Cold War Files: CIA Fooled by Massive Double-Agent Failure

The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.

The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.

“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.

“The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure,” he stated in a journal article published last week.

The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies “wreaked havoc” on the agency, Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as insignificant, and that congressional oversight committees also did not press the agency to reform its vetting processes.

Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the agency in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant.

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence—the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.

Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.

The CIA’s first major double agent failure occurred in Cuba and was revealed by Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987.

Aspillaga revealed that some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.

Later that year, Cuban state television confirmed the compromise in a documentary revealing the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear.

The intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer, who quoted former CIA officer Brian Latell.

In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi.

According to two East German Stasi officers, Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert, operating against CIA without inside sources was difficult.

“Naturally we tried but did not succeed in placing agents in the CIA,” they stated in their 2009 book. “Nevertheless, there was not a single CIA operation on [East German] territory that we were not able to detect using [double agents] and counterespionage operations.”

Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind.”

The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf also wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s “we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.”

“On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans,” Wolf said.

Wolf had been able to identify a CIA officer working in West Germany who was recruiting East Germans and then dispatched double agents to the officer.

Fischer says former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years.

Former CIA Director Robert Gates also said the agency was “duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.

Fischer states that the East German failure was “wall-to-wall,” from the lack of advance warning in 1961 of plans to build the Berlin Wall, to 1989, when cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.

From 1961 to 1989, all CIA intelligence on East Germany was “no more and no less than what Wolf wanted it to know,” he said.

The last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and after its 1991 collapse in Russia.

It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s.

Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass “feed material”—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents.

The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993, when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.

During that period, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA, Aleksandr Zhomov, who fooled the agency into believing he could supply information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980s.

Zhomov, who was paid an estimated $1 million by the CIA, made the fake offer in 1987 and according to Fischer, was dispatched by Moscow in a bid to protect Ames from being discovered as the source of the earlier leak.

In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from “bogus” and “tainted” sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.

The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.

Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.

A major problem for Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of agents to work for the agency. Instead, the CIA was reliant on “walk-ins,” or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations.

Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster.

“The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious,” he said, “not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War.”

The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to “cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents,” Fischer concluded.

“Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause,” he said. “To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly.”

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member, said he was familiar with some of the details on CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new.

“Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it,” said Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show “the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed.”

“What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong,” said deGraffenreid. “And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.”

David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly notes that “intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.”

Read the Original Article at Free Beacon

Trumbo: How Historical Revisionism in Film is attempting to Dupe a Generation

I just watched the movie Trumbo after a friend of mine who works in the movie biz asked me to see it and give him my ‘honest’ opinion. The bottom line is despite all the “rave” reviews the film got and even with the star power of Brian Cranston, Dianne Lane. Helen Mirren and John Goodman the movie was utterly and completely nauseating to watch.

I felt it my obligation, as a caretaker and watchman of history, to warn others of how utterly historically inaccurate the movie really is. But alas, I am out of my depth on this subject. Let me quote an author who is an expert on the subject of Hollywood and Communism, author Allan Ryskind.-SF

 

New Hollywood Movie ‘Trumbo’ Glorifies a Stalinist Screenwriter

The just released movie,Trumbo, is not only a major tribute to Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo but is Hollywood’s latest effort to exalt those hardcore Party members who made a serious attempt—and almost succeeded—in capturing the movie industry.  The following are the author’s answers to questions put to him by those interested in the historic battle between the Communists and the anti-Communists in the 1930s and 1940s.

Q: Do you view the newly released movie, Trumbo, a major tribute to the blacklisted screenwriter, as fundamentally accurate?   

