"From the Okhrana to the KGB: Continuities in Russian foreign intelligence operations since the 1880s" (http://www.media.nara.gov/dc-metro/rg-263/6922330/Box-10-123-2/263-a1-27-box-10-123-2.pdf), Andrew 1989; excerpts:
There is no convincing evidence that any KGB-inspired press campaign in the West has been as effective as the tsarist attempt to persuade Western investors, all of whom later lost their money, to ignore the risks of investing in Russia. Before World War I, every Paris newspaper of note save for the socialist L'Humanite was successfully bribed to support tsarist government loans. By 1914, 25 percent of France's foreign investment was in Russia-three times as much as in the whole French empire, the second biggest empire in world history.1 The immense French stake in Russia - 80% of it in government loans - was not due simply to tsarist "active measures", but it would scarcely have been possible without them. It is only necessary to imagine the possible consequences of an equally well-funded press campaign designed to frighten, rather than to reassure, French investors about the state of Russia and the security of their investments. [See also http://www.persee.fr/articleAsPDF/cmr_0008-0160_1972_num_13_1_1867/article_cmr_0008-0160_1972_num_13_1_1867.pdf http://www.econ.rutgers.edu/dmdocuments/KimOosterlinck.pdf] Nor, contrary to popular belief, is there any evidence that KGB forgeries, despite their increased numbers, are more effective than those of the tsarist Okhrana. There is a strong probability that Peter Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana's Paris-based Foreign Agency from 1884 to 1902. was responsible for the fabrication of the famous anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which described a mythical Jewish plot for world domination. The Protocols re-emerged between the wars as one of the central texts in Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism, becoming the most influential forgery of the 20th century. 2 It is still published in a number of countries, mostly in the Middle East. No KGB forgery has had a comparable influence.
After its foundation in 1881 , the Okhrana rapidly developed a network of agents and agents provocateurs, initially to penetrate the revolutionary Diaspora abroad. In 1886, Rachkovsky's agents blew up the People's Will printworks in Geneva, successfully giving the impression that the explosion was the work of disaffected revolutionaries. In 1890, Rachkovsky unmasked a sensational bomb-making conspiracy by Russian emigres in Paris; the leading plotter was, in reality. one of his own agents provocateurs.
The most successful intelligence penetration anywhere in Europe before World War I was the Russian recruitment of the senior Austrian military intelligence officer, Colonel Alfred Redl. The Redl story, like those of the Cambridge moles, has been embroidered with a good many fantasies. But even the unembroidered story is remarkable. In the winter of 1901-1902, Colonel Batyushin, head of Russian military intelligence in Warsaw, discovered that, unknown either to his superiors or to his friends, Red! was a promiscuous homosexual. By a mixture of blackmail and bribery of the kind sometimes employed later by the KGB; he recruited Red) as a penetration agent. With the money given him by the Russians, Redl was able to purchase cars for himself and for one of his favorite lovers, a young Uhlan officer to whom he paid 600 crowns a month. Red! provided voluminous intelligence during the decade before his suicide in 1913, including Austria's mobilization plans against both Russia and Serbia. 4
The Bolsheviks learned from Okhrana files after the February Revolution that almost from the moment the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, they had been more successfully penetrated than perhaps any other revolutionary group. Okhrana knowledge of Bolshevik organisation and activities was so detailed and thorough that, though some of its records were scattered when its offices were sacked in the aftermath of the February Revolution, what survived has become one of the major documentary sources for early Bolshevik history. Of the five members of the Bolshevik Party's St. Petersburg Committee in 1908 and 1909, no less than four were Okhrana agents.5 The most remarkable mole, recruited by the Okhrana in 1910, was a Moscow worker named Roman Malinovskv, who in 1912 was elected as one of the six Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, the tsarist parliament. "For the first time," wrote Lenin enthusiastically, "we have an outstanding leader (Malinovsky) from among the workers representing us in the Duma." In a party dedicated to proletarian revolution but as yet without proletarian leaders, Lenin saw Malinovsky, whom he brought on to the Bolshevik Central Committee, as a portent of great importance: "It is really possible to build a workers' party with such people, though the difficulties will be incredibly great."
