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Tennant Bagley,
one of the CIA officers who took control of the case, recalled
to me that the letter was written in fluent German, and
that the author, who claimed to be a high-ranking officer
of a Communist intelligence service, refused to divulge
his name or even nationality. The mysterious author suggested,
according to Bagley's recollection of the case, that there
were moles in Western intelligence who would betray him
if he identified himself. He therefore proposed helping
Western intelligence put "its own house in order," presumably
by ferreting out the moles, before he would consider defecting
to the West. He signed the letter "Heckenschiitze."
In his initial reports, sent to mailing
addresses supplied by the CIA, "Heckenschiitze" rapidly identified
seven Soviet spies. These included a British admiralty aide
at the Portland Naval Base, named Harry Houghton, who had
been supplying the KGB with secret information about United
States nuclear submarines; Col. Israel Beer, an Israeli military
historian who, in fact, was an Austrian who had emigrated
to Israel 20 years earlier, pretended to be an Orthodox Jew
and gradually won the confidence of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion
and other Israeli leaders; and Col. Stig Wennerstrom, the
Swedish air attache in Washington, who was actually a general
in the KGB
"Heckenschiitze" also provided a document
that caused serious embarrassment at the British Secret Service
- a purported list of 26 Polish officials compiled by British
agents in Warsaw as potential targets for recruitment. This
list, "Heckenschiitze" explained, had come from the KGB When
Bagley and other CIA officers evaluated the list, the question
arose: How could the KGB have obtained such a sensitive document
unless it had a mole inside the British Secret Service?
The British intelligence asserted
that the names could have been taken out of the Warsaw telephone
directory. The denials were so heated that even the usually
suspicious Angleton was prepared to believe that the anonymous
mole was a dispatched agent attempting to sow discord between
the American and British services.
Then, to everyone's astonishment,
a researcher in the CIA's Eastern European Division discovered
that British intelligence had sent essentially the same list
to the CIA a year or so earlier. It now became clear to the
CIA officers handling the case that the list had not been
lifted from the Warsaw phone book, but from the secret files
of British intelligence.
Allen Dulles, then the Director of
Central Intelligence, presented this evidence to his British
counterpart, and, after several months of investigating those
who had access to the list, British intelligence traced the
probable leak to the safe of George Blake. Blake, a Dutch-born
intelligence officer, had rapidly risen in the ranks of the
British Secret Service through a remarkable string of successful
recruitments of Communist officers in Germany. Could such
successes have been purposely provided by the KGB to enhance
Blake's standing?
During his interrogation, Blake admitted
that he had spied for the Soviet Union since 1952 and that
he had passed virtually every important document the British
Secret Service had in its files to the KGB
The depth of this KGB penetration
into British intelligence stunned the CIA When the British
diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to the
Soviet Union in 1951, Harold (Kim) Philby, an officer in the
British Secret Service, also had come under suspicion and,
in the early 1950's, he had been effectively retired. The
Philby case was now reopened. Then, after Blake's confession,
Anthony Blunt, a former officer in the British security service
(MI5), who had retired at the end of the war, was confronted
by British interrogators and, in return for a grant of immunity,
admitted that he had served as a Soviet mole. (In 1963, Philby
defected to Moscow, thereby clearing up any doubts about his
loyalties, and about his loyalties, and, then, Blake escaped
from prison, and also went to Moscow.
Heckenshulttze next turned his attention
to the West German intelligence service, the BND, headed by
General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's former intelligence chief
against the Russia. The BND worked closely with the CIA, which
had created it.
"Heckenschiitze" reported in 1959
that he had been told by a high-ranking KGB officer that the
BND had been thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet intelligence,
and that many of its top officers had been blackmailed by
the KGB into cooperating with it. He stated that of the six
BND Officers who had visited CIA head quarters in Washington
in 1956. and Allen Dulles with met, two were KGB Moles. This
lead was specific enough to identify immediately one member
of the group, Heinz Felfe.
