Paul Redmond (5:34)

Quietly sitting in my office as head of scci. So the phone rings and it's Margie Griner, Claire's secretary. And she said, you better get up here right away. And I could hear screaming in the background.

Julie Cohn (5:53)

Claire George at the time was Deputy Director of Clandestine Services at the CIA, AKA Paul's boss's boss. So Paul heads over to Claire's office.

Paul Redmond (6:03)

And I walk in, take the. He's screaming. Take the Concorde. Charter a fucking plane. Get over and tell that Blankety. Blankety Blank, goddamn effing mothering fool. Whatever, and I'll explain what it was. And then I walk in and he said, get over there. I said, where the fuck do you want me to go, Claire?

Julie Cohn (6:25)

Claire thrust a piece of paper in Paul's face. A message from the Chief of Station in Bonn detailing the revelations of Mr. X, which, like that, that was a big problem that this man had messaged about how potentially Langley's messages were being hacked. I mean, you hate to see it. You just.

Paul Redmond (6:44)

Claire is. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Julie Cohn (6:47)

This Chief of Station quite possibly just put this new Walken's life in immediate danger. And someone needed to warn him of that right away without using a single communication line to do it. Paul Redmond met his secretary in the hall, who, having overheard the commotion, already had his jacket, his passport and an envelope full of cash in her hands. Paul jumped in a car and headed straight to the airport. In fact, it all happened so fast that he and his wife still debate whether he even remembered to call home to say he'd be missing dinner.

Paul Redmond (7:16)

So I get to Dulles. It was, I don't know, maybe a half an hour to, you know, closing the doors or something, and there was no line at the check in. I had had nothing except my blazer and a whole bunch of money in my pocket and said, I gotta go to. I gotta get on that flight. And he says to me, do you have any luggage? I know I look like I have any luggage. So I drink my way across the Atlantic as I always did.

Julie Cohn (7:44)

Then he landed at dawn, and because he missed the train into the city by minutes, he flagged down a cab for a $400 long distance ride to the embassy, which also housed the CIA offices. As quickly as possible.

Paul Redmond (7:56)

And I walk in the door and there is on his desk, he's releasing another cable saying, what are you going to answer? I said, john, please don't send that and don't. I'm your answer, and don't go back to Washington.

Julie Cohn (8:09)

For a couple of years, the apoplectic state of the Deputy Director of Clandestine Services, the emergency jet to West Germany, and the immediate removal of the man who had been so careless. It was indicative of how high the tension was about the losses that had started in early 1985. Members of senior leadership, and particularly of those in the SE Division, felt a deep sense of loss. Many of those assets had become true friends. At the time, the head of the Soviet East European division was a man named Burton Gerber. Previously, Gerber had worked as the CIA's chief of station in Moscow. And he felt an incredible personal responsibility for the safety of anyone who worked for the CIA. I mean, everyone did, but Burton in particular. He just passed away a month ago, but Even into his 90s, I heard he still lit a candle at Mass for each asset who died under his watch. The mistake of the Chief of Station in Bonn made him livid. It became clearer than ever that new, much more stringent safety protocols needed to be devised and implemented asap. At Langley and in the SE Division's field offices all over the world, this episode is all about finding the leak, the source of that blood. But before he could even do that, Gerber had to staunch the bleeding, put on a tourniquet, seal up the SE Division's internal communications tighter than ever before. To keep the new walk ins safe, he cracked down on secrecy and compartmentation of information, and he instituted intense new safety protocols. It would be the beginning of what was quickly to become known as Gerber's draconian compartmentation. For one thing, there would be absolutely no cable traffic about any new assets. CIA handlers would travel to meet with their sources in person. The handler would type up meeting notes on an air gapped, custom built, steel encased laptop, encrypt those notes, and then bring the laptop back to headquarters in person. At the same time, Gerber created the so called back room, A windowless, nondescript, always locked office where all communication about news sources was handled. Burton Gerber appointed Sandy Grimes, one of his most thorough, trustworthy officers, to run the backroom. And at first, Sandy brought in only one other person to help. Diana Worthen. The two had worked together before and trusted each other's integrity and work ethic implicitly. The work inside that room was so secret that not even the people in the adjoining office knew what it was that the women were doing. Over time, Sandy added a few more colleagues to the back room. All veteran officers, quiet, hard working, trustworthy, often overlooked, and all women. At that time, in the mid-80s, swashbuckling and career climbing was considered the purview of the men at the agency. Analysis, particularly this painstaking level of paperwork and quiet filing, was considered more of a woman's job. And that sexism had been worse a decade or two earlier, back when almost all the women who worked in that back room had been hired. Like when Sandy joined the CIA in 1966, she spent the first four years of her career typing or cutting and pasting unclassified maps. It was during this period, she wrote, we learned that college degrees, foreign languages and professional testing aside, we were clerical employees. In other words, the CIA's female staff, they hadn't stayed on this long for the glory or the big time promotions. They believed in the work, and they had learned to keep their heads down and stick together. They trusted each other. And that all female backroom, it worked. Because of the new compartmentation, the new assets stayed alive and safe. The tourniquet was officially on. So now what about that wound? If Mr. X was right, they had to check the communication channels for that leak. To be fair, they had already begun testing them before Mr. X walked in. But they really doubled down on their efforts. How? One of the methods that they used was called a canary trap, named for canaries that are sent into coal mines that would alert miners by dying if there was deadly undetectable gas. And it went like this, okay, there was a Soviet general in Nairobi who was evidently a real schmuck, and everyone in the CIA kind of hated him. Milt Bearden, the Deputy Chief of the SE Division at the time, flew to Nairobi and started sending messages back to headquarters about how that general had just walked in and volunteered his services to work for the CIA, which was not true. Then back at Langley, Paul Redmond would write fake responses, and then they waited to see if the schmuck would be arrested. Then when he wasn't, Bearden would send more messages, each time casting the net wider, sending the info to more and more people. This went on for so long that.

