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- <text id=94TT1118>
- <title>
- Aug. 08, 1994: Espionage:Death of the Perfect Spy
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
- Aug. 08, 1994 Everybody's Hip (And That's Not Cool)
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- ESPIONAGE, Page 32
- Death of the Perfect Spy
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> The untold story of the most valuable Russian informant--and
- how he was betrayed by Aldrich Ames
- </p>
- <p>By Elaine Shannon/Washington
- </p>
- <p> They called him by fanciful code names--Top Hat, Bourbon,
- Donald, Roam--and on the days when his latest cache of secrets
- would arrive at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA
- officer says, "it was like Christmas." There was something for
- everyone. The names of four U.S. military officers working as
- spies for the Soviet Union. Hard evidence of Beijing's deepening
- animus toward Moscow, which President Nixon exploited to forge
- his 1972 opening to China. Technical data on Soviet-made antitank
- missiles, which allowed U.S. forces, years later, to defeat
- those weapons when they were employed by Iraq during the 1991
- Gulf War.
- </p>
- <p> This intelligence trove was provided by General Dmitri Polyakov,
- a barrel-chested weekend carpenter and collector of fine shotguns
- who served as a top officer of the Soviet military intelligence
- agency, the GRU. Polyakov began working for U.S. intelligence
- in 1961, and during the succeeding decades he passed increasingly
- precious secrets, at blood-chilling personal risk. In Moscow
- he brazenly stole from the GRU stockroom a special kind of self-destructing
- film that he used to photograph secret documents, as well as
- hollow, fake stones in which to conceal the film in meadows
- for pickup by U.S. spies. To signal his handlers, he would ride
- the tram past the U.S. embassy and activate a miniature "burst"
- transmitter hidden in his pocket. During postings abroad, he
- would pass information face to face: in the back alleys of Rangoon
- or among the bulrushes along the Yamuna River in New Delhi,
- where his CIA contact would pretend to fish while a hidden recorder
- taped Polyakov's staccato military briefing, punctuated by peacocks
- screeching in the background.
- </p>
- <p> In an interview with Time last week, that CIA officer, who asked
- that he not be named, recalled how worried he felt when Polyakov
- was suddenly ordered to return to Moscow in June 1980. "You
- know, if anything happens, you are always welcome in our country,"
- the American began to babble, like a nervous lover. "I hope
- the day will come when I can sit down openly with you and have
- drinks and dinner in our country." The Russian fixed him with
- steel-blue eyes and replied, quietly and evenly, "Don't wait
- for me. I am never going to the United States. I am not doing
- this for you. I am doing this for my country. I was born a Russian,
- and I will die a Russian." But what will be your fate, asked
- the American, if your spying is discovered? The reply came in
- Russian: "Bratskaya mogila"--a common, unmarked grave.
- </p>
- <p> No one knew what became of America's perfect spy until January
- 1990, when the state-controlled Soviet newspaper, Pravda, reported
- that on March 15, 1988, General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov was
- executed for espionage. CIA and FBI agents who knew the Russian
- agonized over what mistake they might have made that resulted
- in his unmasking. Only recently did they learn the truth. Aldrich
- Hazen Ames, a career CIA officer, was arrested in February and
- sentenced to life in prison after he admitted taking $2.5 million
- from the KGB, starting in 1985, in return for secrets that included
- the identities of many Soviet and East bloc citizens spying
- for the CIA. At least 10 of these people are believed to have
- been executed.
- </p>
- <p> The CIA has confirmed that the most important of Ames' victims
- by far was Polyakov, whose briefing transcripts and photocopies
- of secret documents fill 25 file drawers in the agency's innermost
- sanctum. Many intelligence experts now believe that Polyakov
- made a far more important contribution than a more famous GRU
- turncoat, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was executed in 1963 for
- supplying the U.S. with information during the Cuban missile
- crisis. Of all the secret agents the U.S. recruited during the
- cold war, says CIA director James Woolsey, "Polyakov was the
- jewel in the crown."
- </p>
- <p> For the first time, in exclusive interviews with TIME, intelligence
- officers who worked with Polyakov and officials who used his
- information have described their relationship with this legendary
- figure in the secret history of the cold war. Furious that Ames
- in recent interviews has sought to minimize the human and national-security
- costs of his treachery, CIA chief Woolsey told TIME last week,
- "What General Polyakov did for the West didn't just help us
- win the cold war, it kept the cold war from becoming hot. Polyakov's
- role was invaluable, and it was one that he played until the
- end--in his own words--for his country."
- </p>
- <p> The son of a bookkeeper, Polyakov was born in the Ukraine in
- 1921, attended military school, and won decorations for bravery
- as an artillery officer during World War II. After the war,
- he studied at the Soviet equivalent of West Point before signing
- on as a spy for the GRU.
- </p>
- <p> In his early 30s, he was given his first assignment: the Soviet
- mission to the United Nations in New York City. There he directed
- Soviet spies who worked without benefit of diplomatic cover.
