SWEEPING INFILTRATION - A POLE UNFOLDS TALE OF INTRIGUE; COULD IT SURPASS THE HISS CASE?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000300150052-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 1998
• Sequence Number: 52
• Publication Date: March 9, 1964
• Content Type: NSPR

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Sanitized - Approved FEi
NATIONAL OBSERVER
CPYRGHT
MAR 9 196
sweeping In filtration
A Pole Unfolds Tale of Intrigue;
Could It Surpass, the Hiss Case?
Gently.
`Amateurs and Stalinists'
Consider that U.S. diplomats behind the The newspaper quoted Mr. Goleniewski
Iron Curtain have been blackmailed into as saying that the KGB had infiltrated all
collaborating with Russia's nefarious see- United.-States
major American embassies the Federal i
ret-police network by beautiful Communist Bureau of Investigation (FBI)." He said
girl friends. Itirther that ."little if anything" was being
Sound like the plot of a bad spy story? done to weed out Soviet agents, because
Perhaps. ' But this was the picture that "~njatQurs and Stalinists" in the Central
emerged from a story in a New York' ` ; Intelli? ehce Agency had refused to bring'!
newspaper last week, and the story plain- ." his revelations to the attention, of higher
ly had the Government wgrried.'Tile'rea- '.officials.
son: It was purporrtedly. based on mfor- :m from" an, purportedly important U.S. inte i- The story prompted high-level con-
aion f ce, a Polish defector living In ferences. in the CIA, the White House, the
New York since 1961 under the assumed FBI and the State Department. But
name Michael' Goleniewski. spokesmen declined .to discuss any .aspect
h
,
fallen intn thn 7-n-
But the specifics of the charges at-
Information supplied by Mr. Golen-
iewski played a part .in the 1961 arrest of
Irwin N. Scarbeck, a U.S. foreign-service
officer in Warsaw, who was blackmailed
by an attractive Polish girl. Scarbeck is
now serving,a 30-year prison sentence for
passing secxets to the Communists.
More Famous Than Hiss Case?
Mr. Goleniewski, said New York's
Journal-American, was a former high-
ranking operative in the Soviet KGB, or.,
secret-police organization, who "has pro-
vided Washington with details of;';what
looms as a greater scandal than the fam-
ous Alger Hiss case." The paper said
he had exposed a series of security
breaches in Warsaw, in which U.S. em-
bassy officials and Marine Corps guards
were compromised by women working for
the Communists,
What made the accusations embarrass-
ing for the Government was the fact that
there is indeed a Michael Goleniewski. He
was described in Washington as a "val--,
uable defector," whose disclosures going
back to 1958 had exposed the activities of r
several Communist agents operating
abroad. He is now a U.S. citizen.
of b
e case publicly. "The White House
doesn't comment on intelligence matters,"
said press secretary Pierre Salinger when
asked for President Johnson's reaction to
the charges.
On Capitol Hill, however, the tempta-
tion was not to let the matter rest so
easily. Ohio Republican John M. Ash-
brook, a member of the House Un-Amer-
ican Activities Committee, called for an
investigation into alleged lax security
measures in the State Department and
CIA, with Mr. Goleniewski as a witness.
How much more there was to the case,
no one would say. One man who seemed
to know was Ohio Democrat Michael J.
Feighan, head of the Hbuse Judiciary sub-
committee on immigration, which cleared
the defector's application for citizenship.
And he wasn't talking. Said Mr. Feighan:
"I have made up my mind to say nothing
at all about it.,,
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000300150052-9
Imagine that Soviet agents have pene- tributed to. Mr. Goleniewski"uere dismis
trated the Central Intelligence Agency ed in Washington asinaccurafe'; and con-
(CIA) and the State Department, trary to information' the defector had ac-
Pretend that U.S. espionage funds in tually given American authorities. And
V
ienna, more than $1,000,000 worth
have those charges were indeed sweeping.. 1