Description from Amazon.com, excerpts from the Kindle edition.
Investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein's classic book on the use of deception by governments to win advantages,in the seldom seen universe of intelligence and counterintelligence. The Invisible war between intelligence services is brought to life in the era of the Cold War..The ultimate art of nations is , deception. It concerns, as James Jesus Angleton described it , " a state of mind —and the mind of the state."
"I began my interviews with Nosenko in January 1976. After I had questioned him for six hours, I found his answers not only imprecise and evasive but troubling. Several of the assertions he made about the KGB's treatment of Oswald were clearly inconsistent with other facts established by the Warren Commission." Location 102
"After the interview was over, I discussed these inconsistencies with Donald Jameson, the CIA contact that Reader's Digest had provided for my dealings with Nosenko. Jamie, as he preferred to be called, was in a wheelchair, having lost the use of his legs in some way that he could not openly discuss. He explained that he was a close friend of Nosenko's, and he was sure any problems stemmed from Nosenko's faltering command of the English lan- guage. 'Nosenko is utterly reliable on the subject of Oswald. He had full access to KGB records,' he assured me, as he wheeled himself off." Location 111
"[Jamie] Jameson had the job of bringing Soviet bloc defectors like Nosenko together with journalists so that they could deliver their authorized briefs. It was a way of getting stories into magazines, newspapers, and books. I subsequently learned that this CIA program of surreptitiously planting news stories even involved writing entire books and publishing them under defectors' names. The Penkovsky Papers, a best seller published by Doubleday in 1966, was the most successful of these 'operations.'" Location 319
"Deception is a complex organism ... to sustain it, the deceiver needs feedback. He must enter the mind of the victim." Location 637
"Finally, I asked Sullivan, 'How does Nosenko fit in?' He shook his head as if I had missed the central point. "Do''t you understand? They were part and parcel of the same thing. That's what got Hoover in an uproar.' He explained that when Nosenko defected in Geneva, Fedora gave the FBI specific details about the reaction of the KGB that tended to corroborate, point by point, Nosenko's story. Sullivan reasoned that if Fedora was providing the FBI with information on behalf of the KGB, as he assumed was the case, then the KGB was deliberately attempting to make Nosenko seem credible." Location 1210
"When Sullivan informed Hoover about this development, and that the CIA had prepared a set of forty-four questions about Oswald aimed at exposing Nosenko, Hoover 'blew his top.' ... Hoover prevented Bagley from asking Nosenko these questions. Sullivan concluded, "As far as I know, the coverup is still going on." That was the last time I saw Sullivan. He was killed six months later when a hunter, apparently mistaking him for a deer, shot him in a wood near his home." Location 1220
"Bagley understood, even before Angleton told him, that he had been duped by Nosenko." Location 1450
"The idea that these might be innocent errors might have been entertained by Bagley—if it were not for Fedora. Bagley took the fact that other KGB agents were going to great lengths to corroborate Nosenko's story as a powerful indication that the KGB was orchestrating the entire defection from Moscow." Location 1538
"'His prize defector.' He explained that the REDTOP who had defected six months before Nosenko in Helsinki had been treated by the CIA differently from any other Soviet defector. Whereas every other defector remained the charge of the Soviet Russia Division, this man had been turned over to the counterintelligence staff. He had become Angleton's personal charge—and source. Angleton believed Nosenko was sent by the KGB to discredit this defector's information, which he had confided to Bag-ley was crucial to understanding KGB deception. This defector then, not Nosenko, was at the heart of the real mystery. His name was Anatoly Golitsyn." Location 1661
"Peter Deriabin, a KGB officer who had been stationed in Vienna before defecting in 1954, had mentioned Golitsyn to his CIA debriefers as a KGB officer who might be potentially disloyal to the Soviet Union." Location 1732
"The French intelligence secrets Golitsyn had provided came from the highest echelon of the French government. When the list of those having access to them was narrowed down, suspicion was focused on both the head of French counterintelligence and de Gaulle's personal intelligence adviser." Location 1787