A former Nazi Officer, Felfe, was
the deputy chief of West German counterintelligence. Like
Blake, Felfe had risen to his high Position through a series
of "successes." West German security Police immediately placed
Felfe under close surveillance, andcaught him transmitting
secrets. The surveillance led to the arrest of a number of
other moles in West German intelligence, including Hans Clemens,
the man in charge, ironically enough, of the surveillance
team inBonn. (Felfe, after being convicted of espionage, was
traded to East Germany for a group of West German spies.)
A classified 1973 review of the memoirs
of General Gehlen by Angleton's deputy, Raymond Rocca, termed
the Felfe case a "crushing defeat" for the BND and concluded
that the West German government had been "thoroughly penetrated".
"Heckenschiitze" finally decided to
defect to the United States in 1960, after more than 30 months
service as an anonymous mole. His
reason: The KGB had found out about certain documents that
he had sent to the C-I-A. and asked his help in tracking down
the leak. "Heckenschutze" now knew that there was a leak in
American intelligence. On Christmas Day, he arrived with his
wife at the American military mission in Berlin, and was met
by a contingent Of CIA officers. He identified himself as
Michael Goleniewski, the vice chairman Of Polish military
intelligence. He further informed the Americans that he had
hidden away a cache of documents in Warsaw.
When the CIA retrieved these documents,
it found thousands of pages of polish and Soviet military
bulletins containing United States military secrets that could
only have come from high level sources in NATO and the United
States Defense Department.
Goleniewski was given an Office in
Washington, where he worked with his debriefing Officers attempting
to "elaborate," as he put it, the various clues. He believed,
for example, that he could pinpoint the leak in the CIA that
had betrayed him. He revealed that Polish intelligence had
known about a 1959 CIA plan to recruit a Polish diplomat in
Switzerland .
The C. I.A. did not pursue the lead,
according to Goleniewski. They spent, he claimed, "only a
few hours" on this subject, and never brought it up again.
Before the debriefing could be completed,
Goleniewski presented the CIA with still another surprise,
He informed his case officers that "Goleniewski had merely
been a cover name he had used in Polish intelligence. His
real name was Grand Duke Aleksei Nicholaevich Romanoff. He
further explained to the bewildered men from the CIA that
his father, Czar Nicholas, had secretly escaped from Russia
to Poland after the Bolsheviks had seized power, Goleniewski
told his astonished audience that he was now heir to the Czar's
fortune.
When news Of these disclosures reached
Richard Helms, then Deputy Director for Plans, he realized
that the CIA, had a potentially embarrassing Problem on its
hands. Goleniewski had been the most productive agent in the
entire history of the C-I-A-, revealing more than a dozen
Soviet moles; the CIA, however, could not be put in the position
of supporting his wild claim to the Czar's fortune. In 1964,
the CIA severed its relations with its former spy.
Almost exactly one Year after Goleniewski
had defected in Berlin, a KGB security Officer named Anatoli
Golitsin defected from the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, Finland,
and was taken by the CIA- to Washington, where he was turned
over to Angleton for questioning.
Even though he held a relatively low
rank in the KGB, he said he had attended Moscow staff meetings
in which the penetration of Western intelligence services
was discussed. Like Goleniewski, he suggested that the KGB
had infiltrated its moles in the C. I A., the British Secret
Service, NATO, and French Intelligence, Indeed, much of the
data that he furnished on this mole complex seemed to parallel
that provided earlier by Goleniewski. Golitsin asserted additionally,
however, that the KGB had managed to place Its agents in France
in cabinet level positions close to de Gaulle.
This Golitsin leads focused suspicion
on the French Deputy Prime Minister, but they were insufficient
for French intelligence to take any action. Golitsin demanded
an immediate payment of $1 million for his information, and
received a substantial portion of it from the CIA
According to Philippe de Vosjoli,
who had been the liaison between the CIA and French intelligence
in Washington, and was brought in on the case, Golitsin insisted
that at least six French intelligence officers were Soviet
moles. After Golitsin provided clues that fit two colonels
in French intelligence, both were allowed to from the service.
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