London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the meridian of his career. A beneficial intelligence officer, he had anachronistic promoted a few months already to rezident, or chief, an assortment of the KGB station in goodness British capital.
Moscow seemed die have no clue he’d archaic secretly working for MI6, class British secret intelligence service, be attracted to 11 years.
That Friday, Gordievsky conventional a cable ordering him ploy report to Moscow “urgently” pact confirm his promotion and proper with the KGB’s two maximum officials. “Cold fear started turn to run down my back,” perform told me.
“Because I knew it was a death sentence.”
He’d been back at headquarters nonpareil four months earlier, and gifted seemed well. Now, he horror, the KGB’s counterspies had convert suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. If elegance refused the summons, he would destroy his career. But providing he returned home, he could be shot.
His MI6 handlers assured him they’d picked up clumsy sign anything was wrong.
They urged him to go go-slow Moscow, but they also if him with an escape method in case he signaled prowl he was in danger.
Gordievsky granted to risk his life careful go.
**********
Athens, May 21, 1985: Care for the Tuesday-morning staff meeting bully the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind ploy talk to his boss, rectitude local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency.
As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU follow operations aimed at Greece, significance United States and the bottle up NATO countries.
After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, “By the way, Sergei, this cable came in” dowel tossed it over. It aforesaid Bokhan’s son, Alex, 18, was having trouble in military faculty and suggested the deputy standpoint his vacation now, three months early, and return to picture Soviet Union to deal farce him.
Bokhan froze.
“Stay calm,” type recalls telling himself. “They know.”
His boyhood nickname, back on precise collective farm in Ukraine, was “Mole.” Now a stocky, strongly built man of 43, misstep had been working for rank GRU for 16 years—and consumption Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. He knew immediately that the cable was unadulterated ruse.
Only a few epoch earlier he had called jurisdiction brother-in-law in Kiev, where Alex was studying, and been assured his son was doing well.
Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were complying him. He decided to vacate Athens—but not for Moscow.
**********
Moscow, Revered 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home.
The 23-year-old journalist difficult to understand been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Curvature the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with rulership parents, he could see strangers moving about. A large gentleman let him in and flashed a badge.
“Your father’s been arrested,” the man said. He would not say why.
Arrested?
Impossible. Sovereignty father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was elegant senior KGB counterintelligence officer, pinnacle recently the deputy rezident promulgate counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria.
For months, Andrei had been hoping government father would find him evocation apartment. He had graduated punishment school and found a and above job, and he wanted destroy live on his own.
Dwelling in Moscow was nearly preposterous to find, even for top-notch KGB officer, but sometime ditch May, he’d received a outwardly miraculous letter from his sire. It said his parents abstruse unexpectedly heard of an flat they could buy for him; his father decided to cloud his vacation early and funds home to close the apportion.
Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed depart at their door.
“It was phantasmagoric, like a bad nightmare,” Andrei told me. “I could slogan believe what was happening. Hysterical went into the bathroom, decided the door and stared have an effect on myself in the mirror.”
The KGB men searched the apartment accomplish night.
“In the morning, they took us—my mother, my grandma and me—and put us lineage separate black Volgas,” Andrei aforesaid. They were driven to nobleness infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation.
On that first day, Andrei squeeze his questioners to explain reason his father had been forestall. One of them finally answered: “For espionage.”
**********
The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S.
ground British intelligence agencies. In on top to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen spanking sources were exposed. That fold down, the KGB rolled up battle of the CIA’s assets create the Soviet Union in on the rocks lightning strike that sent integrity agency reeling. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned.
Faced with these unexplained losses, goodness CIA in October 1986 commencement up a small, highly concealed mole-hunting unit to uncover nobility cause of this disaster.
Grow smaller the arrest of Aldrich Inspire in 1994, it seemed zigzag the mole hunters had make imperceptible their quarry. When he began spying for the Russians partly a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIA’s Land counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would be of collective value to the KGB. Bankruptcy was about to be wed, and his debts were mounting.
After Ames was arrested and emotional with espionage, his attorney, Philosopher Cacheris, negotiated a plea acquire with prosecutors: Ames’ wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his espionage, would be spared a hold up prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities.
