By W. Alan Messer
W. Alan Messer joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1972, after serving in the U.S. Army and earning an M.A. in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. For nearly sixteen years, he was an analyst on Soviet defense economics, including strategic missile production assessments, in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. After a two-year stint in the Directorate of Science and Technology, serving as a Program Manager in its Mobile Missile Assessment Center, Mr. Messer joined the Directorate of Operations as an operations officer on operational counterintelligence, specializing in the Soviet and Russian intelligence services. He retired from the CIA in 2003.
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Abstract: In his book, The Fourth Man, author Robert Baer claims to have assembled evidence substantially leading to the conclusion that CIA senior officer Paul Redmond was a mole in the CIA from about 1985 to at least 1992, if not beyond. In this, Baer attempts to disentangle his own theory from the ongoing spy cases that ran roughly concurrently in this timeframe: CIA officers Rick Ames and Edward Lee Howard as well as FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen. The examination of all the flaws of Baer’s own argument and evidence along with comparisons with more authoritative eyewitness testimony reveals a narrative that is needlessly and dangerously gratuitous, since it fails to make even a prima facie case regarding the reputation of its target. In the end, these flaws and fallacies illustrate so much that passes for “professional” analysis in this day and age.
First published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
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In his book, The Fourth Man, Robert Baer provides an intriguing story about the inside investigation of a mole in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that has not yet been arrested.1 The book conveys some interesting and probably actual clues regarding this mole’s investigation and identity. But it is heavily salted with flaws, fallacies, contradictions, unasked questions, and substantial uncertainties that ultimately lead to an irresponsible public conclusion concerning the identity of this possible mole. In the end, even Baer admits it is a shaky conclusion.
What follows is a forensic examination of Baer’s book, highlighting the uncertainties in the conclusions, the fallacies and contradictions throughout the narrative, and the weaknesses of Baer as a reporter of these events. Baer was a career case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO).
The reader may be disappointed that this article does not rise to the level of a literary drama. Still, treatment of this subject requires close attention to the story’s details and the logic with which conclusions are pursued. This review aims to argue for more professional standards of analytical conduct, particularly among those who would presume to be intelligence professionals.
In conducting this examination, I rely heavily on the claims that Baer, himself, makes throughout his book. Although many journalists have written about these events, three authoritative discussions provide a foundation for comparing notes.
Milt Bearden was the deputy chief of the Soviet/East Europe [SE] Division in 1985 and 1986, and then became the chief of SE from 1989 through 1991. In 2003, he published a book that replayed the events of this period in extensive detail.2
Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (pronounced Ver’-ta-fay) were longtime DO officers with extensive experience in counterintelligence. They investigated the mole Rick Ames and wrote an authoritative book about it in 2012.3 Baer cites these two books as “indispensable.”4
Finally, Oleg Gordievsky was an exceedingly important spy for the British MI6 from 1974 to 1985, and his reporting was shared with the CIA. He figured prominently in theories about a Fourth Man and wrote his autobiography in 1995.5
In scrutiny of the book’s claims, we should first begin with a few observations about the author, particularly his admission right up front that, although he was a career CIA case officer, he had no experience in Soviet operations or counterintelligence.6 His comments about the State Committee for Security (KGB) Second Chief Directorate (SCD), among others, suggest as much. Since the SCD plays a prominent part in his subsequent claims that the SCD probably recruited the Fourth Man, let’s stop and dwell on this a bit.
While the SCD was responsible for internal counterintelligence and security, the KGB First Chief Directorate (FCD) was responsible for foreign intelligence operations, primarily abroad. But Baer wrote that “the CIA made no mistake” about the fact that “the Second Chief Directorate had a better track record of observing the discipline of espionage than the First.”7
To anyone with years of experience with Soviet intelligence, this is absurd. The SCD operated almost exclusively on Soviet soil. In the conduct of investigations, the SCD relied heavily on surveillance by the specialists in the KGB Seventh Directorate. SCD officers had little or no experience at running countersurveillance routes [marshrut], and they lacked the incentive to do it well since, unlike FCD officers under official cover, their officers were not at risk of having their overseas tours terminated prematurely, their agents compromised, or their careers being interrupted by a hostile service.
The most proficient FCD officers on the street were those who supported “illegal” officers abroad since their primary responsibility was to service dead drops to communicate with illegals. Skill at running countersurveillance routes was required because illegal officers were not covered by diplomatic immunity and, hence, were vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment if caught.
Baer also claimed, “[I]t’s unlikely the Second would have been so quick to arrest the agents outed by Ames, putting him in an extremely exposed position.”8 This ignores the ultimate decisionmaking authority, which would reside at least with the KGB leadership.
It also ignores the proper roles of the SCD and FCD in such matters. The SCD was known as “big CI [counterintelligence]” (bolshaya), and FCD Directorate K was known as “little CI” (malen’kiy). If the FCD conducted preliminary investigations abroad and lured suspect officers back to Moscow for apprehension, the apprehension and legal investigation were conducted by the SCD. No counterespionage investigation could avoid the purview of the SCD.
Baer habitually refers to spies or moles as “double agents” when speaking of moles recruited by the KGB who worked as staff officers of the CIA. A “double agent” is one who, ostensibly working as a spy for the CIA, is working for an adversary service.9 Baer excuses this as being consistent with “common parlance,” yet it is contrary to the very language of the business.10
At another point in the book, Baer tries to explain the nature of “eyewash” cables and gets it completely wrong. Clearly he lacked the requisite experience.11
At yet another point, Baer calls electromagnetic emissions that can be picked up at a distance “tempest.”12 Here he is confusing the phenomenon with the security program to research and defeat the spread of such emissions.13 Yet the flaws do not end there, as we shall see.
There are two primary themes that Baer pursues in his book. The first is the notion that a Fourth Man was working for the KGB, who was never caught. The other three men were the CIA’s Edward Lee Howard, Rick Ames, and FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen. The second notion focuses on the identity of this Fourth Man, who has not been publicly identified until Baer’s book.
In the end, all of this will be clear as mud—at the expense of several reputations.
FOURTH MAN THESIS
The point of departure for Baer’s narrative is the two cases of Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich (“Rick”) Ames. Howard was a CIA case officer in the SE Division, being groomed to serve in Moscow and assigned the sensitive task of handling the “billion dollar spy,” Adolf Tolkachev, codenamed GTVANQUISH. However, according to Baer, he failed his polygraph and was fired in May 1983.14 According to Baer, Howard subsequently volunteered for the KGB and, out of spite, gave up Tolkachev in November 1994.15
CIA case officer Rick Ames volunteered for the KGB in April 1985, and was not finally arrested until February 1994. The formal mole hunt for him began in October 1986 with the highly compartmented Counterintelligence Staff Special Task Force, CI/STF, headed by Jeanne Vertefeuille. In 1991, this became the Counterintelligence Center Special Investigations Unit (CIC/SIU).16 Ames is most noted for the “big dump” of documents he provided on 13 June 1985 that compromised the identities of many of the CIA’s most sensitive agents.
The third man, FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen, is mentioned numerous times by Baer. Still, little detail is provided other than that he first volunteered with the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) in 1979, later volunteered with the KGB in October 1985, broke his contact with the KGB in 1991, resumed his connection in 1999, and was arrested in 2001.17
It was precisely the compromises of agents that could not be attributed to either Ames, Howard, or Hanssen that gave rise to the notion of a Fourth Man. However, this is not a new charge. Milt Bearden first surfaced this in his book, published in 2003.18 It was elaborated later in an article by the author David Wise in 2015.19
When Bearden surfaced the Fourth Mole theory in 2003, he cited four cases that did not align with either Howard, Ames, or Hanssen: Gordievsky, Bokhan, Polyshchuk, and the French spy codenamed FAREWELL. In his 2015 article, Wise dropped the FAREWELL case and focused on the first three, but the treatment by Bearden and Wise was exceedingly brief. Baer picked up these three cases before elaborating on more issues and enigmas.
Gordievsky
Among the prominent, compromised cases was that of Oleg Gordievsky, which was the most enigmatic. In Gordievsky’s rendering, he had been a KGB political intelligence officer (Line PR in KGB parlance) in Copenhagen in October 1974, when the British MI6 recruited him.20 He was later posted to London in 1981 and, through a series of events, became the acting resident or station chief in CIA speak on 28 April 1985. On 16 May 1985, he was recalled to Moscow for consultations.21 This recall is the hinge on which the thesis of the Fourth Man hangs, but it is only the start of a mystifying series of events that none of the proponents of the Fourth Man elaborate.22
Meanwhile, CIA case officer Rick Ames had walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, on 16 April 1985, under the pretext of an authorized CIA operational act, and volunteered to the KGB. According to Ames, he only delivered a letter that included the identities of two or three “volunteers” to the CIA’s Moscow Station that Ames believed were KGB dangles.23 A dangle is a double agent deliberately sent by the KGB to entice the CIA to recruit and run him.
Ames again went to the Soviet embassy on 15 May, where he met the Line KR (counterintelligence) chief, Viktor Cherkashin. According to Ames, he was ushered into a particular room where Cherkashin only communicated with him through written messages, fearing the FBI bugged the embassy. As instructed by Cherkashin, Ames met only with “clean” diplomat Sergey Chuvakhin for lunches beginning on 17 May.24 Baer mentions none of this detail.
Instead, Baer credits Ames’ claim that he gave up Gordievsky in his “big dump” of revelations on 13 June 1985. Everyone Baer talked to said that Ames was telling the truth accurately.25 However, in their authoritative telling, Grimes and Vertefeuille (G/V) are far more ambiguous, allowing that Ames, “either … innocently or deliberately,” gave the wrong date.26 And they were ambiguous for some good reasons even they did not acknowledge.
One anomaly in the G/V version is the claim that Ames began a “routine” practice on 17 May 1985, exchanging a grocery bag of classified documents for a bag with press materials, money, and taskings from Chuvakhin.27 G/V never explained what the grocery bag contained on 17 May, but it would seem strange that Ames could provide a whole stack of classified documents and never reveal a source.
