The Frugal Life Of A Chinese Spy In America

"Sitting around the house—secret audio recordings would later show—the two often talked about Chinese politics, remarking that Mao, like Stalin, was misunderstood by history. The influence of Maoist ideology was, perhaps, evident in the Maks’ extreme frugality: they ate their meals off of newspapers, which they would roll up and toss in the garbage. Every Saturday morning, after a game of tennis, they drove to a gas station and washed their car using the mops and towels there. From the gas station, the Maks drove to a hardware store and disappeared into the lumber section for ten minutes, never buying anything. For weeks, the agents following them wondered if the Maks were making a dead drop, but it turned out that the lumber section offered free coffee at that hour."

You can read more in The New Yorker HERE.

Chinese 'Seed Corn' Espionage

"As farmers work to plant the fields of Iowa this week, the FBI still lists five Chinese nationals as ‘wanted’ for stealing seed corn over the past three years... Mo is accused of being the ringleader for an elaborate network of men trying to steal inbred corn seed from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto farm fields in Iowa and Illinois in 2011."

"September 2012: Another man, Li Shaoming, is alleged to smuggle corn seed from Monee, Illinois to China. The DOJ claims Li concealed 374 small manila envelopes each containing small quantities of corn seed within two boxed of Pop Weaver brand microwave popcorn boxes."


You can read more HERE.

Kim Philby: New BBC Four Documentary

If you recognize the name "Kim Philby" as one of the most infamous spies of the 20th Century then you may want to watch this recent BBC Four documentary about him.

While it surveys Philby's entire career, a primary focus is on his little-discussed time in exile in Beruit (having resigned from MI6 under a cloud) from 1956 until his sensational defection to Moscow in 1963.  This absorbing  program features interviews with many contemporaries who knew Philby personally (now at the end of their own lives), as well as the aging authors of the most prominent books ever written about Philby, including Philip Knightly (who describes the circumstances of his unique interviews with Philby in Moscow).

Even if you've never heard the name "Kim Philby," you may also enjoy this as a portrait of a time when a falling-down-drunk alcoholic with a pronounced stutter (from the right school and family, of course), could drink, philander, lie, and betray his way through a charmed life in the British secret service. At least for a while.

"Where Is The Line Between Intelligence And Criminality?" Is It Frank Terpil?

You probably don't recognize the name Frank Terpil.  He was infamous only briefly in the early 1980s, an ex-C.I.A. man who, after being forced out of the agency in 1972, began working as an arms dealer, intelligence specialist, and adviser to a Who's Who of the world's most vile dictators, including the Shah or Iran, Idi Amin of Uganda,  Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, and Cuba's Fidel Castro, among many others.  This otherwise unassuming, pudgy guy from New York with a big moustache covering a broad smile was, to some who knew him professionally, a dangerous psychopath and, "the man who put steel in the spine of Idi Amin." How is this guy's name not more notorious and legendary?

I was astounded to read this morning that Frank Terpil is still alive, and had recently sat for an interview from his home in Cuba about his work for Gadhafi in the 1970s, during which interview Terpil apparently confirmed that he had been more than a mere military adviser, but had run a sort of Murder Incorporated for Gadhafi, arranging the assassination of the dictator's political enemies all over the world.  (The last I'd heard, Frank Terpil was purportedly arrested in Cuba in 1995, having been an international fugitive from justice for 15 years at that point, and was ominously under investigation for crimes against the state there.)

How did this street kid born in working class Brooklyn in 1939, end up being recruited by the CIA in 1965, and then get kicked out again just six years later when his black market foreign currency dealings during his posting in India came to light? Seemingly disaffected and almost unemployable back in the United States, how did Frank Terpil manage to become mysteriously well-connected and wealthy in later years working internationally as a sort of mercenary who, Zelig-like, placed himself in the service of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty dictators of the era, many of whom were avowed enemies of America?  

