Cold War (1998) s01e21 Episode Script
Spies
One of the CIA's greatest spies Dmitri Polyakov is caught by the KGB and strip-searched his head is held in an arm lock to prevent him taking poison "The invisible front that's what it was in the cold war and for us it was war.
The soldiers may have been on alert but for us and the others who went out in the cold it was actual war.
" --- Captioned by Luis Luque Santoro --- --- CNN's Cold War Series --- Episode 21 Spies 1944 - 1994 Dawn on the 16th of July 1945.
Allied scientists of Los Alamos leave for the New Mexico desert to watch the test of the first atomic bomb.
They had been working for years under a blanket of total secrecy Ted Hall at 19 was the youngest scientist on the project.
"I was there or at least I was there in a truck or a lorry some distance away or what it was considered to be a safe distance away.
I can't remember if there was any signal circulated that the test was about to be made but anyway the damn thing went off and it was a rather awesome sight.
" For Ted Hall the cold war had begun the year before.
"I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as nazi Germany developed.
There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do the right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly.
" Others thought the same way.
The KGB had several sources inside Los Alamos, unknown to one another.
The scientist Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, both passed on details on how to detonate nuclear weapons by implossion.
A principle so new to Soviet science that there was no equivalent word in russian.
In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb, triggered by implossion, it copied key elements of the American bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
The atom spies had saved the Soviet Union perhaps 2 years of research.
Ted Hall was questioned by the FBI in March 1951, but not charged for lack of evidence.
A month later KGB agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death.
Amid the anti-Soviet fervor of the time they became the only spies ever executed in peace-time America.
"It was gruesome and certainly brought home the fact that there were flames consuming people, and that we were pretty close to being consumed.
" The inteligence war was lopsided.
the KGB operated in the west but the CIA confronted a closed world.
Trains crossing the Finnish border into Russia was sealed by steel shutters.
The United States faced a long famine of information.
"This lack of understanding of how the Soviet system functioned would dog us in the CIA through out the entire cold war, whether it was the Soviet Union itself or the carbon copies of the Soviet Union in East Germany or in Cuba you name it.
" Most early infiltration operations into the Soviet Union were doomed from the start.
western agents were betrayed by KGB spies like the British inteligence officer Kim Philby.
Philby came to public atention because of his asociation with fellow double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
"Philby on the right holds a press conference to deny charges that he was involved in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.
" - "If there was a third man, weren't you in fact the third man?" - "No, I was not.
" - "You think there was one?" - "No comments.
" - "Mr.
Philby the dissapperance of Burgess and Maclean is almost as much as a mistery today as it was when they went away, about four years ago or more, can you share any light on it at all? - "No, I can't.
" "Philby told us a lot about those misions.
He told us about the numbers of people, he told us about the coordinates, where and how the operations would be carried out, whether they would be parachuted in or send in by sea.
Those areas were of course surrounded by Soviet counterinteligence and they were caught.
The normal routine was that the agents were interrogated.
Some were very hostile and kept silent.
In doing so they signed their own death warrants.
" In 1953 Soviet emigre Mikhail Kudriavtsev parachuted into Russia to spy for the CIA.
"After we were dropped in, we were tied up and taken off to the KGB.
When the investigator from Moscow arrived, and he arrived suspiciously quickly by nightfall, I got the impression that they had been waiting for us.
That somehow the KGB knew we were coming.
" Kudriavtsev saved his life by telling the KGB everything and agreeing to parrot a prepared statement at this heavily State managed press conference.
"This is me Before we spoke at that conference we were given scripts that we had two days to learn by heart.
" Kudriavtsev told the world of his great error in ever thinking ill of the Soviet Union let alone trying to topple it.
"It was hard for me to say those things, very hard, but I had to do it in order to not be taken back to the Lubyanka.
" "You began to believe that this was a service that really had enormous coverage and that everything we did not a sparrow could fall without this enormous KGB finding out about it, because in terms of our own individual experiences we know, or we knew that the operations we were involved in had been betrayed by people like Kim Philby.
" The KGB put vast arrays of captured CIA equipment on show, the west had suffered failure abroad and betrayal at home.
It was back to the drawing board.
The Korean war provided further blows to the CIA's self confidence, highlighting gaps in forecasting and assessment.
"The CIA was wrong about the start of the war, they were wrong about the Chinese involvement and intervention in the war and they were wrong about the capabilities of the North Korean forces.
I think the Korean War, in terms of its intelligence failures left a lot of lessons for the policy community and the intelligence community.
And one of those lessons was that indeed we would have to get better technical intelligence and make more of a commitment to signals intelligence and communications intelligence.
And with this, you get resources put with the National Security Agency, under the Pentagon in order to develop a capability to intercept messages around the world.
And this produced extremely vital information to the intelligence community.
" Berlin was a communications hub where countless Soviet bloc phone and teleprinter lines crisscrossed beneath the city.
To intercept them the Americans and Britishs drove a tunnel deep into the Soviet sector.
The purpose of the Berlin tunnel was to tap the communications lines of the Soviet forces in East Germany, in Poland and their links with Moscow.
In order to provide current intelligence on those forces and also early warning.
The lines from the taps would come down into the tunnel itself and first they would be amplified, because then we had to run the lines up into the area of the warehouse where we had hundreds and hundreds of recorders that operated day and night and recorded every single bit of this stuff.
" From the start, this operation was betrayed to the KGB by a source inside British intelligence George Blake.
"I was secretary at the meeting at which this tunnel was being planned and so I was able to draw a very simple sketch, which showed how the tunnel was going to run and what cables it was intended to attack.
" Blake had served as a British intelligence officer in Seoul.
Captured by the North Koreans, he witnessed the West's bombing of civilians.
"When I saw these enormous American flying fortresses, flying low over what seemed to be defenseless Korean villages, I felt a feeling of shame.
I felt very acutely that I was on the wrong side and that I should do something about it.
" Blake went home to Britain in the first group of POWs released from Korea after the 1953 armistice.
