MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED TH

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:31 am

Chapter 10: "Give Me Your Badge"

Once he had been interrogated by the FBI, Peter Karlow knew his career in the CIA was finished.

What he did not know was that Sheffield Edwards, the CIA's director of security, had been out to get him, evidence or no evidence. The fact that there was none did not deter Edwards in the least. In January 1963, three weeks before the FBI interrogation, the CIA security chief called in the bureau's representatives to discuss Karlow, who was still regarded as the "principal suspect" in the mole hunt.

"Individuals present at the conference," Edwards wrote in the wonderfully stilted language of officialdom, "recognized the distinct possibility that a definite case cannot be made against [Karlow] since there is a possibility that [Karlow] is not identical to [Sasha]. The Director of Security indicated that this Agency desired that the other areas of a personnel and /or security nature in the ... case be fully developed during the interview with [Karlow] since it is the opinion of the Office of Security ... that [Karlow] whether or not he is identical to [Sasha] should be terminated from Agency employment." [1]

Nothing could be clearer. If the CIA could not prove Karlow a mole, it would find some other reason to fire him. Karlow's continental manner and educated airs obviously annoyed Edwards, a former Army colonel, a slender man of military bearing who kept his gray hair close-cropped. His dislike for Karlow was transparent and permeates the secret memos he wrote at the time, many of them heavy with sarcasm. At the meeting, Edwards fretted that Karlow might not agree to the FBI interview. "However, the general opinion of individuals at the conference," the security chief concluded, "was that [Karlow], who appears to have a very high regard of his own intellect, will, whether he is [Sasha] or not, go ahead with the FBI interview." [2]

On February 19, the week after the FBI interrogation, Karlow called on Edwards. It was a nasty confrontation.

"You're a traitor!" Edwards barked. "It's just a question of whether we fire you or let you resign."

"And you are a fool," Karlow rejoined.

After a further exchange of pleasantries, the CIA security chief informed Karlow that a decision would be made in a week on whether he would be permitted to resign without prejudice.

Karlow protested that he was innocent. It was obvious, he added, that Edwards did not believe him. "He was not disabused of this fact," Edwards wrote. [3]

Two days later, Karlow sent a memo to Richard Helms, as the deputy director for plans had requested. "I wish to help the FBI in any way that I can," he wrote, "both to resolve the case and to clear my name. I have nothing to confess and nothing to conceal. I realize that, through an incredible error ... I have come so deeply under suspicion of treason that my career in CIA is ended." Karlow added: "I intend to fight any suspicions or allegations of disloyalty or indiscretion in any way that I can, inside and outside CIA and the government, until any personal implication or blemish on my record is removed." [4] He attached a statement explaining the conflict over his father's birthplace in the forms he had filled out over the years, an inconsistency that the Office of Security had now seized upon, along with minor security violations by Karlow -- he had once left classified waste in a coffee can, for example -- as the club to drive him from the CIA.

The next day, Karlow once more called on Helms, whom he regarded as his friend. This time, he told Helms he was planning to resign. Helms, the quintessential bureaucrat, and a man of icy composure, smoothly noted that the case was now out of his hands and under the jurisdiction of the FBI. But Karlow, Helms thought, ought to try to correct "certain discrepancies" that had been found in his personal records.

Karlow did not realize that mole suspects have no friends. In his own memorandum to the files, Helms wrote that he had urged Karlow to clear up any contradictions in the FBI records, or "he was running the risk of having his children live under a cloud as far as any type of government employment was concerned, including a commission in the armed services." Helms added: "I went down this track, because it seems to me that the only leverage one has on Karlow to get any possible admissions from him is to make him concerned not so much as to his own future, but that of his children and other members of his family." Helms concluded: "I gave him no solace. ..." [5]

At this point Karlow was not trying to save his job. All he could do was to keep battling to clear his name. "When I was finally accused on the fifth day of the FBI interrogation," Karlow said, "I felt relief. There was no way they could prove I was a Russian spy. The accusation was so preposterous. But I didn't want to leave with a cloud over my head."

Karlow kept pressing his accusers for specifics. If he was a Soviet spy, which he knew he was not, what was he supposed to have done, when, and where? He pushed Lawrence Houston, the agency's general counsel, for details of his supposed crimes.

"Finally, they came up with two dates. On January 6, 1950, and August 24, 1951, I was supposed to have been in East Berlin being briefed by my [KGB] case officer," the mysterious "Lydia." But Karlow was able to find records demonstrating that he was elsewhere on both dates. As it happened, Karlow had a book inscribed, "To my dear friend Peter Karlow, Rouen, the 6th January, 1950" -- the very day Karlow was accused of being in East Berlin -- which had been given to him by one of France's World War II heroes, Captain Jean L'Herminier. "He was captain of a submarine, the Casabianca, that landed one hundred and four French Moroccan commandos on Corsica the night before the island's liberation in 1943." Karlow had something in common with the French hero; the captain had lost both legs in the war.

Karlow had met L 'Herminier at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where both men had been sent for treatment and to be fitted with artificial limbs. A member of the hospital staff asked Karlow if he spoke French, because there was another patient who spoke no English. Karlow went to the room. "I saw a photo of the sub on the side of the bed and immediately knew in whose presence I was," Karlow remembered. The two men became good friends.

At the end of December 1949, Karlow sailed on the Ile de France for Le Havre, en route to Germany to take up his new post in Karlsruhe, where he had been sent to set up the technical laboratory for Richard Helms. "We celebrated New Year's Eve on the Ile de France," Karlow remembered. From Le Havre, Karlow took the boat train to Paris, and then another train to Rouen, where he stayed overnight and visited L'Herminier. The Frenchman gave Karlow the book, which was entitled Casabianca, and written by the former captain to describe the exploits of his famed submarine during the war.

And, as it happened, Karlow was also able to reconstruct where he had been on the other date questioned by the CIA. On August 24, 1951, Karlow, his mother, and his future wife, Libby, were staying in Berchtesgaden at the Berchtesgadener Hof Hotel. "It was when I proposed to my wife. They found our names in the hotel registry."

Karlow was never told how the CIA came up with the two specific dates. But he was incredulous at the reaction of the agency's Office of Security when, after considerable time and effort, he produced the evidence indicating he was not in East Berlin on the dates in question. Karlow spoke with Robert L. Bannerman, the deputy director of the Office of Security, who was to succeed Sheffield Edwards as director. "Bannerman said, 'You must be a high-level spy because you're so well documented.'" When Karlow was not well documented, when the multitudinous application forms he had filled out over the years differed slightly, this was taken as evidence of his guilt. It was an impossible Catch-22.

On March 12, Karlow wrote another memo to Helms. A new CIA team was reviewing his case, but two of its members were from Edwards's staff. Since Edwards "believes me guilty," how could he get a fair hearing? "I am at home on admin leave," Karlow told Helms, "but my 'cover' vis-a-vis my friends in CIA is wearing thin. This case has dragged on far too long already." [6] Helms wrote back a terse note suggesting Karlow take up his problems with Houston. [7]

Three weeks later, however, on April 3, Karlow was able to get a telephone call through to Helms, who reported the conversation in a classified memorandum to the CIA's deputy director, Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter. Karlow, Helms said, "felt a web had been woven around him based on circumstantial evidence and that he was finding it extremely difficult to untangle the web and come to grips with the exact nature of his alleged derelictions." [8]

By now, however, the web had completely enveloped Karlow. Two weeks later, General Carter brought down the ax. "I have come to the decision that we can no longer employ Mr. Karlow with the Central Intelligence Agency and that he should be authorized to resign," Carter wrote. [9]

But Karlow had already offered to resign. He knew he was powerless to stop the glacial movement of the bureaucracy. But he was able to win one concession. Houston wrote a memorandum for the record stating that the CIA and FBI investigation of Karlow's "security case" had not shown "that he was involved ... in any way." But the memorandum also noted that the case "remains open in the FBI." It was the best Karlow could do; he gave a copy for safekeeping to a former high CIA official as insurance that it would not be "lost" in the agency's files.

"My name was dragged into this through no action of mine," Karlow said. "Like a chimney pot falling off a rooftop. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it. So I resigned." At age forty-two, Karlow's career in the CIA had ended.

Years later, Karlow could still remember the anger, frustration, and despair he felt during those days in the spring and early summer of 1963. "It was a very dim cult period. It was demoralizing, trying to figure out what happened. I had to explain to my family that I wasn't a Russian spy. To my wife, my mother, and my sister."

On July 5, 1963, Karlow left the CIA headquarters building for the last time.

He met in Lawrence Houston's office on that day with Robert Bannerman, Edwards's deputy in the Office of Security.

"Bannerman said, 'Give me your badge.'"

Karlow wore his laminated plastic identification badge on a chain around his neck. He took it off and handed it to the OS man. "Bannerman escorted me out of the building." Karlow's white Packard convertible was waiting in the parking lot.

Karlow said he did not have any "sentimental thoughts" of the past as he walked out of Langley headquarters that day with Bannerman. "I never had any attachment to that building," he said. "I still believed in a small agency, confused, scattered around the city, hard to find. The headquarters building was Dulles's dream. Things changed after we moved there. It was impersonal after that. I didn't have any feeling about the building."

But as the two men walked through the vast lobby, Karlow pointed to the inscription on the marble wall: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. John VIII-XXXII."

He looked at Bannerman, and said, "I hope you read it sometime."

______________

Notes:

1. CIA Memorandum to File, January 25, 1963. The document was heavily censored by the CIA before its release, but the words that can, from the context, logically be assumed to be missing have been inserted by the author.

2. 1bid., p. 2.

3. Memorandum, Edwards to Hoover, February 19, 1963.

4. Memorandum, Karlow to Helms, February 21, 1963.

5. Richard Helms, Memorandum for the Record, February 25, 1963.

6. Memorandum, Karlow to Helms, March 12, 1963.

7. Memorandum, Helms to Karlow, March 12, 1963.

8. Memorandum, Helms to Carter, April 3, 1963.

9. Memorandum, Carter to Houston, April 18, 1963.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:32 am

Part 1 of 2

Chapter 11: AEFOXTROT

George Kisevalter had greased the line.

The address in Manhattan that he had given to Yuri Nosenko before they parted in Geneva in 1962 belonged to an agency asset. If anything came in to that address from abroad, signed by "Alex," it would mean that Nosenko was trying to recontact the CIA.

But Kisevalter did not trust even the best communications arrangements. He tested the link from time to time. They might never again hear from Nosenko, but if he did send a cable, a postcard, or a letter to the Manhattan address, it had to work.

"We had the line greased. I would send a cable to COS, Copenhagen. 'Send cable to following address in New York.' I sent periodic messages from Copenhagen, Geneva, and other places to keep the line activated. And to time it -- how soon would we know the message had arrived?" The timing was important, because the CIA was to meet Nosenko, in whatever city he was, under the movie marquee beginning with the highest letter of the alphabet three days after he sent the cable to the New York address.

At Langley, there had been changes since Nosenko's first meeting with the CIA in June 1962. Howard Osborn, who had replaced Jack Maury as chief of the Soviet division, had in turn been succeeded in 1963 by David E. Murphy. In the fall of 1962, Pete Bagley had come back from Switzerland and joined the division as a counterintelligence officer. Having been shown the Golitsin file by Angleton, he was now persuaded that Nosenko was a plant, a dispatched agent of the KGB.

Late in January 1964, Yuri Nosenko returned to Geneva with the Soviet disarmament delegation. "A cable came in to New York," Kisevalter said. "I found out within hours. I flew to Geneva and Bagley flew in separately."

"Bagley met him [Nosenko] under the marquee of the movie theater in Geneva. [1] He gave Nosenko a note with the address of the safe house. We went to a different safe house from the one we used in 1962."

And so the first of half a dozen meetings in the new safe house began. Nosenko did not know, of course, that one of the two CIA case officers he was meeting with -- Pete Bagley -- now believed him to be a Soviet plant.

It was only two months after the Kennedy assassination. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, and the Warren Commission, which Johnson had appointed to investigate the murder of President Kennedy, was about to begin hearing the first of 552 witnesses.

The tragedy in Dallas was on everyone's mind, but what Nosenko now told Kisevalter and Bagley staggered the two CIA men. He had, he assured them, personally handled Lee Harvey Oswald's case when the former Marine arrived in Moscow and asked to remain in the Soviet Union.

"Oswald came up almost immediately," Kisevalter recalled. "We questioned Nosenko about every detail on Oswald." What Nosenko told the two CIA men was that the KGB had decided it had no interest in Oswald. And Nosenko added that he was the official who ordered that Oswald be told he would have to leave when his visa expired.

When Oswald then attempted suicide, Nosenko continued, his decision to order Oswald to leave the Soviet Union was overruled by other officials outside the KGB who had decided it would be best, under the circumstances, to let Oswald stay. According to Kisevalter, when Nosenko was asked why the Soviets had reversed themselves, he replied: "Because he tried to commit suicide. There would only be adverse publicity if he tried it again." As Nosenko later explained it to a congressional committee, the Soviets concluded that if Oswald did succeed in killing himself, the reaction in the press would harm "the warming of Soviet-American relations." [2]

After Kennedy was shot, Nosenko said, General Oleg Gribanov, Nosenko's boss as head of the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, had ordered Oswald's file rushed from Minsk by military plane. Nosenko said he had examined the KGB file on Oswald and found it to be a routine record of Oswald's stay in Minsk, with references to his wife, Marina. There was, Nosenko said, no indication at all that the KGB had ever approached Oswald for operational purposes.

The two CIA officers in Geneva quickly relayed Nosenko's account to Langley headquarters. As might be imagined, the KGB man's statements caused great controversy within the CIA and later created a problem as well for the Warren Commission, which had to decide whether to give credence to his story.

In the 1964 Geneva meetings, Nosenko also ranged over a wide variety of other subjects. The recent capture of Oleg Penkovsky also loomed large on the minds of his questioners. Nosenko provided the first account of how Penkovsky was caught.

According to the KGB man, Penkovsky's downfall had begun almost by chance. George Kisevalter summarized Nosenko's story. "Penkovsky had one weakness that all Soviet intelligence officers have who work for the army," he said. "They do not appreciate the lengths to which the KGB can go. Internal surveillance is directed against the Russians. In Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], there is an excellent KGB school for surveillance. A Seventh Directorate School. Leningrad is a cosmopolitan city, with a variety of ethnic types. The candidates for the school are chosen from Leningrad or elsewhere, then assigned to Moscow. If they came from Moscow, there's a chance they would be spotted by friends or relatives, so they select them from Leningrad."

In Moscow, Kisevalter explained, the KGB maintains "light surveillance" even on the wives of diplomats. One of the women being watched was Janet Ann Chisholm, the wife of the MI6 station chief. "One person trained in Leningrad and now in Moscow says, 'I think this woman reacts to a Russian.' 'Who's the Russian?' 'I don't know. He disappears.' So they assign a more experienced officer. They watch Janet Ann Chisholm.

"From ballet school she walks to get the bus. She walks by a commission shop, where Soviets bring icons and other objects for sale. She browsed in the store and she'd see Penkovsky walk by. She would leave and would follow him to the end of the block where there was an arcade with shops, and steps going down. Out of sight, he could pass films without looking at her. It was an alternate to the park.

"There were eleven meetings with Chisholm, all told, at the park or the arcade. The park was near the British residences. It was a very small, triangular park. Three streets led into it and he could come from any direction, and drop candy or cassettes into her shopping bag.

"When the KGB spotted her, an artist is called in and the two KGB guys describe how the man was dressed. They dress a guy like Penkovsky. They tell him, 'You are to walk in front of the woman, but don't turn your head so she can see your features.' They inserted him in front of Ann and she turned to follow him.

"Now the Sovs are sure that Chisholm is in contact with the as yet unknown Soviet. They call out the brigades, little girls bouncing balls, helicopters to read invisible X's on top of embassy cars, an army of surveillance agents. They spot Penkovsky being followed by Ann and locate who he is and where he lives. It's an apartment house on an island in the middle of the Moscow River.

"It presents surveillance problems. The closest apartment house is half a mile away on the other side of the river. The KGB said, 'We've got to get him out of there,' to search Penkovsky's apartment. Pen- kovsky often goes for lunch at a fast-food shashlik place near Gorky Street. He goes to lunch as usual and has violent stomach pangs. Penkovsky has been poisoned.

"A friendly old gentleman happens to be next to him and says, 'I'm a doctor.' The doctor happens to have an ambulance around the corner which takes Penkovsky to the Kremlin Polyclinica inside the Kremlin. They pump his stomach while the KGB searches the apartment. They find nothing. This was September-October, after the last meeting with Penkovsky. The KGB searched carefully so as not to tip off Penkovsky they had been there.

"The reason they didn't find anything is that Penkovsky had a desk drawer he had built with a trick way to open it. All of his spy paraphernalia was in the desk drawer."

The KGB, according to Nosenko's account, now decided to place Penkovsky and the apartment under round-the-clock surveillance. "They checked on the people upstairs," Kisevalter continued. "A big steel trust executive. They got his boss to call him in and give him a trip to the Caucasus with his wife. For many years of service to the state, fulfilling the plan, et cetera. 'Who, me?' the guy says. But the steel executive is pleased. Then the boss says, 'I have a newly married nephew coming to Moscow. You know how it is to get permission for an apartment. Can I have the key while you're gone?' The executive was hardly in a position to say no.

"The 'nephew' and his 'wife' move into the apartment. There are geraniums allover in window boxes. Penkovsky's wife, Vera, and Galina, the daughter, are visiting Varentsov. They are out at the marshal's dacha. Penkovsky is alone in his apartment. The KGB is watching with binoculars from their LP [listening post] across the river. They relay word to the 'nephew,' Penkovsky is doing something in his desk. On a signal from the LP, down comes a huge pot of geraniums on a cable. It has a hidden camera that is silent. The pictures are developed and they see on the film how to open the desk drawer. Again they poison him, go in, and this time they find the material in the desk, the one-time pad, the camera. It was Nosenko who told me this story."

During most of the Nosenko debriefings in 1964, Kisevalter said, Serge Karpovich, a CIA case officer, was present. "He was working for Bagley, who wanted his own man along, and was concerned I would not go along with him on Nosenko's bona fides, which Bagley did not believe." To bug the sessions, Kisevalter said, "Karpovich was trying to use electric wave pulsation recording. You use ordinary household current to bug a room. It didn't work worth a damn. So we just brought in an ordinary tape recorder."

As in 1962, Nosenko had a lot of other cases and more information to impart. He revealed that the KGB had an important source in Paris who was transmitting American and NATO military secrets to the Soviets. He did not know the name of the spy. But he disclosed that the KGB had a portable X-ray machine that could read combination locks, a device that, as it turned out, had been used to penetrate a vault in Paris that held the secrets.

Ten months later, in the fall of 1964, Robert Lee Johnson confessed to the FBI that while an Army sergeant stationed in Berlin in 1953, he had contacted the KGB, which recruited him as a spy. Johnson in turn recruited his best friend, Sergeant James Allen Mintkenbaugh. Johnson was later assigned to the Armed Forces Courier Center at Orly Airport, a heavily guarded communications center for top-secret and other highly sensitive material. In the fall of 1962, he used the KGB X-ray device to read the combination of the vault. Seven times, he removed secret documents and drove to a rendezvous with KGB agents, who photographed the material so that Johnson could replace it in the vault before dawn.

Nosenko, Kisevalter said, described a bizarre group of KGB technical experts who had developed and worked with the hazardous X-ray machine. "He told us about the KGB squad called 'the toothless ones,' so called because they had been exposed in their training to radiation by the very instrument used in Paris to read the combination of the lock. The X-ray machine had two parts which had to be put together. There were about fifteen in this high-tech group. They all had false teeth, metal teeth, I think. One of the toothless ones came to Paris to show Johnson how to use it." [3]

In the Geneva safe house, Nosenko also talked about Aleksandr Cherepanov, the KGB man whose controversial packet of papers Paul Garbler had managed to copy, only three months earlier, before diplomats in the American embassy in Moscow had insisted on giving them back to the Soviets. The papers had contained reports of KGB surveillance of American diplomats.

"When we asked him about the Cherepanov papers," Kisevalter recalled, "he said, 'These are my operations.'" The case officers pressed Nosenko. If Cherepanov was a legitimate KGB officer, what was his motive for turning over the papers to the couple from Indiana who brought them to the embassy?

"Cherepanov resented being treated by the KGB as a stooge," Kisevalter said. "He and another officer signed off to destroy papers at the KGB. He managed to keep the material from going in the burn bag."

Paul Garbler, if Nosenko's account was accurate, was correct in fearing that Stoessel and Toon, by returning the papers, had sealed Cherepanov's fate. Nosenko not only claimed that the operations described in the papers were his, he said he had participated in a nationwide manhunt to track down the errant KGB man. "Nosenko went north chasing Cherepanov," Kisevalter said. "But they caught him in the south. They nailed him on the Iranian border and executed him."

During the clandestine meetings with the CIA officers, Nosenko provided the first hint that he was toying with the idea of defecting to the West. "We talked about his future," Kisevalter said. "He was expecting a letter from his wife. 'By mail?' I asked. 'No, from Guk. He's coming from Moscow.'" Yuri Ivanovich Guk was the KGB colleague whom Nosenko had talked about in 1962; it was Guk who Nosenko said had warned him to stop seeing the British secretary who worked for MI5 in Geneva.

"Guk brings the letter," Kisevalter continued. "Nosenko comes early one day and reads it to me alone. He's upset. It was an intimate, sentimental letter with news of his family. He's saying, 'They may not send me out again. Maybe -- I should stay.' He said, 'Maybe I'll never see her again.'" To Kisevalter, Nosenko was struggling with his emotions and the pull of his family.

Even so, the case officers were stunned, "stupefied," as Bagley put it, when on February 4, Nosenko dropped a bombshell. He said he had decided to defect, because he had received a cable recalling him to Moscow. He asked for the protection of the CIA.

"He said, 'I've been ordered home,'" Kisevalter recalled. "Bagley ran for the cable room and told headquarters of the recall." Despite Bagley's conviction that Nosenko was a KGB plant, he urged that Langley agree to take him. Nosenko's information about Oswald was so potentially explosive it overrode the CIA officer's objections. Recalling Bagley's action, Kisevalter said, "He recommended we accept him in view of the Kennedy assassination, and what Nosenko had said about Oswald. Of course, the answer came back, grab him. If it comes out that we sent him home we're in trouble."

Nosenko had said in 1962 he did not want to defect. He had changed his mind, he said now, because he feared the KGB suspected him, he might never be able to leave the Soviet Union again, and he wanted to build a new life. Much later, Nosenko admitted that his story of a recall cable was false; he said he had made it up to convince the CIA to accept him.

"For reasons best known to the Soviet division," Kisevalter said, on instructions from headquarters "we spent days in Geneva on the organization chart of the KGB, including every individual he [Nosenko] could remember. Had we known he would defect, we would have got that information later."

On February 4, Nosenko was given American identity documents and driven across the Swiss border to Germany in civilian clothes. After a week, he was flown from Frankfurt to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, arriving on February II. "He was kept in a safe house in northern Virginia," Kisevalter said. "A man-and-wife CIA team acted as cook and housekeeper and security." He was christened EFOXTROT.

For Nosenko, his new life in the United States quickly turned into a nightmare that was to continue not for months, but for years. Angleton and Bagley viewed Nosenko's mission as twofold: to deflect from Golitsin's leads to moles inside the CIA, and to convey a message to the West that the KGB was innocent of involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald, and therefore had no link to the assassination of President Kennedy.

On the face of it, Nosenko's assertion that the KGB had no interest in Oswald seemed to defy logic. As a former Marine, Oswald presumably had at least some information that the KGB might want to know. Moreover, Oswald had been stationed at Atsugi, Japan, a base for the U-2 aircraft. Since 1956, the CIA spy planes had been overflying the Soviet Union to collect intelligence data; and to the CIA it seemed improbable that the KGB would not want to debrief Oswald about the U-2. [4]

Yet Nosenko held to his account; the KGB had not debriefed Oswald and had not recruited Oswald. The reason Nosenko gave, in effect, was that Oswald was too flaky for the KGB to want to deal with him. On March 3, 1964, a month after Nosenko defected, he was interviewed by the FBI. He said he had made the decision to turn
down Oswald's original request to remain in the Soviet Union because Oswald did not appear "fully normal." [5]When Oswald's file was rushed from Minsk to Moscow after the assassination, Nosenko added, he had read a summary memo in the file written by Sergei M. Fedoseev, chief of the First Department of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate. As the FBI report put it, Nosenko "recalled that it contained the definite statement that from the date of OSW ALD's arrival in the USSR until his departure from the USSR, the KGB had no personal contact with OSW ALD and had not attempted to utilize him in any manner." [6]

Nosenko had even more surprising news about Oswald for the FBI. From the file, Nosenko said, he knew that Oswald had a gun in the Soviet Union and "it was used to shoot rabbits. NOSENKO stated that Western newspaper reports describe OSWALD as an expert shot; however OSWALD's file contained statements from fellow hunters that OSW ALD was an extremely poor shot and that it was necessary for persons who accompanied him on hunts to provide him with game." [7]

But rabbits and spy planes were peripheral to the central problem faced by the CIA as a result of Nosenko's statements about Oswald. Boiled down, it came to this: if Nosenko was a true defector, his information was of great importance because it could be taken as strong evidence that the Soviets had no connection to Kennedy's murder. But if Nosenko was a dispatched agent of the KGB, and not a true defector, did that mean that Oswald was acting for the Soviets when he shot the President?

Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans, fell into that trap. When he testified to the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, Helms, by now a former CIA director, said that if Nosenko fed the CIA false information about Oswald's KGB contacts, "it was fair for us to surmise that there may have been an Oswald-KGB connection in November 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy." [8]

But if Nosenko was indeed carrying a message, other, less chilling explanations were possible. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union, and had killed an American president. If he acted entirely on his own, it would not be hard to envision the Soviet leadership panicking after Dallas, and sending someone to reassure the United States that the Soviets had no connection to the assassination. But Helms was right about one thing-it was of "the utmost importance to this Government to determine the bona fides of Mr. Yuri Nosenko." [9]

The questions over Nosenko's authenticity were to split the CIA down the middle, with Angleton, Bagley, and their adherents on one side of the chasm and most of the agency's officials on the other. While many members of Angleton's staff believed, with their boss, that Nosenko was "bad" or "dirty" -- the shorthand terms favored inside the CIA for false agents -- most officials of the Soviet division, and the agency's leaders, eventually concluded he was what he said he was, a genuine defector. The debate over Nosenko, however, has continued to this day, particularly among former CIA officers.

But in the beginning, the doubters prevailed. There was, to start with, the matter of Nosenko's rank. According to Bagley, "He was a major in 1962 and a lieutenant colonel, he said, when he came out in 1964. Then he admitted he was a captain." But defectors before Nosenko had been known to inflate their rank and puff their importance in an effort to impress their new best friends.

Intriguingly, however, the debate over Nosenko's rank tied in with the Cherepanov papers. Nosenko produced a KGB travel document that he said he had carried in 1963 when he participated in the man hunt for the traitorous Cherepanov, a document that showed his rank as lieutenant colonel. The CIA debriefers raised all sorts of questions about the document -- why did Nosenko still have it, why did it show a higher rank than captain, which he later admitted was his true rank? The CI Staff believed that the KGB had provided Nosenko with a phony document to support his claims of higher rank. "Why was he traveling to Geneva with an internal travel document, anyway?" asked Scotty Miler.

"There was an explanation," a former high official of the CIA said. "He was a captain. Whenever they sent KGB officers out of Moscow they gave them the temporary rank of major or lieutenant colonel on the temporary ID card. Nosenko's expecting a promotion but he defects before it's finally signed. He thinks of himself as having been promoted."

Nosenko's debriefers turned to the subject of "Sasha." Two years earlier, Anatoly Golitsin had warned of a mole in the CIA with that KGB cryptonym. Peter Karlow, the principal suspect, had been forced out of the CIA, but the gumshoes had been unable to prove that Karlow was Sasha, or even that there was a penetration of the agency. Did Nosenko know of a mole named Sasha?

"We drew a blank from Nosenko on the name Sasha in '62," Bagley said. "In '64 he volunteered the name Sasha and said it was a U.S. Army officer in Germany. You'd think since it was only a year and a half before, he would have remembered that he didn't know about any Sasha." Bagley said that the Army officer's identity was established with the help of a later Soviet walk-in, whom U.S. intelligence code- named KITTY HAWK.

Angleton's deputy, Scotty Miler, confirmed that "some of Nosenko's information was valuable." For example, Miler said, his leads also helped to narrow down the search for the Army officer. "Nosenko knew his Sasha had served in Berlin. He knew the time frame. The FBI located him. Sasha turned out to be an Army major. He was not prosecuted. He confessed and was used as a double. The bureau turned him." The Army officer, who needed money to pay for a German mistress, had been recruited by the KGB in Germany in 1959. He later returned to Washington and provided low-level intelligence to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.

James E. Nolan, Jr., a former deputy assistant director of the FBI for counterintelligence, believed the case had even more ramifications than met the eye. By the time that KITTY HA WK, whom Nolan regarded as a KGB plant, although others do not, had provided additional information that led to the major, "he was no longer in the Army. He was given immunity in exchange for his cooperation. Nosenko's Sasha was used briefly as a double when the Soviets showed some new interest in him. We let it run for a little while."

Nolan said he believed that the Soviets recontacted this Sasha "to build up KITTY HAWK'S bona fides, because KITTY HA WK had provided information that led us to the Army major. So recontact would prove the major was indeed a Soviet agent, and thus underscore KITTY HAWK'S bona fides."

The case of the Army major, while not very important in itself in the annals of the Cold War, illustrates the complexity of the world of counterintelligence. Golitsin warned of a Sasha in the CIA, Nosenko spoke of a Sasha in the military, who was identified with the help of a third Soviet KGB officer whose provenance remains unresolved to this day.

Nosenko's debriefers questioned him as well, as they had in 1962, about Vladislav Kovshuk, the high-ranking KGB official who had visited Washington in 1957 under an alias. Golitsin had speculated that Kovshuk was so important that he must have come to the United States to meet a mole inside the American government, perhaps in the CIA.

Nosenko repeated that Kovshuk had been dispatched to Washington to meet a KGB source code-named ANDREY. According to Bagley, Nosenko provided enough information to lead U.S. intelligence to a noncommissioned officer who had worked at the American embassy in Moscow, had since returned to the United States, and lived in the Washington area. By most accounts, ANDREY was a sergeant who had worked in the embassy motor pool." ANDREY knew nothing, and was not prosecuted," Bagley said. Kovshuk did meet with ANDREY near the end of the Russian's tour in Washington, Bagley added. "He made the contact, turned ANDREY over to the residentura, and then left. What was he doing the rest of the time? Nosenko did not know. 'He was hunting for him,' Nosenko said. We asked, , A chief of section hun ting for a source?' Nosenko said, 'It took all that time to find him.' But he was in the phone book in Washington, we pointed out. Nosenko had no answer."

Bagley's comments on Kovshuk's mission capture the flavor of his view of Nosenko, and Angleton's, and of the interrogation that began in 1964. Virtually all of Nosenko's statements and explanations were met with a deep, pervasive suspicion. As a result, nothing Nosenko could say was accepted at face value.

"Nosenko was a plant, is a plant, and always will be," Bagley said. [l0] In this fixed view of Nosenko as a KGB plant, the leads the defector provided were either yielding up spent assets, spies whose value was long past, or were designed to deflect from the real mole or moles in the CIA whom Golitsin was trying to uncover.

Golitsin said Sasha was a CIA penetration. Nosenko said Sasha was an Army officer. Golitsin said Kovshuk came to America to meet a high-level mole. Nosenko said Kovshuk came to meet ANDREY, who turned out to be an Army sergeant.

"He was pointing away from the Golitsin leads to penetrations," Bagley said. "My test for defectors is, do they provide current access to previously unknown information? Nosenko didn't." But Nosenko seemed to have revealed a great number of cases. For example, what about his leads to Robert Lee Johnson, who cracked the safe containing NA TO secrets in Paris? "Robert Lee Johnson had lost his access and was a burned-out case," Bagley replied.

On April 4, less than two months after the defector had arrived in the United States, the CIA began what its officials euphemistically referred to as the "hostile interrogation" of Yuri Nosenko. Although he had chosen to live in a free society, Nosenko was confined by the CIA for the next four years and eight months. For more than two years of this period, he was isolated in a concrete cell under brutal conditions. Later the conditions improved, but his movements were still restricted. Nosenko, to put it simply, had become a prisoner of the CIA, lost in an American gulag.

Former CIA director Stansfield Turner has blamed Angleton for the decision to imprison Nosenko, a view bitterly disputed by Angleton loyalists. "Angleton ... decided that Nosenko was a double agent, and set out to force him to confess," Turner wrote. "... Angleton's counterintelligence team set out to break the man psychologically." [11]

Responsibility for the decision to incarcerate Nosenko and place him under harsh interrogation was shared with Angleton by Helms; David E. Murphy, the head of the Soviet division; and Bagley, the division's counterintelligence officer. Murphy minced no words in telling Helms that Nosenko "must be broken" if the CIA was to learn the truth, although the agency's desire for more information, he admitted, "may conflict with the need to break Subject." [12]

When questioned by a congressional committee about his own role, Helms waffled. The decision, he said, "was jointly arrived at." He added: "I don't know who exactly made the final decision. ... I was a party to the decision. ... I don't want to duck anything. ... I was there. It would not have been my final decision to make." [13] In testimony to the same committee, Murphy was asked if he had "primary responsibility for what happened to Nosenko." He replied: "I was responsible for the case." [14]

However, according to Bagley, "The decision to start hostile interrogation was made by David Murphy, Helms, and me. Angleton did agree to the incarceration. It was unthinkable that he didn't. Angleton agreed to the hostile interrogation, along with Helms and Murphy. Angleton never opposed the incarceration." [15]

A former CIA officer who closely studied this period of the agency's history, however, had no doubt that " Angleton was the bottom line on incarcerating Nosenko. Absolutely. Murphy did it? Horseshit! Sure, Soviet division had responsibility for Nosenko, but it could not have happened unless Jim signed off on it, unless he agreed."

The CIA officer then made a startling disclosure: "What Jim really wanted to do with Nosenko was send him back to the Soviet Union. Helms would have no part of it. And rightly so. Then the idea arose, let's start this harsh interrogation."

One of the problems faced by later investigators was that it was almost impossible to find traces of Angleton's role in the affair. "I never saw a document he signed off on," the CIA man said, "but he didn't object. Jim's fingerprints were never on anything. He was the artist of all time. Nosenko was confined for three years. But in three years, Angleton never objected. There is no shred of evidence that Angleton ever complained to Helms."

For almost a year and a half, beginning on April 4, 1964, Nosenko was confined under harsh conditions in an attic room of a safe house outside Washington. He had been told that day that he was being taken there for a physical and a polygraph test. He later described what happened. "After finishing the test an officer of CIA has come in the room and talked with a technician. [The CIA officer] started to shout that I was a phoney and immediately several guards entered in the room. The guards ordered me to stand by the wall, to undress and checked me. After that I was taken upstairs in an attic room. The room had a metal bed attached to the floor in the center of this room. Nobody told me anything, how long I would be there or what would happen to me." [16] Some days later, the interrogations began.

