On the morning of 4 November 2022, retired senior counterintelligence officials gave a panel presentation about The Fourth Man book by Robert Baer to an audience of 300 people at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) luncheon meeting held in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
The panel speaker biographies are shown followed by the edited transcript of that day.
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Paul Redmond – CIA
- Served 34 years in CIA’s Clandestine Service operating mostly against the Warsaw Pact/Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union.
- He served as Deputy Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Center (CIC) where he led the CIA’s investigation that identified Aldrich Ames.
- Was appointed the first Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence by DCI John Deutch.
- After retirement in 1997, he was appointed as Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security.
- Redmond was a consultant to the National Counterintelligence Executive, and to the Department of Energy, where he conducted a counterintelligence review of the department’s nuclear weapons laboratories. He also directed the Hanssen and Parlor Maid Damage Assessment Teams.
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Positions during the 1994-1995 timeframe:
Deputy Chief/Counterintelligence Center/DO (1991- Early 1995)
First Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDO/CI) (Summer 1995 – 1997)
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Edward Curran – FBI
- Served 38 years in the FBI, primarily the National Security Division (NSD). Prior to retirement he served as Section Chief, overseeing all Russian intelligence matters in the NSD.
- He was assigned to the CIA as Chief of the Counterespionage Group in 1994 as a result of a PDD by President Clinton as a key part of reforms following the arrest of CIA officer Rick Ames.
- During his career he was appointed and assigned to the Department of Energy to review, prepare and implement a counterintelligence program as directed by a PDD. This assignment was after his appointment as Director of Counterintelligence, On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), DOD to review and implement counterintelligence safeguards after the signing of an Arms Control Treaty (INF) between the US and the USSR.
- After leaving the FBI he served as a senior official in the Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department.
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Position during the 1994-1995 timeframe:
Chief/Counterespionage Group/CIC/DO (Summer 1994 – 1996)
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Dr. Michael J. Sulick – CIA
- Served 28 years in CIA’s Clandestine Service.
- A specialist in Russia and Eastern Europe, Sulick was chief of multiple stations, and later Chief of the Central Eurasia Division.
- He served as Chief of the Counterintelligence Center from 2002-2004.
- Appointed as Director of the National Clandestine Service from 2007-2010, where he was responsible for supervising the agency’s covert collection operations and coordinating the espionage activities of the US Intelligence Community.
- He is the author of Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War and American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present.
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Position during the 1994-1995 timeframe:
Chief of Station
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Lucinda (Cindy) Webb – CIA
- Served 32 years in the CIA and managed programs in Clandestine Operations, Counterterrorism, Counterespionage, Analysis, Leadership, Congressional Relations and Recruiting.
- Was the Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of Operations Ted Price during the Ames case.
- Served as the Deputy Chief of CIC’s Counterespionage Group for Operations alongside John Turnicky, who was the Deputy Chief, Counterespionage Group for Security (and later the CIA Director of Security). They worked as a team under Edward Curran.
- Webb spent five years as the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center as well as the Associate Deputy Director for Operations for Counterintelligence (2006-2011).
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Position during the 1994-1995 timeframe:
Deputy Chief/Counterespionage Group for Operations/CIC/DO. She and John Turnicky directly supervised the Special Investigations Unit and the head of the unit, Laine Bannerman (not Redmond as the book implies). (1994-1997)
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John Turnicky – CIA
John Turnicky served many decades in the CIA’s Office of Security and became the Director of Security for the CIA.
Position during the 1994-1995 timeframe:
Deputy Chief/Counterespionage Group for Security/CIC/DO.
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AFIO Presentation Edited Transcript
Paul Redmond:
This is a rather intimidating gathering. I would guess that it’s probably the greatest concentration in one place at one time of intelligence expertise since the last time Burton Gerber dined alone.
On a more serious notes, good morning, thank you AFIO. Thank Jim and Annette for helping making this happen. I also wish to thank the dozens of people, some of whom are here, who have come out of the woodwork to support me regarding this wretched book.
Not enough time to thank you all, but I must mention the two Cindy’s: Cindy Webb and Cindy Kwitchoff. Cindy Webb has done a massive amount of work. I couldn’t possibly have gotten through this without her help. She regularly has to peel me off the ceiling. She’s been just wonderful. Cindy Kwitchoff has done brilliant work following Mr. Baer’s efforts to flog his book on vlogs or whatever you call them.
All right, lest there be any doubt, I wish to say as clearly as possible, right off the bat that we’re here to debunk Mr. Baer’s book in as much detail as possible, given the very brief time we have to present.
