GRU
colonel Oleg Penkovsky (image right) was
one of the few valuable intelligence
source, recruited by the West during the
Cold War. The information he provided to
the West puts him in the same league
as CIA crown jewels GRU general Dmitri
Polyakov and avionics
electronics expert Adolf
Tolkachev, influencing American
and British intelligence assessment and
policy making during the Cold War
Born in 1919 as
the son of a White Army officer who died
during the war against the Bolsheviks,
Penkovsky followed in his father's
footsteps and entered the Soviet army in
1939 as artillery officer. After the
Second World War, he graduated from the
Frunze Military Academy and joined the
GRU (military intelligence) where he
received intelligence training. Penkovsky
was sent abroad under the cover
of military attaché of the Russian
Embassy to Turkey, to spy on Turkish
and U.S. military installations and later
received training in missile and
rockets weaponry.
Problems with his
superiors, apparently because of his
father's past, affected his assignment in
Turkey and later caused a planned
assignment in India to be cancelled.
These were probably the seeds for his
disillusion in the Soviet system and his
dislike for the politics of Nikita
Krushchev.
In 1961, prior to
leaving for London to set up a Soviet spy
network, Penkovsky contacted British and
American intelligence officers through a
British businessman in Moscow. During his
frequent travels to the West for his GRU
missions, Penkovsky, now a double agent
codenamed HERO and YOGA, met
with CIA and MI-6 officers and underwent
extensive debriefings. He also handed
over numerous photos and documents to
personnel of the British embassy to
Moscow. His information gave the Western
intelligence agencies a good view on the
strength of the Soviet forces and
provided evidence that Soviet military
and technical capabilities were
overestimated.
When in
1962 the Soviets began deploying
nuclear missiles on Cuba, at the doorstep
of the United States, Penkovsky
provided invaluable intelligence about
the progress of the deployment of the
missiles. During the subsequent Cuban
Missile Crisis, his detailed information
gave the Kennedy administration an
important tactical and diplomatic
advantage over the Soviets, making
Penkovsky one of the few men that
prevented a nuclear war and change the
course of the Cold Ward.
During 1962, the
KGB became aware of a mole in the
Soviet intelligence community. It is
assumed that either British MI-6 mole
George Blake or NSA courier Jack Dunlap
tipped off the Soviets, eventually
leading them to Penkovsky. After an
extensive surveillance, KGB officers
arrested Oleg Penkovsky on 22
October 1962, just hours before U.S.
president Kennedy would address the
nation about the Soviet missiles on
Cuban soil. GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky
was tried in may 1963. After his public
trial, which was extensively covered in
the media, he was found guilty to
treason, sentenced to death and executed.
There's a featured story on
Penkovsky on the CIA website, which
also contains numerous numerous documents,
related to the Penkovsky case. Below a
Cold War Spies video, with interviews
with former CIA Chief of Missile Division
Sidney Graybeal, Penkovsky's CIA contact
Joe Bulik and KGB interrogator Alexander
Zagvozdin.
Friday, February
03, 2012
Romeo Spy John
Symonds
Romeo
spies have been around for centuries
(they still are), but it was only during
the Cold War era that the Soviet security
service KGB and especially the former
East German foreign intelligence service
HVA turned it into an extremely effective
weapon of espionage.
Romeo spies were
well trained intelligence officers.
Charming and attentive, they seduced
secretaries, working in the offices of
important politicians, military
headquarters or the industrie, and
persuaded these women to provide them
with classified information. All in the
name of love.
Often, these women
were recruited under a false flag by
making them believe their
lover worked for some Western
intelligence agency. These operations
were well prepared and supported, in
order to convince their victims so well
that the poor wives had no idea they were
actually helping Soviet intelligence.
One such Romeo spy
was the remarkable John Alexander Symonds
(see image). As a detective in London's
Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard),
Symonds used unorthodox methods to
persuade criminals to cooperate with the
police. Meanwhile, many other police
officers bluntly extorted people in the
sex industry and received money in
return for turning a blind eye. In
1969, he became targeted in a corruption
investigation and subsequently fled
England to avoid imprisonment. Ans so
began a most unusual career.
Initially, Symonds
worked as a mercenary in Africa. During
his time in Africa, he meticulously wrote
down all names and details of
metropolitan police officers who were
actively involved in corruption and
extortion, believing that this
information might be of use in the
future. However, the KGB crossed Symonds'
path and eventually persuaded him to work
as a Romeo spy for the Soviets.
After an extensive
training in all aspects of the art of
Romeo spying (yes, also the erotic
aspects) he began an eight year career as
illegal agent, seducing wives and
daughters of CIA officers all over the
world. He excelled in this extraordinary
job and provided Soviet intelligence with
invaluable information, pilfered from
ignorant wives.
In the 1980's, he
decided to defect and returned to
England, using his writings about the
corruption in the Metropolitan Police
department as a bargain in the
negotiations with British security
service MI5. He also told them about his
eight year career as Romeo Spy and
offered MI5 to reveal the modus
operandi of KGB illegals. Unfortunately,
MI5 consulted Scotland Yard, who told
them that Symonds was a fantasist who
tried to evade prosecution. Symonds was
arrested and convicted spending three
years in jail.
When Vasili
Mitrokhin, senior archivist of the KGB's
First Directorate (foreign
intelligence) defected in 1992, he
handed over a vast archive of copied top
secret documents, straight from the KGB
archives. During the subsequent
debriefings and analysis of
Mitrokhin's documents, British foreign
intelligence service MI6 identified John
Symonds as one of the KGB's top spies who
carried out many successful spy
operations.
