FEDORA

[Tom Graves]

KGB Major Aleksei Kulak, J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA, was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office off-and-on for a total of about ten years from early 1962 to 1976. Among many other things (like protecting false -- or perhaps rogue -- physical defector to the U.S. Yuri Nosenko), he spread disinformation about the KGB's reaction to the assassination.

His name is mentioned several times in the following excerpt from Mark Riebling's 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, which book you can read for free by googling "wedge" "riebling" and "archive" simultaneously.

My comments are in brackets.

[True-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn wouldn't have anything to do with the FBI's liaison to the CIA], but Angleton himself was willing to share the defector’s theories with Papich in long talks after work at their homes. They lived only a few blocks apart, in North Arlington, and Papich would find himself at two or three o’clock in the morning in the backyard greenhouse where Angleton grew orchids. The hobby had become a full-blown obsession for Angleton, who frequently traveled as an orchid salesman for cover on sensitive missions abroad. When he took his custom hybrids to flower shows, he showed them with the professionals, and sometimes won prizes. It was always warm in the orchid house, and Angleton would be diddling around with his plants while they talked, but it got them away from the families, and there were a couple of old wood benches where Papich could sit down. So it was among the leafy shadows and eternal summer of the greenhouse that Papich learned the details of what Golitsyn called the Soviets’ “long-range plan” [or "Master Plan" -- what his detractors called "The Monster Plot"].

Greatly simplified, this plan called for massive political warfare, buttressed by secret intelligence deceptions. At the Twentieth Communist World Congress, in 1959, the U.S.A. had been designated the Main Enemy, but at the same time it had been decided to try a new approach. There was to be a thaw in relations, and a return to Leninist deceptions like the Trust and the New Economic Program (NEP), which had once convinced the U.S. that the Soviets were reforming. The KGB was to be reorganized to project an image of disunity and weakness in the communist world. By playing up false splits between communist nations, the Soviets would hope to divide and confuse the West, ultimately weakening it. Over the short term, the objective was economic aid to the communist world; over the long term, the goal was to end the Cold War, which would cause the U.S. to disarm.

Papich was skeptical. Even if the KGB had been divided, as Golitsyn said, into an elite “inner” core which knew about such things as secret bloc coordination, and a much larger “outer” KGB, which did not, hundreds if not thousands of people would eventually have to know. How could such a big secret be totally kept from the West?

The answer, Angleton said, was contained in the question. Human nature being what it was, such a secret surely couldn’t be kept forever; therefore, the Soviets must exploit human nature to keep the West from believing the secret, once it was out. That would not be too difficult, for the Western mind naturally wanted to believe in Soviet weakness and evolution, and probably would, if that false message came from a plurality of Soviet sources especially when those sources provided other information that was verifiably true. Where [in the 1920s] the NEP had used Western contacts with The Trust to inject its reformist message into British intelligence, Golitsyn said, the KGB would now create a new “Trust” of anticommunists — defectors and “walk-ins” from Soviet intelligence. False information would even be planted on genuine defectors and unimportant agents in the KGB, on the assumption that these would be cultivated by the West — a process Golitsyn compared to the deliberate misbriefing of “doomed pilots” in World War II. Dis-informants would confirm the reality of bogus schisms within the communist world, perpetuate a false picture of communist designs, and deflect from true information provided by defectors such as Golitsyn. [KGB "defector" Yuri] Nosenko could be part of that strategy, Angleton reasoned, even if his information overlapped with Golitsyn’s on many counts; eventually, once his credibility was established, he would take CIA for a ride. [Nosenko was eventually hired by the CIA to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.] Disinformation messages would be shifted over time, to accord with Western preconceptions, and the net effect would be to keep the West from taking seriously the idea of any secret Soviet plot.

Papich was still not convinced. How would the Soviets know whether and when certain information was believed by CIA, and when and how to shift their messages accordingly?