- "How did you find the food out there, Mr.
Blake?" - "Well, the food was adequate but very monotonous.
" - "It was monotonous, was it?" - "Very monotonous.
" - "Anything special? I mean, any odd things they gave you to eat or anything?" - "No, just rice and turnips mainly.
" - "Pretty impressive diet, isn't it?" - "Three times a day.
" Blake slipped back into British intelligence only now he was a KGB spy.
"I was given a Minox camera and I carried that Minox camera with me whenever I went to work, like I carried my wallet with me, and the reason was that I never knew what important documents I might find on my desk, which were worthwhile photographing.
" Blake's warning about the tunnel gave the KGB a problem.
To move against it risked exposing him.
"This was an argument not to take any measures against the tunnel.
Not to send any disinformation down the tunnel, not to show that we knew anything about the tunnel.
This was a very important consideration, because as long as Blake remained inside British intelligence we knew he'd be of great value to us.
So the Berlin tunnel operated courtesy of the KGB and the CIA basked in a signals intelligence bonanza.
"We got military order of battle on Soviet forces in Germany and in Poland.
We got information which came from Moscow, for example on the whole reorganization of the Ministry of Defense But the real, the real kicker in all this was the fact that we got something we never expected to get: We got all kinds of, of personality data, operational data on the operations of the Soviet military counterintelligence.
So that we were, at that point, totally on top, we thought of the counterintelligence picture in in in Berlin.
" But the KGB was just choosing its moment to pull the plug on the tunnel.
"They warned me before hand that it was going to happen, so I was rather on tenterhooks as you can imagine, what the outcome would be.
" Heavy rain one April night in 1956 caused a cable failure, giving the KGB the excuse it needed turning the West's intelligence feat into a Soviet propaganda victory.
"Obviously I mean, there there was a feeling of you know, of of great unhappiness.
On the other hand, you know, you just sort of shrugged your shoulders and said: 'Well, we were lucky it lasted that long'.
" Five years later George Blake was himself betrayed and sentenced to 42 years in prison.
He had given the KGB the names of nearly 400 agents working for the West, supposedly on condition that they wouldn't be harmed.
"During my trial, which was held in camera, so everything could be said there there was no mention at all, it wasn't part of the prosecution's case, that I had been responsible for the death of any number of agents.
" But armed with Blake's names, Moscow simply waited until they had sufficient additional evidence.
"George Blake had that innocent mind in a sense; he's still a very naive man.
He didn't want to know that many people he betrayed were executed and I think we even discussed this subject at one point, and he wouldn't believe it.
He would say: 'Well, I was told that this would not happen.
' It did happen, he was not told.
" As the Cold War intensified, through the 1950s, pressure on the CIA increased.
The West was desperate for detail about the size and strength of Soviet forces, glimpsed, and photographed, at Moscow air shows or May Day parades.
It was the Soviet missile force which worried the CIA most and about which they knew the least.
"There was limited human intelligence about the missile deployments in the Soviet Union.
There were some communications intelligence which would suggest that this facility or this town may be involved in missile activities, because of communications with known missile sites.
But what we were missing was any firm, hard evidence of actual deployment of missiles.
" From 1956, American technical superiority started providing answers.
The CIA's own reconnaissance plane, the U-2, flew high over Russia to photograph Soviet bases but in four years of searching, found no operational intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites.
Then in 1960, the Americans successfully launched a satellite fitted with a camera.
After 17 orbits the film capsule was ejected, caught mid-air and brought back to Earth for analysis.
A subsequent flight confirmed the existence of just one Soviet ICBM launch site.
The rest of the puzzle's pieces were provided by perhaps the greatest spy of the Cold War.
"This is a photograph of Oleg Penkovsky, colonel in the Red Army with all of his medals which he earned during World War II a handsome soldier and a great American patriot.
This photograph was taken in the hotel in London in April 1961, after one of our meetings where Oleg Penkovsky on the left and me on the right enjoying a small glass of wine.
" Penkovsky provided further reassurances about the limitations of Soviet power.
"While they were still a serious threat, no question about it, they were strong militarily, absolutely strong militarily, but they were not as strong as, our estimators had felt and he helped us bring it down to the level where they really were.
They were not 10 feet tall, they were about my size, 6 foot 2.
" Penkovsky revealed the Soviets' lack of atomic warheads and their problems with guidance systems.
He acted out of resentment that his career in military intelligence had stalled, but also out of fear that Khrushchev's adventurism would bring disaster on the world.
Khrushchev told Kennedy: "I want peace, but if you want war, that is your problem.
" But Penkovsky told the CIA that Khrushchev was bluffing, "Kennedy should be firm," he said.
"Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets.
He is not ready for any war".
"If you can get into the mind of the Khrushchevs of the world, then you've got a weapon that no technical amount of information can give you and this is what Penkovsky was able to give us.
" Penkovsky's information was critical to the United States during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
U-2 photographs revealed the presence on Cuba of Soviet missiles for which Penkovsky had already handed over the operating manuals.
With the world closer to nuclear conflict than at any time in the Cold War, intelligence experts were summoned to the White House to brief President Kennedy "The first question the president asked was: 'How long before they can fire those missiles?' And Art Lundahl said: 'Well, Mr.
Graybeal is the missile expert'.
So he turned to me and I stood up behind the president McNamara and Rusk and for the next, er, probably five to 10 minutes, they fired one question after the other.
In answer to the president's question: 'How long can they fire these missiles' I relied primarily on the combination of intelligence sources but mainly Penkovsky's information, which told us how these missiles operated in the field.
" The CIA assessment is said to have bought the President three precious days' breathing space.
Ironically Penkovsky himself was now under KGB surveillance.
The last time Joe Bulik had seen him, was in Paris.
"I never had the feeling that he was in danger otherwise I would have insisted that he stay.
In fact, forced him, if I had to kidnap him! But I never really had the feeling that he was, at that time, our last meeting in Paris I never felt that he was in danger.
