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Anatoly Golitsyn - Magda Hassan - 08-06-2009

Anatoliy Golitsyn




Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn CBE (Russian: Анатолий Михайлович Голиц9ын;born August 25, 1926 in Piryatin, Ukrainian SSR) is a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about alleged long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. He provided "a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the 'Lines' (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents."[1] He is an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and is now an American citizen.[2]


Defection

Golitsyn worked in the strategic planning department of the KGB in the rank of Major. In 1961 under the name "Anatole Klimov" he was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Finland. He was completely fluent in English, and had great familiarity with contemporary American literature[citation needed]. He defected with his wife and daughter to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via Helsinki on December 15, 1961. He was flown to the United States and interviewed by James Jesus Angleton, CIA counter-intelligence director. In January 1962, the KGB sent instructions to fifty-four residents throughout the world on the actions required to minimize the damage. All meetings with important agents were to be suspended. [1]. In November 1962, KGB head Vladimir Semichastny approved a plan for assassination of Golitsyn and other "particularly dangerous traitors" including Igor Gouzenko, Nikolay Khokhlov, and Bogdan Stashinsky [1]. KGB made significant efforts to discredit Golitsyn by promoting disinformation that he was involved in illegal smuggling operations [1].
Golitsyn provided information about many famous Soviet agents including Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Vassall, double agent Aleksandr Kopatzky who worked in Germany, and others [1]. It was only with the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961 that Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole.
Controversies

Golitsyn was a figure of significant controversy in the Western intelligence community. Military writer John Hackett and CIA counter-intelligence director James Angleton identified Golitsyn as "The most valuable defector ever to reach the West" [1], [2]. However, the official historian for Britain's MI5 Christopher Andrew [3] described him as an "unreliable conspiracy theorist" [4]. Andrew believes that although intelligence data provided by Golitsyn were reliable, some of his global political assessments of the Soviet and KGB strategy are questionable [1]. In particular, he disputed the Golitsyn's claim that the "Sino-Soviet split was a charade to deceive the West"[1].
Accusing Harold Wilson

Golitsyn falsely claimed that Rt Hon. Harold Wilson (then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) was a KGB informer and an agent of influence. This encouraged pre-existing conspiracy theories within the British security services concerning Wilson.[1][5] During his time as President of the Board of Trade in the late 1940s, Wilson had been on trade missions to Russia and cultivated a friendship with Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov. He continued these relationships when Labour went into Opposition, and according to Mitrokhin Archive, his insights into British politics were passed to and highly rated by the KGB. An "agent development file" was opened in the hope to recruit Harold Wilson, and the codename "OLDING" was given to him. However "the development did not come to fruition" according to the KGB file records [1]. Golitsyn also accused the KGB of poisoning Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson's predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, in order for Wilson to take over the party. Gaitskell died after a sudden attack of lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disorder, in 1963. Golitsyn's claims about Wilson were believed in particular by the senior MI5 counterintelligence officer Peter Wright.[6] Although Wilson was repeatedly investigated by MI5 and cleared of this accusation, individuals within the service continued to believe that he was an agent of the KGB, and this belief played a part in the coup plots against him.[7]
Golitsyn and Nosenko

In 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer working out of Geneva, Switzerland, insisted that he needed to defect to the USA, as his role as a double-agent had been discovered, prompting his recall to Moscow [8] Nosenko was allowed to defect, although his credibility was immediately in question because the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order. Nosenko made two extremely controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a double-agent but a KGB plant; and that he had information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by way of the KGB's history with Lee Harvey Oswald in the time Oswald lived in the Soviet Union.
Regarding the first claim, Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant defectors in an effort to discredit him. Regarding the second claim, Nosenko told his debriefers that he had been personally responsible for handling Oswald's case and that the KGB had judged Oswald unfit for their services due to mental instability and had not even attempted to debrief Oswald about his work on the U-2 spy planes during his service in the United States Marine Corps. Nosenko repeatedly failed lie detector tests. Judging the claim of not interrogating Oswald about the U-2 improbable given Oswald's familiarity with the U-2 program and faced with further challenges to Nosenko's credibility (he also falsely claimed to be a lieutenant colonel, a higher rank than he held in fact), Angleton did not object when David Murphy, then head of the Soviet Russia Division, ordered him held in solitary confinement for approximately three-and-a-half years.
James Angleton came to public attention in the United States when the Church Commission (formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), following up on the Warren Commission, probed the CIA for information about the Kennedy assassination. The Nosenko episode does not appear to have shaken Angleton's faith in Golitsyn, although Helms and J. Edgar Hoover took the contrary position. Hoover's objections are said to have been so vehement as to curtail severely counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's service as the FBI's director.
His books

