Day 206: Deception: The Untold Story of East West Espionage

Harder evidence comes from an operation involving the Estonian Voldemar Kiik, one of the most successful British agents of the post-war era. His story is almost entirely unknown outside Estonia, where he was buried with military honours in the national cemetery, next to Rebane, after his death in 2002. His mission was to reconnoitre the airfield at Tartu, Estonia’s second city. Details of his mission remain classified to this day, but it would have been of huge interest to British and American intelligence to know about any hardened hangars, the quality and quantity of air defences, and signs of nuclear weapons storage and transport. Kiik was a medical student in London when Rebane approached him, probably in 1950. He was the ideal recruit – brainy, determined and a cut above the other Estonian young men in London, whose patriotism often outweighed their other talents (they, in turn, found his successful womanising tiresome). He was already battle-hardened. Mobilised by the Red Army in 1940, he jumped off a troop train and hid in a forest before being conscripted by the Germans. Wounded in the head in the battle of Velikaya Luka near Leningrad, he was left for dead during a German retreat, only to be rescued during a counterattack. He detested both occupying powers equally. Rather than exchange the mandatory ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting, he and the other Estonians in his unit would shout ‘Ei Ütle!’ (Don’t Say!). The pronunciation was close enough to fool the Germans, and gave a pleasant tingle of resistance.

As well as the usual tradecraft, he was schooled intensively in Russian (which he did not speak) and in Pelmanism – the knack of remembering large quantities of data. But in a notable difference from the carelessness that surrounded Operation Jungle, he does not seem to have been trained with the other Estonians. With a cyanide pill sewn into his lip he parachuted into Estonia in the summer of 1952. Though tempted to visit his mother – it would have been his only chance to see her before she died – he concentrated on his mission, perhaps using the remnants of a pre-war British network for support. His route back involved a perilous crossing of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier where disaster nearly struck. Another British agent making the same crossing shortly beforehand had come across some border guards asleep at their post and had shot them, perhaps unaware that he was complicating things for anyone else. The result was a frenzy of border-guard activity. Starving, sodden and fearing capture, Kiik waited in a swamp for two weeks, living off berries. He then took a Benzedrine pill he had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right).bh His name did not appear on a list of Estonians wanted by the KGB, and his family was not harassed, showing that the Soviet authorities never got wind of his mission (they believed he had emigrated to Canada). Prematurely grey after his ordeal, he then worked for the British government as an instructor in covert operations (among his pupils, he once said, was the future King of Norway).

Kiik’s successful mission, the mysterious agent who crossed the border before him, Captain Nelberg’s letter and some other evidence of separate, successful missions all support the theory that SIS, perhaps as early as 1950 and certainly by 1952, had reason to continue Operation Jungle as a bluff. If so, the human calculations are chilling. Were the agents still inside the Soviet Union counted as good as dead? What of the men being sent to join them? The verdict of sheer incompetence might be moderated by the steel nerves and stunning cynicism that such decisions would involve.

Meanwhile a conflict between intelligence and political objectives was plaguing the other side too. The Soviet authorities wanted to lure a senior Estonian émigré figure – ideally Rebane – across the border for a humiliating show trial. The KGB was more interested in further penetration of SIS and the CIA. But with Rebane belatedly aware of the deception, the hunters had become the hunted. It is unclear how far Rebane and SIS were at cross-purposes in the final years of the operation. The wily Estonian claimed later that even after the closure of the Latvian and Lithuanian operations, he fought to maintain the radio games with the KGB-controlled partisans, in the hope of getting his own agents back. He succeeded in at least one instance, but his career with SIS was over. The once-dashing officer ended up working as a night watchman before moving to Germany and a job in that country’s intelligence service. Having dodged repeated attempts by the KGB to entrap him, he died in 1976, having burned his papers; his devoted secretary Liis Dillie Lindre lived to see her country regain independence in 1991, yet continued to sleep with a loaded revolver by her bed (in a suburb of Brussels) even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Rebane’s Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues moved to the United States. Carr was shunted first sideways and then out of the service; until his death in 1988 he blamed Philby, not his own incompetence, for the fiasco. Viktor van Jung, a cerebral and charismatic Estonian émigré who had trained two CIA agents who went on a doomed mission in 1954, went on to a high-flying career in the agency. Strong indications are that he was the CIA officer who ran Ryszard Kukilński, a senior Polish officer who passed on invaluable Warsaw Pact secrets to NATO.