Nosenko had no access to television, radio, or newspapers, his food was subsistence-level -- for many months it consisted mainly of weak tea, watery soup, and porridge -- and he was under constant observation. He was also denied cigarettes. "I was smoking from fourteen years old, never quitted. I was rejected to smoke. I didn't see books. I didn't read anything. I was sitting in four walls ... I was hungry ... I was thinking about food because all the time I want to eat. I was receiving very small amount, and very poor food." [17]

Washington is brutally hot in the summer, and attic rooms unbearable. Nosenko told what it was like: "I was sitting in some kind of attic; it was hot, no air conditioning, cannot breathe; windows -- no windows, closed over. I was permitted to shave once a week, to take showers once a week. From me were taken toothpaste, toothbrush. The conditions were inhuman. ..." [18]

As the days marched by, Helms had a problem: what, if anything, to tell the Warren Commission, which was pressing to complete its report. Helms met with former Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission chairman, and informed him that the CIA had been unable to establish Nosenko's bona fides and could not vouch for the truth of his story. The commission never questioned Nosenko, and its final report, issued on September 27, contained no reference to Nosenko.

It is doubtful that Helms remembered to tell the former Chief Justice, whose Supreme Court promulgated strict standards to protect the rights of criminal suspects, that Nosenko was confined in an airless attic. But as bad as it was, Nosenko's quarters and the conditions under which he was held were luxurious compared to what awaited him. While the Russian was locked up in the attic, the CIA's Office of Security was constructing a special prison cell for him on the Farm.

All CIA trainees go through courses at the Farm, a school for spies in Virginia near Colonial Williamsburg. The CIA base is under military cover as the " Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, Department of Defense, Camp Peary." Armed guards protect the installation, which stretches over ten thousand acres along the York River. The heavily wooded site is, of course, closed to outsiders and surrounded by a chain link fence. During World War II, it was a prisoner-of-war camp for captured German soldiers.

Blindfolded and handcuffed, Nosenko was taken there in August of 1965 and placed in a twelve-by-twelve-foot windowless concrete cell in a house deep in the woods on the CIA base. Nosenko was watched day and night by a television camera. To occupy his mind, he secretly made a chess set from threads, but it was seen and confiscated by the guards. In an effort to keep track of time, he also fashioned a calendar out of lint from his clothing.

He was desperate for something to read. He was given toothpaste, but it was taken away when he tried, under a blanket, to read the writing on the tube. Nosenko was held, interrogated, and polygraphed in this cell for more than two years.

More than a year went by after Nosenko arrived at the Farm before he was allowed to get any fresh air and exercise. He was taken from his cell for thirty minutes a day to a fenced-in exercise pen, from where he could only see the sky.

It was "deplorable," Helms later told congressional investigators, but the CIA was in a position where it risked criticism for holding Nosenko too long, but would have been "damned the other way" if it had not "dug his teeth out to find out what he knows about Oswald." The cell on the Farm, Helms tried to persuade the House committee, was therapeutic for Nosenko, almost a Virginia branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Mr. Nosenko, at the time he defected and before, was a very heavy drinker. One of the problems we had with him during his first period of time in the United States was he didn't want to do anything except drink and carouse. We had problems with him in an incident in Baltimore where he starting punching up a bar and so forth. One of the reasons to hold him in confinement was to get him away from the booze and settle him down and see if we could make some sense with him." [19]

Nosenko was convinced he was given drugs, including "hallucination drugs," during his confinement. The CIA has denied this, claiming that Nosenko was given only necessary medications. [20] Helms testified that he turned down a request to administer "truth drugs, such as, I believe, sodium pentothal." Another CIA witness said the proposed truth serum was sodium amytal. [21] In his memoir, Stansfield Turner said Nosenko was given "one or more of four drugs on seventeen occasions." [22]
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:32 am

Part 2 of 2

Other psychological pressures were applied. For example, just before he was flown to the Farm, Nosenko was told by his CIA interrogators that he would be held for more than ten years. While confined, Nosenko was poly graphed three times. But the first two lie-detector tests were rigged, designed to break Nosenko and persuade him to confess that he was a dispatched agent of the KGB. The first time, the CIA man giving the lie-detector test was instructed to tell Nosenko he had flunked, regardless of the outcome. Nosenko was also told that the polygraph could read his brainwaves, which was not true. The results of a second polygraph-actually a series of polygraphs over ten days-suggested Nosenko was lying about Oswald, but the CIA later said the test was invalid. And small wonder; Nosenko was wired to the machine for seven hours for one test, and while his interrogators took their lunch breaks, he was left strapped to the chair so he could not move. One such "lunch break" lasted for four hours. The polygraph operator also harassed Nosenko, warning that there was no hope for him, and that he might well go crazy. Nosenko passed a third polygraph, which included two questions about Oswald, and the CIA considered this test to be the only one that was valid.

Bagley personally handled the Nosenko interrogation by closed-circuit television that linked the special prison on the Farm to Langley headquarters. Three interrogators on the scene questioned Nosenko. Bagley contended that the CIA had not, at the outset, planned to incarcerate Nosenko for so long. "We expected it to be ten days, two weeks, to confront him with the holes in his story." Why, then, had it lasted more than four and a half years? "He dug himself deeper with new contradictions," Bagley said. "He clearly had not held the jobs he claimed. And he said he had participated in operations against the U.S. embassy that he didn't take part in. His statements were designed to hide something."

Guided by Bagley, the interrogators pounced on any conflicts in Nosenko's story. For example, Nosenko had claimed that in Geneva in 1962, he personally participated in the operation against Edward Ellis Smith, in which the CIA 's first officer in Moscow had been sexually compromised by his KGB maid. Smith's entanglement with the KGB swallow was discovered in 1956. [23] Nosenko said he had been transferred to the Seventh Department, handling tourists, in 1955. "During the hostile interrogation of Nosenko," Bagley said, "he was confronted with the fact that he said he handled Smith, but how could he have handled Smith if he was already transferred to the tourist department? 'Who's Smith?' Nosenko asked. Upon which we played back the tapes of the '62 meeting in Geneva in which he talked about Smith. The tapes were loud and clear. He listened to them, and he said" -- here Bagley grimaced, imitating Nosenko -- "'Mr. Bagley got me drunk.'"

It was, of course, entirely possible that Nosenko was puffing when he claimed to have entrapped Smith, but he surely would have known of the operation. The successful ensnarement, in bed, of the CIA's first man in Moscow would undoubtedly be the subject of considerable corridor gossip, and much snickering, inside the Second Chief Directorate. And it was also possible that the maid had been planted on Smith as early as 1955, before Nosenko transferred to the tourist branch. As with so much in the world of counterintelligence, almost every event can have an explanation that is either sinister or innocent, depending on one's viewpoint.

James Angleton, for example, made much of the fact that the premier FBI source in New York City, a KGB officer code-named FEDORA by the bureau, had vouched for Nosenko's bona fides. This, Angleton believed, proved that FEDORA himself was a plant, since the FBI source had assured the FBI that Nosenko was a real KGB defector.

It was a line of reasoning for which an undergraduate in a beginning college course in logic would be flunked. In the first place, Nosenko might be a real defector; the comments of the FBI's Soviet asset in New York would then be accurate. But even if Nosenko was assumed to be a plant, as of course Angleton believed, there were several alternative explanations for FEDORA 's statements, including the obvious possibility that the Soviet source in New York had not been told by the KGB that Nosenko had been sent. Or if Nosenko was real and FEDORA a plant, FEDORA might still support Nosenko to shore up his own credibility. The permutations and combinations were, in fact, endless. FEDORA'S comments about Nosenko really proved nothing about either man.

A former high-ranking FBI official disputed Angleton's conclusion that FEDORA had vouched for Nosenko in the first place. "FEDORA was simply reporting overhearing a conversation about Nosenko in which two Soviets at the UN mission, probably both KGB, were saying, 'Oh, it's terrible about Nosenko.'" He pointed out that the New York Times, on February II, had carried a front-page article from Geneva reporting Nosenko's defection. It would have been read, of course, by Soviet diplomats in New York. "FEDORA wasn't confirming Nosenko's bona fides at all. He was reporting a conversation, and he had no knowledge of whether what he overheard was true. But to the Scotty Milers and other people in Angleton's shop, the information from FEDORA was just what they were looking for."

Angleton had one reason to doubt FEDORA that was more persuasive. "FEDORA said a cable had been received from Moscow about Nosenko's defection," a former CIA counterintelligence officer said. "We ran all sorts of NSA tests and couldn't find any evidence such a cable existed." The National Security Agency, the nation's code-breaking arm, might not be able to read the Soviet code, but from information provided by FEDORA, it could perform traffic analysis that might indicate whether a cable was sent on the date, and at the time, that he said it was. NSA was not infallible, however, and it could not always pinpoint a particular message.

FEDORA, code-named SCOTCH by the CIA, was Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, a KGB officer under cover at the United Nations, first as an employee of the secretariat and then as a scientific attache in the Soviet mission to the UN. He began feeding information to the FBI early in 1962, only a few months after he arrived in the United States to begin work on November 29, 1961, as a consultant to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Kulak, then thirty-nine, married and accompanied by his wife in New York, was a short, stocky man whose name, of course, meant "wealthy farmer" n Russian. "We called him Fatso," said an FBI man who worked the case. [24]

Kulak was no run-of-the-mill KGB man. He was a spy who specialized in collecting scientific and technical secrets. He had a doctorate in chemistry and had worked as a radiological chemist in a Moscow laboratory. [25] As winter turned to spring in 1962, Kulak had walked into the FBI office on Manhattan's East Side one day and offered his services. He said he was disgruntled about lack of progress in his KGB career. The Soviet system, he said, had not recognized his abilities. But either Kulak or the FBI building might have been watched by the Soviets. Eugene C. Peterson, who served fifteen years in FBI counterintelligence, and became chief of the Soviet section, agreed that if FEDORA was genuine, he was taking a chance in the way he made the initial contact. "It was risky," he said. "It raised questions."

Peterson, a tall, husky, balding man with clear blue eyes and a skeptical, streetwise face, added: "FEDORA provided a paucity of CI information. He did not identify any penetrations." Mostly, he said, FEDORA identified who was who in the KGB residentura in New York.

J. Edgar Hoover had total faith in FEDORA, but it was always possible that the doubts at the working level never got up the line to Hoover. And the doubts did exist. "There were questions, right from the start," Peterson said. "And certainly for the last four to six years."

On the other hand, a former high-ranking CIA official insisted that FEDORA had provided the United States with valuable information. He was convinced that the KGB man was a valid source, for several reasons. "There were a whole series of things," he said. "His attention to details about surveillance and countersurveillance. You surveil the individual and when he comes to the meeting you see if he is taking precautions, whether he is worried about being followed. FEDORA was worried about surveillance. If he walks out of his office and goes straight to the safe house, you know something is wrong. Then, there was his willingness to disclose information about KGB officers. Which he did. They don't like to give away identities of officers."

Above all, the CIA man said, FEDORA had revealed to the United States what the KGB had tasked him to collect in the area of science and technology. "He gave us their S&T requirements. A KGB wish list. Identifying factories where military equipment was being manufactured. Everything he wanted was military. Tanks, missiles, everything. He was a very useful source, given the paucity of our access in those days."

To make Kulak look valuable to the KGB, the FBI provided him with "feed material," genuine U.S. secrets cleared by the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and passed to FEDORA for transmittal to Moscow. "It was low-grade stuff," the CIA man said, "but not phony."

The periodic clandestine meetings between Kulak and the FBI were videotaped. "I saw videos of FEDORA being debriefed," the CIA official related. "Chunky guy, typical Russian. These were New York FBI agents debriefing him, in English. With a big bottle of Scotch from which all were drinking."

In February 1963, Kulak left the UN secretariat and switched over to the Soviet mission to the United Nations. In 1967, Kulak told the FBI he had been recalled to Moscow on normal rotation. When he returned in 1971, again as a scientific attache, he resumed his relationship with the bureau. But FEDORA 's position, if he was a true agent-in-place, became more and more tenuous. News accounts, including one by Seymour M. Hersh in the New York Times, suggested that the FBI had penetrated a Soviet diplomatic mission in the United States. Hersh reported that one of the reasons that President Richard Nixon had established the secret White House plumbers unit was ostensible concern that "a highly placed Soviet agent of the KGB ... operating as an American counterspy would be compromised" by the Watergate inquiries. [26]

In 1971, during the furor over the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, Kulak reported that a set of the papers had been delivered to the Soviet embassy. The CIA scoffed at the report. In a meeting with David R. Young, one of the chiefs of the White House plumbers, CIA director Richard Helms said he discounted the report because "we know the fellow who has been giving us these reports and we have our doubts about them." [27]

In all, Kulak/FEDORA served two years in New York with the UN secretariat, beginning in 1961, and then two tours with the Soviet mission between 1964 and 1977, with a four-year break in between when he was called back to Moscow . [28] Despite the doubts about Aleksei Kulak, KGB walk-ins are hard to come by; over this sixteen-year period, the FBI paid him approximately $100,000.

"In 1977 when FEDORA was getting ready to go back for the last time," Peterson said, "we pointed out the articles that had been published. We told him, 'Your life is in jeopardy. ''Oh, I can handle that,' he said. My own view is that if he wasn't a plant, he would have been executed."

After passing information to the FBI for more than a dozen years, Kulak/FEDORA returned to Moscow for the last time in 1977 and was subsequently seen there by the CIA, alive and well. That, of course, did not prove he was genuine. It either meant that Kulak was a true spy for the United States who had escaped detection, or a double agent for the KGB all along. "He would have been under surveillance in Moscow," Peterson said, "and when he met with the CIA, they would have moved in and rolled him up."

In 1978, the writer Edward Jay Epstein revealed the code name Soviet diplomats had been assigned in this country for that long. Told that the FBI FEDORA, describing him as a KGB officer at the UN collecting data on "science and technology." [29] U.S. intelligence officials were shaken by the disclosure, because the description of the Soviet asset was so specific that they assumed he was a dead man. "We estimated that after the Epstein book, he [FEDORA] was through," a former senior CIA official said. "There is no way he could have survived." [30] But, oddly, nothing happened to FEDORA, as far as the CIA could learn.

Boris A. Solomatin, who served as the KGB's New York resident from 1971 to 1975, during Kulak's second tour in Manhattan, offered one possible explanation. In an interview with the author in Moscow in September of 1991, Solomatin, although declining to refer to FEDORA by his true name, said: "There were circumstances that deflected suspicion. He was a Hero of the Soviet Union during the war, and it diverted suspicion."

The debate over FEDORA'S bona fides has never subsided. The CIA accepted him as genuine in 1975 (after Angleton's departure). [31] The FBI has had more difficulty making up its mind, and has flip-flopped back and forth on the question. In 1967, the FBI seemed to accept FEDORA as bona fide. [32]

But a later secret study supervised by James E. Nolan, Jr., the deputy assistant FBI director for counterintelligence, and completed in March 1976, concluded that FEDORA was a plant, a view said to have been modified by the FBI again in the early 1980s. By 1990, the CIA had learned that Kulak had died of natural causes.

At the same time that FEDORA was active, the FBI and later the CIA were receiving information from another Soviet source in New York City, Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, an officer of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. He was code-named TOPHAT by the bureau and BOURBON by the CIA, which preferred liquor over headgear. In intelligence circles, the names FEDORA and TOPHAT became inextricably intertwined, like ham and eggs. In 1966, Polyakov was sent to Burma, and in the early 1970s he was posted to India, where Paul L. Dillon served as his CIA case officer. Back in Moscow after that, he Continued to send information to the CIA, using a burst transmitter provided by the agency. The Soviets announced in 1990 that TOPHAT had been caught. They later said he had been executed on March l5, 1988. [33]

But FEDORA and TOPHAT were sideshows. At Langley, it had become increasingly clear that the Nosenko interrogation was a disaster. Moreover, it was one that carried a potential for scandal if the public should learn that the CIA had imprisoned a defector. Whether Angleton and other CIA officials even stopped to consider the catastrophic effect on other potential defectors should the Soviets find out about Nosenko's ordeal is not known.

But something had to be done. In 1967, Helms, by now the director of the CIA, ordered Bruce Solie, of the Office of Security, to review the question of Nosenko's bona fides. On October 28, Nosenko was finally taken from his cell and shifted to the first of three safe houses in the Washington area. Conditions improved considerably, but his movements were still restricted, and he was not a free man. [34] Not until March 1969 did the CIA finally allow Nosenko a two-week vacation in Florida. In a memo to Helms, Howard J. Osborn, the director of the Office of Security, wrote: "Nosenko is becoming increasingly restive and desirous of obtaining freedom on his own. After nearly five years of varying degrees of confinement, this desire, including that for feminine companionship, is understandable." [35]

Bagley clearly saw the potential for scandal. He sent a letter to Angleton warning of the "devastating consequences" if Nosenko was set free. Taking pencil to paper, he wrote down a list of possible "actions" to handle the Nosenko problem. Option number 5 was "Liquidate the man," number 6 was "Render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug etc.). Possible aim, commitment to loony bin," and number 7 was "Commitment to loony bin without making him nuts." [36]

But Bagley, who had risen to deputy chief of the Soviet division by 1966, never sent his list of chilling options to anyone, and it was obviously not meant to see the light of day. It became public only because in 1976, Angleton's successor as CI chief, George T. Kalaris -- with the approval of then CIA director George Bush -- named John L. Hart, a former station chief, to conduct another review of the Nosenko case. Hart discovered Bagley's penciled list in the files and told Congress about it.

Bagley, ambushed by Hart, was furious. The options on his list, he said, were "never proposed, it was a thought process: here we sit with this guy and what do about it? These were handwritten notes in pencil, never shown to anyone else, never intended for anyone else."

Had he really contemplated murdering Nosenko? "Of course not," Bagley replied. "I wouldn't permit it and it was not agency policy. There wouldn't be any thought of it. I might add it's my own policy as well. I don't go around killing people. And Hart knew it." But the thought had occurred; "liquidate the man" was one of the ghastly options on Bagley's list.

In October 1968, Bruce Solie submitted his report to Helms, clearing Nosenko. [37] On the basis of the report, the KGB man was rehabilitated, hired as a consultant by the CIA, and given $137,052 in lost pay and resettlement expenses. [38]

Helms did not have an easy time of it when he tried to explain the Nosenko affair to Congress. Representative Harold S. Sawyer, a Michigan Republican, asked the former CIA director whether he knew that what had been done to Nosenko, holding him without trial, subjecting him to "physical and mental torture," broke the law. Helms wasn't sure; he thought Nosenko's legal status fell into a "gray area." The congressman did not buy it:

Mr. Sawyer: Well, he was a human being, wasn't he?

Mr. Helms: I believe so.

Mr. Sawyer: You know in most states even treating an animal like this will land you in jail.


Helms did not reply.

As for Yuri Nosenko, he summed up his experience succinctly. "I passed through hell," he said. "I was true defector."
_______________

Notes:

1. Bagley was not sure of the movie theater marquee he stood under in Geneva that night, but "I think it was ABC. There was such a theater in Geneva at the time."

2. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 490.

3. According to Kisevalter, Nosenko's leads enabled the FBI to identify Johnson, but not to arrest him, since the bureau Jacked proof of his espionage. Back in the United States, and employed at the Pentagon, Johnson went A WOL in J 964 after his wife threatened to expose him as a Soviet spy. When FBI agents called on her to investigate his disappearance, she told them the truth, and implicated Mintkenbaugh. Johnson surrendered in Reno, Nevada, late in November and confessed. He and Mintkenbaugh pleaded guilty in J965 and were each sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison. Johnson died in prison in May 1972 after being stabbed by his son, Robert, who was visiting him at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

4. In 1978, when Nosenko testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he said the KGB was unaware of any knowledge Oswald might have had about the U-2 because it had not questioned him. Asked why Oswald, a radar operator at Atsugi, had not been interrogated about the U-2, Nosenko replied that the KGB "didn't know that he had any connection with U-2 flights." Testifying to the same committee, former CIA director Richard Helms said he found Nosenko's testimony on this point "quite incredible" and added that he had been unable "to swallow" it.

On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald arrived in the USSR, the Soviets shot down the CIA U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Much of the plane remained intact. From that date on, the Soviets had Jess need to question anyone about the U-2; they had one. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 479, and September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 179.

5. FBI report of March 5, 1964, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 509.

6. Ibid., p. 512

7. Ibid., p. 513.

8. Ibid, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 21.

9. Ibid

10. Bagley stated this with utter conviction, and an almost religious faith, during an interview with the author early in 1990, twenty-six years after Nosenko's defection. "Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 44.

12. Memorandum, Murphy to Helms, February 17, 1964, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 87.

13. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 103.

14. Ibid., March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 531.

15. For the most detailed examination of Angleton's role, see Samuel Halpern and Hayden Peake, "Did Angleton Jail Nosenko?" in International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 3, No.4 (Winter 1989). The article, although an apologia for Angleton, does demonstrate that other CIA officials were involved. However, the study also quotes Bagley, in a footnote, as saying that the decision was "taken jointly" by the CIA officials involved, "including Angleton" (italics added).

16. Affidavit of Yuri Nosenko, August 7, 1978, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, pp. 106-8.

17. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Se1ect Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, pp. 524-25.

18. Ibid., p. 525.

19. Ibid., September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 31.

20. According to CIA records, however, Nosenko was given Thorazine, a powerful drug used to control psychotic disorders and manic depression. Other drugs administered were Zactrin, also known as Zactirin, a mild tranquilizer and aspirin combination no longer produced; Donnatal, an antispasmodic drug for indigestion; tetracycline, a common antibiotic; and antihistamines and cough syrup. Nosenko told a congressional committee in 1978 that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug, and speculated more recently that it was LSD. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September J978, Vol. XII, pp. 521,525, and 543; and Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 188.

21 Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 116, and September 1978, Vol. II, p. 532.

22. Turner, Secrecy and Democracy, p. 45. When questioned by the author, Turner said he did not recall the source of this information in his memoir. However, since Turner did not identify the drugs in his book, his assertion that Nosenko was given drugs seventeen times is not necessarily in conflict with the CIA's official position that Nosenko was given only normal prescription drugs, no truth serums.

23. The KGB prefers to call an agent used as a seductress a "sparrow." The CIA uses the term "swallow." The reasons for these ornithological differences are not clear.

24. FEDORA was later erroneously identified in some published reports as Victor M. Lessiovski, a KGB officer who held a high rank in the UN. Lessiovski was rumored to be the KGB resident in New York City. FEDORA told the FBI that Lessiovski was indeed a top KGB agent, an important man, but not the resident. A short, plump man who wa1ked his wife's pet poodle every night near their home in Manhattan, Lessiovski served as personal assistant to UN Secretary-General U Thant of Burma for eight years. The KGB man moved in the highest social circles in Manhattan. He was so well connected, in fact, that when Pope Paul VI visited New York in 1965, it was Lessiovski who arranged for Jacqueline Kennedy to meet the pontiff. The former First Lady was amused that she had been introduced to the Pope by the KGB. Lessiovski left New York in 1971 and returned to the Soviet Union.

25. Although a consultant, Kulak was an employee of the UN secretariat for two years, attached to the Office of the Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs. He held the highest professional rank at the UN below that of a director.

26. Seymour M. Hersh, "The President and the Plumbers A Look at 2 Security Questions," New York Times, December 9, 1973, p. J. To test whether FEDORA was in jeopardy as a result of the published reports, a former FBI counterintelligence agent said, the CIA gave one of the news stories to a low-level analyst. Within a few hours, he claimed, the analyst had pinpointed Kulak as the likely FB1 source. But Hersh's story did not indicate whether the KGB man was based in New York or Washington. It did say that the source had been a double agent "for nearly ten years," but other had been concerned that his story might unmask FEDORA, Hersh laughed. "The source came from high up in the FBI," he said.

27. David Young, "Memorandum of Conversation, July 21, 1971," in Statement of Information Submitted on Behalf of President Nixon, Hearings, House Committee on the Judiciary, May-June 1974, Book IV, p. 107.

28. Oddly, Kulak's name varied slightly on each tour. In Permanent Missions to the United Nations, the official diplomatic list of the UN, the name "Alexei Sidorovich Kulak" appears for the first time in January 1964, with the title "First Secretary" of the Soviet UN mission. From January 1968 through May 1971, he drops off the list. He reappears in September 1971, this time as "Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak," with the new title "Counsellor." He drops off the list for the last time in February 1977.

29. Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: Reader's Digest Press/McGraw-Hill, 1978), p. 20.

30. The counterspies were almost equally appalled by the apparent origin of the disclosure. It was well known in intelligence circles that Epstein's major source had been James Angleton. The former CIA counterintelligence chief, officials concluded, had deliberately blown FEDORA, whom Angleton considered a plant.

31. The CIA decision was based on a study by Benjamin Franklin Pepper, an officer in the Soviet division, who concluded that FEDORA was authentic.

32. Under the cryptonym VUPOINT, an FB1 study that year of FEDORA and other Soviet assets suggested that Kulak was a legitimate source.

33. In his book Spycatcher, published in 1987, former M15 official Peter Wright wrote that TOPHAT had provided information that Jed to the arrest in 1965 of Frank C. Bossard, a forty-nine-year-old employee of the British Aviation Ministry who was photographing documents about American missile guidance systems on his lunch hour. Bossard was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison. In fact, the FBI intelligence division had misled MI5, wrongly attributing these leads to TOPHAT in order to protect another GRU source in New York, code-named NICKNACK.

34. In all, from April 4, 1964, to August 13, 1965, Nosenko was confined to a safe house near Washington. From August 14, 1965, to October 27, 1967, he was imprisoned in the cell at the Farm. From October 28, 1967, to December 1968 he was held at three safe houses in the Washington area.

35. Memorandum, Osborn to Helms, March 24, 1969, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 41.

36. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U .S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vo1. II, pp. 519, 525, 536. Some of the words in Bagley's jottings were abbreviated but are spelled out here for clarity.

37. A 900-page summary of the agency's file on Nosenko, prepared by Bagley, later cut by him to 447 pages, and submitted in February 1968, reached an opposite conclusion. It argued that Nosenko had lied on every major point about his KGB background. A decade later, the House Assassinations Committee also concluded that "Nosenko lied about Oswald." But the committee noted that the defector's imprisonment "virtually ruined him as a valid source of information on the assassination." The Final Assassinations Report: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 114. All other CIA studies supported Nosenko's bona fides. In addition to the Solie report, there were two 1ater internal reviews of the Nosenko case, one by John Hart in J976, while George Bush headed the CIA, and one in the spring of 198J, by Jack J. Fie1dhouse, a CIA officer, undertaken at the request of CIA director William J. Casey. Both reports, as well as Solie's study, concluded that Nosenko was what he said he was -- a KGB officer who changed sides and defected to the CIA.

38. Other Soviet intelligence officers who came over to the West in the years since Nosenko's arrival have said he was, as far as they knew, a bona fide defector. For example, Victor Gundarev, a KGB colonel who defected in Athens in 1986, told me in July 1989. "Nosenko was real. I was a student at the KGB Higher School in 1964. They talked about him as a traitor. Of course it could be a cover story, I don't know." It is true that other defectors might not have va1id or detailed knowledge about Nosenko. On the other hand, according to former senior CIA officials, no defector subsequent to Nosenko has provided information that casts doubt on his bona fides.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:33 am

Chapter 12: Molehunt

By the late summer of 1963, the mole hunt at the CIA was in full cry.

Golitsin's sojourn to England had temporarily slowed it down, but after the defector's abrupt return from London, the search for penetrations gained new momentum. The mole hunt was directed by James Angleton, who now began showing Golitsin classified CIA files so that the defector could comb through the agency's secrets, looking for clues and likely suspects. [1]

In July, the same month that Golitsin returned to Langley, Peter Karlow, the first suspect, had resigned. But nothing had been proved against him. If Karlow was not the mole, then who was? Nor could it be assumed that there was only one traitor in the ranks. The CI Staff did not, in fact, confine itself to searching for a single Soviet agent inside the CIA. The agency might be honeycombed with moles. As the investigation grew, its target expanded, following a familiar rule of bureaucracy. [2]

To conduct the mole hunt, Angleton had turned to the Special Investigations Group (SIG) within the Counterintelligence Staff. [3] Its chief at first was Birch D. O'Neal, a courtly Georgian with a syrup- thick Southern accent, who had joined the FBI in 1938 and later switched over to the CIA. A portly, florid-faced man, O'Neal, as befitted his position, was extremely secretive. "Nobody had the vaguest notion of what Birch was doing," said a former colleague in the SIG, "to the point where you sometimes wondered whether he did either."

But if O'Neal, then fifty, and already looking toward his retirement, presided over the hunt, the master of the hounds was Scotty Miler, whom Angleton handpicked and brought in from Ethiopia, where he was station chief, to join the SIG and the search for penetrations. Angleton named him deputy chief of the SIG.

Miler, an old Far East hand, slow-spoken and tough, had a natural bent for counterintelligence work. In his view, every possible suspect had to be scrutinized, for a mole could be anyone, anywhere. Every lead had to be followed up meticulously. The security of the agency might depend upon it. And Miler had a system. If a CIA colleague fell under suspicion, he would draw up a list of every questionable item in the man's personal background or arising out of the operations in which he had been involved. Then, one by one, plodding through the files, he would eliminate those points for which, after further investigation, he had satisfied himself there were benign explanations. When this laborious process had been completed, if there were still items left on Miler's list, then the suspect would be marked down as a possible security risk. Not necessarily guilty, but a risk. Agency officials at a higher level would have to decide what to do about the suspect; that was not Miler's responsibility. Sometimes Miler would have dealings with the very people he was secretly investigating, or he would run into them in the halls. It made him feel uncomfortable. It was a difficult job, mole hunting, but someone had to do it.

Half a dozen other CIA officers were assigned to the SIG, including Jean M. Evans, an ultraconservative former OSS counterintelligence officer, bilingual in French, who concentrated on analyzing Golitsin's leads. [4] A spare, slender man of medium height, with thinning hair, Evans wore glasses perched on a sharp nose that gave him a rather birdlike appearance. He seldom talked about himself. A New Englander, with a laconic, Yankee manner, Evans had been an Army colonel before joining the CIA and had worked for the agency in Munich. In Munich, he had headed counterespionage at the CIA's Pullach base, which operated in tandem with General Gehlen's organization. [5] Like Miler, Evans was a meticulous man; no detail escaped his eye. But then, as CI officers are fond of saying, counterintelligence is in the details.

Clare Edward Petty, another member of the SIG, was an Oklahoman, a trim, gray-haired, square-jawed man with a friendly, somewhat professorial air. He had joined the CIA after the war and worked in Germany with the Gehlen organization for eight years. He took pride in having fingered Heinz Felfe of the West German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) as a possible Soviet spy even before the defector Michal Goleniewski provided the leads that led to Felfe's arrest in 1961. Petty joined the SI G in 1966. In time, he was to become its most controversial member, because of the astonishing conclusion he reached about the identity of the senior CIA mole.

One of the SIG's tasks was to analyze a windfall of coded Soviet wireless traffic that had been acquired by Western intelligence during World War II and given the cryptonym VENONA. Only tantalizing bits of the code had been broken. The traffic included code names of Soviet agents in the West, but not their true identities. The SIG pored over the material, hoping for new leads to moles. Birch O'Neal eventually came to be responsible for the VENONA material, and for the collection abroad of "collateral," information such as travel records, shipping schedules, and so on, that might help to decrypt the Soviet traffic.

Another SIG member, Albert P. Kergel, also worked on the VENONA traffic and coordinated closely with the National Security Agency in the search for penetrations. A slender, balding man, well over six feet tall, Kergel was originally from New York State, a historian by training and a graduate of Columbia University whose specialty was the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. John D. Walker also worked on the VENONA intercepts for the SIG during a brief period between assignments as station chief in Israel and Australia.

There were a few others who came and went: Charles Arnold, a six-foot officer with a Dick Tracy profile and a perpetually worried expression, joined the SIG but quickly became known as a naysayer. "He was the one who'd say, 'You don't have a case," a former CIA officer recalled. " Arnold became very skeptical of the whole thing and wrote a lot of papers urging his fellow mole hunters to get back on track." With that sort of attitude Arnold was not destined to last long on the SIG; he soon left the agency and retired to a small town in the Virginia Tidewater. William F. Potocki, part of a husband-and-wife CIA team, also worked closely with the mole hunters. A big, blondhaired career officer from Chicago, he had worked in the Berlin base for Bill Harvey before joining Angleton's staff in 1958.

The SIG's offices were on the second floor of CIA headquarters, overlooking a low roof and just around the corner from Angleton's own office in Room 2C43 on the same floor. Indeed, from his office Angleton could look across the way to the SIG offices in the D corridor, located in a wing at right angles to his own. Just by glancing out the window, he could reassure himself that the mole seekers were hard at work.

The mole hunt was given the code name HONETOL. [6] It was to last almost two decades, and before it petered out, the search for penetrations had investigated more than 120 CIA officers. But the mole hunt was not limited to the CIA.

"We were investigating everyone in the United States government," said a former senior member of the CI Staff. "We had files on people in USIS, Commerce, and other agencies. We had newspaper people. Newspaper cases were in the files."

If the mole hunters ranged far afield, the main arena for their efforts was nevertheless the CIA itself. For it was the agency, obviously, that offered the most tempting target to the KGB.

A mole in the CIA could tell the KGB about the agency's ongoing operations and its plans for future operations. He or she could give the Soviets the names of CIA officers under cover around the globe and of key officials at Langley. And, perhaps even more important, a Soviet mole inside the CIA would be well placed to detect whether the KGB itself had been penetrated.

The real danger, from the Cl Staff's viewpoint, was not a low-level Soviet agent at Langley. Because of the compartmentalization that intelligence agencies practice, with varying degrees of success, a low-level traitor would probably have access only to a limited amount of classified material in his or her own section. The real danger would be a mole high enough up in the Clandestine Services to have access to a wide array of CIA operations and plans.

Ideally, the KGB would have liked to recruit the director of the CIA, or failing that, his deputy, or the deputy director for plans, the chief of the Soviet division of the DDO, or the chief of counterintelligence. Recruitments at that level would be rather difficult for the Soviets to achieve. And it would have been an awkward and delicate matter for Angleton and his mole hunters to investigate themselves or their own superiors. As a result, the CI Staff tended to look downward, and to concentrate its search for penetrations in the Soviet division, a choice dictated by both logic and discretion.

Because the target of the CIA's Soviet division was the Soviet Union itself, and because the division spent a great deal of its time trying to recruit Soviet intelligence officers, it was reasonable to assume that a high priority for the KGB would, in turn, be the recruitment of a CIA case officer inside the Soviet division. The case officer would have access to a broad range of operations, and beyond his own knowledge he would hear gossip in the corridors about other CIA assets and intelligence successes.

If the mole was not Peter Karlow, no matter; the list of CIA officers whose names began with K was long enough to provide ample fodder for the SIG for years. In July 1964, Golitsin, poring over the CIA's files, triumphantly pointed to a new candidate. This time, he was sure, he had found the penetration.

The officer's name began with the requisite letter. He had a Slavic background, since he was of Serbian descent, and he had served in Berlin. He thus fit Golitsin's mole "profile."

Richard Kovich was known as Dushan to his intimates. He was a seasoned officer who had handled half a dozen of the CIA's most sensitive cases. He supported George Kisevalter in the running of Pyotr Popov, the GR U colonel who was the first major CIA penetration of Soviet intelligence. He was the case officer for Mikhail Federov, whose CIA code name was UNACUTE, a GRU illegal whom Kovich had recruited in Paris. With the knowledge and consent of the Norwegian secret service, he ran Ingeborg Lygren, a Norwegian woman who worked in her country's embassy in Moscow but reported through Kovich to the CIA. And he was the first case officer for Yuri Loginov (code name AEGUSTO), a celebrated KGB illegal whose fate, along with Lygren's, became a major embarrassment to the agency.

