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Golitsin further
described a Plan that French intelligence had devised to
spy on American nuclear-missile sites. The information that
French spies collected in the United States in this operation
would. according to Golitsin, be channeled to the KGB through
its moles in French intelligence. It turned out that top
French officers in Paris had ordered the espionage but De
Vosjoli had never been informed about it. When De Vosjoli
inquired about it after learning about it from Golitsin,
he received orders from his superior's in Paris to now organize
the spy networks in the United States that Golitsin had
outlined. As far as de Vosjoli was concerned, this order
demonstrated that French intelligence was being controlled
by KGB moles and used to collect information for the Soviet
Union, not France. He Protested the scheme, pointing out
that France had no interest in spying on American missile
sites' When his orders were not changed, he resigned from
French intelligence and, after being informed that he would
be assassinated if he returned to France, he went into hiding
in the United States.
A large number of documents that Goleniewski
had left for the CIA in the tree trunk in Warsaw contained
information stolen from the NATO command. There was, for example,
a top-secret June 1960, report on .intelligence objectives
elaborated by the commanding staff of NATO. Goleniewski claimed
that some of these documents had come from a French source.
married to a Communist, Who had once been associated with
the French war college.
In August 1963, French intelligence
photographed a NATO official passing an attache case full
of NATO documents to a Soviet Embassy official. He was Georges
Paques, a former director of studies at the war college who
had been an aide to nine French ministers. During his interrogation,
he confessed that he had been spying for the Soviet union
for some 20 years.
Then, in 1968, Hermann Ludke, a rear
admiral in the west German Navy and the deputy chief of logistics
for the NATO command, was identified by West German security
police as a KGB_ SPY. Two weeks after his interrogation began,
Admiral Ludke was found dead; he had been shot with a rifle.
German officials declared his death an apparent suicide. The
same day that Ludke was killed, Gen- Holt Wendland, the deputy
director of west German intelligence, was found shot to death
in his headquarters, another alleged suicide. Goleniewski
claimed that he had pointed to Wendland as a key Soviet mole
in West German intelligence under the code name "Organizer"
as early as 1961- General Wendland had been the prime target
of a West German security investigation. and had undergone
interrogation prior to his death, He now was presumed to have
been a Soviet mole for some 22 Years, according to a CIA officer
who had been privy to the investigation. Within two weeks,
four other German officials, who were reported to be suspects
in the Ludke-Wendland cases, died violently, all alleged suicides.
Behind a ring of three barbed-wire
electrified fences at Fort Meade, Md., is the headquarters
of America's most secretive intelligence service the National
Security Agency (NSA.). Even though it has more employees
and a larger budget than any other American intelligence including
the CIA. Even though its very existence had been classified
a secret in the mid 1950s, such secrecy is considered necessary
because it is responsible for protecting the security of the
channels through which the leaders Of the United States Government,
military forces and intelligence services communicate with
one another. In most cases, the NSA designs the ciphers, encoding
machines and protected lines through which the nation's most
closely guarded secrets are transmitted . Any breach of this
system can have disastrous consequences.
Aside from protecting the nation's
secret communications, the NSA intercepts and deciphers the
secrets of foreign governments. Such-signal intelligence includes
intercepts of telephone and radio signals, telemetry from
missiles and electrical impulses from radar and sonar. Vast
quantities of information about the testing, capabilities
and deployment of Soviet weaponry are derived from the NSA's
electronic intelligence, or ELINT. Information about Soviet
intentions comes from its code and cipher operations, which
is known as Communications intelligence, or COMINT.
Despite its aura of secrecy, NSA has
had multiple penetrations by Soviet intelligence. On July
22, 1963, Victor Norris Hamilton, a Syrian-born research analyst
at NSA headquarters, turned up in Moscow and announced that
he was defecting. He had been presumably an agent of the KGB
In Moscow, he joined two other former NSA employees, Bernon
F- Mitchell and William H Martin, who had defected 10 the
Soviet Union three years earlier. While working as KGB moles
at NSA head quarters, they had provided the Soviet Union with
information about the technical capabilities and locations
Of the super secret sensors that the NSA had employed against
it, and also with data about the NSA's codes and breaking
techniques.
One day after Hamilton defected from
the NSA, Jack E. Dunlap, an employee of the NSA since 1958,
was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning - an apparent
suicide. One month later, when Dunlap s wife found sealed
packets of Government documents in the attic of their house,
it was reported that he was a Soviet agent.
Col. Thomas Fox, the chief Of counterintelligence
of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the investigation,
told me that Dunlap, a native of Bogalusa, La. had been recruited
by the KGB. while employed at the NSA communications-interception
base at Sinop, Turkey. He had met there Major General Garrison
Coverdale the chief of staff of the NSA. General Coverdale
then selected Dunlap to be his personal driver at NSA. headquarters
at Fort Meade. General Coverdale further arranged for Dunlap
to receive top-secret clearance and a position in the NSA.'s
traffic-analysis division. Since the general's car had "no
inspection" status, Dunlap could drive off the base with documents
hidden in the car and then return without anyone knowing that
the material had been removed from the base.
