OCTOBER 1954. THE KOREAN WAR WAS OVER, and we had not yet become embroiled in Vietnam. I had graduated from the University of Connecticut in the spring. The job fair representatives who visited the campus during my senior year included one from the CIA. He spoke very vaguely about what the Agency did, but indicated that there would be possibilities for travel. This was what I wanted to hear. A typical product of the 1950s, I thought only in passing about equal rights for women and had no overriding visions of a rewarding professional career. My major goal was to work and live abroad, preferably in Europe.
The representative told me that the only openings he had for women were clerical, and he urged me to acquire secretarial skills. Thus after graduation I went to business school and learned how to type and take shorthand while awaiting the call from the CIA to tell me if I had been accepted.
When that call came, I took the train to Washington. My first assignment was in the unclassified typing pool, where a group of newly hired young women typed 3×5 cards listing North Korean scientists, as their names appeared in professional journals. Probably we got a lot of the names wrong, but it didn’t seem to matter. We were marking time until we were called for our polygraphs and, if we passed, given a real assignment. I did pass, after having a philosophical argument about whether Chiang Kai-shek was a boon to China, and whether one could characterize the Communists as agrarian reformers. My answers must have been reasonably orthodox; in any event I had studied Far Eastern history in college, and knew more about the subject than my examiner.
As part of the assignment process, I was asked if I would be interested in serving overseas and, if so, where. “Europe” was my first answer, but the personnel officer successfully got me to add that I would not rule out a posting in some other part of the world. Shortly thereafter, my assignment came through: the Near East and African Division.
After I had worked there for a short time, the personnel officer offered me a position as an administrative assistant in an outpost in French West Africa. I did not know where it was, and neither did the personnel officer, but we hunted it down on a map. And, after mulling it over for a day or two, I said I would go.
In those days, a woman’s educational background and linguistic accomplishments meant nothing. I minored in German in college, with six years of that language under my belt. I also had two years of French, but my command of it was pretty shaky. However, the only criterion was the ability to type, and that I could certainly do.
Fortunately, there was a hitch in the assignment, so I got to spend almost a year in Washington before heading overseas. My friends and I were all short of money, but managed to do our share of sightseeing and partying. In those days the CIA was located in World War II temporary barracks downtown, along the reflecting pool between Constitution and Independence Avenues, so we were right in the thick of things. I traveled by bus to work and, in those more innocent days, while waiting at the bus stop on Constitution to go home, I would sometimes see President Eisenhower on the golf green behind the White House practicing his putting. Among my most pleasant memories is taking my ice skates to work in the winter, and skating on the reflecting pool during my lunch hour.
Two agreeable years in West Africa followed. I had an excellent Chief of Station, John Edwards. A Harvard-educated gentleman of the old school and a veteran of World War I and World War II, he had spent the interwar years in France or Francophone countries in Africa and spoke polished French. Under his tutelage my French became reasonably fluent. He was an indulgent boss and let me do a lot of traveling around West Africa. My longest and most adventurous trip was by train to Bamako, Mali, and then by boat around the northern bend of the Niger River, with stops at exotic places like Mopti, Djenne, and Timbuktu.
The West African tour also gave me a different perspective on life. For the first time, being white put me in the minority. This struck me when I first got off the plane and it took a while before I became comfortable with the concept.
However, once I settled in I enjoyed Africa so much that I asked for a second assignment there. This time East Africa was my destination.
The East African post had its pleasant aspects. At an altitude of more than seven thousand feet, the climate was excellent and flowers bloomed year-round. Also, we were above the zone of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and similar tropical health hazards. Sometimes we took a weekend break, going down the edge of the Great Rift Valley to the Red Sea to swim and snorkel. It was a hazardous two-hour journey, over a narrow road with more than one hundred hairpin turns, but the views were magnificent. Often we encountered baboons and dik-diks (a tiny gazelle), on the way and giant manta rays were a common sight once we reached the sea.
