Chapter 19

The Polyakov Mystery

The greatest spy of the twentieth century? Perhaps. Whatever the case, Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov was certainly one of the most mysterious and even today, many American intelligence experts estimate that the CIA has never possessed such a valuable resource in the heart of the ‘Evil Empire’, to use Ronald Reagan’s expression. Yet there are also other experts who claim that General Polyakov was actually a double agent responsible for poisoning the Langley headquarters. So why was this high-ranking Red Army spy shot in the mid-1980s? His death sentence was revealed by Pravda in 1990, at a time when the USSR still existed and was thus information directly orchestrated by the Kremlin. This is why these same experts, who questioned Polyakov’s loyalty, believe that there must have been some form of subterfuge and misinformation: a classic KGB manoeuvre.

What was the truth? It is fair to say that the fall of the Red Empire had done little to unravel the mystery of the Soviet secret services, which remain carefully protected by their existing avatars; the FSB and the SVR. Yet this is not surprising when the Russian leader is a former KGB man who has placed many of his former comrades at the top of his government.

The Americans gave Polyakov the curious codename of ‘Top Hat’, as well as another aristocratic alias, ‘Bourbon’, showing that they clearly held Polyakov in high esteem. Senior CIA officials considered him to be the prototype ‘fake defector’, a spy who pretends to switch sides so as to better misinform the enemy. This highlights one of the most tortuous aspects of intelligence: a grey area where any form of certainty seems to have been abolished.

Was Polyakov a genuine defector? A preliminary remark must point out the fact that he was never actually a ‘physical’ defector. Unlike other Soviets, he never chose ‘the free world’, to use Kravchenko’s famous expression. Instead, even though he often lived outside of the USSR, he never officially broke with his home country. When the time came for him to retire, he did not try to flee to the West and, much to his misfortune, chose to stay in the USSR. However, the official announcement of his death sentence and execution does not mean that he was actually shot, although even this is not the only uncertainty in this particular case.

Dmitri Polyakov was born in the Ukraine in 1921. The son of an accountant, he was a brilliant student and was admitted to the prestigious Frunze Military Academy, where the officers of the Red Army were trained. He was naturally mobilised during the Second World War and as an artillery officer, led his men with courage, which resulted in him being decorated several times. After the war, he continued his military training and was quickly assigned to the Red Army’s intelligence agency, the GRU. His private life was very normal: he married a military nurse who gave him two sons.

In 1956 the young officer was given his first foreign posting to the United States. He was to be entrusted with a special mission: to work as a member of the Soviet delegation to the UN that was responsible for coordinating the work of ‘illegals’ in the United States, that is, those spies without diplomatic cover. Polyakov’s work was clearly satisfactory as he was appointed as a colonel. After a brief return to the USSR, he went back to New York and resumed his post.

The beginning of the 1960s marked a real turning point in Polyakov’s life as it saw the start of his career as a double agent. However, before looking at the details of his betrayal, we shall continue to follow the path of his official career in the GRU. After New York, Polyakov once more returned to Moscow, where he was appointed as the military attaché in Burma. This was a time when America was engaging in its war with Vietnam and Yangon was a strategic place for an intelligence officer. He was later posted to India, where he held the post of head of the Soviet Bloc. Now appointed general, he returned to the USSR and directed the Chinese department of the GRU. Now he was at the top, his rank and position allowed him to have access to the Red Army’s best-kept secrets. He finally retired in 1980, where he could enjoy of his favourite hobbies: woodworking. He was denounced in the mid-1980s and although no longer an active agent, he must have maintained contact with some of his former colleagues.

At the outset, the longevity of his career as a double agent is somewhat surprising, but can be explained by his extreme caution. Unless, of course, he was a false double agent and a man who only betrayed when ordered to do so. An example of his excessive caution can be seen in the way he made contact with his American case officers, always using the correct Soviet procedures. He always refused face-to-face contact and chose the location of the dead letterboxes (the hiding placing that can only be accessed after completing a very complicated process) himself, this allowing him to communicate with the Americans. Later on and still in an attempt to avoid unnecessary physical contact, he demanded to have access to the most sophisticated technology. Consequently, the CIA concocted an ingenious course of action: the use of a transmitter that was capable of sending radio waves that were so compressed they were virtually undetectable. This meant that he could pass an American building while inside some form of public transport and simply click the lock on his briefcase and send a message that would otherwise have taken up fifty typed pages of documents.

