SPIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301910006-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2010
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: October 21, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM American Almanac STAnON WRC-TV
NBC Network
DATE October 21, 1985 8:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT S p i e s
ROGER MUDD: When we come to look back at 1985, it may
very well be that we will remember it as the Year of the Spy.
Spies have always been among us. They are fascinating and
repellent figures: heroes when they're ours, villains when
they're not. We have the CIA, the Soviets have the KGB.
But the spies have been more than just among us lately.
We've heard too many revelations in the last few months of
Americans doing the KGB's bidding not to realize that some sort
of war is going on. Secrets are being bought and sold; and so,
it seems, are Americans.
The latest is 33-year-old Edward Lee Howard, a former
CIA agent who had been in training for a Moscow assignment. In
1983, however, he reportedly failed a lie-detector test on the
use of drugs, and the CIA fired him.
Sometime last summer, the FBI put Howard under
surveillance. A month ago, Edward Lee Howard vanished from his
home outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, much to the embarrassment of
the CIA, the FBI, and its Director, Judge William Webster.
Where is Edward Howard, Judge?
WILLIAM WEBSTER: I can't answer that question. And if
I could, I don't think I'd be in position to tell you right now.
He is a fugitive. We have substantial information about where
he's gone. But I think that's all I can tell to you.
MUDD: How did he get away?
WEBSTER: Well, he got away because his departure was
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not observed. And I can't really say much beyond that.
MUDD: There are now strong indications, however, that
Howard escaped the FBI surveillance in a car with the help of his
wife and that old trick, the inflatable dummy.
Howard was reported seen last week in Helsinki. And
Washington's espionage experts now assume he is in Moscow.
After the escape, an arrest warrant was issued for
Howard charging him with conspiracy to deliver national defense
information to a foreign government. The FBI believes Howard
sold the information for cash to the KGB.
The world uses the initials KGB because the full name is
nearly impossible to pronounce, unless you're a Russian.
MAN: Comitet Gosudarstvenoy Besopastnosty.
MUDD: KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security, is
headquartered in downtown Moscow in this rarely photographed
building.
KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov controls several hundred
thousand agents who are the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and
the national police all rolled into one. Their control at home
is total.
MAN: Don't push me.
MUDD: The KGB is trying to extend its reach,
particularly in the United States, with a sophisticated, lavishly
financed campaign of espionage aimed mainly at America's high
technology.
In Washington there are just under 400 Soviets. The
KGB's chief operatives work at the Russian Embassy on 16th
Street, just three blocks north of the White House.
STANISLAV LEVCHENKO: The best way to calculate those
numbers is just to have in mind that from 35 to 40 percent of
every Soviet citizen stationed in the United States are
professional intelligence officers.
MUDD: Stanislav Levchenko was a KGB major before he
defected six years ago. He says he's still apprehensive about
being seen on television.
If Levchenko's formula is correct, then about 425 of the
1135 Soviets in the United States are full-time spies, 425. It's
the FBI's job to track them.
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WEBSTER: We're outmanned in that respect.
MUDD: Yeah, that was my question. It's just not
possible, is it, sir, for the FBI to watch all those guys?
WEBSTER: That's true. That's true. We've increased
our capability about 25 percent in the last four years. Now,
this isn't something you can do overnight. You can't just go out
on the street and hire counterintelligence officers. But I think
it's been done gradually, it's been done effectively, and we're
seeing the results of it today.
MUDD: Not only does the FBI have to keep track of the
Soviet diplomats, but also hundreds of other Soviets in America:
journalists, travel agents, businessmen, or people pretending to
be.
Retired Admiral Bobby Inman, who once helped run the
CIA, says the detente of the '70s increased Soviet traffic to the
U.S., and that stretched the FBI.
ADMIRAL BOBBY INMAN: We were trying to use trade as a
means to bring the Soviets into the behavior that better met our
standards in international relations. The end result is that the
number of potential case officers in this country running agents
has gone up very largely, while the number of people to watch
them has gone down. So there are just too many potential
operators of agents out there roaming around for the numbers of
people who are keeping a watch on them.
MUDD: The Freedom of Information Act helped us track
the roamings of KGB agent Dimitri Yanov, ostensibly the deputy
chief of a Soviet trading company in New York. During one
stretch, Yanov made seven day ski trips to New Jersey, seven
trips to Washington D.C., and overnight trips to eight different
cities, visiting, inspecting, and negotiating at everything from
an offshore drilling conference in Houston to an aluminum
shredding plant in Cedar Rapids, to a digital manufacturing plant
in Anaheim.
What would Dimitri Yanov been been looking for?
Stanislav Levchenko says the KGB is looking for any technology
even remotely related to the military.
LEVCHENKO: Without that espionage and without stealth
of certain items of high technology, Soviets' military machine
would be at least 15 years behind the technological level of
United States, Great Britain, Japan, and so forth.
MUDD: Admiral Inman says 15 years ago what the KGB
wanted was government secrets, codes, classified manuals.
