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SPIES AMONG US CNN’s new original series, “Declassified,” sheds light on old covert operations. B Y J A N E T D O N O VA N
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captivated audience listened as retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin recounted bugging a State Department conference room when he worked as a press officer at the Soviet Embassy many years ago. “I recall I was sitting on the bench right across from the State Department building - it was about 100 yards away - just checking if the bug worked. It worked very well. I heard everything. We tried to do it in the FBI building, but we failed.” Kalugin’s story is one of many featured on CNN’s new original series “DECLASSIFIED: Wolf Blitzer and Mike Rogers (Photo by Tony Powell) Untold Stories of American Spies.” Jeff Zucker, President of CNN senior C.I.A. officer Mark Kelton explained Worldwide, hosted a premiere of the show to that cover can never be maintained wholly give a Washington audience gathered at the throughout an agent’s career. “At some Newseum a taste of what’s in store for the point, your cover is lost by whatever means.” eight-part series that debuted June 19. Kelton went on to describe the value of Each episode is built around a newly- keeping a solid covert agent on the job, declassified mission told firsthand by the agents emphasizing that intelligence operations who lived it. The premiere told the story of are a craft that can’t be taught, but rather former C.I.A. case officer Marti Peterson learned with practice. “Experienced people who spent two years in Moscow at the U.S. are the premium, so Marti’s skills, when she Embassy posing as a clerk while leading a got to be mid-career and after that, were dangerous double life. She was arrested on absolutely essential. There were roles that she a railroad bridge in 1977, but because of could work in that were very effective, and diplomatic immunity, was sent home after a the cover was not that important.” She also brief detention. “A year later, it came out in got remarried and changed her name. That the Washington Post, and it was big news,” helped, too. Peterson recalled. “But It only lasted about In cases like Peterson’s, there is cause to five minutes, and I said, ‘That’s just Soviet wonder if she had any reservations or regrets propaganda,’ and nobody really cared. I went about the work she did. “I don’t think I ever on with my covert assignments.” questioned that what I was doing was the right Surprisingly, Peterson’s reassignment put thing, even though we were asking people to her back in the Soviet Union where she was be traitors to their country,” Peterson said. “As obviously known to the “enemy.” Retired trainees, I remember we had these kind of
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discussions, but there was a greater good here for the winning side. I think that’s what we all believed in.”We do however, suspect she is still troubled by certain memories – you’ll need to tune in to find out for yourself. Consider ing this ser ies exposes elements of the C.I.A.’s clandestine operations, it was former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the series’ host Mike Rogers who shed light on how much covert mission information was shared with Congress. ”Quite a bit” he said, “I think it does depend on the chairman and the chairman’s interests.You would be surprised. We were very clued in.” Since the C.I.A. revealed a substantial amount of information, we asked Peterson to tell us something we didn’t know. In response, she detailed an affair she had with a State Department officer in Moscow and explained that the only other person who knew about it was “a KGB guard who stood on the corner there at the Embassy because he’d see me go out to the parking lot and get in my car and if somebody walked out with me I’d have to drive away. But then, I’d come back. It was a covert operation.” Only the KGB noticed... there’s that. Major General Kalugin reminded the audience that we live in a different world now, for better or worse. “When I was a student at Columbia University, I stood in line to visit the F.B.I. Headquarters. They never asked who I was. No one asked a single question,” he remembered. “That was the beauty of America.”
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