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00:00One of the CIA's greatest spies, Dmitry Polyakov, is caught by the KGB and strip-searched.
00:17His head is held in an arm lock to prevent him taking poison.
00:24The invisible front, that's what it was in the Cold War.
00:31And for us it was war.
00:34The soldiers may have been on alert, but for us and the others who went out into the cold,
00:40it was actual war.
01:10Dawn on the 16th of July 1945.
01:31Allied scientists at Los Alamos leave for the New Mexico desert to watch the test of
01:36the first atomic bomb.
01:40They have been working for years under a blanket of total secrecy.
01:48Ted Hall, at 19, was the youngest scientist on the project.
01:53I was there, or at least I was there in a truck or a lorry some distance away.
01:59It was considered to be a safe distance away.
02:02I can't remember if there was any signal circulated that the test was about to be made, but anyway
02:08the damn thing went off.
02:12And it was a rather awesome sight.
02:20For Ted Hall, the Cold War had begun the year before.
02:26I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important
02:32that there should be no monopoly which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it
02:37loose on the world as Nazi Germany developed.
02:42There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do.
02:48The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly.
02:56Others thought the same way.
03:00The KGB had several sources inside Los Alamos, unknown to one another.
03:05The scientist Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall both passed on details of how to detonate nuclear
03:10weapons by implosion, a principle so new to Soviet science that there was no equivalent
03:16word in Russian.
03:22In 1949, the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb.
03:27Triggered by implosion, it copied key elements of the American bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
03:33The atom spies had saved the Soviet Union, perhaps two years of research.
03:40Ted Hall was questioned by the FBI in March 1951, but not charged for lack of evidence.
03:49A month later, KGB agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death.
03:55Amid the anti-Soviet fervor of the time, they became the only spies ever executed in peacetime
04:02America.
04:03It was gruesome, and it certainly brought home the fact that there were flames consuming
04:10people and that we were pretty close to being consumed.
04:16The intelligence war was lopsided.
04:20The KGB operated in the West, but the CIA confronted a closed world.
04:28Trains crossing the Finnish border into Russia were sealed by steel shutters.
04:34The United States faced a long famine of information.
04:40This lack of understanding of how the Soviet system functioned would dog us in CIA throughout
04:49the entire Cold War, whether it was the Soviet Union itself or the carbon copies of the Soviet
04:56Union in East Germany and in Cuba, you name it.
05:04Most early infiltration operations into the Soviet Union were doomed from the start.
05:13Western agents were betrayed by KGB spies like the British intelligence officer Kim
05:18Philby.
05:21Philby came to public attention because of his association with fellow double agents
05:25Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
05:29Philby on the right holds a press conference to deny charges that he was involved in the
05:32disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.
05:34Well, if there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?
05:38No, I was not.
05:40You think there was one?
05:41No comment.
05:42Now, Mr. Philby, the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean is almost as much of a mystery
05:47today as it was when they went away about four years ago or more.
05:52Can you shed any light on it at all?
05:54No, I can't.
05:59Philby told us a lot about those missions.
06:05He told us about the numbers of people.
06:08He told us about the coordinates, where and how the operations would be carried out, whether
06:13they would be parachuted in or sent in by sea.
06:18Those areas were, of course, surrounded by Soviet counterintelligence and they were caught.
06:26The normal routine was that the agents were interrogated.
06:33Some were very hostile and kept silent.
06:37In doing so, they signed their own death warrants.
06:43In 1953, Soviet emigre Mikhail Kudryavtsev parachuted into Russia to spy for the CIA.
06:55After we were dropped in, we were tied up and taken off to the KGB.
07:02When the investigator from Moscow arrived, and he arrived suspiciously quickly by nightfall,
07:10I got the impression that they had been waiting for us, that somehow the KGB knew we were
07:16coming.
07:20Kudryavtsev saved his life by telling the KGB everything and agreeing to parrot a prepared
07:26statement at this heavily stage-managed press conference.
07:34This is me.
07:39Before we spoke at that conference, we were given scripts that we had two days to learn
07:43by heart.
07:49Kudryavtsev told the world of his great error in ever thinking ill of the Soviet Union,
07:54let alone trying to topple it.
07:59It was hard for me to say those things, very hard.
08:06But I had to do it in order not to be taken back to the Lubyanka.
