Opening the Vault of a CIA Madman

The Tangled Web of Counterespionage, Betrayals, and the KGB

The CIA’s Counterintelligence (CI) team had a reputation of conducting surveillance on not just official enemies, but Agency staff as well. According to CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith, the CI staff “believed the only sensible way to get along with anybody was to read his mail, tap his telephone, bug his bedroom, and to distrust him even more when you knew all the intimate details of his life.”

The first time Smith visited Angleton’s office, it took him a day “to get over the experience. I found Angleton tucked away in an inside office which was completely draped in very heavy curtains. His desk sat amid a dozen various gadgets. Some of them I could identify as photographic apparatus, but I had no idea what purpose most of them served. Angleton himself was peering at some documents under a strong desk light…I felt I had been admitted to an inner sanctum whose existence I must never mention to anyone…”

Family Jewels

In December 1974, Seymour Hersh knew he had a bombshell story on his hands from what he learned about the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and he decided to see if he could get more out of the CIA. “I figure I have about one-tenth of one percent of the story which you and I talked about,” he explained to CIA Director William Colby in a phone message, “which is more than enough, I think, to cause a lot of discombobulation, which is not my purpose. I want to write it this weekend, I am willing to trade with you. I will trade you Jim Angleton for 14 files of my choice. I will be in my office at the Times in 30 minutes.”

Having no interest in handing over Agency files to influence the news story about to be published, Colby phoned the Chairman of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Lucien Nedzi. “Who is Jim Angleton?” Nedzi wanted to know.

“He is the head of our counterintelligence,” Colby replied. “He is kind of a legendary character. He has been around for 150 years or so. He is a very spooky guy. His reputation is one of total secrecy and no one knows what he is doing.” Colby realized how bad this sounded and quickly switched gears: “We know what he is doing, but he is a little bit out of date in terms of seeing Soviets under every bush.” Nedzi was dumbfounded that a man known for keeping secrets was now openly revealing them: “What is he doing talking to Hersh?”

“I do not think he is,” Colby replied mistakenly. “Hersh called him and wanted to talk with him, but he said he would not talk with him.” Nedzi pointed to a problem with this theory: “Sy showed me notes of what he said and claims [Angleton] was drunk…”

After Hersh’s story appeared in the Times on December 22, 1974, Angleton’s career with the CIA was over. He was, however, allowed to remain working for the Agency as a consultant to help with the transition. George Kalaris, who had been summoned to headquarters to take over Angleton’s job temporarily until a permanent replacement could be found, becoming Acting Chief. By June 1975, with no other candidate found, Kalaris became the new Chief of CI Operations (CIOPS).

Kalaris found that by this time CI had been sequestered away from the Agency’s business. The group received mountains of cable traffic, but very little of it seemed to be important. According to a later CIA study, the team “had no relationship with the Soviet Division or any of the other geographic divisions. If the divisions had any significant cases, Kalaris was unaware of them because the divisions were giving him nothing of substance.” He learned of all of the sensitive cases that were being held from CI from a staff member who had recently joined from the Soviet-Eastern Europe (SE) Division. This officer was also surprised by “the almost total absence of Soviet expertise in the staff. There was no Russian language capability and no realistic area knowledge, and what experience there was in Soviet matters was dated and limited.”

The lack of cooperation went both ways. In the CI staff files, there was cases that should have involved the SE Division, but for which they had never been informed “or had only limited information about.” Angleton’s paranoia had permeated into the staff, mostly hand-selected by him personally, and had adopted to his operating model of sharing almost nothing and barely speaking to others, including within their own team. The practices had settled in and “most had given up hope of ever going anywhere else or accomplishing anything new.” Management was separated from the rank and file; Kalaris was shocked to learn that his chief of support had been working for Angleton for four to five years and had never met him, catching glimpses of him only from a distance. In Kalaris’ view, the atmosphere was one of “doublethink and mirrors.”

Angleton was not interested in sharing much either with his successor and his staff largely followed his lead. Kalaris therefore had difficulty to find out what the team had actually been doing for years; the staff “below top leadership had never been exposed to more than their own narrow slice of staff activities, and accordingly even with the best of will they were limited in what they were able to tell the new management.” Based on the contents what staffers were discovering, one wrote a memo entitled “Skeletons in the CIOPS Closet.” By the beginning of 1975, work was underway to transfer data to the SE Division, cataloguing Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officers, true names and code names of agents and assets.