" Back in Moscow, Penkovsky sent what seemed like a routine message.
"We'd gotten a signal from Penkovsky that a dead drop was loaded and then we sent Dick Jacobs to service that dead drop.
He was arrested and as soon as that happened, we knew the case was over, it was dead and that Penkovsky was in the hands of the KGB.
Pum!" - "State how you started your criminal activities.
" - "In November 1960 I decided to contact American intelligence.
I prepared a letter explaining my request and asked them to work with me.
" The chief KGB interrogator was Alexander Zagvozdin.
"We questioned him not once, not 10 or 20 times, but perhaps 100 times.
He realized that his actions were punishable by death and he used to ask me: 'Will I be executed?' I never said he wouldn't I never said he wouldn't be executed.
I used to say one thing: 'Only if you confess everything, and repent fully, can you hope for mercy'.
That's probably why Penkovsky's life was not spared he didn't confess everything.
I know for sure that Penkovsky was shot.
I can't tell you anything else.
I know his body was cremated.
I don't know any more, and I'm not interested.
" Not all spies wound up famous.
These are the home movies of Galina and Mikhail Fedorov.
KGB officers who operated under deep cover for 20 years.
They were never caught.
In the event of war, they would be in place to spy behind enemy lines.
The KGB never lacked recruits, some served for money, some for ideology and some for the sheer excitement of living a secret life.
"I love espionage.
Why? Because there is this smell of adventure, the smell of risk, the smell of uncertainty.
Because when you go off to meet an agent, you never know whether you're going to be arrested.
It adds color to life.
" "I need 007 No, Mr.
Bond.
I expect you to die!" "Spy mania in London started about the time I arrived.
In 1961, we used to be asked everywhere, we were very popular.
We would be invited to private parties, and the attitude towards us was good.
But as the Sixties went on, there were those big disasters, with Blake and the other KGB spies.
And you had the Profumo scandal, with the prostitute Christine Keeler.
That shook Britain up a bit After that, when I turned up somewhere, people would ask: 'Are you a spy?' So I'd say: 'Of course I'm a spy!'" Western governments grew weary of the huge KGB presence in their midst.
In 1971 the British expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers identified by a defector.
Technology increasingly assumed the burden of spying.
Satellites could now intercept radio communications and data from test launches of the opposition's missiles.
Film taken in space no longer even had to be returned to Earth.
"The satellite would take the picture of the sky and this image could be beamed back to an analyst at his desk in the United States, who could actually see what was happening in the international arena, without leaving his desk.
" Here lay the greatest intelligence successes of the Cold War: Through photography and electronic eavesdropping, each side received huge flows of information, often too much for the analysts to handle.
Technological spying even played a part in helping the superpowers edge towards peace.
"The technical systems were almost essential to our arms control process.
We learnt just all kinds of things about Russian military systems from the photographs and from the electronic listening.
At one point, when we were negotiating the SALT II arms control treaty, I had to go to the Senate and say: 'If you ratify this treaty this is how closely I can monitor it and check on whether they are complying with the terms of the treaty'".
Despite a fleet of spy ships, listening posts worldwide and Sputniks overhead, Soviet technical intelligence lagged behind the West.
Even so, they claimed to have cracked the ciphers of over 60 countries, obtaining many codes by theft and blackmail.
"Soviet technical intelligence was far inferior to Soviet human intelligence.
The Soviets were extremely good at persuasive tactics, which would ultimately bring many people into their ideological embrace.
" KGB spying methods spread beyond superpower conflict.
Routine surveillance of ordinary citizens by the East German secret police, or Stasi.
The Stasi inhabited a moral world of its own.
Interrogations were routinely filmed and they had cameras everywhere.
"Relations between the various areas of counterintelligence and with the department which handled interrogations were very amicable.
There were all sorts of people there, and it was a friendly atmosphere.
They weren't the kind of devious types who'd use atrocious methods to force confessions out of people.
" "Anything you've done will be treated with discretion.
" "What do you mean? I haven't done anything.
" -"That's not true.
" -"But what have I done?" "I don't know what you want from me.
" "I haven't done a thing.
" "Well, terrible things did happen.
There were many cases of injustice, particularly in the later years which really bothered me.
Reprisals were taken against people solely on the grounds that they had different political opinions or against people who wanted a different, better form of socialism.
" Vera Wollenberger joined the East German peace movement in 1981, encouraged by her husband Knud.
"My personal motivation for opposing state policies was the decision in the early Eighties to station nuclear missiles in the GDR (German Democratic Republic aka East Germany) and to re-introduce military instruction in schools.
" Vera and her family were constantly harassed by the Stasi, who burgled her house and made sure she lost her teaching job.
Her husband stood by her throughout.
In 1988 Vera was arrested on her way to this demonstration.
Her crime: carrying a banner which bore Rosa Luxemburg's words: 'Freedom is how free your opponent is'.
She was interrogated and imprisoned.
In 1991, after the collapse of the GDR, Vera got access to her Stasi file in which she learned that the main informer against her, had been her own husband.
"I can't really say how I felt.
It was such an extreme situation, rather as if one had died for a moment, and then returned to life.
The surprising thing was the reports were written as if about a stranger, not about a wife.
To him I was an enemy of the state and he had done everything to fight me: the enemy.
" Some "enemies of the state" received more drastic treatment.
In 1978 Bulgarian intelligence asked the KGB to help them kill the emigre writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov.
Markov was murdered at a London bus stop by a stranger who "accidentally" prodded him with the tip of an umbrella.
"The Bulgarians were given a choice of weapons and finally they picked up this umbrella as a cover, to shoot the man with a poisoned pellet.
It was not supposed to be uncovered because the pellet would dissolve in his body within 24 hours if I recall correctly.
I did not conceive, I did not plan, I was not involved in any execution, but I was aware And I always say that knowledge does not imply a misdeed, does it? Do you suppose I would go over to the United States or U.
K.
and announce publicly? I would hang myself.
" The temptation was always there for the spymasters to earn favor from the leadership whether by covert action, or just slanting a routine report.