New Lies for Old

In 1984, Golitsyn published the book New Lies For Old[3], wherein he predicted the collapse of the communist bloc orchestrated from above. He warned about a long-term deception strategy designed to lull the West into a false sense of security, and finally economically cripple and diplomatically isolate the United States. Among other things, Golitsyn stated:
  • "The 'liberalization' [in the Soviet Union] would be spectacular and impressive. Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the communist party's role; its monopoly would be apparently curtailed."
  • "If [liberalization] should be extended to East Germany, demolition of the Berlin Wall might even be contemplated."
  • "The European Parliament might become an all-European socialist parliament with representation from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 'Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals' would turn out to be a neutral, socialist Europe."
The Perestroika Deception

In 1995 Golitsyn published another book The Perestroika Deception where he claimed:
  • "The [Soviet] strategists are concealing the secret coordination that exists and will continue between Moscow and the 'nationalist' leaders of [the] 'independent' republics."
  • "The power of the KGB remains as great as ever... Talk of cosmetic changes in the KGB and its supervision is deliberately publicized to support the myth of 'democratization' of the Soviet political system."
  • "Scratch these new, instant Soviet 'democrats,' 'anti-Communists,' and 'nationalists' who have sprouted out of nowhere, and underneath will be found secret Party members or KGB agents."
Reactions

Author Mark Riebling stated that of 194 predictions made in New Lies For Old, 139 had been fulfilled by 1993, 9 seemed 'clearly wrong', and the other 46 were 'not soon falsifiable'.[4].
According to Golitsyn, the programs of perestroika and glasnost have been planned by the Soviet and KGB leadership to improve the international standing of the Soviet Union and deceive the West. This information was supported by publications claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev justified his new policies as a necessary step to "hug Europe to death" and "evict the United States from Europe." [9] Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky also supported this information:
"In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are even now, for 30 years. These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our "common European home." (interview by The Brussels Journal, February 23, 2006).
On June 8, 1995, the British Conservative Member of Parliament Christopher Gill quoted The Perestroika Deception during a House of Commons debate, saying "It stretches credulity to its absolute bounds to think that suddenly, overnight, all those who were Communists will suddenly adopt a new philosophy and belief, with the result that everything will be different. I use this opportunity to warn the House and the country that that is not the truth," and "Every time the House approves one of these collective agreements, not least treaties agreed by the collective of the European Union, it contributes to the furtherance of the Russian strategy." [10]
According to Russian political scientist Yevgenia Albats, Golitsyn's book New Lies for Old claimed that "as early as 1959, the KGB was working up a perestroika-type plot to manipulate foreign public opinion on a global scale. The plan was in a way inspired by the teachings of the sixth-century B.C. Chinese theoretician and military commander Sun Tsu, who said, I will force the enemy to take our strength for weakness, and our weakness for strength, and thus will turn his strength into weakness" Albats argued that the KGB was the major beneficiary of political changes in Russia, and perhaps indeed directed Gorbachev. According to her, "one thing is certain: perestroika opened the way for the KGB to advance toward the very heart of power [in Russia]" [11].
Golitsyn's publications are vigorously supported by American political writers Jeffrey Nyquist[12] and Joel Skousen,[13] as well as by the John Birch Society.[14]
Miscellaneous