According to Rositzke, none of the CIA operatives returned from their missions. But a sprinkling of former agents who survived inside the Soviet Union did crop up after 1991, with embarrassing consequences for their spymasters. One of the most conspicuous cases involved Sweden, a country that had maintained a stony silence over its espionage efforts in the Baltics, which seem to have been every bit as disastrous as those of SIS and the CIA. The activities of the C-byrån (C-Agency), renamed in 1946 as T-kontoret (T-Office), began during the war and were stepped up in 1948 when a Soviet attack on Sweden seemed all too likely. Using Baltic émigrés and run in close cooperation with SIS, they finished in 1957, after the humiliating public exposure of a Swedish spy ring and a formal Soviet diplomatic protest.

~~Deception: The Untold Story of East West Espionage Today -by- Edward Lucas

Day 200: Molecular Red

It is hard to imagine a landscape more remote from Russia in the early twentieth century than the West Coast of the United States in the late twentieth century. In place of scarcity, a bright abundance. Some central nodes to the military industrial complex were born and grew there, particularly in the aerospace industry, not to mention the Air Force’s own private think-tank, the RAND corporation. And as California prospered, so did its finest universities, such as Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley, not to mention Berkeley’s rivals at the peak of the public University of California system. Pump enough Pentagon money into this cluster of institutions and the result is Silicon Valley.

It is hard to imagine an organization of knowledge and labor more remote from what Bogdanov was proposing at the Socialist University after the Bolsheviks came to power, or even from that extensive and effective apparatus that the Soviet Union actually constructed after Stalin died. But in its own terms, the Californian military-industrial complex worked. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the dominant forms of power, economy, even of human life, owe their existence to what Donna Haraway calls the techno-science that issued from a handful of research universities in the Cold War years. It was not pure serendipity that brought Paul Feyerabend to Berkeley to teach the philosophy of science in the midst of an astonishing flowering of both pure and applied science. The term techno-science highlights how implicated science is and was in particular moments in the history of technology.

Feyerabend’s grasp of this part of the picture was never strong. Perhaps he was fatally hampered by his endemic hatred of all things Marxist. Perhaps the new world would not reveal its workings to someone so touched by the old. More useful in this regard is the work of Donna Haraway. Born in the 1940s, trained as a biologist, radicalized during the Vietnam War years, and lodging at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both Cold War techno-science and the struggle in and against its imperial consequences. Haraway: “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements.”

If for Bogdanov the catalyst that diverted him from the life sciences was the labor movement, for Haraway it was feminism. Haraway: “Feminists re-appropriate science in order to discover and to define what is ‘natural’ for ourselves. A human past and future would be placed in our hands. This avowedly interested approach to science promises to take seriously the rules of scientific discourse without worshipping the fetish of scientific objectivity.”

There is an interesting tension here, even a productive one. With some startling exceptions such as Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, most strands of Western Marxism taken up by critical thinkers in the United States in the postwar period were allergic to techno-science. Even among radical social scientists of this period, knowledge of, and commitment to, some version of natural science as a mode of inquiry was rare, and where it existed it was not often combined with such a strong commitment to a thoroughgoing critique of the existing form of science.

Haraway’s is a very different intellectual formation to the one that grew out of the influence of Herbert Marcuse, who taught at the other end of California to Haraway, in San Diego, from 1965 until he was forced to retire in 1970. While there are détournements of Lukács and Marcuse in Haraway, they are very much applied to understanding two immediate phenomena: new kinds of techno-science, and the rising social movement of feminism. What formed at the juncture was feminist science studies.

Science? Technology? Goddess preserve us! There are plenty of feminisms that try to take their stand against techno-science from without, as if it had some prior and given claim to speak for nature. Haraway: “Feminist theory has repeatedly replicated this ‘naturalizing’ structure of discourse in its own oppositional constructions.” A useful attribute of feminist science studies is that it tends not to make the assumption that there is something inherently radical about philosophy, or culture, or play or poetry over and against the scientific and technical. It does not take sides in advance within the existing intellectual division of labor. It is, among other things, a practical critique of that division of intellectual labor. “Destabilizing the positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification might be a more powerful feminist strategy than ‘speaking as a woman.’”

It retains a sort of double discomfort, asking critical questions in a scientific zone, and speaking knowledgeably about actual sciences in a humanities zone. This is irritating, and usefully so. Feminist science studies persistently recasts the objectivity claims of the sciences, and does so, to make it worse, without dismissing the scientific endeavor. It is so much harder to dismiss a critic who takes a knowledge practice seriously, who wants not to abandon objectivity, but wants a stronger one, grounded in making a more extensive series of mediating links in the production of knowledge available for scrutiny.

