Agee willingly passed information to the KGB, who in return gave him more materiaclass="underline" his books Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa, blowing the cover of a further 2,000 agents, were supplemented by the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which was able to publish secret CIA documents.
In 1980 the US Senate Intelligence Committee, set up in the wake of the Church and Pike committees, revealed how damaging Agee had been to the CIA. This led to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (known as the ‘anti-Agee’ bill), which made it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of a covert intelligence agent. (One of those who voted against the act was Barack Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden.) This curtailed Agee’s activities considerably.
The general dismay within the Western intelligence world was not alleviated by the discovery of Gunther Guillaume at the heart of the West German government. The self-described ‘partisan for peace’ had become one of chancellor Willy Brandt’s most trusted aides following the 1972 election. Even though Guillaume came briefly under suspicion the following year, the charges weren’t taken seriously, particularly by Brandt, who later admitted he had overestimated his knowledge of human nature. Guillaume was able to pass over material sent to Brandt by President Nixon, as well as the many pieces of confidential NATO documentation that passed through the office. However, the West German counter-intelligence department was still suspicious, and in April 1974 Guillaume and his wife were arrested and admitted their guilt. Willy Brandt resigned the following month, something that the Stasi didn’t really expect, or want, according to its former chief Markus Wolf. It was ‘equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal’ — a simile that could have applied to many other agencies’ activities during that period.
9
REBUILDING
The late seventies would see both sides in the Cold War try to regain the ground that had been lost in the earlier part of the decade. New ideas were tried out, new agents recruited — although the KGB noted that it was much harder to gain ideological recruits during this time. The majority of agents were motivated by money.
One of the more unusual Soviet plans sought to gain intelligence on American military capabilities, but was derailed by the CIA’s Operation Silicon Valley. Unlike the KGB scheme to ruin the area as seen in the 1985 James Bond movie, A View to a Kill (in which Soviet agent Max Zorin attempted to flood Silicon Valley), this was espionage by stealth.
Described by the CIA later as ‘part of… a broad Soviet effort to acquire Western technology for military and commercial purposes’, the Soviet plan, developed in 1973, was to buy banks that were financing developments in Silicon Valley, the heartland of American technological progress, and thereby gain access to their secrets. Three banks were targeted to be approached by their intermediary, apparently wealthy Hong Kong businessman Amos Dawe: the Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe. At the same time, Dawe’s associate Y.T. Chou was trying to gain a half-interest in the Camino California bank in San Francisco.
The manager of the Singapore branch of the Moscow Narodny bank offered to finance Dawe’s future plans if he would travel to the States to make the purchases. The KGB hoped to eventually gain control of twenty separate institutions, each worth around $100 million. The genius of the plan was that such a takeover wasn’t illegal at the time under American law — once the sale had taken place, Dawe could appoint whosoever he wished to be his representative on the board. And, of course, that would have been a KGB agent.
A $1.8 million first down payment on the triple transaction was made before an astute agent at the CIA noticed a peculiar lending pattern by the Narodny branch: money was going from Singapore to the Pacific Atlantic Bank in Panama, to the Commerce Union Bank in Nashville, Tennessee, and, finally, by letters of credit, to Dawe in San Francisco. Rather than simply expose Dawe’s actions, the CIA set up Operation Silicon Valley; in October 1975, the Agency leaked their information to the publisher of the Hong Kong financial newsletter, Target. As soon as the story was published, the Narodny bank withdrew its funds, leaving Dawe vulnerable and broke — and then the Soviets even tried to sue him for the return of the monies already supplied. Contrary to some reports, Dawe was eventually convicted of fraud in Hong Kong, and sentenced in 1985 to five years’ imprisonment, serving only half. He disappeared after his release and his Hong Kong company was compulsorily wound up in 2009.
Similarly motivated by greed was one half of a pair of spies who would gain notoriety under their code names, the Falcon and the Snowman, particularly after a film of their exploits was made starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn as the eponymous KGB assets. Although the film was a fictionalized version of events, based on a book by journalist Robert Lindsey, many spy histories have treated it as a documentary.
‘The Falcon’ was Christopher John Boyce, who had taken up falconry as a hobby as a youngster; ‘the Snowman’ was Andrew Daulton Lee, whose nickname derived from his drug-dealing activities. While it was Boyce who found himself in a position to benefit the KGB, Lee was the one who walked into the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in April 1975 offering the secrets. The two had known each other since they were boys; Lee had drifted into drug-dealing while Boyce had been able to find a job working at the TRW Corporation in Redondo Beach, California. TRW had been at the forefront of development of America’s first Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, as well as the Pioneer spacecraft for NASA. At the time Boyce was employed there, they operated the satellites in the Defence Support Program, and Boyce worked in the ultra-secret ‘black vault’ room, which housed the coding equipment for the CIA, his job being to change the ciphers daily.
Boyce accordingly had access to some of the most secret material in America, including details of the Rhyolite satellite and its planned successor, Argus, an essential part of the surveillance of both the Soviet and Communist Chinese. He would also see other ‘chatter’, including information regarding the CIA’s alleged role in influencing the Australian labour unions against the then-prime minister Gough Whitlam. He therefore proposed to Lee that he would copy material which Lee could then take to the Soviets and sell — although Boyce would maintain that his primary purpose for his treason was his disgust at American behaviour: ‘I have no problems with the label traitor, if you qualify what it’s to,’ he told an Australian reporter in 1982. ‘I think that eventually the United States government is going to involve the world in the next world war. And being a traitor to that, I have absolutely no problems with that whatsoever.’
Although appalled at the lack of sense demonstrated by Lee in coming direct to the highly watched embassy in Mexico, the KGB realized that they had access to prime material. Over the next eighteen months they not only provided Lee and Boyce with around $77,000 for their efforts (of which Boyce only received around $20,000), but also trained Lee in basic tradecraft. Unfortunately, Lee’s drug use increased with his available spending money, and he became more and more careless.