Soviet Moles in the CIA, Part 1 and 2 (How the Soviets duped US into thinking we won the Cold War)

The Committee for State Security (KGB) has always been the foundation of the Soviet police state. It has kept the borders tightly sealed against escape, maintained thousands of concentration camps, and actively spied on the Soviet population at home while arming terrorists and operating sophisticated spy networks abroad. The Communists have depended on the KGB for their hold on power.

Thus the "death" of Soviet Communism in 1991 should have ended the KGB. Among other consequences, Soviet espionage against the United States should have collapsed with the "end" of the Cold War. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), anticipating this change, has already diverted hundreds of its officers from counterintelligence against Soviet agents into the war on drugs and other campaigns.1

Instead, the opposite has happened. Immediately before resigning, Mikhail Gorbachev increased the KGB's budget by 20%.2 Since Boris Yeltsin came to power, the KGB's foreign section has been renamed the Federal Intelligence Service (SVR in Russian), and its operations have been expanded yet again. One news report admitted that "Russian President Boris Yeltsin has cultivated the former KGB and even strengthened its authority," while according to another source, "Russian spy operations against the US have shown little decline following the collapse of the former USSR. Western intelligence agencies report that Russian spying is on the rise around the world."3 Indeed, the FBI is now reporting a startling rise in the number of Soviet agents operating in the US.4

Given the atmosphere of wishful thinking created by the news media, it is no wonder that Americans were taken by such surprise on February 21, 1994, when Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Aldrich Ames was arrested as a Soviet spy. But the Ames case is only the tip of the iceberg. Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, are now so heavily infiltrated as to render them virtually useless against Soviet aggression. Our own intelligence agencies, in fact, are lulling the West to sleep by reassuring us that Soviet Communism is probably dead.

The news media has largely downplayed the damage caused by Ames, as well as the growing evidence of a much larger Soviet network inside Western intelligence circles.

Ames was a major figure in the CIA. He joined the agency in 1962 and spent the next two decades gradually working his way up the ranks. By 1985 he became chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Bloc Division--an incredibly sensitive position, giving him authority over the debriefing of defectors from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

During the next six years, serious problems developed. At least ten, and possibly dozens, of CIA intelligence operations failed; covert foreign contacts "suddenly stopped cooperating"; and at least eight CIA agents were uncovered and assassinated, as were two FBI agents.5 By 1990, the CIA's Counterintelligence Center finally noticed that Ames was paying cash for a home and car too expensive for his salary, and that he had been involved with some of the agency's recent disasters. The Center issued a memo to the Office of Security, requesting an investigation. The memo was ignored.6

The CIA, meanwhile, was recruiting members of the Stasi (the East German secret police) to act as spies for the United States. But in 1991, the CIA and FBI discovered that all of these "spies" had been double agents--in other words, they were secretly working for the Stasi, passing disinformation to the CIA. Someone inside the CIA must have betrayed these operations to the enemy.

The ensuing investigation found about twenty suspects. One was Aldrich Ames, who had worked with some of the Stasi contacts. Ames was given a polygraph lie-detector test, or "fluttered." Yet despite results that FBI officials now admit were suspicious, and despite the 1990 memo, Ames was cleared.7

And promoted. Ames was now transferred to the "Black Sea Counter-drug Offensive," a small but growing CIA operation inside the "former" Soviet Union. Recent evidence shows that this project was, in part, a cover for teams of the CIA and US Special Forces who were training elite military units under Eduard Shevardnadze, the Communist dictator of Soviet Georgia. Merely one month after Ames arrived in Soviet Georgia in 1993, CIA agent Fred Woodruff was mysteriously assassinated--receiving a bullet in the head while being driven on a remote road outside the city of Tbilisi.

British intelligence analyst Christopher Story has revealed that Soviet Georgia is now a major route for shipment of morphine and other drugs into Europe. During his involvement in the "Counter-drug" project, Ames began receiving millions of dollars from the Soviets, leading to speculation that he may have also helped the Communists set up their drug-smuggling operation. Aldrich's wife, Maria del Rosario Ames, was later arrested along with her husband for helping him in his espionage; she was Colombian, a possible link to the drug cartels.8

During 1993, the FBI finally noticed that Aldrich Ames had been making unauthorized trips to Colombia and Venezuela, had maintained contacts with Soviet KGB officers in the United States and other countries without informing the CIA, had illegally collected large numbers of classified CIA documents in his office and home, and was receiving millions of dollars from unknown sources. Finally, the FBI opened an investigation under the code name NIGHTMOVER, leading to Ames' arrest this year.

Ames confessed to being a Soviet spy, and was convicted. But the real story is far more ominous. Ames was only one of dozens of suspected spies in the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division; indeed, he could not have single-handedly betrayed all of the CIA projects that failed. More importantly, the FBI revealed that Ames had been given many CIA documents from operations well outside his authority, meaning that other spies must have worked with him.9

Although the CIA is refusing to look for more spies, several shocking incidents over the past 40 years have proven the agency is heavily infiltrated by Soviet moles.

