OPINION - ALL THOSE MOLES IN AMERICA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200002-0
MID ItT 9>
LOS ANGELES TIMES
1 December 1985
All Those
Moles in
America
~ JByThomuPow&s t all en
ded in smiles at Geneva, but if
you want to know what the relation-
ship of the United States and the
Soviet Union is really like, forget the
speeches of Mikhail S. Gorbachev
and Ronald Reagan and watch what the
KGB and the Central Intelligence Agency
do. This is hidden most of the time, but an
extraordinary series of spy stories in
recent weeks has opened a window into
the secret world of the intelligence war.
Most of them are related to the case of
Vitaly Sergeyeveich Yurchenko, the
high-level KGB defector who stayed in
this country just long enough to suggest
the other side is winning.
In the business of espionage the word
"dangle" is a term of art. It can be either a
verb or a noun. It jumps out at the reader
in the CIA's densely detailed, three-page
biography of Yurchenko, wh" requested
political asylum at the U.S. Embassy in
Rome in August, then apparently changed
his mind and went home in a blaze of
publicity on Nov. 6. For three years in the
early 1970s, the CIA biography says,
Yurchenko was responsible, along with
other duties, "for the insertion of agents
[dangles] into Western, especially Ameri-
can, intelligence services." This fact poses
a question certain to animate CIA coun-
terintelligence experts for many years:
Was Yurchenko a dangle?
Questions of this sort keep CIA direc-
tors awake at night. At lunch one day in
1977, Richard M. Helms asked Benjamin
C. Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post,
"Do you know what I worried about most
as director of the CIA?" Bradlee had many
ideas but all were wrong. "The CIA is the
only intelligence. service in the Western
Thomas Powers, author of "The Man Who
Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the
CIA," is working on a book about strategic
weapons.
The agency's
real fear i s a
long-term Soviet
agent in the
upper reaches
of the clandestine
services.
world which has never been penetrated
by the KGB," Helms told him. "That's
what I worried about."
We can be pretty sure the current
director, William J. Casey, is much trou-
bled by the same thing.'Many penetra-
tions of the CIA have been revealed in
recent years-one of importance just last
week, when a CIA analyst, Larry Wu-Tai
Chin, was arrested and charged with
selling documents to China over a 30-year
period. The Chin case is a'erious matter,
but the agency's real fear is of something
much worse-a long-term Soviet agent,
or "mole," in the upper reaches of the
clandestine services.
Since the early 1960s, a number of
Soviet defectors have claimed the exist-
ence of such a mole without being able to
identify him. The story is long and
involved. Some analysts believe the de-
fectors, some not. It's all very confusing.
Yurchenko is said to have identified a spy
in the CIA who had already left the
agency, Edward L. Howard, and then fled
the country in September. Inevitably this
report is wrapped up in the controversy
over his own bona fides-was Yurchenko
telling the truth, or was he sent by the
KGB to deflect suspicions from the real
culprit? The arrest last Monday of yet
another spy identified by Yurchenko-a
National Security Agency analyst, Ronald
W. Pelton-is evidence that he was what
he said he was. But arguments over bona
fides can never, by their very nature, be
settled once and for all. In an interview
with Helms some years ago I mentioned a
friend of mine who was investigating the
case of an earlier Soviet defector who had
disappeared in Vienna. "He can do it if he
likes, " Helms said. "I wish him well. But
he'll never find out what happened."
Helms was right, of course.
There are several good reasons why
intelligence services spend so much time
and trouble attempting to penetrate their
opponents. Learning secrets is only one of
them. The secrets, after all, are mostly of
Intelligence services
are like wrestlers in a
darkened room-they
feel their adversary.
The quiet grappling of
the CIA and the KGB
tells us how the two
sides are really getting
along.
the house-keeping variety-who holds
which post, how things are done and the
like. The name of an agent or two is an
occasional bonus. The real goal is to
"muddy the waters," another term of art.
An intelligence service can be crippled
by an opponent in three ways. The first,
and by far the hardest, is to feed it false
information of consequence, thereby in-
fecting its advice to national leaders. The
second is to embarrass it, so that even
good advice is taken with a grain of salt.
The third is to burn it in an episode so
painful and confusing that the target
service loses confidence, misses golden
opportunities through caution and turns
inward in recrimination and acrimony. In
this light, the truth about the Yurchenko
affair seems almost beside the point. The
waters have been thoroughly muddied:
Reagan seems to think Yurchenko came
to do mischief; the CIA is hard-pressed to
explain to congressional oversight com-
mittees how the fish got away, and at war
with itself over what went wrong. What
once seemed like a major coup-Yurchen-
ko's defection, coming hard on the heels of
other high-level Soviet defectors in Lon-
don and Athens-now looks like a major
disaster. Whatever he told the CIA during
three months of debriefings will go into
the files with a permanent shadow over it.
What really happened? Naturally, I
don't know, but perhaps the old philo-
sophical principle of "Occam's razor"
must apply-the simplest theory that
explains the known facts is most likely to
be true. In this case the simplest theory is
that Yurchenko defected and then
changed his mind. His press conference at
the Soviet embassy was a nice touch
intended to muddy the waters-and it did.
He may survive and even prosper back in
Moscow, but only, I suspect, in order to
back up the frail theory he was a plant.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200002-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200002-0
Does any of it matter? In peacetime not
much, in wartime plenty. Nations go to
war with their intelligence assets in hand.
Once the shooting starts, new spies are
hard to come by.
Is anybody winning the intelligence
war? This is hard to say. Some counterin-
telligence people claim that arrests prove
they are doing their job. Other apologists
say the real change is not more spies, but
more prosecutions. Past cases were han-
dled differently. Once discovered, spies
were turned, or "doubled," and then used
to feed false information to the other side.
But no such claims can hide the serious
damage caused by spies uncovered re-
cently, beginning with the Walker case in
May. The CIA officer, Howard, apparently
identified by Yurchenko, allegedly com-
promised an important CIA spy in the
Soviet Union. Chin worked for the For-
eign Broadcast Information Service, a CIA
subsidiary, but officials say he had once
operated in document-control, with ac-
cess to highly classified Asian reports.
The Pelton case could yet prove the
worst of all. He worked for the nation's
largest and most secret organization, the
National Security Agency, which breaks
codes and monitors Soviet communica-
tions of all types. Technical collections
systems costing millions may become
useless once the other side knows how
they work. Only the bare outlines of these
cases have been made public but the
muffled cries from intelligence officials in
Washington are unmistakably pained.
For the moment the CIA's score card
does not look good, but the KGB probably
isn't much happier with its own recent
setbacks, and in any event the purpose of
intelligence services is not to score points.
It is to close with an opponent. Big
successes, like big defeats, obscure the
importance of what is to be learned from
simultaneous contact at man y points.
Intelligence services are like wrestlers
in a darkened room-they feet their
adversary through close watch of his
embassies, listening to his broadcasts,
attempts to recruit his officials, reading
his newspapers, monitoring his economy,
photographing his military installations
and a host of other means. A well-placed
spy is a valued asset, but nothing a spy
might say can match the intimate body-
heat of enveloping contact. The quiet
grappling of the CIA and the KGB can tell
us how the two sides are really getting
along. The picture that emerges is a
troubling one. What I see is fear, distrust,
hostility and the pursuit of malign advan-
tage without foreseeable end. p
a
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200002-0