The Spies Who Came in from the Cold War

In a small district courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, at the beginning of March, two senior U.S. security officers pleaded guilty to charges of spying for Russia. Harold James Nicholson, 46, a 16-year CIA veteran, former station chief in Bucharest and Kuala Lumpur, and teacher of new agents at the Camp Peary training center in Virginia, admitted passing top secret documents -- including dossiers on his students -- to Russian controllers since 1994. Earl Edwin Pitts, 43, an FBI supervisor in the counterintelligence division, confessed to handing over classified information from 1987 to 1992. Two years before, Russian super spy Aldrich Ames, whom former CIA deputy director of operations George Carver described as "the most damaging Russian agent since Kim Philby," was sentenced to life imprisonment.


Just a few days before Nicholson's arrest late last year, the Berlin central criminal court in a closed session sentenced Udo Ziemer, 59, and Karl-Heinz Michalek, 48 -- both former employees of East German spymaster Marcus Wolf -- to two years of imprisonment for spying for Russia. The two men testified that they had contacted former Stasi sources, including moles at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, for information on diplomats and military personnel.


These and a string of other recent Russian spy arrests around the world have led intelligence experts to conclude that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, has lost none of its old touch in infiltrating Western intelligence services and is pursuing espionage with as much, if not more, vigor than during the Cold War.


"Every country spies on every other country. This is a simple fact of political life," says Col. Mikhail Lyubimov, former KGB station chief in Copenhagen and deputy station chief in London. "The difference for Russia is that now we do not have to worry about ideology, we can be more objective ... and protect and pursue our national interests better."


But what is the new agenda of the SVR? And who defines the "national interest" it is intended to protect?


"The SVR has no strategy, only tactics. It follows Trotsky's idea that momentum is everything and the end itself is irrelevant. Its main task is just to fight other intelligence services," says retired Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky, 46, a former assistant to the head of the KGB's technological espionage department. "The technical intelligence it gathers is useless, because the difference in technology levels [between Russia and the West] are too great, and the political intelligence is of limited value now that we are no longer enemies. In short, it is gathering intelligence for the sake of gathering intelligence."


A damning indictment, and one that few of Preobrazhensky's fellow KGB veterans agree with. But what is not in doubt is that Russia's foreign intelligence services, like their Western counterparts, have faced a major reorientation challenge since the breakdown of the Cold War political landscape which created them. According to ex-Col. Oleg Gordievsky, former KGB deputy station chief, or rezident in London and a British spy for 11 years, it is a reorientation that the SVR is just beginning to undertake.


"There is still a strong philosophy [in the SVR] that the West is evil and dangerous and wants to weaken Russia," says Gordievsky, 57, who defected to London in 1985 after being betrayed by Aldrich Ames. "Theirs is still a purely quasi-Communist way of thinking."


Not only does the SVR remain ultra-conservative, but its role in intelligence gathering is redundant, claims General Oleg Kalugin, 62, the former head of KGB external counterintelligence, who helped orchestrate the 1978 "poisoned umbrella" murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov in London. "Before, the KGB had a role to undermine the capitalist West, and ultimately to bring it down," says Kalugin. "Now, the SVR devotes a huge amount of time and resources to gathering medium-grade economic and technical data, supposedly so that Russia can take its rightful place in the competitive world of international business. But even though Russia steals [technological] secrets, it cannot use them, so the whole thing is a total waste of time and money. ... The only thing they still can do is to spy on other spies."





The extent to which the SVR still pursues Cold War philosophy is arguable -- but at a grass roots level there is ample evidence that the SVR is again active in its old Soviet stomping grounds.


Germany, for instance, has experienced what Hans Jurgen Forster, head of the Brandenberg office of Germany's counterintelligence service, the Bundesamts fur Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, describes as "a renaissance of espionage activity" over the last two years. A recent BfV report says that Moscow is actively re-establishing its networks in the region, using old contacts as a springboard.


A recent spate of convictions of former KGB agents seems to give credence to the theory. Convicted spy Karl-Heinz Michalek named Dr Jurgen Rogalla, 63, the former head of the Stasi's U.S. department and holder of the prestigious DDR Schamhorst Order for his intelligence work, as the man who had put him in touch with his SVR controller "Alexander," who on one occasion personally gave Michalek money to pay a source. A Berlin court sentenced Rogalla to a relatively light sentence of eight months because of lack of evidence.


The BfV has dozens of other cases on its books, for instance that of Siegfried Schidt, 50, former police chief of Frankfurt am Oder and a KGB operative since 1975, who was arrested for spying for the SVR in December 1996. According to the German news magazine Focus, at least ten other criminal investigations are under way as a result of "Operation Weekend," mounted by Germany's spy-hunters acting on information from a former Stasi agent in Potsdam. The agent, identified as "Horst M," testified that he had been "reactivated" by SVR officer Waldemar Bacharev, who ordered him to contact his old colleagues in order to set up a new agents' network. "M" agreed, but not before informing the BfV. A warrant has been issued for Bacharev's arrest, and among the ten alleged agents under investigation is prominent PDS (Socialist Party) politician Andre Brie.


