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The end of the Cold War had not been a moment to relax for Directorate S. Rather it was a time to double down. The world was fluid and uncertain and that meant intelligence was more important than ever. In the first few months after the coup, even while the future of the whole KGB was uncertain, a decision was taken to increase the focus on illegals. “The world is not as safe as some people present it to be,” Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Chief Directorate, explained soon after he retired. “So I think it would be a very safe measure and a good precaution to strengthen the illegal branch.”
The emphasis on illegals was part of a traumatic shift by the new SVR. In the early 1990s it was forced to cut its overseas network of officers operating under diplomatic cover by a third. The fact that relations with the West were improving offered new opportunities, though. In the Cold War, it was hard for Russians to get visas to the West. Now that commercial ties were growing, spies could be placed under cover in business ventures. And the openness also offered the chance to dispatch more illegals. “While favourable circumstances exist it is essential to utilize the repose to deploy to the West as many illegals as possible and to cultivate and recruit more special agents,” one member of the directorate, Alexander Kouzminov, later explained. It was almost as if, as everything else crumbled, the illegals became even more important. But they were about to be dealt a serious blow.
DRESSED IN SHABBY clothes, a Russian knocked on the door of the American embassy in one of the Baltic states in March 1992. He was turned away disappointed, not once but twice. The Americans seem to have been nervous that the elderly man claiming he used to work for the KGB may have been a test of their new, more friendly relationship with Moscow. So the next stop for the Russian was the British embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he explained to a female diplomat that he had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and had access to top secret material. The Russian pulled open his bag. Inside were spicy sausages, bread, and dirty clothes. But he also pulled out some handwritten notes. These, he explained, were the names of illegals operating in the West—both their real identities and their cover names. The British diplomat immediately called MI6. At the time, the British Secret Service was based at Century House in Lambeth, a grubby, twenty-story tower block. It was a gloomy place that reeked of the past. “Are you still here?” officials from the rest of government would sometimes joke with its chief, Colin McColl, when they saw him. The Cold War was over and people were asking what exactly spies were for. But the team that dealt with Russia, and which sat on the thirteenth floor with a panoramic view of the nearby Oval cricket ground, had no intention of stopping even though their old adversary was on the back foot. The Russian defector in Riga, they soon learned, was a prize of the highest order. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who now wanted to inflict as much damage as he could on his former employers. He had secretly copied out and then buried large chunks of the KGB’s operational history in the garden of his dacha.
MI6 organized Mitrokhin’s exfiltration via boat on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while a young officer dug up his files so they could be removed in six large trunks. Three thousand five hundred counterintelligence reports would be sent to thirty-six countries. The US file alone consisted of eight hundred pages. The CIA counterintelligence chief rued the fact he had to travel to London cap in hand for material that could have been his. The FBI, meanwhile, said it was “the most detailed and extensive pool” of intelligence about enemy spies they had ever received. It led directly to a number of illegals, one of them a KGB man living on the American East Coast under the name Jack Barsky. He was put under surveillance by the FBI, who overheard him confessing who he really was to his wife. Disillusioned, he had actually told the KGB back in 1988 that he had been dying of AIDS so that he could give up spying and bring up his child.
Fortunately for Heathfield and Foley in Canada, they had been deployed after Mitrokhin had retired in 1984. But the defection meant that Moscow could not be sure that the legend of any illegals trained before that date had not been blown. When the scale of the disaster became clear, the SVR knew it would have to rebuild its deep cover networks by sending out even more new illegals.
