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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 13: Sasha He was a little man, no more than five foot five, strikingly handsome, with a flower tattooed on his left hand in the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger and the letter A, his blood type, tattooed in the same place on his right hand. He had been a Soviet intelligence officer in World War II fighting against the Nazis, and later a German intelligence officer fighting against the Soviets, so the tattoo of the blood type was understandable, but he never explained the flower to anyone, not even to his wife. His background was equally mysterious. At various times, he had used at least four different names. To his customers in the successful picture-framing gallery that he and his wife, Eleonore, operated in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, he was known as Igor Orlov. To his wife and friends, he was Sasha. Very few of his customers knew that he had worked as a CIA agent in Germany for thirteen years. Paul Garbler called him "the little man." When Garbler had reported in to the Berlin base in 1952 to work for Bill Harvey, he had been introduced to Orlov, who would be his principal agent. In running Orlov, Garbler did not use his real name. He was Philip Gardner. And Orlov, too, was using an operational name that had been given to him by the CIA. In Berlin, he was Franz Koischwitz. *** "Orlov was already recruited and working when I arrived in Ber- lin," Garbler recalled. Who had recruited him? "That's kind of murky," Garbler said. "By 1952, when I arrived, he had been there for a couple of years as a principal agent for the base. Wolfgang Robinow handled Orlov before me. He was a case officer, born in Germany and spoke German fluently. I took over the little guy from Robinow. He took me to a safe house and introduced me to Orlov." At the time, of course, Garbler did not know his new agent as Orlov, a name he had not yet been given by the CIA. He knew him only as Franz Koischwitz. "He was little, a china doll of a man, with dark brown hair parted on the side, slicked back. A very natty dresser. He had a wife who was much taller than he was. He was almost obsessively clean. His hands were always well manicured. "My agent ran eleven whores and a one-armed piano player," Garbler said. "The girls and the piano player worked in a bar in the Soviet sector where a lot of Russian soldiers hung out. The piano player was named Willi. Orlov never told the girls he was working for the Americans, of course." The primary purpose of the operation, Garbler said, was to try to persuade one of the Soviet military men who patronized the bar to cross over to West Berlin, and then to recruit him. But as a subsidiary target, Orlov/Koischwitz reported any gossip of military or intelligence interest that the women might pick up in the saloon. "If they heard the fifteenth division was moving, they reported," Garbler said. "They gave the little man every single piece of gossip they got." And Garbler, with Orlov's help, made what appeared to be a Soviet recruitment. "One of the girls, a shapely redhead named named Trudy, brought a Russian enlisted man into West Berlin. We led him to believe he was in touch with a West German university professor, who wanted to know what was going on in the Soviet Union, availability of food, gasoline, et cetera." A CIA contract agent played the part of the professor. The meeting with the Soviet enlisted man took place in an elegant CIA safe house, decorated to look like the home of the professor, whom the hooker introduced as her uncle. "Wally Driver was the photographer," Garbler said. "When the Soviet came up out of the U-bahn underground station, he was photographed through a peephole in a van. The Russian wore a khaki shirt and jacket, but he was not in uniform. In the house, we were taking pictures as the enlisted man talked with the CIA man posing as the professor, and the whore. Wally Driver put a camera in a cuckoo clock, wrapped it in cotton to silence it, and ran a wire to the professor. The professor was to take the pictures by pressing the button. To conceal the noise from the Russian, our guy had to cough each time he took the picture. We got some real good pictures." The Soviet enlisted man, according to Garbler, agreed to remain in touch with the "professor." "He did stay in touch. There was communication. He sent at least one letter while I was still there, maybe more. "It was not all that successful," Garbler admitted, "but looked at then, it seemed fine. It was typical of the wild-ass things we were doing in those days." *** Munich, 1947. Eleonore Stirner, then twenty-three, had survived the war and the Allied bombing raids that had badly damaged the city. She remembered people taking shoes off the corpses in Munich after the air raids. On this winter day in February, she was riding on streetcar No.8 to Schwabing, a Bohemian section of Munich. "I was delivering food to a professor who was an artist, in his atelier," she said. "I had laryngitis and couldn't speak. Sasha and a tall friend, Boris, got off at the same stop, and it turned out we were going to the same apartment house. They helped me carry the potatoes upstairs to the top floor. The professor whispered, 'They are foreigners, let's invite them in and maybe they have sugar.' That's how I met my husband." Sasha and Eleonore were married in July, 1948. It was an unlikely match, a former Soviet intelligence officer and the daughter of a Nazi Party member, but in war-torn Germany, Eleonore Stirner was happy to have found a husband. There were not many young men left. "All my friends were dead," she said frankly, "or I never would have married a Russian." Interviewed in her spacious frame shop and art gallery in Alexandria's Old Town, Eleonore Orlov proved an intelligent woman of boundless energy, her occasional