Word: moles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wartime stint in the Office of Strategic Services, had a flair for global intrigue and office politics that propelled him into the CIA's upper echelons. During his 20-year tenure as head of counterintelligence at the height of the cold war, Angleton hamstrung the agency with a paranoiac mole hunt that led him to ignore crucial leads provided by KGB defectors -- and even to terrorize staff members with intimidating inquiries. By the time he was sacked in 1974, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking Angleton had so thoroughly undermined the agency's effectiveness that a formal CIA review accused...
Angleton's fixation on Soviet penetration probably began with allegations that his best friend in Britain's MI6 intelligence service, Kim Philby, was a KGB mole. Philby removed all doubt when he defected to the Soviets in 1963. "After the Philby case," says an Angleton friend, "Jim was never the same." But the full scope of Angleton's obsessive mole hunt was not apparent until his dismissal. Agents sent to clear out his secret vault at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters discovered hundreds of files from his Ahab-like search for Soviet counteragents within the ranks...
...NICK NACK DOSSIER. The FBI gave Angleton a file full of tips from a Soviet military intelligence officer code-named "Nick Nack," who outlined Soviet penetrations around the world. Angleton, convinced that the agent was part of a Soviet plot to plant a mole, stuffed the report in a safe and ignored its contents. When Angleton's successor, George Kalaris, followed up the information, all of the 20 leads it contained resulted in arrests and convictions of important Soviet agents. "In each instance," says Mangold, "spies continued to operate for seven to 10 years because of Angleton's neglect...
ALSO: How a cold-war mole hunter paralyzed...
...from an Intelligence Committee trip to the Soviet Union, is brandishing a unique souvenir.General Vladimir Kryuchkov, chief of the KGB, gave the third-term Oklahoma Democrat a newly issued series of stamps honoring some of the spy agency's biggest heroes. Included in the set: Kim Philby, the notorious mole in the British intelligence service who defected to Moscow in 1963 and joined the KGB's inner circle. In jest, Senator Boren asked his Soviet host why Philby's equally famous fellow double agents, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, had not been given their own stamps. "That's the next...