Carter Roy (16:47)
Ba da ba ba ba and participate in McDonald's while supplies last December 1961, a Soviet intelligence officer walks into the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland and announces that he wants to defect. His name is Anatoly Golitsyn. He is a high ranking member of the kgb. And he has a story, something big, something that will consume Jim Angleton for the rest of his career. Anatoly is brought to the United States and debriefed with the CIA. Officers who first speak with Anatoly find him arrogant and demanding. He insists on being interviewed by Jim personally, says nobody else at the agency is smart enough to understand what he has to say. Jim doesn't argue. He just pulls up a chair. Anatoly explains he's become disillusioned with the Soviet system and is ready to spill its secrets. He gives Jim information about KGB operations in Helsinki. He he provides a dossier of KGB personnel structure and methods. This gives him credibility. For Jim, this is the moment he's been preparing for his entire career. The CIA hasn't landed a KGB defector of this caliber since 1954. Anatoly was inside the KGB's strategic planning department, the part of the organization that decides how the whole machine operates. He doesn't just know what the KGB is doing, he knows how they think. Anatoly tells Jim that the KGB reorganized itself in the late 1950s and that the reorganization was designed to do one deceive the west on a massive scale. According to Anatoly, the KGB had essentially turned itself inside out. The bulk of its visible operations were were theater. The real power sat with a tight inner circle running the show from behind the curtain and those Soviet officers and diplomats that Western agencies kept recruiting as spies. Anatoly says most of them were already working for Moscow. The CIA thought it was gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union. In reality, Moscow was deciding what the CIA got to see. And yes, if you think that sounds a lot like the double cross system that Jim learned About from Kim during the war, where captured spies are turned and used to feed false information back to the enemy. You're right, and that's exactly why it resonates with Jim. He has spent his career understanding how deception operations work. He knows firsthand that reality can be manufactured. And now Anatoly is telling him the Soviets have been doing it to the Americans for years. But that's not all. Anatoly also claims the CIA itself has been infiltrated by a high ranking Soviet mole, someone embedded deep inside the agency. If that's true, the implications are staggering. Every operation the CIA has run could be compromised. Every source it's developed could be in danger. Every intelligence assessment it's produced could be wrong, or worse, designed to be wrong. People could be dying because of this person. People may have already died. He provides a handful of details. The molecules is of Slavic descent, may have been stationed in West Germany, has a last name that started with K and might have ended in ski, and operates under the KGB codename Sasha. I mean, think about that for a second. Slavic descent, stationed in Germany, last name starts with K, might end in ski, spelled S K, Y. You could probably find a dozen people in any government agency who fit that description. But Jim doesn't see it that way. To Jim, this is the thread he's been waiting for. And when he gets a thread, he pulls. He never stops pulling. This is a man who slept on a cot in his office during the war because he couldn't stop working. His whole career has been built on the idea that if you look closely enough, the pattern reveals itself. And now, for the first time, someone from inside the KGB is handing him the edge of something that may be thin, maybe vague, but it's real. He can feel it. And Anatoly isn't done. He makes one more prediction, and it's the one that seals Jim's devotion. He tells Jim the KGB will send another defector after him, a false one. His sole purpose will be to discredit Anatoly's information and protect the mole already inside Jim's agency. If that happens, Anatoly says don't believe him, no matter how convincing he is. Jim files that away. Then the mole hunt begins. Jim starts by scouring personnel files for anyone inside the CIA who might fit the outline Anatoly has given him. The first person in the crosshairs is a career CIA officer named Peter Carlo. Peter lost a leg during World War II. He spent the 1950s rising through the ranks of the CIA's Technical Services Division, the division responsible for the gadgets and tactical tools the Agency uses in the field. Think Q from the James Bond films. Peter is in line to become its chief. He also fits Anatoly's description. Jim discovers that Peter was actually born Peter Klabansky, a Slavic name ending with Sky. He served in Germany and had access to sensitive operations. On paper, this looks promising. Jim's team starts pulling the thread. The FBI puts Peter under intensive surveillance. They watch his movements, they monitor his contacts. They dig into his finances, his relationships, his history. Weeks go by, then months, and they find nothing. No secret meetings, no unexplained money, no contact with Soviet agents, nothing incriminating at all. But Jim insists that doesn't exonerate Peter. There's a difference in Jim's mind between we didn't find anything and he's clean. It just means Peter is careful. Peter is forced to resign in 1963. He is entirely innocent. He will spend the next two days decades fighting to clear his name. The CIA eventually pays him close to half a million dollars in compensation and gives him a secret medal. But his career is gone. And Peter is only the beginning. Jim's counterintelligence staff draws up a list. 40 CIA officers fall under investigation. 