Art of Betrayal (23 page)

‘Would you prefer to speak Russian or English?' George Kisevalter asked. Kisevalter, the bearish CIA officer who had handled Popov in Vienna, had the easy-going manner and fluent Russian which ensured that he would take the lead in the conversation out of the four. ‘I would much rather speak Russian because I can express myself much better in Russian,' replied the well-dressed Soviet official, explaining that his English was rusty. ‘Well, gentlemen,' the visitor continued, trying to wrestle back control, ‘let's get to work. We have a great deal of important work to do.' He was hungry for betrayal and there was not a moment to waste in disgorging his secrets. ‘I have thought about this for a long time.'

Desperation had driven the Russian to undertake ever greater risks
to reach this point. He had watched and waited for the right moment, experiencing many false starts. Nearly nine months earlier in Moscow, two American students had been walking on a bridge leading away from Red Square when a man approached them. ‘I have tried to get in touch with other Americans but so few of them speak Russian,' he told them cautiously. ‘I have some information I wish to give directly to the American Embassy.' They walked on with him. ‘Do not open it or keep it overnight in your hotel. Go immediately to the American Embassy with the letter.' The man explained how an American U2 spy plane, piloted by Gary Powers, had been brought down a few weeks earlier after surface-to-air missiles exploded around it. A few streets from their hotel, he entrusted a white envelope to the students. One of the students went to the Embassy with it, fearful every step of the way of a hand on his shoulder.

The letter made its way back to the CIA. It included the first details of how the U2 had been downed. There was also a photograph of a Soviet and an American colonel at a party with the Soviet's head cut out and the words ‘I am' written in its place. Tracking down the American was easy, and he explained that the Soviet colonel was a man who had served in Turkey in the mid-1950s called Oleg Penkovsky.

More secrets could be left in a dead drop, Penkovsky explained in the students' letter. The act of physically passing secret information is the most dangerous because it is the most vulnerable. If caught in the act, both agent and officer are finished, the agent as good as dead. A dead drop is one solution. Material is deposited in an agreed hiding place and later picked up, the two parties never having to meet in person. Penkovsky wrote that he would look for a chalk mark in a particular phone booth before loading the drop. Everyone knew that the KGB's home turf was the hardest place to operate, requiring the most rigorous methods. The phrase ‘Moscow Rules' would come to be used as shorthand to refer to the type of procedures or tradecraft an intelligence officer would have to employ to carry out his trade in the city's streets.

This might be a provocation, the Americans thought as they looked at the letter – the old Soviet trick of dangling a fake agent to tempt the other side. Whoever took the bait would be identified as an intelligence officer and could be expelled, watched or perhaps targeted
to be turned. But the chance of this being a real offer – the chance to run the first top-level spy inside the Soviet Union – was too good to pass by. However, the CIA had a problem. It had no operational presence in Moscow. An officer had been posted to Moscow a few years back to try and work with Popov, but the American had been seduced by his maid, who worked for the KGB. When they tried to blackmail him using pictures taken from a camera in her handbag, he had approached the Ambassador, who had been furious to find that the CIA were operating in his Embassy without his knowledge.
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Since then, the State Department, which controlled the cover slots that CIA officers would use, had resisted further deployments to avoid upsets. So how could the CIA contact Penkovsky?

A young, inexperienced officer was their first and utterly disastrous answer. Codenamed ‘Compass', he arrived in Moscow in October 1960 with cover as a cleaner.
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The city was a grey, unforgiving place to foreigners. Days would go by without seeing a smile on the streets. The traffic was light because almost all cars were official, but a vehicle belonging to a foreigner would be followed and surveillance would continue on foot on the streets, often in a manner designed to be obvious and enough to put someone on edge. Any conversation with an ordinary Russian would be quickly interrupted. There were few restaurants for foreigners, tickets for the Bolshoi were hard to come by and formal meetings would be stilted and unwelcoming. The only fresh vegetables for American diplomats were those flown in from the US once a week. They said you could tell how long someone had been in Moscow because newcomers headed for the caviar at diplomatic receptions while veterans quickly snaffled fresh lettuce or celery. Life was isolating and Compass could not cope. He became depressed by the cold, dark winters and turned to drink. Like many who served in Moscow, the ever-present surveillance began to play with his head. He became paranoid and came up with increasingly ludicrous schemes to establish contact with Penkovsky. Perhaps, he suggested to headquarters, Penkovsky could practise throwing snowballs and then hurl his material over the wall into the house where Compass lived, pretending he was getting rid of dirty pictures. Not exactly Moscow Rules.