In 1964, when his trouble began, Kovich was thirty-seven and had worked for the CIA for fourteen years, having joined the agency straight out of the University of Minnesota. A handsome man of six feet, Kovich was an extrovert with a sense of humor and a self-assurance that often made him speak up when others were silent.

He was born Dushan Kovacevich in Hibbing, Minnesota, the son of Serbian immigrants. His father, who was totally illiterate, ran electric shovels, digging iron ore from the Mesabi Range. It was a tough, polyglot town, where thirty-seven languages were spoken, and Kovich got out by joining the Navy at age seventeen.

The CIA assigned him to the Soviet division from the beginning. He started out with the agency in Japan, targeting Soviets, helped Kisevalter on the Popov case in Austria in 1953, then ran the defector shop in Washington for a while. (At the Farm, Kovich was known for putting the initials KTIP on the blackboard when he lectured to trainees about defectors; it meant Keep Them in Place.) In 1955, operating from headquarters, he supported Kisevalter again for three years on the long-running Popov operation.

By now, Kovich was a "third national officer" for the division, which meant he recruited people in other countries to work in Moscow. One ofhis recruits was Ingeborg Lygren, the secretary to Colonel Wilhelm Evang, the chief of the Norwegian military intelligence, who had sent her to Moscow in 1956 to work as the secretary to the Norwegian ambassador, Erik Braadland. Evang's service was the Norwegian equivalent of the CIA, and Lygren became Kovich's asset with Evang's blessing. As a NATO ally, Norway was happy to share with the CIA whatever information Lygren might pick up on the diplomatic gossip circuit. For three years, under the cryptonym SATIN- WOOD 37, she reported to Kovich from Moscow.

Per Hegge, a foreign correspondent for Aftenposten, the leading morning paper in Norway, remembered Lygren. He had met her by chance at Oslo University in the early 1960s. "She was taking Russian courses, after she had returned from Moscow," he said. "Perhaps she wanted to keep up with her Russian, I don't know." Lygren, he said, was an unlikely spy. "She was a gray mouse, very ordinary-looking, five-seven, maybe forty-five at the time. She grew up in Stavanger in southwest Norway where people have a strong regional accent that makes it very hard for them to pronounce Russian words, and she had a terrible accent."

Once Golitsin got to read Kovich's file, he must have seen the name Ingeborg Lygren and remembered that during the 1950s the KGB had a source in Moscow who was a Norwegian woman. That was it, Golitsin said, the big breakthrough; Lygren was a Soviet spy, and Kovich had run her for the CIA! Re had probably used Lygren as a communications channel to his KGB masters, or so Golitsin speculated.

In the career of Dushan Kovich, the CI Staff clearly had discovered a rich tapestry, with threads that led off in a dozen directions. One can almost hear the members of the SIG licking their chops. Here, at last was Sasha. They were wrong, and their mistake shattered several lives and in the end cost the CIA-and the American taxpayers-a great deal of money, but that is getting ahead of the story.

Angleton was ecstatic. Now the mole hunt was getting somewhere. In the fall of 1964, the CIA decided to tip off the Norwegians, but Angleton did not tell Evang. After all, if Lygren was a mole, her boss might be a supermole, working for the Soviets, hand in glove with Richard Kovich.

Instead, the CIA warned Norway's civilian surveillance police, a hush-hush agency headed by Asbjorn Bryhn, a tough character who had been a hit man in the Norwegian resistance, killing Nazis during the occupation, never sleeping in the same place twice. Alerted by the CIA, the surveillance police watched Lygren for months. Their reports noted that she led a remarkably ordinary life and engaged in no suspicious activities. Nevertheless, acting on the CIA's information, they arrested her in September 1965 and began a series of harsh interrogations.

At the time, Lygren was back in Oslo at her old job, working for Evang in military intelligence. But when the surveillance police arrested her they didn't tell Evang for several days. "She just didn't show up for work one day," Per Hegge said. "Of course, Evang was furious, He and Bryhn didn't speak to each other, even before the Lygren affair. The friction went back to World War II, when Bryhn was living in the woods on the run against the Nazis and Evang was with the Norwegian exiles in London, living well. There was a lot of animosity between London and the groups that were in the woods." [7]

Lygren was imprisoned for almost three months. The Norwegian press had a field day with the case. It looked as though a Russian spy was working in the very heart of Norwegian intelligence. The headlines trumpeted the spy case for weeks. Evang in particular came under heavy fire, but his offer to resign was turned down by the defense minister. One report suggested that Evang had sent Lygren to Moscow to approach the Soviets in the risky role of a double agent.

All the while, the surveillance police were grilling Lygren relentlessly, trying to force her to admit she was a Soviet spy, which she was not. One interrogation report was seized upon by Bryhn's staff as amounting to a "confession." Then, abruptly, in mid-December, the state's attorney decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. The case against Lygren was dropped. She was reinstated in her job, but, devastated by her ordeal, she eventually retired and left Oslo.

Parliament named a special panel, the Mellbye Commission, to investigate the war between the two intelligence agencies, and another official board, the Committee of Justice, to probe the Lygren case itself. [8]

Despite the fact that the Norwegian government had dropped the espionage charges against Lygren, Angleton remained convinced she was guilty. In March 1968, Bryhn's successor as head of the surveillance police, Gunnar Haarstad, came to Washington to meet with high officials of the CIA and the FBI. Angleton and his deputy, Ray Rocca, took the Norwegian police chief to a small restaurant in Georgetown for a pleasant lunch that Haarstad said "had very little to do with anything other than flies used when fishing for salmon. The Lygren case was not touched upon at all. ... However, when we stood up from the lunch table in Georgetown, Angleton took me a bit to one side, removed a piece of paper from his pocket, and asked me to read it." The note Angleton handed to him, he wrote, was a brief summary of Golitsin's information about Lygren. " Angleton wanted the paper back, but by quickly scrutinizing it, I could see that it contained nothing more than what I already knew from before." Haarstad realized that his American colleagues regarded the case against Lygren as "hard as a rock." Haarstad added: " Angleton let me understand, quite cryptically, that he was convinced that Golitsin's information and judgment were correct, and that it was a mistake for the Norwegian authorities to drop the case against Lygren." [9] Despite Angleton's view, a few months later, in July, the Norwegian parliament voted to award Lygren $4,200 as compensation for her unjustified arrest and suffering.

Frustrated in their efforts to nail Kovich over the Lygren case, the mole hunters turned their attention to UNACUTE, the GRU illegal whom Kovich had run in the midst of Lygren's tour in Moscow. Soviet illegals are trained to spy abroad without the benefit of diplomatic cover and immunity. They are difficult to spot, because, chameleonlike, they blend in with the populace of their target country. Typically, they open a small business as cover.

Mikhail Federov -- whose true name, Kovich believed, was Alexei Chistov -- was a GRU illegal who traveled to Switzerland with a Mexican passport and ended up in France. In Paris, Federov posed as a studio photographer. Re had a little shop on the Right Bank where customers could have their portraits made. A short, lean man of military bearing, Federov dressed well, and with his black hair and dark complexion he could easily have passed for a Frenchman or a Spaniard. Certainly no one would have taken him for a Russian. In 1957 , he contacted the American embassy and volunteered his services to the CIA. But walk-ins are not always taken seriously. A Mexican
photographer claiming to be a Russian spy?

Kovich, overseas on another operation, was told that some screwball had come into the U.S. embassy in Paris claiming he was a Soviet intelligence officer. Kovich hurried to Paris. It took him about seven minutes to conclude that first, Federov wasn't crazy, and second, he was a genuine GRU illegal.

Kovich recruited him. At first, Federov, who was fluent in French and Spanish, wanted to defect. Kovich, following his own "KTIP" principle, worked hard to keep him in place. Finally, Federov agreed. The CIA digraph for France was UN, and Mikhail Federov became, in the agency's files, UNACUTE.

The take was impressive. In April 1958, Kovich met UNACUTE at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. Seven months earlier, in October 1957, the Soviets had stunned the world by launching Sputnik, the first space satellite. Now Federov told Kovich that another rocket launch would take place the following month, on May 15. Moreover, Federov added, in late August the Russians would put dogs into canisters and launch them into space.

On May 15 precisely, just as UNACUTE had predicted, the Soviets launched Sputnik III, and a triumphant Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev jibed at the smaller U.S. satellites then circling the earth as "oranges. "JO On August 29, Kovich met with Federov again, this time in a safe house in Berlin. The second launch was supposed to occur, and they were listening to Radio Moscow. Suddenly, the announcer broke in to say that the Soviets had put two dogs into space and parachuted them safely to earth.

Federov chuckled. "What do you think of my information?" he asked Kovich. The CIA man thought it was pretty good. For three years, Kovich ran Federov, but the CI Staff at headquarters was skeptical. UNACUTE, despite a wealth of information that he transmitted to the CIA, was labeled as a probable Soviet plant.

Federov moved around a lot; over a period of three years, Kovich met him in Paris, Nice, Bern, Geneva, and Berlin. Early on, they had met on the French Riviera, and it was there that Golitsin, analyzing Kovich's file, pronounced that the Soviets must have recruited the CIA officer.

In the atmosphere of the time, it was hard to find any Soviet source whom the CI Staff accepted as genuine. Even decades later, these beliefs ran deep. Scotty Miler never changed his mind about Federov. "Federov was a plant who led him [Kovich] on a chase through Europe," Miler said. "There were indications that Federov was out to make a recruitment or reestablish contact with someone who had been recruited."

Perhaps so, but both Kovich and George Kisevalter were convinced that he was a genuine and valuable CIA asset. On one of Federov's trips to the West, Kisevalter recalled, "he went through Berlin and I met him." Kovich had brought Federov to a CIA safe house, and Kisevalter was there, posing as a Frenchman.

"He doesn't know how to drink vodka," Federov said to Kovich. "We'll teach him." Since Kisevalter had been born in St. Petersburg and had a native Russian's familiarity with vodka, he had some difficulty keeping a straight face as Federov explained that it was necessary to eat something first, a piece of bread or some olive oil, and only then, down the hatch.

"We were trying to find out where the dead drops were in Karlshorst," Kisevalter said. "Federov had buried some documents in a dead drop, not at Soviet headquarters, of course. He had hidden them somewhere near the train station. He told us where to find the documents. A German CIA agent was practically a real mole, digging up the tracks for miles, looking for the drop, but he never found it." [11]

Despite the CI Staffs suspicions, CIA director Allen Dulles considered Kovich's agent so valuable that the agency took an extraordinary step. Soviet defectors or agents often ask to meet the President or the director of the CIA, to reassure themselves of their own importance and to confirm that their information is appreciated at the highest levels of the United States government, but those requests are rarely granted. Federov had asked to meet personally with Dulles. In an unusual move, he was flown in "black," that is, secretly, to Washington, where he met not with Dulles, who was out of the country, but with General Charles P. Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA. According to Kisevalter, Cabell, an Air Force general, "put on his uniform to impress Federov."

It was Kovich who accompanied his prize asset on the flight from Berlin in September 1958. The CIA man had hoped to borrow Dulles's own plane for the trip, but the director was using it on his travels, so Kovich had to scrounge up an Air Force C-54, a four-engine prop plane, for the long trip to Washington. Federov got to see CIA headquarters, met with Cabell, and was hidden in a safe house in northern Virginia for about a week. [12]

After meeting the CIA's deputy director, Federov flew back to Berlin. Some months earlier, in March, Federov had returned to Moscow, but came out again. Now he informed the CIA that he had been called back to Moscow once more. In October 1958, he left Berlin and the West for the last time.

UNACUTE was never seen again. After three years as the Russian's case officer, Kovich lost contact. Federov had disappeared. George Kisevalter was convinced that an error by the CIA had led to his capture. "Some jerk in headquarters decided to send a letter to Federov using the Soviet internal mail. It was sent to Moscow by pouch and then remailed in the Soviet Union. They thought the internal mail was too complicated to monitor, but one way the KGB could do it was to spot the guy who mailed it. The letter was intercepted." [13]

Two years after Federov vanished, Kisevalter received information from Oleg Penkovsky suggesting that Federov was indeed a genuine CIA source who had been been detected by the Soviets. It was April 1961 and Kisevalter was meeting Penkovsky in London's Mount Royal Hotel. "Penkovsky tells me, 'I graduated from the rocket academy. One of the generals, General Borisoglebsky, said on graduation day, hey, let's have a drink. It was May. He, the general, said, life is not a bowl of cherries. Not long ago, he said, I was chairman of a court-martial committee and we condemned a GRU officer to be shot for treason.'" [14]

Although General Borisoglebsky had not disclosed the name of the GRU officer, Penkovsky said the general mentioned that the traitor had been secretly flown to CIA headquarters to meet a high official. Since Federov had been flown in black to meet General Cabell, there was no question that the person Penkovsky was talking about was Federov.

Kovich, too, was later told that Federov had been executed, but that his death had been even more gruesome than Penkovsky had related. The KGB has been known to go to great lengths to discourage Soviet intelligence officers from spying for the West. In the 1980s, Kovich was informed, a Soviet defector to the CIA said that during his training he had been shown a movie of Federov being thrown in an oven alive.

A former CIA officer with knowledge of Federov's fate said, "I know someone who has witnessed films of the execution. One of their favorite ways of doing this was to cremate some guy alive. They'll do it and film it and show it to others and say, 'This is what happens when you go over to your friends at Langley.'"

If Federov had indeed been executed, whether shot or cremated, it would constitute rather persuasive evidence that he was a real agent for the CIA. In 1964, when Kovich fell under suspicion, the mole hunters knew Penkovsky's account of Federov's fate, since Kisevalter had reported it, but it did not slow them down. Kovich's phone was wiretapped by the CIA, and his mail was intercepted.

For there was a third case that Kovich had handled that appeared even more sinister to the CI Staff. In May 1961, only months before Golitsin had defected, the Helsinki CIA station got a Soviet walk-in. Frank Friberg was the station chief, the same COS who later that year found Golitsin on his doorstep in the snow and escorted him to Washington. Now, in the spring, Friberg reported the approach of the walk-in who had contacted the embassy.

Kovich, then stationed in Vienna, was dispatched to Helsinki. He met with the Soviet, who said his name was Yuri Nikolaevich Loginov, and who identified himself as a KGB illegal in Heisinki posing as an American tourist named Ronald William Dean. The KGB man said he wanted to defect and go to the United States; he had one foot on the plane. Patiently, following his and the CIA's rule, Kovich persuaded Loginov to remain in place, where of course he could be much more valuable to the West. Then, at some later date, the CIA would spirit him to safety.

Kovich was in Helsinki for about ten days, and while he was there, Loginov kept a scheduled meeting with two other KGB agents, one of whom was none other than Golitsin, using his cover name Anatoly M. Klimov. Loginov met in front of the Astra theater with a KGB man who introduced himself as Nikolai A. Frolov and led him to a parked car, where Golitsin was waiting. A driver took them to the outskirts of the city while Loginov, who was on his initial trip to the West as an illegal, explained some difficulties he had experienced in Italy, the first country he had traveled to after leaving the Soviet Union. Soon after, Loginov met again with his two KGB colleagues and Frolov and Golitsin told him that Moscow Center had accepted his explanations. They gave him a visa to return to Moscow.

Before leaving Helsinki, Loginov reported the meetings to Kovich and agreed to remain as an agent-in-place. The CIA gave him the code name AEGUSTO.

Seven months later, one of first things Golitsin revealed to the CIA was the existence of Yuri Loginov, a KGB illegal who spoke fantastic English. Golitsin had great praise for Loginov's abilities. Since Loginov was now being run by the CIA, it is unlikely, although not impossible, that Golitsin, a defector, would have been told that Loginov had been recruited by the agency. If Golitsin was told, it would have violated all the rules of espionage tradecraft.

But in 1964, Golitsin was shown Kovich's file, and if he saw that Kovich was in Helsinki in mid-May, at the very time that Golitsin met with Loginov, he would have smelled a connection. Golitsin would almost certainly have guessed that Kovich's presence in Helsinki was linked to Loginov.

The story of Yuri Loginov is one of the most controversial in the history of the CIA. It is a case that the agency long attempted to suppress. But the endgame would not be played out for another five years.

Loginov grew up in Kursk, an industrial city south of Moscow, and then in Tambov, the son of a Communist Party apparatchik. During World War II, the family moved to Moscow, where at school Loginov demonstrated his aptitude for foreign languages. In his early twenties he was recruited by the KGB and trained as an illegal. After Helsinki, he traveled to Paris, Brussels, Austria, Germany, Beirut, and Cairo in a series of trips to the West.

By the time Golitsin was shown Kovich's file in the summer of 1964, other case officers, first Edward S. Juchniewicz, then Peter Kapusta, had taken over Loginov's handling. Kovich had become known as a sort of headhunter, an experienced CIA officer on standby who could be sent anywhere in the world to make a pitch to a Soviet. In Berlin, he had married Sara Arthur, a secretary in the Berlin base. Now in 1964, winding up a three-year tour in Vienna, Kovich and his wife returned to headquarters.

He was not promoted, as he had expected to be, and his career seemed stalled. He did not know, of course, that the mole hunters on the second floor had targeted him as the new chief suspect. But he did feel that something was wrong. It was to be more than a decade before he learned officially that he was a suspected Soviet agent. As the CIA would find out in due course, Richard Kovich was not a person to be swept aside and forgotten.

***

There were others, many others. One of those placed under the counterintelligence microscope was Alexander Sogolow, a large and boisterous Russian-born case officer from Kiev who had the misfortune to be known throughout the agency by the name Sasha.

It was Sogolow whom Peter Karlow had been thinking of when the polygraph operator asked him about "Sasha," making the needle jump and putting Karlow deeper into the quagmire. In Russia, many names have diminutives, affectionate nicknames that friends and family use in place of the more formal given name. For Alexander, the diminutive is always Sasha.

Assigned to headquarters in the early 1960s after a tour in Germany, Sogolow got wind of the fact that the mole hunters in Langley were looking for "Sasha." On a trip to Vienna, he unburdened himself to Kovich, who was then serving in the Vienna station.

"They're going to come after me," Sogolow bemoaned. "I'm in trouble. They say his name is Sasha."

"Hell," Kovich assured him, "relax. There are eighteen million Sashas in the Soviet Union." Ironically, it was the first that Kovich had heard about the search for penetrations back at headquarters. He didn't know that he himself was a suspect.

Sasha Sogolow was born in czarist Russia in 1912, the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman who supplied uniforms for the Russian army. Sogolow used to tell the story of how, when the revolution came, the family fled to Germany, their jewels hidden in a toy cane that was given to him. The family made it safely to Germany, but little Sasha lost the cane. At least that is how Sogolow liked to tell the tale. [15]

The Sogolows immigrated to New York in 1926, where Sasha graduated from City College and St. John's University Law School. It was the Depression, and Sogolow, according to a CIA colleague, "worked for a while selling chicken-plucking machines, until he was beaten up by a bunch of manual chicken-pluckers." [16] During World War II, he was an Army intelligence officer, acting as an interpreter for General Eisenhower and General Patton, and then working for the High Command in Berlin. Rejoined the CIA in 1949 and was sent to Germany.

Since the Soviet Union was the main target of the CIA, the agency needed Russian-speakers. Like Sogolow, many officers in the Soviet division inevitably had Russian backgrounds, which to the mole hunters made them all the more suspect.

And Sogolow, despite Kovich's ironic reassurances, was under suspicion by the SIG. He had a Slavic background and had served in Berlin. It was true that his name did not begin with the letter K, but by now, the CI Staff was not wedded to that detail of the mole profile. The search for penetrations had begun to spread to other letters of the alphabet.

Worst of all for Sogolow, his name was Sasha. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that the KGB would use the code name Sasha for someone who really was called Sasha. But it was not impossible, and in the atmosphere of the time, the CI Staff was leaving nothing to chance.

"We looked at his file," Miler recalled. "We went over operations he was involved in in Germany, where he had been." The SIG, Miler said, was particularly interested in Sogolow's "proximity" to Igor Orlov, a Russian-born CIA contract agent who had worked for Sogolow in Frankfurt in the late 1950s, and who was emerging as the
newest suspect.

As for Sogolow, Miler said, "nothing was found." He was not transferred to a lesser job, Miler insisted, nor placed in the limbo that awaited other targets of the mole hunters in the D corridor. But Sogolow was never to reach the level he had hoped for within the agency.

The SIG also turned its attention to George Goldberg, a tough, street-smart Latvian who got out of Riga with his father just ahead of the Soviet army. The rest of his family, his mother and sister, died at the hands of the Nazis. Goldberg, a stocky, muscular man, drove a taxi in Chicago, went into France on a glider with the 101st Airborne Division on D-day, was wounded in the head, and with blood streaming down his face suddenly found himself staring at the barrel of a 9mm Schmeisser submachine gun.

"They weren't taking prisoners after three days," Goldberg recalled. "I said in German, 'What do you want to shoot me for?' In that moment the young soldier was transformed into a human being. 'You're bleeding to death,' he said. 'Here, hold my gun and let me bandage you.'

"My war lasted three days. I spent the rest of the war in Stalag 4B near Leipzig." Liberated from the German prison camp by the Russians, Goldberg was briefly pressed into service by the Soviet army as a Russian and German translator. He was with the Soviet troops when they linked up with the Americans at the Elbe.

After the war Goldberg worked for Army intelligence, served in Korea, and joined the CIA in 1954. During the 1960s, he was stationed in Munich and Bonn under Army cover. But back at headquarters, the SIG began investigating him, unbeknownst to Goldberg.

"Goldberg had been in Germany," Miler said. "He was also a defector. [17] He came from the Soviet Union. It was not directly the result of Golitsin's leads, but he was examined in the light of Golitsin's leads to see if there was any connection." Beginning in 1958, Goldberg had recruited and, with Harry Young, run Boris Belitsky, the Radio Moscow correspondent code-named AEWIRELESS, later revealed by Nosenko to be a double agent under Moscow's control.

Was that why Goldberg was a suspect? "His handling of the Belitsky case was one of the reasons," Miler said. "Goldberg had been in Germany. There were other things, operations that went sour."

All during this time, Goldberg was a contract agent, denied the full status as a staff officer that he desired. In 1969, he went to Chicago with the agency's Domestic Operations Division, recruiting foreign students. "By 1970, I should have made permanent staff, because I was acting chief of base in Chicago," Goldberg said. "I might have, but for the trouble." Goldberg was told by the head of domestic operations that his promotion had been blocked "by someone from outside the division." Goldberg, his career thwarted, retired in 1975 to Colorado.

Typical of the targets of the SIG during this period was Vasia C. Gmirkin, a case officer in the Soviet division. Gmirkin's colorful background was unusual even for the division, many of whose officers had roots that reached back to the turmoil of the Russian revolution. He was born in China in 1926, where his father had been the czarist counsel in Urumchi, in Sinkiang province, which borders Russia. Young Vasia grew up speaking Russian and Chinese. When the revolution began, his father returned to Russia to fight with the Cossacks against the Bolsheviks. His unit was pushed back into China. The governor of the province knew and liked him and made him a Chinese citizen and a general. In 1934, Gmirkin's father sent his wife, daughter, and two sons to the safety of Tientsin, near Peking. Soon after, the Soviets marched in, took over, and executed Gmirkin's father. In 194 I, at age fifteen, Vasia and the rest of his family managed to get out and immigrate to San Pedro, California. He enlisted in the Navy and returned to China as an interpreter for the Marines. In 1951, he joined the CIA. He worked in Los Angeles for four years and was then transferred to the Soviet division at headquarters. Under State Department cover, one of his jobs for the agency was to escort visiting Soviet farmers around the United States.

Working in Africa and the Middle East, including Baghdad, Gmirkin had some impressive successes, including the recruitment of an opposition intelligence agent. By 1968, he was a branch chief in the Soviet division. But that year, David Murphy, the head of the Soviet division, left to become chief of station in Paris. He was replaced as the Soviet division chief by Rolfe Kingsley, a Yale man and veteran clandestine operator.

By now, virtually everyone of Russian origin in the division was under suspicion, and Kingsley told Gmirkin to clean out his desk; he was through as branch chief. In seventeen years, Gmirkin never got a promotion. He would be recommended by his superiors, and then, he was told, it would be vetoed by the CI Staff.

Gmirkin's final years with the CIA embodied the ironies of an entire era. For Gmirkin, although a victim of the mole hunt, ended up his career as the case officer for Anatoly Golitsin. He served as Golitsin's handler from 1976 until he retired three years later. Although he did not accept Golitsin's theories, he grew personally close to the defector, helped to edit Golitsin's book, and was one of two CIA officers who signed the preface. The other was Scotty Miler.

***

One of the more bizarre episodes in the annals of the SIG was the investigation of Averell Harriman, whose long and distinguished career included the posts of ambassador to the Soviet Union, under secretary of state, cabinet member, and governor of New York. But to the CI Staff, Harriman was a possible Soviet mole, code-named DINOSAUR. [18]

The investigation of the multimillionaire diplomat began, not surprisingly, with Golitsin. "As a result of Golitsin's allegations," Scotty Miler confirmed, the SIG had decided that "certain things that had occurred when Harriman was active in Soviet affairs ought to be looked at." When Harriman had served in Moscow the Soviets had presented him with the Great Seal of the United States that contained the eavesdropping device. Could that be one reason he was suspected? "Yes," Miler said, "the fact he accepted the bugged seal was a minor part of it."

But another former member of the SIG was able to shed more light on the matter. "Harriman had been in the Soviet Union early on, helping them build factories and things like that," he said. "Golitsin had a story that a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union had an affair with a Soviet woman, the fruit of which was a son. And that Harriman was still attached to the son and was, as a result of the affair, recruited by the KGB. When this agent, presumably Harriman, went back to the Soviet Union on a visit, they had a play written by a well-known playwright called The Son of the King and this was actually produced in Moscow. Harriman attended the premiere and it was so obviously about him that Harriman complained bitterly and got the whole thing taken off the stage.

"Golitsin even came up with an identity for the son. Harrirnan had written a book in 1956 about a trip to the Soviet Union and acknowledged the assistance of the companion the Soviets had given him, and Golitsin concluded this companion was the son. It's in Harriman's book." [19] In Angleton's Alice in Wonderland world, the fantasy of Operation DINOSAUR took on a life of its own.

The investigation was pursued, even though Ed Petty, a member of the SIG, established that Harriman was not in Moscow on the days the play was performed. These were not details that Angleton wanted to hear. DINOSAUR was fed as well by the fact that Harriman had two Soviet cryptonyms in the intercepted VENONA code traffic. "One of them was CAPITALIST," the former mole hunter recalled. "But that proves nothing. It doesn't prove a thing. The Soviets gave crypts to everybody and his brother."

In fact, all of Golitsin's leads, no matter how preposterous, were carefully investigated by the staff of the SIG. Its members were undaunted by the fact that, according to the testimony of John L. Hart, Golitsin, their prime source, had been diagnosed as paranoid. "In the course of his dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency," Hart testified to Congress, "he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and separately by a clinical psychologist as a paranoid. And I am sure that everyone knows what a paranoid is. This man had delusions of grandeur. He was given to building up big, fantastic plots. ..." [20]

Perhaps Golitsin's most farfetched view was that the Sino-Soviet split that emerged in the late 1950s was nothing more than a KGB deception. When Angleton proposed to convene a meeting of academics to hear Golitsin's theory, it was immediately dubbed "the Flat Earth Conference." [21] In Golitsin's opinion, the Soviet-Yugoslav split was another massive KGB plot, as was Alexander Dubcek's "Prague Spring," the abortive revolt that ended only when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Angleton believed most of these hare-brained theories.

At a dinner party, for example, Angleton remarked to the columnist Stewart Alsop that the Sino-Soviet split was merely a KGB invention. Alsop, skeptical, asked for proof. Angleton said he had some, and they arranged to have lunch. "Well, at lunch," said a friend to whom Alsop later related the story, "Angleton produced shards of information that to him indicated a pattern of cooperation between the two countries. For example, Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, still had an agent in Peking, whom Angleton assured Alsop was a KGB man. The Russians were building a railroad on the Chinese border. It was all meaningless to Alsop and reaffirmed his suspicions about Angleton's paranoia."

Don Moore, the veteran FBI Soviet counterintelligence chief, liked Angleton personally but was highly skeptical of the unusual theories advocated by the CIA man and Golitsin. For some reason, Angleton thought that Moore's attitude would change if only the FBI official would socialize with the defector and his wife. Moore declined, but Angleton persisted, bringing up the idea repeatedly. "If you went out with Mrs. Golitsin and Anatoly, you'd have a better opinion," he told Moore. The unlikely foursome never went to dinner, but at some point Moore did meet Irina Golitsin. It did not change his view of her husband's theories.

Through it all, the staff of the SIG toiled away, following each of Golitsin's leads, poring through the files, analyzing old cases, hoping that the elusive penetration might yet be caught. And now, in 1964, three years after Golitsin's arrival, the mole hunters thought they had, at last, unearthed Sasha.

_______________

Notes:

1. It was very odd indeed to allow a Soviet, and a former KGB officer, to read secret CIA files. In defense of the practice, Scotty Miler, a key former member of Angleton's staff, said that Golitsin was not shown raw files but "sanitized" versions from which some sensitive material had been deleted. However, Miler said that it was only in 1969-after the mole hunt was long under way-that he had been instructed "to sanitize the files," and began doing so. "Up to that time I had not been involved in it," Miler said. "I don't know what happened before."

2. The term "mole" as a description of a penetration agent placed inside an opposition intelligence service or government was popularized by John le Carre in his spy novels, and to some extent filtered into the vocabulary of real spies. Most CIA officers prefer the term "penetration." The first use of the word in an intelligence context has been traced to Sir Francis Bacon's history of the reign of King Henry VII, published in 1622: "He was careful and liberal to obtain good intelligence from all parts abroad. ... As for his secret spia1s which he did emp1oy both at home and abroad, by them to discover what practices and conspiracies were against him, surely his case required it: he had such moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him." Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, F. J. Levy, ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 243. Bacon, however, appears to have used the word "moles" in the sense of "dissidents" or "opponents"; in the modem usage it means a person reporting back to a foreign intelligence service.

3. Inside the CI Staff, the SIG was pronounced not as an acronym, but with each letter enunciated. It had always had the responsibility for detecting penetrations in the agency, among its other duties, but the search for moles became its principal function after Golitsin defected.

4. Because of Evans's fluent French, Angleton often used him as an intermediary in dealing with Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST, the French internal service.

5. The CIA had two bases in Munich at the time: the Pullach base at the headquarters of General Reinhard Gehlen, whom the CIA had set up as chief of an independent intelligence organization that became West Germany's BND, and the Munich operations base, headed by David Murphy , which conducted operations independent of the Gehlen organization.

6. Pronounced ha-nuh-toll (the first syllable spoken as in the name Hans), the cryptonym sounded like a cold remedy but apparently was a sort of acronym. A former CIA officer said: "Jim was trying to win over the FBI and particularly Hoover to cooperate in the mole hunt. He came up with the idea of HONETOL because it incorporated the first two letters of Hoover's name with some of the letters of Golitsin's name, Anatoly." According to Miler, the cryptonym was used jointly with the British, who, of course, were hard at work looking for their own moles.

7. There was more than wartime rivalry involved, according to Hegge. "Bryhn mistrusted Evang, who had been a member of a radical student group, the Mot Dag [Toward the Dawn], and considered him a Soviet mole. This greatly distressed the Prime Minister at the time, Per Borten, of the Center Party, a sort of Harry Truman without the brains, a gregarious man who could not stand the fact that his two intelligence chiefs didn't even speak to one another. And of course the case caused a considerable scandal for his government at the time."

8. The Mellbye Commission was headed by Jens Christian Mellbye, a public defender who later became a member of Norway's supreme court. As a result of the Lygren case, the commission became a permanent watchdog body for the country's intelligence agencies.

9. Gunnar Haarstad, In the Secret Service: Intelligence and Surveillance in War and Peace (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1988), pp. 247-50.

10. "Soviet Satellite Weighing 1.5 Tons Fired into Orbit," New York Times, May 16, 1958, p. 1.

11. Soviet illegals often communicate with Moscow through dead drops. In this case, Federov said he remembered roughly where the drop was but no longer possessed the piece of paper that gave its precise location.

12. A GRU officer under diplomatic cover could not slip away from his post for such a trip. But as an illegal, Federov could disappear for ten to twelve days and no one would miss him. The CIA had a "window of opportunity" in September when the trip could be scheduled, and it was.

13. The KGB, Kisevalter added, had successfully trailed at least one embassy officer who had mailed letters in Moscow, with disastrous results. George Payne Winters, Jr., a State Department officer working for the CIA as a "co-optee," was fired because of it, he said. In that instance, the letter, addressed to Pyotr Popov, the GRU colonel working for the CIA, was not supposed to have been mailed. The letter was addressed to Popov at his home in Kalinin. Winters misunderstood his orders and mailed the letter anyway, Kisevalter said; the KGB fished the letter out of the mailbox, and Popov, the first important penetration of Soviet intelligence, was doomed.

According to Kisevalter, it was Popov himself who was able to warn that he had been caught by the mailing of the letter. Although under observation by the KGB in his final meeting with CIA officer Russell Langelle, "Popov slipped him a note. He cut himself deliberately and used a strip of paper to write on, underneath the bandage. In the men's room of the Aragvi restaurant, he slipped off the bandage and passed the note. There were KGB observers behind the wall of the men's room. I translated the message, in which he said he was being tortured and was under contro1, and how they got him."

Several published accounts have suggested that in Geneva in 1962, Yuri Nosenko said the shoes of the American diplomat who mailed the letter to Popov had been dusted by a maid with a chemical that enabled the KGB, perhaps with the aid of a dog, to trail him to the mailbox. Kisevalter and Bagley, who debriefed Nosenko, agree that although Nosenko talked about the KGB's use of tracking chemicals, he never said anything about spy dust having been sprink1ed on anyone's shoes in the Popov affair. The Cherepanov papers also referred to the KGB's use of spy dust, and some members of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff believed that the references to tracking chemicals by both Nosenko and Cherepanov were somehow part of an effort to imply that these techniques-rather than a mole in the CIA-were Responsible for the capture of Popov.

14. The story rang true, because General Viktor V. Borisoglebsky was a military lawyer and judge, and a high-ranking Communist Party official who had presided in August 1960 over the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the CIA U-2 pilot who had been shot down over Sverdlovsk earlier that year. Ironically, he also presided over the trial of Oleg Penkovsky in May 1963 and sentenced him to be executed.

15. It made a nice story, but it seemed improbable that the jewels would have been entrusted to a five-year-old. Within the Sogolow family, the accepted version was that the jewels had been smuggled out of Russia in the heel of the shoe worn by Sasha's older sister.

16. David Chavchavadze, Crowns and Trenchcoats: A Russian Prince in the CIA (New York: Atlantic International Publications, 1990), p. 154.

17. Goldberg was not a defector in the accepted sense of the term. The label "defector" is normally applied to Soviet intelligence officers or other officials from the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe who have sought refuge in the West. Goldberg got out of Latvia before it was overrun by the Soviet army.

18. The SIG used a separate code name for each person it investigated.

19. Harriman did write a book about a trip he took to the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1959: Peace with Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959). In the acknowledgments, Harriman thanked two senior Soviet officials, Anastas Mikoyan and Georgi Zhukov, and added "I am gratefu1 also to my numerous guides and interpreters, including Mr. Zhukov's assistant, Vasili V. Vakrushev, who accompanied me throughout my travel and contributed much to its interest."

20. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. II, p. 494.

21. David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 203.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:33 am

Chapter 13: Sasha

He was a little man, no more than five foot five, strikingly handsome, with a flower tattooed on his left hand in the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger and the letter A, his blood type, tattooed in the same place on his right hand.

He had been a Soviet intelligence officer in World War II fighting against the Nazis, and later a German intelligence officer fighting against the Soviets, so the tattoo of the blood type was understandable, but he never explained the flower to anyone, not even to his wife. His background was equally mysterious. At various times, he had used at least four different names.

To his customers in the successful picture-framing gallery that he and his wife, Eleonore, operated in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, he was known as Igor Orlov. To his wife and friends, he was Sasha. Very few of his customers knew that he had worked as a CIA agent in Germany for thirteen years.

Paul Garbler called him "the little man."

When Garbler had reported in to the Berlin base in 1952 to work for Bill Harvey, he had been introduced to Orlov, who would be his principal agent. In running Orlov, Garbler did not use his real name. He was Philip Gardner.

And Orlov, too, was using an operational name that had been given to him by the CIA. In Berlin, he was Franz Koischwitz.

***

"Orlov was already recruited and working when I arrived in Ber- lin," Garbler recalled. Who had recruited him? "That's kind of murky," Garbler said. "By 1952, when I arrived, he had been there for a couple of years as a principal agent for the base. Wolfgang Robinow handled Orlov before me. He was a case officer, born in Germany and spoke German fluently. I took over the little guy from Robinow. He took me to a safe house and introduced me to Orlov." At the time, of course, Garbler did not know his new agent as Orlov, a name he had not yet been given by the CIA. He knew him only as Franz Koischwitz.

"He was little, a china doll of a man, with dark brown hair parted on the side, slicked back. A very natty dresser. He had a wife who was much taller than he was. He was almost obsessively clean. His hands were always well manicured.

"My agent ran eleven whores and a one-armed piano player," Garbler said. "The girls and the piano player worked in a bar in the Soviet sector where a lot of Russian soldiers hung out. The piano player was named Willi. Orlov never told the girls he was working for the Americans, of course."

The primary purpose of the operation, Garbler said, was to try to persuade one of the Soviet military men who patronized the bar to cross over to West Berlin, and then to recruit him. But as a subsidiary target, Orlov/Koischwitz reported any gossip of military or intelligence interest that the women might pick up in the saloon. "If they heard the fifteenth division was moving, they reported," Garbler said. "They gave the little man every single piece of gossip they got."

And Garbler, with Orlov's help, made what appeared to be a Soviet recruitment. "One of the girls, a shapely redhead named named Trudy, brought a Russian enlisted man into West Berlin. We led him to believe he was in touch with a West German university professor, who wanted to know what was going on in the Soviet Union, availability of food, gasoline, et cetera." A CIA contract agent played the part of the professor. The meeting with the Soviet enlisted man took place in an elegant CIA safe house, decorated to look like the home of the professor, whom the hooker introduced as her uncle.

"Wally Driver was the photographer," Garbler said. "When the Soviet came up out of the U-bahn underground station, he was photographed through a peephole in a van. The Russian wore a khaki shirt and jacket, but he was not in uniform. In the house, we were taking pictures as the enlisted man talked with the CIA man posing as the professor, and the whore. Wally Driver put a camera in a cuckoo clock, wrapped it in cotton to silence it, and ran a wire to the professor. The professor was to take the pictures by pressing the button. To conceal the noise from the Russian, our guy had to cough each time he took the picture. We got some real good pictures."

The Soviet enlisted man, according to Garbler, agreed to remain in touch with the "professor." "He did stay in touch. There was communication. He sent at least one letter while I was still there, maybe more.

"It was not all that successful," Garbler admitted, "but looked at then, it seemed fine. It was typical of the wild-ass things we were doing in those days."

***

Munich, 1947. Eleonore Stirner, then twenty-three, had survived the war and the Allied bombing raids that had badly damaged the city. She remembered people taking shoes off the corpses in Munich after the air raids.

On this winter day in February, she was riding on streetcar No.8 to Schwabing, a Bohemian section of Munich. "I was delivering food to a professor who was an artist, in his atelier," she said. "I had laryngitis and couldn't speak. Sasha and a tall friend, Boris, got off at the same stop, and it turned out we were going to the same apartment house. They helped me carry the potatoes upstairs to the top floor. The professor whispered, 'They are foreigners, let's invite them in and maybe they have sugar.' That's how I met my husband."

Sasha and Eleonore were married in July, 1948. It was an unlikely match, a former Soviet intelligence officer and the daughter of a Nazi Party member, but in war-torn Germany, Eleonore Stirner was happy to have found a husband. There were not many young men left. "All my friends were dead," she said frankly, "or I never would have married a Russian."

Interviewed in her spacious frame shop and art gallery in Alexandria's Old Town, Eleonore Orlov proved an intelligent woman of boundless energy, her occasional moments of melancholy tempered by a strong sense of humor. She spoke at length about her own past in Nazi Germany, her later dealings with the CIA and the FBI, and the enigma of the man to whom she was married for thirty-four years. Sasha Orlov had died at age sixty in May 1982, leaving his wife and two grown sons, Robert and George.

Eleonore Stirner was born in Munich on March 10, 1923, the daughter of Joseph and Rosa Stirner. "I joined the Hitler Youth at age sixteen," Eleonore Orlov said. "I was head of water sports, canoeing, and so on, for all of Bavaria. It was like the Girl Scouts. It was the only fun we had in life. Everybody liked Hitler ." Her father, a six-foot-six SS man, fought in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Italy, where he was captured and held as a POW for two years. "After the war, we lost our apartment because the neighbors saw the black uniform and the boots and threw us out. "

Because of her own membership in the Hitler Youth, she was sent to Dachau in 1945, where she served a prison term of five months, working in the fields of the former Nazi concentration camp, weeding and harvesting, and picking the bugs off potatoes. "Polish officers who had been prisoners were in charge," she said. Released in 1946, she was working as a secretary in a medical supply house when she met and married Sasha Orlov.

At the time, he called himself Alexander Kopatzky. He told his wife that he had taken the Polish-sounding name to avoid being sent back to the Soviet Union. He was born, according to Eleonore, on January I, 1922, in Kiev. He had never revealed his true name to her, she said, although she thought that once, on an official form, he might have listed his parents' name as Navratilov.

He was trim as a gymnast and a man of continental manners, when sober. "He drank a lot of vodka. He kissed ladies' hands. He went to military school in Novosibirsk or somewhere in Siberia. He was definitely an officer. He was very punctual, shined his shoes, did his gymnastics in the morning, he had a neat haircut, short hair all his life, proper dress. And he was a very good shot. Sasha liked to hunt and talked of hunting tigers in Siberia with his father. He was an intelligence officer for the Soviets. In 1944, he was badly wounded in the neck and the calf as he parachuted into Germany. He was captured, nursed back to health in a German field hospital, and recruited as liaison between Vlasov's army and the German army. This was in 1944, a brutal winter." [1]

General Andrei A. Vlasov was a Soviet lieutenant general captured with most of his troops by the Germans in July 1942. The Germans allowed Vlasov, who was strongly anti-Soviet, to form a Russian Army of Liberation (ROA), enlisting Russian prisoners of war to join the Nazi war effort and fight the Red Army. [2]

After recovering from his wounds in a German hospital, Orlov joined forces with his captors. By his own account, he served for almost a year as a German intelligence officer before joining General Vlasov's intelligence service. After the war he was imprisoned by the American authorities in Dachau, at the same time that Eleonore was there, although they did not then know each other.

When they did meet, in 1947, Orlov was already working for the CIA in Pullach, outside Munich, where the agency had set up General Reinhard Gehlen and his German intelligence network.

Orlov told his wife very little about his work for the CIA. But according to one former SIG member, in 1948-49, "Orlov had worked in Ukrainian ops in the Munich area for the [CIA's] Munich operations base. He worked for Dave Murphy."

Eleonore Orlov looked back on those early months of their marriage as an idyllic period in her life. The young couple went for picnics in the Bavarian countryside. "I rode my bicycle along the Tsar. It was a very happy time."

All of that changed abruptly in 1949, during the Berlin airlift. "We 1ived a quiet life until one day an American knocked on the door and said, 'We need you in Berlin.'

"In Berlin, he changed his name to Franz Koischwitz. The Americans gave the name to us. I was Ellen Koischwitz. I insisted the name begin with a K because of my linens. My linens said EK, for Eleonore Kopatzky. My mother sent them from Munich."

As Franz Koischwitz, Orlov remained in Berlin for seven years. "I didn't work for the CIA in Berlin, but I typed my husband's weekly reports," Eleonore said. "So I knew the work he was doing."

What Orlov was doing was enrolling women for his network. "He went every night to bars, 1ots of nightspots. Telephone bars, where you can just pick up the telephone and speak to someone at a table across the room. Sometimes he recruited girls at Resi, a telephone bar in Hasenheide, a section of Berlin that means 'rabbit's meadow.'"

He was a1so drinking. Paul Garbler had good reason to remember that. "Three times," Garbler said, "I had to bail him out of the slammer. Orlov was a terrib1e driver. Used to scare the shit out of me driving around Berlin with me. Most Russians are terrible drivers. They don't 1earn when they're 1ittle kids, 1ike we do. He would run red lights, back up in the midd1e of the street, with cars whizzing around.

"When he talked about something sad, like when one of his girls got the clap, he would cry. His eyes would fill with tears. I never asked his background and he never asked mine."

Tears came to Orlov's eyes again in 1955, when it was time for Garbler to 1eave Berlin after three years. The CIA man and his agent had their last meeting in a safe house. Orlov presented Garb1er with an inscribed book of photographs of Berlin. [3] It was signed, "Franz Koischwitz with Ellen and Robert June 1955."

A year later, the CIA transferred the Koischwitzes from Berlin to Frankfurt, 1argely because Eleonore had rebelled against their life o the move in furnished rooms, which they switched every few months to preserve security. Their son Robert had been born in 1954. As Eleonore put it, "I wanted out of Berlin. There I was with a baby, and no home. I was like a bag 1ady."

In Berlin, close to the border and Soviet headquarters, a CIA agent was at risk, Eleonore said. In Frankfurt, deep inside West Germany, there would be no need to move all the time. Moreover, the agency offered to give the Koishwitzes American passports.

"We went to the American consulate to start our citizenship papers. [4] Then we ran into trouble. Franz Koischwitz had been imprisoned for a traffic vio1ation. So the Americans changed our name to Orlov. We had to go to the consu1ate and swear we were Igor and Eleonore Orlov." Because they had been told they cou1d take on1y small airline bags on the flight to Frankfurt, she said, before they left Berlin she had given away their few possessions, inc1uding her linens monogrammed EK. So it no 1onger mattered to her whether their new name began with a K.

In Frankfurt, Mrs. Orlov worked for the CIA, screening and translating photocopies of letters intercepted in the mai1 flowing between the Soviet Union and West Germany. Her husband, she said, "traveled a lot, to Hamburg, Cologne, all over West Germany in a black Opel Kapitan. I know now what he did in Frankfurt. I put it together. We three ladies in the censorship office saw all 1etters to and from the Soviet Union. My husband visited the peop1e in Germany who wrote those 1etters to the East. He was trying to recruit people who had contact with Russia."

Eleonore's office was "on an unmarked floor, thirteenth floor of the I.G. Farben building. We looked for letters of intelligence interest, and would put those aside to trans1ate. For example, if someone's aunt in the Soviet Union said they didn't have fish anymore, it might mean a big power plant was being built.

"I even got a 1etter from Boris Pasternak, a thank-you 1etter to one of his admirers in Germany for Doctor Zhivago. I swindled it, put it in my pocketbook and kept it like an autograph. No one ever missed it. I put it in my copy of Doctor Zhivago."

In April 1957, the CIA flew the Orlovs to America so that Eleonore, who was pregnant, could have her child in the United States, and to allow the Orlovs to establish a residence to become citizens. First, the Orlovs were taken to Ashford Farm, a CIA safe house on the Choptank River, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Later, to have her baby they were moved to another safe house in the Georgetown section of Northwest Washington at 3301 O Street. [5] Her physician at Georgetown University Hospita1 was Dr. John W. Walsh, who that same summer was caring for Jacqueline Kennedy, whose daughter, Caro1ine, was born in November. [6]

While waiting for her baby to arrive, Mrs. Orlov said, "a CIA guide took us to the White House, the museums. He tried to give us a taste of America." The Orlovs' second son, George, was born on August 9. "Then back to Frankfurt, and we started a new 1ife with legitimate papers and PX privileges. Sasha got a car and we had a wonderfu1 life."

It was wonderfu1 except for Orlov's relations with his CIA colleagues. In Frankfurt, friction had quick1y deve1oped between Orlov and Nicho1as Kozlov, another ex-Soviet working for the CIA. Much of the troub1e began in 1959 when Orlov went on a trip to Vienna. "For the trip, they gave him elevated shoes to be taller, colored his hair pitch black, and gave him horn-rimmed g1asses with no prescription," Eleonore said. When Orlov returned to Frankfurt, he was convinced that his safe had been rifled. "The safe had an outside combination and two un1ocked compartments inside and Kozlov had the combination," she said. Before 1eaving for Vienna, Orlov had put pieces of mica in his part of the safe and found them on the floor when he returned. According to Eleonore, he comp1aine.d to his superior, Sasha Sogo1ow -- who was 1ater to become a mo1e suspect in part because of his association with Orlov -- but Sogo1ow dismissed the incident.

The trouble was not over, however, for either Orlov or his wife. CIA security officers investigating the alleged break-in found a postcard in the safe addressed to Eleonore Orlov from an admirer, which her husband had intercepted and p1aced there. The CIA men grilled Eleonore about the card, accusing her of b1ack market dealings.

"In Frankfurt I had Georgie in the carriage," Mrs. Orlov said. "I met a man in the park. He gave me opera tickets to the Frankfurt Opera House, he was the stage director, and I gave him gin from the PX. This came out in my 1ie-detector test. The postcard said some- thing like 'If I don't see you I will fall in 1ove with the entire corps of ballet girls.'

"They asked, 'Why did I give him the gin? Did I pay him with cigarettes to make 1ove to me?' I said, 'You're crazy. If I wanted to have a man, I can have one.' I was in trouble because bartering was against the law. I was dismissed from my job."

E1eonore Orlov said she never saw the postcard but that her husband confronted her about it before he 1eft for Vienna. "He was extremely jealous. In Berlin he held a gun to my head severa1 times. Because he smelled cigarettes, and I didn't smoke, I said yes, I was in the subway. I had to sit in the smoking car."

As Mrs. Orlov tells it, her husband's decision to report the alleged break-in of the safe destroyed his re1ationship with the CIA. "Mr. Sogolow was a good friend of the Koz1ovs, so he cou1dn't possibly do anything," she said. "When he [Orlov] complained about Koz1ov, that was the end of our career."

The Orlovs were not to1d that, however. Igor was promised a new job in the United States, and in January 1961, the Orlovs sai1ed for New York on the S.S. America. On the day before President Kennedy's inauguration, they drove in a snowstorm to northern Vir ginia. Orlov called a number he had been given to contact the CIA, only to find it had been disconnected.

"Eventually he made contact and was told there was no work for him," Eleonore said. "We had to 1ive. In the summer of 1961 he went to work driving a truck for the Washington Post. We had no citizenship papers. We had a green card, but no passports.

"He did not accept the Berlitz course offered by CIA, but we did get some money, about twenty-seven hundred dollars. It was CIA money. I was ready to leave for good. We argued. I said, 'What do you do in this country? What is there here for me? Being the wife of a truck driver?" Mrs. Orlov withdrew $1,800 of the CIA money. "I bought three tickets on the S.S. Bremen to go to Germany. I took the chi1dren, my books, my feather bed. I went to my mother and she threw me out on the first day. 'I told you not to marry this foreigner. And I know now he's a spy. People here ask me about him.'

"I stayed nine months in Munich, rented an apartment, and Igor sent me every month one hundred dollars. He so1d his TV to have money to send me, his typewriter. He only earned sixty dollars a week. I couldn't find a job, I had no papers. Who is E1eonore Orlov? Where did you go to school? What have you done for the 1ast five years?"

In 1962, Eleonore Orlov brought the children back to Washington and rejoined her husband. By 1964, the Orlovs had saved enough money to open a picture-framing gallery on South Pitt Street in Alexandria. A few miles away at CIA headquarters, the mole hunters were closing in.

***

Scotty Miler had joined the Specia1 Investigations Group in October 1964, and the Orlov case was virtually the first to land on his desk. "Golitsin said Sasha had operated primarily in Berlin, but a1so in West Germany," he said. "So we began going through the fi1es, who was involved in what and where. Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together. It took three years to focus on Orlov as a candidate, in 1964," Miler said. "Orlov's diminutive was Sasha. He had worked in Germany. There were other people known as Sasha. We started by asking how many people we know were known as Sasha. That's the first 1ayer of investigation. Second, does anyone have a true name beginning with a K? Or an operational name."

Orlov's name did not begin with the letter K, but one can visualize the excitement on the second floor when the mole hunters opened hi dossier and saw that before it was Orlov, his name had been Alexander Kopatzky, and then Franz Koischwitz, and that he was called Sasha.

But wou1d the KGB really use a code name that was a1so a person's nickname? "Un1ikely, but not unknown," Miler replied.

After analyzing Orlov's file, and the cases he had handled in Germany, Miler said, the Counterintelligence Staff became "absolutely" convinced that it had uncovered solid evidence against him. Several other former CIA officers interviewed also said they believed that Orlov had been a double agent for the KGB. "He [Orlov] fit the indicators, and his operations went bad," said Pete Bagley.

Within the CIA, it was Bruce Solie of the Office of Security who was given credit for cracking the Orlov case. Solie was the principal officer in OS who had worked on the mole hunt from the start. Tall, thin, and bespectacled, given to long pauses between sentences, Solie grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, served as an Air Force navigator in the European theater during World War II, earned a law degree after the war, and in 1951 joined the CIA, where his entire career was spent in the Office of Security.

In addition to the basic profile of Sasha that Golitsin had provided a name beginning with K, active in Germany, a Slavic background -- the defector had provided another fragment of information. Sasha, he said, had given the KGB information about military identity documents that would be carried by agents whom the CIA was sending into the Soviet Union. Solie searched the files but could find no operation that fit Golitsin's description.

But Solie made an interesting discovery: the CIA, more than a decade earlier, had indeed planned to send in an agent with military ID and had been looking for such documents. It was Orlov who had provided them, explaining that he had obtained the documents from a Soviet source. "Orlov came up with three," a CIA officer recalled. "But that wasn't enough. Four were required. So they [the CIA] gave up on it."

Solie went back to Golitsin. Something wasn't right, he said. Golitsin thought about it some more. Maybe, he said, it had been the other way around; that is, Sasha had not passed information to the KGB about identity papers -- the KGB had given documents to Sasha to plant on the CIA. To Solie, the case now made sense. Golitsin had originally gotten it backward, but even so, the defector's lead had allowed Solie to pinpoint Orlov. The three documents provided by Orlov, Solie concluded, would have been booby-trapped by the KGB, altered in some tiny detail, so that any agent attempting to use them in the Soviet Union would have been immediately detected.

None of this business about the documents was hard evidence that might stand up in a court of law, but it was enough to allow the agency to ask for a criminal investigation. By mid-1964, the CIA had referred the Orlov case to the FBI.

***

"It was in the afternoon," Mrs. Orlov said, that the FBI came calling for the first time. "One day early in March of 1965. Six guys rang the bell and said, 'We'd like to search your house. Espionage.' It was after school, about five P.M. Sasha said, 'Can my wife go to a movie with the children?' The FBI agents said okay. He brought me my coat and we went away.

"They were still there when I came back. All the drawers on the floor, every piece of paper photographed. Even from my handbag. I had to leave my purse. They stayed until close to midnight. They said Sasha has to come to the FBI office in the morning after he finished his truck route. They told him to report to the Old Post Office Building in Washington. [7]

"There was no search warrant. At this time we didn't know the word 'search warrant.' The next day an FBI agent, Bert Turner, and another gentleman came to the gallery, where we also lived upstairs, and asked about Berlin, about Germany. They asked me, 'Why do you write to Switzerland so much?' I said, 'This is my aunt.' 'We also know you write to Australia. Who is that?' 'It's my former maid in Germany.' And to Montevideo?' 'My aunt, too.' My mother had five sisters. It made me furious. I said, 'Look, it's a free country.'

"They came and came and came every day for days. They asked me to take a lie-detector test and I refused. My husband said, 'They will put you in prison if you don't.' But I didn't. Sasha took an FBI lie-detector test. He passed. He welcomed it.'"

At the FBI, the Orlov case had landed on the desk of Courtland J. Jones, a tall, soft-spoken Virginia gentleman from Lynchburg who had joined the bureau out of law school in 1940. In the fall of 1964, when Jones got the case, he was a counterintelligence supervisor at the Washington Field Office.

"The Orlov case was called UNSUB8 SASHA," Jones said. The FBI had opened the file early in 1962, right after Golitsin's arrival. Each suspect for Sasha, beginning with Peter Karlow, went into the UNSUB SASHA file. "There were five or six serious candidates for Sasha in the file," Jones said, "and maybe some name checks in addition."

Whatever the results of Orlov's polygraph, the FBI agents kept the pressure on. The interrogations at the Washington Field Office continued. The gallery was under constant surveillance. "He was desperate," Mrs. Orlov said, in explaining what happened next.

The Washington Post backs up on the rear of the Soviet embassy, and one day in April, Orlov, who was still driving a truck for the newspaper, slipped into the embassy through a rear door. "He came home in the afternoon," Eleonore Orlov recounted, "and said, 'I was in the Soviet embassy and asked for my mother's address. I asked for help because the FBI said they will do something nasty to my mother if I don't say I'm a double agent. And I don't even know if she's living.'"

At first, Eleonore said, it seemed as though Orlov's purpose in visiting the embassy was to find out whether his mother was still alive, or dead and beyond the reach of the FBI. But he quickly made it clear that he had much more in mind. He was planning their escape. "He was so afraid they would arrest both of us. Who would take care of the children? We were living on sixty dollars a week." Her husband revealed, Eleonore said, that he had asked the Soviets for asylum for himself, for her, and their two sons. The embassy had agreed, he said.

"The Soviets told him, tomorrow after school go to the parking lot of a shopping center in Arlandria [a section of Alexandria], not with your car, but in a taxi. In front of the bowling alley there will be a car . You and your wife and children will be picked up." Orlov, she said, ordered her to take the children by taxi to the parking lot the next day; it was not clear, she said, whether he would be there as well.

Eleonore Orlov had no desire to flee to the Soviet Union. "I was frantic," she said. "I called my pastor. He came, he went down on his knees and prayed with me. He said, 'Don't go to the Russians, don't do this.' I called a friend. I asked her, 'If something happens to me, will you take care of my children?' I thought I had two choices: to jump from the Wilson Bridge or to go to the parking lot. I was not allowed to bring anything with me, just my driver's license and the car keys."

The next day, Eleonore drove her husband into Washington for another FBI interrogation. She went back to the house. "I went to the basement and discovered one of my cats had given birth to four kittens. That did it. I couldn't leave the house. I just couldn't. So I stayed home. I knew at five o'clock my husband would come home from the interrogation. I just sat there and waited. He came and said, 'Guess what? They let me go. They apologized and said I can go on with my life. Tomorrow we are free. But you did not obey me.' He was very angry. He was even thinking I am working with the FBI. It was a big argument. Very big.

"The FBI had asked him, 'Where were you yesterday?' 'I was in the Russian embassy.' 'Yes, we know.' 'I tried to ask for my mother's address.' If my husband was a Russian spy he wouldn't have to go to the embassy. He would have some way to contact them safer than going in. Maybe he bluffed them [the FBI], but you don't play with your life."

But if Orlov thought his troubles were over, he was wrong. To the mole hunters at Langley, Orlov's visit to the Soviet embassy was final proof that he was a Soviet spy. T o his wife, it was the act of a desperate man who feared arrest and hoped to protect his family.

Convinced that Golitsin's Sasha had been run to ground, James Angleton constantly questioned the FBI about the case. "Jim never let it go," said James E. Nolan, Jr., the former FBI counterintelligence official. "He'd ask, 'Have you cracked the Orlov case? What's new on Orlov?' Angleton used the case to keep the bureau on the defensive. "If he had nothing else to throw at us," Nolan said, "he'd beard us about Orlov."

The pressure from the CIA went down the line. Supervised by Courtland Jones, FBI agents kept the Orlovs under surveillance for years.

Suddenly, after Orlov's last interrogation, a parade of new customers began visiting the Gallery Orlov. Some openly identified themselves as FBI agents. They were led by Joseph D. Purvis, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Washington Field Office. "Mr. Purvis came to have a picture framed with Hoover shaking hands with some guy, with a flag and a big seal in the background," Eleonore recalled. "Then came Mr. Jones. Several FBI agents came. [9]

"Mr. Jones came every year to bring us a basket full of Stayman apples. He sent us Christmas cards for quite a while.

"Mr. Purvis had a gray poodle. It was a toy poodle, he kept it on his arm. The cats would try to jump on the poodle to defend their territory. Once, we framed for Mr. Purvis a portrait of his wife. We framed several pictures of Hoover shaking hands with agents."

Perhaps one of the more bizarre by-products of the entire era of the mole hunt was that great numbers of photographs of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, and a symbol of staunch anti-Communism in America for decades, were framed for the FBI by the man whom both Hoover and Angleton suspected to be a Soviet spy, the legendary Sasha.

Another FBI agent, Fred A. Tansey, became a particularly good customer and befriended the family. "He gave us two doors and a finial for the banister, beautiful things he would find for the house. He always found an excuse to visit us." [10]

The FBI agents were there for a reason, not only to keep an eye on the gallery and Igor Orlov, but to gauge the amount of actual business conducted there. James Nolan, who rose to number two in the FBI's intelligence division, confirmed the bureau's motive.

"For a brief period I had the Orlov case," he said. "I got all the receipts [from the FBI men who had pictures framed at the gallery]. That's why the agents were in there all the time. To see how much business they had and whether the shop was a front."

In the spring of 1966, a year after the FBI had searched the Orlovs' gallery, there was a new and startling development in the case. A Soviet KGB officer, who came to be code-named KITTY HAWK, contacted the CIA and offered, among other wares, fresh information about Orlov. The KITTY HAWK case was, and remains, one of the most controversial of the Soviet cases during the entire era.

Igor Petrovich Kochnov, who was KITTY HAWK, arrived in Washington late in March 1966 on temporary duty as a Soviet diplomat.!! About a week later, he telephoned the home in Northwest Washington of Richard Helms, then deputy director of the CIA. Helms was out, and Kochnov got Helms's then wife, Julia, heiress to the Barbasol shave cream fortune. Kochnov said he had information that would be of interest to the CIA. [12]

When CIA officials met with Kochnov as a result of his phone call, he had a suggestion that, on the face of it, was outrageous. He had been sent to the United States, he said, to try to find and contact Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet defector whose real name was Nikolai Fedorovich Artamonov. In 1959, Artamonov, the youngest destroyer captain in the Soviet navy, had sailed across the Baltic Sea to Sweden in a small boat with his Polish girlfriend, Ewa Gora, who was now his wife. [13] If the CIA would help him fulfill his mission, Kochnov said, his KGB career would skyrocket, and he would work as an agent-in-place for the CIA. Since the CIA protects defectors, often-as in this instance -- changing their names, Kochnov's request was bold, to say the least.

But both the CIA and the FBI went along with the operation. Courtland Jones talked it over with Elbert T. "Bert" Turner, who was assigned as Kochnov's FBI case agent. The decision was made, along with the CIA, to put Kochnov in touch with Artamonov and see where it led. "We put him into play and gave him feed material," Jones said. "Turner and I felt it had to be done, and what do we have to lose? I was about to go to the Outer Banks on vacation and Bill Branigan, the section chief, called over and one of us said, 'What are we going to call this operation?' Both Bill and I had vacationed on the Outer Banks. I said, "Bill, I'm going to Kitty Hawk tomorrow. Shall we call it KITTY HAWK?' He said, 'Why not?'"

KITTY HAWK, according to several former FBI agents, told U.S. intelligence that Orlov had worked for the Soviets. The KGB man, Courtland Jones said, also told the FBI that Orlov had visited the Soviet embassy, which he had, in 1965. According to another former FBI man close to the case, "KITTY HAWK said that when Orlov went into the embassy, he said he was being interviewed at the time by the FBI, and asked for suicide pills in the event he needed them. And when we asked Orlov about that, he said, no, no, he went to the embassy to ask about relatives."

The KITTY HAWK operation ended in disaster. Kochnov contacted Shadrin, who worked at the time for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Under FBI control, Shadrin pretended to switch loyalties and fed Kochnov information prepared by U .S. intelligence. After several months, Kochnov announced that he had to go back to the Soviet Union, but he turned Shadrin over to other KGB handlers. Shadrin met with the Soviets for several years, once in Vienna. [14] Then in December 1975, he went back to Vienna, accompanied by Bruce Solie, of the CIA's Office of Security, and Cynthia J. Hausmann of the Counterintelligence Staff. On the night of December 20, Shadrin kept an appointment with a Soviet agent on the steps of the Votivkirche, a church on the Rooseveltplatz, not far from the American embassy. He was not seen again. [15]

A decade later, the Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko provided a postscript to the Shadrin case. Before re defecting to the Soviet Union, Yurchenko told the CIA that KGB agents in Vienna had kidnapped Shadrin. As he struggled in the backseat of a car that was spiriting him out of Austria, Yurchenko said, the KGB agents gave him too much chloroform, and he died.

***

In 1978, the Orlovs moved their gallery and home to King Street, in Alexandria's Old Town. The FBI's periodic surveillance continued for fifteen years, to no avail.

"We were unable to establish that Orlov was Sasha," Jones said. "Orlov said no, he wasn't, and there you are. What could we do?"

The bureau kept at it, however, not only because of pressure from the CIA, but because the FBI worried that Orlov, even if no longer active as a Soviet spy, might be a "sleeper" agent, to be activated at some unknown time in the future. "In any such investigation," Jones said, "we would consider was he a sleeper, is he going to be contacted by mail, telephone, radio?"

Although Angleton, Miler, and many other CIA officers remained convinced that Orlov was a Soviet agent, that opinion was not universally held, even within the agency. A high-ranking former CIA official familiar with the case concluded: "We did not think that Orlov had ever been under the control of the KGB. My overall impression is we really didn't have a case against Orlov. A lot of suspicions, but no case."

On May 2, 1982, at the age of sixty, Igor Gregory Orlov died of cancer at his home above the gallery. "Two days before he died," his wife said, "one of our former customers, a priest, came in, and asked, 'Can I pray for you?' Igor said it isn't necessary, but if you think it's good you can say a few words. The priest said, 'Life is like a river; We people on the banks go into the river and swim a little bit and then we go back to the bank again.' Igor said, 'Yes, you are right. But I would really like to have my ashes in Russia, not in America.' Then he turned to me and said, 'Cremate me and bring the ashes to the Soviet embassy and they know what to do.' I looked at the priest. He said, 'Mrs. Orlov, this is quite natural. All my friends from the East, when it's time to die, they like to be buried in their homeland.'

"The boys were with Sasha all night long. He slipped into a coma and died Sunday morning. Mr. Tansey made the funeral arrangements. There were no services when he died. Monday he was cremated."

Eleonore Orlov did not follow her husband's instructions. "His ashes are upstairs on the mantel," she said. "In a box decorated with a Russian eagle."

Despite Orlov's last wish, and his earlier request for asylum in the Soviet Union, in their thirty-four years together, Eleonore Orlov said, her husband had never expressed any sympathy for the Soviet system, or dropped the slightest hint that he might have worked for the Russians. Rather the opposite, she insisted. "He was very careful in his dealings with anyone of Russian background. He never let anyone in the house. He was afraid to be poisoned by the Russians."

In Berlin, she said, "we were scared to death of the Russians. He was afraid they would kill him. First because of Vlasov, and now because he was working for the Americans. He was poisoned by an East German doctor in West Berlin, poisoned with mushrooms. Not enough to kill him, but perhaps they had planned to bring him over the line to the Russians. It was the time of the Menschenraub, the kidnappings on both sides in Berlin."

Why had she never pressed her husband to reveal his true background, his name at birth, for example? Mrs. Orlov smiled and said, "You know the legend of Lohengrin. You know what happened to Elsa." [16] She did ask, once, about the tattoo of the flower on his left hand. "None of your business," he said.

Did Eleonore Orlov believe her husband was a Soviet spy? She did not believe it, she said, nor did she want to believe it. "Deep in my mind I don't know. I asked the FBI to let me talk to Golitsin. They laughed in my face. 'Out of the question.' I'd like to know how he knows about 'Sasha' and the letter K."

Even to entertain the possibility that her husband was a spy hurts her deeply, she said. "For seven years he drove a delivery truck for the Washington Post at two A.M. and ran the gallery by day. He worked 2 A.M. to 9 A.M. and then every Monday all day he had to collect from the drugstores and places that sold the paper." If Sasha Orlov had money from spying, she asked, would he have done that?

No, she could not believe he was a spy. "I don't believe he was. There is not a shred of proof. If he did that" -- there were tears in her eyes now -- "it would be very low. I can't believe a man could lie to his family for thirty years and not help us in our struggle. When we bought the house it was in terrible shape. I worked for a year, tearing off the plaster, stripping it down. I worked as hard as anyone in the gulag. If he let me do that, if he really was a spy ..." Her voice trailed off.

She composed herself. "If Igor worked for the Russians all his life and took his family for cover, I would not like to sleep at night anymore," she said. "At the end of John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, he writes to his wife, I'm sorry. I married you only for cover. I saw the last episode on TV at a friend's home. It came like a mountain of bricks on me. I said, my God, that could be me."

______________

Notes:

1. Eleonore Orlov provided me with a one-page biography that Orlov wrote in his own hand. Bearing in mind that Orlov was a spy for three countries, and that the CIA concluded he was a double agent for the Soviets, the dates and details in the document nevertheless appear to coincide with what is known of his background from various other sources. By Orlov's account. however, he was captured in December 1943, rather than in 1944, as Eleonore remembered the date.

The handwritten biography reads:

Igor Gregory Orlov, born 1-1-1922 in Kiev, Sov. Union. Naturalized Sept. 6, 1962 in Alexandria Va. Naturalization # 8240855.

Military or Government services August 1941-Dec. 1943 Lt. in Sov. Intelligence Service, Dec.43-April 1944, Prisoner of war in German Hospital. April 1944-March 1945-Lt. in German Intelligence Service, "Staff Valy." March 1945-May 1945, Intelligence Service ROA (Vlasov Army) 1946-1948--U.S. Intelligence Service 1950-1961-CIA "operatives"

2. In May 1945, Vlasov and one of his divisions marched into Prague, switched sides, and fought the SS garrison. What happened next is disputed; by some accounts, Vlasov surrendered to the American forces, only to be handed over to the Russians. Other versions claim he was captured by the Soviet army. In 1946, the Russians announced that Vlasov and six other generals had been found guilty of treason and hanged.

3. Garbler had it still, almost thirty-five years later. When I interviewed him at his home in Tucson, where he retired with his wife after leaving the CIA, he walked over to a bookcase that covered an entire wall of his study, reached up to a high shelf, and took it down. It was entitled Berlin: Symphonie einer Weltstadt (Symphony of a Metropolis) and had been published in Berlin in 1955 by Ernst Staneck Verlag. The inscription, in German, said: "Berlin! Only a tiny stone in the mosaic of your travels through the world. This book may help you when you think occasionally of the city, your work, and the people you have become acquainted with. With many good wishes we say goodbye to you once again."

