Date: 4/28/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
Everybody needs to start somewhere. In this edition of the Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale series, I am bringing you back to early 1977 and what amounts to my first solo gig upon setting up my base in London. It was my real introduction to how the “Great Game” is played. It also provided useful early admonishment that what is laid out in briefing manuals often has little to do with what one meets in operational life.
In the very first CIB (“A Tale of Investment Risk, Part I,” August 24, 2020), I told the story of a 1978 assignment in London that brought me into an uneasy bilateral working relationship with the other side. That had followed upon my work in the attempt to determine how a shooting “spy v. spy” war had erupted in Vienna. That earlier episode was also the subject of the first formal Spy Tale entry (“A Firestorm in Vienna,” November 18, 2020).
Today’s story sits chronologically in between these two.
I had just acquired what would turn out to be a prolonged multiyear “visiting lectureship” at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I would shortly thereafter add a research fellowship at the Centre for Strategic Studies in London and thereafter hold both appointments along with a regular faculty slot back in the States. The situation provided for some quite useful flexibility.
Dealing with the Vienna mess had actually been my initial formal project after setting up shop at LSE. In fact, I had dashed off to West Berlin (the first stop in my trip to Vienna) before I had even set up my office at LSE.
That period in my life was sort of a blur. I had received my Ph.D. in May of 1976. After my return from Vietnam, the folks across the river from DC had kindly allowed me to finish my graduate work and complete the dissertation before activation. This was interrupted only by training and a slow indoctrination into “all things agency” interspersed on long weekends and academic breaks over a three-year stretch.
I had signed an agreement effectively allowing “government work” for an indefinite period after leaving the war zone but subsequently replaced that with a more formal contract shortly thereafter. The call up occurred less than three weeks after my degree was completed, followed by some final training and a brief desk job in Northern Virginia before moving to London.
I had published a few pieces and had some college teaching before shipping out. So, I was hardly new to academe. The LSE slot was genuine, but my appointment was also facilitated by the position being financed by an American-based foundation with rather opaque funding sources.
For some time before and after, financial realities had British universities relying upon external funding (either revenue and grants from foreign institutions or tuition paying students from abroad).
As evidence, shortly before my arrival, LSE received UK government funding for one of only two major university buildings nationwide Whitehall would authorize over a two-year period. The money was for the National British Library for Political and Economic Science:
Unfortunately for LSE, the government also indicated it would not have funds for the purchase of any books to put in the new library for several years into the future.
Nonetheless, LSE would remain the foundation for my multiyear stay in London. In the first several years, I parlayed the post with a post-doctoral fellowship at Tulane University in New Orleans. That US position would provide the connection for the experience I am writing about today.
Upon completion of my Tulane fellowship, my more permanent academic cover would be completed with a regular appointment at a US university. That would result in an effective splitting of my time between London and East Coast US for years thereafter.
But back in late 1976, I was learning the ropes in every sense of the word.
Shortly after return from Vienna and a brief recuperation from the wound I received there (see the previously mentioned “A Firestorm in Vienna”), I was handed my coveted first solo assignment.
This one involved meeting a potential asset at Trinity College, Cambridge.
As usual, background is necessary here.
I have long admired the academic traditions at Cambridge and Oxford. But while I have had occasion to visit both, I was always more comfortable at the “younger” of the two: Oxford was founded in 1096; Cambridge in 1209 (after a group of scholars left Oxford following a disagreement with the townsfolk).
There was also a personal connection to Cambridge. The Tulane fellowship was designed to pair a famous scholar with one or two juniors. The pairings were based on similarity in research interests. During the early period of my fellowship, the famous scholar in residence was G.S. Kirk, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and fellow at Trinity.
Geoffrey was working on a major study of classical Greek myth as portrayed in Homer (it resulted in a six-volume magnum opus published between 1985 and 1993). I, on the other hand, had completed my dissertation on Platonic myth in The Republic and was in the process of writing a book on the position of myth in all of Plato’s works (which would have a more modest appearance in 1982).
Technically, the foundation-sponsored postdoc appointment was supposed to be in the humanities, while political science (the field of my Ph.D.) was classified in the social sciences. But they overlooked the disparity because of the close coincidence of research interests, strong support from Geoffrey, and the strategic intersession of Arthur W. H. Adkins, founder and scion of the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago.
I had the pleasure of spending time with Arthur, one of the most gracious and most towering of intellects, during an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) fellowship at the Chicago Committee during my early research. The “H” in NEH also certainly helped my cause in securing the Tulane grant.
As I noted in earlier issues of Spy Tales (“A Giving of Accounts … from Massachusetts to Vietnam,” February 17, 2021; and “Saving Plato in a Prague Apartment,” February 23, 2021), my first academic specialty was in the political philosophy of Plato and the classical Greeks. It came from an opinion I brought back from ‘Nam not to trust anybody born after Aristotle.
Geoffrey was kind enough to provide what amounted to a limited (and non-paid) “visiting exchange” position at Trinity, allowing me to use some of the college facilities, especially the famous Wren Library. My access included “Fellows’ Parlour,” under the watchful gaze of Sir Isaac Newton, 1667 Trinity Fellow, as seen below:
The “Parlour,” is located in the Master’s Lodge, another of the famous Trinity buildings on the Court.