The only downside to this tour was that I did not get on with my boss, and there were only the two of us. Anyway, despite the after-hours and weekend adventures, I was beginning to have enough of working in Africa. As my tour wound to its end, I was offered a job in yet another African post. The duties would be the same clerical and administrative ones that I had been carrying out for years, only this time I would also be expected to be the Chief of Station’s interpreter because the designated officer did not speak French!
By now I had developed some rudimentary career goals, and this did not sound like it would be a satisfying assignment. Furthermore, it was the African component’s policy (freely expressed in those days) not to promote women above GS-07. I had attained that grade long ago. Looking for advancement, I sought a job outside of Africa, and found one—in Helsinki, Finland. Not only would this give me the opportunity to see a different part of the world, the job was rated as GS-09, one of the few such slots available to women then, although the situation was beginning to change.
Operationally, Finland was much more active than the African posts where I had served. Because the country bordered the USSR, the CIA in Helsinki concentrated all its efforts on the Soviet target—a target on which I now began to gain some expertise. My routine duties included keeping the REDCAP notebook—a comprehensive listing of all the Soviet officials in the country—up to date. I developed some familiarity with Russian names, organizations, career patterns, indications of intelligence affiliation, and like details. Moreover, I became personally involved in a controversial and fascinating case, which was a hallmark of the Angletonian era. (James Jesus Angleton, of whom much will be said below, was Chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff from 1954 until 1974.) In December 1961, KGB counterintelligence officer Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, with his wife and small daughter, appeared on the doorstep of CIA Station Chief Frank Friberg and announced his unalterable intention to defect. Friberg, an intelligent and decisive officer, immediately contacted Steve W and me.
Friberg gave us our marching orders. Steve was to take the passports of the Golitsyn family to the Embassy and issue them U.S. visas. Luckily, Steve was able to do this without raising any immediate questions. I was told to go to the office and get cash for the travel of Frank and the Golitsyn family. Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties, and therefore I could get into the strongbox where we kept our money.
I immediately drove to the office, opened the strongbox, pulled out wads of currency without counting, and then proceeded as fast as I could to the airport where Frank had told Steve and me to meet him. Because this was December, snow was piled up along the streets. I recall driving up and over a cement tram stop in my Volkswagen beetle in my haste. Luckily no policeman was around to observe this illegal and bonejarring maneuver.
Steve drove up to the departure terminal with the Golitsyn passports, and I arrived with money for their tickets and other expenses. Friberg and the Golitsyns then emplaned for Stockholm, on their way to Frankfurt and then the United States. Needless to say, my accountings did not balance that month, but Headquarters wrote off the rather large discrepancy without a murmur.
We will return to the Golitsyn story in later chapters. For now it suffices to mention that, at first, Golitsyn was debriefed by the Soviet Bloc Division at Headquarters but soon came into the hands of the CI staff. We in Helsinki became more and more frustrated because Golitsyn had served for over a year in Helsinki and could tell us a great deal about KGB activities in Finland, yet this did not seem to be a major thrust of the debriefings and the debriefers seemed to know little about things Finnish. Eventually, much later, we got one long debriefing report that contained answers to some of the questions we had asked, but significant gaps remained.1 Two items of information provided by Golitsyn allowed me to assess my budding skills as a counterintelligence analyst. I won one and lost one. In the first case, one of the Embassy components had wanted to hire a young woman as a secretary. She had a Russian émigré background. Further, she seemed overskilled for the position she was to fill. I advised against hiring her, and while there was some heartburn she was not brought on board. According to Golitsyn, she had indeed been sent by the KGB to penetrate the Embassy.
In the second case, we had learned that one of the Finnish employees of the U.S. embassy had made an unreported trip to Leningrad. He would have needed a Russian visa and Golitsyn, who was under consular cover, was the logical person to have issued it. We then learned that Golitsyn had traveled to Leningrad at the same time as our employee. Putting two and two together, and getting five, we called in the employee, questioned him about his trip, and eventually saw to it that he was fired. Now we learned from Golitsyn that the employee had been loyal while employed. Golitsyn had tried to recruit him in Leningrad, but had been turned down. Unfortunately, after we fired him, he changed his mind, recontacted Golitsyn, and told the KGB officer everything he could about what he had learned during his Embassy employment.