Golitsyn's views are shared by leading Czech dissident and politician Petr Cibulka, who has alleged that the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was staged by the communist StB secret police.
The 1996 American film Mission: Impossible featured a fictionalized character based on Anatoliy Golitsyn named Alexander Golitsyn, played by actor Marcel Iures.
The 1992 PC adventure game KGB (Titled Conspiracy in The United States) by Cryo Games is based around the investigation into the murder of a man named Golitsin.
Angleton and Golitsyn reportedly sought the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr. (himself once a CIA man) in writing New Lies for Old. Buckley refused but later went on to write a novel about Angleton, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.[15]
References


  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7.
  2. ^ Arnold Beichman, New lies for old: the communist strategy of deception and disinformation. - book reviews, National Review, September 7, 1984
  3. ^ War and Intelligence Conference
  4. ^ Christopher Andrew, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games By Tennent H Bagley Reviewed by Christopher Andrew, The Sunday Times, June 24, 2007
  5. ^ Dorril, Stephen and Ramsay, Robin (1992). Smear! - Wilson and the Secret State. Grafton
  6. ^ Wright, Peter (1987). Spycatcher. New York and London: Viking Penguin Inc.
  7. ^ Leigh, David (1988). The Wilson Plot. Heinemann
  8. ^ Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. ISBN 0-671-66273-2.
  9. ^ Talk of Gorbachev at the meeting of the Soviet Politburo on March 26, 1987. New edition of documents of Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Interview with Pavel Stoilov. (Russian) - by Radio Free Europe
  10. ^ Christopher Gill MP, House of Commons Hansard Debates for 8 Jun 1995, Column 370
  11. ^ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia--Past, Present, and Future. 1994. ISBN 0-374-52738-5, see chapter Who was behind perestroika?
  12. ^ Nyquist, J.R. Origins of the Fourth World War: [and the Coming Wars of Mass Destruction]. Eureka, CA: Broadway Printing, 1998. ISBN 0-96668-770-1
  13. ^ Joel Skousen. Analysis of Strategic Threats In the Current Decade (2000-2010), JoelSkousen.com, May 2004
  14. ^ William F. Jasper. Putin’s Russia, The New American, January 22, 2007
  15. ^ Buckley, William F., Jr. Spytime: the Undoing of James Jesus Angleton: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, 2000. ISBN 0-15-100513-3.
Books

  • Anatoliy Golitsyn. New Lies for Old G. S. G. & Associates, Incorporated, 1990, ISBN 0-945-00113-4
  • Anatoliy Golitsyn. The Perestroika Deception : Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency Edward Harle Ltd; 2nd Ed edition (1998) ISBN 1-899-79803-X
External links