According to Joseph Hufelschulte, foreign editor of Focus, there are even rumors that Russia has placed a mole in the Pullach headquarters of the Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence service, after information on top secret BND operations was leaked to the SVR.


The BfV has also noted that SVR rezidenturas (official stations under diplomatic cover) in Germany have not only grown over the last four years, but are significantly larger than those in any other European country. The frequency of visa applications by covert intelligence officers for travel to Germany is on the rise, notes the BfV report, and, according to Focus, Potsdam's security chief Wolfram Holtkotter is one of many BfV officers to have registered a sharp rise in suspicious short wave radio transmissions of the kind used by "covert operatives."


"Germany is now number one target in Europe," says Gordievsky. "[Germany] is playing a key role in the expansion of NATO, and its technological expertise is of great interest to the Russians. ... Now that there is no Stasi, no Czech or Polish espionage, the SVR has to set up its own networks. And I do not doubt that it is doing this actively." That Germany has always been one of Russia's most crucial espionage targets is no secret. The rezidentura at Berlin-Karlshorst was, throughout the Cold War, the biggest KGB outpost in the world, employing -- according to the BfV -- around 450 agents in its heyday as the KGB's front line against Western Europe. And its continued priority status on the SVR's list of key espionage targets is supported by evidence that leading positions in the SVR are increasingly being filled with German specialists. The new chief of the SVR's "Administration S," in charge of the worldwide deployment of covert agents or "illegals," occupied a senior position in the Karlshorst rezidentura until the early 1990s, said the BfV report. The control of SVR's Fourth Department, responsible for intelligence-gathering in Eastern Europe, Germany and Austria, was given to a former KGB Bonn station chief in mid-1995.


The German experience is also significant because of the speed with which the SVR transformed its German network from the most severely weakened of all of its outposts into one of the most active in Europe. After the DDR's collapse the BfV seized the Stasi files, and only those agents who had been recruited directly by the KGB, and had therefore no contact with compromised Stasi controllers, remained relatively secure.


But judging from the number of recent arrests, the SVR may have moved too quickly and carelessly to create a really secure network. Marcus Wolf, the legendary East German spymaster who headed the DDR's espionage wing, and on whom John le Carr? based his character "Karla," scorns the idea of creating a new espionage network out of the ruins of an old one.


"When a network is severely compromised, it is foolishness to attempt to reactivate it," says Wolf, speaking in perfect Russian from his Berlin home. "Any leak is poison to a network [of agents]. There is an element of doubt... which is hard to overcome. This is basic field craft -- one is wary of any structure which may have been compromised."


A better example, perhaps, of successful espionage is America, where -- until the arrests of Ames, Nicholson and Pitts -- the SVR ironically scored its greatest espionage victories as the Cold War drew to a close.


"Russian intelligence has achieved better penetration of the U.S. in the last decade than at any time since the Second World War," says Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. "For much of the Cold War, the KGB sought to capture agents among the ideologically inspired intelligensia ... which was almost completely futile. The Ames and Nicholson cases ... show what you can do with bribery. It is a very successful strategy."


As head of the CIA's counterintelligence group, Ames betrayed many key Western agents between his recruitment in 1985 and his arrest in February 1994, including Oleg Gordievsky and General Dmitry Polyakov -- described by former CIA chief James Woolsey as "the jewel in the crown" of U.S. agents after he supplied top-level defense and political data to the CIA for over 20 years. Polyakov and at least nine other U.S. moles were shot after Ames fingered them, and, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee damage report released in November 1995, many of the "100-plus" Russians recruited by the CIA and betrayed by Ames' espionage reoriented their loyalties back to the KGB. The disinformation they fed to the Americans reached presidential briefings and cost the U.S. "millions of dollars in retooling military equipment to meet fabricated changes in Soviet capabilities," says Arlen Specter, the committee's chairman. The case cost Woolsey and two other senior CIA chiefs their jobs, and Ames himself life imprisonment.


Ames, Nicholson and Pitts all appear to have been motivated purely by money. Despite Yevgeny Primakov's insistence in December 1995 that Ames worked with the Russians because "he realized that the Soviet people were not as aggressive and hostile as they had been portrayed," Ames himself admitted in a biography by Pete Earley released in February that, "the sad truth is that I did what I did because of the money, and I can't get away from that." Earley estimates that Ames received around $4 million. Nicholson confessed to earning $180,000 and Pitts admitted to receiving $200,000.


But the success of Ames as a spy is not wholly heartening for the SVR, according to Kalugin. The fact that one man could betray so many agents testifies to the "huge" extent of CIA penetration in Russia -- and with Ames gone, the CIA on the alert, and potential recruits deterred by the severe sentences for Ames, Nicholson and Pitt, the prospects for further penetration in the U.S. may be bleak.





Despite setbacks in America, there appears to be a mood of quiet triumph at the SVR headquarters in Yasenevo, near Moscow. "[The SVR] is now competitive at an international level," SVR director Vladislav Trubnikov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta in December, summing up the SVR's performance in 1996. "A dramatic reorganization has now been carried out. ... it has dropped a global approach, and focussed its attentions on the main issues."