4. Technically, Eleonore Orlov said, both were stateless persons. "I had German citizenship," she said, "but I lost my citizenship on the day I married Igor, a foreigner. He had no citizenship. I was listed as a 'homeless foreigner' and had to report to the police every year."

5. Few of the Orlovs' neighbors realized that the CIA operated a safe house in the heart of Georgetown, one of Washington's most elegant residential areas. Real estate records of the District of Columbia list "John M. Booth by" as the owner of the corner house at 3301 O Street from 1947 to 1965, but no trace of such a person could be found. He was not listed at the time in the telephone book, which showed "Cortlandt E. Parker" and later "Samuel S. Ingraham" at that address. Virginia Erwin Page Gore bought the house in February 1965 for $63,000 but never met the seller, "Mr. Booth by." She sold the property a few weeks later to Richard and Lillian Borwick for $75,000. The Borwicks, who were living in the house in 1990, said they were aware that their home had been a safe house used by the CIA. Mrs. Borwick said Mrs. Gore bought the house "from the government." She added: "I knew it was a safe house because every [interior] door had a lock on it. The basement was soundproofed and that's where people were interrogated. There was a single light bulb hanging down from the ceiling." Neighbors told her they saw a lot of foreigners go in and out of the house, she added.

6. Three years later, Dr. Walsh delivered John F. Kennedy, Jr., at Georgetown.

7. At the time, the building housed the FBI's Washington Field Office.

8. In FBI parlance, the term stood for "unknown subject."

9. "Over a period of time I took quite a few watercolors and other pictures to be matted and framed," Jones said. He displayed a watercolor of a boater on a river, framed by the Orlovs. Jones spent time at the gallery, he explained, because he wanted to get a firsthand impression of the Orlovs. "I have a strong investigative background," he said. "I always felt the more you know about your opponent, the better. I got to know his boys, I got to know Ellie."

10. Tansey, who retired in 1980, insisted that he was not on assignment for the FBI when he visited the Orlovs. "My relationship with the Orlovs was strictly with regard to their business," he said. "I was a customer and a friend. I was in the intelligence division at headquarters but had no responsibility for this case." Asked whether he did not worry that his close association with a suspected Soviet spy under investigation by his own division might be misinterpreted, Tansey replied: "I don't comment on things like that."

11. Some published accounts have referred to KITTY HAWK as "Igor Romanovich Kozlov," or "Igor Kozlov." But Kochnov never used that name, either in Washington or in his previous posting at the Soviet embassy in Karachi, Pakistan.

12. There was no mystery to how Kochnov obtained Helms's home telephone number. "I've always been listed in the phone book," Helms said. "My home then was on Fessenden Street."

13. As it happened, when Artamonov and Ewa reached Stockholm, the CIA officer in the American embassy who received them when they appealed for assistance was Paul Garbler. Garbler, the deputy COS, helped to set in motion the arrangements for their asylum in the United States.

14. Although Kochnov's call to the Helms residence had set the KITTY HAWK case in motion. Helms insisted that he had not approved any aspect of the operation. "There was never the slightest intent on my part that Shadrin would go out of the country and meet any Soviet," Helms said. "Whoever manhandled that case, it was not I. I don't recall being asked is it okay to put this guy [KITTY HAWK] in touch with Shadrin. I have no recollection of anyone asking me to make such a decision. It doesn't make sense. I would not have approved it."

15. The FBI and CIA officials who handled KITTY HAWK do not agree on whether Kochnov was a plant or a genuine agent. James Nolan, the FBI counterintelligence official, who closely studied the case, came away convinced that KITTY HAWK was a fake, in part because he never reappeared as a CIA source. "My view is that if KITTY HAWK was genuine, they [the Soviets] would never have taken him out of the United States," Nolan said. "Or he would have been back here right away. Look, you've got two hundred KGB officers in the U.S., and they can't find Shadrin. He goes and finds him in twelve hours, singlehanded. What two big residencies in New York and Washington couldn't do. He's demonstrated he is a brilliant operator in the United States. So he should have come back [to the U.S.], and he didn't. He floated around in Moscow and other places, he was visible, seen, but never so you could talk to him. That ought to tell you after a while that something's wrong. He should have had a red star pinned on him and be sent back here as deputy resident. He wasn't." However, Vasia C. Gmirkin, who wrote a still classified study of the Shadrin case for the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff in the late 1970s, after James Angleton had gone, concluded that both KITTY HAWK and Shadrin were bona fide. By 1990, the CIA had received intelligence that KITTY HAWK had died, of natural causes.

16. In Richard Wagner's opera, based on the medieval German story, Lohengrin is a knight of the Holy Grail who rescues Princess Elsa from an unwanted suitor. He is led to her by a swan. She is forbidden to ask his identity, but curious, one day she does, and Lohengrin must leave.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

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Chapter 14: Trinidad

As the first chief of the MOSCOW station, Paul Garbler had every reason to believe that headquarters was pleased with his performance. He had handled the contacts with Penkovsky as instructed, managed to keep a low profile, and had the wit to copy the Cherepanov papers before they were politely handed back to the KGB.

Midway through his tour, he received word that he had been promoted. Garbler and his wife, Florence, celebrated with champagne and caviar.

In February 1964, as his assignment in the Soviet Union was winding down, Garbler flew out of Moscow to meet with David Murphy, the chief of the Soviet division, who was on a trip to Western Europe. Murphy offered him a top job back at headquarters as deputy chief of the division. But he would start out, temporarily, as chief of operations. Garbler accepted on the spot.

With a few days of holiday on his hands, he went skiing alone in Zurs, Austria, early in March. Although an accomplished skier, Garbler lost his balance and took a spill, suffering a head injury that left him with headaches and partial paralysis on his left side, in his arm and leg. He was taken to a hospital in Wiesbaden, West Germany.

In the hospital, he was visited by Hugh Montgomery, who had been his deputy was in Moscow but had been expelled the previous year in the fallout over the Penkovsky case. "Montgomery didn't come to Wiesbaden to wish me well," Garbler said. "There was none of that. I sensed that Hugh was there to see if I was rational, since I had landed on my head. And he said, 'Dave Murphy doesn't want you to go back to Moscow. Why don't you just come home?' I said I walked into the Moscow job and I intended to walk out, not on a stretcher." Garbler soon recovered and returned to his post in Moscow.

In June, he flew back to Langley to take up his new job as operations chief in the Soviet division. But he harbored lingering suspicions about the accident. "I was in good health, I played on the embassy hockey team. I thought somebody had slipped me something." Garbler wondered whether the somebody might have been General Gribanov, the chief of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, who had the responsibility of watching and compromising U.S. diplomats stationed in Moscow.

"I knew Gribanov had been traveling," Garbler said. "I checked carefully on the movements of General Gribanov. We found he had traveled to Innsbruck and St. Anton, Austria, less than three weeks before I got to Zurs." The CIA was not able to determine what the KGB general was doing in Austria. And there the trail ended; Garbler could not establish that he had been drugged.

And he had other problems to deal with. Almost from the start, things did not go well back at headquarters. Garbler did not slip easily into the role of a gray bureaucrat. He clashed with Pete Bagley, the division's counterintelligence officer. As a former chief of station in Moscow, Garbler did not hesitate to voice his opinions.

Late one evening, there was a flare-up with another officer in the Soviet division over a cable being prepared to alert some thirty CIA stations around the globe. The cable said that the KGB had approached the CIA to work in tandem against the Chinese. Garbler challenged the accuracy of the cable and asked to see the evidence. The officer who prepared it said "the best report came from Rocky Stone in Katmandu." He handed Garbler the transcript of a bugged conversation between Howard E. "Rocky" Stone, the station chief in Nepal, and the KGB resident.

"I read the transcript. The Soviet KGB man says, 'Your Scotch is great, Chivas Regal, the best.' The CIA man says, 'The zakuski are wonderful-what about working with us against the Chinese?' The Soviet ducks any response. I was appalled. This was the evidence!"

Garbler went back to the officer. "I asked, 'Is this the best you have?' He said yes. I said, 'That's terrible, there's nothing to it.' He said, 'You haven't been here long enough. That's what Dave wants. Don't make waves.'

"The next day I said to Dave Murphy, 'Do you really want to send this?' Murphy replied, 'It's just possible I made a mistake, you don't belong on my team.' I was out. Pete Bagley had a straight line to be deputy chief and I was looking for a job." In time, as it turned out, Bagley did become deputy chief of the Soviet division.

It seemed to Garbler that there was "something weird" about his rapid fall from grace in the Soviet division, but he chalked it up to normal bureaucratic infighting. And, after all, he quickly moved to another assignment, with Murphy's help. "To give Dave his due, he got me a good job as chief, foreign intelligence, Western European division." In 1965, after Garbler had worked in his new post for several months, a major reorganization took place inside the DDP. The Central and Western European divisions were merged into a new European division (EUR), headed by Rolfe Kingsley, a senior officer who had been chief of station in Copenhagen and Ottawa.

Early in 1966, Kingsley selected Garbler to be chief of operations in the new division. He sent the nomination up to Desmond FitzGerald, the deputy director for plans. Two weeks later, Garbler said, Kingsley called him into his office, all smiles. He showed him the memorandum he had sent to the DDP. It had come back with a notation penciled on the margin by FitzGerald: "Excellent choice, I agree."

For Garbler, it was a prestigious new job at the center of the agency's operations in Europe. He put the unfortunate experience in the Soviet division behind him and settled into his new post. Three weeks later, on a Friday evening, a shaken Kingsley summoned Garbler to his office. "He told me Tom K. wanted to see me right away." Thomas H. Karamessines was FitzGerald's deputy.

It was late, and Garbler remembered his steps echoing in the almost deserted building as he made his way to Karamessines's office. What could Tom K. possibly want?

Karamessines, a short, stocky man with black horn-rimmed glasses, was ill at ease. But he came quickly to the point. He and FitzGerald had been talking about it most of the afternoon, and they had reached a decision. The agency had a new responsibility for Garbler, Karamessines said. "We're sending you down to the Farm."

The Farm! Garbler was staggered; Karamessines might as well have said Siberia.

It made no sense; Garbler pointed out that the DDP had just agreed to his appointment as chief of operations for all of Europe.

"We need someone with your operational experience to motivate the trainees," Karamessines replied smoothly. "We're lucky to have you."

Garbler managed to ask how soon he was needed at the Farm.

"Within a week," Karamessines said.

Garbler, years later, still remembered the anger that rose within him. "I asked myself, what the hell was going on? What about my family? We'd bought a house believing we would be in the Washington area for at least three years. My wife was deep in plans for decorating it. My daughter had just been placed in school. What was I to tell them?"

Garbler argued with Karamessines for an hour. His demand to see either FitzGerald or the director of the CIA was turned down. He could refuse the assignment, Karamessines finally told him, only if he resigned.

After fifteen years in the CIA, Garbler had too much of a career investment to quit. Dutifully, but puzzled, he went off to Williamsburg, where he spent the next two years as deputy director of the Farm, working with young trainees. All the while, he kept expecting word from headquarters that a terrible mistake had been made.

The other CIA officers on the staff at Camp Peary were quick to realize that something odd was going on with Garbler, and they shunned him, lest something rub off on them. "It was as if I had contracted leprosy," Garbler remembered.

Two years to the day, Garbler was back in the office of Karamessines, who was by now the DDP. The chief of clandestine operations was upbeat; he had discussed Garbler's next assignment with Richard Helms, the new CIA director. Garbler was really going to like his new job.

"Great," said Garbler. With his background as chief of station in Moscow, perhaps he had been selected for was in one of the major Eastern-bloc countries. Or maybe a senior post had opened up back in the Soviet division.

"We're sending you to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad," Karamessines said.

Garbler was stunned.

Karamessines, like a travel agent selling passage on the Titanic, cheerily extolled the advantages of Garbler's new post. The situation in the Caribbean was "very bad." Dick Helms was greatly concerned. The agency needed a reliable, experienced man as station chief in Trinidad.

Garbler was incredulous. "I couldn't believe this was happening," he said. He had visited the island once, years before, on an aircraft carrier, and knew that the major preoccupation of the residents was the annual carnival. "I had worked for years to learn my trade in Soviet operations. What was I going to do in Trinidad?"

Outraged, Garbler protested the decision, marshaling all his arguments, demanding to know the real reason for his exile. In return, Karamessines provided only soothing replies. Garbler was being assigned to one of the agency's most important nerve centers in the Caribbean. Helms wanted him there. Once again, Karamessines reminded Garbler that he could always resign if he did not want the assignment.

By now, Garbler was sure there was a conspiracy against him in the agency, although he did not suspect the reason. When he left Karamessines, he went directly to the office of Howard J. Osborn, the chief of the Office of Security. An old friend of Garbler's, Osborn said yes, he knew of the appointment. The security chief admitted, Garbler said, that sending him to Trinidad was a bit like "assigning Dick Helms to run the incinerator." He laughed and bantered with Garbler. But he shed no light on what was really going on.

At age fifty, Paul Garbler, former dive-bomber pilot, Berlin operative at the height of the Cold War, and the first CIA chief of station in Moscow, swallowed his pride and went off to Trinidad for four years.

Midway through his tour, Garbler finally learned the truth. A DDP officer who was an old and close friend arrived in Trinidad on agency business, and stayed with Garbler at his home. After dinner, Garbler invited his colleague into the study, which had been swept for electronic bugs only a few days earlier by CIA technicians. Garbler turned up the stereo anyway.

After several cognacs, the visiting CIA man put security aside and confided in his old friend.

Headquarters wanted Garbler out of the way, he said, because he was suspected of being a spy for the Soviet Union. He was believed to be a Soviet mole inside the CIA. He had been sent to Trinidad so he would be cut off from access to secret operations and classified documents involving the Soviets.

There was a moment during World War II that Garbler often remembered. He was flying his Navy Helldiver in terrible weather on a mission to Japanese-held Chichi Island, in the far Pacific, and Grafton B. "Soupy" Campbell, the squadron leader, was having trouble finding a way through the thick cloud cover. The planes were running low on fuel, and if they did not attack soon, they would not make it back to the carrier. Suddenly there was an opening in the clouds below, and Garbler and all the other pilots got on the radio at the same instant. In unison, they yelled, "Dammit, Soupy, dive!"

Now, almost thirty years later, with the carnival music of Trinidad blaring on his hi-fi, the clouds had parted once again for Garbler. Finally, he understood.

***

At the time, Garbler was unaware that an intense hunt for penetrations was underway within the CIA. Nor did he yet know how or why the agency had come to focus on him as a major suspect.

The key, of course, was Igor Orlov, whom Garbler had called "the little man" when he had run him in Berlin almost two decades earlier. But how did the mole hunters get from Orlov to Garbler?

Garbler, after all, did not have a name that began with the letter K. Ed Petty, a former member of the Special Investigations Group, explained what had happened.

Within the SIG, he said, there was general agreement that Orlov was Golitsin's "Sasha." Bruce Solie had reached that conclusion after studying the Berlin operational files. "But there was a problem. They went to Golitsin. 'You said it was a staff penetration,' they said. 'This guy [Orlov] was never a staff officer.' Golitsin came up with this theory. 'The Russians are running Orlov, and doubling the agents run by Orlov, and their real target is your staff officers. You can be sure among officers who ran Orlov you will find one or more serious penetrations. The Russians will have gone to them, the CIA staff officers, and said, "We control your network, you had better cooperate with us or your careers go down the drain." I could never understand how Angleton or anybody bought the logic. [1]

"Upwards of a dozen case officers had handled Orlov and they all came under suspicion. They were all gone over with a fine-tooth comb."

Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy and a key member of the SIG, defended the decision to broaden the investigation. "You have to make a presumption that if Igor Orlov was a spy, he in turn would recruit some of the people he was associated with," Miler said. "From a CI point of view you have to assume one spy may recruit another."

Not only were all of the case officers who ran Orlov investigated, he continued, "but also other agency people he might have known or socialized with."

But Miler insisted that the mole hunt was not solely the responsibility of the SIG. Others played a part as well. "The Counterintelligence Staff," he said, "did not do the investigations. We did the research. OS [the Office of Security] did the investigation if it became a good case. OS, the DCI [the Director of Central Intelligence], chief of CI, and the DDP would know about it. In almost every instance of a referral to the FBI the DCI gave the approval."

It was through Orlov, therefore, whose previous operational names had begun with the letter K, that the mole hunters made the quantum leap to the first chief of the Moscow station. Like an electric current that arcs between electrodes, the mole hunters had moved from Orlov, whom they were convinced was Sasha, to every case officer, secretary, or other CIA employee who had ever had any contact with him.

Once the SIG had focused on Garbler, the counterintelligence men dug into his file and found additional information to feed their growing suspicion. In Korea, for example, where Garbler had served as assistant naval attache and as President Rhee's pilot, he had played tennis, the mole hunters triumphantly discovered, with George Blake. Blake, who was captured and imprisoned under harsh conditions when the North Koreans overran Seoul, was later unmasked as a Soviet agent inside MI6.

As the "evidence" mounted against Garbler -- including the discovery that his father had emigrated from Russia and his mother from Poland -- the CI Staff became persuaded that the former chief of the Moscow station was a Soviet spy. The CIA referred the Garbler case to the FBI.

***

In Trinidad, after Garbler had learned he was a suspected Soviet mole, there was little he could do except serve out the rest of his tour . Stuck in Port-of-Spain, more than two thousand miles from headquarters, he could not even begin the process of trying to clear his good name.

There was time to brood and think, time to despair. Although he now knew why he had been sent to the Caribbean, he tried to make the best of it. Trinidad was, after all, an island paradise. Rum and sunshine were abundant. Garbler liked the people; he found them hedonistic and unpredictable, but also generous and kind. Among them he made many lasting friends, both black and white.

But for the better part of nine years, he now realized, he had been shunted into blind alleys, cut off from the mainstream in the CIA, and finally isolated under the coconut palms, a suspected traitor to the country he loved and had served all of his adult life.

Garbler reviewed the last half-dozen years, reevaluating events in the light of what he now knew. What might have seemed bureaucratic errors or innocent events took on new meaning. It was like seeing a movie over again, this time knowing the plot.

He thought back to Moscow. Was it possible that the agency's suspicions, of which he had still not officially been informed, had begun there? In Moscow, Garbler had been told almost nothing by headquarters about developments in his most important case, that of Oleg Penkovsky. If he was already under suspicion, headquarters would have told him as little as possible.

He remembered when he was recovering from his ski accident in the hospital in Wiesbaden and Hugh Montgomery, his deputy chief of station in Moscow, had paid him a visit. At the time, he had thought that Montgomery had been sent by David Murphy, the division chief "to report to Murphy whether I had enough marbles left to return to Moscow and run the station." But in retrospect, Garbler wondered whether Montgomery's true purpose was "to see if I was carrying KGB money in my pajamas."

Garbler had been determined to return to his post in Moscow. "The bunglers at headquarters may have thought my insistence on returning was linked to my need to see my KGB handler one more time, if for no other reason, to get instructions for future contact in the U.S. Murphy would infer from my position that I had to go back and satisfy the people who were controlling me from the other side."

In 1972, when his tour in Trinidad ended, Garbler returned to headquarters and immediately made an appointment with William v. Broe, the CIA inspector general. A complaint to the inspector general, Garbler knew, would earn him the displeasure of Karamessines, the deputy director for plans, but at this point, Garbler had nothing to lose.

Garbler told his story to Broe, whom he was certain already knew it. He had achieved senior status in the DDP at age forty-five, Garbler said, and could normally have looked forward to another fifteen years of increased responsibility. Instead, he had been sidetracked, the victim of invisible charges that he had never been told about officially. Garbler demanded to know why, if he was a suspect, he had not been informed.

Broe did not respond, but promised to talk to Karamessines, who then wrote a memorandum praising Garbler's sterling performance in Trinidad, but making no mention of the mole charge. But Garbler's protests had some effect; after nine years as an unperson in the CIA, he was partially rehabilitated and in 1973 sent to Stockholm for three years as chief of station.

The knowledge that he had been suspected by his own service of omitting espionage for the Soviet Union had placed a terrible strain on both Garbler and his wife, Florence, and their daughter. In the midst of Garbler's fight to clear his reputation he was awakened one night from a deep sleep by his wife.

"Paul," she said, "I've never asked you this, and I know it's not true. But now I want to hear it from you. Did you ever spy for the Russians?"

"Christ, hell no, you know I didn't," Garbler said.

Garbler had still not been told officially that he was a suspected mole. He had never been given a chance to confront his faceless accusers. Sweden was a pleasant assignment, but Garbler was not ready to give up. In December 1976, after he returned from Stockholm, he wrote to the inspector general again.

This time, he demanded an inquiry.

_______________

Notes:

1. Some former CIA officers thought that Golitsin had not warned of moles in the CIA when he defected, but only about two years later. Donald Jameson, for example, who had been an officer in the Soviet division, remembered taking Golitsin to dinner in August 1962 at the home of former CIA director Allen Dulles in Georgetown. "Dulles said, 'The thing that interests me most is, do you know of any penetrations in the CIA?' Golitsin said no. Dulles knocked on wood, on the table, and Golitsin did, too." But Golitsin was telling his CIA debriefers a different story. The evidence is clear that Golitsin spoke of moles from the start. Even before he arrived in Washington, he told Frank Friberg that he had seen information that had leaked from "high inside the CIA." At the outset, he warned of a penetration named Sasha. And he disclosed that the KGB knew about the CIA's effort to copy the Soviet bug in the Great Seal. By January 15, 1962, within four weeks of Golitsin's defection, and as a result of his leads, wiretaps were in place on Peter Karlow, and a full-fledged FBI and CIA investigation of Karlow was under way. The mole hunt reached an even greater level of intensity in 1963 and afterward as it spread from Orlov, and beyond Karlow to other staff officers.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:34 am

Chapter 15: Murphy' s Law

By the mid-1960s, the CIA's Soviet division was in turmoil. The division, staffed as it was by so many Russian-speakers and persons of Russian origin, had become the primary target of the mole hunt triggered by Golitsin.

Literally dozens of its officers were under suspicion, and many were being actively investigated by the SIG, the Office of Security, and in some cases the FBI. Down on the Farm, Yuri Nosenko was being held incommunicado, a ticking time bomb for the agency. Paul Garbler, the first chief of the Moscow station, had been exiled to Trinidad, an unwitting suspect. All of the other case officers who had run Igor Orlov were also under investigation.

Because Golitsin had predicted that any defector who followed him would be a plant, virtually all of the cases being run by the division were viewed as bad by the CI Staff. The Soviet division was supposed to be recruiting Soviet intelligence officers around the world, but what was the point if the powerful counterintelligence officials at headquarters regarded every new recruit or walk-in as an agent sent by the KGB?

The result was that the CIA's Soviet operations had ground to a halt. At the time, during the height of the Cold War, the CIA existed primarily to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union; other targets were secondary. Now the mole hunt had paralyzed the Soviet division and thereby the CIA itself.

While some agency officials dispute this, it was precisely the conclusion reached by William E. Colby, the director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976. "From the mid-1960s on," Colby said, "Soviet operations came to a dead halt. Helms and Karamessines had launched a program we called hard targets. 'Let's recruit hard targets. Soviet. Chinese. That's what we're in business for.' It wasn't happening.

"As I understood it, it was because of the high degree of suspicion that was exhibited about any operational opportunities. The insistence of CI that defectors be looked at as probable fakes. There was an awful impasse between the CI staff and the Soviet division."

A former high-ranking official of the agency said the problem went far beyond the Soviet division. "The Soviet division had people in stations all over the world," he said, "but they were not the only ones who could recruit Soviets. Other officers in the stations could recruit Soviets as well. [1] The divisions went ahead and tried to recruit people, but they were constantly getting into disputes with Angleton because he claimed that anyone we recruited was being sent to manipulate us. Angleton believed everyone was bad. We kept on working, we kept on recruiting, but it was totally undermined by the CI Staff."

According to one former senior CIA officer, Angleton tried to persuade the British to reject Yuri Krotkov, the first Soviet defector to vouch for Nosenko. A Moscow filmmaker, Krotkov had defected in London in the fall of 1963. "Krotkov was a KGB co-optee," the CIA man said. "He gave us a lot of information about Soviet dissidents. He was a tremendous source of interesting information. All scoffed at by Angleton. All throwaway, Angleton said -- who cares about a bunch of dissidents?"

Nosenko had defected early in 1964. "Krotkov was immediately asked if he knew Nosenko, and yes he knew him, and verified that Nosenko was an officer in the Second Chief Directorate. That sealed his doom. Jim said, send him up to Scotland and put him in a castle and let him rot there for a couple of years. The Brits wouldn't do it. Then he said, send him back. Dick White [the chief of MI6] said, 'Send him back, are you mad? We'll never get another Soviet defector.' White was horrified. The Brits intervened and Krotkov was allowed to stay. He lives in California now." [2]

***

Murphy's Law states that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will. And as it happened, during this tumultuous and difficult period in the 1960s, when so much in the CIA went wrong, the Soviet division was presided over by David E. Murphy.

Tall and bespectacled, with a high forehead and a shock of gray hair that contrasted with his blue eyes, Murphy was square of jaw and rather distinguished-looking, with a faint resemblance to the actor William Holden. At CIA headquarters Murphy looked like a man who was always in a hurry, a slightly stooped figure striding rapidly down the corridors. He gave the impression of a high-powered executive who thought fast and acted fast.

To most of his colleagues, Murphy was an Irishman from Syracuse, in upstate New York. "Of course he was Irish," said one ex-CIA officer. "I was in his house, there were shillelaghs on the wall." But considerable mystery surrounded his roots. Wild rumors persisted in the agency that Murphy was an orphan, that he was adopted, that he wasn't really Irish, that his true name was Moscowitz, and that he might even have had a Russian background. Some of this chatter may have stemmed from the fact that Murphy's first wife, Marian Escovy, was a White Russian. Or perhaps from the fact that Murphy was fluent in Russian, as well as in German and French. [3]

What little is in the public record about Murphy reveals that he was born on June 23, 1921, in New York State, was graduated from State Teachers College in Cortland, New York, south of Syracuse, in 1942, and served in the Army during World War II. After that, the official biography lists him as a "consultant" to the "Department of Defense." In fact, Murphy served with Army intelligence in Korea and Japan, then joined the CIA. By 1949, or soon after, he was chief of the agency's Munich operations base.

In 1953, Murphy came to Berlin to be deputy chief of base under Bill Harvey. In Berlin, his backyard adjoined that of Paul Garbler, who was there running "Franz Koischwitz," later to be known as Igor Orlov. By 1959, Murphy had briefly succeeded Harvey as chief of base, and in 1963 he was promoted to chief of the Soviet division at headquarters. As such, he was at the center of the period of the mole hunt, the intense conflicts over Golitsin and Nosenko, and the freeze in Soviet operations.

Murphy was a senior player in the agency, and his career advanced rapidly, but along the way he got into some highly publicized scrapes. In Vienna, CIA legend has it, Murphy wound up in a barroom brawl with a KGB man and had to escape, ignominiously, out the men's-room window. Scotty Miler recalled that something like that happened. "Apparently he went to a beer hall or bar after receiving an indication that this KGB guy could be recruited. Dave made his pitch and then the guy blew up, threw beer in his face, and started yelling 'American spy!'"

In 1966, while serving as chief of the Soviet division, Murphy starred in another Keystone Cops episode, this time in Japan. It made headlines around the world, although Murphy was described in the news stories as a "tourist."

The trouble began when Murphy flew into Tokyo to try to recruit the KGB resident, Georgy P. Pokrovsky, who was there under cover as first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Tokyo. It was unusual for a division chief personally to participate in a high-risk field operation, but Murphy was not one to shy away from danger or intrigue.

George Kisevalter remembered the episode. "As chief of SR [Soviet Russia] division," he said, "Murphy went to Japan using his true name. To show the boys how to do it. He took with him a case officer who got hit in the head with an umbrella. It was a scandal and got into the press."

Indeed it did, and the news stories centered on some odd goings-on at the Clean Breeze apartments in Tokyo on the night of St. Patrick's Day. Pokrovsky, according to the published accounts, returned to his residence at the Clean Breeze to find a Colombian neighbor, one Jose Miguel Moneva Calderon, seemingly ill in the lobby. The Colombian asked Pokrovsky to help him to his apartment to get some medicine. The Russian obliged. Who was waiting in a nearby stairwell but the two American "tourists," Murphy, whose residence was given as McLean, Virginia, and Thomas A. Ryan, of Vienna, Virginia. A scuffle ensued. Pokrovsky got away, but returned with Soviet reinforcements. The KGB goon squad encountered the two Americans outside the apartment, and a free-for-all took place. Pokrovsky hit Ryan with the umbrella and one of the CIA men had his glasses broken.

Pokrovsky charged that the Americans had tried to kidnap him. The Japanese police smoothed over the affair, calling it merely "a quarrel with two Americans and a Colombian." In Washington, Robert J. McCloskey, the State Department spokesman, was asked whether there were "any American government representatives involved in this."

"No, sir," he replied sturdily.

And it was under Murphy that the Soviet division ran, and then began to suspect, the KGB illegal Yuri Loginov, code name AEGUSTO. Loginov, it will be recalled, had been recruited in Helsinki in 1961 by Richard Kovich, who later became one of the CI Staff's prime mole suspects as a result of Golitsin's analysis of his career. Kovich not only had a name that began with the letter K, a Slavic background, and service in Germany, he had handled Ingeborg Lygren, the Norwegian CIA agent, Mikhail Federov, the GRU illegal, and Loginov.

Although Loginov was run in the field by a succession of CIA officers after Kovich, the case was supervised at headquarters from the start by Joseph C. Evans, a counterintelligence officer who worked for Murphy and Bagley in the Soviet division. A short, stocky, compact man who chain-smoked filter cigarettes, Evans was a former newspaper reporter who had edited a weekly in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He joined the agency and was sent to London in the 1950s to analyze traffic from the Berlin tunnel that the CIA had dug to wiretap the Soviets. Back at headquarters in 1959, he concentrated on a narrow specialty, Soviet illegals. A thoughtful man with an analytical turn of mind, he had faith in Loginov, at first.

Evans took part in the debriefing of Golitsin. "I debriefed him thoroughly on Loginov," he said. It was in May 1961, while Kovich was in Helsinki, that Golitsin and another KGB officer had met there with Loginov. "Golitsin said the other officer from Moscow was from the illegals directorate and was shepherding Loginov and 'staging' him -- the term they use is stazhirovka, a familiarization test before a final mission." At the time, Evans said, "I was quite apprehensive about Loginov returning to Soviet hands," since he was now ostensibly a double agent for the CIA.

Loginov flew to Paris in the fall of 1962. In the spring of 1964, he arrived in Brussels on his third trip to the West. He traveled to Germany, then left for Beirut in June, went on to Cairo, posing as a Canadian, and later returned to Moscow. In January 1967, the KGB dispatched Loginov to Antwerp on his fourth trip to the West. He was instructed to go to several countries and finally to the United States, his main target.

Although Richard Kovich continued to believe in Loginov, there were growing suspicions about the KGB illegal in the Soviet division and the CI Staff. To Bagley and Evans, the counterintelligence officers for the Soviet division, the stazhirovka process appeared endless. "He never seemed to handle anybody," Bagley said. "Here we had an illegal who spent all his time documenting himself. Most illegals handle cases, like Lonsdale.

"There were several other reasons," Bagley added. "Specific reasons. Not just that he was unproductive. There were concrete points. He made a mistake about a radio transmission. He knew something he hadn't yet received from Moscow. His legend didn't check out. He was always being promised he would handle important assignments, but it never happened." By about 1965, the decision had been reached: Loginov was a plant.

Joseph Evans said that "the decision was made because of two reasons. One was, we despaired of getting to the bottom of the story. We questioned him about contradictions and gaps in his story. Here was someone who could infer from the types of questions that clearly we doubted his story and never a reaction of anger and surprise. And, two, we had a loose cannon. If we break off and let run free a man who has a passport, we don't know where he's going to go."

If Loginov came to the United States, his ultimate target, he would be under FBI surveillance. But the CIA's concern, Evans said, was that "this man was capable of changing identities and disappearing. We'd lose him."

"Loginov gave us nothing of CI value," Evans insisted. "He gave us no illegals or agents. His false documentation never led to any illegal support apparatus, no accommodation addresses of [Soviet] agents, which illegals have, nothing."

Loginov's failure to identify illegal support agents was significant, Evans insisted, because "if they support one, they could support others. He identified none who could lead to other illegals." Loginov's real mission, Evans believed, was "to find out how much we knew about illegals and how they operated."

To be sure, Evans said, Loginov had turned over his codes to the CIA. " 'This is my cipher system,' he said. So yes, we were able to read his traffic. But were there other systems? Were there two? He had one-way communication from the [Moscow] Center by radio, unreadable unless you had the cipher system. We were able to listen -- he told us frequencies, times -- and confirm his messages." But, Evans repeated, Loginov might have been getting radio messages the CIA didn't know about.

Another reason for the CI Staff's conclusion, Evans said, was that Loginov never explained his motive for volunteering his services to the CIA. "I never sensed a hatred of KGB or of his assignments. Nor was he doing it for the excitement of being a double agent. He said he liked to work for the Americans, but he never displayed the counter feeling of animosity to the Soviet system. 'I just want to work for the Americans,' Loginov said." [4]

As Evans recalled it, "I reached the decision he was bad and I was supported in this decision by Dave Murphy and Pete Bagley. They felt as I felt on the same grounds -- that something was wrong."

One thing that was wrong, of course, was that Loginov had backed up the bona fides of Yuri Nosenko. At the time, Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA, and the agency, in David Murphy's blunt language, was attempting to "break" him. The CIA case officers in contact with Loginov were ordered to question him about Nosenko. Loginov's answer, that Nosenko was a genuine defector, would, by itself, have been enough to cast doubt on Loginov. Loginov supported the bona fides of Nosenko and that was what got him in trouble," said one former agency officer.

Meanwhile, Loginov was maintaining contact with the CIA. He had arrived in South Africa late in January 1967. In May, he flew to Kenya, where he was met by a CIA case officer, and the following month he was back in Johannesburg, traveling on a Canadian passport as Edmund Trinka. [5] He moved into an apartment on Smit Street.

Now, at CIA headquarters, an extraordinary decision was made. Convinced that Loginov was a plant, the agency decided to "burn" its own agent. It tipped off the South African intelligence service to the fact that Yuri Loginov, a Soviet illegal, was in Johannesburg, living as Edmund Trinka.

In July 1967, agents of the South African security service raided Loginov's apartment and arrested him. He was jailed and a long series of interrogations began.

If the CIA was right, it was turning the tables on the KGB and putting a Soviet spy out of action. If the agency was wrong, it was causing the arrest and imprisonment of one of its own agents. It might even be placing his life in jeopardy. As might be imagined, it was not a decision that most CIA officials want to talk about, even today.

Pete Bagley, careful to note that by 1967 he had left his job as deputy chief of the Soviet division to become chief of station in Brussels, said: "Loginov was arrested with the approval of the division and Angleton. It was Dave Murphy's decision and Jim's. He was exposed to the South Africans. We gave him to the South Africans."

The South African intelligence service was told that the CIA had been running Loginov as an agent, but that the CIA had been unable to establish Loginov's bona fides and suspected he was a KGB plant.

