Snowden: The Deception Question

Epstein, Edward Jay. James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?
The Deception Question


Even Angleton’s harshest critics at the CIA, such as William Colby, recognized that the KGB planted misleading clues in intelligence channels. But they believed, as Colby wrote in directives, that the CIA was able to weed out such tactical disinformation by considering it in the context of intelligence gathered by satellites, communications intercepts, and other sources. This view held that while it might be possible to temporarily confuse CIA field officers, disinformation would never be passed up the chain to the White House. Angleton’s view that it could be used to manipulate a President was peremptorily dismissed. Colby termed it “sick think.”


In 1995 , however , the CIA Inspector General found that in the 1980s and early 1990s the KGB had dispatched at least half-dozen double agents who provided disinformation cooked up in Moscow to their CIA case officers. It further discovered that this concoction of bogus and factually true information had routinely been passed between 1986 and 1994 to three Presidents– President Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. The disinformation, according to the Inspector General, became part of one of the CIA's most highly classified products, with each report signed personally by the CIA director, provided with a distinctive blue stripe to signify their importance , and sent directly to the President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. When the CIA Inspector General retrospectively traced out the path of this disinformation in the blue border reports, he found that the “senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence.” These CIA officials apparently continued to forward the Russian disinformation to the White House because it would be too embarrassing for them to admit that they had been so badly deceived. Whatever their motive, the CIA officers who had been gulled by the KGB found a common interest with the KGB in not revealing on-going deception. The CIA Director John Deutch, who had received these blue border reports when he was deputy director of the Department of Defense, told Congress that the CIA’s failure to disclose that the intelligence was from KGB-controlled agents was "an inexcusable lapse in elementary intelligence practice."

So Angleton proved to be right about the KGB’s capabilities to penetrate, deceive, and use the CIA to deceive its own government.


By the time Angleton died, in 1987, the term Angletonian had become an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, or bizarre. Even though every Director of Central Intelligence from Allan Dulles to James Schlesinger kept Angleton as their key advisor on counterintelligence, his critics ridiculed his idea that KGB moles could infiltrate the FBI and CIA. In the media, the notion of moles was treated as evidence of his paranoia. Simply put, in 1987, Angleton's thesis that the KGB could use the CIA to deceive Presidents was viewed by almost every commentator on the subject as an excursion into paranoia.


In Russia, however a handful of people in the KGB and Kremlin had a very different appreciation of the situation. They knew in 1987, as the FBI would only learn many years later, that the CIA had been successfully penetrated . The KGB had advanced its mole Aldrich Ames to a key position in the heart of its counterintelligence. They also knew that the FBI, America’s anti-espionage service, had also been doubly penetrated The KGB had two moles, Earl Edwin Pitts and Robert Hanssen, with access to the FBI’s computer files. They also knew that these moles were reporting back to Moscow the thinking of American counterintelligence. So the KGB had installed the feedback part of the deception loop. They also knew that the KGB had no fewer than six disinformation agents. From their feedback, they knew that the CIA and FBI had accepted them as reliable sources. These agents formed the disinformation part of the loop. They also knew that their Moscow-prepared disinformation was moving from the CIA case officers, to the Reports section. And that it was included in the reports signed by the National Intelligence Officer for Soviet Russia and Director of Central Intelligence William Casey (and then William Webster) for the eyes of President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.


After the Cold War ended, the CIA learned more about this vulnerability. In 2004, KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin, spoke at a dinner in his honor at the Spy Museum in Washington about how the KGB duped the CIA. He recounted to former US intelligence officers how he helped run two KGB moles -- one well-placed in the CIA's Soviet Russia Division, the other in the FBI -- when he was deputy KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in the 1980s. They were of course Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. He explained how this helped facilitate the KGB’s disinformation operations to further delude the CIA even after leaks were detected by the CIA. Of course, by this time, the CIA Inspector General had already found out about the KGB’s success in deception. Cherkashin could gloat in 2004 over the KGB's prior successes because the CIA leadership had not seen that Angleton had been right.

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Mytake: Intelligence art is very complicated....do not dwell on it if you are too simple to sustain its pressure.

Opinion
Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?
Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives.
By Edward Jay Epstein
May 9, 2014 6:50 p.m. ET
Edward Snowden's massive misappropriations of classified documents from the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence is mainly presented by the media as a whistleblowing story. In this narrative-designed by Mr. Snowden himself-he is portrayed as a disgruntled contractor for the National Security Agency, acting alone, who heroically exposed the evils of government surveillance beginning in 2013.
The other way of looking at it-based on the number and nature of documents Mr. Snowden took, and the dates when they were taken-is that only a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation.
So far, only the whistleblower version has had immense international resonance. The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists who assisted Mr. Snowden in this enterprise were awarded the 2014 Polk Award for national-security reporting. Former Congressman Ron Paul organized a clemency petition in February for Mr. Snowden, stating: "Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them."
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