BY CINDY (LUCINDA) WEBB AND PAUL REDMOND
Both Retired CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDO/CI)
with input by
Edward Curran
retired Senior FBI Executive, FBI Section Chief of Russian Espionage Cases
Dr. Michael Sulick
retired CIA Chief, National Clandestine Service, former ADDO/CI
John MacGaffin
retired Associate Deputy Director for Operations, and FBI Executive
John Turnicky
retired CIA Director of Security
Dr. Richard Rita
retired senior CIA Analyst,
former Chief, Special Investigations Unit/CEG/CIC who wrote the official history of SIU
and other CIA and FBI counterintelligence professionals
This paper reviews the assertions Mr. Robert Baer makes in his book “The Fourth Man” which alleges retired senior CIA officer Paul Redmond was a master KGB Spy.
In preparing this we spoke to former CIA officers and FBI agents who were directly involved in issues covered in the book as managers, counterintelligence experts, operations officers, security investigators, and analysts. Most were also involved with CIA’s Counterintelligence reforms following the February 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames. Mr. Baer spoke to some of these officers but not all.
We did not have access to CIA or FBI classified information but drew extensively on the expertise of key people who were there during the period covered in the book and after and know the facts.
To a person, each said they found Mr. Baer’s analysis that Mr. Redmond was a spy to be completely without merit, highly irresponsible, and condemned the credibility and motivation of his four principal sources.
Indeed, they found the book full of inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, slander, mischaracterizations and deeply flawed assumptions.
There were too many inaccuracies to dissect each one in this paper so we selected the most egregious. We broke the analysis into four major components:
- Important historic context;
- The five primary falsehoods core to Mr. Baer’s assertion that there is a “Fourth Man”—a KGB master spy—and the seriously inaccurate evidence he uses to point to Mr. Redmond;
- Important exculpatory material that Mr. Baer and his sources either ignore, downplay or irresponsibly rationalize away;
- Facts concerning Mr. Redmond’s two reported trips to Moscow and corrected information on an inaccurate allegation of an unreported trip to Moscow in the mid-1980s. Mr. Baer reports this incorrect assertion in his book along with details he claims he obtained from an ongoing FBI investigation.
The officers with whom we spoke who were most directly involved in the investigations and activities involved in the book include but are not limited to:
Then Senior FBI Chief of CIA’s Counterespionage Group Edward Curran and his two CIA Deputies Lucinda Webb and John Turnicky.
Ms. Webb was Deputy Chief of Counterespionage for Operations and Mr. Turnicky was Deputy Chief of Counterespionage for Security. They were supervisors for Mr. Baer’s principal CIA source, Ms. Laine Bannerman, while she was Chief of the Special Investigative Unit (SIU) within the Counterintelligence Center’s Counterespionage Group, though Mr. Baer conspicuously fails to recognize that key fact.
Ms. Webb went on to be CIA’s Associate Deputy Director for Counterintelligence for five years and Mr. Turnicky went on to be the CIA’s Director of Security— the senior most jobs in CIA’s Counterintelligence and Security Missions respectively.
Dr. Rich Rita, senior CIA analyst who served in both the Special Investigative Unit as well as Russian Operations at different times from June 1995-2014. He wrote a detailed, classified History of the SIU from 1990-2001 which is the time covered in Mr. Baer’s book and beyond and provides an accurate account of developments Mr. Baer and his sources get completely wrong.
Michael Sulick who spent much of his career in Russian operations and Counterintelligence as well as senior leadership positions in CIA, including Deputy Director for Operations, Associate Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, Chief of Central Eurasia Division, Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence and Chief of Station in Moscow during the time covered in the book and beyond.
John MacGaffin, career CIA operations officer, Chief Central Eurasia Division and Associate Deputy Director for Operations prior to, during and after the Aldrich Ames espionage investigation and arrest. He was one of the senior CIA officers deeply involved in designing post Ames reforms together with the FBI and the National Security Council. He then served as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Director of the FBI and later Senior Advisor to the Director of the National Counterintelligence Center.
Paul Redmond, career CIA officer and senior Counterintelligence manager who, among many other accomplishments, led CIA’s investigation that identified Aldrich Ames. He is irresponsibly and incorrectly implicated by Mr. Baer and his sources as the 4th Man.
SUMMARY
“The Fourth Man” by Robert Baer seeks to convince the reader that Mr. Paul Redmond —a distinguished retired senior CIA officer who among other accomplishments led the CIA investigation that identified Russian spy Aldrich Ames—is himself a Master KGB Spy.
Mr. Baer has promoted—without rigorous investigation, analysis or research—a hypothesis allegedly developed 28 years ago that was not credible or appropriately documented at the time and in subsequent years has been discredited by other information and investigations.
Specifically, Mr. Baer promotes the hypothesis from Ms. Laine Bannerman, a retired CIA employee who ceased to have access to CIA’s official espionage investigations when she was removed from her position in 1995.
As background, Mr. Redmond had asked Ms. Bannerman to review any remaining Russian CI leads not explained after Aldrich Ames was arrested and debriefed in 1994. She was replaced in 1995 when her immediate management—below Mr. Redmond—lost confidence in her ability to incorporate CIA’s many post Ames reforms working with the FBI on Russian espionage cases.
Nevertheless, Mr. Baer relies on a pattern of her incorrect assumptions and her confirmation bias to build a highly dishonest case against Mr. Redmond for the serious crime of treason. Mr. Baer’s narrative time and again disregards more reasonable alternative, accurate explanations and exculpatory information, while showing no concern for the harm caused to Mr. Redmond or an investigative ethic to get the facts right.
Counterintelligence managers and experts involved in these investigations at the time and beyond found “The Fourth Man” book replete with factual errors, flawed investigative tradecraft, half-truths, omissions of critical facts and a pattern of misreading or downplaying statements from individuals who challenged the veracity of Mr. Baer’s conclusions.
The book relies on obviously biased, long retired CIA sources with challenged memories from 28 years ago and no access to important historic and current classified evidence.
Open source information which could have corrected the flawed storyline is not incorporated to expose the errors.
Instead, Mr. Baer portrays his three principal CIA sources as heroes trying to expose the senior spy in the CIA he calls the Fourth Man, while others in CIA worked to disrupt their valiant investigation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
He neglects to provide the facts surrounding the removal of his principal source from her position which is relevant to motivation and reliability or the massive efforts by CIA leaders to build a robust Counterintelligence capability.
In what is arguably his biggest miss (among many) he does not explain how the 2001 arrest of FBI agent Robert Hanssen as the senior KGB spy in the FBI, discredits Bannerman’s 1994 alleged allegations against Mr. Redmond.
In sum, Mr. Baer builds an analytic foundation based on misinformation and revisionist history from biased sources and then—irresponsibly—points by name to Mr. Redmond as a high-level “Master KGB spy.”
Mr. Baer—with no credible experience in Counterintelligence or Russian operations—chose to believe these sources about such a serious charge and publish their false assumptions while ignoring and failing to give sufficient weight to others who were directly involved at the time, contradicted his main thesis and had much greater insights and access.
The book should never have been written; it is at best a classic case of “confirmation bias,” and many other investigative and tradecraft failures and at worst raises questions about malicious, deliberate and irresponsible motivations.
The resulting false allegation has done tremendous damage to the personal and professional reputation of a dedicated professional with a storied thirty-year career protecting the Nation’s security; an injustice that must be corrected.