Aldrich Ames, Traitor

While Oleg Gordievsky, KGB colonel spying for MI6, said he didn’t want to be paid, mid-level CIA operative Aldrich Ames made payment the heart of his approach to the KGB: he demanded $50,000 up front. At a subsequent meeting with his handler, Ames delivered seven pounds of classified information, and made sure he named every single spy working for America or Britain inside the Soviet Union.

In the month of his first payment from the KGB, Ames had arrived at a brutally logical conclusion. Any of the CIA’s numerous spies inside Soviet intelligence could get wind of what he was up to and expose him. The only way to protect himself, therefore, was to reveal to the KGB any and every asset who could betray him, so the Russians could sweep them up and execute the lot.

Ames: “If one of them learned about me, he would have told the CIA and I would have been arrested and thrown in jail . . . it wasn’t personal. It was simply how the game was played.”

At least ten spies identified by Ames would perish at the hands of the KGB, and more than one hundred intelligence operations were compromised. Soon after the big dump, Ames received a message . . . from Moscow: “Congratulations, you are now a millionaire!”

— The Spy and the Traitor, pp. 243 – 244

One of the spies whose identity he blew was that of Oleg Gordievsky.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Three Conditions: The Spy and the Traitor, p. 64

Gordievsky raised his hand and issued a declaration: he would work for British intelligence, but only under three conditions.

“First, I don’t want to damage any of my colleagues in the KGB Station. Second, I don’t want to be secretly photographed or recorded. Third, no money. I want to work for the West out of ideological conviction, not for gain.”

Now it was Hawkins’s turn to be affronted . . . The second condition was moot. If MI6 decided to record him, he would never know, since the recording would, by definition, be secret. His preemptive refusal to accept financial compensation was more worrying. It is an axiom of spycraft that informants should be encouraged to accept gifts or money — although not so much that they would not want more or would be tempted to extravagant expenditure that might attract suspicion. Cash makes a spy feel valuable, establishes the principle of payment for services rendered, and can be used, if necessary, as a lever. And why did he wish to shield his Soviet colleagues? Was he still loyal to the KGB? In reality, Gordievsky was partly protecting himself. If Denmark started ejecting KGB officers, the Center might begin looking for an internal traitor and eventually alight on him.

— The Spy and the Traitor, p. 64

The Prague Spring

When everything old is new again.

Early in 1968, more than thirty KGB illegals slipped into Czechoslovakia, with orders from the KGB’s chief, Yuri Andropov, to sabotage the Czech reform movement, infiltrate “reactionary” intellectual circles, and abduct prominent supporters of the Prague Spring. Most of these agents traveled disguised as Western tourists, since it was assumed that the Czech “agitators” would be more likely to reveal their plans to apparently sympathetic foreigners. Among the targets were intellectuals, academic, journalists, students, and writers, including Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel. It was the largest intelligence operation the KGB had ever mounted against a Warsaw Pact ally.

— The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre, pp. 30 – 31

The heartbreaking denouement:

On the night of August 20, 1968, 2000 tanks and more than 200,000 troops, principally Soviet but with contingents from other Warsaw Pact countries, rolled across the Czechoslovakian frontiers. There was no hope of opposing the Soviet juggernaut, and Alexander Dubcek called upon his people not to resist.

— The Spy and the Traitor, p. 32

Ukraine could easily have gone that way, but instead its people chose to resist.

Berlin, 1989

The Age of the Strongman, Chapter 12: Merkel, Macron and Europe’s Struggle Against the Strongmen (2020)

During the twentieth century, no city felt the deadly allure and disastrous consequences of strongman leadership more than Berlin. When Hitler finally committed suicide in his bunker, his capital city lay in ruins around him. For the current German elite, therefore, nationalism in any form remains highly suspect. As Thomas Bagger, a leading German intellectual and the diplomatic adviser to the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, put it to me: “France and Britain can always fall back on the nation-state. That is much harder for Germany.”

