Happy 82nd Birthday To John Le Carre

As Biography.com notes, today is British thriller writer John le Carre's birthday.

John Le Carré was born October 19, 1931 in Poole, England. His first published novel, Call for the Dead (1961), introduced his ‘anti-hero’ George Smiley, who appears in most of his stories. Some of his many popular works are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Honourable Schoolboy, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Russia House, The Tailor of Panama and Absolute Friends.

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

http://www.biography.com/people/john-le-carr%C3%A9-9376419

Although I don't subscribe to le Carre's worldview, I find him to be a fine writer and his earlier novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a Cold War classic.

You can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of John le Carre's Our Kind of Traitor via the below link:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/LeCarreOurKindOfTratiorReview.jpg

You can also read my Crime Beat column on John le Carre and Ian Fleming - Spy Writer Vs Spy Writer - via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html

Ferguson Smith, Spycatcher Who Cracked Cold War Communist Spy Rings, Dies At 98

The British newspaper the Mirror offers a piece on former Chief Inspector Ferguson Smith, the U.K.'s supreme spycatcher.

With his neat military moustache, upright bearing, dapper dress and old-fashioned charm, Ferguson Smith seemed like any other ex-RAF gent enjoying his retirement.

The former Bomber Command flight lieutenant lived quietly in his home of more than 60 years, indulging his love of poetry and the countryside and doting on his wife, Margaret, until her death 10 years ago.

But few of his neighbours in Malden, Surrey, had any idea he was a decorated war hero, former personal bodyguard to ex-King the Duke of Windsor and, most remarkably, a supreme spycatcher.
Smith, who died at the age of 98 this month, hero died at the age of 98 this month, was instrumental in snaring the most notorious traitors and Russian spies of the 50s and 60s.

During a 36-year career in Special Branch, his quiet manner, obsession with detail and determination to go the extra mile saw him catch the infamous Portland spy ring – who were selling nuclear submarine secrets to Moscow – and arrest the most dangerous of all Red spies, George Blake.

Smith also helped jail naval attache-turned traitor John Vassall as well as Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who sold details of Britain and America’s atomic bomb programme to the Soviets.

... Last night spy expert Neil Root said the nation owed a huge debt to spycatcher Smith – who must have been a master of mind games and tough James Bond 007-style counter-espionage techniques.
Neil, author of Twentieth Century Spies, said: “There was a real fear of Communist spies in the 50s and 60s.

“At the time espionage and counter espionage were about face to face contact, it was all meeting in dirty macs on park benches. It was much more psychological, you had to be able to read people.

“The things you see in James Bond now, that was the kind of stuff happening then. It was much more brutal, people were killed much more quickly.

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

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/ferguson-smith-special-branch-brought-2296496

The Farewell Dossier: A Look Back At The Cold War Spy Code Named 'Farewell'

I watched an interesting documentary on the Military Channel last night about Vladimir Vetrov (seen in the above photo), the Soviet KGB officer who spied for the West. Vetrov was given the code name 'Farewell' by French Intelligence.

You can watch a video about the program via the below link:

http://military.discovery.com/tv-shows/shadow-ops/video/vetrov-helps-wipe-out-a-kgb-network.htm

The CIA's web site offers an account of "The Farewell Dossier" by Gus W. Weiss.

During the Cold War, and especially in the 1970s, Soviet intelligence carried out a substantial and successful clandestine effort to obtain technical and scientific knowledge from the West. This effort was suspected by a few US Government officials but not documented until 1981, when French intelligence obtained the services of Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, "Farewell," who photographed and supplied 4,000 KGB documents on the program. In the summer of 1981, President Mitterrand told President Reagan of the source, and, when the material was supplied, it led to a potent counterintelligence response by CIA and the NATO intelligence services.

...Vetrov was a 53-year-old engineer assigned to evaluate the intelligence collected by Directorate T, an ideal position for a defector in place. He had volunteered his services for ideological reasons. He supplied a list of Soviet organizations in scientific collection and summary reports from Directorate T on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. Farewell revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers stationed in 10 KGB rezidents in the West, along with more than 100 leads to Line X recruitments.

Upon receipt of the documents (the Farewell Dossier, as labeled by French Intelligence) CIA arranged for my access. Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true. Since 1970, Line X had obtained thousands of documents and sample products, in such quantity that it appeared that the Soviet military and civil sectors were in large measure running their research on that of the West, particularly the United States. Our science was supporting their national defense. Losses were in radar, computers, machine tools, and semiconductors. Line X had fulfilled two-thirds to three-fourths of its collection requirements--an impressive performance.

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

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm

William Safire's wrote a piece on the Farewell Dossier for the New York Times in 2004.

Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of ''the Farewell dossier'': how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the cold war.

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/02/opinion/the-farewell-dossier.html

George Blake, the MI6 Spy Who Betrayed Up To 40 British Agents And Defected To Russia, Says He has No Regrets

 

Vladimir Putin, Russia's president former KGB agent, likes to trot out the memories of the Cold War spies like Kim Philby and honor them as heroes.

One such Cold War spy, 90-year George Blake, is still alive and resides in Putin's Russia.

Exiled former master spy and traitor George Blake, whose betrayal of British agents to the KGB is said to have cost any lives, claims the 'happiest years' of his life are being spent in Putin-controlled Russia.

In a rare interview marking his 90th birthday, the former MI6 officer recalled sharing cocktails, including martinis - favored by James Bond - with fellow spies outside Moscow in their KGB retirement.

Nearly five decades after he escaped from a British jail and was smuggled to east Berlin in a camper van in one of the classic cloak-and-dagger stories of the 20th century, Blake lives quietly in the Moscow suburbs with his wife Ida on a pension from the KGB.

'These are the happiest years of my life, and the most peaceful, ' Blake, who goes by the Russian name Georgy Ivanovich, said in the interview, published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta.

... There was no sign of regret or remorse for his duplicity and he appeared content with the life he forged after being exposed with fellow traitors Donald Maclean and Kim Philby as among the most 'significant' spies of the Cold War years.

You can also read the Associated Press piece on Blake in the Philadelphia Inquirer via the below link:

http://articles.philly.com/2012-11-07/news/34974566_1_british-prison-soviet-spy-double-agent