THE BIG MOLE
Kim Philby is perhaps the most interesting spook
of the last century. He's certainly the one who's
been subject to the most speculation by both
professionals and amateurs over the years.
Philby's most widespread appearance in print was
as the model for John Le Carre's Bill Haydon character
in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, although
Haydon is Philby significantly downplayed.
Most recently, he's the chief protagonist in
Declare,
Tim Powers' latest marvelous amalgamation of
fact and fantasy.
Philby's greatest effect on the U.S. spook
community was the manner in which he apparently
drove James Angleton insane over what's come to
be known as the Big Mole. This was certainly
not hindered by the fact that not only had Philby
known Angleton for years, but he was also one
of Angleton's spook instructors when the latter
was an OSS novice in London in 1943, tutoring him
on the double-cross system they worked
against the Germans. They also
shared a weekly lunch in Washington D.C. for
about three years starting in 1949 when Philby
was stationed there as a liaison officer, so
Philby probably knew Angleton as well as anyone
knew the "Blond Ghost."
The genesis of the Big Mole was the defection of
Anatoly Golitsyn from the KGB in late 1961. Golitsyn
was the first big defector from the Soviet Union and
did indeed expose a number of Soviet moles in the
west. This lended credibility to his story about
a very highly placed mole code named SASHA, or the
first incarnation of the Big Mole. SASHA was supposed
to be buried in the CIA itself, and had supposedly
been activated in 1957 when a top KGB official named
Viktor Kovshuk flew into D.C. without surveillance,
rendezvoused with and activated SASHA, and left
almost immediately. The fun begins, especially
given Golitsyn's contention that further defectors
would be "sent" to cast doubt on him, especially
concerning his SASHA story.
The next key event was Philby's final defection to
Moscow from his post in Beirut in 1963, almost immediately
after which there was a remarkable change in the personality
of the KGB. The speculation is that a rising young KGB
star named Yuri Andropov used the spook experience of
Philby to tell him how the KGB should look and operate in
Western Europe and the U.S., and in the process rose quickly
through the ranks of the KGB and, eventually, even higher.
In the words of Ron Rosenbaum (from his "The Shadow of
the Mole" found in Travels with Dr. Death and Other
Unusual Investigations:
KGB operations - once mainly distinguished by thuggish
tactics of blackmail, bribery, and brute force - developed
a level of subtlety and complexity almost baroque, in
fact rococo, in the many-layered richness of ambiguity
they displayed. Particulary in relation to the American
target; particulary in relation to James Angleton.
Yuri Nosenko started the mind games when he became the first
post-Philby KGB defector in January 1964. Nosenko claimed
that the Big Mole was named ANDREY, not SASHA, and that
Kovshuk's mysterious trip was to activate ANDREY. He supplied
sufficient details to prompt the FBI to arrest a Sergeant
Rhodes who had once worked in the American embassy motor pool
in Moscow and who admitted meeting Kovshuko in 1957.
Angleton and his acolytes thought this a red herring in
an attempt to protect SASHA, since such a low-level grunt
couldn't possibly be a highly placed and dangerous mole.
Thus starts the Mole War.
Angleton et al. weren't about to let Nosenko get away with
lying to them:
When conventional methods of interrogation failed to get
Nosenko to confess his perfidy, the CIA's Soviet Bloc division
decided he would have to be convinced of the absolute
hopelessness of holding out. And so they put Nosenko
in a thick-walled steel cage, with only a single bed
and a bare light bulb, nothing to look at, listen to, or
react to, no distinction between night and day, no hope of
escape except by a confession. They kept him in solitary
confinement for two and a half years. There are hints
they did more than observe him, interrogate him, and subject
him to extreme sensory deprivation. There are hints that
they slipped him mind-altering truth-serum drugs. There are
hints of harsher, more physical methods brought to bear.
And yet, after all that, Nosenko never cracked.
When Nosenko failed to confess what they wanted to hear,
his interrogators cracked. They demanded that the entire
CIA Soviet Bloc division be quarantined from all contact
with confidential information. They didn't want the Big
Mole - who they were sure was in the division - to be
able to muck things up.
By late 1966 Nosenko was still in solitary and the division
still quarantined, so CIA director Richard Helms
ordered a resolution in 60 days. Two months later Nosenko
was released from solitary as he still hadn't told the
Angleton faction what they wanted to hear. The Angleton
camp was - and still is - convinced that this delivered
the CIA into the hand of the Soviets under the hidden
guidance of the Big Mole. The so-called "Angleton
orthodoxy" is the first of the five schools of thought
concerning the Big Mole that Rosenbaum details.