08:11You begin to believe that this was a service that really had enormous coverage and that
08:18everything we did, you know, not a sparrow could fall without this enormous KGB finding
08:24out about it.
08:25Because in terms of our own individual experiences, we know, or we knew, that the operations we
08:31were involved in had been betrayed by people like Kim Philby.
08:38The KGB put vast arrays of captured CIA equipment on show.
08:43The West had suffered failure abroad and betrayal at home.
08:48It was back to the drawing board.
08:55The Korean War provided further blows to the CIA's self-confidence, highlighting gaps
09:01in forecasting and assessment.
09:03The CIA was wrong about the start of the war.
09:07They were wrong about the Chinese involvement and intervention in the war.
09:13And they were wrong about the capabilities of the North Korean forces.
09:19I think the Korean War, in terms of its intelligence failures, left a lot of lessons for the policy
09:25community and the intelligence community.
09:28And one of those lessons was that, indeed, we would have to get better technical intelligence
09:33and make more of a commitment to signals intelligence and communications intelligence.
09:40And with this, you get resources put with the National Security Agency under the Pentagon
09:46in order to develop capability to intercept messages around the world.
09:52And this produced extremely vital information to the intelligence community.
10:01Berlin was a communications hub where countless Soviet block phone and teleprinter lines crisscrossed
10:07beneath the city.
10:11To intercept them, the Americans and British drove a tunnel deep into the Soviet sector.
10:19The purpose of the Berlin tunnel was to tap the communications lines of the Soviet forces
10:26in East Germany, in Poland, and their links with Moscow, in order to provide current intelligence
10:34on those forces, and also early warning.
10:40The lines from the taps would come down into the tunnel itself, and first they would be
10:46amplified, because then we had to run the lines up into the area of the warehouse where
10:52we had hundreds and hundreds of recorders that operated day and night and recorded every
10:58single bit of this stuff.
11:04From the start, this operation was betrayed to the KGB by a source inside British intelligence,
11:10George Blake.
11:12I was secretary at the meeting at which this tunnel was being planned, and so I was able
11:22to draw a very simple sketch which showed how the tunnel was going to run and what cables
11:30it was intended to attack.
11:35Blake had served as a British intelligence officer in Seoul.
11:40Captured by the North Koreans, he witnessed the West's bombing of civilians.
11:46When I saw these enormous American flying fortresses, flying low over what seemed to
11:54be defenseless Korean villages, I felt a feeling of shame.
12:02I felt very acutely that I was on the wrong side and that I should do something about it.
12:13Blake went home to Britain in the first group of POWs released from Korea after the 1953
12:19armistice.
12:20How did you find the food out there, Mr. Blake?
12:21Well, the food was adequate.
12:22Very monotonous.
12:23It was monotonous, was it?
12:24Anything special?
12:25I mean, any odd things they gave you to eat or anything?
12:26No, just rice and turnips, mainly.
12:27That's a pretty impressive diet, isn't it?
12:28Three times a day.
12:29Blake slipped back into British intelligence.
12:30Only now he was a KGB spy.
12:31I was given a Minox camera, and I carried that Minox camera with me whenever I went
12:32to the North Korean base.
12:33I was a KGB spy.
12:34I was a KGB spy.
12:35I was a KGB spy.
12:36I was a KGB spy.
12:37I was a KGB spy.
12:38I was a KGB spy.
12:39I was a KGB spy.
12:40I was a KGB spy.
12:41I was a KGB spy.
12:42I was a KGB spy.
12:43I was a KGB spy.
12:44I was a KGB spy.
12:45I was a KGB spy.
12:46I was a KGB spy.
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12:48I was a KGB spy.
12:49I was a KGB spy.
12:50I was a KGB spy.
12:51I was a KGB spy.
12:52I was a KGB spy.
12:53I was a KGB spy.
12:54I was a KGB spy.
12:55I was a KGB spy.
12:56I was a KGB spy.
12:57I was a KGB spy.
12:58I was a KGB spy.
12:59I was a KGB spy.
13:00I was a KGB spy.
13:01I was a KGB spy.
13:02I was a KGB spy.
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13:09I was a KGB spy.
13:10I was a KGB spy.
13:11I was a KGB spy.
13:12I was a KGB spy.