Meanwhile, Gordievsky underwent a strange sequence of events, beginning with his arrival at the airport in Moscow and his unaccompanied travel to his home. According to Gordievsky, he was interviewed on 20 May by the chief of the KGB FCD, Viktor Grushko, but this essentially concerned speculation about a British volunteer that had not panned out.28
The next day, Gordievsky could access a diplomatic bag with a box labeled “For Mr. Grushko’s eyes only.” Gordievsky had not expected this box to be there when the bag was closed in London the Friday before.29 Could these have been documents from Ames? Not likely and not a Fourth Man in American intelligence, not from London.
Gordievsky provided extensive documentation on strategic-level Soviet policymaking that was crucial in shaping the foreign policy of the Reagan administration. The British provided this to the CIA, but not the source’s identity. According to Bearden, the chief of the SE Division had assigned Rick Ames to determine who the source might be. By March 1985, “Ames thought he had the answer—Gordievsky.” Ames had determined this analytically, noting the correlation of Gordievsky to a profile Ames had reconstructed from the reporting. Ames then sent a cable to London Station, which confirmed that Gordievsky did, indeed, fit the profile.30
On 24 May, Gordievsky’s KGB headquarters supervisor, Third Department chief Nikolay Gribin, invited him to his dacha. Still, Gordievsky begged off because he wanted to see his mother and sister, implying that he did visit them. According to Gordievsky, Grushko called him to the office on 27 May to talk about a high-level agent penetration of Britain. Gordievsky then went to the FCD headquarters in Yasenevo, where he was treated to sandwiches and brandy. Clearly they were drugged because Gordievsky woke up the next morning half dressed, with no memory of the day before. Two Line KR counterintelligence officers appeared and admitted that Gordievsky had been interrogated but had provided no details. After a mildly accusatory conversation about Gordievsky’s character, he was driven back to his apartment.31
Gordievsky was then interrogated on 29 May by Grushko, Gribin, and the chief of Line KR’s Fifth Department (internal investigations) chief, General Sergey Golubev. According to Gordievsky, this lasted five hours, during which Grushko said, “If only you knew what an unusual source we heard about you from!” After discussions about Gordievsky’s dissident proclivities and the compromised FAREWELL case, Golubev said that the KGB knew about Gordievsky’s recruitment in Copenhagen by a named MI6 officer. He then said, “[W]e’ve got irrefutable evidence of your guilt. We know you were a British agent.”32 Despite all this, Gordievsky was not arrested.
Instead, his wife and children were brought back to Moscow, and he was allowed to go to a KGB sanatorium (vacation complex) outside of Moscow from 15 June until about 9 July.33 So this vacation began two days after Ames made his “big dump,” in which he claimed to have included the identification of Gordievsky. After returning from this vacation, Gordievsky remained at home and connected with the British on the streets in Moscow sometime before he was clandestinely driven out of the Soviet Union on 19 July.34
This was over two months after his recall, and the sequence of events over that two months suggested that the KGB was operating on a highly vague “unsub [unknown subject] lead” that failed not only to identify the spy but to communicate the seriousness of what had been compromised. This was confirmed in its outlines by the KGB defector Vitaliy Yurchenko when he defected to the CIA on 1 August 1985. According to Yurchenko, Gordievsky was recalled in May 1985 “because of some suspicions. He had been interrogated but had not confessed and had not been arrested.”35
Had a Fourth Man, more authoritative than Rick Ames, been reporting to the KGB, we might expect a more rapid and definitive outcome to the KGB investigation. Baer argued that even if Ames gave Gordievsky up earlier (in April or May), there needed to be more lead time for the recall.36 But this argument fails to explain why Ames’“ big dump” on 13 June had not sealed Gordievskiy’s fate, especially since, according to Baer, two sources had identified Gordievsky by then. It also does not explain the box from London, “For Mr. Grushko’s eyes only,” that Gordievsky was not supposed to see.
Finally, it does not explain why FCD Chief Grushko would admit to him that an “unusual source” led to Gordievsky and Line KR officer Golubev would admit that the KGB knew about Gordievsky’s recruitment by a named MI6 officer in Copenhagen back in the 1970s. At the time, no one in the CIA knew this.
Bokhan
GRU Colonel Sergey Bokhan was the deputy resident in Athens when he received a suspicious message on 21 May 1985 that recommended he return home immediately because his son was having problems at school. Bokhan saw this as a ruse because he had learned that his son had no problem just a few days before.37 Thus, according to Baer, “as with Gordievsky, Ames was certain he hadn’t given up Bokhan’s name until the 13 June meeting. Howard knew nothing about Bokhan.”38
In his book, Bearden claims that Edward Lee Howard was preparing for an assignment in Moscow when he was fired in 1983 and knew only about operations that required internal handling in Moscow. Bokhan was being handled with rigid compartmentalization by Athens, so Howard was eliminated as the source of compromise.39 The only problem with this is that the defector Yurchenko provided an “unsub lead” that indicated that Howard was also aware of a CIA asset in Budapest.40
Howard’s accesses were formally confined to the Soviet (internal) branch of the SE Division. So clearly, the “hall file” or rumor mill had escaped the confines of bigot lists that enumerate only those with a “need to know” a compartment or case. Baer admitted as much when he wrote, “In theory, bigot lists are a good idea, but in practice, they’re not foolproof. People gossip, documents are misdirected, and mistakes are made. One day, the Athens chief sat down at his station and informed them about Bokhan. Although they weren’t on the Langley bigot list, Lofgren and Redmond found out about Bokhan thanks to this slip-up.”41 Uncharacteristically, Baer does not provide a date when this happened.
In their authoritative account, G/V noted that “Howard’s treason … more or less explained the possibility that Bokhan was under suspicion when he defected. He had been working for the CIA for many years, since 1975. Therefore Howard could have learned about his case at some point.”42 The timing of Bokhan’s alerting message could suggest a Fourth Man and others besides Howard had more direct, identifying information. But this is to speak in terms of probabilities.
Polyshchuk
Although Baer notes the case of Leonid Polyshchuk, he mistakenly claims that he had been recruited in Lagos, Nigeria, before he was lured back to Moscow in May 1985. From then on, Baer ignores any of the details of the case. According to Baer, Howard knew nothing about him, and Ames claimed he first gave up his name during the “big dump” of 13 June 1985.43
Polyshchuk had been recruited in 1974 while serving as an FCD Line PR officer in Nepal.44 He departed Moscow in 1975 and was not heard from until he was posted to Lagos in February 1985, this time as a Line KR officer.45 According to Bearden, Polyshchuk received a letter from his parents in April 1985 that said he had extraordinary luck since they had found an apartment for sale near their home in Moscow, and he could buy it for 20,000 rubles. Polyshchuk reported to the CIA that he had already requested leave to return home to close the deal. This home leave was out of the cycle, but he assured the CIA that this was routine. The only problem was that he did not have 20,000 rubles, and the CIA argued that he should not take such a sum from the CIA across the Soviet border. Instead, the CIA identified a drop site on 10 May 1985 for laying down the funds.46
In late May, according to G/V, headquarters officers had a serious discussion about the wisdom of this drop. Ironically, Rick Ames emerged out of his customary lethargy to argue strenuously that the fall was too dangerous and should not be made. He had been acting as an advisor since he was chief of the Soviet Branch of SE’s CI Group. He was overruled, and the drop was made.47
Polyshchuk and his family returned to Moscow in July 1985 on leave, and recontact with the CIA was not scheduled in Lagos until late September, but he missed his first two scheduled meetings.48 On 2 August 1985, Polyshchuk cleared the dead drop. Ames admitted he gave up Polyshchuk in the “big dump.”49 Strangely, although they published their book nine years after Bearden’s book, G/V make no mention of the apartment or the home leave scheduling issue. They indicate that the CIA owed him $20,000, while Bearden claimed it was 20,000 rubles ($30,000).50
Be that as it may, the Fourth Man theory hinges on interpreting the message from Polyshchuk’s family. If the apartment were a KGB-contrived ruse, it would point to a Fourth Man. However, the public literature needs to provide an exact date in April when this message was sent. We also have no date for the actual dead drop. Ames would have been able to report the dead drop location seven days after SE Division identified a drop site. Ames identified Polyshchuk over seven weeks before servicing the drop site. Once again, the Fourth Man theory hinges on probabilities.
IDENTIFYING THE FOURTH MAN
Baer identifies the Fourth Man as Paul Redmond, who was chief of the Soviet (internal ops) branch of the SE Division from September 1984 until he became chief of SE/CI in the fall of 1985. He then transferred to become the deputy chief of CIC in April 1991.51
On the other hand, Bearden writes that Redmond retired in 1999 and implies that Redmond became chief of SE/CI after September 1985.52 Baer does not provide any of these critical dates and claims that Redmond retired in 1997.53 The importance of these details will become apparent as we proceed.
In the wake of the arrest of Ames, a new SIU was created in May 1984. According to Baer, the deputy director of operations (DDO), Ted Price, had tasked Redmond to make this but “didn’t tell Redmond he’d concluded there was another Russian double agent burrowed somewhere in the CIA.”54 This is a dubious claim because it fails to explain how Price justified the task to Redmond.
In any case, it was Redmond who reached down and selected Laine Bannerman to be the chief of the new unit doing “the post-Ames investigation.” Baer claimed that Bannerman had been forced out of the CIC by its chief, John Hall. Hall had provided no reasoning for this dismissal and did not help her find a new position.55 Now Hall was Redmond’s immediate boss, but, according to Baer, Redmond told Bannerman he would interfere with Hall over this assignment, which would be in the CIC under Redmond.56
So who was Laine Bannerman? She had been the chief of a particular branch of CIC and my predecessor in that position. For several years before this, I had had a close professional relationship with her because she had been my boss. From her, I learned the foundations of my professional understanding of SE operations, counterintelligence, and the ethics of running clandestine sources. If we had an occasional disagreement, it was always in the context of her honesty and professionalism. That said, I never knew the back story to Laine’s transfer other than that it happened.
It is from this newly oriented SIU that Baer derives his conclusions about Redmond. According to Baer, Bannerman briefed the decisions of the SIU’s work in November 1984 and provided the profile of the mole that fit Redmond even as the SIU concluded that the mole was no longer active.57
Again, while I was aware of this briefing, I did not know its contents or the discussions that transpired there. According to Baer, the analysis was based on a matrix-type analysis that arrayed compromised cases, CIA officer accesses, and other clues against candidate moles in the CIA. The evidence in this matrix analysis included the Gordievsky, Bokhan, and Polyshchuk cases, which I have discussed above.58 But symptomatic of the problematic quality of some of the evidence was the case of Nikolay Chernov.
