Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| It must be wondered whether I harboured any reservations about throwing in my lot with the KGB, and whether I really believed I would be allowed to work on my terms, avoiding compromising British interests. This was, of course, at the height of the Cold War, at a period of particularly high tension when Palestinian terrorism was spreading across Europe and there was a strong suspicion in the west that the Soviets had encouraged, if not actively sponsored atrocities in Germany, Italy and France. When the CIA Chief of Station in Athens, Richard Welch, was murdered two days before Christmas 1975, the dangers faced by CIA men in the field became all too apparent, but from my discussions with Oleg Kalugin it was clear that the KGB had no intention of killing their opponents. On the contrary, they wanted to recruit them as moles and were confident that, with the right preparation, they could attract high-calibre defectors, cultivate new sources and exploit their existing ‘walk-ins’ more efficiently. It seemed that the KGB had received some excellent offers of collaboration from the most unexpected quarters, and the question to be addressed was one of their integrity. Were they on the level when they made their approaches, or were they acting as double agents in elaborate sting operations masterminded by the CIA or some other American counter-intelligence agency? Kalugin’s own experience with Robert Lipka and John Walker showed that it was not exclusively senior personnel who enjoyed the best access to classified information, and in both cases relatively junior men had been entrusted with handling the most sensitive data, even if it was simply to burn it. Those circumstances, of course, were ideal for espionage because it provided an opportunity to steal the original documents with no danger of them ever being missed, thereby prompting an unwelcome investigation.
The shooting of Richard Welch, at his home in Athens, turned out to be the handiwork of a mysterious left-wing, domestic Greek terror group which styled itself ‘November 17’ and immediately, publicly claimed responsibility for his assassination. It seemed that ‘N17’, as it was also known, had identified Welch as the CIA station chief after his name, true role, home address had been published in an Athens newspaper, a disclosure blamed not on the KGB but on a young CIA renegade, Phillip Agee. Beset with divorce and money troubles in Mexico, Agee had approached the Cuban intelligence agency and had gained its sponsorship for an exposé of the CIA in which he named hundreds of CIA officers and their agents. The impact on the clandestine service, where the majority of their personnel posted abroad operated under diplomatic cover, had been devastating, and Welch had been the first such victim. N17, formed in opposition to the American-backed military junta of the Greek colonels, was pledged to rid Greece of all foreign influence and had targeted Welch after Agee’s revelation. The death had shocked the KGB which much preferred to engage its adversary with more subtle tactics, of which I was but one component. Nobody would die as a result of my activities, although a few marriages might suffer, and the KGB might engage in a little blackmail, exploit some greed or indulge some of the other well-established tactics of ‘the great game’. The person to encourage me in thinking of Sofia as a suitable base was Valentin who confided to me that his career had been wrecked by Oleg Lyalin. He had no hope of any future postings abroad because he was completely compromised by the defector, so no NATO country would ever accept him under diplomatic cover and, even if one did so, his operation usefulness would be zero because he would be bound to attract so much surveillance that he would be completely neutralised. In thse circumstances I represented his ticket to a much coveted overseas assignment. In short, Valentin was desperate to get out of Moscow, and I represented his ticket. We both likes boxing and tennis, and he literally begged me to tell Nick that Sofia was the best solution, and that Valentin should accompany me. It was from Valentin that I finally understood the depth of feeling within the KGB about Lyalin's betrayal, and learned for the first time that the offer made to me to assassinate him had been entirely unofficial. Apparently Andropov had vetoed a plan to have the defector murdered and the proposal put to me in Morocco had come from an entirely unofficial group of freelancers who had seen their own careers curtailed by their subordinate's revelations. Lyalin had made some lurid claims about the role of Department V, and this was a topic of considerable, continuing sensitivity. The notorious 'Thirteenth Department' had been shut down following the embarrassing revelations of another defector, Bogdan Stashinsky, in 1953, when he had confessed to the assassination of a Ukrainian nationalist leader in West Germany