Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| Doubtless the psychologists would claim that I was a classic case of an attention-seeker, craving approval and approbation, but more likely the KGB recognised that all I needed was for my material needs to be taken care of, and to be treated with a degree of respect, or certainly the decency that I had not found in the Met. Flatter me, and I’m yours. Tell me you’re going to make my wildest dreams come true and I’ll do your bidding. Treat me like an idiot and I’ll bring the entire house down, myself along with it. Of course Marcel and Gold Tooth had probably submitted a psychological profile on me before I ever reached Moscow, as the Russians are keen on learning about what makes their sources tick, but now I was available for close-up scrutiny and could be examined as closely as any laboratory guinea-pig. Was I who I claimed to be? Could I still be working for a British secret service? Did I have what it takes to be a good spy or an outstanding lover? I knew that the KGB’s psychiatrists were thorough, and how much weight they attached to the underlying character and motivation of their agents. I was to learn that in the so-called ‘golden age’ of the legendary illegals in the pre-war era. The very best recruitments had been accomplished by Arnold Deutsch, once the NKVD illegal rezident in London who had successfully pitched Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. His true profession? He had been a Vienna-trained psychologist who had worked under academic cover at London University. The very first task he had set each of his agents was to prepare a lengthy autobiography, disclosing their inner-most secret feelings and desires, which he had adapted into a psychological profile. It had been by adopting such methods that the Soviets had achieved such impressive results by penetrating the west’s most secret establishments.
My adherence to the KGB seemed entirely natural, at least to me. I was joining a new firm, gaining my colours, my wings, my whistle and mt arm-band, but this was not school, the army of the police. Hitherto I had been a half-hearted part-timer, a useful one-day-a-week fellow claiming expenses and medical aid, but now I was becoming known, had gained the trust of the KGB and was to be trained. The KGB itself was transforming from an exploitive, opportunistic manipulator into a considerate, even caring corporate employer, apparently concerned about career paths. .
Until his arrest in 1985 John Walker headed the most successful Soviet spy-ring ever to operate in the United States, and after his retirement from the US Navy had recruited his brother and son to maintain the supply of classified material. The breach of security was so great that the Soviets were estimated to have read more than a million of the US Navy’s most secret messages, and jeopardised the exact location of the entire submarine fleet. The person who received much of the credit for this ongoing intelligence bonanza was Oleg Kalugin, who returned to Moscow a hero, although only the Chairman, Yuri Andropov, and a few of the most senior KGB officers knew the details of his coup or why he had been decorated with the coveted Order of the Red Star. As if his handling had not been sufficient proof of Kalugin’s skills, he had also run a source inside the National Security Agency, the very same Robert Lipka who was, years later, to be betrayed by the Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin. With the rank of lieutenant-colonel and subordinate only to the FCD Chief Aleksandr Sakharovsky, Kalugin had embarked on a project that really had very little prospect of success, but had been inspired by the embarrassing defection of Oleg Lyalin in London. A KGB post-mortem had established that Lyalin had manifested plenty of signs of unreliability before his defection, and both the rezident and his counter-intelligence adviser had been negligent, covering up for Lyalin when he had been discovered to have been conducting affairs with the wives of his colleagues. Kalugin’s solution, as he had suggested to Valery Boyarov of the KGB’s counter-intelligence branch, had been to attract some western defectors to Moscow, but a little research had revealed that the few who had come to live in the Soviet Union were far from favoured citizens. Perhaps the most famous of all had been Kim Philby, then living in alcoholic isolation and in miserable circumstances at his tiny flat. Kalugin had been determined to befriend Philby and transform his circumstances, and at about the same moment I had turned up, not exactly a defector, but certainly someone with a detailed knowledge of life in London, and with plenty of contacts. We both hit it off together, and became firm friends, perhaps because I had rather more to offer in current operational terms than either Philby or his fellow Cambridge conspirator, Donald Maclean, who was then in poor health, suffering from kidney failure, with whom he was at daggers drawn because Melinda Maclean had run off with Philby. Maclean was then working for a foreign policy institute and really had very little to do with the KGB, whereas Philby had been cultivated by Kalugin as he was a very poor advertisement for defection to Moscow. All the stories about Philby holding the rank of general and going to work at the KGB’s headquarters were complete bunkum, and the truth was that he sat at home in an alcoholic, occasionally suicidal stupor, trying to tune his radio to the BBC World Service. Until Kalugin had decided to exploit his undoubted talents, Philby had been a wasting asset, but the reality he had been completely out of touch with life in the west since he fled from Beirut in January 1963. Indeed, he had not really lived in London since 1956, when he moved to the Lebanon, so he was actually about twenty years out of date in terms of what he could offer the KGB about