You can watch a really compelling 90 minute Frontline episode about him (including extensive interviews with him from exile in Beruit, and with his mystified and protective family back in Brooklyn), which aired originally on PBS in 1982, that answers all of these questions and more, on You Tube HERE. The show is clearly a product of its time, and has  a distinct "Watergate" feel to it.  It repeatedly raises a rhetorical question about whether Frank Terpil really could've done all of this himself, without the support and encouragement of the CIA (despite his apparent break with the agency in 1972, and despite the extreme illegality of his conduct, including arms smuggling and murder-for-hire).

Ted Shackley, who was Deputy Director of the CIA at the time, had his title stripped in 1977 (and was forced to retire under a cloud in 1979) amid the public scandal over Frank Terpil and Edwin Wilson's plot to sell C4 plastic explosives to Libya.  Shackley's autobiography, Spymaster: My Life In The CIA, published posthumously in 2005 after being approved by the CIA's Publication Review Board, suspiciously makes no mention whatsoever of either Frank Terpil or Edwin Wilson.

It's interesting to me that, according to THIS Miami Herald article about Frank Terpil published yesterday (which includes a recent photo of Terpil at 74 years of age), he lives a quiet life in exile in Havana, with a much younger local girlfriend and, "little to do, spending too much time frequenting Havana watering holes and nursing a drink." That all sounds eerily reminiscent of the unhappy later years which notorious British spy Kim Philby spent in Moscow after he defected there in 1963, until he died in 1988, lonely and drinking too much, with a much younger Russian woman as his sole companion.

Stalin's Daughter And His Legacy In America

Today is the 47th anniversary of the date in 1967 that the black sheep daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin arrived in New York and defected to the United States, a huge coup during the height of the Cold War.

I'm not entirely sure why I knew this had happened back then, because I wasn't even alive in 1967.  But I was vaguely aware of it, and so was very surprised to read THIS account of an interview with her in a recent issue of the The New Yorker magazine. (Stalin's daughter was still alive?!?) She actually died in 2011, after many illnesses.

In  later years she lived quietly in a nursing home in Wisconsin, subsisting on social security payments, apparently. There was a certain irony in that, I thought, because according to this article, when she defected in 1967, she wrote to her children, whom she'd left behind in Moscow, that, "Communism had failed as an economic system and as a moral idea."  I also thought it notable that her American-born daughter, Stalin's granddaughter, now works in Portland, Oregon selling, "antiques, vintage clothes, and scented candles."

I thought this sentence from the introduction to the article was noteworthy, too.  "The C.I.A. official who first interviewed her noted in a memo that 'our own preconceived notions of what Stalin’s daughter must be like—just didn’t let us believe that this nice, pleasant, attractive, middle-aged hausfrau could possibly be who she claimed to be.'”

CIA Uses "Chili Peppers" Songs To Torture

I started reading THIS article from the Huffington Post because it's headline touted the revelation that the CIA apparently used Red Hot Chili Peppers songs as part of its "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo Bay.

It made me laugh because I like their music myself.  But then two other references in this article caught my eye. One was that the band Skinny Puppy apparently got wind that their music was being used in the same way, and they apparently sent an invoice tio the CIA, billing them for the use of their songs.

The other aspect of this article that caught my eye was its phraseology. It reads in part, "a detainee identified as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn Abu Zubaydah was tortured while listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers on loop."  It obvoisly gives a very different impression of what was going on depending on whether 'while" really means "while" (implying the music was played as a background soundtrack to, say, water boarding), or whether, to bemore  accurate, 'while" should really be replaced with "by" (implying that merely listening to the music was "torture").

THIS National Journal article may give more insight on this point. "Zubaydah was also shackled at the wrists and hung to the ceiling of his cell, all the while loud music was played on an endless loop."  But this sentence contains its own frustrating ambiguities.  Is it the shackles and chains that were hung to the ceiling, or Zubaydah himself?

Edwin P. Wilson: CIA Agent, Flamboyant Con Man/Arms Dealer

As I've noted before, I'm always intrigued by the under-reported epilogues to famous stories. 

