Rendezvous with a Spy
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Pete Bagley
I had imagined it would be raining in Brussels, but as I step out of the airport terminal I find myself blinded by bright sunshine. When I lived here years ago I had longed for days like this, but now I’m slightly disappointed: it feels like the wrong weather for a rendezvous with a spy.
I find a taxi and the driver speeds me through the streets, past drab factories and glass-encased office complexes. As we reach the city centre, the familiar hodge-podge of architectural styles flits by: a brown monstrosity from the Sixties, soot-stained Art Nouveau villas, a modern hotel in marble and granite, and then a run of pharmacies, kebab restaurants and photocopy shops. My cabbie, conducting an argument with someone through his Bluetooth earpiece, takes a stomach-churning swing of the wheel and guns up a wide tree-lined boulevard. We are now in the diplomatic quarter. I catch sight of a bloom of red roses in an otherwise sparse garden, the flag of a South American nation hanging from elaborate cornices above.
A few minutes later, we reach a quiet crossroads with a flashy-looking Italian café positioned on one corner, customers in sunglasses smoking and drinking beer by the side of the road, squinting at their smartphones and laptops. I pay my taxi driver and walk to the block of flats directly opposite the café.
It is a squat building encased in dark grey brickwork: not beautiful, but not especially ugly either. That, at least, feels right. Because unknown to the Eurocrats sipping Hoegaarden behind me, this nondescript building is home to secrets. The present is unspooling in the sunshine, but I am about to journey back in time, deep into the heart of an espionage operation that changed the course of the Cold War fifty years ago.
I click the door open and walk into the foyer. A bank of buttons has names printed on it, and one of them reads ‘Bagley’. I push it, and a few seconds later a speaker crackles with static. ‘Good morning!’ says a tinny voice. ‘Come up.’ I step into the tiny lift and wonder what I will find when I emerge from it. It has taken me weeks to set up this meeting, and Tennent Harrington Bagley—known to most as Pete—has offered to talk to me for several hours.
I’m nervous. I have spent years researching the Cold War for my spy novels, and Pete Bagley has featured in several of the books on my shelves. Now 85, he is one of the few survivors of the upper echelons of the CIA who battled against the KGB, and has been described as ‘a legendary spy’. He was appointed deputy head of counter-intelligence in the CIA’s Soviet Russia division in 1962 at the tender age of 30. According to one former colleague, there were few in the agency more ‘nakedly ambitious’, while CIA director Dick Helms has said he was a ‘golden boy’ who was seen as a potential future head of the agency.
But Bagley never made it to head of the CIA: instead he became embroiled in a controversy that nearly tore the agency apart, and he ended his espionage career as Chief of Station in Brussels, where he has long since retired. That controversy, the handling of the defector Yuri Nosenko, has featured in several books and films, including a 1986 BBC/HBO production in which Tommy Lee Jones played a fictionalized version of Bagley, ‘Steve Daley’, and Robert De Niro’s 2006 film The Good Shepherd.
In 2007, Bagley wrote a memoir focusing on the Nosenko operation, but at several points his account intersected with another story. The handling of Russian colonel Oleg Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, had the highest stakes of any operation ever run by either agency. Taking place during two of the most dangerous episodes in recent history—the Berlin crisis in 1961 that led to the building of the Wall and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—the operation was packed with human drama, as well as espionage tradecraft familiar to millions from fiction: microfilmed documents, assignations in safe houses in London and Paris, and coded messages and dead drops in Moscow. If it sounds like the plot of a John le Carré novel, this is no coincidence: it inspired one of his best-known books, The Russia House.
I have long been fascinated by Penkovsky and the unanswered questions, conspiracy theories and Chinese whispers that have surrounded the operation, and I looked at it in greater detail when researching a novel set in Moscow during the Sixties [The Moscow Option]. Pete Bagley’s memoir, although primarily about another operation, seemed to me to present new evidence about Penkovsky that warranted further investigation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bagley had taken advantage of the new spirit of openness to travel to Russia. He met with several former KGB officers with whom he had fought invisible battles for years, and in time became friendly with a few of them. The days of openness were all too brief, and the door soon shut on many such exchanges, but Bagley had found some answers, and he detailed them in his memoir.
Some of the information was simply staggering. Bagley claimed that former Soviet intelligence officers had told him that the KGB had discovered that Penkovsky was working for the West earlier than they had claimed: the official story was bogus. Bagley wrote that Penkovsky had most likely been betrayed by a double agent working for the Soviets in the West, perhaps a very high-ranking member of CIA or MI6.
I’ve read a lot of books about espionage, and many contain outlandish conspiracy theories, but Bagley’s book stayed with me for months. I realized that it was not simply a matter of detail about a half-century-old espionage operation: Penkovsky’s information is credited as having helped Kennedy face down Khrushchev during both the Berlin and Cuban crises. If Bagley’s claims were true, they had a knock-on effect on both those events for a simple reason: if the KGB had known throughout that a military intelligence officer was giving the West highly classified military secrets, why had they let him continue to do so—and how had it altered their own actions? In short, Bagley’s information had the potential to change the accepted history of two of the major events of the 20th century, both of which had nearly led to nuclear war.