In Britain, there were only limited resources to follow up the two hundred leads Mitrokhin produced about possible agents. The domestic security service MI5 had cut back its counterespionage teams by more than half between 1990 and 1994. A joint MI5-MI6 team targeting Russians in the United Kingdom had been disbanded. In one case a team was passed an intercept suggesting a message was about to be picked up from a drop site, offering the chance to catch a Russian intelligence officer in the act. But at the last moment, the surveillance team was pulled off to deal with something considered a higher priority. The sense was that all of this spy-versus-spy stuff was a bit old-fashioned. There was an important contrast in the 1990s. Western leaders and policy makers thought the Cold War had been won and Russia barely mattered anymore. Russia would “naturally” end up a liberal democratic state. That meant spying on Russia and catching Russian spies was no longer a priority. There were other threats to worry about now. But meanwhile, Russia, on the back foot, felt it needed intelligence on its old adversaries more than ever, precisely because it was vulnerable.
IN MOSCOW, CIA and MI6 officers found themselves in a strange new world. A few months after the coup, John Scarlett became MI6’s first-ever head of station who was “declared” to the other side’s spies. It was a second Moscow posting for the future MI6 chief and as he walked the streets, he could sense how the speed of the Soviet Union’s collapse had been bewildering and traumatic. “People were out in the streets selling their personal belongings,” he later recalled. Russia had gone from being a superpower seeing itself as on a par with the United States to an economic basket case. Some liberals in Moscow had hoped for an infusion of support from the West. Instead all they got were businessmen out to make money and some economists from Harvard promoting “shock therapy” in the form of relaxing price controls and privatizing state industries to create “popular capitalism.” The result was a disaster. The economy went into in free fall, with prices skyrocketing, savings disappearing, manufacturing collapsing, and unemployment rising rapidly. This was a catastrophic first experience of Western capitalism in the early 1990s. For most people shock therapy simply created shock. The West saw outward signs of change in elections and privatization but it did not see the pain inflicted on ordinary people. But then it was not really that interested. The Cold War was over. It had won. And so who needed to worry about Russia?
As Western spies sat down with their old adversaries over vodka, they could sense the Russians struggling to come to terms with their new status. But in the meetings there was more drinking than trust. Each side thought the other had not stopped spying. And each was right. The SVR was certainly going through difficult times, but those who watched Russia closely in the CIA began to see warning signs that the old enemy was returning faster than anyone realized. In one officer’s mind, the KGB had splintered but then reconstituted itself to fight again, a bit like the robot in the Terminator films. But no one at the top was paying attention to the warnings of people dismissed as “Cold War dinosaurs.” “People looked at me like I was insane. It was lonely,” recalls one CIA officer. While most people in the West believed Russia was changing, the old guard in the spy business—who could still feel the watching eyes on the streets of Moscow—never believed it had or would.
In Moscow, the Russians were likewise convinced MI6 and the CIA had never stopped their work against them. Many former KGB officers were convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union had been the result of subversion carried out by Western intelligence rather than internal decay. Now, the territory under Moscow’s control had shrunk and its buffer from the West had gone. The Russians thought the strategy was continuing to try to keep Russia down when the truth was almost more painful—the West at the highest policy level had lost interest in Russia. There was no master plan. But in Moscow, the spies could also see their opposite numbers in the CIA and MI6 as busy as ever. John Scarlett’s time in Moscow would end with his expulsion over the recruitment of one agent (although the real reason was a row over who his Russian counterpart would be in London). The CIA and MI6 were opening up intelligence stations in its neighborhood—including former parts of the Soviet Union like the Baltic states—which were then being used to persuade Russians to walk over the border with secrets. Russians—including former KGB officers—were lining up to sell what they knew. There were so many, the CIA was literally turning them away. The knowledge of this pained old KGB hands deeply. It was a humiliation.
In 1994, Vyacheslav Trubnikov took over as head of the SVR. Russia, he told me years later in Moscow, wanted to be an equal partner, working together against common threats like terrorism and proliferation. But instead it took the message that “Russia as the defeated side should stick to the rules and manners, which will be dictated by the victorious allies.” NATO, rather than disbanding, instead expanded closer to Russia’s borders, breaking what Moscow believed was a promise. Too many Western spies were engaged in what Trubnikov (rather endearingly) describes as “hanky panky.” He points to one Western intelligence agency running a sting operation to smuggle nuclear material out of Russia in order to make the point that Moscow could not be trusted to look after it anymore. The belief the other side had not stopped meant you could not, either.
