Edward J. Epstein on KGB true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn
The following is an excerpt from Edward J. Epstein’s 1990 book, Deception: The Once and Future Cold War. It represents only part of what Epstein wrote about Golitsyn in said book.
My comments are in brackets.
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[James Angleton’s Chief of Counterintelligence Operations, Scotty] Miler, meanwhile, was gradually drawing out Golitsyn on the subject of the putative leaks in American intelligence. Golitsyn insisted that the wealth of CIA material he had seen in KGB files could not have come from any single mole or source. He compared the Soviet penetration to a “cancer,” saying, ”When the patient refuses to recognize it exists, it grows and spreads, with bad cells infecting the good cells.” The “patient” in this case was both the CIA and the FBI. The “bad cells” he suggested in his analogy, had begun with the Army’s and CIA’s recruitment of Hitler’s former intelligence officers. He asserted that the CIA had mistakenly assumed that their sources in Eastern Europe were not known to the Soviets, but, in reality, they had been compromised by Germans playing a double game. Instead of arresting these WW II “traitors” [my quotation marks], the Soviets used them as bait to entice CIA case officers into situations where their careers could be jeopardized and they could be compromised. Some of these officers were then recruited, and they produced biographical data on other officers in the CIA, which helped the KGB play on their weaknesses. Golitsyn held that, by the time he had defected [in December 1961] the KGB had maneuvered its “inside men” into key positions in both the CIA’s Soviet Division [Leonard V. McCoy? George Kisevalter? Richard Kovich?] and the FBI’s counterespionage office.
Angleton’s interest, however, went far beyond the security problem arising from the recruitment of Western case officers by the KGB. He wanted to know why the KGB focused on particular units of the CIA, such as the operational side of the Soviet 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 in place in 1959 [sic; it was formulated in 1959 but not put in place until late 1961 and early 1962 when Popyakov and Kulak, respectively, “volunteered” to spy for the FBI’s NYC field office]. Their main job was to report back on how the CIA was evaluating material it was receiving from other KGB agents. With them in place, disinformation became a game of “show and tell” for the KGB.
The dispatched defectors, double agents, and other provocateurs, who could be anyone from a Soviet diplomat to a touring scientist, “showed” the CIA a Soviet secret. Then its penetrations [i.e., “moles” in the CIA] would tell the KGB how the CIA had interpreted it. This combination of inside man and outside man, “mole” and fake defector, allowed the KGB to continually manipulate its adversary.
The immediate remedy was to find the penetrations. With the assistance of the CIA’s Office of Security [which author John M. Newman says housed a KGB “mole” by the name of Bruce Leonard Solie in its mole-hunting Research Branch] which has responsibility for ferreting out moles, Angleton arranged for a series of “marked cards” for the Soviet Division to test Golitsyn’s assertion.
The “marked card” is to counterintelligence what the barium test is to medical diagnosis. Information that can be followed, like a bent card, is passed through an intelligence channel to see where it ends up.
One “marked card” in Angleton’s series was the exact time and place of a CIA approach made to a Soviet diplomat stationed in Ottawa, Canada. No one else knew about this “approach” except the unit in the Soviet Division to whom this card was passed. The meeting itself was a pure invention.
A surveillance crew was then placed in a position where they could watch the site without themselves being observed. Then, on the day of the contrived meeting, they recorded Soviet security officers watching the site from a car. So, this marked card had ended up in the hands of the KGB.
Through a process of elimination, subsequent marked cards narrowed down the possible leak to a handful of CIA officers involved with recruiting REDTOPS [Soviet diplomats, military officers and bureaucrats, etc., targeted for recruitment by the CIA] and preparing reports on them.
Yet, no matter how the cards were dealt out, no single individual could be pinpointed. This development suggested to Angleton that the Soviets had more than one mole in the Soviet Division. [Either that, or possible “mole” Solie in the mole-hunting Office of Security was creating and distributing the “marked cards” for Angleton in such a way as to make it seem that way.]
Angleton, moreover, was convinced by these tests that the penetration was in continual contact with the KGB. Time after time, when the division was told about a new operation, the information seemed to reach Moscow in a matter of days. Nosenko himself seemed to have a means of updating his story [Bagley’s “helper” in interviewing Nosenko, Russia-born George Kisevalter, was a possible “mole," and Bruce Solie (whom author John M. Newman believes was a “mole” in the mole-hunting Office of Security) showed up unannounced in Geneva in June 1962 to ask Nosenko questions about the possible penetrations Golitsyn had warned Angleton about — Bagley said Nosenko “drew a blank” — Kisevalter and Solie met at a coffeehouse afterwards] — even though Nosenko was supposedly in isolation.
Suspicion fell first on David Murphy. Could the chief of the Soviet Division be a Soviet agent? After Murphy was transferred to Paris, Bagley was investigated and transferred. Five other division officers were considered as candidates for the mole and reshuffled. Yet the leaks continued. The Kim Philby problem, which had so affected Angleton in 1951, now seemed like just the outcropping of a far deeper phenomenon. Finally, in 1967, Angleton recommended to Helms that he temporarily cut the entire division out of sensitive cases. Helms reluctantly complied.
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Note: Epstein wrote that Golitsyn defected to the U.S. by going to the American Embassy in Helsinki. This is incorrect. He went to the house of the Chief of Station, (Frank Friberg) — whom Angleton said made a big mistake by notifying CIA headquarters in a non-encrypted / non-limited-circulation cable that Golitsyn knew there was a KGB '“mole” in the CIA in Germany — Golitsyn’s “Sasha”.
He also wrote that Penkovsky had been recruited at the American Embassy in Moscow, and that the conversation during his debriefing there must have been picked up by hidden KGB microphones. In fact, Penkovsky was recruited in London in April 1961 and, as indicated by the “Zepp” incident, was betrayed by a “mole” in U.S. or British intelligence within two weeks.
Read my Substack article on “Zepp,” my Wikipedia article on Tennent H. Bagley, or the edited-by-me Wikipedia article on Yuri Nosenko for details.
Epstein also wrote that David E. Murphy was Chief of the Soviet Russia Division when Nosenko “walked into” the CIA in Geneva in June 1962. In fact, that position was held by John Maury at the time.