Question:
Who was the highest-ranking American ever recruited
as a mole by the Russian Intelligence Service?
Answer:
Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whalen. When Whelan
was arrested by the FBI in 1962, he was Intelligence
Adviser to the Army Chief of Staff-- one of the highest
intelligence positions in the country. As Intelligence
Adviser, he had "need to know" access to virtually whatever
intelligence was relevant to the Joint Chief of Staff's
planning and allocation of military forces, including
communications and electronic intelligence-gathering.
He had also served since 1957 as deputy chairman of
the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which, among
other tasks, assessed secret nuclear and ballistic intelligence
received from scientists. During most of that period,
he held a third surreptitious position as a paid mole
for the Russian Intelligence Service. He had been compromised
and recruited in the mid 1950s for the Russian Intelligence
Service by Colonel Sergei Edemski in Washington. At
that time, he worked for the Foreign Liaison Service
at the Pentagon. After being caught, he admitted passing
documents that revealed some of America's most carefully
guarded secrets, including the deployment of US nuclear
weapons and the US retaliation strategy. He was convicted
and, because of his cooperation, was given a relatively
light sentence. He served six years in a federal prison
before being paroled.
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