Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA - Hardcover

Wise, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394585143 ISBN 13: 9780394585147

Publisher: Random House, 1992

Synopsis

Details the obsessive internal spy hunt reminiscent of the McCarthy era lead by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton after he was lead astray by former KGB officer Anatoly Golitsin. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Reviews

When Soviet intelligence officer Anatoly Golitsin defected to the West in 1961, he hinted strongly that a long-range penetration agent was active within the Central Intelligence Agency. The possibility of a "mole" in the ranks set CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton on an obsessive internal spy-hunt that eventually shattered the careers of many loyal officers and paralyzed the agency's Soviet operations. Wise traces the spread of this virus of suspicion, showing how it first came to focus unjustly on Peter Karlow, a WW II hero and intelligence veteran with 21 years' service, and then, like Frankenstein's monster, turned against its creator. The joke at Langley headquarters was that Angleton ended up suspecting himself. As Angleton's institutional paranoia spiraled out of control, CIA director William Colby, aware that his counterintelligence chief had become a destructive force, eased him out of office. No mole was uncovered, and Angleton died in 1987. Wise's engrossing book includes the story of Yuri Nosenko, whom Angleton regarded as a Soviet plant. Held without trial, Nosenko was subjected to physical and mental torture to force him to "confess." Wise co-authored The Invisible Government. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This Kafkaesque chronicle from CIA maven and novelist Wise (The Samarkand Dimension, 1987; The Children's Game, 1983, etc.) might just as easily be titled Damage: damage to an agency's morale, to its officers and their families, to civil liberties, and ultimately to US military and foreign policy in some of the hottest years of the cold war. The 1961 defection of KGB officer Anatoly Golitsin came just as the CIA was finally installing the first chief of its critical Moscow station, but the defection was anything but a harbinger of better things to come. The renegade spy's tantalizing clues about a traitor deep within the CIA--who had a last name beginning with ``K,'' a KGB code name of "Sasha," a Slavic background, and several years of service in Germany--fell on all-too-fertile soil in the hyperparanoid mind of counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, already concerned about two turncoats (and about to be burned even worse by lunch companion Kim Philby). Although the alleged spy was never unmasked, the resulting hunt for the elusive mole had devastating repercussions for more than two decades: suspicions that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Communist agent; the forcible detention for nearly five years of a later defector believed (but never proven) to be a Soviet plant; the possible ``burning'' of other defectors by the CIA; stalled recruitment of spies within the USSR; and, worst of all for CIA personnel, the investigation of over 120 suspects (including Angleton himself), several of whom were compensated by Congress in the 1980's for the harm done to their careers. Wise has uncovered the quiet agony of the molehunt victims through interviews with more than 200 people, many of them Company alumni. A solid journalistic contribution to one of the enduring controversies in cold war spookery, with close attention paid to the byzantine mind-games that the CIA waged against its enemy and, ultimately, its own staff. (Eight pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394585143
• ISBN 13: 9780394585147
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325