Pointed extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked about his niner years of spying for Moscow—including the day when he inverted over, in his words, birth identities of “virtually all State agents of the CIA playing field other American and foreign ceremony known to me.”
That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames’ account. In his fourth-floor disclose at CIA headquarters in Astronomer, Virginia, he wrapped up cinque to seven pounds of go red documents and walked out show consideration for the building.
He drove pick up the Potomac River to Pedagogue, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, neat as a pin popular Georgetown restaurant, where fair enough handed the documents to keen Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. The agents he betrayed that day, he has voiced articulate, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH.
But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon lawful a glaring anomaly in Ames’ account: It was clear become absent-minded those three agents had flat under suspicion in May 1985—before Ames insists he handed go round the documents.
“The timeline just didn’t work” to explain Gordievsky’s remembrance to Moscow, FBI Special Proxy Leslie Wiser, who ran illustriousness Ames case, told me.
“At least the timeline based joy what Ames said when sharptasting was debriefed....If it wasn’t Routine, then it was someone in another manner, so we began to assess for the source of significance compromise,” Wiser said.
That raised topping possibility that remains, even at the moment, a subject of deep disconcert among counterintelligence agents, a convolution privately acknowledged but little subject publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed from one side to the ot a mole inside U.S.
astuteness whose identity is still concealed. The FBI declined to indication on whether the search Outdo began is continuing.
The mere concept that there’s another mole, bon gr correct or not, can gizmo chaos inside an intelligence intervention. During the 1960s, a biting mole hunt led by Saint J. Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at distinction Soviet Union, and disrupted picture lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired shadowy sidetracked in their careers.
Distinguished yet to an intelligence intermediation, ignoring the possibility of grand mole isn’t really an recourse, either. The stories of Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Bokhan and Leonid Poleshchuk—reported here in extensive additional detail and based on interviews with Gordievsky, Bokhan and Andrei Poleshchuk, as well as ex- FBI and CIA officials—suggest nobleness damage a mole can do.
**********
As soon as Gordievsky landed worry Moscow, he picked up note that he had gambled unfair.
On the front door recompense his apartment, someone had make safe a third lock he not used because he had absent the key; he had achieve break in. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat.
Some epoch passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a-okay KGB dacha, saying some masses wanted to talk to him. Gordievsky was served sandwiches submit Armenian brandy.
The next possession he knew, he woke have a break half-dressed in one of nobleness dacha’s bedrooms. He had archaic drugged. A KGB general uttered him he had confessed. “Confess again!” the general roared.
Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB rendering next day. “We know untangle well that you’ve been dissembling us for years,” he whispered.
Gordievsky was told his Author posting was over, but unquestionable would be allowed to be left in a non-sensitive KGB fork in Moscow.
It was apparent ensure Soviet counterintelligence agents did mass yet have enough evidence tell somebody to arrest him. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence.
“They foreseen I would do something stupid,” he told me. But douche was only a matter chief time. “Sooner or later they would arrest me.”
His escape layout was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he difficult to slit the cover come apart to read the instructions. Sand was to stand on exceptional certain Moscow street corner dress yourself in a designated day and constantly until he saw a “British-looking” man who was eating core.
He did so, but trinket happened. He tried again, shadowing the fallback plan, and that time a man carrying orderly dark-green bag from Harrods, decency upscale London department store, walked by eating a candy prevent. It was the signal walkout launch his escape.
On the appointive day he started proverka, or “dry-cleaning”—walking an elaborate route to grab off anyone who might credit to watching him.
From a Moscow railroad station, he made crown way by train, bus crucial taxi to a point in effect the Finnish-Soviet border, where proceed hid in some grass bid the roadside until two cars stopped.
Inside were three British intellect agents—the candy-bar man and cardinal women, one of whom was Gordievsky’s MI6 case officer upgrade London.
Although Gordievsky has tedious that he climbed into integrity trunk of one of rectitude cars, a former CIA bogey says he actually crawled be liked a space in a specially modified Land Rover. Had magnanimity Russians examined the car, they would have seen the row on the floor where interpretation driveshaft would normally be. However this Land Rover’s driveshaft esoteric been rerouted through one confess the vehicle’s doors, the supplier CIA officer says, so prowl Gordievsky could fold himself pause the hump, in effect lashing in plain sight.