When the book was published, I received a lot of requests for comment. I chose not to make any public comment until could get my head around it, and my friend’s heads around it who know about the real story. So we’ve been bit slow out of the box on this. Another reason we’ve been slow to respond is that we’ve been careful to keep the CIA’s lifetime secrecy agreement. Obviously, there’s some details we can’t discuss, details particularly about operations and investigations.
Therefore, we have confined most of our comments where we can to the information that Mr. Bear and his sources raised in his book, which Mr. Bear claims was cleared by the CIA. That would be, just so everybody understands, in this room for classification. CIA doesn’t clear things on the subject of whether whether they’re true or not.
The presentation today will be just skimming the surface. We have a 60 page plus paper late last night that got cleared by PRB covering all of the details that Cindy and a few of us have come up with, which we’re going to use in future public presentations whether they’re overall or written. We have in the works about four or five other papers which will be published in various journals, and we’re going to do an in-depth, in the future, series of podcasts.
Now, in my view, obviously, for me personally, “The Fourth Man” is a collection of outright falsehoods, misleading assertions, groundless speculation, and decade-old theories which have long been disproven. I’ve just got another statement [see end of paper] which just got approved, much longer, which will be put up to this effect.
This bloody book seeks to portray me as some sort of “master spy” working for the KGB for many years. It appears to be largely based on statements by a few people who worked in counterintelligence at the time and clearly have some sort of grudge against me. Mr. Baer’s intent in the book seems to be to write up-and these are his words-a ”spy thriller” for the movies with three “master spy catchers” who, despite unresponsive CIA in my brilliantly machiavellian efforts to deter them, manage to identify me as, Baer’s words again, “the most damaging spy in American history.”
To address this nonsense, we have distilled this presentation today into some five significant falsehoods in the book. I have four colleagues here with me today, including over here John Turnicky who was in Security and CIC, all of whom are involved in this business. In order to save time, we’re not going to go through all their introductions.
To get going to the substance as opposed to the rhetoric, these people are here for one main reason: to give credibility to this presentation, so you don’t have to take my word for it. It’s an authoritative commentary that seems to be the most important to me in this presentation. Going to start off with Eddie Curran who’s going to give his views of it as an FBI officer. And then we’ll go from there. Fire away Eddie.
Edward Curran:
It’s a tragic day that we have to be here, I have to be here to defend Paul against some of these ridiculous and outrageous accusations that have been made with him. I’ve known Paul most of my career, spent 38 years of the FBI.
When I was the ASAC in Los Angeles, I had the counterintelligence program. I was on my way back to the airport one day and the news came over about Aldrich Ames being arrested. I almost drove right into the pole. I couldn’t believe it. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know very much about it. I was Ames’ liaison officer when he and I were in New York. So I know he’d be briefing sources. I knew at that point whatever he gave up was going to be a tremendous impact on the Intelligence Community.
On the nightly news, the CIA was being bashed from every quarter of Congress, the FBI and other places. I got a phone call from the FBI saying we want you back in Washington, we want you to go to the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center, Counterespionage Group (CEG).
I got my briefing from FBI headquarters before I went over there, and at no time did that briefing say anything about Paul Redmond. Paul Redmond was a legend at that point in the FBI. Not necessarily early in my career, but later when I got up in the high altitude with Paul. He was treated as a professional, a long time, experienced officer and basically he was a big pain in the ass, but nobody questioned his ability. He stood up to the CIA, he didn’t roll over to the FBI. I guess that hurt a lot of people, but he was never questioned as to his integrity or experience.
When I went over to CEG, I didn’t know what was in store for me. I knew there was a lot of hostility at that point between CIA and the FBI. I first met with Cindy Webb and John Turnicky, two of the best people I’ve ever met in my professional career. Cindy coming from the Directorate of Operations and John Turnicky from the Security side of the house. So we had the people there to do the job.
My instructions were that other than Aldrich Ames, there’s somebody else out there that’s higher than Aldrich Ames and has access to extremely classified information. In the FBI, very few people had that information-that’s not disseminated to the field offices.
So where do we start looking? Well, the book mentions there’s over 300 polygraphs that people have failed. The culture at that time in the CIA was that it doesn’t matter whether you pass it or fail it, nothing ever happened to you. So we had to change that culture real quick. Basically say you’re going to pass this or you’re not.
I’ll let John Turnicky explain it, but I asked him to get three or four of the best polygraphers from the security section, and they would now work for John. We had one question: basically are you a spy? That’s all we were concerned about, nothing else. What the book doesn’t mention, we processed 98% of those people on that list. 98%. They may have had other problems but they weren’t spies. The book doesn’t mention that. I’ll let John Turnicky give a little overview of what we did with the polygraph because it led to Nicholson’s discovery.