Angleton smiled. Here at last, he said, was the “final cause” of Soviet penetration, its ultimate logic, the key to KGB strategy. Although the most obvious purpose of any Soviet mole was simply to relay secrets to Moscow Center, the most valuable type of secret was knowledge of how KGB disinformation was being interpreted, so that it could be tailored to Western perspectives. The penetration and disinformation agents were to work in tandem: the “outside” men [like FEDORA and TOPHAT] supplying the disinformation, and the “inside” [like probable KGB moles Bruce Solie and Leonard V. McCoy] reporting what was thought of it. If operating successfully, that “feedback loop” would leave Western intelligence agencies, and their sponsor governments, completely at the mercy of the KGB — unable to distinguish falsehood from fact. And Golitsyn believed, as did Angleton, that the Soviets had indeed penetrated Western intelligence to the point where such a feedback loop could successfully operate. The defector employed a medical analogy to describe the severity of the problem: “When the patient refuses to recognize it exists, it grows and spreads, with bad cells infecting good cells.” Western intelligence was “sick” from the cancer of penetration at various levels. The French and British and other services were already dead; CIA had been penetrated broadly at a fairly low [sic] level, and was gravely ill; the FBI, because of at least three penetrations in its New York and Washington field offices [FEDORA, TOPHAT and SHAMROCK -- Boris Orekhov], was “dying.” “I listened with great interest to what Jim was getting from Golitsyn,” Papich later said. “To a certain extent, Jim [Angleton] sold me a message on that; some people might say I was Jim’s man at the FBI. I was very much concerned about all of our vulnerabilities, because our inclination at the FBI was sometimes to accept things at face value, to be impressed only when a defector gave us cases. Well, the whole idea of disinformation agents made me realize that we had to look at all our cases goddamned carefully.”

But Papich immediately understood that the new Angleton-Golitsyn line was bound to be “controversial” and “irritating,” especially to FBI officers who had already soured on Golitsyn. When Papich relayed the essence of Golitsyn’s thesis to others at the FBI, it was rejected out of hand. Privately, G-men like Don Moore and William Branigan would make fun of what they called Golitsyn’s “Monster Plot,” while simply telling Papich and Angleton that the idea was “too speculative.” Strictly speaking, that was true; though CIA had established Golitsyn’s bona fides, his account of the new long-range [KGB] strategy had not yet been independently confirmed. The Agency could document a secret KGB meeting in May 1959 [the 20th Party Congress] and some subsequent reorganization and could glean a return to Leninism from open party sources, and even [false-defector Yuri] Nosenko had confirmed the existence of Department D [in the First Chief Directorate, but not of its counterpart, Department 14 in the Second Chief Directorate]. But otherwise everything rested ultimately on Golitsyn’s word. “We need confirmation; we need more detail,” the FBI counterespionage experts told Papich.

The liaison officer sensed that there were other reasons why his colleagues didn’t want to believe Golitsyn. Hoover had always said, “An attack on any employee of the FBI will be considered an attack on me personally,” and in alleging that three employees in Hoover’s two most important field offices were Soviet agents, Golitsyn caused a closing of ranks against the very possibility. Whereas the Bureau was only too eager to chase down alleged Soviet moles in CIA, it stubbornly refused to investigate Golitsyn’s allegations about communist spies in the FBI, saying that the defector’s leads were not specific enough. Angleton countered by suggesting, through Papich, that Golitsyn’s memory might be jogged, or his deductions sharpened, if he were allowed to view certain FBI personnel and operational files in sanitized form, with sensitive methods and sources concealed. But the Bureau flatly refused all CIA requests to examine its files. “We never gave Golitsyn any of our material, despite [Angleton's] many requests that we do so,” FBI counterintelligence man James Nolan recalled.

Yet Papich knew that FBI resentment of CIA’s star defector [Golitsyn] ran even deeper than unwillingness to believe the KGB had penetrated the Bureau. There was also a will to believe that the Bureau had successfully penetrated the KGB. Indeed, the FBI had just recently made its first-ever recruitments within Soviet intelligence, and though Golitsyn would cast them as probable disinformation agents, the Bureau wanted to believe they were bona fide.

The first of the FBI’s two new sources was forty-year-old Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, nicknamed “Fatso by his Bureau handlers and officially code-named “Fedora.” He served as a consultant to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, but his real task was to collect scientific and technological secrets from KGB spies in the U.S. One afternoon in March 1962, he simply walked into the FBI’s New York Field Office, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and claimed to be disenchanted by lack of advancement within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. For cash, he would provide the FBI with the identities of other KGB officers, furnish Soviet military-technological “wish lists," and report on Red Army missile capacity and nuclear-development plans.

The second new FBI source was Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, code-named “Top Hat.” An officer in the GRU and a junior military attache at the UN, he approached an
FBI agent in New York in early 1962. Claiming to be disillusioned because he had to remit 90 percent of his salary to Moscow, he agreed to further meetings in a room at the Cameron Hotel, on West 86th Street. Soon he was serving up the identities of GRU cipher clerks, gossiping about political developments in Moscow, and bad-mouthing guidance systems on Soviet missiles (so inaccurate, he said, that they could not hit Miami from Cuba).

