For years, among members of the US Intelligence community, there was an undeserved smugness that highly placed Soviet Intelligence operatives such the British spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Harold “Kim” Philby could never happen here in the United States. Despite the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, Americans were thought superior to “that sort of thing”. Besides, our security procedures and regulations were thought to be airtight. The British, on the other hand, were thought somewhat lacking in matters of security. Or, at least, that was the prevailing mentality until the arrival, on our shores, of one Anatoliy Golitsyn in the early 1960s. 

Golitsyn, a self-confessed major in the Soviet Intelligence Service (known by the Cyrillic acronym “KGB” or “Committee for State Security”), astounded his CIA interlocutors with the assertion that there was one or, perhaps, even several, long-term KGB“moles” (“hostile penetration assets”) situated within the highest echelons of the CIA and other United States government offices. (Perhaps even within the Oval Office of the White House itself? [See this author’s book: For Good of Country: The Plot to Kill An American President.”]) 

Unfortunately, Golitsyn had had little, if any, additional identifying or qualifying information on the subject. Needless to say, Golitsyn’s revelations created immediate and widespread alarm throughout the U.S. Intelligence community and other US government offices. While some US officials, including the late James Jesus Angleton (the long-time Counter-Intelligence Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency), believed Golitsyn, an equal number of intelligence officials did not. These latter CIA officials rejected Golitsyn’s bona-fides and were convinced that Golitsyn was a Soviet “plant” whose mission was to give false information (“Dezinformatsiya”) to the Americans about highly-placed Soviet “moles” in the US government hierarchy.