Probe intent. But this Land Rover’s driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicle’s doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. But even this was not enough. His most important information was on the continued Soviet efforts to penetrate the American and British nuclear weapons programme. She spent her whole career there, serving overseas in a number of different embassies, including those in Moscow and Hanoi, Vietnam, acting as a diplomat. At some point in 1985, the KGB learnt of his identity, almost certainly via CIA officers secretly working for the Russians, and Tolkachev was arrested, interrogated and executed. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. If it should turn out that the mole is no longer alive, the intelligence agencies would still run a damage assessment to try to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed. For Tolkachev, the driving factor was ideology, but for the CIA officer who likely betrayed him, Aldrich ‘Rick’ Ames, the impetus was entirely financial. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. Quite how important the Rosenbergs themselves were in this network is a matter of debate, particularly Ethel. Thanks! Maybe a fifth. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. “Cold fear started to run down my back,” he told me. Once Lenin and his followers had taken power, they set about transforming Russia into the Soviet Union, a vast communist monolith with two primary focuses: maintaining a strict communist ideology and discipline, and exporting their ideology globally with the ultimate goal of inspiring a worldwide revolution. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Thank you for subscribing to HistoryExtra, you now have unlimited access. Tolkachev’s experiences and fate were not unique. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. In the aftermath of World War II, the US spy agencies are estimated to have enlisted around 1,000 former Nazis or Nazi collaborators to act as spies and informants during the Cold War. (He later alleged that he suspected they were plants anyway – that is, not real spies, but agents intentionally dangled by the Russians to confuse the CIA.) In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: “I’m quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April ’85, until June 13th.”. Finding such people in a position of access – to documents and people – was tremendously difficult, and it took huge efforts over years to recruit them. In April 1985, Ames arranged to meet a KGB officer based in the US. For both the US and Soviet Union, there was a sense of inevitability that they might become rivals, and by 1947 – less than two years after the last shots of World War II had been fired – the Cold War had become a reality through the Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy declaration by US President Harry Truman that committed the US to fighting Soviet expansion in Europe and beyond. This mutual respect not only extended to the individuals and organisations themselves, but in the ‘gentlemanly’ exchange of captured agents, many of which took place on Glienicke Bridge in Germany, which connects West Berlin and Potsdam. Fears. Soviet and American intelligence officials did not attack their counterparts. They oversaw an espionage network that included Ethel’s brother and their main source was Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British scientist who handed over large amounts of scientific and technical intelligence on the atom bomb to the Russians. A Russian. His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was “Mole.” Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 years—and feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. He spent more than three decades in the agency, the vast majority in the Directorate of Operations with a focus on the Soviet Union. Hathaway had been appointed as CIA Moscow station chief at a crucial time in the espionage confrontation between East and West: the CIA had lost a number of significant agents, and those back in Washington had decreed that no new agents were to be recruited until the losses could be explained. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. The KGB, the GIGN (or in some versions of the joke, the FBI) and the CIA are all trying to prove they are the best at catching criminals. He was motivated entirely by financial gain – he would end up being paid millions of US dollars by the Russians – and passed across thousands upon thousands of pages of highly classified documents. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, “By the way, Sergei, this cable came in” and tossed it over. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. 9. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. In the West, it could mean imprisonment or, in the case of some like the Rosenbergs, the electric chair; in the East, it invariably meant a bullet to the back of the head. Everything you ever wanted to know about... MK Ultra: the secrets of the CIA’s mind-control programme, The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know, Cannibalism at sea: the starving Victorian sailors who ate a cabin boy, The Anarchy: everything you wanted to know, How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? “He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, ‘Here is something from Leo.’” By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. He’d been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. Ames was probably the most destructive Soviet spy or ‘mole’ hidden in the CIA. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. Hanssen decided to offer his services to Soviet intelligence just a few years after joining the FBI. Origins of the Cold War 2. Inside were three British intelligence agents—the candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievsky’s MI6 case officer in London. I could sense he had been tortured.” Leonid was executed on July 30. