It is now May 2023.
Had anyone told me a year ago that I would be party to building a website about me, I would have told them they were expletive deleting crazy.
When I retired about 25 years ago from CIA, I had no intention of continuing in the business.
Nonetheless after I retired, I did a little bit of business consulting trying to help rather stupid American companies protect their secrets.
I also served as a consultant to the House Intelligence Committee, and served briefly, and not very successfully, in the brand-new Department of Homeland Security.
Over the years I was also involved in doing damage assessments for spy cases such as Robert Hanssen and Parlor Maid.
I also lectured a bit and did quite a few TV appearances, usually in connection with some big flap when a spy was caught.
Not having, in any way, a case of what is called “Potomac Fever,” I desired to move out of Washington, DC as quickly as possible.
Given my family’s rather deep roots in Massachusetts, that took about 12 years and we moved to Marblehead, MA about 13 years ago.
I also had no desire to become a long-term talking head and frankly view that role with some distaste particularly when one has been out of the business quite a long time and has only dated knowledge of what is really going on. (How in the name of all that is holy would I have any idea what is going to happen to Putin?)
Once we moved to Marblehead, I did no TV with one exception where I had a chance, given the subject, to take a good swipe at one of the dumber HPSCI members of the past. Thus with the exception of lecturing to rather dreary classes at Boston University about “counterintelligence,” I was also almost completely out of touch with former colleagues and the intelligence business in general.
Hence a year ago, I was happily living very quietly, very comfortably on the water in the lovely town of Marblehead, which despite its 20,000 population still has a small, declining core of real Americans, Yankees, who are being driven out by the higher and higher taxes imposed by the newcomers who build more and educational Taj Mahals for their Yuppie Puppies. This declining minority is supplemented by a marvelously diverse and extremely interesting group of Europeans who have settled here.
This rather idyllic, civilized way of life was rather rudely interrupted by several phone calls about a year ago from such good friends as Jim Risen, Michelle Van Cleave and Cindy Kwitchoff.
I was informed that some “intelligence website” of which I had never heard and cannot now remember the name, was carrying a review of a book which named me as a spy.
The book was called The Fourth Man by one Robert Baer. I recalled that Mr. Baer, whose name I vaguely remembered from the Agency, had called me and we had talked about spies and a bit about myself; and a trip I had taken after retirement to Moscow on business.
From that conversation, I had no idea Mr. Baer was writing his book in a way to make the case that I was a spy. In fact, I even invited him to visit us here, were he ever on the East Coast.
The past year has been largely taken up by coping with this book, the legal ramifications, and working with a large number of former intelligence officers to write, get cleared and publish reviews and studies which effectively demolish the book at a substantive level.
At the beginning when Cindy Kwitchoff and I talked, she said you must have a website. When I reacted rather negatively to that idea, she explained that unless you get your story out there, whenever someone searches your name on the internet in the future, search results will show only stories about the book saying you’re a spy.
She cited Roger Hollis, a former head of MI-5 accused in a book of being a Russian spy. Despite official statements by Her Majesty’s Government that he was not a spy, searches of his name now years later raise the spy issue right up front.
More or less abandoning my usual stance of “I do not give a _____ what they say about me so long as they spell my name right,“ I have agreed to develop a website with Cindy, who not only knows the spy business but is a marvelous expert on building websites and maintaining them.
Thus we are embarking on this website to which the above is by way of background and introduction.
Finally, it must be clearly understood that this website in no way should be considered as competition to the work of David Major’s website, CICENTRE.COM. He is by far the preeminent expert on spy cases and counterintelligence in general.
PLANS
Following is a brief description of what we plan this website will contain; and what may or may not appear– depending on time and resources.
A longer, more detailed podcast version of the group discussion of the book we had at an AFIO lunch.
A podcast interview of me, my background, and career which undoubtedly will contain probably excessive expression of my views and prejudices on counterintelligence and the USA’s incandescent incompetence in the field.
Continued discussion of Mr. Baer’s book with concentration now on his capabilities as a “reporter” of what he says he has been told.
As complete as possible a presentation of the reviews and commentary of the book which have been published elsewhere.
A podcast-adapted lecture I put together and gave to American companies years ago about a fascinating, completely domestic commercial espionage case where an individual, following the classic steps of spotting, assessing, developing and fully recruiting–completely by email with only one personal contact suborned an employee of another company and stole all of that company’s proprietary information.
A gentlemanly podcast debate between myself and David Major on the mutual disaffinities between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.
IDEAS, POSSIBILITIES
A symposium with a DC institution to discuss the pathological phenomenon of what we might call the Angleton syndrome: what causes intelligence officers to get stuck on the conviction that someone is a spy even when there is no convincing information he is.
This would cover the Angleton era, Roger Hollis, Brian Kelly, myself and two other cases, one in Canada and one that apparently occurred in Australia. It might also include the Dreyfus case, (which has always been cast in terms of anti-Semitism) if any relevant data can be found in Europe hundreds of years later.
It is important to look at this phenomenon not just because of the damage it has done to humans but also the disastrous effects it can have on an intelligence organization.
It has been for years constantly stated that Angleton led to the complete paralysis of CIA’s Soviet operations.
However, no one apparently has looked at the equally disastrous overreaction to Angleton which amounted to the almost complete destruction of counterintelligence in CIA’s operations: Director Colby’s: “every CIA officer will be his own counterintelligence officer.”
It can rationally be argued that this idiotic mindset lead, for instance, to the risible situation where all the DO’s putative human East German and Cuban operations were controlled.
Using a large pile of unclassified lecture notes found recently in a closet, a rather long podcast lecture on my prejudices on counterintelligence which asks the basic question of “Why are Americans so stupid regarding counterintelligence?” and provides my answer.
Almost all of the retired officers who have helped us deal substantively with Mr. Baer’s book experienced the firestorm after Ames’s was arrested and participated in building a very strong counterintelligence capability in CIA based on full cooperation with the FBI.
During the course of coping with Mr. Baer’s book we have had no dealings with the FBI and only fleeting, indirect glimpses of CIA.
We have, however, come to the conclusion that many of the elements of an effective counterintelligence capability so many of us worked so hard to establish post-Ames have been eliminated or diluted—including Congressional mandates and a PDD. We possess from that era a great deal of data and given time a resources may air that issue publicly.