"When we drew up reports of course we dramatized those bits which pointed out the threat to the Soviet Union.
By emphasizing the right things, I'd ensure that my report would go straight to the top, to the Politburo.
if the report was dull and boring, it would just get filed away.
This was the problem with all suppliers of information: We'd tailor it to get a high rating from Moscow.
" But did it matter if spies skewed their reports? How much did political leaders heed their intelligence services? "I would argue that we probably exaggerate the significance of intelligence.
Once policy makers decide on a course, I don't think correct intelligence or incorrect intelligence is going to bring any great changes in that course.
" 1988, Kim Philby is buried with full honors in a Moscow cemetery.
He first betrayed Britain half a century before, passing a wealth of secrets to the KGB.
And yet converts were never wholly trusted.
To the end the KGB opened his mail and bugged his phone.
It seemed as if the age of the spy was over.
In fact throughout the Eighties, the CIA had been carefully establishing agents within Soviet intelligence and defense circles.
Precious sources like avionics expert, Adolf Tolkachev, seen here on his way to a meeting in Moscow with his CIA contact.
The KGB suddenly started to arrest the CIA's most important Soviet spies.
"In 1985, we began to lose cases, by which I mean Soviet officials working for us and some of them disappeared.
This led us to believe that something was wrong.
It did not lead us to believe, aha! there must be a mole.
" Then the West lost Gen.
Dmitri Polyakov, of Soviet military intelligence.
Polyakov had retired after 18 years of spying, when the KGB pounced.
He had been recruited while at the United Nations in New York.
Polyakov returned to Europe in 1962 on the Queen Elizabeth.
His picture was taken by the ship's photographer at the captain's dinner.
Seated just a few tables away, the FBI man who recruited him: John Mabey.
"He said: 'I'm dissatisfied with the way things are in the Soviet Union, the government does not look out for the people, they're headed on a course of war with the United States and, they can't possibly win it and the only people that are going to suffer out of this are the Russian people.
We'd met on the Queen Elizabeth every day that it was at sea, sometimes twice a day, we reviewed literally thousands of pictures of Soviets who had been in the United States or stationed around the world and he identified a number of them by picture and by name.
" "Polyakov was our crown jewel.
He worked for us for so many years, and he achieved such a rank that, rather than us looking at an organization through the eyes of one of our sources, looking at that organization from the bottom up, with Polyakov eventually we were able to look at that organization, the GRU, his organization, from the top down, as well as look at the KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Communist Party apparatus.
" In 1991, Sandy Grimes joined the team investigating the CIA's agent losses.
In charge, Jeanne Vertefeuille now suspicious there was a KGB mole in their ranks.
Trying to pin down a counterintelligence case when you're looking for a mole is always a very difficult and long-term job.
When we compiled a list of how many people could have done it we came up with 198 people.
" The mole hunt took three years homing in on CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames.
The FBI filmed him secretly in Bogota in 1993.
"I was walking up and down, wondering what had happened to my KGB contact who had been there an hour earlier.
I was reasonably alert, but I didn't see the surveillance.
And I suppose it was frustrating for the FBI because they were scared to death of me seeing the surveillance so they had to stay way back.
As a result, they never saw me doing anything They had no evidence of any operational activity on my part.
" The FBI staked out Ames' house and tapped his phones.
The breakthrough had come from CIA analysis of his bank statements.
"We had just received records from one of the banks Rick had and Dan is reading these things off and I'm entering them in the in the computer and, my God, it was unbelievable.
On 17 May, Rick would had reported having had a lunch with his Soviet contact Chuvakhin 18 May there's a deposit into his checking account for $9,000.
On the 21st February 1994, Ames was arrested for spying along with his wife, Rosario, after years of high living.
"Shock, depression, instant recognition, you know.
You know, one's life flashes before one.
A sense of things coming to an end But no sense of relief, it's much more painful than that.
" In April 1985 Aldrich Ames had walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and started selling secrets to the KGB.
They paid him a total of $2.
7 million.
"Well, the reasons that I that I did what I did in April of 1985, were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly as simple as that.
" "I attributed it heavily to Rosario She was the one who was interested in spending money and who liked to live high on the hog and I think he wanted to sort of to buy her love and the way to buy her love was to get her expensive things.
" Ames had no illusions about the real price of his treachery.
"I knew quite well, when I gave the names of of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law and then prosecution, and capital punishment certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers.
Obviously these these folks I knew would have to answer for what they'd done.
And certainly I I felt that I inured myself to against you know a reaction to that.
" Dmitri Polyakov was one of the 25 agents betrayed by Ames.
Ten were executed and one committed suicide.
One alone was smuggled to safety by the British Secret Service.
"I was seized by the KGB in May 1985.
I was put under house arrest, but I managed to escape in July alive, well and safe.
I was lucky The others were shot in the dungeons of some KGB prison after long months of continuous threats and interrogations.
They lost everything: family, children, work, and then their lives.
They spent a year, two years, or in the case of Gen.
Polyakov, nearly three years, expecting to die at any minute.
" Polyakov was tried in secret, critical of the Soviet leadership to the end.
He had given the West precious information on Soviet missiles, nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare.
Yet so many spies paid with their freedom, or their lives in destructive cycles of tit for tat.
"The men like Polyakov gave up names, they gave up secrets.
I did the same thing for reasons that I considered sufficient to myself.
I gave up the names of some of the same people who had earlier given up others.
It's a nasty kind of circle with terrible human costs.
" Aldrich Ames is serving a life sentence with no remission.
Dmitri Polyakov was sentenced to death.
He was executed in 1988 with a bullet in the back of the head then buried in an unmarked grave.
For half a century, the spies had peered intently at each other through a fog of ignorance and deceit.
They produced ever more realistic appraisals of their opponents' strengths.
But very few were able to answer the toughest question: Does our enemy intend to fight us? Despite the CIA and KGB's vast resources the answer lay hidden not in a satellite photo, or an agent report but in the minds of their opponents.
