Art of Betrayal (35 page)

When Bagley got back to Washington, he talked to Angleton about Nosenko. The counter-intelligence chief then inducted him into the secret of Golitsyn's defection six months earlier. Two defectors one after another was a little odd. What was interesting was the overlap between the two, for instance on the spy in the British Naval Attaché's office. They also both talked of a senior KGB officer coming to the US on an unexplained visit. Nosenko's account seemed to explain it away as the targeting of a low-level official, while Golitsyn believed it might have been linked to the mole within the CIA. Golitsyn also differed in other areas, for instance over how Popov was caught. Golitsyn thought there was a high-ranking spy in the CIA, Nosenko thought Sasha was just an army captain. Angleton and Bagley agreed there was something suspicious going on. Golitsyn himself had warned that the KGB would send others after him to try and muddy the waters. Could this be what was happening? Was Nosenko part of the KGB's grand deception strategy unfolding and an attempt to protect its mole within the agency itself? ‘Nosenko will mutilate the Golitsyn leads,' Angleton told Bagley, as if talking about a weed corrupting the purity of one of the orchids that he bred in his spare time.
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Anyone who followed Golitsyn and who did not back his case would be seen by Angleton as a false defector sent to confuse. That was the case with Nosenko, it was decided.

Nosenko resurfaced in Geneva in January 1964. It was a cold night and the first cinema in the phone book was closed. Bagley, in disguise, brushed past the Russian who was waiting outside and handed a note with the location for their meeting.
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‘Yuri has a bit of a surprise for us,' Kisevalter told Bagley when he arrived. In a strangely emotionless and mechanical voice, Nosenko declared he was now ready to defect.
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‘I don't want to go back,' he said.
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Bagley and Kisevalter were not keen on the idea. Nosenko said the KGB was on to him, although it seemed strange that he had been let out of the country if it was. At a second meeting, he claimed to have received a telegram recalling him home. ‘I just defected now; this day, this hour, this minute, I just defected,' he told them.
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He provided details of microphones hidden
in the US Embassy in Moscow and also dropped a sensational bombshell. He said that in his job working on Americans in Moscow he had personally been responsible for the file on Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had assassinated President John F. Kennedy just two months earlier. Oswald was a former marine and radar operator who had tried to defect in the USSR before returning to the US and who had more recently been in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. When he was named as the assassin, Nosenko explained, the Soviet leadership demanded all files relating to him to be flown to Moscow immediately by military plane.
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The KGB had thought Oswald a nuisance – he had even tried to slash his wrists to get attention – and so it had decided he was mentally unstable and not even worth debriefing. The KGB had had nothing to do with the assassination, Nosenko now explained.
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This revelation meant that debriefing Nosenko was vital. The timing was remarkable. And suspicious, some thought. Was it really plausible that the KGB had not been interested in Oswald? Had Nosenko now been sent by the KGB to divert attention from the truth that it had assassinated an American president?

