My Spy Can Lick Your Spy

by MAX FRANKEL

THIS cold war of ours may yet turn out to be fun. Well, grisly intellectual fun, anyway. In less than a decade a good part of the war has already been transformed from an incendiary to a literary contest. Sublimation of this sort can do much to cure indignation.

The occasion for this premature celebration is the appearance of the “memoirs" of two Soviet spies, one theirs, one ours, i he books are tedious but fascinating. The authors are unconvincing but certainly intriguing. “Books,” in fact, is a little generous for what are really tirades of tantalizing tidbits. And “authors” is probably not the word for the spooky committees that mischievously compiled these collections of fact and fancy. Still, as literary experience, this new genre must be reckoned with. Plots more simple than Old Westerns have been infused with meanings more obscure than the New Poetry. The result leaves heroes, villains, authors, and readers alike to wonder who has done what unto whom.

Espionage is threatened today, as never before, by technology. The human spy, menaced like all artisans by obsolescence, must find new domains for research and new outlets for his reportorial talents. What could be better than books that simultaneously sublimate the old adventure, glorify the old vocation, and still confound the adversary?

This exchange of literary missiles can be traced directly to the Berlin swap of a certain Gordon Lonsdale for one Greville Wynne in 1964. Obviously, the partly public trials of each in Moscow and London had Jailed to satisfy the new promotion requirements of their respective intelligence services and the outsized egos of the principal plotters.

Lonsdale, whose credentials from birth forward are still in dispute, had been the central figure in a ring spying upon British naval research. Six months after his return to Soviet custody, he made himself available to a British publisher and spyadventure writer in East Berlin to dictate a memoir of sorts. Four months later, as a version of this memoir headed for newspaper publication, he demanded that the draft be changed, especially to remove some passages boasting of his successes as a lover. The protest was ignored, so Lonsdale now signaled a desire to publish a book whose contents he alone would control. When finally delivered in Moscow, this manuscript omitted the love scenes and 25,000 other words that Lonsdale is said to have composed, but it contained some entirely new sections, In an apparently new style, about alleged adventures in the United States. The result is called Spy— Twenty Tears in Soviet Secret Service—The Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale; it was published in Britain by Neville Spearman and in the United States by Hawthorne Books with, alas, an incredibly stingy and incoherent account of how it all came to be.

In the meantime, Greville Wynne, an itinerant British “businessman” who was tried in Moscow together with his Soviet contact, a “scientific worker” named Oleg Penkovskiy, rushed home to begin his memoir. But he was scooped by his executed associate; as soon as Wynne had been set free, there appeared through some mysterious channel the raw materials for a volume now published by Doubleday as The Penkovskiy Papers. Frank Gibney, the editor and rather liberal annotator of the book, is no more satisfying than the Lonsdale crew in relating the origin of his manuscript.

It seems that Penkovskiy, who was portrayed at his trial as a rank-and-file Soviet official whose acquaintances did not extend beyond a limited circle of “restaurant habitues, drunkards and philanderers,” had conveniently composed a hasty but lengthy memoir refuting this insult to Western intelligence by telling who he really was: a colonel of Soviet intelligence merely posing as a bureaucratic contact with Western scientists and businessmen, the son-in-law, great-nephew, and confidant of three different Soviet generals, including the chief of the tactical missile forces, a pal to the chief of military intelligence in Moscow, the occasional guest at parties of Kremlin dignitaries, and the possessor of a good number of awards and secrets.

Miraculously, just at the time of his arrest in 1962, this memorable bundle is said to have been smuggled “in highly anonymous circumstances” to an Eastern European country and thence to Peter Deriabin, a defector from the Soviet security forces still living in hiding somewhere near New York. Mr. Gibney reports that Deriabin, in turn, “undertook the long preliminary work of translation and selection” before delivering the results to him as editor. The CIA has admitted checking the final product for “security” though not “accuracy”; Mr. Gibney “assumes” that the agency deleted some material. Britain’s MI-6, the joint possessor of Penkovskiy while he lived and of the dead records of the case, must have had at least an equal interest in this literary project but has shrewdly evaded all connection with it thus far.

