Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| My second mission was in Benin, where there was a girl at the US embassy who was believed to be the CIA Station Chief’s secretary. According to the KGB, this girl had been having an affair with a French nightclub owner in the capital, Cotonou, and was vulnerable. She had already confided in the local KGB rezident, and he had reported this to Moscow. My task had been to cultivate the target and maybe recruit her, so I checked in to the local hotel and made contact with an intermediary to arrange an introduction. The KGB rezident invited me to his home for beetroot soup and what he believed to be a decent bottle of wine, but actually was vinegar. He showed me a picture of my target, Kate, but almost as soon as I got back to my hotel she turned up in my hotel’s swimming-pool. We were soon getting to know each other quite well in my room, and she took a very professional approach to establishing my state of health. A detailed inspection took place and she persuaded me that she was experienced, and maybe even a honey trap. Thus far the American women I had encountered had been quite inexperienced, somewhat inhibited and a little naïve, but Kate was very different, so much so that I was suspicious of her, and I was right to be so.
Kate invited me to a party the following evening and I arranged to pick her up the US embassy. I had rented a car, but when I arrived she was not ready, and I was invited by a black servant, wearing white gloves, in to the embassy to wait for her. As it was air-conditioned I agreed enthusiastically, and accepted a drink from him, but I realise that I am being watched by a surveillance camera. During the Cold War, and maybe today too, all American embassies have a ‘walk-in room’ conveniently close to the entrance lobby were potential defectors can be interviewed. Ostensibly they are ordinary consular interview rooms where visa applicants and others can talk in some privacy, away from the prying eyes of receptionists and other locally-employed staff, but in reality they are equipped with covert video cameras and wired for sound. This expedient allows the CIA to maintain an accurate record of precisely what a ‘walk-in’ is offering, and help judge from his demeanour whether he is authentic. Since, historically, the CIA’s very best information had come entirely fortuitously from these entirely unexpected sources who turned up at diplomatic premises without a prior appointment, these rooms had become an essential component in the collection of secret intelligence. For all of its investment in cultivating and pitching their adversaries, the best spies had been those who had been self-recruited. The problem was discriminating between the decoys and ‘dangles’ employed by the opposition, and this was true for all the participants in the Cold War. While the putative informant was making his pitch his every mannerism was being recorded so as to assist in establishing his bona-fides, verifying his identity and checking on the authenticity of information. Doubtless the room had been sterilised to collect DNA samples, and other forensic evidence. However, tt occurred to me that the CIA now had my fingerprints, had my photographs, and I was isolated on American territory. An American diplomat then appeared to ask me some questions, but I was suitably indignant, claiming to be a white hunter surveying for a safari park in Benin’s Parcs National de Niger W, so-called because the river Niger almost surrounded it, almost as the letter ‘W’. Fortunately my legend as John Frederick Freeman was watertight, so after a few hours of questions I was released, but I wasted no time in leaving the country before the local CIA station could complete their checks. My passport was an authentic British passport, but if my photo was circulated to Langley, and then maybe to other CIA stations in the region, I could be in trouble. Bulletins known as ‘burn notices’ are occasionally distributed by the CIA to its overseas stations to warn of conmen or agents who have lost their usefulness, and I had no wish to have my details circularised. I simply wanted to to proceed with my main mission, to establish myself as a prosperous businessman in India, exporting jute sacks to Africa from Bangladesh. Coincidentally, the main jute sack factory in Ghana had burnt down shortly before my arrival, so my cover story had quite a topical ring to it as I was supposedly selling a commodity that was now in considerable demand. In addition, I was to buy Atlas bicycles through an agent in Delhi for shipping to Ghana, and negotiate the purchase of chick-peas. To enhance my cover as a successful international trader I rented a penthouse flat in the embassy district of New Delhi, known as the golf links, and close to the Bulgarian embassy, and started to enjoy myself, particularly on the embassy circuit. My