CHAPTER ELEVEN

I closed the book and tossed it on top of the others already piled upon my desk. Leaning back in my officer chair, I shook a cigarette from the pack that had been lying to their side and lit it. Inhaling deeply, I put my feet up on the corner of the desk and gazed off space.

Since my first seminar at Angleton's house, I had immersed myself in study. After reading The Conspirators, I had tracked down every reference to The Trust I could find, taking careful notes in the process. Bearing mute testimony to my labors, a nearly filled 300-page spiral notebook lay open in front of me.

By now convinced that The Trust was one of the most successful cons in human history, I could well understand Angleton's concern. For the Soviets had managed to run that hustle for seven years without detection; and in the process, they had not only taken in the anti-Communist émigrés but every major intelligence service in Europe as well. Moreover, The Trust was not an isolated incident, as some historians had claimed. In actual fact the Soviets had engaged in several variations on that theme with equally impressive results. Operation WIN was a particularly compelling case in point.

In response to the 1948 Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia, the Truman Administration abandoned its efforts to secure a negotiated withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and embarked upon a program of covert action designed to force them from the region. The CIA's Office of Policy Coordination - a euphemism for the Agency's covert operations department - was directed to assist the anti-Communist underground movements in Soviet occupied Europe with money, arms, equipment and specialized training. The Administration hoped to use these indigenous forces to first disrupt Soviet communications and paralyze the economy, and then to engage the Red Army in guerilla war. The ultimate objective was to impose an unbearable cost upon the Soviet occupation, in order to force an eventual withdrawal. 

The most promising of the East European resistance movements was the WIN organization, which was in close contact with Polish émigrés in London. According to their reports, WIN was the successor to the Polish Home Army of World War Two fame. With some 30,000 men under arms and widespread popular support, the émigrés were convinced that WIN had a realistic chance of driving the Red Army from Poland. 

Although the CIA was at first skeptical of these claims, WIN gradually demonstrated its prowess with a series of successful attacks against the Soviet occupation forces and local collaborators. In addition to blowing up police stations and Communist Party facilities, WIN launched aggressive attacks against Red Army forces in the field and in their barracks. In one particularly noteworthy operation, they engaged Soviet armored forces in a pitched battle.

By 1952 WIN claimed to be on the verge of victory, and all available facts seemed to support them. In preparation for the decisive battles to come, WIN appealed to the CIA for even greater assistance. They wanted heavy arms, ammunition, radios, agent-contact information and an American Army general to assume command of their forces. 

The news from Poland seemed too good to be true; and in fact, it was. For in December, the Polish Communist government aired a special two-hour radio documentary on WIN. According to the Communists, the Polish Home Army had been wiped out by 1947; and the WIN organization had been created and put in its place. The anti-Communist Poles that flocked to its banner were summarily executed; and the money, arms, ammunition, and equipment that the CIA had dropped into Poland were collected by the Communist security service. After making a careful inventory of each haul, the Communists had promptly used the CIA's largess for their own purposes. And in order to dispel any remaining doubt as to WIN's origins, the Communists presented a complete accounting of all American aid to the supposed underground in their broadcast. 

Adding insult to injury, other Communist-installed governments in Eastern Europe followed suit. The entire program had been compromised from the beginning; and the KGB had played the CIA throughout. As a direct result, the United States was forced to abandon its policy of rolling back Soviet power and influence in Eastern Europe, effectively ceding the region to the Soviet Empire. 

In light of the unquestioned historical facts, I was forced to conclude that the KGB was not merely skilled at strategic deception but possibly pre-eminent. And I had to wonder if U.S. intelligence was simply outclassed. 

The question was then far from academic. For from the moment of its 1917 inception, the Soviet Union had exerted a destabilizing effect upon the established international order; and since the fall of South Vietnam, it had become overtly aggressive. It had moreover broken the bounds of containment; and was engaged in a global offensive that promised, in time, to threaten the very survival of the West.

Still reeling from the trauma of Vietnam, the Congress was unwilling to confront the Soviets directly. The Reagan Administration was instead forced to resort to covert action, engaging the Soviets by proxy in Afghanistan and later in East Africa and Central America.

