Cold Warrior: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter.

Defects and Defectors

AT ONE point in Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior, Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973, is quoted as saying to the author: "I still haven't the faintest idea if Nosenko is bona-fide." This is a remarkable comment, because from the mid 1970s on, both the CIA and the FBI had made up their institutional minds about Yuri Nosenko.

The young Russian had defected to the United States in February 1964 claiming to be a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. Extraordinarily, just three months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Americans had in their hands someone who on two occasions had had an opportunity to inspect the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald. And Nosenko was ready to testify before the Warren Commission that not only had the KGB made no attempt to recruit Oswald during the three years he lived in the Soviet Union, it had not even thought it worth while to debrief him. But as the CIA began to interrogate Nosenko, it came up against lies, inconsistencies, and patent nonsense in his testimony.

The Agency was now in a quandary. If it concluded that Nosenko was not a genuine defector but an agent dispatched by the KGB, it would bring into serious question the Warren Commission's finding that there was no Soviet involvement in the assassination. If it concluded that Nosenko was a genuine defector, it would contradict the evidence accumulated against him by its Soviet Bloc Division. Finally, in October 1968 the CIA concluded that whether Nosenko had or had not been a dispatched agent, he had long ceased to be of any use to the KGB. The CIA decided to cut its losses, release him from custody, resettle him somewhere in the United States with a new identity, and hire him as a consultant on KGB history. But, as far as the Agency was concerned, he would remain a source whose "bona fides are not established." Not until 1976 did the Agency reverse itself and declare that Yuri Nosenko had been a genuine defector all along.

Tom Mangold, a BBC-TV journalist, is in no doubt whatsoever that Nosenko was everything he claimed to be. That it took the CIA so many years to recognize something so self-evident, and that Richard Helms has not yet done so, is ascribed to the pernicious influence of one man, the late James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1974. Angleton was, according to Mangold, the leader of the "Intelligence Fundamentalists"--men and women throughout the Western intelligence services who were "zealots to the cause, true believers," determined to prevail against the "imminent international Communist storm."

Angleton can do nothing right. Mangold repeatedly shows him making a mess of his marriage, indulging his passion for martinis, turning up at his Langley office at 11 in the morning, or rolling up drunk after lunch. But his innumerable personal failings were nothing to compare with the disastrous consequences of his professional actions. Mangold's central charge is that Angleton, as a result of his cold-war obsession, fell under the spell of another KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who persuaded Angleton that the most important step in the Kremlin's quest for world domination was the takeover of the Western intelligence services. They would become vehicles of Soviet disinformation, both through fake defectors and through "moles" within the services who would seek to ensure that the "disinformation" coming out of the Soviet Union was accepted back home as genuine information. Subscribing to this theory, Mangold asserts, led Angleton to demoralize the Agency and ruin careers through his vain hunt for "moles" burrowing away at Langley. In addition, he prevented the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division from recruiting spies in the Soviet Union--its raison d'etre--in the fear that they might all be KGB agents. But this assault on paranoia itself bears the marks of the disease.

Would Angleton have been right not to institute a "molehunt"? In 1961 alone--the year of Golitsyn's defection--Heinz Felfe, one of the counterintelligence chiefs of the German intelligence service, was arrested as a Soviet spy, as was George Blake of Britain's MI-6. The CIA, the KGB's major adversary during the cold war, could not but have been a key target for Soviet penetration. Doubtless, "molehunts" are annoying, disruptive, offensive to collegial self-esteem as well as good-fellowship, and so on. Careers may be set back or even terminated unfairly. But the CIA, as the guardian of the nation's secrets, has to err on the side of caution.

Moreover, the "molehunt" was not just a personal project of Angleton's. It required the authorization of the DCI. Nor was it all that far-reaching. Some forty officers were investigated from a staff numbering about seven thousand. That no moles were ever uncovered is for Richard Helms, at least, proof that the CIA was not penetrated during his years there, and for this he credits the work of James Angleton. The spycatcher himself, though, remained convinced that the organization had been penetrated. Whatever the case may be, the counterintelligence record of the post-Angleton CIA has hardly been auspicious. There was the case of Philip Agee; of William Kampiles, who in 1978 sold the Russians the manual for the KH-11 photo-reconnaissance satellite; of Edward Lee Howard, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985; of Karel Koecher, a contract translator who was indicted for spying in 1984; of David Barnett, who was convicted of spying in 1980.

