In West Germany, Soviet agent Heinz Felfe became head of the Soviet counter-intelligence section of the BND — a similar role to that held by Kim Philby in the UK a decade earlier. Enquiries from the CIA and other agencies for information held by the BND gave Felfe, and thus Moscow, an insight into their operations. The damage that he achieved was considerable (although perhaps not as great as he claimed in his self-serving autobiography, released in the mid-eighties): ‘Ten years of secret agent reports had to be re-evaluated: those fabricated by the other side, those subtly slanted, those from purely mythical sources,’ pointed out one CIA officer.
British naval clerk John Vassall penetrated the British Admiralty, and was blackmailed into working for the KGB after attending a homosexual party set up by Moscow Centre. On his return to the UK, he was able to provide his handler with thousands of highly classified documents covering naval policy and weapons development. He continued working for the Soviets for five years until his lifestyle attracted suspicion, and he was arrested for espionage.
Not everything went according to plan for the KGB. After the fiasco caused by Nikolai Kholkov’s failure to kill Okolovich and the assassin’s subsequent defection in 1954, an attempt on the Ukrainian Vladimir Poremsky failed the following year when his prospective killer told the West German police of his mission. The KGB couldn’t even kill Kholkov; an attempt on his life using radioactive thallium failed.
One assassin working for the KGB’s ‘wetworks’ section, Department 13, did chalk up some successes. Bogdan Stashinsky used a cyanide gas-spraying gun to assassinate two Ukrainian emigrés, Lev Rebet in October 1957 and Stepan Bandera, two years later. However, Stashinsky’s German-born wife persuaded him into a change of heart and they defected to the West in Berlin, a day before the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. He stood trial for the murders, but, as BND chief Reinhard Gehlen explained in his autobiography: ‘The court identified Stashinsky’s unscrupulous employer [KGB Chairman Alexasandr] Shelyepin as the person primarily responsible for the hideous murders, and the defendant — who had given a highly credible account of the extreme pressure applied to him by the KGB to act as he did — received a comparatively mild sentence.’ As a result of Stashinsky’s defection and the very public trial, the Kremlin reconsidered the use of assassination as a weapon. Contrary to the belief of spy thriller writers, ‘wet affairs’ became a last resort for the Kremlin in the early sixties, rather than standard operating procedure.
While agents in place continued to make a valuable contribution to the espionage activities of the American intelligence community during the late fifties, their work was supplemented by two other sources — the advent of the spy-plane program, and the increased use of cryptographics, courtesy of the newly established National Security Agency.
The early fifties saw the ‘Reds under the Bed’ scares, fomented by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and despite his downfall, there were many who believed that the Soviet Union was considerably stronger than it actually was. All the various agencies had to make estimates, and inevitably used worse case scenarios as the basis for these. The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 did nothing to quell those fears — not only could the Russians launch missiles at the US from their various territories around the world, but they could now do so from space as well.
The CIA’s Project Aquatone went a long way to dealing with the queries raised by the various other agencies. As a CIA report written a few days after the initial operation pointed out, ‘Five operational missions have already proven that many of our guesses on important subjects can be seriously wrong, that the estimates which form the basis for national policy can be projections from wrong guesses, and that, as a consequence, our policy can indeed be bankrupt.’
Project Aquatone involved a pilot flying at 70,000 feet above the Soviet Union, photographing everything that he could see. After President Eishenhower gave the go-ahead in November 1954, a special plane, the U-2, was devised by Lockheed engineer Clarence Kelly Johnson, and in July 1955 became the first to be tested at the Groom Lake facility in Nevada — now better known as the conspiracy-inspiring Area 51. A new camera was developed by James Baker and Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, with the resolution necessary to gain detailed information from the air.
The first flight took off from Wiesbaden in West Germany on 4 July 1956, and despite Khruschev ordering it to be shot down, it carried out five of its seven allotted missions, providing information on the Soviet Navy’s Leningrad shipyards as well as causing a drastic revision of the armed forces’ estimates of Soviet bomber strength and the military’s state of readiness. For the rest of the decade, the CIA would maintain the cover story that the missions were purely of a scientific nature, all the while improving the U-2’s capabilities, and working on a new plane, Project Oxcart, which could supersede it.
Although the U-2 would continue in active operational service for a further fifty years — and is still in use today by the US armed services — the program of overflights across the Soviet Union came to a sudden halt on 1 May 1960, when the twenty-fourth mission, flown by Captain Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. The wreckage of the plane was put on display by the Russians, and Powers was the subject of a show trial. He would only serve two years of his sentence, before being swapped for KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel.
As far as CIA DCI Allen Dulles was concerned, the U-2 project ‘was one of the most valuable intelligence-collection operations that any country has ever mounted at any time, and… it was vital to our national security’. It also had the added benefit that ‘It has made the Soviets less cocky about their ability to deal with what we might bring against them.’
The U-2 program may have become public as a result of Powers’ crash, but another aspect of the intelligence community that was becoming increasingly valuable would remain secret for considerably longer — the National Security Agency (NSA), based from 1956 onwards out of Fort Meade, near Washington DC. Whereas now the NSA’s address and phone number come up in a Google search, in the fifties this well-funded signal intelligence service was so secret that those insiders aware of it would joke that its acronym stood for ‘No Such Agency’.
Although the combined British and American SIGINT (signal intelligence) codebreakers had achieved some success in the years immediately after the Second World War in reading then-current Soviet codes, the Kremlin’s decision on Friday 20 October 1948 to change all of their codes and cypher machines created what has been described as ‘perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history’. Black Friday, as it quickly came to be known, marked the start of an eight-year period when there was little knowledge about what was going on inside the Soviet Union, only alleviated by the U-2 missions. The codebreakers had been able to decipher the North Korean signals during the war there, providing invaluable information that saved many lives during the early part of that conflict, but it became clear that there were too many different agencies all carrying out their own code-breaking activities. President Truman created the NSA in 1952 to coordinate the collection and processing of communications intelligence, with the secretary of defence as the government’s executive agent for all SIGINT activities, taking the new agency outside the jurisdiction of the CIA.