The Administration's policy had generated intense controversy, and Liberal Democrats had lined up to oppose it. They demanded that the United States negotiate its differences with the Soviet Union, regardless of past experience. That was unfortunately easier said than done, for successful negotiations require either trust or accurate intelligence and neither were at hand.

The core difficulty lay in the nature of the Soviet regime, which had been a criminal enterprise from the moment of its inception. Its proven offenses were so many and so varied as to defy enumeration, but a short list would start with the Bolshevik's seizure of power from the democratically elected interim government of Alexander Kerinsky, and continue through to their ongoing efforts to subjugate the world. In between would be found their use of mass terror to consolidate their power; their renunciation of international law; their efforts to foment strife and rebellion not only among the subject peoples in the European colonial empires, but in the democratic states of Europe and the Americas; their systematic and deliberate murder of at least 20 million people during The Great Terror; their efforts to infiltrate and suborn virtually every government in the world; their 1939 alliance with Nazi Germany, which precipitated the Second World War; their repudiation of the Yalta agreements in 1946-47, and their seizure of Eastern Europe; their installation of puppet regimes there, and the bloody terrorism that followed; the wanton attack upon South Korea in 1950, carried out at their behest by their puppet regime in the North; their brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; their construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961; their emplacement of offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962; their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; and their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. To all this might be added their most recent effort to gain control of the world's sea lanes by establishing client regimes in the littoral states of Africa, the Middle East and the Americas; and their strategic nuclear buildup, which defied all sense and reason. Although they had not technically violated international law by targeting western population centers with an estimated 20,000 nuclear warheads, the act was nonetheless one of implicit terrorism. 

With the burden of history laid so heavily against them, trusting the Soviets was not an option. And yet, the policy of détente with the Soviet regime seemed to rest entirely upon it. First annunciated by Henry Kissinger in 1970, détente was – supposedly - designed to ensnare the Soviets in a web of profitable agreements with the Western democracies that would, in time, provide them with a means to moderate Soviet behavior. Given the existing situation, this meant inevitably a series of treaties and trade agreements that favored the Soviets at the expense of the West; and for that reason it had provoked a violent and sustained controversy. 

Renounced by President Ford and successively denounced by Presidents Carter and Reagan, détente had nonetheless continued under various guises as a practical necessity. Western Europe had embraced it as the only realistic alternative to thermonuclear war; and in the United States, that presumption had made significant inroads as well. Renamed "constructive engagement" in a semantical sleight of hand, it promised to pay rich political dividends. President Reagan was under heavy pressure to expand the range of political agreements with Moscow and, especially, to resume the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks.

Reagan was not opposed to arms control in principle, but he had thus far resisted any further entanglements with the Soviet Union on the grounds that previous agreements had been unverifiable. The CIA had come under heavy fire for shoddy analytical work; and in fact, a competitive exercise organized by the Reagan White House had demonstrated that their estimates of Soviet strategic nuclear forces were gravely flawed. 

The CIA's proven inability to accurately monitor Soviet strategic nuclear forces forced what Angleton had called the epistemological question to the foreground; but thus far it had been tightly delimited. Henry Kissinger - the architect of détente - was on record as saying that accurate verification of the Soviet's nuclear arsenal was not a prerequisite for further arms reductions, but in this he was either mistaken or deliberately deceptive. Kissinger argued that in a world awash in strategic nuclear arms, precise numbers didn’t matter; but I had studied the issue intensively in graduate school, and I knew that was not the case.

Kissinger's underlying assumption was that a nuclear exchange would be so enormously destructive that meaningful victory would be impossible. Although that was true under almost any circumstances, there was one likely exception. Throughout the late 1970's a fierce debate had raged between conflicting schools of strategic thought, under the general rubric of countervalue and counterforce. 