with a precision murder weapon that fired cyanide gas and left almost no trace of its use. Stashinsky's disclosures had been confirmed by another KGB killer, Nikolai Khoklov, and the awkward, world-wide publicity given to this pair had provided the west with a veritable propaganda coup. All trace of the Thirteenth Department had been eradicated, although the actual technical capability to mount what the KGB had termed 'wet jobs' had been covertly transferred to the Line F specialists of Department V. As ell as compromising every KGB officer he had ever come into contact with, and identifying his contemporaries operating under alias in diplomatic posts by looking at western collections of passport photos, Lyalin had committed the unforgivable sin of reopening the whole issue of the KGB's policy on assassination. The topic was particularly touchy because, unbeknownst to me at the time, Oleg Kalugin had been ordered by Vladimir Kryuchkov to help the Bulgarian intelligence service to kill a dissident, Georgi Markov, who had incurred Todor Zhivkov's displeasure by making unflattering remarks about him on the BBC World Service's Bulgarian broadcasts. Reluctantly Kalugin had supplied the Bulgarians with a gun disguised as an umbrella, and this had been used to fire a pellet filled with a lethal dose of ricin into Markov's leg as he walked across a bridge over the Thames while on his way to work at Bush House. Markov had died soon afterwards, although another attempt, on the life of a Bulgarian defector in Paris, failed narrowly. While Andropov preferred to disassociate the modern KGB from such activities, and had vetoed proposals to kill other defectors, in Australia and Canada, his FCD chief (and future successor as Chairman), Vladimir Kryuchkov had taken a rather more flexible, pragmatic attitude to curry favour in Sofia and had been willing to sanction the Markov hit. Knowledge of this decision had been known to only a very few, but Andropov had argued that if Lyalin had been murdered it would have served to confirm the validity of his allegations. However, this was not a view shared by men such as Valentin who had been caused very considerable inconvenience and disadvantage by Lyalin's treachery. It was through confidences like these that I was able to begin to understand how the KGB functioned. After Leningrad we visited Yalta, Sochi and Sevastopol in the Crimea, and then spent three very pleasant days in a private train compartment, complete with our own stewardess, to Sofia. There I was put into the same flat in the middle of a militia block in Struga, in the centre of the city, as I had been in 1973, only on this occasion I was without Anka Mladinova, my girlfriend whom, I now knew, had been planted on me. Valentin was attached to the local Soviet embassy to be close to me, and I was given a job as an editor in the Sofia Press news agency. This suited Valentin who came up with all sorts of ideas to keep us entertained, including our membership of a prestigious film club. At that time the only movies on general release in Bulgaria were stunningly boring documentaries about tractor production, whereas the Party’s film club viewed the films undubbed and acted as a censorship panel to decide whether they were suitable for sub-titles and a wider audience. Not surprisingly, the films we saw were all deemed inappropriate for the rest of the population, but our membership cards gave us access to an important social centre in Sofia, one of the few venues in the capital that served imported drinks and really good coffee. As can be imagined, single men with access to these luxuries were in constant demand in Sofia. As for my office work, it was ludicrously easy, as I discovered when I was introduced to the head of the Sofia Press’s English section. Foreign broadcasts were jammed so Bulgarians had little opportunity to study the language from native-speakers, and I was amazed to find that the English section consisted of a dozen girls, some of them very good-looking, who were employed in translating Bulgarian texts into English, reliant entirely upon dictionaries, but with absolutely no linguistic skill. The results were quite absurd, and it took almost no effort on my part to transform the nonsense into a reasonably intelligible version. For this trifling task I was offered four hundred Lev a month, which was about four times the salary earned by an experienced editor. The only slight hiccup I experienced at work was as a result of a report submitted by a girl who turned out to the daughter of the Minister of the Interior. She obviously had gained her post through nepotism, and when I criticised her disastrously low performance she complained about the ‘mysterious Englishman’ who was making her life difficult, but when her father went to see the Soviet Ambassador he ordered him to instruct his daughter not to ask any further questions about me! Suitably chastised, the girl had confided to her colleagues that I was