moments of melancholy tempered by a strong sense of humor. She spoke at length about her own past in Nazi Germany, her later dealings with the CIA and the FBI, and the enigma of the man to whom she was married for thirty-four years. Sasha Orlov had died at age sixty in May 1982, leaving his wife and two grown sons, Robert and George. Eleonore Stirner was born in Munich on March 10, 1923, the daughter of Joseph and Rosa Stirner. "I joined the Hitler Youth at age sixteen," Eleonore Orlov said. "I was head of water sports, canoeing, and so on, for all of Bavaria. It was like the Girl Scouts. It was the only fun we had in life. Everybody liked Hitler ." Her father, a six-foot-six SS man, fought in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Italy, where he was captured and held as a POW for two years. "After the war, we lost our apartment because the neighbors saw the black uniform and the boots and threw us out. " Because of her own membership in the Hitler Youth, she was sent to Dachau in 1945, where she served a prison term of five months, working in the fields of the former Nazi concentration camp, weeding and harvesting, and picking the bugs off potatoes. "Polish officers who had been prisoners were in charge," she said. Released in 1946, she was working as a secretary in a medical supply house when she met and married Sasha Orlov. At the time, he called himself Alexander Kopatzky. He told his wife that he had taken the Polish-sounding name to avoid being sent back to the Soviet Union. He was born, according to Eleonore, on January I, 1922, in Kiev. He had never revealed his true name to her, she said, although she thought that once, on an official form, he might have listed his parents' name as Navratilov. He was trim as a gymnast and a man of continental manners, when sober. "He drank a lot of vodka. He kissed ladies' hands. He went to military school in Novosibirsk or somewhere in Siberia. He was definitely an officer. He was very punctual, shined his shoes, did his gymnastics in the morning, he had a neat haircut, short hair all his life, proper dress. And he was a very good shot. Sasha liked to hunt and talked of hunting tigers in Siberia with his father. He was an intelligence officer for the Soviets. In 1944, he was badly wounded in the neck and the calf as he parachuted into Germany. He was captured, nursed back to health in a German field hospital, and recruited as liaison between Vlasov's army and the German army. This was in 1944, a brutal winter." [1] General Andrei A. Vlasov was a Soviet lieutenant general captured with most of his troops by the Germans in July 1942. The Germans allowed Vlasov, who was strongly anti-Soviet, to form a Russian Army of Liberation (ROA), enlisting Russian prisoners of war to join the Nazi war effort and fight the Red Army. [2] After recovering from his wounds in a German hospital, Orlov joined forces with his captors. By his own account, he served for almost a year as a German intelligence officer before joining General Vlasov's intelligence service. After the war he was imprisoned by the American authorities in Dachau, at the same time that Eleonore was there, although they did not then know each other. When they did meet, in 1947, Orlov was already working for the CIA in Pullach, outside Munich, where the agency had set up General Reinhard Gehlen and his German intelligence network. Orlov told his wife very little about his work for the CIA. But according to one former SIG member, in 1948-49, "Orlov had worked in Ukrainian ops in the Munich area for the [CIA's] Munich operations base. He worked for Dave Murphy." Eleonore Orlov looked back on those early months of their marriage as an idyllic period in her life. The young couple went for picnics in the Bavarian countryside. "I rode my bicycle along the Tsar. It was a very happy time." All of that changed abruptly in 1949, during the Berlin airlift. "We 1ived a quiet life until one day an American knocked on the door and said, 'We need you in Berlin.' "In Berlin, he changed his name to Franz Koischwitz. The Americans gave the name to us. I was Ellen Koischwitz. I insisted the name begin with a K because of my linens. My linens said EK, for Eleonore Kopatzky. My mother sent them from Munich." As Franz Koischwitz, Orlov remained in Berlin for seven years. "I didn't work for the CIA in Berlin, but I typed my husband's weekly reports," Eleonore said. "So I knew the work he was doing." What Orlov was doing was enrolling women for his network. "He went every night to bars, 1ots of nightspots. Telephone bars, where you can just pick up the telephone and speak to someone at a table across the room. Sometimes he recruited girls at Resi, a telephone bar in Hasenheide, a section of Berlin that means 'rabbit's meadow.'" He was a1so drinking. Paul Garbler had good reason to remember that. "Three times," Garbler said, "I had to bail him out of the slammer. Orlov was a terrib1e driver. Used to scare the shit out of me driving around Berlin with me. Most Russians are terrible drivers. They don't 1earn when they're 1ittle kids, 1ike we do. He would run red lights, back up in the midd1e of the street, with cars whizzing around. "When he talked about something sad, like when one of his girls got the clap, he would cry. His eyes would fill with tears. I never asked his background and he never asked mine." Tears came to Orlov's eyes again in 1955, when it was time for Garbler to 1eave Berlin after three years. The CIA man and his agent had their last meeting in a safe house. Orlov presented Garb1er with an inscribed book of photographs of Berlin. [3] It was signed, "Franz Koischwitz with Ellen and Robert June 1955." A year later, the CIA transferred the Koischwitzes from Berlin to Frankfurt, 1argely because Eleonore had rebelled against their life o the move in furnished rooms, which they switched every few months to preserve security. Their son