In this Opinion Journal piece, Edward Jay Epstein reviews former KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin’s new book, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer (Basic Books, January 1, 2005). Although there is no assurance that the ongoing reform movement in the Central Intelligence Organization is going to remedy the longstanding problems that have evolved in that agency over the past generation, Col. Cherkashin’s book makes clear that the U.S. has little to lose by seeking to correct the CIA’s deficiencies. In short, the KGB played the CIA like a fiddle during the Cold War.
Mr. Cherkashin had a distinguished 40 year career in the KGB that began in 1952 under Stalin, included a hitch as deputy KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1979 to 1985, and ended when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. During that period, Col. Cherkashin primary mission was to organize KGB operations aimed at undermining the CIA’s integrity, confidence and morale, and he was pretty darn good at his job:
Mr. Cherkashin describes in detail how he helped convert two American counterintelligence officers–one well-placed in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, the other in the FBI–into moles. Their names are notorious now, but over the course of a decade Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen operated with anonymous stealth, compromising most of the CIA’s and FBI’s espionage efforts in the Soviet Union.
But Mr. Cherkashin does not attribute his success solely to his personal cleverness:
Mr. Cherkashin skillfully torments his former adversary, the CIA, by attributing a large part of the KGB’s success to the incompetence of the CIA leadership, or its madness. He asserts, in particular, that the CIA had been “all but paralyzed” by the “paranoia” of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence chief, who suspected that the KGB had planted a mole in the CIA’s Soviet Russia division.
Mr. Cherkashin is right that Mr. Angleton’s concern retarded, if not “paralyzed,” CIA operations in Russia. After all, if the CIA was indeed vulnerable to KGB penetration, as Mr. Angleton believed, it had to assume that its agents in Russia would be compromised and used for disinformation. This suspicion would recommend a certain caution or tentativeness, to say the least. Mr. Cherkashin’s taunt about Mr. Angleton’s “paranoia” echoed what was said by Mr. Angleton’s critics in the CIA, who resented his influence, believing that polygraph tests and other security measures immunized the CIA against such long-term penetration.
But of course Mr. Angleton was right, too. On Feb. 21, 1994, Mr. Ames, the CIA officer who had served in the Soviet Russia division, was arrested by the FBI. He confessed that he had been a KGB mole for almost a decade and had provided the KGB with secrets that compromised more than 100 CIA operations in Russia. Mr. Hanssen was caught seven years later.
Since Mr. Cherkashin had managed the recruitment of Mr. Ames and helped with that of Mr. Hanssen, his accusation that Mr. Angleton was paranoid for suspecting the possibility of a mole has the exquisite irony of a stalker following his victim in order to tell him that he is not being followed. Mr. Cherkashin adds a further twist by suggesting that Mr. Angleton’s “paranoia” made it easier for the KGB to recruit demoralized CIA officers as moles. According to this tortured logic, if the CIA — and its counterintelligence staff — had acted more ostrich-like, by denying the existence of moles in its ranks, the KGB would never have found Aldrich Ames or penetrated the agency in other ways.