etration of British intelligence.) The KGB, for example, might know
that a Western intelligence service was interested in one of their
agents and would allow the person to be recruited and run by the hos-
tile service. KGB “operational games” using double agents were run
to allow them to understand the target and tradecraftof other ser-
vices and to identify intelligence officers. They also allowed the
KGB to tie up foreign intelligence officers with useless cases. They
were also often used as a venue for recruiting opposing intelligence
officers. The adversary’s case officer would be confronted with evi-
dence that he or she had been duped and would be offered a chance
to avoid exposure by working for the KGB.
Rarely did the KGB “dangle” one of its own officers. But in the
late 1980s, a senior KGB officer approached the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) chief of station on a train and volunteered to work for
the United States. Dubbed “Prologue” by the CIA, Aleksandr Zhu-
mov provided misleading information about the arrest of spies be-
trayed by Aldrich Amesand Robert Hanssen. The KGB risked Zhu-
mov because of their desire to protect those two agents. It was a rare
incident; movies and novels to the contrary, the KGB did not relish
risking one of their officers as a double agent.
Western services ran similar operational games against the KGB
and the GRU. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) artfully
ran a military noncommissioned officer for several years. The case
allowed the FBI to identify several Soviet intelligence officers. On
another occasion, U.S. counterintelligence authorities used a
young Russian-speaking army sergeant as a double agent. The
KGB used a 67-year-old East German professor as his courier. She
was arrested and served three years before being traded for 17 East
German citizens. A less successful double agent case was that of
Nicholas Shadrin.
The worth of double agents is difficult to measure. Double agents
do not produce valuable foreign intelligence; they are difficult and
expensive to run. In his memoirs, a former KGB counterintelligence
officer noted that double agents were not worth the cost of running
them and “were scarcely more than balls in the games played by in-
telligence agencies.” Yet many professionals on both sides of the
Berlin Wall believe there really is no other way to catch spies than to
use double agents.DOUBLE AGENT•7306-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 73