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MOLEHUNT

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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