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When the investigation
then rules out Mitchell, Sir Roger, the head of MI-5, remained
the sole candidate. Although the Fluency Committee had no
direct evidence that Sir Roger ever was in contact with
Soviet intelligence, De Mowbray went personally to the seat
of the British government at 10 Downing Street, identified
himself, and asked to see the Prime Minister. To his surprise,
he received an immediate appointment. He came right to the
point and told him that there was reason to believe Sir
Roger was a traitor. This initiative was not "popular" with
his superiors. Two years later, De Mowbray retired.
Golitsyn's stay in England turned
out to be unexpectedly brief. During his interrogation about
the KGB agents in British intelligence, he alluded to a similar
situation in the CIA.
This possibility was of great concern
to MI-5. It might explain the origin of some of its own untraced
leaks. Arthur Martin, one of the most skilled interrogators
in MI-5, quickly zeroed in on the CIA treatment of this charge.
Had his leads been followed?
Golitsyn insisted that they had not.
Instead, the interrogators from the Soviet Russia Division
persisted in asking the wrong questions. They wanted to know
the names of case officer from the KGB, not the purpose behind
their activities. They confused tactics, with strategy.
He explained that the tactic was making
contact with the "main enemy", the CIA, in order to compromise
and recruit agents. The strategy was not merely to neutralize
the CIA but to turn it into an instrument to serve Soviet
objectives.
Martin listened attentively. He already
knew, from his experience with recruits the KGB had made in
British intelligence, of the vulnerability of intelligence
officers. He had also come to believe that the CIA had placed
too much faith in security procedures, such as lie detector
tests. He asked Golitsyn if he had any ideas about why his
CIA interrogators had downplayed, if not entirely avoided
this issue.
Golitsyn said that he knew the KGB
had been successful in recruiting at least one, and possibly
more, CIA officers in the Soviet Russia Division. He assumed
from the way he was treated that the mole (or moles) was still
influential in the Division.
It was clear to both Martin and De
Mowbray that the CIA had badly mishandled Golitsyn's interrogation.
While they did not the entirely buy his theory of an active
mole in the Soviet Russia Division, they realized that it
might have inhibited him from openly discussing this issue
with the CIA. In any case, his allegation could not be lightly
dismissed. If there was a penetration of this sensitive part
of the CIA, it would affect all the allied intelligence services.
Martin decided to go directly to his friend, James Angleton.
Angleton had himself come to a similar
conclusion about Golitsyn's original debriefing. Whatever
was the reason, the Soviet Bloc Division had not got the full
story out of Golitsyn. He thus went to Helms with an unprecedented
request. He asked that responsibility for this defector be
re-assigned to his counterintelligence staff.
Helms found Angleton's case persuasive.
He not only made the re-assignment but, as he explained to
me, he gave Angleton "carte blanche" authority to use whatever
resources were needed. In doing so, although he didn't realize
it at the time, he set in motion the longest and most incredible
debriefing in the history of the CIA.
In July 1963, through a leak arranged
by MI-5, a story appeared in the Daily Telegraph revealing
that Golitsyn (under the purposely misspelled name "Dolitson"
was in England. It had the calculated effect of persuading
Golitsyn that his security could not be assured in England.
Three weeks later, Golitsyn arrived back in the United States.
Under Angleton's tutelage, there would be no more exhaustive
grillings of him or repetitive showings of snapshots of Soviet
diplomats. Angleton told him that his interest was not the
KGB's staffing, or "order of battle", as it is called; but
the "logic of Soviet penetration".
As Angleton saw it, it was not a debriefing,
but an "elicitation". Golitsyn became an intellectual partner
in the process where their dinners would turn into discussion
of Soviet politics that would continue into the early hours
of the morning. Golitsyn was allowed to sift through sanitized
copies of Angleton's "serials", searching for connections
between these clues.
To build his confidence, Angleton
arranged for Golitsyn to brief Attorney-General Robert F.
Kennedy on the KGB threat, and took him on trips to Europe
and Israel to speak to allied intelligence executives. Golitsyn,
encouraged by this attention, proposed organizing a new counterintelligence
service which would be independent of the CIA. Angleton took
it under consideration, although it had no chance of coming
to fruition, to further drew out his ideas about the KGB.