Paul Redmond (13:07)

And I got really, really sick of, you know, bake. I. I ran out of crap to make up, so all I, I just started punching in numbers so it looked as though it was super deciphered.

Julie Cohn (13:21)

Much to everyone's dismay, nothing ever happened to the much hated general. Meaning the KGB wasn't intercepting those messages. Paul ran several other communication tests from various other locations, including Moscow and Nada. Okay, now the communication seemed secure and the new sources were safe. But as feared, operations and assets that were run before the draconian compartmentation. Those people that were locked into that leaky hull, they kept getting compromised. One of the most devastating losses that occurred that year was of an asset named Dmitry Polyakov. Polyakov was arguably the most important KGB source the CIA had ever run. Sandy knew Poliakov well and had worked with him for decades. Her health prevented her from taking part in this podcast, but she gave us permission to use past recordings of her. The following is from a lecture she gave at the International Spy museum in Washington, D.C. july 7, 1986. GRU General Dmitry Poliakov is arrested in Moscow one day after his 65th birthday. We have over a 20 year history with him, and we considered him the crown jewel in CIA operational history against the Soviet target. And on a personal note, more than half of my career was intertwined with this case. Beginning from the second month after I joined the agency. Dmitry Polyakov took almost no money for his decades of work for the CIA. Instead, he had been risking his life because he thought the Soviet Union was ruining Russia. Now, here's what's crazy. Even after they knew they didn't have a technical penetration, even after Polyakov's death, and despite the staggering losses both before and immediately after Vitaly Yurchenko redefected, there was within the CIA hesitation to admit that those deaths might have been caused by a traitor or mole in their midst. It didn't mind admitting that there was likely some kind of leak somewhere. But the CIA didn't want to believe it was being betrayed by one of its own. Paul Redmond was one of the few who did not share that hesitation and was getting particularly frustrated with the agency's reticence to assemble a special task force.

Paul Redmond (15:58)

It just kept adding up. And I had a guy named John Riley who worked with me for me to do an actuarial study of how long KGB officers survived working for us. And it was months, Brad. And so I started making a sting.

Julie Cohn (16:16)

Okay, remember Dan Payne? You've known him until now as one of Vitali Yurchenko's bodyguards. But after Vitale left, Dan changed jobs and began to work in a secret office that handles internal mole hunts and special investigations. His first big job post, Yurchenko was being assigned to the very task force created because of Paul Redmond's stink.

Paul Redmond (16:40)

Frankly, it was Paul Redmond who started the whole thing. Paul Redmond wrote this memo, which subsequently became known as Something's Wrong in River City. Basically, Paul had written like a page and a half memo. And it wasn't even like a formal memo. It was like Paul putting notes on a piece of paper that said all of these things happened, and there's got to be an explanation for this. And I believe the explanation is there's a spy here, and we got to start taking a look at it. We got to start pulling together a team of people to start looking at it.

Julie Cohn (17:18)

