Betrayal In Berlin: My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Steve Vogel's interview With Cold War Spy George Blake

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on Steve Vogel’s interview with former Soviet spy George Blake (seen in the above photo).

Steve Vogel is the author of “Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War’s Most Audacious Espionage Operation,” which I reviewed in these pages. The book covered the dramatic story of the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service’s attempt to tap Soviet telephone lines by building a tunnel in Berlin during the Cold War.

But the bold plan was blown from the start. An SIS officer named George Blake was a Soviet spy and he informed the Soviets. To protect their valuable spy, the Soviets allowed the tunnel to be built. The West gained much intelligence before the Soviets publicly uncovered the tunnel.

The book covers many interesting people from the era, and although I despise the Soviet spy, I was most interested in George Blake. Blake lives in Russia today under the protection and public admiration of former KGB officer and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who calls him every year on his birthday.  

I contacted Steve Vogel (seen in the above photo) and asked him about his interview with George Blake.

“My dad was a case officer with the CIA, and I was born in Berlin in 1960,” Mr. Vogel said. “Too late for the tunnel, but in time for the Berlin Wall, which my dad said was put up to keep me out.”

He said he was back in Berlin in 1989 as a reporter and saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. He covered many Cold War spy stories, including the trial of East German Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf.

Steve Vogel said his father died in 1986 and hearing stories from his father’s retired CIA friends, he thought this was a good time to write a story about Cold War Berlin.

“When I started the book, I was focusing on the tunnel, but it’s hard not to get sucked into the George Blake story. He was a fascinating figure, one of the great espionage stories of the 20th century,” Mr. Vogel said.

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/18/steve-vogels-interview-with-cold-war-spy-george-bl/ 

You can also read my Washington Times review of Betrayal in Berlin via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2020/01/cold-war-spying-in-spy-capitol-of-world.html 

Britain’s Top Fictional Spy Also Its Greatest Intelligence Asset

Peter Apps at Reuters.com offers a column how Ian Fleming's iconic James Bond character is the United Kingdom's greatest intelligence asset.

In the 62 years since James Bond first appeared in print, there's no doubt he has helped boost the reputations of his real-life counterparts in British intelligence.

Now, Daniel Craig - the truest to author Ian Fleming's original vision since Sean Connery, if not ever - is back on screen in "Spectre." The franchise is as strong as ever.

In reality, however, the decades since Fleming first penned "Casino Royale" have been distinctly mixed for the United Kingdom and its spies.

For sure, the Secret Intelligence Service - traditionally known to its members as SIS and to the rest of the world as MI6 - and its sister service MI5 retain a world-class reputation. They are in good company. The reach and skill set of those two agencies - responsible for foreign and domestic intelligence, respectively - are more than equaled by signals intelligence specialists Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Britain's special forces - the Army's Special Air Service (SAS) and Royal Marines' Special Boat Service (SBS) are also legendary.

They have, however, been far from infallible. Even as Fleming wrote of their prowess in the early 1950s, some stellar embarrassments loomed.

Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Whitehall (one-word shorthand for the UK's version of the State Department, the Pentagon and CIA and FBI headquarters) was torn apart by slow-burning scandal as news emerged that some of Britain's most trusted intelligence officials had in fact been spying for the Soviet Union. More recently, there have been controversies over officials' complicity in torture and rendition, as well is the small matter of their intelligence-gathering related to Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Bond and his fellow fictional British operatives, however, allow UK intelligence to project an image that goes well beyond the niggling issues of reality.

It might have only the most tangential relationship to what really happens, but it still has real-world impact.

A couple of years ago at a drinks reception in Washington, a former CIA official told me he believed neither he nor anyone else in the U.S. government would ever turn down a briefing from British intelligence. It wasn't just about the quality of the material, he said - good though it often was.

Even the phrase "British intelligence," he said, had a mystique, glamour and style that was intrinsically fascinating. He suspected British officials were well aware of it, he added, and deliberately styled themselves accordingly.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/10/27/britains-top-fictional-spy-also-its-greatest-intelligence-asset/   

Kim Philby: The Man I Knew, By The Master Spy's Oldest Friend

Neil Tweedie and Michael Smith at the British newspaper the Telegraph offer a piece on the Kim Philby story, as told in a book by Tim Milne.

Harold Adrian Russell ''Kim’’ Philby was an adequate rather than spectacular cricketer as a pupil at Westminster School. When fielding, he was content to stand apart from the rest, observing events at a distance. His preferred position? Deep cover. So it would be for much of his adult life. 
 

The label often attaching to Philby, the most prominent member of the Cambridge Ring, is that of “master spy”, a description conveying ruthlessness, guile and charm. Britain’s most infamous Cold War traitor, whose betrayal resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of agents operating on the dark side of the Iron Curtain, possessed those qualities, certainly. But his charm was not simply of the synthetic kind and he commanded the affection and loyalty of friends, even as the awful truth of his clandestine career – a Soviet asset operating at the heart of British intelligence – became clear. 
 

Tim Milne was Philby’s closest associate in the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. A fellow pupil at Westminster, he was recruited into the secret world during the Second World War on the recommendation of his friend. In retirement, he wrote a memoir of his friendship with Philby, which was promptly banned from publication by MI6. Now, four years after Milne’s death at the age of 97, his story can be told. 
 