As Christmas approached, Penkovsky had become frustrated that
he had heard nothing. He decided to try another route. On 21 December, an American businessman who lived in London reported to the CIA what he thought had been a provocation in Moscow during a recent visit organised by the State Scientific and Technical Commission.
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A friendly Russian from the Commission had gone back with him to his hotel and asked for cigarettes. He spoke English with a heavy accent but was jovial company. Once they were in his room, the Russian locked all the doors, turned up the radio as loud as he could and produced a folded pack of paper from his coat pocket. These were secret documents, he explained, and needed to go to the American Embassy. The businessman refused. At the end of the trip, the Russian approached him again at the airport and asked him to contact American officials on his return. The Russian gave his phone number and said he would be waiting every Sunday at 10 a.m. for a call.

Penkovsky had picked the wrong member of the delegation to approach. But there would still be time for his path to cross with that of an unusual British businessman who had been on the same trip. Suggesting to a businessman, over a good lunch at a club, that he might like to do his bit for Queen and country has always been par for the course for MI6. Businessmen could move behind the Iron Curtain in a way spies found hard. And surely if they saw something interesting, overheard something interesting or – best of all – met someone interesting, then it would not hurt to report back, would it? MI6 ran a large team out of an office in Queen Anne's Gate, milking the salesmen and industrialists for every drop of intelligence, and the plush Ivy Restaurant in Covent Garden was the venue where MI6 officer Dickie Franks, a future chief, had made just such a suggestion to Greville Wynne, a consultant for British companies. In November 1960, Franks suggested it might be worth getting in touch with a particular committee in Moscow.
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The well-groomed moustache, well-cut suits and well-oiled hair gave Greville Wynne the appearance of a well-bred, public-school-educated businessman. But it was a façade he had carefully constructed. Wynne had endured an unhappy childhood in a small Welsh village. When he was a young boy, his mother, who liked to dress him up to impress the neighbours, had taught him how to pretend to be something else, a trick accentuated by his dyslexia
which he worked hard to hide. His father, by taking him down the mines to see where most local boys ended up, gave him the urge to escape.
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When he was eleven his mother died. The overwhelming emotion from father and son was relief, Wynne would later say. As a young man he scrimped and saved to pay for evening studies in electrical engineering and eventually made his way into business, deliberately adopting the clipped tones of the upper class to acquire some social polish, marrying Sheila and stretching to pay for a house in Chelsea. In the stratified world of the English class system his origins could not be entirely hidden, however. ‘He was a dapper little figure in his dark suits, what a lower-middle-class Englishman thinks of wearing to put himself up a class,' observed an English journalist who met Wynne.
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Wynne was a bon vivant, but there was also something fragile about him. When he arrived in Moscow, the Commercial Counsellor at the Embassy thought his trade promotion visit ‘ludicrously worthless' and the man ‘a silly ignoramus'.
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But he did not know about the secret life in which Wynne was revelling. The world of spying offered the chance to join a club even more exclusive than those notionally offered by the British class system and with it the opportunity to escape, to be different and to have a secret from others. Exposure to the margins of this world would eventually plunge Wynne into a fantastical Bond-like landscape of the mind.

During the December visit when Penkovsky had approached the American, Wynne had visited the Russian's office. His first observation, true to form, was about the women. ‘Buxom healthy girls, but with bad complexions and no make-up. Brassieres and deodorants are unknown to them,' he noted.
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One of the men at his meeting struck him as different. ‘He had a very straight back and did not wriggle or slouch. He sat quite still, his pale firm hands resting on the cloth. His nails were manicured. He wore a soft silk shirt and a plain black tie. His suit was immaculate.' Penkovsky had circled round Wynne during the December visit but never made his pitch, opting instead for the American. At the ballet on the last evening, Penkovsky did suggest to Wynne that perhaps he might like to ask for a Soviet delegation to come to London.