A: It bears little relation to the truth, really.  Trumbo’s heavy labors on behalf of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and a Communist America are essentially erased, down George Orwell’s famous memory hole.  So is his support of Lenin, Adolph Hitler (during the Hitler-Stalin pact) and North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung after his aggressive attack against South Korea in 1950.  Trumbo’s support of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and military threats against Western Europe are also unnoticed. Trumbo, in fact, is treated as something of a saintly Socialist, more Pope Francis than Karl Marx.  The anti-Communist community, meaning those who fought  the considerable Red conspiracy in Hollywood, are slammed pretty hard, with columnist Hedda Hopper, actor John Wayne and the House Un-American Activities Committee absorbing some of the biggest licks.

Virtually all the anti-Communists are made to look mean, petty and hypocritical, so audiences fresh to the controversy might easily dismiss their opinions.  Trumbo, however, is elevated to hero status a brave, talented American—he was brave and talented, I think I’ll concede that point—who not only defied the blacklist, but defeated it, while striking  a major blow on behalf of the First Amendment, supposedly Dalton’s North Star when it came to politics.  It’s all nonsense, of course, for he was a deadly serious Stalinist who deployed a dozen strategies to do in his country.

Q: How did this movie come about?

A: The film’s screenwriter is John McNamara, who did such TV shows asLois and Clark and Acquarius and was inspired by Bruce Cook’s 1977 friendly biography. McNamara, a big admirer of Trumbo, worked on the script for years.  Jay Roach, the director, is another Trumbo fan.  He’s directed such successful hits as Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery and Meet the Parents . The star who plays Dalton is Bryan Cranston, who was a meth dealer in the hit TV series Breaking Bad and has been giving major interviews singing Trumbo’s praises.

Q: Conservative critics say that Hollywood is making a hero out of a dedicated Stalinist who fought long and hard to bring about a Sovietized America. Was he, in fact, a member of the Communist party?

A: There is no question about his CP membership.  In those famous 1947 hearings, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) submitted material proving beyond a quibble that he was a party member, though Trumbo and nine other screenwriters and directors refused to respond to questions about party membership, accusing HUAC of violating their First Amendment rights.  Trumbo and the other nine, soon to be dubbed The Hollywood Ten, served time in prison for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted because the Hollywood studios laid down the rule that no one could work in Hollywood if he or she belonged to the Soviet-controlled Communist party or refused to tell Congress whether or not they belonged.  Years later, however, Trumbo finally admitted to his biographer, Bruce Cook, that he joined the party in 1943 and that “I might as well have been a Communist ten years earlier.  But I’ve never regretted it.  As a matter of fact, it’s possible to say I would have regretted not having done it …” (Bruce Cook’s Dalton Trumbo, pp. 146-148.)

In an unpublished memo among his papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison (a copy of which is in my possession), Trumbo writes, after his prison term and a lengthy sojourn to Mexico, that he “reaffiliated with the party in 1954” and that “in the spring of 1956, I left the party for good.”  His papers in Madison also revealed he remained a Stalin apologist until his death, insisting that whatever his defects, the Kremlin dictator’s most important historical contribution was to have advanced the cause of Socialism worldwide.

Q: But is it really fair to call him a Stalinist, meaning a long-time servant of the Soviet dictator?

A: Though he says he joined the party in 1943, Trumbo never publicly deviated from the Stalinist line since the late 1930s and never publicly criticized any of his infamous deeds.  In a sympathetic portrayal of the Hollywood Communists in their classic, The Inquisition in Hollywood, authors Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund ask: “Were the Hollywood Communists ‘Stalinist’? The initial answer must be ‘yes.’  Communist screenwriters defended the Stalinist regime, accepted the Comintern’s policies and about-faces, and criticized enemies and allies alike with an infuriating self-righteousness, superiority and selective memory, which eventually alienated all but the staunchest fellow travelers.” (p. 239)

“As defenders of the Soviet regime,” they added, “the screen artist Reds became known apologists for crimes of monstrous dimensions, though they claimed to have known nothing about such crimes, and, indeed, shouted down, or ignored those who did.”  Ceplair and Englund also stress that they “defended that regime unflinchingly, uncritically, inflexibly—and therefore left themselves open to the justifiable suspicion that they not only approved of everything they were defending but would themselves act in the same way if they were in the same position.” (p. 241)

Q: But why did the House Un-American Activities Committee feel it should open up an investigation of the Communist influence in Hollywood?