--- Captioned by Luis Luque Santoro --- --- Any comments, corrections or sugestions
The soldiers may have been on alert but for us and the others who went out in the cold it was actual war.
" --- Captioned by Luis Luque Santoro --- --- CNN's Cold War Series --- Episode 21 Spies 1944 - 1994 Dawn on the 16th of July 1945.
Allied scientists of Los Alamos leave for the New Mexico desert to watch the test of the first atomic bomb.
They had been working for years under a blanket of total secrecy Ted Hall at 19 was the youngest scientist on the project.
"I was there or at least I was there in a truck or a lorry some distance away or what it was considered to be a safe distance away.
I can't remember if there was any signal circulated that the test was about to be made but anyway the damn thing went off and it was a rather awesome sight.
" For Ted Hall the cold war had begun the year before.
"I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as nazi Germany developed.
There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do the right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly.
" Others thought the same way.
The KGB had several sources inside Los Alamos, unknown to one another.
The scientist Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, both passed on details on how to detonate nuclear weapons by implossion.
A principle so new to Soviet science that there was no equivalent word in russian.
In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb, triggered by implossion, it copied key elements of the American bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
The atom spies had saved the Soviet Union perhaps 2 years of research.
Ted Hall was questioned by the FBI in March 1951, but not charged for lack of evidence.
A month later KGB agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death.
Amid the anti-Soviet fervor of the time they became the only spies ever executed in peace-time America.
"It was gruesome and certainly brought home the fact that there were flames consuming people, and that we were pretty close to being consumed.
" The inteligence war was lopsided.
the KGB operated in the west but the CIA confronted a closed world.
Trains crossing the Finnish border into Russia was sealed by steel shutters.
The United States faced a long famine of information.
"This lack of understanding of how the Soviet system functioned would dog us in the CIA through out the entire cold war, whether it was the Soviet Union itself or the carbon copies of the Soviet Union in East Germany or in Cuba you name it.
" Most early infiltration operations into the Soviet Union were doomed from the start.
western agents were betrayed by KGB spies like the British inteligence officer Kim Philby.
Philby came to public atention because of his asociation with fellow double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
"Philby on the right holds a press conference to deny charges that he was involved in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.
" - "If there was a third man, weren't you in fact the third man?" - "No, I was not.
" - "You think there was one?" - "No comments.
" - "Mr.
Philby the dissapperance of Burgess and Maclean is almost as much as a mistery today as it was when they went away, about four years ago or more, can you share any light on it at all? - "No, I can't.
" "Philby told us a lot about those misions.
He told us about the numbers of people, he told us about the coordinates, where and how the operations would be carried out, whether they would be parachuted in or send in by sea.
Those areas were of course surrounded by Soviet counterinteligence and they were caught.
The normal routine was that the agents were interrogated.
Some were very hostile and kept silent.
In doing so they signed their own death warrants.
" In 1953 Soviet emigre Mikhail Kudriavtsev parachuted into Russia to spy for the CIA.
"After we were dropped in, we were tied up and taken off to the KGB.
When the investigator from Moscow arrived, and he arrived suspiciously quickly by nightfall, I got the impression that they had been waiting for us.
That somehow the KGB knew we were coming.
" Kudriavtsev saved his life by telling the KGB everything and agreeing to parrot a prepared statement at this heavily State managed press conference.
"This is me Before we spoke at that conference we were given scripts that we had two days to learn by heart.
" Kudriavtsev told the world of his great error in ever thinking ill of the Soviet Union let alone trying to topple it.
"It was hard for me to say those things, very hard, but I had to do it in order to not be taken back to the Lubyanka.
" "You began to believe that this was a service that really had enormous coverage and that everything we did not a sparrow could fall without this enormous KGB finding out about it, because in terms of our own individual experiences we know, or we knew that the operations we were involved in had been betrayed by people like Kim Philby.
" The KGB put vast arrays of captured CIA equipment on show, the west had suffered failure abroad and betrayal at home.
It was back to the drawing board.
The Korean war provided further blows to the CIA's self confidence, highlighting gaps in forecasting and assessment.
"The CIA was wrong about the start of the war, they were wrong about the Chinese involvement and intervention in the war and they were wrong about the capabilities of the North Korean forces.
I think the Korean War, in terms of its intelligence failures left a lot of lessons for the policy community and the intelligence community.
And one of those lessons was that indeed we would have to get better technical intelligence and make more of a commitment to signals intelligence and communications intelligence.
And with this, you get resources put with the National Security Agency, under the Pentagon in order to develop a capability to intercept messages around the world.
And this produced extremely vital information to the intelligence community.
" Berlin was a communications hub where countless Soviet bloc phone and teleprinter lines crisscrossed beneath the city.
To intercept them the Americans and Britishs drove a tunnel deep into the Soviet sector.
The purpose of the Berlin tunnel was to tap the communications lines of the Soviet forces in East Germany, in Poland and their links with Moscow.
In order to provide current intelligence on those forces and also early warning.
The lines from the taps would come down into the tunnel itself and first they would be amplified, because then we had to run the lines up into the area of the warehouse where we had hundreds and hundreds of recorders that operated day and night and recorded every single bit of this stuff.
" From the start, this operation was betrayed to the KGB by a source inside British intelligence George Blake.
"I was secretary at the meeting at which this tunnel was being planned and so I was able to draw a very simple sketch, which showed how the tunnel was going to run and what cables it was intended to attack.
" Blake had served as a British intelligence officer in Seoul.
Captured by the North Koreans, he witnessed the West's bombing of civilians.
"When I saw these enormous American flying fortresses, flying low over what seemed to be defenseless Korean villages, I felt a feeling of shame.
I felt very acutely that I was on the wrong side and that I should do something about it.
" Blake went home to Britain in the first group of POWs released from Korea after the 1953 armistice.
- "How did you find the food out there, Mr.
Blake?" - "Well, the food was adequate but very monotonous.
