father. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could purchase for him; his father decided to take his vacation early on and come domicile to close the bargain. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door.
"Information technology was surreal, like a bad nightmare," Andrei told me. "I could not believe what was happening. I went into the bath, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror."
The KGB men searched the flat all night. "In the morning, they took us—my mother, my grandmother and me—and put the states in separate blackness Volgas," Andrei said. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation.
On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. One of them finally answered: "For espionage."
**********
The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIA's assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned.
Faced with these unexplained losses, the CIA in October 1986 fix a pocket-size, highly undercover mole-hunting unit to uncover the cause of this disaster. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, information technology seemed that the mole hunters had institute their quarry. When he began spying for the Russians almost a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would exist of incalculable value to the KGB. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting.
After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames' married woman, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would exist spared a long prison judgement if he cooperated fully with the authorities. In extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked most his nine years of spying for Moscow—including the 24-hour interval when he turned over, in his words, the identities of "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me."
That twenty-four hour period was June 13, 1985, by Ames' business relationship. In his fourth-floor part at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he wrapped up 5 to vii pounds of hush-hush documents and walked out of the building. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a pop Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Diplomatic mission official named Sergei Chuvakhin. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH.
Only the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames' account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen nether suspicion in May 1985—before Ames insists he handed over the documents.
"The timeline just didn't piece of work" to explain Gordievsky's recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. "At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed....If it wasn't Ames, and then it was someone else, and so we began to search for the source of the compromise," Wiser said.
That raised a possibility that remains, even today, a subject field of deep concern amid counterintelligence agents, a problem privately acknowledged merely little discussed publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed past a mole inside U.S. intelligence whose identity is still unknown. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is standing.
The mere belief that there'south another mole, whether correct or non, can cause chaos inside an intelligence bureau. During the 1960s, a corrosive mole hunt led by James J. Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at the Soviet Spousal relationship, and disrupted the lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired or sidetracked in their careers. And still to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isn't really an option, either. The stories of Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Bokhan and Leonid Poleshchuk—reported hither in extensive new detail and based on interviews with Gordievsky, Bokhan and Andrei Poleshchuk, as well as former FBI and CIA officials—propose the impairment a mole can exercise.
**********
As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked upwardly signs that he had gambled wrong. On the front end door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used considering he had lost the central; he had to pause in. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat.
Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, collection him to a KGB dacha, proverb some people wanted to talk to him. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dacha'south bedrooms. He had been drugged. A KGB full general told him he had confessed. "Confess again!" the full general roared.
Gordievsky was taken domicile, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the adjacent day. "We know very well that you've been deceiving usa for years," he said. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, simply he would exist immune to remain in a not-sensitive KGB department in Moscow.
It was credible that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough bear witness to abort him. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. "They expected I would do something stupid," he told me. Only it was just a matter of time. "Sooner or later they would arrest me."
His escape program was leap under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the embrace open to read the instructions. He was to stand up on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a "British-looking" man who was eating something. He did and then, only nothing happened. He tried once again, following the fallback programme, and this time a man carrying a greenish purse from Harrods, the upscale London section store, walked by eating a candy bar. It was the bespeak to launch his escape.
On the appointed 24-hour interval he startedproverka, or "dry-cleaning"—walking an elaborate road to throw off anyone who might exist watching him. From a Moscow railroad station, he made his manner by railroad train, autobus and taxi to a point nearly the Finnish-Soviet border, where he hid in some grass by the roadside until 2 cars stopped.
Inside were three British intelligence agents—the candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievsky's MI6 case officeholder in London. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a erstwhile CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified State Rover. Had the Russians examined the car, they would take seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. But this Land Rover's driveshaft had been rerouted through i of the vehicle's doors, the quondam CIA officeholder says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in outcome hiding in plain sight.
They drove through several checkpoints with no problem, but they had to end at Soviet customs when they reached the border. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close by—Alsatians, he later learned. Minutes passed. His fearfulness mounted. He started having trouble animate. The women fed the dogs tater fries to distract them. Then the car started up over again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out Sibelius'Finlandia. He was complimentary.
**********
In Athens, Bokhan chosen an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Diplomatic mission. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. "You have the wrong number," he was told.
The coded substitution triggered a coming together that nighttime with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser, who cabled headquarters in Langley that BLIZZARD was in problem. Soon at that place was a program for an "exfiltration," the CIA'southward term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign land.
Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their ten-year-quondam girl, Maria, to the beach. He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIA—information technology would have put her in mortal danger—only now he had to say something. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Would she ever live in the W?
"What country?" Alla asked.
"It doesn't matter," he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: "Due south milym rai i v shalashe." If y'all dearest somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent.
"I don't want to live in a tent," she said.
He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. They had a sumptuous lunch—Bokhan knew it might exist his terminal repast with his family—and Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Later they drove home, he packed a gym bag and appear that he was going for a jog. And so he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye.
He drove around Athens in his BMW for close to an hr to make certain he wasn't existence followed, then walked into a 100-foot pedestrian tunnel under a highway. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other terminate. In the back seat were a jacket, chapeau and sunglasses. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe business firm. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. Later on stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a armed services jet flew him across the Atlantic. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several blackness cars and people on the tarmac. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. "No," he was told, "they're here for yous."
He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers.
"Welcome to the U.s.," i of them said.
**********
Later months of interrogation at Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told his captors he wouldn't answer any more questions unless they told him who his father worked for. "That's when they showed me a slice of paper with the words, 'I met Joe,'" Andrei told me. "It was in my father's handwriting." Leonid Poleshchuk knew his get-go CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, every bit Joe. "It was the KGB'due south way of saying my father worked for the CIA," Andrei said.