13:13I was a KGB spy.
13:14I was a KGB spy.
13:15I was a KGB spy.
13:16I was a KGB spy.
13:17I was a KGB spy.
13:18I was a KGB spy.
13:19I was a KGB spy.
13:20I was a KGB spy.
13:21I was a KGB spy.
13:22I was a KGB spy.
13:23I was a KGB spy.
13:24I was a KGB spy.
13:25I was a KGB spy.
13:26I was a KGB spy.
13:27I was a KGB spy.
13:28I was a KGB spy.
13:29I was a KGB spy.
13:30I was a KGB spy.
13:31I was a KGB spy.
13:33This was a very important consideration, because as long as Blake remained inside British intelligence,
13:40we knew he'd be of great value to us.
13:45So the Berlin Tunnel operated courtesy of the KGB, and the CIA basked in a signals intelligence bonanza.
13:54We got military order of battle on Soviet forces in Germany and in Poland.
14:02We got information which came from Moscow, for example, on the whole reorganization of the Ministry of Defense.
14:10But the real kicker in all this was the fact that we got something we never expected to get.
14:17We got all kinds of personality data, operational data on the operations of Soviet military counterintelligence,
14:28so that we were, at that point, totally on top, we thought, of the counterintelligence picture in Berlin.
14:38But the KGB was just choosing its moment to pull the plug on the Tunnel.
14:44They warned me beforehand that it was going to happen.
14:48So I was rather on tenterhooks, as you can imagine, what the outcome would be.
14:58Heavy rain one April night in 1956 caused a cable failure, giving the KGB the excuse it needed,
15:06turning the West's intelligence feat into a Soviet propaganda victory.
15:13Obviously, there was a feeling of great unhappiness.
15:20On the other hand, you just sort of shrugged your shoulders and said, well, we were lucky it lasted that long.
15:28Five years later, George Blake was himself betrayed and sentenced to 42 years in prison.
15:35He had given the KGB the names of nearly 400 agents working for the West,
15:40supposedly on condition that they wouldn't be harmed.
15:44During my trial, which was held in camera, so everything could be said there,
15:52there was no mention at all, it wasn't part of the prosecution's case,
15:58that I had been responsible for the death of any number of agents.
16:06But armed with Blake's names, Moscow simply waited until they had sufficient additional evidence.
16:15George Blake had that innocent mind, in a sense. He is still a very naive man.
16:21He didn't want to know that many people he had betrayed were executed.
16:28And I think we even discussed this subject at one point, and he wouldn't believe it.
16:35He would say, well, I was told this would not happen. It did happen. He was not told.
16:47As the Cold War intensified through the 1950s, pressure on the CIA increased.
16:53The West was desperate for detail about the size and strength of Soviet forces,
16:58glimpsed and photographed at Moscow air shows or May Day parades.
17:08It was the Soviet missile force which worried the CIA most, and about which they knew the least.
17:14There was limited human intelligence about missile deployments in the Soviet Union.
17:21There was some communications intelligence which would suggest that this facility or this town
17:28may be involved in missile activities because of communications with known missile sites.
17:34But what we were missing was any firm, hard evidence of actual deployment of missiles.
17:41From 1956, American technical superiority started providing answers.
17:48The CIA's own reconnaissance plane, the U-2, flew high over Russia to photograph Soviet bases,
17:55but in four years of searching found no operational intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites.
18:02Then in 1960, the Americans successfully launched a satellite fitted with a camera.
18:09After 17 orbits, the film capsule was ejected, caught mid-air, and brought back to Earth for analysis.
18:16A subsequent flight confirmed the existence of just one Soviet ICBM launch site.
18:23The rest of the puzzle's pieces were left to the CIA.
18:28This is a photograph of Oleg Pankovsky, Colonel in the Red Army,
18:33with all of his medals which he earned during World War II.
18:37A handsome soldier and a great American patriot.
18:45This photograph was taken in a hotel in London in April 1961.
18:51After one of our meetings where Oleg Pankovsky on the left,
18:55me on the right, enjoying a small glass of wine.
18:59Pankovsky provided further reassurances about the limitations of Soviet power.
19:05While they were still a serious threat, no question about it,
19:08they were strong militarily, absolutely strong militarily,
19:11but they were not as strong as our estimates.