I spent more than four years in Helsinki. Late in my tour, it became obvious that professional career possibilities for women were opening up. Women were permitted to apply for the Career Training course, the gateway to officer status. There were limitations, however. In the Directorate of Operations (DO), women were accepted for only two career tracks—analyst or reports officer. We were not allowed to take the long course that teaches one to become an operations officer, and we were barred from paramilitary training. And there was no parity in numbers. We were seven women out of a total class of sixty-six.
Nonetheless, it was a rewarding and broadening experience. Given my interest in the Soviet target, perhaps the highlight of my training was the three-hour spellbinding lecture given by George Kisevalter concerning his participation in the Popov case. (Petr Semenovich Popov was a GRU officer who volunteered to us in Vienna in 1953. Kisevalter, a fluent Russian speaker and a legend throughout his career, was one of his handlers.)2
After successfully finishing the Career Training course, I headed back overseas, this time to the Benelux area. Arriving in the summer of 1966, I spent more than four years in a relaxed environment, working as an analyst against the Soviet target and spending as much time as possible in travels around Europe. Toward the end of this tour, I realized that I needed to spend some time at headquarters. In close to twenty years I had never had a headquarters assignment. Furthermore, my parents were aging. I had not been able to see much of them in recent years and this was an omission I wished to correct.
My first headquarters assignment was as Chief of the Biographics Branch in what was then the Soviet Bloc (SB), but soon to become the Soviet and East European (SE), Division. This was the largest branch in the Division, but among the least prestigious because it was not directly involved in operations. Our mission was to process thousands of trace replies on Soviet and East European officials for our Stations abroad and for friendly liaison services. Unfortunately for branch morale, if our initial research turned up data indicating that a particular individual was of special interest, the trace reply was taken out of our hands and we never heard what happened next.
During this period, for personal enrichment and to add to my professional skills, I began to study Russian. I took a Directorate of Intelligence course, which was geared to enabling analysts to read Russian in their areas of specialization. The years that I spent in this endeavor eventually paid off, because I was able to translate or edit some of the documents provided by GRU general Dmitriy Polyakov, by KGB defector Anatoliy Bogatyy, and by the French source Vladimir Vetrov, known as FAREWELL.
After more than three years as Chief of the Biographics Branch, I was eager for a change. I applied for a job as night and weekend duty officer for the Directorate of Operations, and was only the second woman ever approved for this position. It was tiring work, because we changed shifts from week to week, but since we reviewed priority operational traffic from around the world I developed a broader view of the Agency’s responsibilities. As it happened, my service covered the period of the fall of Vietnam.
The DO duty officer stint only lasted six months. By then I was looking for a normal day job. When I was offered a position in the Counterintelligence Group of SE Division, I couldn’t have been happier. The slot was that of Deputy Chief of the Research Branch, under Joseph F, a seasoned officer with a compendious knowledge of the KGB. My specific task was to write a study on the GRU. It took about eighteen months to complete this study, which was eventually published for DO consumption in November 1976 under the title The GRU Today.
While writing this study I first became privy to the Polyakov case and the fount of information he had provided. Luckily in the early 1970s we had three junior officer defectors from the GRU. While what they told us was of some interest, their production could not compare with that of Polyakov. They provided “cover,” however, in that the average reader of The GRU Today would be inclined to believe that these three defectors were the source of much of the material presented. In reality, of course, Polyakov’s information formed the backbone of the study. It was during the writing of this study that I first began my professional association with Sandy, who was the Agency’s expert when it came to Polyakov.
By now it was the late 1970s. The Division had become aware that the U.S. intelligence community had a need for counterintelligence information, but most of what was available to us was not being disseminated outside the DO, except perhaps to the FBI. To correct this shortcoming, two new branches were established in the Counterintelligence Group. One, headed by Faith McCoy, disseminated CI reporting from Soviet sources. The other, to which I was named Chief, did the same for East European sources. This arrangement lasted for about one year. Faith then left for an overseas position, the two CI production branches were melded into one, and I became chief of CI production for all of the Division’s stable of sources.
