I was just watching the rerun of the final episode of The Sopranos ‘ second season, the one in
which they expose and dispose of Big Pussy, the crime-family mole. It captured
the schizoid way that friends and colleagues respond to those who betray them
at close range-betray them, not behind their back, but in their face. It’s both
intimate and horrifying. In the language of mole literature, they’ve been
“penetrated.” The sequence concludes with the penetrated and the penetrator all
sharing shots of tequila on Tony’s boat before they shoot Pussy and throw his
bulky body into the ocean.
It was beautifully and subtly written, and what I loved was
the way the subplot and subtext of the episode-about Tony Soprano’s food
poisoning-reflected the Big Pussy mole plot. Throughout the scenes leading up
to the execution of Big Pussy, Tony is puking and farting and racing to the
toilet. There’s a lot of speculation in the dialogue about what caused the food
poisoning: Was it the chicken vindaloo at the Indian restaurant, the zucchini
flowers or the mussels at the Italian restaurant? The mystery suggests that the
food poisoning is really a metaphor: Tony just can’t digest the fact that his close friend has betrayed him, and he
experiences the trauma of betrayal internally.
I found myself thinking about that as I was reading the
100-page FBI affidavit and dossier on the mole who called himself “B”. I found
myself thinking about the mole whose history I knew best, Kim Philby. What
triggered it all was the lie B told about Kim Philby.
You know about Philby, right? The Godfather of moles, the
one sometimes called “the Spy of the Century,” a.k.a. the “Third Man.” Not
precisely the Third Man of the Graham Greene novella or the film of that name,
though there’s more of a link between the two than is generally known. (See my
column, “Thriller of the Century,” Jan. 17, 2000.)
The lie about Philby was one the alleged mole told not to
the F.B.I. he was deceiving, but to the Russians he was spying for. The lie
about Philby had been quoted in much of the initial coverage of the arrest of
Robert Hanssen, amid allegations that he is the mole who called himself B, the
agent who, the F.B.I. claims, volunteered his services to the K.G.B. in 1985.
(To preserve Mr. Hanssen’s presumption of innocence-particularly important
considering recent F.B.I. blunders in the Richard Jewell and Wen Ho Lee cases-I
will refer to the mole by the pseudonyms used in his correspondence with his
Russian handlers: “B,” “Ramon Garcia,” “G. Robertson” and-I love this one-“Jim
Baker.”) Barring a confession, the F.B.I.’s task will be to prove in court that
Robert Hanssen is B. (Has James Baker
been interrogated yet?)
The lie about Philby appears in one of the last letters that
B wrote to the Russians. Quoting from the F.B.I. affidavit, The New York Times quoted B as follows: “I decided on this course when I was 14
years old-I’d read Philby’s book.”
But if the spy was Robert Hanssen, that’s a glaring lie,
because Mr. Hanssen-born in 1944-would have been 14 in 1958, five years before
Kim Philby defected to Moscow, 10 years before his memoir, My Silent War , was published in the West.
So either Mr. Hanssen is not the spy-or, if he is, then why
is he lying so blatantly and obviously to his Russian handlers? Well, one
reason might be that, in addition to deceiving his ostensible bosses at the
F.B.I., B was playing a game of deception with the very people he was being
paid to deceive for. Throughout his 15 years as a mole, B attempted-with what
success we can’t be sure-to conceal his name and true identity from the
Russians. Citing security concerns (among others; he knew we might have moles
within the K.G.B. unknown to him), B repeatedly refused the Russians’ requests
for face-to-face meetings or anything else that might give away his identity.
The lie about Philby might have been a way of disguising his
age, and thus further concealing his identity.
But what’s most interesting about the Philby lie is the
letter in which it comes: a remarkable, emotional, self-dramatizing letter from
a mole at the end of his tether. It’s a letter that B wrote approximately a
year before his arrest, a letter that is worth quoting at length because it
illustrates something crucial about the relationship between a mole and his
handler. The way it’s much like a long marriage. The following is a communiqué
from a spy, but it’s also a love letter:
… I have come about as
close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get
silence. I hate silence.
Conclusion: One might propose that I am either
insanely brave or quite insane. I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal.
Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers.
I have, however come
as close to the edge as I can without being truly insane. My security concerns
have proven reality-based. I’d say, pin your hopes on “insanely loyal” and go
for it. Only I can lose.
I decided on this
course when I was 14 years old. I’d read Philby’s book. Now that is insane, eh!