Anatoly Golitsyn - Magda Hassan - 08-06-2009

In the midst of a blinding snow storm, a short stocky man, bundled in a heavy overcoat, arrived at the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. He matter-of-factly identified himself as a consul at the Soviet Embassy, and then asked to see Frank Friberg. The request, coming from a Soviet stranger, immediately set off alarm bells; Friberg was the CIA station chief.
The procedures for dealing with a potential defector were immediately put in effect. After escorting the Russian visitor to an isolated room, the marine guard alerted the desk officer at the embassy, who relayed the Mayday message to the CIA station. Within minutes, Friberg rushed down to meet this Soviet "walk in". The stranger came right to the point. He identified himself as Anatoli Golitsyn, a major in the KGB. To leave no doubt in the mind of his CIA counterpart, he handed over a sheath of secret documents from the files of the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki. He said he would make further information available about the Soviet espionage apparatus if the CIA immediately arrange his safe passage to the United States, along with that of his wife and daughter. It was an extraordinary offer. Friberg asked the Russian if he would consider returning to the Soviet Embassy and acting as an agent in place for the CIA. Golitsyn was adamant. He replied he would not survive if he returned. The KGB had means of identifying CIA agents in place-- and he could disclose them after he was safely in America. Friberg realized that he was suggesting that there was a serious leak in the CIA. Unable to persuade him to work as a mole, he asked how much time he had to organize his defection. Golitsyn replied that he had to be out by Christmas day. After that, his wife and daughter would be expected back in Moscow, and Soviet security personnel, who were being rotated over the holiday, would be back on active duty. This gave Friberg a maximum of forty-eight hours. In Washington, the frantic search through the CIA's central registry of records produced only a single "trace" on Golitsyn. Peter Derebian, a KGB officer who had been stationed in Vienna before defecting in 1954, had mentioned him to his CIA debriefers as a KGB officer who might be potentially disloyal to the Soviet Union. Before this lead could be followed up in Vienna, Golitsyn had been recalled to Moscow. The CIA had been given now a second chance. The Soviet Russia division authorized his immediate evacuation from Helsinki. No matter what diplomatic complications it would cause, it wanted to get this KGB officer in the palm of its hand, and use him to identify, and possible approach, other potential defectors in the Soviet diplomatic Corp. On Christmas day, a US air force courier plane landed at Helsinki's snow-covered airport. Servicing military attaches stationed abroad, such flights are routinely exempted from foreign customs and immigration inspection. This was, however, not a routine training mission. While the plane waited on the runway, a car pulled up beside it. Its passengers, who carried no luggage, quickly boarded the plane. Among them were Golitsyn, his wife and daughter. Minutes later, the plane was airborne again, en route to West Germany. The first round of interrogations took place at the US Army defector center outside of Frankfurt. Golitsyn was required to write out by hand his entire career in the KGB from the day he joined in 1948 to the day he defected-- listing all the positions he held, promotions he received and KGB officers with whom he came in contact. Unlike most previous defectors, who had field agents with limited knowledge about the central apparatus of the KGB, Golitsyn claimed to have been assigned to the KGB's headquarters in Moscow and also to its "think tank", the KGB institute, where intelligence operations were related to overall Soviet strategy. To determine if his story was true, Golitsyn was next strapped into a stress-analyzing machine, used by the CIA as a lie-detector , and relentlessly quizzed about various details of his story -- a process known in the CIA as "fluttering". After each session, counterintelligence experts also compared each bit of information he provided with what was already known. By the end of the first week, the CIA was fully persuaded that he was a bona fide defector who had indeed held the positions in the KGB he claimed. Arrangements were then made to bring him and with his family to the United States. In February 1962, in an isolated and heavy-guarded CIA compound overlooking the Choptank River in Talbot County, Maryland, he began an extensive debriefing. To the amazement of his debriefers, he not only revealed knowledge of a wide range of secret NATO documents -- but he identified them by their code numbers. He explained that for convenience the KGB used the NATO numbering system to request specific documents, which would than arrive from its source in France in 72 hours. President John F. Kennedy, apprized of the Golitsyn revelations, then dispatched a personal courier to Paris, with an "eyes only" letter for President Charles De Gaulle. In it, he warned that the KGB had penetrated French intelligence. A few weeks later, six French intelligence officers, handpicked by De Gaulle, arrived in Washington. They carried with them specially-devised ciphers that by passed the normal channels of French intelligence, and kept their very presence in the United States a secret from even their own embassy. Their tape-recorded interrogation of Golitsyn, who they code-named Martel, took 14 days, and left them in