POISONING SALT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91B00134R000400130027-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 4, 2009
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: May 1, 1979
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Article appeared
on page 10, 12
JEFF STEIN'
0
aaz SALT
HEN SENATOR HEJRT
Jackson (D-Wash.) told a
Houston audience on March
9 that he might not vote for SALT it be-
cause the loss of top-secret U.S. moni-
toring stations in Iran crippled the
ability to verify Soviet compliance
with the pact, he struck a blow at the
soft underbelly of the negotiations. A
poll published in Public Opinion maga-
zine, for example, had shown that the
major factor in a citizen's decision on
whether or not to support SALT tt was
whether or not he or she trusted the
government "to negotiate and enforce
a treatyin the best interests of theU.S."
(Emphasis added.) This. recognition
of the crucial role of verification to the
success of the treaty led Carter last
year to publicly admit, for the first
time, the existence of U.S. spy satellites.
An administration official replied to
Jackson in, the Washington Post, charg-
ing that the senator's assertions were
"premature and alarmist!' As the
President himself had said, there were
many other methods of verification.
But over the past six months, a flood
of espionage cases, books, and articles,
often with sensitive, inside information
(the release of which does not seem to
trouble the justice Department), has
undermined such assurances, particu-
larly in regard to the value of U. S.
spy satellite systems. These disclosures
come at a time when public opinion
on foreign policy issues has become
confused by right-wing charges that
the Soviet Union has taken advantage
of Carter's indecisiveness to make gains
throughout Asia. and Africa. The at-
mosphere` is ripe for. a new round of
scapegoating. Are hidden scriptwriters
at work; fashioning unanswerable
11 1 May 1979
charges of Soviet "moles" burrowing
into the top echelons of the CIA, using
those charges as blunt instruments to
forge a new and aggressively anticom-
munist foreign policy consensus?
That would appear to be the case,
and the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks (sAur) appear to be the immedi-
ate target.
AST NOVEMBER, A U. Si attorney was moved to remind
the jury in the espionage case of
William P. Kampiles that it was the
defendant who was on trial, not the
Central Intelligence Agency. Kam=
piles, apparently a disgruntled CIA
watch officer, had been arrested in
August for selling a supersecret KH-1 I
spy satellite manual to the ticB. Testi-
mony during the trial established that
seventeen other Kid-11 manuals were.
missing as well, and that the FBI had
been investigating the "possible com-
promise" of the system two and a half
months before it got onto the trail of
Kampiles. Questions of whether Kam-
piles had been.the "fall guy" in a com-
plicated KGB operation soon floated to
the surface.
Michael Lecleen, executive editor of
the Washington Quarterly, which reflects
the i-iews of its sponsor, the George-
town Center for Strategic and Inter-
national Affairs, offered this view:
"[T]he best-informed people in this
field-including more than one for-
mer CIA director-are privately saying
that the responsibility . . . may arise
more from the activities of a `mole'
than from incidents related by a slim
thread of chance."
One former CIA director, Richard
Helms, was more explicit. According
to the Washington Post, he said, "The
Kampiles case raises the question of
whether or not t'nere.has been infiltra-
tion of the U.S. intelligence commu-
nity or government at a significant
level."
Ledeen found a culprit. He pointed
out-correctly-that the best way to
protect against "moles" is to maintain.
strict compartmentalization of infor-
mation, operations, and . personnel.
"Yet," he charged, "Colby eliminated
much of this compartmentalization."
Ledeen's account came across as
.authoritative and persuasive, thanks
to his apparent ::11.e
C L4 ge;:re operation desi
'" ry-
ne
g
r
alleged mole. But in f
tuitous and unsubsm,, i4.
Colby's directorship of the
all, a Republican hawk, C.es .
and an admiral, Stans:u}d Z-u followed Colby), Led had tips
his hand as to his own soirrm
"I am not a mole," Col
besxw
deadpan around the Wash t.. .t
circuit. 8 d'
On September 24, meanwhile, one a
h
Jo
n A. Paisley, an ostensibly retired
capabilities who had been in on devel-
oping the spy satellite, wrapped him?
self in weights, fired a bullet into his
head, and rolled off the deck of his
sloop into the chilly waters of the
Chesapeake Bay. That was the official
version. Evasions and half tmths by
CIA spokesmen, however, provoked
one reporter, Joe Trento of the lYil-
mington (Del.) News Journal, to specu- I
late in- print weeks later that John A.