Fedora and Top Hat were so prized and so jealously protected by the Bureau that for much of 1962 their existence was hidden from CIA. Theoretically, enough contextual information about both men should have been turned over to CIA for Angleton to assess their bona fides, even if their true identities were obscured. But Hoover bypassed Angleton and sent reports based on Fedora’s and Top Hat’s information straight to President Kennedy. When one report described Fedora as “a source of unknown reliability,” the FBI director took up his infamous blue-inked fountain pen and slashed out the “un.”

By 1963, CIA had to be informed of both sources, however, because both were begging the FBI to supply “feed material," doctored or low-grade intelligence, to keep their KGB superiors happy. That was a complicated process which required careful coordination. Military secrets had to be cleared by Military Intelligence, naval secrets by Naval Intelligence, etc. The game would be lost, moreover, if doctored intelligence passed by the FBI did not cohere with what the Soviets might be getting from doubles run separately by CIA. Indeed, the necessity of coordination in such double-agent schemes had been one of the great counterintelligence lessons taught by the Dusko Popov and Kopff-Baarn cases of World War II. So by 1963, CIA had been brought into the feeding of Fedora and Tophat [By probable KGB "mole" Leonard V. McCoy in the Soviet Russia Division's Reports & Requirements section?].

“They checked with us, and there was a mechanism for clearance of feed material for the two UN diplomats,” Angleton’s deputy Scotty Miler confirmed. “They didn’t tell us all the details of how they were met and how they were handled, but that wasn’t really important. We knew enough, not only from Golitsyn, but from other sources, that we weren’t too sure the agents were kosher. And it was our business to tell the FBI why we didn’t think Fedora and Top Hat were for real: because they weren’t giving the proper poop, because they were asking for things that fit in with what we thought the Soviets could check on, and because of what they told us about Soviet objectives, some of which was counter to Golitsyn.”

There were other caution flags. It seemed odd to Papich, as to Angleton, that, after almost a half-century without a Soviet walk-in, the FBI should suddenly get two of them. Their reporting ranged across compartments, which was odd in the notoriously compartmented KGB. And much of what they provided was dated. “They gave us cases,” Papich said, “but most of them we knew already.”

Those few cases the Bureau hadn’t known about seemed of dubious value, at least to Papich and Angleton.

In 1963, for instance, Fedora said that the Soviets had a spy in a British nuclear-research facility. Suspicion soon hovered over Giuseppe Martelli, a physicist at Culham Laboratory. Investigation revealed rendezvous information locked in a drawer in his desk and partially used coding pads for secret communications. But, according to MI5’s Peter Wright, “no evidence had been found that Martelli had access to secrets or was passing them to a foreign power.” To Angleton and Papich, as to Wright, the Martelli case seemed clearly of the “throwaway variety,” as if designed to build up the credibility of the source at little real cost to Soviet operations.

The very nature of Fedora’s approach to the FBI caused suspicion. “I got turned off on Fedora right from the beginning,” Papich said. “If you’re doing something, and you’ve been trained in such-and-such a way, overall, you’re going to try to adhere to orthodox principles. In football, for instance, you’re going to punt on fourth down, for the most part. And in espionage, you’re not just going to stroll into the enemy camp in broad daylight and volunteer. But what the hell did Fedora do? He walked into our goddamn office in New York! Right on 72nd Street, not too far away from the Soviet consulate [and said that he felt confidant doing so because all of the other KGB officers in NYC were at a meeting about their mole "Dick" in the NYC FBI, which information caused the FBI to search in vain for years for non-existent "Dick"]. And you don’t do that if you’re going to defect, knowing that it’s surveilled by your own people. If you do it that way, and you’re a bona-fide agent, you’re going to get your head chopped off.”

But when Papich made that case to Don Moore, the Bureau’s Soviet counterintelligence chief, he got nowhere. “Sam, maybe just walking in one day was the best way of doing it, because it’s what the Soviets would least expect,” Papich would recall Moore as saying. “He knew just where to go, which floor. He had confidence he wasn’t going to get burned, he had confidence he wasn’t being tailed by his own people — all that traffic and whatnot in New York, who the hell was going to see him going into the field office? That’s not the way we would do it, but he did it that way, and people don’t always adhere to orthodox principles. Sometimes you’re not going to punt on fourth down. Sonny Jurgensen sometimes didn’t; sometimes he’d throw a pass. Well, the same thing can happen in counterintelligence.”

My comment:

LOL!