When the KGB began reactivating their agents, they discovered that one of their most important assets over the years was no longer in a position to help them, since she had retired! Melita Norwood’s long service to Communism passing over atomic secrets had been recognized with the Order of the Red Banner in 1958; she eventually collected it in Moscow in 1979. She had evaded detection by the Security Service in the UK over the years (‘a harmless and somewhat uninteresting character’ was the assessment in April 1966) and had been instrumental in recruiting other agents including a civil servant, code-named Hunt. He was reactivated in 1975 via a French agent, but according to KGB papers supplied by Vitali Mitrokhin when he defected in 1992, Hunt’s usefulness was pretty minimal, and an MI5 investigation concluded that it was unlikely that his activities caused any significant damage. That assessment was also applied to three other agents — a chemical engineer, a lab assistant, and an aeronautics and computer engineer — who were brought back into the KGB fold in the mid-seventies.
The Soviets were able to get useful information from some agents during the decade. Code name Ace, aircraft engineer Ivor Gregory, was recruited for cash by the London residency in 1967, and was able to pass technical details on numerous planes, including Concorde, aero-engines and flight simulators, which enabled the Soviets to create their own versions. He died in 1982, although his treachery wasn’t discovered until a decade later.
Michael John Smith, code-named Borg, was an electronics engineer, who received security clearance when reports of his earlier affiliation to the Communist party weren’t cross-filed properly. He started working for the KGB in May 1975 and in the three years before his security clearance was revoked, he was able to pass the Soviets vital information from his employment at Thorn EMI defence contractors on the then top-secret Project XN-715, developing and testing radar fuses for Britain’s free-fall nuclear bomb. His material was so good that the KGB suspected he was a double agent, and went so far as to test him with a non-contact polygraph during a trip to Vienna. However, the Soviets broke off contact after he lost his security clearance, until he changed jobs; then between 1990 and 1992, he supplied information from the General Electric Company. He was betrayed when his original case officer, Victor Oshchenko, defected in 1992; Smith was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, reduced to twenty on appeal. Since his release, he has campaigned ‘to discover and expose the full story behind the conspiracy that led to my conviction of supposedly spying for the Russians in the early 1990s’, according to his blog.
‘It is hard to overstate the damage done to the intelligence service during the seventies,’ CIA Director William J. Casey said in a speech in 1982. ‘Unrelenting questioning of the Agency’s integrity generated a severe loss of credibility.’ Although the Church Committee and other assaults on the CIA certainly caused severe problems for the Agency, they were the cause of some of their own difficulties.
James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975, has been seen by some as a scapegoat for the Agency’s problems; to others, the way in which he was allowed to operate epitomizes what was wrong with the Agency during this period. Even the CIA themselves describe him as ‘one of the most influential and divisive intelligence officers in US history’.
Angleton was recruited into the OSS in 1943, and served with the counter-intelligence branches in London and Rome, finishing the Second World War as chief of counter-intelligence operations in Italy. He remained there until 1947 and then became the liaison between the new CIA and other western counter-intelligence organizations, notably Shin Bet and Mossad, the agencies for the new country of Israel. In 1954 he was appointed to the role at CIA headquarters that he held until his departure. Although charming in a social context, in business he was described as ‘arrogant, tactless, dismissive, and even threatening’ to those who disagreed with him.
It was Angleton who managed to get hold of a copy of Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, via his Israeli contacts, when no one else had been able to obtain it. Angleton was utterly convinced that the Soviet Union was implacably hostile towards the West and, on top of that, as far as he was concerned, international Communism was monolithic. He didn’t believe that the Sino-Soviet split of 1960 was genuine, but was simply part of an elaborate disinformation campaign, and it was a firm tenet that the KGB had penetrated all of the Western agencies.
Angleton’s interactions with two KGB spies informed this opinion. He had been friendly with Kim Philby during the forties: the two met regularly when Philby was stationed in Washington from 1949 onwards, to the extent that their weekly dinner meetings were known as ‘The Kim and Jim Show’. When Philby’s treachery became obvious after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, Angleton spent the next few years deconstructing his former friend’s career, and realized that his various promotions had been part of a Soviet plan. If Philby could reach a situation where he was being seriously talked of as a future head of MI6, there could well be other agents. As a result, DCI Allen Dulles agreed to the establishment of the counter-intelligence section.
The other agent was Anatoli Golitsyn. While many regarded him as — to put it politely — a fantastist, his tales of KGB infiltration of the entire Western intelligence operation (which he didn’t start to mention until sometime after his defection) fit in precisely with Angleton’s way of thinking. Golitsyn claimed that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent; by the end of his time at the Agency, Angleton would add Swedish prime minster Olaf Palme and West German chancellor Willy Brandt to that list (Brandt of course wasn’t the source of any leaks — it was his assistant Günter Guillaume).
In 1962, shortly after Golitsyn’s defection, Angleton moved to the new CIA building at Langley and set up the Special Investigation Group (the SIG), searching for KGB influence within the Agency. To the surprise of many, Angleton accepted Golitsyn’s claims at face value. It reached a point where the SIG would pass Golitsyn its case files for evaluation, and the Russian would ‘finger’ specific individuals as likely agents, a practice that later CIA officers found hard to credit.
This meant that when Yuri Nosenko defected, and his claims often contradicted Golitsyn (notably about the presence of a KGB spy within the CIA itself), the newcomer was ignored. The drastic treatment that Nosenko received at the CIA’s hands was because Angleton and like-minded colleagues refused to believe he wasn’t a KGB plant. Only when new DCI Richard Helms intervened and ordered a review of the evidence was Nosenko exonerated.
Angleton’s methods antagonized his colleagues, and many believed that he was speculating about likely Soviet agents, rather than bringing actual proof. The case that Angleton made regarding one particular agent, interrogated in 1968, was described as ‘the last piece of reasoning you would bring into a case where you already had evidence. But it’s certainly not the kind of thing that you would start off a case with.’ The paranoia that Angleton fostered even resulted in one of the counter-intelligence chief’s analysts accusing Angleton himself of being a Soviet spy.