Robert had been born in 1954. As Eleonore put it, "I wanted out of Berlin. There I was with a baby, and no home. I was like a bag 1ady." In Berlin, close to the border and Soviet headquarters, a CIA agent was at risk, Eleonore said. In Frankfurt, deep inside West Germany, there would be no need to move all the time. Moreover, the agency offered to give the Koishwitzes American passports. "We went to the American consulate to start our citizenship papers. [4] Then we ran into trouble. Franz Koischwitz had been imprisoned for a traffic vio1ation. So the Americans changed our name to Orlov. We had to go to the consu1ate and swear we were Igor and Eleonore Orlov." Because they had been told they cou1d take on1y small airline bags on the flight to Frankfurt, she said, before they left Berlin she had given away their few possessions, inc1uding her linens monogrammed EK. So it no 1onger mattered to her whether their new name began with a K. In Frankfurt, Mrs. Orlov worked for the CIA, screening and translating photocopies of letters intercepted in the mai1 flowing between the Soviet Union and West Germany. Her husband, she said, "traveled a lot, to Hamburg, Cologne, all over West Germany in a black Opel Kapitan. I know now what he did in Frankfurt. I put it together. We three ladies in the censorship office saw all 1etters to and from the Soviet Union. My husband visited the peop1e in Germany who wrote those 1etters to the East. He was trying to recruit people who had contact with Russia." Eleonore's office was "on an unmarked floor, thirteenth floor of the I.G. Farben building. We looked for letters of intelligence interest, and would put those aside to trans1ate. For example, if someone's aunt in the Soviet Union said they didn't have fish anymore, it might mean a big power plant was being built. "I even got a 1etter from Boris Pasternak, a thank-you 1etter to one of his admirers in Germany for Doctor Zhivago. I swindled it, put it in my pocketbook and kept it like an autograph. No one ever missed it. I put it in my copy of Doctor Zhivago." In April 1957, the CIA flew the Orlovs to America so that Eleonore, who was pregnant, could have her child in the United States, and to allow the Orlovs to establish a residence to become citizens. First, the Orlovs were taken to Ashford Farm, a CIA safe house on the Choptank River, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Later, to have her baby they were moved to another safe house in the Georgetown section of Northwest Washington at 3301 O Street. [5] Her physician at Georgetown University Hospita1 was Dr. John W. Walsh, who that same summer was caring for Jacqueline Kennedy, whose daughter, Caro1ine, was born in November. [6] While waiting for her baby to arrive, Mrs. Orlov said, "a CIA guide took us to the White House, the museums. He tried to give us a taste of America." The Orlovs' second son, George, was born on August 9. "Then back to Frankfurt, and we started a new 1ife with legitimate papers and PX privileges. Sasha got a car and we had a wonderfu1 life." It was wonderfu1 except for Orlov's relations with his CIA colleagues. In Frankfurt, friction had quick1y deve1oped between Orlov and Nicho1as Kozlov, another ex-Soviet working for the CIA. Much of the troub1e began in 1959 when Orlov went on a trip to Vienna. "For the trip, they gave him elevated shoes to be taller, colored his hair pitch black, and gave him horn-rimmed g1asses with no prescription," Eleonore said. When Orlov returned to Frankfurt, he was convinced that his safe had been rifled. "The safe had an outside combination and two un1ocked compartments inside and Kozlov had the combination," she said. Before 1eaving for Vienna, Orlov had put pieces of mica in his part of the safe and found them on the floor when he returned. According to Eleonore, he comp1aine.d to his superior, Sasha Sogo1ow -- who was 1ater to become a mo1e suspect in part because of his association with Orlov -- but Sogo1ow dismissed the incident. The trouble was not over, however, for either Orlov or his wife. CIA security officers investigating the alleged break-in found a postcard in the safe addressed to Eleonore Orlov from an admirer, which her husband had intercepted and p1aced there. The CIA men grilled Eleonore about the card, accusing her of b1ack market dealings. "In Frankfurt I had Georgie in the carriage," Mrs. Orlov said. "I met a man in the park. He gave me opera tickets to the Frankfurt Opera House, he was the stage director, and I gave him gin from the PX. This came out in my 1ie-detector test. The postcard said some- thing like 'If I don't see you I will fall in 1ove with the entire corps of ballet girls.' "They asked, 'Why did I give him the gin? Did I pay him with cigarettes to make 1ove to me?' I said, 'You're crazy. If I wanted to have a man, I can have one.' I was in trouble because bartering was against the law. I was dismissed from my job." E1eonore Orlov said she never saw the postcard but that her husband confronted her about it before he 1eft for Vienna. "He was extremely jealous. In Berlin he held a gun to my head severa1 times. Because he smelled cigarettes, and I didn't smoke, I said yes, I was in the subway. I had to sit in the smoking car." As Mrs. Orlov tells it, her husband's decision to report the alleged break-in of the safe destroyed his re1ationship with the CIA. "Mr. Sogolow was a good friend of the Koz1ovs, so he cou1dn't possibly do anything," she said. "When he [Orlov] complained about Koz1ov, that was the end of our career." The Orlovs were not to1d that, however. Igor was promised a new job in the United States, and in January 1961, the Orlovs sai1ed for New York on the S.S. America. On the day before President Kennedy's inauguration, they drove in a snowstorm to northern Vir ginia. Orlov called a number he had been given to contact the CIA, only to find it had been disconnected. "Eventually he made contact and was told there was no work for him," Eleonore said. "We had to 1ive. In the summer of 1961 he went to work driving a truck for the Washington Post. We had no citizenship papers. We had a green card, but no passports. "He did not accept the Berlitz course offered by CIA, but we did get some money, about twenty-seven hundred dollars. It was CIA money. I was ready to leave for good. We argued. I said, 'What do you do in this country? What is there here for me? Being the wife of a truck driver?" Mrs. Orlov withdrew $1,800 of the CIA money. "I bought three tickets on the S.S. Bremen to go to Germany. I took the chi1dren, my books, my feather bed. I went to my mother and she threw me out on the first day. 