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    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque
    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque
    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque
    Ebook149 pages

    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque

    By E. B. Held

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    About this ebook

    When thinking of New Mexico, few Americans think spy-vs.-spy intrigue, but in fact, to many international intelligence operatives, the state’s name is nearly synonymous with espionage, and Santa Fe is a sacred site. The KGB’s single greatest intelligence and counterintelligence coups, and the planning of the organization’s most infamous assassination, all took place within one mile of Bishop Lamy’s statue in front of Saint Francis Cathedral in central Santa Fe.

    In this fascinating guide, former CIA agent E. B. Held uses declassified documents from both the CIA and KGB, as well as secondary sources, to trace some of the most notorious spying events in United States history. His work guides modern visitors through the history of such events as the plot to assassinate Leon Trotsky, Ted Hall’s delivery of technical details of the atom bomb to the KGB, and the controversial allegations regarding Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Dr. Wen Ho Lee’s contacts with China.

    Held provides background material as well as modern site locations to allow Cold War enthusiasts the opportunity to explore in a whole new way the settings for these historical events.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9780826349361
    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque
    Author

    E. B. Held

    E. B. Held is a retired CIA clandestine operations officer. From 2002 to 2009, he was Chief of Counterintelligence at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. He currently serves as Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C.

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    • 4/5
      *A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque*, by E. Bruce Held, is a history of Soviet clandestine operations in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, prior to and during the Cold War, particularly Soviet efforts to acquire information on U.S. nuclear weapons development, with a focus on the geography of Santa Fe and Albuquerque where clandestine information transfers took place. Held was a CIA officer before heading counterespionage at Albuquerque’s Sandia National Laboratory. He introduces readers to the tradecraft of clandestine operations and argues they have an ethical component, and that the ebb and flow of history—whether a nation is in good or bad repute—influences effectiveness in intelligence gathering. Held embeds tradecraft in the narrative, sometimes leading to confusing text, as in Chapter 5, where he uses seven spies’ code-names interspersed unevenly with their real names. He also constructs a hypothetical scenario involving North Korea, paralleling actual events that involved the Soviet Union. That rhetorical device seems problematic. On the other hand, Held uses short statements like, “Stalin had a low tolerance for failure,” that cram in a lot of meaning. Chapter 2 describes Soviet operatives’ use of a Santa Fe drugstore as a jumping-off point for the Mexico City assassination of Stalin’s rival Leon Trotsky. Chapters 3 through 8 describe Soviet spies’ recruitment of sources within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, with Oak Ridge, Chicago and Berkeley on the periphery. Hill shows that while the physicists Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall were enthusiastic sources for the Soviets, J. Robert Oppenheimer was not a source. And this reveals an important irony, though Held is not explicit about it: Reality as understood at the highest classification level may differ from reality as understood at a more mundane level. Oppenheimer’s enemy Lewis Strauss apparently made sure Oppenheimer’s security clearance investigators had no access to the highest-level information. With 29 photos and three maps (all black-and-white), *A Spy’a Guide* is of special interest to residents of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and to visitors familiar with these cities in the “Land of Enchantment.” And it was published (in 2011) by the University of New Mexico Press.

    Book preview

    A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque - E. B. Held

    A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque

    E. B. Held

    University of New Mexico Press

    Albuquerque

    ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-4936-1

    © 2011 by the University of New Mexico Press

    All rights reserved. Published 2011

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Held, E. B.

    A spy’s guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque / E.B. Held.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8263-4935-4 (paper : alk. paper)

    1. Espionage—New Mexico—Santa Fe—History—20th century. 2. Espionage—New Mexico—Albuquerque—History—20th century. 3. Santa Fe (N.M.)—Guidebooks. 4. Albuquerque (N.M.)—Guidebooks. 5. Espionage, Soviet—New Mexico—History. 6. Espionage, Chinese—New Mexico—History. 7. New Mexico—History—20th century. 8. Cold War. 9. United States—Foreign relations—Communist countries. 10. Communist countries—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title.

    E743.5.H415 2011

    327.1209789—dc22

    2010035057

    Cover: A shadowy clandestine-operations officer paying his respects in front of St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, 2010 (photo by Richard Guy Held).

    To Lani Flanagan

    Author’s Note

    The simple objective of this guide is to make the rich story of twentieth-century espionage in New Mexico come alive for residents of and visitors to the Land of Enchantment.

    I am a storyteller, not a trained historian. My hope is to capture the imagination of a wide range of readers, from middle-school students my son’s age to retirees like myself, from visitors on a short walking tour to Cold War–history buffs. I have kept the narrative short and crisp in order to appeal to these broad interests. For those who would like to delve deeper into the historical context, I have also included, at the end of each chapter, a Suggestions for Further Reading section.

    The main themes of this guide are true beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have not included any detail that is not, to the best of my knowledge, true. Given the murky nature of espionage, however, I do need to reserve an uncertainty factor on some details.

    As a retired CIA clandestine-operations officer, I submitted the manuscript for this book to the CIA’s Publications Review Board for review as required to prevent disclosure of classified information. I appreciate the assistance the board has provided me. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis are mine and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of my views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent disclosure of classified information.