The Chernov Case
According to Baer, Chernov was a GRU technician posted to the United States who had volunteered to the FBI in the 1960s; contact was broken off in 1972. Chernov, long into retirement, was then arrested in the early 1990s. Somehow, the Russians had obtained a copy of a memo on this case. How the CIA learned this, Baer does not say, but he claimed that “the only copy” of this memo had found its way to the Soviet branch of the SE Division. So the SIU placed this clue on its matrix, but, as Baer noted, the SIU knew nothing about Robert Hanssen at the time.59 There would have been memos on this case in FBI files, and Hanssen was in an ideal position to compromise this because he served in the cockpit of FBI Soviet operations at headquarters from August 1983 to September 1985.60
The Vasilyev Case
Another case in the SIU matrix was that of Vladimir Vasilyev, a GRU colonel posted to Budapest who had previously volunteered at the CIA in 1982 before returning to Moscow in 1984. Baer writes that the defector Yurchenko reported that Howard had provided an “unsub lead” to an “angry KGB colonel” based in Budapest.61 This lead would provoke a KGB counterintelligence investigation of colonels based in Budapest and mislead them about where he worked since Vasilyev worked in the GRU military intelligence organization, not the KGB. Baer reports that Vasilyev returned to Moscow “on routine reassignment” in the fall of 1985, and made contact with the CIA via a dead drop in Moscow on 11 December 1985.62
So far, so good, but Baer then segues into very provocative statements. He claims that the SIU placed this case in its matrix because SE East European Operations had held Vailyev’s operational file, not the Soviet branch where Howard sat. Furthermore, Ames did not have access to cases run in Eastern Europe.63 But also, according to Baer, it was not until Vasilyev was ready to transfer back to Moscow in mid-1985 that his file was moved to the USSR Branch in preparation for running him there.64 Baer provides no precision on the date this was transferred, but it could have predated the big dump in June.
Far more compromising of Baer’s account is the contradictory version provided by G/V. They report that the Vasilyev case was handled by SE/CI, where Ames worked. Furthermore, while he was arrested in early June 1986, the “most probable date” for his compromise was the “big dump” in June 1985.65 Baer argued that the dead drop in Moscow on 11 December 1985 could have been under KGB control and designed to mislead the CIA. But G/V reported that the package contained no CI material and nothing that would mislead our CI investigations. It did have valuable intelligence on a wide range of other topics.66 Assigning this compromise to a Fourth Man is rather doubtful.
Papushin Lead
Another clue in the SIU matrix, according to Baer, was an unsub lead from defector Sergey Papushin. According to Baer, Papushin resigned from the KGB when he landed in New York in 1989 and volunteered to defect under convoluted circumstances. Papushin had served in the British branch of the SCD, responsible for monitoring the British embassy and MI6 undercover officers in particular.67
Papushin was also a notorious alcoholic. He was being debriefed when, in August 1990, “out of the blue,” he made “the sensational claim that when the KGB still employed him, he’d heard a rumor the Second Chief Directorate had recruited a CIA officer in Moscow, presumably a case officer.” Most CIA officers thought he was either suffering from delirium tremens or lying to make himself relevant “again” to the CIA and FBI.68
According to Baer, one aspect that caught the SIU’s eye was that the KGB, totally out of character, had “desperately” tried to get him to return home—going so far as to arrange a meeting in the United States with his father. To the SIU, this was suspicious because of his low rank.69 However, it would be natural for the KGB to want to arrest and interrogate Papushin to determine the damage he had done, mainly because he could (and did) identify SCD American branch officer Aleksandr Zhomov.
As Baer admitted, Zhomov had “volunteered” to the CIA in Moscow in 1988 and was codenamed GTPROLOGUE.70 “Eventually,” the CIA determined that he had been dangled by the KGB.71 What Baer does not report and Bearden does is that the Zhomov case ended abruptly in July 1990 when Bearden and Redmond called his bluff about his desire for exfiltration.72 Baer does not tell us when the KGB sought to persuade Papushin to redefect, but it was almost certainly when the CIA was in the middle of Zhomov’s dangle operation. Thus, the KGB had a more pressing reason to debrief Papushin.
A second thing that caught the SIU’s attention was that “Papushin had said he assumed the CIA officer had been posted to Moscow; he didn’t say he knew it for a fact.” He didn’t know if the officer was dispatched to Moscow, passing through, or posted outside the Soviet Union. Hedging his reporting lent credibility to his claim.73
However, Baer appears to have grossly misrepresented what Papushin had said. According to Bearden, Papushin was frustrated that the CIA and FBI ignored him. “So he did something he knew was guaranteed to grab attention again. He gave one of his handlers an urgent message to be taken immediately to the top levels of the CIA. There is a mole in the agency, Papushin declared.”
But, contrary to Baer’s account, Papushin also “said that the KGB had a penetration of the CIA in Moscow. He had friends in the American Department of the Second Chief Directorate, and he’d overheard enough from his colleagues to conclude that they had an agent in the CIA station.”74 This suggests that what Papushin initially said was not nearly as ambiguous as Baer would have us believe. And, in any case, it would not point to Baer’s preferred target for the Fourth Man.
1982–1984 FOCUS
Another series of clues, apparently in the matrix, were the cases of Boris Yuzhin, Tolkachev, and a French asset known to the CIA as FAREWELL.75 Baer claimed that “another thing becoming increasingly clear to SIU was the emergence of 1982–84 as a pivotal time frame, very likely the one in which the Fourth Man may have started to spy for the KGB.”76
According to Baer, Boris Yuzhin had been a KGB officer posted to San Francisco who was spying for the FBI and CIA when he returned to Moscow in 1982. By 1 August 1985, the defector Yurchenko was able to report that Yuzhin had been caught and tried, but exactly when he was caught, Baer does not say. Yurchenko claimed that he had been caught because the CIA-issued camera, disguised as a lighter, had been discovered in the Soviet consular offices in San Francisco. Again, when this discovery was made, Baer does not say. Then the KGB, apparently through investigation, was able to link Yuzhin to this lighter. According to Baer, the SIU put this in the “anomalies column.”77 On whether this meant it was in the matrix or not, Baer is notably silent.
A second case concerned the French spy known to the CIA as FAREWELL. According to Baer, while the French shared his information with the CIA, it never revealed his actual name. At the same time, the CIA correctly guessed his name. According to the defector Yurchenko, FAREWELL murdered a man, and while in prison, he confessed to a fellow prisoner that he was a French spy. He had supposedly hoped the prisoner would go to the French embassy and motivate the French to release him. Instead, the prisoner revealed this to the KGB. FAREWELL was executed in 1983.78
Once again, there are some disparities in the details. According to Bearden, FAREWELL was arrested for murder in 1982 and uncovered in prison in 1984. In either case, this story lacked any reasonable logic concerning the prisoner’s motivation because he would run a high risk of being caught collaborating with a spy for no apparent reason. And this is probably why, despite Yurchenko’s report, Bearden decided, “The conclusion is almost inescapable that there was a fourth man.”79
Both of these cases depended on the testimony of Yurchenko. We never learn how Yurchenko knew this, perhaps because Baer never bothered to ask. But information over many years from many defectors has documented the KGB’s habit of lying to its officers, providing periodic in-service training sessions in which the familiar story about the role of surveillance detecting espionage was purveyed. With the arrest of Ames, many of these stories could be convincingly documented as disinformation, probably in the anticipation that a KGB officer in the audience would leak this to the West. In the case of FAREWELL, the story was perhaps more elaborate.
In the third case, Adolf Tolkachev, Baer admitted that, in April 1983, Tolkachev reported to the CIA that the SCD was investigating a leak of classified information in his institute. While the SCD had no name, they were confident there was a leak. Baer claimed he spoke with a “former Russian intelligence officer” who claimed to have been exposed to a CI case study of the Tolkachev affair while in training. He claimed it was a long-running investigation involving discreet 24/7 surveillance, apartment bugging, and video monitoring at work. The KGB’s reported goal was to determine if he had other accomplices.80
However, Baer’s source again provides no accurate dates on this. What had inspired this was yet another “unsub lead” to the KGB. Equally clear is that neither Howard nor Ames could have provided this unsub lead.
The first thing to observe about all three cases is that they predate Redmond’s assignment to the USSR (internal) branch of the SE Division because this began in September 1984. Bearden noted that Redmond had served in Kuala Lumpur, Athens, Cyprus, and Zagreb until he and his wife decided to remain at CIA headquarters for the sake of two children.81 So, if there was a Fourth Man in these cases, it was not Redmond.
UNSUBS
The second thing to observe is that each case’s extended path of KGB investigation suggested it was operating on an unsub lead at best. An excellent example of this was provided by Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB officer who defected in Helsinki in December 1961. This was the beginning of a notorious controversy for years, inside and outside the CIA. However, for our purposes, it provided a classic example of an unsub lead and the dangers they represent.
Golitsyn reported that the KGB had targeted the Norwegian embassy in Moscow and determined that a woman staffer was determined to be lonely. It then dispatched a handsome officer to sit next to her at an opera and engage in a “honey trap,” or sexual seduction, that either leads to recruitment or is recorded for blackmail purposes, if necessary. Making the mistake of moving from the lead itself to the source’s opinions, the CIA reported that Golitsyn had identified one Foreign Ministry female as the spy. Still, years later, Norwegian security detected that it was a second female, but not before the first one had been arrested and sat in jail for about three months. It turned out that the first female had served in the Norwegian embassy in Moscow, but the second female was her predecessor in that position. 82
ANOTHER THEORY
The cases of Tolkachev, FAREWELL, and Gordievsky all have something in common, but to strengthen the case for an alternative theory, we must also consider the possibility of Ryszard Kuklinski. Kuklinski was a Polish military officer recruited by the CIA in 1973 and served in the Polish High Command, with access to highly secret documents about the long-run plans for Warsaw Pact forces.
