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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 5: The Moscow Station Paul Garbler knew there would be a lot of drinking at his bon voyage party in 1961. For one thing, it was an exciting moment in the history of the CIA: he had just been chosen as the first chief of the Moscow station. For another, the host of the party was the legendary William King Harvey, whose Falstaffian figure attested to his fondness for booze. Behind his ample back, Harvey was known as "the Pear," for his shape. A crew-cut former FBI agent, Harvey was a colorful, tough character who always packed a gun, drank three martinis for lunch, and had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep at meetings. [1] It was Harvey, over drinks one night in Berlin seven years earlier, who had persuaded Garbler, a Navy pilot, to resign his commission and join the CIA. "And when you were drinking with Harvey, you were drinking a lot," Garbler recalled. In less than a decade, Garbler had risen from a case officer in Berlin, where he had served under Harvey, to the man selected to head the most important field station in the CIA. Garbler had every reason to be proud of his achievement. The other guests at Harvey's party were Richard M. Helms, then the assistant deputy director for plans; Thomas H. Karamessines, a senior official of the DDP; Eric Timm, chief of the Western European division; and James Angleton. It was this small group of senior agency officials who had made the decision late in 1960 to establish the CIA's first station in the Soviet capital. Garbler's principal mission, indeed the major reason for the decision to open the Moscow station, was to provide a means of clandestine communication with the agency's premier spy in the Soviet Union, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU. "What we had up to then was singletons going into Moscow under various kinds of cover," Garbler explained. There was no station, he said, and therefore no chief of station. "I was the first legitimate COS in Moscow." So there was a great deal to celebrate. "Everybody drank a lot of booze. It got pretty wild. Helms left early. Angleton backed me into a corner. He said, 'I've been working with FBI. We've got a couple of cases where the source has returned to the Soviet Union and we want to maintain contact. I'll let you know details tomorrow and you tell me if you can handle it.' The next day Angleton told me where the dead drop was." Garbler agreed to run Angleton's agent in Moscow. Garbler, a tall, rugged, and handsome man, had the face of a Western cowpuncher but had been born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in south Florida, where his father was a successful builder. Garbler joined the Navy a few months before Pearl Harbor, and while training as an aviation cadet in Jacksonville he met Florence Fitzsimmons, an attractive Army nurse from Bayside, Queens. They were married in the midst of the war. Florence served in the Italian campaign, landing at Salerno with the Fifth Army and working her way up through Italy. Paul was a dive-bomber pilot flying from carriers in the Pacific, so they did not see each other for two and a half years, until the war ended. Garbler flew in the first and second battles of the Philippine Sea and at Chichi island, and won three Distinguished Flying Crosses and eight Air Medals. After the war, the Navy sent Garbler to Washington to learn Russian and receive training in intelligence. He shipped out to Seoul, South Korea, in 1948, and served as President Syngman Rhee's personal pilot. He was in Korea in June 1950 when the North Koreans invaded. The Navy sent Garbler back to Washington, and a year later he was assigned to the CIA and trained as a spy. In 1952, although still in the Navy, he began a three-year tour in Berlin base for the CIA. Using the alias Philip Gardner, Garbler took over as the case officer handling Franz Koischwitz, a principal agent whose target was the Soviet military establishment at Karlshorst, in East Berlin. It was while in Berlin that Garbler accepted Harvey's invitation to leave the military and join the CIA. He returned to headquarters in 1955 and was sent to Stockholm the following year as deputy chief of station. By 1959, he was back in Washington, working in the Soviet division, an assignment that helped to put him on the short list for chief of the Moscow station. On November 30, 1961, Garbler reported in to the American embassy in the Soviet capital, under cover as the assistant naval attache. In Moscow, Garbler's small CIA station operated under the handicap of massive KGB surveillance of embassy employees. The station was so clandestine