Joseph Evans said the decision to expose Loginov was a "collective recommendation; what should we do? We discussed the alternatives. Dave Murphy signed off on that, and Angleton, maybe. I assume it was cleared with the DDP and discussed with Angleton, but I don't know that." [6]

Another senior former CIA officer, a retired station chief, had no doubt that Angleton was at the heart of the decision. "He was the master figure behind the scenes who moved the puppets around, whether the puppet was young Bagley, who thought he was smarter than everyone else, or some old buddy like Kingsley, who was unsure of himself, or Tom K. The point is that Jim never made overt power moves. But as chief of CI, Angleton got every piece of eyes-only traffic. He saw it all. Any exposure of Loginov would not have taken place without his permission. It couldn't."

On September 9, the South African security police announced that Yuri Loginov had confessed to espionage in that country and twenty-three other nations. Major General H. J. van den Bergh, the chief of the security police, released a long list of Soviet diplomats in other countries whom he said Loginov had identified as KGB agents.

Evans, posing as a South African security official, met and questioned Loginov after his arrest. "He admitted to me in South Africa that he had not told us everything about his relationship with the KGB," Evans said. But Loginov would not say more. Evans reported to the CIA that Loginov had teetered on the edge of admitting he was a dispatched agent, but never did. Convinced, nevertheless, that Loginov was a fake, the CIA allowed him to languish in a South African prison, which was, of course, where it had put him.

***

The mole hunt was not going well. Karlow had been forced out, Garbler shunted aside, the career of Richard Kovich stalled, and countless other officers investigated, and in some cases, transferred to less sensitive work. But no moles had been found, unless one counted Igor Orlov, who admitted nothing. In any case, Orlov had never been a CIA officer, only a contract employee in Germany.

But in the late 1960s, the Special Investigations Group began focusing on a new and astonishing target. This time it was no low-level agent running hookers out of bars in Karlshorst. This time it was the head of the Soviet division himself, David Murphy.

To begin with, Murphy was accused as a possible Soviet agent by Peter Kapusta, one of his own officers (who had handled Yuri Loginov). William R. Johnson, a former senior member of Angleton's staff, recalled the episode. Johnson, a trim, pipe-smoking man with the manner and mustache of a British regimental colonel, went to Yale with Angleton, who recruited him into the agency and sent him to Vienna. Later, Johnson served all over the Far East for the agency, ending as chief of base in Saigon.

According to Johnson, Kapusta went to Sam Papich, the FBI's veteran liaison man with the CIA, and voiced his allegations about Murphy. It was an unusual and rare move for a CIA officer to go outside his own agency to the FBI.

Papich had good reason to remember the accusation against Murphy. "Kapusta called in the middle of the night," he said. "It was one or two o'clock in the morning." But, Papich added, "The FBI did not investigate. From the beginning, the bureau looked at the Murphy matter strictly as an internal CIA problem. We received certain information, including Kapusta's input. By our standards, based on what was available, FBI investigation was not warranted."

William Johnson said, "I never could figure out why he [Kapusta] accused Murphy. I could not follow his reasoning. It involved the fact that Murphy and Blake were in Berlin together. I wrote a report and fired it off to Helms. I was in shock. I saw Sam [Papich] a couple of days later. He couldn't make head or tail of it, either."

Since Papich and the FBI had declined to take up the case, that might have been the end of it, but for the fact that the SIG was investigating Murphy. That meant that Angleton, too, had become suspicious of David Murphy, one of his closest colleagues and the senior CIA official in charge of operations against the Soviet Union. The mole hunt had now taken a mind-boggling twist: the chief of counterintelligence suspected the chief of the Soviet division. [7]

Scotty Miler confirmed that the SIG had conducted a full-dress investigation of Murphy while he headed the Soviet division. The Murphy investigation, he said, was "not directly in connection with Sasha. Just a series of failures, things that blew up in his face. Odd things that happened. The scrapes in Japan and Vienna. They [the KGB] may have been setting up Murphy just to embarrass CIA. But you have to consider these incidents may have been staged to give him bona fides."

Miler lit a cigarette and slowly exhaled. "Maybe Murphy was like Joe Btfsplk. He may have just been unlucky." [8] Then, too, Miler said, Murphy had been in Berlin at the same time as Orlov. "Orlov and Murphy overlapped in several places."

And Murphy's family could not be ignored, Miler added. "Murphy's wife was a White Russian from China who emigrated to San Francisco. It was a factor, just as in the investigation of anyone of that White Russian background. There were a lot of salted emigres, particularly coming out of China. So, yes, that had to be looked at."

But, Miler finally conceded, the beer hall and umbrella-bashing scrapes, Murphy's overlaps in Berlin with Igor Orlov and George Blake, his wife's background, were not really the root cause. What really led the Counterintelligence Staff to suspect Murphy, who headed all CIA operations against the Soviet Union at a critical time, was his link to a White Russian whom the mole hunters believed was a KGB agent. The background and activities of the man who cast a shadow over Murphy's career is one of the most intriguing, and previously untold, stories of the Cold War.

"Murphy was instrumental in getting him into the agency," Miler said. "It was like Ivory Soap that he was a spy.

"The man was not a staff employee, he was contract. And he was let go. And some things went very badly wrong when he worked for us. We lost some agents. It was during the Korean War. This chap was managing agents working behind the lines in North Korea who were lost. The suspicion was this wasn't just incompetence, but he betrayed these agents."

The man whom Miler was talking about was a character who might have stepped from the pages of a le Carre novel, or more likely one by John Buchan. His name was Arseny "Andy" Yankovsky.

He was born in 1914 in Vladivostok, Russia, into a landed family of the czarist aristocracy. The Yankovskys had a coat of arms, a huge estate, cattle and horses. They were, in fact, famous for breeding horses. When the revolution came in 1917, Andy's father, George, joined the White Russian forces and fought against the Red Army. Three years later, the Yankovskys were driven from their estate. George, his two brothers, Andy, and about two dozen other family members, along with the best of their cattle, fled Russia, crossed the border into North Korea, and settled in Chongjin. They later bought land in the mountains near Chuul and built their homes there. [9]

George Yankovsky had been a famed hunter in Russia, and in North Korea, he and his three sons hunted wild boar, leopards, and Korean tigers, which are bigger, and said to be fiercer, than the tigers of India. He sold furs, and trapped tigers for zoos. The Yankovskys also sold powdered reindeer antlers, much prized as an aphrodisiac throughout Asia. An accomplished lepidopterist, George had twenty species of butterflies named for him. [10]

In this exotic if rugged environment, Andy Yankovsky grew up speaking Russian, Korean, and Japanese. Other White Russians joined the colony in North Korea, and in 1934, young Andy took a bride, Olga Sokolovskaya, the divorced mother of two young children. They had met during her summer vacation trips to the colony. Like many White Russians, Olga had made her way to Harbin, Manchuria, where her daughter, Anastasia (Nata) Sokolovskaya was born in 1925. The same year the family moved to Shanghai, where a son, Rostislav, known as Slava, was born about 1930. But when Olga married Andy Yankovsky, her children were separated; Slava remained in Shanghai with his father and Nata lived with her mother and her new stepfather in North Korea.

By 1947, the good life the Yankovskys had lived in Chuul was over. The Soviets, who had occupied North Korea, rounded up most of the White Russian colony, including Andy, his two brothers, and his father. "The Soviets marched in and arrested everybody," said Andy Yankovsky's stepdaughter, Nata. "The army troops were everywhere. They arrested men only. Andy was arrested. He escaped, and got out on foot. They walked across the 38th parallel, Andy and Olga."

At the time, Nata, twenty-two, was in Chongjin. "I got out on a fishing tug in 1947, in the hold with smelly fish," she said. She joined her mother and stepfather in Seoul. But Andy's father and two brothers were sent to a labor camp in Siberia, she said, where his father soon died. In the meantime, she said, her brother Slava in Shanghai, lured by Soviet promises, boarded a ship and returned to the Soviet Union, where he was promptly imprisoned in the gulag for ten years.

In Seoul, American intelligence was looking for recruits among the White Russian refugees. "David Murphy is the first one who interviewed us," Nata said. "He interviewed Andy and then me. He [Murphy] was stationed in Seoul. We were interrogated endlessly."

For a year, Nata worked in Seoul as a typist for the Army. Then the Yankovskys were transferred to Tokyo. Andy Yankovsky went to work for the CIA. By 1949, Nata had also been hired by the agency as a translator and interpreter in Yokosuka.

That's where she met Ed Snow.

Edgar Snow (no relation to the well-known writer) was a Russian speaking case officer for the CIA, a six-foot-tall, blue-eyed, personable man whom women found attractive. Andy Yankovsky, as a contract agent, worked for Snow, as did Nata.

Snow's background was almost as colorful as Andy Yankovsky's. He was born in Seattle in 1922, the son of Nikolai Snegerieff, a Russian from Novosibirsk who had fought in the White Army. After the defeat at Irkutsk, Snow's father remained in that city and met and married Snow's mother, then sixteen. He and his wife, then pregnant with Ed, escaped from Russia and made their way to Canada and then to Seattle, where the family name was changed to the more manageable Snow.

The senior Snow was offered a job with Continental Can in Japan, and young Ed went to the American School there and learned Japanese. The family returned to the United States when Ed was ten, living first in Los Angeles and then in Phoenix, where he worked as a disk jockey while still in high school. He joined the Navy, got into intelligence work, and was an observer at the atomic tests on Bikini Atoll. After the war he finished college at UCLA, approached the CIA with some ideas about Soviet operations, and was hired. In 1948, the agency sent him to Japan under military cover.

There he ran Andy Yankovsky , who was building a network of agents in North Korea. And when the agency took on Yankovsky's stepdaughter as a translator, Snow was attracted to her. At twenty-seven, Nata was petite and vivacious, with long sandy hair in curls. They were married in 1954.

According to Scotty Miler, the agency had hired Yankovsky after David Murphy had recommended him. The Korean War broke out in June 1950, and in time almost all of Yankovsky's agents in the north were caught, Miler continued.

"Yankovsky was running agents from South Korea and training them to go into North Korea, infiltrate across the border, some by boat, some in air drops. To gather military intelligence. A lot of his agents were rolled up. The vast majority. Somewhere between two dozen and fifty.

"Snow was in Soviet operations in Japan. He was running his father-in-law, in essence. His wife was a White Russian. Snow had permission to marry her, since normally you can't marry a foreign national. And then it turned out later she had relatives behind the Curtain."

Nata Sokolovskaya insisted that she had fully disclosed her background to the CIA from the start. "Not only my brother, but also my other relatives in the gulag. They knew about him as they knew about every single relative. If they were so upset about my brother, why did they recruit us in the first place? Why did they grant permission to marry Ed? Of course, when I got the job I told them about Slava. With lie detectors. I don't remember whether I put it on written forms or not, but I told them."

Edgar Snow and Nata returned to CIA headquarters from Tokyo in 1954, soon after they were married. By that time, pregnant with a daughter born later that year, Nata had left the CIA.

Snow rose within the Soviet division to the key post of chief of operations. In 1959, he was slated to go to Berlin to work with George Kisevalter on the Popov case.

By this time, however, the CI Staff and the Office of Security had been turned loose on the Snow Y ankovsky case, the problem of the lost agents in Korea, and Nata's relatives behind the Iron Curtain. A major mole hunt now took place inside the agency, two years before Golitsin defected and triggered the larger search for penetrations. In a very real sense, the great mole hunt had begun in 1959 with the investigation of Ed Snow, his wife, and his father-in-law.

"There were horrible interrogations," Nata said. "For years I had nightmares. They called me in. There was a big room, a lot of officers, a huge table, everybody glaring at you. But the questions are all the same. Helms was there, I think, and Dulles, too. All during the summer of '59. They mainly asked me about the two years we spent under Soviet occupation in North Korea, from 1945 to 1947."

Snow and his wife were interrogated separately. Also drawn into the case was Vivian L. Parker, a British-born CIA case officer who immigrated to America and became a naturalized citizen in 1942 at the age of thirty-four .The CIA sent Parker to India in the mid-1950s, to Madras and Calcutta, and he had the misfortune to have met and married Andy Yankovsky's cousin, Marianne. Now the mole hunters had two case officers linked by marriage to Yankovsky.

According to George Kisevalter, CIA director Allen Dulles summoned Snow to his office at the end of the investigation and fired him. Kisevalter said Dulles told Snow, "We have a tragedy here, your security is shot. We have to let you go." At the age of thirty-seven, having achieved a senior position in the division, Snow was through.

"Dulles personally got him a job," Kisevalter continued, "and then he became vice president of Lit ton Industries, thanks to Dulles. Dulles acted very kindly, because he felt Snow had been mousetrapped and the agency had done him an injustice. But it ruined his whole life." [11] Vivian Parker and Yankovsky were fired as well, along with Ed Snow.

Andy Yankovsky, his stepdaughter insisted, "was the most loyal person to this country. We thought we had found our haven." She was still bitter, even thirty years later, about what the CIA had done. Her husband, her stepfather, and Parker, all three men, had been fired on the same grounds, she said, "relatives behind the Iron Curtain. Relatives dying of starvation and freezing to death in the gulag.

"Both Andy's and my family have fought Communism for three generations, and lived in exile as stateless White Russian immigrants. In the eyes of the Soviet government, we were their worst enemies. We were all on the list for deportation to Siberian labor camps. If we had known, all of us would have tried to make it across the 38th parallel. We had no great plans or ambitions, we 'just wanted to live,' as Dr. Zhivago said in Pasternak's book. If we had outlived our usefulness to the CIA, we should have been dismissed in a more humane manner. We were totally defenseless and devoted to this country. We have served this country well."

Mole hunters have long memories. The books were never closed with the dismissals in 1959, and less than a decade later, the Snow-Yankovsky-Parker case rose up to haunt David Murphy, the chief of the Soviet division. It was, as Miler confirmed, one of the major threads of the SIG's investigation of Murphy himself. As farfetched as it might seem in retrospect, the mole hunters were trying to find out whether Murphy, by helping to recruit Yankovsky, was somehow responsible for the loss of CIA agents in the Korean War.

Ed Petty was one of the members of the SIG who had investigated Murphy. Angleton not only considered Murphy a prime suspect, but, according to Petty, "even stated outright on certain occasions that Murphy was a KGB agent." After studying the files, Petty wrote a long paper concluding that Murphy was not a mole, after all. But with the suspicions of treason swirling around Murphy, his days as chief of the Soviet division were numbered.

In 1968, a major upheaval took place within the division. Murphy was forced out-replaced as head of the Soviet division and sent to Paris as chief of station. At first, William Colby was in line to succeed him. But President Johnson reached down into the agency's ranks and plucked Colby out to go to Vietnam. As a result, Rolfe Kingsley succeeded Murphy.

According to Miler, not only the suspicions of Murphy played a part in his departure, "but also the decision to incarcerate Nosenko. And the whole Nosenko case." It was Murphy who had played a primary role in subjecting Nosenko to his terrible ordeal. Helms had by now demanded that the issue of Nosenko's bona fides be resolved; the case had gone on too long. The Soviet division was an obvious target. "It was decided a change was needed, new management, new style," Miler said.

Just how far Angleton had turned against the former division chief soon became clear in startling fashion. On a trip to Washington, Count Alexandre de Marenches, the three-hundred-pound director of the SDECE, the French intelligence service, was buttonholed by Angleton. The counterintelligence chief warned de Marenches that David Murphy, the new chief of station in Paris, was a Soviet mole.

William Colby said that he learned of Angleton's astonishing warning about Murphy several years later. It happened, Colby said, when he visited Paris a few months after he had been appointed director of the CIA. "De Marenches drew me aside and said, 'Did you know that Angleton told me that Murphy was a Soviet agent?'"

Colby said de Marenches had good reason to be upset. "He meant, 'You've got to get your agency under control. You shouldn't be speaking with two voices.'" As soon as Colby returned to Langley, he said, "I read the files on Murphy. There were allegations, the thing had been looked at." In his memoir, without naming Murphy or de Marenches, Colby said that the files revealed that the officer, "a brilliant and effective one at that, was given a totally clean bill of health. But our counterintelligence had never accepted the conclusion." [12]

After reviewing the file, Colby recalled, "I wrote a memo saying there should be no suspicion of this man." Moreover, Colby gave Murphy an important assignment coordinating the agency's technical operations with human intelligence. "I called him after I reviewed the file. I said, 'I want you to know this is over.' I was taking a chance, putting him into a highly sensitive activity. I did it deliberately."

The story of Angleton's warning about Murphy to the French has circulated for years in the murky world of counterintelligence. But members of Angleton's inner circle refused to believe it. "Colby is the only source for that," Scotty Miler said.

However, Alexandre de Marenches himself confirmed that Angleton had warned him that Murphy was a Soviet spy. An urbane aristocrat who speaks colloquial English without a trace of an accent, de Marenches said he remembered the conversation very well. "Around '71 I was in Washington," he said, "To be told that the liaison officer with me [Murphy] was a Russian agent was a bit of a surprise, to put it mildly." And Angleton had told him that? "Yes, Angleton told me this. It was flabbergasting." [13]

Even before Colby learned of Angleton's suspicions about Murphy, de Marenches had alerted a senior CIA official to Angleton's warning about the Paris station chief. According to a former agency officer, "De Marenches said to the official, 'My dear friend, why does the CIA send me a Soviet spy as chief of station?' This was a conversation in Paris. The CIA man said, 'I don't believe it.' De Marenches said, 'It comes from your Monsieur Angleton.'"

When the incredulous CIA man got back to Langley, "he asked Jim for an explanation and got a three-page memo giving all the reasons that Dave Murphy was a spy. When you read the three pages you realize Angleton was really off the wall. Angleton wanted Helms to send a letter incorporating the material in the three pages. Helms ducked it. Instead, the senior official wrote back a nice letter to the French saying there's nothing to support it."

Richard Helms insisted he could not recall the incident and had been unaware of the suspicions about Murphy. But then Helms found it difficult to remember almost any controversial matters that occurred on his watch. He could not remember who had made the decision to imprison Nosenko; he had never approved the Shadrin operation. Interviewed in his office on K Street in Washington, where the former CIA director was an international business consultant, Helms at seventy-seven was a symphony in gray-gray hair, gray suit, and shades of gray as he talked about his years as head of the CIA and the need for a delicate balance between intelligence and counterintelligence. He was tall, slim, elegant, and relaxed; in contrast to years past, he agreed to be quoted.

"I don't recall Jim coming to me and saying anything about a problem with David Murphy," he said. "I heard about this later, after I left the agency. My best recollection is that at the time I sent David Murphy to Paris I wasn't aware of Angleton's suspicions. I never believed it. I had no reason to doubt Dave Murphy's loyalty."

But Angleton did. And what makes Angleton's warning to the French even more bizarre is that Howard J. Osborn, head of the CIA's Office of Security, had cleared Murphy of the mole charges before he ever went to Paris, according to a former senior agency officer. "When Murphy was about to go to Paris he was under suspicion," he said. "Helms would not send a COS to Paris under a cloud. He insisted it be resolved. Osborn gave Murphy the toughest interrogation he ever ran, and a long polygraph. It was nasty. And Dave Murphy came up absolutely clean. It was negative all the way."

Angleton, the former CIA officer said, "not only warned de Marenches personally but also Marcel Chalet, then head of the DST [the French counterespionage service]. I'm convinced he gave Chalet a message similar to one he gave to de Marenches. Poor Murphy. It's a wonder he was able to go to the bathroom while he was in Paris. It was the most egregious, outrageous conduct I've ever heard of."

But there is an unknown sequel to the story. According to a former high-ranking CIA counterintelligence officer, Angleton also voiced the same warning about Murphy's successor as COS in Paris, Eugen F. Burgstaller. "It happened around 1974," the CIA man said. "Angleton said Burgstaller was a Soviet agent, too. It didn't convince the French. By that time, Angleton had less and less credibility. He warned Chalet, and I think he went over and saw Chalet." [14]

Marcel Chalet declined to comment on whether Angleton had warned him that two successive CIA station chiefs in Paris were Soviet agents, although he did not deny it, either. [15]

Rolfe Kingsley, the new head of the Soviet division, had been chief of the European division and before changing jobs had approved Murphy's assignment to Paris. Kingsley was not aware until after he took over the Soviet division that Murphy had been a mole suspect.

Murphy, as matters turned out, was only the first to go. According to a senior former officer in the Soviet division, when Kingsley came in, "the division was cleaned out. Literally hundreds of people, all of the Russian-speaking officers, were transferred without being asked to other divisions. The Soviet division had hundreds of people and most were Russian-speakers. Most were children of Russians, some were born in Russia. Virtually the whole division was transferred. It was all designed to cleanse the division of a possible mole."

If the Counterintelligence Staff couldn't find the mole, he said, then the transfers meant that at least the suspected penetration would in all probability no longer be in the Soviet division. It was a new approach; instead of pinpointing the penetration, which it could not do, the SIG had cast its net wide in an attempt to scoop up the mole along with everyone else.

The former officer said most of those transferred never knew what hit them. "The excuse given was we were not successful in recruiting Soviets. Each person developed an individual rationale for being transferred. No one realized it was because we were all suspect. Angleton decided to freeze everyone of Russian origin."

T o staff the depleted Soviet division, he said, the agency turned to officers from the old Eastern European division, which had been absorbed into the Soviet division two years earlier. "EE would take over, they knew how. Hundreds of people were affected by the search for the mole," he concluded, "because hundreds were transferred out of the division."

Another former officer of the Soviet division said, "I think Kingsley permanently injured the clandestine capability." He added, "I don't know if he was under orders or setting policy."

Donald F. B. Jameson, who served in the Soviet division at the time, confided that "there were a substantial number of changes" as officers were shifted out of the division. "It was related to their affiliation with Murphy. And, as it now appears, there was the presumption that they were all spies."

Kingsley strongly disputed these accounts of a wholesale purge. Asked whether hundreds of Russian-speaking officers had been transferred, he said: "That's a lot of baloney." Kingsley declined, however, to say how many officers he had removed.

Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time, could not remember mass transfers. "That's nonsense," Helms said. "It never happened as far as I'm concerned. It's simply untrue." Was Helms aware of any transfers from the division for security reasons? "No, I was not," he responded. But Scotty Miler thought that perhaps "fifty, plus or minus," had been transferred. "Out of maybe three hundred people in the division."

Whatever the totals, among the officers who remained, those under suspicion were secretly identified to Kingsley by Thomas Karamessines, the DDP. In addition, Kingsley sat on a hush-hush committee of three, consisting of himself, Angleton, and a representative of the Office of Security. The secret committee kept Kingsley abreast of the latest suspicions of the SIG.

Kingsley was not, he later claimed, much impressed with the evidence that was presented to him in the arcane committee of three. He realized he had stepped into a can of worms; morale in the Soviet division was at a low ebb, operations had ceased, everyone was looking under the chair for moles. The division, Kingsley felt, had lost sight of its purpose, to penetrate the Soviet Union.

But with Murphy gone, Kingsley was soon caught up in the end-game of the Loginov case. The decision to betray Loginov to the South Africans, after both Angleton and the Soviet division decided he was a fake, had taken place before Kingsley headed the division. But Kingsley shared the prevailing view that Loginov was not genuine; he had never produced what the agency wanted.

To this day, many former CIA officers consider what happened next one of the worst blots on the agency's record. With the approval of the CIA, South Africa traded Loginov back to the Soviet Union in a three-cornered swap for some half-dozen West German agents imprisoned by East Germany.

According to George Kisevalter, Angleton was the key figure in arranging the trade of Loginov. "Angleton decided he was a plant and engineered the swap with the East Germans to release the West Germans in return for Loginov, who was then given back to the Soviets."

"Angleton," said one former CI officer, "would have to have been consulted every inch of the way." Even though Loginov was suspected by the CIA to be a plant, no one was sure, and to trade him back to the KGB might be signing his death warrant if the agency was wrong.

After Loginov's arrest in Johannesburg in 1967, the South Africans had announced the Soviet spy had revealed the names of KGB officers all over the world. Asked how Loginov could have been a plant, given the large numbers of KGB officers he exposed, Pete Bagley replied: "He named his Soviet handlers in Africa, Kenya, and Belgium. But those were giveaways. Loginov gave away the names to deceive us on the rest."

In fact, the KGB officers' names had been provided to the South African security service by the CIA, and had been culled from the agency's files. They did not come from Loginov at all. The release of the names, according to one CIA officer, was designed to put Loginov in the worst possible light with the KGB. But Loginov's "confession," although bogus, might nevertheless ha ye endangered his life if he was sent back to the Soviet Union. [16]

When South Africa, before agreeing to the swap, asked the CIA whether it was sure it did not want Loginov, Rolfe Kingsley said he did not. Angleton agreed; the CIA had no further use for Yuri Loginov. [17]

A CIA officer familiar with the Loginov case explained what then occurred. "Loginov was taken from South Africa to West Germany, and the arrangements were made for him to be pushed back by Jim. When Loginoy arrived in Germany and realized fully the horror of his situation, he was scared to death and resisted very strongly being sent back. The story at the frontier is pretty sad. He literally had to be pushed across. Into the hands of the KGB, who took him away."

This account, related as well by several other CIA sources, was disputed by Bagley, who claimed that Loginov was "happy" to go back. "At the reunion with the Soviets, they fell into each other's arms. It is unthinkable we would have thrown anyone over the line against his will." The fact that Loginov provided information to the South Africans proved he was not a true illegal, Bagley argued. "Illegals like Abel keep their mouths shut. Illegals don't talk."

Evans, too, clung to the hope that he and the other CIA officers who swung against Loginov had not made a terrible, fatal mistake. He was not persuaded that Loginov had been sent to his death. But the CIA, according to several knowledgeable sources, obtained information from later defectors that Loginov had been executed. Richard Kovich, the man who recruited Loginov, learned of his agent's fate when he was called back to the CIA as a consultant some years after he had retired; by that time the agency had a Soviet defector who said he had attended Loginov's funeral.

George Kisevalter had heard much the same. "A later defector came with the story that Loginov had been shot," Kisevalter said.

"He was sent back to goodbye."

_______________

Notes:

1. There was one major exception. In the Soviet Union only officers of the CIA's Soviet division could recruit a Russian. Any recruitment of a Soviet, regardless of the country where it was taking place, required approval of Langley headquarters.

2. Krotkov revealed to Western intelligence that one of his successful missions for the Second Chief Directorate had compromised the French ambassador to Moscow, Maurice Dejean. Krotkov had introduced him to a beautiful young actress, a KGB "swallow" with whom Dejean had an affair. The story is related in John Barron, KGB: The Secret World of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 170-92. Krotkov later wrote a book about his life, I Am from Moscow (New York: Dutton, 1967).

3. Murphy, retired for more than a decade, was living in McLean, Virginia, in the shadow of the CIA, in 1991. He declined to be interviewed, although we spoke by telephone and he agreed at first to answer written questions subject to review -- and deletions -- by the agency. After reading the questions, he declined to answer any. Much of the information circulating about his background, he said, was "garbled or in some cases untrue. ... The 'Murphy is a White Russian syndrome' is a good example. There is no way I could respond to such garbage about my background in a manner which would satisfy those who have spread those falsehoods. In a way I'm reminded of the Polish rabbit joke. It was on the Polish-Soviet frontier during the great purges of the thirties. A Polish rabbit's solitude was shattered when a Soviet rabbit came tearing across the border in obvious panic. 'What's your hurry?' asked the Polish rabbit. 'They're killing camels back there,' gasped the Soviet rabbit. 'But you're not a camel,' answered the Polish rabbit. 'Try proving that to them!' sadly replied the Soviet rabbit." Letter, David E. Murphy to author, January 7, 1991.

4. In a series of interviews, Evans said he could not reply to some questions because they involved classified information. I put these queries in writing, and Evans submitted a four-page reply to the CIA, which deleted almost two pages -- his entire answer to the question asking him to list in detail the reasons why he doubted Loginov. In their initial response in December 1990, the CIA's censors left only one answer of any substance. I had asked Evans whether the CIA had officially taken the position that Loginov was a plant. The agency let stand his reply: "The official CIA position was that Loginov had not established his bona fides." Evans appealed, and in June 1991 the CIA permitted him to reply in writing, but only in generalities, to the core question of why Loginov was suspect.

5. For this purpose, the KGB, as it usually does in such cases, used the identity of a real Canadian who had returned to Lithuania and died. The real Edmund Trinka was born on January 16, 1931 in Fort Whyte, Manitoba.

6. Desmond FitzGerald was the deputy director for plans (DDP) from mid-1965 until July 23, 1967, when he collapsed on a tennis court at his country home in The Plains, Virginia, and died. The South Africans arrested Loginov that same month.

7. Asked to comment on the investigation of him by the SIG as a suspected Soviet mole, Murphy chuckled and replied: "I know who I am." He made it clear he did not wish to be interviewed about his own turn as a mole suspect, or about any other aspect of his long and somewhat stormy career.

8. Joe Btfsplk, as every fan of Al Capp's comic strip L'il Abner knows, had the misfortune to go through life with a black raincloud hovering over his head.

9. At the time, all of Korea was occupied by Japan, which annexed the country in 1910 and called it Chosun. In Potsdam in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea at the 38th parallel. Russian troops entered North Korea in August 1945, and U.S. troops moved into the south the following month.

10. Including Saturnia jankowskii. Marumba jankowskii, and Actias jankowskii, as well as a swan, Cygnus jankowskii, and a beetle, Captolabrus jankowskii.

11. The strains told on Snow's marriage; three years later he and Nata were separated, and in 1968 they were divorced. After Andy Yankovsky left the CIA, he was hired by TRW, the aerospace firm, and worked as the company's public relations man for the Far East. He had homes in Tokyo and in San Francisco, where he died on February 13, 1978. Ed Snow died in Los Angeles on April 1, 1990, at the age of sixty-seven.

12. William Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 365.

13. De Marenches said he had no memory of having told Colby of Angleton's warning. "It was not Colby," he said, "it was Helms." He said he had informed the CIA director of Angleton's warning about Murphy during the same visit to Washington. "I saw Helms in his office," he said. But, de Marenches added, "During my eleven years [as head of the SDECE] I saw six directors of CIA." Richard Helms said he did not remember "de Marenches coming to my office in Langley and telling me my station chief in Paris is any Soviet agent."

14. Burgstaller, who served as chief of station in Paris for five years, beginning in 1974, was startled to be told of his colleague's assertion. "I must say I never have heard that," he said. "And I never got any indication from any of the senior people [in French intelligence] that they had received such a warning."

15. "You won't be surprised that I prefer not to answer questions relating to David Murphy, Eugen Burgstaller, and James Angleton dealing with the internal problems of the American services," he said. "Somehow, to be precise I must tell you that the first two men cited were and are my friends and that James Angleton has served his country well. This said, you know as well as I do that the job that was theirs exposed them to controversy." Letter, Chalet to author, July 19, 1990.

16. Joseph Evans, the headquarters officer in charge of the case, denied that the provision of the names to the South Africans by the CIA would have jeopardized Loginov. The KGB, he argued, knew that as an illegal, Loginov did not have access to the names.

17. 0n a decision of this importance, with its potential for opening the agency to criticism, logically the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, would have to have approved. But Helms said, "I have no recollection of the case whatever." Could he explain why Loginov was traded back? Helms put up his thumb and forefinger, forming a zero. "That's what I recall," he said. "I have no memory of it."
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:35 am

Chapter 16: Downfall

John Denley Walker, the station chief in Israel, knew that a visit from a senior official at headquarters always meant a certain amount of extra preparation and effort. The VIP would have to be entertained and looked after.

But he was not prepared for what happened when James Angleton arrived on one of his periodic trips to Israel. The visit had come soon after Walker had taken up his duties as station chief in 1967.

At the time, Angleton was drinking heavily. The counterintelligence chief asked Walker to arrange to have a case of whiskey delivered to his hotel room.

After it arrived, Angleton told Walker he suspected the bourbon had been poisoned by the KGB. Walker tried to explain that he had bought the whiskey at the embassy commissary and had delivered it himself, but to no avail. Angleton would not be dissuaded.

To Walker, Angleton looked exhausted. The CIA station chief feared that the chief of counterintelligence was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

"I'm sending you home," he said.

Angleton was enraged. "You can't do that," he replied.

When Walker insisted, Angleton warned angrily of retribution; he would see to it that Walker never got another decent job in the CIA. But the conversation had its effect; Angleton took some time off to rest. He went, not back to Washington, but to Elat, on the Gulf of Aqaba.

By this time, Angleton's power was beginning to unravel. His warning to the French that David Murphy was a Soviet agent had not been taken seriously by the SDECE, and eventually boomeranged to undermine the counterintelligence chief. In addition, Angleton had lost Pete Bagley, one of his closest allies and strongest supporters in the Soviet division.

CIA director Richard Helms had decided it was time for a change in the leadership of the Soviet division. Early in 1967, Bagley, then the deputy chief of the division, was offered the post of chief of station in Brussels. By September, he was in place. Bagley's exit was soon followed by David Murphy's departure for Paris.

But no one was safe from the suspicion pervading the CIA. Now, Bagley himself became a target of Angleton's mole hunters. Ed Petty, a member of the SIG, began digging into his background.

Petty fastened on an episode that had taken place years earlier, when Bagley had been stationed in Bern, handling Soviet operations in the Swiss capital. At the time, Bagley was attempting to recruit an officer of the UB, the Polish intelligence service, in Switzerland. Petty concluded that a phrase in a letter from Michal Goleniewski, the Polish intelligence officer who called himself Sniper and who later defected to the CIA, suggested that "two weeks after approval of the operation by headquarters," the KGB had advance knowledge of the Swiss recruitment attempt -- advance knowledge that could only have come from a mole in the CIA.

Bagley said it proved nothing of the sort. "I was running the correspondence phase of Sniper in Switzerland," he said. "We wrote a letter to a Polish security officer when I was in Bern station." The letter, an attempt to recruit the Pole to work for the CIA, "mentioned the man's boss. Some time later, Goleniewski wrote again, mentioning the name of the UB chief in Bern, 'whose name you already know,' which meant that Goleniewski knew of our letter. But that doesn't mean there was a mole in CIA. It means the target turned the letter in to his service and our guy [Sniper] was high up enough to know it."

Bagley said that Petty had interpreted the episode to mean that "the UB knew of the recruitment attempt in advance, which is quite different." Petty, nevertheless, wrote an analysis of the Swiss recruitment episode, and of Bagley's file, and concluded that "Bagley was a candidate to whom we should pay serious attention." The study gave Bagley the cryptonym GIRAFFE. Petty said he submitted his paper "with some trepidation" because "I was well aware that Bagley had long been a protege of Jim Angleton."

Petty turned in his report to James Ramsay Hunt, Angleton's deputy. "Hunt said, 'This is the best thing I've seen yet.'" But, Petty added, he heard nothing from Angleton.

"The Bagley report stewed in Angleton's in box for a considerable time," Petty said. "Then one day he called me in to discuss the Nosenko case. He brought up some of the points in Bagley's nine-hundred-plus-page study. And I said, 'If there is a penetration, then Nosenko could not have been genuine.'" A mole in the CIA, Petty argued, would have told the KGB of Nosenko's initial contact with the agency in 1962, and, Nosenko, had he been a true asset, would never have come back in 1964. "I said to him, 'You don't need all these points in Bagley's nine-hundred-pager -- it's much simpler than that.'"

"Angleton sat there and mulled this point over for some time. Then he said to me, 'Pete is not a Soviet spy.'"