Inside the CIA, the tension over how to view Russia remained intense. One of his subordinates recalls Milt Bearden referring to Russia as “Ouagadougou with rockets,” another remembers it being “Upper Volta with rockets,” but the meaning was the same—a country that was significant only because it happened to have nuclear missiles. Bearden suggested the CIA’s Moscow station would eventually be no different from Paris, staff remember him saying. The agency would gather intelligence on political developments but work jointly with the Russians on issues like terrorism, drugs, and weapons proliferation. That idea sent shudders down the spine of the small band of old hands. Deep inside Russia House, the CIA’s old guard were not willing to let go. They still hungrily sought the tiniest scraps of intelligence. That was because they harbored a dark secret. The hunt for spies had not ended as the Cold War concluded. For all the talk of its adversary being on the back foot, there were a select few within the CIA who knew the Russians had moles burrowed somewhere among them.
4
“Karla”
IN JUNE 1988, the CIA’s Moscow station chief, Jack Downing, had been traveling on the “Red Arrow”—the Leningrad-Moscow overnight train. In the early hours of the morning, he stepped out of his compartment to strike up a cigarette. At that moment a young Russian walked up to him, shoved an envelope into his hand, and then quickly disappeared down the corridor. This was enticing but also dangerous. The CIA man stuffed the envelope into his coat and quickly returned to his own compartment. He knew there might be cameras, so he waited until he was in a secure room at the consulate in Leningrad before he opened the envelope. Inside was a surveillance picture of himself—the type the KGB took of its targets, along with documents and a note. In the note a Russian claimed he was a KGB officer who worked in the Second Chief Directorate and whose job was to watch American spies. His marriage was on the rocks and he wanted to escape but he was willing to provide intelligence to the CIA before they got him out. It seemed a godsend after dark times for the agency in Russia.
The previous years had been bleak ones. The agency had stared into the abyss back in 1985. The CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe division had patiently built up an impressive stable of agents over a number of years. And then they watched their assets go dark one by one in a matter of months. The morning cables brought near-daily news of disasters as KGB officers spying for America literally disappeared, often failing to show up to meet their CIA handlers at an agreed time and then missing the fallback contact. Many, they would later find out, had been executed, their families only informed that their bodies had been buried in unmarked graves.
Deep within Langley, behind a door with five cipher locks, a team had been set up to try to find out why. For some it was personal—agents whose intelligence they had handled were now dead. On a whiteboard they outlined what they knew. Perhaps it was some kind of compromise in the CIA’s Moscow station? Or their communications had been broken? That was more appealing than the alternative—a traitor. In early 1986, Russia House was faced with a dilemma when a new Soviet official volunteered to spy. They took him on and had one goal: keep him alive. They kept the circle of knowledge to as small a group as possible—only a handful of people who kept off regular communications channels and who would travel roundabout routes to meet the agent. This, one veteran says, was the moment of creation of what they describe as a CIA within the CIA—an inner core determined to protect their secrets and battle the KGB. These were people who were paranoid with good reason, a kind of secret society within a secret agency. They knew they faced a formidable adversary. A foe that was determined to divert them from the truth. And this opponent had a name and, for those who met him, a face.
The Russian on the train did not give his name but the CIA code-named him “PROLOGUE.” “He played the role brilliantly,” says one person involved in the case. He would also, perhaps because of the way he came and went over the years, become known as “phantom.” The intelligence he provided included a rundown of the activities of the CIA’s Moscow station and details of the 1985 losses. He provided information that suggested that those disasters had been the result of bad tradecraft, rather than a mole. Some were skeptical about this new source but the “front office” who ran operations wanted to believe he was the real deal. The divisions over whether to believe him became bitter. There would be a show of hands on whether to trust him at one point. The decision was to keep going. There were clues that something was wrong—a piece of intelligence suggesting he was happily married, for instance, which was at odds with the story he told. But over the next three years, he would lead the CIA in a merry dance, delivering documents and diverting and distracting. He knew what the CIA wanted and he knew how to offer it to them in a way they could not resist. In 1990, the time had finally come for him to be exfiltrated. He was given false documents but never showed up for a pickup that would have taken him to a ferry to get out through the Baltics into Finland. The game was up. A cable was sent from Moscow back to headquarters with the bad news. Milt Bearden was in a room with some of the critics of the operation when he read it. “Don’t you say a f-ing thing,” he told them. The CIA had been played.