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. Yet at the top of the pyramid, where the power to set agendas resides, there is only the Agenda, and the primary difference between the two parties is the speed at which 'the Agenda' is advanced. At its heart was a battle for information, to know what the other side was up to. Soon there was a plan for an “exfiltration,” the CIA’s term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. They were both executed by electric chair on the same day. He became upset at not being promoted – feeling that he should be a general – so offered his services to the West. He was coming out of the petrol station when there was a tap on his car window. Ames’ espionage career finally ended in 1994 when he was arrested: his extravagant lifestyle had finally given him away. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB. Six-Day War; Part of the Arab–Israeli conflict: Map of the military movements and territorial changes during the Six-Day War. The territory of Israel before the war is colored royal blue on this map, while the territories captured by Israel during the war are depicted in various shades of green. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. He was rescued in dramatic fashion two months later, hidden in the boot of a specially modified car and smuggled to Finland. They were identified following a joint Anglo-American codebreaking effort into Soviet transmissions, were arrested and convicted in the early 1950s. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.”. Bokhan’s son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. He stayed in safe houses in Virginia at first, then lived half a year in California to learn English, moved back East and consulted for the CIA and some U.S. companies. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. It was the signal to launch his escape. I had no job. Please enter your number below. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. For example, what do you do when an enemy spy falls into your hands? Desire. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. “It was the KGB’s way of saying my father worked for the CIA,” Andrei said. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isn’t really an option, either. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. They place animal informants throughout the … The Secretary General of the UN decides to set them a test. Professor Michael Goodman steps into a realm of suspicion and sedition to explore why some people turned traitor. Save a huge 50% when you subscribe including free UK delivery! “Afterward, we drove to a home in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe,” Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a restaurant tucked away on a side street in Washington. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. He might be dead, or he’s living in his dacha now. Continue If an American was caught spying in the Soviet Union, the routine was to declare them ‘persona non grata’ (person not appreciated) and send them back to the US. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachev’s unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researcher’s identity. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames’ account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985—before Ames insists he handed over the documents. Noor Inayat Khan: why was the British spy such an unlikely war hero? In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. To betray the state was to risk everything, yet on one cold and snowy evening in February 1978 that was precisely the choice one individual made. “At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed....If it wasn’t Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise,” Wiser said. This was the perfect location for a spy exchange, literally spanning the Cold War divide. Arrested? “It was in my father’s handwriting.” Leonid Poleshchuk knew his first CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, as Joe. His MI6 handlers assured him they’d picked up no sign anything was wrong. “Your father’s been arrested,” the man said. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH. His fear mounted. Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and petty theft. He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIA—it would have put her in mortal danger—but now he had to say something. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought. “No,” he was told, “they’re here for you.”. What caused the likes of Ames and Tolkachev to turn against their own nations? “I could not believe what was happening. “There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldn’t put our finger on.”, And Bearden says, “I remain convinced there is a fourth man. After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames’ wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. They had a sumptuous lunch—Bokhan knew it might be his last meal with his family—and Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. or … Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Cold War summits: David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr explain. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. At times the role of intelligence was absolutely crucial; at others it made no difference. For a long time he resented the impact of his father’s CIA spying on his own life. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovsky’s prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilous—and finally caught the KGB’s attention. The Cold War was, above all, an ideological battle, one that in many ways began in 1917 with the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution. “I was 18 years old.” He sees that episode differently now. That raised a possibility that remains, even today, a subject of deep concern among counterintelligence agents, a problem privately acknowledged but little discussed publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed by a mole inside U.S. intelligence whose identity is still unknown. Neither trusted the other, and each undertook colossal efforts to extend their own influence, sometimes directly and often through puppet governments and proxy battles. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. “Stay calm,” he recalls telling himself. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIA’s assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. These things have to be run to ground.”. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an American husband-and-wife team involved in passing on information regarding the Manhattan Project, the codename given to the construction of the atomic bomb during World War II. It was officially referred to as Project MK/NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification program that within months became known as MK-ULTRA. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Trying to find out what your adversary is going to do before they do it; trying to understand what is happening around the globe; and trying to be in a position to influence and exert your national objectives are the ultimate goals of an intelligence organisation. “In the morning, they took us—my mother, my grandmother and me—and put us in separate black Volgas,” Andrei said. At first, it was thought that he had been betrayed by Ames, every bit as prolific a mole as Polyakov himself, but in 2001 the FBI unmasked one of its operatives, Robert Hanssen, as another Soviet mole. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. One of them finally answered: “For espionage.”. Hathaway was one of the original breed of the CIA, recruited at the start of the Cold War, part of a cadre who spent their careers hidden in the shadows fighting cat-and-mouse battles with their Russian counterparts. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. He had to be tightly controlled by the CIA with his information very carefully concealed so that only select individuals knew anything about him. Recruited by MI6 in the mid-1970s when stationed in Denmark, he was a patriotic Russian who despised the Soviet system. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. In exchange for the millions of dollars that he had received, Ames had provided scores of names, a number of whom were subsequently executed. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. In April 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGB—“dangles,” in intelligence parlance. It is one thing to look at individuals, operations and events to judge the role played by spies, but completely different to look at it across the evolution of the Cold War and throughout the world. Privacy Statement So the discrepancy between Ames’ timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. “You have the wrong number,” he was told. Philby was probably the most destructive, having served in the late 1940s as the MI6 liaison officer to the CIA. U.S. counterintelligence agents have established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Terms of Use The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Cookie Policy He started having trouble breathing. In 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit. Polyakov was a general in the Soviet military intelligence agency, GRU, codenamed Top Hat by the FBI, who became an agent in 1961. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. In the days of the Soviet Union, one side terminated in the Western bloc, one in the Eastern, so crossing over was both physically and metaphorically significant. That happened several times.”. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Ever. Now, he feared, the KGB’s counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. The biggest question is whether the lives, billions spent, and huge amount of time and effort made a difference. It’s OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. The English word disinformation is a loan translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. Each went on to a successful career in government: taken together they had access to intelligence secrets, the atomic bomb, diplomatic affairs and propaganda efforts. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. These rules were unwritten and ungoverned, but important nonetheless and number one amongst them was a certain sense of respect and etiquette. The super spy Sydney Bristow combines college and being a double agent at SD6 (a criminal cell pretending to be a CIA black ops unit ) and now CIA in order to bring down SD6 .The story heats up with Sydneys long lost KGB spy mom coming back and offering herself for the good of the CIA and to get to know Sydney .The stories … One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). Cold War Moscow was a place like no other. But it was only a matter of time. Athens, May 21, 1985: After the Tuesday-morning staff meeting at the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind to talk to his boss, the local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. His trove of intelligence included the names of US military officers spying for the Soviets, missile specs and tangible evidence of a rift emerging between the Soviets and China, the latter prompting US President Richard Nixon to re-establish diplomatic relations with China in the early 1970s. But Hathaway knew better than to reject an overt gesture from the ‘main enemy’. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. We have now placed Twitpic in an archived state. “That’s when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, ‘I met Joe,’” Andrei told me. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Until then, the US and Soviet Union had been bound together in a ‘marriage of convenience’, conceived to take on greater foes – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. “Sooner or later they would arrest me.”. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. Originally a KGB operative and dangerous assassin, Romanoff was recruited into S.H.I.E.L.D. When he began spying for the Russians almost a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would be of incalculable value to the KGB.

Antimatter Crypto Price Prediction, The Assembly Room Wedding Cost, High Point Clothing Store, Viking Vs Spartan Deadliest Warrior, Bet Lifetime Achievement Award Winners, Switch Watergardens Takeaway, Rebecca Name Wiki, Bettinardi Bb1f 2016,