If Angleton was unwilling to assist, despite having stayed on as a consultant explicitly to do this, Kalaris would have to find out for himself what the CI staff had done in the past. The key, Kalaris thought, would be in the many locked safes and vaults surrounding Angleton’s office. It would take months to review all the reams of paper in these storage units. Significant quantities of information in these files, it turned out, had never been integrated into the CIA’s records system nor shared with other groups outside of CI: “Information from the mail-intercept program, for example, was indexed inside the CI staff, but reflected nowhere outside. Other material largely duplicated files maintained by other elements. Some files contained mostly press clippings.” An Information Management Services (IMS) team was brought in on a long-term basis to handle the massive task at hand of going through the files: a decision had to be made on whether to index, transfer, retain, or destroy each item.

The vault across from Angleton’s office was of particular interest: inside were two safes for which no one had the combination. The Office of Security was tasked with bringing in specialists to drill into the safes. Kalaris watched their work with great interest, having never seen this process before and “interested to observe how it was done.”

The excavation team poring through the files found Bushman bows and arrows among the materials. Since the CIA had in the past developed weapons for assassination purposes and had amassed through a joint venture with the U.S. military enough toxins to kill hundreds of thousands of people, Kalaris took no chances with this discovery. Concerned that the arrows might be poisoned, Kalaris sent them with great care to the Office of Technical Services (OTS) to be examined. When OTS judged the arrows to be harmless, Kalaris handed them over to Angleton “as a personal memento.”

More ominously, there were files discovered that greatly bothered Kalaris. He told staff members that were “bizarre things of which I shall never ever speak” among the contents. It would be decades before it was revealed what he saw. Among the files hidden from the rest of the CIA was one codenamed GRIDIRON, describing the downfall of an RCMP senior officer in counterespionage, and how this involved the paranoia of Angleton’s team and their guru, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. The CIA had been excited in earlier years at the inside information of the KGB Golitsyn had to offer, including how “the KGB, prior to 1960, had been talking about the assassination of Richard Nixon should be become President.”

Brik

David Soboloff should have known how to get something to eat in Montreal, but his KGB training had not prepared him for this minor detail in 1952. His actual name was Yevgeni Brik, but he had assumed the identity of another man who had left Canada years before and he now had a strong cover, even though the two men looked slightly different. Brik had spent part of his youth in Brooklyn, so he did not have an accent speaking in English, but culturally having lived in Russia he might as well have been from a different world. To Brik, restaurants were too difficult to handle with their complex menus and booths, which scared him. He had already left a restaurant once, failing to place an order. The people there seemed to be up to no good. Now he was staring hungrily at a street food vendor, wondering why the citizens of Montreal were happily consuming dog meat. Once Brik discovered what hot dogs actually were, he added fries to his orders and he now had meals secured for the next week.

Brik was on a mission to infiltrate the United States, but he had to establish an adequate cover in Canada first. “Maintain your legend,” Brik had been told by his KGB superiors, “it is the key to survival.” Brik was afraid someone on the street would one day stop him and challenge his identity; he could be subject to such questioning in Moscow. He built up his cover by visiting Toronto addresses where he was supposed to have lived to enable him to answer questions about his background. He managed to obtain a legitimate Canadian passport since Soboloff was a real person; his true whereabouts in Russia, however, were unknown to the authorities.

Brik was not a very effective spy; the minute he had been recruited, he told his wife back in Russia he was working for the KGB. Now alone in Canada, he engaged in numerous affairs with women; an assignment such as this, fraught with danger, required him to relax, he reasoned. He reported these affairs to the KGB with the exception of one: he became involved in Kingston with Larissa Cunningham, the wife of a corporal in the Canadian Army. When Brik was moved to Montreal, which was a three-hour car drive away, he asked the married woman to join him, without explaining why he was leaving town. Although she loved Brik, Cunningham insisted she would not leave her husband.

Heartbroken, Brik tried to come up with ways of having the KGB return him to Kingston so he could be close to her. Assigned the cover job of a watch repairman, he wrote a message and left it in a dead letter box, claiming that there was too much competition in the watch repair business for him to establish an appropriate cover. Somehow, this would bring him back to Kingston, he thought. The KGB simply switched his cover to photographer and he was instructed to set up a photo shop, which he reluctantly did. As he got to know the other small business owners in his vicinity, they did not seem to be exploiting people as much as the KGB training told him they would be.

