Part 6: Wedge...A Mind of Winter...Sinister Implications...Molehunt

WEDGE FROM PEARL HARBOR TO 9/11 

HOW THE SECRET WAR 

BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA

 HAS ENDANGERED NATIONAL SECURITY 

MARK RIEBLING

BOOK THREE 

THE POETRY OF DECEPTION

CHAPTER NINE

A MIND OF WINTER 

THE DEFECTION OF A KGB major on December 15, 1961, was one of the few encouraging auguries on an otherwise unsettling Friday for the U.S. government. President Kennedy had boarded Air Force One for a weekend visit to Venezuela, pleased that a contract had been awarded Lockheed for a rocket to the moon, but disturbed by developments in Europe. Six months after Khrushchev had built a wall between East and West Berlin, the U.S. was still trying to resolve the crisis diplomatically, but French President Charles de Gaulle was dividing NATO by objecting to America’s hardline position, and on this very day France had closed her skies to UN aircraft. Washington was trying, similarly, to split the Soviet bloc by selling thirty thousand tons of edible oils to Yugoslavia. It was a frustrating maze, this game of foreign relations in the Cold War, but the ultimate price of failure was implicit in the Pentagon’s terse announcement this day that it would stockpile crushed-bulgur survival wafers in atomic-fallout shelters. It probably would have comforted Kennedy little to hear that such biscuits might never be necessary, according to the new KGB defector, because the Soviets had hatched a plan for defeating the West without waging war.

The KGB man had come over just after noon Washington time, or 6:00 p.m. in Helsinki. In a blinding snowstorm, he had approached the Haapatie Street doorstep of CIA’s station chief, Frank Friberg. Within hours, Friberg was on a U.S. Air Force jet with the stocky, sharp-eyed KGB major, who gave his name as Anatoliy Golitsyn. Neither Friberg nor anyone else at CIA had any inkling, at the time, that Golitsyn would become perhaps the most controversial and divisive defector of the Cold War, a catalyst and symbol of the deep and philosophical forces that were already spinning FBI and CIA into collision. 

For the moment, Golitsyn’s defection sent a much needed frisson of excitement through CIA’s new headquarters at Langley, Virginia. A half-hour drive from downtown Washington, D.C., cloaked by several thousand acres of Virginia forest and ringed by a huge parking lot, the main building was a seven-story modernistic monster; some thought it looked like a giant milk crate. The Agency had moved in only the month before, and one could still smell the paint in the corridors, but already there was nostalgia for the ratty old tempo buildings, and the type of man that had worked in them. 

In the golden days of OSS, and on through the fifties, clandestine operations had been managed mostly by men whose families had helped create the American institutions it was CIA’s duty to defend. But by the early 1960s, after Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles had improved foreign intelligence to something between a science and an art, its practice was at once degraded from a noble calling into a teachable trade. Bill Donovan’s bold Easterners were being replaced by prudent professionals, and what had been a private club was becoming a public service bureaucracy. Nothing betokened this change more than the huge Langley parking lot, with its special sections reserved for area divisions, directorates, and watch staffs. That was too orderly, too much like a corporation. Veteran CIA officers quipped that, should an Agency officer be captured by hostile forces, he was authorized to answer only three questions: name, grade, and parking-space number. 

Dulles’ departure also symbolized the change. Earlier in the year, a CIA-backed army of anti-Castro exiles had bungled badly in the attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It was a gung-ho operation in the classic Donovan style, even to the point of poor security, and Castro’s militia had been waiting on the beaches when CIA’s commandos landed. The operation had embarrassed President Kennedy, and Dulles had hung on just long enough to dedicate the new headquarters that November. 

His successor, millionaire Republican shipbuilder John McCone, had no experience in spying. Ordinarily, the Agency’s deputy director for plans (DDP) would have been overseeing things until McCone settled in, but Richard Bissell, too, was on the ropes. He’d been in on the Bay of Pigs planning, and there was pressure for him to go; he was spending the holidays trying to decide. So it was by default, more than design, that one of Bissell’s senior officers in the Department of Plans, forty-eight year-old OSS veteran Richard Helms, had come to be running the secret operations of CIA. 

Helms’ background was tradecraft, contacting and running agents, and through much of the 1950s he’d been chief of a division responsible for secret operations in Central and Eastern Europe. Helms was the ultimate professional; depending on circumstance, he could be friendly as a grandfather, or cold as a witch. He gave back-slapping pep talks to new chiefs of station—“Ring the gong for us out there in Malaya, Dave!”—but was rumored to have fired an Agency tennis partner who tried to presume on their friendship for personal advancement. Tall, with thinning black hair, he was a man without any other memorable qualities except supreme emotional control and a ruthless dedication to his work. 

Helms sensed immediately the importance of Anatoliy Golitsyn, who by Christmas was being debriefed at Ashford Farm, a scenic CIA property near the Choptank River in Maryland. KGB defectors were rare enough, but Golitsyn was a major, and few higher-ranking KGB men had ever defected. He had served in Moscow Center, processing the “take” from spies in NATO, and when CIA officers tested him with a batch of NATO documents in which both fake and real papers had been mixed, he quickly identified the real ones. But Golitsyn was less an “operations” officer than a scholar and historian; he had spent years studying at KGB think tanks, including the KGB Higher Institute, where he earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. in spying. As a theoretician, Golitsyn could tell CIA not only what the KGB was doing, but how and why. 

One document Golitsyn provided was particularly suggestive. Among the package of papers he turned over to CIA debriefers the week before Christmas was one describing a new KGB “disinformation directorate, ” Department D, which Golitsyn said was to implement the Soviets’ grand strategy for winning without fighting. According to a CIA Soviet Division officer who saw the document, “It described the need for disinformation in KGB intelligence work. It stated that just catching American spies isn’t enough, because the enemy can always start again with new ones. Therefore, said this KGB document, disinformation operations are essential. And among the purposes of such operations, as I recall the words of the document, the first one mentioned is ’to negate and discredit authentic information the enemy has obtained.’ The last of the four or five purposes the secret KGB document listed was ‘to penetrate deeper into the enemy service.’” 

Golitsyn intimated that Soviet disinformation operations were designed to support a new “long-range plan, ” by which “the world balance of power” was to be “shifted inconspicuously in communist favor, ” but declined to elaborate with anyone except President Kennedy. Helms refused to allow that—it was unwise to let defectors become too convinced of their own importance—so a fuller exposition of the KGB’s master strategy would have to wait. But by early January 1962, Golitsyn had tantalized his handlers with at least three leads about the KGB’s practical activities. First, he said, the KGB had penetrated every intelligence service in NATO, including CIA. Second, the KGB would send false defectors after Golitsyn, to deflect from his leads. Finally, KGB Department 13, which handled assassinations and sabotage, was plotting to kill a Western political figure. 

Helms did not attach too much urgency to this last warning. Golitsyn could not specify the target of the plot —his best guess was perhaps an opposition figure in Northern Europe—and CIA could not just approach the thousand or so European persons who fit that description, and say, “Be careful.” 

Nor could much be done with Golitsyn’s warning about false defectors who would allegedly follow him … except, perhaps, to wait alertly. 

But Golitsyn’s leads about Soviet moles were quite “live.” Generally, he said, a “cancer” of penetrations had been growing in CIA since it was OSS; specifically, the Agency harbored a Soviet spy of Slavic background, whose name began with “K” and ended in “sky.” This agent was known within the KGB as “Sasha,” and had spent time in Germany. Golitsyn believed that Sasha might have been activated by the KGB in 1957, when V. M. Kovshuk, head of the American Department in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, had visited Washington. The defector also suspected that this spy might have been in a position to tell the KGB about an American-British electronic-surveillance project, code-named “Easy Chair.” Those clues added impetus to the investigation of a CIA employee who was already under suspicion when Golitsyn arrived. 

His name was Peter Karlow. He had been born Klibansky, the last name of his Russian émigré father; he had served for six years in Germany, where he ran a CIA laboratory near Frankfurt; he had been stationed in the United States in 1957, when Kovshuk visited; as an officer in CIA’s Technical Services Division, he had been CIA chairman of the Easy Chair project. It was in that capacity that he had come under suspicion of compromising information before Golitsyn came over; apparently a high number of science-and-technology projects had been compromised. Karlow had also served in OSS, losing a leg in the Mediterranean theater. Perhaps he had even been one of the original “Venona 14, ” the moles mentioned in Soviet cable traffic as having served in OSS. 

Still, Helms knew there wasn’t much that the Office of Security could actually do about the suspicions of Karlow. CIA could not tap his phone, break into his house, or even follow him around. Those were domestic operations, the province of J. Edgar Hoover. The only thing for it was to turn the Karlow serial over to the FBI. 

Helms was apprehensive about that. From personal involvement in the Cord Meyer case ten years before, he realized how easily FBI loyalty investigations could cause interagency friction. And as one of the few CIA headquarters officers who had known about Pyotr Popov, CIA’s mole in Moscow, Helms knew the potential danger posed by ten-ton FBI surveillances. If Karlow really was guilty, it would be crucial that he not detect the suspicions against him. Otherwise he might cease behavior, such as contact with Soviet cutouts, that could establish his guilt. If, on the other hand, he was innocent—as Helms truly hoped—it would be equally vital that a complete, secure, foolproof inquiry be conducted, without nagging questions about whether FBI indiscretion had prejudiced the outcome. Only then could Karlow’s reputation be fully restored. 

But Helms, ever the professional, suppressed his doubts and followed standard operating procedure. On January 9, 1962, the Peter Karlow serial was officially passed to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. 

SIX DAYS AFTER getting the tip from CIA, the Bureau began what Hoover termed “a discreet investigation” by openly knocking on the door of Karlow’s home. There was a suspicious German couple down the street who might be spies for a hostile country, the G-men said. Could the Bureau use Karlow’s garage to set up listening equipment? Karlow consented; the next morning, his own phone sounded tapped. As a Technical man himself, Karlow knew the signs. He also thought it was odd that the gas company insisted on cleaning his fireplace—for free. Obviously, he was under some kind of suspicion. 

As Papich informed Sheffield Edwards in early February, the FBI coverage established, among other things, that “certain meetings … had been held in the recreation room in the basement of the home of the Subject, ” at which had been present some former and present CIA Technical people from Karlow’s days in Germany. Papich also reminded the Agency security director, as Edwards recorded, that “the general aim of the FBI was, of course, prosecution if a criminal case can be established.” Edwards said CIA had an “open view” on that, though “the primary interest of this Agency, of course, ” was simply to find out if Karlow was a KGB agent, “and if so what Agency information has been compromised by Subject.” As long as the Bureau did not interfere with those objectives, CIA “desired that the FBI conduct a full covert investigation.”

The Bureau complied, maintaining its surveillance of Karlow throughout 1962. On one occasion, agents followed Karlow to Philadelphia, where he entered a storefront carrying a box, then emerged three hours later without it. According to the Bureau surveillance report, “Nothing can be observed within the business establishment inasmuch as Venetian blinds extend across the entire window in front of the store and are kept tightly closed.” But by February of the following year there was still no firm evidence against Karlow, and Hoover, tired of playing out the case, wanted results. Karlow was summoned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office, where he was told by special agents Maurice Taylor and Peter Brent: “You have the right to remain silent.” After a week of hostile grilling, in which he consistently denied being a Soviet agent, Karlow composed a letter to Helms. “I wish to help the FBI in any way I can, both to resolve the case and to clear my name. I have nothing to confess and nothing to conceal. I realize that, through an incredible error … I have come so deeply under suspicion of treason that my career in CIA is ended.” But, Karlow insisted, “I intend to fight any suspicions or allegations of disloyalty or indiscretion in any way that I can, inside and outside CIA and government, until any personal implication or blemish on my record is removed.” 

He never had a chance. The next day, Helms coolly informed him that the matter was out of CIA’s hands; it was entirely within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Karlow went home on administrative leave. Meanwhile, according to CIA counsel Lawrence Houston, “Allegations were coming in from the Bureau about Karlow’s relationship with a Russian who turned out to be a defector. It led to an employee hearing board, which determined that probably he should no longer be on the staff.” On July 5, Karlow limped through the Agency parking lot on his wooden leg and drove away from Langley for the last time. 

But Houston, among others, didn’t think his old OSS colleague would ever have worked for the communists, and was always bothered by the case. “I was sure there was something wrong about this, ” Houston recalled. “And a year or two, a couple of years, later, I went back and asked our people down in Security, and they checked with the Bureau. The Bureau said, ‘Oh, we had the wrong guy.’ ” Two FBI agents who reviewed the case, Courtland Jones and Alexander Neale, confirmed that the FBI ultimately found Karlow innocent. 

“I thought that was absolutely inexcusable, ” Houston said. “But there had already been so much damage done to Peter’s reputation, and so much of our business depends on trust, and he had already moved on with his life, and was pretty bitter toward CIA. So he wasn’t put back on the rolls. Only years later, when the truth finally came out, was he given a rather nice decoration for his long and valuable service, and a good financial settlement for the damage to his career.” 

INTERAGENCY RECRIMINATION over the Karlow and other molehunt cases was still some years away in the early 1960s, but dispute over one source of the Karlow serial—CIA’s new KGB defector—was quick in coming. It is unclear exactly when and how the FBI first learned of Anatoliy Golitsyn, but by June 1962 the Bureau knew all about him. Hoover had one of his infamous eruptions, insisting that McCone explain why he hadn’t been immediately informed. 

The FBI director had some basis for complaint. Although it was “accepted procedure” for defectors to be “handled by CIA through the interrogation and resettling periods, ” it was also standard practice to convene an interagency defector committee once the man was safely west. That way, each agency could decide for itself whether the individual was of any interest, and, if so, how urgent and immediate that agency’s need to debrief him was. 

Typically, the FBI claimed a priority need to interrogate any KGB defector about any Soviet operations within the United States. Things were working more smoothly in this regard than in 1949, when the two sides had scuffled over Ansimov in a Washington restaurant, but a year before Golitsyn there had been a big flap over the Bureau’s lack of access to a former colonel in Polish intelligence, Michael Goleniewski, who had made his initial contact with the U.S. through a letter addressed to Hoover personally. The Agency had obtained this letter in Switzerland and had run Goleniewski as an agent in place, then smuggled him west and debriefed him, all without letting the FBI know what was going on. 

After that episode, Dulles had promised to make it “standard procedure” to let the Bureau know, in a timely manner, about any intelligence defectors. If standard procedure had been followed, then, the Peter Karlow serial would have come to the Bureau in January and would have been a Bureau case from the outset. 

But real life wasn’t always so simple. Defectors were complicated human beings under extreme emotional duress, and the relation between any defector or agent and his handler, or principal, was intrinsically fragile. To introduce any new outside elements while trying to build bonds of trust was dangerous. As Angleton later put it: “Now, assuming an agent of ours comes to the United States, we are presented with a problem, therefore, of: Is he to be transferred to the jurisdiction of the FBI? The moment the answer is yes, we are subjecting that individual to risk.” Angleton recognized that “in order not to jeopardize the domestic activities of the Bureau, and at the same time to give them the full benefits of the individual, ” there had to be “a coordinating process with them, ” but defector-handling was necessarily “a gray area.” That was so, Angleton would say, “not because of jealousies or internecine fighting”—although there was certainly enough of that to go around—but “by virtue of the actuality of a principal-agent relationship.” 

That was especially true in regard to Golitsyn, who was as difficult an agent as his principals had ever handled. He had been testy with Friberg and various CIA personnel on the way from Helsinki, fearing that inadequate precautions had been taken for his safety, and his mood had not improved at CIA’s Ashford Farm. There, under Victorian eaves shagged with ice, his own mind had gone cold. His information, he kept insisting, was so important that he must deal directly with the president of the United States. This access was denied him, and he was sulking. All CIA needed to alienate Golitsyn further was to bring in a bunch of flat footed cops from the FBI. So the Agency had tried to hide Golitsyn from Hoover, at least until the defector warmed to his hosts. And even after the FBI had learned about Golitsyn, McCone refused to make him available. 

The ensuing bureaucratic battle was exacerbated by personal hostility between Hoover and McCone. For all the problems Dulles had caused, Hoover much preferred the bumbling, genial ways of a Donovan man to McCone’s all-business administrative approach, which was in fact much akin to Hoover’s own. “By the early sixties, Mr. Hoover had developed a respect for Dulles, ” Papich recalled. “They didn’t like each other necessarily, but each knew what to expect.” McCone not only ruined that familiarity, but never even tried to make friends with the legendary Hoover. The new DCI was as frosty as his hair was white, his spirit unleavened even by the instinct for camaraderie that was well developed even in the irascible Bedell Smith. “No question, McCone was tough” Papich allowed. “He probably would have liked to toss Hoover into the Potomac.” 