This is irritating in another way as well. Haraway: “Marx insisted that one must not leap too fast, or one will end up in a fantastic utopia, impotent and ignorant. Abundance … is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning.” This is what Platonov knew from daily experience. Surplus feeds the body which feeds the soul. There can be no retreat into the superstructures when there is no food, shelter or safety. The production and reproduction of our species-being, whatever it may be, has to be a central concern of any critical knowledge. Given the rising inequality, poverty, and hunger in twenty-first-century California, to which the state has responded by mirroring its great universities with a series of equally great prisons, questions of material need that were so palpable to Platonov return at the heart of the empire.

~~Molecular Red: Theory For the Anthropocene -by- McKenzie Wark

Day 196: Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

Matters had looked very different on that morning in late March 1985 when Ari Ben-Menashe had caught the early-morning British Airways flight from Tel Aviv to London. Eating his kosher airline breakfast, he reflected that life had never been so good. He was not only making “real money,” but had learned a great deal at the elbow of David Kimche as they trawled through the Byzantine world of selling arms to Iran. Along the way, he had also furthered his education in the continuous interplay between Israel’s politicians and its intelligence chiefs. For Ben-Menashe, “compared to my former colleagues, the average arms dealer was a choirboy.” He had identified the problem: the aftereffects of Israel’s Lebanon adventure, from which it had finally withdrawn, battered and demoralized. Anxious to regain prestige, the politicians gave the intelligence community an even freer hand in how it waged pitiless war against the PLO, whom they saw as the cause of all Israel’s problems. The result was a succession of scandals where suspected terrorists and even their families were brutalized and murdered in cold blood. Yitzhak Hofi, the former head of Mossad, had sat on a government commission, set up after intense public pressure, to investigate the brutality. It concluded that intelligence agents had consistently lied to the court about how they obtained confessions: the methods used had too often been gross. The committee had called for “proper procedures” to be followed.

But Ben-Menashe knew the torture had continued: “It was good to be away from such awful matters.” He regarded what he was doing, providing arms for Iranians to kill untold numbers of Iraqis, as “different.” Nor did the plight of the Beirut hostages, the very reason for his wheeling and dealing, unduly concern him. The bottom line was the money he was making. Even with Kimche’s departure, Ben-Menashe still believed the merry-go-round he was riding would only stop when he decided—and he would step off a multimillionaire. By his count, ORA’s business was now worth “hundreds of millions”—most of it being generated through the house in the London suburb from where Nicholas Davies ran ORA’s international operations.

Ben-Menashe knew Davies had continued to amass his own fortune, far in excess of the sixty-five-thousand-pound yearly salary he was paid as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror; Davies’s commission from ORA was almost always as much in a month. Ben-Menashe didn’t mind if the newspaperman took “an extra slice of the cake; it left plenty to go around. It was still champagne time.”
...
Admoni’s first call was to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered every step be taken to “secure the situation.” With those words Peres authorized an operation that once more demonstrated the ruthless efficiency of Mossad.

Admoni’s staff quickly confirmed Vanunu had worked at Dimona from February 1977 until November 1986. He had been assigned to Machon-Two, one of the most secret of all the plant’s ten production units. The windowless concrete building externally resembled a warehouse. But its walls were thick enough to block the most powerful of satellite camera lenses from penetrating. Inside the bunkerlike structure, a system of false walls led to the elevators that descended through six levels to where the nuclear weapons were manufactured.

Vanunu’s security clearance was sufficient to gain unchallenged access to every corner of Machon-Two. His special security pass—number 520—coupled with his signature on an Israeli Official Secrets Acts document ensured no one ever challenged him as he went about his duties as a menahil, a controller on the night shift.

A stunned Admoni was told that almost certainly for some months, Vanunu somehow had secretly photographed the layout of Machon-Two: the control panels, the glove boxes, the nuclear bomb-building machinery. Evidence suggested he had stored his films in his clothes locker, and smuggled them out of what was supposedly the most secure place in Israel.

Admoni demanded to know how Vanunu had achieved all this—and perhaps more. Supposing he had already shown his material to the CIA? Or the Russians? The British or even the Chinese? The damage would be incalculable. Israel would be exposed as a liar before the world—a liar with the capability of destroying a very large part of it. Who was Vanunu? Whom could he be working for?

