a counterintelligence cold case file the fourth mole

Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence StudiesWinter/Spring 2009

A Counterintelligence Cold Case File

The Fourth Mole

Mike Mattson

As you read this, is there somewhere in the envi-rons of Washington, sitting in a comfortable arm chair, an individual who has successfully

eluded all of the counterintelligence (CI) efforts employed to search out THE FOURTH MOLE, a mys-terious character who holds the key to answering numerous anomalies that resulted in the loss of U.S. operations and assets’ lives starting in 1985? Genera-tionally, of course, this person could be lying in the shade of a leafless oak, six feet under. But the imagi-nation prefers the former to the latter circumstance, as it leaves the door open for discovery, arrest, trial, conviction and incarceration.

Might there also be a retired U.S. Intelligence Officer (IO), a foil to the aforementioned individual, who while sitting in his armchair, finds himself rumi-nating on the years spent assessing the damage done by the spies of the infamous ‘Decade of the Spy’? Do his thoughts always return to the feeling that something didn’t add up; something was missing, concluding that there could have been someone else? As retired former Assistant Director of the FBI and former NSC staffer John Lewis points out, “the CI mindset that there was another one still keeps him up at night.”1

Interestingly enough, open source literature does not abound with ruminations of such a mole. A true CIA legend, Milt Bearden in his book with James Risen entitled The Main Enemy and his KGB opposite number, Victor Cherkashin in his book with Gregory Feifer

1. John Lewis (Retired FBI), interview by author, 22 July 2008, Washington, DC, phone.

entitled Spy Handler, are the main voices pointing out anomalies that suggest the existence of such a person. Let us explore the times, the cases, the context, and some other intelligence professionals’ observations that were secured in the development of this article, to see if the fourth mole’s presence can be discerned.

T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F L O O K I N G B A C K

It is particularly important for new intelligence officers to study this time period, when treason from within our own government resulted in the deaths of some of the bravest and most extraordinary men in the Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation) who had risked everything to help America main-tain peace. Today we face an espionage threat that is greatly expanded and well equipped to steal our secrets and weaken our security. As Michelle Van Cleave, the former head of U.S. Counterintelligence at NCIX from July 2003-March 2006 pointed out in her February 8, 2009 editorial in The Washington Post on the importance of CI, “If left unanswered, these growing foreign intelligence threats could endanger U.S. operations, military and intelligence personnel and even Americans at home.”2 The lessons learned beginning in, “The Year of the Spy,” 1985 and con-tinuing through the arrest of Robert Hanssen in 2001 are critical; first, in determining if we missed a mole along the way, and secondly, to reinforce the National Counterintelligence Executive’s (NCIX) emphasis on CI awareness and practice.

T H E C O L D W A R A T M O S P H E R E

The American and Russian systems of govern-ment were intrinsically different throughout the Cold War. Their intelligence apparatus however, were similar in one particularly disturbing sense. Both offered unlimited opportunities for the well-placed, enterprising intelligence officer (mole) to betray his loyalty oath, and to commit treason with some degree of comfort in regards to his safety and financial well-being.

Whether the penalty for treason results in the “9 gram” solution, referring to the weight of the bullet used by the KGB for executions, or the sentence of long-term or life imprisonment available in both nations,

2. Van Cleave, Michelle, “Foreign Spies are Serious. Are We?” The Washington Post, 8 February 2009, sec. B, p. 3.

III. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies Winter/Spring 2009

it is questionable whether all of those who were apprehended and punished would have spied regard-less, had they known the outcome to be obtained in their case. Did they all have the belief that “it won’t happen to me,” or was their motive, reward, sense of adventure, or confidence in their own particular “spy expertise,” sufficient to propel them on regardless of the historically inevitable consequences, and the mathematical certainty of eventual betrayal, capture or death? Or was it a sense or the feeling of destiny famously displayed by the former GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) Rezident in India, Dimitri Polyakov, who had been recruited in 1961 and was working for the U.S. government known to the CIA as agent BOURBON and to the FBI as agent TOPHAT? Perhaps the psychiatrist Dr. David Charney, an expert on the psychology of the spy, can shed light on this mindset.

I N T E R V I E W W I T H D R . D A V I D C H A R N E Y

Dr. Charney gained his expertise into the spy’s mind after working as the psychiatric consultant to Earl Pitts (FBI

Special Agent and KGB spy), Robert Hanssen (FBI Spe-cial Agent and GRU/KGB spy), and Brian Regan (USAF and NRO/TRW employee who attempted to spy for Iraq, Libya, and China) after they had been arrested. Hanssen gave permission to author David Wise to interview Dr. Charney for Wise’s book detailing the Hanssen case (SPY: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America).3 I sat down with Dr. Charney and discussed the spy’s mindset, the Soviet/Russian approach to espionage, and his thoughts on the fourth mole theory.

Dr. Charney began our conversation with a quote from the Chicago stockyards: “...(in their line of business) we use every part of the pig except the squeal!”4 Dr. Charney relates this to the same way the Soviet Union used to, and possibly still does, run certain agents against the U.S. and other nations. The quote highlights Dr. Charney’s view that most spies who had worked for the Soviet Union were exploited for everything they could provide, for as long as pos-sible, then somehow they were given up and left to fend for themselves. He argues that most of the time

3. Wise, David. Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. New York: Random House, 2003. 4. Dr. David Charney, interview by author, 11 November 2008, Alexandria, VA, tape recording.

these agents were given up to protect another highly placed asset or penetration, for political gain, or just strictly to shove it in the face of the opposing service, making an international media splash. These end games depended only upon the Soviet Unions’ goals, political intentions and motivations at the time.