John Turnicky:
Okay, one clarification: The CIA Office of Security always cared about what the polygraph said! It’s a big part of the security program. As most people in this room are aware of post Ames, there was a lot of tension going on between FBI and CIA. The thought to bring Ed over was probably the greatest move ever, because what we . . . .
Paul Redmond:
We need to clarify here that Ed was sent over to CIA as head of Counterespionage Group in CIA as a direct result of President Clinton’s Presidential Directive that the head of that group permanently be a senior officer from the Bureau.
John Turnicky:
Yes. Our number one goal was security and CI. At that time we made sure that any security-related information that had possible potential CI issues had to go to CIC and get reviewed. If there were significant issues, the FBI would be brought into it. We created a branch within the offices of CEG of security officers. That branch was made up of experienced poly examiners, investigators, and adjudicators-people who had the experience of dealing with the entire security apparatus.
As part of that branch, we also had an FBI agent assigned in a supervisory role to make sure that all communications were out there for FBI, CIC, and the Office of Security to see. That was just a primary thing that we wanted to make sure that nothing got dropped, that things that were shared.
With the assistance of the Office of Security, we were able to bring the Financial Investigations Branch from the Office of Security into CEG. It was a big help because now we had-whether it was polygraph related information, investigative information, financial information-we had the whole thing right there at CEG.
I wanted to go back after Ed’s comments too, and talk a little bit about that review. Again, post-Ames, what we did was, with the help of the Office of Security, to go back and do a review of the entire population’s polygraph results, issues, making sure that there were things that should have been investigated that perhaps got missed. Out of that review, there were a number of instances and issues that were sent over to CEG to be looked at.
As Ed mentioned, the great, great majority of those people were cleared out. They were interviewed, talked to. They went back in most cases, took another polygraph with an expert or very senior examiner, and they were cleared out. The others were eventually resolved in favor. There were a couple that were actually referred to the FBI so that they could be looked at again. There was no criminal activity from anybody that was ever found. There’s one exception, but you’ll be talking about that later [Nicholson case].
Unlike what the book says, we were sharing information: you had the Office of Security at CIA, you had the CIC, and you had the Bureau right there in one place with access to any information that was CI related.
Cindy Webb:
Those of you who are from the CIA at the time may recall: we had everybody and their grandmother investigating us. Some of it was good, some of it not so good. Congressional oversight, our IG, there was lots of stuff. A lot of these changes like this increased sharing was a critical one. We were making all kinds of changes to make us a much better organization, which is what we turned out to be.
Paul Redmond:
I would add also that what John, and Ed was saying to some degree, speaks directly to the falsehood in the book where Mr. Baer quotes Bannerman saying that investigators could not get access to security information and records. You’ve just heard-that’s nonsense.
John Turnicky:
It was all there. Nobody was holding back. As a matter of fact, the Office of Security really just bent over backwards to help out to make sure that that information got shared.
Cindy Webb:
All while protecting hardworking, wonderful employees who are trying to get their hard work done and move it on so that they could move on.
Edward Curran:
Let me just add, when I did arrive, I had Cindy and John as my deputies, which later on in this presentation you’ll hear after the Nicholson case, how influential they were. I tried to work with SIU (Special Investigative Unit). I did not realize when I first got there as Chief/CEG that CEG had a separate SIU within the office of CEG. The flow of information from the SIU was not good. I’m not going to comment on all the things said in the book other than they’re mostly lies. But it was apparent to me that we weren’t going to get the cooperation from SIU.
Paul Redmond:
Just to make sure everybody understands. If the people in this room aren’t clear with all this, the trouble is, we’ve lived it and we talk as though everybody understands it. After Ames, it was clear that they were loose ends. I and Ted Price established another investigative unit which had the title Special Investigative Unit, which succeeded Sandy Grimes and Vertefeille’s group, who did Ames, and Laine Bannerman was put in charge of that. When Ed got there, he found Laine in charge of it. Some of the things we’re going to talk about later is that that obviously didn’t work.
Cindy Webb:
Laine Bannerman is a principal source of Bob Baer’s in this book and why there’s so much disinformation in it. We’ll go through it now.
Paul Redmond:
The first sort of falsehood, that we put this label on, is this business of the November 1994 briefing, which is here because it’s important, and two, everybody seems to focus on it. This is where Laine allegedly, according to the book, gave a briefing with Ed and myself present and other people, that clearly from the “matrix” pointed to me as a spy. And in the best way of writing a movie script, they described that I dashed out and slammed the door or something.
