lafeber | Когда критика лучше похвалы

В 1956 советские контрразведчики в ГДР обнаружили подземный туннель, что ЦРУ прокопали из Западного Берлина в Восточный Берлин. Длиною в треть мили этот туннель успел просуществовать больше года. ЦРУ его использовало для перехвата телефонных и телеграфных сообщений советского и восточногерманского руководства. Торжествующие советские власти собрали толпу журналистов и повели их на экскурсию в этот туннель срывать покровы, чтобы показать им и всему миру, до каких подлых трюков опускаются нечистоплотные американцы в своем незаконном подглядывании и подслушивании.

Однако реакция оказалась другой. Вместо критики эта операция встретила одобрение. Общественность сочла, что именно так и такими мероприятиями должны заниматься американские разведчики: подкапываться и подслушивать. Не устраивать перевороты в чужих странах, как это было в Гватемале и Иране, а бескровно и умно собирать информацию о коммунистах. Слухи об американском участии в гватемальских и иранских событиях тогда уже циркулировали. В частности, Фидель и Кастро и Че Гевара к тому моменту уже кипели от негодования именно из-за тех событий, готовясь к своим кубинским приключениям.

Вот так неожиданно восстанавливается запачканная репутация. Несчастие с западноберлинским туннелем помогло.

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Туннель был совместным проектом ЦРУ и MI-6. Джордж Блейк его с самого начала выдал, но в КГБ не спешили вскрыть туннель, чтобы не выдать Блейка.

Blake, as an MI-6 insider, operated for years undetected, providing to the KGB identities of more than 400 individuals – staff officers and assets of the Western Services, resulting in many of the individuals being executed by the Soviets. One piece of information which he shared with the KGB was a list of MI-6 targets for assessment and possible recruitment in Warsaw, Poland. This document was shared by the KGB with the Polish UB (Polish security service) circa 1958.
An insider within the Polish UB, identified as Col. Michael Goleniewski, provided the list to the U.S. via an unsolicited letter mailed to the U.S. Embassy in Bern. Goleniewski was volunteering information to the West via a series of 14 anonymous letters which provided counterintelligence tidbits on KGB activities. Goleniewski was not known as the source until his own defection to the West in late-1960.
When the U.S. shared the list with the British, MI-6 told the U.S. interlocutor they thought it a fabrication. Subsequently, an operational analyst within the CIA’s Eastern European division remembered seeing the identical list in a liaison communication from MI-6 (perhaps for deconfliction or counterintelligence purposes). It was then confirmed that the secret list had an MI-6 provenance, and therefore there was a benevolent insider within MI-6 providing the KGB secret documents – the hunt led to George Blake
Repeatedly throughout his later years, when asked how helpful he was to the KGB, he would respond that he gave the KGB everything his fingers touched. He always referenced his compromise of the Berlin Tunnel as his greatest singular accomplishment. He measured success by his betrayals.
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2020/12/29/notorious-kgb-asset-and-mi-6-insider-george-blake-dies-in-moscow/

Блейк умер в Москве в декабре 2020.

"Полковник Блейк был блестящим профессионалом – особой жизненной закалки и мужества. За годы трудной, напряжённой работы он внёс поистине неоценимый вклад в обеспечение стратегического паритета, сохранение мира на планете."
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/letters/64752

Операцией по строительству туннеля руководил Билл Харви, бывший сотрудник контрразведки ФБР, которого наняли в ЦРУ, когда там не хватало своих контрразведчиков. Харви первым разоблачил Кима Филби и был весьма колоритным персонажем на фоне традиционных разведчиков.

On the surface, it seemed strange that Bill Harvey had been chosen to take over the Berlin Operations Base, one of the CIA’s most important and prestigious installations. He spoke no German, or any other foreign language, and he had no service overseas—he had never even been overseas. Unlike so many of his CIA colleagues, Harvey had not served with the OSS during the war, and had no dashing stories of time behind enemy lines.
Harvey did not look the type either. The former FBI G-man from Indiana was nothing like his more refined colleagues, with their boarding school pedigrees, Ivy League connections, and easy grace. Some were amused and more than a few appalled by Harvey, a blue-collar gumshoe who did not even own a trench coat. In a CIA then dominated by the blue-blooded eastern establishment, Harvey was defiantly, almost gleefully midwestern.
Just under six feet, with a bullet-shaped head and bulbous, pear-shaped body that was big and getting bigger, Harvey looked like a flatfoot from a Raymond Chandler novel. His eyes bulged from his head owing to a toxic thyroid nodule, giving him a perpetually manic look. Yet the lips beneath his pencil-thin mustache were strangely delicate—“a glamour-girl’s mouth in a toad’s face,” wrote Norman Mailer, who used Harvey as a character in his novel about the CIA. Harvey had a voice like an acetylene torch emanating from somewhere deep inside his gut. With little prompting, he could erupt with strings of obscenities that were as terrifying as they were creative.
Some suspected that his crude speech and “deliberately countrified manner” were calculated to shock his more genteel colleagues; indeed, the politer the company, the more he seemed to swear. Stories circulated of his rampant womanizing, though they were likely untrue and probably planted by Harvey himself to add to his persona.
What was not exaggerated was his drinking, which even by the prodigious CIA standards of the day was in a league of its own. Waiters at his favored lunch spots on Connecticut Avenue knew to have a pitcher of martinis waiting the moment they spotted his distinctive figure at the door, blocking light. Two generously poured martinis would be gulped down before the food even arrived, and another pair downed by the time Harvey ambled back to work with his distinctive “duck-like strut that was part waddle and part swagger.” Back at the office, it was not unusual to see him snoring at his desk by early afternoon.
Generally, Harvey was enshrouded in clouds of smoke from the three-plus packs of Camels or Chesterfields he inhaled every day. He sat at meetings paring his nails with a hunting knife, or repeatedly flipping the lid of his Zippo lighter, or, even more disconcertingly, spinning the cylinder of his snub-nosed revolver. No one else at the CIA regularly carried weapons, but Harvey always did, with one gun in a shoulder holster and often a second tucked in the back of his pants. “If you ever know as many secrets as I do, then you’ll know why I carry a gun,” he growled at anyone who asked.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-hick-from-indiana-who-nailed-master-spy-kim-philby

После Берлина Харви переключился на Кубу и руководил неудачными попытками убийства Фиделя Кастро, на чем его карьера бесславно закончилась.

The CIA did try to kill Castro. This part of the operation was run by William King Harvey, the pistol-packing, martini-swilling CIA representative to Mongoose. He had been assigned by the White House to run a program known as ZRRIFLE that tried to use mobsters to bump off the Cuban dictator. But Harvey did not tell Lansdale what he was up to. Everything was on a strictly “need to know” basis, and Harvey did not think that Lansdale, as an outsider no longer on the CIA payroll, needed to know. In any case, the CIA plots failed to eliminate the Cuban dictator.
The CIA had no more success, under Lansdale’s prodding, in mobilizing an internal insurgency against Castro despite a massive expenditure of resources. The CIA station in Miami, operating under the cover name Zenith Technical Enterprises, became its largest in the entire world, with some 15,000 Cuban exiles connected to it and so many boats ferrying agents and supplies to Cuba that it controlled the third-largest navy in the Caribbean. The CIA’s agents carried out a few sabotage operations, but, as future CIA Director Richard Helms was to write, “the notion that an underground resistance organization might be created on the island remained a remote, romantic myth.”
As 1962 progressed and Mongoose failed to produce results, tempers frayed all around. The relationship between Bill Harvey and Bobby Kennedy, a CIA officer recalled, was “bad from the beginning, and then it deteriorated steadily.” At Langley, a story was making the rounds that when Bobby Kennedy demanded to know why a team of exiles had not yet been infiltrated into Cuba, Harvey replied they had to be trained first. “I’ll take them out to Hickory Hill and train them myself,” Kennedy snorted, referring to his mansion in northern Virginia. “What will you teach them, sir?” Harvey shot back. “Baby-sitting?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/operation-mongoose/549737/