ESPIONAGE COLD-WAR RIDDLE: A MOST UNUSUAL SPY

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06545650
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: July 13, 2023
• Document Release Date: August 19, 2022
• Case Number: F-2022-01226
• Publication Date: January 23, 1990

Approved for Release: 2022/08/15 C06545650
Espionage
Cold-War Riddle: A Most
Unusual Spy
By MICHAEL WINES
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON. Jan. 22 � From the
day in 1961 that he first met F.B.I.
agents in Manhattan, Donald F.
seemed a most unusual spy.
He knew secrets of the Soviet Union's
military intelligence network and its
nuclear arsenal that could be found no-
where else. He tipped the Americans
and the British to Soviet agents who
might otherwise have never been de-
tected. In a job where longevity is rare,
he was a grand old man, juggling two
careers � globetrotting Soviet diplo-
mat, American agent � for at least two
decades.
When Pravda, the Soviet Communist
daily, reported last week that Donald
F., "one of the most important" spies
of recent years, had been captured and
sentenced to death, an American offi-
cial privately called it a major loss.
Code Name Top Hat
The official may be right Although
Pravda did not identify Donald F., a re-
view of Soviet diplomatic records
shows that he is a senior Soviet Army
officer, Lieut. Gen. Dmitri Fedorovich
Polyakov. That conclusion is con-
firmed ,by former American intelli-
gence officials.
General Polyakov, who served in the
military from the 1950's to the 1980's,!
was known to the Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation and the Central Intelli-
gence Agency by the code name Top!
Hat, the former officials said. �
According to Pentagon records, Gen-
eral Polyakov last served as a lieuten-
ant general in the Soviet Army Air De-
fense Command. That is a top post in
the force, charged with defending the
Soviet Union against nuclear attack.
Mystery and Suspicion
But beyond agreeing that General
Polyakov held what Pravda called "a
very important position," the report of
the spy's downfall remains shrouded in
a half-light of mystery and suspicion.
Despite his decades of ostensibly faith-
ful service to the Western cause, some
American experts have never been
satisfied that General Polyakov was
not at heart an agent of deception for
the Soviet Union.
The Pravda account provides new
grist for the debate. While much of the
newspaper's report accurately tracks
General Polyakov's diplomatic career,
experts say, the article veers from the
truth at enough points to leave analysts
puzzled and skeptical.
For example, the Dmitri F. Polyakov
known to American officials was not
recently captured and sentenced to
The Washington Post
The New York Times A 16
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
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death, but has been dead for several
years. Experts who believe in General
Polyakov's genuineness say he was ap-
parently swept up and executed in a
wave of arrests of American agents in
the mid-1980's, shortly after a series of
security lapses rocked the C.I.A.'s Mos-
cow station.
"A couple of years ago, for reasons
that aren't clear to us, the Russians got
a bunch of our guys and killed them,"
said a former official. "The consensus
of the community is that he was one of
them." That conclusion was later con-
firmed by Government experts.
Perhaps a Double Agent
Others say General Polyakov has re-
tired from espionage and could not
have been caught in the act of sending
messages to the C.I.A., as the Pravda
account reported.
Equally mysterious is why Pravda
would admit that an American agent
duped the K.G.B. at all. Some say it
seeks to bolster the sagging career of a
K.G.B. colonel, Aleksandr Dukhanin,
who Pravda says captured General
Polyakov. Colonel Dukhanin has been.
accused of bungling a corruption in-
quiry involving a Politburo member,
Yegor K. Ligachev, who is a conserva-
tive critic of President Mikhail S. Gor-
bachev.
Others say the aim is to burnish the
image of the K.G.B. at a time when
other Communist secret police agen-
cies, from Rumania's Securitate to
East Germany's Stasi, are being dis-
banded. The article on Donald F.,
which also praises the K.G.B.'s attacks
on internal corruption, is one of many
recent reports that cast the agency in a
favorable light.
Still others contend that he was not
an American spy at all, but a Soviet
"dangle" whose 20-year mission was to
spread false information and foul the
trails left by other Soviet agents in the
C.I.A. and F.B.I. In that view, General
Polyakov either died peacefully or has
retired with honors, and the Pravda re-
port is but a final twist intended to con-
vince the United States of his loyalty.
Among those holding that view are
Peter Wright, the former assistant di-
rector of British intelligence and au-
thor of the book "Spycatcher," and Ed-
ward Jay Epstein, an American writer
on intelligence issues, along with a le-
gion of former C.I.A. officials who ana-
lyzed Top Hat and other Soviet
"moles" of the 1960's.
i;i;:a44-.fat
"I never believed he was genuine,"
said one of the former C.I.A. officials.