14 are considered serious suspects. Promotions, stall raises are withheld. Careers that officers spent decades building are quietly dismantled, not through formal charges or trials, but through suspicion, paranoia, and the word of one defector. One of the more painful cases involves a man named Leslie James Bennett. He's not a CIA officer, but a senior counterintelligence official for Canada's Royal Canadian mounted police. In 1962, Jim actually trusts Leslie enough to have him interview Anatoly. But Jim being Jim, that trust doesn't last. Not long after he starts to suspect Leslie of being Sasha. He opens an investigation, and eventually the Canadian police launch one too. They put Leslie under surveillance. They tap his phone. They bug his house, including his bedroom. The operation ends in Leslie being taken to a safe house for a five day interrogation. During those five days, his interrogators ask him humiliating personal questions about his sex life based on recordings from the bug in his bedroom. They find nothing. No evidence that Leslie was ever disloyal to anyone. But his top secret clearance is revoked anyway, and his career is over. His wife and children leave him, and eventually he's living in poverty in Australia. By the mid-1960s, the damage is mounting. Peter Carlo is gone. Leslie Bennett's career is destroyed. Estimates vary, but according to author David Wise, the careers of more than 100 CIA officers are damaged or Derailed by the mole hunt. Some are formally investigated. Some are quietly passed over for promotion with no explanation. Some simply realize they've been frozen out and leave on their own. The CIA eventually pays compensation to at least three officers under what agency employees grimly call the Mole Relief Act. And it's not just the people being investigated who are impacted. It's everyone around them. If your colleague is under suspicion, does that make you suspicious too? If you vouch for someone and they turn out to be guilty, does that mean you're compromised? People stop talking to each other. They stop sharing information. They stop trusting. Jim has a yellow line painted on the floor of the CIA vault room, cordoning off the safes that only his staff can access. If you work in that building, you see it every day, A physical reminder that someone is watching. Meanwhile, the Soviet division, the part of the CIA responsible for actually gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union, is grinding to a halt. Meetings with potential sources are vetoed. New operations are questioned before they begin. Intelligence coming in from the field is dismissed as possible disinformation. Soon, the suspicion becomes its own kind of trap. Push back against the mole hunt, and you look like you're protecting the mole. Defend a Soviet source and you're naive. Question Anatoly's credibility, and you're doing exactly what a false defector would want. There's no way to win. And as the mole hunt drags on, Jim is increasingly the only one who still believes in it. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover initially cooperates with the CIA after Anatoly defects, but he quickly grows skeptical of his sweeping claims about a Soviet mole at the top of Western intelligence. By the mid-1960s, the bureau has largely distanced itself from Jim Search, leaving him to pursue the theory inside the CAA long after others have stopped believing in it. Jim has searched for Sasha for three years and has almost nothing to show for it but hundreds of damaged careers. And then, right when Jim is at his most isolated, right when the rest of the agency is starting to wonder if he's lost his mind, another Soviet defector arrives, exactly as Anatoly predicted. His name is Yuri nosenko. In early 1964, he shows up to a CIA office, and he's carrying a bombshell. The year prior, President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union for some time. And yes, by the way, we might as well call this show the 6 degrees of JFK at this point. He pops up in so many episodes. Anyway, Yuri claims that he personally handled the KGB's file on Oswald in 1959. According to Yuri, the KGB considered Oswald unstable and essentially worthless. They had no interest in recruiting him. Jim doesn't believe a word of it. And from his perspective, the reasons are overwhelming. First, the timing is almost too convenient. JFK has just been assassinated by a man who lived in the Soviet Union for three years. And months later, a KGB officer shows up volunteering that Moscow had nothing to do with it. If you're Jim, that doesn't look like a coincidence. It looks like a cleanup operation. Second, Yuri's story keeps changing. During his initial contact with the CIA in Geneva in 1962, he gives one version of events. When he defects in 1964, some of the details have shifted. His reasons for defecting change. To Jim, those inconsistencies aren't the normal fog of memory. They're the tell. A real defector gets the details right because he lived them. A fake defector gets them wrong because he's reciting a script that's been revised between performances. And finally, there's the overlap. Yuri's information touches on the same cases and the same operations that Anatoly reported on, but reaches different conclusions. To most people, that might suggest two honest sources who simply disagree. To Jim, it's proof of something far more sinister. The KGB wouldn't send a defector who contradicts their previous defector unless the second one is designed to neutralize the first. Anatoly predicted this would happen. He told Jim years ago that the KGB would send a false defector to discredit him. And now, right on schedule, here's Yuri. Jim's mind is made up. Yuri is a plant. In April 1964, on Jim's recommendation, Yuri is held in a secret CIA detention facility in Southern Maryland. He's kept alone. The food is bare minimum. He later says they gave him lsd, and they tell him that this is his life for decades, unless he admits he's working for Moscow. This goes on for over three years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is so outraged by Yuri's treatment that it effectively destroys the cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's tenure. Which is a significant thing to break, given that these are the two agencies most responsible for protecting the United States from foreign espionage. Meanwhile, Anatoly's claims are growing stranger by the year. He tells Jim that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is a Soviet agent, that the rift between China and the Soviet Union that every other analyst in the Western world considers genuine is a charade, a massive deception staged for Western consumption. That the KGB's influence reaches into the highest levels of virtually every Western government. These claims are, to the rest of the intelligence community, absurd. The FBI privately mocks what they call