...By 1912, Lenin was so concerned by the problem of Okhrana penetration that, on his initiative, the Bolshevik Central Committee set up a three-man "provocation commission" that included Malinovskv... S. P. Beletsky, the director of the Police Department, described Malinovsky as " the pride of the Okhrana." But the strain of his double life eventually proved too much. Even Lenin, his strongest supporter, became concerned about his heavy drinking. In May 1914, the new Deputy Minister of the Interior, V. F. Dzhunkovsky, possibly fearing the scandal that would result if Malinovsky's increasingly erratic behavior led to the revelation that the Okhrana employed him as an agent in the Duma, decided to get rid of him. Malinovsky resigned from the Duma, and he fled from St. Petersburg with a 6,000-rouble payoff that the Okhrana urged him to use to start a new life abroad. But Lenin had been so thoroughly deceived that, when proof of Malinovsky's guilt emerged from Okhrana files opened after the February Revolution in 1917, he at first refused to believe it.7
The infant KGB's two most successful human intelligence operations of the 1920s, Sindikat and Trest, involved the creation of a bogus anti-Bolshevik underground in Russia in order to penetrate genuine anti-Bolshevik groups in the West. The deception lured to their destruction the two men the KGB regarded as its most dangerous opponents: the former anti-tsarist terrorist Boris Savinkov, who had become Kerensky's deputy minister for war, and the British "master spy", Sidney Reilly.
The KGB also penetrated and subverted the Paris headquarters of the remnants of the White Armies that had been defeated in the Civil War. The climax of that penetration was the kidnap and assassination of two successive heads of the White Guards, General Aleksandr Kutyepov in 1930 and General Yevgeny Miller in 1937. Emigre Trotskyists were penetrated, undermined, and their leaders assassinated in almost identical fashion. The chief aide of Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov, the main Trotskyist organiser in Western Europe, was the KGB agent, Mark Zborowski. Sedov was liquidated in 1938, followed by several other leading Trotskyists and finally by the great heretic himself in Mexico in 1940. 8
Until World War II, no Western intelligence service, with the possible exception of the French, made it a major priority to obtain cipher materials or diplomatic documents to assist its cryptanalysts. The Okhrana, however, had made such material one of its major objectives by the beginning of the 20th century. The British Ambassador in St. Petersburg from 1904 to 1906, Sir Charles Hardinge, discovered that his head chancery servant had been offered the staggering sum of 1,000 pounds to steal a copy of one of his diplomatic ciphers. At 1980's values, that sum compares with the Walker family 's earnings from the KGB.
Hardinge also told the Foreign Office he experienced "a disagreeable shock" on learning of the vulnerability of his ciphers. A prominent Russian politician told him he "did not mind how much I reported in writing what he told me in conversation, but he begged me on no account to use the telegraph, as all our telegrams are known." 10
...Efforts to improve the British Embassy's rather primitive security were unavailing. Cecil Spring Rice, the Embassy Secretary, reported in February 1906 that, "For some time past, papers have been abstracted from this Embassy . .. . The porter and other persons in connection with the Embassy are in the pay of the police department and are also paid on delivery of papers. . . . Emissaries of the secret police are constantly waiting in the evening outside the Embassy in order to take charge of the paper procured ..." Despite the installation of a new safe, the fitting of padlocks to the filing cabinets and instructions to diplomatic staff not to let the chancery keys out of their possession, the theft of papers continued. Two months later, Spring Rice obtained proof "that access has been obtained to the archives of the Embassy, which have been taken off to the house of the Agent Komissarov, where they have been photographed." The probable culprit was a bribed servant who had taken wax impressions of the padlocks to the filing cabinets and had then been provided with duplicate keys by the Okhrana. The American, Swedish, and Belgian Embassies all reported similar successful attempts to burgle their files. 12
