Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

By Agee’s own count, Dirty Work II brought the total number of CIA officials exposed by him and the RUPOR team to about 2,000. For the KGB it had been a remarkably effective active measure. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 1980:

In recent years members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees… have become increasingly concerned about the systematic effort by a small group of Americans… to disclose the names of covert intelligence agents… Foremost among them has been Philip Agee… The destructive effect of these disclosures has been varied and wide-ranging…

The professional effectiveness of officers who have been compromised is substantially and sometimes irreparably damaged. They must reduce or break contact with sensitive covert sources and continued contact must be coupled with increased defensive measures that are inevitably more costly and time-consuming. Some officers must be removed from their assignments and returned from overseas at substantial cost, and years of irreplaceable area experience and language skills are lost.

Since the ability to reassign the compromised officer is impaired, the pool of experienced CIA officers who can serve abroad is being reduced. Replacement of officers thus compromised is difficult and, in some cases, impossible. Such disclosures also sensitize hostile security services to CIA presence and influence foreign populations, making operations more difficult.

All thirteen members of the House Intelligence Committee sponsored the Intelligence Identities Protection Bill, popularly known as the “Anti-Agee Bill,” which eventually became law in June 1982. Agee himself had been deprived of his American passport in 1981 and traveled over the next few years on passports issued by, successively, Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His influence, by now, was in sharp decline. As he complained, “My 1983 call for a continent-wide action front against the CIA’s people in Latin America went nowhere. People had other preoccupations and priorities.” 71

LIKE THE CIA, the FBI was inevitably a major target of KGB active measures. Until the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, many of these measures were personally directed against the Bureau’s long-serving, aging and irascible director. Service A employed three simple and sometimes crude techniques. The first was to portray Hoover as in league with extremists such as the ultra right-wing John Birch Society, whose founder regarded even the former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Service A had acquired both some of the society’s stationery and samples of its leaders’ signatures from its California headquarters to assist it in its forgeries. In November 1965 it fabricated a letter of good wishes from Hoover to the leader of the John Birch Society, reminding him that the FBI funds put at his disposal would enable the society to open several more branches. 72

A second, more sophisticated form of active measures concerned alleged FBI abuses of civil rights. Operation SPIRT was designed to demonstrate that the head of the Passport Office in the State Department, Frances Knight, was a secret FBI agent whose loyalty was to Hoover rather than to the Secretary of State. In 1967 Service A forged a letter from Ms. Knight to Hoover and arranged for it to be sent to the celebrated columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Washington Post on August 4. 73The fabricated letter reported that a situation of “extreme urgency” had arisen as a result of press enquiries about an alleged FBI request to her for information on Professor H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard critic of American policy in Vietnam:

I am seriously afraid that this may indicate preparations for a sustained press campaign against us. We have already discussed the attitude of the Secretary of State towards the long-established practice of the department making inquiries at the request of the FBI…

Forgive me if I sound alarmist, but I am quite certain from what I have heard that a principle of vital importance is at stake which affects the whole conduct of the government and, in particular, the effectiveness of the Bureau.

Ms. Knight told Hoover she was unwilling to commit too much to paper and suggested an urgent meeting with him. 74Knight and Hoover both dismissed the letter as a forgery, but the fact that neither denied the FBI’s contacts with the Passport Office persuaded the KGB that at least some of its mud had stuck. 75

A third line of attack deployed by Service A against Hoover was to accuse him of being a homosexual. 76The truth about Hoover’s probably severely repressed sexuality is unlikely ever to be known. Later, much-publicized claims that he was a gay cross-dresser whose wardrobe included a red dress and boa, which made him look like “an old flapper,” and a black dress, “very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings,” which he wore with a black curly wig, rest on little more than the discredited testimony of a convicted perjurer, Susan Rosenstiel, who claimed to have seen Hoover so attired. Nor is there any reliable evidence that Hoover and his deputy, Clyde Tolson, who shared his house, ever had a homosexual relationship. But attempts to portray him as a heterosexual are also less than convincing. Hoover had no known female liaisons. As his staunchly loyal number three, “Deke” DeLoach, acknowledges, probably the only person he had ever loved was his mother: “Hoover’s capacity to feel deeply for other human beings [was] interred with her in the Old Congressional Cemetery near Seward Square.” 77

The later commercial success, admittedly in a more prurient period, of fanciful stories of Hoover at gay transvestite parties suggests that in fabricating stories of his homosexual affairs in the late 1960s Service A had hit upon a potentially promising active measures theme. DeLoach was later depressed to discover how readily such stories were accepted as “undeniable truth:”

“Tell us about Hoover and Tolson,” people would say.

“Was it obvious?”

“Did everyone know what was going on?” 78

As sometimes happened, however, Service A spoiled a plausible falsehood by surrounding it with improbable amounts of conspiracy theory. It sent anonymous letters, intended to appear to come from the Ku Klux Klan, to the editors of leading newspapers, accusing Hoover of personally selecting for promotion in the FBI homosexuals from whom he expected sexual favors. Not content with turning the FBI into “a den of faggots,” Hoover had also allegedly been engaged for several decades in a larger gay conspiracy to staff the CIA and the State Department with homosexuals. The national security of the United States, claimed the letters, was now seriously at risk. 79Service A’s belief that major newspapers would take seriously nonsense of this kind, especially emanating from the Ku Klux Klan, was graphic evidence of the limitations in its understanding of American society. The letters had, predictably, no observable effect.

THE MOST CELEBRATED victim of the FBI’s own active measures was the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Hoover’s obsessive belief that King was “a tom cat with degenerate sexual urges” and his simmering resentment at King’s criticism of the FBI led him to make the preposterous allegation to a group of journalists in 1964 that “King is the most notorious liar in the country.” When his staff urged him to insist that his outburst was off the record, Hoover refused. “Feel free,” he told the journalists, “to print my remarks as given.” The active measures against King were organized, apparently without Hoover’s knowledge, by FBI Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. In December 1964 Sullivan sent King a tape recording of some of his adulterous sexual liaisons which the Bureau had obtained by bugging his room in Washington’s Willard Hotel. With the tape was an anonymous letter which purported to come from a disillusioned former supporter: