KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. on December 15, 1961. In addition to knowing that the CIA was penetrated by a Germany-based “Sasha” (Igor Orlov, aka Alexander “Sasha” Kopatzky), he uncovered several KGB / GRU penetrations of the intelligence services of our NATO allies, including, according to Tennent H. Bagley in his book Spy Wars, “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.”
When putative KGB officer Yuri Nosenko “defected-in-place” to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962, what Nosenko voluntarily told Bagley (and probable “mole” George Kisevalter) so overlapped (and contradicted) what Golitsyn had told the CIA six months earlier that Bagley realized that Nosenko, who had worked in a different part of the highly compartmentalized KGB than Golitsyn, had to be a false defector who had been dispatched to discredit Golitsyn.
In 1984, Golitsyn published a book he’d finished writing in 1982 titled New Lies for Old, in which he explained how the Kremlin had set up in 1959 a special deception-based “KGB-within-the-KGB” department for waging disinformation, “active measures,” and strategic deception counterintelligence operations against the US and other NATO countries.
In his book, he made several observations and predictions, including that the Sino-Soviet Split was a farce intended to get the West to drop its guard.
Mark Riebling wrote about Golitsyn in his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA.
”In 1982, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had submitted a top-secret manuscript to CIA. In it, he foresaw that leadership of the USSR would by 1986 ‘or earlier’ fall to ‘a younger man with a more liberal image,’ who would initiate ‘changes that would have been beyond the imagination of Marx or the practical reach of Lenin and unthinkable to Stalin.’ The coming liberalization, Golitsyn said, ‘would be spectacular and impressive. Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the Communist Party’s role; its monopoly would be apparently curtailed.... The KGB would be reformed. Dissidents at home would be amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to take up positions in the government. Sakharov might be included in some capacity in the government.... Political clubs would be opened to nonmembers of the Communist Party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative political parties. Censorship would be relaxed; controversial books, plays, films, and art would be published, performed, and exhibited.’ Golitsyn provided an entire chapter of such predictions, containing 194 distinct auguries. Of these, 46 were not falsifiable at the time this book went to press (whether, e.g., Russian ‘economic ministries’ Will be dissolved, it’s too early to tell) and another 9 (e.g., Yugoslavia’s “prominent role” in East-Bloc liberalization) seemed clearly wrong. Yet of Golitsyn’s falsifiable predictions, 139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 — an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent. Among events correctly foreseen: ‘the return to power of Dubcek and his associates’ in Czechoslovakia; the ‘reemergence of Solidarity’ and the formation of a ‘coalition government’ in Poland; a newly ‘independent’ regime in Romania; ‘economic reforms’ in the USSR; and a Soviet repudiation of the Afghanistan invasion. Golitsyn even envisioned that, with the ‘easing of immigration controls’ by East Germany, ‘pressure could well grow for the solution of the German problem [by] some form of confederation between East and West’ — with the result that ‘demolition of the Berlin Wall might even be contemplated.’ Golitsyn received CIA’s permission to publish his manuscript in book form and did so in 1984. But at the time his predictions were made, Sovietologists had little use for Golitsyn or his ‘new methodology for the study of the communist world.’ For the man who had once been ridiculed at CIA’s infamous ‘Flat Earth Conference’ for claiming that the Sino-Soviet split was false, it must have seemed yet another classic case of ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.’ John C. Campbell, reviewing Golitsyn’s book in Foreign Affairs, politely recommended that it ‘be taken with several grains of salt,’ while other critics complained that Golitsyn’s analysis ‘strained credulity’ and was ‘totally inaccurate,’ or became so exercised as to accuse him of being the ‘demented’ proponent of ‘cosmic theories.’ The University of North Carolina’s James R. Kuhlman declared that Golitsyn’s new methodology would ‘not withstand rigorous examination’; in the London Review of Books, Oxford historian R. W. Johnson dismissed Golitsyn’s views as ‘nonsense.’ British journalist Tom Mangold [whose main source was probable KGB mole Leonard V. McCoy] even went so far as to say, in 1990 — after Golitsyn’s prescience had become clear — that ‘As a crystal-ball gazer, Golitsyn has been unimpressive.’ Mangold reached this conclusion by listing six of Golitsyn’s apparently incorrect predictions and ignoring the 139 correct ones. Golitsyn’s analysis was as little appreciated within CIA as it was in the outside world. ‘Unfortunate is the only term for this book,’ an Agency reader noted in an official 1985 review. A CIA analyst took Golitsyn to task for making ‘unsupported allegations without sufficient (or sometimes any) evidence,’ and for this reason would be ‘embarrassed to recommend the whole.’ Golitsyn’s case was deductive, based on pattern-recognition and abstract principles; he had no transcript of a secret session in which Gorbachev said he would do all these things. Therefore, his predictions did not need to be taken seriously. There had been a time, of course, when CIA’s conception of “evidence” was considerably less legalistic. This alternate conception, which came out of British literary criticism, had governed OSS/CIA counterintelligence for roughly thirty years, from 1943 to 1973. It had caused considerable conflict between FBI and CIA, in such matters as molehunts and disputes over the bona fides of defectors. Questions about the legitimacy of Yuri Nosenko or the loyalty of Igor Orlov were, to the FBI, only “unsupported allegations without sufficient (or sometimes any) evidence.” The FBI’s refusal to side with CIA on such questions had limited Cl chief James Angleton’s ability to prove his suspicions about penetrations, false defectors, and possible KGB complicity in the killing of JFK. The result had been an increase in FBI-CIA tensions, an interagency feud over Golitsyn, a decrease in Angleton’s popularity at both agencies, the decentralization of his Cl staff, and then his outright dismissal. The clash between Angletonian and Hooverian Cl paradigms had then been resolved in a way which remade CIA counterintelligence philosophy according to the simple and direct methodology of the FBI. If it had been otherwise — if CIA had not lost the war of philosophies to the Bureau; if the FBI had accepted Golitsyn; if Angleton’s looser conception of evidence had survived at CIA into the 1980s — the Agency would have perhaps been sensitized to Golitsyn and what he had to say. As it was, however, the defector had been put out to pasture after Angleton left, with a part-time consulting arrangement. He was free to send in ‘crank memos’ and to publish his predictions in a book, but no one at CIA paid him much mind. After all, Golitsyn saw Soviet reforms as part of the Leninist disinformation strategy conceived back in 1959. For the strategy to succeed, the KGB would have to have so deeply deceived and penetrated CIA, with false defectors and moles, that it could effectively control American intelligence. But most at CIA discounted the possibility of false defectors, and there was still no firm proof of any mole. And perhaps most fundamentally, as the philosopher William James once noted, ‘we tend to disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.’ Who had any use, in the end, for Golitsyn’s belief that the coming glasnost and perestroika would merely constitute the ‘final phase’ of a long-term KGB strategy to ‘dominate the world’? One of Golitsyn’s predictions, however, could not be ignored, even if one rejected all else, he said. This was his observation that ‘Liberalization in Eastern Europe on the scale suggested could have a social and political impact on the United States itself.’ Specifically, ‘anticommunism would be undermined,’ while Western institutions that owed their existence to the perception of a communist threat, such as NATO and the U.S. intelligence community, ‘could hardly survive this process.’ As Gorbachev himself put it in 1987, perestroika was ‘tantamount to an ideological catastrophe’ for the West, because “it frustrated] the chances of using the ‘Soviet threat’ bugbear, of shadowing the real image of our country with a grotesque and ugly ‘enemy image.’” Gorbachev’s key adviser Georgi Arbatov was even more explicit about what the Soviets planned. “We are going to do something terrible to you,” he told U.S. journalists. “We are going to take away your enemy. The ‘image of the enemy’ that is being eroded has been absolutely vital for the foreign and military policy of the U.S. and its allies. The destruction of this stereotype is Gorbachev’s secret weapon.” As the Soviet Empire fragmented during the late 1980s, U.S. policy professionals began to agree with Arbatov’s claim that, in light of developments in the communist world, ‘America also needs perestroika.’ Many journalists and politicians now believed that the apparent disappearance of the communist threat made it necessary to reorganize American intelligence.”
. . . . . . .
My comment: The only big “mistake” Golitsyn made was in not realizing that Soviet Communism would eventually, under former KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin, morph into Russian Fascism, and that the successors to the KGB —the SVR and the FSB — would continue to wage disinformation, “active measures” and strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies, just as the KGB itself had done when it initiated these Sun Tzu-based tactics (after a thirty-five year hiatus) by dispatching Dmitry Polyakov in late-1961 and Aleksei Kulak in early 1962 to the FBI’s NYC field office to “volunteer” to spy for it at the U.N.
https://archive.org/details/NewLiesForOld
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“New Lies For Old” should be required reading for all American high school students. As should “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies” by M. Stanton Evans.
But, America has been “dumbed down” for decades, courtesy the Communist infiltration and their influences here.
Putin-and-Xi-led Communism is the real threat. “One Clenched Fist”