The official, like others interviewed.
declined to be identified. The former of-
ficial said he reviewed Top Hat'E
credentials in the mid-1970's as part ol
an analysis of Soviet informers or.
dered by William E. Colby, the Direc.
tor of Central Intelligence at the time.
'The Guy Was Legit'
General Polyakov's defenders are
equally adamant. "The guy was legit.
absolutely," said an F.B.I. expert on
the Soviet Union from the 1960's.
"There was never any controversy
about it."
Although Mr. Wright and others say
the F.B.I. and C.I.A. decided in 1978
that Top Hat was a Soviet double agent,
Government officials insist that he was
genuine and that "there has never been
a legitimate debate" about his loyal.
ties.
Legitimate or not, the debate his
been never ending. The C.I.A.'s legend-
ary spymaster of the 1960's, James
Jesus Angleton, concluded early on
that Top Hat and a second Soviet agent
recruited at the United Nations, Fedo-
ra, were fakes. Their mission, he be-
lieved, was to discredit evidence pro-
vided by a Soviet defector, Anatoli
Golitsin, that a Soviet spy had pene-
trated the C.I.A.'s highest levels.
Mr. Angleton never found the spy,
and the turmoil that his search taused
led to his dismissal from the C.I.A. But
the debate over Top Hat and Fedora
did not end. His successors conducted a
review that appeared to clear Top Hat,
but concluded that Fedora was in fact a
double agent for the K.G.B.
Casey Reopens Debate
In the early 1980's, President Rea-.
gan's Director of Central Intelligence,
William J. Casey, reopened the debate.
His own inquiry, mounted by a team of
former agency officials, concluded'
somewhat weakly that "the charge of
being a plant could not be substantiat-
ed," a former C.I.A. official said.
'The public record, pieced together
from books and the Pravda account,
'settles nothing. �
Diplomatic records show that Gen-
eral Polyakov served in the Soviet Mis-
sion to the United Nations in New York..
in 1956 and again from 1959 to 1962, �
when he was promoted to the rank of
colonel. After a stint in Moscow, he was
posted in 1966 at the Soviet Embassy in
Burma, where he was the military
attache.
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In the early 1970's, he moved to the
Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and re-,
turned for a second tour in 1980, with
the rank of major general, before re-
turning again to Moscow.
Classified Conversations
The diplomatic cover masked at
least two other secret lives. John Bar-
ron, an author and .intelligence expert,
wrote in 1974 that General Polyakov
was a Soviet spy while at the United
Nations. Former American officials
say he was an agent for the military in-
telligence agency, G.R.U.
Pravda reported that he first ap-
proached the F.B.I. in November 1961
and later met American agents several
times at the "Kamerun Hotel," appar-
ently a reference to the old Cameron
Hotel on West 86th Street. Pravda said
the C.I.A., which assumed control of
him in Burma, later communicated
through personal ads in the classified
advertising section of The New York
Times, all addressed to "MOODY-Don-
ald F." Such an ad appeared in The
Times for 10 consecutive days in May
1964.
American officials of that era said -
General Polyakov seemed invaluable,
providing names of Soviet spies, details
of G.R.U. operations and political infor-
mation on the Government in Moscow.
"Back in those days, there weren't
too many defectors, and he was the
best the bureau had," an official said.
"It was pretty big stuff."
Who Misled Whom?
Mr. Wright said Top Hat psovided
the F.B.I. with copies of stolen British
defense documents, leading to the ar-
rest of a major Soviet spy, Frank Bos-
sard, by the British secret service.
But Mr. Wright dismissed the tip as a
Soviet attempt to generate rifts in the
British-American alliance, since the
documents in question contained top
United States defense secrets. -
Other authors, including Mr. Epstein,
say Top Hat and Fedora gave the F.B.I
and C.I.A. data suggesting that Soviet
nuclear miasiles were far less accurate
than they actually were. The mislead-
ing data, fed to the United States
through the 1970's, misled the Nixon
and Carter Administrations into mak-
ing seriously flawed agreements with
Moscow on limiting nuclear weapons,
those writers contend.
But another C.I.A. official said that
Mr. Casey's review of the evidence re-
fined those charges, and that "the
record was pretty, good as far as the
analysis and conclusions" about Soviet
nuclear abilities were concerned.
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