that even the distinguished American ambassador, Llewellyn E. Thompson, a kindly but shrewd career diplomat, was not sure which members of his staff might be spooks. Because of KGB bugs, sensitive conversations inside the embassy had to take place in "the bubble," a secure room-within-a-room. "Tommy's first question in the bubble after I arrived," Garbler recalled, "was, who was here for the CIA other than me?" There were not many names that Garbler could provide; the station was so small that Garbler had only a few officers on his staff. [2] Within a few months, he was joined by his wife, Florence, who taught at the Anglo-American school and helped him in his espionage work. "She had no operational training or tasks. But she accompanied me on some visits to help screen me. If I had to empty a drop in Gorky Park, I'd have no reason to be there. But if Florence was with me, we'd be strolling around together, I'd point things out to her, and eventually we'd sit on a bench. That would be the dead drop. Or marking a signal site with chalk at a theater, she would screen me from the view of casual passersby. She was a big help to me." The month after Garbler arrived in Moscow, Anatoly Golitsin defected in Helsinki. Garbler had no reason to pay much attention to that at the time, since he was concentrating on his primary mission of monitoring clandestine contacts with Oleg Penkovsky, whom the CIA regarded as its most important asset inside the Soviet Union. [3] "We were able to do quick brush contacts with Penkovsky at social affairs," Garbler said. "For example, an embassy official would give a cocktail party, Penkovsky was invited. On his trips to the West, Penkovsky had been shown photographs of people who might give him something or take his film. He would know that somebody was going to brush him at this party. One or two times we did this. At different locales, including Spaso House, the ambassador's residence." Garbler met Penkovsky only once. "It was at a reception at Spaso House. Penkovsky did not have my picture, and did not know who I was." Garbler, living his cover as assistant naval attache, was in uniform at the reception. As far as Penkovsky knew, he was having a pleasant chat with an American naval officer; he had no idea he was talking to the chief of the CIA station. *** Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, the CIA's most celebrated spy, was born in 1919 in Ordzhonikidze, in the northern Caucasus, the son of a White Russian army officer who was killed battling the Bolsheviks at Rostov during the Russian civil war. Young Oleg was raised by his mother, who, to protect her son's future, claimed that his father had died of typhus. [4] Oleg went to artillery school in Kiev. After the Soviets attacked Finland in 1939, Penkovsky's rifle division was sent to the front. Assigned to duties in Moscow the following year, Penkovsky met Vera Gapanovich, the daughter of a powerful Soviet general. When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Oleg was sent to the Ukraine, where he earned eight decorations but was hit by shrapnel, was knocked unconscious, and lost four teeth. In the hospital back in Moscow, Penkovsky met General (later Marshal) Sergei S. Varentsov, who had been injured in a jeep accident. Varentsov took a liking to the young artillery officer, and made him his aide on the spot. And he soon had an assignment for Penkovsky. Varentsov's daughter, Nina, the apple of his eye, had married a Jew, a Major Loshak, who got in trouble with the authorities for selling cars and parts on the black market. He was arrested in Lvov and sentenced to be shot. The marshal sent Penkovsky to intercede, but he arrived too late. "After her husband had been executed," said George Kisevalter, the CIA case officer who handled Penkovsky, "Nina Varentsov pulled a pistol from an officer and blew her brains out. Penkovsky spent his own money to give them a decent burial. When he reported back to a tearful Varentsov, the marshal said, 'You're like a son to me. You did everything you could. You did what I would have done.'" [5] The episode cemented the personal bond between the powerful marshal and his young aide. Varentsov got Penkovsky into the prestigious Frunze Military Academy and persuaded him to go into intelligence work. Penkovsky married Vera Gapanovich, and his star was on the rise. In 1955, he was sent to Turkey as the acting GRU resident in Ankara. Six months later, a GRU general, Nikolai Petrovich Rubenko, whose real name was Savchenko, arrived in Ankara to take over as the resident. Tension soon developed between Penkovsky and his bullying boss, a much older man. Penkovsky also disliked a rival GRU officer in