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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 1: Escape from Helsinki It was early evening, ten days before Christmas of 1961, and the snow, crisp and white, had covered Helsinki. Frank F. Friberg, the chief of station of the Central Intelligence Agency, was shaving, getting ready for a holiday cocktail party, when the doorbell rang at his home in Westend, a suburb four miles west of the Finnish capital. Since few people knew where the CIA station chief lived, it was with some puzzlement, mixed with caution, that he went to the door and opened it. A short, thickset man stood there in the snow with a red-haired woman and a little girl, who clutched a doll. A Russian fur hat covered most of the man's dark hair. "Do you know who I am?" he asked. Friberg said he did not. "I am Anatoly Klimov." The CIA man opened the door wider and quickly motioned the family in. He knew the name Klimov well; a KGB officer working under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Helsinki. Friberg had even studied Klimov's picture; but he had not recognized him bundled up in an overcoat and a fur hat, standing in the darkness on his doorstep. In the living room, the two men struggled to overcome a formidable language barrier. The Russian kept repeating a single word: it sounded to Friberg like "asool." Friberg was bilingual in English and Finnish -- his parents had emigrated to America from Finland, settling in the heavily Finnish community of Westminster, in north-central Massachusetts, where he was born -- but he spoke no Russian. The KGB man in turn spoke no Finnish and only broken English. Finally, Friberg handed the Russian a pencil and a piece of paper, and Klimov wrote the letters "asyl." Now there could be no mistake. Major Anatoly Klimov of the KGB was trying to write the word "asylum" in English. Friberg, alone in the house -- his wife was on a visit to the States -- had suddenly acquired a Soviet defector and his entire family. Not merely a defector but a KGB walk-in, the dream of every CIA officer. There was no talk of Klimov's remaining as an agent-in-place, reporting to the CIA from inside the KGB; the Russian, frightened for his life, gave Friberg two hours to get him out of Helsinki. After that, Klimov warned, the KGB would notice his absence and try to block his escape. The Russian also told the CIA man his true name. It was not Klimov, he revealed. It was Anatoly Mikhailovich Golitsin. *** When Golitsin walked in, Frank Friberg had been working for the CIA for ten years. The station chief was a man of medium build, with blue eyes and brown hair -- an ordinary-looking man but for a sizable fencing scar on his left cheek, earned at Harvard. He had worked for the agency under commercial cover in Sweden and traveled all over Europe, posing as a sales representative for a manufacturer. In 1957, the agency had sent him to Finland under diplomatic cover. He had been promoted to chief of station earlier in 1961. Thus, at the age of forty-nine, Friberg toiled in the shadows in an unglamorous agency outpost, a station that gained what importance it had by virtue of its geographic location on the periphery of Soviet power. The defection of Anatoly Golitsin was the major event of his espionage career, and years later, he had no difficulty recalling every detail. "I knew he was a good-sized catch," he said. "We hadn't had one of his stature since Deriabin in 1954. [1] We'd been in touch with Golitsin," Friberg added. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War, and the CIA was always alert for potential Soviet recruits. "We had someone dealing with him on visa matters, to get a better assessment of him. We knew he was KGB, but he was a hard-liner, and we thought there was no chance of getting him to defect. In fact, we thought he would be the last one to defect." Now Golitsin explained his motive to Friberg. He said he was fed up with the KGB. He had been feuding with his boss, V. V. Zenihov, the KGB resident in Helsinki. "Golitsin was a CI [counterintelligence] officer," Friberg explained. "His task was to work against the principal enemy, the U.S.A., England, and France. He told me, 'Zenihov just doesn't understand CI. And now my defection serves him right.' He wanted so much to get even with the KGB that it dominated hisentire existence. "He said he had planned this far in advance, a year to a year and a half before he actually took the step. He didn't even tell his wife until six months before, and they agreed to wait until their daughter could come to visit them. She had been in school in Moscow." The CIA station chief had to move fast. There was an eight-o'clock flight for Stockholm that night. Friberg telephoned Stephen Winsky, a young CIA officer, who sped to the house, picked up the Golitsins' passports, returned to the consulate, and stamped in American visas. That was easy for Winsky to do; his cover was embassy vice-consul. "As we were getting ready to leave for the airport," Friberg said, "Golitsin ran to the