My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate
uncertainty. So far I have judged the edge correctly. Give me credit for that.
Set the signal at my
site any Tuesday evening. I will read your answer. Please, at least say
goodbye. It’s been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time.
[signed]
Ramon Garcia .
Wow! What’s going on here? Ever since my editor, “Agent P,”
downloaded the entire hundred-page F.B.I. dossier and affidavit on B/”Ramon
Garcia”/etc., I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between B and his
handlers. In particular, one of the Russians I’ve come to call “the Poet.” And
while it’s too early to make more than tentative conjectures, I think one can
say there are several things going on here:
First, the interpenetration of real spies and spy
literature. B’s melodramatic, emotional, existential language-“So far I have
judged the edge correctly”; “Only I can lose”; “It’s been a long time, my dear
friends, a long and lonely time”-seems clearly influenced by Le Carré’s
Romantic vision of the agent as a tormented hero out there alone on the edge.
The vision is best expressed in one of Le Carré’s lesser-known (but I think
perhaps best) novels, The Honourable
Schoolboy : a vision of the agent out there on the edge, taking the risks,
doing the dirty work, making the betrayals on behalf of the bureaucrats back
home.
Second, there’s tension in this marriage-and though we may
never know the specific trigger for the “lonely edge” letter, the Philby lie
picks up on a recurrent theme one can find throughout the correspondence
reprinted in the dossier: the struggle over B’s true identity. The struggle of
the K.G.B. and S.V.R. (the successor agency) to get B to give it up, and the
struggle of B to withhold his identity.
It’s easy to see why B wants to withhold his identity, but
why is it so important for the mole handlers?
It has to do with the way that historically, double agents
have often been double-edged swords.
It has to do with events that go back to Philby’s era, and
to Philby himself.
Consider one of the most famous, most history-making
intelligence failures: Stalin’s refusal to believe the warnings of Hitler’s
surprise attack in 1941. And consider one of history’s most famous intelligence
victories: the Allied intelligence deception that convinced Hitler that the
D-Day landing would come at Calais rather than Normandy, the one that caused
him to hold his reserves at Calais rather than commit them to Normandy even after the landing there-a decision that
may have decided the war. And consider the enigma of the Hess flight, the
shocking 1941 solo landing in Scotland by Hitler’s No. 2 man, Rudolph Hess, and
the way it was interpreted. All
three-victory, defeat and enigma-involving moles like Philby; the latter two
involved Philby himself.
In the first instance, Stalin nearly lost the war because he
refused to believe the reports of double agents all over the world who were
warning him that Hitler was about to attack. He was convinced that he couldn’t
trust his moles, because he feared they were actually disinformation agents in
the pay of the British, trying to split the alliance between him and Hitler. He
had moles, but (like B’s controllers), he didn’t always know who they were or
whether he could trust them.
While Hitler, in the case of the D-Day deception, did trust certain moles-and found
himself the victim of a brilliant deception operation that involved the use of false moles : the double-cross system.
The success of the double-cross system was predicated on a
remarkable intelligence coup: British counterintelligence captured and co-opted
virtually every single German agent sent into the U.K. during the war. Captured
them and either forced them to transmit disinformation on their short-wave broadcasts
back to Germany, or executed them and sent back radio broadcasts in their names to the Germans. These
dead or doubled agents convinced Hitler that General Patton was building the
main Allied invasion force across the channel from Calais, when Patton in fact
was building a false front, an empty shell designed to distract from the
Normandy destination of the D-Day invasion.
And then there was the
Hess case enigma, in which Philby was a central player. It’s a case I had
occasion to study when researching a piece on Philby based on access I’d gotten
to Philby’s private papers after his death, before they were auctioned off in
the London offices of Sotheby’s by his Russian wife and disappeared into the
hands of private collectors. (That piece, which first appeared in The New York Times Magazine , is
reprinted in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune. )
Philby was a Soviet mole within British intelligence when
Hess’ flight stunned the world. He may have been Stalin’s most important mole in
the West. Or was he working for himself as well? He certainly seemed like a
true believer. He’d been recruited in 1934 at Cambridge (along with four others
who made up the Cambridge Ring of Five). Radicalized by the Depression and by
the West’s failure to respond to the threat of Hitlerism, Philby worked out of
ideological conviction rather than for money, as his successor mole B did.
But, like B, he also worked for the love of the game.