Ankara, Nikolai V. Ionchenko, later an adviser to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. [6] Penkovsky returned to Moscow in 1956 and was preparing to be sent to India when the KGB at last unearthed the fact that his father was a White Russian army officer. He was eventually cleared but downgraded and assigned to a selection board for GRU trainees. By this time Penkovsky was becoming increasingly frustrated in his career. In November of 1960, he was transferred to the State Committee for Science and Technology, which meant that he would deal with foreign businessmen and officials and be able to travel abroad. But even before this opportunity presented itself, Penkovsky had already reached a momentous decision. Three months earlier, in August 1960, Penkovsky made the first of four attempts to offer his services to the West. The GRU colonel was returning home from summer leave in Odessa when his train stopped in Kiev, so that cars from another train from the Caucasus could be attached. As he walked on the platform, he noticed two American college students speaking Russian. In Moscow the next day, Penkovsky spotted the same two students in Sokolniki Park, followed them toward the Hotel Ukraina, and approached them. He handed them a package and begged them to deliver it to the American embassy. "They took the package," Kisevalter said. "The Marine guard lectured the students, don't take things from Russians. I was at headquarters when the package came in by courier. My God, we grabbed our heads and went crazy. Everything was typed in Russian. The first letter was an invitation to dance. 'I'm an intelligence officer. My people are suffering. Khrushchev will plunge the world into a third world war. I want to offer my services. I realize this letter is not enough. On page three and four you'll find a sketch of a dead drop and a signal site elsewhere to indicate a message has been placed. I want precise instructions of how I can securely deliver to you a package which contains all details of the entire Soviet arsenal of rocketry, conventional and nuclear.'" Kisevalter was animated as he spoke of what was surely one of the most electric moments of his espionage career. Penkovsky's letter, he said, "contained a most unbelievable list of incoming candidates for the military-diplomatic academy, which is their highest intelligence school, and backgrounds of the candidates, their assignments after graduation, and languages." It was an intelligence bonanza such as the CIA had never seen. [7] "But we didn't have assets in Moscow," Kisevalter lamented. "We didn't respond to Penkovsky's letter." Incredible as it may seem, the CIA did not have anyone in the Soviet capital who could reply to Penkovsky's overture. There was no CIA station in Moscow. "About October of 1960, we get a cable from MI6," Kisevalter said. "It reports that two British businessmen said some nut named Penkovsky in civilian clothing had wined and dined them in Moscow. Penkovsky asked them to take a package to the American embassy. They refused. 'Will you take my card?' They agreed. It listed Penkovsky's office on Gorky Street. On the back he wrote, 'Please call this number,' his home number, 'at ten A.M. on any Sunday from a pay booth.' "Another month goes by and we try to get a guy into Moscow. We had no one Russian-speaking there. We had no one to run, no agents, so there was no one there. We sent one of our people in as an assistant supply officer." The CIA man moved into America House, a Moscow apartment building catering to foreigners but staffed by Soviets. "Meanwhile, we're trying to figure out about Penkovsky. We don't understand how a military intelligence officer could walk around Moscow in civilian clothes." Eventually, the CIA learned the answer: Penkovsky had been assigned to the civilian scientific committee. About this time, a Canadian diplomat, William Van Vliet, recently returned from Moscow, flew to Washington from Ottawa to see Kisevalter. In all likelihood, Van Vliet was acting for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), then in charge of that country's counterintelligence. Penkovsky, Van Vliet said, had approached him and James Harrison, another Canadian official, at the National Hotel in Moscow and turned over his business card and a sealed envelope that Penkovsky said contained drawings of Soviet ballistic missiles. Once again, Penkovsky asked that the package be delivered to the Americans. Harrison, Van Vliet told Kisevalter, was greatly distressed that Canada had been ensnared in what appeared to be an American spy operation. "I thought he was going to have apoplexy," Van Vliet said. The Canadians kept the package overnight, Kisevalter