A reference in THIS article from the New York Post yesterday caught my eye. Its focus is on the debauched life of deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. ("Sex dungeon!") But a passing reference suggests that former CIA operative Edwin P. Wilson once ran a murder-for-hire squad for Gaddafi.

I first heard of Edwin P. Wilson when I read a 1986 book about him titled "Manhunt" by Peter Maas, which profiled him as a former CIA agent/con man who had 'gone rogue' and gotten involved in big money arms dealing with the Libyans while leaving business associates with the impression that he still worked for the CIA. He was arrested in 1982, and ultimately sentenced to over 50 years in prison.  That's where the story had ended for him, I assumed.

But it didn't end there, apparently.  Wilson died in September 2012 in Seattle at the age of 84, a free man. According to his New York Times obituary, in the end he served only 22 years of his 52 year sentence and, after a successful jailhouse appeal ("they framed a guilty man"), was released in 2004. 

His obit calls him 'the spy who lived it up.' "He showered minks on his mistress, whom he called 'Wonder Woman.' He owned three private planes and bragged that he knew flight attendants on the Concorde by name. His preferred habitat was a hall of mirrors. His business empire existed as a cover for espionage, but it also made him a lot of money."

For such a flamboyant character, the last years of his life following his 2004 release apparently passed anticlimactically. "Since then he had lived in Seattle on a monthly Social Security check of $1,080. He died of complications from heart-valve replacement surgery, his nephew Scott Wilson said."

Infamous Cold War Blunder: US Embassy Riddled With Bugs

On this date back in 1987, the United States government memorably accused the Soviet Union publicly of riddling the newly constructed US embassy in Moscow with hidden listening devices.

According to a  New York Times article that you can read HERE,  "the security problems in the new embassy building stem from a decision in 1972 to have much of the building assembled from prefabricated modules manufactured at a Soviet site not open to American inspection."

The building was infamously scrapped at a result, and a new embassy building was ultimately constructed, finally opening in the year 2000, long after the fall of the Soviet Union.  THIS Baltimore Sun article from July 2000 about the opening contains several memorable quotes, including:

•  "The U.S. Embassy construction began in 1979, using supports built by Soviet workers. By 1985, U.S. officials discovered the supports had eavesdropping equipment embedded throughout. 'It's nothing but an eight-story microphone plugged into the Politburo,' Dick Armey, a Republican congressman from Texas, said at the time."

• "Another titillating event occurred at the end of 1991, as the Soviet Union fell apart. Vadim Bakatin, the head of the KGB at the time, presented U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Strauss with the blueprints for the embassy bugs. Until that moment, the Soviet Union had steadfastly denied the bugging. It was a gesture of friendship, Bakatin said, and he hoped the United States would be able to de-bug the building and move in."

• "Finally, at a cost of $240 million, the embassy was taken apart brick by brick and rebuilt stone by stone - Minnesota stone."
  
  
  
  
  
   

Spy Jonathan Pollard Predictably Back In The News

Like clockwork, Jonathan Pollard is back in the news once again. Every couple of years public speculation (and political pressure from some quarters) mounts to release the imprisoned American spy, who passed classified documents to Israel (for money) in the early 1980s before getting caught.  Since being imprisoned in the mid-1980s, revisionist historians have, contrary to known facts, turned Pollard in some circles into a sort of 'dual patriot' to both the United States and to Israel, one who should therefore not still be imprisoned, they assert.

Jonathan Pollard is back in the news now because the possibility has been floated that he might be released as part of a broader agreement among Israel and the Palestinians critical to jump-starting peace talks between them.  You can read more about it on CNN HERE.

I wrote previously about Jonathan Pollard in 2012 HERE and in 2010 HERE (a more detailed re-examination of his spying, and subsequent arrest and trial).

