Was WaPo's Doder an observant, well-connected journalist, or a KGB agent?

How is it that The Washington Post’s Russian-speaking, vodka-drinking Moscow Bureau Chief, Dusko Doder (who died ten days ago at the age of 87), always seemed to get the biggest “scoop”? How did he know before the Kremlin announced it that Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had died?

(Doder claimed that he intuited “something was up” with the ailing Andropov when the jazz station suddenly started playing somber music and all of the lights in the KGB building were on late at night.)

In 1985, KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko defected to the U.S. . . . for three months.

While he was here, he told American authorities that the KGB was feeding information to Doder and that it had given him at least $1000.

Time Magazine reported these accusations as facts.

Doder sued Time for libel in a British court and won.

In retrospect, it looks as though Time should have conferred with retired CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley — if it could have — because in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, he wrote extensively about the troublemaking false defector and the KGB “moles” he’d been sent to the U.S. to protect.

. . . . . . .

Here’s a long excerpt from Bagley’s chapter, “Hiding a Mole, KGB-Style”:

A different answer [as to why the CIA was losing so many of its spies in the USSR in 1985] was suggested early on — from a defector fortuitously emerging from within the KGB. Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko brought startling news: a CIA officer had gotten into secret contact with the KGB and had revealed spies working inside the USSR. Yurchenko did not know the traitor’s name, he said, but he had learned enough about him that CIA quickly identified Edward Lee Howard, who had been Moscow-bound and already briefed on important spies inside Russia before CIA fired him for misconduct. Might this, along with one or more of those other factors [like possible superior KGB surveillance and / or compromise of the American Embassy’s top-secret area], explain the debacle? Apparently not. The analysts kept running into blank walls and finally came to the end of the road, facing the fact that no combination of the above factors could explain all the losses. The failed investigation ground to a halt. Then Langley’s guardian angel woke up, saw their plight, and sent a miracle from heaven in the form of a new, [never revealed] genuine source from inside the KGB. He pointed them toward a KGB mole in CIA’s ranks. [3] Finally then, after betraying with impunity throughout the whole nine years of the investigation's wanderings, Aldrich Ames, who had been head of counterintelligence against the Soviets and thus aware of almost every CIA spy against Russia, was arrested in February 1994. He confessed his treason and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Fragments of information seeped out into public view and gradually coalesced into a relatively coherent image of what had been transpiring during those nine years. Though the image remains vaporous and hazy (as it will remain until the unlikely day when all secret files spring open) it reveals a long, underground struggle of the KGB’s practitioners of [mandated in 1959] “aggressive counterintelligence,” trying to nudge CIA’s investigators onto rabbit paths off the track of Aldrich Ames while those investigators moved ponderously, almost reluctantly, toward whomever or whatever had betrayed CIA’s agents in Russia. The KGB actors of this drama were laboring under a huge disadvantage: they had to trick people who were already alert. With insouciant disregard for the safety of the precious mole, their leaders had ordered the arrest of CIA spies almost as soon as Ames uncovered them. Alarm bells clanged in Langley, again and again. In this daunting situation the KGB professionals evidently tuned up their long-practiced skills of aggressive counterintelligence. In the snippets of information that have seeped out, an onlooker can discern their launching deceptive games, one after another, sacrificing secrets, strewing lures and diversions to confuse, delay, and mislead the inevitable CIA investigation. Act after act of this drama played out, year after year, with the KGB deceivers gradually prevailing, confusing their adversaries and stalling their investigation — only to be thwarted in a dramatic final act not by any failure of their cunning but by the arrival of a deus ex machina from offstage. An epilogue, too, becomes hazily visible: a mischievous hint that the play had a different ending from the one we have seen. The KGB may have lost the fight onstage and failed in the long run to save Ames, but has the audience seen everything? While losing that fight, might the KGB have been winning a different one — successfully hiding another mole? We learn from insiders in both camps that neither Ames nor a combination of Ames and Howard and the KGB’s mole in the FBI, Robert Hanssen, could have undone all the lost CIA spies. The curtain falls on the suggestion that another mole still lurks, undiscovered. [4] The play has a prologue to whet the audience’s anticipation: the events of the 1960s, when other KGB staff officers pretended to work for CIA and for the same reason — to hide and protect moles. In the events about to unfold on stage, the audience sees that the new KGB actors will have more difficulty covering up their discoveries of American spies. In the prologue there were fewer arrests (only Popov and Penkovsky), they took place three years apart, and there was no last-minute apparition to give away the game. The drama thus emerging can be seen only hazily, but it is no illusion. The KGB confirmed, even boasted, about how it had been "confounding the CIA,” as KGB colonel Victor Cherkashin put it. We in the KGB had sent out so many KGB officers to deceive CIA that one would have a hard time, this insider claimed, even to count how many real spies Ames ever betrayed. "Some names chalked up to him were double agents — loyal KGB officers who made the CIA and FBI believe they spied for them.”