A few houses up the street in Potomac lived Foreign Service Officer, Felix Bloch. A State Department Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) in Vienna from 1983-87 (Economic Counselor 1980-83), Felix was observed delivering his “stamp collection” to Soviet spy, Reino Gikman (aka Pierre Bart), in Paris on May 14th, 1989. From David Wise’s two books (The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History-2002 & Spy: The Inside Story of How Robert Hanssen Betrayed America-2003) we know French Counterintelligence was asked by the FBI to clandestinely follow Felix’s movements on a business trip to Paris for the European Bureau’s Office of Regional Politics and Economics after monitoring a phone conversation between the two on April 27, 1989.
The French surveilled Felix meeting Gikman for dinner at Le Meurice Hotel, leaving the shoulder bag he arrived with under the table. Gikman left with the bag. The French notified US authorities of their rendezvous ahead of Felix’s subsequent trip to Brussels in support of a NATO summit attended by President George H. W. Bush, but neither security agency could trust Belgian Intelligence to cooperate because of alleged Soviet infiltration. Felix had supper with Gikman a second time at the Hilton in the Belgian capital on May 28th, but there is scant documentation of what transpired.
On June 22nd, three weeks after their meeting in Brussels, the FBI taped a call from Gikman (pretending to be a “Ferdinand Paul”) to Felix in D.C. during which he warned their “friend Pierre” had caught a bad flu and hoped Felix didn’t catch it as well: “Cannot see you in the near future, he (Gikman) is sick, a contagious disease is suspected. I am worried about you, you have to take care of yourself”.
The FBI knew immediately their counterintelligence investigation had been compromised. It wasn’t until the arrest of FBI Agent Robert Hanssen for espionage in 2001 they discovered who the mole was that tipped off the Soviets on May 22nd, 1989, halting their Felix Bloch investigation. It took Hanssen eight days following the Paris dinner between the two “philatelists” and six before the Brussels meeting to notify the KGB. Why then did the KGB allow the Brussels meeting to take place? Were they confident their infiltration of Belgian Intelligence would control the situation? Even though the US, French and Soviets all knew of the second meeting between Felix and Gikman in Brussels, it apparently went ahead with little scrutiny. Reino Gikman, who lived in Vienna (is that where he blackmailed/recruited Felix?), completely disappeared after the May 28th meeting, most likely sent home by the KGB.
When news leaked that a senior State Department official was suspected of espionage, all hell broke loose in the US media. Felix denied everything and claimed he and Gikman were merely collectors with a shared philatelic interest. Felix famously led the media on a 22-mile hike around DC with his terrier Mephisto, reporters shouting questions as he strolled nonchalantly through the heat and humidity of summer.
The State Department initially suspended Felix although there was only circumstantial evidence. Further media research discovered he had a fetish for S&M and found the prostitute he visited in Vienna: Tina Jarousek. She testified to a grand jury he visited weekly and paid handsomely for her services ($10,000/annum for seven years). Was Felix blackmailed by the Soviets based on his Vienna fetish or was he recruited in the early 1970s when the Bloch family was stationed in West & East Berlin for five years?
Or did Felix sell state secrets to fund his fetish? His wife Lucille (Lu) Stephenson had a telling quote in Karen Krebsbach’s 1995 Foreign Service Journal piece “Guilt By Association”: “His interest in money would gradually ‘move way beyond fascination. It became sheer obsession.’” A thorough FBI investigation later determined his visits to sadomasochists actually began in Berlin in the 1970s, so he may have been blackmailed by the Soviets for almost twenty years.
Marine guard Clayton Lonetree worked at the Vienna Embassy the same time Felix was DCM. It’s where Clayton confessed in December 1986 that he let his Russian girlfriend (KGB “swallow” Violetta Sanni)) into the Moscow Embassy after hours on his previous tour, giving her access to classified information. When Clayton spied in Vienna he was being blackmailed by the Soviets based upon his Moscow betrayal. Lonetree was sentenced to thirty years in prison, but was released after nine. Felix must have worked closely with the Regional Security Officer and Station Chief when Clayton confessed, yet just over two years later he was under investigation.