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy is an often-intimate portrait of the Third Man, candid in its assessments. Written without rancour – despite Philby’s attempt to blacken Milne’s name during interrogation – it charts the 37 years from first meeting at Westminster in 1925 to Philby’s escape from Lebanon to Russia. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/10669294/Kim-Philby-The-man-I-knew-by-the-master-spys-oldest-friend.html 

Kim Philby, The Observer Connection And The Establishment World Of Spies

Robert McCrum looks back on the notorious British traitor and spy Kim Philby and the old boys club.

One of the darkest and most enthralling British espionage stories of the 20th century turns 50 this month, still resonant with sinister meaning. It was on 1 July 1963 that the British government finally admitted what it had known for some time: that Harold Adrian Russell Philby – "Kim" to friends and family – was not merely living in the Soviet Union as a defector and a Russian spy, but was actually the fabled "third man". Later this archetype of treachery would become known, in the words of his biographer, as "the spy who betrayed a generation".

Philby was perhaps the most lethal double agent in the annals of British espionage. As a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring and a secret servant of the Soviet intelligence services, Philby was responsible for the betrayal of countless national secrets as well as the brutal elimination of many British agents.

At the same time he was a member of the British establishment, with a distinguished literary father and friendships with prominent English literati, such as Graham Greene, as well as with high-flying US spooks such as James Angleton, later to become head of the CIA. If ever there was a member of the club – two, as it turned out – it was Kim Philby, OBE.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/28/kim-philby-david-astor-observer

Note: James Angleton rose to become the head of Counterintelligence in the CIA, but he did not serve as the director. Also, although Ian Fleming was a young journalist for Reuters prior to World War II, he was working as a stockbroker when he was recruited to serve in British naval intelligence. He was not, like Graham Greene, a "prominent English literati."    

My Crime Beat Column: Iranian Intrigue in David Ignatius' The Increment

David Ignatius wrote this book before the eruption of street protests in response to the rigged elections in Iran and the Iranian government’s subsequent violent crackdown on the protestors.

The Increment (Norton), a political novel as much as it is a spy thriller, concerns an Iranian scientist, “Dr Ali,” who contacts the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via their public web site and offers to provide information about Iran’s nuclear program.

The responsibility for handling the “virtual walk-in” agent falls to Harry Pappas, a veteran CIA officer who is the chief of the agency’s Iranian Operations Division, known within the CIA as the “Persia House.”

Pappas, described by Ignatius as a big man in what has become a little institution, is a somewhat burned-out officer. His greives for his son, a marine who died in combat in Iraq, and for the current sorry state of the CIA.

Pappas must share the handling of Dr. Ali with Arthur Fox, the chief of the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Fox, who has political connections in the White House, sees Dr. Ali as a “smoking gun,” which he hopes will push the president towards war with Iran to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.

Pappas, the old field intelligence officer, wants to move slow and he states that they don’t know who Dr. Ali is, nor do they know what he knows. Without CIA officers or local agents operating in Iran, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to learn more about Dr. Ali and his access to nuclear weapons development.

The CIA director, a Navy admiral more suited for the bridge of a ship than the leadership of an intelligence agency, acknowledges that Fox has the upper hand with his White House connections, but he allows Pappas to pursue an avenue with his contacts in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Pappas knows that SIS, also known as MI6, the British equivalent to the CIA, has “assets” on the ground in Iran. Pappas sets out to use those assets to contact Dr. Ali.

His contact in SIS is Adrian Winkler, the chief of staff. Winkler, a poster boy for upper class Brits, was Pappas’ old friend and colleague. They served together in Moscow and Iraq while each represented their respective intelligence service. Winkler tells Pappas that they do indeed have agents in Iran, and they have much more - they have the Increment.

“We use soldiers from the Special Air Service, mostly,” Winkler explained. “Black ops people, highly trained. Many of them are from the - forgive the term - former colonies. Indians, Paks, West Indians, Arabs. They all speak the languages fluently, like natives. They can operate anywhere, and more or less invisible. Or so we like to think. They are seconded to SIS for certain missions where we have to get into a denied area, do something unpleasant, and get out. They have the mythical 007 “license to kill,” as a matter of fact. I like to think of them as James Bond meets My Beautiful Launderette. They give us certain capabilities that we would not have, even under our own rather expansive rules. You don’t know about the Increment because, strictly speaking, there is no such organization.”

Winkler provides Pappas with a trio of operators from the Increment and they are dispatched to Iran to make contact with Dr. Ali.

David Ignatius, 58, is a columnist for The Washington Post. He writes about politics and international affairs for the national newspaper. He has also written six previous novels.

Body of Lies, his previous novel, was made into a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

Ignatius has covered the Middle East and the CIA for more than 25 years and he knows both well. Much of his new novel is based on facts, including the Increment.

Having performed security work as a young sailor in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee, I’ve met CIA officers. I’ve attended CIA briefings and I’ve been trained by CIA officers. As a writer, I’ve interviewed a good number of retired and active duty CIA officers.

I know them to be patriotic public servants. I believe they have been poorly portrayed in books, films, and on TV. The Bourne film series, for example, portrays CIA officers who spend countless time and effort trying to track down and kill one of their own officers. What nonsense. Have we run out of terrorists and criminals to serve as bad guys in this world?

Ignatius offers us believable characters and realistic situations. This is an interesting novel. I only wish he had written more about the Increment in action.

Ignatius, who is to the left of me politically, is against military action to thwart a nuclear Iran. He subscribes to the wait and see school of thought. I’m waiting to see if Israel will launch an attack on Iran, just as they attacked Syria and Iraq when they attempted to develop nuclear weapons in the past.

With protestors on the streets in Iran in the news, this is a good time to read The Increment, even if you don’t agree with Ignatius’ world view.