To return to the beginning of his collaboration with the Americans in the early 1960s, there are two versions that currently exist. The first is that Polyakov was approached in New York not by the CIA, but by the FBI. In the US, the federal agency is also responsible for counterintelligence and so there was nothing to prevent the FBI from poaching a Soviet official.

The second version seems more plausible, given Polyakov’s personality, and sees the Soviet taking the initiative and contacting the Americans. But why? Once again we enter the realms of hypothesis and the first explanation of his betrayal could be that he was deeply affected by the horrors of the Second World War and wanted to spare his country the drama of a second conflict. He feared that a war might one day break out between the two superpowers, but as a patriot, naturally wanted the USSR to emerge victorious. However, he did not want to see the Soviet regime and its corrupt leaders triumphant, but rightly or wrongly, believed that the Americans were being naive and had not fully recognised the Soviet threat. Sooner or later he believed that they would eventually succumb and be eaten by a fish much cleverer than themselves.

Constantin Melnik¹⁰³

Must we believe [Polyakov] when he affirmed during his trial that he had rebelled - in an unfathomable paradox of the human soul - following the break up to the communist system after the death of Stalin; a system to which he had been so enthusiastically devoted during his youth? This hard line Stalinist was now apparently leading the defence for democracy. Instead we should consider his whole demanding temperament and that this high-flying spy could not accept the petty bureaucratic cowardice of the regime. Day to day intelligence is not about the exploits of Richard Zourgué or Kim Philby, not to mention that idiot James Bond...

[Thus according to Malik, it is this revolt against an exacting and callous organisation that pushed him to devote his body and soul to a democratic system.]

There have been other spies and influential agents - Georges Pâques in particular - who thought they were working for peace by betraying their country, as they believed that in doing so, they were helping to maintain a military and strategic balance between East and West. The difference here is that Polyakov believed that it was the West that was in need of help as it had underestimated the USSR’s power and its ability to cause harm. We now know that this was not the case and that his analysis was incorrect, at least from a strictly military point of view. In the late 1970s, Yuri Andropov (the head of the KGB and later president of the USSR), secretly drew up a catastrophic picture of the competition between the USA and the USSR, to the detriment of the latter.

According to other sources, another reason that many have strengthened the Soviet’s resolve to betray his country was that while stationed in New York in the early 1960s, his eldest son, who was then very young, fell gravely ill. Polyakov requested that his child be cared for by the best doctors, which was expensive, but his superiors refused to grant him the necessary funds and the child died. Did this mean that Polyakov now conceived a definitive hatred against the Soviet authorities?

Another question is what was the exact nature of the information that Polyakov passed on to the Americans, firstly to the FBI and then to the CIA while he was in Burma and India? According to some experts, his information was extraordinary, even claiming that there was so much of it that two rooms in Langley had to be devoted to him. However, this exaggeration is no doubt linked to the propaganda that would later surround Polyakov and the CIA’s wish to celebrate his success.

A catalogue of the spy’s revelations, however, do have some semblance of reality. Firstly, Polyakov handed over many military secrets regarding Soviet weaponry and technological developments. This means he would have given the CIA, documents on Soviet anti-tank missiles; information that would later have allowed US forces to neutralise the weapons supplied to the Iraqis during the first Gulf War. Later, when he was stationed in Burma, he transmitted very precise information on the material aid that Russia and China were supplying to the Viet Cong.

Polyakov also confirmed to his case officers that the split between the two major communist powers, despite this one-off collaboration to help the Vietnamese, was genuine, and was not a manoeuvre designed to deceive the West. Yet this vital piece of information was not enough to satisfy certain CIA analysts, who instead relied on the information given by another Soviet defector, the famous Anatoly Golitsyn, in whom the equally famous James Jesus Angleton (the head of the CIA) had complete confidence.¹⁰⁴ Golitsyn had always claimed that the break between Beijing and Moscow was a sham and purely designed to mislead the western powers. It was a sweeping statement that could not fail to cause astonishment and even lead to people doubting Golitsyn’s sincerity. This was especially true when you consider that James Angleton, the head of the all-powerful CIA counterintelligence unit until the mid-1970s, immediately regarded all those who contradicted his favourite defector must consequently have been working for the KGB. Polyakov, who Angleton had always been wary of, naturally fell into this category.