Pentration of the CIA is certainly not a new Soviet goal. The Communists found their best opportunity at the time the CIA was first created--during World War II, when the new agency was known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Nathaniel Weyl, who broke with the Communist Party, USA, wrote that "In the Office of Strategic Services... employment of pro-Communists was approved at very high levels provided that they were suited for specific jobs."10 As it turned out, OSS director General William "Wild Bill" Donovan had systematically recruited his OSS personnel directly from Communist Party membership.

Nor was Donovan shy about admitting this. When confronted by the FBI with clear evidence of Communist agents in the OSS, Donovan boasted, "I know they're Communists; that's why I hired them."11

When the OSS became the CIA in 1947, the original personnel were largely retained, Communists and all. By 1952, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith publicly confirmed that hidden Communist agents were working inside his agency.12

Since no one in the Executive branch seemed to be interested in rooting out these spies, Congress began to take an interest. Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee specifically raised the idea of a formal investigation, as later described by legal advisor Roy Cohn:

“One desired investigation that never got started was that of the Central Intelligence Agency, headed by Allen W. Dulles. Our staff had been accumulating extensive data about its operations and McCarthy was convinced that an inquiry was overdue.

Our files contained allegations gathered from various sources indicating that the CIA had unwittingly hired a large number of double agents-individuals who, although working for the CIA, were actually Communist agents whose mission was to plant inaccurate data....

...although we spent far more for intelligence than other countries, the quality of the information we were receiving was so poor that at times the CIA found out what was happening only when it read the newspapers....

When the news broke out that McCarthy was contemplating an inquiry into the CIA, consternation reigned at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue [the White House]. Vice-President Nixon was assigned to the delicate job of blocking it.”13

Block it Nixon did, and no outside investigation of spies in the CIA has ever been held. The consequences were obvious. Even the Eisenhower administration was forced to admit in 1954 that CIA intelligence measures against the Soviet Bloc had been a dismal failure.14 Since the end of World War II and continuing to this day, the United States has never been able to infiltrate the KGB or recruit double agents of any significance.

But the final proof of massive Soviet penetration emerged during the 1960s, with the spectacular defection of the highest-level KGB officer ever to reach the West.

Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Ukrainian born in 1926, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1945 as he prepared to become a military officer. He began several years of training in intelligence and acquired a position in the KGB by 1948. By the early 1950s, he had risen to an important enough position to co-author a plan for restructuring Soviet intelligence, which brought him into direct contact with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and other top officials.

Four years of study at the KGB Institute in Moscow brought Golitsyn closer to the inner circle of Communist power during the late 1950s. He then worked until 1960 as a top analyst for the KGB in its Moscow headquarters, ultimately reaching the rank of major.

Golitsyn was one of the youngest officers ever promoted to such a high position, and the discovery of the KGB's innermost secrets rapidly disillusioned him. He managed to have himself reassigned to Finland with his wife and daughter in 1961. Three days before Christmas, he suddenly presented himself at the US embassy to announce his defection. Within 72 hours, the US Air Force evacuated Golitsyn and his family to Frankfurt, West Germany, just before he had to return to Moscow. After lie-detector tests showed he was telling the truth, he was transferred to the United States for a full debriefing.

Golitsyn's shocking information plunged the CIA, and other Western intelligence services, into a state of turmoil for over a decade. He revealed that the KGB placed the bulk of its resources not on stealing secrets, as the West commonly believed, but on deceiving and manipulating Western nations into gradually surrendering to Communism. Every time our intelligence experts would exploit some source of information from the Soviet Union, the KGB would "poison" that source with disinformation. By sending false defectors who were secretly working for the KGB, or by leaking falsified documents, or by organizing phony opposition movements inside the Soviet Bloc, the KGB could influence Western policymaking with seemingly reliable information. Using such techniques, the Communists could make the West believe that the Soviet and Chinese Communists were at war with one another. Or that Communism had "died."

The Golitsyn revelations shook the CIA to the core. Much of the intelligence being gathered could no longer be trusted; apparent successes in stealing Soviet secrets were actually Communist victories in deceiving us. Many CIA officials became furious with Golitsyn, and refused to listen.

To carry out such a huge but delicate operation, the Soviets needed spies in Western intelligence agencies for feedback. These moles would tell the KGB whether the disinformation was being believed, allowing the Soviets to alter the deception to give it more plausibility.15

Because of his former access to KGB intelligence, Golitsyn was able to prove the extent to which Soviet moles had infiltrated sensitive positions. For example, through his ability to recognize a wide array of top-secret NATO documents, he showed that the KGB had agents planted throughout the NATO command structure. His evidence was further confirmed in 1967 by the testimony of Giorgio Rinaldi, an Italian who admitted to being involved with some 300 NATO officers in a massive Soviet spy network--one that was never uncovered or removed.16 Recent years have seen further confirmation of Golitsyn's allegations. On November 17, 1994, former NATO official Rainer Rupp was convicted in a German court for his role as a Soviet spy. Operating under the KGB code name TOPAZ during the 1970s and 1980s, Rupp and his wife (code-named TURQUOISE) had passed "strategies, codes and military preparedness plans" from NATO headquarters to the East German secret police, who transferred the secrets to the KGB.17

Golitsyn also had knowledge of secrets from the highest levels of the French government, and said the information had come from a Soviet spy ring operating under the code name SAPPHIRE. His evidence implicated several members of French Intelligence (SDECE), including the chief of counterintelligence and President Charles de Gaulle's own intelligence advisor. Rather than investigating and stopping the ring, however, the French government and SDECE moved to cover up the evidence. Days after one of the spies was identified, he was murdered-apparently to protect the rest of the spy ring.