side of the driveway near the street and dug a package out of the snow." Golitsin told him that the package, which he had buried before ringing Friberg's doorbell, contained documents that he had managed to take when he left the Soviet embassy. But Golitsin kept the package with him constantly, and he never showed the contents to the station chief. On the way to the airport, Friberg rendezvoused with Winsky, who handed him back the passports. Golitsin was growing increasingly nervous. "We got him out in a little over two hours," Friberg said. "I got tickets on the commercial flight. I took him out under the name of Klements, using his Russian passport with the U.S. visa. No one questioned it, because it was so close to his 'real' name, Klimov." Friberg had, of course, alerted CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where the word of the impending arrival of a high-ranking Soviet defector was electrifying, and badly needed, news. Only eight months earlier, the CIA, after riding high in the fifties under the avuncular, pipe-smoking spymaster Allen W. Dulles, had been devastated by the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA's bungled operation on the beaches of Cuba had not only failed to overthrow Fidel Castro but ended in the death of 114 Cuban exiles and the capture of most of the rest of the almost 1,500-man brigade. It had proved a vast embarrassment to President John F. Kennedy, after only three months in office. Kennedy had inherited the covert operation from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he had given the go-ahead for the Cuban invasion and took responsibility for its failure. The setback put Kennedy at a terrible disadvantage at his summit meeting in Vienna in June with Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, who bullied the young President. Only three weeks before Golitsin appeared on Frank Friberg's doorstep in Helsinki, Kennedy had replaced Dulles with John A. McCone, a millionaire businessman from California. Richard M. Bissell, Jr., the architect of the Cuban invasion, who headed the CIA's Directorate of Plans, still lingered on as the DDP, but was soon to be replaced by his deputy, Richard M. Helms. [2] Although headquarters eagerly awaited the defector's arrival, a series of misadventures lay ahead for Friberg and the Golitsins as they set out for Washington. They made the 8:00 P.M. flight to Stockholm, only to discover that they would have to shuttle to another airport, north of the Swedish capital, for the connecting flight to New York. Golitsin, petrified at the possibility of being grabbed by the KGB, refused to set foot in another international airport. The next flight out originated in Helsinki, and Golitsin feared the KGB might be aboard. While the station chief pondered his next move, he and his charges went to ground in a safe house in Sweden for the better part of two days. Finally, Friberg arranged to borrow the American air attache's plane to fly Golitsin and his family to Frankfurt. Meanwhile, theCIA's Office of Security dispatched a three-man team, headed by Stanley C. Lach, to guard the defector. By the time Golitsin reached Frankfurt, the OS men, although unseen by Friberg, were discreetl in place. In Frankfurt, Friberg and the Golitsins boarded an Air Force plane for the States. But it was an unpressurized World War II Liberator bomber, and after half an hour, at 8,000 feet, Golitsin's daughter, who was sensitive to the altitude, began to choke. Friberg ordered the plane back to Frankfurt, where he booked a commercial flight on Pan Am to London and New York. There was another day of delay while the CIA arranged a new passport for Golitsin under yet another alias. Friberg and the Golitsins then flew to London. No sooner had they landed than British security agents swarmed over the plane, investigating a rumor that a bomb was aboard. Friberg managed to persuade the British to leave the Golitsins on the plane as all the other passengers were evacuated. The airliner eventually took off for New York, but the defector's odyssey, and Friberg's, was not over yet. A dense fog had rolled in over New York, and the flight was diverted to Bermuda. More CIA security agents were rushed to the island, where Golitsin remained overnight. The next day, Friberg and the Golitsins finally flew to New York. "He'd had enough of planes by that time," Friberg said. "We went to Penn Station and took the train to Washington." A familiar face was waiting. "We were met at Union Station by Steamboat Fulton, a case officer who knew Golitsin. His real name was Robert. He had worked with me for two years in Helsinki. He had met Golitsin at a couple of diplomatic receptions." The Russian and his family were whisked to a safe house in northern Virginia. Friberg, exhausted, checked into the Key Bridge Marriott. The station chief's job was simply to get Golitsin safely out of Helsinki and away from the KGB. But inevitably, during their seemingly endless four-day journey to Washington, the two men talked. Golitsin's English, although