FANCY FABLE A SPY STORY Book 111
Preface
I think at this point in
the story, it is appropriate to let my alter ego tell the story from his
prospective.
Neil
Douglas-Tubb Author
“I began to spin this tale
in the late 1990’s.
Now it’s well past Easter 2017 and I am about
to re write what’s written yet again and then put this part of the story to
bed.
This is the third of what I image will be six
books telling the story of the cloak and dagger days, at the height of the Cold
War from the Canadian prospective. Back
then, when I was in the business, (RCMPolice Security Services B operations) it
was mid October, time seemed to be racing toward November.
In ‘the business’ there is never a clear
beginning or a clear cut ending to things, we just worked on with whatever it
is that we were working on. Some of the files we worked on were inherited from
predecessors and then like them, when our time was up in the branch, or on that
desk, it got passed on to who ever is next.
Of course, somethings came and went but
always there was spillage into something else. As book 111 opens Operation
Sandman, aka Operation Dustman, had played out in France. At the same time
there had been a back ground feature bubbling away that we had the potential for
a mass defection of Soviet Embassy
Staff in Ottawa. This had the potential to be the largest single defection of
the Cold War. It was all triggered by a
senior member of the Soviet Embassy staff misreading the queues his own system
was giving him.
This ‘thing’ and I call it a ‘thing’
deliberately, because it just dropped on us over the Thanksgiving weekend was
an indirect result of an operation we ran on the Hill called Operation
Fishman’s Friend on Parliament Hill
1976. It was designed to see if the Soviets were using Canadian Tourist areas
and national holidays to service their sleeper agents. The Agency (CIA) had
advised us they were, and as we came to find out, they did.
Operation Fisherman’s Friend coincidently
spun into overlapping with Operations Dustman and Sandman. The Dustman
Operation and Sandman were both defined in the spinning(s) of the complexities
in the defection of Boris Demidov.
Confused yet?
Dustman indirectly caused Sandman to swing
into action and then split and became Fancy Fable and Green Sleeves as things
progressed. If you can follow that then you are definitely a bureaucrat.
Finally, operation Fancy Fable spun out of all this, with its focus on British
Intelligence and the presence of a mole within MI-5/6. It took a very long time
to establish just who and where the mole was.
The Dustman file was running unobtrusively in
France with our defector stashed away in a quiet hotel room in St Germaine, a
subset of Greater Paris. It was there that all hell broke loose. Literally, it
blew up.
On the Canadian end, things began to undo
nearly simultaneously on both Parliament Hill, during Operation Fisherman’s
Friend and on the C/N train platform in the Kingston Ontario. And in south
western Ontario on the 401 Highway near Woodstock.
Seemly, these three unrelated events were
tied together.
On the Hill, the NCO i/c of the operation
chanced upon one of his agents-in-place. A soviet, who had been doubled and
sent back into their system to work for us. This man was whisked off the Hill
and out of sight before anyone other then Montgomery could notice.
It was abundantly clear that our system of
agents and double agents hand been compromised. This man had been called to a
meeting in Ottawa with all the appropriate protocols that were laid out in the
file for a meet to happen. Montgomery should have set all this into motion, but
didn’t.
From Parliament Hill and the Kingston C/N
station, to an incident on the 401 Hwy, the process of undoing progressed to
Paris and then into the south of France.
That all turned into Operation Dustman.
The Dustman operational file was the primary
concoction of happenings that initiated the Sandman/Green Sleeves files. Then
as luck would have it they all began to spin on their own. It is a fact that
some files can become a statistic but never spin. They just sit there in someone’s drawer as a
warm body in a paper chase. All they are is a statistic, and that only helps at
promotion time when the ‘diddly squat factor’ is being measured as a volume of
work load.
On the other hand, some files take off and
run like hell. That running and spinning can play hell with your future, again
at promotion time when the quality of what you were doing is the being measured
against the risk and results factor(s), and that again was being measured
against the ‘diddly squat factor’ of having the appearance to doing something
while at the same time staying safe preserving your career.
It was in this spacious vacuum of the greater
unknown where you rose or fell in this business.
The problem with a ‘runner’ was the
quality/outcome, and that was had an unpredictable value that could end a
career at a moment’s notice.
The other factor that determined your future
was whose coat tails you were on. That was most important. But there were no
guarantees.
It was in the risk taking of stashing Boris,
the Dustman, as he was referred to in hushed tones by those who knew, having
him sit quietly in a Paris safe house while we waited for someone in the Prime
Minister’s Office (PMO) to give us the go ahead to finish what we had started.
So over the course of one weekend three case
files went operational and one of the three went to crisis almost immediately
and literally had become a shit storm over night. This was followed by the second file taking
off hell bent for leather within 24 hours. All three were runners, and runners
are operational files that open like
a bat out of hell and gallop to conclusion like there was no tomorrow. Breaking
damned near every rule in business of slow and methodical, the wait and bait
model.
All three were loosely attached to
Fisherman’s Friend and that had gone off into a shit storm first. So,
‘Situation Normal ... All Fuck’d Up’ (SNAFU) ... two shit storms at once and
with more forming. Thank you Joseph Heller!
