Boyce eventually travelled with Lee to Mexico, where their KGB handler proposed that Boyce leave TKW and go back to college, with a view to becoming a longer-term agent working for Moscow Centre. Boyce agreed to do one final job — photographing the technical drawings for TRW’s new satellite, the Pyramider. This would net a further $75,000.
Lee missed his rendezvous with the KGB on 5 January 1977, and, in total breach of all tradecraft and common sense once more, threw a package containing the negatives of the designs into the Soviet embassy grounds the next day. He was instantly arrested by the Mexican police, and the films were developed. Lee eventually admitted he was a spy, but claimed he was working on a disinformation operation for the CIA.
Boyce was arrested a few days later. The two men were tried separately; Boyce claimed that the material on Pyramider had been over-classified, since the project didn’t go ahead, and that Lee had blackmailed him into continuing with the treachery. He was found guilty and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment. He would later escape and go on the run, allegedly planning to fly from Alaska into the Soviet Union, but he was recaptured before he could try. Lee’s lawyers maintained his story that he was part of a CIA disinformation plan, and that both he and Boyce had been abandoned by the Agency when they got into trouble. Lee was sentenced to life imprisonment.
As in Britain, during the seventies the KGB concentrated on scientific and technical espionage against the country they regarded as ‘The Main Adversary’ — the United States. Their attempts to penetrate the inner circles of the Nixon and Ford administrations met with little success, although Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was one of many policymakers to grant favoured access to Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, much to the annoyance of the KGB, who wanted to cultivate their own ‘back door’ to the power players in Washington. They had slightly more luck with the United Nations, with KGB agents becoming personal assistants to the secretaries-general from U Thant to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. However they had to admit in 1974 that ‘For a number of years the Residency has not been able to create an agent network capable of fulfilling the complex requirements of our intelligence work, especially against the US.’ When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, attempts were made to capitalize on previous friendly relationships between Soviet officers and Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Neither succeeded. Valdik Enger and Rudolf Chernyaev, two KGB agents at the UN, were arrested by the FBI in May 1978 after accepting classified information about anti-submarine warfare from a US naval officer who was actually working for the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service (the forerunner of the NCIS, as featured in the popular TV show).
The KGB were far more successful recruiting scientists. The Falcon and the Snowman weren’t the only TRW employees engaged by the KGB — a scientist, code-named Zenit, was recruited a year after Boyce’s arrest. There were agents at IBM and McDonnell Douglas, and researchers at MIT, the Argonne National Laboratory and the US Army’s Material Development and Readiness Command. Some of these agents were approached on a personal level by Soviet colleagues in the same field; others worked purely for cash.
Inevitably, some were caught. Dalibar Valoushek, a Czech border guard, had been placed under cover in Canada in 1957, and ten years later become the controller for the KGB’s most important Canadian agent, Hugh Hambleton, whose access to research projects made him an ideal spy. However a year later, Valoushek was moved to New York and ordered to infiltrate the think tank, the Hudson Institute. When this proved unfeasible, Valoushek was removed from the assignment. In 1972, he told his son Peter of his double life, and recruited him into the KGB; Peter was trained in Moscow and sent to McGill University in Montreal and later Georgetown University, looking for students whose parents had government jobs, or other likely recruits. However in May 1977, Valoushek senior was arrested and turned by the FBI.
According to KGB files, for the next two years, Dalibar Valoushek tried to inform Moscow Centre that he was now a double, but no one took any notice. The FBI tried to use him to put pressure on Hambleton in 1980, but the latter was confident that he could not be arrested. ‘A spy is someone who regularly gets secret material, passes it on, takes orders, and gets paid for it,’ he said at the time. ‘I have never been paid.’ The RCMP and the Canadian Ministry of Justice tried to bring charges, but found insufficient evidence. Hambleton was eventually arrested when visiting London in 1982.
Three key KGB agents provided material throughout the seventies: two in the US, one in Europe. John Anthony Walker, Karl Koecher and George Trofimov were all busy during this period, passing classified information often in exchange for large sums of cash.
Walker had volunteered his services to the Soviets in 1967 when he was working in the communications room for the US Navy’s submarine operations in Norfolk, Virginia: ‘I’m a naval officer,’ he told staff at the Soviet embassy in Washington. ‘I’d like to make some money and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.’ The first item he stole was a key list for an old cryptographic machine — which, it was later suggested, led directly to the North Koreans’ desire to capture the US spy ship, the USS Pueblo, a month later — and from there on photographed multiple documents, claiming sarcastically that ‘K Mart has better security than the Navy’. Although Walker retired from the Navy in 1976, he had already recruited his friend Jerry Whitworth, and later brought in his own son and elder brother so that the work could continue.
Karl Koecher and his wife Hana, meanwhile, were actively working for the KGB from within the CIA. The pair were originally Czech StB agents sent across as illegals in 1965; they had broken off contact with the StB in 1970, but tried to build bridges with their former employers in 1974, a year after Karl had begun working in the CIA’s Soviet division. This brought them to the attention of the Soviets, who took over their case. Highly sexually active (and apparently with all the allure of Mike Myers’ spoof spy Austin Powers — ‘a terrible lover’ according to one report), Koecher was able to pass on compromising information on Washington officials, as well as classified Soviet and Czech material. Koecher went freelance in 1975 but continued to supply the KGB, passing on information that would compromise the CIA’s Moscow asset Aleksandr Ogorodnik in 1977.
George Trofimov was a retired US Army colonel based in Germany as a civilian who in 1969 became Chief of the United States Army Element at the Nuremberg Joint Interrogation Centre, giving him access to very high levels of documents. He was recruited to the KGB by his boyhood friend, Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church. This wasn’t as unusual as it might sound: the KGB often used the church and its officials within its schemes. Throughout the seventies and eighties — and until his retirement in 1995 — Trofimov sent material to Moscow via Susemihl, who continued to rise within the Orthodox Church, eventually achieving high rank as the Metropolitan of Vienna.
West Germany was a useful source of information for the Soviets. The ‘secretaries initiative’ continued to reap dividends. Margret Hîke passed on information from the office of the West German president from 1968 throughout the seventies, in exchange for 500 marks a month and expenses. Using a camera disguised as a tube of lipstick, she gave the KGB ten volumes of documents between 1968 and 1980, including mobilization plans, details on the government war bunker, and accounts of the president’s meetings with foreign diplomats.