a paralyzing quandary. The French intelligence secrets Golitsyn had provided came from the highest echelon of the French government. When the list of those having access to them was narrowed down, suspicion was focused on both the head of French counterintelligence and De Gaulle's personal intelligence advisor. Golitsyn then dropped another bombshell. He told of a KGB plan he had help draft in Moscow to use the French intelligence service to spy on missile sites in the American Midwest. French intelligence officers would be ordered by Paris to use their contacts to gather data -- for the benefit of Moscow. De Vosjoli initially was openly incredulous of this allegation. It not only implied that the KGB controlled French intelligence, but that it would blatantly use its officers to spy on the United States. His first reaction was that Golitsyn was a "plant", dispatched by the KGB for the express purpose of disrupting US-French relations. Several months later, however, he had to abandon this theory. He received an order from Paris to begin organizing French spy networks in the United States. The mission would be to ferret out secret data about American missile bases. De Vosjoli could not believe his eyes: it was the very order that Golitsyn claimed he had seen a year earlier in Moscow. Since he knew that France itself had no need for such information about US bases, he queried Paris for further clarification. The answer instructed him to implement the plan without further delay-- or questions. At this point, he realized that Golitsyn's assertion , as implausible as it first seemed, was correct. The KGB had penetrated French intelligence. He refused the order. In Paris, a top official, who was identified through Golitsyn's leads as a member of a spy ring, code-named Sapphire, was thrown from a window-- and died. When well-connected friends in Paris then informed de Vosjoli that this was done on orders of French intelligence to protect others in the ring. He then attempted going out of his normal reporting channels to General De Gaulle himself, but to no avail. By November 1963, he realized his own life was in jeopardy and he sought the protection of the CIA. Golitsyn, the source who had caused all this turmoil, was becoming throughout this period increasingly more difficult to debrief. He was an angry, short-tempered man with no patience for matters that he considered trivial. He prided himself on being a historian of Soviet foreign policy. His interrogators, on the other hand, needed to test every petty detail in his story. This led to constant friction. The Soviet Bloc Division seemed mainly concerned in having Golitsyn identify the KGB officers working under cover as diplomats at each embassy. He was tediously shown over one thousand snapshots of Soviet diplomats, usually surreptitiously taken, and asked if he recognized them. Then Golitsyn refused to look at any more photographs, shouting at his debriefers, "What good is knowing all the names in the KGB. .. if you don't understand what they do?". He insisted that they should be debriefing him on strategy-- not personnel. The interrogators let him finish his tirade, then, returned to the snapshots. Their job was to identify officers of the KGB, not delineate its geopolitical strategies. Then, when these photo sessions were over, Golitsyn was asked whether he would be willing to go abroad and personally contact former KGB acquaintances on behalf of the CIA. He refused, explaining "The KGB knows all your operations in advance". To prove his point, he ticked off a number of examples of CIA attempts to recruit Soviet diplomats in Switzerland and Austria which the KGB had had advanced warnings. The debriefers showed little interested in this assertion; instead they implied his debriefings were coming to an end. Golitsyn then demanded to see the President of the United States. When informed that such an audience was impossible, he became even less cooperative, and asked permission to go to England.. By the end of his first year, the CIA had concluded that they had "squeezed" Golitsyn of all the information he knew. In early 1963, it arranged to send him to England to be "resettled" under a new identity. Stephan De Mowbray handled his case there Before his defection, Golitsyn had worked at KGB headquarters in the northern European espionage division, which included England. He had prepared his defection by memorizing English as well as French documents. Many of these came directly from the files of MI-5, the British equivalent of the FBI. For example, he quoted verbatim from a secret report on the breaking of a Soviet code by British intelligence. As it turned out, one of his interrogators had written the report. When he rechecked the "bigot list"-- which identifies all those with access to the report, he found that it had been circulated is to only the top executives officers of MI5. How then could have Golitsyn seen it in Moscow? The only answer was that one of these executives had provided the KGB with the report. The search for that tainted executive, which would continue for over a decade, began with the setting up of a secret unit, called innocuously "The Fluency Committee". The members included De Mowbray and six other counterintelligence officers drawn from both MI-6 and MI-5. Their sole job was determining who was the mole. As these investigators evaluated the clues from Golitsyn and other sources, they gradually eliminated most of the names on the Bigot list. There remained two prime suspects-- Sir Roger Hollis, the Director of MI-5, and his deputy,Graham Mitchell. Both were put under surveillance.