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ADMIRAL INMAN: In the early 1970s, a whole new
additional requirement was given. As the Soviets saw the opening
opportunities to acquire technology in the West to try to use to
improve their military forces, they organized for it more
efficiently, more effectively than they usually do.
MUDD: You talking about computers, basically?
ADMIRAL INMAN: Designs for radars, for fire-control
systems. The case related to the look-down, shoot-down radar for
the F-14 aircraft, where they got all the designs for it through
one of these contacts.
MUDD: That was William Holden Bell, wasn't it?
ADMIRAL INMAN: Exactly.
MUDD: How much money did you receive?
WILLIAM HOLDEN BELL: I believe it was something less
than 100,000; 85,000, I believe.
MUDD: Seven years ago William Holden Bell's personal
life was in turmoil. He was ripe for recruitment by the KGB.
BELL: The divorce was like any California divorce, very
messy, costly. And the loss of my job was -- I was still working
for the Hughes Aircraft Company, with a considerably reduced
salary. And I also had expenses due to the death of my son,
which had occurred just a few months earlier. And it just all
stacked up on me.
MUDD: Bell needed money. And his new friend at the
apartment complex, Polish businessman Marian Zakarski, seemed to
have an unlimited supply.
BELL: And we became friends, socialized a lot, just
through the facilities there at Cross Creek Village, barbecues
around the pool and such things.
MUDD: Marian Zakarski was a Polish secret agent. At
first, all he wanted were some unclassified Hughes Company
papers. Then he wanted secrets. And before it was over, Bell
had sold him radar secrets for the B-1 and the Stealth bombers.
Looking back at what happened, Zakarski was working for
his government and he got life in prison. You were working
against yours, and you got eight years. Shouldn't it have been
the other way around?
BELL: I think there were mitigating circumstances. I
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certainly am not dissatisfied with the sentence I got. It was
certainly fair, as far as I'm concerned.
MUDD: You mean that if you were engaged in espionage
for greed, the sentence ought to be lighter than if you were
engaged in it for ideological commitment?
BELL: How could you consider like $85,000 greed over a
period of a year and a half that it went on? I did not take the
initiative. The initiative was taken by Mr. Zakarski. And over
a period of time, I did something stupid. And I'm paying for it.
MUDD: Most of what the KGB finds valuable in the United
States is free. In fact, close to 90 percent of the intelligence
it gathers comes from libraries, magazines, and from the Federal
Government itself.
The Government Printing Office is a treasure trove for
any intelligence officer. It seels books on MX missile basing
and on anti-satellite weapons. It publishes diretories that
enable the KGB to match names and jobs, critical jobs. And for
$9 it sells the Pentagon phone book.
At its suburban Maryland plant, the printing office
mails out stacks of government magazines and journals to the
foreign governments. The Soviets subscribe to The Engineer,
Naval Aviation, Airman, Air Reservist, and the Congressional
Record.
MAN: To deploy a thousand Peacekeeper-type-quality
warheads...
MUDD: On Capitol Hill, most congressional hearings are
wide open, not only to the press and to the public, but also, of
course, to the Soviets. It is all part of America's open
society.
But Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is Vice
Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says we almost
shoot ourselves in the foot.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: They build a new embassy in
Washington on the Mount Alto site. If we asked them to send the
KGB over, pick the best spot that they possibly could, they
couldn't have picked a better spot. It sits up there with all
their antennas, where they can listen in to the White House, the
Treasury Department, the CIA, the Department of Defense, Capitol
Hill, and everywhere else.
[Clip of communications sounds]
SENATOR LEAHY: They have this very active, ongoing
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espionage activity in the United States. We're able to identify
who most of those KGB officers are. But there are just so many
of them under diplomatic cover that there's no way we can even
keep track of them.
And what I have suggested is that we at least limit
their number of diplomats in the United States to the same number
that we have in the Soviet Union.
MUDD: America's intelligence experts acknowledge that
we will never be able to compete against Soviet espionage on even
terms, that the mismatch is one of the prices we pay for our
democracy.
They also agree that today's KGB agent is no longer the
accented, lumpy, baggy-suited heavy. William Holden Bell found
that out.
BELL: Spies don't wear trench coats and carry
magnifying glasses. They wear cutoff jeans. That is, they don't
have "secret" or "spy" stamped on their forehead, is what I'm
really saying.
MUDD: In June of this year, Bell's old benefactor,
Marian Zakarski, was released from U.S. prison, taken to the
Glinika Bridge in Berlin and freed in a spy exchange. He is now
a hero in Poland.
BELL: His pay was continued. His wife was given a nice
apartment and a car, which normally you wait five years for.
MUDD: So, while he's free and his wife has a nice
apartment, you're here on Terminal Island holding the bag.
price.
BELL: Well, I spied against my country. I'm paying the
MUDD: In Geneva in a month's time, Ronald Reagan of the
United States will sit down across the table from Mikhail
Gorbachev of the Soviet Union to talk about Star Wars technology
and missiles and radar and first strikes. And Mr. Reagan will
look at Mr. Gorbachev, and Mr. Gorbachev will look at Mr. Reagan,
and each will wonder what the other knows and how he came to know
it.
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