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CHAPTER 16

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.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, MOSCOW, 2015

IN HIS 1974 NOVEL, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carré helped establish the concept in the public imagination of a mole burrowing into a rival intelligence service. Le Carré’s now-classic mole, code-named Gerald by the KGB, managed in the novel to gain access to the inner sanctum of the British intelligence service MI6. Aided and guided by his controllers in Moscow, he systematically stole British intelligence secrets. As Le Carré 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 the KGB mole Heinz Felfe, who was advanced through the ranks of West German intelligence by an elaborate series of sacrifices by his controllers in Moscow until he actually headed West German counterintelligence in 1961, could have served as the nonfiction inspiration for Le Carré’s 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. As U.S. intelligence only found out after the Cold War ended, the KGB also had the ability to sustain moles for decades.

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