PROLOGUE had been a “dangle”—sent by the KGB to mislead and misdirect. His job was to keep the CIA off the scent of what had gone wrong in 1985. The KGB normally did not dangle its own officers because they knew so much. The fear was they might use the opportunity to defect for real. The Americans knew this, which was one of the reasons they took a chance on the man on the train. But the KGB was willing to take risks to protect its top spies. And the dangle was no ordinary KGB officer. The name of the Russian who had put on such a bravura performance was Alexander “Sasha” Zhomov. Two decades later, he would be present in Vienna in 2010 and watch a spy exchange he helped negotiate.
Little has been said publicly about him but there are those inside the CIA’s “Russia House” and who work on Russia at the FBI who to this day call Zhomov their “Karla”—the Russian spy who was the archenemy of George Smiley in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor novels. Other colleagues shy away from that reference. They dislike it precisely because they did not want to turn him into some elusive, mythic character. But that is what he would become. His name still elicits a pause and the drawing of breath from some veterans of the spy wars.
Zhomov was short, intellectually strong rather than physically so—one American who met him describes him as always well dressed, with smart Italian shoes. He had piercing gray eyes, thick eyebrows, and jet-black hair. Sometimes when they saw him over the years he would have an elegant mustache, other times not. He was no thug. “He is smart as shit,” says one American spy who came up against him. “He got inside our heads,” another says, recalling how Zhomov loved the games within games that make up espionage and the deceptions it entails. (American spies play their own games when it comes to Zhomov though, with a number trying to plant the notion he might be homosexual precisely because they know it will get him into trouble in Russia.) Those who met him often recall the silver crucifix he wore and how he would touch it occasionally, almost as if to ward off demons. In the late 1980s, he had already spent years studying the “main enemy” as a protégé of “the Professor,” Rem Krassilnikov, who ran the First Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. This was the department tasked with catching American spies. Zhomov supervised the surveillance teams that watched their every move. He was the man who would receive the daily reports of what the bugs in their houses had picked up or who had been out where or what they said on the phone. He knew their lives intimately. And in the PROLOGUE operation he got the chance to study his opponents face-to-face. This and other successes meant Zhomov would rise up in the KGB and then its domestic successor agency—the FSB—to eventually run the department hunting American spies and the Russians who spied for them.
One thing that marked out the Russians was their patience and persistence—not just in sending illegals abroad but also trying to catch foreign spies operating at home. CIA officers would come and go from Moscow Station; sometimes one would come back for a second posting after a decade away. But Zhomov was always there. He knew each individual, how they operated, and every trick and tactic they used. It meant he could immediately tell if there was some tiny change in behavior that suggested something was happening.
Zhomov’s deception operation in the dying days of the Cold War had been designed to put the Americans off the scent of the moles that the KGB had inside American intelligence. It was not lost on anybody that the KGB would not dangle one of its own officers for nothing. If PROLOGUE was a dangle, then it meant there was likely a mole he was trying to protect. The small team of American mole hunters slowly began to narrow down the possible list of traitors who had access to the compromised intelligence. The investigation waxed and waned as superiors lost interest, but the team continued its search. By 1993, the CIA team had narrowed down the list to one officer. But there was still skepticism in many quarters and the FBI would not go along with their assessment. And so it took a spy to help push the investigation over the line.