Another of Polyakov’s important contributions was his denunciation of many Soviet moles who were operating in the West. But were they genuine spies? Returning to Golitsyn, we know that some of the alleged spies denounced by the defector were eventually exonerated because not enough evidence had been found to convict them of anything. On the other hand, those denounced by ‘Top Hat’ proved to be genuine spies, which would appear to give credit to the idea that he was operating in good faith. Or at least outwardly it gave this impression, as the history of espionage is full of examples where spies have denounced their own agents in an effort to enhance their credibility and give weight to any information that they handed over to the enemy. These smaller fish had to be sacrificed in order to save bigger ones and a spy who was about to be unmasked was often denounced without any real threat to his existing intelligence networks. In this way, as can be seen in the murder of Thomas de Quincy, espionage itself can almost be regarded as one of the fine arts.

The two moles denounced by Polyakov were actually British subjects. The first, John Vassall, was employed at the Admiralty and was blackmailed by the KGB as a result of his homosexuality. The second, Frank Bossard, worked at the Ministry of Defence as a missile guidance specialist and in all likelihood was tempted into betraying is country for money - Moscow could be very generous to its informants when necessary. Both moles were denounced by Polyakov in the mid-1960s, who handed over the KGB documents, which could only have been sent by these two spies, to his American case officers. The two men were arrested, but the British secret service, who had not been able to uncover the spies themselves, were not too happy about them being unmasked by the CIA. What is more, it could not have happened at a worse time: the shockwaves were still being felt from Philby’s betrayal,¹⁰⁵ and as a result the US were still suspicious of their British allies. What is more, Golitsyn had declared that the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent, even to the point where he was the subject of ongoing surveillance by the Americans.

The fact that these incidences all happened around the same time inevitably led to significantly cooler feelings between the US and Great Britain, so much so that Harold Wilson planned to remove the CIA station that was based in London. Would such a tactic, undoubtedly favourable to Moscow, be deserving of the sacrifice of the two spies, Vassal and Bossard, who due to their impudence would probably have ended up being caught anyway?

Edward Epstein, the American author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA (1989), pays reference in his book to the Peter Ustinov comedy, Romanoff and Juliet. In one scene, the prime minister of a small European country declares to the Soviet ambassador that the United States is involved in a covert operation. ‘We know they know’, the ambassador responds. The prime minister then tells the US ambassador, ‘they know you know’, who then replies back, ‘we know they know we know’. The prime minister returns to the Soviet ambassador who proclaims ‘we know they know we know they know’. When the American is told this he counts it all out on his fingers before finally exclaiming, ‘What? They know?!’.

Polyakov also had a key role to play in the sensitive area of chemical and biological weapons and given his high level responsibilities within the Soviet government, it was one subject in which he was very knowledgeable.

In order to gain a clear view on these issues, we must return to the end of the Second World War, when both the Americans and Russians were seriously engaged in the hunt for Nazi brainpower. Among the scientists were experts with advanced research in the fields of chemical and biological weapons, which as we now know, were to have terrible consequences. Never forget that it was a German called Fritz Haber, who had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, who invented the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi death camps. These were highly skilled areas which naturally attracted a lot of attention and both Moscow and Washington each tried to lure the scientists while showing hardly any moral conscience. It was not just the German scientists but also the Japanese who were of interest, such as the sadistic doctors of the notorious Unit 731.

Research concerning the development of chemical and biological weapons was the focus of numerous espionage and misinformation operations. The first aim was to seize the enemy’s trade secrets, who at the same time had to be persuaded that they were the best in what they were doing, so that they continued to pursue what was ultimately extremely costly research. In short, it was the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, who’s main aim was to ruin the USSR.

Yet this squabble to gain information sometimes had devastating effects. In the late 1960s, the US military continued to pursue their research, fully aware that the future widespread use of chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield was uncertain, especially when one has far more effective nuclear weapons! The aim was for an arsenal made up of a smaller and more sophisticated neutron bomb, the so-called ‘clean bomb’, that could kill people without destroying everything around it. In short, President Nixon took the decision to decrease research into chemical and biological materials, without destroying any existing stocks. However, the game of misinformation did not stop and an American double agent called Cassidy sent his Soviet contacts some very worrying information that US researchers had developed a frighteningly powerful nerve gas. In retaliation, Moscow sent its own scientists into overdrive. The paradox of this story is that thanks to the Americans, Moscow actually created a terrifyingly efficient chemical weapon, even though the US had actually given up trying to develop one in the first place.

