WHERE THE SPIES ARE . . . HAVE BEEN, OR MIGHT BE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000301940004-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: November 14, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000301940004-4
ARTICLE AP NEW YORK TIMES
ON PAGE 14 November 1985
Where the Spies Are.
Have Been, or Might
By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 ? In this
city whose streets are clogged with
tourist buses nosing out monuments
and memorabilia, there are no public
excursions for the cognoscenti of the
cloak and dagger.
Which is not to say one cannot put
one together on one's own.
For all its rowdy debates about bal-
ancing budgets, simplifying taxes
and arming outer space, Washington
also serves, more discreetly, as an es-
pionage capital, perhaps the espio-
nage capital of the world.
Yet some of this discreet activity is
not all that easy to hide. According to
some estimates, the dozen intelli-
gence agencies of this Government
alone employ about 200,000 people,
most of them technical staff people in
Washington. There is no telling how
many employees of other countries
are engaged in spying on the United
States, or on one another.
Some of it is there to be seen just for
the looking.
Games All Over Town
The Central Intelligence Agency,
sources say, plays spy-training
games all over the capital all the
time. Trainees practice identifying
people in crowds and following them
surreptitiously. The target could be a
man crossing Connecticut Avenue at
K Street carrying a rolled-up copy of
The Financial Times, or a woman in a
blue bonnet at Dupont Circle with a
visible pack of Salems.
Moreover, glimpses of the clandes-
tine world occasionally come into
wide-open view, as when the reputed
K.G.B. defector, Vitaly S. Yurchen-
ko, no doubt bringing glee to his spy-
masters in Moscow, announced just
days ago that he had changed his
mind and wanted to go home.
Mr. Yurchenko slipped away from
his C.I.A. "handler" at an all-night
continental Georgetown restaurant,
Au Pied de Cochon, and made his way
a half-mile up Wisconsin Avenue to
the new Soviet Embassy compound
and thence into the nightly news.
The compound, not incidentally,
sits atop a high Washington hill. And
sprouting from the compound is an
espionage sign of the times: a whole
farm of antennas to eavesdrop on
Washington area communications
and to send and receive coded tries-
sages.
Any tour of Washington spy spots
should not overlook the suburbs,
which also figure in the hugger-
mugger of capital espionage. There
are spies out there, and spy hangouts
and spy rendezvous points.
John A. Walker Jr., who the Gov-
ernment says ran a network supply-
ing Moscow with detailed information
about military communications sys-
tems, was apprehended last May
after reportedly dropping a large
brown grocery bag filled with secret
Navy documents at the base of a
white utility pole on a country road in
Poolesville, Md., about 25 miles from
the capital.
The C.I.A.'s 20-year-old headquar-
ters, which was designed as a college
campus, borders the Potomac River
on a sylvan site at Langley, Va.
It is surrounded by high fences and
armed guards. But anyone hopping
, on the right Metro bus can get inside,
because several lines include that
stop. Just don't try to get off the bus if
you don't have an identification card
(Jr an appointment.
Charley's Place
A few miles from Langley, in
McLean, another Washington bed-
room community, there are some res-
taurants and bars popular with Lang-
ley operatives, past and present.
One is called Charley's Place,
though, appropriately enough, it had
a different name until recently: the
Joshua Tree. No one will say who
Charley is or what long-buried case
the tree might have symbolized.
"What's our secret?" the restau-
rant asks on one of its table menus.
Then it answers: "Charley's Place al-
ways starts with the very finest in-
gredients, including a daily variety of
fresh fish."
As for Washington spies and Wash-
ington spying from the past, there is,
for starters, Harvey's, a downtown
Washington restaurant at 1001 18th
Street.
Back in 1950-51 Harvey's was where
Harold (Kim) Philby, then the top
British secret service (MI6) officer in
Washington, had lunch weekly with
James Angleton, then the head of
counterintelligence for the C.I.A.
Mr. Philby was later identified as
the "third man" who tipped off the
British Foreign Office "moles," Guy
Burgess and Donald Maclean, that
the net of evidence against them was
tightening. They fled to the Soviet
Union to escape arrest, and later Mr.
Philby himself fled.
In his memoirs, "My Silent War,"
Mr. Philby described Mr. Angleton as
"one of the thinnest men I have ever
met and one of the biggest eaters."
"Lucky Jim!," Mr. Philby wrote.
"After a year of keeping up with An-
gleton, I took the advice of an elderly
lady friend and went on a diet."
STAT
John Scali, an ABC News commen-
tator, made use of several Washing-
ton restaurants and the coffee shop in
the basement of what was then the
Statler Hotel (now the Capital Hilton)
in the backstage diplomacy with a
Soviet Embassy counselor, Alek-
sandr Fomin, that is credited with
ending the Cuban missile crisis in
1962.