From 1898 to 1901, Russia made repeated attempts to persuade Germany to sign a secret agreement on spheres of influence in the Turkish Empire that would recognise her age-old ambitions in the Bosporus. The attempts were abandoned at the end of 1901 because, as the Russian Foreign Minister Count Lamsdorf informed his ambassador in Berlin, decrypted German telegrams showed that the German government had no real intention of signing an agreement. 13
The KGB and GRU revived and expanded tsarist techniques for obtaining Western cipher materials and diplomatic documents to assist their codebreakers. Initially, their most successful Sigint-support operations were probably those targeted on Western embassies in Third World capitals, notably Beijing and Tehran. A police raid on the Soviet Embassy in Beijing in April 1927 uncovered entire filing cabinets full of diplomatic dispatches and cipher materials stolen by Chinese servants and others from Western diplomatic missions. In the filing cabine ts, according to a Foreign Office minute, were " probably the two most important dispatches"· written recently by the British envoy, Sir Miles Lampson, as well as other British documents. Lampson himself reported that thefts of Italian and Japanese documents were even m ore extensive. The documents obtained from the Italia n legation included " decyphers of a ll important telegrams between Peking and Rome and vice-versa." Stolen Japanese files, according to Lampson, were " comprehensive and even include such details and sea ting arrangements at official dinners and records of conversations held between officials of Legation and visitors thereto." 16
It is equally clear that existing accounts of the origins of the Nazi-Soviet pact require some revision in order to take account of the role of Soviet Sigint and stolen diplomatic documents. Donald Cameron Watt has recently argued persuasively that, during Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Russians provided the German Embassy in London with misleading excerpts from British diplomatic documents. The intercepts were designed to encourage the Germans to conclude a Nazi-Soviet pact by suggesting at various times that the British were more eager for a deal with Russia than in fact they were and that they were willing to offer better terms than were actually offered. 20
A reassessment of the " Great Patriotic War" in the light of the achievements of Soviet Sigint is also overdue. In the early 1970s, the history of the Western Front was suddenly transformed by the disclosure of two stunning intelligence successes. First came the revelation of the Double Cross, which turned all surviving German agents in Britain into British- controlled double agents feeding the enemy with false intelligence. Then came the even more sensational disclosure of the "Ultra" secret: the breaking at Bletchley Park of the main enemy codes and ciphers, especially the various versions of the German "Enigma." For the next 15 years, historians were astonishingly slow to ask whether anything similar happened on the Eastern Front. The pioneering research of David Glantz concludes that, so far as deception was concerned, it did. Maskirovka, he argues, achieved successes on the Eastern Front comparable with those of the Double Cross system in the West. It remains difficult to assess in detail the achievement of Soviet wartime Sigint. Geoff Jukes, however, has argued convincingly that there was a dramatic improvement in Soviet Sigint during the few months after the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad early in 1943. 21 The major reason for that improvement was probably so straightforward that it has been generally overlooked. Among the more than 80,000 German prisoners of war, there were signals personnel running into three figures. When their Soviet captors requested their cooperation: most must surely have concluded that it would be unwise to refuse. Soviet Sigint was, once again, powerfully assisted by human intelligence.
In the space of a few years at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Soviet intelligence had no less than three agents operating in the National Security Agency and successfully recruited another NSA defector. In December 1959, two NSA cryptanalysts, 30-year-old Bernon F. Mitchell and 28-year-old William H. Martin, flew undetected to Cuba at the beginning of their three-week annual leave, boarded a Soviet freighter, and delivered their shopping lists in Moscow. Their absence was not detected by NSA until over a week after the end of their leave.