Now that he had an identity and an established job, the KGB now wanted Brik to attempt to emigrate to the United States, the ultimate goal. The KGB found penetrating the U.S. through Canada to be easier as the fake documentation would typically fool Canadian authorities more so than their U.S. counterparts. He was frightened by a question on the application relating to the filing of income taxes: the real Soboloff had never filed a tax return since he had left Canada in his youth. Brik used this as a pretext to abandon the entire process; the risk was too high of being caught, he reasoned, while remaining in Canada meant that Cunningham, his lover in Kingston, was still reachable domestically.

For some reason, the KGB accepted Brik’s rationale that migrating to the United States was too dangerous and he took the opportunity to visit Cunningham in attempt to convince her to get a divorce. He had not factored in how he would keep his KGB double life a secret from her; he sometimes worked at 2 a.m., using a short-wave radio and a cipher pad, decoding instructions on his next steps to take, which would undoubtedly raise suspicions. Since she rejected his proposal once again, he did not have to contend with hiding the true nature of his work and he returned to his fake job in Montreal.

Brik was soon to promoted by the KGB to the status of “illegal resident,” with the expectation that he would be able to run agents of his own. Instead, for the time being, he still worked alone and received his tasks through radio messages to check out companies in surrounding regions and report back to headquarters, work which he found extremely boring. He was supposed to be minding a photo studio in Montreal, but the KGB assignments usually took him out of town and the demands of doing both were too much for him. He was also scared of his new KGB handler, Vladimir Bourdine, who made the North American official enemies appear kinder and possessing a more human touch in contrast.

Brik still had affection for his homeland, but he wanted out of the KGB. He brought his conundrum to his lover in Kingston; at first, Cunningham laughed at him, presuming this was one of his typical exaggerations. She had never heard of the KGB, but after he had explained all of the pieces of his story bit by bit, she believed him. She urged him to tell his story to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who she explained were different from the police forces he knew back in Russia. Two hours into his drive back to Montreal, Brik stopped in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, and placed a call to the RCMP. At the time, the RCMP’s Security Service handled counterespionage cases in Canada and they were excited to have their first significant case to handle; previously their work had focused primarily on the fading Communist Party of Canada.

A man approached Brik at the Mount Royal Hotel at the appointed time. “That bellhop downstairs is something,” the man said, taking out half of a dollar bill. “I wanted to tip him but he grabbed so fast he tore it in half.” Brik replied: “That’s funny, the same thing happened to me.” Ending this contrived exchange, the two pieces of the bill were placed together and shown to be a match. Brik had been given the half of the dollar bill to prove his identity to an RCMP officer. The representative pretended to be Eugene Walker from the Canadian Secret Agency, an organization which did not exist. The RCMP offered to make him a double agent; they could register his business to make it appear more legitimate and if he ever needed assistance, he only needed to search out a pay phone and call a particular dentist, asking for Mr. Walker. The dentist, a “cut-out” for the RCMP, would call them on Brik’s behalf and they would return the call 15 minutes later at a different pay phone.

Although Brik by this point wanted to leave the spy business entirely, he reluctantly accepted the assignment. The RCMP found running him as a double agent challenging, particularly with his Kingston lover Cunningham 3 hours away taking up part of his time and most of his thoughts. In response, the RCMP asked the military to move the woman’s husband to Yukon in north, bordering Alaska. Brik’s lover was now as far away from him as possible within Canada. The dentist sent a distress signal to the RCMP, who traveled to meet with Brik. To his face, the RCMP denied making the change, saying that transfers were an expected part of military life. Brik accused the RCMP of being behind this attempt to destroy his relationship and collapsed to the floor, covering his face and crying. The RCMP responded by asking how his wife in Moscow was doing; perhaps she could be brought to Canada. Without further words being spoken, Brik had decided to continue working as a double agent.

Bennett

Decoding messages from the KGB was a time-consuming process; the broadcasts arrived in Morse code and Brik had to decipher them using a one-time cipher pad, meaning that there was no repetition from which to learn in terms of how the messages were encoded. Sometimes he could spend hours late at night working on a secret communication, only to discover that it was a benign message wishing him a happy birthday or celebrating the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. If Brik happened to miss a particular message, whether through laziness or overwork, he mailed a letter to an appliance store on Rideau Street in Ottawa, whose store owner placed a card in his window. This signaled to his KGB handler Bourdine that the message needed to be repeated the next week. Leslie James “Jim” Bennett of the RCMP set up an observation post on the KGB storefront, convincing a store owner across the street that one of his rooms on the upper floor was needed for a drug investigation.