KGB controller in India was the Russian wife of an important Indian steel tycoon, and she ran an ‘illegal’ network across the entire country. Under her instructions I befriended an English woman whom the KGB codenamed JILL, and another target, a member of the Bronfman family that owned the Canadian distillers, Seagrams. However, my first contact with Leonid V. Shebarshin, the embassy’s legal rezident, was as a consequence of running low on funds from a bank account that had been set up in Senegal. There should have been large amount of cash on deposit for me, more than enough for me to buy a house or a local company, but someone had emptied the account, and this made me very nervous, worried that perhaps I had become the victim of a defector. I made a signal requesting a meeting, according to the procedure that had been set up before my departure, and eventually I had a meeting with someone from the local KGB rezidentura. We established each other’s credentials through a series of pre-agreed passwords, and I explained that my bank account in Senegal had been looted. More discussions took place, and finally I was met by the tall, black-haired rezident, Leonid Shebashin, but instead of helping me out financially he gave me several idiotic missions to target Americans, one at the embassy and others at the consulates at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. I considered this duplication to be too dangerous, and I thought Shebarshin was exploiting me for short-term advantage, placing me in considerable jeopardy. Whilst I was perfectly happy to operate against the Americans, I had not forgotten my experience in Dar-es-Salaam and I knew that I should not push my luck. Shebarshin seemed oblivious to my complaints, and sent me on a job to Katmandhu, to report on the Chinese occupation of Nepal. It was on one of these missions that I met the stunning Hilda Gardner, a vivacious Puerto Rican who was married to an American dentist, but wherever we went she attracted far too much attention. She had been to the Woodstock rock festival where she had danced naked and achieved worldwide fame when her photograph had circulated around the world, making her the embodiment of the free-love culture than sweeping the globe. Although she was of no great operational significance, she provided me with cover and gave me access to some useful contacts. When an American diplomat fell for Hilda I quietly stepped aside and encouraged the relationship, reporting the liaison to the KGB who doubtless found a way to exploit the fact that he was in an adulterous affair. I was not remotely jealous or resentful at losing Hilda, and instead turned the situation to my advantage by seeking advice on my 'betrayal' from Jenny, another target and one of Hilda's acquaintances. This was, of course, the most cold-blooded, hypocritical exploitation of women My assignment to India had been Kalugin’s idea, but it had proved to be one of his less good ones because Leonid Vladimirovich, who had been in the capital since 1971 when he had been given the assignment of heading the PR (political) line. In 1977 he had been promoted to the post of rezident, but I thought he was completely unqualified to be running a rezidentura. I soon discovered that Shebarshin had been a regular diplomat, a graduate in 1958 of the oriental faculty of Moscow University’s Institute of Foreign Relations, and had served twice in Islamabad, for a total of six years, before he had been co-opted by the rezident, Yakov P. Medyanik, to work with the KGB, and then had attended the Andropov Institute to graduate as a FCD officer. Little did I know that I had chosen a particularly powerful enemy who was to be appointed Chief of the First Chief Directorate in 1988 when Vladimir Kryuchkov was made the KGB’s chairman. He had spent an unusual, continuous thirteen years in south Asia, and was coming to the end of his appointment in Delhi, destined for the senior post in the FCD’s Seventeenth (India) Department in Moscow before completing his last overseas assignment, as rezident in Tehran. Although he was considered a high-flyer at Dzerzhinsky Square, and was destined to go right to the top, I thought he had little idea on how to run clandestine operations. He may have had diplomatic skills in abundance, and may have been highly regarded by the senior management as an expert on the region, but I never saw any signs of them. As far as I was concerned he was an exploiter, looking for short-term advantages and results irrespective of the risks or the possible consequences for me. While he was fully protected by diplomatic immunity, had operated in relatively benign environments in countries friendly to the Soviet Union, and had plenty of genuine experience as a diplomat to back up his cover, I was in an entirely different boat. If I got into trouble the very last place I could turn to for assistance