Paisley might "reappear in Moscow
at this year's annual May Day parade
in Red Square."
It turned out, for example, that
Paisley had not exactly "retired from I
the agency in 1974 as deputy director
of the Office of Strategic Research,"
as CIA spokesman Herbert E. Hetu
stated. Paisley had continued to work
with the CIA as a consultant, notably
as coordinator of the "B Team," thel
experts who reviewed top secret CIA
intelligence on Soviet nuclear capabil-
ities. CIA security officers removed
highly classified papers relating to the
arms talks from Paisley's boat and
apartment (in a building that housed
several Soviet diplomats) when it was
discovered he was missing. And ac-
cording to one witness, the sloop had
been full of sophisticated radio gear.
Remarkably, the CIA later stated
that it had routinely destroyed Pais-,t
ley's fingerprints in an "officerr_organ-
ization" following his official retire-
ment. Paisley's dentist said he "eye-
balled" plates from a rotting, bleated
corpse recovered from the Chetapeake
to iden tify them as Paisley's. The hands
were severed before cremation. His
wife Maryanne Paisley neversaa the
body. Could Paisley have defected,
Trento and others ask, taking with
him vital intelligence secrets and Ieav-
.' - .CONZ'I'II
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ing only a fake corpse behind?
Senate Intelligence Committee
thought its own inquiry raised enough
unanswered questions for the case to I
go to the Justice Department.
Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but
Trento's account of the Paisley rays-
tery, as rendered in the March issue of
Penthouse, ultimately resurrects old
questions about William Colby's han-
dling of the cr A. John Paisley reported-
ly began a cruise to the Caribbean
with Maryanne on their sloop soon
after his retirement in 1974. On the
way, they docked for a while at the
Mason Marina in Wilmington, N. C.,
at the "same time" a KGB defector
named Yuri Nosenko was there.
HE NOSENKO AFFAIR AND-
the feuding it provoked be-
tween Colby and the CIA's
counterintelligence czar James Angle-
ton lie at the heart of the recent wave
of spy stories and "mole" theories. Ac-
cording to Edward Jay Epstein's book
Le8end, which relied heavily on Angle-
ton's cooperation, Nosenko ostensibly
defected from the KGB in 1964 with the
story that Lee Harvey Oswald had not
been a Soviet operative. Believing it
was a cover story, Angleton dismissed
Nosenko as a KCB "disinformation"
plant. For the next four years, while
Nosenko was continuously and merci-
lessly interrogated, CIA operatives and
officials hotly debated his credibility.
In 1968, without any resolution of the
dispute, Nosenko was given a CIA
stipend, a new identity, and a new
home in North Carolina. Finally, in
1975, William Colby "rehabilitated"
One Russian and brought him back to
Washington. According to some re-
ports, he is now actively handling as-'
signments on Soviet intelligence for,
the crA.
A "former operations chief of the
CIA's counterintelligence," writing
alongside an interview with Epstein in
New York magazine, decried Nosenko's
new lease on life. "Acceptance of No-f
senko," he wrote, "throws the entire,
perspective about Soviet intelligence;
out of focus. His information tells us
things the present devotees of detente
want to hear and cumulatively de-
grades our knowledge (and the sources
of this knowledge) of Soviet intelli-
gence capabilities, policies, and effec-
tiveness." His conclusion: "... William
Colby virtually destroyed et [counter-
intelligence] in the CIA."
Angleton had reason to be bitter.
Colby had fired hire late in December
1974, immediately following Seymour
Hersh's expose of CIA domestic spying
programs in the New 2 ork Times. As
counterintelligence chief, Angleton
had been in charge of the mail cover;
and surveillance programs; thus, his
responsibility for them and his firing;
were linked publicly. Close observers;
soon learned otherwise: that Angle-'
ton's removal had more to do with';
fundamental policy. disputes with'
Colby.
Suspicious of detente as a gargan-
tuan Soviet plot, and convinced that
the antiwar movement was directed
from Moscow, Angleton was among
the most recalcitrant of Cold Warriors.
Inside the agency, Russian defectors
were but shadows in his special, sub-
terranean world; nothing could be
what it initially seemed to be.
When he became CIA director in
1973, Colby pressed for a more open,
risk-taking intelligence service, but
Angleton dug in his heels. By the time
he was fired, Angleton believed N Vest-
ern defenses were about to be stripped.
When Colby delivered the "family
jewels"-the internal secrets of ciA
crimes-to the Church committee and
the Rockefeller commission, Angleton
was convinced that the agency was
being wrecked from within.