Brik was to send his letters to the appliance store on Saturday mornings. Once he missed the deadline and looked for a post office that was open on Sunday. He had been taught in his KGB training that they could approach police officers in North America, who would answer questions that were reasonable in nature. “Where can I buy a stamp?” Brik asked one officer he located on the street in Montreal. “It’s Sunday,” the officer replied. “The post office is closed. Where do you come from anyway?” Fearing his identity was in the process of being compromised, Brik turned his back to the officer and left without saying a word.

“Are you still with us?” Bourdine, Brik’s KGB handler, was upset with his performance and castigated him for showing up late for a meeting on Bank Street in Ottawa. There was too much work for him to accomplish, Brik complained. He feared that the KGB had figured out his double agent status and would send him back to Moscow. On the other hand, he was also afraid that Canada might execute him as a traitor just like the Soviet Union would theoretically do. In an RCMP officer’s car, Brik explained how he no longer wanted to be a spy. “Get out, get out! I never want to see you again,” the officer replied. Brik stayed in the car, motionless, eventually conceding: “Okay,” he would remain as a double agent.

Brik’s fortunes seemed to change with the arrival of Nicolai Ostrovsky, a more accommodating and calm KGB handler. Ostrovsky invited him for a beer, which Brik declined as it violated protocol, but he appreciated the man’s demeanor nonetheless as a marked improvement over Bourdine. Ostrovsky instructed Brik was to run his first agent, a Canadian stealing secrets for the KGB regarding the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow, an interceptor aircraft anticipated to be sold eventually to the U.S. and Great Britain. If Brik handled him well, there would be more agents to follow. The RCMP Security Service was ecstatic as each new agent would be a new KGB operator exposed working in Canada. Brik was relieved that the KGB apparently did not suspect him of betraying them.

The leaking of confidential information on the Arrow project caused a problem for the RCMP in terms of acting on this immediately or waiting. There was the risk of burning the source now because of the sensitive information being fed to the Soviet Union or they could wait for bigger revelations to follow. The U.S. also had an agreement with Canada that required them to keep the information safe. The classified information obtained by the Soviets would be obsolete in a few years anyway, the RCMP reasoned, and elected to let the secrets go.

Now comfortable with his status, Brik was more bold in his interactions with authority. His only fear continued to be the possibility that he could be called back to Moscow. He traveled to Montreal’s east end, looking to photograph an oil tank in the refineries of the area, after seeing one pictured in a magazine. It would make a great addition, he thought, to the wall of his fake photo studio. After setting up his equipment, he was soon accosted by a guard. “What the hell are you doing here? Let’s see some identification.” Brik was nonplussed: “Identification?” he responded. “I’m a Russian spy and this stuff is going straight back to Moscow. What do you think I’m doing?” The guard was not amused, barking: “Get out of here!”

Drowning his sorrows in bottles of Old Tom gin one night, Brik went even further in exposing his espionage work, phoning the Montreal Gazette on a whim. “Do you want a story?” he asked the journalist he reached on the line. He explained how he was an undercover Soviet agent posing as a Canadian photographer who had defected and was working for the Canadian government. Since he was drunk and lacked a Russian accent, the reporter dismissed this as a crank call and did not pursue the story. The RCMP was tapping his phone and was soon at his door. Brik was whisked to Ottawa and thrown in solitary confinement for three days as a ruse to shut him up. His Canadian handler pretended to pull strings with the “separate” RCMP when in fact he worked for them. He was subjected to interrogation with real personnel, but the intent was to frighten him into the belief that he narrowly escaped severe punishment for his attempted betrayal. Brik fell back into line but a surprise betrayal would follow as a result of his trip home.

Morrison

James Morrison, a corporal in the RCMP, was a womanizer like Brik, but he was also a big spender and deeply in debt, roughly equal to a year’s salary and growing with each interest payment. Although he was not part of the case, his boss Jimmy Lemieux sent Morrison on the mission of returning Brik to Montreal after the interrogation ruse, in part because he wanted Morrison to return with smoked meat from their favorite Montreal deli. Lemieux explained to Morrison the importance of keeping Brik’s identity and association with the RCMP a secret and sent him on his way.

