The Lessons of Le Carre

Whether or not it wins an Oscar, the movie adaptation of John Le Carre's 1974 novel "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" demonstrates the power of the classic spy story about the struggle of a fallen intelligence officer to uncover a high-level mole. The obstacle to finding the mole is the intelligence service itself, which attempts to rid itself of the mole hunter. It doesn't want to admit that it has been gulled—a story that's all too rooted in reality.

Consider, for example, the findings of an internal CIA investigation in 1995. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the CIA's inspector general examined how in the late 1980s and early 1990s the CIA had incorporated Russian disinformation into its own reporting. He discovered that over those years the KGB had dispatched at least a half-dozen double agents who provided disinformation cooked up in Moscow to their CIA case officers. Between 1986 and 1994, some of this data had routinely been passed to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in reports with a distinctive blue stripe to signify their importance.

When the inspector general traced the path of this disinformation, he found that the "senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence." CIA Director John Deutch, who had received the blue-border reports when he was deputy secretary of defense, told Congress that the CIA's failure to disclose that the intelligence emanated from KGB-controlled agents was "an inexcusable lapse."

The only way that the KGB could have duped the CIA for years was by modifying its data so that it would continue to seem plausible—and that required some form of feedback. As it later turned out, the KGB had no fewer than three moles in American intelligence capable of providing such feedback: In the CIA it had Aldrich Ames starting in 1985. And in the FBI the KGB had both Robert Hanssen since 1978 and Earl Edwin Pitts starting in 1987. They survived as moles—Hanssen for 22 years—because of the sort of institutional blindness, born out of bureaucratic fear, so well described in Le Carre's novel.  Those officers in the CIA who attempted to remedy this blindness, notably counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, were dismissed as paranoid.

These double agents came to light largely because of the defections from the KGB that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, under more normal circumstances, entrenched bureaucracies can be expected to resist reappraisals of their past work, especially where careers are at stake. The intelligence community's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is a case in point.

Based on intelligence, including reports from agents and defectors, that an Iranian nuclear weapon-design program—code-named Project 111—had ended, the NIE declared: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," including "nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium enrichment." The intelligence community took at least partial credit for this success by attributing Iran's change to "increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work."

Today no one, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, believes that Iran gave up its nuclear weaponization ambitions. Indeed we now know from satellite imagery and other means that in 2003 the regime was secretly completing a new uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo, 20 miles north of the holy city of Qom. That was after it closed down Project 111, which in any case had been compromised by a laptop stolen from Iran and smuggled into Turkey and then into CIA hands.

Nor can the CIA rely on its own espionage apparatus, because a communications accident in 2004 compromised most, if not all, of its agents in Iran: The CIA inadvertently sent a list of its operatives to a double agent, a disaster described by the reporter James Risen in his book "State of War." As a result, the CIA could not be sure how much of the data it received from those operatives was disinformation.

Yet, as far as is known, the CIA has still never reappraised the sources and methods that led to its conclusion that Iran had abandoned its quest for a nuclear weapon.


Mr. Epstein's latest book is "James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?" 

The Forgotten Concept of State-Sponsored Terrorism Reconsidered

After federal prosecutors charged that Iranian officials were behind a plot to pay a gang of Mexican drug dealers $1.5 million to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador in Washington DC, American officials expressed incredulity that the Iranian government would “cross the line” by sponsoring such a plot. Despite prima facie evidence of state sponsorship, including monitored telephone calls that traced directly back to officials of the covert action branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and state banking arrangements for the first part of a $1.5 million transfer, a “senior law enforcement official”– often code used for the FBI Director– told the New York Times that such a plot was inconsistent with Iran’s previous modus operandi and suggested that it might be a rogue operation not approved by the Iranian government. Anything is of course possible but such a tortured explanation shows how far the concept of state-sponsored terrorism has fallen out of fashion in America.