Paul basically penned a temper tantrum in letter form. The KGB is wrapping up our cases with reckless abandon, he declared. According to the author, Pete Early, Redmond infused it with the fire and outrage of a Bible Beating evangelist and went on record boldly stating that he believed the department had a mole. Paul Superior, the chief of the counterintelligence staff, started a task force to look into the losses. To head it, he called in a woman he had worked with in the past, known for her encyclopedic knowledge of the KGB and of the CIA's Soviet assets. She was an old battle axe named Jean Verdefey, who was very intelligent, dressed like a librarian, had no spouse, no kids, and kept her distance socially from most people. You couldn't butter Jean up, and nothing got past her. In the the Secret History of Women in the CIA, author Liza Mundy describes Jean as a spiritual descendant of the wartime women of World War II. Astute, well educated, and long consigned to jobs well beneath her, she resembled Agatha Christie's Jane Marple in that as a woman of a certain age, people underestimated her keen intellect and shrewd assessments. Jean returned from an assignment in Africa and came back In October of 1986, a full year after Vitaly Yurchenko had redefected. Her task force was primarily an analytical investigation, trying to find commonalities in the losses. Jeanne didn't want to assume the culprit was a mole and miss what might be the real problem. They did, in fact, look into some human candidates. But the task force found 44 different possible ways other than a mole, that the information could have been leaked. They wanted to let the facts lead them to the answer, not assume that the answer was a mole and look for the facts to prove it. In Paul's frustrated eyes, though, what that meant was that the task force was trying to boil the ocean for a cup of tea. And after years of hard work, Gene's task force got nowhere. The end. No answers were ever found. Sorry. Can you imagine? Worst podcast ending ever. No. The CIA would eventually find the cause of that leak, and that would eventually shine a new spotlight on the Vitaly Yurchenko case. But it would take nine years. Nine years to find the serial killer behind all the 1985 and 86 murders. Are you looking for more ways to get your true crime fix? I have an option for you that will cost you nothing but give you everything. You can watch all your favorite true crime shows for free on Pluto tv. Follow along as mysteries are unlocked and secrets are revealed on 48hours, dateline24.7 and forensic files. Still feel like there are things left unsolved? Check out their crime dramas like Tracker and csi. Pluto TV is available on all your favorite devices so you can stay on top of every case from anywhere. Pluto TV Stream Now Pay Never.

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A lot of people, especially those who don't know the full story. Blame the CIA for shoddy or lazy work when they hear that it took the Agency nine years to find the leak behind the losses. But that's not the case. Laziness or lack of hard work is not the reason for the delay. But there are three main reasons that did cause the delay that I want to tell you about. Because later on, these three reasons will provide extremely critical context for evaluating Vitaly Archenko's legitimacy. The first reason is the ghost of a man named James Jesus Angleton. You heard that right. The second is the Soviet deception machine, one this country is unfortunately still dealing with today. And the third is some geopolitical drama that was going on in the world at the same time that would pull focus away from solving the mystery. To be clear, there are more than three reasons why it took so long. And there are some fascinating books to read on this time in history that delve into dozens of factors. I do not want to understate how hard it is to search for a leak, especially one you don't know is a mole. It's a true needle in a haystack situation that takes thousands of hours and lots of dead ends. But for big picture purposes, I've boiled the reasons down to the three that stand out most to me. First, the ghost of James Jesus Angleton. Who is this guy and why is he haunting everyone? Here's John Cipher. To answer the question. You met John? A couple of times. But I know it's easy to lose track of names, especially when they all sound similar and you can't see any of their faces. John Cipher had a 28 year career in the CIA's Clandestine Services. He's the guy that I met because I was writing a movie for him and he served as a lead instructor in the CIA's clandestine training school.

Paul Redmond (22:53)

So the head of counterintelligence inside the CIA for like 20 years, from the early to mid-50s until 1970s was this guy, James Jesus Angleton, who had worked during World War II for the OSS. I think he was a Yale graduate, sort of poet, an odd sort of duck. But he, during World War II worked a lot with British intelligence. They were sort of like the British and Soviets. For years had been involved in espionage and spying. The US was sort of new to it.

Julie Cohn (23:26)

James Angleton was a brilliant, eccentric spycatcher. He had coke bottle glasses and avidly tended to a hothouse of rare orchids in his spare time. As a young man starting out, he had come to admire one of his British counterparts, a man named Kim Philby, who helped school Angleton in the spy trade. So much so that Angleton even took to wearing the same cool homburg hat as his idol.

Paul Redmond (23:51)

Kim Philby was a mentor and influence on Angleton.

Julie Cohn (23:55)

The problem was Philby had been a Russian spy since he was in college at Cambridge, before He even joined MI6. His entire career he had been funneling intel to the Russians that cost thousands of lives. This guy rose through the ranks until he was head of counterespionage for MI6. And the whole time he was lying to everyone, including his star eyed and very clever protege, James Angleton. Then, after over a decade of Angleton and Philby being friends, a Soviet spy named Golitsyn defected to the US and one piece of intel he revealed implied that Philby was a spy. The rumors had already been swirling for a while in the uk, but when Gallitzin helped tip off Angleton to some investigation that proved it to be true, it shattered Angleton. I mean, can you imagine? They would have had long alcohol laden lunches together and Angleton would be sharing intel and discussing cases with this man that he assumed was an ally, a friend. And learning his old idol was a genius con artist who had duped him from the get demolished his trust in anyone other than Gallitzin, whom he then trusted. Maybe too much, because after he had been here a while, Golitzyn started to feel his relevance fading and so he started to make stuff up basically. But Angleton kept listening to Gallitzin and his theories. Gulitson told Angleton that the CIA had a mole whose name he thought started with the letter K. And he also told Angleton that anyone who defected after him was probably a fake sent by the Soviets to deceive the CIA. Angleton tore the agency apart looking for.