The second school was the "sick think" school that arose
in opposition to the "Angleton orthodoxy". The key assumption
behind this school is that the Big Mole probably never existed,
but was rather an invention of the double-cross thinking
that obsessed Angleton
and his acolytes. No logical chasm was too wide to be bridged
by a theoretical variation - no matter how tenuously connected
to reality it might be - of the Big Mole theory. One blatant
symptom of this was Angleton suspecting a couple of Nosenko's
interrogators of being the Mole or at least in league with him - one
for believing Nosenko too much and the other for disbelieving
him too much. The coup de grace, though, was Project Dinosaur,
the code name of Angleton's project to prove that Averill
Harriman was a long-term Soviet mole.
The axe came for Angleton in 1974 when he made an unauthorized
trip to Paris to notify the French spooks that the man Colby
had just appointed to be CIA station chief there was a Soviet
mole. Angleton was officially fired because of his involvement
in an illegal mail-interception program, but was really let
go because Colby had had enough of his mole hunt.
The third school - of which the author says he's probably the
only proponent - posits that Angleton's thinking wasn't
convoluted enough. This school claims that Philby outsmarted
Angleton with a double-double-cross system that depended on
the creation of what are known as notional moles. They are
called notional after a medieval philosophy concept that refers
to a class of entities that exist only in the mind. An example
would be the notional British moles placed in German territory in
WWII via "secret" communications deliberately meant to be
intercepted. Just enough vague references to an agent were
leaked to lead the Germans to believe that a real one existed.
Thus, they wasted resources looking for him and the British
wasted nothing more than the time it took to send a few extra
and phony secret messages.
According to this school, Philby sent over a series of defectors
with a variety of stories calculated to keep Angleton's head
spinning and the CIA effectively paralyzed. According to
Rosenbaum:
So you send one false defector after another to approach the
CIA. You provide them with some true information and some false,
and one common theme: there is no Big Mole, there were a few
little moles, but they've already been caught.
Thus Angleton's thinking wasn't convoluted enough to consider
that Philby deliberately plotted to keep him obsessing about
a Big Mole when there was none.
Now we get even more convoluted as we consider the fourth and
fifth schools. The fourth says that Angleton was the mole and
Philby his control; the fifth that Philby was an American mole
in the Soviet Union and Angleton his control. The case for
the fourth school was first made by a man on Angleton's own
counterintelligence staff named Clare Petty, whose bona fides
were established by his spotting the top mole in the West German
intelligence service long before the West Germans did. In addition
to some details we won't dwell on here, the fourth school case
can be made circumstantially by the fact the Angleton arguably
did more damage to the CIA during his decade long mole hunt than
any number of real moles might have done.
A corollary of the fifth school theory is that not only was
Philby a mole for Angleton, but so also was Yuri Andropov, the
man whose rapid rise in the Soviet spook apparatus coincided
with Philby's arrival in Moscow in 1963. If the Soviets could be
convinced that Andropov and Philby were spook geniuses who
inflicted grievous damage on their arch-enemies, then they
would be ceded sufficient power to do real damage to the
Soviets - a real possibility since Stalin was no longer around
to purge the entire intelligence apparatus every couple of years.
And the circumstantial evidence? Try 1989.
Now don't be discouraged that we've run out of schools.
Once you get into this sort of thing additional schools are
easy to "convene". For instance, I'm sure the usual crowd
of Clinton haters assume as a matter of course that he's been
a Soviet mole since his trip there back in the 1960s.
And what better way to lull the capitalist running dogs
into a false sense of security than having the economy double
in size during your years in office? Not to mention it's less
a paralogical morass than attempting to claim that Clinton had
absolutely nothing to do with the economy for 8 years while
Reagan had everything to do with it during his 8 years (or at
least the last 5 of them, and then nothing to do with the
Bush recession in 1991, and then everything to do with the
Clinton boom in the 1990s, and now nothing again during the
current economic decline, and everything again during the
next economic expansion).
Personally I think Jim Henson was the Big Mole. After all, he
molded pretty much every young mind from 1969 until the CIA
caught up with him and he "died" of a "bacterial infection."
Just try singing any of those catchy Sesame Street
songs backwards, comrade.
posted by Steven Baum
3/1/2001 11:37:04 PM |
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