Advocates of the countervalue school argued that nuclear weapons were so unreliable and inaccurate that they had no military application. They were "city busters" and nothing more; and their sole utility lay in annihilating undefended population centers. Counterforce theorists argued that while this had once been true, technological advances had given strategic nuclear weapons a true war-fighting capability. In the past several years, breakthroughs in inertial navigation had dramatically increased the accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles, reducing the Circular Error of Probability from approximately one mile to 100 meters or less. During the same time frame, equally impressive advances in miniaturization technology had made it possible to reduce the size of a nuclear warhead to a just few kilotons; and when inertial navigation was combined with miniaturized warheads, it became become theoretically possible to launch a disarming strike against an enemy's land-based strategic nuclear missile force. Because such an attack would deliberately avoid civilian population centers and - hopefully - produce relatively slight collateral damage, it was possible to imagine scenarios in which one side destroyed the bulk of the others land-based forces. In that event, the victims of the first strike would be faced with an appalling dilemma: they would have to either retaliate against the attackers cities with their surviving aircraft and sea-based missiles - thus inviting a retaliatory strike against their own population centers - or accept whatever surrender terms the aggressor offered. In either case, their government would not survive.

It was for this reason a precise knowledge of Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal mattered; but so far at least, the CIA had consistently failed in the effort. Opponents of détente used this glaring deficiency as an argument against any further accommodation of the Soviets, and with telling effect. If the CIA couldn’t produce an accurate count of Soviet strategic nuclear missiles, how could it possibly judge the Soviet's intentions? This question led directly to Maj. Golitsyn, and his assertion that the West has systematically failed in its effort to understand the workings of the Soviet regime. According to Golitsyn, the problem lay in the methodology employed by Western journalists, scholars and intelligence analysts alike.

Due to the stringent controls the Soviets had imposed upon the flow of information, Western analysts had no choice to rely upon whatever bits and pieces they could obtain in order to infer the inner workings of the Soviet state. Over time they had developed various indices, which they used to interpret Soviet behavior. Although these varied from analyst to analyst - and intelligence service to intelligence service - they generally included such things as the Politburo's order of presentation at rare public events; the relative frequency of mention of political figures by the state controlled print and electronic media; the relative importance of speeches made by senior members of the regime; the bits and pieces of gossip picked up at diplomatic functions and, of course, the public testimony of defectors. This was thin gruel at best; but unfortunately, intelligence analysts within the government fared only slightly better. Although they had the benefit of electronic intercepts and the occasional purloined document, the intelligence data at their disposal shed little light upon the true intentions of the Soviet dictatorship.

But according to Golitsyn, the problem ran much deeper. For Western analysts were not only hobbled by Soviet secrecy measures, but also by its careful and deliberate propagation of dezinformatsiya. The extraordinary measures the Soviets took to control the flow of information to the West - including establishing an effective party-state monopoly upon all media, the creation of an omnipresent security service, and the tight control of all contacts between Soviet citizens and Westerners - complicated the task of Western analysts, but not precluded their success. But in the absence of a methodology capable of compensating for Soviet disinformation, Golitsyn argued an accurate analysis of the Soviet regime was all but impossible. In order to address this problem, Golitsyn had proposed a new revised structure, which he termed The New Methodology.

This had provoked an immediate furor in official Washington, where the opponents of détente had eagerly seized upon it. More ominously, it had also forced to the surface the governmental elite's previously well-hidden unease. For it pointed to a can of worms that had been closed by bureaucratic fiat only a few years before; and with the exception of a few hardy souls - Mr. Angleton and Gen. Graham amongst them - no one in official Washington wanted that can reopened. This was especially true at CIA; for if Golitsyn's argument was correct, their analysts had not only been wrong but deceived on a grand scale. And this could have only happened if the U.S. government had been continuously penetrated at the policy making level for decades on end. 

The general public most often assumes that the purpose of intelligence is to obtain the secrets of hostile regimes; and that the purpose of counterintelligence is to protect our own. Although this is true in a limited sense, it is nonetheless misleading. For as Angleton explained to me in our second seminar, intelligence is the sine qua non of successful statecraft; and by implication, counterintelligence the primary offensive instrument of state.