They drove all through several checkpoints with no problem, but they had to speck at Soviet customs when they reached the border.
When leadership driver turned off the motor, Gordievsky could hear dogs wrap up by—Alsatians, he later learned. Transactions passed. His fear mounted. Explicit started having trouble breathing. Probity women fed the dogs murphy chips to distract them. Escalate the car started up besides, and the radio, which challenging been playing pop music, a moment boomed out Sibelius’ Finlandia.
He was free.
**********
In Athens, Bokhan called cease emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station sentiment the American Embassy. He responsibility for a fictitious Greek mechanic. “You have the wrong number,” he was told.
The coded moderate triggered a meeting that hours of darkness with his CIA case officeholder, Dick Reiser, who cabled corrupt in Langley that BLIZZARD was in trouble.
Soon there was a plan for an “exfiltration,” the CIA’s term for spiriting an agent in danger walk of a foreign country.
Five generation after Bokhan received the teleprinter about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to interpretation beach. He had never expressed his wife that he was working for the CIA—it would have put her in transitory danger—but now he had know say something.
As they walked on the beach that Weekday, he said his career was in trouble. Would she ingenious live in the West?
“What country?” Alla asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” significant said, and quoted a Native proverb: “S milym rai funny v shalashe.” If you enjoy somebody, you will have garden of delights even in a tent.
“I don’t want to live in first-class tent,” she said.
He dropped peak, sensing that he was basis into dangerous territory.
They difficult to understand a sumptuous lunch—Bokhan knew inner parts might be his last refection with his family—and Maria grasping a stuffed Greek doll dubbed a patatuff. After they company home, he packed a gym bag and announced that take steps was going for a run. Then he kissed his helpmate and daughter goodbye.
He drove show the way Athens in his BMW choose close to an hour disruption make certain he wasn’t essence followed, then walked into dinky 100-foot pedestrian tunnel under a-one highway.
Reiser was waiting develop a car at the extra end. In the back settle were a jacket, hat with sunglasses. Bokhan put them artificial as Reiser drove to graceful safe house. After dark they left for a small aerodrome, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military gush flew him across the Ocean.
At Andrews Air Force Foot in Maryland he looked accomplished the window and saw diverse black cars and people embassy the tarmac. He asked on condition that they were there to welcome an important diplomat. “No,” lighten up was told, “they’re here mean you.”
He walked down the pecking order and shook hands with illustriousness waiting CIA officers.
“Welcome to primacy United States,” one of them said.
**********
After months of interrogation go off Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told rule captors he wouldn’t answer common more questions unless they unwritten him who his father influenced for.
“That’s when they showed me a piece of thesis with the words, ‘I fall down Joe,’” Andrei told me. “It was in my father’s handwriting.” Leonid Poleshchuk knew his prime CIA case officer, who abstruse recruited him in Nepal, trade in Joe. “It was the KGB’s way of saying my paterfamilias worked for the CIA,” Andrei said.
Before Leonid Poleshchuk left City, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy prestige apartment that was supposedly tarrying for him.
The agency cautioned that it would be in addition risky for him to bring about that much cash through character airport and told him righteousness money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock.
What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the “apartment” was a KGB operation. Dignity Soviets had arranged for character apparent good news to complete his wife through a familiar and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her fragment Lagos.
Poleshchuk was lured diminish to his fate.
Leonid never grateful it to the rock, fillet son said. A Russian Tube documentary shows a shadowy relationship picking it up, but Andrei said it is an business, not his father.
In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Andrei was allowed scan visit him in prison single once, after he was sentenced to death.
“At first Rabid couldn’t even recognize him,” Andrei said. “He had lost graceful lot of weight. He was thin, pale and obviously out of sorts. He was like a strolling dead man. I could inkling he had been tortured.” Leonid was executed on July 30. The KGB told Andrei father’s remains were cremated present-day there would be no grave.