related. "Then they called Penkovsky, called him back, and said, 'Here, take your package.'" The documents were returned to Penkovsky unopened. [8] Penkovsky had now made three attempts to communicate with the CIA, and had nothing to show for it. What happened next would have discouraged a less persistent spy. "Our guy is now in place in Moscow," Kisevalter said. "We sent him a message for Penkovsky -- 'Please don't contact anyone else, don't deliver the package for your own security, be patient, we will contact you.' The case officer knows he's surrounded by Soviets in America House and starts drinking heavily. He doesn't find a phone booth until eleven A.M., an hour late, and then he improvises. The message he gave Penkovsky was a senseless garble. He was drunk. He now teaches school in West Virginia." In April 1961, Carlton B. Swift, Jr., the CIA operations chief in London station, the millionaire scion of the meat-packing family, reported that a British businessman, Greville Wynne, had met Penkovsky in Moscow. "Penkovsky took him to parties," Kisevalter said. "When it was time for Wynne to leave, Penkovsky pulls out an envelope and says please deliver these to the American embassy in London." MI6 had already recruited Wynne, who traveled frequently to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to serve as Penkovsky's courier. He took the envelope back to London. And finally, later in April 1961, the CIA had its first face-to-face meeting with Oleg Penkovsky, who traveled to London as the leader of a Soviet trade delegation. Kisevalter and another case officer, Joseph J. Bulik, flew to London and met with Harold Shergold and Michael Stokes of MI6 in what now became a joint British-U.S. operation. They set up in London's Mount Royal Hotel, near Marble Arch, where Penkovsky's delegation was being wined and dined on another floor by a group of British steel executives. Kisevalter sent a note to Penkovsky asking him to come to Kisevalter's room, using an interior fire escape. "We waited. There was a knock on the door. There's Penkovsky, in civilian clothes. 'We're the ones you wrote to,' we said." To prove it, the CIA officers showed Penkovsky a copy of his original letter. "Penkovsky took off his jacket," Kisevalter continued. "From under the lining he removed a package and handed it to us. 'You don't know much about me,' he said. He then told his life story. 'Do you have time?' he asked. We had time." It was the first in a series of intensive debriefings of Penkovsky that summer in England and France. From London, the CIA-MI6 team followed Penkovsky to Birmingham and Leeds, meeting with him clandestinely seventeen times in fifteen days in the three cities. During one of these meetings, Penkovsky made a startling proposal: in the event that war was imminent, he would, if the CIA and MI6 wished him to do so, hide miniature atomic bombs at strategic locations around Moscow to destroy the Soviet capital. "He had twenty-nine critical places in Moscow," Kisevalter said. "He described each of the locations, all significant from a military point of view. The primary headquarters of the Moscow military command, an emergency secondary military headquarters, underground in an abandoned Moscow subway, the headquarters of the artillery command. We let him continue, rather than cut him off, because for us it was useful to get a list of these strategic locations. "He wanted us to provide the bombs, each small enough to fit in a suitcase. His idea was to go around town in a taxi with the bombs in suitcases and put them in garbage cans or alleys or other places to conceal them." How would the nuclear weapons have been triggered? "They would have been time bombs," Kisevalter said. "All would be triggered to go off at the same moment. Giving him a chance to get away." Penkovsky's scheme to launch World War III with a taxi and suitcases struck the CIA and MI6 officers as impractical, but they did not want to discourage his cooperation. "We told him we didn't have such weapons available," Kisevalter recalled, "but if and when we had such bombs and if a need arose, we would be in touch." Kisevalter smiled. "And we got the twenty-nine locations." In Leeds, a Keystone Cops episode nearly resulted in Kisevalter's arrest. "Headquarters said I had to go to England as a Scotsman, Mr. McAdam. I registered in a hotel in Leeds. It was pouring cats and dogs. I had just met Penkovsky on the street. 'Can we talk?' I asked. 'Yes, I'm free for two hours.' We went to my hotel. There were a lot of people in the lobby. 