MOLES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000201930007-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 30, 2010
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: October 11, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/30: CIA-RDP90-00552R000201930007-1
THE NATION
11 October 1980
A ':I^.LE A P!!A.2 D
~
ON PAGE 3.a 14
- mt, oles
oles"--those most top-secret of secret agents
:=are-,all. the rage. these days. In Washing-
..._ligence is probing the case of an American
mole in the Kremlin named Anatoly N. Filato%', who was ex-
posed and possibly executed by the K.G.B.Edward Jay
Epstein, who wrote a .book describing how James Jesus
Angleton,. the former Central- Intelligence counterintelli-
gence chief, was fired by Director William_ Colby because of
his too-energetic,hunt for a Soviet mole, weighed in with an
article called "The Spy War" in The New York Times
Magazine of September 28. In his piece, Epstein says that,
although the Agency refuses to admit it, there are undoubt-
edly Soviet moles at this very moment punching the clock in
Langley. And all. this coincides with the showing on public
television of a dramatization of John Le Carne's novel
Tinker,. Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is about the efforts of a
drab British intelligence agent called George Smiley to dig
out a mole in the "Circus." Graham Greene also celebrated.
a mole in his recent 'novel, .The Human Factor, (The best
mole novels are by British writers-perhaps because British
moles tend to move in the same Oxbridge circles that British
writers do. Vide Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean-not to
mention the flamboyant Kim Philby,. who -knew everybody.
As did Anthony Blount, the most recently defrocked British
mole. Blount's ties reached beyond the old-boy network to
the royal family, a connection that proved quite valuable.
When he was found out,. he was treated like a gentleman and
the matter Kept Out of the Papers---until papers found out.
American moles tend to be- iron-U;?'colortess .people with
names like Bernon F. Mitchell A.66- William H. Ma'rti?i )
What differentiates moles from your Garden-variety spies
is their penetration into the upper reaches of the intelligence
hierarchy of a rival nation. So if the intelligence services. are
all doing their jobs, they have infested each other's com-
mand posts with moles: Thus, we have the K.G.B.'s moles
in the C.I.A_. telling Moscow that they know that we know
all about thus-and-such, while simultaneously telling the
C.I:A.: what the K.G.B. wants it to know. Meanwhile, in
Moscow, the C.I.A. mole is telling his control in Langley
that that last hot bit of intelligence from confidential agent
.Y was actually a K.G.B. concoction. As the channels of
communication back and forth become saturated with this
kind of stuff, each intelligence agency'will: eventually know
just about everything that its opposite number knows. Fur-
thermore, maybe one of these moles, having kept his nose,
clean, has even.worked his way up and is now running the
agency in which he was planted. Perhaps the C.I.A. is now
run by a Soviet mole and vice versa. In that case, instead of
purging only one section, as Angleton did in,his campaign
against Soviet moles in the C.I.A., the entire Agency should
be cashiered. We can see the headline now: "C.I.A. Fired as
Security Risk."
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/30: CIA-RDP90-00552R000201930007-1