Relations between FBI and CIA became increasingly strained over the question of Bureau access to Golitsyn. President Kennedy had to be brought into the dispute, which was embarrassing to both agencies, as well as highly annoying to the president. McCone reluctantly acceded, and shortly after the Rudolf Abel-Francis Gary Powers exchange of February 10, 1962, Papich and Don Moore, the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence chief, met Golitsyn at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, just four blocks from the White House. 

“That Mayflower meeting covered a lot of ground, ” Papich recalled. The FBI debriefers started about nine o’clock in the morning, stopped for a sandwich, went on, stopped for another sandwich about six, then continued until ten o’clock that night. They questioned Golitsyn about his KGB training, and about Soviet personnel at consulates, embassies, the United Nations. Moore displayed surveillance photos of Soviet diplomats, saying each time, ‘Do you know this man?’ ” 

Golitsyn was gruff. “No, ” he mostly said, but there were several he recognized. 

“What do you know about him?” the agents would ask. 

He never knew very much. Or, if he did, he would say, “Yeah, I know him, but I’m not going to tell you any more now.” And so, despite the wide range of topics covered, the meeting was not very productive for the FBI. “We were disappointed with Golitsyn, because most of the hot stuff he gave related to agents overseas, ” Papich said. “And it was clear that Golitsyn knew a lot more than he was telling. He was a cagey character. He was worried that we would just wring him out for what he knew, and then he wouldn’t have any bargaining power anymore. So he was going to give out his information to us in pieces. He was a bright, arrogant bastard; he even tried asking us questions, to improve his own base of knowledge. Well, we weren’t going to give him any information, and that didn’t make him happy. I don’t think he saw us as people who could do him good, anyway, unless he could have access to the boss. He would have loved to have sat down with J. Edgar; he was that type. But Hoover—no way was he going to meet with any Soviet defector.” 

Moore was even less charmed than Papich, and later claimed to have been put off by Golitsyn’s analysis of the recent Abel-Powers exchange, which was much in the news. Though Papich could not recall Golitsyn’s speaking of the Abel case, Moore remembered Golitsyn theorizing that, just as thim, so the FBI would have tried to double Abel before sending him back to Moscow. At any rate, the KGB would certainly have expected the FBI to do that, Golitsyn warned, and if the FBI had in fact doubled Abel, the KGB would certainly try to turn him back against the Bureau in a deception game. 

“You give me Abel’s secret messages, ” Golitsyn allegedly pleaded. “You need me to analyze them. You give me reports, I give you facts.” 

Moore, who had an intimate familiarity with the Abel case, knew that the Soviet illegal had not been doubled by the FBI. The reasoning struck him as convoluted, speculative, overly conspiratorial. Besides which, Golitsyn was too haughty, too sure of himself. Moore decided that he simply didn’t like the man. “Frankly, ” he would say, “that Golitsyn was a pain in the ass from the word go.” 

But KGB officers don’t come along very often, so Moore didn’t pass up the chance to meet the defector again, a few weeks later, at a yellow-brick CIA technical research facility on 23rd Street in Northwest Washington, adjacent to the old OSS buildings. This time, Moore brought along his deputy, William Branigan, as well as Intelligence Division chief William Sullivan and Russian speaking special agent Alekso Poptanich. Angleton headed a six-man Agency contingent, whom Moore knew as a man who wouldn’t even take off his jacket when Papich arranged an interagency poker game. Golitsyn stood and addressed the group, which sat around a massive mahogany table. Beware of false defectors who will come after me, he said. And beware the Soviet long range plan. He displayed a chart which he had sketched on a sheet of canary paper. In the middle was the KGB, with arms stretching everywhere like an octopus to other states in the Soviet bloc, even to Albania and Yugoslavia, which supposedly were outside Moscow’s sphere of influence. Golitsyn spoke of “phony splits” and “false liberalization” in the communist world, and secret channels of coordination. He was short on detail, but kept using the word “disinformation.” 

The G-men were unimpressed. There was some coughing and shifting of elbows. A silence when Golitsyn waited for questions. A longer one when he said he could be more specific about the Soviet strategy only with Hoover or his boss, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Poptanich, who sat beside the defector, asked in Russian about Soviet spies in the United States. Golitsyn looked at him and said nothing. 

Angleton, who kept his head down, was scribbling in indigo ink on a notepad, drawing a flock of waterfowl on a pond. He said, in his gravelly voice, that he thought Golitsyn should see “Bobby.” 

The KGB man was led from the room while the point was argued. FBI men were against letting Golitsyn see their superiors, because they feared losing control of him. CIA officers thought Golitsyn’s message was potentially so important that he should be allowed higher access; only then would he open up. The debate ended in impasse. 

When Golitsyn was ushered back in, he was questioned closely by Poptanich and Branigan, each of whom had years of field experience in counterespionage. They got some ancillary explanation of KGB organization and pecking orders, but little else. “He couldn’t tell us with any accuracy what the Soviet situation was in Washington, for instance, ” Branigan griped. “He just didn’t know.” 

Papich, who arranged the meeting but did not attend, thought that at least part of the problem was the FBI’s inability to understand the Soviet mind-set. “We didn’t have a single agent that ever worked, or lived, or was assigned in the Soviet Union. We had several fellows, like Poptanich, who could handle the language, but they didn’t have that foreign experience. We didn’t think like them. And what we, in the FBI, meant by counterintelligence was not what a KGB man like Golitsyn had in mind. So naturally, Poptanich was disgusted because he got nowhere trying to talk to Golitsyn.” 

Despite his patent failure to win the defector’s trust, however, an Annual Report of Performance Rating noted that Poptanich had recently “participated in the interrogation of a Soviet defector and his knowledge of the Russian language and mores of the Russian people proved most helpful relative thereto.” His supervisor, Branigan, lauded Poptanich’s refusal to be intimidated by Golitsyn or by CIA pressure. Poptanich had indeed hewn to what was becoming an FBI party platform on the Soviet defector; as Branigan put it: “The FBI was not happy with Golitsyn and did not respect him.” 

GOLITSYN’S REPUTATION WAS meanwhile rising swiftly at CIA, especially since one of his dark predictions seemed to be coming true. On June 5, 1962, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB security officer with the Soviet Disarmament Commission, approached an American diplomat at U.S.-Soviet disarmament talks in Geneva, Switzerland, and whispered that he wished to talk privately with U.S. intelligence. He was met in a safehouse by young CIA officer Tennent H. “Pete” Bagley. After offering Nosenko some liquor and peanuts, Bagley said he would appreciate the Soviet’s speaking clearly and slowly, and in English wherever possible. Nosenko then delivered a great number of sentences, fast, in Russian, while swigging whiskey and munching nuts. Because of the language problem, Bagley had to puzzle out much of what Nosenko said from a tape of the conversation, which had been made automatically by a recorder in the wall, but even then there were gaps. In the early 1960s, portable tape recorders were not the refined machines they later became, and there was much ambient noise. The machine would pick up the crumpling of paper, the scraping of a match, the drone of a distant airplane, yet fail to record key words or phrases. The essence of Nosenko’s message, however, was clear: he was in financial trouble, and would work for CIA as an agent-in-place. To prove his sincerity, he would tell what he knew about KGB penetration of CIA. After hearing him out, Bagley cabled headquarters that Nosenko had “conclusively proven his bona fides.” 

But when Bagley flew home that weekend to make a full report, Angleton was skeptical. All of Nosenko’s information was of the “throwaway” variety, the CI chief said. Nosenko spoke of Department D, but only after Golitsyn had already disclosed it. Nosenko gave specific locations of microphones at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, but Golitsyn had provided approximate locations of some of the microphones six months earlier. Nosenko also said that Pytor Popov had been detected in 1959 by a special KGB “spy dust” sprayed on the shoes of his Western contacts, not blown by a mole in CIA, and that “Sasha” was a low-ranking Army officer, not a high ranking Agency man. Might not Nosenko be a false defector, intended to throw CIA off the trail of its mole(s)? 

Bagley eventually bought that logic. He wondered what disinformation Nosenko would try to feed CIA when he next made contact, as he promised to do whenever he was outside the Soviet bloc. Thanks to Golitsyn, CIA was “keyed in” to an apparent KGB deception game right from the start. 

Golitsyn himself was becoming increasingly impatient with his hosts, however, and with the lack of access they afforded him to higher-ups. He wondered if the British might be more appreciative, especially because he had information which had already allowed them to confront Kim Philby and force a confession. Golitsyn therefore flew to Britain to help MI5 hunt for moles, arriving on January 24—the very day that Kim Philby, after confessing, eluded Western surveillance and hopped onto a Soviet freighter in Beirut. CIA agents converged on Philby’s apartment and confiscated a typewriter ribbon; they turned it over to the FBI, who found no leads. Philby soon afterward surfaced in the Soviet Union. 

Golitsyn returned to the U.S. in June 1963, after his identity was partially leaked to the British press, and was taken under wing by Angleton, who believed that, with the proper approach, he could be immensely valuable. Though the defector still did not see President Kennedy, Angleton did get him an appointment with RFK. Golitsyn held back from the attorney general what he knew about long-range Soviet strategy, but during fall 1963 he began to open up to Angleton, whom he befriended and considered an intellectual equal. In late-night drinking sessions, Angleton elicited from Golitsyn the logic of KGB penetration, and details of the Soviet strategy for winning without fighting. 

Angleton then tried to get Golitsyn to share his big secrets directly with Papich, perhaps hoping that the liaison officer could in turn arrange a meeting between the KGB defector and Hoover. The chance came one Saturday afternoon, when both Papich and Golitsyn happened to be over at Angleton’s North Arlington home. 

“I’m going to be gone for a while, ” Angleton said. 

He stepped out, leaving Golitsyn and Papich sitting in armchairs in the living room. Papich made his pitch. 

“We’re both of Slav background, ” he began. He related how his family had immigrated from Yugoslavia, what the country meant to him. Even if it was just an extemporaneous spiel, Papich meant every word of it. Golitsyn was listening intently. “You’re just like my father, in many respects, ” Papich went on. “You’ve come here and you’ve got freedom that you never had before. Your children are going to have freedom they never had before. You’ve got a future here that you never would have had.” And so on, until finally there was a silence. 

“Are you finished?” Golitsyn asked. 

“Yes.” 

“Thank you, ” the defector said, and then went quiet. He had no questions, no observations; he wasn’t going to share details of the Soviet Union’s master plan with any FBI man except Hoover, no matter how favorably recommended by Angleton. 

But Angleton himself was willing to share the defector’s theories with Papich in long talks after work at their homes. They lived only a few blocks apart, in North Arlington, and Papich would find himself at two or three o’clock in the morning in the backyard greenhouse where Angleton grew orchids. The hobby had become a full blown obsession for Angleton, who frequently traveled as an orchid salesman for cover on sensitive missions abroad. When he took his custom hybrids to flower shows, he showed them with the professionals, and sometimes won prizes. It was always warm in the orchid house, and Angleton would be diddling around with his plants while they talked, but it got them away from the families, and there were a couple of old wood benches where Papich could sit down. So it was among the leafy shadows and eternal summer of the greenhouse that Papich learned the details of what Golitsyn called the Soviets’ “long-range plan.” 

Greatly simplified, this plan called for massive political warfare, buttressed by secret intelligence deceptions. At the Twentieth Communist World Congress, in 1959, the U.S.A. had been designated the Main Enemy, but at the same time it had been decided to try a new approach. There was to be a thaw in relations, and a return to Leninist deceptions like the Trust and the New Economic Program (NEP), which had once convinced the U.S. that the Soviets were reforming. The KGB was to be reorganized to project an image of disunity and weakness in the communist world. By playing up false splits between communist nations, the Soviets would hope to divide and confuse the West, ultimately weakening it. Over the short term, the objective was economic aid to the communist world; over the long term, the goal was to end the Cold War, which would cause the U.S. to disarm. 

Papich was skeptical. Even if the KGB had been divided, as Golitsyn said, into an elite “inner” core which knew about such things as secret bloc coordination, and a much larger “outer” KGB, which did not, hundreds if not thousands of people would eventually have to know. How could such a big secret be totally kept from the West? 

The answer, Angleton said, was contained in the question. Human nature being what it was, such a secret surely couldn’t be kept forever; therefore, the Soviets must exploit human nature to keep the West from believing the secret, once it was out. That would not be too difficult, for the Western mind naturally wanted to believe in Soviet weakness and evolution, and probably would, if that false message came from a plurality of Soviet sources—especially when those sources provided other information that was checkably true. Where the NEP had used Western contacts with the Trust to inject its reformist message into British intelligence, Golitsyn said, the KGB would now create a new “Trust” of anticommunists—defectors and “walk-ins” from Soviet intelligence. 

False information would even be planted on genuine defectors and unimportant agents in the KGB, on the assumption that these would be cultivated by the West —a process Golitsyn compared to the deliberate misbriefing of “doomed pilots” in World War II. Disinformants would confirm the reality of bogus schisms within the communist world, perpetuate a false picture of communist designs, and deflect from true information provided by defectors such as Golitsyn. Nosenko could be part of that strategy, Angleton reasoned, even if his information overlapped with Golitsyn’s on many counts; eventually, once his credibility was established, he would take CIA for a ride. Disinformation messages would be shifted over time, to accord with Western preconceptions, and the net effect would be to keep the West from taking seriously the idea of any secret Soviet plot. 

Papidh was still not convinced. How would the Soviets know whether and when certain information was believed by CIA, and when and how to shift their messages accordingly? 

Angleton smiled. Here at last, he said, was the “final cause” of Soviet penetration, its ultimate logic, the key to KGB strategy. Although the most obvious purpose of any Soviet mole was simply to relay secrets to Moscow Center, the most valuable type of secret was knowledge of how KGB disinformation was being interpreted, so that it could be tailored to Western perspectives. The penetration and disinformation agents were to work in tandem: the “outside” men supplying the disinformation, and the “inside” reporting what was thought of it. If operating successfully, that “feedback loop” would leave Western intelligence agencies, and their sponsor governments, completely at the mercy of the KGB—unable to distinguish falsehood from fact. 

And Golitsyn believed, as did Angleton, that the Soviets had indeed penetrated Western intelligence to the point where such a feedback loop could successfully operate. The defector employed a medical analogy to describe the severity of the problem: “When the patient refuses to recognize it exists, it grows and spreads, with bad cells infecting good cells.” Western intelligence was “sick” from the cancer of penetration at various levels. The French and British and other services were already dead; CIA had been penetrated broadly at a fairly low level, and was gravely ill; the FBI, because of at least three penetrations in its New York and Washington field offices, was “dying.” 

“I listened with great interest to what Jim was getting from Golitsyn, ” Papich later said. “To a certain extent, Jim sold me a message on that; some people might say I was Jim’s man at the FBI. I was very much concerned about all of our vulnerabilities, because our inclination at the FBI was sometimes to accept things at face value, to be impressed only when a defector gave us cases. Well, the whole idea of disinformation agents made me realize that we had to look at all our cases goddamned carefully.” 

But Papich immediately understood that the new Angleton-Golitsyn line was bound to be “controversial” and “irritating, ” especially to FBI officers who had already soured on Golitsyn. When Papich relayed the essence of Golitsyn’s thesis to others at the FBI, it was rejected out of hand. Privately, G-men like Don Moore and William Branigan would make fun of what they called Golitsyn’s “Monster Plot, ” while simply telling Papich and Angleton that the idea was “too speculative.” 

Strictly speaking, that was true; though CIA had established Golitsyn’s bona fides, his account of the new long-range strategy had not yet been independently confirmed. The Agency could document a secret KGB meeting in May 1959 and some subsequent reorganization, and could glean a return to Leninism from open party sources, and even Nosenko had confirmed the existence of Department D. But otherwise everything rested ultimately on Golitsyn’s word. “We need confirmation; we need more detail, ” the FBI counterespionage experts told Papich. The liaison officer sensed that there were other reasons why his colleagues didn’t want to believe Golitsyn. Hoover had always said, “An attack on any employee of the FBI will be considered an attack on me personally, ” and in alleging that three employees in Hoover’s two most important field offices were Soviet agents, Golitsyn caused a closing of ranks against the very possibility. Whereas the Bureau was only too eager to chase down alleged Soviet moles in CIA, it stubbornly refused to investigate Golitsyn’s allegations about communist spies in the FBI, saying that the defector’s leads were not specific enough. Angleton countered by suggesting, through Papich, that Golitsyn’s memory might be jogged, or his deductions sharpened, if he were allowed to view certain FBI personnel and operational files in sanitized form, with sensitive methods and sources concealed. But the Bureau flatly refused all CIA requests to examine its files. “We never gave Golitsyn any of our material, despite Jim’s many requests that we do so, ” FBI counterintelligence man James Nolan recalled. 

