Strategic deception has become an unfashionable concept in Western intelligence circles, largely because of the extremes to which some of its adherents, myself included in the early days, pushed it. But there is no doubt that it has a long and potent history. The "Trust" operations of the GPU and OGPU in the early years of the Bolshevik regime are a powerful reminder to any KGB recruit of the role these operations can play. At a time when the Bolshevik regime was threatened by several million White Russian emigre's in the 1920s, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the legendary founder of the modern Russian Intelligence Services, masterminded the creation of a fake organization inside Russia dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. The Trust attracted the support of White Russian emigre groups abroad, and the Intelligence Services of the West, particularly MI6. In fact, the Trust was totally controlled by the OGPU, and they were able to neutralize most Emigre and hostile intelligence activity, even kidnapping and disposing of the two top White leaders, Generals Kutepov and Miller, and the Trust persuaded the British not to attack the Soviet Government because it would be done by internal forces.
Strategic deception has also played a major part in the history of Western intelligence, most notably in the Double Cross operations of the war, which enabled the Allies to mislead the Germans about our intentions at D-Day.
Looking at the intelligence balance in 1963, there was no doubt that the Soviets had the necessary conditions to begin a major disinformation exercise. They had large-scale and high-level penetrations in the West, especially in Britain and the USA, and had possessed them almost continuously since the war. Hiss, Maclean, the nuclear spies, Philby, Burgess, Blake, and the many others gave them a very intimate knowledge of the very organizations which needed to be deceived. Secondly, and often overlooked, the Soviets had continuous penetrations of the Western Signals Intelligence organizations since the war, from Philby and Maclean until 1951, but closer to the early 1960s through the defection of the NSA operatives Martin and Mitchell in 1960, and the suicide in 1963 of Jack Dunlap, a chauffeur at NSA who betrayed details of dozens of the most sensitive discussions by senior NSA officials in his car.
As I read the files, a number of reasons made me believe that Penkovsky had to be the deception operation of which Golitsin had learned in 1959. The first thing that struck me about Penkovsky was the sheer coincidence of his arrival. If ever an organization needed a triumph it was MI6 in the early 1960s. It was rocked by the twin blows of Philby and George Blake, its morale desperately low after the Crabbe affair, and the disastrous Suez operations, and Dick White was trying to rebuild it. He removed the post of Deputy Director, sacked a number of senior officers most closely associated with the Sinclair regime, and tried to introduce some line management. He was never entirely successful. Dick was not a particularly gifted administrator. His achievements in MI5 stemmed from intimate knowledge of the office and its personnel, and a deep knowledge of counterespionage, rather than a flair for running organizations.
Deprived of these, his first years in MI6 were, almost inevitably, marked by expediency rather than clear strategy. This was never so well illustrated as with his decision to retain Philby as an agent runner in the Middle East, even though he believed him to be a spy. I asked him about this later, and he said that he simply felt that to sack Philby would create more problems inside MI6 than it might solve. Looking at MI6 in the early 1960s, I was reminded of Lenin's famous remark to Feliks Dzerzhinsky.
"The West are wishful thinkers, we will give them what they want to think."
MI6 needed a success, and they needed to believe in a success. In Penkovsky they got it.
There were three specific areas of the Penkovsky case which made me highly suspicious. The first was the manner of his recruitment. Toward the end of 1960, Penkovsky visited the American Embassy in Moscow in connection with his ostensible job, which was to arrange exchange visits with the West on scientific and technical matters. Once inside the Embassy he offered to provide intelligence to the Americans, and was interviewed by the CIA in their secure compound. He told them that he was, in fact, a senior GRU officer, working for the GKNIIR, the joint organization between the KGB and the GRU on scientific and technical intelligence. The Americans decided Penkovsky was a provocation, and refused his offer. By the time I read the files, the Americans had discovered through another defector, Nossenko, that the rooms used for the interview with Penkovsky had been clandestinely microphoned by the KGB. It was obvious that even if Penkovsky had been genuine, the Russians must have learned of his offer to spy for the Americans.
Early in 1961 Penkovsky made another attempt. He approached a Canadian businessman named Van Vleet in his apartment in Moscow. Van Vleet interviewed Penkovsky in his bathroom, with the water taps running to shield their conversation from eavesdropping. There was no proof that Van Vleet's apartment was bugged, but both he and Penkovsky assumed it to be so, because of his connections with the RCMP. Later, at Penkovsky's trial, evidence against him was produced in the form of tape recordings of conversations between Penkovsky and Wynne which had also taken place in bathrooms with water taps running. It was clear that the Russians had technical means of defeating this type of countercoverage.
Penkovsky's third approach, to Wynne, was successful, and as a result he was run jointly by MI6 and the CIA. But the second suspect area in the Penkovsky case was the type of intelligence which he provided. It was split into two types: ARNIKA, which was straight intelligence, and RUPEE, which was counterintelligence.
The RUPEE material consisted mostly of identifications of GRU officers around the world, nearly all of which were accurate and most of which were already known to us. But beyond that there were no leads at all which identified any Soviet illegals in the West, or to past or present penetrations of Western security. It made no sense to me; here was a man in some ways fulfilling a function analogous to my own, who had spent years at the summit of the GRU, and in regular contact with the KGB, and yet he had apparently picked up not one trace of intelligence about Soviet intelligence assets in the West. I compared Penkovsky's counterintelligence with that of the last major GRU source, Colonel Popov, who spied for the CIA inside the GRU during the 1950s. Popov provided identifications of nearly forty illegals operating in the West, before he was captured and shot.
ARNIKA was different; Penkovsky handed over literally thousands of documents dealing with the most sensitive Soviet military systems. But there were two oddities. Firstly, he sometimes handed over original documents. It seemed to me beyond belief that a spy would risk passing over actual originals, or that the Russians would not miss them from the files. Secondly, Penkovsky's most important documents, which enabled the Americans to identify the Russian missiles in Cuba, were shown to him by his uncle, a senior GRU commander of missile forces. Penkovsky claimed that he copied the document while his uncle was out of the room. Once again, this seemed to me to smack more of James Bond than of real life.
The third area which made me suspect Penkovsky was the manner in which he was run. The tradecraft was appallingly reckless for such a sensitive source. The problem was that his intelligence was so valuable, and at the time of the Cuban missile crisis so current, that he was literally bled for everything that could be got, with little attempt made to protect him or preserve him as a long-term asset. I counted the distribution list for Penkovsky's intelligence. Seventeen hundred people in Britain alone had access to Penkovsky's material during the time he was running in place. MI6, MI5, GCHQ, the various branches of Military Intelligence, the JIC, the Service chiefs and their staffs, the Foreign Office, various scientific research establishments - they all had their own lists of people indoctrinated for various parts of Penkovsky's material, although few people saw the whole range. Of course, like all source reports, there was no hint as to how the intelligence had been acquired, but by any standards it was an astonishingly large distribution, and raised the question of whether it would have been detected by the ever-vigilant Russian Intelligence Services, who at that point in 1963 had demonstrated a consistent ability to penetrate British security at high levels.