Moreover, Dunlap had other high-level
connections in the NSA The Carroll Report, a secret Defense
Department document (part of which I received through a Freedom
of Information Act request) named after Gen. Joseph F. Carroll,
who was asked to investigate the case, noted that Dunlap had
helped a colonel at the NSA. base pilfer some "expendable
items of Government property" from his office. From this incident,
the report deduced, "Dunlap had already had experience in
circumventing NSA. procedures under relatively high level
tutelage." The implication was that he had expanded his access
to secret files by offering to help officers appropriate furniture
and other articles from their offices.
When General Coverdale left Fort Meade
in August 1959, Dunlap was reassigned as a driver to the new
NSA. chief of staff, General Watlington. By continuing his
chauffeuring, Dunlap retained access to the "no inspection"
vehicle necessary for smuggling documents on and off the base.
The Carroll Report makes it clear
that Dunlap was interrogated by NSA investigators just before
he died. According to Colonel Fox, the Defense Department
investigating team did not establish any connection between
Dunlap and the three NSA employees who fled to Moscow. Since
four KGB. moles had been uncovered in the NSA., the agency
found it necessary to change its secret codes, encoding machinery,
security procedures and entire modus operandi.
While Dunlap was chauffeuring around
the NSA chief of staff at Fort Meade, the KGB developed another
mole at the pinnacle of American military intelligence Lieut.
Col. William Henry Whalen. Colonel Whalen who was the intelligence
advisor to the Army Chief of Staff. Since Colonel Whalen,
as intelligence adviser, could demonstrate a "need to know,"
he had access to virtually all military planning and national
intelligence estimates. In return for money, he regularly
supplied secrets to his Soviet case officer over a three-year
period , even after he had retired from the Army because of
a physical disability. According to his subsequent indictment,
the highly classified data sold to the KGB included "information
pertaining to atomic weaponry, missiles, military plans for
the defense of Europe, estimates of comparative military capabilities,
military intelligence reports and analyses, information concerning
the retaliation plans by the United States Strategic Air Command
and information pertaining to troop movements. " He gave away,
in short, a wide range of national secrets available to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Pleading guilty in 1966 to charges
of conspiring with a Soviet agent to divulge national defense
documents, Colonel Whalen was sentenced to 15 years in prison,
and paroled after six years.)
Through the services of Dunlap and
Whalen, the KGB succeeded, as Angleton put it, in "opening
the window" on virtually all American intelligence-gathering
activities in the Soviet bloc. Just as the CIA was able to
ferret out KGB moles by tracing the documents that Goleniewski
provided from Moscow to their source,, the KGB could presumably
trace the military intelligence reports and analyses that
Whalen provided to whatever traitors existed in the Soviet
intelligence apparatus. During this period, 1958 to 1963,
the KGB did in fact succeed in catching the CIA's two prize
moles in Moscow, Peter Popov and Oleg Penkovsky. Both were
executed.
Even in the light of these past Soviet
successes in penetrating the NSA and Defense Department, there
is considerable resistance in the intelligence community to
confronting the possibility that the KGB has used the same
techniques and resources to establish new and undetected moles
in American intelligence. For one thing, there is little bureaucratic
incentive for searching for moles: If the search is a failure,
it will be viewed as a demoralizing witch hunt; if it is successful,
it will completely undercut trust in the past work of the
intelligence service. Just as the British Secret Service resisted
the idea that it had been infiltrated by KGB moles even after
it bad received the incriminating documents from Goleniewski,
the FBI elected not to pursue evidence of a mole. For example,
William C. Sullivan, Assistant Director of the FBI for Domestic
Intelligence until 1971, claims that J. Edgar Hoover, the
FBI Director, refused to allow him to move against what he
was convinced was a Soviet mole in the FBI's New York office.
In his autobiography, Sullivan describes how he discovered
the leak and, unable to identify the mole, proposed transferring,
one by one, all personnel out of the suspected section. Hoover
replied, "Some smart newspaperman is bound to find out that
we are transferring people out of the New York office," and
flatly rejected the request. The source of the leak had not
been removed from the office, or further identified, when
Sullivan retired. Similarly, the CIA has relied on polygraph
examinations to uncover moles, even though there is no empirical
evidence that they work. In 1978, for example, a 23-year-old
watch officer in the CIA named William Kampiles sold to the
KGB atop-secret manual explaining the technical operations
of the KH-11 satellite system that is used over the Soviet
Union. When the CIA investigated, it discovered that there
were at least 13 other missing KH-11 manuals. Kampiles had
passed all his polygraphs.
The strategy denial is of course
self-fulfilling. So long as a secret service denies it is
possible to penetrate it, it is unlikely to find evidence
of such penetration.
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