"CIA had positively identified through Golitsyn's leads a central figure in a spy ring, code-named "Sapphire." He was considered one of the most promising executives in French intelligence who was working for Soviet intelligence. Days after de Vosjoli passed this information on through channels, this double agent was thrown to his death from a window. De Vosjoli assumed the murder was done to protect others in the ring." Location 1815
"De Vosjoli got the message: they wanted reports, or even gossip, that questioned Golitsyn's credibility. De Vosjoli reported back to Paris that Golitsyn was becoming increasingly short-tempered with the nonstop debriefings." Location 1825
"The most troubling of these reports described the breaking of a Soviet code by British intelligence. According to the "bigot list," which identifies those with access to a particular secret document, the contents had been circulated to only five high-ranking officers of MI5. How then could Golitsyn have seen it in Moscow? De Mowbray concluded that there was only one possible answer: One of these five executives had provided the KGB with the report. ... Over the course of the next ten years, it gradually eliminated four out of five names on the "bigot list." The remaining suspect was Sir Roger Hollis, the Director of MI5." Locatoin 1879
"His primary interest was using Golitsyn to unravel what he called the 'logic of Soviet penetration.'" Location 1922
"Miler didn't mince words. He came right to the point: 'The KGB was afraid that Golitsyn could blow everything they were working on. If they couldn't kill him, they had to discredit him or at least muddy the waters. Nosenko, Fedora, Top Hat were all part of that mission.'" Location 1971
"KGB was in the process of organizing special actions, including untraceable assassinations. The purpose was to advance Soviet agents of influence in selected European democracies. He also had related how, just before he defected, he had been told by the chief of the Northern European Division of the KGB that "General Rodin" was involved in such an operation. He wasn't sure whether it was to be in England or a Scandinavian country. Angleton immediately ran a 'trace' on Rodin. He was identified as a top officer in the KGB's Department Thirteen." Location 2142
"The answer it came up with, which then became part of the 'Shelepin Plan,' was to divide Soviet intelligence into two distinct entities: an outer and an inner KGB." Location 2203
"In 1978, after Hoover's death, events proved Golitsyn was right—at least about Fedora. After it was determined by the FBI that the Soviets had to know Fedora was supplying the FBI with Soviet secrets, he returned to the Soviet Union and received a promotion, which caused the FBI to conclude he had been a KGB-controlled disinformation agent during the years he was supposedly working under FBI control." Location 2566
"Sullivan had described how Vadim Isakov, a Soviet diplomat working for UNESCO in New York, led the FBI 'on a merry chase of arms dealers' around the country in the early 1960s— even though he knew he was under surveillance. He was trying to buy, among other things, accelerometers. Eventually, in 1965, he led his FBI shadows to an arms dealer in New Jersey, who agreed to sell him accelerometers, and he was promptly arrested. Sullivan's point was that it was a 'set-up' designed to focus American attention on these devices (which he did not describe further)." Location 4682
"When an intelligence service believes it is invulnerable to enemy deception, it is most vulnerable." —James Jesus Angleton Location 5491
"Of the KGB double agents who might be in a position to know operational rules, some prominent ones, such as Fedora and Igor, not only had returned to Moscow and the KGB fold— and had been accordingly assumed to be disinformation agents— but they had been determined through other U.S. intelligence surveillance techniques, which Soviet intelligence apparently had not known about at the time, to be under KGB control when they conveyed their messages to the CIA." Location 5564
"Like Yurchenko, Nosenko had claimed to work in KGB headquarters in Moscow—a position, in both cases, which the CIA had no independent way of verifying. And like Yurchenko, Nosenko came with a message that implied that there was no mole, or other serious leak, in the CIA." Location 5861
