Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein

Author:Edward Jay Epstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Eje Publications Ltd
Published: 2012-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The War of the Moles

Having inward spies means making use of officials of the enemy...

to find out the state of affairs in the enemy's country, ascertain the

plans that are being formed against you, and disturb the harmony

and create a breach between the sovereign and his ministers.

—Sun-tzu, The Art of War

After learning about Dunlap, I wanted to know why U.S. intelligence

was vulnerable to penetrations. Not only must such a mole

be in the right place at the right moment, he must be willing to

betray his country, very possibly at the risk of his life. What were

the conditions that allowed the KGB to find these "inward spies"?

Earlier in my research, an officer in the CIA's Soviet Bloc

Division outlined to me what he claimed was a novel that he

wanted to write. It was called "The Letter."

It begins when a young CIA officer working out of the American

Embassy in Berne, Switzerland, receives an anonymous letter

warning him that one of his superiors in the CIA is a Soviet mole.

The writer adds that he will personally contact the officer within

the week and provide him with secret documents that will establish

his bona fides. The letter writer makes one final request: he asks

the CIA officer to keep even the fact that he has received

the letter a secret from his superiors, lest it leak back to the mole

and the KGB.

The case officer ignores this injunction. Instead, following CIA

procedures, he informs his superior about the letter. Several

months later he receives another letter from the mystery writer

explaining that his initial letter has leaked to the KGB, precipitating

a Soviet security investigation. To prove that there was

indeed a penetration into the CIA station, he also encloses the

name of an Eastern European diplomat the CIA was planning to

recruit that month. The writer notes that if this letter is passed up

through channels, he will undoubtedly be discovered and arrested;

if not, he will contact the CIA officer.

The CIA officer, convinced by this information that indeed there

is a mole in his own chain of command, decides this time to follow

the instructions in the letter. This time he ignores the rules.

Weeks go by. Then, at a large reception, a Soviet diplomat

identifies himself to the CIA officer as the letter writer. He explains

that he is a KGB counterintelligence officer who wants to

defect to the United States. He points out that, having revealed

himself, his life now depends on the discretion of the CIA officer.

And he offers a bargain that is difficult to resist. He will supply an

entire cache of documents about Soviet intelligence operations that

will pinpoint the Soviet moles in the CIA. In return, all the CIA

officer has to do is help conceal his identity until the mole complex

is exposed.

The CIA officer replies that he has no real choice in the matter:

whatever documents he receives from him will have to be passed

up through channels.

The KGB officer then suggests a way out of this bind. The

documents could be turned over to his superiors, but, to throw the

inevitable KGB investigation off his tracks, the CIA officer would

misreport the time of the meetings by a day or so.

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