" - "It was monotonous, was it?" - "Very monotonous.
" - "Anything special? I mean, any odd things they gave you to eat or anything?" - "No, just rice and turnips mainly.
" - "Pretty impressive diet, isn't it?" - "Three times a day.
" Blake slipped back into British intelligence only now he was a KGB spy.
"I was given a Minox camera and I carried that Minox camera with me whenever I went to work, like I carried my wallet with me, and the reason was that I never knew what important documents I might find on my desk, which were worthwhile photographing.
" Blake's warning about the tunnel gave the KGB a problem.
To move against it risked exposing him.
"This was an argument not to take any measures against the tunnel.
Not to send any disinformation down the tunnel, not to show that we knew anything about the tunnel.
This was a very important consideration, because as long as Blake remained inside British intelligence we knew he'd be of great value to us.
So the Berlin tunnel operated courtesy of the KGB and the CIA basked in a signals intelligence bonanza.
"We got military order of battle on Soviet forces in Germany and in Poland.
We got information which came from Moscow, for example on the whole reorganization of the Ministry of Defense But the real, the real kicker in all this was the fact that we got something we never expected to get: We got all kinds of, of personality data, operational data on the operations of the Soviet military counterintelligence.
So that we were, at that point, totally on top, we thought of the counterintelligence picture in in in Berlin.
" But the KGB was just choosing its moment to pull the plug on the tunnel.
"They warned me before hand that it was going to happen, so I was rather on tenterhooks as you can imagine, what the outcome would be.
" Heavy rain one April night in 1956 caused a cable failure, giving the KGB the excuse it needed turning the West's intelligence feat into a Soviet propaganda victory.
"Obviously I mean, there there was a feeling of you know, of of great unhappiness.
On the other hand, you know, you just sort of shrugged your shoulders and said: 'Well, we were lucky it lasted that long'.
" Five years later George Blake was himself betrayed and sentenced to 42 years in prison.
He had given the KGB the names of nearly 400 agents working for the West, supposedly on condition that they wouldn't be harmed.
"During my trial, which was held in camera, so everything could be said there there was no mention at all, it wasn't part of the prosecution's case, that I had been responsible for the death of any number of agents.
" But armed with Blake's names, Moscow simply waited until they had sufficient additional evidence.
"George Blake had that innocent mind in a sense; he's still a very naive man.
He didn't want to know that many people he betrayed were executed and I think we even discussed this subject at one point, and he wouldn't believe it.
He would say: 'Well, I was told that this would not happen.
' It did happen, he was not told.
" As the Cold War intensified, through the 1950s, pressure on the CIA increased.
The West was desperate for detail about the size and strength of Soviet forces, glimpsed, and photographed, at Moscow air shows or May Day parades.
It was the Soviet missile force which worried the CIA most and about which they knew the least.
"There was limited human intelligence about the missile deployments in the Soviet Union.
There were some communications intelligence which would suggest that this facility or this town may be involved in missile activities, because of communications with known missile sites.
But what we were missing was any firm, hard evidence of actual deployment of missiles.
" From 1956, American technical superiority started providing answers.
The CIA's own reconnaissance plane, the U-2, flew high over Russia to photograph Soviet bases but in four years of searching, found no operational intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites.
Then in 1960, the Americans successfully launched a satellite fitted with a camera.
After 17 orbits the film capsule was ejected, caught mid-air and brought back to Earth for analysis.
A subsequent flight confirmed the existence of just one Soviet ICBM launch site.
The rest of the puzzle's pieces were provided by perhaps the greatest spy of the Cold War.
"This is a photograph of Oleg Penkovsky, colonel in the Red Army with all of his medals which he earned during World War II a handsome soldier and a great American patriot.
This photograph was taken in the hotel in London in April 1961, after one of our meetings where Oleg Penkovsky on the left and me on the right enjoying a small glass of wine.
" Penkovsky provided further reassurances about the limitations of Soviet power.
"While they were still a serious threat, no question about it, they were strong militarily, absolutely strong militarily, but they were not as strong as, our estimators had felt and he helped us bring it down to the level where they really were.
They were not 10 feet tall, they were about my size, 6 foot 2.
" Penkovsky revealed the Soviets' lack of atomic warheads and their problems with guidance systems.
He acted out of resentment that his career in military intelligence had stalled, but also out of fear that Khrushchev's adventurism would bring disaster on the world.
Khrushchev told Kennedy: "I want peace, but if you want war, that is your problem.
" But Penkovsky told the CIA that Khrushchev was bluffing, "Kennedy should be firm," he said.
"Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets.
He is not ready for any war".
"If you can get into the mind of the Khrushchevs of the world, then you've got a weapon that no technical amount of information can give you and this is what Penkovsky was able to give us.
" Penkovsky's information was critical to the United States during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
U-2 photographs revealed the presence on Cuba of Soviet missiles for which Penkovsky had already handed over the operating manuals.
With the world closer to nuclear conflict than at any time in the Cold War, intelligence experts were summoned to the White House to brief President Kennedy "The first question the president asked was: 'How long before they can fire those missiles?' And Art Lundahl said: 'Well, Mr.
Graybeal is the missile expert'.
So he turned to me and I stood up behind the president McNamara and Rusk and for the next, er, probably five to 10 minutes, they fired one question after the other.
In answer to the president's question: 'How long can they fire these missiles' I relied primarily on the combination of intelligence sources but mainly Penkovsky's information, which told us how these missiles operated in the field.
" The CIA assessment is said to have bought the President three precious days' breathing space.
Ironically Penkovsky himself was now under KGB surveillance.
The last time Joe Bulik had seen him, was in Paris.
"I never had the feeling that he was in danger otherwise I would have insisted that he stay.
In fact, forced him, if I had to kidnap him! But I never really had the feeling that he was, at that time, our last meeting in Paris I never felt that he was in danger.
" Back in Moscow, Penkovsky sent what seemed like a routine message.
"We'd gotten a signal from Penkovsky that a dead drop was loaded and then we sent Dick Jacobs to service that dead drop.