Earlier Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. The agency cautioned that it would exist too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the coin would be in Moscow, stashed inside a imitation rock.
What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the "flat" was a KGB operation. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate.
Leonid never made information technology to the rock, his son said. A Russian Tv documentary shows a shadowy effigy picking it up, simply Andrei said it is an actor, not his begetter.
In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to expiry. "At showtime I couldn't even recognize him," Andrei said. "He had lost a lot of weight. He was thin, pale and obviously ill. He was like a walking dead human being. I could sense he had been tortured." Leonid was executed on July xxx. The KGB told Andrei his male parent's remains were cremated and there would be no grave.
**********
In the history of U.S. intelligence, simply three major moles—men whose betrayals had lethal results—accept been identified.
Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and little theft. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a popular-up dummy in his car's passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). Just the day before, Moscow had appear that a Soviet defence force researcher named Adolf One thousand. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachev's unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researcher's identity. (Howard, Russian regime reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. I news account said he had fallen downwards the stairs and broken his cervix.)
After Ames, at that place was FBI amanuensis Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of ii FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
U.Due south. counterintelligence agents take established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. So the discrepancy between Ames' timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained.
In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI amanuensis who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985—almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, "we believed it was important for us to consider the strong possibility that Gordievsky was compromised past someone inside the U.South. intelligence customs."
Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken well-nigh the date—Ames has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB. But Ames always insisted to the FBI, the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee that he revealed no meaning sources earlier his coming together at Chadwicks. In Apr 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were really working for the KGB—"dangles," in intelligence parlance. He did so, he said, to testify his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: "I'm quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April '85, until June 13th."
**********
For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long subsequently the initial shock passes. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters in that location, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would non be posted back to London. "When I came to Moscow, she left," he says, taking the children with her on a vacation.
Afterwards Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. He traveled frequently, to the United states, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, Due south America and the Eye Due east. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB.
He always hoped Leila would join him in England. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by half dozen years of separation proved too much to repair. By 1993 their marriage was over.
Sergei Bokhan was too separated from his family for half dozen years. Within 2 weeks after his flying to the United States, he had a new name, a false background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta. He stayed in safe houses in Virginia at outset, and so lived one-half a year in California to larn English language, moved back Due east and consulted for the CIA and some U.South. companies.
When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. "For two years I went to Lefortovo ii, three times a week," Alla Bokhan told me. "We had neighbors that were very close. Everyone avoided me. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went downward the stairs. I had no job. When I plant a job, the KGB called and they fired me. That happened several times."
Finally, in 1991, with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup confronting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities permit Alla and her girl get out. They flew to New York and, with help from the CIA and the FBI, were reunited with Sergei at a motel most John F. Kennedy International Airport. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big handbasket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Maria, then xvi, was conveying the patatuff.
Bokhan's son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. He works as a computer programmer. For a long time he resented the impact of his father's CIA spying on his ain life. "I was angry because I was dropped from military schoolhouse and sent to the Ground forces, far off, near Vladivostok," he said. "I was 18 years old." He sees that episode differently now. "Later on many years, I understood him. It's OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. He didn't have a choice." Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity.
Andrei Poleshchuk told me his father's abort was a disaster for his mother. "It shortened her life," he said. "Soon later on his arrest she complanate psychologically. I will never forget the 24-hour interval when I got habitation and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. Her optics were empty. Information technology was scary."
The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. After some months, she was released. Just, he adds, "I would never, ever come across her smile again." She died 3 years later, in 1988.
After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. In 1988, he took a Moscow river prowl and met "a blond, bluish-eyed and very beautiful" woman named Svetlana, who worked for an automotive magazine. They married in 1993, afterward the collapse of the Soviet Wedlock, and he worked for an independent paper in Moscow for a time. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the Usa. They accept 2 children, and he works every bit an independent research analyst for concern and government contractors in Northern Virginia.
Soon afterward they arrived in the United States, at that place was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. "Afterward, we drove to a dwelling house in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe," Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a eating house tucked abroad on a side street in Washington. Leonid's original instance officeholder "blamed himself for years for letting my father down. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some activity by him, some error, had led to his betrayal."
Earlier his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a golden watch to his CIA example officer at the time. "He asked information technology be given to Joe, with a message, 'Here is something from Leo.'" By the time Joe learned of the souvenir, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. "Joe said to his people, 'Keep the picket, I want to give it to his son.'" At a reception after the church building ceremony, Joe gave Andrei the lookout man.
He was wearing it the 24-hour interval nosotros met.
**********
Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Long later on the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his thirty-year career at the CIA, is convinced in that location was a traitor, as nevertheless undetected.
"Some of information technology just didn't add together up," he says. "The mole isn't just some guy who stole a few secrets. He might be dead, or he's living in his dacha now. And the intelligence civilisation is not going to allow that go. In that location is no statute of limitations for espionage. These things accept to exist run to ground."
If in that location is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to endeavour to decide the full extent of his treachery. If it should plow out that the mole is no longer alive, the intelligence agencies would still run a harm cess to endeavour to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed.
"That the KGB ran a '4th mole' is undeniable," Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officeholder, has written. Of form Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may accept been unable to resist a take a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA.
It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk vicious under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubtfulness it.
John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a quaternary mole. "I always idea there was some other one," he told me. "At that place were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldn't put our finger on."
And Bearden says, "I remain convinced there is a fourth man. Maybe a fifth. I talked to some former MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Either one of ours or theirs."
More From Smithsonian.com:
When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-unexplained-cold-war-fbi-cia-180956969/
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