19:15And he helped us bring it down to the level where they really were.
19:19They were not ten feet tall, they were about my size, six foot two.
19:24Pankovsky revealed the Soviets' lack of atomic warheads
19:28and their problems with guidance systems.
19:31He acted out of resentment that his career in military intelligence had stalled,
19:35but also out of fear that Khrushchev's adventurism would be the cause of his death.
19:41Khrushchev told Kennedy,
19:44I want peace, but if you want war, that is your problem.
19:48But Pankovsky told the CIA that Khrushchev was bluffing.
19:52Kennedy should be firm, he said.
19:55Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets.
19:58He is not ready for any war.
20:01If you can get into the mind,
20:04you can get into the heart.
20:07If you can get into the mind of the Khrushchevs of the world,
20:16then you've got a weapon that no technical amount of information can give you.
20:23And this is what Pankovsky was able to give us.
20:29Pankovsky's information was critical to the United States
20:33during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
20:37U-2 photographs revealed the presence on Cuba of Soviet missiles,
20:42for which Pankovsky had already handed over the operating manuals.
20:48With the world closer to nuclear conflict than at any time in the Cold War,
20:53intelligence experts were summoned to the White House to brief President Kennedy.
20:58First question the president asked was,
21:01how long before they can fire those missiles?
21:03And Art Landau said, well, Mr. Graybeal is the missile expert.
21:07So it turned to me, I stood up behind the president, McNamara and Rusk,
21:11and for the next probably five to ten minutes,
21:14I fired one question after the other.
21:17In answer to the president's question, how long can they fire these missiles,
21:21I relied primarily on the combination of intelligence sources,
21:26but mainly Pankovsky's information,
21:29which told us how these missiles operated in the field.
21:34The CIA assessment is said to have bought the president
21:37three precious days' breathing space.
21:44Ironically, Pankovsky himself was now under KGB surveillance.
21:50The last time Joe Bulick had seen him was in Paris.
21:55I never had the feeling that he was in danger,
21:58otherwise I would have insisted that he stay.
22:01In fact, forced him if I had to kidnap him.
22:05But I never really had the feeling that he was...
22:08At that time, our last meeting in Paris, I never felt that he was in danger.
22:14Back in Moscow, Pankovsky sent what seemed like a routine message.
22:19We'd gotten a signal from Pankovsky that a dead drop was loaded,
22:24and when we sent Dick Jacobs to service that dead drop, he was arrested.
22:27And as soon as that happened, we knew the case was over. He was dead.
22:31And then Pankovsky was in the hands of the KGB.
22:35Boom.
22:58The chief KGB interrogator was Alexander Zagvozdin.
23:03We questioned him not once, not ten or twenty times, but perhaps a hundred times.
23:10He realised that his actions were punishable by death.
23:15He knew that his actions were punishable by death.
23:19He knew that his actions were punishable by death.
23:23He knew that his actions were punishable by death.
23:28And he used to ask me,
23:31Will I be executed?
23:34I never said he wouldn't.
23:37I never said he wouldn't be executed.
23:40I used to say one thing.
23:44Only if you confess everything and repent fully can you hope for mercy.
23:52That's probably why Pankovsky's life was not spared.
23:55He didn't confess everything.
24:01I know for sure that Pankovsky was shot.
24:09I can't tell you anything else.
24:12I know his body was cremated.
24:16I don't know any more.
24:19And I'm not interested.
24:26Not all spies wound up famous.
24:30These are the home movies of Galina and Mikhail Fedorov,
24:34KGB officers who operated under deep cover for twenty years.
24:43They were never caught.
24:48In the event of war, they would be in place to spy behind enemy lines.
24:56The KGB never lacked recruits.
24:59Some served for money, some for ideology,
25:02and some for the sheer excitement of living a secret life.
25:10I love espionage.
25:13Why? Because there is the smell of adventure,
25:16the smell of risk, the smell of uncertainty.
25:21Because when you go off to meet an agent,
25:23you never know whether you're going to be arrested.
25:27It adds colour to life.
25:31I need 007.
25:36No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!
25:47Spy mania in London started about the time I arrived.
25:50In 1961, we used to be asked everywhere.
25:53We were very popular.
25:56We would be invited to private parties,
25:59and the attitude towards us was good.
