J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA "FEDORA"
In early 1962, a KGB major by the name of Aleksei Kulak walked into the FBI’s NYC field office and said he wanted to spy for the Bureau at his workplace — the United Nations — where he was spying for the USSR under the cover of scientific advisor. The agents at the field office were amazed that he’d walked in in broad daylight, seeing as how the KGB’s residentura was just a few blocks away. He said he wasn’t worried he’d been spotted, though, because “all of my colleagues are meeting right now about your guy, DICK,” i.e., about a “mole” in the FBI who had been given that cryptonym by the KGB.
This “revelation” by Kulak, whom the FBI gave the crypto FEDORA, caused the Bureau to tear itself apart for ten years as it searched for a nonexistent “mole” in its midst.
Kulak “spied” for the FBI for fifteen years and returned to Moscow for good in 1977. During those fifteen years he vouched for the “bona fides” of KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko. He helped make the name of a KGB officer / diplomat in Mexico City Department 13*- “radioactive” in time for it be volunteered to a Lee Harvey Oswald impersonator over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination of JFK. He caused Nixon to form The Plumbers by telling him that the Kremlin had a complete copy of the Pentagon Papers (it didn’t). In short, he was a Kremlin-loyal triple-agent, sent to the FBI to form a devastating “inside man / “outside man” feedback loop with KGB “mole” Bruce Solie (the inside man) in the CIA’s mole-hunting Office of Security so that Sun Tzu-like strategic deception counterintelligence operations could be waged against the intelligence services of America and her NATO allies.
In 1980, the FBI finally realized that FEDORA was a plant. Three years later, a counterintelligence-hating xxxxxxx by the name of James Geer changed the Burau’s official position on him back to “he was truly spying for the FBI.”
And that’s the FBI’s position today.
And oh-by-the-way, for the past fifty-five years or so the CIA’s official position on Nosenko has been that he was a true defector. In fact, in the mid-1970s it hired him to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.
”Gag me with a KGB spoon.’
*Department 13 was the assassination and sabotage unit in the First Chief Directorate** of the KGB.
** Today’s SVR