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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 21: The Legacy As he looked back on the era of the mole hunt, Richard Helms had no regrets. It was warm in his office in downtown Washington, but he preferred to keep on the jacket of his exquisitely tailored suit as he talked. Angleton may have been the point man, but it was Helms who had presided over the period of the mole hunt, first as the deputy director for plans from 1962 and then as the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. Little of importance could have occurred during that period without his personal approval. Helms knew. In retrospect, what did he think of the handling of the mole investigation? It had to be done, Helms said. "One of the real nightmares the DCI lives with is that someone is going to walk into his office and say, 'We found a penetration.' Any director worthy of his stripes is bound to pay attention to allegations and to try to run them down. We had to check these things out. I felt it then, and now. "When I was director, I refused to sign off on getting rid of anybody until it was clearly demonstrated that they were indeed a penetration." But, he conceded, some officers had been "put on a siding while the allegations were being checked out. "What are you going to do with these people in the meantime? You can't hang them from the ceiling. When these cases came forward it was Angleton who raised the possibilities, but investigations had to be conducted by OS, not by Angleton." How many CIA officers had been investigated? "I don't know the numbers," Richard Helms said. And no one was found? "Not that I'm aware of." *** Any large organization rests on trust, or it could not function. Among its members, there is a presumption of loyalty to the organization, to their common goals, and to each other. As Robert T. Crowley, the veteran Clandestine Services officer, put it graphically, "In operations you have to ask, 'Would I want this guy on my air hose at two hundred feet?'" The CIA, too, rests on trust, but assumes betrayal. That is its continuing dilemma. The era of the mole hunt brought into sharp relief the potential threat posed to any organization that has built into its basic structure a powerful unit in charge of suspecting everyone. A Department of Paranoia, as it were. James Angleton, who directed the agency's counterintelligence for two decades, devoted the last thirteen years of his career to finding "the mole" or moles in the agency. Angleton was the CIA's Captain Ahab, endlessly pursuing the great white whale. He never even got close enough to throw a harpoon. It is tempting but too easy to say that Angleton was paranoid. By the dictionary definition, a paranoid is "characterized by oversuspiciousness, grandiose delusions, or delusions of persecution." [1] Yet it is hard, and perhaps unfair, to make the case that Angleton was paranoid. His suspicions had a rational basis. There were moles and traitors in other intelligence agencies, notably M16. Even in the CIA, moles and traitors would surface (although none of the CIA cases took place, or at least were discovered, until after Angleton left the agency). Some cases may remain unpublicized, because the CIA preferred it that way, but the known list is long enough: Edwin Gibbons Moore II, a former CIA officer who had hundreds of classified documents in his home, and offered them to the Soviets for $200,000. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment in 1977. William P. Kampiles, a former CIA watch officer, who received $3,000 from the Soviets for a copy of the manual for the KH-11 spy satellite. Convicted and sentenced in 1978 to forty years. David Barnett, a former CIA case officer in Indonesia, who sold agency secrets to the Soviets for $92,600. Pleaded guilty to espionage in 1980 and sentenced to eighteen years. Karl F. Koecher, a CIA contract employee who worked as a translator from 1973 to 1975 while an agent of Czech intelligence. Arrested in 1984, pleaded guilty to espionage, and traded in an East-West exchange of prisoners in 1986. Sharon M. Scranage, a CIA clerk in Ghana, who passed agency secrets to her lover, an agent of the Ghanaian intelligence service. Arrested in 1985, pleaded guilty to revealing classified information, and sentenced to five years. Larry Wu Tai Chin, a former CIA broadcasting analyst who passed secrets to Chinese intelligence for thirty-three years, for which he received about $140,000. Arrested in 1985, convicted the following year, and committed suicide in February 1986 while in jail and awaiting sentence. Edward Lee Howard, a CIA case officer about to be sent to Moscow when he failed a polygraph test and was fired. Howard then sold the secrets of the CIA's operations in Moscow to the KGB and put the money he received in a secret Swiss bank account containing upwards of $150,000; he buried an additional $10,000 in the New Mexico desert. Escaped from the FBI in 1985 and was granted asylum in the Soviet Union. The list is sufficient evidence that