A Mind of Winter

by Mark Riebling

Angleton's prized source: the KGB defector who predicted the rise of the Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Washington, December 15, 1961. The defection of a KGB major was one of the few encouraging augurs on an otherwise troubling 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 U.N. aircraft. Kennedy was trying to similarly split the Soviet Bloc by selling 30,000 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-bulgar survival wafers in atomic fallout shelters. It would have little comforted JFK to hear that such biscuits might not 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 six p.m. in Helsinki. In a blinding snowstorm he had approached the Haapatie Street doorstep of CIA station chief Frank Friberg. Within hours, Friberg was on a U.S. Air Force jet with the stocky, sharp-eyed KGB major, 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 who 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 Beedle 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 embarassed 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 outgoing 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 a CIA property in Maryland. KGB defectors were rare enough, but Golitsyn was a major, and no higher-ranking Soviet had ever defected. Golitsyn, moreover, had been inside the enemy's brain center, having spent years studying at KGB think-tanks, and could therefore provide new insight into Soviet strategy. Indeed, Golitsyn was soon alluding to Soviet disinformation operations, designed to support a "long-range plan." But the prickly defector had so far 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 a to kill a Western political figure.

Helms did not attach too much urgency to that latter 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." He said that 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 tells the KGB about an American-British electronic surveillance project, code named Easy Chair. With those clues, Angleton reviewed personnel records over the Christmas holidays, and Helms was not surprised when, by the second week of January, the CI Chief had found a suspect who seemed to fit perfectly the profile.

His name was Peter Karlow. He had been born Klibansky, the last name of his Russian-emigre 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. The possibility that Karlow might be "Sasha" could not be ignored.

Still, Helms knew there wasn't much that Angleton could actually do about the Karlow suspicions. 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, or else he might cease behavior, such as contact with Soviet cutouts, which 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 could be fully restored,

What to do? Helms, ever the professional, 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 if Karlow were 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 they followed Karlow to Philadelphia, where he entered a storefront carrying a box, and 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 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 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 not longer be on the staff." On July 5, Karlow limped through the Agency parking lot toward his car and drove away from Langley for the last time.

But Houston, among others, didn't think his old OSS colleague would have ever 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 -- all because of the FBI."

Interagency recrimination over the Karlow and other molehunt cases was still some years away in the early 1960s, but dispute over the 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 mid-February 1962 they knew all about him. Hoover had one of his infamous eruptions, insisting that McCone explain why the Bureau hadn't been immediately informed.

The FBI Director had some basis for complaint. Although it was "accepted procedure," as Helms would later say, 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. Typically, the FBI claimed a priority need to interrogate any KGB defector about any Soviet operations within the United States, and within a day of his arrival in-country, G-Men were normally allowed to probe him on the identities and duties of illegals, or foreign intelligence officers serving under diplomatic or commercial cover, or even American citizens who might be hostile agents-in-place. The Bureau would then work any such cases with research and interviews, surveil prime suspects, and with luck catch a foreign agent in the act of passing classified data to his case officer in the KGB. If standard procedure had been followed, the Peter Karlow serial would have come to the Bureau directly from Golitsyn, 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 inherently 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. He insisted on speaking English, and would not deal with Russian-speaking case officers; that was problematic, because Golitsyn was officially under the care of CIA's Soviet Division. He became increasingly stingy with his material, and after speaking cryptically about KGB assassination plans, a long-range disinformation plot, and false defectors who would follow him, he had given out little except for the Karlow serial. 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 further alienate Golitsyn was to bring in a bunch of flatfooted 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, DCI McCone, who had decided to remain at the Agency, refused to make the KGB man available.

The ensuing bureaucratic battle was exacerbated by personal hostility between Hoover and McCone. For all the problems Dulles had caused, the FBI Director would have 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 60s, 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 his hair was white, his spirit unleavened even by the instinct for cameraderie that was well-developed in a military man like Bedell Smith, but with all Smith's irascibility. "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. 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 Abel-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. They 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?"

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 speaking of the Abel case, Moore remembered Golitsyn theorizing that, just as the KGB would have tried to turn Powers into a double-agent before returning him, 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 conspirational. 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 his supervisor, Intelligence Division chief William Sullivan, and Russian-speaking special agent Alekso Poptanich. The six-man Agency contingent included Angleton, 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 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."

Poptanich and Branigan left the meeting agreeing with their supervisor, Moore, that Golitsyn's importance was being grossly exaggerated by CIA. Though the ultimate consequences of disagreement on Golitsyn were still to be seen, the Soviet defector was already polarizing American counterintelligence along interagency lines.

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 mindset. "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, Bill 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 meet privately with U.S. intelligence. He was met in a safehouse by young CIA officer Pete Bagley. After offering Nosenko some liquor and peanuts, which were heartily accepted, Bagley said he would appreciate the Soviet speaking clearly and slowly and in English wherever possible. Nosenko then delivered a great number of sentences, fast, in Russian, while swigging whisky and munching nuts. Because of the language problem, Bagley had to puzzle out much of that 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 60s, 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 it, he would tell what he knew about KGB penetration of CIA. Bagley cabled headquarters that Nosenko had "conclusively proven his bona fides."