Yet Papich knew that FBI resentment of CIA’s star defector ran even deeper than unwillingness to believe the KGB had penetrated the Bureau. There was also a will to believe that the Bureau had successfully penetrated the KGB. Indeed, the FBI had just recently made its first-ever recruitments within Soviet intelligence, and though Golitsyn would cast them as probable disinformation agents, the Bureau wanted to believe they were bona fide. 

The first of the FBI’s two new sources was forty-year old Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, nicknamed “Fatso by his Bureau handlers and officially code-named “Fedora.” He served as a consultant to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, but his real task was to collect scientific and technological secrets from KGB spies in the U.S. One afternoon in March 1962, he simply walked into the FBI’s New York Field Office, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and claimed to be disenchanted by lack of advancement within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. For cash, he would provide the FBI with the identities of other KGB officers, furnish Soviet military-technological “wish lists, and report on Red Army missile capacity and nuclear development plans. 

The second new FBI source was Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, code-named “Top Hat.” An officer in the GRU and a junior military attache at the UN, he approached an FBI agent in New York in early 1962. Claiming to be disillusioned because he had to remit 90 percent of his salary to Moscow, he agreed to further meetings in a room at the Cameron Hotel, on West 86th Street. Soon he was serving up the identities of GRU cipher clerks, gossiping about political developments in Moscow, and bad-mouthing guidance systems on Soviet missiles (so inaccurate, he said, that they could not hit Miami from Cuba).

Fedora and Top Hat were so prized and so jealously protected by the Bureau that for much of 1962 their existence was hidden from CIA. Theoretically, enough contextual information about both men should have been turned over to CIA for Angleton to assess their bona fides, even if their true identities were obscured. But Hoover bypassed Angleton and sent reports based on Fedora’s and Top Hat’s information straight to President Kennedy. When one report described Fedora as “a source of unknown reliability, ” the FBI director took up his infamous blue-inked fountain pen and slashed out the “un.” 

By 1963, CIA had to be informed of both sources, however, because both were begging the FBI to supply “feed material, doctored or low-grade intelligence, to keep their KGB superiors happy. That was a complicated process which required careful coordination. Military secrets had to be cleared by Military Intelligence, naval secrets by Naval Intelligence, etc. The game would be lost, moreover, if doctored intelligence passed by the FBI did not cohere with what the Soviets might be getting from doubles run separately by CIA. Indeed, the necessity of coordination in such double-agent schemes had been one of the great CI lessons taught by the Dusko Popov and Kopff-Baarn cases of World War II. So by 1963, CIA had been brought into the feeding of Fedora and Top Hat. 

“They checked with us, and there was a mechanism for clearance of feed material for the two UN diplomats, ” Angleton’s deputy Scotty Miler confirmed. “They didn’t tell us all the details of how they were met and how they were handled, but that wasn’t really important. We knew enough, not only from Golitsyn, but from other sources, that we weren’t too sure the agents were kosher. And it was our business to tell the FBI why we didn’t think Fedora and Top Hat were for real: because they weren’t giving the proper poop, because they were asking for things that fit in with what we thought the Soviets could check on, and because of what they told us about Soviet objectives, some of which was counter to Golitsyn.” 

There were other caution flags. It seemed odd to Papich, as to Angleton, that, after almost a half-century without a Soviet walk-in, the FBI should suddenly get two of them. Their reporting ranged across compartments, which was odd in the notoriously compartmented KGB. And much of what they provided was dated. “They gave us cases, ” Papich said, “but most of them we knew already.” 

Those few cases the Bureau hadn’t known about seemed of dubious value, at least to Papich and Angleton. In 1963, for instance, Fedora said that the Soviets had a spy in a British nuclear-research facility. Suspicion soon hovered over Giuseppe Martelli, a physicist at Culham Laboratory. Investigation revealed rendezvous information locked in a drawer in his desk, and partially used coding’ pads for secret communications. But, according to MIs’s Peter Wright, “no evidence had been found that Martelli had access to secrets or was passing them to a foreign power.” To Angleton and Papich, as to Wright, the Martelli case seemed clearly of the “throwaway variety, ” as if designed to build up the credibility of the source at little real cost to Soviet operations. 

The very nature of Fedora’s approach to the FBI caused suspicion. “I got turned off on Fedora right from the beginning, ” Papich said. “If you’re doing something, and you’ve been trained in such-and-such a way, overall, you’re going to try to adhere to orthodox principles. In football, for instance, you’re going to punt on fourth down, for the most part. And in espionage, you’re not just going to stroll into the enemy camp in broad daylight and volunteer. But what the hell did Fedora do? He walked into our goddamn office in New York! Right on 72nd Street, not too far away from the Soviet consulate. And you don’t do that if you’re going to defect, knowing that it’s surveilled by your own people. If you do it that way, and you’re a bona-fide agent, you’re going to get your head chopped off.” 

But when Papich made that case to Don Moore, the Bureau’s Soviet CI chief, he got nowhere. “Sam, maybe just walking in one day was the best way of doing it, because it’s what the Soviets would least expect, ” Papich would recall Moore as saying. “He knew just where to go, which floor. He had confidence he wasn’t going to get burned, he had confidence he wasn’t being tailed by his own people—all that traffic and whatnot in New York, who the hell was going to see him going into the field office? That’s not the way we would do it, but he did it that way, and people don’t always adhere to orthodox principles. Sometimes you’re not going to punt on fourth down. Sonny Jurgensen sometimes didn’t; sometimes he’d throw a pass. Well, the same thing can happen in counterintelligence.” 

THOUGH GOLITSYN WAS beginning to widen their longstanding philosophical split, FBI and CIA did manage to team up at the field level in a number of cases during the early 1960s. Good cooperation did exist along-side strong disagreement. In some areas, Papich effected liaison so smoothly that the net effect was a sort of “golden days” during the Kennedy period, which obscured the deeper conflicts already being formed over molehunts, deception theory, and even assassination. 

In general, liaison was most effective when practical or case-oriented, at least from the FBI’s point of view. In 1961, for instance, before CIA’s new Moscow Station Chief Paul Garbler was dispatched to the USSR, Angleton reportedly gave him a number of cases developed with Papich. “I’ve been working with the FBI, ” Angleton told Garbler at a goodbye party at William Harvey’s house. “We’ve got a couple of cases where the source has returned to the Soviet Union and we want to maintain contact. I’ll let you know the details tomorrow and you tell me if you can handle it.” At some point, the Bureau had even been cut in on Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the GRU colonel who had been working for CIA for two years. 

In spring 1962, when it was believed that Penkovskiy might visit Washington, a complicated FBICIA watch was kept on all planes arriving from Europe. The agencies’ instructions to Penkovskiy read, in part: “Go to the Washington monument approaching it on foot from Constitution Avenue and Fifteenth Street. Walk around the monument. You will see one of your friends. If he is holding a newspaper do not contact him. If he is not holding a newspaper follow him to a waiting car.” But Penkovskiy was executed before he ever made it to the United States. 

When clear security interests seemed at stake, Hoover did not mind acquiescing in certain of CIA’s extralegal adventures. From February 21 to March 19, 1963, FBICIA cooperation in the Hunter mail-opening project was expanded to include correspondence with Latin America; the FBI provided CIA about 180 names for watch-listing. During this period, the two agencies also collaborated on a “black-bag job”—a burglary—of the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. This operation had the cooperation of Philippe de Vosjoli, the French Western Hemisphere intelligence chief, who remained inside the embassy after midnight and let the team in. The objective was apparently to see what material French intelligence agents in the U.S. might be passing to their superiors in Paris, some of whom Golitsyn and Vosjoli suspected were working for Moscow. 

Cooperation likewise bloomed in Mexico City, where CIA’s Station Chief David Atlee Phillips worked well with Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attach’e, on the case of an American military traitor. A mole in the Cuban Embassy had given CIA a letter offering to reveal American military secrets. The letter provided a room and telephone number at a local hotel and asked for a private meeting. “Before assuming responsibility for the case [Anderson] wanted to be sure the man was an American, ” Phillips related. “He asked if I had an agent who could contact him under the guise of a Cuban intelligence officer responding to the message and find out more about the stranger’s proposal. I had just such an agent, ’Enrique, ’ who spoke fluent English.” 

The two agencies arranged for Enrique to meet the letter-writer in a Mexico City restaurant, with Phillips seated at the next table, not four feet away, listening. As Phillips reported the next day to Anderson, it turned out the novice spy was a middlegrade United States military officer who needed enough money to allow him to flee a hen-pecking wife. “I don’t know how the case turned out, ” Phillips said, “but it must have been a surprise and a shock to the disloyal military man when, eventually, there was a knock on his door from the FBI.” 

Despite such teamwork, however, the Bureau still faced digs about being a bunch of flat feet. “In the world of intelligence, FBI agents—that is, career FBI men who have been through the FBI Academy, as distinct from sub-agents who only work outside the Bureau—stand out just about like pink carnations in a vase of red roses, ” wrote former OPC officer James McCargar in a 1963 book published under the pseudonym Christopher Felix. “Perhaps the widespread comments on their heavy preference for gabardine have now led the Bureau’s agents to change into less uniform garb. But experience tells me no one has been able to do anything about their expressionless faces and their transparent reticence. They are of a mold—not unlike the comic strips’ Dick Tracy, who any fan knows only laughs once a year and can keep his counsel for as long as five years at a time, no matter how baffled his Chief becomes.”

Such jibes were good-natured enough, returned in kind by Papich and others at the Bureau, and seen as part of the good macho shit-giving tradition that boys learn on playgrounds. Disputes about defectors remained theoretical and far from explosive, and there was some afterglow from the mutual respect Dulles had managed to establish with Hoover. In his own book, published the same year as McCargar’s, the retired DCI saw interagency relations as a virtual continuum of rainbows, broken only by the blackness of misinformation. 

“There are [certain] kinds of myths … of the spiteful or backbiting sort, that one sometimes hears in more restricted and ‘knowing’ circles, ” Dulles wrote. “Since the FBI and the CIA work very closely in the field of counterintelligence, it was to be expected that rumors would come to life in some quarters that they were working against each other, or in competition, and that relations between them are not good. The facts of the matter are that relations between them are on a wholly satisfactory basis. Each agency passes to the other all information that belongs to its special province. There is no failure of coordination.” 

Dulles should have known better, even if he was merely engaging in PR. Liaison was generally good during 1963, but there had been plenty of bungles even during the latter years of Dulles’ own tenure, and there were bigger problems looming. Even as Dulles wrote, a failure of coordination on the Cubela-Trafficante plots, and poor FBI-CIA coverage of Oswald in Mexico, had perhaps been factoring into the imminent death of President Kennedy. Soon, too, interagency infighting would preclude the truth about that tragic event from being fully known. Only then, as CIA and FBI struggled to reconcile conflicting views on the assassination, would the full importance of the defectors controversy, and the molehunt, begin to emerge.

CHAPTER TEN 

SINISTER IMPLICATIONS 

A CHILL MIST CAME off Lake Geneva on the evening of January 23, 1964, nine weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy. A CIA officer hung back in the shadows across from Cinéma ABC at 42 Rue Rhône, watching people buy tickets in the strong pool of light under the marquee for Dr. Strangelove. An electrified trolley rattled past, blocking his view for a moment, but then he saw his man. Casually and at the same moment, they walked toward each other. Amidst the jostle of entering and exiting patrons, a matchbook changed hands invisibly. 

The KGB man was a full block away before he opened it and read the ballpoint: “20 Chemin François Lemann.” After an hour of taxis and buses for counter surveillance, he met the CIA man at the safehouse. 

They drank. The KGB officer got drunk. He offered “to come over.” 

An escape was plotted. On February 4, the KGB agent failed to turn up for lunch with the rest of the Soviet delegation in the dining room of the Palais des Nations. Most of the Soviets were flying that night to Moscow, so no one had noticed when he removed his things from the hotel on Avenue Wendt. By noon he was in the back seat of a sedan with tinted glass and diplomatic plates, disguised as a U.S. Army officer, smoking American cigarettes, wending through the Alps toward Germany. 

The KGB defector’s debriefing would soon assume an awesome significance, for he was America’s only source of information on Lee Harvey Oswald’s “lost years” in the USSR. Both FBI and CIA agreed that this man could answer the riddle of a possible Soviet role in President Kennedy’s death. The fight would come over whether he spoke the truth. 

FROM ITS INCEPTION, the official U.S. government investigation into JFK ’s death put politics, or policy, at a premium to fact. Obvious delinquencies and cover-ups would later lead conspiracy theorists to suspect government complicity in the assassination. In fact, what was covered up was indications of a communist role. On November 23, Helms’ assistant, Thomas Karamessines, was put in a state of near-panic upon hearing that Mexican authorities were about to arrest and interrogate Silvia Duran, a Cuban consular official who had met with Oswald and, it later developed, had sex with him several times during his visit. As Karamessines later said, “CIA feared that the Cubans were responsible for the assassination, and that Duran might reveal this during an interrogation.” That, in turn, might lead to an international crisis that could literally mean the end of the world. Faced with the absolute ultimate in “situation ethics, ” Karamessines sent a flash cable to Mexico Station: “Arrest of Silvia Duran is extremely serious matter…. Request you insure that her arrest is kept absolutely secret, that no information from her is published or leaked, that all such info is cabled to us.” 

When U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann questioned Duran’s insistence that her only contact with Oswald had been to process his visa request, Helms cabled Mexico Station chief David Atlee Phillips, warning that the ambassador must not go public with his fears. “There is distinct feeling here, ” Helms wrote, “that Ambassador is pushing this case too hard … and that we could well create flap with Cubans which could have serious repercussions.” 

The FBI, too, acted to obscure any possible communist connection. Within hours of the president’s death, two key Kostikov-related documents—the October 18 cable from CIA, stating that Kostikov had met with Oswald, and a Hunter (mail-opening) report, indicating that Oswald had mentioned Kostikov in a November 9 note to the Soviet Embassy—were removed from the Dallas office by order of Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. 

When special agent James Hosty was called to testify before the Warren Commission in 1964, he found that FBI files which he had intended to cite about the Kostikov connection were missing. Without those documents, he could not testify about their contents. When he returned from the hearings, the Kostikov documents had mysteriously appeared back in his file with a note attached: “Removed from Hosty’s inbox on November 22.” The withholding of that Kostikov information from the public had been ordered, Clarence Kelley later concluded after viewing the FBI assassination files, “because the White House seemingly considered the risk of a confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Kennedy assassination was too great.” 

It was just such a desire to avoid world war, in fact, that led to creation of the Warren Commission. After John McCone briefed Robert Kennedy and new president Lyndon Johnson about CIA’s anti-Castro plots on November 24, both RFK and Johnson were haunted by suspicions that the president had been killed in retaliation for attempts on Castro’s life. The next day, worried that evidence of Soviet-Cuban complicity “could lead us into a war that could cost forty million lives, ” Johnson directed that “speculation about Oswald’s motivation should be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting the thought that this was a Communist conspiracy.” Thus arose, on November 29, an official commission of inquiry under Chief Justice Earl Warren. “The President told me how serious the situation was, ” Warren recalled. “He said there had been wild rumors, and that there was the international situation to think of…. If the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war.” Commission members were soon confronted by the same conspiracy conundrum: “If we find out it was the Russians, ” one commission lawyer wondered aloud during a staff meeting, “will it mean World War III?” 

Even if Warren’s commission had wanted to find a communist role, however, staff lawyers quickly realized that the FBI, which would end up doing most of the legwork, was unlikely to provide them with evidence that would lead down that avenue. The Bureau had already come under fire for failing to protect JFK. If it were to be shown that Hoover had failed to detect and thwart a foreign conspiracy, the FBI director might well lose his job. Commission members knew that Hoover would do whatever it took to shield the FBI from criticism; early on, the staff learned that the FBI had hidden the fact that agent James Hosty’s name was in Oswald’s address book (Marina had written it there after Hosty visited her house, a few weeks before the assassination, to ask about Oswald).

Hoover’s duplicity on that matter, and more sociological factors, soon led to a subtle bias at the commission toward the Agency and against the Bureau. Commission lawyers admired their sophisticated CIA contacts, many from the same Ivy League schools they had attended. FBI men, by contrast, seemed plodding. CIA analysts did not dissuade commission members of that opinion. They, too, felt that the FBI had been derelict in its handling of Oswald. 