That was not always the case. During the Cold War, the US government routinely assumed that the Soviet Union and other adversaries engaged sponsored covert actions including political assassination, embassy bombing, and airplane hijackings and used terrorist groups and criminal gangs to camouflaged their sponsorship. The extent to which their intelligence services covertly employed terrorists from the Red Brigade, Baader-Meinhof Gang, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is now a matter of record. How these false flag operations worked is made abundantly clear in the brilliantly-researched miniseries on “Carlos The Jackal.” For two decades, Carlos (nee Ilich Ramerez Sanchez) was able to carry out dramatic terrorist operations because he had hidden state sponsorship for them . Consider, for example, his kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in Vienna in 1975. The operation was conceived of and backed by Saddam Hussein. Iraq provided him with the weapons, explosives, and other equipment by using its diplomatic pouch to transport them to its Embassy in Vienna, as well as the false documentation and money he needed. It also arranged his escape to Algeria with his hostages. In other operations, he was assisted by Syria, Yemen, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Sudan. Only when the Cold War ended and he lost this state sponsorship was he extradited from Sudan to France and arrested.

State sponsorship of terrorism did not end with the Cold War.. As late as April 2001, the US designated seven governments— Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan— as "state sponsors of international terrorism" and also cited Pakistani for its “support to terrorist groups and elements active in Kashmir,” as well as the Taliban, which it noted “ continues to harbor terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda.” One reason that Iran headed the list was the FBI had concluded in 1999 that it used local Saudi terrorists to mask its role in killing 19 Americans with a giant truck bomb blow up the US military residences at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

Nor did Bin Laden operate without state sponsorship prior to 9-11. In his jihad against Russian forces in Afghanistan, he was supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. After Saudi broke with him in 1990, he was backed by Sudan and then, after 1996, by Afghanistan. In Taliban-run Afghanistan, he was able to used its Ariana airlines to move weapons and personnel to the Emirates and Pakistan (which were staging bases for his terrorist operations.) He may have also had covert cooperation from Iran. The 911 Commission learned from documents which the CIA it only a few days before its report was due to be published that the international travels of at least 8 of the hijackers who took part in the 9-11 attack were “apparently facilitated" by Iran. These men were allowed to transit through Iran without their passports being stamped and without obtaining transit visas. If their passports had been stamped by Iran they may not have been permitted entry to the US. The Commission was unable to investigate the extent of Iranian support since its Report had to be shipped to the printers .

In light of the discovery of the Iranianb plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador, It may be useful to reconsidered the concept of state sponsorship of terrorism.

TV's Reality Show

Showtime has a new psycho-thriller series called “Homeland” that concerns the search for a hidden mole by the CIA. So in the episodes to come dedicated investigators will ferret him or her out. What is interesting here is the schism between the fictional world and real world of counterespionage. In the former, the issue is discovering and getting rid of the mole. In the real world, the issue is the vulnerability of the organization itself. If the CIA can be penetrated for a sustained period of time by an enemy agent masquerading as a loyal officer, then there is a defect in its apparatus. To admit this, is to admit it is vulnerable to penetration. Such an admission will paralyze its intelligence gathering. The alternative is to view such allegations as the product of “paranoia” and “sick think,” as CIA Director William Colby termed it. This mindset maintains the illusion of invulnerability and the organization’s morale, but allows the penetration to continue.

This single most revealing document on how the CIA dealt with this dilemma is the 1995 finding of its own CIA Inspector General. His investigation determined that 6 or more agents recruited by the CIA in the 1980s and early 1990s were actually controlled by the KGB. The internal investigation further established that between 1986 and 1994 information from these double-agents had routinely been incorporated in the CIA's most highly classified product, a report signed personally by the CIA director, and provided with a distinctive blue stripe to the President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all received this disinformation, according to the Inspector-General. But the shocking part is not that the KGB successfully deceived the CIA but that the CIA did not reveal it had been gulled after learning its agents were controlled by Moscow. The Inspector General states “senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence.” Yet they chose not to blow the KGB’s deception.

If it revealed that the KGB controlled these agents, its entire illusion of invulnerability would crumble. It would have to confront the possibility that the KGB was able to continue this operation for eight years because it had someone inside the CIA telling it how the data it was preparing was being interpreted by the CIA. James Jesus Angleton had contended that such feedback required a mole in either CIA or FBI counterintelligence. At the time, it was believed by the leadership of the CIA that its rigorous defenses , including polygraph examinations, security checks /and agents recruited in Russian intelligence, made it invulnerable to such a deep penetration. So Angleton fired by Colby and discredited.. It was only decades later moles such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were discovered. Angleton was proven right in his assessment but the Cold war was over.

