Howard Blum - The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officers Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal

Pete Bagley, before he entered the secret world.

For Phil Werber,

My good buddy since way back when

And Leonard Novins,

In memory

Theres no such thing as a former spy.

A KGB wisdom

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel , that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

I N THIS BOOK, MY INTENTION is to reveal one of the last great secrets of the Cold War. It is also the true story of one spys quest through a legacy of betrayals to solve this mystery. And to accomplish both these goals, I relied on not only previously classified government documents, memoirs, interviews with both present and past officers in the intelligence services but also, most helpfully, conversations with individuals who were intimately connected to the characters who animate this story. A complete chapter-by-chapter sourcing appears at the end of this book.

But let me also share another advisory: When the hero of this story, Pete Bagley, knew he was dying, he wrote to a friend, In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest.

And thats what I set out to do in the pages that follow.

HB

(In Order of Appearance)

The Americans

T ENNENT P ETE B AGLEY: Counterintelligence officer and deputy head of the CIAs Soviet Bloc division.

M ARTI P ETERSON: The first female case officer assigned to Moscow Station.

J OHN P AISLEY: CIA analyst with a wide-ranging portfolio, which included defector interrogations as well as Soviet military strategy and nuclear weapons capabilities.

R AY R OCCA: Head of Research and Analysis, the CIAs Counterintelligence Staff.

J AMES A NGLETON: Chief of the CIAs Counterintelligence Staff.

C LARE E DWARD P ETTY: Member of CIAs Special Investigative Group (SIG).

C HRISTINA B AGLEY R OCCA: Pete Bagleys daughter, a CIA officer who married Gordon Rocca, a DIA analyst and the son of Ray Rocca.

W ILLIAM C OLBY: CIA fieldman who became director of Central Intelligence.

G EORGE K ISEVALTER: Russian-born CIA officer who served as handler for several double agents.

J ACK M AURY: CIA Soviet Division chief.

W ILLIAM H OOD: Cold War Vienna Station chief.

D AVID M URPHY: Berlin fieldman and CIA Soviet Division chief.

R ICHARD H ELMS: Wartime OSS officer who rose through the ranks to become CIA director.

J OHN A BIDIAN: Security officer at the American embassy in Moscow who performed operational tasks for the CIA.

B RUCE S OLIE: CIA security officer who defended Nosenkos bona fides and later played a key role in the ill-fated running of double agent Nicholas Shadrin.

L EONARD M C C OY: CIA reports officer who defended Nosenko, asserting he was not a dispatched Russian agent.

J OHN H ART: CIA officer who cleared Nosenko and later gave testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that was pointedly critical of Pete Bagley.

K ATHERINE H ART: Chief of staff for CIA field stations and wife of John Hart.

M ARYANN P AISLEY: Wife of John Paisley and, for a time, a CIA clerk working directly for Katherine Hart.

D AVID S ULLIVAN: CIA analyst who leaked information to an aide of a US senator and later reported his suspicions about John Paisley to the Office of Security.

The Russians

A LEXANDER O GORODNIK: Double agent code-named Trigon who, when caught, committed suicide by ingesting a cyanide pill concealed in a fountain pen.

P YOTR P OPOV: Lieutenant colonel in military intelligence (GRU) who provided military secrets to the CIA and was executed for treason.

O LEG P ENKOVSKY: Colonel of GRU who passed secret intelligence to both the CIA and MI6 and was executed for treason.

L EONID B REZHNEV: Soviet general secretary whose private conversations were covertly recorded in the course of the CIAs Gamma Guppy operation.

B ORIS N ALIVAIKO: KGB officer based in Vienna who lured the CIA into an embarrassing trap.

G ENERAL O LEG G RIBANOV: Chief of KGB counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate) who established a special unit to focus on operational deception.

L IEUTENANT G ENERAL S ERGEY K ONDRASHEV: High-ranking KGB officer with a wide-ranging career in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations.

The Poles

M ICHAL G OLENIEWSKI: Polish intelligence officer code-named Sniper.

The Czechs

K ARL AND H ANA K OECHER: Husband-and-wife team of Czech intelligence officers who worked closely with the KGB and succeeded in infiltrating the CIA.

The Defectors

P ETER D ERIABIN: KGB officer who became a consultant to the CIA.

Y URI I VANOVICH N OSENKO: KGB officer who defected after the Kennedy assassination.

A NATOLY G OLITSYN: KGB officer who later worked closely with the CIAs Counterintelligence Staff.

I GOR K OCHNOV: KGB agent who pretended to be a defector in order to set a trap for a Russian-born American citizen working for the DIA.

N ICHOLAS S HADRIN: Soviet naval captain who became a US double agent, an operation that resulted in his kidnapping and death at the hands of the KGB.

G UILT IS A HEAVY BURDEN. It weighs down on the heart, an unremitting punishment. Yet she did not try to escape the pain, or find excuses to wiggle out of the blame.

Instead, she acknowledged her complicity. There were things she might have done that could have made a difference. Thats the definition of guilt, she discovered: knowing all you should have done.

It didnt matter that she had not been in the car that night. It didnt matter that the accident occurred at the exit that led to the main entrance of the Central Intelligence Agency. Or that this was where her husband worked. And where she had worked, too.

All that mattered was that a young, handsome boy, her sons best friend, had been killed.

In the terrible aftermath, shed blamed her husband, too. It hadnt been his fault; he had played no role in the nights heartbreaking events. And yet! She knew, as any wife would know, that hed created the reckless world that had inevitably bred this tragedy.

Full of rage, raw with shame, after nearly two decades of marriage, she had demanded a divorce. And with her anger, she had driven him into the arms of her best friend.

She now saw that it was all her own doing. As things had become undone, shed capriciously kept yanking the dangling threads. And in the end, her life had unraveled.

Her punishment: a ceaseless, unabated guilt.

But all her guilt was nothing, no, less than nothing, when measured against the pain caused by the new, sinister knowledge that had taken hold of her life. It had the power to change everything that had come before, to turn long-accepted truths into lies. It was a very dangerous secret.

But she knew it could not be shared. She did not dare. It must be entombed forever in the shrewd armory of her heart.

Brussels, October 1978

T WO DEATHSEACH PURPORTEDLY A SUICIDE, each with its roots deep in the secret world, each with its own perplexing mysterieswrenched Pete Bagley, retired and somewhat besmirched spy, from the complacency of his pleasant exile and set him on the twisting path back to the shadowy battlefields of his previous life. It would be, he fully recognized, his final mission, his last chance to set straight the betrayals, both personal and professional, that had scarred not just the agency, but also his own family of spies. And like every old man who at last musters the courage to confront unfinished business, he could only hope that it was not too late.