The Bureau, for its part, was not entirely happy with the cooperation it was getting from CIA. After November 23, when the Agency told the FBI that Kostikov was “an identified KGB officer” associated with the group “responsible for sabotage and assassination, ” the Agency was under great pressure to explain why it hadn’t earlier warned the FBI that Oswald might be dangerous. “We do not participate in the actual work of protecting the president or planning his trips within the U.S.A., ” one CIA report stated weakly, by way of rationalization. 

FBI investigators could also have stood to know about the Castro schemes, and CIA officers fretted that the Bureau might make a connection between the Mafia plots and Kennedy’s death. Sheffield Edwards met Johnny Rosselli after the Kennedy assassination, perhaps to discuss Rosselli’s belief that Castro had “doubled” Trafficante’s hit squad and turned it back against the president—but Edwards worried that the FBI was tailing them and spying on the meetings. Perhaps it was just such FBI surveillance that led Papich to query CIA in January 1964 whether they were plotting to kill the Cuban leader. The official answer, as Papich recorded in a memo, was that “The Agency currently is not involved in any activity which includes plans to assassinate Castro.” 

That information was passed to the two FBI section chiefs working the JFK assassination, and to the Bureau supervisors responsible for anti-Castro activities, who got the misleading impression that CIA had never conspired to kill Castro. Papich, being a good soldier, revealed nothing of his knowledge of the earlier CIA plots, which he (and those few others at the FBI who knew about them) believed had only reached the “discussion stage.” The Bureau’s expert on Cuban matters was never informed of the CIA-Mafia schemes, or of Castro’s September 7 retaliation threat—which seemed to the FBI expert, when he learned of it years later, “a pointed signal.” 

The Bureau’s bitterness only deepened, moreover, as it shared post assassination leads with CIA, but felt it got little in return. For instance, on November 23, according to Bureau documents, the FBI briefed a “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” on matters relating to the assassination. Although he denied it, there would later be speculation that “George Bush” was the future president, who was at the time managing a Texas based offshore-oil firm. That position might have put him in contact with George DeMohrenschildt, a Texas-based petroleum engineer who specialized in scouting offshore sites. DeMohrenschildt, a Russian èmigrè investigated by the FBI for alleged communist affiliations, had been Oswald’s closest Dallas contact before the assassination. 

But even as the FBI shared its information with CIA’s George Bush, whoever he was, yet another Agency failure to warn the FBI of imminent danger was about to obstruct permanently any probe into a possible conspiracy. Within twenty-four hours of the president’s death, CIA analysts prepared a memorandum covering the facts they knew at the time. As James Johnston, staff lawyer for a later congressional reinvestigation of the Dallas tragedy, described the memo’s contents: “They [CIA] knew that Oswald had once defected to the Soviet Union. They knew that he made a trip to Mexico City two months before the assassination and talked to Soviet Vice Consul Kostikov about a visa. And they believed that Kostikov was a KGB assassination and sabotage expert. From this, their memorandum argued, there was reason enough to believe that Oswald was part of a foreign plot. If this were true, CIA analysts predicted, then Oswald himself might be killed before he could talk.” 

The gist of the memorandum, according to Johnston, was to be passed through CIA liaison to the FBI—with the warning that Oswald could be in danger. “Unfortunately, relations between the two agencies were strained, and liaison was awkward, ” Johnston later lamented. Oswald, while in police custody, was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, before the FBI received the message. 

ON NOVEMBER 26, 1963, perhaps out of anger over CIA’s failure to warn the FBI about Oswald’s safety, President Johnson gave the FBI the lead responsibility for investigating JFK’s death. By some accounts, the Agency initially welcomed playing second fiddle, because it wanted its own efforts to be as independent as possible. But within a day of Johnson’s decision, the FBI’s expanded duties seemed to be having just the reverse effect. CIA’s Mexico City station refused to cooperate with a Bureau team that tried to wrest away its list of informants, and on November 27 FBI legat Clark Anderson cabled headquarters to complain that, according to the CIA people in Mexico City, only the Agency had “jurisdiction in getting investigative results abroad.” 

An FBI supervisor was sent down from Washington to try to clear up the dispute. CIA Station Chief David Phillips reluctantly agreed to let the Bureau run the show. But it was not long before a special Warren Commission delegation had to travel to Mexico to handle problems of coordination, especially in the area of possible Cuban involvement. 

One difficulty was that the FBI, being a domestic law enforcement agency, did not have enough foreign contacts to conduct a meaningful investigation. For instance, after a Mexican woman and her daughter claimed to have seen Oswald with two other gringos at a party at the Cuban Embassy, the FBI interviewed her twice but, having no way to confirm or deny the story, simply left it alone. Nor did the Bureau conduct any follow-up investigation to determine the identity of a “mystery passenger” who had reportedly departed Mexico City for Havana aboard a Cubana Airlines jet on November 22. 

The FBI similarly failed to follow up on information received by CIA headquarters from its Mexico Station on December 3, 1963, about the suspicious activities of Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban-American who left the U.S. for Cuba the day after the assassination. Lopez’s itinerary was confirmed by several sources, including one who reported hearing, according to a March 20, 1964, memo to the director of CIA from Mexico Station, “that Gilberto Lopez, U.S. citizen, was involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.” The Lopez case was passed to the FBI, but, as a later CIA memo tersely recorded, “FBI furnished no further info on subject.” Grilled years later by a Senate committee, the FBI agents handling the Oswald investigation could not account for their failure to pursue the Lopez lead. 

Liaison did improve after Angleton’s CI Staff took over CIA’s assassination probe in early 1964. The move was ordered by Helms, he later said, because the CI Staff “had through the years the responsibility for carrying on liaison with the FBI, [and] was in a better position and used to dealing with the Bureau.” That was only the official reason for the shift, however. Unofficially, Helms wanted to remove the Agency’s Soviet Division, which Angleton believed was penetrated by the KGB, from any direct role in investigating possible KGB complicity in the president’s death. 

In most areas, Angleton had little difficulty coordinating with the Bureau. Shortly after assuming control of CIA’s inquiry, for example, he contacted FBI Assistant Director Sullivan and said, “It would be well for both McCone and Hoover to be aware that the Commission might ask the same questions wondering whether they would get different replies from the heads of the two agencies.” The CI chief therefore suggested that the heads of the two organizations rehearse their answers so as not to tell conflicting stories. Examples of possible questions and how they should be answered: 

“(1) Q. Was Oswald ever an agent of the CIA? 

A. No. 

(2) Q. Does the CIA have any credible evidence showing that a conspiracy existed to assassinate President Kennedy? 

A. No.” 

Despite Angleton’s good relations with Sullivan and Papich, however, there was an inability to reconcile the larger, institutional difference in mind-sets. Told by Angleton staffer Birch O’Neal on November 27 that Kostikov’s KGB role was known “on the basis of an analysis, ” Papich pressed: “Do you have anything more specific which would pinpoint him as being a member of that department?” O’Neal admitted the case was wholly deductive, but agreed to prepare a statement for Hoover, laying out the case. “Keep it right down, very brief and very simple, ” Papich reminded him. O’Neal conferred with a CIA colleague, probably someone in Raymond Rocca’s CI-research section, who indicated his “firm belief” that Kostikov was a KGB assassinations specialist and agreed to outline CIA analysis of the point. But it was to be four years before the FBI finally accepted, on the basis of other, non-analytical CIA reporting, that Kostikov was a KGB assassinations man. That suspension of belief allowed the Bureau considerably more freedom to assure a suspicious public that Oswald had been a lone loony. 

That conclusion, reached officially by the FBI on December 9, 1963, had in fact colored the Bureau’s investigation from the start. As Mexico City legat Anderson later said, he proceeded at all times under the “impression, ” conveyed to him by Bureau headquarters, that Oswald was the sole assassin and not part of any conspiracy. He therefore “tried to stress, ” to the skeptical ambassador and to his CIA contacts, “that every bit of information that we had developed in Washington, at Dallas, and elsewhere, indicated that this was a lone job.” That conclusion was bolstered around the turn of the year, when the Bureau sent Jack and Morris Childs, two FBI moles working in the American Communist Party as part of an operation code-named Solo, to visit the Cuban Embassy. The Childses reported that Oswald had indeed discussed assassination with the Cubans, but that the offer had been turned down. 

This report matched most FBI agents’ intuitions. Neither the KGB nor its Cuban offshoot, the highly professional DGI, would have hired an unstable loser like Oswald, the Bureau’s reasoning ran. Nor would Castro or Khrushchev have risked U.S. discovery and retaliation— such as an invasion of Cuba, or even world war—merely to replace a liberal like Kennedy with the more conservative Lyndon Johnson. Nor would speculation about a communist role serve either the country or the Bureau well. Therefore William Sullivan leaked, on what he later said were Hoover’s orders, the news that “An exhaustive FBI report now nearly ready for the White House will indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy.” 

That story, which ran nationally on December 13, caused a direct clash between Hoover and McCone. After the Bureau’s ability to conduct an “exhaustive” inquiry in three weeks was questioned by columnist Drew Pearson, Hoover suspected that McCone was leaking anti-Bureau information. According to a heavily redacted December 1963 FBI memo, “Relations with the CIA, ” which later turned up in the FBI’s file on Pearson, Hoover was upset because “Information developed by Mr. DeLoach has indicated that John McCone, Director, CIA, has attacked the Bureau in a vicious and underhanded manner characterized with sheer dishonesty.” There should be a “firm and forthright confrontation” with the CIA director, the FBI memo urged, to discourage any such future “attack against the Bureau.” Hoover jotted “OK.” 

Papich went to McCone and told him, diplomatically but directly, of the FBI director’s concerns. On December 16, McCone telephoned Hoover to appease him.

“I know the importance the President places on this investigation you are making, ” McCone said. “He asked me personally whether CIA was giving you full support. I said we were, but I just wanted to be sure that you felt so.” 

Hoover was soothed when McCone agreed the main responsibility for the investigation fell on the Bureau. If the Bureau said there was no foreign plot, CIA would play along—especially since that was the answer the White House wanted publicized. 

While the public record was being censored, however, Angleton was considering more carefully, and secretly, the specter of a possible KGB plot. After an all-nighter at FBI headquarters, Papich had driven to Langley and was in Angleton’s office by 10:30 a.m. on the day after the assassination, where the CI chief apprised him of certain “sinister implications.” Angleton was bothered by Golitsyn’s ominous 1961 warning about the KGB’s plotting to kill a “Western political leader, ” by the mystery of Oswald’s travels in the USSR, and by other unresolved questions. 

CIA had heard, for instance, that Kostikov had planned in advance to leave Mexico on November 22, and that a Cubana Airlines flight to Havana was delayed for six hours on the tarmac in Mexico City on the night of the assassination, awaiting an unidentified passenger. The man had finally arrived at the airport in a twin-engine aircraft, then failed to go through Customs, where he would have needed to identify himself by displaying a passport. The Cubana plane took off and the mysterious passenger rode in the cockpit to Havana, precluding any identification by the passengers. Mexican surveillance soon established that Kostikov had remained in Mexico City, but Angleton still wondered who the passenger had been, why he flew to Cuba on the day the president died, and why he had taken such pains to conceal his identity. 

Similar questions swirled around Gilberto Lopez, the Cuban-American who, by some reports to CIA, had been involved in Kennedy’s death, and whose actions the FBI inexplicably failed to probe. Lopez had lived in Tampa, which was Santos Trafficante’s base of operations, and he had visited Cuba for several weeks during May 1962, precisely when Trafficante had claimed to be sending his agents into Cuba to poison Castro. Lopez was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, whose leaflets Oswald had distributed, and his wife and others characterized Lopez as pro-Castro. 

It was also known that Lopez had a brother in the Cuban military who was studying in the Soviet Union. On November 17, 1963, the day President Kennedy’s Dallas limousine route was announced, Lopez was at a get-together of the Tampa Chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, where color slides of Cuba were shown. CIA knew from several informants that Lopez had been at the residence for some time waiting for an important telephone call—the “go ahead order” for him to leave the United States. Lopez obtained a Mexican tourist card at the Honorary Consulate of Mexico in Tampa on November 20. Then he had departed for Texas. 

What he did there was not known. At twelve noon on the day after the assassination, according to a CIA source, “Lopez entered Mexico on foot from Laredo, Texas … and proceeded by bus to Mexico [City,] where he entered Cuban Embassy. On 27 Nov he left Embassy for Cuba on Cubana flight 465 and was the only passenger allowed on the plane.” Thereafter, Lopez was reportedly not working in Cuba but spent most of his time playing dominoes— strange and luxurious treatment, indeed, for a purported dissident who had once defected to Cuba’s main enemy. 

Also pointing to a possible Cuban role were CIA phone taps on November 26. On that morning, Cuban figurehead President Osvaldo Dorticos, in Havana, telephoned his ambassador in Mexico City, Joaquin Hernandez Armas, to inquire whether Silvia Duran, the Cuban Embassy employee who had spent time with Oswald during his visit, had been asked anything about “money” by the Mexican authorities. Armas said she had not been, but in closing the phone call, the CIA report said, “Dorticos again asked if Duran had been questioned about ‘money.’ Hernandez said no.” Nonetheless, Mann, the U.S. ambassador, told Washington he believed “that Dorticos’ preoccupation with the money angle of interrogation of Silvia Duran” corroborated “the strong possibility that a down payment was made to Oswald in the Cuban Embassy here, presumably with promise of a subsequent payment after assassination, ” and that the purpose of Oswald’s journey to Mexico had been to receive that payment and to “set up get away route.” 

Although CIA intercepted another phone call between Dorticos and Hernandez Armas the following day, in which the Cuban president said his question about money referred to another matter, Angleton wondered whether the Cubans hadn’t perhaps discovered—from a penetration of CIA?—that the previous day’s conversation was tapped, and had staged a corrective or clarifying call especially for CIA’s hearing. 

In any case, Angleton believed that Oswald’s trip to Mexico City would certainly have been orthodox behavior if he were affiliated with some foreign intelligence service, such as the Soviet KGB or Cuban DGI. Agents periodically left their home countries to meet their handlers in safehouses, and Oswald’s six days in Mexico City got him out of the FBI’s reach. Other mysterious aspects of Oswald’s odd character, which the FBI and the Warren Commission casually dismissed, seemed perfectly explicable to Angleton as espionage “tradecraft.” Oswald used aliases and post office boxes, and lived apart from his family. His possessions had been found to include a book which had certain letters cut out, giving the impression that this might have formed the base or key for a cipher system. It was also noted that letters from Oswald to his mother regarding his desire to return to the United States seemed dictated, since they contained none of his usual grammatical errors, and used legal language with which he could not have been familiar. 

He was in communication with foreign-linked organizations such as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which agents often used to relay innocent-sounding messages. After the assassination, he fled to a movie theater, prompting KGB defector Pyotr Deriabin to observe in a memo to CIA: “Certainly, we know the KGB’s penchant for using theaters for meeting places.” The Russian emigre DeMohrenschildt had found him a job briefly in 1962 at Jaggars Stonewall, a Dallas photographics firm which prepared U.S. intelligence maps based on U-2 photographs; co-workers said he had indicated a detailed knowledge of microdots. Also suspicious was Oswald’s counterfeiting of identity documents. The counterfeits were inferior by CIA standards, but how and why had Oswald learned to make them? 

One possibility, taken seriously by Angleton and many others at CIA, was that Oswald had learned his tradecraft in Russia. A CIA report of the period asserted flatly that both Oswald and his Soviet-born wife, Marina, had been recruited by the KGB, and noted that Oswald, while living in the Soviet Union, had obtained a hunting license but never went hunting. “This would have been a good method for the KGB to meet and train him, ” the report said. CIA analysts speculated that the Soviets were running a terrorist training camp in Minsk, where Oswald had lived, and considered whether he might not have been “programmed” or brainwashed by Soviet mind-control specialists using LSD. Other questions hung unanswered: Why had Oswald maintained contact with the Soviet Embassy in Washington? What was the purpose of his contacts with Kostikov? Had he made other contacts with Kostikov, which CIA didn’t know about? Oswald had refused a lie-detector examination on those matters. That he was murdered before he could be interrogated in detail, as CIA analysts had warned, only fueled suspicion. 

But what would the Soviets possibly gain from Kennedy’s death that would be worth the risk of U.S. retaliation? From a pragmatic Western perspective, there seemed little profit indeed, but Angleton thought about the problem with more subtlety. First of all, the nuclear age precluded any massive U.S. retaliation—as Johnson’s craven cover-ups of all possible communist connections were already demonstrating. Second, if the Soviets had truly penetrated the Soviet Division at CIA, as Angleton believed, the KGB might even have hoped to steer U.S. investigation of the crime. As for the Soviet motive: Out was Kennedy, a charismatic leader who could “sell” a socially conscious anticommunism in the Third World and even to Western liberals. In was Johnson, who would only “heighten the contradictions” between East and West and therefore hasten (by Leninist dialectical reasoning) the ultimate collapse of late capitalism. 

