Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Golitsin’s leads produced hundreds of suspects but virtually no spies. He “took everyone back to the days in the early twenties when the Soviets first allowed Western enterprise into the country and began recruiting agents,” a senior officer said. “Battalions of people researched back. They came up with identities that fit the facts but never proved anything.” By another officer’s count, Golitsin’s information produced more than a hundred cases of suspected espionage against Americans, nearly as many against the British, tens of cases involving the French, and a dozen or so in Germany, plus assorted leads to Soviet agents in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Greece, and Norway. “This not only tied up all of your proper counterespionage functions, it tied up much of the security services of Allied nations,” the senior officer continued. “It was also very stultifying to the positive, offensive operations of ourselves, the British, etc., because if you got a good case, got some good information, it was immediately written off as ‘It’s got to be a phony.’ People didn’t trust one another. You couldn’t deal with another service because they were ‘penetrated.’ ” The fears aroused by Golitsin and spread by Angleton seemed more devastating than real Soviet agents could ever have been.

  No one was safe from Golitsin. David Murphy, head of the Soviet Bloc Division and a fervent believer in Golitsin, was listed in Angleton’s “serials” as a “probable” Soviet agent. Murphy suffered from the same guilt by association as Kovich. He was of Polish descent, spoke fluent Russian, and was married to a White Russian. He had been with military intelligence at the outbreak of the Korean War and had crossed paths in Seoul with George Blake, who had had an affair with the wife of one of Murphy’s agents. As the CIA chief in Munich, Murphy had directed the handling of SASHA and had even arranged for SASHA’s transfer to Berlin. Later, as chief of the Soviet branch in Berlin, Murphy had met secretly with Popov. Afterward, George Blake claimed to have known all along about “Dave Murphy’s big operation” with Popov.

  Murphy was “accident-prone,” one officer said. In Vienna he had had a beer thrown in his face by a Russian he was trying to recruit, and in Tokyo he had been beaten up by a KGB goon squad. “There was not one single Soviet case which this guy touched which didn’t turn to shit,” a fellow officer said. To some, Murphy’s past performance smacked of deliberately destructive behavior. To others, it seemed unlikely that the KGB would purposely stain the record of its own man.

  Murphy was removed from his job as head of the Soviet Bloc Division and assigned to Paris as station chief. He suspected nothing untoward. The Paris job was a plum. It also conveniently required an interim period of several months while Murphy attended the Foreign Service Institute and studied French. During those months he was cut out of operations entirely and was under intensive investigation. “He wouldn’t have gone [to Paris] if he hadn’t been cleared,” a senior officer said. Investigators “went over Murphy from stem to stern and concluded that he was clean.” Angleton, however, was not convinced. After Murphy arrived in Paris, Angleton took the head of French intelligence aside and warned him that the CIA’s new station chief was a Soviet agent. Such calumny was devastating to Murphy’s effectiveness in Paris, but in the end Angleton would become the principal victim of his own warning.

  Murphy was replaced as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division by Rolf Kingsley, formerly head of the Agency’s Western Europe Division. Kingsley was an outsider with no better solution to the mystery of the mole than anyone else. But something had to be done to remove the paralysis of doubt that had brought operations against the Soviet Union to a standstill. “In order to get on with the darn job, we finally resorted to extreme measures,” a senior member of the Soviet Bloc Division said. Kingsley purged the division of anybody who could conceivably be the mole. “He brought people in who couldn’t have possibly been the penetration because they’d been a thousand miles away at the time,” an officer explained. “In effect, Kingsley said, ‘If a penetration is there, prove it. In the meantime, you can be damn sure he’s not there right now.’ He wanted it clear that the penetration was somewhere else.” With Kovich in Central America and Murphy headed for Paris, Pete Bagley, now the deputy chief of the division, was sent to Brussels, an assignment that he had conveniently requested. Leonard McCoy, a reports officer who had become so upset by the handling of Nosenko that he bypassed the chain of command and barged into Helms’s office to protest, was transferred out of the division. Another officer who had fallen under suspicion for his handling of SASHA was assigned to the CIA training base at Camp Peary, Virginia. And so it went: “If you couldn’t find the guy, you could at least emasculate him.”