would be my own British High Commission where any misfortune would doubtless be transmitted instantly by the local MI5 representative to London. Whatever other trouble I might be in, my passport alone would be enough to earn me prison time in India unless the KGB exercised some influence on my behalf, and I was under no illusions about what Moscow’s attitude would be to any potentially embarrassing incident. There was, after all, virtually nothing to link me directly to the Russians or the Soviet embassy, so I would be on my own. These were considerations of which the unsympathetic Shebarshin seemed entirely oblivious. The KGB’s plan, settled before my departure, was for Nellie to join me in India after she had taken her university diploma, and maybe be given a job in the Bulgarian embassy, and I believed this had been approved at the highest level, but shortly before her finals she was arrested by the militia and asked to sign a declaration that she would have no further contact with me. Reluctantly she had signed, but then she was threatened by a KDS colonel named Domchev who told her she would never see her son again and end up in a stone quarry, the traditional fate in Bulgaria of dissidents sentenced to the labour camps. Naturally Nellie had absolutely no idea about my work for the KGB, although she knew that I visited Russia quite frequently. She thought I was some kind of Communist official, although neither she, nor anyone else in her family, was a member of the Party. Indeed. It had been her skill as a language teacher that had probably protected her from worse sanctions in the past. She had taught dozens of pupils, including diplomats and senior government officials, and was recognised as an expert in her field. On one occasion, when the militia had harassed her for not having voted in one of the elections, which invariably produced a 100% result for the Communists, she had resisted the pressure and had been left alone. Although the militia and the KDS were different organisations, threats from either had to be taken seriously, and upon her release Nellie went straight to the central post office and sent me a telegram in a false name ‘Nina Holecec’ which, interpreted by me, meant in English, ‘I’m in a hole, please check!’ I understood immediately so I telephoned Nellie, realised she was in trouble, and jumped on the first flight back to Bulgaria, puzzled by what had happened. Why had Nellie come under pressure from the KDS when I was supposed to be working for the KGB? I arrived in Sofia on 13 July 1977, my birthday, and went straight to Nellie’s flat on Ivan Assen II where I found her in a state of considerable distress. Far from having looked after her in my absence, as I had been promised, the KDS had been bullying her, and clearly had no intention of allowing her to join me in India as had been agreed. Infuriated, I sat down at Nellie’s father’s desk and wrote a fifty page report explaining why I had left India, complaining about Shebarshin’s unprofessional behaviour, and demanding an explanation for Nellie’s treatment. In my view the entire episode had been a complete waste of time, and I knew that elaborate preparations had been required before I had set off for Africa. Someone had emptied the main operational account in Senegal, and someone had reneged on the plan to let us settle in India. Having completed my catalogue of complaints, I delivered it to the Soviet embassy and, having lit the blue touch-paper, waited for the inevitable fireworks. As I should have expected, my diatribe created all kinds of problems and I was informed by Valentin that I had been suspended, and would receive a small allowance until a decision had been taken in Moscow on my future. I had, in effect, been accused of desertion, having left my mission in India without Moscow’s permission, and without the knowledge of the rezident. The first offence was clearly regarded as a grave one by the KGB which was more used to dealing with Soviet personnel who were under an iron discipline, and not with someone such as myself, who was really a volunteer. KGB illegals sent abroad to live in target countries undergo lengthy training and make considerable sacrifices to complete their missions which can last for years. Their advantage is that they can work in complete isolation from the Soviet rezidentura which, in a hostile environment such as London, Washington DC or New York, would be the subject of intensive surveillance and technical monitoring. In these circumstances the legal rezident would be inhibited from conducting all his usual espionage duties, such as meeting agents, recruiting sources, surveying signal sites and servicing dead-letter drops. By passing these activities to an illegal network, controlled independently by an illegal rezident, the risk of compromise through routine surveillance is minimised. In many respects