Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World / Edition 1

ISBN-13: 9780156011174

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 10-19-2000

Pages: 432

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.09(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

1: Operation Lake Terrace

East Berlin: Summer 1985

The operations officer of the KGB's Karlshorst Detachment tossed the message into a classified waste bin and scowled. Twice in one week his superiors at the Moscow Center had laid down the law. Karlshorst's failure to place a new agent inside the American signals intelligence site in West Berlin was unacceptable.

    The colonel knew that he and his men were paying the price for success. For almost three years, fate had smiled on the men of the KGB's Third Chief Directorate, whose job it was to penetrate American intelligence units on the other side of the antifascist wall. In 1982, a brash American sergeant had literally appeared on the Soviet doorstep and volunteered to serve as Moscow's man in Field Station Berlin, the high-tech electronic eavesdropping post that was the KGB's top-priority target. From their bases in West Berlin, the colonel knew, the Americans and their allies were carrying out an unrelenting intelligence collection campaign against Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces. The field station was the enemy's most dangerous unit, but the colonel and his Karlshorst team had it well covered—at least until recently.

    For three years, the American sergeant had plundered the sensitive facility, exchanging thousands of pages of highly classified documents for a great motivator—stacks of hundred-dollar bills. The man, code-named Paul, was arrogant—his ego required constant stroking—but he was bold. The operation was a KGB officer's dream. Witheach pickup of top-secret documents, the Karlshorst Detachment was able to provide the Moscow Center with a clearer picture of the remarkable capabilities that the Americans and their technology wizards had packed into the mountaintop installation.

    All had benefited from the operation. The colonel and several of his case officers had received promotions and decorations. The Center was well pleased, and it directed its petulant carping at some other unfortunate operational element. Technicians in the KGB's supersecret Sixteenth Directorate pored over the stolen documents provided by Paul and busily pondered ways to counter the Americans' electronic warfare systems.

    Then the good life came to an abrupt halt. The Americans transferred the valuable agent to a new assignment in the United States—New Jersey, the colonel seemed to recall. There the greedy sergeant would be controlled by KGB colleagues working under cover at the United Nations. The transfer of their agent was traumatic for Karlshorst. With its top-producing source gone, the detachment's production plummeted. Soon the Center began its incessant badgering. Moscow analysts had become spoiled by the steady flow of secrets that had flowed from East Berlin.

    "Where is the man's replacement?" Moscow demanded. "That field station is your highest priority. It must be covered. Failure is out of the question."

    The colonel summoned his secretary, the dumpy Ukrainian wife of one of his case officers. East Germans could not be trusted. "Tell Kiryukhin to see me as soon as he gets in," the colonel growled.

    For several months, case officer Valery Mikhailovich Kiryukhin had been touting his latest lead as a worthy successor to the departed American sergeant. Tall, good looking, and given to wearing American jeans acquired during a tour at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, Kiryukhin could be unnervingly arrogant and overbearing. "Telephone intercepts confirm that the guy is in financial trouble," the English-speaking Kiryukhin reported. After several preliminary meetings with the American, Kiryukhin was supremely confident. Like the departed Paul, his new recruit was a sergeant, and he had already crossed the bridge by delivering some secret documents. The cocky Kiryukhin boasted to anyone who would listen that his new man would develop into a fine agent.

    In Moscow, the Center was pleased at the prospect of renewed coverage of the Teufelsberg Field Station—pleased, that is, until Kiryukhin was forced to admit that his gold-plated new recruit had broken contact. No one knew why the American had failed to deliver the latest batch of secrets he had promised. Kiryukhin was sure that the sergeant was still in Berlin. Perhaps the indebted soldier had lost his nerve, he suggested.

    The colonel cursed silently as he thought to himself: The only way to get Moscow off our backs is for Kiryukhin to force the issue with the timid sergeant. If Valery Mikhailovich had to shower the American with hundred-dollar bills, then he must do so.

West Berlin: November 1985

The narrow break in the window blinds permitted only a limited view of the dimly lit street. Passersby ambled along the sidewalk, their muffled voices barely audible through the window. Berliners were engaged in their favorite pastime—walking along the lakeshore. Since before dusk, we had maintained our vigil at the window, straining to spot a familiar figure on the street. I fidgeted and glanced at my watch, its dial barely visible in the blacked-out room.

    It was well past 7:30 P.M., the appointed time of the meeting. A wave of pessimism swept over the occupants of our hidden observation post. Where was he? Had something unforeseen derailed the operation? The possibility that we might be outwitted again by our cunning adversaries was almost too painful to bear. Six months of work for nothing.