The "James Bond" Myth: Low Pay At MI6

Real life spies in the British secret service (MI6) are paid annual salaries that range from $40,000 - $60,000 a year according to THIS CBS News article, a meager amount that is apparently causing morale problems.

A store manager at McDonald's in the United States earns $39,000 a year on average, according to CareerBliss.com HERE,

Trailer For Upcoming James Bond Movie

Paraphrasing Kevin Dillon's character from Platoon, "Nothing beats a good James Bond movie...except maybe the Indianapolis 500." The trailer for the new James Bond film, Skyfall, has been posted on You Tube HERE, and it looks good to me.

New Cold War-Era Spy Story Declassified

"It's a plot worthy of a Hollywood action movie: 40 years ago, the U.S. Navy carried out a daring mission to retrieve a top-secret film capsule that had settled more than 16,000 feet (4,876 meters) underwater on the ocean floor."

"At the time, the expedition was the deepest undersea salvage operation ever attempted. Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday detail the capsule's incredible recovery, using what was at the time the Navy's most sophisticated deep-sea submersible. On July 10, 1971, a classified U.S. satellite, code-named Hexagon, attempted to return a mysterious 'data package' to Earth by ejecting a capsule over the Pacific Ocean. The capsule's parachute failed, and the canister slammed into the water with an excruciating 2,600 G's of force."

"Since these satellites preceded today's era of digital technology, Hexagons recorded images on film, sending them back to Earth in capsules that re-entered Earth's atmosphere and were recovered within a designated zone near the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean. During the first Hexagon mission in 1971, the parachute attached to one of these capsules broke. The capsule sank to a depth of about 16,400 feet (almost 5,000 meters) in the Pacific... At that time, no object the size of the film canister had ever been detected by sonar and been searched for underwater."

You can read more at NBC News HERE. I wrote HERE a year ago when the first public references to this event were initially made. 

Where Is Mathias Rust Today?

Twenty five years ago a German teenager named Mathias Rust famously flew a light aircraft into the Soviet Union, landing in Red Square.  On this date 24 years ago, he was released from custody after spending 14 months in a Moscow prison (despite having been sentenced formally to four years in a Russian labor camp). 

You can watch a 5 minute retrospective HERE, which initially aired on Deutsche Welle just a few months ago. It includes an interview with the now 44-year old Mathias Rust.

Why did he do it as a 19 year-old back in 1987?  "For World Peace," Rust explains. He was inspired by a German comic book hero like Flash Gordon, apparently, and believed that Reagan and Gorbachev were incapable of resolving the differences between the Super Powers following the break-down of talks at  a recent summit.

"In later years Rust's fortunes took a dive," this Deutsche Welle segment concludes. "He was convicted of attempted manslaughter, shoplifting, and fraud.  Rust says he's now working as a financial analyst."

Canadian Spy's Other Life As "Baron Mordegan"

A 41 year-old Canadian naval officer named Jeffrey Delislie has been formally charged with spying, presumably for Russia, according to THIS article in The Globe and Mail.

The story continues by detailing the predictable fears that this revelation will damage Canada's intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States.  But then the story suddenly veers hard left toward World of Warcraft and other online MMORGs, a twist I did not expect.

 "SLt. Delisle led a rich second life online as 'Baron Mordegan,' an avid Internet gamer and a collector of medieval fantasy gear, his ex-wife told The Globe and Mail in March...'He admitted he had a computer addiction problem,' she said. SLt. Delisle used the Internet screen handle 'Baron Mordegan' during their 13 years of marriage, his ex-wife remembers. They divorced in 2010. She said he once explained that it came from a 1988 fantasy movie titled Willow... Ms. Delisle said her ex-husband was already hooked on medieval and military history when she met him at age 15.... SLt. Delisle, she said, would also spend large amounts of money on his medieval fantasy games."

Sexual Harassment At The CIA

"Stories of sexual improprieties are infamous at some CIA stations, especially in high-stress areas. It is a civilian agency, and employees in war zones tend to work long hours, live in close quarters and let off steam by drinking alcohol after work," according to THIS article in today's Los Angeles Times. 