Answers were soon forthcoming. Vanunu was a Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakech, where his parents were modest shopkeepers. In 1963, when anti-Semitism, never far from the surface in Morocco, spilled once more into open violence, the family emigrated to Israel, settling in the Negev Desert town of Beersheba. Mordechai led an uneventful life as a teenager. Along with every other young person, when his time came he was conscripted into the Israeli army. He was already beginning to lose his hair, making him appear older than his nineteen years. He reached the rank of first sergeant in a minesweeping unit stationed on the Golan Heights. After military service he entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. Having failed two exams at the end of his first year in a physics-degree course, he left the campus.

In the summer of 1976 he replied to an advertisement for trainee technicians to work at Dimona. After a lengthy interview with the plant’s security officer he was accepted for training and sent on an intensive course in physics, chemistry, math, and English. He did sufficiently well to finally enter Dimona as a technician in February 1977.

Vanunu had been made redundant in November 1986. In his security file at Dimona it was noted that he had displayed “left-wing and pro-Arab beliefs.” Vanunu left Israel for Australia, arriving in Sydney in May of the following year. Somewhere along his journey, which had followed a well-trodden path by young Israelis through the Far East, Vanunu had renounced his once-strong Jewish faith to become a Christian. The picture emerging from a dozen sources for Admoni to consider was of a physically unprepossessing young man who appeared to be the classic loner: he had made no real friends at Dimona; he had no girlfriends; he spent his time at home reading books on philosophy and politics. Mossad psychologists told Admoni a man like that could be foolhardy, with a warped sense of values and often disillusioned. That kind of personality could be dangerously unpredictable.

~~Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad -by- Gordon Thomas

Day 188: The Savage Wars of Peace

Between January 1899 and May 1902 the U.S. Army ruled Cuba, first under stolid Major General John R. Brooke, then under the more dashing Major General Leonard Wood, erstwhile commander of the Rough Riders. Unlike the Filipinos, the Cubans did not fight U.S. rule, in large measure because they were confident that it would be temporary; with the passage of the Teller Amendment in April 1898, Congress had eschewed any desire to annex the “pearl of the Antilles.” The Cuban insurrectos took a bonus of $75 a man and duly disbanded. The U.S. Army picked up the pieces after the Spanish left: Soldiers went around distributing food to a hungry populace, staging a sanitary campaign, erecting thousands of public schools (modeled on those of Ohio), rooting out corrupt officials, building roads and bridges, dredging Havana harbor, and generally attempting “to recast Cuban society, such as it was, in the mould of North America.”

The occupation’s most spectacular achievement occurred when Walter Reed, a U.S. Army doctor, confirmed the intuition of a Cuban physician that yellow fever was not transmitted by general filth or other factors but by one particular variety of mosquito, the silvery Stegomyia fasciata. A mosquito-eradication campaign undertaken by the Army Medical Corps produced immediate results: In 1902, for the first time in centuries, there was not a single case of yellow fever in Havana; just two years before there had been 1,400 known cases. Incidence of malaria, another scourge of the city, of all tropical cities, plummeted nearly as much. Such dramatic improvements in public health were to become a commonplace feature of American colonial administration.

Knowing that the U.S. military occupation would be brief, and determined to safeguard American interests in Cuba after the troops went home, Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901. Under its terms Cuba would be obligated to obtain Uncle Sam’s approval before signing any foreign treaty; maintain low foreign debt; ratify all acts of the U.S. military government; and give the American armed forces the right to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property. In addition, Cuba would have to provide the U.S. long-term leases on naval bases; it was this provision that would lead to the creation of a naval station at Guantánamo Bay in 1903. In short, the Platt Amendment represented a considerable abridgment of Cuban sovereignty.
Havana went along because it had no choice. It was only when the Cubans pledged to honor the Platt Amendment that the U.S. Army left the island, though the U.S. Navy remained a looming presence offshore. Cuba now had its own government headed by Tomás Estrada Palma, a former schoolmaster who had spent years living in New York State, but it was in effect an American protectorate.

Panama
The Platt Amendment, following the outright annexation of Puerto Rico, signaled that the U.S. was intent on turning the Caribbean into an “American lake.” This desire grew stronger once an isthmian canal was under way. The story of how the republic of Panama was created is well known and need not be recounted in much detail here. As we have seen, U.S. troops had been frequent visitors to Panama, landing there thirteen times between 1856 and 1902 to guarantee freedom of transit for Americans. Although most of Panama’s population had long chafed under the distant rule of Bogotá, in the past U.S. forces had always preserved Colombia’s sovereignty over the isthmus. That would change in 1903.

