EDITOR'S NOTE: For this article,en the The author extensively interviewed most of those officers in the secret services of the United Stales. Great Britain and France who had worked on the Anatoliy Golitsyn case from 1961 to 1974. OULD THE WEST HAVE DEALTost differently with one man's overwhelming supply of information? Was it duped by Soviet ""? Or was it a victim of its own paranoia—perhaps the most contagious and corrosive of hu- man diseases? Anatoliy Golitsyn defected from the KGB—the Soviet secret service—in ex- change for asylum in the U.S. He told CIA officials he wanted to explain how the KGB really operates. He spoke of "moles"—Soviet double agents—in top positions of secret service organizations in the West. He predicted (accurately) moves the KGB would make. And he said the Soviets had a new strategy-40 conquer the West without struggle. Their reactions to Golitsyn's disclo- sures left the secret services of three Western nations in a shambles. Divided by distrust, they nearly fell. There were probes. resignations. firings. defections_ imprisonment and even a death. It all began when Golitsyn appeared at the American Einbassy in . , in the midst of a snowstorm on Dec. 22, 1961. Short. powerfully built, in his mid-30s, speaking English with a heavy Russian accent, Golitsyn asked to see Frank Fribcrg, the CIA station chief. He identified himself as a major in the KGB. assigned to the Soviet Embas- sy in Helsinki with the job of vice con- sul as his cover. While stationed at KGB headquarters in Moscow. he had learned all about the Soviet espionage appara- tus in both the U.S. and Europe, he said. adding that he had documents from KGB archives. He offered all this•to the CIA in return for safe passage to the United States for himself and his wife and daughter. who were spending Christ- mas with him in Finland. In Washington. a search of the CIA's central records came up with only a single trace of Golitsyn. Seven years earlier. he had been listed by another KGB defector as potentially disloyal. For Richard M. Helms, then the CIA chief of operations, taking in Golitsyn

CIA Was Wrecked was a calculated gamble. but finally Helms gave the "Go" signal. After several weeks of around-the- clock interrogation at an Army base outside Frankfurt. during which he filled in biographical sketches on hundreds of By Edward Jay Epstein KGB officers in Moscow and abroad,

bering system to re- quest secret docu- ments, which were shipped to Moscow First, the stranger within three days. He Golits-yn was taken under cover to the named KGB moles at United States. Counterintelligence ex- the top echelon of told the CIA he perts from the CIA and military intelli- French intelligence gence pieced together his story. They —and one at the core. learned that he had been assigned to the was a KGB agent of President central KGB apparatus in Moscow. For de Gaulle's inner circle five years, he had prepared for his defec- —as suppliers of these tion by ferreting out details about espio- Then he told secrets secrets. nage networks around the world. Golitsyn In March 1962. reported that the KGB had established President John F. Ken- that left Western moles at the heart of French. British and American intelligence. nedy dispatched to Paris a "for-your-eyes- His first bombshell landed on the only" letter for de intelligence reeling. French. Golitsyn revealed that the KGB Gaulle, informing . had such complete access to the French- him of the Soviet pen- kept secrets of the North Atlantic Treaty etration allegation. Organization that it used NATO's num- Several weeks later. six handpicked French counterintelligence experts arrived in Washington. For 14 days. they heard Golitsyn describe a ring of at least six top French intelligence officers, code- named Sapphire. operatine under KGB instruction. He asserted that. aside from stealing NATO documents, Sapphire was about to use French intelligence offi- search netted no definitive answer as to cers to get data on American missile their guilt or innocence, but the resulting sites. The officers were unaware that it suspicion led to "severely limited coop- would be for the KGB, not France. eration" between U.S. and British intel- Thyraud de Vosjoli, the French ligence. as one British investigation of- intelligence liaison with the U.S., found ficer put it. this incredible. He suspected that Golitsyn continued was a "clever plant" who had feigned his to "disrupt relations" be- PAGE 8 • OCTOBER 14, 1984 • PARADE MAGAZINE tween the U.S. and France. Then, to his amazement, he received