At that moment, Petty saw the light, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It suddenly hit him; not Bagley but Angleton himself was the mole. "I was flabbergasted," Petty said. "Because the subject of my paper about Pete had not arisen. It was at that point that I decided I'd been looking at it all wrong by assuming Golitsin was good as gold. I began rethinking everything. If you turned the flip side it all made sense. Golitsin was sent to exploit Angleton. Then the next step, maybe not just an exploitation, and I had to extend it to Angleton. Golitsin might have been dispatched as the perfect man to manipulate Angleton or provide Angleton with material on the basis of which he [Angleton] could penetrate and control other services."

Angleton himself must be the traitor, Petty decided. "Angleton made available to Golitsin extensive sensitive information which could have gone back to the KGB. Angleton was a mole, but he needed Golitsin to have a basis on which to act."

Petty was now sure he had unlocked the key to everything that had been going on inside the agency for the past decade. "Golitsin and Angleton. You have two guys absolutely made for each other. Golitsin was a support for things Angleton had wanted to do for years in terms of getting into foreign intelligence services. Golitsin's leads lent themselves to that. I concluded that logically Golitsin was the prime dispatched agent."

The more Ed Petty thought about it, the more convinced he became that Angleton had been the mole all along. Angleton had extraordinary access, after all. "The only place in the CIA besides the cable room where there was total access was on James Angleton's desk. From the indications we had, the penetration had to be at a high and sensitive level, and long-term. You could say the director's desk fit that description, but there were several directors. All the operational cables went through Angleton."

By now, the mole hunt had run out of control. Like a Frankenstein monster, it had finally attacked its own creator.

In 1971, Petty said, "I started working on it. Putting stuff on index cards, formulating my theory." He did not dare to discuss what he was doing with Jean Evans, then his boss. Instead he went to a close friend, a senior officer, and told him what he was thinking. "I said, 'I can't do this without some backstop.' He said he would take it to the director and a few days later he came back and told me go ahead. He said he had talked to Helms."

Helms denied that while CIA director he knew that his counterintelligence chief had himself become a mole suspect. "I never heard about it when I was in the agency," he said. "I knew Ed Petty -- he'd worked for me years before." But no one "ever told me that Petty's study was under way." Petty's conclusion that Angleton was the mole, Helms added, "didn't make any sense to me."

The senior officer to whom Petty had confided was James H. Critchfield, who had been Petty's boss in Munich years earlier and rose to head the Eastern European and Near East divisions. Critchfield said he was indeed aware of Petty's investigation, and Petty had discussed it with him. But, Critchfield added, he never told Helms about it until after he and the CIA director had both left the agency. [1]

Petty's belief that his mentor had seen the director was not far off the mark, however. For in 1974, Critchfield, as it turned out, had informed William Colby, then the CIA director, about Petty's investigation of Angleton. Critchfield was about to retire. "I conveyed that Ed Petty had told me of possible security problems in the CI Staff. Of course I mentioned Angleton. I did not want to walk out the door without bringing it to the attention of the director." [2]

Petty worked in absolute secrecy, never revealing to anyone except Critchfield that he was gathering information to accuse his own boss, James Angleton, as a Soviet spy. By the spring of 1973, after toiling for some two years, Petty felt he could not develop his theory any further. He decided to retire.

"I told my intermediary, 'I'm going to retire.' He said, 'You've got to have a talk with somebody.' By now Colby was director, but he was not available. I finally saw the assistant DDO, David Blee. I told my story and he said, 'We would like you to stay.' The clear implication was 'Keep doing what you're doing.' So I stayed and kept at it. I stayed another year."

In 1974, Petty said, he reached a firm decision to retire. Blee, he said, urged him to prepare a report on Angleton. [3] "I said, 'It's only on cards.' So they sat me down with a senior officer, James Burke, and I talked to him on tape for twenty-six hours. Plus I turned over two safe drawers full of collateral material. On the tapes, I said quite clearly, to my best hypothesis, Angleton had to be the person. The penetration. We didn't say moles. I didn't say he's the only possibility. But he's the only one who has been here all that time and has seen it all. I said they should get rid of Angleton. Fire him."

***

Even before William Colby became director of the CIA, he had begun zeroing in on Angleton's counterintelligence turf. After Colby returned from Vietnam in 1971, Helms had named him executive director of the agency.

When President Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, appointed Helms ambassador to Iran, Colby, in February 1973, became the DDO under James R. Schlesinger, the new CIA director.

"I'd had minimum contact with the CI Staff," Colby said. "I knew they were highly secretive and a separate power. I'd had one contact with Angleton in Rome, in the mid-fifties. The CI Staff was running an agent, and eventually I took over the agent. I had my doubts that was the way to run a railroad." The clash in Rome was not very important, but it planted the seed in William Colby's mind that Counterintelligence had become too much a law unto itself.

Colby and Angleton did not often cross paths again until 1967, when Colby was asked to take over the Soviet division, a job that David Murphy got instead when Colby was unexpectedly sent to Vietnam. During the period when Colby was preparing for what he thought would be the post of Soviet division chief, Angleton asked to see him. "Jim invited me down for 'the Briefing.' I went through several hours of his briefing. The KGB was everywhere, it was penetrating Americans, foreign political leaders. The presumption was that the agency was the main target. Being a lawyer, I wanted to hear evidence. There wasn't any."

When Colby became the DDO under Schlesinger, he was now in charge of counterintelligence -- and had suddenly become Angleton's boss. "I began to look at it and found the CI Staff had several hundred people. I was under pressure to reduce. That seemed an awful lot of personnel slots."

Colby was DDO for only a couple of months, but in that period, he also found out that Angleton had a hammerlock on anything to do with Israel. "I discovered the Israel account was being run through the CI Staff, and to my amazement I learned that the chief of station Cairo could not communicate with the COS Israel. Everything had to go through the CI Staff."

Colby also discovered that the agency had for twenty years been opening first-class mail in violation of the law. During most of that period, Angleton and the CI Staff intercepted letters between the United States and the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. "I got into the mail-opening thing and wrote a memo saying it should be terminated," Colby said. "The Post Office guy running it was getting scared. I couldn't find it had produced anything. Angleton objected. Schlesinger cut the baby in half and said, 'Let's suspend it but not terminate it.'" [4]

In May, Colby was promoted to director of the CIA. "I began to talk to Jim about these things shortly after I took over," he said. "I raised taking away the Israel account several times and he had resisted it. I did not want to push it through. I can tell you the reason now, since he is no longer living. He was so intense I was really worried that if I got rid of him he would have done harm to himself."

Colby feared that Angleton would commit suicide?

"Yeah. So I was trying to ease him out." As part of his campaign to get rid of Angleton, Colby gradually began dismantling pieces of the CI Staff. Up to then, the counterintelligence Staff had exclusively handled liaison with the FBI. That meant that often Sam Papich, Hoover's man, dealt directly with Angleton, with whom he had developed a close personal friendship.

"I put liaison with the FBI under the DDO," Colby said. "Nobody could tell what the CI Staff was doing. Yet the FBI relationship was important. So I designated a guy on the DDO's personal staff who became liaison with FBI."

Methodically, Colby took other steps to chip away at Angleton's power. Until then, no proposed clandestine operation anywhere in the world could take place without approval of the CI Staff. Colby decided that division chiefs should make those decisions; the CI Staff "should give advice, not have a veto or approval of the operation." The Counterintelligence Staff was reduced to running name checks on people proposed to be used in operations. "They could give a clearance that there was nothing bad on someone," Colby said, "but they didn't approve the overall operation."

With operational approval removed from Angleton's domain, Colby next took away Angleton's power to review operations already in progress. According to Colby, the CI Staff and several other CIA units engaged in these periodic reviews. To an extent, he said, "these staffs had developed an operational function and were running their own operations. I thought that was a mistake. A division should run operations." Now the CI Staff was out of the business of project review.

In addition, Colby removed the small international Communism unit from Angleton's fiefdom. As each of these offices were plucked out, the size of Angleton's staff dwindled from hundreds to some forty people.

"Taking away FBI liaison and the other units was designed to lead him to see the handwriting on the wall," Colby said. "He just wouldn't take the bait."

Angleton, of course, realized what was happening, as did Scotty Miler. Colby did not explain his changes, Miler said, "but it was clear why. He felt CI approval for each operation was inhibiting ops. It got rid of people looking over the operators' shoulders. There was nobody second-guessing them. To use extreme language, it got rid of the Gestapo.

"There was a direct connection between Colby's dislike of the mole hunt and his decision to break up CI in 1973," Miler continued. "Colby didn't understand CI. And he said every case officer will be his own CI officer. Jim's reaction? 'There goes counterintelligence.'

"We knew the handwriting was on the wall," Miler went on. "Jim and I talked about it. This was the first step toward firing Jim. I saw little future for CI. At age forty-eight I presumably had some places to go. But we certainly realized that CI as Jim conceived of it, and as I did, could not function under the reorganization."

When Colby had finished, Angleton and his staff had little to occupy themselves. "We were left with penetrations and double agents, a few of which CI ran," Miler said, "and we were left with approval of double-agent operations, and day-to-day oversight. Maybe a couple of dozen such operations. We were turning more to research and analysis, and we reexamined the penetration cases to see if we had missed anything."

Recalling the curtailment of Angleton's power, Colby was frank about what he had done and why. "As DDO and then as director, I sliced into his empire. He'd developed a direct relationship with Dulles, Helms, and McCone. He tried it with Schlesinger." It had not worked under Schlesinger, and Angleton knew there was no hope of maintaining the same kind of clout under Colby.

"I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him and the question was how," Colby said. "I thought it essential to run a clear-cut organization where different parts worked together. His idea was to be totally secretive and cross lines all over the place. Second, I found several hundred people in there. I honestly couldn't figure out what the devil they were doing. What benefits was this giving us? I couldn't find any.

"I finally decided if I was to be responsible for CI, I had to have control over it. And I didn't have confidence I had control with him there. Counterintelligence needed a sweeping with a good new broom."

In Colby's view, the mole hunt had hobbled CIA operations and all but destroyed its main mission at the time, spying on the Soviet Union. "I couldn't find we'd identified any penetrations. And I concluded his work had hampered our recruitment of real agents. I'd be happy to get two false agents if I could get three real ones. We weren't recruiting any because of the negative effect of the super-suspicion. I said that has to stop. We've got to get agents. We've got to recruit Soviets. That's what the agency's in business for."

Angleton, Colby concluded, had stopped the agency dead in its tracks. "The big factor was what he was doing was counterproductive. If you find a reason to reject everyone you want to recruit, you don't have ops. Jim thought the fact you can get at a potential Soviet agent means he's being manipulated from the other side. The most important thing was the lack of agent recruitment, and from a discipline point of view the way he worked in total secrecy. I thought his fixation on the wily KGB was exaggerated and out of the real world. We shouldn't have anything as important as this in the hands of anybody so intense. And then, there was the question of fairness to my officers. I couldn't accept that they be placed under suspicion for inadequate reasons."

Finally, there was the embarrassment of the David Murphy episode. When Alexandre de Marenches took him aside and said Angleton had warned that David Murphy was a Soviet spy, Colby said, "I was infuriated. How can a service operate if a man is sent as COS Paris and another man goes over and tells the French he is a Soviet agent?"

For Colby, it was the last straw. "I had already come to a decision we had to make a change, and this was one other factor, a big one. It was another indication that Jim seemed totally out of control. By then it was a question of how to do it."

While Colby was pondering how to get the reluctant Angleton to walk the plank, the problem solved itself in the person of Seymour M. Hersh. A brilliant and tireless former police reporter from Chicago in the tradition immortalized in The Front Page, Hersh had come to national prominence in 1969 when he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for an obscure news service, for which he Won the Pulitzer Prize. He then joined the New York Times, where his reporting on Watergate in the early 1970s helped that newspaper to keep up with, and occasionally even surpass, the stories broken day after day by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post.

While covering Watergate in 1973, Hersh said, "somebody I was dealing with told me there was a big problem inside the agency. Muskie had hearings on reorganizing the intelligence community in the fall of '74. There was a witness there and I was talking to him afterwards. I said to him, 'What the hell is the problem inside the agency?' I started meeting this person."

That was when Hersh learned about the Family Jewels.

In May of that year, Schlesinger -- shocked by the wigs, spy gadgets, and other support that the CIA had given to Nixon's White House plumbers -- issued a decree forbidding illegal activities by CIA employees, and requiring that they report any knowledge of past or present violations of the agency's charter. Thus was born the "Family Jewels," an agency euphemism for a 693-page compilation of the worst skeletons in the CIA's closet. The list included assassination plots against foreign leaders, drug tests on unsuspecting Americans, mail intercepts, and Operation CHAOS, a program of domestic spying on Americans opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Hersh soon heard of this extraordinary list and managed to learn part of its contents. "I eventually got in contact with someone who had access to the Family Jewels," he said. "I got hard numbers on how many mail openings, wiretaps, unauthorized break-ins there were, and, of course, the domestic spying. I remember talking to Angleton, and he initially said he had nothing to do with it."

Angleton also cast a lure in front of Hersh, with no effect. "Angleton said, 'Look, forget what you're working on, I have a better story for you.' And he told me about two [espionage] nets, in North Korea and a net in Moscow. 'Trap lines' he had laid in Moscow. I called Colby and told him what Angleton had said, and I thought I heard him gasp, suck in his breath. That Angleton would say that on an open phone line.

"By the time I got ready to see Colby I had hard numbers. I called up Colby and he agreed to see me on a Friday morning at the agency, and I laid out what I knew. I just came off a very hot year, all of Watergate, and Colby had sat down with me on the Glomar Explorer, and we held it, which by the way was not my decision. [5]

"He simply reviewed my domestic spying story with me. I said there were so many mail openings, so many break-ins, and he went over the numbers, in general reducing them. The big number was the ten thousand files -- I said they were dossiers -- on American citizens. He said, 'Sy, they were more like files.' If I said there were sixty-two break-ins he said, 'No, there were nineteen.' From his point of view it was damage limitation. But he was also confirming everything."

As soon as he got out of the building, Hersh telephoned Abe Rosenthal, his editor at the New York Times. "I said, 'Abe, I got it. I don't have him on the record but he confirmed it.' I remember being amazed I got that detail out of him. I went into the office on a Friday and wrote it and they ran it on Sunday."

Colby described how, in his meeting with Seymour Hersh, he had tried his best to downplay the CIA's role. "He came to me with what he said was a story bigger than My Lai. That we were engaged in a massive domestic intelligence operation. I said, 'Sy, you've got it all wrong.' He asked me about wiretaps. I said we weren't wiretapping a lot of people, a few cases of CIA employees or ex-employees who were suspect. He said we were opening the mail. I said it was very, very limited. Just a small amount of mail to and from Moscow."

Colby realized that he had not succeeded in throwing Hersh off the scent -- an impossible task, in any event. "I had a sense he was going to run with something," Colby said laconically. With one of the CIA's most onerous cats about to poke its whiskers out of the bag, Colby determined he could delay his dismissal of Angleton no longer.

"Some time before," Colby said, "I had pointed out to Angleton that if he left before a certain day, he would get a better pension arrangement. He said no the first time I raised it. It came up again in December of 1974, before I saw Sy. I had a session with him a few days or maybe a week before. I pointed out it was time to go on, and if he didn't want to retire I had this other job of writing a history of his contribution to the agency. It was a way to keep him gainfully employed. He turned me down on that, too. I said, 'Well, think about it, Jim.' I said I wanted him to leave by the end of December."

With the Hersh story about to explode, Colby telephoned Angleton and told him that the Times was on to Operation CHAOS, the domestic surveillance program, and other potentially embarrassing secrets. "I called Jim up. I said, 'I'm sorry this has happened. It really doesn't relate to our discussions. You and I know we've had these discussions over a long period of time. But I insist you go now.' I wasn't going to go into the uproar that was coming with Jim there and have to defend him and work with him. Because some of the Jewels were things he did, like the mail opening. I said, 'There's not a person in the world going to believe us, Jim, that it wasn't caused by Sy.'"

But, in retrospect, Colby agreed that the "precise timing" of his dismissal of Angleton was indeed a result of Hersh's story in the Times. He had, after all, fired Angleton in anticipation of its appearance. [6]

Hersh's story led the paper on Sunday, December 22, 1974, under a four-column headline: "HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS." The Times story reported that the CIA, in violation of its charter, had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation" against the antiwar movement, and had engaged in break-ins, wiretaps, and "the surreptitious inspection of mail." [7]

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Hersh's story set off a political chain reaction. President Gerald R. Ford, skiing in Vail, Colorado, announced he would tolerate no illegal spying and ordered Colby to prepare a report on the CIA operation. Colby ordered the DDO, William E. Nelson, to draft it. "By eight A.M. Monday," Miler said, "I had been advised I was to stand by to review some material being prepared by Nelson's office for the White House about the Hersh article. We had to review the Family Jewels report about mail opening and other things for the report that Colby flew out to Vail. Then I was told to be in Nelson's office at seven o'clock that night.

"During the day Jim called in me and Ray Rocca, and explained he was retiring." Rocca was the deputy chief of the CI Staff. Also present at the meeting in Nelson's office that night, Miler said, were Angleton; Nelson, slim, blond, well-tailored and smooth of manner; and Nelson's deputy, David Blee.

"Nelson explained Jim was retiring, they were making big changes in CI, Rock [Raymond Rocca] and I were no longer to be in CI. Then he turned to me and said, 'What are you going to do?' 'I guess I'll retire.' 'Good.' He turned to Rock and he said, 'I guess I'll retire.' That was it."

Two days later, Hersh reported the resignation of James Angleton, and soon after, of Rocca, Miler, and William J. Hood, another Angleton deputy and a thirty-year veteran of the OSS and the CIA. Hood, a latecomer to Angleton's inner circle -- he had joined the staff as executive officer only in 1973 -- had planned to retire anyway, Miler said, but was caught up in the mass departures.

On the day that Angleton's dismissal became known, Daniel Schorr of CBS News received a telephone call from his office at 6:00 A.M. A camera crew was on the way to Angleton's home in Arlington, and Schorr was instructed to meet it there. Schorr vividly recalled what turned into an off-camera interview that lasted four hours. "I arrived, he opened the door, sleepy-looking, wearing a robe over pajamas. He invited me in. He sat down and we talked for a long time. 'I've been up all night,' Angleton said. 'My family is away, but I can offer you apple juice or Sanka.'

"He was emaciated-looking, and his glasses came down over his nose, and he sometimes tended to look over them. He was soft-spoken. He talked at enormous length about Yasir Arafat. How Arafat went to Moscow and laid a wreath on Lenin's tomb. He showed me a photograph of a beaming Arafat at the tomb. 'The man standing next to Arafat at Lenin's tomb is his KGB case officer,' Angleton said. 'Petrovakov. He was head of KGB headquarters in Karlshorst when Blake was in Berlin.'"

No pictures, Angleton told Schorr; the camera crew would have to remain outside. "He said, 'You've blown my cover, I sent my family to several states, they're scattered all over, because of the story. It's caused me a lot of trouble. If my picture is taken, my wife will be killed. My wife of thirty-two years is gone, and here I am.' He went on, bewailing his troubles. Then back to Arafat again."

Angleton rambled on circuitously, the conversation disjointed. He had been to Israel thirty times. He had never met Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar. Then a long dissertation on how Georgi Malenkov had taken over in Moscow, and other Kremlin maneuvers, all controlled by the KGB. Dzerzhinsky ran four thousand agents, Stalin changed the OGPU to a terror organization.

"He talked about Watergate," Schorr said. "He said, 'When Watergate occurred, Helms was deeply victimized. Helms was set up as the scapegoat for President Nixon.'" Angleton was disturbed by detente. "'Public opinion favors detente, everything swirls around detente, which is just another word for peaceful coexistence, used by Stalin. The Nixon-Kissinger detente bothers me deeply.'

"'For twenty-two years I handled the Israeli account. Israel was the only sanity in the Middle East. They wanted to transfer this account -- that was unacceptable.' Colby was planning a trip to Israel, and Kissinger forbade him to go to East Jerusalem, because it would recognize Israeli control, and Colby canceled it. Angleton was furious at this.

"Angleton said the Yugoslav break with the Soviet Union was false, as was the Sino-Soviet split -- neither happened, it was all part of KGB disinformation designed to mislead us. They remained under central control. That's when I decided he was really crazy. I said, 'Mr. Angleton, do you really believe that?' He didn't answer, and went on speaking almost as though I wasn't there. He was talking as though he was looking into his own mind.

"Then Angleton said he was leaving. I said, 'Mr. Angleton, you realize there are sixteen cameras out there. You've just told me if your picture is taken your family will be killed.' He went out anyway and seemed mesmerized by the cameras. He spoke for some time. Then he got into his blue Mercedes and drove away."

***

Colby's broom had now made a clean sweep of the leadership of the Counterintelligence Staff. But the fallout from Hersh's story was just beginning. President Ford named an eight-member commission headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller to investigate the charges. By early in 1975, a full-dress inquiry had begun in the Senate under Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat. In the House, a similar investigation was conducted by Representative Otis G. Pike, a Democrat from Long Island. [8]

James Angleton reluctantly emerged from the shadows for a memorable appearance before Senator Church's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was the first time he had ever testified in public. As the cameras clicked and whirred, the tall stooped figure was sworn in at the witness table under the bright lights of the chandeliered Senate caucus room.

After some initial sparring between Angleton and Church, Senator Richard Schweiker, a Pennsylvania Republican, began questioning the former counterintelligence chief. At an earlier, executive session, the senator pointed out, Angleton had been asked why the CIA had failed to comply with a presidential order to destroy the deadly shell-fish toxin that it used to coat the microscopic missiles fired by its dart guns.

Angleton had replied: "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government." Had Angleton really said that? Schweiker asked. "Well, if it is accurate, it shouldn't have been said," Angleton replied.

That wasn't enough for Schweiker. Did Angleton believe the CIA had to obey the President or didn't he? The remark was "imprudent," Angleton said; he wished to withdraw it.

Senator Church joined the questioning. "Did you not mean it when you said it the first time?" he asked.

"I do not know how to respond to that question," Angleton replied. "I said that I withdrew the statement."

"But you're unwilling to say whether or not you meant it when you said it?"

"I would say the entire speculation should not have been indulged in."

Senator Robert Morgan of North Carolina was troubled by Angleton's answers. He wanted to know how "the actions of that Central Intelligence Agency can be monitored in such a way as to protect the fundamental rights of the American citizens of this country? ... How can we act if ... the intelligence agencies refuse to obey the guidelines? ... what assurances do we have that an intelligence agency would follow any mandate of the Congress or the President?"

"I have nothing to contribute to that, sir," said James J. Angleton.

***

In the days immediately before the fall, Miler said, "Jim was very discouraged. What was going to happen to CI? What was going to happen to efforts to keep the government from being penetrated? There were many nights we would go to the Shanghai for dinner, out on Lee Highway. Or Jim would go to La Nicoise, a restaurant in Georgetown." [9] Over lunch there the two men would talk about the dim future of counterintelligence.

"He was very concerned we hadn't found the mole," Miler said. "He asked me, 'Where should we be looking? What should we be doing? Did we miss something? What were we doing wrong?'"

_______________

Notes:

1. Petty kept Critchfield informed. "He used to stop by my office from time to time," Critchfield said, "and tell me about fragments of information that led him to believe there was a penetration. Angleton was one of the common denominators that ran through the cases. I listened because it seemed important and because of my respect for Ed Petty, who had been one of my two chief analysts."

2. Colby said he did not specifically remember Critchtield's visit, but had been told of the Petty study by William E. Nelson, the DDO, after it was finished. "I said, 'Aw, c'mon. It was nonsense." The Petty study, Colby said, was a "nonstarter" and did not affect his later decision to dismiss Angleton.

3. Blee, who was later to head the Counterintelligence Staff, regarded Petty's study of Angleton as a serious effort that would have to be carefully considered, not simply filed and forgotten. Without taking a position on whether Petty's conclusion about Angleton was valid, he moved to make sure that the study was preserved.

4. The Post Office, however, refused further complicity in the illegal program, and on February 15, 1973, the mail-opening program in New York, the largest of four such programs run by the CIA over the years, was shut down. During the twenty years from 1953 to 1973 that the CIA opened first-class mail, under the code name HTLINGUAL, 28 million letters were screened, 2.7 million envelopes were photographed, and 215,000 were opened in New York City alone.

5. The Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship operating under cover as a Howard Hughes mining vessel supposedly searching for minerals in the deep ocean floor. Its true purpose was to recover a Soviet submarine that had sunk in the Pacific. The CIA had named the supersecret operation Project Jennifer. In February 1974, Co1by learned that Hersh was investigating Project Jennifer. He went to the New York Times Washington bureau and met with Hersh and Robert H. Phelps, the Times Washington editor, pleading with them to wait. Colby was given no commitment ("We didn't offer any promise whatsoever," Phelps said), but Hersh, busy covering Watergate, did not yet have enough information to write about the submarine project anyway. A year later, after the story briefly peeped out in the Los Angeles Times. Colby, on grounds of national security, asked the New York Times (as well as several other newspapers and television stations) to hold off on further coverage. The Times agreed, but Hersh, who by now had prepared his story about Project Jennifer, protested vigorously. All the news media went along with the CIA request until columnist Jack Anderson broke the story on his national radio program on March 18, 1975.

6. Hersh suspected that Angleton's indiscretion in telling him about CIA networks in North Korea and Moscow was the real reason that Colby finally dismissed the counterintelligence chief. Remembering Colby's gasp when he related this conversation to the CIA director, Hersh said. "I think that's why he fired Angleton." Time magazine reported that Angleton himself claimed that "his resignation was solely because of an indiscretion in the course of an interview with the Times that could have jeopardized a U.S. agent in Moscow." However, Colby said he had no memory of Hersh telling him about Angleton's lapse. "Maybe he did," Colby said. "But it wasn't a factor in firing Angleton. I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him and the question was how."

7. Colby's adversaries in the intelligence community later launched a whispering campaign that the CIA director had leaked the mail-opening program to Hersh to torpedo Angleton. Both Hersh and Colby firmly denied it.

8. The Rockefeller Commission and the two congressional committees reported wide-spread abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including assassination plots by the CIA against foreign heads of state. As a result of these investigations, Congress belatedly established permanent intelligence committees in the Senate and House to watch over the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. And the President was required to inform Congress of covert operations. Efforts to pass broader "charter" legislation, defining the tasks of the spy agencies and setting strictly defined limits on their activities, failed to pass, however, Despite this, the myth arose that the Church committee and other investigations had somehow hobbled the intelligence agencies.

9. La Nicoise, where Angleton lunched regularly, was notable for the odd fact that in the evening the waiters wore roller skates.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:36 am

Chapter 17: Aftermath

The Norwegian counterintelligence man was puzzled. He had spotted a KGB officer in Oslo and followed the Soviet to a resort. What puzzled him was the woman the Russian had met there. She was older than might have been expected, in her mid-sixties perhaps, not the sort of young lovely a KGB man might choose for a weekend tryst.

A former FBI counterintelligence agent told what happened next. "Norwegian security identified her, and then, 'Oh my God, she had worked in Moscow.' She fit Golitsin's case."

It was the late seventies, more than ten years after Ingeborg Lygren had been arrested and grilled -- and eventually released for lack of evidence -- as a result of Anatoly Golitsin's identification of her as a Soviet spy. Angleton had warned the Norwegians about Lygren and had continued to insist on her guilt, even after her release.

The woman at the resort was Gunvor Galtung Haavik, sixty-five, who had been a secretary at Norway's embassy in Moscow for nine years before Lygren had served there. [1]

By 1977, Gunvor Haavik was assigned to trade and political matters in the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs in Oslo. Checking their records, Norwegian security found that she had worked in the Moscow embassy from 1947 to 1956.

"The original Golitsin story," the FBI counterintelligence man went on, "was that the KGB had targeted the Norwegian embassy in Moscow, decided that the woman who turned out to be Haavik was lonely, and sent a handsome officer to sit next to her at the opera. It worked."

James E. Nolan, Jr., an FBI counterintelligence official in the Soviet section at headquarters when Haavik was spotted, explained how the case had gone awry. "Golitsin talked about a Norwegian woman recruited in a Moscow honey trap who was an important KGB source in the Norwegian foreign service. That was absolutely, totally accurate. The agency with the help of the Norwegians came up with five or six candidates and showed him the files. 'This is the woman,' Golitsin said. They arrested her. Big stink. Trouble is, it was the wrong woman."

Once they had picked up Haavik's trail, Norwegian security police followed her for months. On January 27, 1977, she was under surveillance as she rode a streetcar to a rendezvous with Aleksandr K. Printsipalov, a KGB man listed as a third secretary in the Soviet embassy. She got off the streetcar, met the Soviet intelligence officer, and handed over documents. At that point, a group of police dressed as joggers closed in, arrested her, and held Printsipalov until he could prove his diplomatic status, at which point he had to be let go.

During interrogations and in court hearings, Haavik admitted she had handed over stacks of secret documents to the KGB, first in the Moscow embassy and then for nineteen years as an employee of the ministry in Oslo. The KGB had equipped Haavik with a special Russian-made bag with secret pockets, the better to take documents from the ministry. She delivered the documents to her KGB controllers at outdoor meetings in the Oslo area, at which she was paid.

Haavik was run by Genilady F. Titov, a KGB officer stationed in Oslo who was later promoted to general. [2] One day after Haavik's arrest, Norway expelled five Soviets for espionage, including Printsipalov and an embassy driver, S. Z. Gromov, both of whom were accused of receiving classified material from Haavik. Titov was in Moscow on leave at the time, but the Norwegian government made it clear he would not be allowed to return.

According to correspondent Per Hegge, of Oslo's Aftenposten, there was more to the story. The Soviets had a personal hook into Haavik. The KGB agent whom Golitsin said had been placed next to her at the opera in Moscow was a man she already knew. "In 1945," Hegge said, "Haavik had served as an interpreter for a Norwegian physician, who was trying to improve health conditions in the camps of Soviet war prisoners whom the Germans had sent to Norway, and who were being repatriated. She struck up a friendship, a romance perhaps, with a Soviet soldier. He, unlike the others, was not sent to Siberia when he returned to the Soviet Union. He wrote to her. They used him to control her; if she didn't cooperate, something dreadful would happen to her Soviet soldier friend. I'm told he was let out of prison to see her. And if she didn't cooperate, he would go back."

The full details of the case were never made public in court. On August 5, 1977, six months after her arrest and before she could be brought to trial, Gunvor Galtung Haavik died in jail of congestive heart failure.

***

Just after Christmas in 1974, Colby called George T. Kalaris home from Brasilia, where he was chief of station, and appointed him chief of counterintelligence to replace James Angleton.

Kalaris, the son of Greek immigrants who owned restaurants in Billings, Montana, had joined the agency in 1952. He had served for the most part in the Far East, where he had been deputy COS in Laos and chief of station in the Philippines. There he had gotten to know Colby, who headed the Far East division. Kalaris was part of the "FE Mafia," the Asian hands whom Colby had brought in to staff a number of high-level positions in the agency.

As one of his first acts when he took over the CI Staff, Kalaris assigned William E. Camp III, a CIA officer who had served in Oslo at the time of Lygren's arrest and whom Kalaris had recruited for the CI Staff, to do a study of the case. Camp concluded, even before Haavik's arrest, that the CIA -- relying on Golitsin's information -- had bungled, alerting Norway to arrest the wrong woman.

Mortified, Kalaris felt the agency should express its regret to Norway for the false imprisonment of Lygren. In 1976, Camp was dispatched to Oslo with a letter from the CIA, signed by Kalaris, apologizing to the government of Norway for the monstrous error in the Lygren affair. Camp, accompanied by Quentin C. Johnson, the CIA's Oslo station chief, called on the Norwegian authorities and delivered the letter and a verbal apology as well. The CIA also offered Lygren money, in addition to the small compensation she had received from her own government, an offer that the Norwegians turned down.

Kalaris also took steps to ensure that Lygren herself was made aware of the agency's contrition. But the official CIA apology to the government of Norway was never made public. By that time, Ingeborg Lygren had retired into obscurity near her native Stavanger, in southwest Norway, her telephone unlisted, her only wish to live out her days quietly and unnoticed.

On January 22, 1991, it was disclosed through an item inserted in the Oslo paper by her family that Ingeborg Lygren had died in Sandnes, a suburb of Stavanger, at the age of seventy-six.

***

George Kalaris, the new chief of counterintelligence, was a tall, thin man with a quick mind and no social pretensions. In an agency run largely by Ivy Leaguers, Kalaris was an anomaly. Whereas many of his colleagues were Easterners who communicated in the languid accents of Groton and Andover, Kalaris grew up in Billings, Montana; in appearance and style, he was faintly reminiscent of Jimmy Durante. His prep school was the streets of Nazi-occupied Athens.

When Kalaris was eleven, his mother took him and his two brothers to Greece to be educated there. His father would come to visit every year. World War II broke out, and Kalaris and his mother and brothers were caught in Athens during the Nazi occupation. The family acquired false identity cards in their true names and posed as Greeks. Kalaris's ID card said that he had been born in Athens. During the war, Kalaris attended law school at the University of Athens. In 1944, Greece was liberated and the American embassy reopened. When an eager Kalaris contacted the embassy, an official told him cheerfully: "We're holding something here for you." It was his draft notice. Kalaris returned to the United States in April 1945 and was inducted in August, just after the war's end. He served two years in the Army, finished law school at the University of Montana, and earned a master's degree in labor law at New York University. He worked as a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board, then joined the CIA in 1952.

The CI Staff, having been whittled down by Colby, was already small when Kalaris was summoned back from Brazil to run it. Kalaris decided to keep it that way. As his deputy he brought in Leonard V. McCoy, who had been a reports officer in the Soviet division. Reports officers do not run agents, but they write up and evaluate the information flowing in from case officers in the field. McCoy had written the reports, among other major cases, on Penkovsky and Nosenko. A big, balding, slow-spoken man, McCoy was appalled as he read the files of the Angleton era, to which he now had access. Strongly pro-Nosenko, and a bitter foe of Angleton, he became even more outraged when he realized the full extent of what had been going on behind the closed doors of the CI Staff and the SIG. [3]

A former colleague of McCoy's sketched in the background. "As a relatively junior officer in the reports section, McCoy wrote a memo to Helms at the height of the Nosenko controversy and said Nosenko was bona fide, and the whole treatment of Nosenko was wrong. Helms sent the memo to Angleton for comment. McCoy became a marked man. He damn near lost his job. Bagley and Angleton came down on him like a ton of bricks. You could hear the spatter for a block. Boy, he [McCoy] was put in the back room and given a dressing down by Bagley.

"The memo so angered Angleton that I think he put McCoy on the suspect list. That was what he frequently did. If someone was difficult to deal with, Angleton concluded he was under Soviet instructions to frustrate the mole investigation." The colleague shook his head. "But when he became deputy for counterintelligence McCoy had the misfortune to get involved in the Shadrin business, and that didn't do his career any good." Shadrin was the Soviet destroyer captain who defected in 1959 and disappeared in Vienna in 1975 after American intelligence played him back against the KGB.

As his other deputy, Kalaris appointed Lawrence M. Sternfield, a tough, heavyset CIA veteran who had worked for the agency in Chile, Brazil, and Bolivia and then handled Cuban operations in Miami. Under Kalaris, the CI Staff had but two components, Research and Analysis, headed by McCoy, and Operations, headed by Sternfield. Sternfield was astonished to learn that Golitsin had agency files in his possession, files that had been shown to the defector by Angleton during the height of the mole hunt. By now the CIA had stashed Golitsin on a farm in upstate New York. Quietly, Sternfield began recovering the CIA's files. Every weekend for weeks, he sent a station wagon to the farm; it would come back to Langley loaded with documents. Ernest J. Tsikerdanos, a CIA officer on the Counterintelligence Staff, was at the wheel.