To handle his debt obligations, Morrison had begun using a check to pay for each bounced check, backed by insufficient funds, in a process known as kiting. As the RCMP’s designated errand boy, he was also tasked with delivering $1,000 payments to the Bell Company, which was being paid secretly to tap phones on the RCMP’s behalf. Morrison stole two of these to help pay off his debts and wrote fake receipts indicating they had been delivered. It did not take long for Bell to notice that payments were missing and Morrison’s theft was discovered by his bosses. He was ordered to return the funds or face dismissal and prosecution.

In his desperation, Morrison was ready to work for the enemy. He approached Ostrovksy, who had long figured out Morrison was surveilling him. He needed money fast and had important information to sell to Ostrovsky, he promised. Without any money exchanging hands, Ostrovsky was able to extract from Morrison that a double agent was working in Montreal as a photographer. Morrison realized he had given away too much information, but Ostrovsky remained emotionless, stating: “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ostrovsky later met Morrison on an isolated country road. “I can give you some money to help out,” Ostrovsky remarked as he laid an envelope containing what he was told was $5,000 on the car seat. There was more where that came from if Morrison could produce more information about Operation Keystone (RCMP’s codename for their work with Brik) and the RCMP’s surveillance activities. Once out of sight, he checked the envelope and found it contained $4,200 in $20 bills. He sold his mother-in-law’s car and although he no longer had a car to conduct surveillance operations, this could now explain how he was able to repay the RCMP and escape prosecution.

At his next meeting with Ostrovsky, Morrison brought with him a handwritten notebook with the names of everyone in the Security Service. Ostrovsky flipped through the pages with great interest. He asked for the addresses of the civilians in the RCMP’s Watcher Service, who followed the KGB using cars, but Morrison did not know those. “That’s fine,” Ostrovsky said, slipping the book inside his breast pocket. The notebook in Morrison’s handwriting was evidence of treason and the KGB had him in their “net.” At the previous meeting, Morrison had asked for an escape plan in case his disloyalty was discovered. Ostrovsky remarked that a plan was being developed to take him through New York City if needed. Ostrovksy requested Morrison travel to Mexico to debrief with “comrades from Moscow,” offering to pay $3,000 in expenses.

Before the Mexican proposal could be implemented, Morrison received his punishment from the RCMP for his $2,000 theft: he would be transferred to Winnipeg and removed from the Security Service. Now that he was placed on regular police work, he was losing access to the information the KGB wanted. Bennett was extremely sad to see Morrison leave on this assignment, as he was one of Bennett’s best friends. Even though Bennett was a civilian employee and was generally deemed to be a lower status than the Mounties of the RCMP, Morrison never treated him as such. The two would spend time together at Morrison’s home and the two families would spend weekends on the RCMP’s campgrounds at Long Island in Ottawa. Their friendship would remain, however, as Operation Keystone fell apart.

Moscow

Despite his fears, Brik decided to request a transfer home anyway to prove his bona fides. KGB headquarters answered that he would return in six months. The RCMP provided him with a choice: staying in Canada would eventually result in Canadian citizenship, a new identity, and the freedom to live his own life. Brik decided to go to Moscow and looked forward to seeing his wife after three years. He requested that the RCMP give him an escape plan. “You’re not going to be there with me,” he explained. “You’ll be sitting safely over here.” Brik flew into a rage when he saw the plan drawn up by the British, since Canada had no assets in the region. The plan involved British officers taking him to Leningrad, at which point he would be on his own to use public transportation and walk on foot over the border of the Soviet Union and Norway. “This is ridiculous,” he complained. “Do you expect me to do that? No way can I escape over the ice to Norway.”

Brik insisted on a better plan and an RCMP officer took a trip to Montreal to personally show him the gun he would be given during an escape operation. While Bennett and Morrison were duck hunting in the marshes of Manitoba, Brik was on his way to Moscow, completely unaware that Morrison had sold his double agent status to the KGB. Brik’s last chance to back out came in Paris, when he met with a KGB handler without RCMP surveillance, as the park was too challenging to surveil discreetly. He sent a coded postcard as instructed to “Eugene Walker” in Canada; he signaled “distress” but since he continued with the journey, the RCMP assumed he had only been experiencing last-minute doubts, as was typical in their experience with him.