Wynne returned to Moscow in April, just a few weeks before the Marble Arch meeting, to discuss the proposed London trip which he would host. As late snow fell around them, Wynne and Penkovsky
walked across Red Square to a hotel. The Russian revealed a hidden pocket in his trouser which he cut with a razor blade to produce documents that he insisted on handing over to a wary Wynne. The Briton was non-committal. At the airport at the last minute Penkovsky offered Wynne an envelope for the American Embassy in London. ‘Look, Penkovsky, you are a likeable guy, but I want to go to London, not Vladimir or some damn jail place,' the businessman said. ‘I want nothing like that on me when I go through your customs.'
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Wynne eventually relented and took a letter back, but handed it to MI6. He had become a courier.

The letter was addressed to Queen Elizabeth and President Kennedy among others. ‘I ask you to consider me as your soldier. Henceforth the ranks of your armed forces are increased by one man,' it read. American and British intelligence realised that they had both been contacted by the same man and, after edging around what the other side knew, agreed to work jointly. Penkovsky had wanted to talk to the Americans, but the British had the contact in the form of Wynne as well as more people in Moscow. From Wynne they had learnt that Penkovsky was coming to their home turf within days. Neither side had known if he was for real or not. Soon afterwards Penkovsky had arrived in London with his delegation in tow. He greeted Wynne formally at the airport. Later, once the two men were at the Mount Royal Hotel, he gripped Wynne's shoulders. ‘I can't believe it, Greville, I just can't believe it.'
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That evening, Penkovsky had waited until after dinner before making his excuses and heading first for his room and then for Room 360 to begin his betrayal in earnest and deliver to the CIA and MI6 a rich seam of intelligence at a critical moment in international affairs.

The relationship between agent and officer is normally conducted one on one. But Penkovsky was unusual. He was assigned no fewer than four officers, partly because of his importance, partly because meetings could take place in the controlled environment of London and partly because this was a joint operation. This created an unstable mix which would eventually combust.

On the American side, there was Kisevalter. He was the obvious choice to try and make a connection with the unknown officer while also trying to judge whether he was genuine. Kisevalter thought he should be the branch chief in the CIA's Soviet Division.
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But he was
not and the man who had the job made up the other half of the CIA team in the room. Joe Bulik's family was originally from Slovakia and he spoke Russian fluently, having served in Moscow as an agricultural attaché during the war. With his black wavy hair, close cropped at the sides, he was a details man, secretive even with his own colleagues. Kisevalter would rather not have had Bulik around. Bulik knew it, but he was the boss. Working with a fellow CIA officer was one challenge, working with another country – even the old ally Britain – was a totally different ball-game. Neither American had wanted to do it, least of all Bulik. He had been overruled.

The junior member of the British team was a fresh-faced thirty-four-year-old called Michael Stokes. Kisevalter thought he was capable and enthusiastic. Bulik did not, later saying that he thought he was a ‘fill-in' and ‘hopeless' and was annoyed at his relaxed manner in the hotel room. ‘I could have kicked his ass,' the confrontational Bulik remarked.
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The senior member on the British side was, many say, the most important officer in MI6's history never to have become chief. Harold Shergold was known to everyone as Shergy. Before the war, he had been a master at Cheltenham Grammar School. Short and well built but slightly bookish, he was intrinsically a shy man but one whose pupils benefited from his keen sense of discipline. In the war he ended up in the Intelligence Corps running forward interrogations of German prisoners in the Middle East with an expertise that impressed those around him.
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After the war, he went to occupied Germany and learnt the skills of agent handling, winning the respect of his peers for his persistence in getting the information he wanted. He was quietly forceful and he was not of the small, clubby world of the old-school-tie men who had previously dominated MI6. In 1954, he returned to MI6 headquarters at Broadway and picked over the bones of the Baltic operations, learning from the disastrous experience just how capable the Soviet enemy was. He was among the few to fight the battle within the office against those who refused to believe that they had been misled. He realised MI6 had nothing in terms of intelligence in the Soviet Union, just ashes.
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Daphne Park was one of many young officers who would benefit from his patronage. He would be the man who would instil a sense of professionalism in the British Secret Service and its work against the
Soviets in the wake of the horror show in Albania and the Baltic States and the recurrent discovery of traitors. It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into legends, John le Carré's Smiley suggests at one point.
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Shergold and Kisevalter were both legends within their own services.