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CIA
MYTH, CIA HISTORY “Americans are usually proud, and rightly so, of the fact that the ‘conspiratorial’ tendencies which seem natural and inbred in many other peoples tend to be missing from their characters and from the surroundings in which they live. The other side of the coin is that the American public, aware of this, frequently feels that both in our diplomacy and in our intelligence undertakings we are not match for the ‘wily foreigner.’ Foreigners likewise attribute to Americans a certain gullibility and naïveté.” - Allen Dulles, CIA Director 1953-1961 It should come as no surprise that the history of the CIA during the Cold War has been inverted, distorted and mythologized. In the official, accepted CIA history the dupes have become heroes, false defectors have become true defectors, Soviet experts have become “paranoids” and their bureaucratic opponents are remembered as saviors. This falsification of history has even been popularized in books like David C. Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors, Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior, and David Wise’s Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA. Now, at long last, a principal character in CIA history has written a firsthand account that explodes the popular falsifications of Martin, Mangold and Wise. The former CIA chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence, Tennent H. Bagley, has written a book titled Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. Bagley writes with straightforward elegance. He describes the CIA’s fall. It began in the 1960s, when the investigation of a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko went awry. To satisfy nervous bureaucrats who wanted to close the investigation, non-experts were tasked with rehabilitating Nosenko, even though he had thoroughly discredited himself. Nosenko was not what he claimed to be. To believe Nosenko’s authenticity, noted Bagley, the CIA would have to accept that the “KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors, [they would also have to believe] what Nosenko told … about his life was the final truth – even though it was a fourth or fifth version….” Bagley laments that the truth about Nosenko has been buried “under layers of lies so often repeated that they have become conventional wisdom.” Falsehood itself has become myth, and as historian Paul Veyne once noted in an essay on mythology, “Daily life itself, far from being rooted in immediacy, is the crossroads of the imagination…. Empiricism and experimentation are negligible quantities.” In large and powerful organizations, where the intricacies of truth are exposed to the bullying impulses of raw bureaucratic power, comprehension becomes a retrospective illusion. Existence is mediated by successive “dream palaces” all of which pass for truth. According to Veyne, “When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind.” This sentence describes the CIA as it swallowed Nosenko’s baited hook. It was a clever piece of strategy to tell the bureaucrats what they wanted to hear. The rest of humanity must bear with unpleasant truths, but a bureaucrat is a special animal. He can ignore expert opinion, consigning fact to the dustbin while elevating fiction to the status of truth. After this fashion he reaps the reward for a job well done, and avoids being blamed for problems. The CIA’s bosses wanted good news from defectors, not bad news. Nosenko was saying, in so many words, that there weren’t any Soviet moles near the top of U.S. intelligence. He alleged that the KGB had failed to recruit certain targets. His information downplayed leads that were given by an earlier defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn. According to Bagley’s account, “The American intelligence community had so unequivocally supported falsehood – and lost so much by doing so – that if any CIA people still remembered, they would probably prefer to let this sleeping dog lie.” The CIA itself was converted into an enemy stronghold. For those who do not understand how the game is played, a brief explanation should suffice. The KGB’s method consists in manipulating foreign intelligence services by using false defectors, double agents and moles in aggressive operational games. Once a false defector is accepted as genuine, the KGB’s dominant position within the target organization is demonstrated. The security of its moles is assured. The false information fed by double agents is corroborated and the poison fully digested. The entire establishment finds itself warmed and comforted under a blanket of lies. Some readers may imagine that all of this is irrelevant. It is old news, belonging to the distant past. The Cold War is over. But that’s not what we see today, with the hammer and sickle reappearing on the Russian flag, with Latin America and Africa turning to Marxism, with Europe drifting into neutrality, with America being vilified around the world, with Russia and China forming a new military alliance. Something very bad is developing out of America’s false hopes and the CIA’s falsified history. America was warned of these events far in advance. The warning came from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a former Major in the KGB. Although Bagley does not mention Golitsyn’s warnings to the West, the Nosenko legend has been used to discredit Golitsyn and his late sponsor within the CIA, James Angleton. In terms of Russian grand strategy, the Nosenko legend has been used to claim that Golitsyn was mentally ill, that his predictions and analyses are paranoid and valueless. Setting Golitsyn aside, Bagley’s intuition prompts him to wonder if Nosenko’s lies might open the way to “a continuum of treason that might still be active today.” The KGB is alive and well. Its methods include terror, murder and subversion. Its goal is the old goal; and I believe this is the context for Bagley’s “continuum of treason.” After the collapse of Communism, as reported by Bagley, a German editor complained to KGB Col. Oleg Nechiporenko about the manuscript of a former KGB mole who spent twenty years inside Radio Liberty, saying that the mole’s account lacked sufficient detail. Nechiporenko chided the editor for being naïve. According to Nechiporenko the mole’s operation “was part of a link, a part of an operation…. And this operation isn’t completed.” Furthermore, any full accounting might tell the CIA “what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.” What does it mean to say that the sword and shield of the Communist Party Soviet Union is “not dead”? This statement signifies much more than an ongoing “continuum of treason.” It signifies a future destructive sequence that America is not prepared to counter. Here we stumble upon an incomplete operation. It is a work in progress. In fact, the Soviet Union itself continues to exist in disguised form. The satellite countries also continue, in shabby democratic drag. The entire strategy of the United States rests on a false foundation. After his rehabilitation by CIA headquarters, Yuri Nosenko was moved to Washington where he became a consultant to FBI and CIA counterintelligence. “Eventually,” reported Bagley, “he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.” All the while, noted Bagley, “The twisted and shaky edifice” exonerating Nosenko “would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal.” Every American should read Bagley’s book. © 2007 Jeffrey
R. Nyquist
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