The KGB's zombification of the CIA began in late 1961 with Polyakov

[Tom Graves]

Note: Everything in this article is what I’ve learned by reading Tennent H. Bagley’s books Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games and Spymaster, and his 35-page article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars.”

All three can be read for free by googling their respective titles (“spy wars” is sufficient for the former) and the word “archive” simultaneously.

Background:

CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, was recruited in 1952 in Vienna and betrayed in early 1957 in D.C. movie houses by his honey-trapped-and-recruited-by-KGB former dead drop setter-upper, recently fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith (John M. Newman, who dedicated his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, to Bagley, believes he was betrayed by the Office of Security’s Bruce Solie with help from Smith and James McCord). In the interest of source protection, Popov was allowed to continue spying for the CIA until he was secretly arrested in early December 1958 and “played back” against the CIA. He was eventually publicly arrested on 16 October 1959.

In October 1957, in an attempt to fabricate incriminating evidence against Popov that wouldn’t implicate the mole who had betrayed him, a GRU officer who was unknown to him, Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov, escorted an ostensible “Illegal,” Margarita Tairova, to him in East Berlin for him to forward to NYC. The plan was for Tairova to notice heavy FBI surveillance in NYC and to flee back to Moscow, thereby casting suspicion on Popov as the mole who had notified the FBI/CIA of Tairova’s impending arrival.

Upon finally being told by James Angleton in 1963 that Dmitry Polyakov was the name of a certain FBI informant, Bagley realized that Polyakov must be Kremlin-loyal because he had been sent to the U.N. in 1959 despite the fact that every KGB officer who had been in contact with Popov was being recalled to Moscow at that time. After Polyakov had established his credibility at the U.N. (and after a recent mole had been dealt with — see below), Polyakov “walked in” to the FBI’s NYC field office in late-December 1961.

General Oleg Gribanov, the risk-taking head of the Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB) who was personally in charge of its new deception-based Department 14, had sent Polyakov to NYC in 1959 so that he could recycle to the FBI and the CIA some bona fides-boosting intel that Popov had told the CIA, but Gribanov had to postpone the operation to “trap like a bear in its den” a more recent mole, GRU Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky had been recruited by the CIA and MI6 in London in April 1961. We know from false-defector* Yuri Nosenko’s asking Bagley and George Kisevalter about an “Indonesian military attaché” named “Zepp” in June 1962 in Geneva that Polyakov had been betrayed by a mole in the CIA or British Intelligence within two weeks of his recruitment. (Look up “Zepp Incident.”)

Polyakov was an informant at the FBI’s NYC field office from late-December 1961 through 1962, at which time he was reposted to Moscow. He eventually “flipped” to the CIA in Rangoon in 1966. We know from Bagley’s post-Cold War friend, former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev, that Polyakov was eventually uncovered by the KGB because “he was telling you more than he was supposed to.” Which begs the question: Who at CIA headquarters was privy to what Polyakov was telling his CIA case officers in Rangoon and New Delhi? Could it have been Leonard V. McCoy — the Nosenko-defending high-level Reports & Requirements officer in the Soviet Russia Division until 1975 when he became Deputy Chief of CIA Counterintelligence?

*Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent there by Gribanov to discredit what he knew a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Gollitsyn, had told the CIA (i.e., Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton) about KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies, and he was a false (or, imho, perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.

. . . . . . .

P.S. Polyakov’s 1962 claim to the FBI and CIA that the Kremlin had discontinued its chemical and biological weapons program was proved to be a lie when some Soviet tanks were captured by Israel during the Six-Day War.

P.P.S. Polyakov and his fellow Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI’s NYC field office, KGB Major Aleksey Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA — who “walked in” a couple of months after Polyakov), gave the Bureau the names of about 150 “Illegals” in NYC, but most, if not all, of those “leads” turned out to be time-wasting dead ends.

P.P.P.S. You can read about the Soviets’ earlier highly successful deception ops, “Trust,” and “WiN” (sic) in Spy Wars.