According to Golitsyn, Soviet control over the SDECE was so complete that the French agency was already functioning as a virtual arm of the KGB. Based on reports he had seen before defecting, he predicted that the KGB would soon use the SDECE as a front for spying on American nuclear deployment. French officer Philippe de Vosjoli, who was liaison between the SDECE and the CIA, disbelieved Golitsyn-until a few months later, when he received precisely such an order to set up a spy ring to monitor US nuclear facilities. De Vosjoli refused to obey the order and, learning that he was targeted for assassination upon his return to France, defected to the United States.18 The SDECE subsequently carried out the operation against the US under the code name BIG BEN.19

The information supplied by Golitsyn also revealed a powerful spy ring of five Soviet agents operating at the highest levels of the British Ministry of Intelligence. Three had already been exposed, and a fourth-Kim Philby-was uncovered in subsequent years. Based on additional evidence provided by Golitsyn, some members of the British MI5 conducted an investigation which concluded that the "fifth man" of the Soviet ring was none other than Sir Roger Hollis, the director of MI5. An MI6 officer, Stephen de Mowbray, tried to warn the prime minister, but was fired. Hollis himself was never fully investigated. Golitsyn's evidence also pointed to at least two close advisors to Prime Minister Harold Wilson as being Soviet agents, but MI5 blocked an investigation.20

Golitsyn was able to show Soviet infiltration in the intelligence services of West Germany, Austria, Canada, Australia, and others. But his most important spy revelations concerned infiltration of the CIA itself. He knew of one mole code-named SASHA; months of investigation finally uncovered a lower-level Soviet spy. But the stolen secrets Golitsyn had seen while in Moscow came from much higher sources, and could not have come from a single agent. To test Golitsyn's claim that many moles had burrowed into the highest levels of the CIA, the Counterintelligence Division issued "marked cards"-tiny leaks of information that can be traced. Using this method, the Office of Security and the Counterintelligence Division proved the information was being leaked from within the Soviet Bloc Division, and by multiple spies.21

The next logical step was to conduct investigations to identify the spies. But, as we shall review in part II of this analysis, those probes were blocked--with disastrous results.

The CIA, and virtually all of Western intelligence, has been thoroughly compromised by networks of Soviet spies. Nor has the "death" of Soviet Communism changed anything. Aldrich Ames, having worked for years as an agent of the KGB, in 1991 made an effortless transition to the renamed KGB (SVR) without any break in his activities.22 So, too, have hundreds of thousands of other Soviet agents throughout the world, whose activities are now sharply increasing.

In Part II: The secret "inner" KGB, CIA intelligence disasters, suppression of key evidence, and the CIA campaign to discredit Golitsyn.

When KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the United States in 1961, he brought a message that was most unwelcome. Not only did he prove the existence of large networks of Soviet spies operating in all Western intelligence agencies, but he also showed that the Soviets were using our own intelligence apparatus against us. While the CIA and other services were chasing after Soviet state secrets, the KGB was carefully leaking "secrets" that were carefully concocted disinformation. According to Golitsyn, the Communists placed higher priority on deceiving the West into gradual surrender than on protecting their own secrets. In other words, the Soviets were not playing the "Cold War game"; they were fighting to win.

To carry out a successful long-term deception, as Golitsyn explained, the Soviets had to restructure the KGB itself. After all, any disinformation scheme would inevitably be exposed through the very process of delivering the deception. A percentage of those KGB agents in contact with Western agents would defect or otherwise betray the plan. To prevent this from happening, the Soviets had to make sure that only a tiny core of personnel--those not in contact with the West--would actually know the plan. The rest of the KGB would implement the strategy without understanding it.

Golitsyn had not only observed the KGB restructuring first-hand, he had actually participated in it. The process had begun in 1953 upon the death of dictator Joseph Stalin, whose violent purging of fellow Communists had left behind a leadership vacuum. A power struggle ensued, threatening to destabilize the entire Communist system. Stalin's successors quickly decided to reinstitute V. I. Lenin's concept of "democratic centralism," in which no single individual holds the fulcrum of power. If the Communists could be re-united under an all-powerful central committee, the Communist Bloc could launch a long-term offensive against the West.

Party leader Nikita Khrushchev decisively beat all opposing factions in 1957, and immediately began building democratic centralism. Factional infighting was ended, and coordination between Communist governments was re-established. Suddenly the Soviet leadership turned its attentions toward creating a new strategic deception policy. The top intelligence officials began studying the writings of Lenin and ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu.

