Here’s a longish excerpt from Craig Unger’s excellent 2021 book, American Kompromat, about how we ended up with a Russian agent as our “President.”
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The mere suggestion of a Russian asset in the Oval Office called to mind The Manchurian Candidate, the classic 1962 movie depicting brainwashing and mind control as a means for communists to seize power. In other words, the kind of paranoia that is often dismissed as the stuff of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. But what if a version of the Manchurian Candidate’s nightmarish scenario really did take place, not in the same way, of course, but with Donald Trump? What if the Soviets had groomed Trump as an asset who eventually found his way into the White House? What if they had approached Trump long ago -- not as someone destined to be president but as one of many assets they carefully cultivated -- and somehow or other they had hit the jackpot? What if they had installed an operative in the Oval Office without firing a single shot, executing the most devastatingly effective attack on American sovereignty in plain sight? Those questions were posed by Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer, sometime around January 2016, ten months before the presidential election. By that time, Karl was deeply alarmed by the various connections he saw between Trump's team and the Russians, but he wasn't sure who to talk to. He had served 23 years in the clandestine service in European, Balkan, and political-military affairs, but now that he was retired and growing organic tomatoes in New England, he no longer had standing in Langley, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. “I was really hopping up and down about this” he told me. “I couldn't sit here without telling someone that we're about to have the Manchurian Candidate story realized!” For all the mystique of the CIA, Carle lived in a world very much based on empirical reality, and it was jarring to be thrust into such a shadowy, paranoid universe. Part of the problem was that the question itself was so horrifying, so dire, that no one wanted to take it seriously. The natural response was that this can't be so. That it can't happen here. Anxious to alert authorities, he reached out to a former ambassador, someone from an oversight committee, and a colleague or two in the agency. Those who were no longer serving in the government shared his alarm when he described his assessment, but no one on the inside responded to him. Finally, Carle talked to another retired CIA official, someone who was considerably older and who'd had ample experience with Soviet operations. “And he said, ‘at the end of the 1960s we were concerned about what we called The Monster Plot.'” The Monster Plot was a theory propagated by James JESUS* Angleton [emphasis added], the famed Cold Warrior and chief counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975 who had become notorious for his obsessive athlete Ahab-like pursuit of the notion that the Soviets had placed an asset at the very top of the CIA or in the US intelligence community and that they would put someone in place at the highest levels of the executive branch. In the course of his quest, Angleton came to personify a powerful dark component of American culture, the deranged and paranoid Cold War mole hunter fanatically searching for real or imagined spies planted in the heart of the CIA and deception plots aimed at the American government. In a country where elemental questions remain unanswered about what the government does behind closed doors Angleton’s dark pursuits suggested a cosmic hole at the center of the American psyche and helped define the genre of spy books and movies including Norman Mailer’s Harlot's Ghost and Jefferson Morley's biography The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James JESUS* Angleton [emphasis added], as well as movies such as The Good Shepherd. Few people questioned Angleton's brilliance, but according to a 2011 article in Studies in Intelligence, the paranoia that was such an elemental part of his theories paralyzed CIA operations against the Soviets for almost two decades because he “became convinced that the KGB had penetrated CIA at high levels .... Angleton took the position that virtually every major Soviet defector or volunteer was a KGB provocation. His studies of a single Soviet defector sometimes went on for ages. In the intelligence academies of the Soviet Union trainees, delighted in studying Angleton because he had paralyzed his CIA for so long. Though the CIA devoted enormous resources to get to the bottom of it, in the end, Angleton, who died in 1987, came up empty-handed. After decades of analyzing his data, the CIA concluded that his theories were not feasible. He had been wrong. The Monster Plot was still a sore point with the agency even fifty years later, and as a result, Carle’s friend warned him that it had torn apart the agency. Nevertheless, when the call was over, Carle had persuaded him to poke around a bit. After all, it would be surprising if the Russians didn't try to place an asset as high as possible in the American government. There was already plenty of evidence that Russian intelligence had focused enormous amounts of attention on Trump, his family members, and people who had access to him. Carle’s friend made a few calls and finally got back to him. “Times have changed,” the old hand said.” It is conceivable now.”
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My comments:
First, the asterisks:
James Angleton (whose mother was Mexican) didn’t like his middle name, Jesús, and never used it, so it’s easy to tell when a writer thinks Angleton considered himself something special.
