Page 160 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 160 of 237

There is a great danger in relying heavily on diplomatic cover. If relations are severed between countries, or war
breaks out, then the CIA tends to be cut off from its sources of information. In January, 1961, for example, when
Washington broke off relations with Havana, the CIA lost its embassy base in Cuba. Ironically, the Cubans
retained two legations in the United States -- their delegation to the Organization of American States in
Washington * and their UN mission in New York.

CIA agents operating abroad under commercial cover pose, as the term implies, as legitimate businessmen, rather
than as diplomats. Not long ago a CIA man in Washington told all his friends he was quitting the agency to
go to Switzerland for Praeger books. Very possibly he was telling the truth and was really leaving the
agency, but not all of his friends believed him.

A CIA officer operating overseas under embassy or commercial cover recruits "agents" locally to feed him
information. The most valuable information often comes not from a trusted agent, but from the occasional highly
placed defector from the opposition camp.

The most useful defector is a Communist official who can be persuaded to stay at his job, at least for a while, and
transmit intelligence to the West. This is known as a defector "in place." The most prized defector of all is one
who works, or who has worked, in the Soviet intelligence apparatus.

A delicate aspect of the CIA's work is the care and protection of its colony of important defectors who have fled
the Communist world. In a CBS television interview [3] Dulles called defectors "one of the two or three most
important sources of intelligence." He added: "When you get a man -- and we have got several -- who have
worked inside the KGB, their secret service, or the GRU, their military service, it's just almost as though you had
somebody inside there for a time."

Dulles estimated that the number of high-level valuable defectors who had come over to the West was "in the
range of a hundred."

Not all of these Russians are "surfaced" by the CIA. Those who remain underground are protected by the agency.
Some go to work for the CIA. Others are given a new identity that, hopefully, will protect them in the United
States from the long arm of KGB assassins.

Recently, a resident of McLean, Virginia, near the CIA headquarters, was intrigued when an obviously
Russian family moved in across the street; two huge dogs guarded the premises, and a chauffeur-driven car
came to take the children to school every day. But the Russian hardly budged from his house, except to go
to a neighbor's occasional cocktail party, where he would identify himself as an "historian." The
"historian" was very likely a defector being kept on ice by the CIA.

Not all stories of Soviet defectors under CIA protection come to such happy endings, however. On October 21,
1952, a lieutenant in the KGB, Reino Hayhanen, entered the United States under the name of Eugene Maki and
became an assistant to Rudolf Abel, the Russian master spy who posed as a mousy photographer-artist in
Brooklyn under the alias of Emil R. Goldfus.

Hayhanen drank and talked too much; he was not a very good spy. Exasperated, Abel finally shipped his assistant
home. Hayhanen decided his reception might be unpleasant; soon May 6, 1957, while en route to Moscow, he
walked into the American Embassy in Paris and defected to the CIA.

He was rushed back to New York, where he identified Abel, which led to the arrest of the top Russian spy who
had been his boss. After Abel's trial and conviction that October, Hayhanen dropped out of sight. The CIA gave