At the time, Colombia’s congress and president were balking at the proposed U.S. terms for a canal treaty, demanding more money. The U.S., with its burgeoning power in the Pacific, considered a canal a strategic necessity, and President Theodore Roosevelt was furious at the “homicidal corruptionists” in Bogotá for reneging on their commitments to allow the project to proceed. Although they did not instigate a Panamanian revolution, the president and his secretary of state, John Hay, knew about it beforehand and tacitly encouraged the plotters. The revolutionaries counted on American military intervention and were not disappointed. On November 2, the gunboat Nashville, which had just arrived at Colón on Panama’s Caribbean coast, received secret orders from the Navy Department to “prevent landing of any armed force with hostile intent, either government or insurgent.” The remarkable thing about this telegram is that, when Commander John Hubbard of the Nashville received it, the revolution had not yet broken out. It would start the next day.

By the time Hubbard received his orders, 500 Colombian soldiers had already landed at Colón, but they still had to traverse the isthmus to reach Panama City, capital of the province. The American railroad superintendent dissembled and told them there were not enough rail cars available to take all of them, but he allowed the Colombian general and his staff to go by themselves. They arrived just in time to be captured by the rebels who took over Panama City on November 3. The success of the revolution was sealed when the USS Dixie appeared off Colón on the evening of November 5 and disembarked 400 marines under Major John A. Lejeune. The Colombian army detachment left at Colón decided not to tangle with the marines; instead their colonel accepted an $8,000 bribe from the Panamanian plotters to sail back to Cartagena with his men. Within the next week, eight more U.S. warships arrived at Panama, effectively foreclosing any possibility that Colombia would take the isthmus back by force.

On November 6, 1903, the U.S. government formally recognized the Republic of Panama. One of the new government’s first acts was to sign a treaty giving the U.S. permission to build a canal under extremely generous terms that turned the Canal Zone—a 10-mile-wide strip on either side of the waterway—into U.S. territory. It was as brazen—and successful—an example of gunboat diplomacy as the world has ever seen. When Teddy Roosevelt was subsequently accused of having committed (as the New York Times termed it) an “act of sordid conquest,” he asked Attorney General Philander Knox to construct a defense. “Oh, Mr. President,” Knox is said to have replied, “do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
War Plan Black
The isthmian canal, completed in 1914, gave the U.S. an invaluable strategic advantage—the ability to move its fleet quickly between the West and East Coasts, the Pacific and the Atlantic—but also a major headache: protecting the precious waterway. It was the same challenge Britain faced with the Suez Canal. London’s response was to assert control over Egypt, the Sudan, and virtually the entire Mediterranean. The U.S. took a similarly sweeping approach with Central America and the Caribbean.

Naval planners looked at the map and realized that there were only a handful of main channels into the Caribbean, the most important being the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola. Control of Puerto Rico and Cuba gave the U.S. a chokehold over this “strategic center of interest” (to use Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words), though the navy remained interested in acquiring bases in Hispaniola as an insurance policy. By 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard: It deployed 20 battleships, roughly the same number as Germany, and second only to Britain’s 49. The extent of American naval might was trumpeted by the cruise of the Great White Fleet around the world in 1907–1909.

Military planners are paid to be paranoid, and despite America’s growing power, they constantly saw threats looming, principally from Berlin. The leaders of the War and Navy departments lived in constant fear that Germany would establish bases in the West Indies or South America and then use them to attack U.S. shipping, the Panama Canal or—worst-case scenario—the American mainland itself. This was the basis of War Plan Black, completed in 1914 by the General Board of the U.S. Navy.

These worries were not entirely farfetched. The German navy, under the command of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was constantly, if unsuccessfully, scheming to acquire a base in the West Indies. The German admiralty staff also drew up war plans between 1897 and 1905 for seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States. Operations Plan III, as the German Caribbean strategy was called, was mothballed after 1906, when rising tensions in Europe forced the German navy to focus its attention closer to home. But after World War I broke out, German U-boats did attack some shipping close to the American mainland (though in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean) and the German foreign office did concoct a wild plot for an alliance with Mexico, which would supposedly receive in compensation the return of the southwestern United States. (The Zimmerman Telegram, laying out this plan, was intercepted by British intelligence and helped draw the U.S. into the war.)

The modern-day reader is certainly entitled to doubt in retrospect how much of a threat Germany ever posed to U.S. control of the Caribbean, but the danger loomed large enough at the time and helps to explain American willingness to intervene in the region. These fears were crystallized in the Venezuela crisis of 1902–03.

~~The Savage Wars of Peace -by- Max Boot