The Spy Who Knew Too Much, page 1
Pete Bagley, before he entered the secret world.
Dedication
For Phil Werber,
My good buddy since way back when
And Leonard Novins,
In memory
Epigraph
There’s no such thing as a former spy.
—A KGB wisdom
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note to the Reader
Cast of Characters
Prologue: The Weight of Guilt
Part I: “Once More unto the Breach”: 1977–1983
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II: A Family of Spies: 1954–1984
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III: “It Takes a Mole to Catch a Mole”: 1984–1987
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part IV: “In My Sights”: 1987–1990
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part V: “The Other Side of the Moon”: 1990–2014
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue: The Weight of Secrets
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Howard Blum
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note to the Reader
IN THIS BOOK, MY INTENTION is to reveal one of the last great secrets of the Cold War. It is also the true story of one spy’s quest through a legacy of betrayals to solve this mystery. And to accomplish both these goals, I relied on not only previously classified government documents, memoirs, interviews with both present and past officers in the intelligence services but also, most helpfully, conversations with individuals who were intimately connected to the characters who animate this story. A complete chapter-by-chapter sourcing appears at the end of this book.
But let me also share another advisory: When the hero of this story, Pete Bagley, knew he was dying, he wrote to a friend, “In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest.”
And that’s what I set out to do in the pages that follow.
—HB
Cast of Characters
(In Order of Appearance)
The Americans
TENNENT “PETE” BAGLEY: Counterintelligence officer and deputy head of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc division.
MARTI PETERSON: The first female case officer assigned to Moscow Station.
JOHN PAISLEY: CIA analyst with a wide-ranging portfolio, which included defector interrogations as well as Soviet military strategy and nuclear weapons capabilities.
RAY ROCCA: Head of Research and Analysis, the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.
JAMES ANGLETON: Chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.
CLARE EDWARD PETTY: Member of CIA’s Special Investigative Group (SIG).
CHRISTINA BAGLEY ROCCA: Pete Bagley’s daughter, a CIA officer who married Gordon Rocca, a DIA analyst and the son of Ray Rocca.
WILLIAM COLBY: CIA fieldman who became director of Central Intelligence.
GEORGE KISEVALTER: Russian-born CIA officer who served as handler for several double agents.
JACK MAURY: CIA Soviet Division chief.
WILLIAM HOOD: Cold War Vienna Station chief.
DAVID MURPHY: Berlin fieldman and CIA Soviet Division chief.
RICHARD HELMS: Wartime OSS officer who rose through the ranks to become CIA director.
JOHN ABIDIAN: Security officer at the American embassy in Moscow who performed operational tasks for the CIA.
BRUCE SOLIE: CIA security officer who defended Nosenko’s bona fides and later played a key role in the ill-fated running of double agent Nicholas Shadrin.
LEONARD MCCOY: CIA reports officer who defended Nosenko, asserting he was not a dispatched Russian agent.
JOHN HART: CIA officer who cleared Nosenko and later gave testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that was pointedly critical of Pete Bagley.
KATHERINE HART: Chief of staff for CIA field stations and wife of John Hart.
MARYANN PAISLEY: Wife of John Paisley and, for a time, a CIA clerk working directly for Katherine Hart.
DAVID SULLIVAN: CIA analyst who leaked information to an aide of a US senator and later reported his suspicions about John Paisley to the Office of Security.
The Russians
ALEXANDER OGORODNIK: Double agent code-named Trigon who, when caught, committed suicide by ingesting a cyanide pill concealed in a fountain pen.
PYOTR POPOV: Lieutenant colonel in military intelligence (GRU) who provided military secrets to the CIA and was executed for treason.
OLEG PENKOVSKY: Colonel of GRU who passed secret intelligence to both the CIA and MI6 and was executed for treason.
LEONID BREZHNEV: Soviet general secretary whose private conversations were covertly recorded in the course of the CIA’s Gamma Guppy operation.
BORIS NALIVAIKO: KGB officer based in Vienna who lured the CIA into an embarrassing trap.
GENERAL OLEG GRIBANOV: Chief of KGB counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate) who established a special unit to focus on “operational deception.”
LIEUTENANT GENERAL SERGEY KONDRASHEV: High-ranking KGB officer with a wide-ranging career in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
The Poles
MICHAL GOLENIEWSKI: Polish intelligence officer code-named Sniper.
The Czechs
KARL AND HANA KOECHER: Husband-and-wife team of Czech intelligence officers who worked closely with the KGB and succeeded in infiltrating the CIA.
The Defectors
PETER DERIABIN: KGB officer who became a consultant to the CIA.
YURI IVANOVICH NOSENKO: KGB officer who defected after the Kennedy assassination.
ANATOLY GOLITSYN: KGB officer who later worked closely with the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.
IGOR KOCHNOV: KGB agent who pretended to be a defector in order to set a trap for a Russian-born American citizen working for the DIA.