In September, Mitchell and Martin gave a highly embarrassing press conference in Mo5cow 's House of Journalists, where they revealed, inter alia, details of NSA 's breaking of the codes of American allies and of US overflights of Soviet territory. Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell had been recruited by NSA, despite admitting to six years of "sexual experimentations" up to the age of 19 with dogs and chickens. The security review that followed his and Martin's defection seems to have concentrated on a search for other sexual deviants .. It failed to detect Jack E. Dunlap, an Army sergeant assigned to NSA as a courier for highly classified documents who, despite a salary of only $100 a week, had purchased a Jaguar, two Cadillacs and a 30-foot cabin cruiser. Dunlap's three years of well-paid work for the KGB from 1960 to 1963 lasted slightly longer than John F. Kennedy's term in the White House. When Dunlap committed suicide in 1963 under the strain of his double life. he was buried with full military honors, like Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery. His treachery might never have been revealed but for his wife's discovery a month after his death of a cache of documents he had failed to deliver to his Soviet control.
On the very day Dunlap's suicide was discovered, another NSA defector, Victor N. Hamilton, gave another embarrassing news conference in Moscow. Once again, Soviet intelligence had exploited a weak link in US Sigint security. NSA had retained Hamilton as a cryptanalyst working on Arabic material even after its psychiatrists pronounced him "mentally ill" in February 1959, discharging him only four months later when he was diagnosed as "approaching a paranoid-schizophrenic break." 23
But for some time the greatest opportunities for Soviet penetration have come from the bribery and seduction of low-level personnel with access to Sigint and technical collection. The classic examples over the last 25 years have been the Walker family network in the United States from 1968 to 1984 and Geoffrey Prime at GCHQ from 1968 to 1978. Both, disturbingly, were discovered largely by chance: Walker as the result of evidence from his wife and anonymous letters from Jerry Whitworth; Prime after he had been caught molesting schoolgirls. More recently, the seduction of Marines guarding the cipher room in the US Embassy in Moscow is part of a KGB penetration plan which is as old as American-Soviet diplomatic relations. In 1939, the assistant American military attache in Moscow, Ivan D. Yeaton, noted how "generously" the NKVD provided female company for embassy clerks:
> 'These "party girls" were will-trained linguists and informers known as intelligence circles as "pigeons". Having attended a few of these parties, I was amazed at the freedom with which (embassy) lads discussed embassy affairs before the "pigeons". It also became obvious, at least to me, that there were homosexuals in the group. From a security standpoint, this was a dangerous situation. But as long as . .. my superior ... also had a [Russian] girlfriend, there was nothing I could do about it.'24
There is no convincing evidence that any KGB-inspired press campaign in the West has been as effective as the tsarist attempt to persuade Western investors, all of whom later lost their money, to ignore the risks of investing in Russia. Before World War I, every Paris newspaper of note save for the socialist L'Humanite was successfully bribed to support tsarist government loans. By 1914, 25 percent of France's foreign investment was in Russia-three times as much as in the whole French empire, the second biggest empire in world history.1 The immense French stake in Russia - 80% of it in government loans - was not due simply to tsarist "active measures", but it would scarcely have been possible without them. It is only necessary to imagine the possible consequences of an equally well-funded press campaign designed to frighten, rather than to reassure, French investors about the state of Russia and the security of their investments. [See also http://www.persee.fr/articleAsPDF/cmr_0008-0160_1972_num_13_1_1867/article_cmr_0008-0160_1972_num_13_1_1867.pdf http://www.econ.rutgers.edu/dmdocuments/KimOosterlinck.pdf] Nor, contrary to popular belief, is there any evidence that KGB forgeries, despite their increased numbers, are more effective than those of the tsarist Okhrana. There is a strong probability that Peter Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana's Paris-based Foreign Agency from 1884 to 1902. was responsible for the fabrication of the famous anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which described a mythical Jewish plot for world domination. The Protocols re-emerged between the wars as one of the central texts in Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism, becoming the most influential forgery of the 20th century. 2 It is still published in a number of countries, mostly in the Middle East. No KGB forgery has had a comparable influence.
After its foundation in 1881 , the Okhrana rapidly developed a network of agents and agents provocateurs, initially to penetrate the revolutionary Diaspora abroad. In 1886, Rachkovsky's agents blew up the People's Will printworks in Geneva, successfully giving the impression that the explosion was the work of disaffected revolutionaries. In 1890, Rachkovsky unmasked a sensational bomb-making conspiracy by Russian emigres in Paris; the leading plotter was, in reality. one of his own agents provocateurs.