Nosenko was brought to the US by the CIA in February 1964 and taken to the attic of a house in the suburbs of Washington DC. Word went out that he must be broken. He was grilled by CIA officers after being denied sleep for up to forty-eight hours. ‘At times the interrogation descended into a shouting match,' recalled Bagley.
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One tape recording is said by a former CIA officer to include Nosenko mumbling ‘From my soul, I beg you to believe me' and a voice screaming ‘That's bullshit' again and again.
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The hope was to secure a confession that he was a plant and then send him back to the Soviet Union. Nosenko said he believes he was administered drugs, possibly LSD, an indication that Sidney Gottlieb's methods might have been in play. Others have disputed the idea that drugs were used. His treatment foreshadowed the way in which the CIA treated suspects of a different time after 11 September 2011. He never had access to a lawyer or any legal process. He was shackled and blindfolded and taken on a plane. He thought he was being sent back to Moscow but was in fact taken to a specially built facility at the Farm, the CIA's training establishment in rural Virginia. He was kept in a concrete cell watched by a camera, with no pillows, blankets, air conditioning
or heating. ‘To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was a hell,' he would later recall.
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To occupy his mind, he would fantasise that he was a submariner or a pilot or a fireman carrying out heroic deeds. At night he would talk in his sleep in character, confusing the guards.
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In his interrogation and polygraph, Nosenko was not helped by the fact that he was a drinker and that he had lied about his rank and exaggerated his importance. Among his falsehoods was the claim that a telegram had forced him to defect. None of this helped his case within the CIA.
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His knowledge was patchy in some areas where it should have been stronger. He had come from a very privileged background but had consistently under-achieved, flunking various exams, and had tried to hide this from the CIA.
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Was he a loser or a cunning double agent? Some officers invested their career in arguing that Nosenko was a plant and that there was a high-level penetration. Golitsyn was also allowed to review Nosenko's file and, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded that his rival was indeed a plant. The head of the CIA was originally convinced that Nonsenko was a plant, but by 1966 doubts were beginning to creep in and further reviews were ordered.
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There was a growing and disturbing suspicion in some parts of the CIA that Nosenko might be innocent. There were also concerns over the legality of his detention.
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Some of his guards even found his treatment troubling, telling Kisevalter of their concerns when he went down to the camp to work as an instructor.
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But what should be done? The way he had been treated could cause a scandal. Pete Bagley wrote some notes which included the options of ‘liquidating the man' or ‘render[ing] him incapable of giving a coherent story'. He always maintained that these were his private scribbling, in which he was venting his frustration and that there was never any serious intent to kill Nosenko.
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Eventually, Nosenko would be released and rehabilitated. In all he had been held for a total of 1,277 days. Years later he called up Angleton on the phone. ‘I have nothing more to say to you,' Angleton said. ‘And Mr Angleton, I have nothing further to say to you,' Nosenko replied.
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The molehunts on either side of the Atlantic moved largely in parallel, but their paths sometimes crossed. The British molehunters understood they had allies in the CIA and would occasionally use this as a bargaining chip. On one occasion, they issued an ultimatum
to Hollis saying they would resign unless he told the Americans about the investigation into Mitchell. Hollis performed the drearily familiar ritual of flying over to Washington to tell the Americans that there might be yet another leak, this time no less than his number two. The President was informed.
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The CIA was getting worried about the British. Teams were sent over – sometimes with the knowledge of British intelligence but sometimes without – to look into their cousins and see how bad things were. One report in 1965 said MI5 was suffering from poor organisation and leadership.

Arthur Martin began to drink heavily and put on weight under the strain of his hunt for the spy. His hair turned grey and anger flared. Even his friends acknowledged that he lacked tact, but he became increasingly reckless, even self-destructive, in his single-minded pursuit. As promotion passed him by, a sense of victimhood increased. At meetings, the tension between Martin and Hollis crackled like electricity in the air. Hollis decided that enough was enough. He confronted Martin and in late 1964 suspended him. But this was not the end for Martin. His old mentor Dick White immediately took him on at MI6. White's MI6 was becoming almost a safe haven from which the hunters could operate against his old service.