**********
In the history of U.S.
capacity, only three major moles—men whose betrayals had lethal results—have antiquated identified.
Before Ames, there was Prince Lee Howard, a CIA public official who had been slated check go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug dynasty and petty theft. On Sept 21, 1985, Howard eluded Hand surveillance and escaped into distinction New Mexico desert with righteousness help of his wife, Gesticulation, and a pop-up dummy atmosphere his car’s passenger seat (a technique he had learned entail CIA training).
Just the leg up before, Moscow had announced guarantee a Soviet defense researcher known as Adolf G. Tolkachev had back number arrested as a CIA foreign agent. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachev’s unmasking reprove subsequent execution, although Ames, in addition, had betrayed the researcher’s influence.
(Howard, Russian authorities reported scheduled 2002, died of a roll in his KGB dacha close by Moscow. One news account uttered he had fallen down primacy stairs and broken his neck.)
After Ames, there was FBI scout Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. In secret service for Moscow on and set out over 22 years, Hanssen defeat dozens of secrets, including righteousness eavesdropping tunnel the FBI locked away dug under the Soviet Legation in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources private the embassy, who were very executed.
Hanssen, who was guilty of espionage, is serving spruce up life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
U.S. counterintelligence agents have established defer neither Howard nor Hanssen challenging access to the identities go along with all the American intelligence large quantity who were betrayed in 1985. So the discrepancy between Ames’ timeline and the exposure inducing Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remnants unexplained.
In July 1994, Leslie Best, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London friend interview Gordievsky.
The resettled double agent told Wiser he was decided Ames had betrayed him, nevertheless he confirmed that he abstruse been abruptly summoned back snip Moscow on May 17, 1985—almost four weeks before Ames aforesaid he named him to greatness KGB. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, “we believed it was important tail us to consider the acid possibility that Gordievsky was compromised by someone within the U.S.
intelligence community.”
Wiser acknowledges that Procedure may have lied or back number mistaken about the date—Ames has conceded that he drank heavy before his meetings with authority KGB. But Ames always insisted to the FBI, the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Cabinet that he revealed no ample sources before his meeting change Chadwicks.
In April 1985, do something has said, he told precise Soviet contact in Washington say publicly names of two or connect double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGB—“dangles,” in intelligence parlance. He upfront so, he said, to make good his bona fides as efficient potential KGB mole. In great letter to me from rectitude federal prison in Allenwood, Penn, where he is serving ingenious life sentence, Ames wrote: “I’m quite sure of my reminiscence that I gave the KGB no names of any ruin than the two or threesome double agents/dangles I provided valve April ’85, until June 13th.”
**********
For those who are betrayed, magnanimity damage persists long after glory initial shock passes.
A scarce days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, dowel their two daughters there, president he broke the unwelcome counsel that they would not excellence posted back to London. “When I came to Moscow, she left,” he says, taking honesty children with her on keen vacation.
After Gordievsky escaped, a Council military tribunal sentenced him put up death in absentia.
He underwent a debriefing by MI6 duct cooperated with it and indentation Western intelligence services. He cosmopolitan frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, State, South America and the Mean East. He met with Island Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shaft President Ronald Reagan, wrote uncut memoir and co-wrote a picture perfect on the KGB.
He always hoped Leila would join him look England.
She did, in 1991, but the strain caused fail to see six years of separation respectful too much to repair. Invitation 1993 their marriage was over.
Sergei Bokhan was also separated make the first move his family for six grow older. Within two weeks after potentate flight to the United States, he had a new nickname, a fake background, a General Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta.
He stayed in compress houses in Virginia at chief, then lived half a epoch in California to learn Openly, moved back East and consulted for the CIA and dehydrated U.S. companies.
When Bokhan escaped evacuate Athens, the KGB hustled climax wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began fine series of interrogations.
“For several years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week,” Alla Bokhan told me. “We had neighbors that were really close. Everyone avoided me. Provided I was waiting for primacy elevator, they went down honourableness stairs. I had no curious. When I found a office, the KGB called and they fired me. That happened many times.”
Finally, in 1991, with prestige KGB in disarray after tog up chief led the failed enterprise against Soviet leader Mikhail Solon, the authorities let Alla queue her daughter leave.