Paul Redmond (25:43)

This K. Now what happened is Angleton became almost too, you know, interested in him and believed him too much and became a Cult, I think the Hanitahl investigation. And in the process it became almost sort of this crazy view. He never, he didn't trust anybody. He was worried that there was a spy inside. There was, you know, lots of officers were thought to be potentially guilty, were investigated, careers were ruined. It became sort of paranoia took over the agency. And so many of the, of even potential Russian sources that came to the CIA. Angleton was the view, oh, this must be part of a larger deception campaign to try to, you know, discredit Golitsyn. And sort of paranoia took over the agency in this period of time.

Julie Cohn (26:34)

James Engleton refused to accept or believe any walk ins. He thought they were all double agents. Here's Stephen Engelberg again, who at the time was a young espionage reporter for the New York Times.

Paul Redmond (26:45)

Basically the Soviet division of the CIA and attempting to recruit what they call assets, had essentially been paralyzed by the chief of counterintelligence, a man named Angleton, who suspected that every single person who wandered in was in fact really a double agent.

Julie Cohn (27:03)

Angleton's paranoia became known as the Monster plot. And those who supported his beliefs later became known as Black Hatters. So hell bent on pursuing a vast conspiracy theory that it almost paralyzed the Soviet division. The author David Martin, famously titled a book he wrote about Angleton the Wilderness of Mirrors. It's a term used to describe this maddening thing in the world of counterintelligence where you can look at every truth like it's actually a deception in disguise until you can't tell the difference between true and false, until your compass is spinning and you're completely lost. Angleton had retired in 1975, but stuck around in various capacities for a few years after that. Meaning that the leadership of the CIA in 1985, anyone who had been at the Agency for more than a decade, really had survived the trauma of Angleton's reign. John Cipher began working at the CIA in that exact year, 1985, just a few years after Angleton had left for good.

Paul Redmond (28:03)

So there was a view by the time I came in that we can't do this again. We can't tie ourselves in knots. We can't distrust everybody inside the Agency. We have to use security, we have to prepare our officers, we have to trust our officers, and we can't turn away every potential source because we think it's part of some crazy monster plot. And so a lot of that has an impact on what happens with these follow on mole hunts and Yurchenko and people after that, because there was sort of a view that if we believe that we have moles inside all the time, it's actually more damaging to us than, you know, investigating, you know, the information that comes to us.

Julie Cohn (28:44)

Now, Jean's task force had a lot working against it. It was underfunded. She was given an empty room with only a typewriter in it, and it was understaffed. But Paul Redmond thinks that anglotonian PTSD is the main reason the task force got nowhere, because a lot of older folks at the agency, not just Jean, but also Gus Hathaway, the chief of counterintelligence at the time, or Claire George or Burton Gerber, they were all scarred.

Paul Redmond (29:10)

They got absolutely nowhere because they didn't look at the people. And the reason 40 or 50 years later, I'm convinced they didn't look at the people, was Angleton. And the people, like Gus, personally observed the horror of the Angleton time where people's careers were ruined, everything was black, they controlled it and, and Angelson was convinced people were spy, and Gus and to some degree, Burton were psychologically disinclined, I'm convinced later, disinclined to go down that road again.

Julie Cohn (29:47)

Dan Payne served on that original task force. He views this slightly differently than Paul and Stephen, but acknowledged that a full mole hunt was never undertaken.

Paul Redmond (29:58)

Yeah, you know, I don't know that I agree completely with Paul on that. So I think there was certainly was a reminder of Angleton and there was a desire to make sure that we didn't make Angleton's mistakes because Angleton went into. And I know because I read the original monster plot and I read a lot of his investigations and the cleanup that took place after. And Angleton was somebody who simply operated on theory and then looked for things to support his theory and disregarded evidence to the contrary. And so I think the goal was we can't make that mistake. We have to take a look at this and, and really look at it from a, you know, kind of a 00 base review. What are the possibilities, and then go where the evidence took us. So I wouldn't say it hindered us. I would say it made us aware of the mistakes in the past and not to fall into those trap. Would we have liked it to have been something other than a spy? Of course. Who, who wouldn't?

Julie Cohn (31:25)

It wasn't that they didn't look at any people. Dan said, for instance, the task force found that every single compromised operation, except for one, was on paper in Moscow station. So as a result, Dan and his team wound up interviewing every single CIA employee who worked in Moscow. In the end, though, after months of careful interviews and investigations, everyone checked out. But he acknowledges that that's very different than running a mole hunt.

Paul Redmond (31:54)

I would say probably that we didn't put as much effort as we should have in looking at individuals who had access. We, we should have spent more time actually investigating those individuals. But, but I mean, there were, there were things that we did do even then. Like one of the things that we did was, was anybody in the Soviet East European division that had not been polygraphed since 1985, we started running them through polygraph. It wasn't like we were not doing anything. We didn't have a suspect list that we were going down and trying to identify or clear specific people down that list.

Julie Cohn (32:43)

Poll Paul would say it was fears of reopening the wounds of the Angletonian era. Dan might say it was an attempt to learn from Angleton's mistakes. But the bottom line was that the task force's methods were impacted by Angleton's legacy. And the thing is, the Soviets knew all about Angleton and they might have been using his legacy to their advantage given that Stephen Engelberg was young and new to this beat. He, he had been reading up on the agency at the time.