However, in the history of espionage, Trinity College was far more famous (or infamous) for something else. It produced the so-called Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross). For at least twenty years from the 1930s on, this group of Soviet agents was the most successful spy ring in history.
These individuals were before my time. But a later major Soviet asset in the UK, George Blake, was another story. Blake also had a Cambridge connection, although his was at Downing College where British intelligence (MI6) sent him to study Russian in 1947.
In 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years for espionage, the longest non-life sentence ever handed down by a British court. Five years later, he managed to escape from Wormwood Scrubs, a supposedly maximum-security prison, and ended up in Moscow. Blake died on December 26 of last year, at the age of 98.
From the standpoint of agents sacrificed and significant operations blown, Blake may well have been the single most damaging Soviet agent in the UK, ever. I would meet him during my time in Moscow years later and found him an unexpectedly interesting conversationalist. “Mother” still has put the clamps on discussing any of the substance surrounding my time in Russia. So, we just must leave it here (for the moment, at least).
Back to my time at Trinity. I took the fifty-three minute express train from London King’s Cross up to Cambridge having arranged overnight accommodations through the porter’s lodge at Trinity. These bowler hat-wearing controllers of the grounds remain the overseers of all matters college at Cambridge (and Oxford as well).
The senior porter the last time I visited Trinity (2017) was Kevin Atkins, standing before the Great Gate in the photo below.
I arrived as a major snowstorm was hitting, one that would delay my travel back to London by several days. And it was in the Fellows’ Parlour at Trinity that I would conduct my interview of a possible asset.
As it happens, this one was a foreign national himself (a Polish scientist) and had approached a US Embassy official during a social gathering in London.
Technically, the word “spy” designates somebody else’s citizen or resident who provides you with human intel. They are not your employees but are labeled agents or assets.
The preferred agent is one an intelligence officer recruits, nurtures and vets himself/herself. Most of an officer’s time in the field is spent doing this. However, in many cases, including the one on this occasion, the initiation of contact comes from the other party.
I had been provided with a background file for the individual codenamed “Periwinkle” (sorry, these titles are supposedly generated at random by a computer. Upon occasion, what comes out is hardly descriptive). He would be the first Pole for which I would have responsibility, but certainly not the last (see “An Unexpected Defection in Rio,” CIB, December 2, 2020).
He was in his early thirties, taught at a technical institute in Lodz, and was at Cambridge doing research under an academic exchange grant. He apparently had little direct contact with subjects for which we would apparently have any priority need and was not particularly convincing at our first meeting.
Perhaps he had a genuine interest in working with us but I arrived at the conclusion relatively early that my first go at interviewing a potential source had been set up by London Station as a low priority mission.
Those back on the secure floor of the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London had decided that this Pole was not worth a veteran’s time. “How bad could the rookie screw things up?” they probably thought to themselves. Let the new guy waste his time and fill out the paperwork.
However, there was always one overarching concern whenever such contacts took place. You had to be careful that the individual on the other side of the table was not a set up. Called in tradecraft a “dangle,” this is somebody sent out to entrap an intel officer, provide false info, or set up a situation designed to waste time, manpower, resources, or explode into a messy public embarrassment.
When in doubt, the rule of thumb was always to walk away. It just was not worth taking a risk. If the agent candidate did provide relevant or unusually interesting intel, that was often regarded as an even more suspect signal. All intelligence agencies practice deception, and one of the more successful ways of doing that is to spoon feed lower-level intel that turns out to be true so that the other side has its appetite whetted. Once the hook is in, deliberately false information is then fed.
“Periwinkle” gave no indications that he was a dangle, or that he had any intention of creating a problem. He may have had other reasons for making his move. Perhaps, he had been stepped over for a promotion back home, saw his career stagnating, had fallen in love with a Brit, or developed a fascination for cricket.
Whatever the reason, after two meetings, I contacted the office back in London that I would not recommend any further overtures once my last meeting with him ended. The next day, as the snow continued to fall, we were scheduled for a third meeting. Periwinkle never showed up and simply disappeared. His rooms at college became vacant and he dropped out of his research.
I worried that I may have inadvertently signaled to the Pole our lack of interest (something that is rarely done; rather, you are always instructed to string him along in the unlikely event he may be of brief use later).
On the other hand, there was another more troubling possibility. The disappearance occurred shortly after I provided my assessment to London Station. I also was not privy to whatever back channels on the fellow the agency may have fashioned with British and possibly other Western agencies.
Thought it better to file the after-contact report and recommendation, keep my head low, not pursue the matter, and continue developing my overt cover. After all, if anything unsavory results in such situations, it almost always flushes down. And at the time, I was about as low in the plumbing as one gets.
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
After moving through the inner circles of royalty, oligarchs, billionaires, and the uber-rich, he discovered some of the most important secrets regarding finance, geo-politics, and business. As a result, he built one of the most impressive rolodexes in the world. His insights and network of contacts took him from a Vietnam veteran to becoming one of the globe’s most sought after consultants, with clients including six of the largest energy companies and the United States government.
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