'I'll go in, you follow me,' I said. I go through the revolving door into the lobby. He doesn't come in. I think maybe he's misunderstood me. I go out through the revolving door. As I go out, he comes in. Everybody in the lobby is looking over their newspapers. Who are these clowns?" Matters rapidly got worse; Kisevalter walked back inside into the arms of the police. "I got arrested in the lobby. Detained, anyway. The police said, 'Mr. McAdam, what are you doing? This is the Queen's own.' Queen's own? I had no idea what they were talking about. Turns out it was the census, every ten years, and if you are traveling during that period, you have to register with the police, and I hadn't. There was no way I could fill out the form. I didn't even know my 'father's' name in Scotland. I went to MI6 and they nearly died laughing and then they filled out the form." Before leaving England, Penkovsky was given a sophisticated camera, fabricated by MI6 technicians, to photograph documents. It looked like a Minox but was specially designed for its task, and used extremely sensitive film. [9] In July, Penkovsky returned to London with a delegation of Soviet technical experts. He handed over a large group of films and documents to Wynne, and met with the four-man CIA-MI6 team again. The joint MI6-CIA team worked out procedures for Penkovsky to continue passing secrets when he returned to Moscow. His contacts would be Wynne and Janet Ann Chisholm, who had once been Shergold's secretary and was the wife of the MI6 station chief in Moscow, Roderick "Ruari" Chisholm. She was flown in from Moscow and met Penkovsky so he would know what she looked like. Penkovsky was given a CIA communications plan code-named Yo-Yo 51, which consisted of a one-time pad in Cyrillic that he would use to decipher coded messages broadcast to him in Moscow by shortwave radio from Frankfurt. [10] In Penkovsky's case, the CIA broadcast a dummy tape with "cut numbers," a form of altered Morse code. The dummy tape sounded like Morse, but was really a continuous but apparently meaningless stream of dots and dashes. Penkovsky was instructed to don earphones and listen at midnight on Saturday and Sunday on a $26 Sony radio that Kisevalter had bought for him. A five-number group, Penkovsky's call number, would be broadcast at midnight, followed by a dummy group, the last three letters of which would tell him how many real coded groups to expect in the message that followed. If the KGB was listening, the message would sound no different from the dots and dashes that preceded it; only Penkovsky could decipher the text with his one-time pad. Penkovsky brought with him a long shopping list from Soviet officials. First on the list was a request from the chief of the GRU, Ivan Alexandrovich Serov, who had also formerly headed the KGB. "Penkovsky says Serov wants a garden swing, he wants bees for rheumatic treatment," Kisevalter said. "And Penkovsky brought with him outlines of many women's feet for shoes for wives of the top brass. 'How do you expect to get this stuff home?' I asked. 'Wynne's going back with ten suitcases. The swing can go by boat -- we have a boat on the Thames.' So we had a shopping expedition. We had to get a present for Varentsov's birthday -- Khrushchev would be there. At Harrods, I got a sterling-silver rocket that dispatched cigarettes and cigars. Just the thing for the marshal. And a watch, but we didn't have a cleared engraver, so we couldn't engrave it. And a sixty-year-old bottle of cognac, which we got by having [CIA] case officers scouring France They did find a cleared dentist, who replaced Penkovsky's missing teeth." As busy as Penkovsky was, leading his double life, he found time while in London to visit the grave of Karl Marx in High gate. "He found it covered with garbage," Kisevalter said. "He photographed it, reported to Moscow what a bunch of lemons were in our embassy here, they weren't even taking care of the grave. He was commended." In September, Penkovsky flew to Paris and stayed for almost a month, meeting with Kisevalter, Shergold, and the two other team members in a British safe house near the Etoile. He returned to Moscow on October 16, 1961. He was never to visit the West again. *** With Penkovsky back in Moscow, it had been arranged that he would make contact in an emergency through a dead drop, a hiding place behind a radiator in the lobby of an apartment building at No. 5-6 Pushkin Street. Penkovsky would leave his message in a matchbox, which he would wrap in wire and hang on a hook behind the radiator. The drop, according to Kisevalter, was to be used only in extraordinary circumstances, "for a warning, in the event of a planned surprise attack by the Soviets, or in case of a drastic change in operational procedure. Suppose Penkovsky was unexpectedly transferred out of Moscow, for example. He had