Quickly the entire Communist structure in the Soviet Union was rebuilt, though in secret. From 1958 to 1960, the Communist Party Central Committee created such new agencies as the Department of Foreign Policy and the Department of Active Operations to coordinate international deception. The Committee of Information, which carried out operation to influence Western political leaders, was shifted to the authority of the Central Committee. And the KGB was put under a new chairman, Aleksander Shelepin.

The KGB underwent the largest and most important rearrangement. Not only did its counterintelligence directorate expand, but a special top-secret new "inner level" was created to coordinate strategic deception. Known as Department D, it was immediately staffed with some fifty or sixty intelligence specialists, all highly experienced and trusted officers of the Soviet secret police. These men had special access to the highest state secrets, and were given the authority to coordinate the most powerful agencies of the Soviet government. Department D was designed to be the high command of the Communist disinformation campaign.

This "inner" KGB has remained so secret that no Soviet defector, other than Golitsyn, has known of its existence. Golitsyn himself was not a member of it, but he was intimately involved in creating it. In 1952 to 1953, he had been appointed to a small team of experts who planned the restructuring of the KGB; Golitsyn's plan was adopted by Shelepin in 1959, by which time the 32-year-old Golitsyn was studying at the KGB Institute in Moscow--and therefore was privy to the details of the KGB reorganization. Later that year, Golitsyn helped implement the deception strategy as a new senior analyst in the KGB's Information Department.

Golitsyn was astonishingly young for his high position, a result of his intellectual acumen. Had the Soviets been more careful, they would not have promoted him so soon, for by 1956 the young Golitsyn had become thoroughly disillusioned with Communism. The launching of the new deception strategy finally convinced him he had to defect to warn the West, and he spent the next few years carefully gathering information that would expose the Communist plans.

Using his position, Golitsyn managed to be assigned with his wife and daughter to the Soviet embassy in Finland. In December 1961, when he received orders to return to Moscow, he realized he had run out of time. He took his family and the few documents he could carry, and defected to the United States embassy. Thus began the controversy that would eventually split the CIA.1

Golitsyn's message was not popular within the CIA. Although he proved himself by helping expose Soviet spy rings in the highest levels of Western intelligence services [see Part I in the Nov. 1994 issue-Eds.], he was telling the CIA that much of its hard-earned intelligence data was merely disinformation concocted by the KGB's Department D. He also shattered all hopes that Communism might disintegrate spontaneously. According to Golitsyn, the Soviet reorganization after Stalin had destroyed all opposition to the regime while permanently healing all factions, splits, and power struggles within the government. Evidence of infighting among the Communists, of popular resistance against Communism, or even of "democratization" in Communist Bloc nations, was an illusion being created by the KGB.

Golitsyn told his CIA debriefers that the Soviets, knowing that Western agencies would not believe propaganda published in the official Soviet news media, used more clever methods to deliver disinformation. The Soviets might allow rumors to "slip" during off-the-record conversations with Western political leaders. Or they might leak special documents or communiques, allowing Western intelligence officers to believe they had stolen it without Soviet knowledge. Or they might pay phony "dissidents" or create illusory "opposition movements" behind the iron curtain, who would pass along "information" that would seem more credible.

But most startlingly of all, Golitsyn revealed that the Soviets understood well the Western dependence on KGB defectors. Department D played on this vulnerability by dispatching phony defectors--double agents who would pretend to expose KGB "secrets" that would now be wholly accepted by gullible Western intelligence services. Meanwhile, KGB spies inside the CIA or other agencies would quietly monitor Western reactions to specific items of disinformation, thus completing the "feedback loop" for the Soviets.

Thus deception could not only be engineered on a grand scale, but could even be fine-tuned for maximum believability.

None of this was idle speculation. In January of 1962, days after escaping to the West, Golitsyn predicted that his own defection would force the Soviets to send false defectors from the KGB and the GRU (military intelligence) to contradict his information.

Within weeks, he was already proved correct. The KGB dispatched a "diplomat" who tried to defect to the CIA in Paris, followed by a similar attempt at the American embassy in Moscow. The Soviets bungled both efforts. Finally two Soviet agents working at the United Nations--one from the GRU, the other from the KGB--almost simultaneously contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and offered to leak Soviet secrets. The FBI assigned them the codenames TOP HAT and FEDORA; the CIA named them SCOTCH and BOURBON. In June yet another such officer, this time from the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, approached the CIA in Switzerland and also began providing secrets. His name was Yuri Nosenko; he was labeled AE/FOXTROT in CIA files (he subsequently defected to the United States in early 1964).2

"Suddenly, in the spring of 1962, the CIA was awash with penetrations of Soviet intelligence--more at one time than during its entire history," wrote journalist David C. Martin years later.3

And, exactly as Golitsyn had predicted, all three "defectors" began providing information that directly contradicted his own. Where Golitsyn had warned of high-level penetrations of the CIA by Soviet spies, Nosenko instead blamed the leaks of information on a low-level code clerk in the US embassy. Golitsyn's charge that Soviet moles had betrayed CIA spy Petr Popov was also contradicted by Nosenko, who claimed that the Soviets had traced Popov's handler merely by spraying an invisible chemical tracer on his shoes. Eerily, TOP HAT and FEDORA were coincidentally able to confirm Nosenko's key allegations. All three confirmed Golitsyn's less important information, but directly contradicted his evidence of top moles in the CIA.4

If Nosenko, TOP HAT, and FEDORA were right, then the Soviets had failed to infiltrate the CIA, and could not pull off sophisticated deception campaigns. If Golitsyn was right, the CIA was already dominated by the KGB, and these other "defectors" were themselves part of the disinformation. CIA officials rapidly polarized into two warring camps on this issue, precipitating a fight that would tear the agency apart for the next decade.