'I told you not to marry this foreigner. And I know now he's a spy. People here ask me about him.' "I stayed nine months in Munich, rented an apartment, and Igor sent me every month one hundred dollars. He so1d his TV to have money to send me, his typewriter. He only earned sixty dollars a week. I couldn't find a job, I had no papers. Who is E1eonore Orlov? Where did you go to school? What have you done for the 1ast five years?" In 1962, Eleonore Orlov brought the children back to Washington and rejoined her husband. By 1964, the Orlovs had saved enough money to open a picture-framing gallery on South Pitt Street in Alexandria. A few miles away at CIA headquarters, the mole hunters were closing in. *** Scotty Miler had joined the Specia1 Investigations Group in October 1964, and the Orlov case was virtually the first to land on his desk. "Golitsin said Sasha had operated primarily in Berlin, but a1so in West Germany," he said. "So we began going through the fi1es, who was involved in what and where. Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together. It took three years to focus on Orlov as a candidate, in 1964," Miler said. "Orlov's diminutive was Sasha. He had worked in Germany. There were other people known as Sasha. We started by asking how many people we know were known as Sasha. That's the first 1ayer of investigation. Second, does anyone have a true name beginning with a K? Or an operational name." Orlov's name did not begin with the letter K, but one can visualize the excitement on the second floor when the mole hunters opened hi dossier and saw that before it was Orlov, his name had been Alexander Kopatzky, and then Franz Koischwitz, and that he was called Sasha. But wou1d the KGB really use a code name that was a1so a person's nickname? "Un1ikely, but not unknown," Miler replied. After analyzing Orlov's file, and the cases he had handled in Germany, Miler said, the Counterintelligence Staff became "absolutely" convinced that it had uncovered solid evidence against him. Several other former CIA officers interviewed also said they believed that Orlov had been a double agent for the KGB. "He [Orlov] fit the indicators, and his operations went bad," said Pete Bagley. Within the CIA, it was Bruce Solie of the Office of Security who was given credit for cracking the Orlov case. Solie was the principal officer in OS who had worked on the mole hunt from the start. Tall, thin, and bespectacled, given to long pauses between sentences, Solie grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, served as an Air Force navigator in the European theater during World War II, earned a law degree after the war, and in 1951 joined the CIA, where his entire career was spent in the Office of Security. In addition to the basic profile of Sasha that Golitsin had provided a name beginning with K, active in Germany, a Slavic background -- the defector had provided another fragment of information. Sasha, he said, had given the KGB information about military identity documents that would be carried by agents whom the CIA was sending into the Soviet Union. Solie searched the files but could find no operation that fit Golitsin's description. But Solie made an interesting discovery: the CIA, more than a decade earlier, had indeed planned to send in an agent with military ID and had been looking for such documents. It was Orlov who had provided them, explaining that he had obtained the documents from a Soviet source. "Orlov came up with three," a CIA officer recalled. "But that wasn't enough. Four were required. So they [the CIA] gave up on it." Solie went back to Golitsin. Something wasn't right, he said. Golitsin thought about it some more. Maybe, he said, it had been the other way around; that is, Sasha had not passed information to the KGB about identity papers -- the KGB had given documents to Sasha to plant on the CIA. To Solie, the case now made sense. Golitsin had originally gotten it backward, but even so, the defector's lead had allowed Solie to pinpoint Orlov. The three documents provided by Orlov, Solie concluded, would have been booby-trapped by the KGB, altered in some tiny detail, so that any agent attempting to use them in the Soviet Union would have been immediately detected. None of this business about the documents was hard evidence that might stand up in a court of law, but it was enough to allow the agency to ask for a criminal investigation. By mid-1964, the CIA had referred the Orlov case to the FBI. *** "It was in the afternoon," Mrs. Orlov said, that the FBI came calling for the first time. "One day early in March of 1965. Six guys rang the bell and said, 'We'd like to search your house. Espionage.' It was after school, about five P.M. Sasha said, 'Can my wife go to a movie with the children?' The FBI agents said okay. He brought me my coat and we went away. "They were still there when I came back. All the drawers on the floor, every piece of paper photographed. Even from my handbag. I had to leave my purse. They stayed until close to midnight. They said Sasha has to come to the FBI office in the morning after he finished his truck route. They told him to report to the Old Post Office Building in Washington. [7] "There was no search warrant. At this time we didn't know the word 'search warrant.' The next day an FBI agent, Bert Turner, and another gentleman came to the gallery, where we also lived upstairs, and asked about Berlin, about Germany. They asked me, 'Why do you write to Switzerland so much?' I said, 'This is my aunt.' 