Angleton also took seriously the observations marshaled in a November 27 memo by defector Deriabin, who cited the Kennedy administration’s opposition to long-term credits to the Soviets, which he said were vital to survival of the USSR. Johnson, by contrast, came from an agricultural state and had always supported grain sales to Russia. Moreover, Western pressure on the USSR “would automatically ease up” if the KGB murdered the president. 

As evidence, Deriabin noted a “conciliatory telegram” by a frightened and disoriented Lyndon Johnson to Khrushchev. A more amenable America would “strengthen Khrushchev’s hand” at a time when the Soviet leader was under intensifying internal pressures because of mismanagement of the 1963 harvest and disputes with China. Kennedy’s death, as Deriabin put it, thus “effectively diverts the Soviets’ attention from their internal problems. It directly affects Khrushchev’s longevity.” Finally, Deriabin ventured that “the death of President Kennedy, whether a planned operation or not, will serve the most obvious purpose of providing proof of the power and omniscience of the KGB.” Much later, Angleton would obliquely compare the Soviets’ probable motivation to a famous scene in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, in which a Mafia chieftain puts a horse’s head into the bed of a stubborn film producer, in order to demonstrate “pure power.” 

Although Angleton’s critics would later excoriate him for entertaining what seemed paranoid theories, it was his job as CI chief to consider every possibility. “In my conversations with Jim, he never excluded that maybe we were missing something on Soviet involvement, ” Papich recalled. “He and I had a lot of discussions on that. As far as we knew, Oswald acted alone. But Jim felt that we couldn’t be sure until we had the full story on Oswald’s possible links to the KGB. That meant getting the full story on his stay in Russia.” 

It also meant a fight with the FBI over whether that story could be believed, once it was obtained from a new Soviet defector—a man who said he could resolve, fully and finally, all questions about whether Oswald had been acting as a KGB agent when he killed President Kennedy. 

ON FEBRUARY 4, 1964, Yuri Nosenko was met at Geneva’s ABC Cinéma by Pete Bagley, the CIA officer who had debriefed him two years earlier. Bagley still believed that Nosenko was a provocateur, sent in part to discredit Golitsyn. But, with Angleton’s blessing, Bagley was to continue playing along, to see what the Soviets’ game might be. Trouble began, though, as they sat down in the safehouse. 

“I’m not going home, ” Nosenko said. 

Bagley was stunned. In 1962, Nosenko had made a big point of saying he would never defect, because he loved his family and country too much. 

“Why do you want to defect?” Bagley asked. “Didn’t you tell us you never would?” 

The Soviet could offer only a vague answer. “Well, I think the KGB may suspect me. I have decided to make a new life.” 

“How about your family?” 

Nosenko changed the subject to Lee Harvey Oswald. He could speak definitively about his government’s relations with the alleged assassin, Nosenko said, because he had personally overseen Oswald’s KGB file. Nosenko insisted, according to a Top Secret CIA summary, that “the KGB was frightened of Oswald” and would “absolutely not” have attempted to recruit him. “The thrust of [Nosenko’s] account was that neither Oswald nor his wife had at any time been of any interest whatsoever to Soviet authorities, that there had not ever been thought given to recruiting either of them as agents and that, in fact, the Soviets were glad to get rid of them both.” 

Bagley helped Nosenko escape from Geneva, and rode with him through Switzerland to Germany. But the defector had not gone beyond a U.S. Army base in Frankfurt before Bagley’s boss, Soviet Division chief David Murphy, expressed renewed certainty that Nosenko was “a plant.” Bagley agreed, and together they told Angleton their doubts about Nosenko’s Oswald story. Although they could not irrefutably disprove it, because it did not contradict any data in CIA files, Nosenko’s mere ability to tell the tale rested on a tripod of incredibles. Of the thousands of KGB officers throughout the world, CIA had secret relations with only one, after Golitsyn, yet he just happened to have participated directly in the Oswald case—not only once, but on three separate occasions: (1) when Oswald came to Russia in 1959; (2) when Oswald applied for a visa to return to Russia in 1963; and (3) when the Kremlin leadership caused a definitive review of the whole KGB file on Oswald after the assassination. That Nosenko was thus in a perfect position to testify to KGB innocence in JFK’s death seemed to Bagley a result of such neatly aligned coincidence that one had to suspect deliberate planning. 

Nor did Bagley or Murphy believe Nosenko’s claim that the KGB would not have at least talked to Oswald. The KGB, as a matter of procedure, didn’t ignore foreigners, period, and certainly not a U.S. Marine like Oswald, who had worked at an operational base for CIA’s U-2 spy planes in Atsugi, Japan. Deriabin told Murphy that the KGB “would be like a pool of piranhas [on such] an American swimming into their sea.” 

But why would Nosenko, or the KGB, lie about Oswald’s Soviet links? Was it because they had conspired to kill the president? If so, and if the KGB had indeed dispatched Nosenko to cover up the plot, how could they have tailored his Oswald story so neatly as to contradict nothing in CIA files? Was it because they had a secret helper inside CIA? 

To Bagley, the implications were ugly. There were going to be doors he didn’t want to open, corridors he wouldn’t want to look down. But the case was there; it would not go away. The burden had fallen on him, and he would do his duty. 

“DO WE KNOW ANYTHING about this?” Hoover scribbled on a news clipping which intimated that a new KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, might have information about Oswald. It was February 11, 1964, and that very day Nosenko had arrived in the U.S. by Air Force jet and been spirited to a CIA safehouse in Virginia. Reading in a news clipping that “The defection to the United States of Yuri Nossenko [sic], Soviet secret police officer, is definitely a victory for our Central Intelligence Agency … It’s good to see the CIA win one, ” Hoover underlined “CIA, ” almost as if to complain: It should have been the FBI. “We are closely following CIA in its efforts to resolve the bona fides of subject’s defection, ” a deputy assured Hoover, but CIA wasn’t giving over much. Hoover scrawled boldly at the bottom of one memo: “Keep after it.” 

On February 13, the Agency provided a brief update on Nosenko’s background and KGB career, but by month’s end the Bureau had received nothing on what Nosenko might know about the president’s apparent assassin. The FBI director therefore ordered his underlings: “We must press CIA to make Nosenko completely available to us.” 

CIA acceded. A team of FBI debriefers went to see Nosenko at a CIA safehouse on February 26 and again on March 3 and 4. Alekso Poptanich, Maurice Taylor, and Donald E. Walter, all of the Washington Field Office, questioned Nosenko for about two hours, mostly in English, employing Russian only when Nosenko became confused. “Source was at ease and very cooperative during this session, ” the FBI director was informed in a Top Secret airtel. 

The FBI men liked Nosenko and instinctively trusted him. Whereas the earlier KGB defector Golitsyn had been a “son of a bitch” to the FBI, Nosenko was warm and friendly. Although they had denied Golitsyn access to any files, the FBI now shared Warren Commission documents with Nosenko. And although the Bureau had been offered custody of the defector, according to Bagley, “for as long as they wanted, ” the interrogators decided after only six hours with him that they had got the whole story on Oswald. 

“I accepted it at face value, ” Poptanich later said of Nosenko’s information. “We had no reason not to believe [Nosenko]. You have to start with the basic premise that you accept the information, and then you go out and verify it or disprove it, and that is what we did with almost all the information we got from Nosenko.” Since none of it could be disproved, Poptanich reasoned, it all must be true.

The FBI’s final determination on that matter, however, would rest with headquarters, where the “Nosenko ticket” was held by Larry McWilliams. Mac didn’t really have a problem with Nosenko’s statement that the KGB was essentially uninterested in an American defector who, as it turned out, could have given them information pertaining to his work as a U-2 radar operator. The way he saw it, the Soviets had a good intelligence network, and all Oswald’s information was dated, useless except for propaganda purposes. 

If Oswald was unstable and they couldn’t control him, it made sense that they probably would never touch him. What was more, Mac learned that Fedora, the Bureau’s KGB mole in New York, had confirmed Nosenko’s rank and importance within the KGB, and had said that his defection caused a major crisis in Soviet intelligence. 

Fedora even confirmed Nosenko’s allegation that he had received a telegram recalling him to the USSR on February 4, which had caused CIA to accept his defection without further delay. Nosenko’s authenticity was seemingly confirmed, too, when he provided information about a Soviet scheme to filch secret documents from the U.S. Armed Forces Courier Center at Orly Airport, Paris. FBI suspicion focused on Robert Lee Johnson, an Army sergeant at Orly, who confessed to doing just what Nosenko said he had done. Johnson was convicted of espionage and sentenced to twenty-five years. Mac thought it inconceivable that the Soviets would sacrifice such a valuable agent just to establish Nosenko’s bona fides. 

But the basic reason for judging Nosenko to be truthful about Oswald was that his story accorded with what the Bureau already believed about the assassination. “The FBI does not perceive any significant evidence of foreign involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, ” a Bureau memo concluded, based on Mac’s analysis, “nor does the FBI perceive any credible evidence that Nosenko’s defection was a Soviet ploy to mask Soviet governmental involvement in the assassination. Therefore, the FBI is satisfied that Nosenko reported the facts about Oswald as he knew them [emphasis added].” 

When informed of this assessment, CIA officers felt that the Bureau’s line of logic was exactly backward. Only if it was first determined that Nosenko reported facts as he knew them could the U.S. be sure that there was no “significant evidence of foreign involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, ” and that Nosenko’s defection was not “a Soviet ploy.” 

The ensuing interagency dispute over Nosenko’s bona fides crystallized twenty years of difference over CIA philosophy. Angleton’s pattern-recognition method, which found in the study of poetry a relevance to the detecting of strategic deceptions, was set squarely against Hoover’s criminal-evidenciary approach. “It wasn’t just tension, ” McWilliams later said. “It was a raging dispute. Some of the conferences that we had—I mean, they were damn near knock-down drag-out. We—Don Moore, Bill Branigan, and I—we would sit down around a table with people from the Agency and disagree like hell.” 

The CIA contingent consisted of Angleton and some people from his shop, along with the two top men in the Soviet Division, Bagley and Murphy, who took the lead in arguing against Nosenko. Murphy’s involvement did not help CIA’s case, for he was not especially beloved by the Bureau. “I don’t know if I ever trusted Murphy, ” McWilliams said. “I just had a feeling.” 

Murphy began his assault on the FBI’s position by noting that most of Nosenko’s information was “cold.” The Orly courier-vault operation, for instance, had been shut down by the Soviets a year before Nosenko’s tip, because Sergeant Johnson had lost his access to the vault and was being publicly exposed by a neurotic wife. 

The G-men countered with a roster of American citizens identified by Nosenko as subjects of KGB interest, and a number of Soviet diplomats named by him as KGB officers. Under no circumstances, the FBI agents argued, would the Soviets “blow” such sensitive information merely to establish a disinformation agent’s bona fides. 

Bagley responded by alleging that Nosenko had lied to the FBI. As proof he cited Nosenko’s claim that, after judging Oswald to be “abnormal, ” he (Nosenko) had instructed a fellow KGB man in the Tourist Department, one “Krupnov, ” to advise Oswald to leave the USSR at the expiration of his visa. CIA already knew, from information provided by Golitsyn, that Krupnov was not in the KGB’s Tourist Department at this time. Nosenko himself had admitted this to CIA, but could not account for the error. He had also conceded, in the time since he had talked to the FBI, that he had lied about receiving a telegram recalling him to Moscow on February 4. He said he made up the story so that CIA would take him. He even admitted lying about his rank. He was not Lieutenant Colonel Nosenko, merely a captain. 

The FBI men were unmoved by those revelations. Mac later opined: “Bagley was a bright guy who thought wrong. They didn’t have enough common sense over there at CIA, they didn’t understand enough about the evaluation of a human being, like we had gathered through years of working with criminals. Any first-year FBI man finds out, when he cops a guy and he’s trying to build himself up, he’s going to lie like hell, with a lot of truth. And it’s an FBI agent’s responsibility to gradually find out the truth from the lie. CIA didn’t understand that.” 

When McWilliams expressed himself to that effect, in much politer terms, Angleton stared him down from across the table. Maybe lying was natural, the CI chief said, but there was something decidedly artificial about the way a certain FBI source—the great Fedora—had confirmed Nosenko’s false rank, his bogus recall telegram, even his incorrect story about Krupnov. 

“There was a concern that Fedora corroborated information from Nosenko that later proved to be false, and that this might somehow taint the value of Fedora, too, ” Angleton’s deputy Scott Miler recalled. “That was our position. The FBI disagreed. They said, ‘No, ’ except for Papich and a few people, like Sullivan, who agreed that it was goddamned suspicious. They never really addressed the issue of the telegram that Fedora had reported on. They just kind of walked away from that.” 

Instead, the Bureau tried to knock out the prop on which CIA’s suspicions of Nosenko and Fedora ultimately rested—viz., Anatoliy Golitsyn. True, FBI agents argued, Nosenko had provided much information that overlapped Golitsyn’s. But maybe this just meant that they had access to the same information in Moscow. 

“The KGB is more compartmented than that, ” Murphy argued. 

“How do we know that?” Mac asked. 

“Golitsyn told us, ” Murphy said. 

They were back again to the source of the problem. “CIA never seemed to comprehend that Golitsyn wasn’t a walking genius, ” Mac recalled. “This overall buying of Golitsyn perverted their entire thinking, and did cause trouble on whether we should accept or reject Nosenko.” 

The conferences resolved nothing. But CIA didn’t give up. 

“All this stuff would come over on Nosenko, ‘proving’ he was a fake—at that time, we wouldn’t even reply to it, ” Mac said. “None of that goddamned stuff that they sent over convinced us that he wasn’t real. The FBI never bought Nosenko being a plant, never bought it from the word go. We just didn’t accept it.” 

The crisis deepened as Bagley pressured the Bureau to reinterview Nosenko about Oswald. He griped to Papich that the two FBI reports he had read left “many important questions unanswered, ” and inspired “no confidence in the FBFs ability to cover the Soviet phase.” He asked his Soviet Russia staff to prepare forty-four additional questions for the Gen to put to the defector. How had the KGB evaluated Oswald’s “operational potential”? Was his hotel room bugged? If so, was it a routine bug, or was it installed especially for Oswald? What “take” was there, if any? Was Oswald physically surveilled? His mail monitored? Precisely when and by whom was it decided that the KGB had no interest in the former spy plane-radar operator? Who, exactly, found Oswald bleeding in his hotel room after his apparent suicide attempt? To what hospital was Oswald taken? Why was the U.S. Embassy not informed? 

Bagley also desired to know more about Marina Oswald. How did Lee Harvey meet his wife? What were the KGB sources on her? How was it that she was “stupid and not educated” and at the same time a graduate pharmacist? How could Nosenko explain the fact that Marina claimed not to know who her father was and bore her mother’s surname, thus indicating that she was born out of wedlock, yet also had the patronymic “Nikolayevna” (“Nikolai’s daughter”), indicating that her father was known? On what grounds did the KGB consider Marina “anti-Soviet” at the time she wished to leave the USSR with Oswald—and why did these factors not prevent her from being promoted in her job after her marriage? How did it happen that there were so few difficulties in the way of Marina’s marriage to a foreigner and departure from the country with him, when similar situations in the past usually resulted in prolonged and often unsuccessful negotiations with the Soviet government? 

“We passed [those questions] to the CI Staff, which was our channel and liaison to the Bureau, ” Bagley related. “The questions were hand carried over to the FBI for the approval Hoover required. There was a big back and forth about whether they would or wouldn’t service these questions in their dealings with Nosenko.” On March 6, Angleton told Bagley that his questions “would not be asked.” 

Bagley was furious. He called up Papich and complained that it would not be possible to complete his job in the Oswald case if he could not get the pertinent information. 

Papich calmly replied that in Director Hoover’s view, assessing Oswald’s stay in Russia was not CIA’s “job” to complete, but the FBI’s. 

Bagley tried a different tack. If Hoover would not allow the FBI to interrogate Nosenko on Oswald, could CIA at least provide some questions for the Bureau to put to Marina? CIA had no access to the woman, and had never interrogated her about her husband and compared it with what Nosenko was giving them. Papich agreed to review CIA questions for Marina, but reminded Bagley not to include any hint that FBI would report back to the Agency. So Bagley passed along questions for Marina, as suggestions, hoping that the FBI might relay the answers back to CIA. 