Paul Redmond (33:12)

And by the way, I mean, they were reading all the same stuff I was reading. So they knew that James Jesus Angleton had thrown the Soviet division into disarray by believing everyone was a scent agent. And that by the mid-1980s, we're now well past the Angleton period. And so therefore anybody in the CIA who says of a walk in like this, well, it's probably a cent agent is going to immediately be told, oh, get that Angleton crap out of here. We're done with that. This is bull. No, this is bullshit. We're not doing that. Those days were over. I mean, this is the Russians we're talking about. I mean, these are chess players. You use everything against your enemy. You try to play towards the exact weakness that you have identified. If they're leaning left, you lean right. Right. I mean, this is, we do this to them. I mean, this is how it's done. It's why, frankly, I found this so intellectually fascinating. It's such a wonderful mix of strategy, tactics and psychology, this field.

Julie Cohn (34:15)

And this brings me to the second main reason the task force had trouble staying focused. The Soviet deception machine. So to understand why the Soviets were mounting elaborate deception campaigns, I need to give you a spoiler alert. The leak that would take nine years to pinpoint you May have guessed it by now, but yes, it was a mole. He was the greatest CIA traitor in history, or in the Soviet's eyes, the goose that laid golden eggs. And they did not want his cover to be blown. Between 1985 and 1986, 22 prized assets, 22 human beings were murdered because of this one pathetic shitstain of a human. Sorry, but hate him. In June of 1985, just a month and a half before Yurchenko's defection, that mole had wrapped more than five pounds of secret documents inside plastic bags and carried them right out of Langley and right into the hands of the kgb. In doing so, he handed over the identities of every single asset on the Soviet East European desk all at once. Now, stick with me here, because to understand why the deception campaign, you have to understand what was going on back in the Soviet Union. Normally, when someone gives you a bucket of names, you don't go around arresting them one after the other because it raises flags and leads the enemy to start looking for a leak. But back in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev had recently taken over as head of the Soviet Union, and KGB leaders were eager to impress him. One in particular, Kryuchkov, wanted to someday run the kgb. And so he boasted to Gorbachev that thanks to great espionage work, they had brilliantly identified over 20 KGB traders. He didn't tell Gorbachev all those names came from one guy. He made it sound like they were the result of his team's super hard work. And that kind of created a problem, because in this version, there was no reason not to round them up right away.

Paul Redmond (36:14)

And so, essentially, Gorbachev insisted that they arrest all of these spies. That created a problem for the KGB to be like, well, fuck, now if we wrestle these spies, the Americans, as dumb as they are, are still gonna have to think, like, oh, my God, like. And one of the natural things to think is, who knew? Is there a spy inside? Therefore, they had to create a deception program.

Julie Cohn (36:35)

If the KGB had to start murdering all the people that their supermole had revealed, they'd need to start deceiving the Americans into thinking their assets weren't getting arrested because of a mole, even though neon red flags are going up all over the place that there must be a leak.

Paul Redmond (36:49)

And deception works best when you play to someone's preconceived notions. And so in the post Angleton era, I think the Russians knew that we would be. We wouldn't want to automatically turn inside and start accusing ourselves of things, since.

Julie Cohn (37:05)

The KGB knew that the CIA was battle weary and hesitant to open a full mole hunt. They'd keep feeding the Americans all sorts of other reasons that their assets were vanishing. And thus, a special series of deception campaigns was born. Remember Mr. X? Here's Paul Redmond, who worked closely on the Mr. X case.

Paul Redmond (37:26)

We ran it for a while. We went through all sorts of gyrations. He didn't want to be met. Eventually, it was obvious he wasn't giving us anything that amounted to a dam. And they were, you know, jerking us around by going through all this stuff. How to meet him, dead drops in East Berlin, RF transmissions. Claire and I came to the conclusion we were right, that, you know, they're just jerking us around and he wasn't giving us it.

Julie Cohn (38:00)

Mr. X was a double agent. He was sent to distract the SE Division from looking for the mole by having them chase down potential leaks in their communication. Instead. Anyway, after over a year of running him as an asset and sending fake messages from all over the world and carefully testing all the comms, it became clear that Mr. X was a KGB deception operation. And then, very quickly after Mr. X, there was a second deception, codenamed Prologue. Here's Sandy talking about Prologue in a lecture she gave at the International Spy Museum in Washington. While I don't like to admit is true, the KGB deserves great credit for their second deception operation. It was beautifully conceived, it was well run, and they read us perfectly. It began in June 1988, when an unidentified Soviet male approached our Chief of Station Moscow on the train from Moscow to Leningrad, and he passed our chief an envelope. The man identified himself as a KGB counterintelligence officer. In that envelope, Prologue provided some great chicken feed that convinced the CIA he was real. And then he told them that the reason for all the 1985 deaths wasn't a mole. The envelope contained several KGB documents. One was of particular interest, especially to Jean at the time. In this document. This document was a KGB assessment of our Moscow Station activities during the relevant period, 1984 through 1986. The KGB analysis was that the reason for their successes and our failures during this period was due to one thing. Here's David Major at the time, the advisor to President Reagan on matters of intelligence, and now the President of the center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Paul Redmond (40:20)

You see when you lose a source what an intelligence service wants to believe, that it was the intelligence officer's problem, that he had made a mistake. Not the service, but the officer made a mistake. And so if we discipline that officer, we don't have a Problem in our organization.

