Spy vs. Spy

Born in 1910 in St. Petersburg to the grandson of a Russian finance minister, Kisevalter departed Russia as a child when his father, a munitions expert, was dispatched to the United States in 1916 to procure weapons for the tsar’s army. When the revolution came, the Kisevalter family threw its support behind the Whites. All but one member of the family in Russia were annihilated. Kisevalter’s immediate family found itself stranded in New York. Growing up amid Russian refugees, Kisevalter remained fluent in his first language. After studying engineering at Dartmouth, he competently discharged his duties as an intelligence officer during the war. A brief career in alfalfa farming followed, after which he accepted, in late 1951, a position as branch chief in the Soviet Russia division of the newly formed CIA.

At the end of 1952, with the Cold War at its height, the United States was still ignorant of even the most basic information about Soviet plans and military capacity.

And then a miracle occurred. In 1953, a Soviet military intelligence officer stationed in Vienna named Pyotr Popov volunteered to spy for the United States. Kisevalter was elected to handle the case. (Living under an assumed name in Vienna, he took the principle of the double life to heart, maintaining an American wife in Salzburg and an Austrian mistress.)

Over the next five years, the spy provided Kisevalter with detailed information about Soviet military capabilities and plans. Popov was arrested in 1959, the victim of an American tradecraft error: As the defector Nosenko later revealed, a diplomat in Moscow, mailing Popov a letter, had failed to spot a Soviet surveillant, and the letter was retrieved from the mailbox and decoded. Hauntingly, Popov was able to pass one last message to his handlers. The KGB, intending to use him as a double agent, had sent him to a meeting with CIA case officer Russell Langelle in Moscow. In full view of KGB surveillance, Popov shook Langelle’s hand and in the process surreptitiously slipped him a note, rolled into a cylinder the size of a cigarette, revealing that he had passed under hostile control.

HE WAS A HERO to the end: The famous cylinder message provided a detailed account of the KGB’s understanding of Popov’s cooperation with the Americans and their plans to exploit him in the future. He had painstakingly written the message while in prison, over a period of months, concealing it under a bandage he had contrived to obtain by cutting his finger. Kisevalter was devastated by the note’s heartbreaking last words: “Could you not ask your kind President Eisenhower to see if he might cause restitution to be made for my family and my life?” Shortly after, Langelle was expelled from Russia and Popov sent to a Soviet firing squad.

In 1961, another miracle occurred. A GRU colonel named Oleg Penkovsky, an even more senior military intelligence officer, approached a group of visiting American students in Moscow and urged them to deliver a letter to the American embassy. “I offer my services to you,” Penkovsky wrote, “and I have some most significant facts to share.” Again, Kisevalter was dispatched to handle the case. The information Penkovsky provided over the next year included the manuals on the SS-4, the missiles deployed by the Soviet Union in Cuba in 1962, and the revelation that the Soviet Union did not yet possess operational ICBMs. By opening a window into the Kremlin’s internal politics, Penkovsky drew the United States back from the brink of nuclear war during the Berlin and Cuban crises. For this, Kisevalter became a CIA legend. Penkovsky, however, was undone by an astute KGB surveillance team and executed by firing squad.

IN 1962, YURI NOSENKO, a Soviet counterintelligence officer who had squandered KGB funds on a drinking spree (and a thieving hooker, although Ashley chastely refrains from mentioning this detail), volunteered his services to the CIA in Geneva. He defected to the United States in 1964. The Agency was not so sure this was a miracle. Nosenko had participated in the KGB’s internal investigation of the Kennedy assassination, which proclaimed the KGB innocent of any involvement. Fearing the defector to be a provocation, senior officials, under the direction of the paranoid James Jesus Angleton, incarcerated him for five years under conditions so cruel that his security guard, describing the situation to Kisevalter, vomited with guilt.

Kisevalter had handled Nosenko and believed him legitimate. But he did nothing. “He was just not the kind of guy,” writes Ashley, “who would burst into the chief’s office and say, ‘You are making a terrible mistake and destroying one of the finest agents and operational sources that we have ever had,’ although it would most assuredly have been his sentiment. George actually had a reverence for legitimate authority.” CIA SpyMaster venerates Kisevalter for his character and his heroism, but this painful episode is hardly evidence for either. Nosenko was ultimately released, though never exonerated, and confusion about his case remains.

