What a horrendous waste of resources to have trained officers being used to seed phony information and map out dead drops. You may be giving them false information but you are also giving them a fundamental view of your method of operation. It would require the CIA to give away their MO since deviations in the future would signal a genuine operation. The Russians were notoriously miserly with their agents. Ames got a pittance considering the value of what he gave them. So phony operations would do little to drain their resources. Dangle operations are only a small part of any good intelligence service's efforts. The most important task they perform is collecting Foreign Intelligance, not Counter Intelligence. Angleton can be credited with preventing moles in the CIA, but to accomplish that he dismissed potential agents which later turned out to be genuine. He saw a Moscow provocation in every single volunteer and it is clear now the CIA threw away many good opportunities.
"Angleton can be credited with preventing moles in the CIA, but to accomplish that he dismissed potential agents which later turned out to be genuine."
You mean rehabilitated by Leftist traitors like Colby et al as "genuine."
RE: Angleton, Colby see following link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1224848/posts