Julie Cohn (40:41)

As in you don't have a molecule, you had a one off.

Paul Redmond (40:43)

Exactly. Perfect.

Julie Cohn (40:46)

For three years the CIA painstakingly ran Prolog as an asset before enough signs pointed to the fact that he was a dangle sent to misinform the CIA and suck up its time and money. And the Soviet's deception campaign went beyond double agents. One of the other deception tactics that caused a huge kerfuffle was a classic sexpionage trick. The so called honey trap. Which entrapped a US Marine named Clayton Lone Tree.

Paul Redmond (41:14)

Don't forget what's his name in Moscow, the Marine. Whatever. Because that a lot of us started saying that. Well, that's the problem. It must be Lone Tree did all these things.

Julie Cohn (41:21)

Okay, okay, but that was John Cipher again. What he's referring to is that in 1985, Marine Sergeant Clayton Lone Tree, who was a guard at the US Embassy in Moscow, fell in love with a Soviet woman named Violetta who also worked at the embassy. Over time she introduced Lone Tree to her Uncle Sasha who blackmailed the Marine into handing over a few US secrets. It's actually still not clear that Violetta was a KGB agent or someone who was co opted by the KGB once they saw that she and Lone Tree had a little thing going. But either way, Clayton Lone Tree felt extremely guilty about it and wound up turning himself in. Dan Payne was working on the task force at that time.

Paul Redmond (42:00)

The thought was if he was indeed letting them in, then there's the answer.

Julie Cohn (42:05)

To the problem he claimed he hadn't. But what if Lone Tree had let Uncle Sasha into the Moscow Embassy where the man could have gotten access to all kinds of information. Paul Redmond ordered the review of every single piece of paper in that embassy.

Paul Redmond (42:20)

Lone Tree comes along and Grimes has never forgiven me. This is when I was still in SC Division. I made her and Diana Worthening. So I made them run an entire inventory of everything that had been in Moscow Station during the time Lone Tree was working for the K and might have let them in.

Julie Cohn (42:40)

It would take Sandy and Diana until early 1988. Two years to finish that mind numbing inventory. And the result was years of wasted time and wasted energy not spent hunting for a mole. Here's David Major again.

Paul Redmond (42:55)

In fact, one of the things to understand about the Russians is that they have a term for all this. We call it denial and deception. They call it Operational games.

Julie Cohn (43:03)

That's the name.

Paul Redmond (43:04)

That's the name. That's their official name. Operational Games.

Julie Cohn (43:07)

Oh my God.

Paul Redmond (43:08)

The Russian term for denial and deception. They don't have denial and deception per se. Everything is an operational game that they're very good at, too. They're very, very good at.

Julie Cohn (43:19)

Here's Ole Kalugin, the. The former KGB general you heard from a few episodes back, who hates Putin and lives in the U.S. he's in his 90s now.

Paul Redmond (43:27)

There was actually a special department in the Soviet intelligence working on disinformation. Well, I was chief of Foreign counterintelligence. That was a major department when I was already about 40 or something.

Julie Cohn (43:44)

Fifty years ago, the deception department was already going strong because it turns out it had started way back in the 1800s.

Paul Redmond (43:53)

So even from the early days, even before the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, there was actually an institute of Mascarovka inside Russia, whose job was to create false narratives, to create subversion, these type of things. What does it mean to hide reality, to mask what you're really doing, to create false views on the other side. You want to influence the thinking of your adversary, and if you can get into their head and make them think the wrong thing by any number of means, you're already sort of an added advantage. In the tsarist Okrana, they created that Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Are you familiar with that? So in the 1890s, they wrote this. This fake story, this fake narrative that they put out to the world of a plot of senior Jewish leaders around the world who were controlling the levers of power. And there was this conspiracy for Jews to run the world. And it was in this book called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It was fake. It was made up by the Russian Okrana, and it was published and pushed around the world. But even that document, which long ago was proved to be sort of fake, was created by the Russian security services. The czarist Russian security service is still in circulation, if you look so on Hamas, which is interesting, who just invaded Israel and stuff, it's in their charter as part of the Jews trying to run the world. Hezbollah, I think, has it in their charter.

Julie Cohn (45:42)

The conspiracy about a cabal of Jews trying to control the world. It was a lie actively made up by the Russian deception department 130 years ago that is to this day, not only still mistaken for the truth, but quoted in terrorist rhetoric and political doctrine.

Paul Redmond (45:59)

So this deception campaign was in. Was to sort of make. To give us a false view that there's other answers to solve these problems. I think the Russians are savvy enough to understand that wouldn't last forever, but it did buy them time and have us Chasing Our Tails Other Places.