    As an employee of the Department of Energy at the time of this writing, I also passed the manuscript through DOE’s review-and-approval process, again for the sole purpose of preventing disclosure of classified information.

    I would like to express my appreciation to my wife, Lani, and children, Sasha, Sergei, and Nikki; to my friends Elshan Akhadov, Alicia Anastasio, Cindy Barrilleaux, Lucille Boone, Chris Brigman, Chui Fan Cheng, Ken Fisher, Steve and Kara Grant, Ruth Griffis, Cal Guymon, Gerald Hendrickson, Linda Hillis, John Hudenko, Annie Huggins, Daniel Kosharek, Gina Rightley, Al Romig, Marion Scott, Dave Stout, Tammy Strickland, Ferenc Szasz, Annie Tomlinson, Liz Turpin-Puli, Jan Walters, Clark Whitehorn, Marci Witkowski, and Charlotte Wynant; as well as to my colleagues on the CIA Publication Review Board, who must remain unnamed.

    Finally, I would like to pay my respects to the honored memory of Adolf Tolkachev; everybody in the world is better off because of his courage and sacrifice.

    Fig. 1. Espionage sites in central Santa Fe (courtesy of Chris Brigman).

    Fig. 2. Espionage sites in central Albuquerque (courtesy of Chris Brigman).

    Fig. 3. Edward Lee Howard’s defection route, September 21, 1985 (courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories).

    Introduction: Ethics and Espionage

    KEY POINT: It may be counterintuitive but is nonetheless true: A powerful nation that holds the moral high ground in the eyes of world public opinion will generally . . . not always, but generally . . . have greater success in the morally ambiguous realm of human espionage than (1) a powerful nation that cedes the moral high ground or (2) a less powerful nation. The reason is quite simple; people around the world will want to help a nation that has the power and the desire to influence world events in positive directions, but often those people will want or need to help secretly. The history of espionage in New Mexico serves as a case study in support of this ethics-and-espionage conundrum.

    Imagine that we are in present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico, having a nice dinner at Geronimo’s restaurant on Canyon Road. I point out to you a simply dressed woman in her early thirties dining by herself off to our left. You comment that she looks like a grade-school librarian. I explain that, in fact, she is a prosperous, small-business woman and well-known flamenco singer. She is waiting for her lover, who is a clandestine-intelligence officer operating undercover as a world-renowned scholar. The woman is unwittingly engaged in a conspiracy with her lover and a Nobel Prize–winning poet to assassinate the leading political exile from the repressive regime in—hypothetically—North Korea.

    I then point out two college boys in the center of the dining room. You observe astutely that they are both carrying copies of Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass, so you assume that they are English literature majors. I explain that, in fact, the younger of the two is a nineteen-year-old Harvard physics prodigy who is in the process of providing secret documents to the older boy on how to construct an atomic bomb. The older boy’s secret responsibility is to hand carry the documentation to North Korean intelligence officers at the United Nations in New York City on behalf of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The two boys use Whitman’s famous poem as a rudimentary cipher to encrypt their secret communications.

    Finally, I point out off to our right a couple in their early thirties gazing out the window. You suggest that they are young parents who have hired a babysitter for the evening so that they can enjoy a dinner date, probably followed by a movie or a walk around the beautiful Santa Fe Plaza. I explain that, in fact, the two are gazing out the window trying to identify the FBI surveillance team that the couple knows is lurking outside, watching their every move. The FBI is on the verge of arresting the young man, a midlevel official of the New Mexico state government, for betraying the two greatest sources of secret intelligence that America has on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Not wanting to spend the rest of his life in federal prison, the young man has convinced his trusting, young wife to aid and abet his clandestine escape from the FBI surveillance so that he can defect to safety in North Korea. He has promised to send for her and their son once he is comfortably settled in Pyongyang, but in truth he is abandoning her to the FBI.

    Of course, you dismissively laugh off my explanations as pure fantasy. None of that spy stuff really happens, you say, and it most certainly never happens in New Mexico! Then I explain that if you simply replace each reference to North Korea with the Cold War–era Soviet Union, all of my fantastic stories become matters of historical fact . . . all of which occurred in our remote, little state capital, Santa Fe.

    Americans love action-packed spy movies, but as a society, we are uncomfortable with the real, morally ambiguous world of espionage.

    Instinctively, most Americans think that spying is wrong, that spies are scum who engage in this wrongdoing for base motives like greed, perversion, or blackmail, and that professional intelligence officers who profit from this wrongdoing, be they CIA or KGB, are at best amoral. These widely held perceptions are only partially true.

    Some spies are scum. As we will learn in chapter 9, CIA traitor Edward Lee Howard was a morally unguided alcoholic who did abandon his wife and son when he defected from Santa Fe to Moscow. Greed motivated CIA traitor Aldrich Ames to betray human lives in exchange for money. Psychological perversion motivated FBI traitor Robert Hanssen to betray his country, his family, and his religion.

    In stark contrast, Russian scientist Adolf Tolkachev, arguably the greatest spy the CIA ever had inside

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