CLARENCE ASHLEY assessed Soviet strategic missile capabilities and evaluated the CIA’s intelligence-collection systems for seven years before leaving to pursue a career in commercial real estate in northern Virginia. Although Kisevalter and Ashley worked for the CIA at the same time, their paths never crossed. Following mandatory retirement, however, Kisevalter too enjoyed a desultory second career in real estate at Ashley’s firm, where he shambled in daily for his morning game of pinochle. There Ashley and Kisevalter became friends and remained close for the next twenty-four years. Ashley’s biography draws upon newly released CIA files, as well as interviews with Kisevalter’s colleagues and KGB defectors. But the book is essentially a transcribed oral history based on Ashley’s conversations with Kisevalter shortly before the ancient spymaster’s death in 1997.

This is Ashley’s first book, and it is a great shame he did not receive better editorial guidance. The book begins with an endless, clumsy scene at Kisevalter’s funeral, at which his family and colleagues say what everyone says at a funeral: The deceased was a terrific guy. He will be missed. Ashley’s characterization continues in this vein throughout: Kisevalter was “a fascinating individual,” “quite an individual,” “a unique individual.” The author’s affection for Kisevalter is evident and touching. But that affection has hampered his literary judgment; he is unable to discern that many of the details of Kisevalter’s life, as well as many of his opinions, are simply not that interesting.

How on earth, for example, did the long discussion of Kisevalter’s former career in alfalfa farming slip by a professional editor and into a book about the great dramas and dangers of Cold War espionage? For those whose curiosity about alfalfa remains unsated by page after page in the main text, there is much to ponder in the footnotes, where no detail of the process by which the animal liver converts the carotene hydrocarbon to vitamin A remains unexplored. One senses that in many places–most, in fact–Ashley has simply transcribed directly from his interview notes with Kisevalter or from the declassified case files. The standard of prose in CIA case files is nothing to which any writer should aspire.

Nonetheless, for the determined reader, there are interesting stories sandwiched between the alfalfa. We learn that the KGB conducted surveillance of American embassy personnel in Moscow by dusting the soles of their targets’ shoes with the ultra-secret “Neptune 80,” an elixir extracted from female dogs in heat, then tracking the diplomats at a distance with the dogs’ anxious mates.

Kisevalter’s recollection of the shameful, bungled handling of the Alexander Cherepanov case is particularly noteworthy: Cherepanov, a KGB counterintelligence officer, attempted in 1963 to offer his services to the CIA by thrusting a package of documents upon a pair of unsuspecting American tourists, pleading with them to take the parcel to the American Embassy. They did so, but having received the documents, the chargé d’affaires, fearing a flap, insisted–over the CIA station chief’s violent objections–upon returning the documents to the Soviets, thus fingering Cherepanov. He tried to escape. The KGB hunted him down and executed him.

THERE ARE A NUMBER of important lessons in these stories, though Ashley fails to draw them. Foremost among them is that Popov, Penkovsky, Nosenko, and the tragic Cherepanov volunteered to spy for America. They were not recruited. Indeed, they volunteered with such eagerness that Penkovsky appeared to be prepared to work for any Westerner, including the Canadian embassy’s commercial counselor.

What this means is that the CIA’s recruitment-driven model of espionage is fundamentally flawed. Yet the model continues to drive internal promotions in the Agency, with destructive consequences for the war on Islamic radicalism. Thousands of useless, unmotivated agents are recruited abroad simply to add numbers to case officers’ annual performance reports–but officers are given no incentive to cultivate the far more useful skills that would enable them to handle volunteers in the deft manner of a Kisevalter.

Kisevalter’s success was in large measure due to his fluency in Russian and his knowledge of Russian culture and history. In its concern to defend itself against foreign penetration, the Agency is loath to hire operatives with connections to foreign countries. The modern equivalent of a Kisevalter–a man born in Afghanistan or Iraq, a native speaker of Pashto or Arabic with deep ties to his country of birth–would in all likelihood not be given security clearance. Accordingly, the Agency has very few operatives from Middle Eastern backgrounds and almost no speakers of the languages necessary for the conduct of modern intelligence. This is a scandal.

CIA SpyMaster, with its description of the long tradition of bureaucratic torpor within the CIA, offers another inadvertent insight into the Agency’s recent intelligence failures. When Penkovsky volunteered, he proposed to check a signal site, three days later, for an American counter-sign. “Of course,” writes Ashley, “he did not know how the Agency bureaucracy worked. The people there just could not respond in three days. One could not even be expected to do traces in three days. One doesn’t do anything in three days in a bureaucracy.” During the Cold War, this was a tolerable weakness. In an era where rapid and accurate name traces mean the difference between granting and denying entry visas to terrorists, this kind of inept sluggishness is a catastrophic liability.

Until the intelligence community learns the lessons of the cases Kisevalter handled, there will be no successes comparable to the Popov and Penkovsky cases–and there will be many more failures.

Claire Berlinski’s novel Loose Lips, set in the CIA, was published by Random House in 2003. A sequel, Lion Eyes, is forthcoming.