indeed an important mystery man with friends in very high places, which then made me the object of considerable, and welcome, attention from them. One of my friends was Yuri Zarvalanov, the son of one of the two parachute agents who turned Bulgaria over to the Soviets in 1945, and another was Andrei Lukanov. Their fathers had been friends during the 1923 uprising and had fled to Russia where they both had married Russian Jewesses. Andrei was later to become leader of the Communist Party, but was assassinated outside his apartment in Sofia in 1996. Yuri later went to Austria, where he was thought to have hidden a quantity of the Communist Party’s funds, but he died of a brain tumour. Although my official job was as an editor with the news agency, I was commissioned in the summer of 1975 to prepare programmes for a new channel for tourists on Bulgarian TV. Foreigners had come flooding into the country to enjoy the Black Sea beaches and they made a serious contribution to the economy. To encourage them, the completely unwatchable domestic broadcasts were improved to cater to a more modern audience, and my role, in between missions for the KGB, was to supervise an English language channel. Whenever the KGB needed me, I would be called to a rendezvous, and invariably met Valentin in the park directly opposite the Soviet embassy. Occasionally we went to the nearby Park Hotel which turned out to be a favourite watering-hole for the local Turkish community and, as I later learned, one of the places later used by Mehmet Ali Agca, the terrorist who was to shoot Pope John Paul II in May 1981. On 24 March 1975, a university friend of my assistant Stoyana Angelov, brought Nellie to my apartment as a fourth for a card game, and somewhat unconvincingly I was introduced as a Bulgarian named Ivan Ivanov, although she realised within a few moments that I was not really a Bulgarian. I was immediately attracted to her, and although my interest was not immediately reciprocated, she told me a little of her background. her father was an academic, a professor of agriculture at the Bulgarian Higher Institute of Agriculture, and her mother was an agronomist and a statistician. She had lived in Cuba in 1964 with her father, and then had studied English philology at Sofia University. After graduation she had married and had a son, and then worked with Intercommerce, the Bulgarian foreign trade organisation. In spite of her initial hesitation, we were soon seeing quite a lot of each other, and she accepted that I had a job with the Communist International movement which required me to travel frequently. It would be a long time before I came even close to telling her the truth about my real background and my work for the KGB. Naturally, I was not keen to share with her the kind of work I had been prepared for, and when I learned the details of another mission, far removed from my Romeo activities, I had another reason not to confide in her. The KGB wanted me to re-establish contact with a couple of my mercenary team and arrange a hit in a West African country. Although I had turned down the Lyalin proposal, I accepted this one because the target was not British, but a local Communist suspected of having sold out to the Americans. In mercenary circles this is known as ‘moving somebody on’ and I had few qualms about undertaking it. Such events are part of the way of life in many African countries, where life is cheap and political power is invariably accompanied by bloodshed. The operation was executed faultlessly, which heightened my standing in the KGB and I was given a further assignment in Ghana, where I already had particularly good connections. My business partner in Accra had been Dr George Busby, and when the KGB first outlined their problem, I had been able to promise an easy solution, confident that he would put me in touch with the right people. The country was then in the hands of a military junta of five army officers, some of whom had been delivered by my friend the doctor, who had become close to their families. At least one of the left-leaning governments was a fully paid-up KGB agent, but another was suspected of being in contact with the CIA, and maybe planning a coup. In that part of Africa the local state-run radio station was always a prime target in any take-over, for whoever controlled the airwaves could monopolise the country’s communications. Aware that Accra’s transmitters were very vulnerable to a surprise attack, the KGB had wanted to build an alternative station, heavily guarded by Spetsnaz-trained Special Forces, which could act as a back-up if the main broadcaster fell into the hands of an adversary. My task, with an unlimited budget, was to establish and protect an alternative site, and this I accomplished easily with Busby’s help to import the necessary components and to acquire the necessary real estate. This earned me a VIP trip as a reward, ending in my second visit to Moscow where I was reunited with Nick