A game-playing streak that may have disclosed itself in the
Hess case. It came at a turning point in the war, when Hitler was on the verge
of deciding whether to attempt an invasion of the U.K. or to send his forces
east against Stalin’s Red Army.
Suddenly-literally out of the blue-Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s
No. 2 man, landed his plane in Scotland and asked to be taken to a Scottish
lord, a leading light of the “peace party” in the U.K. Instead, he was captured
and taken to London for interrogation. The whole world, including Stalin, was
insane with desire to know what was going on. Philby’s controllers pressed
their moles: Was there a deal in the making that would leave Stalin out in the
cold to fight Hitler alone? Was this a British intelligence plot?
And here’s the
fascinating thing: Philby didn’t tell Stalin the whole truth. He shaded the
truth; he fabricated a key detail. We know this in part because the former
Soviet Union declassified the Soviet file on Hess, the so-called Black Bertha
file (“Black Bertha” was supposedly Hess’ nickname in the homosexual
underground).
It revealed that Philby had fed Stalin’s paranoia about
Hess, that he’d told Stalin, through his Russian controllers, that Hess had been part of a British plot to sign
a separate peace with Hitler and turn him against Stalin.
Can we know that for sure? Perhaps not; but I found a
tip-off in a little fabrication Philby made in his report to Stalin. I tracked
down the Scottish lord’s son to ask him about his father’s involvement in the
Hess flight, and he told me he’d concluded that “Philby lied” to Stalin. He lied,
the son told me, “by claiming that he was present at a
dinner in Berlin when my father supposedly met Hess-which never happened. My
father never met Hess.”
This seemingly minor lie, a claim of insider knowledge by
Philby to bolster his British-plot claim, was to have long-term consequences
for the postwar world. Stalin berated Churchill about it as late as 1944, and,
according to one of the best histories of the K.G.B. and its moles,
“contributing to Moscow’s distrust of British intentions was to be one of
Philby’s main achievements as a wartime Soviet agent.” A distrust that helped
create the paranoid psychic landscape of the Cold War.
Again an instance of how a double agent can be a
double-edged sword because he can have a double agenda: partly the one he’s
assigned, partly the one that may come from his own love of the game, of being
in a pivotal, double-facing position in which he can play one side against the
other, make them both dance to his own tune.
That’s why B’s handlers were so concerned to know the true
identity of their mole. That’s why they kept suggesting to him that they meet
face-to-face in a foreign country, suggestions that B consistently rejected.
Because it’s not enough to have a mole; you have to be certain you can trust your mole. The Russians feared a
double-cross operation: that B had been arrested and “turned” and used as a
conduit to feed disinformation to them. That’s why the relationship became more
strained, particularly in the last few years.
Because in the beginning of their relationship, the Russians
had reason to feel secure: They had backup to check out B’s good faith. They
had C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames, who’d volunteered his services less than six
months before B did. And so when B first approached the K.G.B. with his initial
blood-money offer-the names of three K.G.B. men who were moles for the U.S.-the
Russians took swift action, because Aldrich Ames had already given them the
same names (but they didn’t take
action until they had B to back up Mr. Ames’ claims).
But then, in 1994, Mr. Ames was exposed and arrested, and
suddenly the tension in the mole marriage between the Russians and B seems to
have ratcheted way up.
Because now they had only each other, and trust became more
a matter of faith on both sides. B would also wonder if the ostensibly
anti-Communist government of Boris Yeltsin would be as loyal to those who spied
for its Communist predecessors.
Enter the Poet.
That’s what I’ve chosen to call the author of the note from
the K.G.B. to B exchanged on April 15, 1991, not long before the K.G.B. coup
attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, at a time when things were in tremendous
flux in the Soviet Union.
Here’s how the Poet, the K.G.B. controller, chooses to open
his letter to his F.B.I. mole:
Dear Friend:
Time is flying. As a
poet said:
“What’s our life, / If
full of care / You have no time / To stop and stare?”
Why this stop-and-smell-the-roses advice from the K.G.B.? A
way, perhaps, of establishing a confiding bond of intimacy when geopolitical
allegiances were cracking and shifting. And when B makes a reference to Chicago
in one of his messages, the Poet comes back with a Beatles reference:
[T]he magical history
tour to Chicago was mysteriously well timed. Have You ever thought of
foretelling the things? After Your retirement for instance in some sort of Your
own “Cristall [ sic ] Ball and
Intelligence Agency” (CBIA)? There are so many people in this world eager to
get a glimpse of the future. But now back to where we belong….
