This Day in Espionage History - April

April 1, 1944: Soviet official Victor Kravchenko defects from his post in Washington, DC and requests political asylum. He would later write a damming book, I Choose Freedom, exposing the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and providing details of the Gulag system and use of penal labor. Kravchenko died from a gunshot wound in 1966.  Though ruled a suicide, family members believe that he was a victim of a KGB assassination squad.

April 2, 1914: Alec Guinness born. Guinness played the lead role as Smiley in the award winning drama series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. During WWII he ferried supplies & agents to Yugoslav partisans during while serving in the Royal Naval reserve.

April 3, 1954: Vladimir Petrov, the Third Secretary of the Soviet embassy in Canberra, Australia defects. Petrov was secretly a high-ranking officer in the secret police organization that became the KGB. The Australian’s offered him 5,000 British pounds and political asylum in exchange for all of the secret documents the he could smuggle out of the rezidentura inside the Soviet Embassy.

April 4, 1964: KGB defector Yuri Nosenko begins more than 1000 days of isolation and interrogation by the CIA.  His harsh treatment was based upon accusations made against him by an earlier defector, Anatoliy Golitsin. The accusations were later shown to be incorrect.

 April 5, 1945: – Reinhard Gehlen, a legendary Cold War spymaster, was earlier a German general, intelligence officer, and head of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East during WWII. As it became clear that Germany would lose the war, Gehlen orders duplicates of vital intelligence about his Soviet operations and agents to be placed in steel cases and hidden in different locations. He later offered this to the Allies in return for his freedom and later started the “Gehlen Organization” and worked closely with the CIA.

April 6, 1951: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of conspiring to pass US atomic secrets to the Soviets, were sentenced to death row.

April 7, 1950: President Truman receives NSC 68, a 66-page top-secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper that provided the blueprint for the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

April 8, 2003: Saddam Hussein’s information minister –Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf – or Bagdad Bob – gave press conference with disinformation announcing that American troops were about to surrender.  It was his last press conference in Iraq

April 9, 1992: KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, a major in the KGB’s First Directorate, defects to British intelligence (MI6). He provides the British Embassy in Riga, Latvia with a treasure trove of detailed notes he copied from First Directorate operational case files. The information he provided exposed a number of previously unknown KGB agents operating in the West.

April 10, 1938: Cambridge Five spy Donald Maclean is reactivated and meets with his new Soviet (NKVD) handler, Kitty Harris, in London’s Leicester Sq. Harris had previously been CPUSA head Earl Browder’s lover. Harris also had an affair with Maclean and used sex to motivate him to provide information to the NKVD.

April 11, 1968: Soviet Golf II class sub K-129 sinks in 16,500 feet of water in the Pacific Ocean. The CIA sets out to find it in 1974 using a specially constructed vessel, the USNS Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193), financed by Howard Hughes. The codename for the operation was Project AZORIAN.

April 12, 1975: entertainer, activist, and heroic WWII member of the French Resistance Josephine Baker dies. The American born Baker’s career was centered in Europe and she was renowned as a dancer and member of the Follies Bergère in Paris.

April 13, 1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles authorizes the MK-ULTRA project. MK-ULTRA was the CIA code name for a series of projects that were later controversial. Though there were more than 200 sub-projects under MK-ULTRA the most remembered the experiments to determine if pills, powders, and potions could be concocted to create pharmacological spies and truth serums.

April 14, 1865: President Lincoln fatally shot by an actor, John Wilkes Booth in badly conceived and ill-advised assassination. Booth and his associates were all connected to the Confederate Secret Service through an earlier plan to kidnap President Lincoln and spirit him to Richmond in the spring of 1865. The kidnapping plot was abandoned, but members of the team decided to assassinate Lincoln instead. 

April 15, 1990: Greta Garbo died. Long rumored to be a spy, she played Mata Hari in a 1931 film featuring outrageous costumes. During WWII she played a small role in the Allied intelligence apparatus. She worked first with the British secret service in 1939 and in the latter part of the war worked with the OSS in morale operations.

April 16, 1985: inebriated CIA officer Aldrich Ames knocks on door of Soviet embassy in DC and volunteers to spy for them. Ames became the damaging spy in the CIA’s history. He was eventually arrested in 1994.

April 17, 1943: Assassin Ramon Mercader was tried and found guilty in a Mexico City courtroom for the assassination of Leon Trotsky on 20 AUG 1940.  The Mexican court blames Oedipus Complex (sic!) as Mercader’s motivation. He received a 20-year sentence and was released in 1960 and returned to the USSR.

April 18, 1944: Disgraced FBI special agent and traitor Robert Hanssen was born. Hanssen became the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI when he was finally arrested in 2001.

April 19, 1943: Operation Mincemeat begins as HMS Seraph sails with heroic Major William Martin aboard. It was a successful British deception plan during WWII designed to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. The plan was to obtain a body, dress him as an officer of the Royal Marines, and provide him with a briefcase and false papers that suggested the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint. The body was placed into the ocean off the coast of Spain with the hope that it would wash ashore and pro-German Spaniards would share the contents of the briefcase with the German embassy.   

April 20, 1954: Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov gives shocking press conference and reveals shocking details about KGB assassination plots against dissidents.

April 21/22, 1956: The Berlin Tunnel is "discovered" 11 months & 11 days after it went operational. Later it was learned that the KGB knew of the tunnel much earlier, but since it was hemorrhaging primarily Soviet military secrets, they chose not to disclose it to protect their agent in British intelligence (MI6), George Blake. 

April 22, 1964: Penkovsky’s British contact, Greville Wynne is exchanged for the KGB illegal Gordon Lonsdale, aka Konon Trofimovich Molody. Wynne was convicted of espionage and received an 8-year prison sentence in 1963. Penkovsky was executed the same year.

April 23, 1919: Oleg Penkovsky (codename HERO) born. GRU military officer, and agent for the US and UK, he was among the most valuable spies of the Cold War. He provided important information on Soviet missile sites in Cuba that allowed President Kennedy to blockade the island and demand the removal of all missiles.

April 24, 1974: Stasi agent Günter Guillaume arrested while working for West German chancellor Willy Brandt as a high-ranking aide. The disclosure led to Brandt’s resignation. Guillaume was tried and received a 13-year sentence. Six years later he was swapped to East Germany in exchange for two western agents.

 April 25, 1960: Pres. Eisenhower approves ill-fated U2 overflight of USSR prior to the planned summit in Paris. Francis Gary Powers’ plane was shot down near Sverdlovsk May 1.

April 26, 1941: William J. Donovan proposes the first US centralized intelligence agency. He is appointed as the head of the Coordinator of Information (COI).

April 27, 1989: State Department official Felix Bloch is identified as an associate of KGB illegal Reino Gikman after a phone call to Bloch warning him of an “illness” is intercepted. Bloch denied being a spy and was never prosecuted. He was, however, booted from the US Diplomatic Service.

April 28, 1994: disgraced CIA officer Aldrich Ames pled guilty to espionage and tax evasion. Ames was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

April 29, 1862: Alan Pinkerton operative, and Union spy, Timothy Webster hanged. He became the first spy to be executed in the American Civil War.

April 30, 1997: Disgraced former FBI special agent Earl Edward Pitts pled guilty to two counts of espionage.  He is sentenced to 27 years in prison.