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BOOKSHELF
The Man Who Stole the Secrets
The story of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen--from the KGB's point of view.
BY EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
Thursday, December 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Recently a number of former CIA officers received an invitation from the
Spy Museum in Washington to attend a luncheon for former KGB Col. Victor
Cherkashin. The event, as the invitation said, would afford "a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine and dish with an extraordinary
spymaster." In the heyday of the Cold War, such an offer, delivered with
slightly more discretion, might have been the prelude to a KGB recruitment
operation. Now it's merely the notice for a book party celebrating yet
another memoir by a former KGB officer recounting how the KGB duped the CIA.
In this case, there is a great deal to tell. Victor Cherkashin served in
the KGB from 1952, when Stalin was still in power, until the Soviet Union
disintegrated in 1991. During most of that time his mission was to organize
KGB operations aimed at undermining the integrity, confidence and morale of
the CIA. He seems to have been good at his job. His big opportunity came
when he was the deputy KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington
between 1979 and 1985.
Those years were the height of a ferocious spy war within the Cold War. In
"Spy Handler," 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 that wasn't the end of Mr. Cherkashin's glory. Returning to Moscow, he
helped run "dangle" operations in which KGB-controlled diplomats feigned a
willingness to be recruited by their American counterparts, only to hand
over disinformation when they were finally "recruited." Thus when the CIA
came around to investigating why its agents were being compromised in
Russia, the KGB sent the CIA a disinformation agent, for example, to paint
false tracks away from its moles. This agent--"Mr. X"--offered to betray
the Soviet Union for $5,000. When the CIA snapped up the bait, Mr. X
pointed it to its own secret communication center in Warrenton, Va.,
falsely claiming that the KGB was electronically intercepting data from its
computers. The purpose, of course, was to divert the agency away from the
mole, who continued betraying CIA secrets for eight more years.
Told from the KGB's vantage point, Mr. Cherkashin's story provides a
gripping account of its successes in the spy war. He shows Mr. Hanssen to
have been an easily managed and highly productive "penetration" who
operated via the unusual tradecraft of dead drops, leaving material at
designated locations where it could be transferred without spy and handler
ever meeting. (Indeed, the KGB never knew Mr. Hanssen's identity.) Mr.
Ames, for his part, was a more complex case, since he had come under
suspicion and the KGB had to concern itself with throwing the CIA off his
trail. That America's counterespionage apparatus allowed both men to
operate as long as they did is a testament to its complacency as much as to
the KGB's cleverness.
And indeed, 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.
Mr. Cherkashin, who received the Order of Lenin for his work against the
CIA, now runs a security company in Moscow. Because his side lost the Cold
War, he is free to travel to Washington to toast his former adversaries
(and present them with autographed copies of "Spy Handler"). The
unauthorized revealing of KGB secrets is against the law in Vladimir
Putin's Russia, and Mr. Cherkashin says that he does not plan to bring out
an edition there. But why not? It's hard to imagine that the authorities
would find much to object to.
Mr. Epstein's "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in
Hollywood" will be published in February. You can buy "Spy Handler" from
the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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R. A. Hettinga