Into the fray stepped James Jesus Angleton, the venerated chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division. A brilliant spymaster with a penchant for detecting disinformation, he immediately recognized in Golitsyn a profound source of intelligence. And when Nosenko made his appearance to discredit Golitsyn, Angleton smelled a rat.

Angleton persuaded key members of the Soviet Bloc Division, the branch of the CIA responsible for handling defectors, that Nosenko was a phony defector. By 1963, Angleton had Golitsyn transferred to his authority, and together the two men launched a series of investigations into Nosenko and other suspect defectors, as well as searching for Soviet spies in the CIA.

It was not long before Nosenko's story began falling apart. Although he claimed to be a lieutenant colonel in the KGB with access to high-level secrets, he could not remember important details of his operations. Under interrogation, he admitted the contradiction but then began changing his story repeatedly. When intelligence experts determined that Nosenko could not have held the rank of lieutenant colonel, he admitted having merely been a captain; when confronted with evidence that he had not, as previously claimed, received a particular communication from Moscow, Nosenko again admitted lying. Further interrogation caused him to admit having lied about numerous facts, including his reason for defecting in the first place.

More disturbingly, however, the documents Nosenko had brought from the Soviet Union had themselves been fabricated to back up his false identity. This could mean only one thing: the KGB itself had doctored the items as part of a deception.5

TOP HAT and FEDORA were also caught participating in the game. FBI surveillance convinced Assistant Director William C. Sullivan that both "defectors" were false, although he was unable to persuade his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, who angrily refused to believe that the Soviets had deceived the FBI. Furthermore, FEDORA independently "confirmed" Nosenko's lies about his rank and communications--again proving KGB involvement. The final evidence surfaced in 1978, when the FBI discovered that the KGB had already long known about FEDORA's leaking of information to the West. FEDORA returned to Moscow-and was enthusiastically promoted by the KGB! TOP HAT was exposed in a similar way.

In more recent years, the Soviet embassy itself has recommended Nosenko as a source of accurate information for at least one American journalist.6

The Soviets did not, of course, stop with these double agents. In 1966, the KGB dispatched yet another supposedly important defector, Igor Kochnov. Codenamed KITTY HAWK by the CIA, Kochnov also insisted that the Soviets had no spies in the CIA or FBI, while he again tried to "confirm" the claims of Nosenko. Once Angleton identified KITTY HAWK as a phony defector, the Soviet returned to Moscow and provided no more "information."7

Oleg Gordievsky, an officer in the KGB's First Chief Directorate, joined this growing list of double agents in 1974, when he first began leaking secrets to England's MI6. In 1985, he defected to the West under suspicious circumstances. Although supposedly arrested by the KGB on suspicion of spying for England, he was not executed. "A generation earlier he would simply have been liquidated," writes Gordievsky (with a co-author) of himself. "Nowadays the KGB had to have evidence."8 Starting with this obvious lie, Gordievsky's story becomes even more absurd. Despite his arrest for treason, he claims the KGB nevertheless allowed him enough freedom that he could repeatedly make contact with British agents and even escape the Soviet Union itself--on foot.9 To top it all off, his family was subsequently released from the Soviet Union.10

Unlike Golitsyn, who still remains under deep cover to prevent assassination by the Soviets, Gordievsky maintains a high-profile life in London. Gordievsky insists that the KGB has had no spies in British intelligence since 1961, and ridicules former MI5 officer Peter Wright for fingering over 200 suspects--including former MI5 director Sir Roger Hollis--as a result of investigations under project FLUENCY. Gordievsky also bitterly denies Golitsyn's revelation of the existence of Department D in the KGB, while he staunchly defends Nosenko as a genuine defector. Gordievsky has advised such prominent individuals as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and his 1990 book, KGB: The Inside Story, has been published widely.11

Desperate to cover up the Golitsyn revelations at any cost, and unable to assassinate him, the Soviets have adopted a saturation approach to drown out his information with a torrent of disinformation. Since 1962, the Soviets have sent at least 15 "defectors" to contradict Golitsyn and support Nosenko, including those listed above. The staggering quantity of such deception tends to obscure the paradoxes in each defector's story.

Yet despite all the clear evidence of a vast Soviet deception program using false defectors, and despite growing evidence of Soviet spies in the highest ranks of the CIA, Angleton and Golitsyn ultimately lost the struggle to save the agency.