When Dr. Charney posited this theory to Earl Pitts during one of their early interviews after his arrest in 1996, Pitts seemed to agree. More intriguing still was the revelation that not only did this idea make sense to him, but that he also believed he fell into this category and had been given up to protect another high ranking mole within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). That man, as Pitts began to describe the behavior of the employee who had hacked into another officer’s computer system and explained lamely that he was trying to expose vulnerabilities in IT security, was the FBI’s Robert Hanssen. Had Earl Pitts’ suspicions been taken seriously, could the FBI have caught the man who some consider to have been the most damaging spy in American history, a full five years before his eventual capture?

Dr. Charney also stated his theory to Hanssen once he had begun interviewing and consulting with him from behind bars. While Hanssen acknowledged that about a month or so before his eventual capture, he did get the sense that something fishy was going on and that there was an increased interest in him while not being overtly shown, he could not completely accept Dr. Charney’s belief that the KGB “tosses” assets. “Hanssen would not rule it out,” says Dr. Charney, whose beliefs on this run contrary to others as we will see further on in this article.5 Hanssen did make it clear that if this was, in fact, the practice of the KGB, then it must have been a very closely held secret because if that had leaked, it would have had a devastating effect on asset recruitment. 6

After years of dealing with spies, Dr. Charney sums up his beliefs by encompassing a few factors. First, he acknowledges that Russians are the best chess players in the world. With that comes a strate-gic thought process which is always looking for the advantage and plans for the future rather then the immediate time period. The Soviet Unions’ policies regarding intelligence and statecraft then, and Rus-sia’s now, are driven by politics and long-term visions, while we in the U.S. are short-term players, as he says, “an ADD7 nation.”8

5. Charney Interview.6. Ibid.7. Attention Deficit Disorder.8. Ibid.


Dr. Charney believes we could well have missed somebody who was at a very senior level of govern-ment. If his theory of Pitts being given up to divert U.S. counterintelligence from the trail of Hanssen, and Hanssen being given up, as well, in 2001, the person he was to protect had to be at the upper echelons of government. He believes this person would have been a career employee who had come up through the ranks rather than a presidential appointee who would have had only access to material during the term of that appointment. Whoever this person is or was, they would have risen through the ranks, held all the necessary clearances, and attained a level of employ-ment that guaranteed them cross-community access and oversight to covert missions, asset operations, counterintelligence measures employed at home and abroad, and current intelligence on the KGB/SVR at the time.9

A N O M A L I E S A R E I M P O R T A N T

The following incident exemplifies the internal struggle within the CI discipline between investi-gating all the facts, leads and hunches, versus the inevitability of ruffling feathers and running into compartmentalization roadblocks. It also helps to show why the conduct of damage assessments must not be hampered, leads followed, and our CI mindset always be to find the facts, no matter how narrow, secured or blocked the compartmented zone.

In 1996, two years after the dis-covery of Ames’s treachery, FBI Special Agent Thomas K. Kimmel Jr., who was already working at FBI headquarters, was tasked to conduct the damage assessment on the Earl Pitts espio-nage case. Pitts, following the earlier treason of FBI agent Richard Miller, was arrested

in 1996 after having spied for the Russians from 1987-1992 and taking in over $200,000 dollars. In the course of the damage assessment, where the goal was to discover and report

what Earl Pitts compromised and the damage caused to the IC, Kimmel came across indicators and formulated a “hunch” that there was another mole within the FBI.10 Agent Kimmel provided

9. Ibid.10. Brian Kelley (Former CIA CI Operations Officer), interview

the Bureau’s leadership with his findings on the Pitts case in a 250-page report in March 1999.11 It was not until April 1999 that a separate short memo, circu-

lated by Kimmel, specu-lated that the FBI might have another mole on their hands.12 The chal-lenge Mr. Kimmel had throughout his damage assessment was that he was not allowed access to the files he required, to

be able to study all relevant “anomalies” in the process of developing specific evidence and documentation. As former CIA CI officer Brian Kelley proposed, it was a case of institutional blindness on behalf of the FBI CI officials who would not let Tom pursue his thesis that there was another mole.13

That access was denied because the Bureau had a mole-hunt underway in the most compartmented manner which would necessarily have precluded Mr. Kimmel from accessing the data he needed to deter-mine if his “hunch” was verifiable. As a former Marine Captain and, at that time, Assistant Director, National Security Division (since February 1997), John Lewis states in David Wise’s Book Spy, “We were not about to allow him to be privy to all those files. My job as Assistant Director was to protect sources and meth-ods. I was not going to open up our entire innermost secrets to someone who had never even worked with this stuff.”14 Lewis did not disagree with Kimmel’s theory that the KGB’s handling of Pitts might suggest another mole. He states, “The fact that the Russians had not tasked Pitts – we knew that. It was common sense there might be somebody else.”15 What Lewis is trying to convey here is the idea that once the KGB had a man inside the FBI they should have been exploiting (tasking) him left and right to collect valuable intel-ligence. Since that did not happen, one could only assume Pitts was not the only FBI source they had, and that another source(s) was providing better intel-ligence. It was only after the unmasking of Hanssen that Kimmel was informed that his “hunches” were right, but at the time he voiced them, they had not been supported by facts.16

by author, fall 2008, Washington, DC, conversation.11. Wise, 181.12. Ibid.13. Kelley interview.14. Wise, 180.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., 182.