James Jesus Angleton Reconsidered

In his newly published memoir, Dick Cheney provides such an intriguing coda to his service on the House Intelligence Committee that it could been the opening of a Le Carre novel. He writes that in May 1987 James Jesus Angleton, the former head of CIA counterintelligence, requested an urgent meeting with him to reveal to him something of “vital importance.” He immediately scheduled it but, just days before it was to take place, Angleton died, taking the unconveyed message to the grave with him. At the time, the general consensus in the intelligence community was that Angleton was paranoid about the KGB. His hunt for a mole, which had partly paralyzed the CIA had failed, and when he was fired from the CIA in 1975, CIA director William Colby called his obsession that the CIA could be penetrated by the KGB “sick think.” His idea that the KGB could plant and then sustain a mole in the CIA or FBI had not been substantiated by any evidence in 1975, and his idea that the CIA could be manipulated into cooperating in its own deception seemed totally out of touch with reality,

Yet, as it turned out after his death, he was not as far out of touch with reality as his critics inside the CIA.

First, the discovery of KGB moles Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, and Robert Hanssen showed that the KGB had the capability to penetrate both the CIA and FBI.

Second, the fact that, despite lie detector tests, surveillance, and other counterespionage measures, Ames and Hanssen went undetected for more than a decade– Hanssen worked for the KGB over a period of 22 years– showed that the KGB had the ability to protect and advance their moles. ( Ames headed the CIA's Soviet Russia Division’s counterintelligence unit, Hanssen worked in the FBI’s anti- KGB operations.)

Third, the CIA Inspector General’s finding in 1995 found that in the 1980s and early 1990s the KGB had dispatched at least a half-dozen double agents who provided the CIA with disinformation cooked up in Moscow and that for eight years this disinformation had been passed in blue-striped reports signed personally by the CIA director to three Presidents even thought “senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence” showed that the CIA would not necessarily expose KGB deception. So Angleton was right on all three scores.

For detils, see my most recent book -- James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?

The Russian Tip: Radioactive Smuggling In London

On Dec. 7, 2006, US Ambassador Henry Crumpton dined in Paris with Vladimir Putin’s special representative, Anatoly Safonov. Both men had deep experience in the spy game. Crumpton ran the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan in 2001 and Safonov, a former Colonel-General in the KGB, was the deputy director of its successor agency, the FSB in Moscow. What occurred at this extraordinary meeting emerged when Wikileak released a December 26,2006 State Department cable classified “secret.” The cable revealed that the subject of the meeting was the strange death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian KGB officer, who had died in London two weeks earlier, from exposure to Polonium 210. This was in no way an ordinary death. Polonium 210 is a rare radioactive isotope that can be used to begin the chain reaction in early-stage nuclear bombs.

According to the cable, “Safonov claimed that Russian authorities in London had known about and followed individuals moving radioactive substances into the city, but were told by the British that they were under control before the poisoning took place.” , Safonov was certainly in a position to know that had reported to British intelligence on Nuclear material smuggling. He was the FSB representative on the joint British-Russian counter-terrorism task force, which, among other things, concerned itself with nuclear smuggling.

Presumably, Russian intelligence had a self-serving purpose for passing such information to American intelligence, whether it was true, partly true, or false. For one thing, it was a warning that the Litvinenko affair could prove highly embarrassing to the British, if indeed its intelligence had received a Russian heads-up on radioactive smuggling prior to Litvinenko’s death. If true, it meant that more was involved in the prelude to his death than has been publically disclosed.