As Bagger saw it, after 1989 Germany had embraced a version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, with its comforting belief in the triumph of liberal democracy and internationalism. After the fall of the wall, Bagger argued, “We felt that we were on the right side of history for once, and it felt pretty good.” A nationalist strongman such as Vladimir Putin was treated with a degree of condescension. Merkel saw him as a figure from the nineteenth century, struggling to cope with the modern world. Firm in the belief that they understood the direction of history and understood the formula for success in the twenty-first century, Germany’s leaders felt that, in Bagger’s phrase, politics was now little more than the “administration of the inevitable.”

From 2014 to 2017, a series of shocks forced Merkel and the German establishment to abandon this complacency. The conflict in Ukraine and the Putin government’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 signaled the return of Russia as a military threat.

This is fascinating stuff!

Stay tuned.

Life and Fate, p. 631

Because Krymov has not been charged, he cannot be put on trial. He exists in the limbo of Lubyanka Prison, serving out an indeterminate sentence.

Once a fellow prisoner advised him:

• “You should help them formulate a charge. How about this? Feeling a wild hatred for everything new, I groundlessly criticized works of art that had been awarded a Stalin Prize.”

Apparatchik Becomes Prisoner

One of the main characters in Life and Fate is a man named Krymov — a party commissar, tasked with making sure all men carry out their patriotic duty in service to the state. Somewhere around p. 600, he is denounced. Which is a very special process, not sure yet how it works, but apparently someone denounced Krymov, and without much ado, he becomes Political Prisoner xxx. No time to tell anyone, his head is shaved, his belt is removed, the buttons of his trousers are cut off, and he has the full-body search. Finally, he finds himself in a cell with a bunch of other people whose last names begin with “K.”

Self has to remind herself over and over, this is not Kafka. This is real. Vasily Grossimov was a journalist and worked with some of the biggest dailies in Russia. He felt Russian most of his life, until he was reminded that he couldn’t be Russian, because he was a Jew.

The prisoners got ready to go to sleep. The light continued to glare down; Krymov could feel someone watching through the spy-hole as he unwound his foot-cloths, pulled up his pants and scratched his chest. It was a very special light; it was there not so that they could see, but so that they could be seen. If it had been found more convenient to observe them in darkness, they would have been kept in darkness.

— life and fate, p. 625

Quote of the Day: General Friedrich Paulus, Commander of the 6th Army, Charged with Taking Stalingrad

“I believe in victory. But you know what? There’s something quite senseless and unnecessary about the whole struggle for this city . . . we shall capture the Tractor Factory. But that won’t help us cover our flank. The Russians are going to attack — von Weichs is quite sure. None of our bluffing will stop that.”

— life and fate, p. 382

Fresh Recruits for the Russian Army, 1942

Novikov’s tank corps was on its way to the Front. The naive young soldiers, men who had not yet received their baptism of fire, believed they were the ones who would take part in the decisive operation. The older men just laughed; Makarov, the commanding officer of the 3rd Brigade, and Fatov, the best of the battalion commanders, had seen all this too many times before.

— life and fate, p. 326

World War II as the Russians Saw It, 1942

Russia seemed like a wounded animal that had been driven back into the sand-dunes, into steppes fit only for camels; there she was, lying on the harsh earth, impotent, unable ever to rise again.

— life and fate, p. 294

In the Kalmyk Steppe

A new character makes an appearance: Lieutenant-Colonel Darensky (also a new setting: the Russian steppe).

Darensky got out of his car and looked at a horseman on top of a small hill. Dressed in a long robe tied by a piece of string, he was sitting on his shaggy pony and surviving the steppe. He was very old; his face looked as hard as stone. Darensky called out to the man and then walked up to him, holding out his cigarette-case. The old man turned in his saddle; his movenent somehow combined the agility of youth with the thoughtful caution of age. He looked in turn at the hand holding out the cigarettes, at Darensky’s face, at the pistol hanging by his side, at the three bars indicating his rank, and at his smart boots. Then he took a cigarette and rolled it between his fine, brown, childlike fingers.

— life and fate, pp. 292 – 293