Well, first of all, I will freely admit I’ve walked out on meetings with Mr. Gerber once in a while, and from people in the room who were really stupid, but I have no recollection at all of that meeting and I very much doubt that I stormed out, I probably left.
That briefing in and of itself raises some questions. If she knew they were going to point to me as the spy, why the hell did they invite me to the meeting? Did she ever report this to Ed, for whom she worked with? Or her direct supervisors Cindy and John? As far as we know, we don’t have access to CIA’s logs obviously, there’s no indication she did. And lastly, I’m going to turn this to Cindy, who gives some view of what was in that briefing.
Cindy Webb:
We don’t have enough time, frankly, to go into all the twists and turns of the different lead elements that go in the book. And I don’t want to waste your time because most of them are horse manure. But the bottom line takeaway is this briefing-which none of the principles that are named in it can remember, that supposedly fingered Paul as the spy, which we would have known about since we were looking-the lead elements they were talking about were largely FBI Agent Robert Hanssen.
There was confusion in 1994 that it might be someone in the CIA because FBI doesn’t like to look at the FBI. But in fact, fast forward to 2000 and ultimately the arrest in 2001 and some brilliant work by some people in this audience. We got the forensic evidence. But this lead we’ve been looking for that they said could only be could only be Paul Redmond was in fact Robert Hanssen. A lot more behind that. I’m going to leave that for our subsequent discussions because we don’t have time. That’s the key takeaway here. And Paul walked out of many meetings pissed off and many of us had chunks taken out of us as a result. But it wasn’t because he was a spy.
Edward Curran:
Let me just add also that Bannerman alleges that I was at that meeting. I don’t remember one iota of that meeting either. And if I was there, then the presentation was pretty bad because I have no memory of it.
Cindy Webb:
But the bottom line, too, is, generally speaking, you don’t invite the primary subject of a spy investigation to your briefing.
There are so many mistakes in this book for those of us that lived it. We’ve just distilled it down to five because these seem to be the five principal ones that tried to frame Paul when you look at it, but lest you think that’s all the mistakes there is, we could go on and on.
Paul Redmond:
The next category is the allegation that I had a “vendetta” against Laine Bannerman’s SIU, that group, because I was afraid they were catching up with me and were about to or had identified me as a spy. So they claimed in the book that I set out to destroy them, get rid of them. They also, of great significance, claim in the book that I closed down the institution of the Special Investigative Unit, and I got Laine removed from the SIU. Cindy and Ed are going to talk briefly about how that’s completely untrue.
Cindy Webb:
That is completely untrue. That SIU as an institution continued to do brilliant work for at least the next 20 years, and I pray to God it’s still there. Tremendous counterintelligence and Russian experts that work together with the Bureau and ultimately we’ll talk later about the Nicholson case, which was a great example of the work they did.
This doesn’t get explained very well in the book, but the three people who had originally been assigned to the SIU, their work was essentially to do a file review after the Ames case. What do we have left that we can’t account for in Ames? For that kind of work, they could do brilliant work looking at all kinds of old Russian cases and figuring out where the anomalies were.
But then we started to get some very amazing source information that told us we had more real problems in the IC. And so all of a sudden, you had to move from what was an analytic kind of counterintelligence review to extremely complex counterintelligence espionage investigations with the Bureau which required a different skill set. The three people we had, it became increasingly clear, did not have the mindset or the skillset to evolve into what needed to be done, which resulted in a few clashes, as I recall.
Anyway, we could go on with more on that, but in the interest of time, I won’t. Instead of closing down the SIU, as this book says, we found somebody else to lead it: Mary Sommer, a superb reports officer from CE Division, who just had an amazing ability, as many reports officers have learned to do, to work across the Intelligence Community to take a lot of analytic information and figure out how to help each other. She did a brilliant job.
So the SIU did NOT close down. In fact, we tripled the resources in that unit, and they did brilliant work. Lots of people can attest to that.
Paul Redmond:
I need to add to that, the specific book claim that I got Ms. Bannerman fired. The actual fact of it is that she was increasingly unwilling to cooperate and pass information from sources unmessed around with to Ed and Cindy. She became intolerable to many people. She didn’t want to let the FBI know anything that she didn’t approve of. The actual occasion for her being removed from that job was that she formally asked the head of CIC to be removed from under the supervision of Ed Curran, the Chief of the Counterespionage Group. That was the final straw, she had to go. Ed had been sent there by Presidential Decision Directive 24 to be from the Bureau to run the place and to know everything, and she wouldn’t go along with it. I, of course, approved after I heard what was going on with her wanting to leave. I didn’t have anything immediately to do with her being removed.
Cindy Webb:
In the book, it acts like she worked for Paul directly, and she probably thought she did because she ignored us most of the time, but that led to her removal.
