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Book Review: The Molehunt

by Bill Uttenweiler
The Aerospace Corporation
Vandenberg AFB, CA

A bright flame draws a moth. Likewise, failures by the intelligence community draw CIA critic David Wise. He selects stories of failure or abuse, so he does not "balance" books with stories of CIA. However, if you want to learn from past mistakes, Wise is an excellent source to study.

Molehunt recounts the paranoia triggered in December 1961 after KGB officer Anatoly Mikhailovich Golitsin asked the CIA Station Chief in Helsinki, Finland, for political asylum. Flown to the United States, Golitsin told debriefers the KGB had a mole ("Sasha") inside the CIA. The turncoat’s real last name began with a "K"; he was of Slavic descent; he had previously served in Germany.

At first suspicion fell on Serge Peter Karlow, who seemed to fit the description. When an investigation failed to turn up anything, he was questioned for a week by the FBI. Those agents wrote a report exonerating him, but the CIA hid it from Karlow. Instead it forced him to leave since he could not prove his innocence.

If Karlow wasn’t the spy, how about intelligence officer Richard "Dushan" Kovich? Or Igor Orlov, a German agent captured after World War II whose CIA cover names had included Franz Koischwitz and Alexander Kopatzky? If Orlov was the mole, was Peter Garbler who handled him for a time clean?

As time went on, the investigation spun our of control. CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton allegedly told the French that David E. Murphy, who was transferring from Chief of the Soviet Division at CIA Headquarters to the CIA Station Chief in Paris, was a mole. Before long, Angleton’s deputy reasoned that no mole could be more destructive than Angleton was, so the deputy opened a case on him! In all, 120 CIA officers fell under suspicion. Not only did the molehunt damage the careers of innocent citizens, it paralyzed the CIA’s ability to perform its primary mission—to spy on the Soviets.

The case had a happy ending, but only for a few of the victims. Recognizing that careers and lives had been unfairly ruined, the Agency quietly sponsored a provision in the FY 1980 appropriations bill called the "Mole Relief Act" to allow it to compensate officers it had wronged. Several of the victims, including Karlow and Kovich, eventually received cash and belated commendations.

An October 1993 CIA monograph available on the World Wide Web called Molehunt "well researched and smooth reading." It cautioned that "Because his sources did not have the complete ‘Sasha" story, however, Wise has presented a somewhat distorted account. Otherwise, the Wise books is accurate and can serve as useful cautionary take for management."

At the end of Molehunt, Wise quotes retired spy-hunter N. Scotty Miler, "As far as we know, none of these people we investigated turned out to be spies." He didn’t mean there weren’t any, Miler explained, "It means we didn’t find one."

Reviewed: Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA by David Wise, New York: Random House, hardback, 309 pages, 1992, $22.

Webmaster's note: This article was originally written in July 1996 for the VSAC News and NCMS Channel Islands Newsletter.]