briefly, before returning to the fleshpots of Sofia. My very first Romeo mission was to South Africa where I was deployed against a woman who worked as a librarian in Pretoria but appeared to have access to the US embassy. Was she a CIA professional, and why was she working for a cultural body? This may appear a rather mundane task, but the implications were considerable because the Peace Corps and the US Agency for International Development were the two American organisations which the CIA was specifically prohibited from using as cover. If really was a CIA officer working under 'non-official cover', then the implications were considerable and there was much mischief to be made by the KGB. If, on the other hand, she was innocent, but for some reason enjoyed regular access to the embassy premises, that too was an advantage that could be exploited, depending upon where she was free to roam. The ultimate objective, of course, was to read whatever was in the ambassador's safe, or to copy material from the coderoom, but lower on the scale were more achievable goals, such as placing a listening device in a conference room used for sensitive discussions, attaching a bug to a telephone, or inside the office of a senior diplomat. Even if a recruited access agent could not achieve any of these ideals, she might be able to pick up gossip or serve to verify information from other sources, such as the exact location of the CIA station within the building, the staff working there, the identity of the Chief of Station and the names of any of the low-echelon cipher clerks working the crypto-equipment. In short, there was much to be accomplished with the cooperation of even the most junior embassy employee. I received a short briefing about my target, Marianne, and received a signal plan and meeting protocol for establishing contact with the local rezidentura which, in South Africa, where there was no Soviet embassy, was to be an illegal structure headed by an illegal rezident. I was only to make contact, by leaving innocuous chalk marks in particular places on specified days of the week, if I had received instructions to do so, or in the event of an emergency, and if I was to meet a KGB controller I was given a form of words to identify myself, and to confirm his bona-fides. I was also given details of a couple of bank accounts in West Africa to which I could gain access in the event that I needed emergency funds, but otherwise I was to use my common-sense and initiative, follow my quite detailed instructions. A particular signal would indicate that I had arrived safely, and another would show that I had found my target. Reports on my progress would be left at a pre-arranged dead-drop, and whenever I had filled a drop I would leave another signal. This was all standard tradecraft, but South Africa was a hostile environment and I would be vulnerable to arrest by the notorious Bureau of State Security. The risk was low, as the holder of a British passport, but I would be operating in a country run by an efficient, authoritarian security apparatus with very close links to the British and American intelligence agencies. One slip, and my true identity might be established with a single telephone call. Worse, if the South Africans suspected I was working on behalf of the Soviets, I could be in deep trouble, isolated in an interrogation centre for months, if not years, without trial. It did not take me long to discover that Marianne was just what she appeared to be, a librarian with no CIA connections, although she did appear to have almost unlimited access to the embassy. She had a very healthy, active sexual appetite although initially she preferred to give me oral sex rather than allow full intercourse, but eventually she succumbed. When I established she was neither a diplomat nor a CIA officer I reported my findings to the KGB which doubtless arranged for someone else to take my place and exploit the psychological assessment to which I had contributed. On the rebound from a former lover, she was certainly vulnerable, and perhaps might have been beguiled into lifting the occasional document or ‘ear-wigging’ an indiscreet conversation. That, of course, was not my concern, and I flew home, mission accomplished. In June 1975 I left for another job in Africa, to target a Chinese diplomat, but I was beaten up by three Chinese bodyguards, and returned on 10 August having contracted malaria. My assignment was to blackmail a Chinese diplomat whom the KGB knew had acquired a black girlfriend. He had apparently had a girlfriend at a previous post in north Africa, and I mailed a letter purporting to come from his ex-girlfriend’s brother, claiming his sister was pregnant, and threatening that unless he co-operated his superiors would be informed, which would immediately end his career. Being reluctant to hand it to him at his embassy, as I had been instructed, I delivered the letter to him at a diplomatic function, but he threw it on the floor