"Partly as a result of that, former CIA officers said, what would be considered workplace sexual impropriety at corporations and other government agencies has been tolerated at the CIA, and trysts between supervisors and employees are not unusual... In 1995, the agency paid $990,000 to settle a class action lawsuit by 450 women. The settlement included promotions for 25 female case officers and better assignments for 14 others. It included raises and other career-enhancing steps for 64 women."


...doing the math, the fact that each of the 450 plaintiffs in the 1995 class action were awarded an average of a mere $2,200, and that  only 40 of the 450 women received promotions or 'better assignments,' tells me that there's likely more to the story...

New: British MP Spied For Czechs In 1960s

Archives from the Czech Security Service reveal that in the 1960s a conservative British MP named Raymond Mawbry sold them information, ranging from a hand-drawn floor plan of the Prime Minister's office to harmless political gossip, usually handed over at high-end restaurants and clubs in London, according to THIS BBC News report today.

"According to his Czech file - which runs for hundreds of pages - Mawby, codename Laval, was first contacted when he attended a cocktail party in the Czechoslovak embassy in November 1960... The central weakness which the Czech spies exploited was money. 'His leisure time he spends in bars… and also loves gambling,' one noted. 'While playing roulette and other games he is willing to accept a monetary 'loan' which was exploited twice.'"

At THIS link you can watch a 30 second clip posted on the BBC website today of Mowbry appearing on BBC TV in the 1960s (while he was spying for the Czechs) and arguing sternly that homosexuals pose a potentially heightened security risk.  After that, the clip continues for another 3 minutes during which a long-retired Tory MP talks about having met and known Mawbry in the early 1980s, when he was still an MP. "Those were the days and nights of all-night sittings, when those of us who were of a drinking disposition would gather in the bars. And Ray was the old sort of full-time MP, i.e. more likely to be found in the bar than doing anything useful. And he was a very jovial character....If you would have said, 'give me 100 names,' I never would have thought of Ray, because Ray was a simple, straightforward guy."

Mawbry died in 1990.

Yet Another Jonathan Pollard Apologia

You may be vaguely familiar with the name "Jonathan Pollard." He was an American civilian intelligence analyst for the US Navy who sold secrets to Israel in the mid-1980s, was caught in 1985 by the FBI at the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington (the Israelis refused to let him in), and pled guilty in May 1986 to a charge of 'conspiracy to provide national defense information to a foreign government.' He has been in prison ever since, now 27 years.

Pollard's name tends to come up every four years, when US Presidents end their terms and traditionally issue presidential pardons.  Like clockwork, supporters of Pollard and friends of Israel mount strenuous and public campaigns to pardon and free him.  And every time, Republican and Democrat presidents alike have always declined to do so.

Veteran CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer interviewed Pollard in prison in 1987, when Blitzer was then the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post,  and wrote a gripping book about the whole affair in 1989 called "Territory of Lies."

Pollard's current defense lawyers have written a new, sympathetic piece for CNN titled "The Truth About Jonathan Pollard" that you can read HERE. The third sentence is the core assertion always made by Pollard apologists. "Mr. Pollard is serving his 27th year of an unprecedented sentence of life in prison for delivering classified information to the state of Israel, a close ally of the United States."

Among the many relevant things that go unmentioned in this piece, however, is that Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in March 1987 in part because and he his wife were widely viewed to have violated their respective plea agreements with the government by giving multiple, defiant interviews to the press, including a notorious 60 Minutes interview, during which they sought to excuse their actions by wrapping themselves in the cause of Zionism. This post hoc rationalization, however, is at odds with the fact that Pollard received over $10,000 in cash from the Israilis, as well as diamonds and other jewels (and had agreed to be paid a further $1,500 a month), in exchange for the information he turned over to them, and that Pollard also stole information about China and provided it secretly to his wife (to help her own business), which documents were later found in their home after it was raided by authorities.