Brik failed to return after 12 weeks but no one knew how long the KGB would keep him in Moscow. In 1956, the RCMP now had several counterespionage cases but none as important as Operation Keystone. The RCMP beamed short wave messages into the Soviet Union at particular times but no responses were returned by Brik. The main signal they waited for was a walk at 5 p.m. Brik was to take in Moscow on a particular street while carrying a vinyl record under his arm. If he took out a handkerchief briefly and blew his nose, this was to signal to the RCMP that he was safe. The British service waited every day at the appointed time but Brik never showed up.

After several months, the British thought they had spotted Brik with a record under his arm but he did not use the handkerchief. A woman was with him, assumed to be his wife. He had been instructed to go alone. The British noticed heavy surveillance and surmised Brik must be either suspected or broken by the KGB. The escape plan would not be activated; he would not be able to escape the Soviet Union alive, they thought, and Brik took no steps to activate the secret plan.

The KGB had continued broadcasting its messages despite Brik’s absence and the RCMP proceeded to decode each one of them. A month after his disappearance, a new illegal appeared to be replacing Brik, named Hector, arriving from Rio de Janeiro. Some in the RCMP viewed this as a positive sign, but not Bennett, who was assigned to search for Hector. He initially assumed that Hector did not exist and was a distraction concocted by the KGB. Using Brik’s private cipher did not make sense given their penchant for security. After three weeks, the messages indicated that a new signal plan was on the way. The RCMP surveilled Ostrovsky, presuming he would be the handler to meet with Hector, but no meetings occurred.

Bennett pursued all leads and discovered from Moscow broadcasts that Hector was supposedly a White Russian who had entered Canada through Brazil with a wife apparently helping him with KGB operations. Bennett scanned immigration files and found two potential matches. One in Toronto was quickly cleared but one in Montreal proved promising; this suspect was surveilled for a year before the RCMP gave up. It was now clear to the RCMP that Operation Keystone was lost but it would take years to discover how badly the case had been compromised. Unbeknownst to the British and Canadians, Brik had been arrested the moment he arrived in Moscow and was sent to a gulag as punishment.

Internal Affairs

After the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa burned down on New Year’s Day in 1956, the RCMP now had the opportunity to install surveillance devices in a new building being constructed. They declined to receive assistance from the CIA, upset that the Agency’s liaison officer in Ottawa had not informed them that the Agency was sending burned agents to Canada through Europe. Something or someone appeared to tip off the Soviets, who left the bugged section of the Embassy unused and spent an inordinate amount of sweeping the area for surveillance devices, apparently finding none giving the purposefully weak signals emitted from the devices. Years later, once their detection technology improved, the Soviets found the microphones and removed them. The RCMP had mostly stopped listening by that point, learning almost nothing of value from the underutilized room.

While stationed in Winnipeg in his new reduced role, Morrison’s debts continued to pile up and he believed that Ostrovsky was his only source of extra funds. He requested a meeting as instructed: writing a letter to a codename of Lambert in East Berlin and a code number, which indicated he would show up at a predetermined location in Ottawa. As he waited for the meeting to take place, he went on a desperate search for secrets he could sell to the Soviets. One night, he broke into Bennett’s apartment looking for classified documents. Bennett and his wife returned that evening from St. Patrick’s Church and saw a light burning in their living room of their apartment on Somerset Street. They rushed home and to their relief they found their friend Morrison inside. He had dropped by for a visit and needed to use the washroom, he explained, and so he had opened the door using a piece of celluloid. “Don’t do it again,” Bennett admonished him. “You nearly gave us a heart attack.” Over coffee, Morrison asked what radio frequencies the Watcher Service was using now. Bennett replied he did not know. Morrison then asked about Brik: “Is there any sign of our friend coming back?” Bennett answered: “No. Nothing so far.”

Morrison met with Ostrovsky, despite having no new secrets to share. The meeting lasted twenty minutes and Ostrovsky wanted to know what technical means the RCMP would be using against the Embassy. Morrison now being disconnected from the RCMP’s Security Service, he barely knew that the Embassy had burned down in the first place. Ostrovsky handed him an envelope with a disappointing amount of cash that did not even begin to address his dire financial straits.

Morrison was soon transferred out of Winnipeg to a small town detachment; he was now even more isolated from the espionage side of the RCMP. Trips to Ottawa were harder to effectuate; he stayed with Bennett during his next trip. Seeking information that the Soviets wanted, Morrison asked Bennett what the RCMP’s plans were for the new Soviet Embassy. Morrison somehow knew who the contractor was on the construction build and the line of questioning made Bennett uncomfortable. Bennett detailed an improbable scheme that involved installing closed-circuit television cameras inside the Embassy. This sounded like a great surveillance measure, Morrison enthused.

