Why Do So Many Espionage Writers Come Across as KGB Agents?
Photo: Adolf Tolkachev
Why does David E. Hoffman smear former CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton about thirty times (and KGB true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn about five times) in his book, The Billion Dollar Spy, even though Angleton retired from the Agency three years before Tolkachev volunteered to spy for it?
Is it because Angleton was correctly convinced that the CIA had at least one high-level KGB “mole” (who ironically was probably his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting boss, Bruce Leonard Solie), and therefore rejected lots of “valuable KGB volunteers and defectors”?
His book reminds me of Tom Mangold’s anti-Angleton / anti-Golitsyn book, Cold Warrior, probably because Mangold’s main source was probable “mole” Leonard V. McCoy. And it reminds me to a slightly lesser extent of David Wise’s 1992 book, Molehunt, probably because his primary source was probable “mole” George Kisevalter. It reminds me, in fact, of “former” KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko’s 1993 book, Passport to Assassination, in which the author devotes no fewer than fifty pages to two people who, despite the avowed subject of the book, weren’t involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s week-long trip to Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination -– false (or rogue) KGB defector Yuri Nosenko and Tennent H. Bagley, Nosenko’s primary CIA case officer from June 1962 to October 1967.
Nosenko ended up being “cleared” by Solie in 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report (and hired by the Agency a couple of years later to teach its and the FBI’s new recruits the art of counterintelligence); Bagley was convinced that Nosenko, having been sent to the CIA in Geneva in 1962 to discredit then-recent true defector Golitsyn — and thereby protect moles in the CIA — was fake when he physically defected to the US in February 1964 when CIA had to let him come to the US because he claimed to have been Oswald’s case officer in Moscow — how lucky for J. Edgar Hoover! — and therefore “knew for a fact” that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.
Gag me with a KGB spoon.