illegals are a uniquely Soviet phenomenon, as their counterparts scarcely exist in other equivalent services. For example, the CIA send a tiny number of their own officers abroad under ‘non-official cover’, and occasionally the British will give SIS officers temporary commercial or journalistic covers, but none devote their lives to the role as the do the members of Directorate S. Whereas the Soviet system provided a continuous supply of dedicated, ideologically-motivated volunteers keen to work at great personal risk in an alien society, perhaps for decades at a time, such people simply do not exist in SIS or the CIA. Illegals do not enjoy the luxury of diplomatic immunity so if arrested they can face serious charges, and both Rudolf Abel and Gordon Lonsdale were examples of the dedicated professionals willing to spend years away from their family, and endure prosecution and imprisonment in the west, whilst all the time remaining silent about the true nature of their assignments. Indeed, neither the FBI nor MI5 had any idea of the true identities of Abel or Lonsdale, even after they had been kept in custody for years and eventually swapped in a spy exchange. Abel had been arrested in New York in 1957 and had served just under five years of a thirty year sentence when he was freed, but never admitted his real name was William Fischer, or that he had been born in England. Similarly, Lonsdale pretended to have been a Canadian, but actually he was Konon Molody, a Soviet-born KGB officer who had been educated in California. Arrested in 1961, he had been sentenced to twenty years, and was released in 1969. I was never in the same category because I had never spied against the countries in which I had operated. My targets had been Americans, but I would never have risked operating in the United States. I argued, of course, that the allegation of desertion simply did not apply to me. I had agreed voluntarily to go to India, and part of that agreement was that arrangements were to be made for Nellie to join me once she had sat her exams. Instead, she had been the subject of harassment and that meant the deal was off. I was not a KGB officer born and bred into clandestine work who could be intimidated, or who would accept his family becoming tacit hostages. My commitment to Nellie was far more important than my relationship with the KGB, which I regarded merely as a business expedient, and one that I could walk away from anytime I wished. From the KGB’s standpoint, my sudden disappearance from Delhi must have been very embarrassing and caused all sorts of problems. Did it mean that I was really a hostile agent that had successfully penetrated their organisation and then withdrawn from the scene after I had completed my role as a double agent? Had I defected to the Americans, having gained sufficient knowledge to be useful to them? Would I betray the identities of the Soviet personnel I had been in contact with? Would Shebarshin be exposed as the KGB’s rezident and expelled from India? Admittedly that last fear would have been unfounded because although India supposedly was unaligned, it was then really a Soviet client state, heavily dependent on Moscow. If Shebarshin’s role had not been declared to the Indian government, his identification might have been exploited by the Americans, and it certainly would have limited his ability to travel further afield. In all likelihood, Shebarshin himself probably would not have been too concerned about personal exposure, but for a rezident to experience the defection of one of his agents, or even to have to admit that one of his charges was out of his control would be an appalling humiliation. Plenty of promising careers had been terminated by such undetected defections, and it was every rezident’s worst nightmare to experience the loss of a trusted subordinate, such as Oleg Lyalin, Oleg Gordievsky or Mikhail Butkov. In each case their rezident had been held by Moscow to have been negligent, and their prospects of advancement sent into freefall. Although I never had access to the secrets of Shebarshin’s rezidentura, the KGB’s counter-intelligence people would have wondered what secrets I had acquired, and worried about others I might have compromised. Rudolf Abel had been caught by the KGB after his principal assistant, Reino Hayhanen, had defected to the US embassy in Paris while on his way back to Moscow, having been recalled to face disciplinary action for his poor performance. Although relatively low in the food chain, Hayhanen had given the FBI enough information for them to trap his rezident. Similarly, Lonsdale had been spotted by MI5 as he had held a rendezvous in London with Harry Houghton, a spy who had fallen under suspicion, and that one fatal encounter had served to incriminate Lonsdale and two other members of his network, Morris and Lona Cohen, alias Peter and Helen Kroger. All