Two years ago, I wrote about the Pollard case in more detail HERE (a post that also includes photos of Pollard and a link to video).

Russian Spies Sell China ICBM Info

Two Russian college professors were convicted of treason yesterday in a Moscow court and were each sentenced to 12 years in prison for, "selling confidential information related to Russia's latest intercontinental ballistic missile, the Bulava, to representatives of China's military intelligence." You can read more on Fox News HERE.

Why is this news scary? "The Bulava [is] designed to equip a new generation of Russian nuclear submarines."

Notwithstanding the foreboding, long-term implications for US national security, I also thought this more mundane, commercial context was also interesting. "After decades of Cold War-era rivalry, Moscow and Beijing have developed what they call a strategic partnership... China also has become a major customer for Russian weapons industries, although Russian arms exports have drained in recent years as China has sought to produce unlicensed copycat versions of Russian weapons."

The Tragic End of Francis Gary Powers

Most people over the age of, say, 40, will probably vaguely recognize the name "Francis Gary Powers," and will nod in recognition when reminded that he was the pilot of a secret U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, sparking an international incident and causing tremendous embarrassment to the Eisenhower administration.  It was announced today that he will be awarded posthumously the Silver Star for valor. You can read about it on CNN HERE.

But how many people know what happened to Powers after he was shot down?

After almost two years in captivity in the Soviet Union, in 1962 Powers was exchanged in Berlin for a very valuable Russian spy, KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher, who had run a spy ring for years in New York as an 'illegal' calling himself Rudolf Abel. Powers received a distinctly chilly reception when he returned home.  Not only had the price for his freedom been high, but he was also criticized for not having activated the secret spy plane's self-destruct charge before it crashed, and for not using the "suicide pill" that the CIA had issued him.

After his release, Powers worked for Lockheed from 1963-1970, until he was fired upon writing a memoir that brought unflattering publicity to the CIA. He then became an airborne traffic reporter for a Los Angeles radio station before taking a similar job at Los Angeles television station KNBC. In that capacity, Powers was covering brush fires in Santa Barbara in 1977 when his helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed several miles short of Burbank airport, killing him. A subsequent NTSB report blamed the crash on pilot error (poor fuel management). Francis Gary Powers was 47 years old.  He had been freed from the Soviet Union only 15 years earlier.

The "Pumpkin Papers" Were Neither, It Turns Out

Richard Nixon, then an ambitious young Congressman from California, revealed to the public on this date back in 1948 the existence of the so-called 'Pumpkin Papers,' secret State Department documents that had been stolen by employees there who were also communist sympathizers spying for Russia.  These documents (mostly photos of documents on microfilm, actually) came to be called the 'Pumpkin Papers' because the reformed former communist who led authorities to them, Whitaker Chambers, had once hidden them in a pumpkin on his family farm.Contrary to popular belief at the time, however, the papers were not still hidden in that pumpkin when they were handed over in 1948.

The Pumpkin Papers played a central role in the later conviction of Alger Hiss on perjury charges in 1950, charges related to his alleged spying.  An urbane, well educated man, Hiss personified the East Coast Establishment that Nixon was reputed to have so loathed. Hiss denied having been a spy, and in later years became somewhat of a martyr figure to left leaning intellectuals during the Cold War, who thought Hiss had been railroaded by grasping neanderthals on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

In 1985, a very high level KGB defector named Oleg Gordievsky confirmed that Hiss had indeed been a spy.  And after the end of the Cold War, when KGB files were opened, further documentary evidence was found confirming that Hiss had been a well-established Soviet spy.

That being said, Wikipedia has a great epilogue to this story.  It reads, "The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the 'pumpkin papers' were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files... On July 31, 1975, as a result of ... follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the 'pumpkin papers' that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank due to overexposure, two others are faintly legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents introduced by the prosecution at the two Hiss trials, relating to U.S./German relations in the late 1930s."