life in London. Apart from George Blake, who had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, having been imprisoned in 1961, the English defector community in Moscow was pretty thin on the ground, and really represented a burden to the KGB, and definitely not regarded as an asset. A former Met detective, on the other hand, knew his way around London as none of the others could ever hope to. Evidently Kalugin realised my potential, and it was not long before there was a clear purpose behind the KGB’s cultivation and flattery. From the gossip I was privy to, I was aware that I was associating with one of Dzerzhinsky Square’s few real stars. Aged forty, Kalugin had been promoted to be the organisation’s youngest general in 1974, and headed Directorate K, a self-contained, elite branch within the FCD that employed some seven hundred officers, divided into eight departments, the first of which was dedicated to penetrating the CIA. In a departure from the KGB orthodoxy, Kalugin had been authorised to adopt aggressive, counter-intelligence tactics to mount hostile operations against the KGB, using separate, dedicated reporting channels isolated from the usual FCD traffic, and therefore immune from betrayal, for the sole purpose of attracting and retaining spies of Kim Philby’s quality. It was this effective strategy that enabled the KGB’s Rem Krasilnikov, of the Second Chief Directorate, to exploit the leads to spies offered by Ames and Hanssen, without alerting the Americans. One of Kalugin’s successors in the Washington DC rezidentura was to be Viktor Cherkashin, a counter-intelligence specialist who, a little later, became the beneficiary of the windfall from these two self-recruited spies, one in the CIA, the other in the FBI. Once this information reached Moscow it was to be handled by Krassilnikov who, when I was in Moscow, had been chief of the SCD’s Second (British) Department before he had been transferred to run the First (North American) Department. Krassilnikov’s task was to identify and neutralise the spies incriminated by Cherkashin without compromising his two valued sources. In the years that followed, I was to become one of Kalugin's main agents, deployed against the unsuspecting wives of CIA personnel. Naturally I was never told exactly what Kalugin knew about me, but it was common-sense that as a counter-intelligence expert he must have wondered about where my allegiances lay, and whether I had been planted onto the KGB by SIS. He had certainly read the account I had written of my experiences in London, and the circumstances in which I had been obliged to start a new life in Africa, but he must have wondered about some of the inconsistencies. Why, he once asked me, if I was on the run from the police, had I been able to maintain contact with Bill Moody? It was a fair question, and it was quite hard to persuade an outsider with no knowledge of the hideous events then still unfolding in London, that although Moody had been the senior officer on the investigation team, he himself had much to lose if I had turned up and told all I knew about what he and his colleagues at the Yard had been up to for years. Kalugin told me that he had been astonished by my revelations of institutionalised corruption at every level of Scotland Yard, but his uneducated viewpoint, whilst widely shared, had been completely unrealistic and owed more to television propaganda than fact. It was true, historically, that the Met’s CID possessed far more technical and forensic resources than the county forces, especially before the amalgamation of the smaller provincial constabularies, and that the Murder Squad was often called in by inexperienced detectives to solve difficult crimes. These events enhanced the Yard’s reputation and made New Scotland Yard a building universally recognised, even if the Commissioner’s Office had long since moved to its present home, the bleak, soulless office block half a mile away in Victoria. I had to explain to Kalugin that there were two sides to the Yard. One was seen by the public, which expected and generally received fair treatment from arguably the best police force in the world. The other perspective was that of the underworld, and a handful of bent lawyers, who understood that the CID kept professional criminals under control by the use of informants. Those sources came from the criminal fraternity and occasionally unorthodox methods had to be used to make a recruitment or ensure a conviction. Innocent members of the public had nothing to fear from such tactics because they were only applied against known villains, Moody, of course, had branched out on his own, with Wally Virgo, to make a business out of their duties and, as I saw it, I had been caught in the middle. The CID had almost nothing whatever to do with the intelligence services, and my continuing link with Harley, after my arrival in North Africa, was simply a matter of self-preservation, not evidence of any SIS operation. As I was to hear later, my connection with Harley had been discovered by the KGB in Rabat after a search had been made of my motor caravan which had revealed several letters from Harley, letting me know what was happening in London. After all, I had detailed in my original account how Harley had given me money to keep me in Morocco, and I would hardly have mentioned that if there was any sinister interpretation to it. Kalugin appeared to accept my assurances, which were on the level, and the issue was never raised again, probably because his cryptographic experts had failed to detect any signs of a hidden code. Doubtless the rezidentura in London had been asked to keep Moscow informed of developments in the much publicised clean-out at the Yard, and the KGB must have known quite enough about SIS’s operations to know that not even the most imaginative Wykehamist could have dreamed up such an elaborate scenario