It also casts new light on the involvement of Russian intelligence. The most plausible way that Russian intelligence could have been aware of radioactive smuggling activities in London was that it had an informant attempting to follow or penetrate the people involved. Consider the activities in London of Andrei Lugovoi. A former KGB officer, who owned a security business in Moscow, he had become involved with both Litvinenko and billionaire Boris Berezovsky, who was Litvinenko’s chief backer, in late 2005. He had also been contaminated with Polonium 210 more than a month before Litvinenko’s death, which made him a suspect. When I later interviewed him, he told me he had many meeting with both of Litvinenko and Berezovsky in London, and that he had entered into a “joint venture” to sell information about security conditions in Moscow to Berezovsky’s contacts in London. His involvement became such that Berezovsky seated him next to Litvinenko at his gala 60th birthday party in January 2006. Since both Litvinenko and Berezovsky were at that time engaged in a well-publicized campaign to discredit and overthrow Putin, I asked Lugovoi about his own vulnerabilities: Wouldn’t Putin government view his work in London as collaboration with the enemy. He answered that he had no such concern because he acted “patriotically,” kept no secrets, and even handed over items that Litvinenko had given him in London in September 2006 to the authorities in Moscow. When I pressed him further about the extent to which he was sharing information about his year long liaison with Litvinenko and Berezovsky, he did not answer directly but pointed out that he had been allowed to run for, and win, a seat in the Duma in 2007 (which he still holds). The implication was that his contacts with Putin’s enemies in London had the sanction of the Russian authorities, and the FSB. If so, it is likely that whatever information Lugovoi shared about the activities of Litvinenko and Berezovsky would reach Safonov in his role as the FSB’s representative on the Russian-British counter-terrorism task force. Since Russia in 2006 had been trying to extradite both Litvinenko and Berezovsky for alleged crimes, Safonov might also have had reason to tell his British colleagues on the task force about any alleged involvement they had in smuggling radioactive materials (even if it was untrue). Yet, if British intelligence ever received such a tip from Safonov, it has not made it public. Nor could it be expected to reveal it since Britain has been anything but transparent in the Litvinenko case. Indeed, it still keeps secret Litvinenko’s 2006 autopsy results, toxic analysis, and other data that could pinpoint the crucial date of his initial exposure. It is therefore doubtful that many pieces in this murky jigsaw puzzle will ever see the light of day.

Wiki-Espionage

The heart of the espionage business is the theft of secret documents. Up until the computer age, this was usually done either by stealing the documents themselves or copying them,. One of the most massive thefts of top secrets of top secret documents occurred in November 1979 when Iranian students captured the US embassy in Tehran before security officers could destroy the tens of thousands of classified CIA and State Department documents stored there. Even many of those that had been shredded into thin strips were painstakingly pieced together by the Iranian intelligence service. These stolen documents covered a vast range of covert CIA activities over two decades in both friendly and hostile nations, including everything from spying operations in the Soviet Union to the secret CIA and Saudi financing of the Jihad in Afghanistan. They also revealed extremely sensitive US espionage operations against allies including Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait as well as juicy gossip about sex lives of politicians. In 1982, to embarrass the United States, the Iranians published a large number of these stolen documents in 54 volumes entitled "Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den." Despite the revelations they provided about the activities of American intelligence, and their ready availability, no major newspaper in the United States, including the New York Times, lent credibility to them by publishing a single document from them. Nor were there any front page news stories about them. Except for the few scholars who ordered the 54 volumes for $248, this huge archive of top secret documents attracted little public notice.

In 2010, another huge archive of secret documents was made available. These classified documents did not accidentally leak onto the Internet through the work of some mischievous Internet hacker. Indeed, they were not even on the Internet. They were intentionally stolen from a private Defense Department network, the so-called “intranet.” The perp allegedly was a 23 year old US Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, who had the clearances necessary to use this private network. If so, the operation was not conceptually different than that of Robert Hanssen, the KGB mole inside the FBI, who, among other things, broke into the private FBI computer network. Both were break-ins aimed at acquiring state secrets, which is, by any definition, espionage. The US Army intelligence analyst allegedly provided the fruits of his theft to an organization called Wiki-leaks, whose founder Julian Assange termed him a “hero.” Wiki-Leaks, in turn, made the fruits of this espionage available to the press, as had the Iranians with their stolen documents. The difference was that Julian Assange, unlike the Iranians, managed to negotiate arrangements with a number of leading news organizations, including the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian in which they would get advance access to the stolen documents in return for not publishing them before a designated date. As a result the Wiki-leaks had simultaneous front page stories in many of the world’s most prestigious publication. Such stories may have had great value to media, and even helped enhance their circulation, but what they were publishing, and lending their credibility to, was not Wiki-leaks but Wiki- Espionage.

When Did Castro Know He Was Targeted For Assassination?