Richard Miller, FBI

Tom Kimmel, FBI

Brian Kelley, CIA Counterintelligence Officer

2 Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies Winter/Spring 2009

T H E “ F O U R T H M O L E ” P H E N O M E N A

Former CIA SE division chief Milt Bearden is the leading open source voice for the idea of the likelihood of a “fourth mole” after the following traitors were exposed – Edward Lee Howard, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.17 Victor Cherkashin (former KGB handler of both Ames and Hanssen) and Gregory Feifer in Spy Handler also state, “That the KGB ran a “fourth mole” is undeniable. It is also true the CIA ran agents that we (KGB) never caught.”18

Perhaps, at this point, it would be appropriate to acknowledge a countervailing view often expressed within the IC from time to time—especially when confronted with a particular case, or cases, that have fallen apart or ended. This contrarian view suggests that a case gone bad, or an asset lost, is not due to betrayal but rather bad luck, or the diligent work of the opposition’s CI service. Explained another way, there could be other means by which the KGB/SVR could have gotten on to U.S. agents through SIGINT, physical surveillance measures, chance encounters, or a report to the police/military by a concerned citizen who witnessed strange behavior. The fact that these methodologies exist could be employed to argue against the search for a mole within the U.S. IC. As Milt Bearden explained, some IO would express this idea in the following way, “every case contains the seeds of its own destruction.”19 Bearden did acknowledge that this is probably true but, in looking at all that happened starting in 1985, his belief is that there was a person we missed, a fourth mole.

Many of the names and operations that were exposed are attributable to the espionage activi-ties carried out by the main three moles of the era: Edward Lee Howard (CIA), Aldrich Ames (CIA) and Robert Hanssen (FBI). All three of these moles gave up considerable information to the GRU/KGB/SVR, essentially putting in jeopardy almost every Soviet/Russian asset the U.S. had. The important things to note in these cases are the timelines of betrayal and how they correspond to the losses and anomalies the U.S. encountered starting in 1985. The following brief overview of these traitors, and the damage they caused, are illustrated for the reader below.

17. Cherkashin, Victor and Gregory Feifer. Spy Handler: the True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 253.18. Cherkashin, 254.19. Milt Bearden (Former CIA Chief of Station and Operations Officer), interview by author, 24 February 2009, Washington, DC, tape recording.

E D W A R D L E E H O W A R D

In the summer of 1983, the Soviet embassy in Switzerland received a letter from an American accompanying an application for a tourist visa to Moscow. The letter proposed a meeting with the

KGB where he would hand over information they might find “interesting.” 20 The Soviets initially turned him down for fear of an FBI trap, but the letter’s author, Ed Howard, would soon resurface along with his wife. Howard enrolled in 1982 and had completed the CIA’s Internal Operations course at the Farm.21

While at the Farm, Howard was exposed to fellow case officers’ identities, sensitive operations taking place in Moscow, and the tradecraft skills used to deceive our Cold War foe. Just before deployment, Howard failed (after four attempts) a routine polygraph, finally admitting he had used drugs and cheated on training exercises at the Farm. He was fired in May 1983 and left the Agency poised to make them pay for their betrayal of him. Howard quickly turned to alcohol and was descending into a very troubled state. The CIA failed to notify the FBI about his condition even though he was a potential risk to national security.

The KGB re-contacted Howard, tracking him down in New Mexico, a year after his first attempts to work with them.22 According to former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, over the course of his espionage career, Howard provided most of his information to the KGB while on trips to Vienna, Austria, from 1984 through 1985. Kalugin described the intelligence provided as “reams of information on U.S. moles in the KGB and GRU.”23 Bearden points out in his book The Main Enemy, and in his interview account with the author, that Howard had no access to operatives outside of Moscow but that he did have access to SIGINT information. As Bearden said, “we assumed they had it all (referring to the Soviets), our HUMINT and SIGINT information was all tainted.”24 We are left to assume that although Howard’s betrayal was extremely damaging, he could not have physically had access to, or provided, certain names/operations that would answer the anomalies described later in this article.

20. Cherkashin, 146.21. Ibid., 147.22. Ibid., 148.23. Kalugin, Oleg, The First Directorate, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 130.24. Bearden Interview.


A L D R I C H A M E S

For nine years, until his arrest on February 21, 1994, Aldrich Ames single-handedly crippled CIA opera-tions within the Soviet Union, pro-viding information that led to the

deaths of at least ten U.S. and allied agents.25 Ames first approached the KGB on April 16, 1985, when he handed a guard in the lobby of the Soviet embassy an envelope addressed to the Washington KGB Rezident Stanislav Androsov.26 According to Victor Cherkashin, who was the KGB number two man in the U.S., the letter (signed by a ‘Rick Wells’ from CIA) contained the names of two Soviet traitors: Valery Martynov and Sergey Motorin, as well as other very sensational and important information on Western spies who had penetrated our service.27 Open sources do not disclose what exactly “very sensational and important information on Western spies who had penetrated our service,” consisted of. Ames is best known for his June 13, 1985 major intelligence handover to the KGB at Chadwick’s restaurant in Georgetown. There are varying accounts here as to how many assets and operations he compromised, but what is agreed upon is that it was the most damaging asset leak the IC had ever faced up to that time.

