Spies, in from the cold, snitch on collaborators

by Jamie Dettmer

Soviet double agents are revealing the identities of American and British 'agents of influence'- politicians, journalists and academics who, wittingly or not, fed information to their Cold War enemies.

The Berlin Wall collapsed five years ago, but the legacy of the Cold War remains. As the clandestine intelligence and propaganda struggles between the East and West come to light, governments on both sides of the old Iron Curtain are reassessing who, exactly, won the elaborate game of espionage conducted at great expense to all players.

On both sides of the Atlantic, bitter spymasters admit that even those most trusted to protect the interests of the West too often failed - or actively betrayed - their countries. East German Stasi files and other secret archives have made it clear that the KGB thoroughly penetrated U.S. counter-intelligence operations. This year will see revelations every bit as disturbing as those that followed the detection of CIA-turn-coat Aldrich Ames. According to sources in Russia, an additional highly placed mole in America 's intelligence community remains to be unearthed.

Another possible security leak - this time dating to the seventies and into the mid-eighties - is being investigated by the FBI, which has launched an inquiry into allegations by a former middle-ranking KGB officer who claims to have handled a British journalist and an associate of hers who served in the Carter White House. The KGB officer, Yuri Shvets, published a book in January containing details of the activities of the couple. In Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, he provides the Soviet code names for the two - "Sputinista" and "Socrates." However, because of threats from Russian intelligence, Shvets refrained from identifying them and instead used the false names "Phyllis Barber" and "Martin Snow."

Insight can reveal that "Sputnista" was the late Claudia Wright, Washington correspondent during the Carter and Reagan years for the British weekly the New Statesman, an influential left-wing magazine read in socialist circles in Europe and the Third World. Wright, according to Shvets, helped to smear Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, among other things. (For legal reasons, "Socrates," who now lives in Moscow, cannot be named here. He supplied the KGB with sensitive information and may have aided Soviet intelligence in targeting a senior CIA officer, says Shvets.) The FBI has declined comment on the case. But intelligence sources have told Insight that the bureau is trying to establish exactly when the two were recruited and whether the man had connections with the KGB while he was working in the State Department as well as in the Carter White House.

For Britain, America's closest intelligence ally, the next few months likely will prove even more explosive. During the holiday season, a stormy debate erupted in London about a KGB defector's allegations that as many, two dozen members of the British establishment were recruited in the seventies and eighties to act as "agents of influence" for Moscow. The defector, Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB's resident chief in London during the mid-eighties, plans to name the agents in a book scheduled for publication this summer. Gordievsky has warned that his list includes some well-known British politicians and journalists.

Britain has never quite recovered from an earlier spy shocker, the treachery of the so-called "Magnificent Five": Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross, all recruited as KGB moles while studying at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Philby's defection to Moscow in 1963 exposed the ineptitude of the country's security agencies - at one time the double agent was a prospective head of British intelligence.

Gordievsky's list, which he had handed over to Western spy chiefs upon defecting, will further embarrass the British establishment. Since Philby's flight, a small book industry has sprung up around the efforts to explain why he and the other well-bred members of his group betrayed their country. Were they convinced by communist ideology? Or were they lured by the excitement of illicit adventure?

Some authors have sought to explain the Magnificent Five's betrayal by pointing to the homosexual background of three members of the group who, they say, encouraged a virtual "homintern" conspiracy. Others have interpreted the group's behavior as an undergraduate rebellion against traditional loyalties that mutated into something far more deadly and serious. Whatever their motives, their treason encouraged the populist idea that something is rotten in Britain's upper class. The country undoubtedly will become enraged if Gordievsky demonstrates that Soviet intelligence had no trouble recruiting from the ranks of the country's political, social and intellectual elites even in the final days of communism.

Richard Gott, a prominent left-wing journalist at the Guardian newspaper, has become Gordievsky's first casualty. Most of Gordievsky's agents, whom he says include senior Labour Party politicians, prominent unionists and leading academics, are said to be out of power, though some still occupy responsible posts. A graduate of Oxford University, Gott has confessed to receiving favors and expenses what he calls "red gold" - from the KGB. While he denies accepting cash payments, he has admitted that the Soviets paid him to travel to Vienna, Athens and Nicosia, Cyprus, to "meet their man" in the 1980s. "The Cold War was a very bizarre period, and perhaps none of us always acted the way we should have done," Gott commented in a resignation letter to the Guardian written after Gordievsky confirmed Gott was on his list.

The pheasant-shooting Gott, whose biggest scoop as a journalist was to be present when Che Guevara's body was discovered in the Bolivian jungle, was not the only Guardian journalist to be targeted. Gordievsky claims that Gott's newspaper was of special interest to Soviet intelligence. "The KGB loved the Guardian," he says. "It was deemed highly susceptible to penetration." According to Gordievsky, Gott was asked to supply information on the paper's Moscow correspondent, Martin Walker, now the Guardian's Washington bureau chief. Walker, a respected reporter, has reacted with shock to the revelation that Gott handed to the KGB details of his personal life, although he defends his former colleague. "My view is that Richard was foolish and frivolous rather than wicked and a traitor," he says. "Richard is part of that jokey side of the left. I think he found it amusing to gossip away with the Soviets and just did not realize how damn stupid it was." Walker says he was completely unaware that he was being targeted.

Gordievsky acknowledges that "agent of influence" is a position difficult to define, but in his book he draws a clear distinction between "useful idiots," to employ Lenin's phrase, and active agents. In fact, agents of influence are those who use their professional affiliation or position to further KGB interests."Some contacts we dealt with knew they were talking to the KGB and were classified as assets," he says. "Others did not know and innocently thought they were talking to a diplomat."

The Guardian was not the only publication targeted by the KGB. Soviet intelligence also was interested in penetrating the New Statesman. While there has been no evidence offered that Gott used his editorial power at the Guardian to mold the coverage of the news pages he controlled to suit KGB propaganda purposes, there are plenty of indications that Wright acted as a useful conduit for Soviet propaganda.

Gordievsky was no low-ranking intelligence officer. He became a KGB colonel and, in 1984, was appointed head of the agency's London station. In that capacity, he controlled most aspects of Soviet espionage operations in Britain and approved the payments to moles and agents of influence and directed their recruitment. A year into his post, however, the Soviets discovered that their own spymaster was a double agent working for MI6, which engineered his defection in a legendary operation.