'We also know you write to Australia. Who is that?' 'It's my former maid in Germany.' And to Montevideo?' 'My aunt, too.' My mother had five sisters. It made me furious. I said, 'Look, it's a free country.' "They came and came and came every day for days. They asked me to take a lie-detector test and I refused. My husband said, 'They will put you in prison if you don't.' But I didn't. Sasha took an FBI lie-detector test. He passed. He welcomed it.'" At the FBI, the Orlov case had landed on the desk of Courtland J. Jones, a tall, soft-spoken Virginia gentleman from Lynchburg who had joined the bureau out of law school in 1940. In the fall of 1964, when Jones got the case, he was a counterintelligence supervisor at the Washington Field Office. "The Orlov case was called UNSUB8 SASHA," Jones said. The FBI had opened the file early in 1962, right after Golitsin's arrival. Each suspect for Sasha, beginning with Peter Karlow, went into the UNSUB SASHA file. "There were five or six serious candidates for Sasha in the file," Jones said, "and maybe some name checks in addition." Whatever the results of Orlov's polygraph, the FBI agents kept the pressure on. The interrogations at the Washington Field Office continued. The gallery was under constant surveillance. "He was desperate," Mrs. Orlov said, in explaining what happened next. The Washington Post backs up on the rear of the Soviet embassy, and one day in April, Orlov, who was still driving a truck for the newspaper, slipped into the embassy through a rear door. "He came home in the afternoon," Eleonore Orlov recounted, "and said, 'I was in the Soviet embassy and asked for my mother's address. I asked for help because the FBI said they will do something nasty to my mother if I don't say I'm a double agent. And I don't even know if she's living.'" At first, Eleonore said, it seemed as though Orlov's purpose in visiting the embassy was to find out whether his mother was still alive, or dead and beyond the reach of the FBI. But he quickly made it clear that he had much more in mind. He was planning their escape. "He was so afraid they would arrest both of us. Who would take care of the children? We were living on sixty dollars a week." Her husband revealed, Eleonore said, that he had asked the Soviets for asylum for himself, for her, and their two sons. The embassy had agreed, he said. "The Soviets told him, tomorrow after school go to the parking lot of a shopping center in Arlandria [a section of Alexandria], not with your car, but in a taxi. In front of the bowling alley there will be a car . You and your wife and children will be picked up." Orlov, she said, ordered her to take the children by taxi to the parking lot the next day; it was not clear, she said, whether he would be there as well. Eleonore Orlov had no desire to flee to the Soviet Union. "I was frantic," she said. "I called my pastor. He came, he went down on his knees and prayed with me. He said, 'Don't go to the Russians, don't do this.' I called a friend. I asked her, 'If something happens to me, will you take care of my children?' I thought I had two choices: to jump from the Wilson Bridge or to go to the parking lot. I was not allowed to bring anything with me, just my driver's license and the car keys." The next day, Eleonore drove her husband into Washington for another FBI interrogation. She went back to the house. "I went to the basement and discovered one of my cats had given birth to four kittens. That did it. I couldn't leave the house. I just couldn't. So I stayed home. I knew at five o'clock my husband would come home from the interrogation. I just sat there and waited. He came and said, 'Guess what? They let me go. They apologized and said I can go on with my life. Tomorrow we are free. But you did not obey me.' He was very angry. He was even thinking I am working with the FBI. It was a big argument. Very big. "The FBI had asked him, 'Where were you yesterday?' 'I was in the Russian embassy.' 'Yes, we know.' 'I tried to ask for my mother's address.' If my husband was a Russian spy he wouldn't have to go to the embassy. He would have some way to contact them safer than going in. Maybe he bluffed them [the FBI], but you don't play with your life." But if Orlov thought his troubles were over, he was wrong. To the mole hunters at Langley, Orlov's visit to the Soviet embassy was final proof that he was a Soviet spy. T o his wife, it was the act of a desperate man who feared arrest and hoped to protect his family. Convinced that Golitsin's Sasha had been run to ground, James Angleton constantly questioned the FBI about the case. "Jim never let it go," said James E. Nolan, Jr., the former FBI counterintelligence official. "He'd ask, 'Have you cracked the Orlov case? What's new on Orlov?' Angleton used the case to keep the bureau on the defensive. "If he had nothing else to throw at us," Nolan said, "he'd beard us about Orlov." The pressure from the CIA went down the line. Supervised by Courtland Jones, FBI agents kept the Orlovs under surveillance for years. Suddenly, after Orlov's last interrogation, a parade of new customers began visiting the Gallery Orlov. Some openly identified themselves as FBI agents. They were led by Joseph D. Purvis, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Washington Field Office. "Mr. Purvis came to have a picture framed with Hoover shaking hands with some guy, with a flag and a big seal in the background," Eleonore recalled. "Then came Mr. Jones. Several FBI agents came. [9] "Mr. Jones came every year to bring us a basket full of Stayman apples. He sent us Christmas