Manipulating Threads
MIRSKY, VEHUDAH
Manipulating Threads Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA By Edward Jay Epstein Simon and Schuster. 335 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Writer, political...
...Golitsyn's scenario became increasingly untenable, and Angleton's continued belief in it sent shock waves of suspicion throughout the CIA...
...The CIA became "a house divided," as its Soviet Division stood by Nosenko while Angleton's counterintelligence crew held fast to Golitsyn's claim...
...Events have made an opening of Soviet society more urgent...
...Indeed, these and many similar developments suggest that perhaps we can put our darker suspicions about the Soviet Union to rest after all...
...Highlights include: Lenin's Trust, the prototypical ruse operation...
...The dissatisfactions of subject nationalities within the USSR and in the Eastern European countries are of course real—as real as the Soviet truncheons used to keep the recalcitrant masses in line...
...In fact, according to the author and his guide, since the late 1950s the primary mission of the KGB hasnot been to gather information...
...Yet after three and a half years of ruthless interrogation, Nosenko still clung to his original story...
...The labyrinthine Golitsyn-Angleton tale is the touchstone of Epstein's narrative recording the history of deception from the Russian Revolution to the present day...
...Is Epstein right...
...At the same time, we are seeing the slow emergence of a civil society independent of the state in the USSR, there has been at least a relaxation of control over the flow of information and ideas, and confrontations like the ongoing one between Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev are no longer uncommon...
...Elsewhere, the selection of evidence can be perplexing...
...The issue was brought to a head by Golitsyn's assertion that the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s was a sham, contrived to throw the West off balance...
...Inconsistencies in Nosenko's accounts made it unclear whether he himself was genuine or had been sent to sidetrack the Agency...
...Angleton is Epstein's Vergil, guiding him through the epistemological inferno of international counterespionage, where even deception and betrayal are not what they seem...
...Finally, in December of 1974, Director William Colby took the opportunity of the Agency's media-exposed troubles to purge Angleton and his staff...
...A case in point is his portrayal of the West as having been seduced into giving up Eastern Europe to the USSR at the end of World War II by Stalin's deceptive maneuvers, such as dissolving the Comintern during the War, easing controls on the Church and making noises about economic liberalization...
...The absence of a broader geopolitical or diplomatic context leaves Epstein's analysis of even some past crucial issues disappointingly thin...
...To buttress his case, Epstein notes how in the early stages of glasnost, to prove its economic failings, the Kremlin released figures showing a declining GNP while neglecting to issue those documenting growth in industrial output, statistics of far greater use to Western strategic planners...
...The inner KGB would create and pass along disinformation (i.e., deliberately misleading "information") to the outer KGB, whose unknowing members would in turn divulge what they "knew" to their Western counterparts in the course of their own leaks and desertions...
...Hitler convincing the Allies in the 1930s of the superiority of his then imaginary Luftwaffe, and egging Stalin into gutting his officer corps...
...Still, there are genuine grounds for Epstein's mistrust of Gorbachev's initiatives...
...The latter was staffed by the usual diplomats and agents who would regularly come into contact with foreigners, the former by a small cadre of officers under the direct supervision of the Politburo, with no overlap or career movement between the two groups...
...rather, it has been to systematically deceive and mislead the CIA through what the ancient Chinese strategist Sun-tzu called the "divine manipulation of threads...
...First, as he observes, the Soviet state continues to have great control over the structure of information by its ownership and management of the media and its domination of the work force...
...The main job of moles and fake defectors was not to pass along new information, but to report back to the inner KGB on how the ploy was working...
...The problem was that Golitsyn had predicted Nosenko's arrival and his story...
...There was more to Yalta than that...
...Yes and no...
...The information he provided led his interrogators to the conclusion that Soviet moles had penetrated the highest levels of French and British intelligence, and even the entourage of Britain's Prime Minister, Labor Party leader Harold Wilson...