Virtually every investigation Angleton initiated was either blocked, terminated, or undermined. He was never allowed to uncover a single major spy or false defector. Angry CIA officers in every department frantically derailed his probes, and howled protests every time he questioned the reliability of a defector. Gradually Angleton's enemies closed ranks to destroy him.

The purge began in 1969, on orders from above, by phasing out Golitsyn's advisory relationship with the CIA. President Richard Nixon, who in the early 1950s had blocked an investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Communist spies in the CIA [See Part I-Eds.], wanted nothing to interfere with his program of detente.12

Then came William E. Colby, who in 1973 was promoted to Executive Comptroller, the number three position in the CIA. His career had certainly raised eyebrows. He had come from the CIA's covert action wing in Vietnam, rather than involvement in true intelligence work. As chief of the CIA's Rome station in the 1950s, Colby had fought hard to provide covert CIA support to Communist front organizations in Italy--over Angleton's vigorous opposition. During the Vietnam War, Colby vetoed Angleton's plan to use counterintelligence to weed out Communist infiltrators in the South Vietnamese government, thus ensuring that hundreds of Communists would continue to paralyze the war effort from within. Most suspiciously of all, Colby met several times with a Soviet GRU agent in Vietnam--without notifying the CIA. Colby even managed to shut down a CIA program to investigate Communists in American labor unions. Although CIA officials constantly overlooked Colby's actions and promoted him, the Counterintelligence Division had long suspected Colby of being a Soviet mole.13

In January of 1973, Colby issued a new directive to all CIA stations worldwide. These orders permanently changed the operational methods of the CIA, effectively overturning every warning Golitsyn and Angleton had ever given. Any information provided by defectors was henceforth automatically to be accepted, so long as it was basically consistent with the majority of other defectors' stories. Thus Nosenko, FEDORA, TOP HAT, and many other phony defectors were legitimized. The new policy assumed that the Soviets do not send false defectors, and that the Soviets are only interested in stealing secrets, not in carrying out strategic deception. Even the word "disinformation" was redefined as Soviet attempts to place propaganda in the Western news media, not as attempts to deceive intelligence agencies. And all searches for Soviet moles were ended.

In the wake of the 1974 Watergate scandal, Colby became Director of the CIA. Within months, he had carefully severed Angleton's connections in the intelligence world, mobilized most of the agency's personnel in a united front against Angleton, and then fired him. All of Angleton's top staffers departed with him. To make matters worse, Nosenko himself was officially rehabilitated--and brought in as a consultant to help train the new counterintelligence staff. The new CIA policy remains in effect today.14

In the years since the purge of Angleton and Golitsyn, the CIA has been wracked with scandals of Soviet spies and false defectors. The recent case of Soviet mole Aldrich Ames was preceded in the 1970s by William P. Campiles, who gave the Soviets an extremely sensitive spy satellite manual, and in the 1980s by Edward Lee Howard. Presumably these represent merely the tiny tip of the iceberg.

The CIA still refuses to admit that any Soviet "defectors" may be phony, but one case in particular turned into a public relations disaster for the agency. Vitaliy Yurchenko, who had held such top positions as chief of the KGB's counterintelligence department, suddenly defected to the United States in July of 1985. Among other operations against the US, he had been in charge of sending "dangles"--Soviet double agents who would approach the FBI and offer "secrets" so as to mislead American intelligence gathering. One of Yurchenko's CIA debriefers was none other than Aldrich Ames, who would not be discovered as a Soviet spy for another nine years.

Like Nosenko two decades earlier, Yurchenko insisted that the Soviets had no spies inside the CIA. Indeed, he specifically backed up Nosenko as being a genuine defector, and he told the CIA that the Soviets had blown Western spy operations using invisible chemical tracers and ex-agents of the CIA. Officials at the agency, including Director William Casey, enthusiastically promoted Yurchenko to the news media and Congress.

But three months after Yurchenko's defection, he surprised his handlers by redefecting to the Soviets, who welcomed and promoted him. To embarrass the CIA, Yurchenko held a press conference for American reporters, at which he alleged that the CIA had kidnapped and drugged him. In other words, the Soviets were openly laughing at the CIA's gullibility.

Unwilling to admit that Golitsyn and Angleton might have been right in the first place, the CIA planted a phony story in the news media that Yurchenko had been captured and shot by the Soviets; shortly thereafter, Yurchenko appeared live on Soviet television to refute the charge. Nevertheless, to this day the CIA blindly insists that, somehow, Yurchenko really had been a genuine defector. After all, CIA policy dictates that the Soviets do not send false defectors.15

So desperate has the CIA been to cover up Soviet deception operations from the public that the agency has resorted to a full smear campaign against Golitsyn and the now-deceased Angleton. In his 1984 book, New Lies For Old, Golitsyn drew on his personal knowledge from within the KGB to predict that Department D would orchestrate the "death" of Communism, starting no later than 1989. The Berlin Wall would be torn down, Solidarity would be allowed to achieve power in Polish elections, the Soviet Union would break up, and a crisis would be manufactured in Yugoslavia. Point for point, Golitsyn predicted the events of Europe since 1989 with chilling accuracy, and warned that the Soviets would be using the deception to prepare for a takeover of Western Europe.