cards for quite a while. "Mr. Purvis had a gray poodle. It was a toy poodle, he kept it on his arm. The cats would try to jump on the poodle to defend their territory. Once, we framed for Mr. Purvis a portrait of his wife. We framed several pictures of Hoover shaking hands with agents." Perhaps one of the more bizarre by-products of the entire era of the mole hunt was that great numbers of photographs of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, and a symbol of staunch anti-Communism in America for decades, were framed for the FBI by the man whom both Hoover and Angleton suspected to be a Soviet spy, the legendary Sasha. Another FBI agent, Fred A. Tansey, became a particularly good customer and befriended the family. "He gave us two doors and a finial for the banister, beautiful things he would find for the house. He always found an excuse to visit us." [10] The FBI agents were there for a reason, not only to keep an eye on the gallery and Igor Orlov, but to gauge the amount of actual business conducted there. James Nolan, who rose to number two in the FBI's intelligence division, confirmed the bureau's motive. "For a brief period I had the Orlov case," he said. "I got all the receipts [from the FBI men who had pictures framed at the gallery]. That's why the agents were in there all the time. To see how much business they had and whether the shop was a front." In the spring of 1966, a year after the FBI had searched the Orlovs' gallery, there was a new and startling development in the case. A Soviet KGB officer, who came to be code-named KITTY HAWK, contacted the CIA and offered, among other wares, fresh information about Orlov. The KITTY HAWK case was, and remains, one of the most controversial of the Soviet cases during the entire era. Igor Petrovich Kochnov, who was KITTY HAWK, arrived in Washington late in March 1966 on temporary duty as a Soviet diplomat.!! About a week later, he telephoned the home in Northwest Washington of Richard Helms, then deputy director of the CIA. Helms was out, and Kochnov got Helms's then wife, Julia, heiress to the Barbasol shave cream fortune. Kochnov said he had information that would be of interest to the CIA. [12] When CIA officials met with Kochnov as a result of his phone call, he had a suggestion that, on the face of it, was outrageous. He had been sent to the United States, he said, to try to find and contact Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet defector whose real name was Nikolai Fedorovich Artamonov. In 1959, Artamonov, the youngest destroyer captain in the Soviet navy, had sailed across the Baltic Sea to Sweden in a small boat with his Polish girlfriend, Ewa Gora, who was now his wife. [13] If the CIA would help him fulfill his mission, Kochnov said, his KGB career would skyrocket, and he would work as an agent-in-place for the CIA. Since the CIA protects defectors, often-as in this instance -- changing their names, Kochnov's request was bold, to say the least. But both the CIA and the FBI went along with the operation. Courtland Jones talked it over with Elbert T. "Bert" Turner, who was assigned as Kochnov's FBI case agent. The decision was made, along with the CIA, to put Kochnov in touch with Artamonov and see where it led. "We put him into play and gave him feed material," Jones said. "Turner and I felt it had to be done, and what do we have to lose? I was about to go to the Outer Banks on vacation and Bill Branigan, the section chief, called over and one of us said, 'What are we going to call this operation?' Both Bill and I had vacationed on the Outer Banks. I said, "Bill, I'm going to Kitty Hawk tomorrow. Shall we call it KITTY HAWK?' He said, 'Why not?'" KITTY HAWK, according to several former FBI agents, told U.S. intelligence that Orlov had worked for the Soviets. The KGB man, Courtland Jones said, also told the FBI that Orlov had visited the Soviet embassy, which he had, in 1965. According to another former FBI man close to the case, "KITTY HAWK said that when Orlov went into the embassy, he said he was being interviewed at the time by the FBI, and asked for suicide pills in the event he needed them. And when we asked Orlov about that, he said, no, no, he went to the embassy to ask about relatives." The KITTY HAWK operation ended in disaster. Kochnov contacted Shadrin, who worked at the time for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Under FBI control, Shadrin pretended to switch loyalties and fed Kochnov information prepared by U .S. intelligence. After several months, Kochnov announced that he had to go back to the Soviet Union, but he turned Shadrin over to other KGB handlers. Shadrin met with the Soviets for several years, once in Vienna. [14] Then in December 1975, he went back to Vienna, accompanied by Bruce Solie, of the CIA's Office of Security, and Cynthia J. Hausmann of the Counterintelligence Staff. On the night of December 20, Shadrin kept an appointment with a Soviet agent on the steps of the Votivkirche, a church on the Rooseveltplatz, not far from the American embassy. He was not seen again. [15] A decade later, the Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko provided a postscript to the Shadrin case. Before re defecting to the Soviet Union, Yurchenko told the CIA that KGB agents in Vienna had kidnapped Shadrin. As he struggled in the backseat of a car that was spiriting him out of Austria, Yurchenko said, the KGB agents gave him too much chloroform, and he died. *** In 1978, the Orlovs moved their gallery and home to King Street, in Alexandria's Old Town. The FBI's periodic surveillance continued for fifteen years, to no avail. "We were unable to establish that Orlov was Sasha," Jones said. "Orlov said no, he wasn't, and there you are. What could we do?" The bureau kept at it, however, not only because of pressure from the CIA, but because the FBI worried that Orlov, even if no longer active as a Soviet spy, might