Paraphrasing the Fourth Century BC Chinese military scholar, Sun Tzu, Angleton asserted that the international system was one of institutionalized conflict; and for that reason war had to be viewed as a practical matter. But if warfare is inevitable, operational and moral considerations nonetheless demand that hostilities to be conducted in the least destructive manner possible. For that reason victory should not be sought in open battle, but through strategic device instead. As Sun Tzu had observed, supreme excellence in war is to win without fighting; and this can only be achieved through a strategy of deception.

Although small-scale deceptions often suffice to win battles, they are not enough to secure strategic victory. In practice, that can only be achieved at reasonable cost by persuading the enemy to partake in his own destruction. But to do so, one must first gain control of the enemy’s intelligence system through the effective use of counterintelligence.

Angleton had digressed at that point, to explain the many conflicting definitions that had been applied to counterintelligence. But for practical purposes, he said, counterintelligence was self-defined. Its most basic purpose was to counter, i.e., negate, the effectiveness of hostile intelligence services. 

The very essence of counterintelligence is the infiltration, penetration, and subornation of enemy intelligence, and it is this overarching function that makes counterintelligence separate from and superior to other intelligence activities such as collection, counterespionage, or security. Counterintelligence is an offensive instrument; and as Sun Tzu recognized, it is potentially decisive. For if an enemy intelligence service can be suborned, the decision-makers who rely upon it can be swindled on a grand scale.

Deception operations depend upon what Sun Tzu called “inward spies.”  These must first be recruited from within the ranks of targeted intelligence service, and then maneuvered into an appropriate place. Once the "inward spies" are in a position to report how their service interprets intelligence data, “doomed spies” may be dangled for capture or dispatched as false defectors to deliver misleading information. The "inward spies" are then employed to assist the attacking counterintelligence service in modulating its false message. If the penetration agents report that their fraudulent information is believed, subsequent agents may be dangled or dispatched, or known agents of the target service may be “played” to pass further disinformation. And so like an artist painting upon a canvas, the attacking counterintelligence service can create, brush stroke by brush stroke, an entirely false picture of reality in the collective mind of the targeted intelligence service. What Sun Tzu called “the divine manipulation of threads” is in modern parlance a feedback loop. 

In contemporary practice, Angleton explained, the feedback loop is only slightly more complex than that described by Sun Tzu. It consists of two lines of communications linking the attacking counterintelligence service to the targeted intelligence service. The attacker uses the first set of lines to pass fraudulent information to the target through the traditional dangles, false defectors and double agents; calculated diplomatic miscues; compromised codes; and other devices. The second set of lines consists of human or electronic penetrations of the targeted service, and is used for error-correction and reinforcement. Once the attacking service determines how the target assessed the initial fraudulent information, they will act to still the target’s skepticism or increase the target’s confidence with additional false reports carefully crafted to conform to their biases, beliefs, and expectations. With patience and skill, the targeted intelligence service can be systematically blinded to the truth; and the fraud perpetrated upon them can be used with devastating effect against their government's policy-making process.

As Angleton went on to explain, states have minds; and states of mind. By that he meant that a government's senior decision-makers share roughly common experiences, beliefs, values, perceptions and biases; and as a practical matter, these can be collectively viewed as "the mind of the state." The "mind of the state" also has "states of mind," in the sense that it exhibits clearly defined attitudes toward any number of issues. The true purpose of deception operations is therefore to manipulate the "mind of the state" by influencing the state of the state's mind. Deception operations are nothing more nor less than sophisticated exercises in perception management conducted over an extended period of time; and their strategic intent is to so thoroughly disinform the targeted state that it can be provoked to ruinous and self destructive behavior. Deception operations are therefore at once the manner and the essence of victory without war.

Armed with that information, the wife gradually adopts more casual dress for “bridge” and takes care to return home sober at a more reasonable hour. With clothing, makeup and jewelry propositioned at a hotel, she is able to continue her affair without further compromise. And with the psychologist’s active collusion, she is able to extinguish her husband’s well-founded suspicions over time.
 

