Circle of Treason Read Free

the few such slots available to women then, although the situation was beginning to change.
    Operationally, Finland was much more active than the African posts where I had served. Because the country bordered the USSR, the CIA inHelsinki concentrated all its efforts on the Soviet target—a target on which I now began to gain some expertise. My routine duties included keeping the REDCAP notebook—a comprehensive listing of all the Soviet officials in the country—up to date. I developed some familiarity with Russian names, organizations, career patterns, indications of intelligence affiliation, and like details. Moreover, I became personally involved in a controversial and fascinating case, which was a hallmark of the Angletonian era. (James Jesus Angleton, of whom much will be said below, was Chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff from 1954 until 1974.) In December 1961, KGB counterintelligence officer Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, with his wife and small daughter, appeared on the doorstep of CIA Station Chief Frank Friberg and announced his unalterable intention to defect. Friberg, an intelligent and decisive officer, immediately contacted Steve W and me.
    Friberg gave us our marching orders. Steve was to take the passports of the Golitsyn family to the Embassy and issue them U.S. visas. Luckily, Steve was able to do this without raising any immediate questions. I was told to go to the office and get cash for the travel of Frank and the Golitsyn family. Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties, and therefore I could get into the strongbox where we kept our money.
    I immediately drove to the office, opened the strongbox, pulled out wads of currency without counting, and then proceeded as fast as I could to the airport where Frank had told Steve and me to meet him. Because this was December, snow was piled up along the streets. I recall driving up and over a cement tram stop in my Volkswagen beetle in my haste. Luckily no policeman was around to observe this illegal and bonejarring maneuver.
    Steve drove up to the departure terminal with the Golitsyn passports, and I arrived with money for their tickets and other expenses. Friberg and the Golitsyns then emplaned for Stockholm, on their way to Frankfurt and then the United States. Needless to say, my accountings did not balance that month, but Headquarters wrote off the rather large discrepancy without a murmur.
    We will return to the Golitsyn story in later chapters. For now it suffices to mention that, at first, Golitsyn was debriefed by the Soviet Bloc Division at Headquarters but soon came into the hands of the CI staff.We in Helsinki became more and more frustrated because Golitsyn had served for over a year in Helsinki and could tell us a great deal about KGB activities in Finland, yet this did not seem to be a major thrust of the debriefings and the debriefers seemed to know little about things Finnish. Eventually, much later, we got one long debriefing report that contained answers to some of the questions we had asked, but significant gaps remained. 1 Two items of information provided by Golitsyn allowed me to assess my budding skills as a counterintelligence analyst. I won one and lost one. In the first case, one of the Embassy components had wanted to hire a young woman as a secretary. She had a Russian émigré background. Further, she seemed overskilled for the position she was to fill. I advised against hiring her, and while there was some heartburn she was not brought on board. According to Golitsyn, she had indeed been sent by the KGB to penetrate the Embassy.
    In the second case, we had learned that one of the Finnish employees of the U.S. embassy had made an unreported trip to Leningrad. He would have needed a Russian visa and Golitsyn, who was under consular cover, was the logical person to have issued it. We then learned that Golitsyn had traveled to Leningrad at the same time as our employee.