"The CIA thus declared Yurchenko, after he was back at KGB headquarters, a bona fide defector—which meant that he had proven himself loyal to the United States. Yet, Yurchenko had demonstrably betrayed U.S. intelligence, first by returning to the KGB; second, at the State Department, by pledging his allegiance to the Soviet Union; and third, by divulging secret details of his CIA debriefing to the KGB. Never before had a defector earned his "bona fides" in such a perverse manner." Location 6065
"The Yurchenko case demonstrates, if nothing else, that once an intelligence service adopts a policy of denying deception, it can be perpetuated indefinitely. Evidence of deception—even as gross as a redefection—can be discounted, held in abeyance, or ignored— even where it has become public." Location 6087
"In the summer of 1984, a number of agents of the Iranian government approached international arms dealers with connections to the CIA, and offered to supply them with intelligence about Iran in return for American weapons on the prohibited list. ... In November 1984, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an ex-Iranian intelligence officer who had represented the Khomeini regime in purchasing arms, approached Theodore Shackley, who had just retired from the CIA as one of its top executives, with a more appealing line." Location 6179
"The test also indicated that Ghorbanifar knew ahead of time that hostages would not be released, as promised. If this test was accurate, as collateral events proved it to be, Ghorbanifar was part of a major deception intended to make President Reagan believe he was advancing an anti-Soviet cabal in Iran—when, in fact, he was helping the Iranian government prosecute its war against Iraq." Location 6328
"There is no reason to assume, if there is to be a war between the superpowers, that it is going to be either a nuclear or a conventional conflict. There are other forms of nonmilitary adversary relations." Location 6421
"Glasnost is a sword which itself heals the wound it inflicts." Location 6850
"Hammer went from industrialist to industrialist in America, extolling the virtues—and potential profit—of investing in the Soviet Union. Hammer told these businessmen that Lenin had openly admitted to him that 'Communism does not work,' and that now the Soviet Union needed capitalists to repair the system. By 1925, Hammer had succeeded in recruiting no fewer than thirty-eight prestigious corporations, including the Ford Motor Company, into investing in Soviet enterprises. As the 'path' gradually expanded to a superhighway for doing business with the Soviet Union, another three hundred foreign companies signed up for concessions. There followed a vast infusion of machinery, trucks, spare parts, ships, planes, and even whole factories—all financed by Western credit." Location 7058
"Whatever success it had in projecting the image of a more moderate and non-threatening state, this Glasnost did not prevent the Soviet leadership from carrying out its other strategic goals. In 1959, as Golitsyn later revealed, it radically reorganized the KGB, so that it would be capable of securely carrying out long-term deceptions (a reorganization confirmed in the late 1960s by U.S. Communications Intelligence)." Location 7338
"Even the word Glasnost was re-translated in 1986 by the Soviet press agency Novosti to mean "transparency" rather than merely publicity." LOcation 7811
"[Edwin Wilson] also recruited ex-CIA assassins, explosive experts, and couriers to work for him in Libya, leading them to believe that they were still working for the CIA when in fact they were working for the Libyan intelligence service. The first three targets of Wilson's assassins were Libyan exiles living in Egypt and France. 'It was a clever enough false flag recruitment,' Angleton continued, with a glint of admiration for the opposition. Behind Wilson's bogus CIA flag was the Libyan intelligence service, which was paying Wilson; and behind this Libyan flag of convenience, whether or not Wilson entirely realized it, was an old KGB hand, Karl Hanesch, whose career Angleton had closely followed." Location 8041
"Nosenko claimed, after all, that his department had originally handled the Oswald case in Moscow, and, two months before the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA had intercepted a telephone call in Mexico City in which Oswald was making contact with Sergei Kostikov, an officer in Department Thirteen. Angleton's questions were thus designed to force Nosenko to acknowledge that he and his department would have to have been aware of any relationship between Oswald that had developed, since Oswald would have been jointly handled." Location 8151