simply in the hope of ingratiating me with their opponents. Kalugin accepted me as a Met officer on the run, without any intelligence ties, and he was right to do so because that was precisely what I was. Indeed, initially he had considered sending me back to London to make contact with possible sources inside the police, but he soon changed his mind when I pointed out the flaws in such a plan. As it turned out, he had plenty of other ideas for me. In any event, he had been tremendously impressed by the way the information in my dossier turned out to be all too dreadfully true. My initiation into the KGB followed a long holiday with Nick in the Soviet Union, to Leningrad, Armenia, Azerbaijan and a tour of Eastern Bloc countries, all paid for by my new employers who entirely understood the one condition I had imposed on our new relationship: I would be happy to work for them, but would not act against British targets or against British interests. Clearly, from the number of lengthy interviews I attended and the training I was given, the KGB had other ideas, and I underwent a course of seduction techniques provided by some very experienced women who clearly knew what they were talking about. At that time I had never heard of a ‘Romeo spy’, and nor had many others, but evidently this was the mission that had been chosen for me. The leading exponent of this rather specialised field of espionage, involving the world’s two oldest professions and somewhat akin to a male Mata Hari, was Markus Wolf, and he had successfully penetrated Konrad Adenauer’s chancellery with an agent codenamed FELIX who pretended to be a sales representative marketing beauty products to hairdressers, and had seduced NORMA, one of the Chancellor’s less attractive secretaries. Their relationship had lasted for years until the BfV had started to take an interest in FELIX and he had been withdrawn to safety in East Berlin. Typically, Wolf had been able to exploit the situation by learning from FELIX of another potentially vulnerable secretary who worked for Hans Globke, Adenauer’s Secretary of State. She was promptly targeted by Wolf’s star Romeo, Hans Stöhler, and proved to be an excellent source, to the point that she was herself recruited as a spy and codenamed GUDRUN. She had continued to supply valuable information until Stöhler, a former Luftwaffe pilot whose cover was that of an estate agent, fell ill and was brought home to die. After his death GUDRUN, who thought she had been working for the KGB, gave up espionage, perhaps proving that she had been truly smitten by Stöhler and had only really spied for him. In this case Stöhler had pretended to be Russian, but Wolf often recruited under a ‘false flag’ which was a demanding role for any handler, and one relatively susceptible to discovery where someone masqueraded as a national of a foreign country. Ideally the HVA needed to deploy authentic, suitable foreigners to play such parts, but they were a commodity in short supply in the GDR. Wolf’s skill at exploiting the vulnerabilities of women earned him a unique reputation, especially as his agents worked for love, not money, although when I was in Moscow only the KGB knew the full extent of the HVA’s operations. He recruited Gabrielle Gast, a BND analyst who had fallen for Karl-Heinz Schneider while she had been completing her doctorate in Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1968. Under his guidance she had applied for a job with the BND at its headquarters in Pullach and by 1987 was deputy chief of the BND’s Soviet Bloc political branch, and a dedicated covert to Communism. Three years later she was betrayed by a senior HVA officer anxious to ingratiate himself with the Federal Republic, who knew only that Wolf had been running a woman inside the BND for years, and she had adopted a handicapped child, but this was enough for the BfV to identify Gast and she was imprisoned. While I was in Moscow Wolf was also handling Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, a twenty-seven year-old blonde divorcee and another of Stöhler’s conquests who in December 1975 had gone to work in Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s private office, but was caught a couple of years later when her HVA controller, Peter Goslar, came under BfV surveillance. Goslar’s home had been searched and among the papers found had been Schmidt’s notes of a conversation with James Callaghan about his recent discussions with President Jimmy Carter. Goslar was then watched as he collected more information from Dagmar and, under interrogation, she revealed she had fallen for Stöhler while on holiday in Bulgaria with her seven year-old daughter, and she was sentenced to four years and five months’ imprisonment for espionage. It later emerged that Wolf had gone to considerable lengths to encourage the agent he knew by the codename INGE, even to the point of arranging a ‘Potemkin wedding’ for her. She believed that her marriage in East Berlin to Stöhler had been valid, but in fact the entire ceremony had been staged by the HVA, complete with a bogus pastor. Her commitment to Stöhler, whom she had known as Herbert Richter, was so complete that she had even agreed to send her daughter to a boarding school in Switzerland so she could devote more time to him, and to espionage. Kahlig-Scheffler always knew that her lover was an East German, although she thought he was an engineer and not an HVA officer, whereas Helge Berger, a buxom secretary in the Foreign Ministry, believed that the handsome ‘Peter Krause’ she met in Bonn in 1966 was a South African working for the British SIS. This was a classic false flag operation, complete with a senior ‘British’ officer who flew in to Frankfurt to debrief her. Actually, he was a former Wehrmacht prisoner of war who spoke very fluent English and persuaded her to supply her boyfriend with thousands of copies of classified