[footnote 5] Another KGB officer was even told by colleagues closer to the operations that “most” of the KGB defectors had been sent out by Moscow Center to mislead the Americans and the British. [6] One of them was that KGB apparition on the train in Russia in May 1987. “Alexander Zhomov, a Second Chief Directorate officer, had staged an elaborate double-agent operation in Moscow in the late 1980s to protect Ames,” admitted Cherkashin. [7] Zhomov played directly with CIA’s Moscow Station chief — sending him surveillance photos and arranging communications via the CIA officer’s own automobile. He proved his inside status by naming the CIA spies who had disappeared— the first confirmation of CIA’s fears that they had been arrested. He demonstrated his ostensible goodwill by giving CIA advance notice of four planned KGB provocations, false volunteers to the Americans, who duly appeared [8] These were all parts of the KGB’s game — and so, too, was Zhomov’s “false information about how some of the CIA agents had been arrested.” He led CIA to believe that the KGB had caught each of the spies only “through sheer luck and hard work.” [9]‘‘ Sheer luck and hard work. " These words might have stirred CIA memories. That’s how Nosenko explained the KGB’s “chance” detection of Popov and Penkovsky — by lucky but skillful and persistent Moscow surveillance of Western diplomats. And CIA was “confounded” then, too — with its guardian angel sound asleep. Zhomov’s game played on for three years. (CIA code-named him “Prologue,” though he acted in what was, in effect, an “epilogue” to the earlier Nosenko affair.) All that time Aldrich Ames continued blithely to betray. The game ended when CIA started planning to exfiltrate Zhomov from Russia. This being no part of the KGB’s plan, Moscow brought the case to an end. This raised an eyebrow or two in CIA. They even wondered whether Prologue might have been a KGB plant — but on a question with such unpleasant implications, they couldn’t agree. The KGB launched these games with confidence. We knew, the KGB colonel admitted, that “the CIA was all but certain that we never risked dangling one of our own staff officers. CIA would almost certainly take Zhomov for a real spy. It did.” The KGB was evidently aware of the prevailing CIA doctrine. The chief of CIA’s Soviet operations division, Burton Gerber, had looked into the old files of Nosenko and related cases of the 1960s and had decided that the paranoid “sick think” of that earlier time “didn’t stand up to scrutiny.” Gerber concluded that “there was no evidence that the Soviets had ever allowed a serving KGB staff officer to approach the CIA as a double agent.” [He was wrong.] He “developed a rule of thumb that had become accepted wisdom within the CIA: The KGB never dangles one of its own staff officers. When a KGB staff officer volunteers to become a spy, he’s not a double agent.” [10] Another ploy in the KGB series had bedazzled CIA even before Zhomov did. An anonymous letter was dropped into the automobile of a CIA officer in Bonn, West Germany, in March 1986, ostensibly from a KGB officer. Six more letters followed from this “Mr. X,” as the CIA dubbed him. He threw out (false) hints that one of CIA’s lost spies (whom Mr. X named) had been betrayed to the KGB by the CIA case officer handling him. That called for a careful — and time-consuming — look. The letter writer asked for (and got) $50,000 and then proceeded to send CIA down yet another rabbit path. He told them that “Moscow was intercepting cables sent from the secret CIA communications center in Warrenton, Virginia.” This led CIA into a time-consuming series of tests of its communications security before it finally concluded that Mr. X was a KGB provocateur. [11] Even after that, the KGB calculated that "the Americans couldn’t be completely certain of their conclusions. The possibility always existed that something had gone unchecked or been misinterpreted, or that key facts remained unknown. In that sense — spreading uncertainty and tying up resources — the KGB’s post-1986 operations were highly successful.” [12] In the summer of 1985, soon after Ames had identified the near totality of CIA’s Soviet spies, emerged center stage of this drama (as already mentioned) a new defector from the KGB — the highest-ranked ever, it was said. Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko s principal contribution (no other important one has ever been publicly revealed) was to tell us about two important spies in the American camp. He said he did not know their identities, but gave enough details to ensure that we could identify them (and feel as if they had done it by their own clever investigation). They were both important spies — or had been. Ronald Pelton had worked in the National Security Agency (NSA), the American center for making and breaking ciphers. This discovery could explain leaks in this field. Edward Lee Howard had worked in CIA’s Soviet operations division. That could explain the arrest of CIA spies in Russia. But Pelton and Howard had one disturbing characteristic in common. From the KGB viewpoint, both cases were stone cold dead. Pelton had already left NSA under a cloud and could never return. Howard had gone to the Soviets only after being fired from CIA, and he had told the KGB all he knew by the time Yurchenko fingered him. Then, after a few weeks in the West and having delivered his messages, Yurchenko, though guilty in his own country of the capital crime of treason, returned to Moscow. Having pursued defectors for the KGB, Yurchenko knew better than anyone else the fate of Soviet intelligence officers who had gone over to the adversary and betrayed state secrets. They could expect no mercy. Those caught while spying in place were shot. Those who had fled to the West were condemned to death in absentia and, if possible, assassinated. Not Yurchenko. He was restored to duty in the KGB and received a medal for his brave act. To explain this incredible turn of events the KGB leaders circulated a curious tale. They had accepted, they said, Yurchenko’s claim that he had not defected at all. As the KGB story goes, Yurchenko said that he had been drugged and kidnapped by CIA in Rome. When he came to his wits in the United States he spun the Americans a few innocuous tales to gain their confidence and a measure of freedom — then cleverly eluded them and took refuge in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. KGB chairman Kryuchkov decorated Yurchenko for his daring. [13] Some in the ranks of the KGB, while suspecting the truth, pretended to believe this impossible tale. It seemed career enhancing to follow the lead of Chairman Kryuchkov, who spread it. Kryuchkov was perhaps unwilling to admit to his Politburo superiors that he had sent Yurchenko into American hands. Independent-minded KGB veterans treated the fable with contempt. I disingenuously asked one veteran who had been in a position to know, “Did Yurchenko genuinely defect?” Apparently taken aback by the naivete of the question, but unwilling to go on record, he just stared at me for a moment, then rolled his eyes heavenward. Another veteran I approached shrugged, “I guess not.” And yet another, who had seen Yurchenko in the KGB after his return, wrote of the “fake defection” for which Yurchenko received the Order of the Red Star. [14] When sending a provocateur to the West as a "defector,” the KGB necessarily had a plan of how to accept him back when his mission was completed. In the 1960s their plant Yuri Loginov (mentioned in an earlier chapter) returned after betraying some relatively unimportant and generally known KGB activities. A board "reviewed his case” in 1969 and, because this was in "the liberal times instigated by Khrushchev,” decided that he did not deserve punishment. [15] The journalist defector Oleg Bitov, after contacting British and American intelligence and publicly denouncing the Soviet system for a year, returned to Moscow in 1984 with a story identical to the one Yurchenko would use — "drugged and kidnapped.” He not only was forgiven (by a board on which Yurchenko claimed to have sat) but was promoted on the staff of the important newspaper from which he had defected. Another of their ilk, Oleg Tumanov, after twenty years of treason as an anti-Soviet broadcast editor of Radio Liberty in Munich, returned to Russia in 1986 — to be “forgiven” because of his "repentance.” Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Yurchenko defection is the American debate about him. Was he a genuine defector or not? In their own books and interviews with journalists, senior CIA officials have certified that Yurchenko gave too much information to be a plant, that the does not send staff officers as defectors, and that there is “no doubt’’ that his defection was genuine. This avoided the embarrassment of admitting to having been duped. More importantly, it avoided the ugly demands of a contrary conclusion. It would be deeply troubling to inquire into why a KGB provocateur would have given away a CIA staff officer, Howard, and an NSA cipher breaker, Pelton, even if they were burnt-out cases. To avoid doing that, CIA was even ready to swallow Yurchenko’s absurd stated reasons for returning to certain death or jail and disgrace in Russia: first, because news of his defection had leaked to the press; second, because a onetime lady friend (married) refused to run off with him, and third, because he learned in the West that he was not, as he had feared, about to die of stomach cancer. The incurable human penchant for self-deception was— not for the first time in history — lending a hand to hostile deceivers.

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My comment: Another false defector, Yuri Nosenko, speciously claimed in 1964 that ABC correspondent Sam Jaffe was a KGB agent.

Note: Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, can be read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously. Likewise, his 35-page 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” can be read for free by googling “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.