He was arrested and as soon as that happened, we knew the case was over, it was dead and that Penkovsky was in the hands of the KGB.
Pum!" - "State how you started your criminal activities.
" - "In November 1960 I decided to contact American intelligence.
I prepared a letter explaining my request and asked them to work with me.
" The chief KGB interrogator was Alexander Zagvozdin.
"We questioned him not once, not 10 or 20 times, but perhaps 100 times.
He realized that his actions were punishable by death and he used to ask me: 'Will I be executed?' I never said he wouldn't I never said he wouldn't be executed.
I used to say one thing: 'Only if you confess everything, and repent fully, can you hope for mercy'.
That's probably why Penkovsky's life was not spared he didn't confess everything.
I know for sure that Penkovsky was shot.
I can't tell you anything else.
I know his body was cremated.
I don't know any more, and I'm not interested.
" Not all spies wound up famous.
These are the home movies of Galina and Mikhail Fedorov.
KGB officers who operated under deep cover for 20 years.
They were never caught.
In the event of war, they would be in place to spy behind enemy lines.
The KGB never lacked recruits, some served for money, some for ideology and some for the sheer excitement of living a secret life.
"I love espionage.
Why? Because there is this smell of adventure, the smell of risk, the smell of uncertainty.
Because when you go off to meet an agent, you never know whether you're going to be arrested.
It adds color to life.
" "I need 007 No, Mr.
Bond.
I expect you to die!" "Spy mania in London started about the time I arrived.
In 1961, we used to be asked everywhere, we were very popular.
We would be invited to private parties, and the attitude towards us was good.
But as the Sixties went on, there were those big disasters, with Blake and the other KGB spies.
And you had the Profumo scandal, with the prostitute Christine Keeler.
That shook Britain up a bit After that, when I turned up somewhere, people would ask: 'Are you a spy?' So I'd say: 'Of course I'm a spy!'" Western governments grew weary of the huge KGB presence in their midst.
In 1971 the British expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers identified by a defector.
Technology increasingly assumed the burden of spying.
Satellites could now intercept radio communications and data from test launches of the opposition's missiles.
Film taken in space no longer even had to be returned to Earth.
"The satellite would take the picture of the sky and this image could be beamed back to an analyst at his desk in the United States, who could actually see what was happening in the international arena, without leaving his desk.
" Here lay the greatest intelligence successes of the Cold War: Through photography and electronic eavesdropping, each side received huge flows of information, often too much for the analysts to handle.
Technological spying even played a part in helping the superpowers edge towards peace.
"The technical systems were almost essential to our arms control process.
We learnt just all kinds of things about Russian military systems from the photographs and from the electronic listening.
At one point, when we were negotiating the SALT II arms control treaty, I had to go to the Senate and say: 'If you ratify this treaty this is how closely I can monitor it and check on whether they are complying with the terms of the treaty'".
Despite a fleet of spy ships, listening posts worldwide and Sputniks overhead, Soviet technical intelligence lagged behind the West.
Even so, they claimed to have cracked the ciphers of over 60 countries, obtaining many codes by theft and blackmail.
"Soviet technical intelligence was far inferior to Soviet human intelligence.
The Soviets were extremely good at persuasive tactics, which would ultimately bring many people into their ideological embrace.
" KGB spying methods spread beyond superpower conflict.
Routine surveillance of ordinary citizens by the East German secret police, or Stasi.
The Stasi inhabited a moral world of its own.
Interrogations were routinely filmed and they had cameras everywhere.
"Relations between the various areas of counterintelligence and with the department which handled interrogations were very amicable.
There were all sorts of people there, and it was a friendly atmosphere.
They weren't the kind of devious types who'd use atrocious methods to force confessions out of people.
" "Anything you've done will be treated with discretion.
" "What do you mean? I haven't done anything.
" -"That's not true.
" -"But what have I done?" "I don't know what you want from me.
" "I haven't done a thing.
" "Well, terrible things did happen.
There were many cases of injustice, particularly in the later years which really bothered me.
Reprisals were taken against people solely on the grounds that they had different political opinions or against people who wanted a different, better form of socialism.
" Vera Wollenberger joined the East German peace movement in 1981, encouraged by her husband Knud.
"My personal motivation for opposing state policies was the decision in the early Eighties to station nuclear missiles in the GDR (German Democratic Republic aka East Germany) and to re-introduce military instruction in schools.
" Vera and her family were constantly harassed by the Stasi, who burgled her house and made sure she lost her teaching job.
Her husband stood by her throughout.
In 1988 Vera was arrested on her way to this demonstration.
Her crime: carrying a banner which bore Rosa Luxemburg's words: 'Freedom is how free your opponent is'.
She was interrogated and imprisoned.
In 1991, after the collapse of the GDR, Vera got access to her Stasi file in which she learned that the main informer against her, had been her own husband.
"I can't really say how I felt.
It was such an extreme situation, rather as if one had died for a moment, and then returned to life.
The surprising thing was the reports were written as if about a stranger, not about a wife.
To him I was an enemy of the state and he had done everything to fight me: the enemy.
" Some "enemies of the state" received more drastic treatment.
In 1978 Bulgarian intelligence asked the KGB to help them kill the emigre writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov.
Markov was murdered at a London bus stop by a stranger who "accidentally" prodded him with the tip of an umbrella.
"The Bulgarians were given a choice of weapons and finally they picked up this umbrella as a cover, to shoot the man with a poisoned pellet.
It was not supposed to be uncovered because the pellet would dissolve in his body within 24 hours if I recall correctly.
I did not conceive, I did not plan, I was not involved in any execution, but I was aware And I always say that knowledge does not imply a misdeed, does it? Do you suppose I would go over to the United States or U.
K.
and announce publicly? I would hang myself.
" The temptation was always there for the spymasters to earn favor from the leadership whether by covert action, or just slanting a routine report.
"When we drew up reports of course we dramatized those bits which pointed out the threat to the Soviet Union.