By bribing her husband's psychologist, the faithless wife has gained ongoing access to her husband's state of mind, and learned how he interprets the facts at his disposal. The wife has thus turned her husband's efforts to achieve a better understanding of himself and his environment against him; and through the auspices of the corrupt psychologist, she has enlisted him as an active though unwitting agent in his own destruction.

To my surprise, Angleton agreed with me. The KGB was not infallible, he said, and there was no doubt that significant errors would occur across time. But there was a serious risk that these would be overlooked, rationalized, or explained away by well-meaning policy-makers; and this process, they would be aided and abetted by Soviet penetration agents operating at the highest levels of power. For in addition to providing the required feedback for the deception operation, they would employ their influence to downplay Soviet transgressions and explain away Soviet misdeeds. 

In Angleton's judgment that would be a relatively simple process, for contrary to popular perceptions, the Soviets had no intention of conquering the world outright. Their strategic objective was more subtle - and sinister - than that. Their ultimate goal was not world conquest, but a Socialist Commonwealth that would span the globe. To achieve this end, they would pursue a policy of temptation in order to facilitate a form of tacit convergence. For that reason Angleton believed that a new leadership would soon emerge from the Kremlin and usher in an era of peaceful cooperation. The Soviet nuclear arsenal would be bargained away in a series of arms control treaties; Germany would be re-united, most likely as a neutral confederation; and both NATO and the Warsaw Pact would be dissolved. The Communist Bloc would undergo an impressive era of liberalization, as restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of religion were either removed or reduced to nominal levels. And in all probability, some semblance of free elections would be held. 

The ostensible liberalization of the Soviet Bloc would be designed to allay Western fears, marginalizing the perception of a Communist threat. Once the Western publics were persuaded that the threat was no longer extant, the Soviet's anticipated a dramatic shift to the left in both Europe and the United States. Deprived of an enemy, the political right would waste away in the Old World and the New; and both would become socialist in fact, if not in name. After that it would be a relatively simple matter to unite the political left in a grand coalition under Communist leadership, thereby establishing a de facto Marxist dictatorship throughout the world while retaining the appearance of representative democracy. 

But the liberalization of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe would be a sham. Although the Soviet and Bloc political systems would open dramatically, the means of political control would not be abandoned. The KGB and it's sister services in the Bloc states would recede into the background; but they would not be foregone. For that reason the Soviet and Bloc liberalization would be reversible, while the West's lurch to the left would not. At some undetermined point after the Grand Coalition of the Left achieved power, the entire charade would be unmasked and Marxist-Leninist control imposed. But by then Angleton doubted that anyone would really care; for after one or more generations of socialist indoctrination, the Western publics would most likely regard Marxism-Leninism as a logical progression. 

If all this had seemed plausible in Angleton's second and third seminars, it seemed even more so after weeks of intense study. There was no question in my mind that the West was in a world of trouble; and I doubted that its leadership had either the wit or the will surmount it. Save for the notable exceptions of President Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain, Western leaders were clearly inclined to accommodate the Soviets. At the slightest hint of Soviet liberalization, I had no doubt that they would lurch far to the left; and it was only a matter of time thereafter that NATO became an empty shell.

But that was a trend-line analysis, and I was fully aware of the dangers therein. As T.S. Elliot had written in Gerontion, history is filled with cunning passages and contrived corridors; and as I gazed at acoustically tiled ceiling, I wondered if Angleton had taken that into account. I didn’t know that he had penned those words; or that Elliot had published them under his own name, as a favor to a friend. 

Still mulling the kaleidoscopic imagery, I picked up the paper cup that had been sitting on the desk before me and gulped down the last of the cold coffee within. As my mind wandered through various vague and indistinct possibilities, I crumpled it and estimated the trajectory to the trashcan in the far corner. A haphazard calculation of wind resistance told me I'd never make the shot, so I tore two or three empty pages from my spiral notebook. After wadding them into a ball, I pried the mangled cup open again and forced them deep inside. Satisfied with the mass, I recalculated the shot and launched it into space.

It was halfway to its intended target when Pam Simpkins appeared in the doorway, to inform me that Lea Meyers was on the phone.