[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
a black eye. By the next morning, the American consul had
arranged her release from the Lubyanka Prison. She was de-
clared persona non grata and expelled a day later.
Reading Gorlenko s account, I detected a mix of previously
secret fact and likely falsehood. First, the revisionism: The case
history was written by the KGB, which had the unenviable
task of publicizing their success in capturing Mary Peters,
while simultaneously trying to deflect attention from TRIN-
ITY s considerable success as an espionage agent.
252 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
Further, the former KGB also had to explain how one of the
Soviet government s most promising young officials had been
recruited at a large embassy in the West well-staffed by coun-
terintelligence experts.
Gorlenko s version of the truth reflects these difficulties. To
overcome them, the account all but ignores the year between
the summers of 1976 and 1977, after Jacques reactivated
TRINITY and the agent delivered his trove of extremely valu-
able intelligence.
So, while the step-by-step record of Mary s surveillance and
capture on the bridge is completely accurate, I find it hard to
believe that the Second Chief Directorate had narrowed down
the list of suspected American agents to TRINITY alone by the
time he returned to Moscow, then simply allowed him to
continue in his sensitive position for two and a half years. And
it is just not plausible that they would have given him com-
pletely free rein for the first eighteen months of this period
before installing video surveillance in his small apartment. It
is more likely that our agent made a tradecraft mistake, as the
Agency s investigative panel indicated, and that this error led
to his subsequent surveillance and capture.
In short, I think the Internet account of TRINITY s demise
and Mary Peters s arrest represents an overstated historical
account, diluted with some good old-fashioned bureaucratic
Cover Your Ass revisionism that has survived the collapse of
Communism and the Soviet empire.
BUT THE COLD WAR was still a reality in 1978 when a situation
in Moscow fully restored both Turner s and Gore Harrington s
confidence in our Silver Bullet techniques.
CIA had received word that an internationally prominent,
English-language magazine published in the United States was
about to print a story that would inadvertently cast suspicion
on a retired senior Soviet
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 253
official as a former secret asset of the FBI and CIA. The Chief
of the Soviet-East European Division appealed to the
magazine s editor to kill the story, but this was impossible:
The issue was already printed. Publication of the article,
however, would place our loyal former agent in extreme
jeopardy.
Since the retired agent was no longer in contact with the
Moscow office, it was imperative that one of our officers slip
free of surveillance to warn the Russian and offer him the op-
tion of emergency exfiltration before the story broke. But those
who knew this old official, whose health was failing, feared
he would refuse the offer, for he loved his Russian homeland
as passionately as he despised the ruling Soviet system.
On the chance that the former agent would accept the offer,
my Technical Services group went ahead with preparations
for the very first clandestine exfiltration from Moscow. Gore
Harrington, still disdainful of CLOAK, opted to be the action
officer who would contact the agent. He was confident that he
could elude his watchers without resorting to the Silver Bullet
option.
But I had other problems to worry about. Since I had been
promoted from Chief of Disguise to Deputy of Authentication
the year before, it was my responsibility to oversee and plan
every detail of the risky exfiltration, including all the document
and disguise options for the subject and the American team.
Because he was well known, transporting the agent through
any airport in Moscow or elsewhere in the Soviet Union was
not feasible, but we had a fair chance of exfiltrating him by
land or sea to another Soviet bloc country, where we could
disguise and move him safely to the West. I marshaled my
troops, both at Headquarters and in Europe, urgently mounting
parallel probes along train and ferry routes, so that we could
update our information on con-
254 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
trols, with a focus on how the Soviet bloc security system
treated a traveler with a particular third-country alias and
cover. Jacob s capable team responded immediately, and the
first probes were dispatched. When I found that we had no
recent passport photo of the agent, my shop produced a suit-
able stand-in. We disguised him to closely resemble our subject
and photographed him in a variety of poses for his exfiltration
passport and other documents. The project consumed us as
we worked mind-numbing eighteen-hour days.
Early one morning several days later, my secretary brought
me a restricted-handling Secret cable from Gore Harrington.
Despite a concerted effort, he had been unable to break free of
KGB surveillance. As a last-ditch attempt, however, he had
turned to the Moscow CLOAK team we had trained and reluct-
antly chose an off-the-shelf Silver Bullet option, which we
had prepared for him despite his earlier resistance. On that
successful outing, Gore Harrington, like his colleagues before
him, had discovered the intoxicating power of invisibility.
Unfortunately, his clandestine meeting with the retired agent
was less productive. The old man s emotional bond to his
native Russian soil was too powerful for him to flee into exile.
He thanked Gore for all we had done, but bravely chose to
accept his fate.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]