Editor’s note: Originally posted on
September 15, 2016 by Nigel West in Strand Magazine:
https://www.strandmag.com/top-ten-spies-of-the-cold-war/
GUEST BLOG / By
Nigel West, Strand Magazine--There are two methods of identifying the top ten spies
of the Cold War. One is to assess the damage inflicted by individual agents;
another is to dig a little deeper and find out who made the major cases of
espionage possible. All but two of the spies on the list were “walk-ins,” being
self-recruited volunteers who literally strolled into the Soviet embassy in
Washington, D.C., without a prearranged appointment and in defiance of the
FBI’s physical and technical surveillance on the building, and offered their
services for a price.
One
of the great skills of a case officer is to recognize an authentic potential
source when it first appears, and another is to react to the delicate situation
in a manner that engenders confidence on the part of the putative spy. Results
will testify to the efficacy of the approach adopted, and in this scenario, the
outstanding professional must be Boris Solomatin, formerly the Washington KGB
rezident who was responsible for recognizing US Navy NCO John Walker as the
genuine article. When they met for the first time, for two hours in October
1967, Walker dispelled any fears Solomatin might have had about an FBI
provocation or agent provocateur, because of the nature of what was being
offered: crypto-cards from the current KW-7 cipher machine employed to
communicate with Norfolk’s fleet of ballistic missile submarines. No
“operational game” would risk compromising such vital information.
Solomatin’s
intuition paid off and Walker remained an active spy, arguably the most
damaging in the history of the United States, for nearly 18 years until he was
arrested in May 1985. By then, Solomatin had received several promotions, had
successfully recruited another U.S. Navy NCO, Glenn Souther, and was safely
back in Moscow, ready to retire three years later at the age of 64.
By
any standards, Solomatin was an extraordinarily accomplished recruiter, matched
only by Viktor Cherkashin, the KGB counter-intelligence expert and deputy
rezident in Washington who handled first Aldrich Ames in 1985 and then Robert
Hanssen six months later, after he had been run originally by the Soviet
military intelligence service (GRU).
Although
highly astute, Cherkashin found himself dealing with two extremely capable
individuals who needed no lessons in self-preservation or tradecraft.
Whereas
Walker (and his network, which consisted of a friend and three members of his
family) compromised a substantial proportion of NATO’s nuclear deterrent by
exposing the Trident nuclear fleet, Hanssen and Ames separately and
independently betrayed dozens of secret operations, nullifying much of the work
of the FBI and CIA.
However,
their access was somewhat restricted to their own rather esoteric world, in
contract to Adolf Tolkachev, the Soviet aeronautical engineer who approached
the CIA’s John Guilsher in Moscow. An experienced member of the local CIA
station headed by Gus Hathaway, Guilsher sensed that Tolkachev’s almost
foolhardy approach was genuine, and thereby began a relationship that would
effectively neutralize the avionics, airborne radar, and IFF systems fitted to
the latest generation of MiG and Sukhoi fighter jets.
Guilsher
and Hathaway knew the danger of a “dangle,” intended by their adversaries to
identify the CIA’s order-of-battle in the embassy, but judged the gamble
worthwhile, and for seven years the aircraft designer passed aircraft secrets
to a succession of fluent Russian-speaking handlers who followed. Guilsher was
himself of White Russian heritage, and the CIA enjoyed a tradition of
attracting personnel whose families had been forced to leave the country by the
Bolsheviks.
Another
was Guilsher’s colleague George Kisevalter, another remarkable case officer who
qualifies to be on our list. Kisevalter had been born in St. Petersburg but
taken to New York as a child, and had joined the CIA in 1951. Two years later,
he had been assigned to run a GRU officer, Major Piotr Popov in Vienna, but his
great coup was his introduction in April 1961 to another, more senior GRU
source, Oleg Penkovsky, who hemorrhaged Soviet missile defense plans during the
Cuban missile crisis the following year.
Another
Soviet colonel who agreed to spy at about the same time was Dmitri Polyakov,
the GRU’s deputy rezident then based at the United Nations mission in New York.
From his original pitch to the FBI’s John Mabey in January 1962, the spy
code-named TOP HAT would supply classified material and remain undetected for
twenty-three years.
It
was Vasili Dozhdalev, a KGB Line N illegals officer who ran the British spy
George Blake in London under the noses of the local security apparatus, an
impressive accomplishment, perhaps eclipsed by Tony Brooks’s recruitment of
Oleg Lyalin in 1972. A member of the KGB’s London rezidentura, based at the
trade mission, Lyalin had been conducting an affair with his secretary when
Brooks exercised some leverage and persuaded him to switch sides. He may only
have been an active spy for eight months, but his impact would be lasting,
making Brooks, already hugely respected within the secret world because of his
wartime resistance work in occupied France, a legend.
Exfiltration,
the essential skill of removing an asset clandestinely from a hostile
environment, saved the life of Oleg Gordievsky in 1985 when the Moscow station
commander, Viscount Asquith, smuggled the KGB officer over the Finnish
frontier, just as the CIA’s David Forden had arranged for his star agent,
Colonel Ryszard Kuklinsky, to be concealed in a diplomat’s car in November 1981
for the journey from Warsaw to West Berlin.
In
the event of failure to help a valued agent escape, as happened to Leonid
Kvasnikov when he learned that Klaus Fuchs was in jeopardy, having been “blown”
as a mole inside the atomic research establishment at Harwell, the scientist
faced a long prison sentence. Nevertheless, his espionage had given the Kremlin
the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon faster than Western analysts had
anticipated.
Recruiter/Handler Spy
1
Boris Solomatin. John Walker
2
John Guilsher. Adolf
Tolkachev
3
George Kisevalter. Oleg Penkovsky
4
John Mabey. Dmitri
Polyakov
5
Vasili Dozhdalev. George Blake
6
Tony Brooks. Oleg
Lyalin
7
David Forden. Ryszard
Kuklinski
8
Victor Cherkashin. Aldrich
Ames, Robert Hanssen
9
Leonid Kvasniko, Klaus Fuchs
10
Viscount Asquith. Oleg Gordievsky
Strand Magazine
Writer: Nigel West: www.nigelwest.com
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