In October 1993, the Center for the Study of Intelligence published a 100-page paper by pro-Nosenko / anti-Angleton former CIA officer Cleveland Cram titled “Of Moles and Mole Hunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature, 1977-92”.
Two of the books he heaped praise on were Tom Mangold’s 1991 Cold Warrior: James Angleton — CIA’s Master Mole Hunter and David Wise’s 1992 Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA. These anti-Angleton books, probably unbeknownst to Cram, had been influenced by probable KGB “moles” Leonard V. McCoy and Russia-born George Kisevalter, respectively.
Cram excoriated Edward J. Epstein’s 1988 book Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA and his 1978 Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald because in them Epstein shared with the world the thoughts and observations of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton and his primary source, KGB true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, as conveyed to Epstein by his sources — former FBI agent William Sullivan, Angleton himself, and former CIA officers Newton S. “Scotty” Miler, Raymond Rocca, and Tennent H. Bagley. (Read my Wikipedia article on him.)
As an example of Cram’s anti-Golitsyn bias (and as a possible indication of how deeply CIA had been penetrated by the KGB), he wrote the following about another book.
The theme of [Epstein’s] “Legend” is extended in a novel which appeared in 1980 called “The Spike” by Arnauld de Borchgrave and Robert Moss. De Borschgrave, soon to be editor of the new “Washington Times,” and Moss, then editor of “The Blue Economist,” were close friends and admirers of Angleton, whose conspiracy theories largely jibed with their own. Moss had been spreading bogus Angleton propaganda in his sheet for some time, an example being his claim Golitsyn had provided the lead to Kim Philby. This caught the eye of then Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner, who inquired of the Counterintelligence Staff. The latter replied from solid knowledge that Golitsyn could only be credited for an assist on Vassall and none on Philby or Blunt.
My comments:
When Cram wrote the above, Angleton’s old CI Staff was effectively being run by its from-1995-on deputy chief, probable KGB “mole” Leonard V. McCoy. From at least 1965 McCoy had been instrumental in the eventual 1968 “clearing” of KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko by another probable KGB “mole,” Bruce Leonard Solie of the mole-hunting Office of Security. (Look him up.)
Factoids: In 1975, Solie and McCoy had managed to lose CIA’s spy, Nicholas Shadrin, to KGB kidnappers in Vienna, and in 1983, CI Deputy Chief McCoy provided two of his “researchers” to anti-counterintelligence FBI Agent James Geer, whose “re-investigation” of KGB Major Aleksei Kulak ended up REVERSING the Bureau’s belated, five-year-old correct determination that “walk-in” informant FEDORA was a KGB-loyal triple agent. As a result, the FBI’s official position today is that FEDORA (Kulak) provided the Bureau with bona fide “intel” for fifteen years, and, by extension, that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector.
Gag me with another KGB spoon, darlin’.
As to whether or not Golitsyn had provided the clinching lead to Philby, several espionage writers have said that he did, and that he did so by fingering Maclean, Burgess and Philby as three members of the “Ring of Five” (Golitsyn’s expression). What’s more, Tennent H. Bagley wrote in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars,
[I]n 1962 new information pointed unmistakably at Philby, and MI6 had to act.
[Note: Golitsyn defected to the U.S. on 12/15/61]
Regardless, it seems as though Cram’s reason for raising the Philby issue is to try to impugn Golitsyn’s value to American and British intelligence. In rebuttal to this idea, Bagley wrote the following in Spy Wars:
In his KGB position Golitsyn had wide access to operational secrets because his job entailed analyzing reports on NATO coming into Moscow from KGB spies in at least eight countries. Additional information came from his indoctrination periods in several KGB departments, and from his service in two KGB residencies abroad. In the process Golitsyn had learned the precise identities of some spies but, most remarkably, had heard and seen and remembered things that would point us to many more whom he couldn’t directly place. His information led to identification of important KGB spies still active in Western governments: senior diplomats, intelligence officers, and prominent businessmen. Many were later arrested or fired from their positions of trust, including two NATO officials, a Norwegian intelligence official, a Canadian ambassador, a former CIA principal agent, a double agent misleading CIA, and some highly placed French intelligence officers. Others who could not be firmly identified or, if identified, could not be prosecuted for lack of evidence included West German intelligence officers, French diplomats, and American code clerks. Each of Golitsyn’s leads had been listed as a “serial,” divided by nationality and shared with the security services of the friendly countries involved. These serials might sometimes have stemmed from fragmentary hearsay — for example, “My KGB colleague X in the Y section told me in [year] that he was handling as a source a diplomat serving in Z Embassy in Moscow who kept a large dog there.” Or they might be descriptions of specific intelligence reports he’d handled that emanated from an unidentified source in a certain NATO country. Some serials were sharper and included the spies’ names or KGB code names. Two or more serials might apply to one and the same spy; the diplomat with the dog, for instance, might have been the source of one or more of the intelligence reports. The number of these serials was phenomenal: more than one hundred fifty British and about one hundred French, of which more than ten pointed to spies in French intelligence and security staffs. Because so many of his leads were fragmentary and could not be verified, some outsiders later criticized Golitsyn for causing turmoil and tension between allies and even suggested that this was his purpose. Shocked and feeling attacked by his revelations, some Western European officials accused him of paranoia and dismissed his information as mad ravings. They were wrong. Golitsyn was not easy to deal with, but those who did over the years attested to his effort to separate fact from supposition. When he was later shown Western files to help him identify spies about whom he knew only fragmentary facts, he erred in two or three cases and pointed in wrong directions (though the leads themselves were later found to have been valid). But what he told in the first months after his defection proved to be accurate and priceless. Those of us who worked with those leads came to call them ‘‘vintage Golitsyn,” in contrast to his later, more speculative pointers and notions.
Bottom line: Cleveland Cram was full of high-fructose beans and KGB* disinformation whether he realized it or not.
*Today’s SVR and FSB
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Hey Thomas. I’ll certainly investigate this angle further. But one question that comes to my mind is this…why would the KGB want JFK dead, as he was in fact a liberal President who wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union? By removing him, wouldn’t that only put in place someone who was more hostile to them?