Introduction
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (KGB) launched a concentrated disinformation campaign as part of an effort to safeguard the identity of their CIA penetration agent, Aldrich Ames. Part of that campaign involved Aleksandr Vasilyevich “Sasha” Zhomov, dispatched as a dangle-type double agent by the KGB in May 1987 targeting CIA’s Moscow Station and its Soviet and Eastern European (SE) Division. CIA assigned Zhomov the cryptonym GTPROLOGUE and accepted him as a source; he subsequently became a key disinformation and deception channel for the KGB. In a broader historical context, GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans, and Cubans—badly burned the agency.
Both the KGB’s dispatch of Zhomov and CIA’s handling of him as GTPROLOGUE are instructive. The former provides insight into the crafting of offensive counterintelligence operations, particularly underscoring how proper tailoring of a controlled source operation can manipulate a targeted service’s attempts at asset validation and thus extend the lifespans of operations. The latter is a cautionary tale of counterintelligence flags that, when methodically inspected, could improve the likelihood of successfully unmasking future provocations.
This assessment is based entirely on publicly available material. To the author’s knowledge, the primary source documents associated with this case remain classified, as do illuminating details they might contain. Also, the publicly available facts of the GTPROLOGUE case are rather disparate and occasionally contradictory. In attempting to reconcile such instances of contradiction, the author has preferred to use information that is supported by a preponderance of available research. With both of these qualifications in mind, what follows is an endeavor to present the first public, comprehensive, and contextual accounting of the case as well as its implications for running double-agent operations and conducting asset validation.
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