BOOK REVIEW: The Defector. The Untold Story of the KGB Agent Who Saved MI5 and Changed the Cold War
By Richard Kerbaj / Blink
Reviewed by: Tim Willasey-Wilsey
The Reviewer Tim Willasey-Wilsey CMG is a Cipher Brief expert. He is also Visiting Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London and Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI, the defense think tank in London.
REVIEW — The expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers from London in September 1974 represented a watershed moment in the Cold War. Before that inspired act of defiance by the British government of Prime Minister Edward Heath, the Soviet Union had achieved psychological dominance in its espionage over the West. The United Kingdom seemed to have been riddled with Soviet spies from Klaus Fuchs, the Cambridge Five, the Portland Spy Ring, the Krogers, John Vassall, George Blake; the list went on and on. However, after 1974, and despite later successes against the United States (Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and the Walker Spy Ring), the KGB lost its aura of invincibility.
Richard Kerbaj in his book The Defector tells the story of the build up to Operation FOOT (as the expulsions were known in London) with real panache. The Defector flows effortlessly from page to page and chapter to chapter. It is genuinely unputdownable; a terrific read.
The story begins in December 1961with the approach and defection of the KGB officer Anatoly Golitsyn to the CIA Chief of Station in Helsinki. Golitsyn’s intelligence revelations were sufficient to convince the CIA’s Chief of Counter-Intelligence (CI), James Jesus Angleton, that he was the real deal. Angleton was sure that the Soviets had penetrated the United States government at multiple levels and Golitsyn helped reinforce his paranoia which was further fueled, in 1963, when his close friend Kim Philby fled to Moscow from Beirut. Kerbaj mentions that Philby had visited CIA Headquarters 113 times during his two-year posting to Washington as the MI6 (SIS) Head of Station. Several of those meetings were with Angleton with whom Philby also enjoyed a personal and social relationship.
The slippery slope began when Angleton gave Golitsyn access to CIA’s CI files. This enabled the defector to spin a wider web of suspicion and to suddenly “remember” things which he had never mentioned before. So, when another Soviet intelligence officer, Yuri Nosenko, defected Golitsyn was easily able to persuade Angleton that he was a fake, intended by the Soviets to spread disinformation. Nosenko was treated in the most appalling fashion.
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The problem was that Angleton had adherents in London, the best-known being Peter Wright a senior CI officer in MI5 (whose book Spycatcher would cause a storm of controversy when published in 1987.) Before long, both the Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis, and his deputy, Graham Mitchell, were under investigation for being Soviet agents and the web of suspicion even extended to Prime Minister Harold Wilson. These were dark days for the British intelligence community; numerous perfectly innocent people were dragged into investigations because they had known Philby or travelled behind the Iron Curtain or had mixed with communists at university before the war.
It is all too easy to get sucked into an atmosphere of paranoia as the McCarthyite era in the United States had demonstrated, as satirized by Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in 1953. In this situation MI5 did not need a zealot but someone with a clear head, a sense of perspective and a broad personal hinterland. Martin Furnival-Jones, MI5’s Head of CI possessed all those qualities; a keen tennis player, ornithologist and amateur actor he was becoming increasingly skeptical of Angleton’s conspiracy theories and his erratic behavior. Golitsyn too undermined his own credibility by his bizarre conduct during his initial visits to the UK. But it is doubtful if Furnival-Jones could have navigated his way out of his appalling quagmire (investigating his two bosses and the prime minister) without a stroke of astonishing luck. As so often happens with a Deus ex Machina (or Black Swan) event, Furnival-Jones’s salvation arrived in a most unlikely fashion.
Oleg Lyalin was a KGB officer from the sabotage department (Department V) serving under cover at the Soviet Trade Mission in London. His motivation for deciding to approach MI5 in 1971 defied all known espionage norms. He was not after money. He was not resentful of his bosses. He was not an ideological anti-communist. He just wanted MI5 to expel him so that he could shorten his posting in London and return to Moscow to divorce his wife. Understandably, MI5 were quizzical about this peculiar man but, over a series of meetings, it became clear that he was telling the truth about Soviet sabotage planning. He was also able to identify many of the KGB Residency members in London. Suddenly MI5, which had been largely blind to the nature and extent of Soviet operations in the UK, had the whip hand and Furnival-Jones was able to brief the new Conservative government about the Soviets’ egregious activities.
Kerbaj attributes to Furnival-Jones an act of remarkable political courage. Ever since the Suez debacle of 1956, Britain had become increasingly deferential to the United States. The books of John le Carré (who had served as an officer in both MI5 and MI6 in the early 1960s) show how much the approval of Washington mattered to the UK political and intelligence establishment. Such was US influence in London that Angleton even felt he had the right to arrive from Washington without any warning and be received at a senior level.
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Despite such precedents, Furnival-Jones took the decision to keep the CIA in ignorance of the material from Lyalin (by then given the codename GOLDFINCH). He reckoned that Angleton would conclude that Lyalin was a fake and would work to destroy the defector’s credibility just as he had done in the case of Nosenko. Indeed, Kerbaj provides the truly shocking statistic that Angleton had turned down 22 Soviet offers of service based on his conviction that they were erroneous, intended to mislead or provoke. Heath had already told Richard Nixon that he did not like the term “special relationship” preferring “natural relationship,” so Furnival-Jones enjoyed his prime minister’s support. Instead, the UK government formulated its plan to expel the 105 Soviet diplomats without consulting or even informing Washington.
The expulsions caught the Soviets completely off guard. In their shock and amazement, they only retaliated by expelling only 18...? British diplomats from Moscow. Furthermore, the UK added a new stipulation that the expelled diplomats could not be replaced. In the end Hollis, Mitchell and Wilson were exonerated and the paranoia gradually evaporated although there were many people whose lives had been ruined not just by the various betrayals but also by the Angletonian witch-hunts. In December 1974 Angleton finally lost his job at the CIA. Even when I joined the British Foreign Office seven years later there were still vestiges of the bad feeling of the period which would be repeatedly dredged to the surface in the books of Chapman Pincher, Andrew Boyle and Peter Wright. But the bad old days were finally over thanks in no small part to one of the strangest of all defectors, Oleg Lyalin.
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