Each would have its turn; have its day as a
shit storm. I got to go France to deal with the “WTF” that happened over there,
because the senior man on the desk, his wife was very pregnant and having
difficulty. She was spotting blood. I was sent instead. I suspected that when
all was said and done, I could turn into the better fall guy for this shit
storm. Other careers could safely proceed and I could go back to uniform and
give out parking tickets on the Parliament Hill.
It didn’t happen that way... thank God.
It was either feast or famine in those days.
We had swung full circle touching both ends of the scale. It swung from absolute and sheer boredom to
utter and complete terror, with a goodly smattering of death and mayhem tossed
in as I recall it in the blink of an eye. Fate’s pendulum swung back and forth
several times during those days.
By October 19th 1976, ‘the Dustman
defection’ appeared to settle in and sort itself out. Both he and I were back
on Canadian soil—both of us alive and after ‘La Grande Tour de France.’
I knew the Dustman file would now drift off
now into the annals of the RCMPolice F-ops achieves under the guise of another
file name that has absolutely nothing to do with the realities of the file or
its contents. It would be tucked away in Number Five section of F-ops for the
duration of the Dustman’s life plus 20 years; then only to be reviewed and
never to be destroyed.
I knew that the Dustman would now have a very
tedious time in beautiful down town Penhold Alberta, at a retired Canadian
Armed Forces Airbase. He might even get to see Red Deer if he were lucky.
Personally, I was whisked away for a short
period of time and kept out of the limelight, out of the way of the HQ crew for
‘operational necessities.’ My own
debrief done by the people I actually worked with and for. Information is the commodity and it had a
shelf life, a value and who ever had it then controlled the value. Time was of
the essence, because information had a value date and it could expire at any
moment.
But basically what everyone wanted to know
was how the hell I got the L'Ordre de l'Orange to cooperate. The Order of the Orange was a for hire business
that operated on the fringe of both the espionage and criminal world and their
business acumen was for sale to the highest bidder ... everyone in the business
used them from time to time. This was a first time in the annals of the
RCMPolice that they wanted to have direct and permanent conduit with the
Force. It was usually cash on the dash
to the highest bidder. Cleone
Melnichenko and I would be the principle points of contact. Primary on the list
of things to discuss in the debriefing was: who the hell was Cleone (aka Vera
Jordan) anyway? Those were things they wanted to know in my debriefing.
The whole Dustman thing came to a classic
end, and what started on Parliament Hill was off and running at a great rate in
several other not so clearly defined directions. ‘The mud shifts around in the river but
clarity is seldom a result.’ (A direct quote from Mr. Sheritt, 85-year-old
native shaman, during one of his moments of pontification).
Things had their own pace in this business
and it is a stretch to really consider anything as dead and gone. It is also a
stretch to see something get up gallop as the Dustman file did. We all knew
that.
The truth of the matter is things don’t
really come to an end but chapters do close and open. The 19th of October was one of
those dates that marked both a closing of the old and an opening of new
chapters. What I was to come to learn is that there can be runners back to
back. True operational case files out last investigators; files are inherited
and passed on, whole careers are based on some and they have been known to move
on into the next generation of investigator.
It was a given that our service had been
infiltrated at the HQ level. That our best kept secrets were floating over to
the Russians weekly.
For whatever the reason, the Chinese were
never considered from our prospective in B-ops until Fancy Fable opened in
London the UK.
One of Canada’s claims to fame in the 1970’s
was, it was easy to get into and out of. To be clearer, it was a foregone
conclusion by all in the trade that Canada was like a sieve, a piece of Swiss
cheese, and just about anyone or anything could slip in and out of the country
unnoticed anytime they wanted. The best worst example was Fred Rose. He was the Member of Parliament elected under the
Labour Progressive Party's banner, and the only MP successfully prosecuted for
espionage. Fred Rose enjoys a unique place in Canadian history.
He came in to Montreal with some regularity
on the MV Alexander Pushkin as crew. He would come ashore to visit his family
and friends.
Operation Fisherman’s Friend provided us with
that proof that the KGB and GRU[1]were in
fact running joint operations. Just as the Americans said. It was reported by the CIA that Col Oleg
Vladimirovich Penkovsky, “Agent Hero” as their source on this bit of
information.
The truth in this business is often skewed.
If you know the Penkovsky story, you will know that he was executed in 1963.
Thus a very long lag time in the sharing the fruits of intelligence gathering
because of other operational necessities south of the border —1963->1976 —
but they did finally tell us.
The mechanics of a ‘meet’ is not something
that is readily obvious to the uninitiated. It could be done in plain sight and
the people involved never get closer to each other than ten feet or for that
matter never appearing to pay any attention to each other either. Sometimes they
passed within a yard of so of each other in a crowd. Then very powerful high
frequency high speed transmitter/receivers would whirl and information would be
exchanged via radio transmission in the matter of a second or two. Done
silently in the blink of an eye; they may never have even made eye contact but
their business was done and they could go on their way.
