The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Read Online Free Page A

training, but the replacement pulled out at the last minute, leaving the CIA empty-handed at a critical juncture. “We had an increasingly desperate and very valuable agent out there and no one in a position to contact him,” recalled a CIA officer who was involved at the time. 24 The agency also still lacked suitable spy gear for the operation. 25
    While the Americans had played the preeminent role in the meetings in London and Paris hotel rooms, the British came to dominate the operation in Moscow. According to the CIA officer, “MI6 was able to do what we could not—devise and carry out a cover operational plan for the case.” The British chose Janet Chisholm, wife of the MI6 station chief, to be Penkovsky’s case officer. She met with Penkovsky a dozen or so times, at British embassy receptions and a cocktail party, at the nearly empty delicatessen shop of the Praga restaurant, at a secondhand shop, in a park, and in apartment building foyers, often under difficult conditions, with her three children in tow. Penkovsky passed film cassettes concealed in a box of chocolates for the children. He seemed frenetic and driven; the CIA worried that he was meeting too often with Mrs. Chisholm. When the CIA finally deployed a trained officer to Moscow at the end of June 1962 to work on the Penkovsky case, the officer’s work was short-lived. Penkovsky was last seen by the CIA at a U.S. embassy reception on September 5, 1962, and then disappeared. 26
    He fell under suspicion by the KGB, which had put Mrs. Chisholm under surveillance. They had drilled a pinhole in the ceiling of his apartment study and put a camera there to monitor him. Another KGB camera in a nearby building photographed him in his apartment. A search discovered the Minox camera, as well as methods for encrypting messages, and a radio receiver he had been given for clandestine communications from the West. Penkovsky was arrested in September or October 1962. He was tried publicly and convicted of espionage, then executed on May 16, 1963. 27
    At almost the same time that Penkovsky was talking to the American and British officers in the hotel rooms, two more Soviet officers volunteered to become spies for the United States, both outside the Soviet Union. In 1961, Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet military intelligence officer assigned to the United Nations, offered his cooperation in New York and became an agent whom the FBI gave the code name tophat . Then, in 1962, Alexei Kulak, a KGB scientific and technical officer, volunteered in New York to the FBI in exchange for cash. He became the FBI’s agent fedora . Both tophat and fedora were important and valuable assets for the CIA and the FBI at different times in the 1960s and 1970s, but they were largely handled beyond the Soviet borders. In the back alleys of the world, it was possible for the CIA to recruit agents and spies, and to exploit volunteers, but not yet in the very center of the Soviet Union, on the streets of Moscow.
    After the loss of Penkovsky, the CIA entered a long, unproductive period in Moscow. A major cause for this was the overwhelming influence of James Angleton, the counterintelligence chief at headquarters. He threw the CIA into a state of high paranoia and operational paralysis. A tall, thin, quirky man, gentle to friends and inscrutable to others, Angleton cut a distinctive figure in owlish eyeglasses, dark suits, and wide-brimmed hats. He lorded over his own autonomous office, keeping his files locked and separate from the rest of the CIA, sitting at a desk piled with dossiers and shrouded in blue haze from chain-smoking. He enjoyed two hobbies, growing orchids and twisting elaborate flies for trout fishing. Over twenty years as the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, from 1954 to 1974, Angleton created an extraordinary mystique about himself and his work. Secretive, suspicious, and tenacious, he became obsessed with the belief the KGB had successfully manipulated the CIA in a vast