This was a responsible and rewarding job. Some of our disseminations went to the White House. The only drawback was the looming presence of Director Casey and his preconceived ideas, and his attempts to influence operations and analysis to fit these ideas.
Two Directorate of Intelligence projects closely involved the Production Branch. The first was the investigation into the possibility that the Soviet Union had masterminded the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope. Despite the fact that all our clandestine reporting pointed to the conclusion that the Soviets were not involved, and despite the fact that the scenario did not jibe in the least with what we knew of KGB methods of operation, there was an attempt to make the facts fit the theory so we could use the possibility of Soviet involvement as a club with which to beat the KGB.
I felt extremely frustrated when one of the officers in our branch wrote a long cable in response to a field inquiry. The cable pointed out what we did and did not know, and what conclusions it might be possible to draw. The cable got as far as the office of the then-Deputy Director for Operations (DDO) John Stein, where it was substantially altered so as to advise the field to use the unsupported theory against the KGB, whether we believed it or not. (I often argued, usually unsuccessfully, that the KGB had done a great many unsavory things, and that we should do our best to publicize these, instead of using information we knew or suspected was false, thereby lowering ourselves to their level.)
The second investigation involved the extent of Soviet support for terrorism. To hear some tell it, behind every terrorist around the world with a bomb in his hand was a KGB officer whispering “Go!” The Soviets had dug themselves somewhat into a hole on this subject, because it was indisputable that they had supported Yasir Arafat in the period when he was masterminding terrorist acts. Arafat was regarded as a “freedom fighter” and could be seen on the Kremlin stand with Brezhnev and others on special occasions. The Soviets also supported some third-world groups, again regarding them as freedom fighters against rightist governments. All this was extrapolated into an overarching conspiracy theory by CIA fundamentalists, in great part influenced by Casey and his good friend Claire Sterling’s highly inaccurate The Terrorist Network.
Once again, I was disheartened by what I saw as attempts to skew the facts. Finally, I felt I had to get away. I applied for an overseas job, any job. John Stein saw to it that I was assigned as Chief in Libreville, Gabon, although Africa Division was not happy to have me and never provided any support during my two years on post. I enjoyed being back in Africa, but Libreville was a drowsy town in a country of little strategic interest. There were few real targets, and those that existed had been extensively worked over by my predecessor. Getting up in the morning, I would often admit to myself that nothing that I was going to do that day was of any substantial interest to the U.S. government. (The CIA eventually closed the post.)
There were some highlights, however. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting Peace Corps personnel in the various villages. In many people’s opinion, including my own, the Peace Corps was the most valuable export that the United States could make to Africa.
One of the most memorable events of this tour was a safari to northern Cameroon. It was the dry season and there were few watering holes. Those that existed were magnets for large numbers of animals. At one watering hole we saw elephants far and near stretched across the horizon, some standing guard while others drank and bathed, and then changing places. It was a healthy herd, or group of herds, ranging from large old animals to toddling babies. This is one of my most vivid and treasured recollections, and for years photographs from this safari decorated my office walls.
In the summer of 1986, as my assignment in Libreville was coming to an end, I received a cable from Gus Hathaway, who had become Chief of the CI Staff. I admired Hathaway, whom I had first known when he was Chief of Station in Moscow in the late 1970s. He then became Chief of SE Division, and in effect my ultimate boss for some years. Gus’ cable was vague, but he asked me to come to the staff to look into a CI problem. I accepted with alacrity. The rest of my story is entwined with what became the Ames mole hunt, and is discussed in detail in later chapters.
Overall, despite a few down periods, I had a successful and rewarding career in the CIA, and would do it all again. I entered on duty as a GS-4, never skipped a grade, and retired as a Senior Intelligence Officer, level three. Promotions do not tell the whole story, however. Along the way, I was associated with some first-class colleagues, whose expertise and work ethic enabled us to meet our goals, and with some bosses who gave me the opportunity to spread my wings. I think of them all with affection and respect.
Since my 1992 retirement, I have received a great deal of ego gratification in public acknowledgment of the success our group had in uncovering Ames as a Soviet mole. While this appreciation is undoubtedly pleasant, the approbation of trusted colleagues is far more important to me.