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#espionage
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Project Azorian: The CIA's Secret Salvage of a Soviet Submarine
In 1968, a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine, the K-129, sank in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, carrying its crew, its nuclear missiles, and its secrets to the bottom, nearly three miles down. The Soviets searched and failed to find it; the United States, using its network of undersea listening posts, located the wreck. And then the CIA conceived one of the boldest schemes in the history of espionage: to raise the submarine — or a large part of it — from a depth of some 4,900 meters, a feat of deep-sea salvage far beyond anything ever attempted, in order to seize the Soviet nuclear missiles, warheads, and, most tantalizingly, the code machines and cryptographic materials aboard. To do it in secret, the agency built a purpose-designed salvage ship equipped with an enormous mechanical claw, and hid the entire enterprise behind an elaborate cover story: that the vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, belonged to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and was mining valuable metals from the sea floor. In the summer of 1974, the ship attempted the impossible. It succeeded in lifting the submarine partway to the surface — before a portion broke off and fell back into the abyss. Exactly what was recovered remains, in part, classified to this day. And when journalists exposed the operation, the CIA's refusal to comment gave the world a phrase that has been with it ever since: that it could 'neither confirm nor deny.' This is the story of Project Azorian.
The Rosenberg Case: Atomic Spies and a Contested Execution
On 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They were the only two American civilians ever put to death for spying during the Cold War, and they left behind two young sons. Their case had become, by the time of their deaths, one of the most bitterly divisive in American history: to their defenders, they were innocent victims of anti-communist hysteria, framed and killed to feed the Red Scare; to the prosecution and much of the public, they were traitors who had handed Stalin the atomic bomb and deserved to die. For decades the truth was fiercely contested, the two camps talking past each other. Then, in 1995, the United States released the Venona decrypts — intercepted Soviet intelligence cables — and, with the later opening of Soviet archives, the picture finally came clear, and it satisfied neither side. Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been a Soviet spy, running a significant espionage ring. But Ethel's guilt was another matter entirely: the testimony that sent her to the chair was later admitted to be a lie, and she appears to have been, at most, a knowing bystander, executed to pressure her husband. This is the story of the Rosenberg case — of real espionage, real injustice, and the hard truth that lies between the two myths that grew up around it.
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB Clerk Who Stole the KGB's Secrets
Vasili Mitrokhin was not a spy in the usual sense, and that is exactly what made him so dangerous to the organisation he served. He was a KGB officer who, after years of disillusionment, had been moved sideways into the archives of the First Chief Directorate — the service's foreign-intelligence arm — and given responsibility for supervising the transfer of its entire secret file collection to a new headquarters. It was the most sensitive paper in the Soviet Union: decades of records on agents, operations, and informants spread across the West and the wider world. For roughly twelve years, from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin used his extraordinary access to commit one of the most audacious acts of intelligence defiance in history. Alone, by hand, he copied and summarised thousands of the KGB's most secret documents, scribbling notes on scraps of paper that he hid in his shoes and clothing and carried out of headquarters past the guards, day after day, year after year. At home he transcribed them, and then he hid the growing archive — sealed in milk churns and tin containers and buried beneath the floor and in the garden of his dacha outside Moscow. He could not get it to the West while the Soviet Union stood. But when the USSR collapsed, in 1992, Mitrokhin travelled to the newly independent Baltic states, walked into a Western embassy, and offered his life's secret work. British intelligence grasped what he was holding, spirited him, his family, and six cases of material out of Russia, and acquired in a single stroke the most comprehensive record of Soviet foreign intelligence operations ever to reach the West. This is the story of the quiet archivist who stole the KGB's own history.
The Cambridge Five and the Spies at the Heart of British Intelligence
In the 1930s, Soviet intelligence undertook one of the most ambitious recruitment operations in the history of espionage: rather than buying secrets from disgruntled clerks, it would cultivate brilliant young Britons at the start of their careers, men of the right schools and the right accents who could be guided, over decades, into the very heart of the British establishment. The most famous of these recruits were five Cambridge University men — Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — who became known as the Cambridge Five. They were not desperate or marginal figures but charming, talented members of the elite, and that was precisely the point. Over the following decades they penetrated the Foreign Office, the security service MI5, the secret intelligence service MI6, and the wartime codebreaking establishment, passing a torrent of British and American secrets to Moscow. Philby rose so high within MI6 that he was considered a future chief of the service — while serving the entire time as a Soviet agent, even as he was nominally in charge of countering the Soviet threat. The ring began to unravel in 1951, when Burgess and Maclean vanished to Moscow one step ahead of exposure; Philby fell under suspicion but was protected by an establishment unable to believe one of its own could be a traitor, and he did not flee to Moscow until 1963. Blunt, by then a knighted royal art adviser, secretly confessed but was not publicly named until 1979. The damage they did — to operations, to agents, to trust between Britain and its allies — was immense and, in places, fatal. This is the story of how five men of the establishment betrayed it from within, and how the establishment's own blindness let them.
Venona: The Secret Code-Break That Exposed the Soviet Spies
In February 1943, in a converted girls' school outside Washington, a small team of American codebreakers began an attack on a target almost everyone believed was hopeless: the enciphered cable traffic of Soviet intelligence. The Soviets encrypted their most secret messages using a one-time pad, a system that is, in theory, mathematically unbreakable — and the Soviet Union was, at that moment, an ally of the United States in the war against Hitler. Yet the project, later given the codename Venona, would become one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the twentieth century. Exploiting a wartime mistake by Soviet cipher clerks, who had reused pages of supposedly single-use pads, the American cryptanalysts slowly, painstakingly began to read the unreadable. What they found, message by fragmentary message across years of labour, was staggering: the Soviet Union had run a vast espionage campaign inside the United States during the war, with hundreds of sources reaching into the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, the State Department, the Treasury, and the heart of the intelligence services of both America and Britain. Venona helped expose the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, the ring around Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the British traitor Donald Maclean of the Cambridge Five. But the decrypts were guarded with such obsessive secrecy that they could not be used as evidence in open court, and for decades the government knew truths it could not prove and could barely speak. The project remained classified until 1995, when the release of its files rewrote the secret history of the early Cold War. This is the story of the code-break that saw into the heart of Soviet espionage, and of the silence that surrounded it for fifty years.
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