to have some way to get word to us." If Penkovsky left anything in the drop he was to signal the CIA by marking a circle in charcoal on lamppost No. 35 near a bus stop on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The lamppost was checked each day by Captain Alexis H. Davison, the assistant air attache and embassy doctor, who had been recruited by the CIA for that single task. Davison could do so without attracting attention; he drove by the lamppost every day on his normal route commuting between his home and the embassy. [11] Late in 1961, the CIA decided to check the drop, even though it had not received a signal from Penkovsky. Headquarters wanted to make sure that the door to the lobby was unlocked, the drop accessible, and everything in working order. The agency persuaded John V. Abidian, the embassy's security officer, to perform that risky task. Although a State Department employee, Abidian needed little persuasion. "The job was there and needed to be done," he said. A tall, darkly handsome New Englander with striking features, Abidian was particular about his appearance. "I had a mania for having a decent haircut," Abidian said. When he had arrived in Moscow the previous year, he had gone to great lengths looking for a good barber. "I finally found one. Near the barber there was a bookshop. It just so happens that the lobby on Pushkin Street was near the bookshop, around the corner. I was able to get my haircut while I knew surveillance was sleeping, or smoking. Then I went into the bookstore in one door and went out the other door." Abidian turned the corner and slipped into the lobby, a dimly lit place with a pay phone along one wall. "I remember the stairwell, the radiator on the right side, a very small lobby." Abidian double-checked, just in case Penkovsky had left something hanging behind the radiator. "But there was nothing there. It was late afternoon, and dark in the lobby." Although Abidian does not remember doing so, he may have lit a match to inspect the drop. "I put my hand down as far as I could -- it would take a very skinny hand to get down further." Since the drop appeared to be empty, Abidian duly reported this back to the CIA. He recalled checking the Pushkin Street drop again, at least once. But, ducking from the barber shop to the bookstore to the dead drop, Abidian was confident that he had not been observed by the KGB. *** Six weeks after Penkovsky returned to Moscow from Paris, Garbler was in place in the Soviet capital. Although busy with the Penkovsky case, he was developing other assets for the Moscow station. One was a diplomat of another country who was cooperating with the CIA. Garbler invited several guests, including the diplomat, to his apartment one night to view a film. In the darkness, he slipped a small device to the man which had a sharp point at one end and a hollow container for a message. "It was to be planted near a pole on the highway and used as a drop," Garbler said. "The man didn't plant it. He claimed he had been under surveillance and decided he'd better not." Garbler asked for the device back, and the diplomat returned it to him a week later another film night in the station chief's apartment. Garbler put it in his pants pocket and then under his pillow that light. He shipped It back to CIA headquarters, where it was analyzed by the Technical Services Division. To his horror, "TSD told me it was radioactive," Garbler said. "The Soviets had apparently broken into the man's embassy safe and planted an isotope in the device." Garbler was told this had been done to make it easier for the Soviets to find it. "I thought back on the fact that for six hours I had it in my pants pocket, near my vital organs," Garbler related, "not to mention under my pillow." The episode left no permanent ill effects but impressed Garbler on the lengths to which the Soviets would go to counter the CIA. Meanwhile, he waited for a signal from Angleton. Although Garbler had agreed, at the farewell party at Bill Harvey's house, to handle the counterintelligence chiefs agent in Moscow -- one did not lightly say no to Angleton -- Garbler and the CI official were not the warmest of colleagues. It went back to an incident in 1956 when Angleton had visited the Stockholm station. At the time, Garbler was the deputy COS. Angleton met with Garbler and Paul Birdsall, the chief of station. The counterintelligence chief made some small talk; he was enjoying the weather, having a nice time in Stockholm. Then he stood up, took off his jacket, removed a belt, and from a hidden compartment inside it extracted a code pad. "I'd like to send a message," Angleton announced. "Does it have to do with something happening in