If You Can’t Trust a Fellow Spy

You telling me that there really was another traitor?” “I’m telling you that the leadership up on the 7th floor at the time believed that it was very possible that there was, and that certain measures had to be taken.” “What did you think, or more importantly, what do you think now? Might there have been?” “Well, at the time, I gave it a 50-50 chance – that special little backroom group of the day clearly came to that conclusion. However, after I’d become the division chief years later and was able to read certain very limited circulation studies, I became more of a believer myself. And in the last year or two, while I haven’t actually been writing my memoires, I have been giving a lot of thought to those days, and chatted with a few of the old guys who were involved in the mole hunt and I now believe that there was indeed a fourth mole.” “OK, let’s say there had been a fourth. I’m a little unclear as to why this is laying on your conscience and what it has to do with me?’ “You probably wondered why you never got promoted over those six years after Moscow, before you quit.” “A few times, sure. And?” “The backroom study group put together a short list of who that 4th mole might have been. You were on that list?” Gerry sat in silence for several long seconds. “So, that’s why I couldn’t get promoted or get a decent assignment? They thought I was a fucking mole? How did they come to that brilliant conclusion?” “Well, part of it was the cases you’d known about, which got wrapped up. Part of it was that throughout 1987 and 1988, we had several KGB volunteers in Moscow and in a couple of other countries who provided little tidbits about just how the KGB had been wrapping up a number of our cases. One guy pointed a finger at an Agency communications problem. Another guy said he’d seen a study claiming that it had been because of poor tradecraft of our officers in Moscow in the mid-80s, and brilliant counterintelligence work of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. But there were two sources who said that there was a mole, even though they only had a few vague clues about such a person. Unfortunately for you, those clues fit your profile and so the CI Staff really started watching you, while you were given shit assignments with no access to any real secrets. And interestingly, whenever you travelled anywhere over the next couple of years on TDY, or even on vacations with Denise, a very senior KGB official just happened to travel to that same city at the same time.” “So that’s why I couldn’t get promoted, no matter what I accomplished?” “Yep. They could never find any real evidence with which to fire you or prosecute you, but hoped that eventually you would just quit. And finally you did. Of course, several years later when we finally figured out about Ames and Hanssen, we realized that the KGB had run a number of deception scams against us, to help protect those two. You just happened to be one of the poor bastards that they tried pointing a finger at so as to draw suspicion away from their actual agents. By then, you were already gone and nobody liked digging up embarrassing ‘mistakes’ from the past. You were written off as simply having been an honest mistake.” Doyle poured himself more coffee. “Well, in a perverted way, I’m glad to finally know this. I’d always wondered what I’d done, or not done, to explain why my career was suddenly going nowhere back then. At least, now I know.” “I never believed the suspicions about you, but I wasn’t yet of a high enough rank to do anything about the situation. I just had to keep my mouth shut and follow orders. By the time I became division chief, you were long gone and doing very well out in the real world, so it just didn’t seem that telling you then would accomplish anything for you. But now…” “Now that you’re dying you wanted me off your conscience, is that it?” “Well, I could think of a more subtle way to phrase it, but in part, yes, that’s why I’m telling you this today. But there’s something else as well. I’ve really come to believe that there was a fourth mole and it pains me that I never did anything about that, even after I became the division chief. In part, I had other fires to put out on a daily basis, but also because nobody on the 7th floor by then wanted to hear about a possible other mole, who they figured was most likely retired by then anyway, if he’d even existed. The publicity damage done by the revelations about Ames, Howard and later Jim Nicholson had been tremendous. By 1997, the leaks seemed to have been stopped and nobody wanted to hear about some ‘historical mole’ and there it ended.” “Did it end by 1997? Or were cases were still going bad thereafter?” “Well, you know how there are always a few cases getting wrapped up and they were just being explained as bad luck. And of course, after the whole Soviet Union started falling apart in 1991, nobody really cared. We were all sitting around waiting for the golden days when the Russians would be our friends and we’d get together and sing Kum Ba Ya with the KGB.” “And why are you telling me that part of the story?” “Because, I want you to find that SOB, if he’s even still alive. I kept thinking that someday I’d get on that, but I’ve waited too long, as you now know. You have the time and the money to conduct a search. I hate to sound melodramatic, but that’s my final request of you.