I began reading other material about Penkovsky, a lot of which has been declassified in recent years, and Bagley’s theories became harder to dismiss. In particular, one point he had spotted that is already in the public domain seemed irrefutable, and completely overturned the established version of events. But other information in his book, such as that from former KGB officers, was frustratingly attributed to anonymous sources. I decided I had to see him to find out more.
The lift doors shudder to a standstill and I step out into a narrow corridor. Bagley has ‘vetted’ me in several long phone calls and emails before agreeing to see me, asking a series of questions to test my knowledge about the topic, my journalistic techniques and more. He has strongly hinted on the phone that he might now reveal the names of some of his sources to me, and precisely what they told him—but what if he has had second thoughts, and decides to clam up?
A door to my left is ajar, and I glimpse a parquet floor covered by several Oriental carpets. Pete Bagley steps forward. He is a still-handsome man, standing tall in a light blue button-down shirt, grey flannel trousers, and polished brogues a deep burgundy colour. His crisp white hair is smartly cut and his face is tanned. We shake hands, and he quickly ushers me through the living room and into a darkened study. The walls are decorated with framed prints and photographs, many of which have a maritime theme. Bagley is from a famous naval family—born in Annapolis, his father was an admiral, as were both his brothers and two of his great-uncles. Bagley enlisted in the Marines in 1943 aged 17, and after the war studied political sciences, taking a Ph.D at the University of Geneva. In 1950, aged 25, he joined the CIA.
Apart from the naval theme, the room is a kind of Cold War cocoon, and strangely familiar to my own study. I recognize many of the books in his shelves from my own, only the spines of his have handwritten reference numbers taped to them: his own private library system. Most of the books are non-fiction, but there are also some novels by John le Carré and Alan Furst. On top of a filing cabinet I spot a paperback of my first novel, and my palms feel a little sticky: more vetting. Behind a sturdy desk, home to a computer and copious piles of paper, are further bookshelves, some of which are taken up with large blue binders. ‘My archives,’ he smiles, seeing me spot them. ‘I’m going to tell you about what’s in some of them today.’ He points to a low gold-coloured sofa. ‘Please, take a seat.’
I am here to interview Pete Bagley, but at times it feels like he is interviewing me: trying to eke out answers from a man trained to do the same with others is not always easy. He speaks in a quiet sing-song voice, almost professorial in tone, and every often he lobs a question of his own into the conversation, about certain books, or certain operations, checking for my reactions. I weigh my words very carefully, conscious that he might at any moment decide that I’m not the person to talk to after all.
Bagley’s replies are equally careful, but his recall of names, dates and facts from decades ago is remarkable. As we circle each other and the reason I have come here, I sense that he misses the old days, when he was involved in the highest echelons of the espionage game. At several points his eyes film over when he mentions officers he knew who have died.
After around an hour of discussion, he tells me he has booked a table for lunch nearby, and we take the lift down to the street and walk a few blocks until we reach a large townhouse that has been converted into a restaurant, and which also acts as the clubhouse for a local tennis club.
We walk through a dark vestibule and a waitress spots us and rushes over. ‘Ah, Monsieur Bagley, comment allez-vous?’
‘Très bien, merci,’ he replies, and she leads us to a table near the windows. Once she has left, Bagley asks me if I think the location is okay. ‘She said it was a little windy outside, and I’m not so sure, but this has a nice view and its position means we can talk undisturbed.’
I smile at the small piece of tradecraft. Old habits…
We take our seats and order, both of us going for the plat du jour, and continue our discussion, still feeling each other out. I gently probe to see if I can persuade him to reveal more about the sources for some of his information on Penkovsky. Bagley’s memoirs were primarily about another Soviet agent-in-place, Yuri Nosenko, but the Penkovsky and Nosenko operations overlapped in several intriguing ways, and it’s this I want to discuss. Our dishes arrive, and Bagley looks up for a moment and stares into the middle distance.
‘I’m dying,’ he says suddenly, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘My doctors have given me a few weeks. I don’t know if they’re right this time—they’ve said it before—but they could be.’
I look at him, stunned. He seems a picture of health, a pink glow under his unlined tanned face, and apart from the whiteness of his hair could be a spry 60-year-old about to play a game of tennis here.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I manage.
‘Oh,’ he says, waving his hand. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Well, it’s the end of my world, maybe.’ He smiles ruefully at the poor joke. ‘I only mention it to underline that there is perhaps a little more urgency to these matters, and to our meeting.’
I stare down at my blanc de volaille. The moment passes, and Bagley continues talking. ‘So you wanted to know about Zepp,’ he says…