They realised that
John Symonds had told the truth about his
extraordinary career and his accusations
against Metropolitan Police. The
publication of the Mitrokhin archive (see
my book review) exposed
the failure of the British security
services to identify Symonds as a
valuable source on KGB operations,
resulting in a parliamentary enquiry. At
the end, Symonds was never
prosecuted for espionage and was offered
immunity in relation to the police
corruption enquiries.
The complete story
is found on John Symonds' Romeo Spy website, where
you can also download his book Romeo Spy.
It's a stunning account of sex, lies and
spies. There's also a great video from a
talk about the famous Romeo spies
Popov and Symonds, by Nigel West, the well
known expert and author on espionage,
recorded at the Raleigh Spy Conference
2009. A most interesting and amusing
talk!
Tuesday, February
07, 2012
Cipher Machines
and Cryptology on Dropbox
I recently made
available all crypto simulations
software and some older tools
through the public folder links of
my Dropbox. Of course,
the latest versions and more details
about most software is always available
through the proper pages on my website.
These include the freeware KL-7,
Hagelin BC-52, U.S. M-209 and recently
updated Enigma cipher machine simulations
(see screenshot below) and free crypto
tools.
The Dropbox is
also an ideal method to exchange files
that are too large to be sent by e-mail.
If you have a request for older software
or documents, or you encounter a broken
link in one of my old weblog posts, just
drop me an e-mail and I will make the
requested file available through my
Dropbox. More information and links to my
public Dropbox files are found on my website download page.
Dropbox is an
easy-to-use web-based file hosting
service (cloud storage) that offers free
accounts with 2 Gigabyte free space and
unlimited file sizes (don't distribute
copyrighted stuff!) You can manage your
files from any location or
computer, through the webpage
interface or with the client
software, which automatically
synchronises all files in a special
Dropbox folder on your computer. To
create you own free account, simply visit
this Dropbox webpage.
Some popular
cipher machines simulations
Monday,
February 13, 2012
Cold War Radio
Jamming
Radio jamming is the
deliberate broadcast of and interference
signal to prevent the reception of a
radio transmission. When talking about
radio jamming during the Cold War, we
generally think about the disruption of
enemy military radio communications and
weapons systems signals, a small part of
what is know as electronic warfare or EW.
However, radio
jamming was also used extensively for
non-military purposes during the Cold
War. Although the Iron Curtain divided
the world physically between East and
West, no barbed wire, high fence or
border guard could stop radio signals
from travelling across borders. During
the Cold War, propaganda was a powerful
weapon in politics and the
battle between ideologies. Winning
the hearts of the enemy's civilian
population was just as important as
depicting the enemy as a tyrannic
aggressor.
Both East and West
excelled in doing so, but probably the
best known examples are the extensive
jamming of the powerful
shortwave and medium wave stations
Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the
Voice of America (VOA). Both these
stations have broadcast for decades in
various languages, mostly towards
eastern-block and Latin American
countries, to bypass the censored press
in those countries.
Many Soviet
citizens listened - often illegally - to
these stations to catch a glimpse of what
was happening in the West. Of course,
these stations not only scheduled the
usual international news and
entertainment, but also propaganda,
directed against the Soviet regime.
Sometimes they even inserted covert
messages for dissidents or
intelligence personnel,
operating inside the Soviet
Union. It was hardly
a secret that RFE was initially a
CIA funded station that was set up
specifically to fight the Cold War by
political and propaganda means.
Just as eager the
Western policy makers and intelligence
services were to get their broadcast
across into the Eastern-Bloc countries,
so eager were the Soviets to prevent
these signals from arriving to their
citizens' radios. To counter this threat
by the West, many very powerful jamming
transmitters were operated
in Russia, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary
and Bulgaria, to name a few. It was
often a cat and mouse game between the
radio stations, slightly changing the
frequency to enable
their listeners to tune in clearly,
and the jamming station operator tuning
his jamming signal right onto the
broadcast frequency.
To disrupt the
reception of powerful shortwave radio
stations, they used even more powerful
jamming transmitters, up to 500 Kilowatt
(that's 500.000 Watt) with various
interference signals such as noise,
non-stop music or even recorded voices
played backwards. These high-power
jamming stations were often located near
densely populated areas to increase their
effectiveness. Radiation and health were
probably not an issue in those days.
Although the Cold
War has ended more than two decades ago,
the practice of jamming radio stations
still continues in several countries.
Amoung them are Vietnam, China, Iran and
Cuba. Radio jamming is a popular
technique for some regimes to keep their
citizens ignorant by extensive
censorship.
To get an idea of
the jamming equipment and the methods
they used you should visit Rimantas
Pleikys' Radio Jamming website with
detailed information, images and sound
samples of former East European
jamming transmitters. You can also read
his excellent paper Radio Jamming in the
Soviet Union, Poland and other East
European Countries (pdf). He
also wrote a book on this
subject which is apparently no longer
available (maybe you can catch it
second-hand). Rimantas Pleikys is
a former Minister of Communications
and Informatics of Lithuania and amateur
radio operator. More about the Cold War
battle over radio waves is found on
my website.
GRU
colonel Oleg Penkovsky (image right) was
one of the few valuable intelligence
source, recruited by the West during the
Cold War. The information he provided to
the West puts him in the same league
as CIA crown jewels GRU general 
Romeo
spies have been around for centuries
(they still are), but it was only during
the Cold War era that the Soviet security
service KGB and especially the former
East German foreign intelligence service
HVA turned it into an extremely effective
weapon of espionage.
Radio jamming is the
deliberate broadcast of and interference
signal to prevent the reception of a
radio transmission. When talking about
radio jamming during the Cold War, we
generally think about the disruption of
enemy military radio communications and
weapons systems signals, a small part of
what is know as electronic warfare or EW.