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The Shadow Dossier — The Defector Who Broke the CIA From Inside · The Shadow Dossier

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  the shadow dossier act i the man who walked in
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  in december 1961 a kgb officer stationed in helsinki
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  walked into the american embassy and asked for
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  asylum his name was anatoly galitsin and he brought
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  with him a claim that would consume the cia's
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  counterintelligence division for more than a
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  decade that the KGB had planted a high -level
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  mold deep inside Western intelligence services,
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  and that almost everything the West thought it
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  knew about Soviet operations might be part of
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  an elaborate deception. Galitsin was debriefed
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  extensively and provided real, verifiable information
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  that led to the unmasking of several actual Soviet
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  agents in Britain, France, and elsewhere. That
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  early credibility mattered enormously for what
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  came next, because it meant his more sweeping
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  and unprovable claims couldn't simply be dismissed.
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  The CIA officer who found Golitsyn's warnings
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  most convincing was James Jesus Angleton. the
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  agency's chief of counterintelligence since 1954
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  a brilliant secretive man with a deep personal
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  fear of soviet deception operations angleton
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  became convinced that gallitzin was the genuine
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  defector and that any soviet source who arrived
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  afterward contradicting him must be a kgb plant
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  sent to discredit him this had an immediate damaging
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  consequence. In 1964, another KGB officer, Yuri
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  Nosenko, defected to the United States with information
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  that conflicted with some of Golitsyn's claims.
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  Rather than being welcomed, Nosenko was suspected
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  of being a false defector. He was held in isolated,
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  harsh confinement by the CIA for more than three
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  years while the agency tried to determine whether
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  he was genuine. He was eventually released and
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  accepted as legitimate. But the episode remains
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  one of the most controversial in the CIA's history.
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  Angleton's mole hunt, driven by Galitzin's framework,
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  expanded outward. Officers whose careers had
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  taken paths that could theoretically fit a Soviet
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  plant profile came under suspicion. Promotion
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  stalled. Careers were quietly ended without formal
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  accusation because the evidence, such as it was,
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  could rarely support one. Files were combed for
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  patterns that could mean everything or nothing.
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  The atmosphere inside the CIA's counterintelligence
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  staff during these years became known in a phrase
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  Angleton himself used as a wilderness of mirrors,
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  a state in which every fact could be read as
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  confirmation of deception and every denial could
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  be read as evidence of skill at deception. There
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  was no version of events, defenders later argued,
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  in which Angleton's theory could be conclusively
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  disproven. which was itself part of the problem.
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  By the early 1970s, senior CIA leadership had
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  grown alarmed at the damage. A counterintelligence
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  division that had become nearly paralyzed, officers
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  under a cloud of suspicion they could never fully
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  clear, and a mole hunt that, after more than
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  a decade. had not identified a single confirmed
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  senior Soviet mole inside the agency to match
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  Galitsin's original warning. In December 1974,
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  the same month journalist Seymour Hersh published
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  revelations about separate, unrelated CIA domestic
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  surveillance abuses, Director William Colby forced
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  Angleton to resign. Galitsin, for his part, continued
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  for years afterward to offer increasingly elaborate
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  theories, including the claim that the Sino -Soviet
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  split itself was an elaborate joint deception.
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  Almost no one in Western intelligence took that
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  particular claim seriously. Historians still
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  debate how much genuine damage Soviet moles actually
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  did during this period weighed against how much
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  damage the hunt for them did on its own. What's
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  clear is that a single defector's warning, filtered
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  through one man's conviction, reshaped an intelligence
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  agency from the inside without a single shot
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  being fired. This concludes declassified file
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  number 052 of the Shadow Dossier, the defector
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  who broke the CIA from inside. What dangerous
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  This is the Shadow Dossier. Thank you for listening.