and called his bodyguards who hustled me out of the restaurant and gave me a good seeing-to outside. My other assignment in Dar-es-Salaam was to report on the Chinese troops arriving on the docks, and when I cast my eye over them I was impressed by their discipline. They were marched off the ships and went straight onto the railway line, working alongside the natives. However, while the locals were immune to malaria, the Chinese fell like flies from disease, and I had heard from a friend who ran the crematorium in the town that on average just over one Chinese a day was dying in Tanzania. Instead of being buried in Tanzania, the urns containing their ashes were sent back to China. Upon my return to Sofia on 10 August I had a new, spacious three-bed roomed flat on the Giorhiou Dimitrov with balconies overlooking the mosque. Here I was joined by Nellie who accepted my proposal of marriage and left her husband to share my life. I had planned to spend Christmas with Nellie but I was sent on a mission to northern Europe with Andrei, and returned from Finland in January 1976. My next mission was in March, also to Western Europe, but discretion prevents me from describing in any detail what took place, so we can move ahead to my adventures in India. Chapter IV India I took Nellie on holiday to the Hotel Granada on the Black Sea in June and upon my return stayed at the Hemus Hotel in Sofia in preparation for my next trip to Moscow, where I was briefed on my new assignment. I was to make a permanent base in an English-speaking country, and the KGB had decided to send me to India, but before establishing myself there as a legitimate businessman, I was to fly to Ethiopia and take a connecting flight to west Africa and develop my cover in Accra and Dakar. My objective was to build a legend as a businessman running an import-export firm, print business cards and open bank accounts in several different cities to fund my new existence in India. There I was to pose as a merchant specialising in trading with various African countries, selling jute sacks from India for the cocoa crop, for the but my real task was to cultivate Sanjay Ghandi. Over the past two years India had been ruled by Sanjay’s mother, Indira, but her will had been imposed through a state of emergency until her temporary fall from power in 1977, which was to last three years. She had taken draconian powers, imprisoned her political opponents and suspended democracy, but the KGB was concerned about the influence exercised by her son Sanjay. The suspicion in Moscow was that Indira wanted to make her country less reliant on the Soviets who regarded it not exactly as a satellite like members of the Warsaw Pact, but certainly far from non-aligned. India massive army and air force were almost entirely equipped by the Soviets, and the trade between the two countries was enormous. While the KGB was anxious to develop this relationship, there were fears that Indira had other ideas, and my task was to establish myself in New Delhi and cultivate contacts in Sanjay’s circle. Unlike his Cambridge-educated brother Rajiv, the Air India pilot from whom he was estranged, Sanjay had acquired quite a reputation as a playboy with decadent western tastes, and was later to die in an accident while practising aerobatics in his biplane. Evidently the belief in Dzerzhinsky Square was that I was just the person to move in on him. Who was I to disagree with such a judgment? Before I reached India I was asked by Nick, at the last moment, to undertake a couple of missions in Africa, and the first was in Zaire where my target was the daughter of the local CIA Chief of Station who was of great interest to the KGB because he was believed to exercise considerable influence over President Mobutu. According to my KGB briefing, the CIA officer was also a doctor who treated Mobutu for a variety of sexually-transmitted diseases he had picked up through his many encounters with infected prostitutes. My task was to befriend the CIA man’s daughter, gain access to his household and find out what information I could, especially about his relationship with the president. This turned out to be an easy assignment, for the girl told me that she had occasionally gone to Mobutu’s palace with her father, and had found the president to be a kindly, grand-fatherly figure who patted her on the head and offered her nuggets of gold, the size of jelly babies, from a jar he invariably produced for favoured visitors. These nuggets were in the original state, unrefined, as they had been picked up, and were quite an incentive for her to accompany her father. The reality, of course, was that Mobutu was a monster; responsible for the deaths of thousands of his own people, and on this occasion I felt no reservations about helping to undermine the American grip over him. In the end, however, my activities were limited to pursuing the daughter and writing reports on the other American diplomats to whom she introduced me. |