The Special Investigations Group was still going strong, looking for penetrations. Kalaris placed the SIG under McCoy. But after fourteen years, the SIG had not uncovered any moles inside the agency, and Kalaris ordered that it spend no more time chasing Golitsin's leads.

The new CI team was later criticized by Angleton's former aides as lacking counterintelligence experience. Perhaps so, but Kalaris had the wit to try to find out what Angleton had been doing for the past twenty years. To that end, he commissioned a series of classified studies. Some dealt with major Soviet cases, such as Nosenko, Orlov, Loginov, and Shadrin. But the most important study of all was a massive, detailed history of the CI Staff itself under Angleton.

To undertake this gargantuan task, Kalaris turned to Cleveland C. Cram. A rotund, friendly man with a scholarly manner, Cram had impressive qualifications for the job -- he was a Ph.D. Harvard historian, of which the Clandestine Services did not have large numbers and a former station chief. Moreover, as a liaison man in London between the CIA and British intelligence, he had lived through the British mole hunt and was already familiar with Golitsin's charges.

A farmer's son from Waterville, Minnesota, Cram was educated at St. John's University, a Benedictine school in Minnesota. He earned a master's degree in European history at Harvard, served four years in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II, and returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. Cram had looked forward to teaching in some lovely small college and spending the rest of his life in an ivory tower. But the CIA offered him a job. Cram accepted it, and never looked back. In 1953 he went off to London, where he stayed five years and met Kim Philby. He ran the British desk at headquarters after that, returned to London for a second tour, then served as chief of station in Holland and in Ottawa.

In 1975, after twenty-six years in the agency, Cram had retired. In the fall of 1976, he was attending a cocktail party in Washington given by Harry Brandes, the representative of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian security service. Theodore G. Shackley, the assistant DDO, called over Kalaris, and the two CIA men cornered Cram.

"Would you like to come back to work?" he was asked. The agency, Cram was told, wanted a study done of Angleton's reign, from 1954 to 1974. "Find out what in hell happened," Cram was told. "What were these guys doing?"

Cram took the assignment. For the duration, he moved into a huge vault down the hall from what had been Angleton's office. It was a library-like room with a door that had to be opened by a combination lock. There many of the materials he needed were at hand -- the vault, for example, contained thirty-nine volumes on Philby alone, all the Golitsin "serials," as Angleton had called the leads provided by his prize defector, and all of the Nosenko files.

But even this secure vault had not been Angleton's sanctum sanctorum. Inside the vault was another smaller vault, secured by push-button locks, which contained the really secret stuff, on George Blake, Penkovsky, and other spy cases deemed too secret for the outer vault.

Kalaris thought Cram's study would be a one-year assignment. When Cram finally finished it in 1981, six years later, he had produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages. Cram's approximately four- thousand-page study has never been declassified. It remains locked in the CIA's vaults. [4]

But some of its subject matter can be described. Cram obviously spent a substantial amount of time reviewing the history of the molehunt that pervaded the era he studied. In doing so, he had considerable difficulty. The names of the mole suspects were considered so secret that their files were kept in locked safes in yet another vault directly across from Angleton's (then Kalaris's) office.

Even though Cram had carte blanche to conduct his study, he had trouble at first gaining access to this most sensitive material. In part, he was hampered as well by the chaotic and often mysterious nature of Angleton's files.

Eventually, Cram got access to the vaulted files on individuals kept in the locked safes. But among Kalaris and his staff, Cram detected an edginess that Angleton, in Elba, might somehow return and wreak vengeance on those who had dared to violate his files by reading them.

Even with access, it was hard for Cram to tell which of the penetration cases were most important and which were less important. The files were shrouded in ambiguity.

One former agency officer familiar with the secret study described the nature of what Cram must have grappled with as he toiled for years, like the Benedictines who had taught him, in the CIA's secret vaults.

"Angleton might be discussing a division chief's plan to send a man as station chief overseas," the ex-CIA man said. "Angleton would say, as an aside, 'I wouldn't assign that man.' 'Why not?' the division chief would ask. Jim would pull out a pack of Marlboros or whatever, light one, and say 'Sorry, I can't discuss that with you.' Well, that was enough."

The numbers were hard to pin down. But after analyzing all the files, Cram concluded that there had been roughly fifty suspects. [5] Of those, about sixteen or eighteen fell into the category of serious, major suspects who were subject to massive and detailed investigations, first by the Counterintelligence Staff, which had the task of pinpointing possible Soviet moles, and then by the Office of Security, which was responsible for further investigation.

As his study progressed, one thing became clear to Cram: an officer could easily be hurt once he was placed on the list of fifty, even if he wasn't on what Angleton's mole hunters had called the "hard core" list. Careers had been damaged simply because a man had been placed on the longer list.

A former officer who was aware of Cram's study said it must have been a challenge. "People just didn't know what the hell Jim and company were doing," he said. "Angleton was a little like the Wizard of Oz. There wasn't anything there. But he made a lot of trouble."

The former CIA man paused as though wondering if he should go on. Then he took the plunge. "The place was a morass of irrationality. You can use the word 'crazy.' These people were a little bit crazy. Not a little bit. Quite crazy. Jim was a tortured, twisted personality. Oh, he could be charming, and pleasant, but at bottom, he was a son of a bitch. He was a bad man."

Other studies commissioned by Kalaris were in progress. Cram would often ride to work with Jack J. Fieldhouse, a Yale man by way of Ohio, who had worked for the agency in Vienna. Fieldhouse, who was working on a study of the Loginov case, was appalled by what he found in the agency's files on the KGB illegal. The Fieldhouse report remains classified in the agency's vaults, but it concluded that Loginov was genuine and had been traded back to the KGB against his will. [6]

Later, in the spring of 1981, after William J. Casey had become CIA director, Fieldhouse wrote a study of the Nosenko case. Again, it concluded that Nosenko was a bona fide defector.

Kalaris commissioned yet another study in an effort to clear the mists that had enveloped the CI Staff. Early in the spring of 1975, he called in Bronson Tweedy, a retired, British-born CIA veteran who had twice served as London station chief. Kalaris had Golitsin on his mind. He turned to Tweedy because he wanted a dependable person outside the agency. [7]

Kalaris told Tweedy to study the entire Golitsin case; he wanted to know how much reliance he could put on anything Golitsin had said. Tweedy worked for months and produced the first study on Golitsin, a ninety-page report that he handed in to Kalaris later that year. It concluded that Golitsin was indeed a bona fide defector but that his value to the agency had been far less than his supporters claimed. With prompting from the Counterintelligence Staff, the idea had gained currency that somehow Golitsin had exposed vast numbers of spies and penetrations in allied intelligence services. In fact, the report found, Golitsin had furnished information that led to the arrest of Georges Piques, the Soviet spy in France; he gave the first lead on William Vassall, the spy in the British Admiralty; and he had supplied some leads in Finland. That, Tweedy concluded, was about all. Despite Tweedy's findings, in 1987 the CIA awarded Golitsin a medal for outstanding service.

Kalaris also pressed Tweedy into service to conduct yet another, lesser-known study. The new CI chief had been left an irksome problem in the form of the Petty report, the reels of tape, index cards, and bulging file cabinets in which the former SIG member had accused Angleton himself of being the Soviet mole in the CIA. Kalaris could hardly overlook the possibility, however farfetched, that his predecessor had been a traitor. Again, Tweedy produced a written study that dismissed the charges against Angleton as illusory. [8]

Although Angleton was now cleared of the charge that he, the prime mole hunter, was himself the head mole, from exile he fought back. The chosen instrument of his battle was the author and journalist Edward Jay Epstein. With Angleton playing the role of Deep Throat, Epstein in 1978 published his book Legend, which for the first time revealed the war of the defectors, the backstage clashes between Golitsin and Nosenko, Angleton's conviction that Nosenko had lied about Lee Harvey Oswald, and J. Edgar Hoover's faith in FEDORA. [9] Angleton emerged in the book as Epstein's hero, a master counterspy with "prematurely silver hair and a finely sculptured face," a "superbly patient" fisherman who "played defectors much like trout." [10]

At the time the book appeared, it was widely assumed in Washington that Angleton was Epstein's source, an assumption that Epstein himself confirmed in a later book. [11] He had, Epstein disclosed, conducted a series of interviews with Angleton for a decade, beginning in 1977. In the second book, Angleton is quoted directly and admiringly.

Angleton had extensive connections in the press, and he managed, through Epstein and others, to air his grievances and his unique worldview. After the fall, he became a celebrity of sorts, a subject of endless fascination for journalists, writers of nonfiction books, novelists, and filmmakers.

But exile proved frustrating for the old CI chief. Stung by John Hart's testimony to the House Assassination Committee about the handling of Nosenko -- Hart had called it "an abomination" -- Angleton in 1978 sued Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, to try to gain access to his own former files, in order to prepare a rebuttal. Claiming he needed to review the files of the Nosenko case to complete his own testimony to the committee, Angleton got only two; but in a settlement that must have been bittersweet, he was eventually allowed to go back into the CIA headquarters, where he had once wielded so much power, and read more of the secret documents. He had to wear a visitor's badge. [12]

With no agents to run and no Counterintelligence Staff at his beck and call, Angleton nevertheless fought back in other ways, applying the operational skills he had honed over more than three decades. It began to be whispered around Washington that Colby was the mole. But somehow the rumors could never be tied to Angleton directly. The former counterintelligence chief took a "Who, me?" attitude if questioned about the whispering campaign against the man who had fired him.

Colby himself, when asked if Angleton had accused him of being a mole, replied: "I've never heard him quoted as saying that. I've heard that some of his aides said it. [13] I'd heard rumors that members of Angleton's staff were saying I was a mole. Or it may have been in the vein of 'Colby couldn't have done more harm to the agency if he were a mole.'

"Several years later I got a call from Jim. 'How are you?' I asked. 'I'm not feeling very good.' 'What do you mean?' 'The New Republic says this week that I said you were a Soviet mole.' I said, 'Jim, as I understand it, you have not said that, but some of your [former] assistants have made that statement.' He said, 'That's right.' I said, 'What do you want me to do?' He wasn't very responsive. I said, 'I'll write a letter to The New Republic saying it's my understanding you've never said that.' So I did, and they ran it. [14] I often wondered what his problem was, and I suspect he may have been afraid of a libel suit."

And what was Colby's response to the rumors about him that floated around the capital? "I've said I am not a mole," he replied. "There's nothing to it. I don't fudge around on that one. I hit it right on the head."

When Paul Garbler returned from Sweden in 1976, he had demanded an official inquiry into the shadowy accusations against him. No one had ever confronted the former Moscow station chief. But he now knew informally that for close to a decade he had lived under a secret stigma as a suspected Soviet penetration of the CIA, a suspicion that explained his exile to Trinidad for four years when his career in Soviet operations should have blossomed.

In a letter to the agency's inspector general, Garbler wrote: "I found myself the victim of a charge against which I was never given the opportunity to defend myself ... I felt a strong sense of personal outrage at what had been done to my family and myself." Without an inquiry, Garbler wrote, the security charge might never be resolved. "I would like finally to defend myself and clear my name." [15]

Eight months later, in August 1977, Garbler received a letter from John F. Blake, the CIA's acting deputy director, reporting that the "security issue has been fully resolved in your favor." It was the first time that the CIA had informed Garbler that there had been a security charge against him. Blake went on to acknowledge that the spy charge had indeed had an "adverse effect" on Garbler's career. "Your feelings of frustration and bitterness are understandable," Blake added, "and I am only sorry that there is no way to turn back the clock." [16]

Was the agency's apology enough? After thinking about the question for several months and talking it over with his family, Garbler decided it wasn't. He wrote to Stansfield Turner, the director, asking for compensation "for my family and myself for nine lean and unhappy years." The charges, Garbler wrote, had called into question "my loyalty to the Agency, the government, and the country." His friends and colleagues had shunned him, he wrote. "I became a person one dealt with warily, a kind of pariah." [17]

Garbler had chosen his words with precision. For years, he had read distrust in the eyes of his associates at the CIA. "People I worked with turned over the papers on their desks when I entered the room," he recalled. "If I was walking down the hall and a group of my colleagues were chattering away, they would see me approach and quickly disperse. Friends turned their backs to me at cocktail parties. Even people who knew me well would sometimes stop in midsentence, to make sure they didn't say too much."

Late in December, three days before Garbler was due to retire, he received a reply from Turner, who said he found the "spurious security charge against you abhorrent." At the same time, Turner said there was nothing he could do about it. There was no way Garbler could be compensated, Turner wrote, unless Congress passed a private bill for that purpose. An "injustice" had been done, Turner added, yet the agency appreciated his many years of fine service. [18] It amounted to a hearty handshake, but no cash.

More than two decades later, Garbler was living in Tucson, to where he had retired with his wife, Florence. He spoke without rancor.

"I retired on December 31, 1977," Garbler said, "and got the usual retirement party on the seventh floor. Turner did not appear. Helms did not appear. Angleton did not appear."

Ten days after he retired, Garbler received a routine letter from Stansfield Turner expressing the director's sincere appreciation for "the important work you have done and my warmest hopes that you will find full enjoyment in the years ahead."

What did Garbler think that wintry day when the farewell party was over, he had cleaned out his desk, and he walked out of the building for the last time? "I looked back a lot that day," Garbler said, "but I thought the Lord had been good to me. I had an unfortunate time in my life. Nine years out of my life, but that all in all, it had been worth it. I would always be proud of the fact that I had served with the CIA.

"I did feel I would like very much to be able to refute what people thought about me and what this small group of people had tried to do to me." Then he remembered something. "At the farewell ceremony, they gave me a little CIA seal in plastic."

Garbler, standing now, turned and stared out the picture window of his study for a long moment. "No medals," he said. "No apologies."

________________

Notes:

1. The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who began working for British intelligence in Copenhagen in 1974, has said that in the mid-1970s he warned MI6 about a Soviet agent in the Norwegian foreign ministry. But he did not indicate whether he was able to identify Haavik by name, nor is it known whether the British passed along the information to Norway. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 567. A former high ranking CIA counterintelligence official doubted that a tip from Gordievsky had resulted in Haavik's detection. "To protect Gordievsky, the Brits would absolutely not pass it on to Norway," he said. "Gordievsky was too valuable to the Brits to risk passing on this little tidbit."

2. Titov, who was known in the KGB as "the Crocodile," also ran Arne Treholt, a high-level Soviet spy in the Norwegian diplomatic corps. In 1984, Norwegian police arrested Treholt at Oslo's airport as he was about to leave for Vienna to meet General Titov. He carried a briefcase containing sixty-six classified documents. Treholt was convicted and sentenced to twenty years. Early in 1991, Titov was named chief of counterintelligence of the KGB. He was dismissed in the aftermath of the failed coup in August against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. All of the KGB's top leaders were fired in the wake of the coup, which had been led by KGB chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov.

3. For example, a 1987 article by McCoy in the CIA retirees' newsletter was a stinging indictment of the Angleton era and its devastating effect on CIA operations. Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuriy Nosenko, CIA," CIRA Newsletter, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Fall 1987), published by Central Intelligence Retirees' Association, p. 20. The unpublished portions of McCoy's manuscript are if anything even stronger in their criticism of Angleton. In the longer version, McCoy defended Paul Garbler and Richard Kovich, as well as Peter Karlow, who is not mentioned by name, and said all three were completely innocent of charges that were "dredged from Golitsyn's imagination" and given "monstrous life" by Angleton.

4. Cleveland C. Cram, "History of the Counterintelligence Staff 1954-1974," classified unpublished study (Langley, Va.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1981).

5. The SIG initially screened more than 120 suspects, a much higher figure. The total of fifty arrived at by Cram probably represents those officers who were subject to further and more intensive investigation.

6. As already noted, in other studies conducted for Kalaris, Vasia C. Gmirkin concluded that both Shadrin and KITTY HAWK were genuine CIA assets, William E. Camp III determined that the CI Staff had made a terrible mistake in the Lygren case, and John L. Hart concluded that Nosenko was bona fide and had been horribly mistreated by the agency.

7. Tweedy was certainly dependable. As chief of the Africa division, he had been asked to explore the feasibility of assassinating Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo, who was inconveniently opposing the CIA's handpicked leaders in that country. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA biochemist respected for his expertise in such matters, suggested that a lethal biological agent -- a disease indigenous to Africa -- be placed on Lumumba's toothbrush. Lumumba eluded Langley's dentifrice but was captured and killed in January 1961 by the troops of Joseph Mobutu. Although Tweedy's role in the Lumumba assassination plot became embarrassingly public during the Church committee's investigation, he was well regarded inside the agency as an objective and honest officer. The son of a prominent American banker in London, he was educated in England and then at Princeton, class of '37. In an agency of Ivy Leaguers with a strong streak of Anglophilia, Tweedy, for his time, was almost the perfect specimen of an upper-echelon officer.

8. According to a former CIA official, "There was a joke going around the agency at one point that Angleton thought he might have been the mole. That he had a dual personality and suspected himself. Of course, it was only a joke."

9. Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York. Reader's Digest/Press McGraw-Hill, 1978).

10. Ibid., pp. 26, 31.

11. Edward Jay Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

12. On Angleton's visit to CIA headquarters, which took place on March 29, 1979, the former counterintelligence chief was accompanied by his lawyer, Philip L. Chabot, Jr. It was Angleton's last hurrah, and Chabot remembered the scene vividly. "I sat nearby and he reviewed documents from the file. He was in there for more than four hours." Soon afterward, Angleton completed his classified testimony to the committee, Chabot said.

13. In an interview in New York magazine in 1978, author Epstein was asked if Angleton knew the identity of the mole in the CIA. His published reply: "Angleton refuses to say, but one of his ex-staff members told me with a wry smile, 'You might find out who Colby was seeing in Rome in the early 1950s.'" "The War of the Moles: An Interview with Edward Jay Epstein by Susana Duncan," New York, February 27, 1978, p. 28.

14. New Republic, February 21, 1981, p. 7.

15. Letter, Garbler to Inspector General John H. Waller, December 8, 1976.

16. Letter, Blake to Garbler, August 3, 1977.

17. Letter, Garbler to Turner, November 29, 1977.

18. Letter, Turner to Garbler, December 26, 1977.
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Re: MOLEHUNT: THE SECRET SEARCH FOR TRAITORS THAT SHATTERED

Postby admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:36 am

Chapter 18: The Mole Relief Act

In 1964, even though Richard Kovich realized his CIA career had mysteriously stalled, he dutifully continued to work as an agency "headhunter," a Russian-speaking officer who could fly anywhere on a moment's notice to make a recruitment pitch to a KGB man.

In the fall of 1966, Kovich was assigned to the Farm to teach agency trainees the skills he had acquired. After three years, he returned to headquarters, did some lecturing and training, but seemed to be marking time. By the beginning of 1974, at age forty-seven, it was clear he was going nowhere. In February, "Dushan" Kovich decided to pack it in.

By now he was aware that Ingeborg Lygren (SATINWOOD 37), Mikhail Federov (UNACUTE), and Yuri Loginov (AEGUSTO), three of his important agents, were suspect. But he did not know that he himself had come under intense investigation as a presumed Soviet mole.

At Kovich's retirement ceremony, William Colby presented him with a CIA medal and two other awards he had earned in his twenty-four years of distinguished service with the agency. [1] With his wife, Sara, Kovich disappeared into a life of retirement. Or so he thought.

Soon afterward, Kovich got a telephone call from a CIA colleague. Could he get on a plane and go and meet someone? Kovich protested that he was retired. But, like an old firehorse, he responded to the call and by 1975 was back globe-trotting for the agency on contract, making his recruitment pitches as of old.

Early in March 1976, Kovich was finally told that he had been suspected of working for the Soviets. Three aides on the staff of John H. Waller, the CIA's inspector general, met with Kovich and broke the news. Kovich was also informed that he was no longer under suspicion. By now, Colby had fired Angleton and himself been dismissed by President Ford in the wake of the various investigations into the intelligence agencies touched off by Seymour Hersh's story about CIA domestic spying in the New York Times. [2] But before Colby left, he ordered that Kovich be allowed to see his files.

As he read the files, Kovich's hair stood on end. He had not realized the enormity of the charges against him. He had not known it was a cause for suspicion to have a name that began with the letter K. It was like watching his life through the wrong end of the telescope. The mole hunters in SIG, the gumshoes in OS, had really thought he was a traitor. To Kovich, it was unbelievable.

He discovered that in December 1965, after Ingeborg Lygren's false arrest, the CIA was so worried that Kovich might bolt that it asked the FBI to prevent him from entering any Soviet installation in the United States. Kovich had laughed bitterly when he saw that in the files; he had never had any intention of fleeing to the Soviets, of course, he was a loyal CIA officer, but he knew that the FBI had no blanket authority to stop anyone from entering a Soviet building. The FBI knew it, too, and had rejected the CIA request.

After reading the files, Kovich realized he could no longer work for the CIA, and he so informed George Bush, the new director. In a letter to Bush in July, Kovich summarized the false accusations that had destroyed his career. Soon afterward, Bush wrote back, expressing regret for what had happened. He hoped, Bush added, that Kovich might take some comfort from the fact that he had been cleared. [3] In the fall, after winding up the project he was working on, Kovich retired from the agency again, this time for good.

Kovich was determined to remove any doubts about his loyalty, however, and if possible to receive compensation. He contacted Stanley H. Gaines, a former CIA colleague who had also retired from th agency and was practicing law. It wasn't the money primarily, Kovich told Gaines. He had given his best for his country, and now he wanted his good name restored and a terrible injustice rectified.

Gaines and Kovich opened discussions with the CIA's inspector general and with its Office of General Counsel. Around the same time, Robert B. Barnett, an attorney for Paul Garbler, had also contacted the agency for the same reason. By now, President Carter had been elected and had appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director.

Just as Paul Garbler had been told by Admiral Turner he would need an act of Congress to be compensated, Kovich was informed that a law would have to be passed. "We couldn't find any specific authority we could fit this kind of relief into," a representative of the CIA's Office of General Counsel recalled. "What this required was legislation on the Hill to grant relief by the agency to people whose careers had been damaged by unfounded mole allegations. The inspector general explored this with us -- he said, 'We think this is a case where some injustice was done. What can we do for these people?' That's when we decided we needed legislation, which we supported."

Although the CIA attorney, who had reviewed the files at my request, thought the agency had given its backing to remedial legislation, initially, at least, that was not the case.

In a letter to Paul Garbler's attorney in 1978, Anthony A. Lapham, then the CIA's general counsel, wrote: "I continue to feel that any tangible damages suffered by Mr. Garbler are speculative at best." While Garbler's career had without question been "sidetracked," Lapham argued, there was no guarantee that he would have been promoted anyway. It would not be "appropriate for the Agency to initiate or formally support" legislation to redress Garbler's misfortunes, Lapham wrote, but "neither would we oppose such a measure." [4]

Stansfield Turner's general counsel was saying that the agency would not back a private bill to help Garbler, although it would not stand in his way. A private bill applies only to one individual, a public law to whole classes of people. Now with Kovich pushing for action, the agency was saying it could not compensate anyone without a public law that would apply to all those who had been wronged by the search for moles. Within the CIA, however, there were strong pockets of resistance to the idea.

The reason for the agency's ambivalence was easy to see. A law giving the director of the CIA power to pay victims of the agency's own mole hunt might slip through unnoticed by the press, but there was always a chance that an alert reporter would spot the provision, that the law would attract unfavorable publicity, leading to all sorts of questions. It was, after all, a breathtaking concept: a secret agency that had wronged its own officers was being asked to turn around, admit its mistakes, and compensate those injured. No bureaucracy, let alone a powerful secret agency, likes to admit error.

Moreover, the CIA feared that a law providing compensation for victims of the mole hunt might be opening up a Pandora's box. The agency had visions of dozens, even hundreds, of ex-officers filing claims running into millions of dollars.

But Kovich, acting as the point man, kept plugging away. In 1977 he wrote to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and in August 1978 he testified to the senators for several days in closed session.

William Green Miller, the powerful staff director of the permanent Senate Intelligence Committee, was impressed by Kovich's arguments. Senator Birch Bayh, who had succeeded Inouye as chairman of the intelligence panel, and Senator Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., the Maryland Republican, supported the idea of legislation. Kovich met with Daniel B. Silver, who had replaced Lapham as general counsel of the CIA in 1979, and with Ernest Mayerfeld, another CIA lawyer and a former clandestine officer for the agency. The House Intelligence Committee joined with its Senate counterpart in supporting the bill.

"The issue," Miller said, "was how do you compensate for a mistake that jeopardized, harmed an individual personally or inflicted mental distress? The reason for the legislation was to make clear in law the right to rectify. There was an earnest desire by the CIA to resolve he issue in a fair way."

The CIA's desire was perhaps more earnest because by now Miller, Birch Bayh, and the Senate and House intelligence committees were breathing down its neck. On September 30, 1980, Congress passed the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 1981. Tucked away in its pages was an obscure clause, Section 405 (a). In its entirety, it read:

"Whenever the Director of Central Intelligence finds during fiscal year 1981 that an employee or former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency has unfairly had his career with the Agency adversely affected as a result of allegations concerning the loyalty to the United States of such employee or former employee, the Director may grant such employee or former employee such monetary or other relief (including reinstatement and promotion) as the Director considers appropriate in the interest of fairness."

On October 14, 1980, the bill was signed by President Carter and became Public Law 96-450. Within the CIA, the law became known as "the Mole Relief Act." [5]

The following month, Ronald Reagan was elected President and named his campaign manager, William J. Casey, as the new CIA director. Both Kovich and Paul Garbler had been told they would receive compensation under the Mole Relief Act. On February 3, 1981, Garbler received a check from the United States Treasury, under the new law. In the spring, Kovich received a letter of apology from the CIA, and by July, he, too, had received his settlement. Although neither former CIA officer wished to discuss the amount he received, intelligence sources said one payment was more than $100,000, the other somewhat lower.

Four other former CIA officers, including Peter Karlow, applied for compensation under the 1980 act. They were all turned down. But Karlow resolved to continue his fight.

There was a catch to the Mole Relief Act, however. The provision was good for just one year. It opened up a window for the victims of the mole hunt, but only if they knew about it and could persuade the agency of the merits of their case before the law expired. [6]

From the CIA's viewpoint, everything was being managed well, that is, quietly. The agency was pleased that the number of mole victims who actually came forward was low. It was pleased as well that the press, except for one article in Newsweek, had missed the extraordinary story. [7] A secret government agency had falsely accused its own officers and was now paying them large sums of money under an act of Congress of which the public was, for the most part, unaware.

The CIA today refuses officially to confirm the names of the officers compensated under the Mole Relief Act, or the amounts paid out, or even the total amount of the payments it made to victims of the mole hunt. "Under the terms of the settlement I'm not at liberty to disclose the amounts," the attorney in the CIA's Office of General Counsel said. "They didn't all get the same amount." But it was, nevertheless, an astonishing story, even if the CIA had been able largely to keep the lid on it.

The fact that many former CIA officers, including those whose careers were affected, were not aware that the law existed in part explains the low numbers of those who came forward during the one-year window. An example was Stephen Roll, who spent twenty-six years as a CIA officer but strongly suspected Angleton had blocked his promotions because of suspicions of his Slavic background. "In 1980, I didn't know about the law," he said. "I heard about it much ater through the grapevine." By then it was too late.

Roll was born in central Pennsylvania, and both his parents were Ukrainians. His rather worked as a track repairman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Roll went to college, learned Russian, did graduate work at Yale, and joined the CIA in 1949. He worked in Munich as chief of counterintelligence, parachuting emigres into the Ukraine in the CIA's ill-fated Red Sox operation, then moved to the Soviet division as a counterintelligence officer. After serving as a chief of base in Libya, he applied for an opening on Angleton's staff. Given his strong counterintelligence background, he expected to get the job, but was rejected without explanation.

Roll remembered what he had been told by Peer de Silva, a fellow officer in the Soviet division. De Silva had sat on a promotion board that considered the name of Richard Kovich. There were comments around the table. When it was Angleton's turn to speak, de Silva said, he turned thumbs down on Kovich, saying: "We can't trust these Slavs."

Roll had realized that something was wrong. "I asked myself, why didn't I get better jobs? Why wasn't I given a promotion? Why was I rejected for the job on Angleton's staff? I can only assume it was because of Angleton, given his attitude toward Russian-speakers. They needed us, but didn't want us to get too high."

Other case officers despaired of proving that their careers had been affected by the search for penetrations. They may have suspected what went on, but producing the evidence was like chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.

Angleton loyalists made the opposite argument -- that it was easy for mediocre officers whose careers had fizzled to blame it on the mole hunt. "Everybody denied a promotion said the mole hunt was the reason," Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy, contended.

But the fact remained that it was difficult to prove harm, and years later to pinpoint decisions made by unidentified bureaucrats whose reasons for shunting aside some officers may never have been committed to paper.

There was another even more basic problem that prevented many agents from taking advantage of the Mole Relief Act: most CIA officers placed on the SIG's list of "hard core" suspects were unaware of that fact. They did not realize that their careers were affected, because they were never told. Still others chose not to reopen old wounds; they had retired and did not care to fight the agency, or to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer to present their cases.

***

In the months of maneuvering that led to his financial settlement, Paul Garbler was also determined to find out more about how and why he had come under suspicion as a traitor. He understood that the main reason for his years of exile was the fact that he had been Sasha Orlov's case officer in Berlin -- and that the mole hunters suspected that Orlov had recruited him.

But he could hardly believe the file of CIA documents, several inches thick, that he ultimately received from the agency under the Freedom of Information Act. Garbler was astonished to discover from the documents that he had also become a suspect because he had played tennis with George Blake.

"When I lived in Korea," Garbler said, "there was a British legation active until June of 1950. The minister was Sir Vivian Holt, one of few living holders of the Victoria Cross. Florence and I became friendly with Holt, who was an eccentric bachelor. He had two officers working for him, Sidney Faithful and George Blake. Up pops the devil. My next-door neighbor was an army major, and he and I played doubles with Faithful and Blake. When the North Koreans came south, Holt said, 'I'm not leaving; this is my legation and British soil. If I have to, I'll fight them with my sword.' He kept a sword over the mantel and brandished it frequently. So he and Faithful and Blake were taken and imprisoned. At least theoretically, that's when Blake was turned." [8]

To the counterintelligence mind, the fact that Garbler had been a tennis partner of George Blake took on ominous significance. The CI men, after all, were paid to perceive sinister patterns. Their occupational weakness was that they might see those patterns even, as in Garbler's case, where they did not exist. [9]

To his dismay, Garbler also discovered from the documents that the CIA had asked the FBI to investigate him, his sex life, his bank accounts, even his parents. "The FBI never called me in," Garbler said. He no longer has his file. "After I got the documents from the CIA, I burned them in disgust around 1979 or 1980. I was made quite nauseous."

As he thought back on his case, Garbler was disturbed by the role of Richard Helms. Admittedly, Garbler had little use for Helms. He would see him in the basement gym where both went to run. Helms nodded but never spoke.

But why, Garbler wondered, had Helms never tried to help? "He must have known I was a loyal and capable officer. He should have known that I was a case officer who just wanted to serve the company and his country." But Helms had never intervened, Garbler said. "He left me swinging in the wind."

Late in 1977, Helms had been convicted in federal court of misleading Congress about the CIA's role in Chile. But to the agency's old boys, Helms was a hero for stonewalling. Like many former CIA officers, Garbler was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, based in McLean, Virginia. At an association lunch at nearby Fort Myer some months after Helms's court appearance and around the time Garbler got his CIA file, "when Helms walked in everyone rose and applauded. Some had tears in their eyes. The entire room was on their feet applauding for Helms." But not Paul Garbler.

"Why should I?" he asked. "He left me out there to rot."

_______________

Notes:

1. Normally, CIA officers receive medals during the course of their careers for particular operations. Checking the files, someone in the bureaucracy noticed that Kovich had received none. Colby remedied the oversight.

2. Colby was dismissed by Ford in November 1975 but agreed to remain on until George Bush could be sworn in to succeed him as CIA director on January 30, 1976. Colby thought he knew the immediate cause of his dismissal; he was convinced that he was done in by the CIA poison dart gun he had produced at the demand of the Church committee. Chairman Frank Church had waved the gun at a Senate hearing, and the resulting photograph made front pages around the world. It was too much for the White House, which already felt that Colby had been excessively candid with the investigating panels. At one point, Vice President Rockefeller, whose commission was supposed to be uncovering the abuses of the intelligence agencies, drew Colby aside and asked: "Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?" In the White House situation room, during a meeting to map strategy to deal with the investigations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, aware that Colby was a practicing Roman Catholic, turned to him and said: "The trouble with you, Bill, is that whenever you go up on the Hill, you think you're going to confession."

3. Because Bush's letter mentioned some of the sensitive cases Kovich had handled, Kovich could not hang it on the wall or show it to anyone. He had to read the original in a special room at headquarters; later he was given a copy to keep.

4. Letter, Anthony A. Lapham to Robert B. Barnett, December 6, 1978.

5. See, for example, "Serge Peter Karlow -- Request for Relief Under Section 405 of Public Law 96-450 ('Mole Relief Act')," memorandum, Stanley Sporkin, CIA general counsel, to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, August 21,1981, declassifed and approved for release February 5, 1987. Although many CIA officers disdain the word "mole" as an invention of John le Carre, life imitates art, and the term, as noted earlier, has crept into the vocabulary of real spies.

6. For some reason, most of those who brought about the passage of the Mole Relief Act were reluctant to discuss it. Almost all of the CIA and congressional officials whom I was able to interview appeared to have suffered severe memory lapses about the legislation they helped to create. For example, Daniel B. Silver, Admiral Turner's general counsel when the bill was enacted and a participant in the discussions that led to the passage of the measure, professed to have almost no memory of it and said he could find no one else who knew anything about it. Silver said he had checked with some former members of his staff but could not shed any light on the legislation. The conversation then went this way:

Q; Is there anyone who served on Turner's staff who would know about this?

A: I can't recall anyone.

Q: Well, it wasn't every day that the CIA handed out millions or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to its former officers. I can't believe that it was done casually or that no one on Turner's staff would be aware of it.

A: [Grunts] I can't help.


7. The article, by Tom Morganthau with David C. Martin, of the magazine's Washington bureau, appeared on August 11, 1980.

8. "When Holt was released," Garbler said, "he came through Berlin, and Florence and I went out to Tempelhof to meet him. He was just passing through. He cried when he saw us. We cried a little bit. He told us Faithful and Blake were alive and well. Or as well as he was. He'd lost about fifty pounds; he looked haggard and wan."

9. As it happened, George Blake had almost derailed Garbler's career for another, unrelated reason. In 1961, as Garbler was getting ready to go to Moscow, the CIA learned that Blake, who had been arrested in April, told British authorities that he had rifled the files of the MI6 officers who had talked with Garbler and other CIA representatives some months earlier about a CIA program to debrief tourists who traveled behind the Iron Curtain. The worldwide CIA operation was known as the "legal travel program." Blake, the CIA was told, transmitted all the information to the Soviets. Garbler recalled a confrontation with Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Office of Security at the time. "Sheff Edwards said, 'Y-y-you can't go to Moscow, you are known to the Soviets.' Sheff stuttered. Jack[Maury] and I argued with him. I said I'd waited all my life to go to Moscow. Also that the Blake operation would be so highly compartmented it would not circulate within the KGB. He finally gave in."
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