Sweden?" Garbler asked politely. "Sure." "We're responsible for what happens here. Would we know what you're reporting?" "No way." Since Angleton traveled with his own codes, they could not be read by the local station. Garbler turned to Birdsall. "Paul," he said, "I don't think we should let him send the message. Let him send it by Western Union if he wants to." Birdsall, a mild-mannered Harvard man who had no stomach for confrontation, overruled his deputy and told Angleton to go ahead and send the message. Now, after several months in Moscow, Garbler received an eyes-only message from Angleton at headquarters. The CI chief had set up a communications procedure for his agent. When the dead drop, located in Gorky Park, was ready to be cleared, the agent would send a an innocuous postcard to an accommodation address abroad. Angelton would be informed when the postcard arrived and would send a code word to Garbler in Moscow, a signal to unload the drop. When the signal came, Garbler, accompanied by his wife, Florence, went to Gorky Park. The drop was a hollow rock. If it was there, that meant there was a message inside. The rock was where Angleton had said it would be. After making sure they were not under surveillance, Garbler picked it up and walked away. Back at the embassy, Garbler opened the rock and found a long message inside, encoded in a series of five-digit groups. That created a problem for the station chief. In sending code, the procedure was to spell out the digits in letters. The number "6," for example, became "six," and then the text was encoded again. Even though the agent's code used only numbers under ten, Garbler estimated that each group of five digits would require three or more groups of five letters, spelled out. But this would create an unusually long message. From the length of the material in the rock, Garbler calculated it would take several "operational immediate" messages to send the entire contents to Angleton. Since all traffic went through the Soviet telegraph system, this extraordinary traffic would alert and possibly alarm the Soviets. Was World War III coming? Garbler cabled Angleton, outlining his dilemma and asking for instructions. Did the counterintelligence chief really want the message by cable? The reply came back: "Send as agreed." The communications room had feeble air conditioning and was hot and stuffy. Garbler, stripped down to his undershirt, sat in the commo room for four hours, painstakingly using one-time pads to reencode the contents of the rock. He had sent four operational messages when headquarters cabled him: "Stop! Send rest by routine precedence," the lowest and least urgent level of communication. Garbler never knew the identity of the agent, or what the message in the rock said, and he never heard another word from Angleton. But the Moscow station chief may have hoped that, having serviced Angleton's agent, the CI chief might forget, or at least forgive, the incident in Stockholm. As the first chief of the Moscow station, Garbler's future seemed bright, and Angleton was not a good man to cross. Garbler never confided in John Maury, the chief of the Soviet division, that he had agreed to unload Angleton's rock. The counterintelligence chief had made it clear when he approached Garbler that the operation was to be handled with the utmost secrecy. And Garbler may have had another sound reason for not telling his division chief. He knew that Maury was not one of Angleton's admirers. The head of the Soviet division, an affable, pipe-smoking Virginia gentleman not normally given to harsh judgments, had made his view on that subject graphically clear, on more than one occasion. "Maury used to say of Angleton," Garbler remembered, "that if you cut his head off, he won't stop wiggling until after sunset." _______________ Notes: 1. Within the agency, Harvey became notorious for slumbering through staff meetings. At one such meeting at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Harvey started nodding off as usual, and gradually his jacket opened, exposing his gun in its holster. Someone wrote a sign and placed it on his potbelly: "Fattest gun in the West." 2. In most stations, the CIA is housed in one area of the embassy. For security reasons, the handful of CIA officers in Moscow were scattered around the building. Garbler had to arrange meetings with them through an elaborate system of signals. "Making contact in the embassy with station officers was a lot like setting up a clandestine meeting with an agent in, say, Paris. I used different signals and signal sites with each officer. In Moscow it sometimes took two days to meet a station officer. All the meetings were in the bubble." 