As if to neutralize Golitsyn's warnings, the CIA has recently planted numerous stories in the media to discredit him. Articles in major national news magazines and a special documentary on PBS in 1990 have been followed by such books as Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior and David Wise's Molehunt, both books savagely attacking Angleton and Golitsyn as "paranoid cold warriors." Both Mangold and Wise masquerade as independent journalists, but both acknowledge that the information for their books came directly from large numbers of helpful CIA officials. As author Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, the CIA frequently plants its own books in the public domain under false cover. This is done by cultivating certain authors, providing them complete manuscripts (or at least sufficient material to write books), and using connections in the publishing industry to arrange for the books' distribution and promotion by major companies. This method allows the CIA to publish viewpoints that appear to come from independent sources.16

Both the Mangold and Wise books present the Golitsyn/Nosenko debate in a severely lopsided way. Mangold's book even goes so far as to ignore completely Golitsyn's accurate predictions of "change" in Eastern Europe, declaring brazenly that "History has dealt harshly with Anatoliy Golitsyn the prophet.... As a crystal-ball gazer, Golitsyn has been unimpressive." Mangold continues by carefully skipping over Golitsyn's already-fulfilled predictions, quoting a few sentences out of context so as to change their meaning altogether.17

But in light of the evidence that the CIA is riddled with Communist spies, it is little wonder the agency strains so hard to convince Americans that Communism is truly "dead."

1 Story, C., Soviet Analyst 22:7-8, March 1994, p. 20. 2 McAlvany, D., McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, Sept./Oct. 1991, p. 22. 3 US News & World Report, Feb. 8, 1993, and Washington Times, Nov. 15, 1992, as quoted in McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, Jan. 1994, pp. 20-22. 4 Ibid., p. 22; Sinai, R., Associated Press, "Cold War over? Not for spies," Contra Costa Times, 3-5-92, p. B1. 5 Story, C., March 1994, Op cit., p. 3. 6 Pincus, W., Washington Post, "CIA memo warned about Ames 3 years before arrest," SF Chronicle, 8-2-94, p. A6. 7 Pincus, W., Smith, J.R., & Thomas, P., Washington Post, "East German Stasi files pointed to Ames as long-sought mole," SF Chronicle, 3-7-94, p. A9. 8 Story, C., March 1994, Op cit., p. 18; Story, C., Soviet Analyst 22:4, Sept. 1993, pp. 15-16; Story, C., Soviet Analyst 22:3, July 1993, pp. 7-8. 9 Pincus, W., Smith, R.J., & Thomas, P., Op cit. 10 Weyl, N., The Battle Against Disloyalty, Cromwell, New York, 1951, p. 180, as quoted in Smith, R.H., OSS, Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1972, p. 10. 11 Smith, R. H., Op cit., p. 11. 12 Burnham, J., The Web of Subversion, Western Islands, Belmont, MA, 1965, p. 182. 13 Cohn, R., McCarthy: The Answer to "Tail Gunner Joe", Manor Books, New York, 1977, pp. 63-64. 14 Martin, D.C., Wilderness of Mirrors, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, p. 62. 15 Epstein, E.J., Deception, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989, chapter 5. 16 "300 officers bared as red NATO spies," Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 3-22-67, pp. 1, 10. 17 "Ex-spy jailed for selling NATO secrets to East Bloc," SF Chronicle, 11-18-94, p. A12. 18 Epstein, E.J., Op cit., pp. 65-66, 68-70. 19 Mangold, T., Cold Warrior, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1991, p. 131. 20 Epstein, E.J., Op cit., pp. 71-73, 80-82; Wright, P. with Greengrass, P., Spycatcher, Viking, New York, 1987, passim. 21 Epstein, E.J., Op cit., pp. 75-78. 22 Story, C., March 1994, Op cit., p. 5.

1 The story of Department D is told in Golitsyn, A., New Lies for Old, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1984, esp. chapter 6; see also Epstein, E.J., Deception, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989, esp. chapter 5. 2 Martin, D.C., Wilderness of Mirrors, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, pp. 110-114; Mangold, T., Cold Warrior, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1991, pp. 410-411; Epstein, Op cit., pp. 74-75. 3 Martin, Op cit., p. 114. 4 Ibid., pp. 112-114; Epstein, Op cit., pp. 47-49, 74-75. 5 Martin, Op cit., pp. 161-162, 164, 172-174; Epstein, Op cit., p. 60; Mangold, Op cit., pp. 163, 397. 6 Epstein, Op cit., pp. 13, 48-49, 60, 96; Martin, Op cit., pp. 161-162; Mangold, Op cit., p. 411. 7 Martin, Op cit., pp. 191-192; Mangold, Op cit., pp. 409-410. 8 Andrew, C. & Gordievsky, O., KGB: The Inside Story, Harper Collins, New York, 1990, p. 13. 9 Ibid., pp. 8-16. 10 Story, C., Soviet Analyst, vol. 22:7-8, March 1994, p. 15. 11 Andrew & Gordievsky, Op cit., pp. 7-8; Mangold, Op cit., pp. 111, 204; Story, Op cit., p. 12. 12 Epstein, Op cit., p. 98. 13 Ibid., pp. 98, 100; Martin, Op cit., pp. 183-184, 217; Mangold, Op cit., pp. 309-315; Epstein, E.J., Legend, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978, pp. 272, 329. 14 Epstein, Deception, Op cit., pp. 90-91, 100-101, 196-199; Epstein, Legend, Op cit., p. 273; Mangold, Op cit., pp. 205-206, 313-317. 15 Epstein, Deception, Op cit., pp. 199-214; Story, Op cit., p. 24; Mangold, Op cit., p. 402. 16 Mangold, Op cit.; Wise, D., Molehunt, Random House, New York, 1992; Epstein, Deception, Op cit., pp. 12-20. 17 Mangold, Op cit., pp. 355-356.

