How The Stories of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 7

How The Stories of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 7

With the passing of nineteen sixty-six the hunt for traitors within the Central Intelligence Agency continued rapidly expanding. Greater targets brought a renewed vigor to assess each in a growing pool of potential victims chosen using the loose parameters set by prized KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. The desperate search undertaken by the Counterintelligence Staff Special Investigations Group (CISIG) had now consumed significant Agency resources for years while displacing and ending the careers of multiple loyal officers. Several instances of contrived guilt were feasibly due to CISIG gazing too long at the shadows cast by legitimate defectors, employees, and officers. When a detail struck investigators as relevant they often became convinced of deviltry at work in spite of the contrary facts. All this occurred in the name of a hunt unleashed by James Angleton and his subordinates many years earlier for a forever elusive penetration agent…

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How The Stories Of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 6

How The Stories Of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 6

Within the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination the Central Intelligence Agency had internally declared Lee Harvey Oswald guilty within forty-eight hours.i The Federal Bureau of Investigation granted the alleged shooter seventy-two hours before its determination of guilt the same day Jack Ruby shot Oswald. American intelligence groups were desperate to find an expedient solution and their suspect’s inability to defend himself was ideal. However, some within the CIA’s leadership believed this had to be another Soviet plot and Oswald was cast in the role of Soviet agent. Such ideas endangered the US government’s allegations that Oswald acted by himself but those not privately endorsing this idea became suspects in Central Intelligence Agency’s hunt for traitors…

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How The Stories Of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 5

How The Stories Of These Soviet Cold War Defectors Reveal The Intelligence Abyss pt. 5

As the calendar fell upon the days of late 1962, the mole hunt inside Western intelligence began to expand within the United States. Fears of disinformation, false defectors, and the assumption of a traitor within its ranks began to internally damage the Central Intelligence Agency. Official attempts to discover and track disloyal intelligence employees had yet to render any solid leads or suspects. The effort to seek turncoats within the US intelligence community gained momentum with each new accusation and it began to spread. Other nations soon would be influenced by America’s search for penetration agents based upon the claims of a single defector…

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