The answers never came. Years later, Bagley was still bitter, because “none of our questions were, I gather, ever serviced by the Bureau.” Of course, CIA could have put its Oswald questions to Nosenko directly; he was, after all, in CIA custody. But custody did not amount to jurisdiction. CIA technically could not bring Nosenko’s Oswald information to bear on the assassination inquiry. That was the FBI’s turf, and what CIA wanted more than anything was for the G-men to develop their own reasons for doubting the defector. “I think we were constrained, that the Bureau felt very strongly it was their responsibility, ” Bagley explained. “Believe me, we were extremely conscious of this, and if my memory is right, I believe we were enjoined at the time not to question him.” 

Some CIA officers began to wonder whether there might be more to Hoover’s territorialism than the usual jurisdictional jealousy. Perhaps the FBI had been biased on the Nosenko question by Hoover’s need to protect the Bureau from censure for failing to prevent a possible foreign plot. “Any bureaucracy has vested interests, and acceptance of Nosenko’s information tended to excuse the FBI for its failure to have Oswald under surveillance, ” Angleton’s man Miler believed. “It was in the best interests of the FBI to accept Nosenko’s story.” 

When Angleton himself candidly conveyed such doubts to Papich, during late-night sessions in the greenhouse, the FBI man begged to differ. If Hoover had in any way felt that the Soviets or Cubans were involved, he wasn’t going to leave himself vulnerable by not pursuing those angles. Besides, the boss wasn’t out in the field chasing down those leads himself, but merely reading what was coming to him from the fellows in the field and at the desks. They did present to him that there was no evidence of foreign involvement, and he bought that view. Nor was he familiar enough with the Nosenko case to have forced through his own views on it. He had followed it in the beginning, but recently he had inked documents with comments like, “How long have we had the Nosenko case? Memo should indicate just who Nosenko is.” 

On March 6, however, Hoover was familiar enough with Nosenko’s information to unilaterally pass it to the Warren Commission. “In the event you desire to have Nosenko appear, ” he coaxed, “it is suggested that you try to make arrangements with the Central Intelligence Agency, which Agency has custody of Nosenko.” This unsolicited offer caused considerable excitement at the commission. That same day, Warren staffer Lee J. Rankin wrote Helms to say that, because of “a report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation … it appears to us that Nosenko’s defection, whether or not it is authentic, is of very great interest.” Commission staffers wanted to discuss the matter with Helms as soon as possible.

Helms came to see them in Rankh’s office at Justice on March 12. He brought along Angleton’s research chief, Ray Rocca, as well as Dave Murphy, whose Soviet Bloc Division had formal charge of Nosenko. Helms tried to explain that, though the FBI might be in a position to report Nosenko’s information to the commission, only CIA was in a position to judge whether Nosenko, and his information, were bona fide. At the moment, CIA had serious reservations about his authenticity, but Helms recommended that the commission “await further developments.” 

The commission did not want to wait. They were quite worried, in fact, that the President’s assassin might have had intelligence connections, and began to complain about “the inability of any of the governmental agencies to fill in the very large gaps still existing in Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico.” Rocca’s explanation for the Agency’s performance was that CIA’s contribution was limited to “the FBI’s investigation on this point.” For the same reason, CIA was “limited in its possibility of assisting” any assessment of “information from an unspecified source that [Jack] Ruby was in Havana in 1963 under a Czech passport.” 

Rankin frowned. Did that mean that the FBI and CIA were failing to cooperate? 

Helms replied that there were always “understandable human problems in conducting any liaison on any subject, ” but that “by and large the procedures for dealing with other agencies” were “effective.” 

On that, the meeting ended, but by June 24, commission members were pressing McCone for a “final answer” on whether Nosenko’s Oswald story should be believed. This request tripped wires at Langley. 

“Director McCone asked me to go down and see Chief Justice Warren and explain that CIA and FBI disagreed about Nosenko, ” Helms recalled. “We met privately in a room in Commission Headquarters and I gave the reasons why we couldn’ t establish Nosenko’s bona fides.” Helms, duly respectful in the presence of the chief justice, spoke softly but to the point. Some of Nosenko’s information, he said, contradicted what CIA had from other sources. Nosenko alleged, for instance, that there were no Soviet regulations which would have prevented Oswald from traveling from Minsk to Moscow without first obtaining permission to do so. But both CIA and the State Department knew that such regulations existed. CIA was not even able to satisfy itself that Nosenko had ever supervised Oswald’s file, and there were many inconsistencies in his story, which, even if it had been consistent, would have made no sense to CIA. Helms was sorry, but “whatever the FBI” had told the Warren Commission about Nosenko’s Oswald information, Justice Warren should consider the fact that CIA could not vouch for Nosenko’s claim that Oswald had “no KGB contacts.” Therefore, such information should not become part of the Warren Commission record. 

The chief justice nodded in seeming assent, but his commission could not decide whether to side with CIA or FBI until July 24, when a full complement of its members, including former DCI Dulles, heard a CIA delegation frame the problem in truly chilling terms. “Nosenko is a KGB plant, ” Bagley pronounced, while Helms and Murphy looked on, “and may be publicly exposed as such some time after the appearance of the Commission’s report. Once Nosenko is exposed as a KGB plant, there will arise the danger that his information will be mirror-read by the press and public, leading to conclusions that the USSR did direct the assassination.” 

That was enough to settle the question. The commission had been founded for no other reason than to avert rumors which might cost “forty million lives, ” and later that afternoon decided it would be “undesirable to include any Nosenko information” in its report. The defector’s FBI debriefings would remain classified in commission files. 

Hoover was not happy about that. “When the Warren people sided with us, it cut across Mr. Hoover’s assertion that the Russians had had nothing to do with the assassination, ” Helms said. “So there was some irritation in the Bureau about it.” 

THROUGH CIA HAD “WON,” for the moment, on Nosenko, there remained the problem of what to do with him. While Nosenko was on a vacation in Hawaii with CIA officers, Helms pondered the options. If the Soviet Division was indeed penetrated by the KGB, it would be important to isolate Nosenko physically from that division, to keep the Soviets from getting feedback on his interrogation, as well as to keep him from updating his story (as, Angleton later related, he already seemed to have some means of doing). It would also be necessary to keep Nosenko away from alcohol, since he had a habit of getting in bar fights, and from reporters, who were pressing for details about the defector who had only weeks earlier been in the headlines. Too, the agents of KGB Department 13 might try to kill Nosenko, even if he was a plant, since that might serve to establish his authenticity in CIA’s minds. Some form of incarceration was therefore going to be required, at least for a time. 

Helms consulted the Soviet Division and the CI Staff about what form the incarceration should take. Bagley and Murphy argued that conditions should be “Spartan” and should coincide with “hostile interrogation.” Nosenko was bogus, but they needed to confront him, and “break” him on collateral information. Angleton objected, however. He wanted to “play” Nosenko like a prize trout, and thought that the key to elicitation was to keep the subject feeling secure. Helms opted for the Soviet Division’s hostile approach, since it promised a quicker answer to what could be an embarrassing problem for the Agency. The Justice Department approved Nosenko’s being jailed on CIA property, and Nosenko returned from Hawaiian fun and sun to be “fluttered” by a CIA polygrapher. Questions were yelled at him, and he failed the exam. He was installed in a small cell, where two debriefers played bad-cop, worse-cop. They caught him in a flat lie when he denied knowledge of an operation involving an American, of which CIA had a record—and which Nosenko had claimed to know about in a 1962 interview taped by Bagley. 

“The transcript must be wrong, ” Nosenko said. 

His questioners brought in a tape recorder. 

“You don’t remember this operation? Here is your voice.” 

Nosenko heard himself giving details of the operation. 

“I was drunk, ” Nosenko said. But this failed to explain how he could have spoken correctly about an operation while drunk yet known nothing about it while sober. 

Nosenko was next shown a travel warrant he had given Bagley in Geneva, back in 1962, as proof of his KGB identity. It was made out to “Lieutenant Colonel” Yuri Nosenko. But Nosenko had already admitted to lying about his rank; he was merely a captain. Why, then, had the KGB made out a travel warrant with this false information? 

Nosenko admitted that he “looked bad, ” even to himself, but as spring warmed to summer, Nosenko stuck to his story, contributing nothing new except to complain about the heat in the attic. A blower was installed to keep the air moving, and as it became evident that the defector was not going to crack anytime soon, CIA would have to find more suitable quarters for a longer-term incarceration. It was therefore decided to intern Nosenko in a small cell at CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, in the same malarial lowland between the James and York rivers where America’s first English settlers had failed to survive in 1607. 

Nosenko’s new home was twelve by twelve feet, windowless, with one naked sixty watt bulb above a narrow steel bed. The walls, floor, and ceiling were formed of steel-reinforced concrete, to prevent tunneling. The toilet flushed, but it was right there in the open. There was an adjoining interrogation room, and out back an exercise yard, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Helms came out to see the place, which he judged to be satisfactory. 

Nosenko was put in. He was under twenty-four-hour visual surveillance through the door. His diet was kept bland, and he could not brush his teeth. He was allowed no reading material, and his guards were provided with earphones so that he could not overhear their TV. To pass the time, Nosenko tried to make a tiny chess set from blanket threads, but each time it was noticed and taken away. He began talking to himself, and sometimes, lying on his bed at night, he would toss aside his blankets and shout about things flickering against the ceiling. At other times, he would just sit along the bed’s edge, clasping the yellow soles of his feet in the palms of his hands, screaming: “Let me talk to the FBI!” 

CHAPTER ELEVEN 

MOLEHUNT 

IN SEPTEMBER 1964, the Warren Commission formally found that Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy, but Angleton’s secret probe continued throughout the decade. “The Warren Commission report should have left a wider window for [the] contingency … that there was Soviet and/or Cuban (KGB and/or DGI) connection with Oswald, ” a Top Secret CIA review later related. “That, indeed, was the opinion at the working level, particularly in the counterintelligence component in the CIA.” Like the idea that Nosenko was bogus, such suspicions were inseparable from Golitsyn’s allegations about moles, for, if Department 13 had in fact conspired to kill the president, they would have surely wanted to control the investigation afterward. As it happened, routine procedure dictated that CIA’s Soviet Division be responsible for determining whether there was any KGB connection—but this was the very division which Angleton suspected was infiltrated by the KGB. And if the Soviets had indeed penetrated the Soviet Division and received feedback from it, that would, in turn, explain how it could have tailored for Nosenko a perfectly uncheckable “legend” for Oswald’s Soviet years. Thus, part of the reason Angleton’s CI shop had taken over the Kennedy probe in December 1963 was a fear of manipulation by Soviet moles. 

But then Nosenko had arrived, only one month later, which put the Soviet Division right back in the middle of things. Had the KGB determined to send him only after their moles’ access to the assassination probe was cut off, and the KGB’s ability to manipulate it ended? Nosenko’s timely arrival with a manipulative message was one more where that fit the general pattern, and one more reason for Angleton to pursue Golitsyn’s penetration leads with renewed vigor. As coming years were to show, however, the hunt for moles could only succeed if FBI and CIA played on the same team to find them. 

TO DIRECT THE SEARCH for penetrations, Angleton had created a Special Investigations Group (SIG) eventually headed by Newton Scott Miler. A husky man with the unflappable face of a big-league baseball umpire, Miler had been chief of station in Ethiopia before joining Angleton’s CI Staff. Managing the molehunt on a daily basis was a thankless job, likely to take years and yet never be resolved unless a confession was gained. All the while, Miler would be doing business on a daily basis with some of the people he was investigating, yet he had to deal with them as if nothing were wrong. “The whole idea was to avoid speculation or rumors to avoid creating a general climate of suspicion, ” Miler would say. “All we had was an allegation. That didn’t make the guy guilty. It didn’t make him innocent. But there had to be an investigation. And at some point, procedure usually required that this be done in conjunction with the FBI.” 

Alas, sharing a case with the Bureau could sometimes work against CIA’s desire to keep things hushed. From the Agency’s standpoint, the best way to neutralize a spy was to ask for his cooperation, play him, use him as penetration or as a deception channel. But Miler knew that the Bureau’s way of neutralizing a suspect was often to confront him, arrest him, “and really destroy him, in the sense that he was no longer useful.” 

So it had been in the case of Peter Karlow. One year of obvious surveillance, capped by a “hell week” of interrogation, was not CIA’s way of doing things. Angletonian CI would have preferred to see Karlow transferred to an out-of-the-way station where CIA could quietly wait for him to make contact with the Soviets. Perhaps, after a time, CIA would obtain data exonerating him; or, if damning evidence was obtained, Karlow might be asked to become a double agent. But because the FBI had made Karlow aware of the suspicions against him and forced him out, none of that was possible. Notwithstanding the Bureau’s later admission of error, CIA could probably never know for sure whether Karlow was a Soviet spy. 

“The idea that the FBI wasn’t doing its job, and wasn’t capable of doing its job, was an attitude that permeated a lot of our search for penetrations, and caused some conflict between the FBI and the CIA, ” Miler later lamented. 

It wasn’t just that Hoover himself didn’t understand counterintelligence, as even his own men acknowledged. It was the way his organization was made to reflect that ignorance. Because of the Bureau’s lack of interest in historical research, Miler found it “awfully difficult, in what has become known as the ‘molehunt, ’ to follow up anything that wasn’t totally specific. We couldn’t just go to the FBI and say, ‘It has to do with this area, this kind of information, and in 1953 our suspect was here, in 1954 he was there. Go after it.’ The FBI wasn’t equipped to do that; they didn’t have the base of knowledge to investigate penetrations. On a number of occasions. Bill Sullivan, without really explaining the whole situation to Hoover, tried to set up a research section, under Larry McWilliams, to study counterintelligence cases, and McWilliams would come over and meet with us. But when it came down to the nitty-gritty, and they needed somebody to be legal attaché, suddenly McWilliams was sent off to Copenhagen, and there’s no research section anymore. When Sullivan tried to say, ‘Look, boss, I need this research, ’ Hoover would just say, ‘Nuh-uh, you don’t. It’s not part of your job, boy.’” 

Because it lacked a sufficient system to search for patterns in the past, the Bureau’s assistance was limited to legwork, to black-bag jobs or surveillance, in the present. But Hoover was even less enthusiastic about helping CIA with physical or technical surveillance than he was about building a CI database. Following a suspect twenty-four hours daily was labor-intensive, and FBI manpower was extremely limited. To service a CIA request, agents would have to be taken off a criminal case. Hoover had done that for more than a year with Peter Karlow, with no prosecution or profit of any kind to show for it. With termination of coverage on Karlow in April 1963, Helms and Angle ton asked Papich for “across-the-board” telephone taps on other suspected Soviet spies, but Hoover had refused to comply, because CIA did not have enough evidence for a warrant. 

By November 1964, as Nosenko was being transferred to Camp Peary, and as new leads were being developed from Golitsyn’s tips, Miler and Angleton thus felt a vital need for closer FBI cooperation in the search for moles. Helms took the matter to McCone, who agreed to raise the subject with Hoover. That was the kind of high-level support the molehunt project needed, and the result was a joint operation to investigate suspected Soviet spies in CIA. 

The targets, as Papich recalled, “were selected as a result of information or analysis from Golitsyn.” The defector was insisting that the breadth and depth of CIA secrets he’d seen in Moscow could not have come from any one man, and suggested that the Agency try to find the original “tumor” from which the “cancer” of penetration had spread. Golitsyn believed that the problem had begun with OSS recruitment of former Nazi intelligence assets during the waning days of World War II, and suspicion soon focused on an ex-Nazi spy who had gone into OSS, Igor Orlov. 

On Soviet orders, Orlov had parachuted into Prussia in 1944, to penetrate Russian-émigré groups behind the advancing Red Army lines, only to be shredded by Nazi anti-aircraft fire as he floated down. Captured, and recovered from his wounds, Orlov went to work for the Nazis until war’s end; he then became active in a Ukrainian exile group before becoming a contract agent handler at CIA’s Berlin Base from 1949 to 1956. Orlov neatly matched the “Sasha” profile provided by Golitsyn: a name beginning with “K” and ending in “sky” (Orlov had formerly been known as Alexander Koptatzky); his diminutive name was “Sasha” he had worked in Germany; and an unusually high percentage of his operations had gone bad. 

By the time he became a suspect in the joint FBI-CIA molehunt, Orlov had emigrated to the U.S. with his wife, Eleanor, and opened a picture frame shop in Alexandria, Virginia. He was there one afternoon in early March 1965 when six men appeared in hats and dark suits, looking quite serious. Sasha wondered if they were Mormons. One of them rang the bell. “FBI, ” he said. “We’d like to search the building. Espionage.” 