From the point of view of the SVR's place in Russia's institutional pecking order, Trubnikov has many reasons to be pleased. The SVR -- almost uniquely among governmental institutions -- has regained all, if not more, of the power and influence it enjoyed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has maintained an integrity of personnel and funding unprecedented in other power ministries.


"The transition from First Chief Directorate [KGB's foreign espionage wing] to SVR was seamless," recalls Rupert Allason, Conservative Member of Parliament for Torbay, England, and a leading intelligence historian. "The Nicholson and Ames cases show that they've lost none of their touch. ... and they have achieved much more political influence than at any time since Gorbachev."


General Kalugin, one of the architects of the KGB's dismemberment in the wake of the August1991 hardline coup attempt, agrees. "I have no illusions about this so-called 'new face' of Russian intelligence," says Kalugin. "If Kryuchkov [head of the KGB until the '91 coup] were to return, he would find a very familiar organization ... and familiar faces."


The SVR's remarkable consistency in the face of upheaval is largely due to the political skills of Yevgeny Primakov, an Arab scholar and champion of the importance of the role of intelligence, ex-head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence and, since January 1996, foreign minister of the Russian Federation. Unlike his counterparts in the domestic branches of the KGB, Primakov kept his head down during the failed hardline Communist coup of August 1991 and succeeded in protecting the First Directorate from budget cuts, institutional dismemberment and removal of top personnel -- all of which hit his colleagues in the internal security agencies.


"It was a crisis period. The KGB had discredited itself," says Gordievsky, who has also written a book entitled, "Inside the KGB." "The idea of kicking the KGB out of the Foreign Ministry was a disaster ... [The SVR] feared that within two years they would be deprived of all legal diplomatic cover."


The major short-term threat for the SVR after 1991 was an unfriendly wind of change which blew through the Foreign Ministry, the indispensable diplomatic krysha, or cover, for most field operatives. Gorbachev's energetic young Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, attempted to purge the huge rezidenturas which bloated the Russian Embassies of the world. A new generation of Kozyrev appointees carried out the plan. According to Gordievsky, reformist Soviet ambassador in London Boris Pankin cut the number of spies in his embassy by nearly half. Similarly, the foreign ministry slashed the rezidentura at the Helsinki Embassy from 41 to 20, closed altogether the stations in New Zealand and several Latin American and African countries, and reduced staff levels even at key stations like Washington and Bonn. Major General Yury Kobaladze, head of the SVR's public affairs section and a former colleague of Gordievsky, agrees that the SVR went through "a major upheaval" in the early 1990s. "It was a time of crisis, yes, but the whole country was in crisis," says Kobaladze, who worked as a Soviet spy in London under journalistic cover. "But now we have recovered."


Even before Primakov's appointment as Foreign Minister -- and the effective triumph of the SVR doctrine over that of reformist Kozyrev -- the SVR's recovery was in full swing. Already by the beginning of 1995, Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, Britain's counter-intelligence and internal security service, told Britain's parliamentary Intelligence Services Committee that Russian espionage activity had "risen back to Soviet levels." Her analysis was confirmed by a March 1997 report by the same committee, whose chairman, former British defense minister Tom King, noted that "Russians are still the top threat."


The BfV concurs that the SVR has not only bounced back in terms of external activity, but also in terms of internal political influence. "Intelligence Services of the Russian Federation have continued to develop during the past few years and once again occupy a strong position in the political and state power structure," notes a recent internal report. "The position of the [intelligence] services ... has been upgraded. Russia once again has the largest and most powerful security apparatus in the world."


But what gives Western security agencies and politicians cause for concern is that the SVR could be using its newly regained influence in the Foreign Ministry not merely to advance its short-term institutional interests, but also to push its own agenda to the forefront of Russian foreign policy as a whole. "The SVR is playing a key role in propagating an anti-Western direction in Russian politics," says Kalugin. "They are constantly pressing the point to Yeltsin that the expansion of NATO is dangerous to Russian interests."


Primakov himself is doing little to dispel that theory. In December 1995, shortly before his promotion to the post of Foreign Minister, Primakov outlined a hawkish philosophy for the new, post-Soviet SVR to a closed gathering of several hundred active and retired intelligence officers. He defined the SVR's most important mission as "the active participation in carrying out Russian policies against the West." There is little indication that Primakov's successor (and former deputy) at the SVR, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, 52, has deviated from this course, or that Primakov himself has changed his tune since his appointment as foreign policy chief.


With "svoi", or their own man, at the top, it is hardly surprising that Russian spies appear to be back in business. That in itself is neither shocking nor, as Lyubimov points out, particularly dangerous. Despite indignant noises from Washington over Nicholson and Pitts, the nuts and bolts of everyday espionage are considered part of the game by governments around the world. The only revelation at the moment is the naivete of Western governments who thought that the end of communism would mean the end of Russian spying. Now of course, they have realized the truth -- that though the cards may have been reshuffled, the game of liars' poker remains unchanged.