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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Question of When?

“The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security.
Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security”

—Snowden in Moscow

In his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John LeCarre helped establish the concept in the
public imagination of a mole burrowing unto a rival intelligence service. LeCarre’s now classic
mole, code-named by the KGB “Gerald,” managed in the novel to gain access to the inner
sanctum of the British intelligence service MI-6. Aided and guided by his controllers in Moscow,
he systematically stole British intelligence secrets. As LeCarre wove the plot, the brilliantly-
orchestrated operation involved spotting, compromising, and recruiting others to gradually
advance Gerald the mole to a position of power. Such well-organized penetrations are not limited
to fiction. The career of KGB mole Heinz Felfe, who was advanced through the ranks of
German intelligence by an elaborate series of sacrifices by his controllers in Moscow until he
actually headed German counterintelligence in 1961, could have served as the non-fiction
inspiration for Le Carre’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came out of the Cold. As US intelligence
only found out after the Cold War ended, the KGB also had the ability to sustain moles for
decades.

The CIA also had its share of long term successes, such as Alexander Poteyev, who fed the CIA
secrets for over ten years while burrowing into Russian intelligence. In the choreography of
these operations, as in Le Carre’s fiction, rival intelligence services ensnared and sacrificed
recruits , as if playing a chess game, to advance their moles. Despite notable successes such as
Felfe, and Poteyev, a great number of these elaborate conspiracies fail insinuate moles in their
adversaries’ confidence. Intelligence services therefore also take advantage of a more prosaic
source: the self-generated spy, or, as they are called in the trade, walk-in.

Although they are largely unsung in novels, these walk-ins are an important part of
espionage. A counterespionage review done for the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board (PFIEB) in 1990 found that most US spies in the Cold War had taken documents on their
own volition and only afterwards offered them to an adversary service. Self-generated spies have
diverse motives. Some intelligence workers steal secrets for financial gains. Others take them to
further an ideological interest. As opportunistic enterprises, intelligence services do not turn walk-
ins away if they have valuable intelligence. Indeed, some of the most successful moles were not
recruited, or even controlled, by spy agencies. They were self-generated penetrations, or
“sources” as the KGB preferred to call them, who first stole secrets and later voluntarily deliver
them to an adversary. Consider the case of Robert Hanssen, who successfully penetrated the FBI

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