Spymaster, page 10
Solomatin went on to become station chief in New York and Rome. In Italy he was involved in several successful recruitments of Western spies. But he never went as far as he should have, in large part because of an influx of Communist Party hacks like Kryuchkov who were increasingly shouldering aside qualified professionals. In 1987, when I began quietly criticizing the KGB and was trying to open a direct line to Gorbachev to discuss reforming the security agency, I turned to Solomatin for help. Like me, he had been put out to pasture as a reserve KGB officer, in his case overseeing the work of the State Planning Committee. When I told him I was thinking of going public with my criticism of the KGB (the first shoots of glasnost were just beginning to sprout), Solomatin urged caution.
“Don’t do it now,” Solomatin, who is ten years my senior, told me. “I agree with a lot of what you say, but if you try to wrestle with the KGB, they’ll tear your arms off. They’ll brand you as a crazy. They might do anything to you. You must leave the KGB with an impeccable record, and only when it’s all over can you say anything you want. They won’t be able to do anything to you then.”
I took his advice, waiting until after I retired in 1990 to begin my public campaign against the KGB—a campaign that saw Kryuchkov and Gorbachev strip me of my rank and pension. As I was working with the Soviet media to unmask the KGB, I asked Solomatin, then retired in Moscow, if he would be willing to help me. He said he would. So I sent reporters from several major Moscow newspapers to his apartment to speak with him. But when they got there, Solomatin (his hands shaking) told them he wouldn’t talk.
The newspapermen called me to complain, and I got on the phone with my former station chief to say he had let me down. But the KGB had been listening to our conversations, and shortly after he had agreed to join me in my crusade against the security agency, Solomatin received a threatening call from a top KGB official.
“Listen,” he told me over our tapped telephone line. “Headquarters called and they told me, ‘If you make a statement to the press, we’ll do worse things to you than we’ve done to Kalugin.’ They said they’d strip me of my pension, and worse. Oleg, you’re ten years younger than I am. Maybe you can afford it. But I can’t. I’m sixty-five. What’ll I do if I’m left without my pension? I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”
I said I understood, and we hung up. This was not the same man I had known more than twenty years before.
But in Washington, our enemy was not the KGB; that fight would come later. It was the U.S. government. Operating right in the belly of the American beast, we set out to do battle.
I was Solomatin’s chief deputy, with half of the Washington station’s forty KGB officers reporting directly to me as head of political intelligence. Solomatin had three other deputies—for counterintelligence, scientific and technical intelligence, and illegals. The second most important branch was counterintelligence, whose half dozen officers in Washington were charged with trying to infiltrate agents into the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other police agencies. Counterintelligence also kept an eye on Soviet citizens in the capital, making sure they didn’t defect or cooperate with the American side. In addition, counterintelligence was assigned to infiltrate Soviet émigré organizations.
The scientific and technical intelligence section had some five officers in our station, and their task was to obtain and analyze classified scientific information, as well as helping us with technical problems, such as installing hidden microphones. The last of the four branches in the Washington station was the most secretive and the least productive while I was there. It was the section dealing with illegals—Soviet citizens or agents usually posing under deep cover as Americans. During my five years in Washington, including more than a year as acting station chief, I never learned of a single case of a Soviet illegal who had penetrated the U.S. government.
Officially listed as second secretary and embassy press attaché, I oversaw the work of about twenty political intelligence officers, their cover ranging from diplomat to doorman. Our three chief targets were the White House, the U.S. Congress, and the State Department. We also targeted U.S. political parties, as well as think tanks like the Brookings Institution, whose scholars had wide contacts in the American government. Soviet military intelligence—the GRU—was primarily responsible for penetrating the Pentagon. But when someone like John Walker strolled into our embassy and furnished us with top secret information, the KGB—as the predominant Soviet intelligence agency—played the lead role in running such an extraordinarily valuable spy.
A major part of my job, however, was to supply KGB headquarters in Moscow and the Politburo with reliable information about U.S. politics and government policy. That dovetailed nicely with my cover job of press attaché, and as soon as I arrived in Washington I began to get to know some of the leading journalists and politicians in the capital. Among the journalists with whom I met were columnists Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, and Drew Pearson; Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the Washington Post; Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor; Henry Brandon of the Times (London); and Carl Rowan, former director of the United States Information Agency. Speaking with them in their offices or at lunches or receptions, I would act like a good reporter, listening to their assessments of the political situation in the country. Rarely did I come up with a scoop for the Politburo, but the reporting of our section enabled Soviet leaders to have a better sense of American political realities. During the 1968 presidential campaign we were able to predict that Nixon would not be the anti-Soviet hard-liner Moscow feared.
I often went to my journalistic sources to get reaction to the latest events in Moscow—an exercise that sometimes bordered on the absurd. In March 1966, the Kremlin wanted reactions to what it considered to be the “historic” Twenty-Third Conference of the Soviet Communist Party, at which hard-liners and reformers fought over growing censorship in the country. In fact, few Americans had been paying attention to the Twenty-Third Party Congress. I went to see the eminent Walter Lippmann at home and asked him what he thought of the recent events in Moscow. To my dismay, Lippmann—who was quite weak by that time—knew absolutely nothing of the Party Congress I was supposedly reporting.
