The sometimes byzantine nature of the spying game in the late eighties is amply demonstrated by the Daniloff case from August-September 1986, which saw the Soviets falsely accuse Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist, of spying in Russia mere days after one of their own agents at the UN was arrested by the FBI, in what Time magazine described as ‘a risky game of tit for tat’. Played out against the backdrop of the plans for the first summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland later that year, the affair saw the eventual swap of Daniloff for Gennady Zakharov (even if neither side would admit that that is what it was at the time).
The Soviet agent, a physicist working at the United Nations, had been cultivating a Guyanese resident of New York, known only as CS or Birg, who worked at a defence contractor. What Zakharov didn’t realize was that Birg had been working with the FBI for three years, ever since the initial contact. When he handed Birg $1,000 in exchange for three classified documents, the FBI were waiting. A few days later, Daniloff, who had spent the previous five and a half years as a correspondent for the News & World Report, met with a friend, Misha, in the Lenin Hills of Moscow; Misha gave him a sealed packet with some press clippings in — or so Daniloff thought. In fact, as he discovered when the KGB arrested him on the street and took him to Lefortovo prison, they were photos of soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan. As one paper at the time explained, ‘The KGB has trumped up a case against [Daniloff] that is literally a mirror image of the case against Zakharov.’ Although Daniloff and Zakharov were released after a fortnight into the custody of their respective embassies, the threat against the American continued; when Zakharov faced charges of spying, so did Daniloff.
Part of the problem was that the KGB did have some very slight cause for concern about Daniloff. A letter had been passed to him by a dissident Russian Orthodox priest back in January 1985 for onward transmission to CIA DCI William Casey. Daniloff had given it to the Second Secretary at the US Embassy. According to the KGB, this was proof that he was working with the CIA.
After many days of tense discussions, during which the summit due to be held in Reykjavík in mid-October looked likely to be cancelled if the stalemate wasn’t resolved, and the US threatened to send home two dozen Soviet delegates from the United Nations, the Soviets finally agreed to release Daniloff on 30 September. The same day, Zakharov was allowed to leave America, having pleaded no contest to the charges. While the summit went ahead, the twenty-five Soviet delegates were still expelled; in retaliation, on 19 October, the Soviets kicked out five US diplomats. Two days later, the US sent home fifty-five more Soviets — allegedly to bring about parity between the size of the respective missions in the countries. A day later the Soviets expelled five more Americans.
But the rules of the game meant that nobody would admit the reality of what had happened. Daniloff was quite clear that he had not been swapped since as far as he was concerned there was no comparison between the two situations. ‘In my case, the investigation into the charges against me was concluded,’ he stated bluntly. ‘There was no trial, and I left as an ordinary free American citizen. In Zakharov’s case, there was a trial, and he received a sentence. I do not believe that these two things are in any way equivalent.’ Although some dissidents were released in the Soviet Union at the same time as Zakharov left the US, it was clear to all neutral observers that this was as much a swap as the handovers between KGB and CIA in Berlin had been during the sixties.
Both John Walker and Jonathan Pollard had targeted the Navy; other branches of the US military fell victim to Soviet agents during the late eighties. In 1987, United States Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree was the first marine convicted of spying against the US; two years later, Warrant Officer James W. Hall III, who described himself as ‘a traitorous bastard, not a Cold War spy’, was found guilty of betraying hundreds of secret documents to both the Stasi and the KGB.
When writing to support a reduction in the thirty-year prison term to which Lonetree was sentenced, his commanding officer, General Alfred M. Gray Jr., wrote that the young marine wasn’t motivated by ‘treason or greed, but rather the lovesick response of a naive, young, immature and lonely troop in a lonely and hostile environment’. Lonetree had fallen for the charms of Violetta Sanni, a Russian girl who worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he was posted as a guard. Despite rules prohibiting fraternization with members of the opposite sex in a Communist country, they began an affair.
Lonetree fell head first into the honey trap, and began providing Violetta’s ‘Uncle Sasha’ (KGB agent Alexei Yefimov) with photographs and floor maps of the embassy, as well as details of American agents. When he was posted to Vienna in mid-1986, he continued to supply information willingly to Uncle Sasha. That December though, he reconsidered what he was doing, and after contemplating suicide, confessed. Although it seemed at the time as if his actions had led to the deaths of around twenty CIA agents, it later transpired that the names he passed had already been supplied to the Soviets by Aldrich Ames. Lonetree’s thirty-year sentence was reduced to fifteen and he was freed on parole in 1996.
James W. Hall III was a very different proposition. His career as a spy for both the Stasi and the KGB was brought to an end following the debriefing of an East German defector, Dr Manfred Severin, who mentioned an American soldier who had provided multiple documents. Hall admitted his guilt to Severin and an FBI agent posing as a Soviet contact in December 1988, bringing to an end a six-year period working for the Communists.
Hall was recruited to the Stasi in 1982 by Huseyin Yildirim, an auto-mechanic at the US Field Station in Berlin, although he had made contact with the KGB a couple of weeks earlier. He would claim later that his motives were purely financiaclass="underline" ‘I wasn’t terribly short of money,’ he told the FBI agent who arrested him. ‘I just decided I didn’t ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I’m not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else.’
During his time in Berlin, and later Frankfurt, Hall provided documents regarding electronic eavesdropping operations carried out by the Americans to Yildirim or KGB officers, and was paid in dollars or German marks. There was concern at the time of his arrest that Yildirim might have been running a spy ring out of the Berlin Field Station: ‘We are looking at the potential — and it’s so far just potential — that this could be the Army’s Walker case,’ one investigating officer said, during preparations for Yildirim’s trial; current assessments agree that Hall caused as much damage during his six years as Walker did in eighteen.
Hall admitted that he delivered between thirty and sixty documents to his handlers, which led to a programme designed to exploit a Soviet communications vulnerability uncovered in the late seventies being rendered useless, as were plans to disrupt electronic commands and surveillance. ‘Without commenting on the specifics, it appears that Hall did very serious damage,’ Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time. Some of the material he provided, such as the National SIGINT Requirements List, enabled Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf to ‘take relevant countermeasures’ against American plans.