What can seem so arcane in the world of espionage between Russia and the West is that so much of what goes on is what is known as counterintelligence—the world of spy on spy. Counterintelligence is about understanding and battling your opposing intelligence service. It can seem inward looking. But it has consequences. If your enemy has a spy in your ranks, then everything you do can be compromised. Your agents’ lives are at risk and so are your secrets. Your opponent can feed in false information to deceive you. The trauma of having your intelligence service penetrated is intense. It means you have played the game and lost. It took MI6 decades to recover from the discovery that one of its most senior officers, Kim Philby, was working for the KGB (the inspiration for John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). So how do you stop such a disaster? One way is to play defense and protect your secrets and watch your own people. But that is hard (and creates the kind of surveillance state the KGB operated at home). So the best defense is a good offense. If you recruit one of their spies you can find out who they have recruited on your side. If you feared your own intelligence service was penetrated, then the most effective way of finding the traitor is not through detective work but to recruit a spy in your opponent’s intelligence service who can tell you who is responsible. It takes a spy to catch a spy. This truth drives each side to try to penetrate the other. This is the inner core of the spy world—its inhabitants sometimes drawing suspicion from their colleagues since they are looking for traitors and deception everywhere around them. It takes a particular mind-set to be able to work in counterintelligence—but for some, too much time immersed in this world of the “wilderness of mirrors” could drive you mad as you lost the ability to distinguish between deceit and truth.
IN AMERICA’S MOLE hunt, the detective work to find their mole was supplemented by vital intelligence from a KGB officer. Alexander Zaporozhsky would be one of the four men swapped in Vienna in 2010 and was one of the most important agents of the era, even though little has emerged publicly about him. Zaporozhsky had joined the KGB in 1975 and served in Africa and in the Latin America department. He was tall and athletic. Former colleagues say he was an ambitious workaholic and a risk taker. In a posting to Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, he had become fluent in the local language of Amharic and was a skilled recruiter of agents, supposedly recruiting dozens of well-placed sources. But it was not the most prestigious posting and, unhappy over his career and money, he offered to spy for the CIA. He was code-named “Max.” The Americans found him well-spoken and self-assured. “If you were casting someone for the role of a KGB colonel, he would get the part,” says one person who knew him. But he had been hard to handle, sometimes feeding erratic information to his handlers and disappearing for long periods. Eventually he would become a colonel in the SVR’s North American department. In the years of turmoil and decline in the early 1990s his disillusion grew. These were difficult times with the country in crisis and spies were eager to cash in as discipline deteriorated. In 1993, Zaporozhsky, even though he did not know the traitor’s name, passed on a piece of information that helped identify the mole that the KGB and SVR had inside the US intelligence community. For this clue, Zaporozhsky would be well rewarded but also pay a price.
The clue confirmed that Russia House itself had a traitor. Aldrich Ames was a second-rate spy who was convinced he was first-rate. For all his failings, he had still been appointed to a sensitive role working on counterintelligence in the Soviet division. In 1985, he had used the pretext of trying to recruit a Soviet diplomat to instead offer the KGB his services. In his second meeting he provided a haul of information the KGB would describe as stunning, tilting the balance of the spy wars in Moscow’s direction. “He was as lazy, sloppy, and careless at spying as he was at his CIA job,” writes former colleague Mike Sulick. When investigators closed in, they found operational notes torn up in his trash. On February 21, 1994, the FBI arrested him. The revelation that the CIA had harbored a mole working on its crown-jewel operations was a hammer blow. “His treachery devastated the CIA,” Sulick later wrote. A generation of Russian agents had been sold out and now it looked like the agency could not be trusted to keep secrets. Ames’s treachery also played into a debate in Washington that asked what the CIA was really for now that the Cold War was over. Congress and the press went on the attack. Worse, a few on the inside soon realized Ames could not have been responsible for all of the compromises. That meant there was another traitor still out there—this was the man who had made the drop in the park as the Russian coup was beginning on the Monday morning in August 1991.