Word: moles
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...likelihood that all these agents had been arrested because they or the CIA made operational mistakes simply defied the law of averages and common sense. Some other explanation--a compromised code or a KGB penetration of CIA communications--was possible, but remote. Everything pointed toward a human penetration. A mole...
Among the senior officials at the directorate of operations, there was a presumption that no colleague could be a traitor. Still, the possibility of a mole could not be discounted. In January 1986, CIA Director William Casey asked for a review of the compromised agents. Although that report concluded that they had probably been lost for operational reasons, Clair George, the deputy director for operations, did not agree. He told Casey, "I think we've been penetrated." Not until October 1986, however--almost a year after the CIA began to realize it had a serious problem--did it finally...
...first the team consisted of only four people. It would have to start from scratch in analyzing the unexplained losses and trying to find their cause. Not a single member was trained in criminal work. It was clear from the resources allocated to Vertefeuille that finding the mole was not a high priority among the CIA's leaders. Why not? "They didn't want to know," said one intelligence official. "If you find a mole, you have to deal with him. It becomes embarrassingly public...
...Soviet division, joined the team. The assignment of three women--Vertefeuille, Smith and Grimes--reflected a sexist belief among the CIA's senior male executives that "little gray-haired old ladies," as one case officer put it, were best suited to perform the painstaking work of catching a mole. Computers might help, the prevailing wisdom went, but only the women had the patience and the skills to go through mountains of files and extract clues...
...atmosphere of languid unconcern that permeated the agency's executive suite. The KGB made its own contribution. From the start the KGB assumed that the CIA would look for a penetration after its agents began disappearing. Moscow therefore did everything it could to deflect the attention of the mole hunters and send them down blind alleys...