A: By 1944, a number of important Hollywood writers, directors, labor union officials and studio executives, alarmed by the Communist infiltration of the industry, formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals MPA).  Among the founders and members were Morrie Ryskind, Walt Disney, Russian émigré Ayn Rand, labor union officials and executives from various studios.  Actors Robert Taylor and John Wayne were leaders in the group.

The group was formed because in 1944 it looked as if committed Stalinists had gotten control of the movie industry.  Party members had major influence in the powerful guilds and unions, with the very influential Screen Writers Guild having tapped Red screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Gordon Kahn to run the guild’s flag-ship publication, The Screen Writer.  Under Trumbo and Kahn, The Screen Writer became an arm of the Red movement in Hollywood.  Virtually everything Red was saluted.  The Communists even appeared to have control of screen content, as numerous films, written by party members, were being shown in theaters across the country celebrating the Soviet way of life and Stalin himself.

Read the Remainder of the Article at CNS News

 

In closing guys, we must understand, as True Patriots, that History is sacred, and if we are going to tell it, we owe it to both our Generation and Future Generations to be HONEST in the re-telling of it. Beware of Revisionist History! IMO it is one of the most dangerous propaganda tools of the socialist and islamo-fascist, because this current generation has no context of the truth! The majority will believe whatever you put up on the screen or print in a book; we owe it to this generation to be both the watchman and caretaker of history; it is that sacred.-SF

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

 

Cold War Files: John F. Kennedy was the Absolute Worst U.S. President of the 20th Century

As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.

In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.

Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam. The assassination of Vietnam’s President Diem on Kennedy’s watch may have been one of the two biggest mistakes of the war there. (The other was the decision to wage a war of attrition on the unexamined assumption that Hanoi would buckle under the pain.) I don’t buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out. Sure, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam — just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: We’ll scale down our presence after victory is secure. And much more than Johnson, Kennedy was influenced by General Maxwell Taylor, who I suspect had been looking for a “small war” mission for the Army for several years. Indochina looked like a peachy place for that — warmer than Korea, and farther from Russia.

(As a side note, there’s another coup that JFK supported earlier in 1963: theBaathist one in Iraq that chucked out a pro-Soviet general. Events in subsequent decades obviously are not Kennedy’s fault, but it still is interesting to look at the documents. Here’s a State Department sitrep from, of all dates, Nov. 21, 1963: “Initial appraisal cabinet named November 20 is that it contains some moderate Baathis. Of twenty-one ministers, seven are holdovers from previous cabinet, thirteen are civilians, four are from moderate Shabib-Jawad faction of Baath (Defense — Tikriti; Communications — Abd al-Latif; Education — Jawari; Health — Mustafa) and a number of technician-type civil servants.” Did you notice the name of that defense minister? I think this might have been Saddam Hussein’s uncle.)

Anyway, I think his track record kind of makes even old Herbert Hoover look good.

Read the Original Article at Foreign Policy

How to Explain the KGB’s amazing success identifying CIA agents in the field?

 

A great example of using “comparison data” and simple deduction to pull back the veil. Counterintelligence 101.-SF

As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles.

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed and CIA personnel compromised or, indeed, had their lives thrown into jeopardy.

The problem dated from the mid-’70s, the very time that James Angleton, the paranoid head of agency counterintelligence, was at last ushered out of office, to the relief of conscientious officers hitherto cast under a dark cloud of suspicion, their promotion delayed or, worse still, denied, and in some cases entire careers wrecked.

But could Angleton have been right? Some consistently maintained so, notably the late Bruce Bagley. Their argument was simple. How could these disasters have happened with such regularity if the agency had not been penetrated by Soviet moles?

Read the Remainder at Salon