A favorite used by both sides is the Dead
Letter Drop (DLD—a place or a thing in
a location that could be used to conceal information so it could be exchanged
secretly; the people who used the DLD never had to meet face to face.). There
were just too many people in too many parks and haunting the tourist traps,
riding subways or eating in third rate restaurants or simply walking along the
streets, to be able to keep good eye on who was who and what they were doing
while they were doing it. The information passed in a DLD was coded via a
onetime pad. The onetime pad is constructed with flash paper, the same stuff
bookies would use in illegal betting joints, that could incinerate instantly by
touching a lite cigarette to it or be eaten and dissolve in one’s digestive
track.
We could, if we got lucky and followed a
known intelligence officer to a meet or to a DLD and then were able to put
together what they were up to then things could get interesting. Once we found the DLD, we could unload it and
see what was there as well as reload it with the information of our choice.
But the problem was the meet or the DLD could
be anywhere and there needed to be a certain good luck factor at work under it
all as well as one hell of a lot of hard deep down old fashion police work that
needed to be done to nail any of this down.
It was drilled into us that being in the
right place at the right time was an art form and not an accident. A dead
letter drop could be anywhere or anything and it could be serviced by either
party to the drop at their leisure. So lady luck was a player in all this
too. She could shine on you or piss on you
and that was all up to her and at her whim.
So it was that on a particular weekend,
Sunday actually, in early October we shifted our approach on the ever shifting
playing field (Thanksgivings Day weekend 1976) and with the slightest change in
how we did things and we picked up several meets on Parliament Hill.
The files that started on the
Hill/Kingston/Paris had unusual and interesting twists and turns and they were
all “runners.”
How we changed our plan of attack. I don’t
believe was ever compromised and I shall leave the details between the lines
for those who may know. Why, because they will know and for those that don’t,
it’s in there someplace and you’ll either recognize it or you won’t.
It is an axiom in this business that the
unorthodox works from time to time, but most often good old fashion gum shoe
investigation got things done. You had to know the opposition.
We had the operational resources in place and
we were ready to go ... as luck would have it ... we could jump on the
situation and chase it down and that’s what we did. It was then the ‘damned
thing’ took off like a bolt of white hot lightning straight from hell.
By the end of the first and second full days
of the operation the body count started to rise. Not just here, but abroad. We
didn’t realize that at the time nor did we get the dots joined immediately but
there had been multiple deaths during that first 48-hour period after the
conclusion of Operation Fisherman’s Friend weekend on Parliament Hill. At the
time they seemed to be loosely connected but as it turned out they were deeply
intertwined. All of this would find a
way to be attributed to the initial incident on Parliament Hill on a bright and
sunny Sunday Thanksgiving’s day afternoon.
The thing that got the whole thing moving for
us was the first death. It was the suicide of one of the ‘Joes’ on the train
platform in Kingston Ontario. That really kicked off the insanity of the next
eight to ten days. That death was followed almost immediately by several more
in an auto accident in South Central Ontario near Woodstock and that was
followed by a number of persons being killed in central Paris by a bomb blast;
seemly one an accident and then another random act of violence, but no. It
would be hard to connect them on the surface, but if anyone was to lift the
proverbial carpet and have a look under it, there they were, all connected.
The repercussions from that first death
echoed through the Security Services of Canada, then very quickly on to Great
Britain, France, Israel, the Soviet Union and the USA (CIA & FBI) as well
as the Criminal Investigation Branches of the French and Italian national
police forces and Scotland Yard.
This echo of death and destruction was
responsible directly and indirectly for a number of deaths over the next few
days. All by violence and if a head count was taken then it depended how you
wanted to count it, or who was doing the counting, when considering what should
be considered in the collateral damage estimated. It was believed that well
over 40 individuals and that figure could easily extend to 60 plus bodies that
came to a violent end in this affair; some by design and some by accident, and
many more injured.
An act of self destruction started the
dominos to tumble, but once the tumbling was initiated and this was coupled
with the force of the operational necessity, then the momentum created would
naturally began to take charge. This thing developed a life of its own. When
that happens this is nearly an impossible thing to bring to a sudden and
complete stop. Once this thing gained a head of steam, or better said, a life
of its own, then it got messy. It couldn’t go any other place other than that.
And it would cost a lot of money, a lot of time and effort and expense measured
by many different non monetary factors just to slow it down and hopefully grind
it to a halt. A good overt example of this was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962
... both Kennedy and Khrushchev paid
heavily to bring this thing to a halt. It cost Khrushchev his job and his place
in Supreme Soviet and indirectly cost Kennedy his life.
In the end, this leap into the deeper and
darker regions of spy vs. spy cost all who participated very dearly. It cost
the Soviets far more than it cost us but we did pay more than our fair share.
There were some that paid and had no idea
what they were paying for or for that matter that they were paying at all, but
they were. They dropped right into the middle of a very dangerous and lethal
game. They were in ‘The Game’ by
default. Sort of, wrong place/wrong time type of thing. It was being played all
around them, so they got too paid for the privilege for one reason only; they
were where they were. Innocent bystanders ... also referred to as “collateral
damage.”
This game of spy vs. spy is a deadly affair
and about to take an Oriental twist.”
Steve
Hodge
Spring
2017
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