Agent Sniper by Tim Tate

Author:Tim Tate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

If the letter gave the wrong date for Goleniewski’s defection, credited him with a degree he had not earned, and incorrectly asserted that he had been divorced prior to bigamously marrying Irmgard Kampf, it was enough to assuage Feighan’s initial irritation. But he insisted that Goleniewski testify on oath; ‘I’d like to see the live body,’ he explained later. ‘The man should make an appearance before all members of the subcommittee.’4

The demand provoked a further round of argument. The CIA was a branch of the executive, answerable directly to the President, and was accustomed to deference from the elected representatives on Capitol Hill. It had also, according to its General Counsel John S. Warner, fought previous battles to prevent Congress scrutinizing its importation of Soviet bloc defectors. ‘[The] head of Senate Judiciary, which has jurisdiction over immigration, said this is an impingement on the immigration authorities. I explained to him that this was not an immigration matter, that this was an operational matter to bring a very important alien into the country without regard to the special provision of the immigration laws.’5

Feighan, however, stuck to his guns until the Agency reluctantly gave in. On 27 May, flanked by Warner and officers from both the CIA and the INS, Goleniewski was brought to a closed session of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationality. It proved to be a brief hearing.

Although there are no official transcripts – nor even a record of the agenda – in US Congressional archives, according to Goleniewski’s subsequent sworn affidavit he spoke only to confirm his name; for the remainder of the twenty-minute hearing, the CIA General Counsel described Agent Sniper’s ‘voluntary efforts and results on behalf of the national security of the United States, its western allies’ and answered all the Committee’s questions on his behalf.6

The perfunctory hearing satisfied the letter, but not the spirit, of the Agency’s commitment, and Feighan left the committee room with a sense of foreboding; something in Goleniewski’s strained and silent demeanour hinted at troubles to come. He did not have long to wait.

That summer of 1963 the CIA’s changing attitude had begun to affect Goleniewski’s equilibrium. The Agency had returned to playing psychological games, constantly switching between his real name and his two alternate identities, Franz Oldenburg and Martin N. Cherico. It had also assigned him a new and strangely hostile handler, whose cover name – ‘Clemens’ – was the same as that of one of the BND spies Goleniewski had exposed. There was no explanation for these unnecessary ploys, but coupled with the obvious slow progress of investigations into his leads and the rejection of his request to meet McCone, they began to destabilize Goleniewski’s mental health.

In the middle of June he decided to bypass the CIA and take his concerns to the head of the US government. The letter he composed was long, rambling and confused, but since it was addressed to President John F. Kennedy at the White House it should have attracted attention:

Dear Sir. It is very embarrassing for me that I must write this letter to you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.