Morrison conveyed this detail to Ostrovksy in a Quebec pub near Buckingham, a half-hour drive from northeast Ottawa. Ostrovsky was unimpressed with the information; in his estimation, Morrison was either a triple agent or was now making up stories for money. Morrison’s personal checks were about to bounce once again and he requested another meeting with the KGB. After a flight to Montreal, Morrison traveled by car to Gatineau where he met an unfriendly replacement for Ostrovsky, Rem Krassilnikov, who was greatly upset that their double agent had wasted his time: “What are you here for?” Krassilnikov chastised Morrison. “Why did you ask us to meet you here?”

Morrison explained how he needed money. “That’s not my department,” Krassilnikov responded. “I don’t deal with that.” Morrison became indignant and replied that he would only speak with Ostrovsky. Morrison got out of the car and the brief exchange with the new KGB handler was over. The KGB had not covered his travel expenses this time and so Morrison’s debt only expanded.

On his way back home, Morrison saw a car with a lone figure inside a block away from where he had parked. He was now panicking that he had been followed by the RCMP’s Watcher Service: why else would a man be parked on a cold fall night and sit alone in the darkness? At a bar in the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa, he agonized over apparently being discovered and debated whether to pitch himself as a triple agent to the RCMP.

Two years had gone by since Brik had disappeared in Moscow. While the RCMP had initially guessed that Brik had caved under pressure and confessed his betrayal, they now had begun to suspect Morrison had something to do with his disappearance. Morrison reached out to headquarters, mentioning his contacts with Ostrovsky and he was placed under interrogation. The RCMP investigators pointed out inconsistencies in his story. “I have nothing to say,” he replied, knowing that they would never subpoena the KGB and had no evidence against him. The Mounties informed him he could be held for up to one year without charges and encouraged him to confess. Morrison now regretted reaching out; their line of questioning revealed to him that the RCMP had no idea what he had been doing with the Soviets. Within nine days he cracked, wanting to speak with his wife.

The RCMP decided to press charges over his check kiting rather than pursue any classified wrongdoing and he was charged with fraud. He was given a two-year suspended sentence and was ordered to pay restitution of $100 a month. The lenient sentence handed down by the court was due to his “past good character, his exemplary record with the RCMP, his military service and the suffering his family would experience from losing nearly nineteen years of service.” Nothing about his treasonous acts was revealed in the court case.

External Affairs

In the late 1950s, Roy Guindon was working as a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. He was smitten with Larissa Dubanova, a ballet dancer from the Bolshoi Theater who spoke perfect English. She also happened to be a KGB agent and informed Guindon one day that she was pregnant with his child. Now guilty of an offense under Soviet law, Guindon had no diplomatic immunity, but to his relief the KGB swept in and offered him the option to marry Dubanova. He readily agreed, but both the pregnancy and marriage were KGB fabrications. Dubanova had suffered a “miscarriage,” she explained and now the KGB wanted more favors. Eventually, Guindon began fulfilling their demands, opening Embassy safes during his night shifts, giving them codes, and granting them access to cable traffic. Once he was moved to Warsaw by the Canadians, the KGB allowed Dubanova to visit him in his new posting and he continued to act as their agent. He was only discovered in his next posting in Tel Aviv, when Israeli intelligence listened in on a meeting Guindon had with a Soviet controller. Due to missteps made by the police in his interrogation, the Department of Justice did not see a path forward that would result in a guilty verdict for Guindon’s crimes.

After Anatoliy Golitsyn had defected from his KGB position in late 1961, he offered the Canadians what he knew about the Guindon case. By this point, Guindon had already been exposed, however. There was not much Golitsyn could offer in terms of specific cases that the RCMP did not already know; however, Bennett, now head of the Russian Desk at the RCMP was intrigued in terms of what he could learn from Golitsyn given how his counterpart at the CIA, James Angleton, held him in such high regard.