Edward Curran:
What she actually wanted was CEG to work for her. That’s basically what she wanted.
Cindy Webb:
And not to cooperate with the Bureau. That was the big issue, too. I mentioned that the work of the SIU could best be seen in the just outstanding investigative work by FBI and CIA that led to the arrest of Harold James Nicholson in 1996. Ed wanted to mention a few things on that case because it shows how all these pieces came together, and instead of the amount of time it took to get to Ames, this was much more effective and eliminated Nicholson’s threat quickly.
Edward Curran:
The Nicholson case was one of the best cases I’ve ever worked, and I couldn’t be prouder of the FBI and the CIA work together on that case. We came up with him as a suspect as a result of the polygraph review program. And it wasn’t just a polygraph. Now you’re putting him under a microscope.
Paul was technically my boss. I ignored him a lot, but he still was my boss, and he was involved in all these issues. Anytime we came up with a tough issue such as Nicholson being back in CIA headquarters, we need to keep an eye on him. We had to develop somebody in his unit to liaison with us. We all sat down and reviewed everybody-it’s a big gamble when you go out and reach out to somebody. We got somebody who was very much influential in the prosecution. The cooperation between the CIA and FBI you cannot believe. The problem was, once Nicholson was under a suspect, a significant suspect, he put in a request to travel to Singapore.
This is a guy who taught countersurveillance techniques at the Farm. He was a teacher down at the Farm. What do we do? Do you let him go or you don’t let him go? We didn’t have enough yet for an espionage charge. Paul and I sat down to figure this out. I also was briefing DDCI George Tenet every week on this case, along with Paul at times and times without him.
We had a decision to make. Do we let him go or let the FBI approach him or neutralize him? Paul wanted to bring in the chief of station. If Paul wanted to send over an FBI surveillance team to surveill them, I was opposed to that because I didn’t think they would be capable of doing it with restrictions the Singapore’s have. The chief of station comes back, I sat down for 2 hours with him. We briefed him on the case. We asked them what Paul’s contention was that possibly the Singapore’s were infiltrated by the KGB. Very, very significant subject. He said that if we send over a surveillance team, they get made in a minute, and then we have a problem with jeopardizing the case, jeopardizing our relationship. The COS said he could do it. He had his own people doing the surveillance.
Nicholson got on the plane. The first day and the second day he was obviously involved in counterintelligence and countersurveillance activity. Paul was in the office, I was in the office, along with Cindy and John. We were on the line with the chief of station. Again Nicholson does countersurveillance, our people see him walk into the Russian Embassy in Singapore. We had our guy-we knew this was the bad guy.
So now the FBI had total charge of this full-fledge FBI investigation. They came back and they did a marvelous job. Remember if they did one mistake, Nicholson would be like Edward Lee Howard and be gone because he teaches this stuff. The FBI made many requests to us to do surveillance inside the building. John Turnicky and his people, you can’t believe what they were able to do. You heard the story about Nicholson standing on his desk looking in the ceiling. That’s where our camera was. We saw him at his desk copying classified information. But again Paul was involved in every aspect of that. George Tenet made the final decisions.
Paul Redmond:
Tell the story about George (then Deputy Director of the CIA).
Edward Curran:
Yes, Paul and I were sitting in the office discussing our opinions.
Paul Redmond:
I’m disagreeing violently.
Edward Curran:
Yeah, well that’s Paul. Tenet came into my office, which Paul gave me a nice four by four closet facility. We explained both sides of the story to Tenet and very legitimate things on both sides.
Paul Redmond:
Favoring Ed. And that was the case. From that time on the FBI obviously did their thing, and did no wrong.
Edward Curran:
Very successful process.
Paul Redmond:
There’s a salient point to that brief story. In this bloody book, Baer says that the 7th floor of CIA didn’t have any interest looking for a mole. We had the DDCI coming down and sitting in Ed’s office moderating between the two of us. If there isn’t a better example of 7th floor tactical involvement of counterintelligence, I can’t think of one.
Cindy Webb:
The book also said that Nicholson was just a small little case and it would deviate and take our resources away from this other big spy, the “master spy”. But we got it all done. We weren’t a one-trick pony. That was the new SIU that did that brilliant work with the FBI.
Edward Curran:
I’m just finishing up my tour with the CEG and had to get back to the FBI headquarters. It was a tremendous three years I had working with Cindy, John and all the other people. I went back to FBI Headquarters as the Section Chief of the Russian Section. I knew every case we had worked, every case we’re working, and any future cases. Paul’s name was never ever mentioned. So I just want to make that public.