“Really?” Lippmann said. “There was a Congress? You tell me what’s going on over there. I must confess I am at a loss to understand your government’s policy.”
I couldn’t simply cable back to Moscow that the gray eminence himself didn’t give a damn about the Twenty-Third Party Conference. So we chatted for a while, and I got his general thoughts on Soviet-American relations and Soviet politics. Reports such as this one usually omitted any critical references to the Soviet Union, so at Moscow’s request I filed a bland cable about Lippmann’s view of recent events in our country. Thus the Soviet leadership was lulled into thinking that the whole world followed the Congress with bated breath and applauded its outcome.
About a half dozen times a year I would lunch with the well-known leftist Washington journalist I.F. Stone. Before the revelations of Stalin’s terror and before the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Stone had been a fellow traveler who openly admired the Soviet system. After 1956, however, he had become a sharp critic of our government. Shortly after arriving in Washington, I received a cable from Moscow directing me to reestablish contact with Stone. KGB headquarters never said he had been an agent of our intelligence service; rather, he was a man with whom we had had regular contact.
I called Stone, introduced myself, and we agreed to have lunch. Our first meeting was cordial, and we got together regularly after that. I came to view Stone as a sympathetic character with insightful views on the U.S. political scene. Our relationship ended, however, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Shortly after the “Prague Spring,” was crushed, Stone and I again met for lunch, but this time his manner was aloof. He warmed up somewhat as we ate and talked, but when I went to pick up the tab at the end of the meal—I usually bought our lunches since Stone was not a wealthy man—he angrily refused to let me pay.
“No, I will never take money from your bloody government,” he said.
We split the bill and said good-bye. I never saw Stone again. Years later when I came back to America as a sort of a celebrity, I had lunch with a supposed Washington journalist, and Stone’s name popped up during our conversation. I said that at some point in my career I maintained friendly relations with Stone and used him as a source of information on various aspects of American policy.
Soon an article appeared in one of Washington’s magazines where Stone was mentioned as a Soviet KGB agent. The author of the article quoted me, alleging that I confirmed Stone’s ties to the Soviet intelligence.
I was not aware of this publication until I returned to the United States, this time with Vadim Bakatin, KGB chief under Gorbachev. We received a cordial welcome in the nation’s capital, met with the FBI director at its headquarters, and visited the FBI training facilities in Quantico. At the end of our trip we were invited by the Washington Post management to attend a meeting. It turned into an ugly confrontation between me and one of the top editors of the newspaper. Pointing his finger, he angrily accused me of slandering one of the best and most respected journalists in America—I.F. Stone. His emotional outburst stunned me. He spoke like a prosecutor in court rather than a newspaper editor. I interrupted him and yelled back: “I never said that Stone was a Soviet agent, but now I’ll tell you the truth. He was a KGB agent since 1938. His code name was ‘Blin.’ When I resumed relations with him in 1966, it was on Moscow’s instructions. Stone was a devoted Communist. But he changed in the course of time like most of us. What else do you want to know?”
The meeting was ended and Bakatin and I walked away.
In 1995 the code word “Venona” for the first time appeared in print in the U.S. media. It revealed a supersecret American and Allied program to read and exploit Soviet intelligence messages collected in the 1940s. Thanks to that program the special services broke up many Soviet espionage networks in the United States and elsewhere. Over two hundred names and code names were registered as KGB and GRU sources in the United States alone. Many of these sources were identified as Soviet agents. I.F. Stone, a.k.a. “Blin,” was among them.
Another occasional source of “open” political information was Richard Valeriani of NBC News, who would give me his assessment of the Washington scene. But the news game is a two-way street, and occasionally I would try to help one of my contacts in the Washington press corps with a scoop. Such was the case when I told Valeriani about an upcoming meeting between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin.
Occasionally I would openly try to recruit a reporter to supply us information in exchange for cash. Such was the case with two Japanese journalists, the first from the newspaper Asahi Shimbun and the second from Kyodo Tsushin. In the past they had given me some reliable information about China and their country’s relations with the United States. I felt they were both sympathetic to me, and proposed bluntly that they feed me information in exchange for money. They declined. I was told later that both men went on to become top editors at their respective newspapers.
Indeed, some in the Washington press suspected that I might have been working for the KGB. Once, after Jack Anderson publicly identified me as a KGB officer, I went to a reception hosted by an Italian journalist, Girolamo Modesti, who had become a good friend. As I walked into the party at his office, Modesti saw me and shouted, “Here comes the famous spy!”
To which I replied, “Girolamo, I’ve always been a spy. How come you didn’t know that before today?”