The most successful intelligence penetration anywhere in Europe before World War I was the Russian recruitment of the senior Austrian military intelligence officer, Colonel Alfred Redl. The Redl story, like those of the Cambridge moles, has been embroidered with a good many fantasies. But even the unembroidered story is remarkable. In the winter of 1901-1902, Colonel Batyushin, head of Russian military intelligence in Warsaw, discovered that, unknown either to his superiors or to his friends, Red! was a promiscuous homosexual. By a mixture of blackmail and bribery of the kind sometimes employed later by the KGB; he recruited Red) as a penetration agent. With the money given him by the Russians, Redl was able to purchase cars for himself and for one of his favorite lovers, a young Uhlan officer to whom he paid 600 crowns a month. Red! provided voluminous intelligence during the decade before his suicide in 1913, including Austria's mobilization plans against both Russia and Serbia. 4
The Bolsheviks learned from Okhrana files after the February Revolution that almost from the moment the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, they had been more successfully penetrated than perhaps any other revolutionary group. Okhrana knowledge of Bolshevik organisation and activities was so detailed and thorough that, though some of its records were scattered when its offices were sacked in the aftermath of the February Revolution, what survived has become one of the major documentary sources for early Bolshevik history. Of the five members of the Bolshevik Party's St. Petersburg Committee in 1908 and 1909, no less than four were Okhrana agents.5 The most remarkable mole, recruited by the Okhrana in 1910, was a Moscow worker named Roman Malinovskv, who in 1912 was elected as one of the six Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, the tsarist parliament. "For the first time," wrote Lenin enthusiastically, "we have an outstanding leader (Malinovsky) from among the workers representing us in the Duma." In a party dedicated to proletarian revolution but as yet without proletarian leaders, Lenin saw Malinovsky, whom he brought on to the Bolshevik Central Committee, as a portent of great importance: "It is really possible to build a workers' party with such people, though the difficulties will be incredibly great."
...By 1912, Lenin was so concerned by the problem of Okhrana penetration that, on his initiative, the Bolshevik Central Committee set up a three-man "provocation commission" that included Malinovskv... S. P. Beletsky, the director of the Police Department, described Malinovsky as " the pride of the Okhrana." But the strain of his double life eventually proved too much. Even Lenin, his strongest supporter, became concerned about his heavy drinking. In May 1914, the new Deputy Minister of the Interior, V. F. Dzhunkovsky, possibly fearing the scandal that would result if Malinovsky's increasingly erratic behavior led to the revelation that the Okhrana employed him as an agent in the Duma, decided to get rid of him. Malinovsky resigned from the Duma, and he fled from St. Petersburg with a 6,000-rouble payoff that the Okhrana urged him to use to start a new life abroad. But Lenin had been so thoroughly deceived that, when proof of Malinovsky's guilt emerged from Okhrana files opened after the February Revolution in 1917, he at first refused to believe it.7
The infant KGB's two most successful human intelligence operations of the 1920s, Sindikat and Trest, involved the creation of a bogus anti-Bolshevik underground in Russia in order to penetrate genuine anti-Bolshevik groups in the West. The deception lured to their destruction the two men the KGB regarded as its most dangerous opponents: the former anti-tsarist terrorist Boris Savinkov, who had become Kerensky's deputy minister for war, and the British "master spy", Sidney Reilly.
The KGB also penetrated and subverted the Paris headquarters of the remnants of the White Armies that had been defeated in the Civil War. The climax of that penetration was the kidnap and assassination of two successive heads of the White Guards, General Aleksandr Kutyepov in 1930 and General Yevgeny Miller in 1937. Emigre Trotskyists were penetrated, undermined, and their leaders assassinated in almost identical fashion. The chief aide of Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov, the main Trotskyist organiser in Western Europe, was the KGB agent, Mark Zborowski. Sedov was liquidated in 1938, followed by several other leading Trotskyists and finally by the great heretic himself in Mexico in 1940. 8
Until World War II, no Western intelligence service, with the possible exception of the French, made it a major priority to obtain cipher materials or diplomatic documents to assist its cryptanalysts. The Okhrana, however, had made such material one of its major objectives by the beginning of the 20th century. The British Ambassador in St. Petersburg from 1904 to 1906, Sir Charles Hardinge, discovered that his head chancery servant had been offered the staggering sum of 1,000 pounds to steal a copy of one of his diplomatic ciphers. At 1980's values, that sum compares with the Walker family 's earnings from the KGB.