Now, the caveats:
Caveat # 1. As former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and NSA officer John M. Newman shows in his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole (which he dedicated to Yuri Nosenko’s primary CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley), the “mole” that Angleton was searching for all those years was probably none other than his Kim Philby-like confidant and mentor, Bruce Leonard Solie, CIA’s “droll, plodding, risk-averse” primary mole hunter in the mole-hunting Office of Security. (Newman also seems to suspect Nosenko-protecting Leonard V. McCoy in the Soviet Russia Division’s Report’s & Requirements section, as do I). It seems that Angleton foolishly confided to Solie everything that KGB true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling him about possible KGB/GRU penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies, and Solie forwarded the important stuff to highly placed KGB moles in French Intelligence and/or to a peregrinating KGB officer by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal (aka Mikhail S. Rogov, the former KGB chief in Paris), who in turn forwarded the intel to Nosenko’s boss in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Gribanov, so that, for example, Nosenko’s “legend” could be tailored and made more effective against Angleton and Golitsyn when he “defected-in-place” in Geneva in June 1962.
Solie, of course, “cleared” Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam (one of the worst ones that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen, according to his 1979 HSCA testimony) and a specious report (which Bagley tears apart in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games). It also just so happens that Solie and McCoy, with help from CIA’s Cynthia Hausmann — who later helped reverse the CIA’s and the FBI’s assessments of Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) to what they unfortunately are today, i.e., that he really was spying for the FBI’s NYC field station — managed to lose GRU defector Nikolas Artemonov / Nicholas Shadrin to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that Nosenko, a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in 1962, was a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to support, through the likes of Kulak (FEDORA), Boris Orekhov (SHAMROCK) and Igor Kochnov (KITTYHAWK), because he was telling the CIA and the FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear — that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB case officer in Moscow (how lucky for the CIA and the FBI!!!) and that he therefore knew for a fact that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the “abnormal”-looking former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.
Newman also says Solie sent, or duped Angleton into sending, Oswald to Moscow in late 1959 as an ostensible “dangle” in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for Popov’s Mole* / Popov’s U-2 Mole* (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA — the Soviet Russia Division — which mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the SRD apart, and drove Angleton . . . well . . . . . paranoiac! Newman supports his theory that Solie sent Oswald to Moscow on the fact that all of the incoming non-CIA cables (e.g., from State and Navy) on LHO’s defection were routed to his department in the Office of Security rather than to where they should gone — the aforementioned Soviet Russia Division — and that this diversion had to be arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics. In his 1995/2008 book, Oswald and the CIA, Newman points out that these incoming non-CIA cables disappeared into a “black hole” in Solie’s office for at least six weeks, and that some of them didn’t surface until after the assassination of JFK.
*Popov’s Mole — Bagley shows in Spy Wars that CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col Pyotr, was uncovered by the Soviets in early 1957 when a high-level KGB officer by the name of Vladislav Kovshuk met with a CIA “mole” in Washington, D. C., movie houses. Bagley thought this “mole” was recently fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith (Popov’s honey-trapped incompetent dead drop setter-upper in Moscow), but Newman believes it was Solie, and that Smith just provided logistical support).
*Popov’s U-2 Mole” — According to former high-level CIA officer William Hood in his book, Mole, Popov told his CIA handler, George Kisevalter, in West Berlin in April 1958 that he’d recently overheard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin had all of the top-secret specifications of the U-2 spy plane. When this intel reached Solie and Angleton, it was incumbent on them to mount a hunt for the leaker (most likely Solie, who had access to the U-2’s secrets in the Office of Security). Solie convinced Angleton that the mole had to be in the Soviet Russia Division.
Caveat #2: The term “Monster Plot” refers to true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn’s trying to warn the CIA and the FBI that the KGB was waging a deception-based Master Plan against them and our NATO allies. The clever expression “Monster Plot” was created by Nosenko-protecting John L. Hart to ridicule Angleton’s and Golitsyn’s ostensible “paranoia.” Golitsyn’s “Master Plan” (which he helped to create) went into effect in 1959 when the Kremlin, having realized that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact couldn’t defeat the U.S. and NATO militarily, decided to defeat us by waging Sun Tzu-like deception, “active measures,” and “Inside Man” / “Outside Man” strategic deception counterintelligence operations.
Caveat #3:
Hmmm.
I’ll think of something . . .
Ah ha!
Here it is:
On page 14, Craig starts talking about “former” KGB officer Oleg Kalugin in a positive light.
Note: I put the word in “scare” quotes because it’s impossible for me to believe that Kalugin isn’t still Kremlin-loyal when he says (elsewhere; not in AK) that Yuri Nosenko and Vitaly Yurchenko were true defectors, that Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA) was really spying for the FBI, and that Bagley’s book, Spy Wars, is “trash.”
PS Bagley’s book and his 2014 follow-up article can be read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously” and “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.”