Paul Redmond:
The next category is they accuse me of being an absolutely brilliant machiavellian puppeteer running back pocket operations to protect myself. Finding out information so I could channel it to be sure that that I could prevent anything from getting to other people, presumably, from sources that might implicate me. That’s absolute rubbish. Mike Sulick is going to talk in general on that subject.
Michael Sulick:
I can give one specific incident because when I was reading this book, I saw myself mentioned a number of times in one story which it supposedly supports the author’s assertion that Paul is the master puppeteer. I was returning to CIA Headquarters with the tape of information from very important Russian agent and Russian counterintelligence. We didn’t put anything in cable traffic about this. I literally just carried this back.
The incident is partly true, yes, Paul did intercept me at the airport. However, he was accompanied by the Division Chief responsible for Russia Central Eurasian Division, Bill Lofgren. After which I remember this very well: I was still dressed in my shabby traveling clothes and the two of them insisted that they were going to whisk me immediately to headquarters to brief the Director and Executive Director, which I did brilliantly in my shabby clothes after my long flight.
But that aside, clearly no rogue operations master puppeteers in that story. In general, cases involving Russian intelligence officers, especially the counterintelligence nature, were always compartmented and Paul introduced even more severe compartmentation measures in these cases.
But the book saying that he alone could control all operations is virtually impossible.
Frankly, a junior case officer on the street meeting an agent has more ability to manipulate an operation-embezzle money from the case, falsify information-than people up the line going all the way to the head of counterintelligence, Paul in this case. It’s just simply impossible. There are too many very narrowly compartmented cases and there are still other people involved with a say in this. I sat at many meetings on these particular cases not only with Paul, but the chief of the Central Eurasian Division. They’re responsible for Russian operations. Sometimes they’re all the chief of stations, even the case officer. There’s finances involved, travel involved, all kept off the books. But still people know that.
The other thing I’ll just add to the end: Russians, of course as everybody in this room know, were very adept at running double agent cases against us, dangled cases consistently. Often when we got these leads, they were done to divert us from Ames or from Hanssen. So Paul raised suspicions about these cases. I certainly did. Others did as well. But Paul Redmond never ever, at least in my memory, ever said let’s just stop this operation, it’s too risky, they’re trying to fool us and so on. We have to run this to ground. If Paul is bad and a mole and there’s a Russian intelligence officer with potential damaging information about a spy in the CIA, don’t you think Paul Redmond would have tried to kill that case if that was the matter? Obviously. So it kind of undercuts this whole silly argument in the book.
Paul Redmond:
Even though we’re short of time, I got to tell one great story that Burton will remember, the so-called Mr. X case in the book where I was allegedly running out of my pocket. A station gloriously screwed up the reporting of a walk-in, potentially a very important walk-in, and infuriated the then DDO Clair Elroy George to the degree that I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Burton Gerber and I get summoned to his office and in a very profane, loud way by Clair said get on an airplane today and get over there and take care of that. It turned out to be a dangle, a misinformation operation. But the point about this whole business of back pocket nonsense is that they cite Mr. X as one of my back pocket operations. In actual fact that case was run personally by Clair George the DDO in a very loud, highly profane way to me directly for its entire duration and I certainly wasn’t running it out of my back pocket.
Cindy Webb:
Last point on that particular issue, they make a big mistake trying to blame Paul as the master puppeteer, but in fact it was a time when we had to have tremendous compartmentation because we had Ames, until that was identified, and after that we knew we had other problems. So what the sources in the book were seeing was a thoughtful compartmentation so that we could recruit new spies that could identify the problem areas that we had.
Paul Redmond:
On the subject of the alleged briefing to DDO Ted Price is very important.
Cindy Webb:
So many parts f this story that I’m going to have to condense and save for a later day. I was Ted’s Executive Assistant during the Ames case and knew him quite well. He sent me down to work for Ed with John and canceled my overseas assignment in the process, but I forgave him on that.
The issue here was, Laine Bannerman claims when no one paid attention to her November 1994 SIU briefing, she found a way to get up and brief Ted Price at six in the morning, which is suspicious in and of itself. That he didn’t say anything when she went through her matrix, but the two of them “could tell looking at each other that it could only be Paul.”
Now I don’t know about you, but if I just had briefed someone at the DDO level that was the Chief of Clandestine Service and told him his Chief of Counterintelligence was a spy or provided evidence to such, he would have been out of his chair and there would have been all kinds of stuff happening. None of that happened.
She claims he never did anything with it for four months. I got regular phone calls from DDO Ted Price on various issues, as did Ed. Price is just coming off the Ames case and he’s going to sit on this for four months and not tell anybody? I don’t think that happened quite that way. That is just definitely not a correct part of the story. He is deceased now, sadly, so he can’t provide commentary, but there’s just nothing true about that story and there are several other pieces that make me think that. But we’re out of time.