His inside reporting supplemented this highly lucrative intelligence during the Polish labor crisis of 1981, which pitted the dissident labor movement, Solidarity, against the Polish communist regime of General Jaruzelski.83 In September 1981, Kuklinski was among a group officers who were informed by the chief of the Polish General Staff that martial law was imminent in the face of rising opposition. He reported this to the CIA. A week later, he learned that the Polish Interior Ministry was investigating a “leak” because Solidarity’s dissident movement had discovered the details of the martial law plan.84
Again, in a dramatic moment on 2 November 1981, Kuklinski was summoned to a meeting in the office of one of his bosses. Six men sat at a T-shaped table and learned that there was a “mole” among them—someone had been leaking information to the Americans. Somehow managing to keep his composure, Kuklinski joined the chorus of voices in the room denouncing such an act of “treason.”85
Now, what connects all four of these cases? First, the KGB (or Polish) investigations of all four smell of an unsub lead inspiring them. Second, they also had one other thing in common.
Writers on this subject up to now have focused exclusively on bigot lists and access within the DO. But it is also true that the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), responsible for finished analysis supporting policymaking, had compartments with bigot lists.
In my earlier career as an analyst, I clearly remember being nominated by my office chief for access to the “KUDO,” cabinet that contained the reporting from FAREWELL. The cabinet had a safe in a manager’s office, including the hard copy reporting. Each analyst was named in a bigot list and signed a ledger for each document he read. Analysts were generally required to read the document in the manager’s spaces, and no analyst had any access to the real identity of the source. Similar cabinets were established for Kuklinki’s material and Tolkachev’s material, and we can deduce from this that Gordievsky’s reporting rated a matching cabinet.
Now a DI analyst or manager with access to all these cabinets was in a position to provide a series of unsub leads based solely on the subject matter compromised in each cabinet. So here we have a Fourth Man theory that evades the focus on the DO bigot lists. If this is provocative to some readers, remember it is merely a theory inspired by the existence of intelligence reports in a series of cabinets. In any case, three of these cases predated Redmond’s arrival on the job in Langley in 1984.
THE SIU MATRIX RESUMED
Among the other clues on Bannerman’s matrix were compromised technical operations. However, Baer only alludes to two technical operations targeting Soviet embassies in South America that were supervised by the Soviet branch in the 1984 to 1985 timeframe.86 But Baer provides no specific dates for this. Did the compromises come before September 1984 or after May 1985? We do not know.
Baer also lists two cases concerning documents, but his discussion is confusing and contradictory. At one point, he clearly distinguishes between “various classified documents” mentioned by Yurchenko and “a sensitive counterintelligence document,” both of which made their way to Moscow.87 So here we have the first document distinguished from the second document but with no associated date.
Concerning the first documents, Baer also claimed that around the time that Howard made contact with the KGB, “[A]gents reported that certain documents or summaries of them found their way to Moscow.”88 This raises several obvious questions. Just who were these “agents,” plural? And if they reported when Howard made contact with the KGB (November 1984, according to Baer), just when had the documents been received in Moscow?
According to Baer, much later, the defector Yurchenko “thought that Howard might have provided them.”89 Was Yurchenko ever questioned as to the justification for his thinking? Baer does not say, but, according to him, the SIU believed that Howard never had access to the documents according to the bigot lists.90 Without any description from Baer of the first documents, the reader cannot judge just how the SIU determined this.
Concerning the second CI document, Baer claimed that this “was compromised long after Howard defected.”91 Now, Howard defected from the United States on 21 September 1985.92 According to Baer, Ames never had access to it, although it is hard to see how the chief of the Soviet SE/CI did not have access to a CI document in the USSR branch of the SE Division. But Baer does not tell us when it was compromised and does not describe this document, making it difficult for the reader to evaluate.
THE SOURCE AND HIS UNSUB LEADS
A final, essential ingredient in all this was information provided by a CIA clandestine source. I will not use his name out of a professional obligation born of a personal nature, so let’s call him Mel. Baer discusses this case, but the essential points boil down to the unsub leads he offered. Mel first encountered a CIA case officer in East Africa in 1988, and “after a series of case officers,” Baer claims, “there came the point when he started to drop hints about his service’s possessing two double agents in American intelligence.” This was more than a “hint” because he said that one was in the CIA and one was in the FBI, and both were active. He had gotten a glimpse of the file on one of them when it was lying on a colleague’s desk. Which one was not said, but he provided the KGB codenames for each one.93 When this was disclosed, Baer did not say.
In Baer’s telling, no more clues were provided for years. Then, in early 1993, the CIA invited their Russian intelligence liaison counterparts to a conference in the United States. The CIA entertained the “extravagant hope” that the delegation would include Mel based on the unforeseen appearance of Mel as a note-taker during a liaison meeting earlier in Moscow. To its surprise, it did. Mel was fortuitously included. CIA case officer Dick Corbin was one of those whom had met Mel in East Africa. He was fluent in Russian and read in on the whole mole hunt.94 So he was included on the CIA side even though his official job did not warrant it.
So far, so good. But despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence officers on trips abroad had kept a close eye on one another, sometimes at night, even posting a security officer in the corridor of the hotel where they were staying. So, what then happened was rather exceptional. While the CIA saw a lot of Mel at the conference and social events, getting him alone was problematic, confined to brief interchanges in hallways and stairwells. However, the CIA moved the venue to a resort outing at Greenbrier in West Virginia. During this time, Corbin managed to arrange time alone with Mel for a fishing trip on one early, cold, rainy morning. At this point, Mel revealed that KGB colleague Yuriy Karetkin had traveled to Caracas to meet the mole in the CIA.95
However, Baer subsequently contradicts his own story.96 According to this version, shortly after Billy Lofgren returned from overseas to become John MacGaffin’s deputy in CE Division, MacGaffin told him something different. At a previously held liaison conference with the Russians, a Russian officer had walked up to a CIA officer during a break and handed him a note that read, “It’s Ames.”97 Baer provided no reason to suspect a second KGB officer had passed the note, and the work by the FBI to match travel dates suggests that Mel never provided the actual name of Ames.
Ignoring what he wrote about this note, Baer continued his first story by claiming that this particular unsub lead was enough for the FBI to match the dates of Karetkin’s travel with those of Ames.98 This validated Mel as a source and justified a search warrant for a secret entry and examination of Ames’ home. This, in turn, surfaced the evidence that led to Ames’ arrest on 21 February 1994.99
So all of this was history. What did this have to do with the reconstituted SIU’s pursuit post-Ames? When he initially wrote about a second CIA mole, Baer reported that Mel made an even more sensational claim: there was a mole in the CIA, one more senior and better placed than Ames. However, no one that Baer talked to could “remember exactly” when this was said. Baer could not even say approximately when this was said.100
The vagueness of this story contradicts the story that Baer subsequently tells. Fifty-two pages later, we get more clarity. In April 1994, Mel was in South America on a month-long assignment and communicated with the local CIA station. Responding to this, case officer Dick Corbin flew down and collected a stunning new unsub lead from him. There was another Russian mole in the CIA besides Ames and Howard.
First, the mole had attended DO division chief staff meetings. Second, “at one point,” he had access to the files cataloging meeting sites in Moscow where officers could meet agents. The files were kept in a four-drawer safe in CE Russia House, but summaries were captured on handwritten 3 x 5 cards. Baer implies he had multiple sources for this story; some claimed the mole even passed “at least some copies of cards” to the KGB and that Mel had even seen one on his boss’ desk.101
The significance of this story is matched only by the details not reported. In CIA intelligence reporting, there is a distinction between the date the agent reported information and the “date of information” (DOI) itself. In this case, Baer provides no clue as to the DOI. Was this true in 1985, 1990, or 1994? In Baer’s telling, Mel only complicated the issue. “Either in South America or later debriefings, Mel was challenged that in East Africa, he’d said there were only two double agents in American intelligence, one in the FBI and the other in the CIA. Mel bristled, saying that he’d said there were three, two in the CIA and one in the FBI.” Now, “all along” takes us back to the two-person lead in the late 1980s.102
Eight pages later, Baer reveals that he is not connecting the dots, for he reports that, after the first meeting in East Africa, subsequent case officers would meet and fly back to Langley with a tape recording of the session. Each was transcribed in a single hard copy and placed in his file.103 Thus all those witting of his case, including those who talked to Baer, would know the truth because a tape recording precluded a careless handling officer from being an intermediary to that truth.
Apart from this, we also have no backstory for Mel’s report, let alone a subsource. The lack of subsourcing was chronic throughout Mel’s reporting.104 While this deficiency and the apparent contradiction in Mel’s claims are severe shortfalls, they may be somewhat understandable. Baer reports that CIA officers found it difficult to work with him, but it should be obvious why.105 Back in the late 1980s, Mel believed he knew there was a mole in the CIA. Thus, telling the CIA anything was doubly risky. He was also aware of the mole when he provided the better lead in early 1993. By April 1994, he claimed that he knew two moles were in the CIA! It is a bit stunning that he could have collaborated with the CIA.
BAER’S CONTRIBUTION
After providing these discussions of the Bannerman briefing and the matrix that supported it, Baer provides some spice to the brew on his own. Most of his “evidence” concerns Redmond’s conduct as a manager throughout the successive mole hunts. While this is no more dispositive of his role as a mole than Ames’ alcohol consumption was of his treason, it is worth an examination, if only to measure the reliability of Baer as a reporter.
Baer noted that the Ames hunt was part of what troubled the reconstituted SIU, and in particular,
the dumfounding oversights committed by the Ames investigators, ones Redmond ignored. Most importantly, he should have thrown a red flag on Gordievsky and the other two CIA spies compromised in May 1985. How could the leader of the instigation, the SIU wondered, have missed a bright shining clue like this?106
Baer has no counterintelligence experience, for the obvious reply is that the Ames investigation itself could not know any of this until after Ames was arrested and interrogated. On the contrary, within about three months, Redmond had established a new SIU and had selected Laine Bannerman to lead it!