moles and traitors exist, and logically must be pursued and, if at all possible, detected. "Today," Sam Papich insisted, "we have moles in every agency, including the FBI. We'd be stupid if we don't think so." But like so much in a democratic system, rooting out spies requires a delicate balance between security and liberty. The CIA is not exempt from due process. It is part of the American government. The agency is free to practice its full range of black arts against other nations, subject to certain minimal presidential and congressional restrictions, but logically it cannot -- at least when dealing with its own officers -- operate outside the democratic norms of the system it professes to defend. It cannot, without great cost, trample on the values it was created to protect. If Angleton was brilliant, as his admirers claim, he was also warped, as his detractors maintain, a tortured and twisted man who saw conspiracy and deception as the natural order of things. His mind, and his universe, was a hopeless bramble of false trails and switchbacks, an intricate maze to nowhere. He was, in the end, truly lost in a "wilderness of mirrors." A former case officer, a white-bearded, wise old owl who left the agency years ago to settle in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, perhaps put it best: "The wilderness? More people found their way into it than out of it. There is something inhuman about the CI mind, and the manipulation of human beings. It's always tempting for a counterintelligence officer to take a case and double it back. That leads you into the wilderness." The old case officer added: "Much of the trouble we get into is due to stupidity rather than to evil design, sabotage, or treason. Normally it's stupidity. "If you have good control over CI, and it works, that's fine. If it doesn't, it ought to be stopped. I'm not even saying that it should be stopped if it damages careers. Those are casualties of war." He gazed out the window, toward the nearby mountains. A breeze was rippling the trees. "There must be control over Angletons," he said. "We can't afford to run the risk of getting the whole outfit screwed up. Angleton went over the line." A former chief of the Soviet division, although he had admired Angleton personally, agreed. Guarding against penetration was "absolutely basic," he said, but it was a question of the methods used. "It's a matter of dealing with facts, not theories. If you're going to move, you have to have hard evidence." But the basic conflict between trust and betrayal that gave rise to the mole hunt inside the CIA was larger than anyone individual. The problem was, and is, endemic. Angleton, after all, exercised great power under five directors -- Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, John McCone, William Raborn, and Richard Helms. Angleton could not have amassed and wielded that power unless the CIA as an institution wanted him to do so. Angleton operated in a supportive environment, not in a vacuum. The mole hunt in the CIA destroyed the careers of loyal officers, shattered lives and families, and paralyzed the agency, bringing to a halt its operations against the Soviet Union at a time -- during the height of the Cold War -- when those operations were the CIA's raison d'etre. Leonard V. McCoy, the reports officer in the Soviet division who later became deputy chief of the reorganized CI Staff, said as much in an article circulated privately among former CIA employees. He wrote: "The negative effect of the Golitsyn era on our Soviet operational management was in fact devastating -- the inevitable culmination of a long-standing belief that CIA could not have a bona fide Soviet operation. Potential cases were turned down, ongoing operations were judged to be deception operations (including Penkovskiy), and defectors who gave information supporting Nosenko ... were judged to have been dispatched by the KGB." [2] Another veteran CIA officer, F. Mark Wyatt, in a review of a BBC film about the Nosenko case, put it even more succinctly: "Because of this case and its many ramifications, careers had been ruined, operations against the Soviet Union paralyzed, and relations with several friendly intelligence services crippled." [3] The mole hunt spread to several other Western allies, touching off a particularly destructive and inconclusive search for traitors at the top levels of British intelligence. It claimed innocent victims in other countries, such as Norway's Ingeborg Lygren. And it created a climate of fear in the CIA. It was not an unfamiliar atmosphere. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's hunt for Communists in the American government flourished in the early 1950s. What happened inside the CIA in the 1960s paralleled the McCarthyism that had taken poisonous root in America a decade earlier. That in itself was ironic, since the CIA had been one of the Wisconsin senator's targets in his destructive witch-hunt. It was almost as though the CIA, insulated by its walls of secrecy, was caught in a time warp, experiencing its own witch-hunt several years after that in the larger society. [4] Like a speeding locomotive with no brakes, the mole hunt had gathered a momentum of its own until, inevitably, it went completely off the rails. The "war of the defectors," the conflict over Golitsin and Nosenko, a central event of the mole hunt, split the agency into two camps, creating scars that had yet to heal decades later. The harm done was so great that the agency even agreed to an act of Congress to compensate the victims of the mole hunt, although it did not take the initiative in seeking to redress the wrongs it had committed. But the payments to Karlow, Garbler, and Kovich, substantial though they were, did not make up for the harm done to them, and to dozens of other loyal officers, some of whom to this day do not even realize that they were victims. Like a snake eating its tail, the mole hunters eventually devoured each other. The mole hunt turned on itself, and led to the spectacle of the chief of the Soviet division, the chief of counterintelligence, even the director of the CIA being accused. David Murphy, James Angleton, and William Colby -- all were touched by the corrosive finger of suspicion. The Soviet division's operations virtually ground to a halt. In the greatest irony of all, as a direct consequence of the mole hunt, counterintelligence within the CIA was also diminished, its size, influence, and effectiveness greatly reduced. When William Colby took over as CIA director in 1973, he was rightly convinced that Angleton had become a destructive force within the CIA. The belief of the Counterintelligence Staff that all Soviet defectors or volunteers were plants and that the agency itself was deeply penetrated had frozen the CIA's operations against the Soviet Union around the world. Determined to change this and to maneuver Angleton out of the agency, Colby dismantled his empire. The pieces were never put back together. [5] "CI," said Sam Papich, "has never been reconstructed." With his excess of zeal, Angleton had succeeded in destroying all that he had worked for. The world of counterintelligence is rather like a cave, so deep, so dark, that no one can fully see into all of its crevices. But the basic task of CIA counterintelligence is to prevent penetrations within the agency and to help detect foreign spies. While the work of counterintelligence -- precisely because it is carried on in secret -- is difficult to measure, one reasonable yardstick is the number of espionage cases that surface in a given period. And the proliferation of spy cases in the mid-1980s, from Edward Lee Howard in the CIA, to Ronald Pelton in the NSA, to John A. Walker, Jr., and his confederates in the Navy, to Richard W. Miller in the FBI, and to the Army's Clyde Lee Conrad, all suggest that something had gone very wrong with U.S. counterintelligence. Indeed, more than one official study reached the same conclusion. In 1988, a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee investigated the nation's counterintelligence agencies. The panel directed its heaviest criticism at the way the CIA had handled the case of Edward Lee Howard, the agency's first defector to the Soviet Union. In its report, the House committee called the case "one of the most serious losses in the history of U.S. intelligence." [6] It published excerpts from secret testimony by Gardner R. "Gus" Hathaway, then the CIA's counterintelligence chief, who admitted for the first time that "what Howard did to us was devastating," and that Howard had revealed to the Russians "some of the most important operations we have ever run in the Soviet Union." Hathaway also conceded that in the Howard case "the agency did not do its job properly." [7] Reviewing the counterintelligence problems facing the United States, the House committee concluded that "something is fundamentally wrong." [8] That same year, a Senate-House conference report found "basic flaws" in the nation's security apparatus. It called the intelligence community "poorly organized, staffed, trained and equipped to deal with continuing counterintelligence challenges." [9] So many espionage cases broke in 1985 that it became known as "the Year of the Spy. " In the wake of these cases, and the defection and redefection of the KGB's Vitaly Yurchenko, CIA director William Webster quietly reorganized the agency's Counterintelligence Staff, replacing it with a new Counterintelligence Center and upgrading its director to the level of associate deputy director for operations for counterintelligence. Whether the changes would prove to be more than a bureaucratic shuffle remained to be seen. Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy, lamented what he saw as the demise of counterintelligence in the wake of Angleton's dismissal and his own departure. But Miler, who spent years in the SIG looking for moles, and never found any -- except, perhaps, Igor Orlov -- was aware that counterintelligence was an inexact science. He liked to quote a remark by the CIA's former deputy director for plans: "Desmond FitzGerald once said CI is nothing but a couple of guys in the back room examining the entrails of chickens." In the end, Angleton had self-destructed. He had mesmerized a succession of CIA directors, but the Wizard of Oz analogy was apt. With the agency tied up in knots, he could no longer maintain the mystique. As John Denley Walker, the former station chief who had clashed with Angleton in Israel, put it: "Angleton became like the spider king and he never knew what was in the web. Colby was pretty nearly right." David H. Blee, one of Angleton's successors as chief of counterintelligence, grasped the problem very well. Blee headed the CI Staff for seven years. "In counterintelligence," he said, "we're all paranoid. If we weren't, we couldn't do our jobs." Another former CIA counterintelligence chief did not want to be identified, but he was astonishingly frank about the hazards. "You go berserk in this job," he said. "You lose your orientation completely. You become demented. You're looking for spies everywhere." It might be a good idea, he added, if the CIA's counterintelligence chief were limited to a term of one year. Angleton's deep-seated belief that Soviet walk-ins or defectors after Anatoly Golitsin were all plants died hard, even after Angleton himself had gone. Some former CIA officers insist that the agency had recovered rapidly from this mind-set. But in 1976, two years after Angleton's departure, Adolf G. Tolkachev, a Soviet defense researcher working on Stealth technology for aircraft, began leaving notes in the cars of U.S. diplomats near the American embassy in Moscow. Tolkachev, fearing KGB surveillance, did not dare to approach the embassy itself. The CIA's Moscow station relayed these approaches to Langley. Three times, it can be revealed, Tolkachev was turned away by the CIA, which feared he might be a plant. Finally, the agency decided to take a chance and began accepting material from the Soviet defense researcher. For almost a decade, Tolkachev proved to be the CIA's most valuable asset inside the Soviet Union, his existence a closely guarded secret. Because of the agency's initial suspicion, it had come close to losing his rich haul of Soviet secrets. Tolkachev was finally caught, betrayed, almost certainly, by Edward Lee Howard. [10] In the end, it all came back to betrayal. The need for trust, the reality of betrayal, transcend the dilemma faced by the CIA and the mole hunters of the 1960s. They are at the core of every human relationship. On one level, James Angleton's obsessive quest for the mole was a search for the evil within. The parallel to the human condition is obvious. In a sense, Angleton and his band of mole hunters were exorcists. Ultimately, they had about as much success as others who have attempted to ply that difficult trade. John Denley Walker, who saw it all from the inside but managed to keep a sense of balance, summed up: "The mole hunt," he said, "probably did more to protect the Soviet agent, if there was one, than to unmask him. While everyone was being investigated and accused, the real mole was sitting back laughing." _______________ Notes: 1. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition (Cleveland: William Collins Publishers, 1980), p. 1030. 2. Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuriy Nosenko, CIA," CIRA Newsletter, Vol. XII, No.3 (Fall 1987), published by Central Intelligence Retirees' Association, p. 20. 3. Mark Wyatt, "Yuri Nosenko, KGB," CIRA Newsletter, Vol. XI, No.4 (Winter 1986/1987), p. 11. 4. It is perhaps of passing historical interest to note that Senator McCarthy was condemned by the Senate, 67-22, on December 2, 1954, eighteen days before James J. Angleton became chief of counterintelligence. 5. There was one exception, however. The power of the Counterintelligence Staff to approve clandestine operations -- such as the recruitment of an agent -- in advance was restored by Angleton's immediate successor, George T. Kalaris. Operational approval was one of the functions that had been removed by Colby. 6. "U.S. Counterintelligence and Security Concerns: A Status Report," Report of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Oversight and Evaluation (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, October, 1988), p. 15. 7. Ibid., pp. v, 15. 8. lbid., p. 19. 9. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, August 20, 1988, p. 2345. 10. On June 14,1985, Tolkachev was arrested in Moscow during a meeting with his CIA case officer, Paul M. Stombaugh, Jr ., who was expelled for espionage. On October 22, 1986, TASS, the Soviet news agency, announced that Tolkachev had been tried, convicted, and executed. When I interviewed Edward Lee Howard in Budapest in June 1987, he admitted that Tolkachev "could very well have been one of the assets I would have handled." Asked if he had betrayed Tolkachev, Howard said: "I don't believe I did that." David Wise, The Spy Who Got Away (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 261-62.
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