still halting, was improving with practice. What Golitsin said was only a tiny blip on the screen, but it was a harbinger of things to come. In Bermuda, Golitsin indicated that Golda Meir, then Israel's foreign minister and later prime minister, was a KGB agent. "He said an Israeli VIP had been in the Soviet Union in 1957, and he had got the impression this Israeli was a KGB agent. He came up with Golda Meir, because that was the only Israeli who had been there about that time." Friberg understandably concluded that Golitsin had a tendency to see spies everywhere, although he was, perhaps, not as vigilant as the KGB man who served as security chief of the Soviet embassy in Helsinki. "Golitsin told me the head of security was suspicious of a cat that kept coming through the ironwork grille on the windows. The guy thought somehow the cat was being used to penetrate their security." [3] The Helsinki station chief noticed something else during the four days he traveled with Golitsin. "He would sometimes confuse names. For instance, he gave me the name of a fairly prominent Finn whom he confused with a hard-line Finnish Communist. They had exactly the same last name, Tuominen. Poika Tuominen was scheduled to be premier of Finland after the Soviets invaded in the winter war in 1939, but he couldn't stomach it and he defected to Sweden. Erikki Tuominen had been head of the Finnish security police and he was a Communist. He was ousted around 1949, as a Soviet informant. Golitsin was saying that Poika was the bad one. Well, it was Erikki." From the start, Golitsin proved difficult to handle. "He was stubborn," Friberg said, "and he did not like to be disagreed with. He insisted he didn't want to meet with anyone who spoke Russian. He was inordinately afraid of anyone who spoke Russian." Clearly, Friberg had private misgivings. But once Golitsin arrived at the safe house in Virginia, the Russian was treated royally. As befit a source of major importance, senior officials came to call. Early in Golitsin's debriefing, McCone's deputy, General Charles P. Cabell, arrived, accompanied by John M. Maury, Jr., the chief of the Soviet Russia (SR) division. The Soviet division initially took charge of Golitsin, as was normally the case when the agency got a Soviet defector. But from the start, the debriefing of Anatoly Golitsin was closely monitored by James J. Angleton, the chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff, who had full access to the tapes and transcripts. Eventually, in fact, the defector was turned over by the Soviet division to Angleton -- a decision that was to have enormous consequences for the CIA and the future of American intelligence. The reason for Angleton's consuming interest in Golitsin was evident. It was the primary job of the counterintelligence chief to prevent any KGB moles from burrowing into the CIA. When a Soviet defector arrived at Langley, the first question put to him was always the same: did he know of any penetrations inside the CIA? If the KGB had succeeded in planting a mole at a high-enough level within the CIA, the agency's secret operations would be known in advance by Moscow. The CIA, without realizing it, would be controlled by the KGB. This was the nightmare that Angleton and other CIA officials feared the most. And Golitsin fed into their fears. Friberg recalled, "He said he had seen some material at KGB headquarters that could only have come from a very sensitive area of the agency. From someplace high inside the CIA." The implication was plain, and frightening. If Golitsin was right, the KGB had an agent inside the CIA. Pressed for a name, a description, a clue -- anything -- Golitsin could only provide tantalizing fragments. The mole, he told his CIA interrogators, was someone of Slavic background whose name might have ended in "-sky." He had been stationed in Germany. His KGB code name was Sasha. And there was
something else, Golitsin said. The mole's true last name began with the
letter K. Notes: 1. Peter Deriabin, a KGB major, had defected in Vienna that year. 2. The Directorate of Plans became the Directorate of Operations in 1973. Inside the CIA, both the directorate and its chief, the deputy director for plans, were known as the DDP, later the DDO. In recent years, CIA officials have tended to refer to the Directorate of Operations, more logically, as the DO and to its chief as the DDO. To make matters even more confusing, the Directorate of Operations is also known as the Clandestine Services, or as some prefer, the Clandestine Service. 3. On the other hand, the suspicious Soviet security man may have been on to something. The CIA did experiment with implanting microphones in cats, so that the household pets could be used to eavesdrop on the agency's unsuspecting targets. The CIA's scientists realized that machines cannot easily discriminate among sounds, tune out background noises, and listen only to conversation. But they reasoned that a cat, if properly trained, could do so.
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