be a "sleeper" agent, to be activated at some unknown time in the future. "In any such investigation," Jones said, "we would consider was he a sleeper, is he going to be contacted by mail, telephone, radio?" Although Angleton, Miler, and many other CIA officers remained convinced that Orlov was a Soviet agent, that opinion was not universally held, even within the agency. A high-ranking former CIA official familiar with the case concluded: "We did not think that Orlov had ever been under the control of the KGB. My overall impression is we really didn't have a case against Orlov. A lot of suspicions, but no case." On May 2, 1982, at the age of sixty, Igor Gregory Orlov died of cancer at his home above the gallery. "Two days before he died," his wife said, "one of our former customers, a priest, came in, and asked, 'Can I pray for you?' Igor said it isn't necessary, but if you think it's good you can say a few words. The priest said, 'Life is like a river; We people on the banks go into the river and swim a little bit and then we go back to the bank again.' Igor said, 'Yes, you are right. But I would really like to have my ashes in Russia, not in America.' Then he turned to me and said, 'Cremate me and bring the ashes to the Soviet embassy and they know what to do.' I looked at the priest. He said, 'Mrs. Orlov, this is quite natural. All my friends from the East, when it's time to die, they like to be buried in their homeland.' "The boys were with Sasha all night long. He slipped into a coma and died Sunday morning. Mr. Tansey made the funeral arrangements. There were no services when he died. Monday he was cremated." Eleonore Orlov did not follow her husband's instructions. "His ashes are upstairs on the mantel," she said. "In a box decorated with a Russian eagle." Despite Orlov's last wish, and his earlier request for asylum in the Soviet Union, in their thirty-four years together, Eleonore Orlov said, her husband had never expressed any sympathy for the Soviet system, or dropped the slightest hint that he might have worked for the Russians. Rather the opposite, she insisted. "He was very careful in his dealings with anyone of Russian background. He never let anyone in the house. He was afraid to be poisoned by the Russians." In Berlin, she said, "we were scared to death of the Russians. He was afraid they would kill him. First because of Vlasov, and now because he was working for the Americans. He was poisoned by an East German doctor in West Berlin, poisoned with mushrooms. Not enough to kill him, but perhaps they had planned to bring him over the line to the Russians. It was the time of the Menschenraub, the kidnappings on both sides in Berlin." Why had she never pressed her husband to reveal his true background, his name at birth, for example? Mrs. Orlov smiled and said, "You know the legend of Lohengrin. You know what happened to Elsa." [16] She did ask, once, about the tattoo of the flower on his left hand. "None of your business," he said. Did Eleonore Orlov believe her husband was a Soviet spy? She did not believe it, she said, nor did she want to believe it. "Deep in my mind I don't know. I asked the FBI to let me talk to Golitsin. They laughed in my face. 'Out of the question.' I'd like to know how he knows about 'Sasha' and the letter K." Even to entertain the possibility that her husband was a spy hurts her deeply, she said. "For seven years he drove a delivery truck for the Washington Post at two A.M. and ran the gallery by day. He worked 2 A.M. to 9 A.M. and then every Monday all day he had to collect from the drugstores and places that sold the paper." If Sasha Orlov had money from spying, she asked, would he have done that? No, she could not believe he was a spy. "I don't believe he was. There is not a shred of proof. If he did that" -- there were tears in her eyes now -- "it would be very low. I can't believe a man could lie to his family for thirty years and not help us in our struggle. When we bought the house it was in terrible shape. I worked for a year, tearing off the plaster, stripping it down. I worked as hard as anyone in the gulag. If he let me do that, if he really was a spy ..." Her voice trailed off. She composed herself. "If Igor worked for the Russians all his life and took his family for cover, I would not like to sleep at night anymore," she said. "At the end of John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, he writes to his wife, I'm sorry. I married you only for cover. I saw the last episode on TV at a friend's home. It came like a mountain of bricks on me. I said, my God, that could be me." ______________ Notes: The handwritten biography reads: Igor Gregory Orlov, born 1-1-1922 in Kiev, Sov. Union. Naturalized Sept. 6, 1962 in Alexandria Va. Naturalization # 8240855. Military or Government services August 1941-Dec. 1943 Lt. in Sov. Intelligence Service, Dec.43-April 1944, Prisoner of war in German Hospital. April 1944-March 1945-Lt. in German Intelligence Service, "Staff Valy." March 1945-May 1945, Intelligence Service ROA (Vlasov Army) 1946-1948--U.S. Intelligence Service 1950-1961-CIA "operatives" 2. In May 1945, Vlasov and one of his divisions marched into Prague, switched sides, and fought the SS garrison. What happened next is disputed; by some accounts, Vlasov surrendered to the American forces, only to be handed over to the Russians. Other versions claim he was captured by the Soviet army. In 1946, the Russians announced that Vlasov and six other generals had been found guilty of treason and hanged. 3. Garbler had it still, almost thirty-five years later. When I interviewed him at his home in Tucson, where he retired with his wife after leaving the CIA, he walked over to a bookcase that covered an entire wall of his study, reached up to a high shelf, and took it down. It was entitled Berlin: Symphonie einer Weltstadt (Symphony of a Metropolis) and had been published in Berlin in 1955 by Ernst Staneck Verlag. The inscription, in German, said: "Berlin! Only a tiny stone in the mosaic of your travels through the world. This book may help you when you think occasionally of the city, your work, and the people you have become acquainted with. With many good wishes we say goodbye to you once again." 