NICHOLAS SHADRIN: Soviet naval captain who became a US double agent, an operation that resulted in his kidnapping and death at the hands of the KGB.
Prologue: The Weight of Guilt
GUILT IS A HEAVY BURDEN. It weighs down on the heart, an unremitting punishment. Yet she did not try to escape the pain, or find excuses to wiggle out of the blame.
Instead, she acknowledged her complicity. There were things she might have done that could have made a difference. That’s the definition of guilt, she discovered: knowing all you should have done.
It didn’t matter that she had not been in the car that night. It didn’t matter that the accident occurred at the exit that led to the main entrance of the Central Intelligence Agency. Or that this was where her husband worked. And where she had worked, too.
All that mattered was that a young, handsome boy, her son’s best friend, had been killed.
In the terrible aftermath, she’d blamed her husband, too. It hadn’t been his fault; he had played no role in the night’s heartbreaking events. And yet! She knew, as any wife would know, that he’d created the reckless world that had inevitably bred this tragedy.
Full of rage, raw with shame, after nearly two decades of marriage, she had demanded a divorce. And with her anger, she had driven him into the arms of her best friend.
She now saw that it was all her own doing. As things had become undone, she’d capriciously kept yanking the dangling threads. And in the end, her life had unraveled.
Her punishment: a ceaseless, unabated guilt.
But all her guilt was nothing, no, less than nothing, when measured against the pain caused by the new, sinister knowledge that had taken hold of her life. It had the power to change everything that had come before, to turn long-accepted truths into lies. It was a very dangerous secret.
But she knew it could not be shared. She did not dare. It must be entombed forever in the shrewd armory of her heart.
Part I
“Once More unto the Breach”
1977–1983
Chapter 1
Brussels, October 1978
TWO DEATHS—EACH PURPORTEDLY A SUICIDE, each with its roots deep in the secret world, each with its own perplexing mysteries—wrenched Pete Bagley, retired and somewhat besmirched spy, from the complacency of his pleasant exile and set him on the twisting path back to the shadowy battlefields of his previous life. It would be, he fully recognized, his final mission, his last chance to set straight the betrayals, both personal and professional, that had scarred not just the agency, but also his own family of spies. And like every old man who at last musters the courage to confront unfinished business, he could only hope that it was not too late.
THE FIRST DEATH HAD OCCURRED without Pete’s—he’d been christened Tennent, but his mother early on had started calling him Pete and the name stuck—immediate knowledge; at the time he’d been living a retiree’s life of contemplative leisure with his wife and his books in the pretty city of Brussels. In fact, the suicide—if that was what had really happened—had been kept a closely guarded secret, and it wasn’t until a month or so had passed—the shared time line was deliberately murky—that the Soviets allowed the grim news to leak. Of course by then, in the aftermath of the menacing arrest and the ensuing diplomatic blowup, there was no longer any operational reason for secrecy. Still, the battle-scarred cold warriors in the SB, as the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division, where Pete had once served as deputy chief, was known, couldn’t help but wonder if the normally reticent KGB hoods had only grown talkative because they couldn’t resist giving the knife they had planted deep into the heart of Moscow Station another vindictive twist.
The least disputed parts of this drama began to play out on the evening of July 15, 1977, a deceptively calm and quiet summer’s night in Moscow. A cooling breeze floated off the Moscow River, party apparatchiks hurried across Red Square on their way home from work, and lovers abandoned the pedestrian bustle of Prospekt Mira to disappear hand in hand into the secluded nooks of the Apothecary Garden. But it was a time of high alert in Moscow Station. In the boxlike seventh-floor spook’s nest hidden away in the US embassy on Novinskiy Boulevard, the spies were hoping that tonight’s operation would calm their worst fears.
When an agent goes silent, there can be many benign reasons. Operatives, too, have their quotidian, overt lives to live. They can catch the flu, grow frazzled trying to placate the demands of a relentless boss, get roped into entertaining visiting in-laws, or even mark the wrong date on their calendars. But hard-nosed professionals wearily concede that the search for excuses is largely wishful thinking. When a usually productive Joe can’t be contacted, when he misses a rendezvous or doesn’t service his dead drops, the truth is staring you in the face with a sickening inevitability: He’s been compromised, no doubt languishing in a cell in the Lubyanka, if he hasn’t already been summarily dispatched by a firing squad.
Tonight would bring clarity. It would resolve once and for all the disquieting questions surrounding the all-star agent the station was running deep inside the enemy’s citadel—the spy code-named Trigon.