Polyakov was found to have been one of those responsible for this act of misinformation regarding the invention of this new weapon of mass destruction. After the double agent Cassidy, the Soviet general had indeed helped to inform Moscow about America’s alleged success with chemical weapons. But had he misinformed Moscow at the instigation of the US? Or did he feel that it was his duty to alert the authorities in his home country? In sum, was Polyakov a traitor or a loyal servant to Moscow?

Before we can answer this, we must first look at the fall of Polyakov. According to the Soviet version, which paradoxically is also supported by the CIA, the KGB began to have their suspicions about him in 1980. Polyakov was approaching sixty and about to enter his retirement, which he enjoyed for several years with his family, indulging in his favourite pastime: woodworking.

The reality seems quite different, especially if one believes the Americans who were told of the affair very late in the day. In 1994 they had just captured a spy called Aldrich Ames,¹⁰⁶ who had been working in the CIA. When questioned by his colleagues, Ames reported that he had denounced Polyakov to his Soviet contacts in the early 1980s. Yet Ames was not the only one who betrayed Polyakov. There was another famous double agent who was unmasked at the beginning of the third millennium, Robert Hanssen,¹⁰⁷ who turned out to be just as greedy as Ames and who also claimed to have denounced Polyakov. The only difference between Ames and Hanssen was that the latter had worked for the FBI. This meant that the two main American intelligence agencies had been infiltrated. This double treachery almost acted as a retrospective tribute to James Angleton, who throughout his life had claimed that a ‘big mole’ (his expression), was raging at the heart of US intelligence!

What is most surprising is the announcement by the Soviets themselves, through Pravda, that Polyakov had been a double agent working for the Americans. Ordinarily, any information that dishonoured their country or the communist regime was usually kept quiet so why make it public five years or so after Polyakov’s supposed trial and execution? The only plausible explanation is that Moscow wanted to legitimise the mass of information Polyakov had provided to the CIA, which for the most part had been based on the idea of misinformation. However, in order to make the false data more credible, there had to be some genuine facts included in there as well. As a result, Polyakov was arrested and there was no way that the CIA could doubt the veracity of the enormous amount of intelligence that he had provided.

This means that Polyakov was not a traitor and the best evidence for this is the fact that in spite of all the CIA’s demands, the GRU general never considered the option of moving to the West. If he had been a double agent for the Americans, then he was risking the death penalty should his identity be discovered. Another factor that supports this case is that he never received any money from the CIA. As a passionate woodworker and hunter, the only gifts he accepted were those of carpentry tools and a hunting rifle: very little payment for a spy of his calibre.

The final piece of evidence relates to the idea that the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen supposedly denounced Polyakov to the KGB in 1980. However, according to Pravda, Polyakov was not unmasked until the mid-1980s. So why the five year wait and thus allow him time to continue meeting with his former colleagues?

The question remains though as to what really happened to Polyakov? One can imagine that the Soviets took advantage of his natural or accidental death and invented the story in order to poison the CIA. The Polyakov mystery had never really gone away and is still being debated among the best intelligence specialists. However, on one last note, it cannot be left out that this patriot sometimes worked for his own personal benefit by using the links that he had forged with his CIA case officers, in order to help his own agenda. Yet if you are working for peace, does that still count as betrayal? Judging by the testimony of Robert Gates, a former CIA director and then Secretary of Defence under President Obama, ‘Top Hat’ rendered a great service to the world. He maintains that Polyakov gave the CIA top secret documents concerning the Red Army’s high command, which thus allowed the United States to accurately assess the Soviet nuclear threat and the inability of their intercontinental missiles: an evaluation that convinced Washington that the Soviets could never have won an atomic war. In spite of himself, Polyakov had helped to put an end to the arms race. That is, unless he was only obeying the orders of his Soviet leaders, who were only too aware that the arms race would lead to the destruction of the USSR, which is effectively what actually happened!