Gardner Hathaway: Intelligence officer whose resourcefulness during the Cold War made him highly esteemed by his colleagues

Hathaway after a fire at the US Embassy in Moscow; he had refused to let in firemen, suspecting some may have been KGB agents (Washington Post)

Gardner Hathaway was a CIA chief of counter-intelligence whose career took him to Cold War focal points ranging from Berlin to Moscow and placed him at the centre of many espionage episodes. Taciturn but courtly, "Gus" Hathaway was an undercover officer known for his mastery of espionage tradecraft and his aggressive efforts to best the KGB. "Gus was a risk-taker," said Jack Downing, a former CIA deputy director of operations. "We needed good intelligence, and we needed to be aggressive to get it. He was canny and smart."

Hathaway convinced superiors to approve an operation in 1978 involving a Russian engineer named Adolf Tolkachev. The episode provided the CIA with a huge amount of sensitive intelligence for a nearly a decade.

Soon after he arrived in Moscow as CIA station chief in 1977. When a fire broke out on the US embassy's eighth floor, Hathaway barred firefighters from entering the CIA station the floor below the blaze. He suspected some were KGB agents, and he refused to evacuate until the fire was contained.

In 1985 Hathaway was appointed chief of counterintelligence. He became alarmed after a number of Soviet agents working for the Americans were taken into custody or disappeared and suspected a mole had penetrated the agency. He assembled a team of trusted colleagues; the hunt would culminate in 1994 with the arrest of Aldrich Ames, a CIA counter-intelligence officer who had been selling secrets to the Soviets.

Gardner Rugg Hathaway, CIA officer: born Norfolk, Virginia 13 March 1925; twice married (three sons and one stepdaughter); died Vienna, Virginia 20 November 2013.