Paul Redmond:
We don’t need to talk about the lack of management interest in searching for a spy because we alluded to that. Mike, do you want to do the $64,000 question to end this?
Michael Sulick:
To sum up, in a sense for what you’ve heard today: Paul Redmond established the mechanisms in the CIA that would have caught Paul Redmond the spy. So by establishing those mechanisms, if he was a spy, in fact, he’d be suicidal. I don’t think he is.
The other issue is, any author writing a book on the murky world of counterintelligence gets into the trap that you don’t have access to the full universe of information that others have. Baer fell into that trap and he makes a sweeping statement that because of the fourth man, whoever it is, Russian operations were totally destroyed, destroyed for years, still destroyed and so on.
The fact of the matter is, there were cases that were not compromised at all. Baer actually mentioned two of them in the book, Max and Adolf. If Paul Redmond, who had access to all these cases because of his position, was a mole, they all would have presented a potential threat to him. Even Rick Ames knew enough about that, that he decided he had to compromise intelligence officers and Russian intelligence cases because they could expose his identity. Hanssen, same thing. Paul Redmond with his background in counterintelligence certainly would have known that.
So how did these cases survive? Makes no sense, logically. If I was a spy, I would have definitely compromised them. So that’s kind of my bottom line on this that makes the books premise totally nonsensical.
Paul Redmond:
Thanks, Mike. I don’t know how much time we can have for questions, but fire away.
Paula Doyle:
Paul, everyone, thank you for coming here. Thank you for debunking the five points. My question is, what can CIRA, what can other organizations do to help you at this point? What’s the next step? Where are you going with this?
Paul Redmond:
Very quickly, we realize it took us a long time out of the box as I said earlier. What we’re going to do now is, we’ve got cleared by CIA a huge body of material and analysis. We’re going to apply that. I think there are four or five articles. Al Messer has got one out there to be published in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. We’re going to probably do a series of podcasts, whatever we can figure out to do. And that’s as far as we got into being more public. As far as talking to the media, we’re going to have to belay talking to the media directly for a while.
I’m supposed to remind people that I’ve retained counsel and I am considering and pursuing all the possibilities. Full stop.
Cindy Webb:
Paula, you raised a great question to me, having been seeped in the Life and Times of Paul Redmond for the last four months, which I didn’t think would happen in retirement as we tried to sort this mess out. I think there may be the need for some kind of legislation. This goes beyond Paul. This affects everybody in this room and beyond. Somebody can falsely accuse you and then what do you do? It’s miserable and we got to stop it. There’s no legislation to stop it, but maybe there’s some opportunities, and I’d like to get people’s views on this.
Jeff Daniel, Documentary Producer:
Thank you very much for this talk and the information you’re presenting. One of the central questions in the book was whether all of the leaks that were not able to be accounted for by Aldrich Ames’s arrest were accounted for? So you addressed this a little bit earlier with the Nicholson case and with Bob Hanssen later on, but I wonder if you could address the question of were there any further leaks that were not able to be accounted for by all of those arrests, or were all of those leaks able to be wrapped up by those arrests? Were there any remaining?
Paul Redmond:
Cindy is going to answer that because I retired in 1997 and a lot of work was done and things were resolved. I would only answer first what Cindy was going to say in detail, there are always going to be leads that you don’t get to the bottom of.
Cindy Webb:
I think pretty much Paul said it in the interest of time. Let me just say I was Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence from 2006 to 2011. We are penetrated. We always will be penetrated, there’s no question about that as a government-that’s just the fact of life. The key question here is Paul a spy? No. That resolved itself-those particular leads resolved itself, no question, with Robert Hanssen. Were there other leftovers? You bet. Always are, always are. People are diligently looking across all different agencies. It’s enormously complex that most people in this room know. But that’s my fundamental answer. CI officers are never going to be out of business.
Paul Redmond:
I would only add that some of you may not have heard Redmond’s Law quote Senator Redmond’s Law: “It’s an actuarial certainty there are going to be spies in your government agencies.” And that has to be valid because it even got quoted in The New York Times.
Questioner:
A key player throughout the book is Billy Lofgren. So how does he fit into all this? Because Baer went to work with South Group and Bannerman supposedly continues the investigation after she had been moved to CE division. So where does he play into this?