documents over the next six years until she was arrested and sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment. Wolf’s best false flag operator was Roland Gandt who persuaded a German secretary at SHAPE, at Fontainbleau, that he was a Danish intelligence officer operating in France under journalistic cover. Accepting that Roland was a national of another NATO country, Margerete fell for him in Vienna but, as a devout Roman Catholic, insisted that she should confess her espionage to a priest. Ever the master of improvisation, Wolf had arranged for a bogus priest to hear her confession at a remote Jutland church, and give her an equally worthless absolution. The false flag was a flexible technique which could be tailored to suit any individual target, and depended largely on the skill of the Romeo. In the example of Dietmar Schumacher, another of Wolf’s stars, he had kept up the pretence of being a peace activist named Olaf for the twelve years of his relationship with an English secretary, Helen Anderson. Codenamed MARY, she had been persuaded by her lover to stay in Germany and obtain a job at a US Army base in West Berlin where she stole classified NATO documents for him. She was only arrested in March 1992 when Schumacher’s HVA controller, Karl-Henz Michalek, confessed, compromising Schumacher who was revealed as a man with a wife, Margarite, in East Germany, and a son. Because Anderson was able to demonstrate that she had no idea her lover had been a Communist spy, she was sentenced to just two weeks’ community service before she settled down in Arbroath, while Schumacher received a suspended prison term of twelve months. Another of Wolf’s Romeos, Herbert Schöter, started an affair with Gerda Osterreider, a slender nineteen year-old student who was on a languages course at the Alliance Francaise in Paris. When she returned to Bonn in 1966 she got a job as a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office and gave her lover the original teletype tape on which incoming diplomatic telegrams were printed. Five years later she was posted to Warsaw where, in Schöter’s absence, she had taken up with a German journalist to whom she had confessed her espionage, and when he reported her she was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Like Berger, some of these agents were appalled to discover how they had been duped, while others remained loyal, and in these circumstances Wolf sometimes managed to obtain their early release in a spy-swap. This happened to Renate Lutze, a secretary in the Ministry of Defence who married her Romeo, Lothar, in September 1972, and was arrested with him at their Bonn apartment in June 1976. She was sentenced to six years, he to twelve, but later they were freed in an exchange negotiated by Wolf. The women who spied for the HVA seem to have been motivated primarily by their almost blind devotion to their lovers, a common denominator that Wolf perceived as more important than ideology or nationality. At the time, few appreciated the potential of the Romeo, and it was only when the HVA’s archives fell into western hands, and Rainer Rupp was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, that the scale of the operation was fully grasped. Rupp’s English wife Ann, codenamed TURQUOISE, had worked at NATO’s headquarters and had willingly spied for her HVA husband, whose name had appeared in a file marked TOPAZ. She received a twenty-two month suspended prison sentence in 1994. Wolf’s other agents included Ingrid Garbe, a member of the FRG’s mission at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels; Ursel Lorenzen, who worked in NATO’s general secretariat; Imelda Verrept, a Belgian secretary in NATO; Inge Goliach, who had penetrated the CDU; Christel Broszey, secretary to the CDU’s deputy leader Kurt Biedenkopf; Helga Rödiger, a secretary in the FRG’s Ministry of Finance; and Ursula Höfs, a secretary in the CDP. All these agents had been persuaded to spy by their Romeo lovers, but the BfV failed to grasp Wolf’s strategy until 1979 when the new BfV president, Dr Richard Meier, belatedly introduced a new vetting procedure, codenamed Operation REGISTRATION, to screen the partners of single women holding sensitive posts. This innovation precipitated the hasty withdrawal of several agents and their lovers, but the principle had been well established. Given the right circumstances, a well-groomed, presentable man could achieve access to important secrets using vulnerable women as surrogates. Wolf had proved the strategy was effective, and the KGB had been looking for suitable candidates when I had turned up. As it was explained to me by Nick, I was not to develop any long-term relationships with my target women, but rather was to act as a reconnaissance, soften them up for others, making the initial approach to see if they would be compliant. After I had bedded them and established the extent of their access to information of interest to the KGB, I was to move on. According to Nick, there was no shortage of suitable candidates waiting for my attention. My encounters with Nina had demonstrated that I was quite inexperienced sexually, and had little idea of any sophisticated technique, and even less of foreplay, so the KGB had decided to rectify the situation. A blonde, good-looking tour guide, whom I met casually in the hotel bar, offered to take me to the famous Moscow Zoo and soon Katinka and I were going everywhere on the metro, visiting all the city’s famous tourist attractions. She was a typical Russian, blonde with soft, velvet blue eyes, beautiful high cheek-bones, good body and reasonable English. She had what you might call English skin, clear and transparent like alabaster, wonderful to the touch. Her rosy cheeks blushed naturally and she had the look of those long-legged peasant girls, originally of German extraction, from the area around the Volga. |