Hardinge also told the Foreign Office he experienced "a disagreeable shock" on learning of the vulnerability of his ciphers. A prominent Russian politician told him he "did not mind how much I reported in writing what he told me in conversation, but he begged me on no account to use the telegraph, as all our telegrams are known." 10
...Efforts to improve the British Embassy's rather primitive security were unavailing. Cecil Spring Rice, the Embassy Secretary, reported in February 1906 that, "For some time past, papers have been abstracted from this Embassy . .. . The porter and other persons in connection with the Embassy are in the pay of the police department and are also paid on delivery of papers. . . . Emissaries of the secret police are constantly waiting in the evening outside the Embassy in order to take charge of the paper procured ..." Despite the installation of a new safe, the fitting of padlocks to the filing cabinets and instructions to diplomatic staff not to let the chancery keys out of their possession, the theft of papers continued. Two months later, Spring Rice obtained proof "that access has been obtained to the archives of the Embassy, which have been taken off to the house of the Agent Komissarov, where they have been photographed." The probable culprit was a bribed servant who had taken wax impressions of the padlocks to the filing cabinets and had then been provided with duplicate keys by the Okhrana. The American, Swedish, and Belgian Embassies all reported similar successful attempts to burgle their files. 12
From 1898 to 1901, Russia made repeated attempts to persuade Germany to sign a secret agreement on spheres of influence in the Turkish Empire that would recognise her age-old ambitions in the Bosporus. The attempts were abandoned at the end of 1901 because, as the Russian Foreign Minister Count Lamsdorf informed his ambassador in Berlin, decrypted German telegrams showed that the German government had no real intention of signing an agreement. 13
The KGB and GRU revived and expanded tsarist techniques for obtaining Western cipher materials and diplomatic documents to assist their codebreakers. Initially, their most successful Sigint-support operations were probably those targeted on Western embassies in Third World capitals, notably Beijing and Tehran. A police raid on the Soviet Embassy in Beijing in April 1927 uncovered entire filing cabinets full of diplomatic dispatches and cipher materials stolen by Chinese servants and others from Western diplomatic missions. In the filing cabine ts, according to a Foreign Office minute, were " probably the two most important dispatches"· written recently by the British envoy, Sir Miles Lampson, as well as other British documents. Lampson himself reported that thefts of Italian and Japanese documents were even m ore extensive. The documents obtained from the Italia n legation included " decyphers of a ll important telegrams between Peking and Rome and vice-versa." Stolen Japanese files, according to Lampson, were " comprehensive and even include such details and sea ting arrangements at official dinners and records of conversations held between officials of Legation and visitors thereto." 16
It is equally clear that existing accounts of the origins of the Nazi-Soviet pact require some revision in order to take account of the role of Soviet Sigint and stolen diplomatic documents. Donald Cameron Watt has recently argued persuasively that, during Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Russians provided the German Embassy in London with misleading excerpts from British diplomatic documents. The intercepts were designed to encourage the Germans to conclude a Nazi-Soviet pact by suggesting at various times that the British were more eager for a deal with Russia than in fact they were and that they were willing to offer better terms than were actually offered. 20
A reassessment of the " Great Patriotic War" in the light of the achievements of Soviet Sigint is also overdue. In the early 1970s, the history of the Western Front was suddenly transformed by the disclosure of two stunning intelligence successes. First came the revelation of the Double Cross, which turned all surviving German agents in Britain into British- controlled double agents feeding the enemy with false intelligence. Then came the even more sensational disclosure of the "Ultra" secret: the breaking at Bletchley Park of the main enemy codes and ciphers, especially the various versions of the German "Enigma." For the next 15 years, historians were astonishingly slow to ask whether anything similar happened on the Eastern Front. The pioneering research of David Glantz concludes that, so far as deception was concerned, it did. Maskirovka, he argues, achieved successes on the Eastern Front comparable with those of the Double Cross system in the West. It remains difficult to assess in detail the achievement of Soviet wartime Sigint. Geoff Jukes, however, has argued convincingly that there was a dramatic improvement in Soviet Sigint during the few months after the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad early in 1943. 21 The major reason for that improvement was probably so straightforward that it has been generally overlooked. Among the more than 80,000 German prisoners of war, there were signals personnel running into three figures. When their Soviet captors requested their cooperation: most must surely have concluded that it would be unwise to refuse. Soviet Sigint was, once again, powerfully assisted by human intelligence.