It would do us well to track back to the beginning of Redmond’s role in all this. According to Bearden, the ambush of Tolkachev’s case officer, Paul Stombaugh, was reported to Langley on 14 June 1985. Earlier in the spring, a technical operation in Moscow, GTTAW, had been compromised. On 21 May, Bokhan received the alarming message to return home. The ambush of Stombaugh provoked Redmond to consider these: “One, two, three. Coincidence? Not fucking likely, he thought.”107
But this was only the first time Redmond led with this line of thought. According to Bearden, it was September 1985 when Rod Carlson, chief of SE/CI, met with Chief of SE Division Bert Gerber, his deputy, Bearden, and the chief of the Soviet (internal) branch, Redmond. Carlson had just met with joint FBI/CIA asset Valeriy Martynov, codenamed PIMENTA. Martynov reported that the KGB residency chief (resident) had conveyed the latest news from his visit to Moscow Center to his line chiefs and revealed that an FCD officer had been arrested, unloading a dead drop in early August. Everyone at the SE Division meeting recognized this as GTWEIGH, Polyshchuk.108
Little did they know that Martynov had been compromised to the KGB in the “big dump” on 13 June, suggesting that he may have deliberately been exposed to the GTWEIGH story, but why? The next element of his story explained. PIMENTA also reported that a CIA officer had been spotted by KGB surveillance loading the dead drop, probably in late July. The Moscow case officer had told Langley then that he had seen “casuals” or civilian pedestrian traffic in the area about 200 yards from the drop site. “It was the casuals,” Gerber observed. Redmond said nothing until Bearden questioned him after the meeting. When asked, Redmond laid out three possibilities: either true casuals reported the drop or KGB surveillance detected it, or, more alarmingly, “we’ve got a bigger problem.”109
The bigger problem was the unpersuasive coincidence of failures. Redmond cited the inability of GTTAW, the recall of Bokhan in May, the ambush of Tolkachev’s case officer on 13 June, the memory of CIA asset GRU Colonel Gennadiy Smetanin from Lisbon, and now the compromise of GTWEIGH.110 Baer has reported none of this.
It is well to pause here and ponder the issue of coincidence. Redmond indeed appears to be the first one to defy coincidence and suggest there was a single internal source of a leak to the KGB. But, at that moment, he could not see that he was also looking at a double coincidence. The FBI did not wake up to the defection of Howard until around 22 September 1985, and by the time Redmond drew his conclusion, it was probably too early for a damage assessment of Howard’s case.111 For now, a single source theory was enough to motivate an investigation, but that did not happen immediately.
Instead, Gerber briefed Director of Central Intelligence William Casey in December 1985 on all the damage that had been detected to date. When Casey asked what was being done about this, the DDO, Clair George, told him that it could be either a technical or a human penetration. In response to Casey’s next question, George said that the DO was “going to run some tests to see if people on the bigot list were the problem.”112 Most of this goes unreported by Baer.113
Unreported again by Baer, Casey also charged John Stein to examine the whole question. According to G/V, Stein was a former SE Division chief, a former DDO, and the CIA’s inspector general, in limbo waiting to become the chief of station (COS), Seoul. In early 1986, Stein’s report concluded that “there was no overarching connection between the compromised cases” known at the time. “Each one contained the seeds of its destruction.” Stein himself believed the most likely explanation was a compromise of communications.114 Stein’s reasoning was the opposite of Redmond’s but would have helped fuel a distraction for another six months.
But then again, maybe not the opposite. Missing from the story by G/V are some elements provided by Bearden, who claimed that Stein had coopted Redmond in January 1986 to help him locate all the files of all the compromised cases. In the report that he briefed to Casey in March, Stein believed the failures could be a breach of communications, but he also acknowledged the possibility of a mole inside the CIA. He recommended that an investigation begin with Moscow Station because it would be a more manageable target. After this, the investigation could turn to Langley. Stein learned later that Casey never launched “a major mole hunt” and never told anyone else about the Stein briefing.115
Meanwhile, Redmond suggested the first test that focused on communications. In December 1985, a bogus cable was arranged to be sent from Nairobi Station, meaning the local GRU resident in Nairobi had volunteered for the CIA. The CIA then waited to see if this officer was recalled to Moscow, but nothing happened.116 This suggested that the communication system had not been compromised.
According to Baer, Redmond’s next move (along with Gerber) was creating a “back room” in January 1986, with Sandy Grimes and Diana Worthen in charge. By this time, Redmond had been moved to replace Carlson as chief of the SE/CI Group. The new unit was euphemistically called “Special Projects” but was instructed to “do anything you need to keep our guys alive.”117 This reflected the focus of the SE Division: the protection of assets.
It was in October 1986 that the chief of the CI Staff, Gus Hathaway, called in Jeanne Vertefeuille to set up a mole hunt, known originally as CI/STF.118 The CI Staff (later in April 1988 reorganized as CIC) was responsible for counterespionage investigations and other agency-wide counterintelligence matters. SE Division, including its CI component, was responsible for the security of its tradecraft and operations and the offensive management of agent operations. Thus, Redmond was not accountable for the mole hunt, as such, until much later.
Meanwhile, Redmond was preoccupied with various operational and security crises facing the SE Division. Earlier, a letter-writing KGB dangle had consumed about six months of Redmond’s time in 1986, running down two blind alleys propelled by disinformation. The first of the blind alleys was information from a KGB volunteer who provided kompromat or compromising information on the case officer who had handled another Ames victim, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Gennadiy Varenni. In the second blind alley, the volunteer reenforced John Stein’s theory of vulnerable CIA communications.119
A second crisis impacting SE Division was the threat posed by the confession of Marine Guard Clayton Lonetree in December 1986. But the import of his admission to collaborating with the KGB did not strike a cord until his colleague confessed in March 1987 that they had perhaps allowed the KGB to enter the U.S. embassy in Moscow when they had served as guards. This galvanized Redmond and Gerber to create a Moscow Task Force to review over 60,000 pages of material sent to Moscow station. This sidetracked Sandy Grimes and others for over a year.120 Of this, Baer has nothing to say.
Redmond’s next big move came after he became the deputy chief of CIC in April 1991. According to Bearden, Redmond was immediately “shocked to learn that the investigation of the 1985 losses had been all but abandoned.” He determined to change this.121
He took Vertefeuille to the FBI and invited them to join a rejuvenated mole hunt. He then called Grimes on the eve of her intended retirement and asked her to participate.122 Why would Redmond not go along with the prevailing lethargy if guilty? Baer says nothing about all this but manages to levy a criticism of the process once it restarted. One flaw was Redmond’s approach to the Ames hunt, especially the way he relied on intuition rather than evidence. A second flaw was the practice where “he, Jeanne Vertefeuille, CIC Chief Jim Olson and the others voted on their favorite suspect, basically turning the investigation into an unpopularity contest.”123
G/V provides a contrary insider view of all this. To begin with, the mole hunt started with a suspect list of 198 names. A little file checking reduced this to 160. To make this more manageable, Jeanne and Sandy removed some more names they “subjectively believed” were unlikely to commit treason. It was not Redmond; it was them. And we should remember that there was no direct evidence identifying an espionage subject at this point. Second, the voters included six others, including two FBI agents. In medicine, this is known as triage, and the interesting thing is that Ames emerged at the top of the list.124 Because he was unpopular?
BEARDEN’S DOCTRINE
Soon after Redmond assumed his position in CIC, another controversy erupted, with potentially devastating consequences. The origins went back to 1989, when Richard Kerr, then the deputy director of central intelligence, criticized what he viewed as the wrong direction of the CIA. “You just go after KGB guys,” he said. Bearden made clear that he sympathized. In early 1991, Redmond bitterly criticized him when Bearden refused to accept a low-level KGB officer into the CIA’s defector program.125 We do not know who this was, but, interestingly, this was precisely when Vasiliy Mitrokhin, a retired KGB major, attempted to defect to the CIA. After Mitrokhin eventually succeeded in volunteering for the British MI6, we learned that he had 25,000 pages of notes on KGB archives going back to the 1930s.126
Bearden had decided that Redmond was blinded by the minutiae of espionage and had no interest in the big picture. At one point, Bearden said, “Jesus Redmond, you’re becoming precisely like the people I came here to fight,” referring to the legacy of CI Staff chief James Jesus Angleton. “You are becoming like our enemy.” For that reason, Bearden expelled him from SE Division, landing him in CIC.127
Only a shallow, headline-grabbing refugee from Africa Division could be so shallow. Let’s ignore the minutiae of an espionage investigation or perhaps of tradecraft itself. Really? Alternatively, Baer suggested Bearden was “only riding a wave of blind optimism washing over all of Washington in the years after the Soviet collapse.”128 In any case, here was the perfect opportunity for a high-level mole to tack to the career-enhancing bureaucratic winds and leave a mole hunt to wither from this hostility, but according to Baer, it did not happen.
Meanwhile, Bearden broadcast the new policy of dialing back on the KGB in a cable that was, ironically, composed by Rick Ames.129 One necessary consequence of this doctrine was the two-time rejection of Mitrokhin as a volunteer to the CIA. Fortunately, the British could see the gold mine in his archive of KGB records.130 It is thus strange that Baer could charge that Redmond had refused to incorporate the Mitrokhin Archive into “counterintelligence databases.”131 The organization that represented those databases—as discussed below—had the archive all along where it could be mined, but the British had the primary responsibility for processing this material.
BEARDEN’S THREAT
This was the prelude to Bearden’s next move. According to Baer, Bearden announced in “a staff meeting” that it was time to destroy “the counterintelligence database. Bannerman thought this sheer folly. No one else in the room spoke up. Redmond did not say a word, even though he knew as well as Bannerman how robust the database was and had a history of standing up to Bearden.132 Bannerman went to Jim Olson, who agreed to “house the Soviet/Russia counterintelligence database.”133
At the time, I worked under Laine and am well aware that the “Soviet/Russia counterintelligence database” does not refer to some computer program but to an organization. This branch was devoted to providing headquarters support to many CI-oriented restricted handling cases. It also included an extensive library of CI information that could guide investigations and ongoing SE Division operations.
At the time, I was firmly led to believe that Laine had gone to Redmond as deputy chief of CIC and told him that Bearden meant to disband the entire branch and its assets.134 I understood that the unit was moved under CIC because of Redmond. From then on, it was operationally under CE Division but administratively under CIC. I suspect that Bearden’s departure as chief of CE Division at the end of 1991 helped to ensure the durability of this arrangement, but more germane is that, again, this was an opportunity for a high-level mole to tack to the career-enhancing bureaucratic winds and leave a mole hunt to wither from this hostility.
While this says something exculpatory about Redmond, it also says something about Bearden as one of our main witnesses. By 1990–1991, their relationship had seriously soured. So Bearden was not on good terms with Redmond when he wrote favorable and unfavorable observations.