I love that last line: the second Beatles reference from the K.G.B. poet, “Magical Mystery
Tour” followed by “Get Back.” The Poet later throws in a reference to a
country-and-western song, “The Green, Green Grass of Home.”
Was the Poet truly a poet and a Beatles fan? Or had his
agent-running training instructed him to use these devices to establish rapport
with lonely, sensitive moles, who need to believe they’re dealing with a
sensitive soul as a partner?
It’s about this time that a long separation occurs and then
a quarrel over money, which is not really a quarrel over money but a quarrel
over trust . B seems to have been
transferred away from his sensitive national-security-related posting in the
F.B.I. When he reestablishes contact, the Russian partner in the marriage
expresses “sincere joy” and then makes the mistake of striking a false note on
the money issue:
“[S]ince our last contact a sum set aside for you has risen
and presents now about 800,000 dollars.”
This sum was supposedly set aside in a Moscow bank after the
Russians had declined, on security grounds, to open a Swiss account for B.
Rather than being pleased, B is deeply offended :
“We do both know that money is not really ‘put away for you’
except in some vague accounting sense,” he says. “Never patronize at this
level,” he instructs his espionage partner with asperity. “It offends me, but
then you are easily forgiven. But perhaps I shouldn’t tease you. It just gets
me in trouble.”
Flirtatious B! Picking a quarrel in order to enjoy the
make-up sex, one might say.
Because he’s not really mad, he’s a bit sentimental: “I
greatly appreciate your highly professional inclusion of old references to
things known to you in messages … to assure me that the channel remains
unpirated. This is not lost on me.”
Well, the sentiment is practical. After the separation, he
wants to make sure that he’s communicating with his Russian partner, not an
F.B.I. sting operation.
But sentiment, even jealousy, is there in B’s comments on a
rival suitor. Listen to him rag on Felix Bloch, the suspected State Department
mole whom B was said to have helped escape entrapment back in 1989 through a
timely warning. It comes in the context of B explaining once again why he won’t
reveal his identity through a meeting in a foreign city:
I am loath to do so not because it is risky but
because it involves revealing my identity. That insulation has been my best
protection against betrayal by someone like me working from whatever
motivation, a Bloch or a Philby. (Bloch was such a shnook … I almost hated
protecting him, but then he was your friend and there was your illegal
[agent] I wanted to protect. If our guy sent to Paris had balls or brains bothwould have been dead meat … (emphasis
mine).
What are the lessons from studying these scenes from a mole
marriage? One might be tempted to say that moles are more trouble than they’re
worth. You can’t be absolutely sure you can trust these figures of deception
unless you have another mole, which raises questions of whether you can trust
the back-up mole not to be fronting his
own agenda.
But there is one sense in which moles may have served a
larger purpose in history than their small-time betrayals. You could make the
case, if you were inclined, that moles saved the planet. It’s often forgotten
how close the mutual suspicion, hostility and paranoia between the nuclear
powers brought us to the brink of nuclear war. Thirteen Days is a salutary reminder of the one instance when this
broke out into the open, but for 40 years a planet-destroying nuclear war was,
in the words of the song “Gimme Shelter,” “just a shot away.”
The fact that it didn’t
happen is a subject worthy of wonder, investigation and conjecture. And I have
a conjecture to offer: Maybe moles made a difference. On both sides. Maybe the
fact that, in looking across the divide, both geopolitical and psychological,
each side felt they weren’t completely blind
about the other, the fact that each side felt they could see inside the other, had penetrated each other, may have made a difference. It may have defused the
fear of a surprise attack, which was the great wild-card nuclear war danger.
The fear of a surprise attack leads to plans to preempt the surprise attack
with a surprise attack of one’s own. To strike preemptively on the slightest suspicion to prevent one’s
missiles from being destroyed in their silos before they can retaliate-which
leads to a dangerous, “use it or lose it” hair-trigger mentality.
The fact that each side felt it had an early-warning
system-a mole-within the other side’s centers of power and intelligence may
have made the difference: In the ultra-tense dialectic of suspicion and
distrust, the fact that each side had penetrated the other may have defused
potential planet-destroying surprise-attack paranoia.
Or not. We may never know. This is in no way a defense of the
betrayals that moles like B have committed; it doesn’t exculpate them from
responsibility for the deaths of friends and colleagues, for the death of trust
itself. It’s no accident that Dante reserved the ninth circle of Hell for those
who betray and inform.