  But nothing could dispel the miasma of suspicion pervading the Agency’s corridors. “Bill Harvey used to be a good man,” Angleton mused to a colleague. “There must be something seriously wrong with him.” It seemed that Angleton was suggesting that Harvey might have been recruited by the KGB, but “none of the many counterintelligence leads ever applied to Harvey,” a CIA officer said. When Lyman Kirkpatrick, the embittered Inspector General, quit the Agency after his arch-rival Helms had been selected for the Director’s job, a rumor that he was about to defect sent a ripple of panic through the seventh floor. Kirkpatrick had left Washington without telling anyone where he was going. When the CIA finally tracked him down by phone at a motel in El Paso and discreetly asked his intentions, Kirkpatrick explained huffily that he was on his way to Mexico to divorce his wife and marry his secretary. Meanwhile, the FBI directed its field offices “to obtain information concerning American students in attendance at Cambridge University from 1931 to 1937 who might have known Philby, Burgess, or Maclean or might have been engaged in subversive activities in college.”

  If the cases against Murphy and Kovich and all the other suspects did not stand up, then perhaps Golitsin’s leads applied to someone else. The next to fall under suspicion was Bagley. Golitsin had not named Bagley, but he had given his interrogators one piece of information that aroused suspicion. Golitsin said that in Moscow he had seen copies of the CIA’s debriefings of Peter Deriabin, the KGB officer who had defected in Vienna in 1954. Bagley had personally conducted that debriefing in Salzburg, Austria, and was an obvious candidate to be the source who had provided the KGB with a copy of the Deriabin transcript. Bagley was also at the center of the case that in 1959 had given the CIA hard evidence of a penetration in its ranks. He was the case officer who had been slated to make the recruitment pitch to the Polish officer in Switzerland, a gambit that Goleniewski’s letters revealed had leaked to the Russians almost as soon as it had been conceived. Clearly, Bagley merited a closer look. But a case against Bagley, the chief accuser of Nosenko, did not make sense. If he was the Soviet mole, why would he work so hard to discredit the one source who said there was nothing to Golitsin’s warnings about a penetration?

  The mirrors of counterintelligence suggested an answer. Perhaps Nosenko was something more than just a disinformation agent, as Angleton, Bagley, and Golitsin maintained. Perhaps he had been dispatched to be discovered as a disinformation agent and thereby advance the career of his principal accuser, Bagley. During the course of the Nosenko affair, Bagley had risen from a case officer in Bern to deputy chief of the Soviet Bloc Division and heir apparent to the top job in the division until Kingsley was brought in to clean house. Bagley’s zealousness in attempting to expose a KGB plot had earned for him the suspicion that he was part of the plot. Such was the quality of justice in the wilderness of mirrors. A man’s successes could be used against him by suggesting that he must have had help from the other side, while his failures could be brought forward as evidence of deliberately destructive behavior. A man’s entire past, as reflected in the counterintelligence files, became a potential weapon against him.

  Bagley’s past—the Nosenko case, along with the leak of the Deriabin transcript and of the planned Polish recruitment—was set down in painstaking detail, but the case was thrown out. The cloud passed over Bagley as quickly as it had for
med, but the notion that Nosenko had been sent to be discovered had taken root. If not to advance Bagley’s career, then whose? The only other person whose status had been noticeably enhanced by the discrediting of Nosenko was Golitsin, who had predicted that the KGB would attempt just such a ploy to undermine his information. Nosenko’s attempt to discredit Golitsin had served to convince the Counterintelligence and Soviet Bloc Divisions of his importance. But a KGB plot to build up Golitsin, who threatened to expose the Soviet mole, made no sense—unless he, too, had been sent. Perhaps the KGB had dispatched Golitsin in a deliberate effort to sow the fatal seed of suspicion that the CIA had been penetrated by a Russian mole. “If you take the thesis of the KGB dispatching a defector to carry out a disinformation program and tie the CIA into knots,” said a chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, “the absolute classic operation would be Golitsin.”