Each morning for the next six weeks, Sasha reported to a nearby FBI office for interrogation. The framing gallery was staked out, with two G-men sitting inside at all times, never taking off their hats, staring down every customer who might be one of Sasha’s Soviet contacts. The Bureau even sent over one of its best double agents, welding engineer John Huminik, to see if he could spot any of the Soviet spies he had met, but Huminik never saw anyone he recognized. 

At some point during his ordeal, Sasha managed to evade FBI surveillance and visited the Soviet Embassy. Perhaps, as he told his wife, he was simply tired of being persecuted in his adoptive country; perhaps, as Angleton later ventured, he was a scared spy running for cover. In any case, the Soviets promised Sasha asylum, and, with KGB assistance, an escape plan was hatched. But on the day he and his family were to have redefected, Orlov suddenly came home, smiling. 

“Guess what?” he said to his wife. “The FBI let me go. They apologized and said I can go on with my life. Tomorrow we are free.” 

The Orlovs thought that meant the government had decided Sasha was innocent. In fact, the FBI had called off its participation in the CIA molehunt because of deepening disagreements over defectors, and because John Edgar Hoover was seventy years old. 

• • • 

AFTER JANUARY 1, 1965, the FBI director was subject to a government law requiring retirement, and it was illegal for him to head the country’s leading law-enforcement agency unless he was annually reappointed by the president. Hoover acutely sensed that any embarrassment to the Bureau could reflect unfavorably on his leadership, providing an excuse not to renew him. Surveillance suddenly became a potential cause of embarrassment, because the new attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, and his deputy, Ramsey Clark, were refusing to authorize warrantless surveillance of suspected spies. Hoover had been routinely conducting such coverage for over a quarterentury, operating basically out of a 1939 directive by President Roosevelt which enabled the FBI to cope with problems “clearly and directly” related to foreign interests. But even if tacitly sanctioned by presidents and attorneys general, warrantless coverage could be regarded as illegal from a certain constitutional point of view. The FBI had never been caught, but the consequences of exposure had increased as Hoover’s grip on power loosened, and as he failed to find the political backing that had been there before. “Hoover wasn’t going to do a surveillance on anybody unless he got that goddamn thing supported by the attorney general, by the president, or both, ” Papich recalled. “That’s how he survived as long as he did. And when he didn’t get that support, this was a time when a lot of troubles developed. We were getting requests from CIA for coverage that we had provided before, but now we were turning them down.” 

A more moderate adjustment in surveillance policy might have been urged on Hoover by Al Belmont, regarded as the FBI Counterintelligence Section’s best friend at the top. But when Belmont retired in spring 1965, the way was clear to a termination of molehunt surveillances. “When Al Belmont left—nobody writes about this, but, boy—Hoover lost his helmsman, ” Papich would later reflect. “Al was great at communicating between J. Edgar and the field. The Bureau was never the same after that. That was the era when you really had your problems.” 

Belmont was replaced by Deke DeLoach, who, it will be remembered, had served as FBI liaison to CIA during the darkest years of interagency relations, from 1948 to 1952. His view of CIA had been shaped by unpleasant experiences with William Harvey and Frank Wisner and their “shakedown cruises” on FBI turf. Now, as the new number-three man, DeLoach was charged with making the Bureau run smoothly and keeping it out of political trouble.

If he needed any excuse to recommend against continued cooperation in CIA’s molehunt, DeLoach got it from congressional hearings led by Louisiana Senator Russell Long. In late 1964 and into spring 1965, Long began looking into allegations that Government agencies illegally spied on Americans. These inquiries caused CIA to temporarily suspend its mail-opening program, by February 27, 1965, the FBI director was urging his men, too, to play it safe. “I would have no hesitance in discontinuing all techniques—technical coverage, microphones, trash covers, mail covers, etc., ” Hoover wrote on a memo reporting the Long Subcommittee’s proceedings. “While it might handicap us, I doubt they are as valuable as some believe.” By late April, Hoover’s “no hesitance in discontinuing” warrantless coverage had caused the coverage to be discontinued. At the same time, ostensibly because the joint FBI-CIA molehunt had failed to gain evidence which might support warrant-backed, legal surveillance, he ordered his men to withdraw from the project. 

But Angleton apparently believed that Hoover’s legalism was a mere pretext for ending the hunt. The deeper reason, it was feared, was that Hoover had come to suspect that the main source of the mole allegations, Anatoliy Golitsyn, might himself be a disinformant under KGB control. It is unclear when Hoover’s suspicion first emerged, but it was well known to Angleton by 1967, when he reprimanded Soviet Division officer Bagley, who was writing a report on the Nosenko matter, for questioning Golitsyn’s veracity. According to Bagley’s memo of one of their arguments, “Chief CI [Angleton] said he did not see how CIA could submit a final report to the Bureau if it contained suggestions that Golitsyn had lied to us about certain aspects of Nosenko’s past. He recalled that the Director of the FBI had stated that in his opinion Golitsyn himself was a provocateur and a penetration agent.” 

There seem to have been two pillars to Hoover’s position. First was the fact that Golitsyn kept asking to see FBI files. If Golitsyn redefected, or was in contact with Soviet agents, or even if he was genuine but was kidnapped by the Russians, FBI secrets could be lost; therefore, the intensity of his interest in Bureau files evoked great distrust. Second, Golitsyn’s disinformation thesis had led to a situation where, as Miler put it, “You had a bunch of CIA guys throwing darts at the FBI’s sources.” These sources included a GRU officer, known to the FBI as “Nick Nack, ” who had briefly been posted in New York; Nosenko, of course; Fedora and Top Hat, the two KGB officers under UN cover; and a third KGB recruitment inside the United Nations, code-named AE/SHAMROCK, whose true identity has never been revealed. 

This “third man”—a KGB officer under diplomatic cover, run jointly by FBI and CIA—had first contacted the Bureau in New York in 1965 and provided leads to espionage cases in France and Britain. His information overlapped with much of what the U.S. already knew about these cases from Fedora and Nick Nack, and Angleton judged him to be bogus. When “Shamrock” appeared, even Bill Sullivan began to doubt the FBI’s good fortune in getting so many sources at the UN. 

Desperate to know what was going on, Sullivan finally broke down and let Golitsyn see some science-and-technology aspects of the Fedora and Top Hat cases. Hoover, and Sullivan’s own deputies, were kept ignorant of this. With Golitsyn’s help, Sullivan re-examined some of the take on Soviet missile-guidance systems, and found that “the lines of disinformation didn’t cross.” At least some of the sources had to be lying, or perhaps deliberately misbriefed. Perhaps they all were. 

Although Hoover did not know that Sullivan had shared FBI data with Golitsyn, he did know that the defector’s theories had caused CIA to doubt the Bureau’s recruitments. Now those doubts seemed to be infecting even the FBI. Hoover wondered: might not Golitsyn have been dispatched by the KGB to destroy the FBI’s intelligence gathering efforts? The possibility had at least to be considered. That all of the FBI’s prized sources had been developed after Golitsyn’s defection—how could he have been sent to discredit sources which did not yet exist?—did not necessarily exclude a KGB deception plan. Perhaps Golitsyn had been planted simply to discredit all future KGB sources, no matter who they were. 

In any case, with Golitsyn implicitly discrediting much of what the FBI was doing in counterintelligence, Hoover was hardly disposed to cooperate in CIA enterprises such as molehunts, which, if successful, might buttress the very arguments that were undercutting Hoover’s treasured informants. Angleton, at any rate, seems to have reasoned that it was such thoughts that had led the Bureau to decline many of CIA’s domestic-coverage requests. 

Thus, after being held open for three consecutive ninety-day periods, the coverage of Sasha Orlov had not been renewed. The FBI’s official rationale for shutting down the case was that they were unable to establish that he was a Soviet spy. There was a significant amount of high-grade circumstantial evidence, but nothing more. A lie-detector test had suggested deception, but that was not the same as legal proof. What could the Bureau do? “We haven’t proved anything, ” Hoover finally said. “Close it.” 

American counterintelligence entered a frustrating phase. Larry McWilliams recalled one occasion when Angleton’s shop sent over a request for the FBI to cover five people that they suspected of being Soviet moles. “It’s a waste of time, ” DeLoach said. “Suppose anything goes wrong, and we’re caught in this thing. Who’s got the bag on it?” A memo went up to Hoover, and he concurred. 

“Coverage at that time—if you were going to have to cover something that was really worthwhile, it was terrible, ” Papich remembered. “Hell, there were Soviet agents in the area, in the country, that we couldn’t cover electronically. We just generally cut down our input on identifying spies, and even the old Venona work was stopped. Jim Angleton believed that, whether it was for prosecution or not, these people should be identified; they might still be around. But J. Edgar didn’t want to be told what targets he should cover, particularly if there was no demonstrable evidence that it was going to benefit the FBI. He’s sticking his neck out, but it’s for another agency—he’s not going to go along with that, especially when Congress was becoming curious, and there were new political considerations.” 

Angleton understood Hoover’s need for political support, but he did not enjoy the consequences of the cutback. “Thousands of man-hours would have been saved if the Bureau had been willing to place taps on [suspected traitors’] telephones, ” he later said. He could only shake his head at the “clumsy bureaucratic actions.” Consensus in the CI Staff was that the Orlov serial, and the joint molehunt generally, were issues important enough to take to a higher level, to Helms and thence to McCone, with the argument that national security transcended the priorities of a rival service. McCone would not have been afraid to “go to the mat” with Hoover, but by April 28 he was gone, and the man who took his place was not inclined to fight anyone over anything. 

WESTERN HEMISPHERE OFFICER David Atlee Phillips had been busy in his division’s operations room at Langley on April 29, monitoring a civil war in the Dominican Republic, leaning over a teletype, when someone touched him on the shoulder. It was Dick Helms. Like many others in the Department of Plans, Phillips had been hoping that Helms would become DCI after a Washington-wearied McCone announced plans to retire to California. But now Helms said, “Dave, meet our new Director—Admiral William Raborn.” 

Helms moved aside to present a short, stocky, sixtyish man, his white-skinned face veined with red lines, his eyes crow’s-footed from years of squinting across seas. Raborn grunted, then stalked about the hectic room, fascinated by the clattering machines. He had been on the job about fourteen hours. Formerly in charge of the Navy’s Polaris missile development program, he had brought it in two years early and under budget, and that achievement had prompted President Johnson to appoint him DCI. He was a diehard, sentimental patriot, and the day before, when Johnson had introduced him to the CIA leadership, tears had coursed down Raborn’s crimson cheeks and formed tiny drops on the point of his chin. He knew little about the intelligence business and apparently nothing about foreign affairs, and he was soon frustrating Helms, the Agency’s new DDCI, and Helms’ successor as DDP, Desmond FitzGerald, with silly questions. Hearing that CIA’s likely choice in the Dominican Republic was between dictatorship and oligarchy, Raborn asked “Who is this fellow Oligarchy, anyway?”

Although uniformly disliked at CIA, Raborn was quite popular at the FBI. Indeed, Hoover got on extremely well with him, just as he had with the first woebegone admiral who held the post, Sidney Souers, back in 1946. “Hoover and the Admiral held many common views and were in frequent contact, ” Phillips recalled. Presumably that was because Raborn, like Souers, was an ineffectual leader who posed no threat to Hoover’s domain, and who happily allowed Hoover to expand into CIA’s yard. Indeed, FBI encroachment into CIA jurisdiction during the Caribbean crisis was to show how fully Hoover was capable of dominating a lesser leader. 

Raborn had been CIA director for less than a week when President Johnson elected to dispatch twenty-five thousand Marines to the Dominican Republic to avert a communist takeover, and not long afterward Johnson followed up by sending in the FBI. Phillips, who was to become CIA’s new station chief in Santo Domingo, presumed that the president “wanted to be able to explain to Congress and the American public, in the event of fiasco, that it had occurred despite the fact that he had committed his ‘first team’—not only the CIA … but the then highly respected FBI as well.” William Sullivan also believed that sending G-men to Santo Domingo was essentially a public-relations ploy. DeLoach was becoming one of LBJ’s best friends, and apparently he had convinced the president that bad press about the invasion could be negated by ordering a legion of American Knights to join the fight against the Red Menace. 

“It made a great story, ” Sullivan recalled. “Hoover, with his dream of a worldwide intelligence network, jumped through the usual hoops to carry out Johnson’s scheme. The whole phony set-up made me angry, especially as I was put in charge of the operation, and I dragged my heels before assigning any agents to go down there, putting off the inevitable. In May of 1965 when I finally wrote the memo requesting permission to send the men down, Hoover wrote ‘It’s about time’ on the bottom. Naturally, the CIA was horrified to find the FBI operating in the Dominican Republic, as horrified as the FBI would have been had Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate a case in New York City. Richard Helms, deputy director of the CIA, found out about it in the newspapers, so I called him to arrange a meeting. He offered to come over to see me, but I knew that thirty seconds after Helms entered the building Hoover would have been told, so I went over his way. We sat down and looked at each other, almost numb with disbelief. We agreed to work together and to try to keep our agents out of each other’s operations … Of course, this arrangement had to be kept from Hoover or I would have been fired.” [we know he paid a higher price for the secrecy DC]

After meeting with Sullivan, Helms called in Phillips for the traditional send-off chat he gave all outgoing station chiefs. Phillips, who was all packed and ready to leave, wondered what Helms’ inevitable one-liner would be this time. Ring the gong for us in Santo Domingo? Show them how to run an intelligence service down there? 

Helms said, “Get along with the FBI.” 

He seemed relieved when Phillips told him he had been working in Mexico City for the past four years with Clark Anderson, “a personal friend and a fine guy” who was now heading the FBI unit on the island. Phillips and Anderson had managed to contain the substantial interagency tensions in Mexico during the JFK-Oswald investigation, or lack thereof; if they could not keep things on track in the Dominican Republic, no one could. 

But Phillips was not prepared for what he encountered when he arrived in Santo Domingo. CIA’s station was staffed by fewer than a dozen people, including secretaries, but the FBI had flown in twice as many agents to make recruitments and file basic reports. Though most of them did speak Spanish, they seemed to have little savvy for foreign-intelligence work. Instead of blending into the environment like CIA case officers, who wore traditional collarless guayabera shirts and tropical straw hats, Hoover’s heroes advertised their presence in gray summer weight suits and snap brim fedoras. “They didn’t even have 3×5 cards, a basic tool of an intelligence organization, or a more than cursory knowledge of the local situation, ” Phillips later smirked. “Only CIA was able to provide intelligence from the rebel zone.”

Phillips immediately went to see Anderson, who was operating out of the U.S. Embassy, to discuss how they could work together. The FBI man was frank. “Here I am with twenty-four men. My instructions are to gather intelligence. None of us knows anything of the local political and military situation and our experience is in criminal, not political investigation. J. Edgar has told us to start churning out reports. What do we do?” 

Phillips and Anderson contrived a program for cooperation. “The important element, ” Phillips recollected, “was that we would keep from trying to recruit and handle the same agents by a frank review of our candidates. We met every morning. Clark would identify potential sources. I would tell him whether we had already recruited the agent, or if we had tried with dubious results. One does not often identify agents to another government agency, but in Santo Domingo Clark and I violated the rules. If one of his officers recruited a source, he would advise me.” 

Though coordination became trickier as CIA’s presence grew to half a hundred men over the coming year, the rival agencies did manage, by all accounts, to “get along” in the Dominican Republic. Sullivan approvingly noted that CIA and FBI had worked in Santo Domingo “like hand in glove.” It was in Washington, as usual, that problems emerged. 

After order was finally restored to the island under CIA-backed Héctor García-Godoy, who appointed a number of “left-of-center” types to form a coalition, Phillips was suddenly recalled to Washington for an audience with Admiral Raborn. Hoover had complained to him that some of Godoy’s new men in the Dominican government were secret communists. Phillips assured the admiral that this was not accurate, but Raborn seemed more inclined to believe the insinuations of the FBI director than the perceptions of his own men on the scene. Phillips felt frustrated and undercut, but when he ran into Helms in the locker room of the Langley gym, he was again enjoined to get along with the FBI. So he returned to Santo Domingo, met with the new president, and raised, as tactfully as he could, J. Edgar Hoover’s concern that García-Godoy was placing “secret communists” in his government. 

“Mr. Phillips, ” Godoy replied acidly, “this is my country. I am the President. I will not do it. To me you are nothing but a foreign spy.” The CIA station chief hastily backpedaled and apologized, and said no more of the FBI’s concerns. 