But when Bagley flew home that weekend to make a full report, Angleton shot him down. 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 caught in 1959 by a special KGB spy dust, 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 bought that logic, and 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" 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 to whom he might reveal his most important messages. 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 from him. 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. British counterspy Arthur Martin visited the Washington to explain the Philby case to both FBI and CIA. The Bureau had no direct "need to know," but did have an interest in the case dating back to the Maclean affair, and the British were adept enough at the politics of American to know that Hoover must not feel the British to be favoring central intelligence.

Golitsyn returned to the U.S. in June 1963 after his identity was partially leaked to the British press, perhaps by Angleton, who believed that, with the proper approach, he could be immensely valuable. Golitsyn officially became the ward of the CI Staff, and though he did not get get to see President Kennedy, but Angleton did get him an appointment with RFK. Golitsyn held back from the Attorney General about long-range Soviet strategy, but during fall 1963 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 Sam 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 just the two of them, 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. He thought he was really going somewhere, and 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'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 20th Communist World Congress, in 1959, the USA 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 objective 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 utilize 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 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 utilized Western contacts with the Trust to inject its reformist message into British intelligence, Golitsyn said the KGB would now create a new "Trust" of anti-communists -- 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 Two. Disinformants would confirm the reality of bogus schisms within the communist world, perpetuate a false picture of communist designs and strength, and, above all, deflect from true information provided by defectors such as Golitsyn. Nosenko must be part of that strategy, 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.

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

Angleton smiled. Here at last, he said, was the "final cause" of Soviet penetration, its ultimate logic, the the key to KGB strategy. Although the most obvious purpose of any Soviet mole was to 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." Golitsyn was able to supply leads to some of these moles, but Angleton thought that Nosenko had been dispatched, in part, to throw both CIA and FBI on the track.

"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 God-damned 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 after meeting him. 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 it all rested ultimately on Golitsyn's word. The apparent dangling of Nosenko to deflect from Golitsyn's information did enhance the latter's credibility at CIA, but the FBI did not yet have a "need to know" about Nosenko, and speculation about his bona fides would probably not have swayed a legalistic G-Man in any case. "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 that "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. Where the FBI 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. If some FBI agents, on the basis of family background or other factors, were thought likely to have attracted KGB interest, and if those individuals had consistently handled cases which inexplicably failed; or, if they had worked with suspected disinformation agents, and were thus in a position to provide the KGB with feedback.... perhaps such patterns might warrant further investigation. 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. "So that he could help us clean our own house! No way were we going to give our files to Golitsyn, and let him study them."

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 Golitsynism 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 Scotch-loving Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, nicknamed "Fatso" by his Bureau handlers and officially code-named Fedora. He served under cover 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 Soviet 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 Dimitri 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 ninety 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, and naval secrets by naval intelligence, etc., and the game would be lost if doctored intelligence passed by the FBI's agents 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 Kopf-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 UN diplomats," Angleton's deputy 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's information, 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, much of which was counter to what we had learned from Golitsyn."

There were numerous 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, and both within months of Golitsyn's warning that disinformation agents would follow him. Both had been recruited by the FBI after the KGB's 1959 reorganization; both had been posted to the Soviet UN Staff in New York, where they were likely to be approached by Western intelligence; and both had volunteered their services after Golitsyn's defection. According to the new CI doctrine, neither man was likely to have ever been in the "inner KGB," but both were exactly the sorts of personnel who might be deliberately misbriefed, and both could be used to deflect from Golitsyn. Their reporting lacked hot clues to new penetrations, such as Golitsyn had provided, and ranged across compartments, which was odd in the notoriously compartmented KGB. 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. In 1963, for instance, Fedora said that the Soviets had a spy in a British nuclear research facility, and suspicion soon hovered over Giuseppe Martelli, a clerk at Culham Laboratory. Investigation revealed rendezvous information locked in a drawer in his desk, according to MI5 man Peter Wright, and partially used coding pads for secret communications. But, said 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 "throw-away 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 god-damn 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. "Kulak knew just where to go, which floor. He identified himself; 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 what-not 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 the number of cases during early 1960s. Good cooperation did exist alongside 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 gave him a number of cases developed jointly 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." One of these sources was Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the GRU colonel who had been working for CIA for several years. Then, in spring 1962,when it was believed that Penkovskiy had fallen under KGB suspicion and might defect, a complicated FBI-CIA 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 Constitutions 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 never defected.

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, FBI-CIA cooperation in the Hunter mail-opening project was expanded to include correspondence with Latin America; in this brief program, Hunter Vince, the FBI provided CIA about 180 names for watchlisting. 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 intelligence Western Hemisphere 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 also bloomed in Mexico City, where CIA's Chief of Station, David Atlee Phillips, worked well with Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attache, 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 middle-grade United States military officer who needed enough money to allow him to flee a henpecking 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 cooperation, of course, CIA officers still liked to make digs about the FBI being a bunch of flatfeet. "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 CIA Soviet Division officer James McCarger 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 strip's 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 McCarger'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."

But Dulles was merely engaging in public relations. 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, as has been seen, a failure of coordination on the Cubela/Trafficante plots, and poor FBI-CIA coverage of Oswald in Mexico, had 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.

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