Another charge against Angleton is that he turned over to the KGB Russians who had risked their lives for the United States. Take the example to which Cold Warrior devotes two chapters, the case of Yuri Loginov. In 1961 Loginov, a KGB "illegal," offered his services to the Americans. The CIA took him up on his offer, but by 1966 both Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff and the Soviet Bloc Division had come to believe that Loginov was working for the KGB and for no one else. Loginov was arrested in South Africa, whose government was tipped off by the CIA. But he never faced trial. Instead, he was swapped for West German spies held in East Germany. Mangold mutters darkly: "The unconfirmed word from Moscow was that Loginov had been court-martialed and shot as a traitor." But then at the end of the chapter he confesses that the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky asserted that nothing whatsoever happened to Loginov because the Russians did not for one moment believe he was working for the CIA. But since his cover had been blown, he was discharged from the KGB. So pity the poor KGB chap, unable to do any more spying!

Mangold then really puts his foot in his mouth. He mentions that an article in a newsletter for CIA retirees in 1988 stated that Loginov had been recruited by the Agency. "If he was still alive," Mangold again rumbles, "it is difficult to imagine that he would not have been re-arrested and confronted with this new evidence of his disloyalty to his country." Indeed. And who wrote this brilliant article? It was none other than Leonard McCoy, Mangold's chief source for his diatribe against Angleton. So it is McCoy, not Angleton, who is responsible for whatever might befall Loginov!

In a chapter ominously entitled "Deadly Betrayal" Mangold suggests that Angleton was responsible for the death of a longtime agent of the FBI and the CIA. He writes that in 1978 Edward Jay Epstein mentioned in an unsigned item in New York magazine that the U.S. had an undercover agent in the Russian Mission to the UN whose credibility was in doubt. "The sole reason for this betrayal of a working CIA agent lay in the Fundamentalists' obsession to further their already discredited argument that all Soviet intelligence defectors were fakes," writes Mangold. The Soviets, according to him, began to investigate. And sure enough, in January 1990, Pravda announced the execution of a Soviet diplomat at the UN who for many years had spied for the United States. Epstein always denied that Angleton had leaked this information to him. His source, he said, was William Sullivan, former Assistant Director of the FBI. Yes, Mangold replies, but Sullivan died in 1977, "before he could be asked the crucial question--did Angleton approve or sanction the leak?" Mangold does not explain what sort of power Angleton of the CIA exerted over Sullivan of the FBI. Nor does he explain how useful this leak could have been to the Soviets if it took them fully 12 years to figure out whom Epstein was referring to.

Mangold has a huge section about the incarceration of Nosenko. He does not do what Stansfield Turner did and accuse Angleton of masterminding it, because he knows that that is not true. The case was handled entirely by the Soviet Bloc Division, with the full authorization of the DCI and the Attorney General. So where does Angleton come into it? Mangold is reduced to quoting a recent interview with Turner, who, obviously retreating considerably from the accusations he made in his 1985 Secrecy and Democracy, says he never saw "a single document in which Angleton objects to what was being done to Nosenko." Whether Angleton could have overruled the Soviet Bloc Division is a matter of speculation. Nonetheless, the point that Angleton's culpability arises merely from his failure to register a protest undermines the premise of the book. Angleton is supposed to have been an all-powerful figure exerting a pernicious influence throughout the Agency, not just a high-level memo pusher.

Mangold has sought to depict a figure emblematic of American cold-war paranoia, a sort of Joe McCarthy of the CIA. And to make a book out of it, he has had to falsify the record to show an Angleton who, despite losing almost every important bureaucratic struggle within the Agency, wielded more power than any DCI.

Mr. Szamuely is a freelance writer living in New York City.