4. Technically, Eleonore Orlov said, both were stateless persons. "I had German citizenship," she said, "but I lost my citizenship on the day I married Igor, a foreigner. He had no citizenship. I was listed as a 'homeless foreigner' and had to report to the police every year." 5. Few of the Orlovs' neighbors realized that the CIA operated a safe house in the heart of Georgetown, one of Washington's most elegant residential areas. Real estate records of the District of Columbia list "John M. Booth by" as the owner of the corner house at 3301 O Street from 1947 to 1965, but no trace of such a person could be found. He was not listed at the time in the telephone book, which showed "Cortlandt E. Parker" and later "Samuel S. Ingraham" at that address. Virginia Erwin Page Gore bought the house in February 1965 for $63,000 but never met the seller, "Mr. Booth by." She sold the property a few weeks later to Richard and Lillian Borwick for $75,000. The Borwicks, who were living in the house in 1990, said they were aware that their home had been a safe house used by the CIA. Mrs. Borwick said Mrs. Gore bought the house "from the government." She added: "I knew it was a safe house because every [interior] door had a lock on it. The basement was soundproofed and that's where people were interrogated. There was a single light bulb hanging down from the ceiling." Neighbors told her they saw a lot of foreigners go in and out of the house, she added. 6. Three years later, Dr. Walsh delivered John F. Kennedy, Jr., at Georgetown. 7. At the time, the building housed the FBI's Washington Field Office. 8. In FBI parlance, the term stood for "unknown subject." 9. "Over a period of time I took quite a few watercolors and other pictures to be matted and framed," Jones said. He displayed a watercolor of a boater on a river, framed by the Orlovs. Jones spent time at the gallery, he explained, because he wanted to get a firsthand impression of the Orlovs. "I have a strong investigative background," he said. "I always felt the more you know about your opponent, the better. I got to know his boys, I got to know Ellie." 10. Tansey, who retired in 1980, insisted that he was not on assignment for the FBI when he visited the Orlovs. "My relationship with the Orlovs was strictly with regard to their business," he said. "I was a customer and a friend. I was in the intelligence division at headquarters but had no responsibility for this case." Asked whether he did not worry that his close association with a suspected Soviet spy under investigation by his own division might be misinterpreted, Tansey replied: "I don't comment on things like that." 11. Some published accounts have referred to KITTY HAWK as "Igor Romanovich Kozlov," or "Igor Kozlov." But Kochnov never used that name, either in Washington or in his previous posting at the Soviet embassy in Karachi, Pakistan. 12. There was no mystery to how Kochnov obtained Helms's home telephone number. "I've always been listed in the phone book," Helms said. "My home then was on Fessenden Street." 13. As it happened, when Artamonov and Ewa reached Stockholm, the CIA officer in the American embassy who received them when they appealed for assistance was Paul Garbler. Garbler, the deputy COS, helped to set in motion the arrangements for their asylum in the United States. 14. Although Kochnov's call to the Helms residence had set the KITTY HAWK case in motion. Helms insisted that he had not approved any aspect of the operation. "There was never the slightest intent on my part that Shadrin would go out of the country and meet any Soviet," Helms said. "Whoever manhandled that case, it was not I. I don't recall being asked is it okay to put this guy [KITTY HAWK] in touch with Shadrin. I have no recollection of anyone asking me to make such a decision. It doesn't make sense. I would not have approved it." 15. The FBI and CIA officials who handled KITTY HAWK do not agree on whether Kochnov was a plant or a genuine agent. James Nolan, the FBI counterintelligence official, who closely studied the case, came away convinced that KITTY HAWK was a fake, in part because he never reappeared as a CIA source. "My view is that if KITTY HAWK was genuine, they [the Soviets] would never have taken him out of the United States," Nolan said. "Or he would have been back here right away. Look, you've got two hundred KGB officers in the U.S., and they can't find Shadrin. He goes and finds him in twelve hours, singlehanded. What two big residencies in New York and Washington couldn't do. He's demonstrated he is a brilliant operator in the United States. So he should have come back [to the U.S.], and he didn't. He floated around in Moscow and other places, he was visible, seen, but never so you could talk to him. That ought to tell you after a while that something's wrong. He should have had a red star pinned on him and be sent back here as deputy resident. He wasn't." However, Vasia C. Gmirkin, who wrote a still classified study of the Shadrin case for the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff in the late 1970s, after James Angleton had gone, concluded that both KITTY HAWK and Shadrin were bona fide. By 1990, the CIA had received intelligence that KITTY HAWK had died, of natural causes. 16. In Richard Wagner's opera, based on the medieval German story, Lohengrin is a knight of the Holy Grail who rescues Princess Elsa from an unwanted suitor. He is led to her by a swan. She is forbidden to ask his identity, but curious, one day she does, and Lohengrin must leave.
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