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.

The "outer" KGB was made up of personnel who, out of necessity, had to be in contact with foreigners, and were therefore vulnerable to being compromised. It included KGB recruiters and spotters posted to embassies and missions ,military attaches, disinformation and propaganda agents and illegal case officers who worked abroad. Since they had to be in touch with Westerners, if only to attempt to recruit them as spies, they were assumed to be "doomed spies". A certain percentage would, by the law of probability would be caught. These "doomed spies" were the equivalent of pilots sent on raids over enemy territory. They were not only restricted from knowing any state secrets (other than what was necessary for their mission), but they were purposefully briefed on what it was useful for the enemy to learn if they were captured.
The "inner" KGB was the real repository of secrets. It was limited to a small number of trusted officers, under the direct supervision of the Politburo, who planned, orchestrated, controlled and analyzed the operations. ( According to Golitsyn, all potential security risks, which included most of the officers of Jewish descent, were transferred into the outer service in preparation for the reorganization). A "China wall" existed between these two levels. No personnel from the outer service would ever be transferred to the inner service, or vice versa. Nor would any personnel in the outer service ever be exposed to strategic secrets other than what had been prepared for them to divulge as disinformation. Angleton realized the implications of this reorganization. If Golitsyn was correct, it meant that the CIA knew virtually nothing about its adversary's capacity for orchestrated deception. To be sure, it had received fragmentary clues from other sources that Soviet intelligence was undergoing shifts in its personnel in 1959 but it had not been able fit these developments into any meaningful pattern. Seen through the new perspective provided by Golitsyn, the KGB turned out to be a different and much more dangerous instrument of Soviet policy. Its principle objective was to provide information to the CIA that would cause the United States to make the wrong decisions. Such information would appear to be credible because it would be fashioned to dovetail that U.S. intelligence received from other sources. It meant, moreover, that very targets the CIA was going after as recruits-- diplomats, military attaches, journalists, dissidents and intelligence officers-- were the carriers of this disinformation. They were all in the outer KGB. Even if they were persuaded to work in place as moles for the CIA, their information would be of dubious value. All they would have access to, aside from trivial details about their own espionage apparatus, was disinformation. Nor would any microphones the CIA planted in Soviet embassies be of any use. The chatter they would eavesdrop on would come from those excluded from the real strategic secrets of the inner KGB. They would thus only reinforce the disinformation. The Golitsyn thesis went further than invalidating the present tactics of the CIA and FBI. It impeached many of their past successes-- at least since the reorganization in 1959. This reassessment would be particularly damaging to double-agents and defectors who claimed to have access to strategic secrets. If they could not have had such access, as Golitsyn asserted, they had to be redefined as either frauds or dupes. In this new light, heroes became villains,and victories became defeats. It was the equivalent for the CIA of stepping through a looking glass. When Angleton presented the Golitsyn thesis to CIA and executives on the operational side, it aroused fierce resistance. Neither CIA nor FBI recruiters were willing to accept the idea that they were going after the wrong Soviet personnel. This would make them the accomplices, albeit unwitting, of Soviet deception-planners. They also were not receptive to a concept of the CIA that discredited valued sources, such as Oleg Penkovskiy, on whom many of them had built their careers. There was also the practical problem that the conclusions drawn from these sources had been forwarded over the years to the National Security Council and the President. The inference that this CIA product was based on KGB disinformation was not therefore not attractive to most of the executives of the CIA. At the FBI, the Golitsyn thesis was rejected out of hand by J. Edgar Hoover. He had a very powerful motive since FBI agents had recruited a number of Soviet diplomats at the U.N., such as Fedora and Tophat, as sources. They not only claimed that they had access to secrets from the decision-making level of the Politburo, but they furnished them on demand to the FBI. Hoover had personally passed some of this material directly to the President. He was not about to accept an interpretation that would render this data KGB disinformation. In 1967, he ended the issue, at least within the FBI, by branding Golitsyn a Soviet-controlled "provocateur and penetration agent" . He advanced the theory that the KGB had staged his defection to discredit the FBI. He then refused any further cooperation with the CIA aimed at substantiating Golitsyn's story. For example, he pointedly withdrew a FBI surveillance team which had been watching a suspect round-the clock on behalf of the CIA. And, as the tensions over this case increased, Hoover broke off all liaison relations with the CIA. (In 1978, after Hoover's death, the FBI acknowledged that Fedora and Tophat were KGB-controlled disinformation agents). By 1968, American intelligence was , as Helms described