...From the consolidation of Bolshevik power in the 1920s, he contends, Soviet leaders have aggressively developed ways to spread disinformation designed to tell the West what it has wanted to hear—whether this was that the infant Soviet economy was collapsing in the aftermath of the civil war, that the Communist Party was being de-Stalinized in the 1950s, or that Soviet military planners adhered to the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" in the 1970s...
...The economic deficiencies of Communism, particularly its inability to move into the high-tech information age, are apparent and borne out by capitalism's growing appeal in countries around the world, Communist and otherwise...
...Golitsyn further told Angleton that in 1959 the KGB was reorganized by its chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin, into two distinct parts, an "inner" unit and an "outer" one...
...As the decade progressed, however, political events substantiated the Sino-Soviet schism...
...The book's last, and most intriguing, chapter traces five "glasnosts" that preceded Mikhail S. Gorbachev's current peace of fensive, dubbed the "Sixth Glasnost" by Epstein...
...This at first appeared plausible, because the National Security Agency had intercepted Soviet relays to China of satellite data on the U.S...
...And Western decisions regarding the Soviet Union are taken in a complex, multipolar international environment where relative perceptions of Soviet strength are only one factor among many...
...It is merely the Kremlin's latest attempt—via a careful calibration of news about well-known Soviet economic inefficiencies, disingenuous concessions and indigenous dissent— to divide the NATO alliance, gain trade credits and technology, and knock the wind out of America's strategic resolve...
...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Writer, political consultant "Deception is a state of mind—and the mind of the state...
...Golitsyn was contradicted by a series of defectors, especially one Yuri Nosenko, a charge of the CIA's Soviet Division who claimed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald's KGB case officer...
...Epstein's thesis is that the manipulation of other nations' intelligence services, and thus their governments and people, is a crucial feature of international relations in general and U.S.-Soviet relations in particular...
...the Soviet discovery of U. S. satellite capabilities through purposefully staged violations of the salt treaty...
...But they concluded that with Soviet tanks bivouacked throughout Europe, they had little choice other than to acquiesce and contain Soviet expansion as best they could...
...By deploying defectors who, wittingly and unwittingly, have given the West a false picture of Soviet strengths, weaknesses and intentions, and by utilizing plants who have fed back what their Yankee dupes wanted or needed to be told, the KGB has been able to control the minds of American strategic planners...
...For example, Epstein cites the Soviet Constitution of 1937, which hardly fooled anyone, yet inexplicably omits the massive cover-up of the Ukranian famine of 1933, a truer example of Soviet manipulation of the Western press...
...press...
...The bearer of these revelations was Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB major who defected in 1961...
...To the author, Gorbachev's glasnost is therefore not the sea change heralded throughout Western Europe and the U.S...
...and the KGB's moderately successful depiction of Yuri V. Andropov to Western journalists as an urbane, jazz-loving, English-speaking intellectual...
...In some of his best pages, Epstein lucidly demonstrates the myriad ways a totalitarian government can compartmentalize and direct the flow of what is made public...
...Today he is a consultant to the CIA...
...That observation by James Jesus Angleton, former CIA counterintelligence chief and Cold War archspook, is the well-chosen epigraph to Edward Jay Epstein's book, a troubling and important addition to the burgeoning literature on the new face the Soviet Union is presenting to the West...
...Second, there is simply no reason to believe that Gorbachev wishes to relinquish the Soviet Union's status as a superpower, or that the raison d'état behind past duplicity has lost its force...
...Air Force...
...As the papers of George F. Kennan, W. Averell Harriman and other policy makers involved show, Western leaders were fully aware of Stalin's game plan...
...As long as history's jury is still out, however, Epstein is right to sound a note of caution, although one wishes he did so with a greater sense of nuance and context...
...Angleton had suspected the existence of an operation like the one Golitsyn described ever since the revelation in the early 1950s that his friend in British counterintelligence, Kim Philby, was really a double agent...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 9