My staff and I, posing as diplomats, met frequently with leading members of Congress, including Senators Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, Charles Percy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jacob Javits, and others. I once talked with Senator Robert Kennedy in his office, and he gave me a tie-tack replica of PT-109, the torpedo boat President Kennedy had captained during the war. Naturally, our relations were most cordial with liberals like Eugene McCarthy; some conservative senators, such as Barry Goldwater, wouldn’t give us the time of day. We didn’t meet with these legislators to recruit them, but rather to divine the intentions and strategy of the U.S. government in the cold war. Our superiors in Moscow—and their bosses in the Kremlin—also enjoyed getting cables saying that Washington’s crack KGB staff had held a detailed conversation with a top senator such as Mansfield.
Though we didn’t attempt to recruit a U.S. senator, we were not averse to trying to induce some of their aides to work for the KGB, although in my years in Washington we met with little success. At one point, we had apparently managed to recruit a senator’s aide. One of our officers had struck up a relationship with the assistant, who briefed us on what was happening in the Senate and gave us some classified information from a research institution with which he was affiliated. But as I learned more about this aide, I became increasingly suspicious. The classified material he gave us was of little value. And his behavior seemed odd: he was easygoing, almost reckless in arranging meetings with us, as if there was some power behind him, protecting him.
I decided we had to find out if this man was genuine or not. So our technical people gave us a vial of sodium pentothal, or “truth serum.” Our officer asked the aide to dinner, then slipped the serum—which generally made people feel weak and loose tongued—in his drink. But evidently our officer slipped too much of the serum into the man’s glass and, instead of loosening up, he began to throw up. He apparently suspected nothing, telling our officer the next morning, “I don’t know what happened to me. Nothing like that ever happened before.”
We tried another trick on this suspected double agent, and it succeeded. In Canada, we had a very highly placed agent in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) counterintelligence unit. Under some pretext we persuaded the Senate aide to travel to Canada. Before long, our mole in the RCMP reported that the aide was indeed an FBI agent. Shortly after the assistant returned to the United States, we broke off contact with him. And not long after that, the subordinate who had handled the botched recruiting job—he was officially in Washington as a TASS correspondent—was expelled from the United States. Shooting for a highly placed target such as a senator’s aide was a risky proposition.
Not long after I arrived in Washington, however, we began to have good luck in recruiting a variety of spies and moles, beginning with foreign diplomats in the capital, moving on to sources in the military and the CIA, and culminating in the astounding work of John Walker. Now, with the cold war over and the United States the undisputed victor in the struggle, our efforts seem futile and sadly diminished. But a quarter century ago, with Soviet and American armies facing off around the world, the top secret information my KGB colleagues and I were gathering seemed to us a matter of life and death. We never knew which purloined military plan or broken code might be the key to swinging a battle or a war in our favor.
In New York, with the exception of my dealings with Cook, I had had little experience with handling top secret material and with the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the espionage business. Before heading to Washington, I was warned by colleagues, “Washington’s just a small town where everything’s controlled by the FBI. You can’t move around, the government employees are scared of contact with Soviets, and the military shun all contact with foreign personnel.” Strangely enough, KGB headquarters viewed Washington as one of the weakest links in our overseas intelligence chain, despite the fact that it offered far more intelligence and targets for us than any other capital in the world. Before Solomatin arrived, the officers at the KGB station in Washington were feeding Lubyanka straight political intelligence and little else. America’s capital, it seemed, was not a good place for our intelligence service to work. But with the arrival of Solomatin and his team, things started to change, and before long Washington would become the place to work. We discovered that we just had to be bolder and more aggressive and, with a little luck, we could get what we wanted.
Solomatin did not get off to a good start, quickly running into the kind of FBI trap that had been demoralizing the station for more than a decade. When we arrived, an officer in the scientific and technical section had been cultivating an agent in the U.S. Army, a supposed expert on military electronics. He had provided some interesting, though not terribly useful, classified information and was promising us far more. Then the truth came out: our mole was an FBI agent, and our efforts to recruit him were exposed in 1966. A scandal ensued, and the officer in the scientific section who had been handling the alleged mole was declared persona non grata and expelled from the United States.
Soon, however, the tide began to turn. We focused intensively on the other embassies in Washington, particularly those from NATO countries, and after several failed operations we cultivated some valuable sources in the diplomatic community.
One of my first assignments from Moscow was to contact the Norwegian ambassador to the United States, who had worked for the KGB before his posting to America. Just as I was about to get in touch with him in 1965, he died of a heart attack. I then was assigned to the case of an ambassador from a large Arab country. This ambassador had been in the employ of the KGB for several years, and we met occasionally in Washington, where he passed me cables and other documents. He left within a year of my arrival. We also recruited several Asian and Latin American diplomats.
During my tenure, the most fruitful of our diplomatic spies was a top official from a Western European embassy who furnished us with diplomatic cables, top secret reports, recordings of his ambassador’s conversations, and correspondence with the U.S. State Department. The diplomat, who had leftist political leanings, had earlier been stationed in Bonn, where KGB officers approached him on several occasions. But the relationship came to naught, apparently because our officers doubted his reliability.