Cherkashin states that according to author Ronald Kessler, the CIA stumbled upon Aldrich Ames after a high-ranking SVR officer who fled to the U.S., codenamed AVENGER, betrayed him.28 This person also led the CIA to another top-level KGB officer who handed them the KGB/SVR file on Hanssen in Novem-ber 2000.29 Cherkashin goes on to say that the SVR, as well as himself, know who this person is in both cases but are probably sitting on the information because said person(s) are out of their reach.30 The important thing he points out is that the U.S. does not know who their AVENGER(s) are and have not found at least one more mole from the CIA or FBI responsible for some of the losses starting in 1985.31

25. Pound, Edward T., and Brian Duffy, “The Ferret and the Moles,” U.S. News & World Report, Vol. 31, Issue 9, (10 September 2001): 30; available from Academic Search Premiere http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5100549&site=ehost-live; Internet26. Earley, Pete. Confessions of a Spy. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997. 176.27. Ibid., 177.28. Cherkashin, 251.29. Ibid., 254.30. Ibid., 253.31. Ibid., 254.

R O B E R T H A N S S E N

Robert Hanssen, on the other hand, began spying for the GRU in 1979 then went dormant for the next six years, as far as we know.32 During that initial

betrayal, Hanssen would not have known about CIA recruitments overseas because of his position within the FBI, though he did learn of TOPHAT (Dimitri Polyakov) which started out as an FBI operation, run later by CIA. As to this case, the question remains: how did Hanssen learn of TOPHAT, because this was not in the purview of his normal access, leaving us to wonder if the information was leaked or told to him in confidence? He reconnected with the Soviet Union this time in service of the KGB on October 1, 1985, and continued to work for them and their successor organization, the SVR, until his arrest on February 18, 2001. The damage done by Hanssen was enormous, betraying human and technical operations, costing the U.S. millions in damage and the lives of many foreign assets who had risked everything to spy for the U.S.

During interviews and conversations with former IC officers, the theory has been expressed that there was another person(s) at a grade level higher than Ames and Hanssen, somebody with an overarching view of not just their organization but also every activ-ity that the U.S. IC was involved with regarding the Soviet Union. But that would be the easy explanation: the more complex rebuttal would have you believe that any read-in, information technology (IT) savvy, confident and careful analyst at a lower pay grade could have also caused this unexplained damage. One thing remains, it has been over two decades since these cases and anomalies became known. Both the U.S. and Russia have released much information regarding these issues, yet there is hardly any reference in open source to the possibility that someone else was—or still is—working as a deep cover mole or penetration within the U.S. IC.

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Below, I provide a summary of the period, along with a comprehensive analysis of the anomalies based on evidence from open source material and first hand accounts from former Intelligence and CI officers who either had direct involvement in these cases, or were active in the community at the time. Intelligencer

32. Wise, 24.


readers will be left to make their own interpretation as to whether or not they believe there ever existed, or still exists, a spy we missed. A caveat is in order. This author does not argue, and it is not the position of this article, that the anomalies discussed herein are the only anomalies that may point to the existence of a fourth mole. What is presented here is limited to open source materials, constrained by a lack of access to classified information. Of course, this author would welcome any additional non-classified material that may have been overlooked and that would strengthen the evidence for a fourth mole. Send such comments or suggestions to me as indicated at the end of this piece.

T H E 1 9 8 0 SA N O M A L I E S F R O M T H E “ D E C A D E O F T H E S P Y ”

By 1985, the unexplained losses of U.S. foreign agents and increasingly foiled operations, alerted members of the IC that something was wrong. In order to provide the reader with a context for these anoma-lies, I will also refer to cases that are not anomalies but are, instead, traceable to the U.S. moles listed here. In addition, the inclusion of these other cases provides the reader a sense of the scope of damage wrought commencing in early 1980s, as well as providing a more precise, however incomplete, timeline of events due to space limitations in trying to list the varied estimates of 30-40+ cases. The unexplained losses/anomalies that point to the possible existence of a fourth mole consist of the following: Vetrov, Bokhan, Polyshchuk and Gordievsky.33

Vladimir Mikhailovich Vetrov — FAREWELL

The first of such anoma-lies was the case of Vladimir Mikhailovich Vetrov, a KGB Line X (Science and Technol-ogy Collection) officer work-ing for the French Intelligence Service, the DST. He started working for the DST in 1981

and between then and the fall of 1982 provided them with over 4,000 documents regarding Soviet S&T collection and the names of over 200 KGB Line X

33. Bearden, Milt, and James Risen. The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown With the KGB, New York: Random House, 2003, 516.

officers.34 His career in espionage was short-lived how-ever, because a year and a half later he was arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison for the murder of a homeless man in a Moscow park who had happened upon Vetrov engaged in a “French liaison” with a woman.35 After stabbing the man to death, Vetrov feared the woman would tell the authorities, so he killed her as well.36 In 1984, while in prison, the rumors started to swirl that Vetrov – aside from being a murderer – was also a spy working for the French under the codename FAREWELL.37 As Bearden and Risen point out in The Main Enemy, Vitaly Yurchenko (while in the U.S. October 25, 1985) believed that Vetrov had been betrayed by the letters he had been writing to his wife while incarcerated, essentially pouring his heart out and disclosing he was a spy. Yurchenko also suggested that perhaps it was a prison informant who had discovered Vetrov’s espio-nage.38 Either way both of those stories seem unlikely and un-verified. Nobody would believe that a hardened and trained KGB officer would have divulged his deep-est secret, the one that would really get him killed in the Soviet Union, through letters or by confiding in a fellow inmate. Thus, the story began to change. Soon the information circling was that the woman Vetrov killed was a known KGB First Directorate sex groupie who had bedded down with many a KGB officer. 39 The homeless man, as well, took on the new identity of a jealous KGB officer who had happened upon Vetrov in the park.40