IN OUR ignorance, we can deal only with the persons of Penkovskiy and Lonsdale as here revealed, with the techniques of subversion by memoir as here devised, and with the consequences of such shameless attempts to foist a viperous and internecine warfare upon an innocent reading public. The dissembling assemblers of their memoirs may even have some sort of right to try anything that serves their sinister purposes. The publishers of this stuff can be excused only if their purpose was to furnish us with entertainment; a serious presentation without critical annotation is unacceptable.

Whatever ghostly lingers may have kneaded these manuscripts, residual traces of Penkovskiy and Lonsdale remain. I believe that Lonsdale composed a good portion of his book, and that Penkovskiy at least spoke a good deal of what is now attributed to his memoir during three lengthy encounters with Western agents in London and Paris. Lonsdale was a carefully groomed spy, while Penkovskiy was only briefly a double agent, a disaffected defector who spied for the West for only sixteen months before his arrest. But among the traces of them as human beings, there is one striking resemblance: their insufferable arrogance.

Each is confident that his espionage is singlehandedly saving mankind from nuclear war. Each is delivering the secrets of a duped and sufferingpeople to a disinterested and noble government bearing mankind’s last hope of salvation. Each contends unconvincingly that the sheer fun of the game, the duplicity, adultery, and open-end expense accounts were incidental rewards and relaxations instead of part of the attraction to treachery.

Their self-revelations, now paraded before all the world by their partners in mischief, raise the uncomfortable thought that all too many members of this spy-and-counterspy fraternity are obsessed with a similarly self-serving and self-deceiving certainty that their lofty cause exempts them from most of the restraints imposed on ordinary men. In enjoying these books, it may be well to keep in mind that their purpose was to persuade us that our heroes’ arrogance is the highest form of patriotism and that the crime of one spy and the treason of the other are in every way admirable.

Oleg Penkovskiy spent the first forty-two years of his life climbing to the upper level of the Soviet New Class, military and intelligence division. That is how he obtained a riverfront Moscow apartment, appointments to prestigious career academies, the chance to woo the daughters of generals and to consort with the wives of others, solid connections to obtain the privilege of every moment, from country homes to automobiles, and ultimately, the supreme gift of travel to the West to see what life can still promise and to load up on records, perfumes, fountain pens, wallets, and cognacs that could be shrewdly invested to rise yet another notch.

Then, in his last two years, Penkovskiy rebelled. An almost filial association since World War II with General, then Marshal, Sergey Yarentsov had smoothed his path in a career that finally led to military espionage. Vain, social, intense, wellmannered, Penkovskiy enjoyed all the perquisites possible but never the freedom from petty bureaucracy and intramural warfare that he really desired. He was trapped in conflicts between the military (G.R.U.) and civilian (K.G.B.) intelligence services. He was trapped between army and Communist Party. Gradually he came to resent many of his immediate superiors, and then their superiors near the top of the hierarchy, and above all, the apparently coarse and spasmodic Nikita Khrushehev. Somewhere here lay the seed of treason.

In his testimony to the West, of course, the seed has sprouted a weeping willow. Every contingency plan in the files of the military and intelligence services was a Khrushchevian plot for military adventure that was certain to end in a sudden, presumably preventive nuclear war. Everything in Moscow was sordid. Every Communist official was a debaucher. Penkovskiy had decided to save the Russian masses by working for the Western classes.

In this melodramatic year, Penkovskiy actually had three jobs. Besides working so assiduously for us, he remained a colonel in Soviet intelligence, nominally trying to recruit traveling salesmen like Wynne into spying for him, and he worked at his “cover” job in the foreign department of the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, which involved steering Western visitors to innocent sights while stealing from them such industrial secrets as the formula for the glue by which Canadian firms affixed artificial fur to its cloth backing. It is hard to believe that a man so occupied and harried would take the time and the risk of composing a memoir that could only duplicate the information already given to Western agents.

Penkovskiy’s spying is said to have started in April, 1961. By July 4, 1962, he was under surveillance, though he tried to pretend with Wynne that their relationship was tainted at worst by blackmarketeering. He was arrested in October, and Wynne was seized in Budapest in November. They were tried in May, 1963, Wynne drawing a sentence of eight years but serving only one before he was traded for Lonsdale. Penkovskiy was said to have been shot almost immediately, but Wynne now contends that he died some other way later.

About Penkovskiy’s importance as a spy, the Soviet prosecution granted virtually nothing, while perpetrators of his memoir claim much too much. From his good fairy, Marshal Varentsov, from the secret military libraries in Moscow, from his own experiences, and even from his casual acquaintances, Penkovskiy unquestionably gathered interesting information about weapons development, particularly about some missiles. He compromised a large number of Soviet agents (300 military attachés are said to have been recalled after his trial, and Marshal Varentsov was demoted with a reprimand for his misplaced trust and indiscretions). The gossip and rumors, especially about subsequently verified incidents of popular unrest and rioting, were usually interesting and sometimes helpful. Above all, the Western spooks must have prized the stuff about Eastern spooks, which, whatever its value to our diplomats and policy makers, must have been potent ammunition indeed for their private little war.

Independent sources suggest that Penkovskiy’s information, much of it quite technical, was very good for about a year but then went sour in the last months, probably because he had been discovered. But the facile and boastful claims on his behalf demonstrate that we are dealing here not only with rival documents of subterfuge but with a coincidental conspiracy of East and West to prove that the fate of all of us rides on their labors.

There is no point in bemoaning the necessity of spying, or celebrating the utility of it. Whenever five men band together for anything useful, one of them will sooner or later wonder why and desert, while a sixth one outside will begin to pry and encroach. As long as another five have banded together elsewhere, the value of both the spy and the traitor is beyond question. What gives pause in these memoirs is the evidence of the alacrity with which these giant modern intelligence agencies can equate their own interests with those of a nation, or even all humanity.

LONSDALE is an enthusiastic contributor to this myth. And his memoir is interesting only as the complement to Penkovskiy’s. Londsale claims to have been born in Ontario in 1924 to a half-breed father and Finnish mother, who were driven by the Depression back toward Finland in 1932 but diverted en route to Poland. He says he left them in 1939 to join the anti-German underground, which he served in Germany under “Alec,” who is our old friend Colonel Rudolf Abel. But much of this was boring, he brags, and it was followed by an even duller period of post-war duty in “military administration” in Germany. Life really began in 1950, he writes, when he claims to have been sent to the United States to perform assorted missions (for “Alec” again), where he stayed until 1954, when he resumed his status as Lonsdale in Canada and, once so documented, set sail for Britain. There he was caught and tried in 1961, serving three years of a twenty-five-year sentence.

The real Lonsdale child seems to have actually returned to Finland with his parents and to have been killed there, possibly in the war against the Soviet Union, so that his documents fell into Soviet hands. According to Rebecca West, one of the few remaining records of the real Lonsdale in Canada testifies to his circumcision at birth. And while Soviet intelligence may be forgiven such an oversight, it was a record that effectively pierced Lonsdale’s masquerade on his first day in captivity.

Western intelligence contends that Lonsdale is really Konon T. Molody, the son of a prominent Soviet scientist, who was born in 1922 and sent at the age of eleven to live with an aunt in California. He then pretended he was her son. He is said to have attended a private school at Berkeley, returning to the Soviet Union in 1938 to receive a commission in the Soviet Navy and special espionage training. Then comes a long blank in the record — which the fake Lonsdale fills in with his gleeful accounts of chasing Nazis in Germany and America — until he appears in Canada in 1954 to acquire the Lonsdale credentials for service in Britain.