There could be only one reason why Hollis had been so reluctant to brief the Americans and to sign off on more intrusive investigative techniques, the hunters decided. And so they trained their guns on him. The MI5 chief was by most accounts a mediocrity with many unable to see how he had risen to the top. He was codenamed ‘Drat'. There were a few mysteries to his past and Peter Wright travelled to Oxford to go through university records. Why had he dropped out of university in the 1930s before finishing his degree? Why was he shy about admitting to friendships with a few Communists at the time? And was it entirely clear what he had been doing in China before the war? Even Hollis's friend Anthony Courtney, the naval commander of the Baltic operation, had been startled when Hollis visited him in Germany and said, ‘My experience is that every man, without exception, has his price – but mine is a very high one.'
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Nothing was conclusive. But it was suggestive to those of a certain bent of mind. The Americans were told of the new investigation, and Angleton plotted to have Hollis removed.
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CIA Director Richard Helms was briefed on ‘what could have been a scandal far outstripping even the
Philby disaster'.
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But while the Americans were briefed, the British Prime Minister was not informed at the time. As his stint as head of MI5 drew to a close, Hollis confronted Wright at headquarters. ‘There is just one thing I wanted to ask you before I go,' Hollis said. ‘I wanted to know why you think I'm a spy.' Wright went through his reasoning. ‘All I can say is that I'm not a spy,' Hollis said and exited, he thought, stage left.
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The hunt was not over. De Mowbray was sent to the US as the counter-intelligence officer under Christopher Philpotts, a high-flyer who believed he was heading for the top and who had bought into the idea of penetration. De Mowbray's brief was to stay close to Angleton, whom he found fascinating. All the molehunters would visit Angleton's curtain-shrouded, dimly lit office to hear from the master. Files would be scattered on the desk and the cigarette smoke generated a haze which was enhanced by his furtive pronouncements.

A few months into his tour, de Mowbray went up to New York with Arthur Martin to meet Golitsyn in person for the first time. It was the beginning of a long and complicated friendship. He found Golitsyn strong willed. ‘He is a very fierce man. At times I used to have hell from him,' de Mowbray recalls. The molehunt looked to have run out of steam, but then in 1968 a new chief of MI6 arrived. Sir John Rennie was an outsider, a Foreign Office man. As such he was distrusted and disliked by most of the service. Among the only people who liked him were the molehunters. Rennie went over to Washington soon after starting and met Golitsyn. He then had dinner with Philpotts, who like others was frustrated that MI5's leadership had failed to pursue the penetration theory. Philpotts explained his concerns to Rennie. ‘Let's do something,' the new Chief said to him. Philpotts returned to London as head of counter-intelligence and began an aggressive investigation, which included scrutiny of the service itself.

There were many Communists, some former and some current, littered around the establishment, including MI6. The molehunt led by Philpotts in the late 1960s never found another Philby in the service. But ten officers, some very senior, were forced to retire early because of ‘irregularities' in their past, often relating to Communism. None was proved to have been a traitor. The purge had been restrained by the ever cautious and calculating Oldfield, but once he
moved post it drove forward. Andrew King, the Pekingese-owning former station chief in Vienna, was among those to fall foul of it. As well as engaging in what were seen as ‘unnatural vices', King had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s (he had noted at the time that giving 20 per cent of his income to the party seemed a ‘jolly high' proportion). He said he had declared this at the time and also when he had first been interrogated soon after the war. After that interrogation, he told the molehunters his then boss had asked the Chief whether more security checks were required. ‘C says that since spies are only people of foreign origin, don't bother.'
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This was the type of culture the hunters believed had allowed the service to rot from within. Most damning of all, even though there was no evidence he was a traitor, King admitted he had always known that Philby and Burgess had been Communists.
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Another senior MI6 officer, Donald Prater, was summoned back from Stockholm and dismissed in 1968 for pre-war Communism in Oxford.
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Another officer left because he had been a schoolfriend of Philby and had been recommended for the service by him. Nicholas Elliott was also interviewed – his friendship with Philby inevitably bringing him under suspicion. This was a bitter and miserable period. One of the ten who resigned quit simply because he did not like what was being done to his colleagues. A chilled delirium overcame the service. It was a McCarthyite witchhunt, a few whispered privately to each other. Antipathy against the molehunters spread, but few dared speak openly for fear of the consequences. At MI5, younger officers avoided Peter Wright in the canteen, whispering of the Gestapo and referring to him as the ‘KGB illegal'. Within the claustrophobic confines of MI5 and MI6 headquarters, an atmosphere of mistrust developed. In the highly compartmentalised world of British intelligence, new recruits were never informed of what was happening or about the suspicions, but they could sense that something bad was afoot.