  The CIA and much of Western intelligence had been turned upside down and still the mole had not been found. Everybody from the lowliest case officer who had ever handled SASHA up to the chief of the Soviet Bloc Division had been investigated and cleared. While Golitsin’s leads had been pursued to their mainly fruitless conclusions, no less than fifty leads provided by Nosenko had never been followed up on the grounds that they were false scents laid down to throw investigators off the track. “But the leads turned out to be very real,” said a member of the Soviet Bloc Division. Angleton’s counterintelligence staff could respond only that the leads were “giveaways,” worthless spies willingly betrayed by Nosenko in order to protect the mole. “If Nosenko is giving all these throwaways in order to protect something much bigger,” a senior officer in the Soviet Bloc Division commented, “this mythical character had to be pretty damn big.”

  Angleton and Golitsin rose to the occasion with the astonishing Project DINOSAUR, the code name for the investigation of W. Averell Harriman, who had been ambassador to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, governor of New York, and Secretary of Commerce, and who had just been named by President Johnson to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. Golitsin described an agent who had been recruited by the KGB in the 1930s while he was in the Soviet Union on business. The KGB had supplied the agent with women, and an illegitimate son had resulted, Golitsin said. He even claimed to know the boy’s name. The agent had had a falling out with his Soviet controllers, Golitsin continued, but during the 1950s he had returned to the fold. In honor of the agent’s return to covert duty, Golitsin related, the Soviets had commissioned a play about the son of a capitalist prince by one of Moscow’s leading playwrights, but when the agent attended the premiere he was so flabbergasted by the similarity between himself and the chief protagonist that he angrily warned the KGB that his cover might be blown. Angleton concluded that Golitsin’s description matched no one but Harriman. The former ambassador had visited the Soviet Union as recently as 1959 and had written a book about his journey in which he thanked his guide, Vasili Vakrushev, who was none other than the illegitimate son named by Golitsin. A check of Harriman’s itinerary showed that he had not been in Moscow on any of the nights that the play about the son of a capitalist prince was performed, but such details did not deter Angleton, who vigorously pressed the new Director, Richard Helms, to warn the President about Harriman. Helms declined.

  People were growing weary of the world according to Golitsin. His leads to the mole had produced nothing but paralyzing suspicion, and his warnings about Soviet disinformation operations appeared more and more fanciful with the passage of time. His claim that the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse looked ridiculous in the face of U-2 photographs of the massive military buildup along Russia’s border with China. “Events began to catch up,” one senior official said. “People began saying, ‘If he’s so far wrong on this, what about all the other stuff?’ ” When Angleton proposed to convene a gathering of academics to hear Golitsin propound his theory about the Sino-Soviet split, it was immediately dubbed “the Flat Earth Conference.” Never did Golitsin look more ridiculous than in 1968 at the time of Alexander Dubček’s rebellion in Czechoslovakia. “Golitsin said Dubcek and the Czech rebellion were completely staged for Western benefit to create an impression of great unrest behind the Iron Curtain and to suck us into trying to exploit the unrest,” a senior officer in the Soviet Bloc Division said. “Up until the morning they invaded Czechoslovakia, Golitsin maintained that this was a deception and that the Soviets had no intention of invading Czechoslovakia.”

  Harriman, Czechoslovakia, and the Sino-Soviet split—no wonder, as one officer said, “the audience was getting smaller all the time.” But it was one thing to say that Golitsin was creating his warnings out of whole cloth and quite another to conclude that he was a dispatched agent. Defectors were known to resort to “spinning” after their hard core of intelligence had been exhausted, concocting ever more astounding stories in an effort to remain the center of attention. The difference in Golitsin’s case was that Angleton continued to believe him.