    A gentle nudge cut short these self-doubts. Something was happening. Barely visible in the darkness, the unmistakable figure of a man on crutches lurched past the window in the direction of a nearby lakeside restaurant—exactly as instructed. I let loose a sigh of relief and gave the thumbs-up signal to my three companions. The figure on crutches—our man—was quickly out of sight. Within minutes, he would enter the Restaurant Seeterrassen. Once inside, the carefully coached double agent would sit facing the door as instructed and await his dinner partner, an English-speaking officer of the Soviet KGB. The trap was set.

    On that November evening in 1985, we were operating in the heart of the French sector of West Berlin. Within three hundred yards of our concealed command post, dozens of undercover American and French counterintelligence agents prepared to carry out their assignments. With luck, the plan would come together. If it did, officers in the KGB's aggressive residenz in East Berlin would be forced to spend the night dispatching frantic cables to the Moscow Center explaining why their highly touted penetration of American intelligence had suddenly blown up in their faces.

    More than forty years after V-E Day, Berlin remained an occupied city, in some ways as bitterly contested as it had been during the war. But in 1985 the contest was not between Hitler's war-weary legions and advancing Allied armies. This was the Cold War. The arena was divided Berlin, and the gladiators were the intelligence services of the western powers and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact.

    Situated more than a hundred miles inside communist East Germany, Berlin was surrounded by a Soviet occupation force of some 300,000 Red Army soldiers. Bequeathed to us by the politicians who drew up the postwar map even as battles still raged, the western half of the historic city had risen Phoenix-like from its own rubble and ashes. As the Cold War raged, the free half of the former Nazi capital had become an insular observation post deep in our Soviet adversary's rear. Allied forces in West Berlin sat directly astride the supply lines that Moscow's armies would depend upon in the event of a war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As a consequence, the three western allies had packed their West Berlin garrisons with a formidable array of intelligence units, all of which spied on the Soviets around the clock by every conceivable means, technical and human.

    Among intelligence professionals, Berlin was deservedly known as the world's undisputed capital of espionage. Of some five thousand American civilian and military personnel stationed in the city, almost two thousand were directly engaged in intelligence and counterintelligence duties, and they were joined by both British and French intelligence contingents. Viewed through Moscow's strategic prisms, western intelligence agencies in Berlin loomed as a serious threat. In the event of war, our efforts would guarantee an advantage to NATO by providing early warning of Warsaw Pact preparations. And our Soviet adversaries could not be comfortable with the behind-the-lines mischief that we would most certainly launch from our West Berlin bases if war were to erupt.

    But this game could be played by both sides. Allied sensitive units in West Berlin also posed a tempting intelligence collection opportunity for the opposition. By deploying a full array of sophisticated military and civilian intelligence collection activities in the surrounded city, Washington, London, and Paris served up thousands of targets for possible recruitment by Soviet and Warsaw Pact spymasters. To make matters worse (or better, if one were Soviet), because the Soviets were one of the four powers responsible for the continuing occupation of the entire city, Moscow's operatives enjoyed unrestricted access to West Berlin, a freedom that they exploited to the maximum. Stark evidence of this was the presence of thousands of Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence agents on both sides of the Berlin Wall, all jousting for position in their unrelenting efforts to penetrate American, British, and French security. For intelligence professionals of both sides, Cold War Berlin was the place to be—an espionage Mecca where the shadowy game of spy versus counterspy was daily fare.

    On this particular evening in November 1985, the drama was being played out between agents of my unit, the 766th Military Intelligence Detachment, and the Karlshorst Detachment of the Soviet KGB's Third Chief Directorate. Earlier in the year, the KGB had made what they believed to be a bold and successful recruitment of an American sergeant. For months, the East Berlin-based Soviets had met the young noncom and plied him with cash in exchange for classified documents, unaware that their promising new recruit was a loyal soldier who had been under the control of American counterintelligence from the beginning. Now it was time to end the operation on our terms. If all went well on this chilly November evening, army counterintelligence would deliver a strong counterstroke to the Soviet operation.

    As agents in Berlin prepared to spring their carefully orchestrated trap, counterintelligence staff officers in Munich, Heidelberg, and Washington awaited the jubilant signal that would flash from the streets of Berlin if the 766th's plan succeeded in besting our Soviet adversaries. The stakes of the operation were high, not the least important of which was the professional reputation of our counterintelligence unit. Some in our Munich headquarters had scoffed at the plan, believing that it was not possible to put so many agents in this small lakeside promenade undetected by the KGB's vaunted countersurveillance personnel. We were determined to prove them wrong.

    Our command post this evening was the darkened front room of a nineteenth-century red brick building belonging to the West Berlin Water Works. Gazing intently through the narrow opening in the blinds, adrenaline pumping, I had no time to mourn the obvious—that our chilly vigil was not high on the list of activities one might choose for a Friday night, particularly in a city famous for its nightlife. To complicate matters, my parents were visiting from their Florida retirement retreat. This was supposed to be a night on the town, an excursion to Berlin's famous Kurfurstendamm and dinner at one of the elegant city's five thousand restaurants.