It is important to note that the CIA did not know Vladimir Vetrov by name, but the Agency had been briefed on the intelligence he was providing to the French as early as 1982.41 Bearden and Risen argue that this was critical because it means that someone at CIA was in a position to report to the KGB that one of their S&T collection officers was working for French Intel-ligence.42 Armed with that information, it would only have been a matter of time for the KGB to figure out Vetrov was the mole and handle him accordingly. So the question is: who gave this information to the KGB? What makes the case an anomaly is that the answer to who compromised him did not come from Edward Lee

34. Cold War Project; available from http://coldwarproject.com/bio/vetrov_bio.htm; Internet.35. Bearden, 131, 180.36. Ibid., 180.37. Ibid., 131, 180.38. Ibid., 131.39. Ibid., 180.40. Ibid., 131, 180.41. Ibid., 516.42. Ibid.


Howard, Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. Howard had been fired from CIA in 1983 and, according to The Main Enemy, would only have had access or knowl-edge of agents being handled and run in Moscow, not in other countries. Vetrov was discovered to be a spy in 1984, at least a year before Robert Hanssen re-approached the KGB to begin spying again. Ames had provided his listing of all Soviet assets to the KGB on June 13, 1985, after the date of Vetrov’s arrest and eventual execution in 1984.43 What we do know is that Vladimir Vetrov was the first asset that falls into the anomalous betrayal category, the focus of this article.

Sergei Bokhan — BLIZZARD

Following Vetrov, Sergei Bokhan – codenamed BLIZZARD – was called back to Moscow unexpect-edly on May 21, 1985, when the KGB told him that his eighteen year old son was having problems at his military academy. Bokhan was a GRU colonel stationed in Athens, Greece at the time, spying for the CIA for ten years including informing them of at least two attempts to sell American military tech-nology to the Soviet Union.44 The first case was CIA officer William Kampiles who attempted to sell U.S. spy satellite information, and the second was in 1984 when a Greek agent had sold the GRU plans for the Stinger missile.45 When Bokhan received the summons to return to Moscow, he was highly suspicious. He immediately began to feel as though this was a KGB trap and that he had been compromised.46 In turn, Bokhan quickly contacted his CIA handlers who arranged an exfiltration plan allowing him to defect, which he did successfully in May 1985.47

The question remains, why was Bokhan recalled? The KGB had requested he return a full month before Aldrich Ames identified him as a spy on June 13, 1985 during his major handoff to the KGB in Georgetown, and five months before Robert Hanssen re-contacts the KGB to start conducting espionage operations again.48 According to Brian Kelley, it is possible that Ames could have betrayed him in April 1985 when he first approached the KGB as stated earlier, during his walk-in at the Soviet embassy in Washing-ton, DC. Open source does not indicate the names that

43. Ibid.44. Cherkashin, 192.45. Ibid.46. Spylist, (Eyespy Magazine); available from http://www.eyespymag.com/spylist.html; Internet.47. Bearden, 152.48. Ibid., 515.

Ames provided at this first contact besides Marytnov and Motorin, so it remains possible that Bokhan’s name was included. Yet Milt Bearden believes that none of the known traitors compromised Bokhan. Also, Kelley states that Hanssen did not know about the Bokhan case, eliminating him as the source.49 In regards to Edward Lee Howard, Bearden suggests in The Main Enemy, “Bokhan was being handled with rigid compartmentalization by the CIA station in Athens, so Howard was eliminated as the source of compromise.”50

Paul Stombaugh andAdolf Tolkachev — SPHERE / VANQUISH

CIA case off icer Paul Stombaugh was the next victim of betrayal on June 13, 1985. He was caught and arrested by the KGB while doing a surveillance detec-tion run in preparation for a meeting with his agent the next night in June 1985.51 He was walking around Moscow attempting to “go black” – essentially meaning you have managed to elude your KGB surveillance and can operate freely, if only for a short time.52 It was not until the next day that the details started to leak out of

Moscow informing CIA Headquarters that not only was Stombaugh caught in the act, it meant

that another prized asset, Adolf Tolkachev – codenamed SPHERE and then VANQUISH – had been compromised. Tolkachev was one

of our most prized assets. He was a Soviet scientist by trade who had worked for CIA f o r the previous six years providing thou-

sands of top-secret documents from his position at the Soviet aviation design

building in the heart of Moscow. The infor-mation he provided allowed the U.S. to save

billions in weapons development, planning and intelligence. His value was truly priceless;

now, he had disappeared. Tolkachev, in fact, was arrested in 1985 and subsequently executed in 1986.53 The CIA would later find out that Tolkachev had been wrapped up earlier and was already in Lefortovo prison awaiting trial that would lead to his execution, unbe-

49. Kelley Interview.50. Bearden, 515.51. Ibid., 7.52. Ibid., 153.53. Bearden, 9.

Paul Stombaugh, CIA, at left, in 1985 KGB arrest.