In an attempt to discover who the mole in the national security state was when breaches continued following the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 (“his treachery resulted in the exposure and rolling up of over 100 spy operations…and the deaths of at least a dozen prized Soviet agents…” according to the New York Times), the FBI paid KGB agent Alexandr Scherbakov seven million dollars for the “Gray suit” file of its anonymous US mole, which after laborious audio and fingerprint analyses turned out to be Robert Hanssen. According to David Wise in his audio book Seven Million Dollar Spy, the FBI agent betrayed fifty human sources or recruitment targets, a number of whom were executed.
This trove included letters Hanssen wrote to the KGB in November 2000: “Bloch was such a shnook. I almost hated protecting him, but then he was your (the KGB’s) friend…” He also cites Felix as a prime example of why he can’t meet the KGB overseas: it might reveal his identity. Hanssen also wrote that anonymity “is my best protection against betrayal by someone like me working from whatever motivation, a Bloch or a Philby.”
Hanssen goes on to say Felix would have been caught committing treason if the FBI had not been so cautious: “If our guy sent to Paris had balls or brains, both [Felix & Gikman] would have been dead meat. Fortunately for you he had neither. The French said, ‘Should we take them down?’ He went all wet. He’d never made a decision before, why start then. It was that close.”
Hanssen saved Felix not only from prison but perhaps even execution: Aldrich Ames received a life sentence with no parole for his betrayal while Hanssen cut a plea deal to avoid a death sentence by agreeing to extensive debriefings with US Agents.
Felix was undoubtedly miffed at being the number two at the Vienna Embassy, working under two Reagan political appointees: Helen von Damm (1983-86, who selected him as her Deputy) and Ronald Lauder (1986-87); the former having an affair and eventually marrying the owner of the Sacher Hotel (who committed suicide in 1990) during her assignment, while Felix called the latter “the laughingstock of Vienna”.
Ambassador Lauder called Felix a “Benedict Arnold” in a subsequent response and had Felix withdrawn from Embassy Vienna in 1987 due to their strained relationship: “I fired him,” Lauder said in a Nightline interview with Ted Koppel, “I wanted to get rid of him for insubordination. Felix Bloch went outside of channels all the time. I know what Felix Bloch was like and I must tell you I was not surprised. I didn’t expect him to be…under investigation for being a spy, but there was something the matter with him, that’s why I fired him.” Felix possibly thought he deserved the Ambassadorship and some have theorized he took revenge on the Department by selling top-secret information for cash.
In February 1990 he was officially terminated by the State Department after 32 years of service, allegedly due to taped phone calls between Felix and Lu in which he acknowledged receiving money from the Soviets. Secretary of State James Baker dismissed Felix for making “deliberate false statements and misrepresentations to the FBI.”
Felix moved to Chapel Hill in 1992 and was hired as a supermarket cashier and bus driver. He was infamously arrested twice for shoplifting, once in 1993 and again in 1994. The first charge was dismissed after he agreed to pay a $60.00 fine and perform 48 hours of Community Service, but he paid $100.00 and served a 30 day suspended sentence for the second charge.
As reported by Karen Krebsbach, when asked by Lu in Chapel Hill about his alleged espionage Felix replied, “There are certain secrets that will go with me to my grave” and “It’s better for you not to know and better for me too.” The couple agreed to separate in February 1993 with Lu finally suspecting Felix had betrayed his wife and country.
When David Wise asked him point blank in a 2003 New York Times interview if he passed secrets to the Soviets, Felix replied, “I’m not going to answer that for the same reason I haven’t declared my innocence.”
(Felix Bloch declined to be interviewed for this piece, responding in a letter: “Please be advised that that subject is strictly off limits.”)
© 2021 James B. Angell All Rights Reserved