While this elicitation was proceeding,
Angleton moved to plug the putative leak in the Soviet Russia
Division. Golitsyn had insisted that it had to come from more
than a single agent, and used the analogy of a growing "cancer"
that the patient refused to recognize -- or cut out. With
the assistance of the CIA's Office of Security, which has
responsibility for ferreting out moles, he arranged a series
of "marked cards" for the Soviet Russia Division. These were
selected bits of information about planned CIA operations
passed out, one at a time, to different units of the Division
to see which, if any, leak to the enemy. The "marked card"
in the initial test revealed that an effort would be made
to recruit a particular Soviet diplomat in Canada. The Office
of Security agents, watching the diplomat from a discreet
distance, then observed the KGB putting its own survelliance
on him on the day of the planned contact, realized that the
"marked card" had gotten to the KGB. This test confirmed Golitsyn's
suspicion that the mole was still active.
Through a process of elimination,
subsequent marked cards narrowed down the leak to the unit
directly involved with recruiting REDTOPS. Since more than
one individual was exposed to this marked information, and
there was no way of knowing if there was more than one leak
in that unit, the investigation could not weed out the mole
(or moles) from the roster of suspects. Instead, beginning
in 1966, the entire unit was cut off from sensitive cases
until its personnel could be reshuffled. Murphy, Bagley and
a dozen other officers were re-posted to Europe, Africa and
Asia. This "prophylactic", as Angleton called it accounted
for what appeared to the uninitiate be a "purge" over the
Nosenko case. In any case, after the transfers, additional
"marked cards" indicated that the penetration had been remedied.
Angleton's interest, however, went
well beyond the security problem arising from the recruitment
of western case officers by the KGB. He wanted to know why
the KGB had focussed its attention on particular units of
the CIA, such as the operational side of the Soviet Russia
Division. The real issue to Angleton was what purposes these
penetrations advanced.
Golitsyn explained that they were
a necessary part of the deception machinery that had been
out in place in 1959. Their job was to report back on how
the CIA was evaluating material it was receiving from other
KGB agents. These moles attempted to work their way into positions
of access in the Soviet Russia Division or other parts of
American intelligence that intercepted soviet data. With them
in place, disinformation became a game of "show and tell"
for the KGB. The dispatched defectors and other provocateurs,
who could be anyone from a Soviet diplomat to a touring scientist,
" showed" the CIA a Soviet secret, and then its moles told
the KGB how the CIA had interpreted it. It was all coordinated
from Moscow like an orchestra. This system was designed by
the KGB, according to Golitsyn, to gradually convert the CIA
into its own mechanism for manipulating the American government.
Angleton wanted to know more about
the Soviet apparatus foe deception. Why had the KGB moved
from being a espionage to deception? Why had it been re-organized?
Golitsyn suggested that it all began
with a Politburo assessment in the mid 1950s that the Soviet
Union would be unlikely to prevail in a nuclear war. It followed
that if it was to win against the West, it would be by fraud
rather than force. For this singular purpose, Soviet intelligence
would have to undertake the tricky job of manipulating the
information western leaders received.
This sort of manipulation was not
a new role for Soviet intelligence. After all,,under the leadership
of Felix Dzerzhinskii in the 1920s, it had ran sustained disinformation
campaigns, such as The Trust, against the West. Aleksandr
Shelepin, a top executive of the Communist Party, was put
in charge of the KGB in 1959, and given a mandate to return
it to a mission of strategic deception.
Under Shelepin, during this reorganization,
Golitsyn worked on an analysis intended to demonstrate how
convention spying could be subordinated to deception goals,
without potentially compromising the secrecy of the latter.
The intrinsic problem was that KGB officers had to be in contact
with western intelligence officers either to recruit them
or to pass them disinformation, and, this presented the opportunity
to defect or otherwise be compromised.
In fact, scores of Soviet intelligence
officers had either defected or offered information to the
CIA since the end of the war. While some of these sources
could be assumed to be dispatched defectors from the KGB,
a large number of the others turned out to be legitimate.
How could the KGB sustain deceptions-- if it was probable
that some of its officers would defect or otherwise betray
its secret.
Golitsyn explained that the KGB re-organization
in 1958-9 was designed to avoid this vulnerability. It effectively
separated the KGB into two distinct entities. An outer and
inner KGB.
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