To some of the old timers the CIA is still a cherished priesthood. Like most priesthoods, these members do all they can to protect the reputation and what is often the mythology of the CIA. The aging members of the priesthood have been very busy the last few years as more and more about CIA mismanagement and venality has emerged publicly.
Among the fiercest defenders of the CIA’s crumbling reputation is the Association For Intelligence Officers – AFIO. Here the CIA’s lies and myths are perpetuated and books and articles by authors who dare point out discrepancies are attacked.
One AFIO message is that its members won the Cold War and if there were excesses, so what? We won. At AFIO, the CIA body count is intellectualized and made digestible.
The AFIO intelligence mindset is an alternate universe where facts are ignored. In the real world the Agency is considered a failure by most people who understand our secret history. AFIO, as the CIA’s apologist, it seems, has a tough sale.
This week the sale just got a little tougher.
British MI6 traitor George Blake, who at 85 is apparently still breathing in Moscow and had recently been honored by Vladimir Putin, reared his ugly head in the form of a new book written by Blake’s KGB handler. One of the supposed great victories of the Cold War – how the CIA had tapped into the main communications line between East Berlin and Moscow by digging a secret tunnel into East Berlin – was, in fact, a myth. It turns out it was all known to the Russians before the first spade of dirt turned.
The Washington Post put Craig Whitlock’s story on the Front Page: “According to a book co-written by Blake’s KGB handler, Sergei A. Kondrashev, Soviet intelligence officials were highly concerned about the risk of exposing their source. They worried that suspicions might be aroused if they ‘discovered’ the tunnel too quickly, so they let the operation proceed unmolested. Heavy rains that damaged one of the cables in the spring of 1956 gave them an excuse to inspect the communications lines and make it appear as if they had stumbled across the tunnel.”
Very exciting except for one thing: the story was reported first in 1989. I wrote details of Blake’s role as a Soviet mole on the planning of the tunnel – codenamed Operation Gold – in Widows (Crown Publishing, co-authored with William R. Corson and Susan B. Trento). One reason you might not have heard about it is because AFIO members trashed the book. What especially upset them was one of their own, AFIO Board Member Robert Trumbell Crowley, had been a key on-the-record source for the book and Widows was dedicated to him.
Almost immediately one AFIO member took up the cause of trying to discredit the book. That member, Leonard McCoy, was a former top level official of the Soviet Russia Division and later the second in command in CIA Counterintelligence. What McCoy did not reveal to his colleagues was that he, too, had been a source for the book and had sat down for hours of tape recorded interviews. McCoy even told a former colleague that my claims of interviewing him were untrue. When I made his tapes available to his colleague, Paul Garbler, the late Moscow COS straightened out other former CIA officers McCoy had misled.
Despite their efforts to try and keep the media from covering the book, Widows was a big seller because it was the first book to reveal Soviet penetrations of the CIA on a breathtaking scale. AFIO members, it seems, are as effective today as they were at the Agency.
AFIO has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of intellectual integrity by allowing members who are featured in books, like Leonard McCoy, to review them. After being humiliated by his actions in Widows, McCoy wrote a scathing review of my 2001 book The Secret History of the CIA, signing it with just his initials. AFIO never pointed out his earlier conflict nor afforded me an opportunity to respond. Despite McCoy’s best efforts that book continues to sell well.
Had The Washington Post paid any attention to The Secret History of the CIA it would have seen the chapter “Tunnel Vision” which chronicled George Blake’s KGB penetration of Operation Gold in great detail. What AFIO has succeeded in doing is informally convincing major news reporters, long too cozy with the Agency, to ignore important new revelations in books some AFIO members find objectionable.
Now another experienced intelligence historian is getting the AFIO treatment. Burton Hersh, author of The Old Boys, has an important recent book out called Bobby and J. Edgar which has the AFIO‘s Intelligencer apoplectic. Hersh’s book is a ground-breaking account of John and Robert Kennedy’s relationship with Hoover going back to Joe Kennedy. Hersh personally knew the Kennedys and has an unrivaled understanding of how Bobby was seduced by the CIA when his brother sent him over to clean up the place. Sadly, what passes for mainstream media these days has been largely ignoring Bobby and J. Edgar. More disturbing is that reviewers who know much less about these matters than Hersh have been assigned to critique the book. And, of course, AFIO’s Intelligencer published a savage and historically baseless review.
The fact that news reporters rely on AFIO as a source for information about the intelligence community is bad enough but the fact that important historical information is delayed for decades because “reputations must be protected” is profoundly disturbing. The idea of discouraging our most able historians from digging out the truth because what they discover is at odds with some kind of preconceived fake narrative is morally reprehensible.
I guess what I really found shocking in The Washington Post’s front-page story is they would only run the tunnel story after a KGB operative told them it was true. When the information was available from American writers eighteen years earlier, The Washington Post ignored it.
To some of the old timers the CIA is still a cherished priesthood. Like most priesthoods, these members do all they can to protect the reputation and what is often the mythology of the CIA. The aging members of the priesthood have been very busy the last few years as more and more about CIA mismanagement and venality has emerged publicly.