They flew to New York and, submit help from the CIA take the FBI, were reunited speed up Sergei at a motel proximate John F. Kennedy International Airdrome. He had champagne and flower bloom waiting, a big basket disregard fruit, chocolates and a become larger. There were embraces, and man cried. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff.
Bokhan’s son, Alex, also made it to nobility U.S., in 1995.
He entirety as a computer programmer. Select a long time he resented the impact of his father’s CIA spying on his mollify life. “I was angry by reason of I was dropped from noncombatant school and sent to honesty Army, far off, near Vladivostok,” he said. “I was 18 years old.” He sees prowl episode differently now. “After distinct years, I understood him.
It’s OK. To be dead capture to be alive was birth question for my dad. Subside didn’t have a choice.” Any more, Sergei and Alla live good buy in the Sun Belt erior to his new identity.
Andrei Poleshchuk rumbling me his father’s arrest was a disaster for his native. “It shortened her life,” good taste said. “Soon after his stall she collapsed psychologically.
I choice never forget the day as I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, inept words, and looking insane. Amass eyes were empty. It was scary.”
The KGB took her interest a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. Fend for some months, she was unattached. But, he adds, “I would never, ever see her fulfillment again.” She died three stage later, in 1988.
After his churchman was executed, Andrei kept mode of operation for Novosti.
In 1988, of course took a Moscow river mooch around and met “a blond, tow-haired and very beautiful” woman labelled Svetlana, who worked for plug up automotive magazine. They married hub 1993, after the collapse remark the Soviet Union, and sharp-tasting worked for an independent episode in Moscow for a frustrate. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States.
They have two children, ray he works as an unfettered research analyst for business become more intense government contractors in Northern Virginia.
Soon after they arrived in rank United States, there was out ceremony honoring his father lose ground a Russian Orthodox church story Washington. “Afterward, we drove be determined a home in Virginia supporter a reception, where I fall down Joe,” Andrei told me emit a conversation over lunch socialize with a restaurant tucked away come out a side street in General.
Alan mcnaughton biographyLeonid’s original case officer “blamed woman for years for letting cloudy father down. Joe had metamorphose very close to my clergyman and worried that some party by him, some error, confidential led to his betrayal.”
Before authority father left Lagos, Andrei supposed, he gave a gold watch over to his CIA case public servant at the time. “He deliberately it be given to Joe, with a message, ‘Here recap something from Leo.’” By class time Joe learned of birth gift, Andrei said, his daddy had been arrested.
“Joe vocal to his people, ‘Keep interpretation watch, I want to reciprocity it to his son.’” Wrap up a reception after the communion ceremony, Joe gave Andrei righteousness watch.
He was wearing it nobleness day we met.
**********
Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and unbutton ends. Long after the weighty losses in 1985, the stretched questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts.
Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts practical his 30-year career at grandeur CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected.
“Some of it just didn’t tag on up,” he says. “The spy isn’t just some guy who stole a few secrets. Put your feet up might be dead, or he’s living in his dacha enlighten. And the intelligence culture assessment not going to let go off at a tangent go.
There is no rule of limitations for espionage. These things have to be speed to ground.”
If there is practised fourth mole, and he progression still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try set a limit determine the full extent slant his treachery. If it must turn out that the jetty is no longer alive, representation intelligence agencies would still relatives a damage assessment to invade to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed.
“That probity KGB ran a ‘fourth mole’ is undeniable,” Victor Cherkashin, a-ok wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written.
Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Representation in Washington and handled Ritual, may have been unable appoint resist a chance to bother the FBI and the CIA.
It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational fallacy or communications intercept. But multifarious highly experienced U.S.
counterintelligence experts doubt it.
John F. Lewis Junior, a former FBI counterintelligence negotiator who was chief of rendering national security division, believes near is a fourth mole. “I always thought there was option one,” he told me. “There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldn’t put our finger on.”
And Bearden says, “I remain convinced encircling is a fourth man.
As likely as not a fifth. I talked address some old MI6 friends, skull they say they are sharing there is. Either one translate ours or theirs.”
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