knownst to his case off icer Stombaugh.54 Stombaugh’s mission had been foiled from the start. Rem Krassil-nikov, the KGB’s head of the Second Chief Directorate’s Ameri-can department, had orchestrated the arrest

of the young CIA case officer by having an actor pose as Tolkachev in Moscow.55 As Stombaugh approached, he was apprehended carrying rubles worth $150,000, concealed miniature cameras, medicine for Tolkachev and other incriminating material according to Cher-kashin.56 According to Brian Kelley, the only likely sce-nario is that Edward Lee Howard gave up Stombaugh.57 This information is further vetted by Cherkashin in his book where he states, “He’s [Tolkachev] been betrayed by a CIA recruit preparing to take over his handling from Stombaugh, Edward Lee Howard.”58 This is further evidenced by the date of his capture: June 13, 1985, the same day that Aldrich Ames met with his KGB handlers in Georgetown and provided a wealth of information.59 Thus, Ames could not have been the source for Stombaugh being caught because that information would not have reached Moscow in time. Also, Hanssen had not yet reconnected with the KGB until October 1985.

Leonid Polyshchuk — WEIGHT

Leonid Polyshchuk was posted to Kathmandu, Nepal in 1974 as a KGB officer. He had recently visited a casino and gambled away all the money allotted to him by the KGB, so the enterprising CIA stepped in, providing him a loan to cover his losses.60 Polyshchuk took the money and later agreed to spy for the CIA.61 While in Nepal, the CIA codenamed him GTWEIGHT and trained him as their asset. The Agency lost con-tact with him and did not reconnect until Polyshchuk was assigned as a Line KR officer in Lagos, Nigeria, in February 1985 working until his arrest in August 1985.62 In this case, Polyshchuk was lured back to Moscow under a false pretense. The ruse was that a

54. Cherkashin, 149.55. Ibid.56. Ibid.57. Kelley Interview.58. Cherkashin, 151.59. Kelley Interview.60. Cherkashin, 191.61. Ibid., 192.62. Ibid.

Moscow apartment, one near his parents, which he had been looking for, had become available. He was notified by his father of the good fortune in early April 1985, leaving the reader to assume the KGB made one available to get him back into the country as expressed by Milt Bearden in The Main Enemy. The CIA had deposited 20,000 rubles, he would need back in Moscow, in a hollow rock in the capital near the Severyanin railroad station. The KGB witnessed the drop through their surveillance.63 Polyshchuk was arrested upon his arrival to Moscow. After the arrest, an internal KGB story later leaked to the CIA and FBI that, “the Second and Seventh Directorates had stumbled upon this great find while trailing a CIA officer.”64 It appears that the KGB was tipped off in the spring of 1985 of Polyshchuk’s role as a traitor. This took place before Ames betrayed him on June 13, 1985, and before Hanssen had re-contacted the KGB in October 1985.65 It is assumed Howard did not have access to this information because Polyshchuk was operating outside of the Soviet Union which, as pointed out by Bearden, Howard was not privy to that information. Polyshchuk was later executed in 1985 and remains one of the main anomalies pointing to the fourth mole.

Gennady Smetanin — MILLION

Gennady Smetanin, codenamed GTMILLION, was a GRU Colonel in Lisbon, Portugal, who in 1983 had secretly sent a letter to the Defense Attaché’s office at the U.S. embassy in Lisbon, offering his services to American intelligence.66 In June of 1985 he was com-promised by Ames. On August 27, 1985, he requested a meeting on the outskirts of Lisbon with his CIA handler, informing him that his scheduled leave to Moscow had been moved up and he was to return in the next two days, so that he could be back on the job in late September.67 As he prepared to leave, a follow up meeting with his handler was scheduled for October 4, 1985, a meeting he never made. As Bearden points out, the next day, August 27, 1985, Paul Redmond (then Chief of the Soviet/East European Division responsible for all clandestine operations inside the Soviet Union) knew that GTMILLION was gone.68 He hadn’t returned to his post in Lisbon and essentially vanished. It was later discovered he had been executed in Moscow in

63. Ibid.64. Cherkashin, 192.65. Bearden, 516.66. Ibid., 104.67. Ibid., 103.68. Ibid., 104.

Arrest of Adolf Tolkachev by the KGB, 1985


1985.69

Valeri Martynov — GENTILE / PIMENTA

On November 6, 1985, one of the CIA’s assets in the KGB Rezidentura in Washington, DC, Valeri Martynov codenamed GTGENTILE by CIA and PIMENTA by the FBI, went home to

Moscow unexpectedly on the same plane as Yurch-enko when he redefected.70 He vanishes as well and it is later found out that he too was compromised (by both Hanssen and Ames) and executed by the KGB in 1985. His family was called back immediately as well, having been told that Valeri was involved in a serious accident.71

Gennady Varenik — FITNESS

KGB Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Varenik had approached the CIA in April 1985 in Vienna, Austria, claiming he needed money.72 He was recruited under the codename GTFITNESS and warned the Agency that the KGB planned to damage relations between Washington and Bonn by bombing U.S. personnel in Germany and blaming local radical terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof or Red Army Faction gangs.73 Cherkashin says in his book that Varenik, to be noticed, most likely fabricated these claims since the KGB, says Cherkashin, did not condone or consider the use of terrorism.74 Varenik, who had been work-ing in the Soviet embassy in Bonn undercover as a Tass correspondent, was suddenly called back to East Berlin in November 1985. His family was also ushered home, having been told their father had slipped on ice and hurt himself.75 Former Case Officer Brian Kelley worked this case, noting that we did find out Varenik had been arrested in 1985 by Soviet authorities. He also claims the case was heavily compartmented, sug-gesting that the source of this betrayal was someone from the inner circle of all CIA Soviet operations.76 The Agency would later find out their asset had been executed by the KGB in 1986. Cherkashin claims (albeit vaguely) in his book that Ames “provided no precise intelligence about Varenik, requiring the Center to conduct its own significant analysis.”77

69. Ibid., 152.70. Ibid.71. Ibid.72. Cherkashin, 198.73. Ibid.74. Ibid., 199.75. Cherkashin, 199.76. Kelley Interview. 77. Cherkashin, 199.