In the space of a few years at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Soviet intelligence had no less than three agents operating in the National Security Agency and successfully recruited another NSA defector. In December 1959, two NSA cryptanalysts, 30-year-old Bernon F. Mitchell and 28-year-old William H. Martin, flew undetected to Cuba at the beginning of their three-week annual leave, boarded a Soviet freighter, and delivered their shopping lists in Moscow. Their absence was not detected by NSA until over a week after the end of their leave.
In September, Mitchell and Martin gave a highly embarrassing press conference in Mo5cow 's House of Journalists, where they revealed, inter alia, details of NSA 's breaking of the codes of American allies and of US overflights of Soviet territory. Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell had been recruited by NSA, despite admitting to six years of "sexual experimentations" up to the age of 19 with dogs and chickens. The security review that followed his and Martin's defection seems to have concentrated on a search for other sexual deviants .. It failed to detect Jack E. Dunlap, an Army sergeant assigned to NSA as a courier for highly classified documents who, despite a salary of only $100 a week, had purchased a Jaguar, two Cadillacs and a 30-foot cabin cruiser. Dunlap's three years of well-paid work for the KGB from 1960 to 1963 lasted slightly longer than John F. Kennedy's term in the White House. When Dunlap committed suicide in 1963 under the strain of his double life. he was buried with full military honors, like Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery. His treachery might never have been revealed but for his wife's discovery a month after his death of a cache of documents he had failed to deliver to his Soviet control.
On the very day Dunlap's suicide was discovered, another NSA defector, Victor N. Hamilton, gave another embarrassing news conference in Moscow. Once again, Soviet intelligence had exploited a weak link in US Sigint security. NSA had retained Hamilton as a cryptanalyst working on Arabic material even after its psychiatrists pronounced him "mentally ill" in February 1959, discharging him only four months later when he was diagnosed as "approaching a paranoid-schizophrenic break." 23
But for some time the greatest opportunities for Soviet penetration have come from the bribery and seduction of low-level personnel with access to Sigint and technical collection. The classic examples over the last 25 years have been the Walker family network in the United States from 1968 to 1984 and Geoffrey Prime at GCHQ from 1968 to 1978. Both, disturbingly, were discovered largely by chance: Walker as the result of evidence from his wife and anonymous letters from Jerry Whitworth; Prime after he had been caught molesting schoolgirls. More recently, the seduction of Marines guarding the cipher room in the US Embassy in Moscow is part of a KGB penetration plan which is as old as American-Soviet diplomatic relations. In 1939, the assistant American military attache in Moscow, Ivan D. Yeaton, noted how "generously" the NKVD provided female company for embassy clerks:
> 'These "party girls" were will-trained linguists and informers known as intelligence circles as "pigeons". Having attended a few of these parties, I was amazed at the freedom with which (embassy) lads discussed embassy affairs before the "pigeons". It also became obvious, at least to me, that there were homosexuals in the group. From a security standpoint, this was a dangerous situation. But as long as . .. my superior ... also had a [Russian] girlfriend, there was nothing I could do about it.'24