Do Russian Nukes Still Threaten The US?
May 18, 2002
by David T. Pyne, Esq.

Full link:

http://www.opinionet.com/article.php?id=950

[Note: This is Part II of a three part series on the Bush-Putin Nuclear Reduction Treaty]

As the recently released 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review has as one of its principle tenets for the Bush Administration’s vast politically motivated reductions of the US strategic nuclear arsenal that Russia and its huge nuclear arsenal are no longer a threat and that the US nuclear arsenal need no longer match or deter Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, it is important to take a closer look at the validity of that assumption. In examining the potential threat of nuclear attack from Russia, one must look first to capabilities and then to intentions. The 1995 US Nuclear Posture Review warned of the possibility of a quick shift in the intentions of the top Russian leadership stating, "A significant shift in the Russian government into the hands of arch-conservatives could restore the strategic nuclear threat to the United States literally overnight."President Vladimir Putin, a former director of the renamed KGB widely considered by Russia experts to be a Russian hard-liner, became Acting President in December 1999 and subsequently President of the Russian Federation an event that may well have "restored"the Russian strategic nuclear threat to the United States.

Even if Putin’s intentions were favorable to the United States as is now widely perceived, the Russian capability to stage a successful nuclear first strike against the United States which would destroy the bulk of our strategic nuclear deterrent and gravely weaken our capability to retaliate remains unchanged. Bush has declared his intention to rely not upon nuclear weapons to deter war and keep the nuclear peace as past US Presidents have done for nearly 60 years. Instead, Bush has stated that henceforth he will rely upon the good graces of the President of the Russian Federation to keep his promise to disarm to a similarly low level of deployed strategic nuclear weapons. Bush’s trust in Russia to keep its promises flies in the face of a study done by the first Bush Administration in 1992 that concluded that Russia has violated every arms control treaty it has ever entered into including the START I Treaty. How soon the Bush Administration has forgotten President Reagan’s time-honored slogan of "peace through strength!"

Many well-meaning Americans believe that the US can afford to rid itself of several thousand "excess"nukes since the Cold War is over and Russia is now our "ally" in the war against terrorism. How well-balanced are the US and Russian nuclear arsenals today? Former Senator Sam Nunn and former Senate Majority Leader, Howard Baker, have written several articles citing estimates that Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal totaling approximately 40,000 warheads. In contrast, the US arsenal consists of no more than 10,000 to 11,000 total warheads, down from 30,000 in 1991. Equally disturbing is that according to sworn testimony by former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Schlesinger to Congress in fall 1997, Russia continues to produce "thousands"of miniaturized nuclear warheads a year despite the fact that the US closed its nuclear production plants almost a decade ago.

According to the Center for Security Policy and other think-tanks, US intelligence has never been able to ascertain the true size of the Russian strategic nuclear force and has issued estimates, which have consistently underestimated the size of the Russian nuclear force. US intelligence assumes as a matter of course that Russia will not deploy MIRV’d warheads on its strategic missiles in excess of the START nuclear arms control treaties signed by the US and Russia in the early 1990s even though it has the technical capacity to deploy many times as many warheads on its missiles as are permitted by treaty and as are counted by US intelligence which always assumes Russian treaty compliance. In view of these facts, it seems dangerously naive to stop using the threat posed by the large Russian nuclear arsenal to determine the size of the US strategic nuclear deterrent and trust the Russians into believing that they have downloaded these additional warheads from their missiles when they have such a vast abundance of nuclear warheads in reserve.

A recent CIA study released last December, entitled "Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat through 2015"reiterated the conclusion of past CIA reports in citing the Russian and Communist Chinese nuclear arsenals as the two greatest threats to this country. A much downsized US strategic nuclear arsenal would be more vulnerable than ever to a disabling Russian nuclear first strike and would leave us even more likely to Russian nuclear blackmail. Furthermore, the Bush Administration has repeatedly stated that the missile defense system they envision for the United States would be woefully insufficient to deter or defend against a Russian nuclear attack is not intended to defend the US against the Russian or Chinese nuclear threat, but rather against rogue state missile threats which are only now beginning to emerge.

Next up: Part III - Bush’s Planned Signature of the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty will Herald the Beginning of the End for the US as a Superpower.

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