Circle of Treason Read Free Page A

Putting two and two together, and getting five, we called in the employee, questioned him about his trip, and eventually saw to it that he was fired. Now we learned from Golitsyn that the employee had been loyal while employed. Golitsyn had tried to recruit him in Leningrad, but had been turned down. Unfortunately, after we fired him, he changed his mind, recontacted Golitsyn, and told the KGB officer everything he could about what he had learned during his Embassy employment.
    I spent more than four years in Helsinki. Late in my tour, it became obvious that professional career possibilities for women were opening up. Women were permitted to apply for the Career Training course, the gateway to officer status. There were limitations, however. In the Directorate of Operations (DO), women were accepted for only two career tracks—analyst or reports officer. We were not allowed to take the long course that teaches one to become an operations officer, and we were barred from paramilitary training. And there was no parity in numbers. We were seven women out of a total class of sixty-six.
    Nonetheless, it was a rewarding and broadening experience. Given my interest in the Soviet target, perhaps the highlight of my training was thethree-hour spellbinding lecture given by George Kisevalter concerning his participation in the Popov case. (Petr Semenovich Popov was a GRU officer who volunteered to us in Vienna in 1953. Kisevalter, a fluent Russian speaker and a legend throughout his career, was one of his handlers.) 2
    After successfully finishing the Career Training course, I headed back overseas, this time to the Benelux area. Arriving in the summer of 1966, I spent more than four years in a relaxed environment, working as an analyst against the Soviet target and spending as much time as possible in travels around Europe. Toward the end of this tour, I realized that I needed to spend some time at headquarters. In close to twenty years I had never had a headquarters assignment. Furthermore, my parents were aging. I had not been able to see much of them in recent years and this was an omission I wished to correct.
    My first headquarters assignment was as Chief of the Biographics Branch in what was then the Soviet Bloc (SB), but soon to become the Soviet and East European (SE), Division. This was the largest branch in the Division, but among the least prestigious because it was not directly involved in operations. Our mission was to process thousands of trace replies on Soviet and East European officials for our Stations abroad and for friendly liaison services. Unfortunately for branch morale, if our initial research turned up data indicating that a particular individual was of special interest, the trace reply was taken out of our hands and we never heard what happened next.
    During this period, for personal enrichment and to add to my professional skills, I began to study Russian. I took a Directorate of Intelligence course, which was geared to enabling analysts to read Russian in their areas of specialization. The years that I spent in this endeavor eventually paid off, because I was able to translate or edit some of the documents provided by GRU general Dmitriy Polyakov, by KGB defector Anatoliy Bogatyy, and by the French source Vladimir Vetrov, known as FAREWELL.
    After more than three years as Chief of the Biographics Branch, I was eager for a change. I applied for a job as night and weekend duty officer for the Directorate of Operations, and was only the second woman ever approved for this position. It was tiring work, because we changed shifts from week to week, but since we reviewed priority operational traffic from around the world I developed a broader view of the Agency’sresponsibilities. As it happened, my service covered the period of the fall of Vietnam.
    The DO duty officer stint only lasted six months. By then I was looking for a normal day job. When I was offered a position in the Counterintelligence Group of