FBI RAID
In the wake of Ames, FBI Special Agent Ed Curran was appointed head of the CIA’s Counterespionage Group (CEG) within CIC. CEG was responsible for internal CI matters and any mole hunts in particular.135 According to Baer, when Bannerman gave her briefing in November 1984, attending were Maryann Hough, Diana Worthen, Lofgren, Redmond, Ruth Olson from the CIA’s Office of Security—and Ed Curran.136
During the briefing, Bannerman noticed that Curran’s face was expressionless. “It had always been a long shot, but she’d hoped that Curran would come around to see the logic of the matrix or, at least at this point, ask some questions demonstrating some interest. But he never said a word. Her hope that the FBI would pick up the ball quickly vanished.”137 Yet, a month later, probably on the weekend of 22–23 December 1984, the FBI raided the SIU spaces and seized all of its papers.138 So what had happened in the meantime?
Baer implies that Redmond reacted sometime between Bannerman’s briefing and the FBI raid to conduct a “scorched-earth counteroffensive” of reprisals. FBI analyst Jim Milburn had been assigned to the Ames mole hunt, probably back in 1991, and Baer implies that he remained in the SIU’s Fourth Man mole hunt after that. Sometime after Bannerman’s briefing, Milburn was “yanked out from underneath Bannerman’s authority.”139 By whom and under whose subsequent authority Baer did not say, even though Baer’s text strongly suggests that Milburn was one of his sources and probably would have known.
While lamenting the removal of Milburn, Baer makes the remarkable statement that “none of the FBI sides of the investigation was vital for nailing the Fourth Man,” as if the FBI, according to Baer, had not been crucial in linking Ames to a KGB officer.140 In any case, “seeing the handwriting on the wall,” Milburn tore the sheets outlining the matrix and profile off the easels and took them to the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO).141 As Baer presents it, here is one premonition of the upcoming raid.
While Baer’s chronology obscures the link, the second signal in his telling is the dispatch of a series of memos from Redmond to DDO Ted Price. These memos were sent in the immediate wake of Bannerman’s briefing and charged her and Worthen with withholding evidence from the FBI related to the Fourth Man investigation.142
Baer then proceeds to avoid the obvious questions. How was such evidence withheld when FBI analyst Milburn was an intimate part of the SIU investigation leading up to Bannerman’s briefing? How could Redmond know what evidence was withheld unless he, the supervisor of the SIU investigation, knew it as well—and had also withheld it? What was the nature of this evidence? Was it exculpatory or incriminating? Or was it details on the backgrounds of sensitive sources?
Milburn’s revelations and Redmond’s memos were presumably on the table before the FBI raid. Bannerman told Baer that “Curran’s people” raided SIU spaces, probably on the weekend of 22–23 December, and “seized all of its paper files.”143 That she never knew whether it had been conducted by “FBI agents” or “Curran’s CIA subordinates” obscures the inevitable conclusions that Curran had not been asleep during her briefing and that the FBI had taken over, doing so about a month after Bannerman gave her briefing and in the wake of Milburn’s gift to WFO. According to Baer, Redmond claimed that the FBI hijacked the investigation and “he could do nothing about it since it was now a criminal matter.” But both Bannerman and Redmond agreed that an FBI raid had occurred. Thus, the FBI investigation that Baer later cited in 2006 probably began in December 1994.
But there is one big reason to doubt Baer’s full version of events. Not two pages later, Baer provides a rather stunning story. We are to believe that Bannerman provided a three-hour briefing to the DDO, Ted Price, on her findings from the matrix—in early January 1995. But, by then, the FBI raid had presumably already happened, and she had discovered this a day or two after it had happened. While Bannerman never mentioned Redmond’s name—only the profile—neither had she mentioned the raid. At least, Baer never noted it and presumably never asked about it.144
How are we to make sense of all this?
Baer again makes the timing of events questionable. After the raid, according to him, Redmond “launched a war of attrition” and enlisted Curran and the FBI to his side.145 But the FBI had already conducted a raid.
Curran took the first step to subject Bannerman, Worthen, and Hough to polygraph examinations over the question, “Are you a KGB spy?” If true, this seems nonsensical. At this point, Redmond was able to tell the FBI that the women had withheld evidence, something Baer claims was a felony. So, you would think this would be the logical question for the examination. The women all passed the test without a hint the issue of evidence ever came up. But the issue would never have arisen in their minds until May 1985. They sat in an empty SIU vault “for months” doing nothing. Then a secretary from Price’s office came down and wordlessly handed Bannerman a sealed envelope with Redmond’s memos in it. While Redmond had recommended referring the matter to the Justice Department, Price had chosen not to.146
Meanwhile, Bannerman was replaced. According to Redmond, as told by Baer, it was because Bannerman refused to more widely expose the CIA’s sensitive Russian agents within the FBI that he had no choice but to replace her.147 Events in the Robert Hanssen case would prove the wisdom of Bannerman’s stance—one I would have to take in the future.148
Strangely, Bannerman then became a target in Baer’s focus. In June 1995, all three officers in the SIU—Bannerman, Worthen, and Hough—were assigned to CE South Group, then headed by Baer, but CE Division chief Billy Lofgren told Baer at the time that they would be working on a special project for Lofgren, and Baer was to ask no questions.149
Baer subsequently observed Bannerman engaged in some spooky stuff and noted that she was working on weekends with no apparent relation to South Group work.150 Subsequently, Baer came to work one morning, and the office of a colleague across the hall was yellow-taped as an FBI crime scene, and his colleague had disappeared.151 Baer implies that it was around this time
nothing was ever made official, but we kept hearing about dozens of officers put on ice. By some accounts—and I was sure they had to be wildly exaggerated—the number was in the hundreds. Hallway chatter had it they’d been tripped up in polygraphs thanks to one indiscretion or another, like shoplifting or keeping a Russian chorus girl on the side. But there seemed to be more to it, some sort of Augean cleaning of the stables.
Some were sent to holding pens at an office park in Tyson’sCorner.152
But then Baer charges Bannerman and company were “at least indirectly responsible for [the holding pens and] the yellow taping of my colleague’s office.”153 I had never heard of such “cleaning” at the time, and none of this activity would seem to advance an investigation of any Fourth Man. But Baer goes even further when he charges that Bannerman’s “hunt was now hidden from CIA counterintelligence and the FBI as well. … It was completely unsanctioned, other than by Lofgren.”154 How could Bannerman’s activity be related to the yellow tape and, simultaneously, be hidden from the FBI?
MOSCOW MISSION
Meanwhile, according to Baer, CE Division had been trying to communicate with Mel in Moscow, with no luck. In September 1994, Worthen was pulled out of the SIU to support a mission to which even the rest of the SIU was not privy. The division had decided to send two case officers into Moscow, posing as a married couple, as tourists with no diplomatic immunity, to look for Mel. Fewer than a dozen officers knew of this operation.155 The only problem was that, as soon as the couple passed through immigration and stood at the baggage claim, “they couldn’t miss it; men and women with earpieces were talking into their lapels. They also couldn’t miss the teams tailing them outside the airport. It almost seemed as if the Russians wanted to be spotted.” Naturally, they aborted the mission.156
Baer reports that “there was no evidence for it, but there was strong suspicion at Langley that someone had tipped off the Russians …”157 Baer runs through several arguments that might support the notion that Mel was a dangle,158 but it begs the question as to why he could give up an incriminating clue to Ames, and later the unsub led to CIA case officer and Russian spy Harold Nicholson.
Far more fundamental questions float up about the aborted mission. Baer observed that, to the SIU, the Fourth Man appeared to have put himself “on ice” in early 1992, and continuing through 1993.159 By the time of Bannerman’s briefing in November 1994, the SIU had concluded that he was no longer active.160 If the Fourth Man was inactive until November, how could he have blown the Moscow mission? Why would he not simply blow Mel? Baer speculates on a motivation: “While the Fourth Man almost certainly would have known about Mel, he could have decided it was too risky to tip off his handlers.”161 Reasonable, except why would he compromise the Moscow mission but not the object of that mission? Subsequently, Baer completely sidetracks some obvious questions by speculating how the Russians might be willing to sacrifice Ames.
All this runs counter to Baer’s claim that the mission of the two “illegal” CIA case officers to Moscow had been blown by a leak from within the CIA, suggesting more evidence of a Fourth Man. Apart from him, there is the question of the Russians.
The obvious question is, why would the KGB behave this way? Having been tipped off regarding the mission (and presumably its general purpose), why would the Russians not have hung back with really discreet surveillance? They then stood to catch a spy and two vulnerable CIA case officers who could be arrested and prosecuted with impunity. The Fourth Man would not have to give up the name of Mel but set up the age-old KGB cover story about the proficiency of its surveillance in detecting spies. The Fourth Man would have had a compelling incentive to blow Mel, either directly or indirectly, because it was only five months before Mel had asserted the existence of an even higher-level spy in the CIA’s ranks than Ames. Baer considers none of this.
On the contrary, when Mel suddenly appeared in South America in April 1994, Redmond pounced on it. He ordered Bannerman to police up all the loose, searchable cable traffic to protect him, and then she was to find Dick Corbin and get him on the next plane out. That Corbin was on leave hiking in the mountains did not matter.162 Redmond’s action could only tighten the noose of the bigot list of knowledgeable people and, thus, himself. And it was precisely at this meeting that Mel provided two unsub leads that would fuel the Fourth Man investigation. Again, here was an opportunity for a high-level mole to tack to the career-enhancing bureaucratic winds and feed the frustration of the mole hunt with ignorance.
A FIFTH MAN?
Meanwhile, why would the SIU conclude that the Fourth Man appeared to have put himself “on ice” in early 1992 and continued through 1993 to as late as November 1994? “There were no unexplained compromises of Russian agents during this period and no unusual pattern activity at the D.C. rezidentura to suggest it was running an important agent.”163 On the other hand, this would ignore the compromise of the Moscow mission back in April, but this is another dot Baer cannot connect.