Mr. Fomin, who had been a diplo-
matic source for Mr. Scali, was actu-
ally the senior K.G.B. officer in
Washington.
Mr. Scali recalled recently that on
Friday, Oct. 26, 1962, he got an urgent
call from Mr. Fomin to meet for.-
lunch that day at the old Occidental-
Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue
next to the Willard Hotel. Over escar-
gots he proposed to Mr. Scali what be-
came the terms for settlement of the
crisis: that Moscow would remove
the missiles under United Nations in-
spection if President Kennedy prom-
ised not to invade Cuba.
They then met again at the Statler
coffee shop, where Mr. Scali brought
back the answer from Secretary of
State Dean Rusk that the United
States was indeed much interested in
this formula.
"It was about 7 P.M. in the deserted
coffee shop," Mr. Scali recalled. "We
were both drinking black coffee.
Fomin assured me that Rusk's an-
swer, which I had relayed verbally,
would be transmitted immediately to
the highest levels of the Soviet Gov-
ernment."
On the following Sunday evening,
after a potentially explosive East-
West confrontation had been avoided,
Mr. Scali recalled that he and Mr.
Fomin "celebrated" with a good Chi-
nese dinner at still another restau-
rant, the Yenching Palace at 3524
Connecticut Avenue, just up from the
National Zoo.
At Les Trois Mousquetaires
In the late 1940's, at 820 Connect-
icut, across from the park at Farra-
gut Square, was another restaurant
that figured in a rare confrontation
between American and Soviet secret
types: Les Trois Mousquetaires, long
since torn down to make way for a
new office building.
Walter L. Pforzheimer, the retired
general counsel of the C.I.A. who is
its unofficial historian, recounted the
little-known incident the other day in
an interview in his Watergate apart-
ment, where he maintaintan unusual
library of 10,000 books, all about
spies:
Two Russian fliers, Pyotr Pirogov
and Anatoly Barsov, had defected in
1948. Like the K.G.B.'s Mr. Yurchen-
ko, Mr. Barsov decided sometime
Continual
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000301940004-4
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000301940004-4
col
later that he wanted to return home.
He was told by Soviet officials that he
would suffer no punishment if he
could bring Mr. Pirogov back with
him. Otherwise, he would get seven
years.
Mr. Barsov, who had been working ?
closely with United States intelli-
gence, had no desire to return, but did
agree to a lunch with Mr. Pirogov. ,
Well before the two defectors arrived, 7
every seat in Les Trois Mousque-
taires had been taken by not-so-secret -
huskies of the United States and,
Soviet Union, all assigned to protect-
their charges.
Mr. Pforzheimer said that at one .
point, Mr. Barsov, who was having ,
trouble making his case to return,
moved to strike his luncheon partner. ,
'Everyone Started Pushing'
"It was a bedlam," Mr. Pforz-
heimer said with some amusement.
"Everyone in the restaurant sud- ?
denly rose and started pushing and*,
shoving to get to the man he was
trying to protect."
No one was seriously hurt, how-
ever, and the embarrassing matter,
was quickly hushed up by both sides,
he said. ?,
Another required listing in a guide
to Washington's spy spots would be,
the Bellevue Hotel, at 15 E Street
Northwest, a block or so from Union ,
Station.
nere, in February 1941, in room
522, another defector, Walter G.
Krivitsky, who had been a top Soviet
operative in Western Europe, was
found dead. His demise was officially
adjudged a suicide, but American in-
telligece officials were convinced he
had been slain under direct orders
from Stalin after having spilled so
many secrets to the United States.
Not all clandestine activity in
Washington relates to East-West ri-
valry.
Sheridan Circle, which is where ?
Massachusetts Avenue starts its gen-
tle climb through Embassy Row, is ?
where a car bomb went off in Septem-
ber 1976 killing Orlando Letelier, the
former Foreign Minister from Chile,
and his assistant. Nearly everyone
associated with Mr. Letelier in his
political exile attributed the bombing
to the Chilean military leadership.
A few hundred yards up Massachu-
setts Avenue on the left is the Japa-
nese Embassy, where secret docu-
ments were frantically burned on
Sunday evening, Dec. 7, 1941.
?
George Tames, a longtime photog-
rapher for The New York Times who ,
was then working for Time magazine,..
shot the event from a neighboring
building. "It took place in the back-
yard," he recalled recently. "Men in
dark suits were rushing out with arm
loads of papers, dumping them into
smoking garbage cans."
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000301940004-4