26:03But as the 60s went on, there were those big disasters
26:07with Blake and the other KGB spies.
26:10And you had the Profumo scandal
26:13with the prostitute, Christine Keeler.
26:16That shook Britain up a bit.
26:18After that, when I turned up somewhere,
26:21people would ask, are you a spy?
26:24So I'd say, of course I'm a spy.
26:28Western governments grew weary
26:31of the huge KGB presence in their midst.
26:34In 1971, the British expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers,
26:38identified by a defector.
26:41Technology increasingly assumed the burden of spying.
26:49Satellites could now intercept
26:52radio communications and data
26:55from test launches of the opposition's missiles.
26:58Film taken in space
27:01no longer even had to be returned to Earth.
27:04The satellite would take the picture of the sky,
27:07and this image could be beamed back
27:10to an analyst at his desk in the United States
27:13who could actually see what was happening
27:15in the international arena without leaving his desk.
27:21Here lay the greatest intelligence successes
27:24of the Cold War.
27:27Through photography and electronic eavesdropping,
27:30each side received huge flows of information,
27:33often too much for the analysts to handle.
27:37Technological spying even played a part
27:40in helping the superpowers edge towards peace.
27:43The technical systems were almost essential
27:46to our arms control process.
27:49We learned just all kinds of things
27:52about Russian military systems from the photographs
27:55and from the electronic listening.
27:58At one point when we were negotiating
28:01the SALT II arms control treaty,
28:04I had to go to the Senate and say,
28:07if you ratify this treaty,
28:09this is how closely I can monitor it
28:12and check on whether they are complying
28:15with the terms of the treaty.
28:18Despite a fleet of spy ships,
28:21listening posts worldwide,
28:24and Sputniks overhead,
28:27Soviet technical intelligence lagged behind the West.
28:30Even so, they claimed to have cracked the ciphers
28:33of over 60 countries,
28:36obtaining many codes by theft and blackmail.
28:39Soviet technical intelligence was far inferior
28:42to Soviet human intelligence.
28:45The Soviets were extremely good
28:48at persuasive tactics,
28:51which would ultimately bring many people
28:54into their ideological embrace.
29:03KGB spying methods spread beyond superpower conflict.
29:06Routine surveillance of ordinary citizens
29:09by the East German secret police, or Stasi.
29:14The Stasi inhabited a moral world of its own.
29:20Interrogations were routinely filmed,
29:25and they had cameras everywhere.
29:32Relations between the various areas
29:34of counterintelligence and with the department
29:37which handled interrogations were very amicable.
29:43There were all sorts of people there,
29:46and it was a friendly atmosphere.
29:49They weren't the kind of devious types
29:52who'd use atrocious methods
29:55to force confessions out of people.
30:05What did I do? I didn't do anything.
30:08What did I do?
30:11I didn't do anything.
30:14Nothing at all.
30:17Well, terrible things did happen.
30:20There were many cases of injustice,
30:23particularly in the later years,
30:26which really bothered me.
30:29Reprisals were taken against people
30:31on the grounds that they had different political opinions,
30:35or against people who wanted a different,
30:38better form of socialism.
30:41Vera Wallenberger joined the East German peace movement in 1981,
30:45encouraged by her husband Knut.
30:53My personal motivation for opposing state policies
30:56was the decision in the early 80s
30:58to station nuclear missiles in the GDR
31:03and to introduce military instruction in schools.
31:08Vera and her family were constantly harassed by the Stasi,
31:12who burgled her house and made sure she lost her teaching job.
31:16Her husband stood by her throughout.
31:22In 1988, Vera was arrested on her way to this demonstration.
31:25Her crime?
31:28Carrying a banner which bore Rosa Luxemburg's words,
31:31freedom is how free your opponent is.
31:35She was interrogated and imprisoned.
31:41In 1991, after the collapse of the GDR,
31:44Vera got access to her Stasi file,
31:47in which she learned that the main informer against her
31:50had been her own husband.
31:52I can't really say how I felt.
31:55It was such an extreme situation,
31:58rather as if one had died for a moment and then returned to life.
32:08The surprising thing was,
32:11the reports were written as if about a stranger,
32:14not about a wife.
32:17To him, I was an enemy of the GDR.