There he paraded variously as a student and businessman, studying Chinese, renting jukeboxes, financing the production of a car lock, and buying a controlling interest in a firm that made bubblegum machines. With his dark and plainly Russian good looks and the accented English of a foreigner taught by Americans (not Canadians, says Dame West), he “seemed to be wholly absorbed in starting up mediocre business deals, womanizing, and engaging in the minor social festivities for which he had a great gift” while organizing his little spy ring. Its principal members were Morris and Lona Cohen, described by the FBI as associates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Colonel Abel, but now called Peter and Helen Kroger; Harry Houghton, a former naval officer who despite his record as a drunkard in sensitive foreign posts was engaged as a clerk at the Portland Underwater Weapons Establishment; and Miss Winifred Gee, a spinster in charge of documents at the establishment and the object of Houghton’s adulterous affections.

All were convicted of conspiracy, but Lonsdale maintains in his book, as he did at his trial, that the radio transmitters, the £7000 in cash, the false passports, and other incriminating materials strewn about the Kroger s’ home had been secreted there by him without their knowledge.

He seems to be. right in saying that he was betrayed by a Soviet defector and not by his own mistakes, but most of his other recollections amount to uninformative bravado. He struts through his interrogations as the shrewd agent surrounded by a “bunch of amateur” detectives and a police force bent on the “systematic robbery” of their prisoners.

“I do not propose to describe in any detail my experiences in the United States,” says Lonsdale with unusual accuracy, for he gives no detail to prove that he ever spied in America, if he did. But he adds: “I hope that many F.B.I. man-hours will be wasted in search of the identity I used in the United States. That they will be wasted I have little doubt because, however efficient the F.B.I. may be in pursuing gangsters and kidnappers they are out of their depth when trying to deal with a sophisticated intelligence network.”

No doubt many hours were so wasted. And with what relish the boys in Moscow must have composed those long and dull but professionally spiced passages to unnerve the GIA men in Langley, Virginia, and MI-5 and MI-6 in London!

Every fourth page, it seems, there is another bid to arouse Briton against American and, more important, British agent against American agent. But this playing upon real and fancied rivalries is, of course, a game designed for two or more spy networks.

The Penkovskiy papers make mountains of the friction between the Soviet military and civilian intelligence services. We know something of the havoc that Penkovskiy’s discovery caused among Soviet spies; his memoir is plainly intended to cause more, and to run up wasted hours in Moscow as well.

Perhaps the most entertaining of all the passages in these books comes to be a chapter of only incidental relevance to them. It is also the most clearly legitimate: a long training lecture by which Soviet agents are said to be instructed in the recruiting, caring, and feeding of American subagents. Penkovskiy is said to have smuggled this out to his Western contacts, and for unbelievably good measure, to have included it in his memoir. In any case, we do not often encounter a necessarily candid portrayal of America through Russian eyes, and this one tells us a good deal about the society in which the eyes were trained.

These passages represent Americans as energetic, enterprising, open and fun-loving, resourceful, industrious, and overwhelmingly interested in just one desire — to make more money. We are said to dress neatly and customarily to “change white shirts and socks daily.” We like to keep hands in pockets and chew gum.

In arranging secret meetings with us, agents are instructed to avoid imposing upon our sacred weekends, holidays, and family anniversaries. And to mind our fear of parks at night. We are said to listen to weather forecasts, so that if rain is predicted, the wise agent will carry umbrella or raincoat, but not rubbers.

To mix with us he must learn the intricacies of the New York subway, learn to play golf, remember to tip 10 (sic) percent at restaurants, and be careful in a bar to say not just “give me a glass of beer” but “Schlitz” or “Rheingold.”

Penkovskiy and his editors, of course, did not intend to amuse us with this lecture. They wanted to scare us with its message of the systematic recruiting of spies in our midst and with its lists of the targets and methods they pursue. I, for one, was more discouraged than frightened by the evidence that these fellows are settling down for a long haul, writing their manuals for the systematic training of their bureaucratic successors.

Alas, there will be more such books, and one of them soon may bring us another lecture from the spy manual, The Preparation, Perpetration & Publication of the Memoir.