OR THE PAST TWO 27EARS,
Angleton's prints have been all
over a series of published at-
tacks on Colby as well as on interpre-
tations of a recent series of dramatic
espionage cases. In normal times, a pri-
vate feud between two retired CIA offi-
cials, each relying on indirection and
leaks, would seem to amount to hardly
more than an arcane, if titillating, bu-
reaucratic struggle. But in the context
of the Kampiles and Paisley cases, un-
resolved charges of F.CB infiltration of
America's intelligence community
lend ammunition to critics of detente.
From all indications, verification of
Russian capabilities will be the focal
point for the right-wing attack on SALT
in the Senate. Henry Jackson's speech
is just a harbinger. The Carter admin-
istration, when push cones to shove,
will have to somehow "prove" that it
can effectively monitor Soviet per-i
formance.
And this is exactly why the contin-
uing series of spy stories and "mot
wars" can so effectively undermine
public support of U.S. arms reductions!
in particular and detente in general.I
Why is i t, after all, that New Tork Ina g- j
azine, usually devoted to the latest 1
wrinkle in disco dining, has become thel
arena for what would seem to be aj
public laundering of ultrasensitive1
charges about Russian spies in the gov-?
ernment? Was this the 1978 version of
Joe McCarthy's bombshell in Wheel -1
ing, West Virginia? tt
The attacks are likely to be trouble t
some for the Carter administration.
No sensible CIA director will unequiv-
ocally report that there is ro KCB pene-
tration of the CIA. Likewise, the Carter
administration will be hard pressed
to present a detailed defense of its spy
satellite systems without risking com-
promise of real secrets.
Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin,
chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee's subcommittee on over-
sight, notes that "charges that the
Russians will seek to evade [SALT it's)
provisions are beginning to be heard."
But in a comprehensive article in the
FebruaryScienticAmerican, Aspinehal-
lenges the doomsayers on the alleged
KH-11 compromise:
"... The introduction of a new stra
tegic weapon involves at least five
stages: research, development, testing,
production and deployment....
"Consider the ways in which the
U. S. is currently able to monitor just
one of these stages; the testing of stra-
tegic launchers. U. S. line-of sir ht
radars can identify the distinctive `sig-
nature' of reflected microwaves asso-
ciated with each major type of Russian
missile. In addition, over-the-horizon
radars can penetrate deep into the in-
terior of the t:ssR and recognize the
characteristic pattern each type of mis-
sile makes when it disturbs the earth's
ionosphere. Early warning satellites,
originally designed to detect a Russian
lest attack, can also serve to monitor
missile tests: the infrared sensors on
the satellites can identify the rocket-
exhaust plume of a missile as it is being
test-fired. Finally, the U. S. has a com-
plex array of sensors, including assort-
ed photographic gear, on ships and
planes that routinely monitor missile-
test impact areas on the periphery of
the ussR and in the Pacific...
"In short," Aspin says, "the `nation-
al technical means' of surveillance
available to this country for observing
Russian missile tests are multiple, re-
dundant and complementary. [
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hey are, in fact, far more reliable
.,tan most human intelligence gather-
ing (that is, spying), which may yield
second hand, dated information, or
even false, planted information."
UT STATE DEPARTMENT
public opinion analyst Bernard
Roshco laments, "The devil
has the best songs and the antiarms
controllers have the best oversimplifi-
cations. I'm afraid that when it comes
down to the Senate, the decision will
not be on the actual details of the
agreement, but on the trustworthiness
of the Soviet Union or the current
state of U.S.-Soviet relations."
What better way to keep relations
between the contending superpowers
off balance than stirring up public
hysteria over an alleged "mole"?
Not far up the road from where
Chain Bridge reaches across the Po-
tomac River from Washington into
northern Virginia is the modest home
of James Angleton. At one end of the
living room is a bookshelf that holds
several rows of volumes on the art of !
trout fishing.
Pullin- down a favorite book, on a
summer evening almost two years ago,
the retired spy-catcher remarked how'
unimportant it is, after all, to take one
from the water.
"It doesn't matter whether you'
hook him," he explained. "It only
matters, when he takes the line, even
if he later drops it, that you've beaten
him. And he knows he's beaten.
"That's the whole point of the'
game."
JEFF STEIN is a Washin"!on uri er who I
specialises in rational seearity affairs. Port ions of
the interview with James Angleton appeared in the
July 26, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
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