3. Golitsin defected only two weeks after Garbler got to Moscow. "I heard about it," Garbler said. "A cable from headquarters arrived. It said that there had been a defection in Helsinki and the KGB was digging through the city, looking for the guy. We used to make occasional shopping trips to Helsinki, and the cable said it wouldn't be good to go at this time. I replied I wasn't planning to go to Helsinki." 4. The family was divided. Penkovsky's great-uncle, General Valentin Antonovich Penkovsky, had joined the Red Army. He was caught in Stalin's purges, jailed but not executed, and fought with valor against the Nazis in World War II, becoming the wartime commander for the Far East military district. He rose high in the Soviet military and earned three Orders of Lenin. He met his nephew Oleg once in Moscow and, in a secret reunion over tears and vodka, promised never to report Oleg's White Russian father. 5. Many details of Penkovsky's background and his espionage career for the CIA were provided to the author by George Kisevalter in a series of interviews at Kisevalter's home near Washington. Kisevalter had been told of these events by the Soviet spy in the course of many hours of debriefings during the GRU colonel's three trips to the West in 1961. Kisevalter's account went beyond the version published in The Penkovsky Papers (New York: Doubleday, 1965), a memoir ostensibly written by Penkovsky and smuggled out of the Soviet Union but in fact prepared with material provided by the CIA from the spy's debriefings in the West. 6. The trouble came to a head when the GRU resident received an order from Moscow. As George Kisevalter recounted it, "A cable came in -- lay off operations because the Shah of Iran was paying a state visit. Every hostile intelligence service in world will be there, don't get caught. Despite the orders from Moscow, Ionchenko wanted to keep a meeting with a Turkish agent who had U.S. Air Force maps. Penkovsky called Turkish security and they nailed Ionchenko, who was expelled. They shot the Turk. Penkovsky was assigned to escort Ionchenko out. Rubenko made life so impossible that Penkovsky cabled Moscow, using KGB channels. This hit the central committee. Khrushchev called in both Rubenko and Penkovsky. The general was censured and thrown out of the GRU. Penkovsky was rewarded for vigilance and reassigned." But he was a marked man for having opposed his boss, a general. It took the intervention of Marshal Varentsov to get Penkovsky a new assignment to the Dzerzhinsky artillery school in Moscow for a nine-month course in missiles. 7. Of the names on the list, Kisevalter said, "one quarter were to be especially trained as illegals. These were starred. One French-speaking agent going to Lebanon, one English-speaking agent going to Israel, and so on." To confirm the validity of Penkovsky's list, ten CIA case officers were assigned to analyze all that the agency knew about the GRU officers. File traces were run, and the CIA was able to identify about forty of the sixty names on the list. "We had photos of about twenty-five," Kisevalter said. "Those with no record had never been outside the USSR." 8. Official documents released by the Canadian government early in 1991 placed the date of Penkovsky's approach at the National Hotel as January 9, 1961. Blair Seaborn, the Canadian charge d'affaires in Moscow, had approved the decision to rebuff Penkovsky. He was later overruled by a new ambassador, Arnold Smith, who arranged to put Penkovsky in touch with MI6, according to the documents. See Dean Beeby, Canadian Press, "We Nearly Did It Again," Ottawa Citizen, March I, 1991, p. A2. 9. The camera had a fixed f-stop of f8 and a fixed shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. Penkovsky was instructed to use a light source of between 60 and 100 watts. He was told that 17.5 by 21 inches was the maximum-size document that could be photographed in one shot. Any document bigger than that required two frames. 10. A one-time pad is a tiny booklet containing groups of random numbers that an agent uses to decode the messages received. The only other copy is retained by the intelligence service that is controlling the agent. As the name implies, each page of the pad is used only once, then destroyed. Sometimes the pads are made of edible paper. Because only two copies of the pads exist, it is impossible to break the code. 11. In addition, Penkovsky was instructed to telephone Hugh Montgomery, Garbler's deputy chief of station, at Moscow 43 26 87 to alert him to the chalk mark. "There was no voice conversation," Kisevalter said. "After three rings, Penkovsky would hang up."
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