had been tried and imprisoned simply because Lonsdale had failed to shake off MI5’s surveillance teams and take some elementary precautions. Thus the KGB was well justified in its paranoid attitude towards defection, and was especially fearful about the loss of illegals, a group considered an elite within the organisation, managed by its own Directorate S staff within the First Chief Directorate. KGB officers cleared to work in this highly secretive unit were known as ‘Line N’, and such individuals were singled out for special attention by hostile intelligence agencies precisely because they only handled illegals. Because I answered to Kalugin in Directorate K, my contacts were limited to his ‘Line KR’ staff, but as I had not been assigned a case officer at the rezidentura upon my arrival in India, Shebarshin must have wondered about the extent of my knowledge, and the degree to which his apparatus was endangered. I can only speculate about this because I never had the opportunity to discuss it with him but, according to Vasili Mitrokhin, my KGB file shows that a review was undertaken of my work over the past five years by Directorate K, and it concluded that I had provided material ‘of significant operational interest’, and had been entirely honest in my dealings with the KGB. On that basis the Chairman, Yuri Andropov, had given his approval for me to be reinstated. It was not until May 1978 that I was summoned to Moscow to be told that I had been reactivated and that I was to prepare for a new, long assignment, after which I would be free to marry Nellie. She then joined me in June, and stayed with me at the Hotel Rossiya for a month. During this period I worked for the Second Chief Directorate, ostensibly working as an editor for the Soviet Press, but was deployed against a British Embassy secretary with a homely figure, codenamed ERICA, who had gained quite a reputation in Moscow as being keen for male company, but was suspected of being a honey trap by the KGB. I was reluctant to go to work against her, but in the circumstances I felt I had little choice in the matter, and I decided the most expedient solution was to report that my efforts had failed, although I am sure our relationship could have blossomed. Our relationship was short-lived because I arranged for her to terminate it in the social club at the embassy, where our spat could be witnessed by plenty of Soviet staff and visitors. My rather cruel solution was to tell her that I had heard she had been a carrier of a venereal disease, and not surprisingly she slapped me and stormed out of the club. After that episode it was not difficult to persuade the Second Chief Directorate that ERICA did not find me attractive. Thus, rather neatly, I avoided compromising any British targets. My KGB contacts seemed unconcerned about my failure to win ERICA’s heart, and I came under some pressure from my handlers to become a Soviet citizen. There were hints that I was to be offered a post, previously fulfilled by Kim Philby who was in failing health, preparing KGB personnel for life in the west prior to their postings overseas. In anticipation of this I underwent a series of rigorous medical and psychological examinations which included lie-detector tests, hypnosis and being drugged. This was quite routine, and similar tests had been administered after my return from each major mission. My task, if I was to succeed Philby, was to provide the KGB with a finishing school for KGB personnel who had completed their university and KGB instruction course, and had mastered English. Kim Philby had given an additional polish to those destined to work in the west, and I was to supply them with information to about the English way of life, covering habits, foibles, superstitions and such simple things such as how to buy a bus or train ticket, and how to approach people in the street. I even described how to behave at a Masonic gathering and gave them the advantage of knowing basic Masonic signals. Much of the advice, of course, was fairly rudimentary: not to cross a road against a red light, don’t push into the front of queues, behaviour that was just unacceptable to Brits, but quite customary in Moscow. I hear that Philby had suffered constant and increasing ill-health, and the number of his classes had been reduced from five days a week, to four, three, and then one, and finally only the day when he felt up to it. I was asked to take over, and learn the technique, initially at Philby’s knee. This offer came at the end of my medical tests, during which I had seen psychiatrists and psychologists, and the only thing found wrong with me was a diagnosis that I had developed into a 'clinically recognised' psychopath. By this time General Kalugin and my handler Nick had been moved on, as a result of an internal KGB power struggle, and had been replaced by Andrei, whom I called Andrew. |