Paul Redmond:
I’ve known Billy for years. I replaced him in Athens. I inherited a branch doing three RH cases that Billy started, he was a good officer. I don’t know what is driving Billy psychologically. There’s a lot in the book about he wants to make me lose sleep and stuff. He obviously doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. And why he came to the conclusion that I was a spy, I have no idea. But if you read the book, he apparently inspired Baer to take this all on. I can’t answer what is going through Billy’s head.
Cindy Webb:
I also mentioned timelines are critically important. Billy retired in 1996. All the stuff that subsequently happened, Billy was gone-he had no access combined with unhappiness.
John Colem:
Well, thank you. First of all, good morning, and it’s great to see AFIO back. Second of all, I have a quick comment and then a question. My name is John Colem. I’m a former Australian liaison officer to this Community. The comment is, having worked as just as closely with our British friends as with our American friends, I need to tell you that the fourth man was Sir Anthony Blunt. [lots of laughter]
My question is, as a former human factors guy, I would be interested to hear the thoughts and even speculations from the panel as to the motivations both of the author of this book and of the people who provided him with information. What do you think their motivations were?
Paul Redmond:
I never really heard about Baer’s career. I knew Bobby, but look, he’s trying to write another book. He says he’s writing a “spy thriller” and he’s trying to write a book that portrays these ladies, these great fighters against the institution, which would make a great movie. And he can get another movie and spend even more time with big time famous actors, plus make money by selling a book. Mike has a great story. You want to tell the story about your neighbor’s reaction to the book?
Michael Sulick:
I have a good high school friend. His wife saw the book at the bookstore and having seen the movie The Third Man, she thought it was a sequel. She bought the book and believing it was fiction and read it until she came to my name. She thought it was kind of odd that they used Mike Sulick’s name as a character. It’s an odd surname. Why would they use that as a character? Her husband said, no, that’s the Mike Sulick that we know, the book is nonfiction. So they called me about it. I said, by the way, you obviously didn’t even know it was nonfiction, what did you think of the book? She said it was hard to follow and it wasn’t really as suspenseful as The Third Man at all. I imagine a lot of people react to the book that way. I have to tell you, I had problems following it and I know all the players in the book and I know pretty much all the incidents.
Gil Kindelan:
We haven’t really looked at what you’re planning to do and what’s wrong with what the book says. All of us, or I should say maybe not all of us, but a lot of us have had real issues with CIA’s Pre-Publications Review in getting things approved. How did this get approved in the first place? Do you have any idea?
Cindy Webb:
They just approved the 60 page paper Paul and I put together, so we’re going to figure out what to do with that. They’re very adamant and I support them on this, they are not the truth police. First Amendment, we should be able to write and their role is to get it approved for classification. They do not obviously comment on whether it’s right or wrong. It was unfortunate in this case that somebody didn’t raise their hand and say ‘wait a minute, we’re accusing a fellow officer of treason, and by the way, the book helps our enemies by putting this stuff out there.’ It’s unfortunate that that didn’t get addressed. As far as the classification review, I’m horrified, as an intelligence professional, as I’m sure many of you are, that so much of this got declassified. I hope someday to have that conversation with people. So far, they haven’t asked us.
Mark Kelton:
I don’t really have a question, just a comment. I was the Chief/CIC after Cindy, so I can second the view that we by that time had run down most of the leads that derived from Ames and led us to Ames and Hanssen. Second thing I’d say is that when I went out to Russia, we were running cases, running activities that wouldn’t have been allowed to run had Paul Redmond been a spy.
I was a junior officer under Paul. He was always demanding, in fact, he was a pain in the ass. I also inherited a number of his cases. They were always well done. But he put in place the plumbing that led us not only to Ames, but to Hanssen. And I can say that pretty definitively.
One final comment. Before I went out to Russia, two of the sources in this book approached me and said they wanted to brief me privately on a matter. They raised Paul and they said Paul must be a mole. And I said, well, we’re f’d if Paul’s a mole, A. And B., we’re running activities out in Moscow that we wouldn’t be allowed to run if Paul was the mole. These people . . . . you know my dad always said to me, honor is the only thing in life that can’t be taken from you. Only you can give it up. The people behind this have given up their honor. They have besmirched the honor of everybody here. It’s not only Paul, but everybody. We owe it to Paul and we owe it to ourselves to push back on this in every way we can.
Paul Redmond:
Thank you.
Cindy Webb:
I would be remiss if I let a chance go, to say what the real story here is about. The real story is about Paul as a national treasure. It is also about the CIA officers, the FBI officers and the rest of the IC that learned the lessons from Ames, came together, figured out a better way to do Team America and fight our adversaries. That’s what the story is about. And I hope that journalists and Hollywood folks here will take the opportunity to reflect on some of this and help us tell the real story of the great professionals that do this tough work.