    Earlier that day, all of us involved in the operation had made polite but obscure excuses to our families. Business would keep us out late, possibly past midnight. We couldn't tell our loved ones that "business" was a euphemism for the Soviet KGB.

    Beside me in our clammy observation post pressing a radio to his ear was unit operations officer Bob Thayer. The thirty-eight-year-old Thayer was the brains behind this six-month, high-stakes sting of the KGB. If events unfolded as planned, Vasily, an English-speaking Soviet operative, was destined to have a bad night. Crouched beside Thayer were Maj. Bill Wetzel, a U.S. Army military police officer, and Alain Bianchi, an agent of the French Surete. Together, we constituted the control element of a forty-person dragnet of American and French special agents deployed in the surrounding streets and restaurants. If Vasily took the bait and paid our agent for the secret documents he was carrying, American and French special agents would take the Russian into custody and swiftly cordon off the area to trap his confederates.

    We had gone to ground in the dank observation post in midafternoon, aided by a cooperating official of the West Berlin Water Works who smuggled us in a closed van into the ancient pumping station. When the German employees went home, their darkened office became our command post.

    By 1985, Bob Thayer had been operating against the KGB for fifteen years. A native of Sioux City, Iowa, the popular operations officer of the 766th Military Intelligence Detachment had inaugurated his career in 1970 as an enlisted special agent before converting to civilian status. With service in the United States, Korea, and Panama, Thayer knew the enemy better than any of us. Patient, methodical, and demanding, the veteran investigator had the right stuff for duty in West Berlin, where not a week passed without some challenge involving our communist adversaries.

    Years of experience had taught Thayer that Soviet countersurveillance agents would cautiously check out the neighborhood several hours prior to the scheduled meeting with their agent. The KGB men, trained to sniff out a trap, would be looking for signs of unusual activity that might indicate trouble. Outwitting the Soviets would not be easy. Somehow, the neighborhood would have to be saturated with special agents without leaving any telltale signs that American counterspies were in the area. Any hint of unusual activity would be detected by the KGB men, who would alert Vasily to abort the meeting with the American source.

    Several days earlier, agents of the 766th had cased the lakeside site and reported that the streets would be far from empty in the early evening. Late vacationers from all over Germany were still enjoying the resort atmosphere. This news inspired Bob Thayer. Why not rent recreational vehicles with German license plates and park them in the neighborhood? The RVs would blend in perfectly with the resort atmosphere and provide ideal hiding places for teams of special agents. Linked by radio communications to the command post, agents could spring from the vehicles on command, and the RVs could be used as roadblocks. Any Soviets trapped in the tight circle would have no choice but to surrender.

    Thayer also knew that our trained KGB adversaries' suspicions would be alerted if they detected too many males, particularly in pairs, in the area of the planned meeting. This was a problem for the 766th, which had few female agents in its ranks. The seasoned operations officer overcame this problem by a variety of measures. He concealed many of our male agents in the RVs. Agents assigned to the streets and in the restaurants were a disarming mix of men and women. Any KGB snoops looking for danger signs would see couples strolling on the waterfront and families with children relaxing in the restaurants and coffee shops of the neighborhood. There would be no trace of grim-faced spooks lying in ambush.

    To accomplish this ruse, Thayer had drafted virtually all of the women in the unit—translators, secretaries, archivists, even the supply clerk—and put them on the streets with the men. Then, to guarantee eyes on the target, he boldly posted two 766th agents in the restaurant where the KGB man had told his American spy to meet him. One was a female, the other a veteran German American who was dining with the borrowed wife and children of a colleague, enabling him to blend unthreateningly into the restaurant's family clientele. When Vasily entered the quaint Restaurant Seeterrassen, the KGB man would have no way of knowing that the silver-haired fellow with the attractive wife and two children in a nearby booth was wired for communications. Special agent Hilmar Kullek's mission was critical. The moment he saw our agent pass an envelope to the Russian, Kullek would sound the alert and the trap would be sprung.

    Thus the stage was set for what would become known in the annals of the Silent War as Operation Lake Terrace. If all went according to Bob Thayer's plan, the arrest and humiliation of Vasily and his colleagues would send a clear signal to Moscow that American soldiers were not for sale, contrary to the teachings as taught in the KGB's training institute. At the same time, photos of the apprehended Soviets would provide convincing proof that the hostile intelligence threat to U.S. forces in Berlin was alive and well.

    In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev had just taken the first steps down the road of glasnost that would lead to the end of the Cold War. But on the streets of West Berlin, the battle of wits between American and Soviet intelligence services continued unabated.

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