an order= from Paris to organize a pro- CIA/continued grarri using French agents in the U.S. to spy on missile bases—just as Golitsyn Golitsyn also focused suspicion in had predicted. Although de Vosjoli (the the CIA on its own Soviet Division— book and movie Topa: tell his story) the unit responsible for recruiting Sovi- strongly objected, he was overruled. et citizens as spies and then aiding them. Driven to conclude that Golitsyn was At least five division officers came un- right—the KGB was controlling French der suspicion. No case was ever proved intelligence—de Vosjoli abandoned against any of them but all were trans- France for the U.S. The scandal led to ferred. In the mid- 1960s, the division resignations by de Gaulle's intelligence came to be cut out of the flow of sensi- adviser and two intelligence service tive information about new spies. chiefs. A senior officer committed sui- The Golitsyn debriefing even strained cide or was murdered, and a NATO CIA-FBI relations. Golitsyn cast doubt official was sentenced to life imprison- on the legitimacy of a highly prized FBI ment. The Franco-American intelli- informant at the UN—a Soviet diplo- gence/defense relationship was tenuous. mat code-named Fedora, established lat- Golitsyn's revela- er as a KGB "plant." Golitsyn then dis- , tions also were dam- mayed J. Edgar Hoover by stating that aging to British intel- an agent in the FBI's Washington office ligence. Ever since was a KGB source. Hoover cut off an , the rep- internal investigation and suggested that resentative of British Golitsyn himself was a "provocateur intelligence in Wash- and penetration agent." In 1970, Hoover ington. retired under severed FBI relations with the CIA and a cloud of suspicion other intelligence services. leaving the in the early 1950s; the CIA with no agency for "watching" the CIA had pressed un- KGB inside the United States. successfully fora full- Initially. Golitsyn had given leads on er inquiry. Golitsyn' the Soviet infiltration of other intelli- forced open the en- gence services in NATO countries, nota- tire issue of Soviet bly Italy. Norway and Canada. And he penetration of the Brit- had listed a number of KGB-controlled ish secret service from' "agents of influence," including the presi- the highest levels dent of Finland. down. Soon, the num- His debriefers wanted only to know ber of suspects under names of KGB officers and sources. investigation as KGB Golitsyn complained. He challenged: agents rose from 10 "What good does it do you to know who to 250. Philby de- your enemy is if you don't know his fected to Moscow. and strategy?" His requests to see higher -a former intelligence officials, including the President. were executive, Anthony Blunt. secretly con- ignored. Frustrated. in the spring of fessed to having been a Soviet spy. 1963, he demanded to go to England. Golitsyn disclosed in 1963 that the Returning from England three months KGB knew British intelligence had photo- later, he was reassigned to James Jesus graphed a secret Soviet code book. some- Angleton, chief of the CIA's counterin- thing known only by top executives of telligence staff. Angleton arranged a M1-5, the British equivalent of the FBI. meeting between Golitsyn and Attor- The suspects here numbered only two: ney General Robert F. Kennedy. the director, Sir Roger Hollis. and his To Angleton. Golitsyn's thesis was deputy, Graham Mitchell. A 10-year simple. The Soviet leaders, deciding they had little chance of winning a nu- clear war against the West, had adopted a new strategy in 1958: winning without fighting. The KGB, previously an in- strument of terror and spying. had been reorganized. Its purpose: to penetrate Western intelligence—not. primarily, to steal military secrets but to alert the KGB on the effects of its disinformation. Angleton became increasingly con- vinced by the Golitsyn thesis. By the late 1960s, his counterintelligence staff had invalidated many CIA and FBI sources as -*disinformation" agents and antagonized many CIA and FBI officers. In 1974. Angleton was fired and all the top officers on his staff were forced to resign. Golitsyn was abandoned as a source. Now a U.S. citizen living in the Washington area. Golitsyn has written a book. New Lies for Old. which con- tains the analyses—expunged from U.S. files—that left Western intelligence in such disarray.

PARADE MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 14, 1984 • PAGE 11