  There were a few shreds of circumstantial evidence capable of supporting the idea that Golitsin had been sent. The defector Deriabin had placed Golitsin’s name second on a list of KGB officers in Vienna who were vulnerable to recruitment by the CIA. By Golitsin’s own account, that transcript had somehow fallen into KGB hands. Knowing that the CIA had had its interest in Golitsin piqued by Deriabin, the KGB might have “dangled” him in Helsinki, hoping to foist a double agent on the unsuspecting Americans. When the CIA failed to rise to the bait, the KGB could then have taken matters into its own hands and ordered Golitsin to defect. To add to that wisp of speculation, there was the trip Golitsin had made to England in 1963. He had supposedly gone to live there permanently, but he had returned to the United States within five months. That brief interlude divided his career as a defector into two clearly distinct phases. The first had lasted from December of 1961, when he defected in Helsinki, until March of 1963, when he left the United States for England. During that period, it was accurate to say, as Angleton frequently did, that the information that Golitsin supplied had never been faulted. It was only after he returned from England in August of 1963 that Golitsin began leading Angleton on the mad hunt for the mole and telling his stories about Harriman, Czechoslovakia, and the Sino-Soviet split. It was as if Golitsin, having established his bona fides during his first stay in the United States, had returned to carry out his disinformation mission.

  How could the KGB even dream of pulling off so convoluted a scheme? “Helms and I have talked about this many times,” a high-ranking officer said. “I do not believe that any son of a bitch sitting in Moscow could have any conception that he could dispatch Golitsin here and disrupt the Allied intelligence services to the extent he did. Nobody could have expected Angleton to buy it, lock, stock, and barrel.” And no one sitting in Moscow could have predicted with any certainty that Nosenko would be fingered as a plant and thereby build up Golitsin. Furthermore, it seemed incredible that the KGB would entrust to an agent whose mission was to be discovered as a fraud the message that the Soviet Union had not had a hand in Kennedy’s death. Such a plot could only fuel suspicions of Soviet complicity. It was true that Angleton’s counterintelligence staff, although convinced that Nosenko was lying, had concluded that there was no evidence to support the contention that Oswald was working for the Russians when he killed Kennedy. But surely the KGB could not control the workings of the counterintelligence staff with so fine a hand.

  Could not—unless they already had a man inside the counterintelligence staff who could influence the handling of the case. Who controlled the counterintelligence staff? Who had directed the handling of both Golitsin and Nosenko, championing Golitsin, denigrating Nosenko, yet stopping short of the conclusion that the KGB had ordered Kennedy shot? Who but James Jesus Angleton?

  Such a case had indeed been outlined. It had the attraction that all conspiracy theories possess. It provided a cause commensurate with the effect. “The effect of Golitsin was horrendous,” a chief of the Soviet Bloc Div
ision said, “the greatest disaster to Western security that happened in twenty years.” Now, for the first time, the possibility arose that the entire fiasco was not a self-inflicted wound but the work of an infernal Soviet machination. Who better to cast as the villain than Angleton himself? Two men who had headed the Soviet Bloc Division at different times, neither aware that an effort had been made to develop a case against Angleton, would make the same point in almost identical terms. “If I were to pick a Soviet agent at the Agency, it would be Angleton for all the harm he’s done,” said one. “There is just as much reason to say Angleton could be the guy because he has done so much to be destructive,” said the other. Popov, Goleniewski, Penkovsky, Golitsin, Nosenko. Everything that had gone wrong could plausibly be traced to Angleton. Complexity became simplicity. With Angleton as the mole, the KGB could dispatch any number of false defectors confident that they would be handled according to plan. “He is the guy who is perfectly placed,” one of the Soviet Bloc chiefs said. “He’s even better to have than the Director.” The Soviets had penetrated the counterintelligence operations of the British with Kim Philby and of the Germans with Heinz Felfe. Why not the CIA with Angleton?

  To others, the suggestion was outrageous on its face. “I’ve known him for thirty-five years and worked with him for thirty, and I find any suggestion of treason or intentional destruction absolutely ridiculous,” said Thomas Karamessines, who directed the CIA’s Operations Directorate in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Jim did make enemies. There’s no question about it. It was in the nature of his work. But he performed his work with distinction, and this country ought to be very proud of him.” Richard Helms, looking back on his many years with Angleton, praised him for making “a really very significant contribution in showing what Soviet spies were doing. If he overdid it, maybe he did, but that’s a difficulty inherent in the job.”