Sergei Vorontsov — COWL

Ames also exposed Major Sergei Vorontsov, a counterintelligence offi-cer in the local Moscow br a nch of t he SCD. Vorontsov had contacted the CIA in February 1984 by dropping a let ter through the window of a U.S. embassy car.78 He was code named COWL and provided the CIA with information about how the KGB tracked American agents in Moscow, including the use of a chemical substance – nitrophenyl pentadien NPPD, called spy dust by the CIA – which the KGB had developed decades earlier to track targets.79 Vorontsov also provided the name of Father Roman Potemkin, a KGB operative working under cover as an Orthodox priest, as most of the Orthodox hierarchy was at the time.80 Potemkin successfully recruited American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, who later was arrested after being set up by a source who gave him photo-graphs of the Soviets Afghanistan campaign. Mean-while, after Vorontsov was arrested based on Ames information, the KGB set up a ruse to lure his CIA handler. It worked, and Michael Sellers was expelled from the Soviet Union in March 1986.

Oleg Gordievsky — TICKLE

Another anomaly of one of the most tumultuous years in espi-onage history occurred with the detainment by house arrest in 1985 of KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky codenamed TICKLE who was the Deputy Resident in London and was working as a spy for MI6 (Brit-ish Foreign Intelligence). He too

was recalled to Moscow in May 1985 before Hanssen approached the KGB and before Ames had provided the KGB with the listing of all our Soviet assets on June 13, 1985. Once he was back in Moscow he was questioned extensively and placed under house arrest, which suggests the KGB was lacking the hard evidence they had against the other compromised agents who were working for the American intelligence services. The main point in this case is that there is no doubt Ames did give up Gordievsky, but when that took

78. Ibid.79. Ibid.80. Ibid., 200.

Arrest of Michael D. Sellers by KGB, 1986.


place (June 13, 1985) Gordievsky was already back in Moscow and being subjected to hostile interrogation.81 Milt Bearden argues that neither Hanssen nor Howard could have known about Gordievsky because of the timelines of when they provided information to the KGB and what they had access to at the time.82

A F I R S T H A N D A C C O U N T J O H N F . L E W I S , J R . 83

“There are anomalies that have occurred over the years that have kept many of the CI officers of the FBI and CIA up at night because they could not be explained,” John said during the author’s interview. These were especially prevalent in the most active spy years of the mid 1980s and ongoing until at least 1991. Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, the former Chief of Counterintelligence, reinforced this opinion when he told John in 1988 that, “we have no more assets left in the Soviet Union.”84

These “anomalies” still exist because they could not be explained, reconciled, or have conclusions drawn from them based on what we know Edward Lee Howard, Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen provided to the Soviet Union during their betrayal of our country.85 During the 1980s, Mr. Lewis headed a very compart-mentalized operation codenamed COURTSHIP that involved the FBI and CIA working together to target KGB officers in the U.S. attempting to recruit the one who could provide us with the name of the mole within our government. One of the other agents assigned to the task force was none other than Robert Hanssen. Bob, as Mr. Lewis refers to him was, in his words, “the guy that was always around, always listening and digesting everything around him, and yet nobody ever knew he was there.”86

Being assigned to this task force allowed Hans-sen the unlimited access to all Soviet agents we were running in Moscow and around the world. He had access to the files that provided an in-depth com-munity-wide look at all Soviet assets and operations being run. Through the work of COURTSHIP the FBI did recruit some assets including Valery Martynov, who was later given up by Ames, then Hanssen, but

81. Bearden, 516.82. Ibid.83. Former Assistant Director of the FBI National Security Division.84. Lewis Interview.85. Ibid.86. Ibid.

overall they did not land the asset who could provide the name of who was disrupting all of our operations, leading to the death of many of our assets.

As Lewis explained, there is a belief that informa-tion within the Intelligence Community travels just as effectively around the water cooler, on a smoke break or in the cafeteria, as it does in classified documents that need to be signed for and delivered amongst those who have a “need to know.” To hear in passing, “guess who we’ve got in Moscow now,” is just as actionable as seeing the cable traffic for a particular activity. Lewis believes that while Ames or Hanssen may not have had direct classified case knowledge of some of these anomalies (i.e. had not seen it on paper), they could have had verbal tip-offs and may have been able to decipher for themselves what was happening with any given activity throughout their espionage careers.87 That said, John Lewis strongly believes that there are unexplained losses that he strongly suggests are attributable to an uncaptured fourth mole.88