the situation, "a house divided against itself". Angleton's staff, and others executives who accepted Golitsyn's thesis, saw the need to take precautions against a reorganized KGB. Instead of targeting Soviet bloc embassy personnel, as it had done before, they wanted to find new ways of penetrating the heart of Soviet intelligence. They also had to make sure that their decisions were not being fed back to the KGB-- even if this meant disturbing careers paths in the CIA. Those involved in the gathering of intelligence saw the situation in very different terms. The attempt to validate the thesis of a Soviet defector had prevented the CIA's Soviet Russia Division from going after promising Soviet recruits. It had also led to defectors being held offshore to avoid another "Nosenko" incident. And it kept reports officers, whose job it was to extract information from agents' reports, from extracting valuable information from sources who had already been recruited. It had, from their point of view, all but paralyzed normal intelligence operations. The frustration of these officers was intensified by the secrecy surrounding the dispute. Few of them were briefed on the Golitsyn thesis. All they knew was that their work was being called into question by Angleton and his staff. As the years dragged on, the mysterious investigation appeared to them as nothing more than "sick think". What neither side in the CIA could see was the other's logic. It was like the celebrated experiment in Gestalt psychology in which one can either see two faces or a wine cup in a picture , but not both. Similarly, the CIA could not deal two mutually exclusive concepts of its enemy. What its operational officers and analysts looked at as valid information, furnished by Soviet sources who risked their lives to cooperate, counterintelligence officers saw as disinformation, provided by KGB dispatched and controlled sources. Finally, Helms decided that Gordian knot had to be cut. He suggested that the test of Golitsyn's thesis should be its utility. Could it be used to identify the deceptions of the Kremlin? If not, what good was it to the CIA? Helms asked, what had 7 years of debriefing Golitsyn produced in practical terms: " an elephant or a mouse?." Golitsyn had never claimed to have participated in any of the actual deceptions planning. He had only seen the mechanism for executing them being put in place. When pressed by Angleton's staff as to what these deceptions might be, Golitsyn could only extrapolate from clues a decade old. They were, at best, unproven theories. For example, he speculated that many of the apparent divisions in the eastern bloc, including the split between China and the Soviet Union, had been staged to throw the West off balance. When he presented them in 1968 to the special committee Helms had assembled, he was unable to convince its members, especially since they directly contradicted the CIA's picture of world events. When skeptic pressed him about his evidence, he became extremely defensive, and demanded their evidence for disputing his theories. The meeting ended acrimoniously, with Golitsyn shouting back at the CIA experts as they subjected him to a cross-fire of objections. Helms concluded that whatever the value of the "vintage" information that he supplied, Golitsyn's speculations about current KGB operations, to which he had no direct access, was worthless to the CIA. He had failed the test. Angleton, who had survived in the CIA bureaucracy for twenty years, understood that this meant that ~Golitsyn was to be "put on the shelf". A patient man, he was willing to wait to see if future evidence developed. In the meantime, he encouraged Golitsyn to set down all the details of the KGB reorganization in a manuscript. The issue of Soviet deception was not settled until 1973. While Helms was willing to tolerate the doubts of Angleton, the new Director William E. Colby, was not. Colby, the son of a Jesuit missionary, whose main experience in the CIA had been in paramilitary and political activities, rejected out of hand Angleton's complicated view of KGB strategic deception. He saw the job of the CIA as a straight forward one of gathering intelligence for the President. He considered "the KGB as something to be evaded" . It was not to be the "object of the CIA's operations". Whereas Angleton had encouraged a policy of suspecting "walk in" defectors and double-agents, he decided to encourage their recruitment. He explained: "We spent an inordinate amount of time worried about false defectors and false agents. I'm perfectly willing to accept if you try to go out and get ten agents you may get one or two that will be bad. You should be able to cross check your information so that you are not led very far down the garden path... at least you'll have eight good agents." This conceptual change was reflected in a top secret order that went out to all CIA stations in 1973. Rather than rejecting REDTOPS who made contact, until their bona fides could be established, it advised: " Analysis of REDTOP walk-ins in recent years clearly indicates that REDTOP services have not been seriously using sophisticated and serious walk-ins as a provocation technique. However, fear of provocations has been more responsible for bad handling than any other cause. We have concluded that we do ourselves a disservice if we shy away from promising cases because of fear of provocation... We are confident that we are confident of determining whether or not a producing agent is supplying bona fide information." Angleton had lost the battle. It was only a question of time before Colby formally got rid of him.
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