An even more enigmatic event apparently happened in 1995. In the wake of the FBI raid in December 1994, Bannerman had been right about the exposure of sensitive assets to the FBI. Now “the FBI was given unfettered access to SIU’s sensitive files,” including those on Mel.164 Once again, Baer is maddeningly vague about dates, but it appears that in 1995, Mel provided the unsub lead that soon thereafter led to the identification of another mole in the CIA, Harold Nicholson. At the same meeting, Mel also “dropped the terrible news that he’d come under suspicion by his service and was completely cut off from all secrets. He had no idea why but knew they were on to him.”165 From Baer, we know nothing of Mel’s fate until he was arrested after returning to Moscow in 2001.166
So, if the Fourth Man put himself on ice in early 1992 and was deemed inactive until late 1994, how could he have given up Mel in 1995, let alone the Moscow mission back in April 1994? As Baer admits, Hanssen broke contact with the Russians in 1991 and did not resume his collaboration until 1999.167 So, he could not have been a candidate.
Starburst clue. At the same time, one other item on the matrix supposed to correlate with the Fourth Man emerges as a major problem Baer does not acknowledge. During the SIU’s brief investigation, Milburn provided a chronology of KGB “starbursts.” This is a tactic whereby the residency has its officers exit the embassy all at once in different directions to distract FBI surveillance and cover for the one officer going to a meaningful meet. According to Baer, during “many” starbursts, Ames was either assigned to Rome or temporarily out of the country.
In contradiction to part of this, Baer then says that the starbursts happened when Hanssen was out of contact with the Russians.168 Hanssen ceased contact at the end of 1991, although the SIU did not know this at the time of Bannerman’s briefing. Ames returned from Rome in July 1989, so, clearly, starbursts did not occur when Ames was in Rome.169 And all of them had to have happened when the target of the SIU’s study had put himself on ice. So who were the starbursts covering?
A similar problem lurks in Baer’s later narrative. According to him, Michael Sulick, a former station chief in Moscow and later the chief of the CE Division, said that Hanssen had given up Mel. But again, according to Baer, the British MI6 was “certain” that he had been exposed at least a year or more before Hanssen reconnected with the Russians in 1999.170 So, if a Fourth Man had leaked something about Mel in 1995 and again in 1997 or 1998, why would Mel not have been arrested at one of those points? Could the Fourth Man have only been capable of a vague unsub lead? Could he have been another mole in the FBI, along with Hanssen? Baer sees none of this.
ADOLF UNSUB
Another loose end in the matrix concerned a sensitive source the FBI and CIA called “Adolf.” According to Baer, he was a Line KR officer in New York when he was recruited. “In the early 1990s,” he heard “rumors” about two moles in American intelligence, one in New York and the other in Washington. One in the CIA and the other in the FBI. According to Baer, Ames was not in Washington then, and Hanssen was inactive.171
Here is where dates are crucial, and the distinction between the date of the asset’s report and the DOI is imperative. Contrary to Baer, Ames was in Washington after July 1989. It would seem unlikely that this was either Hanssen or the other KGB mole in the FBI, Earl Pitts, since they both served in the FBI New York Field Office but departed in August 1987 and August 1989, respectively. The only way Adolf could refer to them is if the real DOI of his information was not “in the early 1990s.” And then he would not have necessarily been referring to the Fourth Man.
The only other aspect of Adolf’s reporting concerned his claim that “Line KR communications specialist” Vladimir Tsymbal traveled from New York to Washington to support an agent operation there. Baer follows the speculation of the FBI and CIA in assuming that this refers to burst radio transmissions and that such devices were not employed with either Ames or Hanssen.172
However, one major problem is that Line KR needed communications specialists. This was the provenance of Line OT or the FCD’s Operational-Technical Directorate. Something Baer seems not to know. Baer fails to tell us the DOI of this observation, but if it was in the early 1990s, Tsymbal could have supported something with Ames or other assets outside the CI arena.
FBI INVESTIGATION RESTARTED
One of the more extraordinary, incriminating stories provided by Baer concerns an FBI inquiry and an unnamed defector. According to Baer, the FBI interviewed several retired CIA officers, including Bannerman, Worthen, and Billy Lofgren, in February 2006. For each, the question was: “Was there any reason Paul Redmond would have visited Moscow in the mid-1980s without Langley’s permission?” According to Baer, Bannerman’s reaction was that, twelve years after her briefing, the FBI “considered Redmond a spy” and was engaged in a full-fledged investigation. Again according to Baer, Olson responded that, had the CIA known of this, Redmond would have been fired, and his case referred to the FBI.173
Several aspects of this story are strange. First, according to Baer, “Milburn was too professional to name Redmond” and said, “Laine, I’m pretty sure the person you were interested in was in it for the game.”174 So how could Milburn have phrased the question to her without mentioning his name? And, if he had not used the name and she had no clue about such a trip, why would she conclude that the target was Redmond?
DEFECTOR
Second, Baer says he has “no idea what was behind the FBI visits in 2006” but then introduces a defector whose story must have inspired it. Baer denies this, claiming that the defector relayed the story “out of Russia after the FBI in 2006 started asking” about Redmond’s visit to Moscow.175 So, by some improbable coincidence, the defector came after the FBI visits. Now, who could plan such a thing?
Several features of this story are suspect. First, the defector goes unnamed, and Baer had admittedly “omitted and blurred many of the details” the defector provided “to make him unidentifiable.”176 This is somewhat strange because the defector had been out for about thirteen years when Baer must have heard about him.
Second, it raises a legitimate question in the reader’s mind about what “details” have been blurred. While Baer “did hear about” the defector, he does not claim he spoke to him. This clearly implies that an intermediary was telling Baer this story.
Third, “the defector didn’t have a perfect track record,” although “he was generally reliable.” So just what details are unreliably reported?
Fourth, the defector “was not in counterintelligence,” implying any aspect of KGB counterintelligence.177
This last item should be seriously borne in mind when reading the details of his story. According to Baer, the defector, a CIA case officer, had completed a European tour in 1984 and took leave, ostensibly on vacation but traveling to a European capital. He then contacted an SCD officer, serving as a security minder for a visiting Soviet delegation. Somehow the CIA officer knew the SCD officer’s name and the dates he would be in the capital.
The CIA officer told the SCD officer that he would agree to spy for the KGB but refused to deal with the FCD because it was too riddled with CIA spies. The CIA officer then said he had worked on the USSR account abroad and was returning to Langley to work on this account. As for his demands, the CIA officer would call the operational shots rather than the KGB. He would not pass documents and decide what secrets he would pass. He refused to meet the KGB in the United States, but only overseas when he happened to be traveling there on business. He would take some cash below the threshold that would attract the FBI’s attention. The SCD officer surmised from all this that the CIA officer had been passed over for promotion, and he desired to teach Langley it had made a grave mistake overlooking his talents.178
According to Baer, according to the defector, the KGB arranged to “facilitate” his travel to Moscow. He was debriefed by two SCD officers who would thereafter manage his case from Moscow Center. That the FBI could not detect his travel through travel records suggests that, on the quick, the KGB would arrange false documents and/or a private flight out of Europe. Now the defector also knew the post-story. Dead drops and covert electronic communications were arranged, apparently for use in the United States in between his meetings in Europe. SCD travelers, apparently to the United States and unwitting of the CIA officer’s identity, serviced the dead drops with no coordination with the FCD or its station in Washington, DC.179
Unobserved by Baer are two notable contradictions to the defector’s claim that the CIA officer would never pass documents. The first, most prominent of these is the claim that the Fourth Man passed copies of 3 x 5 cards describing meeting sites in Moscow even though he had refused to pass documents.
But the second, more intriguing, contradiction was Baer’s early claim that a former chief of Russia House had told him that the Fourth Man had “passed the Russians memoranda of conversations between [Russian President] Yeltsin and [President] Clinton. The KGB … then weaponized the memoranda by waving them in front of Yeltsin’s nose as a warning that he’d better not get too cozy with the Americans …”180
The Russia House chief was implicitly claiming that the CIA had a mole at the top of the Russian regime who could report on this—a mole that was implicitly surviving. But even this report may have been contradicted by the other Baer claim that the SIU had deemed the Fourth Man inactive from 1992 to 1994, which is precisely when a memo would have passed. This is where dates are crucial because Yeltsin and Clinton had about twenty personal meetings or telephone conversations, the first two within the essential period of inactivity.
Even Baer registers incredulity over the defector’s story. The first suspicion circles around the notion that a Russian source, unrelated to KGB counterintelligence, could induce the trust of one of the very few KGB officers witting of the case and providing such extraordinary detail.
Second, Baer understands that the defector reported all this after the FBI visits to former CIA officers in 2006. But having learned this story through an unnamed intermediary, Baer uncritically accepts the timing reported in the story.181 When Baer talked to him, Redmond said that he told the FBI “the dates didn’t work.” So what were the dates in question? Here is another crucial question that was not asked. Baer never says, “[I]t stinks of Russian disinformation.”182
As for the FBI, Baer confesses his ignorance of the role this defector or Bannerman’s matrix played in their conclusions. But he is confident that “almost invariably when investigating Americans for espionage, the FBI takes a strictly by-the-book approach.”183 To anyone familiar with the Brian Kelley fiasco—not to mention FBI conduct in numerous other cases—this is ludicrous.184 Baer cited Redmond as claiming the FBI started cooking the books in the Kelley investigation, and Bannerman agreed that the FBI manipulated the evidence.185 I read Brian’s manuscript, and he cited several instances of FBI malpractice.
Baer then entertains the notion that the Russians framed Redmond. Former Russia House hands told Baer that the Russians were certainly capable of clever disinformation.186 The letter-writing dangle back in 1986 had provided compromising information, or kompromat in the KGB vernacular, on the case officer for another Ames victim, LTC Gennadiy Varennik, by claiming he was fabricating his financial dealings with his agent.187
Then there was the case of Vertefeuille. She had been pitched by the Soviets while serving in Africa and had reported the pitch. But in the middle of the Ames mole hunt, the Russians began wiring money into her bank account as if she had accepted the pitch. This even provoked the FBI to open an investigation against her, codenamed “Gray Mouse.”188 It was all determined later to be false, of course.
In all this, Baer fails to make another connection staring him in the face. At about the time of Bannerman’s briefing in November 1994, according to Baer, the deputy chief of the SCD’s American Department, Valentin Klimenko, was meeting with the CIA Moscow Station chief and proceeded “to needle him about another Russian mole in the Agency beyond Ames.” What professional intelligence organization would engage in such reckless behavior?