Four years earlier, in a steamy Turkish bath in Bogotá, Colombia, a CIA officer with only a towel wrapped tight around his waist for a semblance of operational propriety had sidled up to Alexander Ogorodnik, a silky midlevel diplomat at the Soviet embassy, and had launched into his recruitment pitch. There’s no transcript of what was said, but presumably the CIA recruiter would have first methodically recounted all the reckless behavior that in the course of just a brief posting had characterized the married foreign service economist’s very undiplomatic life in Latin America; e.g., his frenetic juggling of romances with several of his colleagues’ wives, his illegal wheeling and dealing of automobiles purchased at diplomatic discounts, his teetering pile of debts, and, not least, the recent announcement by his young Colombian mistress that she was pregnant. The implication would’ve been clear: If the Americans without really trying had discovered all this, how long would it take for the diplomat’s Soviet comrades to catch on to his shenanigans? And it would’ve been unnecessary to point out that the dour Russian foreign service bureaucrats were as unforgiving as they were judgmental. Then when the CIA man saw that it wasn’t just the steam that was causing the diplomat to sweat, he’d munificently offer up a way out of all this mess: a chance to earn the sort of money that would make old problems go away, as well as finance new ones.
The moments that follow any approach are always pregnant, a tense time when things might veer off in any direction. There’s no telling if the prey will scream with indignation, or if he’ll slink off shamefaced to put a bullet in his head. However, Ogorodnik, according to the bemused CIA accounts, didn’t hesitate. He promptly announced that he’d never been a fan of the Soviet system. In fact, he insisted, he’d always been a capitalist at heart. And as if to prove it, he quickly proposed a very lucrative arrangement for his services.
A crash course in tradecraft was conducted over several weeks in a room in a Hilton hotel in downtown Bogotá. Shooting documents with a tiny T50 camera concealed in a fountain pen as well as mastering the protocols for dead drops can be a tricky business. Yet to his new handlers’ delight, the diplomat was a natural. With surprising speed, the agent code-named Trigon was up and running.
Only it wasn’t long before disappointment set in. The camera work was first-rate, the deliveries flawless, but top dollar was being shelled out for bargain-basement product. The spymasters in Langley had a bad case of buyers’ remorse.
Then in 1974, Ogorodnik was transferred back to Moscow and given a desk in the Ministry of Affairs that gave him access to a steady stream of top secret memos and planning documents. And just like that, the CIA’s high-priced investment turned prescient. Trigon was soon making regularly scheduled drops of rolls of T50 films that, when developed, brought a treasure trove of secrets into focus. Moscow Station now had eyes in the enemy’s house. Langley was head over heels.
But after nearly two high-flying years, the exuberant mood had grown subdued, even a bit glum. Warning signs had begun to appear. In January 1977, a CIA officer skied through a fresh blizzard of snow to the designated drop site in a forest on the outskirts of Moscow. Nothing could be found. Perhaps the snow had deterred Trigon, the optimists wanted to believe. So after an uneasy month of waiting, Moscow Station tried again: A hollowed log filled with previously requested communication gear was left at the usual site. It was never retrieved. But then in April, Moscow Station broke out in cheers when Ogorodnik left a cache of film canisters as scheduled. Only once the station’s tech officers sorted through the material, there were renewed doubts. Every spy has his own handwriting, the way he goes about his clandestine tasks, and to the discerning eyes of the analysts at the embassy, this cache didn’t seem to be Trigon’s handiwork. It was too sloppy, assembled without his usual meticulous tradecraft.
Yet refusing to accept the unacceptable, Moscow Station decided they’d give Trigon one more try. A coded message was sent by shortwave radio requesting that if he was ready to resume work, he should send the prearranged signal.
And to the rekindled excitement of the true believers in Moscow Station, he did. A red dot appeared on a “Children Crossing” traffic sign adjacent to a Moscow school.
There were naysayers, though, who had misgivings. They dismissed this signal as a lure. To their skeptical eyes, the red dot was clearly stenciled—and no genuine fieldman would stick his head out of the shadows long enough to execute that sort of painstaking procedure. Further, the stenciled dot was colored in a red as bold and bright as the Soviet flag—and that, too, didn’t seem a secret agent’s furtive doing. It was all too deliberate; in the field, subtlety was the guiding rule.
In the end, both sides agreed there was only one way to find out for sure.
UNBUTTONING HER BLOUSE, THE SPY attached the tiny radio receiver to her bra with a Velcro tab. Her long, streaked blond hair hid the earpiece. If the KGB watchers were tailing her, she’d now be able to eavesdrop on their transmissions. But that, she realized, offered only small reassurance. If the opposition was on to what was going down, that meant it was already too late. For Trigon, and for herself.
It was just after six on that July evening in Moscow when Marti Peterson, a willowy thirty-two-year-old and the first female case officer ever assigned to Moscow Station, left her apartment and headed off for the drop. She clutched a bag containing what looked like a lump of black asphalt. A closer examination of the shard, however, would reveal a secret compartment; inside were messages and a new, improved miniature camera that the tech wizards at Langley had fabricated just for Ogorodnik.