By emphasizing the right things, I'd ensure that my report would go straight to the top, to the Politburo.
if the report was dull and boring, it would just get filed away.
This was the problem with all suppliers of information: We'd tailor it to get a high rating from Moscow.
" But did it matter if spies skewed their reports? How much did political leaders heed their intelligence services? "I would argue that we probably exaggerate the significance of intelligence.
Once policy makers decide on a course, I don't think correct intelligence or incorrect intelligence is going to bring any great changes in that course.
" 1988, Kim Philby is buried with full honors in a Moscow cemetery.
He first betrayed Britain half a century before, passing a wealth of secrets to the KGB.
And yet converts were never wholly trusted.
To the end the KGB opened his mail and bugged his phone.
It seemed as if the age of the spy was over.
In fact throughout the Eighties, the CIA had been carefully establishing agents within Soviet intelligence and defense circles.
Precious sources like avionics expert, Adolf Tolkachev, seen here on his way to a meeting in Moscow with his CIA contact.
The KGB suddenly started to arrest the CIA's most important Soviet spies.
"In 1985, we began to lose cases, by which I mean Soviet officials working for us and some of them disappeared.
This led us to believe that something was wrong.
It did not lead us to believe, aha! there must be a mole.
" Then the West lost Gen.
Dmitri Polyakov, of Soviet military intelligence.
Polyakov had retired after 18 years of spying, when the KGB pounced.
He had been recruited while at the United Nations in New York.
Polyakov returned to Europe in 1962 on the Queen Elizabeth.
His picture was taken by the ship's photographer at the captain's dinner.
Seated just a few tables away, the FBI man who recruited him: John Mabey.
"He said: 'I'm dissatisfied with the way things are in the Soviet Union, the government does not look out for the people, they're headed on a course of war with the United States and, they can't possibly win it and the only people that are going to suffer out of this are the Russian people.
We'd met on the Queen Elizabeth every day that it was at sea, sometimes twice a day, we reviewed literally thousands of pictures of Soviets who had been in the United States or stationed around the world and he identified a number of them by picture and by name.
" "Polyakov was our crown jewel.
He worked for us for so many years, and he achieved such a rank that, rather than us looking at an organization through the eyes of one of our sources, looking at that organization from the bottom up, with Polyakov eventually we were able to look at that organization, the GRU, his organization, from the top down, as well as look at the KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Communist Party apparatus.
" In 1991, Sandy Grimes joined the team investigating the CIA's agent losses.
In charge, Jeanne Vertefeuille now suspicious there was a KGB mole in their ranks.
Trying to pin down a counterintelligence case when you're looking for a mole is always a very difficult and long-term job.
When we compiled a list of how many people could have done it we came up with 198 people.
" The mole hunt took three years homing in on CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames.
The FBI filmed him secretly in Bogota in 1993.
"I was walking up and down, wondering what had happened to my KGB contact who had been there an hour earlier.
I was reasonably alert, but I didn't see the surveillance.
And I suppose it was frustrating for the FBI because they were scared to death of me seeing the surveillance so they had to stay way back.
As a result, they never saw me doing anything They had no evidence of any operational activity on my part.
" The FBI staked out Ames' house and tapped his phones.
The breakthrough had come from CIA analysis of his bank statements.
"We had just received records from one of the banks Rick had and Dan is reading these things off and I'm entering them in the in the computer and, my God, it was unbelievable.
On 17 May, Rick would had reported having had a lunch with his Soviet contact Chuvakhin 18 May there's a deposit into his checking account for $9,000.
On the 21st February 1994, Ames was arrested for spying along with his wife, Rosario, after years of high living.
"Shock, depression, instant recognition, you know.
You know, one's life flashes before one.
A sense of things coming to an end But no sense of relief, it's much more painful than that.
" In April 1985 Aldrich Ames had walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and started selling secrets to the KGB.
They paid him a total of $2.
7 million.
"Well, the reasons that I that I did what I did in April of 1985, were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly as simple as that.
" "I attributed it heavily to Rosario She was the one who was interested in spending money and who liked to live high on the hog and I think he wanted to sort of to buy her love and the way to buy her love was to get her expensive things.
" Ames had no illusions about the real price of his treachery.
"I knew quite well, when I gave the names of of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law and then prosecution, and capital punishment certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers.
Obviously these these folks I knew would have to answer for what they'd done.
And certainly I I felt that I inured myself to against you know a reaction to that.
" Dmitri Polyakov was one of the 25 agents betrayed by Ames.
Ten were executed and one committed suicide.
One alone was smuggled to safety by the British Secret Service.
"I was seized by the KGB in May 1985.
I was put under house arrest, but I managed to escape in July alive, well and safe.
I was lucky The others were shot in the dungeons of some KGB prison after long months of continuous threats and interrogations.
They lost everything: family, children, work, and then their lives.
They spent a year, two years, or in the case of Gen.
Polyakov, nearly three years, expecting to die at any minute.
" Polyakov was tried in secret, critical of the Soviet leadership to the end.
He had given the West precious information on Soviet missiles, nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare.
Yet so many spies paid with their freedom, or their lives in destructive cycles of tit for tat.
"The men like Polyakov gave up names, they gave up secrets.
I did the same thing for reasons that I considered sufficient to myself.
I gave up the names of some of the same people who had earlier given up others.
It's a nasty kind of circle with terrible human costs.
" Aldrich Ames is serving a life sentence with no remission.
Dmitri Polyakov was sentenced to death.
He was executed in 1988 with a bullet in the back of the head then buried in an unmarked grave.
For half a century, the spies had peered intently at each other through a fog of ignorance and deceit.
They produced ever more realistic appraisals of their opponents' strengths.
But very few were able to answer the toughest question: Does our enemy intend to fight us? Despite the CIA and KGB's vast resources the answer lay hidden not in a satellite photo, or an agent report but in the minds of their opponents.
--- Captioned by Luis Luque Santoro --- --- Any comments, corrections or sugestions