Then, according to Baer, the station chief reported that “Klimenko was in possession of detailed and intimate knowledge of the current workings of the CIA’s Russian operations” and that this provoked the COS to think that someone was leaking.189 What “detailed and intimate” knowledge Baer is talking about, he does not say, but Ames had presumably provided this type of information up to February 1994. Furthermore, how could there be uniquely detailed, intimate knowledge between February and November 1994 if the Fourth Man was probably inactive, as Bannerman’s briefing claimed?
CONCLUSION
After delivering all this incriminating detail—however flawed it was—Baer suddenly wrote, “I don’t know who the Fourth Man was.” He then says, “[T]here was no way Redmond could have known what Curran would do with the November 1994 briefing,” pages after he had suggested that Redmond conspired with the FBI and perhaps instigated it with his memos to Ted Price.190
He then claimed, “I also don’t know whether the Russians framed Redmond,” after having presented some evidence that this is precisely what they did. Baer then drops the sixty-four-dollar question: “Why weren’t there more clear-cut compromises tied to the Fourth Man?”191 Indeed.
Baer’s story, in all its sloppy detail, should not have been told, especially by someone supposedly schooled in the intelligence profession.
This review cannot provide an exhaustive treatment of all of the detail in his book’s 229 pages. Some claims, if true, could implicate Redmond, but many other flaws and contradictions have been left on the cutting room floor.
However, all such details come through Baer’s reporting standards filter. This is a problem. He claims to have interviewed many former CIA officers, and I knew almost all of them to be honest, dedicated professionals, but I have generally refrained from citing them outright and chosen to attribute most of the claims to Baer instead because I am deeply suspicious of the results. In any case, too much is too slovenly argued.
We expect this from contemporary journalism in America. Outside the intelligence business, we have recently witnessed the scandalous case of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was subjected to a public thrashing built on the impeached testimony of one witness and the outlandish claims of two others. You have to go back to the public thrashing of Whittaker Chambers in the late 1940s to register something this bad, but there have been numerous other cases in the interim.192
Why should intelligence hold to higher standards than mere journalism? Policymakers rely on the Intelligence Community for two things: first, nonpublic information that cannot be procured any other way, and second, higher standards of reliability and veracity. The intelligence business is expected to provide information that is accurate from sources that are reliable and vetted. Violations of those standards within the CIA have had serious consequences.
One of the most notorious cases was the FBI’s extremely aggressive investigation of Brian Kelley as a CIA mole before the FBI very belatedly encountered source information and analysis that Robert Hanssen was the mole—in the FBI.193
The most damaging would be the case of a true double agent, run by al-Qaeda, whose gullible handlers facilitated the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers and contractors near Khowst, Afghanistan, in 2009.194
And then there is the notorious case of the asset “Curveball,” whose unexamined fabrications contributed to a country’s entry into the war.195
The potentially slanderous nature of this story caused some former CIA officers to argue that Baer should not have published the book.
When Baer spoke to the former chief of SE Division, Burt Gerber, to tell him that he had a short list of suspects for the Fourth Man, Gerber was furious, saying, “No one should ever have given you that.”196 This is precisely why Grand Jury proceedings are generally kept secret.197
In presenting this case, Baer plays the Pontius Pilate, claiming in a later interview, “Intuition tells me it’s not him [Redmond].” But with the backhand, he makes the incriminating insinuation, “the FBI told me I only have a quarter of the evidence against him.”198 If the FBI said this to Baer, and they have so much more evidence, what has the FBI been doing for the last 27 years?
Robert Baer was raised in the CIA to be a professional. At its best, the CIA is an intellectual, ethical, and operational breeding ground for its officers. It is disturbing that the unexamined flaws, unquestioned defects, and contradictions pervading this text more nearly reflect a legacy of the CIA than of Robert Baer.
REFERENCES
Notes
1 Robert Baer, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia (New York: Hachette Books, 2022). Kindle.
2 Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003).
3 Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefieulle (G&V), Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2012).
5 Oleg Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky (London: MacMillan, 1995).
6 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 86, 21.
9 The word “agent” as used by the CIA should not be confused with the same term used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to refer to its own staff officers. In talking about those cases compromised by Ames, Baer is always talking about straight agents.
10 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 236.
13 A quick look here will suffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_%28codename%29
14 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 55.
16 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 104, 128. This SIU should not be confused with the follow-on unit, SIU, formed to track down the Fourth Man.
17 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 231, 135.
18 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 526–529.
19 David Wise, “Thirty Years Later, We Still Don’t Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-unexplained-cold-war-fbi-cia-180956969/
20 Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution, p. 204.
22 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 111–114.
23 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 168.
25 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 111.
26 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 170.
28 Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution, p. 326. The volunteer was Michael Bettaney, an MI5 officer who had tried to work for the KGB in London.
30 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 47.
31 Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution, pp. 330–332.
34 Ibid., p. 9; Wise, “Thirty Years Later, We Still Don’t Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies.”
35 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 97.
36 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 113.
39 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 527.
41 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 115.
42 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 97.
43 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 115.
44 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 65–67.
45 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 97.
47 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 68. Strangely, although they published their book nine years after Bearden’s book, G/V make no mention of the apartment or the home leave scheduling issue. They indicate that the CIA owed him $20,000, while Bearden claimed it was 20,000 rubles ($30,000). Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 97.
48 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 68.
50 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 97.
51 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 199, 128.
52 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 536, 108.
53 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 207.
54 Ibid., p. 72. Because Baer acknowledged that Price would not talk to him, it is not clear how Baer would know this, but both men clearly understood up front that there was probably another mole. Otherwise, continuing the mission of SIU made no sense.
60 Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, Arrest Warrant and Search Warrants, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/hanssen-affidavit.pdf/view (accessed 4 September 2022).
65 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 84.
68 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 142–143.
72 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 447–448.
73 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 144 (emphasis original).
74 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 450 (my emphasis). The “friends” in the SCD American Department could have included Zhomov and perhaps the KGB knew this.
75 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 117–118, 119.
79 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 529.
80 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 59–60.
81 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 30-31.
82 David Wise, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA (New York: Random House, 1992).
83 Paul Gessner review of A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country, by Benjamin Weiser (2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20061214234056/http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/RK/bookrev.html
84 Thomas M. Troy, Jr., Review of Benjamin Weiser, A Secret Life (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), https://web.archive.org/web/20070613114121/; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no2/article11.html
85 David R. Stokes, The Spy Who Really Came in from the Cold, Review, 21 December 2008. (Stokes attended a CIA conference on the occasion of a release of a massive number of documents from this case.)
86 Baer, The Fourth Man, pp. 116, 165.
92 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 98.
93 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 11.
94 Ibid., p. 15. According to Baer, the chief of Central Eurasia (CE) Division (as SE came to be called), John MacGaffin, remembered Dick Corbin’s fishing trip; p. 26.
97 Ibid. By this time, Bearden had managed to rename SE Division CE Division.
103 Ibid., p. 79. The first meeting was in 1988; p. 10.
107 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 27–30.
109 Ibid., pp. 109–110. However, Bearden failed to pick up on Martynov’s unwitting provision of disinformation concerning surveillance; p. 127.
110 Ibid., p. 110. G&V wrote that Smetanin and his wife went on a scheduled home leave, but he was scheduled to meet with his CIA case officer in Lisbon on 4 October and failed to make the meeting. Thus, Redmond’s observation was undoubtedly after this. G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 87.
111 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 117–118, 134.
113 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 152.
114 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 99. Unfortunately, despite repeated searches, this report has not surfaced and its conclusions are drawn from the memories of some of those involved. G&V do not identify those providing this memory, even though Stein himself died in February 2021.
115 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 164–166.
116 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 77; Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 159.
117 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 76.
118 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 104–105.
119 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 191.
120 Ibid., p. 111; Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 198–201, 300–302.
121 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 477–478.
122 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 127–128.
123 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 195.
124 G&V, Circle of Treason, pp. 129–130.
125 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 470–471.
126 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Mitrokhin (accessed 30 August 2022).
127 Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 471.
128 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 38.
130 G&V, Circle of Treason, p. 133.
131 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 192.
133 Ibid., p. 160. It is not clear when the staff meeting occurred. Redmond would presumably not have been there after April 1991 because he had been moved to CIC.
134 As I recall, this would have been in about the fall or late 1991.
147 Ibid., p. 178. But note that Baer appears to provide two different names for her replacement, both totally inexperienced analysts from the DI.
148 Ibid., p. 179. See also p. 84.
183 Ibid., p. 217.
184 Regarding Kelley, see ibid., p. 200. As for other cases, we have Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal (New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2001); Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI (New York: Regan Books, 2003); Notra Trulock, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), and the whole Steele dossier fiasco, among the reams of material on this are: “Steele Dossier,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier; FBI Release of Unclassified Version of Debriefings to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), dated 17 July 2020, Bates numbered SENATE-FISA2020-001106 to SENATE-FISA2020-001167 at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21103055-170209-danchenko-interviews.185 Ibid.
186 Ibid., pp. 218, 221.
187 Ibid., p. 191; Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 197. Varennik was CIA asset GTFITNESS.
188 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 137.
189 Ibid., p. 136.
190 Ibid., p. 220.
191 Ibid.
192 Whittaker Chambers, Witness 50th Anniversary Edition (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, Regnery Publishing, 2014).
193 For a reference to a source, see Niles Lathem, “FBI ‘Spy’ Contact Left KGB Bozo in the Dark,” New York Post, 23 February 2001, https://nypost.com/2001/02/23/fbi-spy-contact-left-kgb-bozo-in-the-dark/ (accessed 20 September 2022). Also see Pete Earley, “My Friend the Spy Expert,” 26 September 2011, http://www.peteearley.com/2011/09/26/brian-j-kelley-my-friend-the-spy-expert/ (accessed 6 September 2022).
194 Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
195 Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007).
196 Baer, The Fourth Man, p. 150.
197 Sara Kropf, “What is Grand Jury Secrecy,” Grand Jury Target, 18 November 2015, https://grandjurytarget.com/2015/11/18/what-is-grand-jury-secrecy
198 Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz , “Longtime Senior CIA Official Comes Forward to Deny He Is the ‘Fourth Man’—a Russian Spy,” 2 July 2022,