32:19To him, I was an enemy of the state,
32:22and he had done everything to fight me, the enemy.
32:29Some enemies of the state received more drastic treatment.
32:34In 1978, Bulgarian intelligence asked the KGB
32:38to help them kill the émigré writer and broadcaster,
32:41Georgi Markov.
32:44Markov was murdered at a London bus stop
32:46by a stranger who accidentally prodded him
32:49with the tip of an umbrella.
32:52The Bulgarians were given a choice of weapons,
32:55and finally they picked up this umbrella as a cover
33:01to shoot the man with a poisoned pellet.
33:05It was not supposed to be uncovered,
33:08because the pellet would dissolve in his body within 24 hours,
33:11if I recall correctly.
33:14I did not conceive, I did not plan,
33:17I was not involved in any execution, but I was aware.
33:20And I always say that knowledge does not imply misdeed, does it?
33:30Do you suppose I would go to the United States or UK
33:34and announce publicly?
33:37I would hang myself.
33:40The temptation was always there,
33:43for the spymasters to earn favor from the leadership,
33:46whether by covert action or just slanting a routine report.
33:56When we draw up reports, of course we dramatize
33:59those bits which pointed up the threat to the Soviet Union.
34:02By emphasizing the right things,
34:05I'd ensure that my report would go straight to the top,
34:08to the Politburo.
34:10If the report was dull and boring, it would just get fired away.
34:16This was the problem with all suppliers of information.
34:20We'd tailor it to get a high rating from Moscow.
34:26But did it matter if spies skewed their reports?
34:30How much did political leaders heed their intelligence services?
34:36I would argue that we probably exaggerate
34:38the significance of intelligence.
34:41Once policymakers decide on a course,
34:44I don't think correct intelligence or incorrect intelligence
34:47is going to bring any great changes in that course.
35:001988. Kim Philby is buried with full honors in a Moscow cemetery.
35:05He first betrayed Britain half a century before,
35:09passing a wealth of secrets to the KGB.
35:13And yet converts were never wholly trusted.
35:17To the end, the KGB opened his mail and bugged his phone.
35:24It seemed as if the age of the spy was over.
35:34In fact, throughout the 80s,
35:37the CIA had been carefully establishing agents
35:40within Soviet intelligence and defense circles.
35:43Precious sources, like avionics expert Adolf Tolkachov,
35:47seen here on his way to a meeting in Moscow with his CIA contact.
35:56The KGB suddenly started to arrest the CIA's most important Soviet spies.
36:05In 1985, we began to lose cases,
36:09by which I mean Soviet officials working for us,
36:13and some of them disappeared.
36:16This led us to believe that something was wrong.
36:20It did not lead us to believe, aha, there must be a mole.
36:26Then the West lost General Dmitry Polyakov of Soviet military intelligence.
36:31Polyakov had retired after 18 years of spying when the KGB pounced.
36:40He had been recruited while at the United Nations in New York.
36:49Polyakov returned to Europe in 1962 on the Queen Elizabeth.
36:54His picture was taken by the ship's photographer at the captain's dinner.
36:59Seated just a few tables away, the FBI man who recruited him, John Mabee.
37:06He said, I'm dissatisfied with the way things are in the Soviet Union.
37:12The government does not look out for the people.
37:16They're headed on a course of war with the United States,
37:20and they can't possibly win it.
37:23And the only people that are going to suffer out of this are the Russians.
37:28The Russian people.
37:31We met on the Queen Elizabeth every day that it was at sea, sometimes twice a day.
37:37We reviewed literally thousands of pictures of Soviets
37:41who had been in the United States or stationed around the world.
37:45And he identified a number of them by picture and by name.
37:50Polyakov was our crown jewel.
37:53He worked for us for so many years,
37:55and he achieved such a rank that rather than us looking at an organization
38:02through the eyes of one of our sources,
38:05looking at that organization from the bottom up,
38:08with Polyakov, eventually we were able to look at that organization,
38:13the GRU, his organization, from the top down,
38:16as well as look at the KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs
38:21and the Communist Party apparatus.
38:23In 1991, Sandy Grimes joined the team investigating the CIA's agent losses.
38:30In charge, Gene Vertifei, now suspicious there was a KGB mole in their ranks.
