In November 1979, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced to the House of Commons that one of the most respected men in the British art world, Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, had been working as a spy for the Russians.
Blunt had become a Communist in the 1930s and had worked for the British Security Service (MI5) during the Second World War, passing secrets to Moscow. In 1951 he helped two other British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, to flee to Russia when they came under suspicion.
Blunt was an example of the type of spy known as a ‘mole’ – agents who are prepared to wait for years, building up their cover, until they get access to vital information.
Unlike more conventional spies who are recruited by their own country to undertake a mission in another, the mole is often someone who, usually for ideological reasons, has chosen to work for an alien cause. Having taken that decision, he deliberately manoeuvres himself into a position where he can inflict the most harm. And all the while he plays the part of a patriot.
Some moles are recruited by intelligence specialists known as case officers. Others recruit themselves by volunteering their services.
Probably the most renowned case since the Second World War was that of the four British spies Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Kim Philby. All decided, while still at Cambridge University in the 1930s, to work secretly for the Soviet Union.
They were initially recommended by ‘talent-spotters’ who passed each onto a Soviet case officer who taught them the rudiments of espionage, and told them to give up their memberships of radical political groups. They were to make themselves as attractive as possible to official organizations.
Each man deliberately cultivated people in positions of influence whom he believed might assist him to find a useful job. Eventually Burgess and Maclean joined the Foreign Office, Philby the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and Blunt the counter-espionage service, MI5.
Once they were in their target organizations, the four men progressed to the most sensitive levels of government, gaining access to the most damaging information.
Maclean, Burgers and Philby all fled to Moscow and eventually died there. Blunt made a full confession to the British Security Service and was not prosecuted. He died in 1983.
A mole who spied against his own country purely for the money was Heinz Felfe, a former officer in the German SS who rose to an eminent position in the West German Federal Intelligence Agency in the 1950s.
In 1951, while looking for a job, he agreed to work for the Soviet secret service (later the KGB), for a salary of 1500 marks a month. At the same time he joined the Federal Intelligence Agency. For the next decade he worked as a double agent, feeding ‘disinformation’ about the KGB to the Germans and in return sending the KGB highly damaging information about the German spy network behind the Iron Curtain.
Suspicious about him finally arose when he bought a house which was too expensive for a man or one salary. When he was arrested in 1961 it was discovered that his activities had lost the West Germans 94 contacts behind the Iron Curtain, including 46 active agents. In 1963 Felfe was sent to prison for 14 years.
Another turncoat spy – who operated in the USA from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s – was John Walker, a former naval officer. His Russian spymasters paid him $1000 a week to run a family espionage ring, consisting of his brother Arthur, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, and son Michael, a seaman abroad the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Their activities enabled the Soviets to decipher countless top-secret communications and receive more than 1500 secret documents.
A quite different type of mole is the ‘sleeper’ who enters a foreign country on false documentation and burrows deep into the fabric of his adopted society.
Peter and Helen Kroger, US citizens of Polish extraction, were just a couple. Outwardly he was an antiquarian bookseller who, with his wife, led a comfortable suburban life at Ruislip in west London in 1961. In reality, the Krogers operated an illicit KGB wireless link with Moscow until they were arrested.
When the Kroger house was searched, even the most innocent-looking household item was revealed to be part of the paraphernalia of espionage. An apparently ordinary tin of talcum powder contained compartments for storing microfilms and a microfilm reader like a tiny telescope.
Renate and Lothar Lutze were deep-cover East German moles operating in West Germany before being arrested.
Born in Brandenburg, East Germany, in 1940, Renate Ubelacker, as she then was, got a job as a secretary in the West German Ministry of Defence in Bonn. Her work involved handling top-secret documents – including those dealing with NATO plans. In September 1972 she married Lothar Lutze, then a spy for the Ministry for State Security in East Germany. She succeeded in getting him a clerical job in the Defence Ministry.
For the next four years the couple gave vital information to the Russian-controlled East Germans. They were unmasked and arrested in June 1976. After spending three years on remand, Renate Lutze received a six-year sentence for spying and her husband was jailed for 12 years. She was released from prison in September 1981.
The most effective moles are those who are the very last to fall under suspicion. Burgess had been educated at Eton; Maclean’s father had been a Cabinet minister; Philby had joined SIS from The Times, and at the time of his exposure Anthony Blunt had been appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures at Buckingham Palace and had been knighted.
Some moles can be given a period of training before going into the field. For their own security it is vital for the moles to learn about secret methods of communicating with their own side and ways of spotting whether they are being watched.
The CIA operates a large base disguised as a military establishment at Camp Peary, in Virginia, USA; the French maintain a remote school high in the Alpes Maritimes in south-eastern France; while the Russian KGB have training centres near Leningrad.
However, it is occasionally impossible for a mole to undergo training, and he may have to be taught basic techniques while actually operating.
Oleg Penkovsky, a Russian lieutenant colonel, volunteered his services as a spy to the British in 1960. When he made a rare visit to the West in a Soviet trade delegation the following year, he was shown how to use a miniature camera and briefed on cipher systems. Instead of slipping away from his group, he simple pretended to go to bed early at his London hotel. In fact the British and Americans had hired the entire floor of the hotel directly above his room, and installed all the equipment necessary for the training sessions. The arrangement worked perfectly, and by the time he was due to return to Moscow Penkovsky was a fully fledged agent.
But his spying career was short-lived. Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB the following year and sentenced to death.
Picture Credit : Google