Julie Cohn (46:17)

Kalugin wrote about deception campaigns in his own memoirs, especially under Yuri Andropov, who was KGB chairman from 1982 to 1984. He writes, Under Andropov, the disinformation branch of the KGB flourished for both domestic and external consumption. It concocted stories to deceive, confuse and influence targeted audience. Okay, he then lists some and I have to read these to you. The CIA ousted President Nixon. The CIA arranged the 1978 mass suicide and murder of more than 900 people of the Jonestown cult. The US was developing an ethnic weapon that would kill blacks and spare whites. U.S. army scientists developed the AIDS virus. Americans steal foreign babies to use their organs for transplant. Honestly, like if it's just frustrating that this is from a hundred year old playbook and people all over the world are still falling for it. Oleg says that in 1981 alone, the KGB, according to its report to the Communist Party Central Committee, funded or sponsored 70 books and brochures, 4,865 articles in foreign and Soviet newspapers and magazines, 66 feature and documentary films, 1,500 radio and TV programs, 3,000 conferences and exhibitions, and 170,000 reports to the public. That's in 1981 alone. I really shudder to think what those numbers look like today, especially now that the KGB doesn't even need to coerce reporters or editors anymore. It just needs to publish a clickbaity article on a bogus website that looks like a newspaper. It's not that the CIA was oblivious to these deception tactics. They did eventually rule out both Mr. X and Prologue, as well as a lone tree honey trap theory they just had. Hadn't been able to tell fact from deception right away, and the delay cost them years they didn't have to waste. Last but certainly not least, reason number three other geopolitical drama happening in the world that caused a major roadblock for the task force events which distracted Jean Verdefey's investigation to the point of derailing it altogether. Parents, when you visit California, Childhood rules. If you don't remember how awesome childhood is, just ask yourself, what would kids do? Dance to a giant organ played by ocean waves? Yep. Camp in floating tree houses hundreds of feet off the ground? Check. Jump in a big tub of mud on purpose. Call it rejuvenation, we don't care.

Paul Redmond (49:05)

Just.

Julie Cohn (49:06)

Just pack your fun pants and let childhood rule your family vacation. Discover why California is the ultimate playground@visitcalifornia.com.

Paul Redmond (49:16)

Hanaday presents in the red corner, the undisputed, undefeated Weed Whacker Guy, champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere.

Julie Cohn (49:27)

And in the blue corner, the challenger.

Paul Redmond (49:30)

Extra strength additive eye drops that work.

Julie Cohn (49:33)

All day to prevent the release of.

Paul Redmond (49:35)

Histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Patternay.

Julie Cohn (49:43)

Patternay. Bring it on. There were a couple other major things going on in the world at this time that pulled serious focus and even funding away from Gene's investigation. There was, for instance, the Iran Contra affair, which broke open the same day that Gene started the task force in October of 86. David Major worked at the National Security Council, which was where a lot of the people who had masterminded the whole scandal had been working. He hadn't been part of the scandal, and he had a lot to say about Oliver north, who had helped mastermind it. But he describes the impact Iran Contra had on all aspects of government, including espionage. So all of that is kind of getting in the way of would we say that that is also diverting attention from what may or may not need to be a mole hunt?

Paul Redmond (50:32)

Oh, God, yes. Oh, God, yes. It diverted the CIA. It diverted us, everybody, the senior leadership in the government, everybody. We got sucked into that thing. It diverted us away from national security issues about dealing with the Russians or dealing with China. It really was very painful. It grips the White House. It neutralizes our President. It was just a terrible, terrible time.

Julie Cohn (51:00)

It did not help when in the middle of the Iran Contra scandal, literally the day he was supposed to testify about it in Congress, Bill Casey, the director of the CIA, unexpectedly died of an undiagnosed brain tumor. And then.

Paul Redmond (51:16)

Good evening live from the Berlin Wall on the most historic night in this wall's history.

Julie Cohn (51:21)

Astonishing news from East Germany, where the.

Paul Redmond (51:24)

East German authorities have said, in essence.

Julie Cohn (51:25)

That the Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore. In 1989, the Berlin Wall broke down. By then, the SE Division had lost almost all their older Soviet assets. But the back room was keeping all the new intel sealed up tight. But we created another problem for ourselves. Some senior officers, not all, but some, had come to believe that whatever existed in 1985 and 1986 no longer existed.

Paul Redmond (52:02)

Right.

Julie Cohn (52:03)

Sources are coming down the pike. And as far as they were concerned, this 85, 86 disaster was only of historical interest.

Paul Redmond (52:19)

How Wrong they were.

Julie Cohn (52:21)

Two years after the wall fell in 1991, the Soviet Union officially collapsed. And as a result, Congress started to slash budgets for espionage. Here's David Major, who. Who by then had left the White House and was in charge of the budget unit at the FBI.

Paul Redmond (52:38)

There was A lot of money pulled out of American counterintelligence in 91. That says we got no more threat. Congress didn't want to hear about the Russians anymore. They wanted their peace dividend. So budgets were cut during that time frame. I lived through that. I saw that. I ran the budget unit during that time. They always wanted to cut it. That didn't mean we stopped working. It just means you had to deal with some stupid people in Congress who believe that everything is all fine and good and all we got to do is sing sing way on Kumbaya and everything will be fine. It was an attitude of people who were not in that profession.

Julie Cohn (53:15)

Milt Bearden, who had served briefly as Burton Gerber's deputy during Yurchenko's time in America, had just been tapped to run the SE Division, which after the end of the Soviet Union was being slangily called Russia House. He agreed with Congress that it was time to stop dwelling on a Cold War mentality and turn the page. Those policies created a backlash with the older guard, the Cold warriors, who thought the newly created organizations in Russia were just new letters for the same old kgb, the FSB domestically and the SVR abroad. There was a bit of a division within the SE Division about how big the Soviet threat was at that point. Can you talk a little bit about the, like the heads butting over that and what your opinion was?

Paul Redmond (54:07)

Yeah, this one is hard. I had. I went to Pakistan 1986. I was there till 89, they biggest part of the Soviet occupation and finally marching them out of Afghanistan, and we really hammered them.

Julie Cohn (54:30)

Shortly after Vitaly Yurchenko defected, Milt Bearden had been sent to Afghanistan to train and help the Mujahideen successfully drive out the Soviets who at the time were trying to occupy their land. Going in, there had been a fear that the Soviet army was a formidable opponent. But Milt soon began writing back to headquarters about how the reality on the ground told a very different story.

Paul Redmond (54:52)

There were people in the SE Division, I think were saying, like, what the hell is Bearden saying? This is the Soviet army, the world power, this. And I'm saying, wait a minute, we're fighting these fuckers head to head, and this is a messed up army. And we had spent, you know, the last 40 years building up this adversary. And we build it up so that we have enough money to engage it. And I'm looking at this and I'm saying, wait a minute, are we talking about the same thing? I'm never trying to say, oh, they're nice guys. I'M just trying to say, wait a minute. They're not even close to us. Not even freaking close.

Julie Cohn (55:39)

He had seen that the big Soviet military threat was more of a paper tiger, and he wanted to stop treating it like it was a real saber tooth. He certainly wasn't very interested in wrapping up the mystery of the 1985 or 86 losses. After all, no more assets had been dying. So maybe if there had been a mole, maybe that guy had died back in 1989 when the murders had stopped. And as for Vitaly Yurchenko, Milt was sure he had been a real defector, not a savvy piece of the chessboard, involved in the murder of 22 assets. Five years after it was formed, Gene's task force had fizzled out. There was no more urgency, no more funds, and no more interest from the head of the department. Bearden was eager to move forward and put it all behind them. However, much of the older guard at the SE Division was in an uproar. A country's ability to fight a hot war is not the only measure of the kind of threat they can pose. And one of that older guard, and I'll bet you can guess who, was louder in his criticism of Bearden than the rest. Paul Redmond, our fluent and profanity Boston Irishman not only disagreed that the Cold War was a thing of the past, he challenged Bearden to a public debate. He had flyers made. He invited people to come watch the Russia is still a threat versus Russia is no more a threat than France. Now debate. Brie and vodka, he said, would be served. Bearden was not amused. He reflected on his annoyance with Paul. In his own book, the Main Enemy, he wrote, I'd decided by now that Redmond was blinded by the minutiae of espionage and had no interest in the big picture. He didn't seem to want to acknowledge that the Berlin Wall had fallen for good and that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. During one heated discussion with Paul, I flared. Jesus, Redmond, you're becoming precisely like the people I came here to fight, I said, thinking of the paranoia of the KGB and of James Jesus Angleton. You are becoming like our enemy. Redmond was still consumed by the 1985 losses. I decided I had to move him out of the division, and he did. Milt moved Paul out of Russia house, out of headquarters entirely. It seemed that if there was a mole, that person might get away with what they'd done forever, and that the mystery of whether or not Vitaly Yurchenko had played a part in keeping that mole safe would never be solved either, except in his attempt to get Paul Redmond out of his hair and to move on. Already from the 85 losses, Bearden had actually put Redmond in a position to finally take charge and do things his own way. This time the hunt would actually succeed. And the leak? It was a mole. A person someone in the SE Division knew well. And someone you guys actually know pretty well by now too. More on that next time. The Redefector is a production of Waveland. I'm Julie Cohn and I wrote and created the series. Jason Hoke is the executive producer and he also produced and edited the series. Shane Freeman is our sound engineer. Additional production assistance provided by Leo Culp Music by Robert Ellis. If you love the series, please make sure to leave a review and to tell a friend. Follow Waveland on Instagram at wavelandmedia for more information on this series and more. Thanks for listening. In the red corner, the undisputed undefeated.

Paul Redmond (59:22)

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Julie Cohn (59:27)

And in the blue corner, the challenger.

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Paul Redmond (59:35)

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