38:36Trying to pin down a counterintelligence case when you're looking for a mole
38:43is always a very difficult and long-term job.
38:47When we compiled a list of how many people could have done it,
38:50we came up with 198 people.
38:53The mole hunt took three years,
38:56homing in on CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames.
39:01The FBI filmed him secretly in Bogota in 1993.
39:06I was walking up and down wondering what had happened to my KGB contact,
39:11who had been there an hour earlier.
39:15I was reasonably alert, but I didn't see him.
39:18And I suppose it was frustrating for the FBI
39:22because they were scared to death of me seeing surveillance.
39:26So they had to stay way back.
39:29As a result, they never saw me doing anything.
39:32They had no evidence of any operational activity on my part.
39:36The FBI staked out Ames' house and tapped his phones.
39:41The breakthrough had come from CIA analysis of his bank statements.
39:46We had just received records from one of the banks Rick had.
39:53And Dan is reading these things off,
39:57and I'm entering them in the computer.
40:00And, my God, it was unbelievable.
40:04On 17 May, Rick had reported having had lunch
40:09with his Soviet contact, Chuvakin,
40:1218 May, there's a deposit into his checking account for $9,000.
40:21On 21 February 1994, Ames was arrested for spying,
40:26along with his wife Rosario, after years of high living.
40:34Shock. Depression. Instant recognition.
40:39One's life flashes before one.
40:43A sense of things coming to an end.
40:46But no sense of relief is much more painful than that.
40:52In April 1985,
40:55Aldrich Ames had walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington
40:59and started selling secrets to the KGB.
41:02They paid him a total of $2.7 million.
41:05Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985
41:12were personal, banal,
41:19and amounted really to kind of greed and folly.
41:23Simple as that.
41:28I attribute it heavily to Rosario.
41:31She was the one who was interested in spending money
41:35and who liked to live high on the hog,
41:38and I think he wanted sort of to buy her love,
41:41and the way to buy her love was to get her expensive things.
41:47Ames had no illusions about the real price of his treachery.
41:52I knew quite well when I gave the names of...
41:56our agents in the Soviet Union
42:00that I was exposing them to...
42:07to the full machinery of counterespionage
42:12and the law and prosecution and capital punishment,
42:17certainly in the case of KGB and GRU officers.
42:21Obviously, I was exposing them
42:25and obviously these folks I knew
42:30would have to answer for what they'd done.
42:35And certainly I felt...
42:43I inured myself against, you know, a reaction to that.
42:55Dimitri Polyakov was one of the 25 agents betrayed by Ames.
43:01Ten were executed and one committed suicide.
43:06One alone was smuggled to safety by the British Secret Service.
43:13I was seized by the KGB in May 1985.
43:17I was put under house arrest, but I managed to escape in July,
43:20alive, well and safe.
43:24I was lucky.
43:28The others were shot in the dungeons of some KGB prison
43:32after long months of continuous threats and interrogations.
43:37They lost everything, family, children, work and then their lives.
43:43They spent a year, two years, or in the case of General Polyakov
43:46nearly three years, expecting to die at any minute.
43:51Polyakov was tried in secret,
43:55critical of the Soviet leadership to the end.
43:59He had given the West precious information on Soviet missiles,
44:03nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare.
44:07Yet so many spies paid with their freedom or their lives
44:11in destructive cycles of tit-for-tat.
44:14Men like Polyakov gave up names.
44:18They gave up secrets.
44:22I did the same thing
44:26for reasons that I considered sufficient to myself.
44:30I gave up the names
44:34of some of the same people
44:38who had earlier
44:41given up others.
44:45It's a nasty kind of circle
44:49with terrible human costs.
44:53Aldrich Ames is serving a life sentence with no remission.
44:57Dmitry Polyakov was sentenced to death.
45:01He was executed in 1988
45:05with a bullet in the back of the head,
45:08then buried in an unmarked grave.
45:12For half a century,
45:16the spies had peered intently at each other
45:20through a fog of ignorance and deceit.
45:24They produced ever more realistic appraisals of their opponent's strengths,
45:28but very few were able to answer the toughest question,
45:32does our enemy intend to fight us?
45:35With their vast resources, the answer lay hidden,
45:39not in a satellite photo or an agent report,
45:43but in the minds of their opponents.
46:05© BF-WATCH TV 2021