A V E T E R A N C I P R O F E S S I O N A L ’ S P E R S P E C T I V E

One idea that John Lewis continually stressed is the fact that every time the FBI started to make progress or possibly came close to a major break in the mole hunt, a major event would take place that, he believes, was staged by the KGB.89 These deception operations would provide us with a spy, or someone who we could go after, all the while the real purpose was to avert the eyes of the CI community to the real threat and danger posed by their most prized assets, Ames and Hanssen.90

This was evidenced in the case of Ronald Pelton, a former NSA employee who had retired in 1980 but had found a new career in espionage once outside. Pelton was in f inancial trouble and had declared bankruptcy three months prior to retiring from NSA in 1980. Between 1980 and 1984 he held a series of jobs, none requiring a security clearance but, with mounting expenses, he decided it was time to secure an outside income. While on a trip to Vienna, Austria, he walked into the Soviet embassy and demanded he see the KGB Chief of Station wherein they discussed an undisclosed price for the secrets he was willing

87. Ibid.88. Ibid.89. Ibid.90. Lewis Interview.


to disclose. Pelton then orally recited his knowledge of Operation Ivy Bells, a highly compartmentalized (less then 100 people were read in) NSA and U.S. Navy joint project to secretly tap undersea cables to moni-tor Soviet military communications and track Soviet submarines.91 The reader can reliably assume Pelton’s SIGINT knowledge proved very helpful to the Soviet Union. Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko, a walk-in to the U.S. embassy in Rome on August 1, 1985, later exposed Pelton’s actions. While Yurchenko’s bona fides have been controversial for decades within the community, his information lead to Pelton’s arrest on November 25, 1985, and conviction, landing him a life sentence. The KGB knew, with Pelton being out of NSA, he was expendable: they had no more need for him once he provided all he knew. So instead of allowing him to continue and possibly giving up one of their higher placed sources still providing legitimate information, they allowed him to be given up knowing it would create confusion and a diversion of resources within the U.S. IC.

Lewis believes the cases of Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames fit into the same mold as the Pelton case. As Robert Eringer points out in his book, Ruse: Undercover with FBI Counterintelligence, Ed Howard’s usefulness ended on July 12, 2002, when he “had an accident,” supposedly tripping on some stairs in his Russian dacha, breaking his neck.92 The only problem: there were no stairs leading to the laundry room; so, the story out of Russia quickly changed, referring to a car accident, as well. All these versions of the death are trivial because the authorities quickly cremated his body without an autopsy, thus washing their hands of Edward Lee Howard forever.93 Russian ‘retirement parties’ take many forms. It could even be possible that somehow (whether from the fourth mole or another source) the SVR knew that Hanssen was no longer useful and that he had been compromised or not looked after properly by the SVR.

91. Nytimes.com, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?query=PELTON,%20RONALD%20WILLIAM&field=per&match=exact (Last Accessed July 23, 2008).92. Eringer, Robert. Ruse, Undercover with FBI Counterintelligence, Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2008.93. Ibid.

— P E R S P E C T I V E S — F R O M T H O S E W H O L I V E D I T

According to John Lewis, many CI professionals share the idea that “there is always one more.” He asserts that the game of espionage was not always run by the so-called “rules,” stating, “What would you do to protect the most important source you have and may ever have? You give away anyone and everyone else you have to in order to keep the best asset protected.”94 John believes in his, “cynical retired CI opinion,” that this fourth mole did exist or still does, and that this person was once at a high level of government.95 He believes the person is still alive because even unlike other events from decades ago where intelligence and information has been subsequently leaked years later, there has been no progress or leads regarding this theory and the unexplained compromises.96 He con-tinues to assess that most likely this person is retired now from the FBI or the CIA, but maybe has not been completely cut off from the flow of information or points of contact, thus the SVR finds them still of use and in turn is either keeping quiet or actively working to protect the individual at all costs.97

This belief is echoed by former CIA officer Milt Bearden who in his interview with the author stated that, “the anomalies don’t add up, there had to be someone else.”98 Brian Kelley, who for four years was erroneously thought by some investigators to be the mole that continued to damage the IC, after being fully exonerated by the capture of Hanssen, also believes in the fourth mole theory.99

T H E U N F I N I S H E D M O L E H U N T

A spy can reach across the decades inflicting incalculable damage to operations, secrets, and careers, as well as causing the ultimate sacrifice. Whether there is a fourth mole remains likely but uncertain. But the strong possibility of his/her exis-tence merits further study and investigation.

We study in retrospect all sorts of disasters, from airplane wrecks, fires, the response to natural disas-ters and issues of war, peace and diplomacy, always

94. Lewis Interview.95. Ibid.96. Ibid.97. Ibid.98. Bearden Interview.99. Kelley Interview.


seeking to uncover unknown facts that will alter and revise our understanding of what happened and why. Indeed, historians continue to study the causes of World War I, and diligently attempt to unearth new facts that shed light on the causes of conflict. Despite the cloak of secrecy of this area of historical inquiry, prejudice against such analysis with respect to CI is lamentable since our country has paid such a high price for shortcomings in this area. While there are commonalities among many spy cases, each case has aspects that are unique and can inform even our handling of current cases, enabling better protection for our government from the ever growing threat of future espionage acts targeting us and our allies. H

Mike Mattson is the Project Leader of the Open Source Analyst team at Evidence Based Research, Inc. in Vienna, VA. He holds a B.S. degree in Busi-ness Administration from the University of Mary Washington and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Strategic Intelligence Studies at the Institute of World Politics.

AFIO thanks Mark Levin for his assistance with this article.

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