When Phillips’ tour on the island was finished, in August 1967, he was summoned to the White House. President Johnson offered him a Dr. Pepper and said: “I want to thank you for getting along with the FBI.” But the president was apparently telling Phillips only part of the story. If happy that the two agencies had managed to work together, Johnson was apparently somewhat more impressed with the Bureau’s reporting on the crisis than the Agency’s. Probably that was because the domestic based FBI, by operating overseas, had been able to fuse both domestic and foreign data on the conflict. Dominican exiles were plotting strategy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and by covering that angle, the FBI could predict events with some degree of certainty. Consequently, LBJ had ordered Hoover to establish a permanent office in Santo Domingo —a move not resisted by Admiral Raborn, but resented by DDCI Helms. “At the time I was not aware of the severity of the strain on relations between J. Edgar Hoover and Helms, ” Phillips recalled. “But the schism with Hoover was sharp, with overtones that affected Agency relations for years.” 

• • • 

NOTWITHSTANDING THE FRICTION which came out of the Dominican affair, some attempt was made during Raborn’s tenure to regularize coordination on cases which crossed jurisdictions. The need for a new mechanism was shown not only in the Caribbean crisis but in the December 1965 transfer to Burma of Top Hat (Polyakov), who had been one of the FBI’s top sources in New York. Policy was that Polyakov had to be turned over to a CIA officer overseas, disrupting the tenuous relation between agent and handling officer. CIA officers did sit down with Polyakov’s FBI handler, and got some guidance on how the GRU man acted, and reacted, but the Agency picked up the contact in Burma—not the FBI. 

That not only put the agent in a psychologically uncomfortable position, but made his former handling officer reliant on someone else’s contact reports, which might not be totally accurate. Even if a meeting were recorded and transcribed, the new handler would miss facial expressions and body language which could be easily picked up by his old contact, and the new case officer might be snowed where the old might have said: He’s not really telling the truth on this one, and I’ll go after him on it. “I think everyone realized we needed a little more flexibility, not draw the line that it had to be the CIA or FBI, exclusively, ” Scotty Miler recalled. “To me, to Jim, and to Sam, it always just made sense that you would coordinate this.” 

On February 7, 1966, a formal agreement was finally negotiated to cover the “overlap” problem. The “heart” of the understanding, according to Papich, was that CIA would “seek concurrence and coordination of the FBI” before engaging in clandestine activity in the United States, and that the Bureau would “concur and coordinate if the proposed action does not conflict with any operation, current or planned, including active investigation.” When an agent recruited by CIA abroad arrived in the United States, the FBI would be advised and the two agencies would confer. The Agency could continue its handling for “foreign intelligence purposes” as long as it briefed the Bureau, and the FBI would become involved where there were “internal security factors.” When Bureau sources went abroad, however, CIA’s superior foreign tradecraft dictated that it take control. The Agency did offer to institute foreign intelligence-training courses, including report-writing and analysis, for FBI personnel. But Hoover turned the offer down. 

FOUR MONTHS AFTER the arrangement was formalized, almost as if to test it, a new KGB man dropped into the laps of both agencies, promising to solve both the problem of Nosenko’s legitimacy and the molehunt. He arrived, and the case began, just as J. Edgar’s honeymoon with the ineffectual Raborn ended. 

Faced with a near-mutiny among CIA staffers, President Johnson fired Admiral Raborn and on June 30, 1966, replaced him with Richard Helms. The move was greeted enthusiastically at CIA—here at last was a clandestine-service officer who had risen from the ranks to run the place—but Helms quickly showed that he could be professional to the point of inflicting pain. A big status symbol for senior officers since moving to Langley in 1961 had been a key to the DCI’s elevator, but when Helms decided there were just “too damn many” people riding up with him, he took some of the keys away, and that was a real blow for those who lost the perk. Reaction at the FBI, too, was mixed; Sam Papich saw “eye to eye” with Helms on most things, and found it “easy to communicate with him, ” but Hoover reacted somewhat differently. 

Within a few days of being appointed DCI, Helms thought it would be polite to call on the FBI director. Hoover received him, which was a good start, since it was not at all a given that he would. Helms put aside his feelings about the Dominican intrusion and politely, quietly said that he had just “come to visit, ” to seek any thoughts Hoover might have about the CIA directorship, or on the relationship between their agencies. Hoover started to talk, and a half hour later he was still talking. As soon as he reasonably could, Helms excused himself, thanked Hoover, and went back to Langley. On the way out, he thought, If that’s the way business with Mr. Hoover is going to go, there’s no sense in my visiting him. And Helms never did again. 

So began what a later in-house CIA historian would term “a very long span of time during which the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mr. Hoover were barely on speaking terms, ” when “it was very difficult for the two Agencies to get along.” Helms did see Hoover sometimes at embassy receptions given by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when their director came to Washington, and Helms made an effort to chat with the FBI director on those few occasions, because most of the other people at the reception either were afraid to talk to Hoover or didn’t want to talk to him. But for the most part Helms was as close to Hoover as the telephone and not any closer. They always referred to each other as “Mr. Helms” and “Mr. Hoover, ” and never got beyond the “Mr.” in all the time they worked together. Helms sensed acutely that Hoover still regarded CIA “essentially as a rival.” 

Through Papich, Helms pressed Hoover to increase telephone taps, and to resume the joint FBI-CIA molehunt and its attendant surveillances, but Hoover refused. Some of the Bureau’s own people, especially Sullivan and his deputy, Charles Brennan, confided to their Agency contacts that they felt the FBI was shirking its duties—but who was going to confront the old man? 

Helms, for one, had more pressing matters on his mind during that summer of 1966—most particularly, a case that began on Saturday, June 18, with the ringing of a telephone at his Georgetown home. The call was from KGB officer Igor Kochenov, offering to work as an agent in-place. 

Under the new jurisdictional agreement, Kochenov would be run jointly, and both CIA and FBI officers reportedly showed up to debrief him at a Virginia coffee shop. Kochnov alleged that Yuri Nosenko was a genuine defector, that Igor Orlov was indeed the Soviet agent known as “Sasha, ” and that Orlov had contacted the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1965. The FBI checked its surveillance records of the Soviet Embassy and discovered that this was true, though they had somehow overlooked it. But because much of his information was “dated” and seemed to support Nosenko, Angleton and Miler suspected that Kochnov was a provocateur. When Kochnov asked for information about Nosenko, ostensibly to help himself climb the ladder in Moscow, CIA suspected that Kochnov had been sent to give the Soviets feedback on Nosenko, whose incarceration would have sealed off the defector from any KGB moles in CIA’s Soviet Division. 

But Angleton did want to play the Kochnov case out, to see what would happen. The two agencies therefore coordinated to recruit a previous defector, Soviet Naval officer Nicholas Shadrin, into a double-agent game, ostensibly to further Kochnov’s KGB career. The operation, code-named “Kittyhawk, ” was run jointly by Bruce Solie, in CIA’s Office of Security, and Elbert Turner of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Kochnov was allowed to contact Shadrin and ask him about the whereabouts of Golitsyn and Nosenko, and Shadrin was permitted to tell the truth, which was that he had no idea. Shadrin also began to pass doctored naval secrets to the Soviets. 

Paradoxically, while Angleton thought that the Kittyhawk game offered a good way of getting FBI and CIA to work together, he decided that this teamwork was only possible if he himself held back. Specifically—and Helms agreed to this—it was decided not to let the FBI know that CIA doubted Kochnov’s bona fides. Hoover’s patience with such pronouncements had clearly been evaporating since Angleton had impugned the credibility of the Bureau’s “third man” at the UN, but balming J. Edgar was only a secondary cause for the concealment. 

The primary one was to avoid giving Kochenov himself any hint of the suspicions against him. Angleton did not regard Turner as an especially adept or experienced case officer, and he knew that Russians, who lived in a society where they could not always speak freely, were adept at reading posture, facial expressions, the flicking of eyes. Americans tended to be open people, inept at reading other people’s body language, let alone hiding their own. CIA officers were trained to override some of this cultural conditioning, but FBI agents, who thrived on public trust, cultivated openness as a virtue. Though Solie was experienced enough to hide his thoughts, Turner might inadvertently tip Kochnov to what was up. It would be better for all concerned if the FBI were kept in the dark. 

Better, that is, for everyone but Shadrin. But the demonstration of that tragic truth was still nine years away. 

In the meantime, Kitty hawk’s implication of Orlov did promise to reconcile the agencies in that part of the molehunt. Angleton, it seemed, had been right about Sasha, and the Bureau had been wrong to shut down their surveillance. After being told that Sasha had visited the Soviet Embassy the previous year, the FBI asked him to explain himself. He said that he had gone there simply to ask for “my mother’s address.” But where Angleton thought this an obvious lie, Turner and other FBI agents said they believed Orlov. If he really were a spy, they reasoned, he wouldn’t have gone to the embassy, which was watched by the FBI; he would have some more secure means of staying in touch. Angleton never let the case go, and would frequently put FBI man James Nolan on the defensive by asking, “Have you cracked the case? What’s new on Orlov?” To see whether the Orlovs’ shop was a front, while at the same time sending a false message that Sasha was not under suspicion, Nolan sent a stream of FBI agents into the gallery on their “free time” with unframed portraits of Director Hoover, but no physical or electronic coverage was imposed.

Angleton fared even less well when he tried to get the FBI to surveil some of Orlov’s former handlers at CIA. Beginning in late summer 1966, leads were passed to Papich, who sent them to his bosses—who passed them back again. “It’s a bunch of nonsense, ” Papich was told. “Where’s their evidence?” The Bureau wasn’t interested in a case unless it promised to lead to prosecution. Miler understood that Hoover was only obeying the law, but he was frustrated when FBI asked him not to give them any more cases until he had something a little more solid. 

“There was a CIA request for shotgun surveillance of Orlov’s handlers, which we failed to go by, ” Larry McWilliams recalled. “As marvelous as it is to be an agency where you can say, ‘Let’s do this!, ’ it’s certainly a different thing if you have to stay within the rules of law. Besides, we didn’t buy Golitsyn’s reasoning in the first place. So, where CIA would call it lack of cooperation, we called it lack of common sense.” 

Among the suspected moles the Bureau declined to surveil was Paul Garbler, who had been Sasha Orlov’s handler at Berlin Base from 1952 to 1955. Garbler had also been CIA station chief in Moscow from November 1961 through February 1964, which theoretically put him in a position to help craft Nosenko’s uncheckable Oswald legend, as well as to betray a CIA-MI6 mole in the GRU, Oleg Penkovskiy, who was executed in 1963. After February 1964, Garbler had been chief of operations for the Soviet Division at headquarters, which placed him in the perfect spot to provide the KGB with feedback about Nosenko. Garbler’s father, it was discovered, had emigrated from Russia, and Angleton’s staff also learned that, while posted in Korea from 1950 to 1952, Garbler had been a tennis partner to British MI6 officer George Blake, who confessed in 1961 to being a Soviet spy. Garbler’s case was referred to the Bureau, who reportedly investigated his sex life, bank accounts, and parents, but never called him in for an interview, and never instituted electronic or physical coverage. Unable either to formally charge or to clear him, Helms quietly arranged Garbler’s transfer to a less sensitive post. 

The Bureau also turned down a request to investigate Richard Kovich, another “Sasha” suspect in CIA’s Soviet Division. Kovich had served in Berlin and handled Orlov, his name began with “K, ” he spoke Russian and had a Slavic background—all of which meant he matched Golitsyn’s mock-up. He had also supported George Kisevalter in the running of Colonel Pyotr Popov, CIA’s first mole in the GRU, in 1953, and again from 1955 to 1958—which meant that he could have conceivably burned Popov, who was executed in 1959. 

From August to October 1964, Kovich had assisted the FBI in running their KGB source at the UN, Fedora, alias Aleksei Kulak, which meant that he might have given the KGB feedback on Fedora’s alleged disinformation. Since then Kovich had been a “headhunter” for the Soviet Division, ready to make a recruitment pitch to a Soviet intelligence officer whenever and wherever division chief Dave Murphy desired. 

On December 2, 1965, Helms wrote Hoover to request physical surveillance of Kovich during what was regarded as a “particularly critical period of time” of CIA’s investigation. Concerned about “evidence that he will contact a Soviet installation in this country, ” Helms urged: “If this should occur this agency desires to know whether your Bureau would take the necessary steps to prevent Kovich from entering any Soviet installation.” But the FBI declined Helms’ request. 

Nor was Hoover enthusiastic about investigating CIA’s Soviet Division chief. David Murphy had worked closely with Sasha Orlov while chief of CIA’s Munich operations base from 1949 to 1953, and while he was deputy chief of CIA’s Berlin Base from 1953 to 1959, Murphy’s backyard had actually adjoined Sasha’s. Murphy’s first wife had been a White Russian from China who emigrated to San Francisco, and Miler knew from his own Far East experiences that there were a lot of communist controlled émigrés coming out of that part of the world. 

Murphy had recommended that CIA hire a man named Andy Yankovsky, who built a network of agents in North Korea, almost all of whom were caught. The Soviet Division chief also had a habit of getting into well publicized tussles with KGB agents in places like Tokyo and Vienna; the persistence of the pattern suggested that such episodes might have been “staged” by the KGB handlers as an excuse for contact, onto establish his anti-Soviet bona fides (as if to say: they would never get into fistfights with their own man). 

Finally, as chief of the Soviet Division from 1963 on, Murphy would naturally have been the ideal KGB source of feedback on Nosenko and other suspected disinformation efforts. Although CIA’s top management had been loath to sic the FBI on Murphy without damning evidence, in late 1966, one of Murphy’s underlings, Peter Kapusta, called Papich at 2:00 a.m. and accused his boss of being a Soviet spy. But the FBI viewed the Murphy matter strictly as an internal CIA problem, and even though Kapusta’s allegation was complemented by circumstantial material from Angleton, the Bureau did not investigate. 

Hoover’s refusal to help CIA root out security problems continued for years, and dismayed FBI Intelligence Division chief William Sullivan. In early 1971, Sullivan later said, Angleton turned to the Bureau for a domestic investigation because he “believed four or five guys were agents, including two guys still in the agency and three or four who had been high level. They were suspected of having dealings with foreign intelligence agents.” Sullivan consulted Hoover, who “refused on the grounds that it was the responsibility of the CIA. However, in this case he realized that he might be put in a compromising position by suggesting that the CIA conduct domestic investigations, so reluctantly he told me to go ahead, but he instructed me to conduct just the semblance of an investigation.” In other words, “It was a brush-off. CIA was never satisfied with the FBI, and I can’t blame them. We did hit or miss jobs. We were constantly cutting the throats of CIA.” 

Papich, who had to carry the bad news to Angleton on the FBI’s numerous refusals and sham inquiries, was circumspect about what happened. “I think where Jim Angleton may have made mistakes is in—and, then, maybe not, maybe history will prove that he was right, as he was right about looking at Soviet deception—but I say he may have selected the wrong targets within the Agency. And he may not have, I don’t know.” 

In the end, that very uncertainty would be the most tragic legacy of FBI-CIA disagreement in the molehunt. Without full, “clean, ” timely investigations by the FBI, the suspects’ careers and reputations could never be totally restored. In effect, they were blacklisted. Garbler was transferred from headquarters to CIA’s tiny station in Trinidad; Kovich was demoted to a lower-security assignment at Camp Peary; Murphy landed as station chief in Paris. All eventually retired in frustration. 

“These individuals were under scrutiny, ” Helms recalled, “and they were put in jobs that were not particularly sensitive, so that if they were indeed a Russian agent, or a Polish agent, or a penetration of some kind, they could not continue to send valuable information to the home office. None of these people were ever taken off the payroll, because I had a policy that nobody was going to be forced to leave the Agency until a clear case was made that there was a reason for this. Suspicion was not enough. So none of these people were fired, and none of them were at least directly penalized financially. And if some people were hurt in the process, I’m sorry!” There was a rare edge of emotion in his voice when he spoke of the matter, even thirty years later. “But this is not a game for the soft-hearted.” 

Alas, Helms’ defensiveness would reveal yet another legacy of the unsuccessful search for penetrations, and it was a dangerous one. Because no legal evidence was ever developed against high-level moles in CIA, and because Karlow, Kovich, and Garbler were later officially cleared by the Agency and given generous financial settlements, it became fashionable to believe that CIA had never been penetrated at all. Eventually Golitsyn’s allegations would be dismissed as paranoia, Angleton would be denounced by colleagues and historians as a merciless inquisitor, and CIA, as an institution, would overcorrect by taking an approach to counterintelligence that could best be summed up by the phrase: “Relax, we have nothing to worry about.” That transformation would not be formally effected until the 1970s, and its impact not fully felt until a decade after that, but it was rooted in the failure to find moles by the end of 1966.

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