- It was during a second tour at the U.N., in 1961, that Polyakov
- sought contact with FBI counterintelligence agents in Manhattan,
- who dubbed him Top Hat and marveled at their good fortune. "He
- was a big catch, and went on for a very long time," says James
- Nolan, formerly the FBI's top Soviet counterintelligence specialist.
- "There aren't many who start out as medium-grade officers and
- rise to the rank of general."
- </p>
- <p> Still, Polyakov's handlers found him an odd duck. He would not
- accept much money: no more than $3,000 a year, conveyed mostly
- in the form of Black & Decker power tools, a pair of work overalls,
- fishing gear and shotguns. He asked for a lot of trinkets such
- as lighters and pens, which he gave to other GRU officers who
- did him favors. Unlike most Soviet officers known to the FBI
- and CIA, he drank and smoked little and was faithful to his
- wife.
- </p>
- <p> The things that mattered to him were his wife, children and
- grandchildren. He considered himself a true Russian patriot
- who had grown disillusioned with the Soviet system. And his
- handlers, despite initial skepticism, eventually shared that
- view. "I think his motivation went back to World War II," says
- the CIA officer who worked with Polyakov in New Delhi. "He contrasted
- the horror, the carnage, the things he had fought for, against
- the duplicity and corruption he saw developing in Moscow." Says
- a CIA headquarters officer who handled Polyakov's case for 15
- years: "He articulated a sense that he had to help us out or
- the Soviets were going to win the cold war, and he couldn't
- stand that. He felt we were very naive and we were going to
- fail."
- </p>
- <p> On a more practical level, Polyakov wanted his two sons to be
- well educated and placed in professional jobs, which could be
- assured by his rise in the GRU. His career, in turn, was aided
- by the CIA, which gave him some minor secrets and provided two
- Americans whom he presented as the fruits of his recruiting.
- They became double agents for the CIA. A year after signing
- on with the FBI, Polyakov was posted back to Moscow, where he
- had access to GRU penetrations of Western intelligence. Before
- long he began serving up moles, including Frank Bossard, a guided-missile
- researcher in the British aviation ministry and U.S. Army Sergeant
- Jack Dunlap, a courier at the National Security Agency.
- </p>
- <p> Any suspicions that he may have been a Soviet plant were allayed
- by the quality of the information he provided. In the late 1960s,
- while running the GRU's key listening post in Rangoon, Polyakov
- gave the CIA everything the Soviets collected from there on
- the Vietnamese and Chinese armed forces. Rotated back to Moscow
- as head of the GRU's China section, he photographed crucial
- documents tracking that country's bitter split with Moscow.
- A CIA specialist on Sino-Soviet relations drew on rich detail
- from a Soviet source--whom he learned just last week was Polyakov--that enabled the analyst to conclude confidently that the
- Sino-Soviet split would persist. The paper was used by Henry
- Kissinger, helping him and Nixon forge their 1972 opening to
- China.
- </p>
- <p> Polyakov's promotion to general in 1974 gave him access to a
- cornucopia of intelligence beyond his immediate mission: for
- example, a shopping list, several inches thick, of military
- technologies sought by Soviet spies in the West. "It was breathtaking,"
- recalls Richard Perle, an Assistant Secretary of Defense for
- President Reagan. "We found there were 5,000 separate Soviet
- programs that were utilizing Western technology to build up
- their military capabilities." Polyakov's list helped Perle persuade
- Reagan to press for tighter controls on Western sales of military
- technology.
- </p>
- <p> By the late 1970s, CIA officers treated Polyakov more like a
- teacher than an informant. They let him call the shots about
- meetings and dead drops. CIA technicians built him a special,
- handheld device into which information could be typed, then
- encrypted and transmitted in a 2.6-sec. burst to a receiver
- in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. And Polyakov often copied documents
- using film that could be developed only with a special chemical
- known to him and his handlers; if processed normally, it would
- come out blank.
- </p>
- <p> Using such tradecraft, Polyakov obtained more than 100 issues
- of the classified version of Military Thought, a strategy document
- produced monthly by the Soviet general staff. The periodical
- contained frank assessments by leading Soviet military strategists.
- Said Robert Gates, a career Soviet analyst and CIA director
- for President Bush: "There were a lot of debates at the time
- over Soviet military strategy and doctrine in terms of how their
- forces would be used in a war." Polyakov's purloined documents
- "gave us insights into how they talked to each other about these
- issues, whether they thought that victory in a nuclear war was
- possible." The answer, thankfully, was no. Polyakov proved that
- Soviet military leaders were not crazy warmongers. They were
- as afraid as we were. This insight may have prevented U.S. miscalculations
- that would have touched off a shooting war.
- </p>
- <p> No one knows where Dmitri Polyakov is buried--or how he died.
- When sentenced to what Russians euphemistically refer to as
- vyshaya mera--the highest measure of punishment--the condemned
- person is taken into a room, made to kneel, then shot in the
- back of the head. It was part of the Stalinist tradition. To
- save his country from that legacy, Polyakov chose to betray
- its rulers. And betrayed by another betrayer, he lost his life.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-