The RCMP’s Security Service Director, William Kelly, and Bennett traveled to the United States to assess Golitsyn. “This is incredible,” Kelly remarked afterwards, meaning it in the negative sense. Golitsyn would never be invited to speak to the team in Canada as long as he remained director. In 1965, Golitsyn was interviewed by the FBI with Angleton present and they left similarly unimpressed. Whereas in the early years of his defection, he had concrete information to offer, now that the well had gone dry he was left to speculate using his much hyped analytical abilities. The FBI wanted his insights on a KGB recruitment conducted in Germany; the FBI felt the pieces of information were too small to positively identify a suspect, but Golitsyn disagreed. Golitsyn offered that KGB penetration of the West went deeper, suggesting that the FBI contribute to the mole hunt underway at the CIA to find a hidden KGB spy. “I suggest we should begin an investigation of ‘Sasha,’ Hanfman, Goldfarb, Kovich, etc.,” Golitsyn told them. “My idea is to give you a little broader idea of the deep penetration. Whether or not you accept it is your business but it would be wrong if I did not mention it.” The mole hunt at the CIA, known internally as HONETOL, would continue for another five years. A memo written by FBI assistant director William C. Sullivan in 1970 noted a “Problem with CIA: CIA wanted the Bureau to undertake full-scale investigation of its four employees based solely on Golitzyn’s allegations.” Since the allegations amounted to speculation on the part of the KGB defector, Sullivan wrote under the header Recommended Action: “None. We do not believe, in light of the facts set forth, that CIA will make an issue of this matter.”

In the late 1960s, the Canadians believed that one case that fell into their lap provided the potential to get one step ahead of the KGB as they had with Brik. Natasha Makhotin had entered Canada in 1968 with her husband Vladimir, ostensibly an employee of the Soviet Embassy. On paper, Vladimir fit the profile of a KGB agent operating in the country. His wife Natasha was thirty-two years of age and apparently a ballerina from Moscow, who bore a striking resemblance to Sophia Loren.

The RCMP’s Watcher Service one day surveilled Natasha Makhotin as she enter a shopping mall parking lot in Ottawa, driving a car with Soviet Embassy plates. She sat idle in a parking spot for a few minutes until a handsome man in his mid-thirties drove his car into the lot and parked beside her. She got out and joined him in his car, kissing him as soon as she got in. She disappeared from view as the car pulled out of the lot; the RCMP could no longer see her on the passenger side and suspected she was hiding. The RCMP followed the pair as they stopped in a motel in nearby Gatineau.

Bennett thought this was a deception operation on the part of the KGB. This theory began to crack when they brought in the man having the affair with Makhotin, whom they nicknamed Joker. During his questioning, Joker revealed that Makhotin was not trying to hide when they left the parking lot; she was performing fellatio on him. He was a cab driver and had seduced her while working as her driving instructor, with his good looks and his propensity to be “full of bullshit,” in the words of an RCMP officer. An affair with him would have no intelligence value for the KGB. “Soviets have human frailties too,” an officer argued. Bennett retorted: “The Soviets are too well trained to do this sort of thing.” Makhotin, he reasoned, was carelessly speaking about her affair on the Embassy phone after being told not to talk openly as a matter of course.

There was now the potential to recruit another Soviet to their cause if Makhotin was indeed carelessly carrying out a love affair with a Canadian, but the RCMP debated on methods to entrap her. The local RCMP wanted to use the KGB’s own tactic of blackmail on them and secretly film one of Makhotin’s rendezvous with Joker. Bennett at headquarters had a different idea: “Look, why don’t we see if we can squeeze the husband. He’s the main target, not the bloody woman. What the hell is she going to tell us? The husband is the one we suspect of being intelligence.” He suggested they phone the Soviet Embassy and inform them that Mr. Makhotin was having an affair with a woman from Toronto. This happened to be true; the RCMP had discovered earlier that while his wife was cheating, he was simultaneously carrying on an affair with a member in the Toronto chapter of the Communist Party of Canada.

Bennett was overruled and the plan to secretly film Mrs. Makhotin was underway. There were logistical issues now that Joker knew that the RCMP was monitoring him. He was careful to request alternative rooms each time he checked into the motel, not accepting the first or second room number offered. Bugging the motel room was not major problem since the CIA had provided clamp-on microphones, which could be switched easily from room to room in under a minute. The idea of filming of the event caused the real issue, as a pinhole had to be drilled into the targeted room with a camera placed in the hole. This meant that the room number had to be known in advance, since this process required more time.

On the night of the surveillance operation with the CIA’s equipment in place, the RCMP watched with anticipation as Makhotin and Joker drove into the motel parking lot as expected. The success of the operation hung on the prospect that Joker would choose the correct room for their liaison.