On September 7th 1963, Fidel Castro sent a message to America. Rushing into a diplomatic reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana, he pulled aside Daniel Harker, the Associated Press correspondent in Cuba, and told him in front of other journalists, "If US leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be a victim of an attempt that can cause their deaths." The AP story made headlines in the United states. Just eleven weeks later, President John F, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas .
Castro’s message did not go unnoticed by James Jesus Angleton at the CIA. As head of its Counterintelligence Staff, he knew that the CIA had a top-secret plans to eliminate Castro. Had Cuban intelligence somehow learned of it?
The plots to kill Castro began in the halcyon days of the Eisenhower Administration. In the summer of 1960, the CIA gave Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the director of its office of security, $150,00 to organize an untraceable assassination of Castro. Working through intermediaries, he subcontracted the job to a group of Mafia figures, including John Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Traficante. The advantage of using the Mafia was that if their assassin was captured, the plot could be plausibly blamed on organized crime. Roselli planned to use a waiter to poison Castro, and had the CIA provide him with botulinus toxin pills. But, as the years dragged on, he was unable to execute the plan. The Kennedy Administration suspected that Roselli was conning the CIA to get immunity from an FBI investigation. So under unrelenting pressure from the Administration, the CIA decided to handle the kill itself. Desmond FitzGerald, the chief of the CIA’s Cuba operation, and a personal friend of the Kennedy brothers, then recruited a 30-year old Cuban named Rolando Cubela Secades. Unlike the Mafia contractors, Cubela had direct access to Castro who was a personal friend of his. He also had experience as an assassin. Before Castro came to power in 1959, Cubela had killed Batista's chief of military intelligence, Blanco Rico, on behalf of Castro. And as an organizer of international support for Castro, Cubela had the freedom to travel. After contacting the CIA, Cubela said he had become disillusioned with Castro and was willing to kill him. So he was fashioned in 1963 into the CIA’s secret instrument to eliminate Castro. Was this the plot Castro was referring to in his outburst?
What really shook Angleton was that Castro had chosen the Brazilian Embassy to deliver the warning. On that very day, September 7th, Cubela was in Brazil was meeting with his CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez to discuss the assassination. Since the CIA’s psychological profile showed that Castro was prone to taunting behavior, Angleton believed it was more than a coincidence that Castro had chosen the Brazilian embassy to warn of an assassination plot that was being formulated that day in Brazil. Then when Angleton reviewed Cubela’s CIA file, his worst fears were confirmed. Not only had Cubela had steadfastly refused to take the CIA’s polygraph examination, but his mistress, who was an airline hostess in France, was working for the Cuban intelligence service. The danger was that Cubela was a "dangle," someone sent by the Cuban intelligence service to feign disloyalty to test the CIA's intention. He sent a memo warning that the Cubela operation was "insecure."
Despite Angleton’s intervention, the assassination mission was not aborted. FitzGerald was under "white heat" from Robert Kennedy to get rid of Castro, and Cubela, secure or insecure, was the CIA’s only candidate for the job. At the September 7th meeting in Brazil, Cubela said that before he murdered Castro he needed proof that Kennedy was personally behind the assassination. He then asked to meet personally with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Such a meeting was out of the question, but FitzGerald found an alternative way of satisfying Cubela's demand. On October 29th 1963, using the pseudonym "Jim Clark," he met personally with Cubela in Paris, telling him he was a special emissary for Robert Kennedy. To prove he bona fides, he said he would write a conformation "signal" into a speech that President Kennedy was due to give in Miami in mid November. The phase they agreed upon was that the Castro regime was a "small band of conspirators" that needed to be "removed." Then president Kennedy himself delivered those very words in Miami on November 18, 1963 .
The meeting, in which Cubela would be given the murder weapon was scheduled to take place in a hotel room in Paris on November 22nd 1963. In the midst of that meeting, Cubela’s case officer was handed the horrifying news that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The meeting abruptly ended.
Cubela returned to Cuba and had no further contacts with the CIA. He continued working for the Cuban government and he was not charged with acting as the CIA’s assassin against Castro. In 1966, he was jailed for post-1964 subversion in Cuba, but unlike more than 500 other Cuban officials who were executed for similar subversion, he was granted clemency by Castro. Later, after serving a prison sentence, he was allowed to resettle in Spain, where he died of old age. Cubela’s close associate Carlos Tepedino eventually admitted to the CIA that Cubela "had strong connections with" and was "probably cooperating with" Cuban intelligence. If so, when Castro issued his extraordinary warning in September 1963, he knew that the CIA planning to kill him. He also knew his warning had gone unheeded when Desmond Fitzgerald flew to Paris to meet with in October 1963. And he knew on November 18th 1963 that President Kennedy had provided in his speech the signal to move the assassination plot ahead.