The arrest of ‘sleeper agents’ on U.S. soil is the stuff of spy novels, not the Cold War.
The Justice Department’s arrest this week of 10 Russian spies posing as American citizens is not stranger than fiction; it mirrors fiction. Innumerable Cold War novels and films focused on “sleeper agents,” professional Soviet espionage officers superbly trained in language and culture who take on the identity of a native-born American to gain access to U.S. intelligence and policy making.
But in reality the most damaging Cold War spies were native-born Americans—Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Aldrich Ames, Richard Hansen—who for reasons of ideology, money or psychological perversity chose to betray their country.
Most Soviet espionage was supervised by “legal” KGB officers operating under official cover as diplomats who, when arrested, faced only expulsion, protected by their diplomatic status. Great Britain famously expelled 105 Soviet personnel linked to KGB intelligence in 1971. But none of them had been posing as a British citizen. The KGB also had “illegal” officers who had no diplomatic status, often used false identities and who usually functioned as covert liaisons with native-born traitors. Long-term sleeper agents, as these 10 appear to have been, are rare.
In the late-1950s, the U.S. government arrested, tried and convicted five Soviet illegals in connection with the Soble-Soblen spy ring: Jack Soble, his wife Myra, his brother Robert Soblen (the two brothers had anglicized their Lithuanian name, Sobolevicius, slightly differently), Jacob Albam and Mark Zborowski. None had diplomatic cover, but neither were they “deep penetration” agents. All used their true identities, simply pretending to be innocent immigrants.
Moreover, their espionage work was confined largely to “agent handling,” i.e., acting as liaison with native-born Americans, mostly Communists, who had been recruited as Soviet spies years earlier. Their major accomplishment was to infiltrate the American Trotskyist movement and the Russian emigré community, targets with no direct connection to the U.S. government. Soble and associates had no plans or prospects of entering American think tanks or other institutions with access to high-level American policy makers.
There were two Soviet illegals exposed in the late 1950s whose activities came a bit closer to the recently arrested 10. An illegal officer, KGB Col. Rudolf Abel (real name Vilyam Fisher), entered the U.S. in 1948 and operated under a variety of false identities. He was finally exposed when his assistant and fellow illegal, KGB Lt. Col. Reino Hayhanen, defected in 1957. (Hayhanen, of Finnish background, had been sent to the U.S. using false papers identifying him as an American of Finnish ancestry.) Abel, who never admitted his real name, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
After only five years he was freed in exchange for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union on a CIA reconnaissance mission. While Hayhanen and Abel assumed false identities as Americans, their function was to maintain contact and pick up information from native-born Americans who spied for the Soviets. Abel’s initial task, for example, was to re-establish KGB contact with Theodore Hall, an American physicist and secret Communist who had provided U.S. atomic secrets to the USSR while working at Los Alamos. Hayhanen and Abel were illegals but not deep-penetration sleeper agents.
Thus, the FBI’s arrest of 10 Russian sleeper agents on U.S. soil has no precedent in Cold War history, even if fans of Walter Wager’s novel “Telefon” (later a movie staring Charles Bronson) find it familiar. Also unprecedented, and reassuringly so, is that FBI counterintelligence had identified these Russian sleepers early on, had been monitoring them for years, and finally decided that it had gained what it could from such surveillance and rolled up the Russian networks.
Deep-penetration agents are a very, very expensive investment. Not only the training of the professional officers themselves, but covertly supporting them, communicating with them, and supervising their activities is a major bureaucratic expense for any intelligence agency. The loss of 10 such agents and the resulting collateral damage makes this a catastrophe for Russian foreign intelligence. The FBI also identified a number of Russian “legal” officers who made surreptitious contact with the sleepers and, thus exposed, these Russian officers are now useless for intelligence fieldwork.
The SVR—Russian Foreign Intelligence, successor to the KGB—also cannot be sure that the FBI has disclosed all that it knows of the 10 agents’ activities (11 with the arrest of a confederate in Cyprus). Prudence dictates that the SVR must assume that any other Russian officers who had covert contact with the 11 may have been identified by American security. Use of these potentially compromised officers in future espionage field-work would be risky and foolish.
We don’t know what additional shoes will drop in this case. Will any of the 10 talk to avoid a long prison term? Rudolf Abel was defiant and refused any cooperation. Jack Soble, however, dodged the death penalty by fully confessing, telling all he knew of KGB operations in the U.S. and Western Europe, and even testified against his brother. These 10 (or 11, if we count the agent arrested in Cyprus) don’t face the death penalty but do face potentially long terms in prison, and there aren’t any Francis Gary Powers available for exchanges.
Messrs. Klehr and Haynes are co-authors, along with Alexander Vassiliev, of “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” (Yale University Press, 2010).
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