Category: CIA
The Soviet Defector Who Did the Most Damage
During the past 30 years, extraordinary material released from American and Russian archives has enormously expanded our understanding about Soviet espionage directed at the United States and its allies during the 20th century. The Venona decryptions were the product of American decoding of KGB messages. The Vassiliev Notebooks were based on documents the KGB provided to a researcher as part of a negotiated book deal. The only material provided by a genuine spy was the Mitrokhin material, several thousand pages of notes made surreptitiously by a KGB archivist. While British historian Christopher Andrew collaborated with Vasili Mitrokhin to write two books based on his notes, Mitrokhin himself has not received the attention he merits. Venona and Vassiliev exposed a great deal about Soviet espionage from the 1930s and ’40s. Mitrokhin’s information covered more recent operations and did far more damage to Soviet intelligence than any other defector.
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Aldrich Ames and the Enemy Within
I had a friend, a Soviet-East Europe Division case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1980s. He was extremely well-suited to operations behind the Iron Curtain: He had a preternatural capacity to know where he was even in areas of Moscow he’d never been to. Maps and photographs once seen were never forgotten, giving him a continuous visual feed as he ran endurance contests against the omnipresent possibility of KGB surveillance. After a few runs, something dawned on him: His agent never made mistakes in his clandestine communications and routines. Everything was perfect.
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Creep state: Corgan claims feds helped sideline rock
Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan says he was approached by government entities during the George W. Bush administration.
According to the singer, he is familiar with several instances of musicians being compromised and protected by the industry due to their willingness to play ball.
‘I’ve been approached by elements of the US government.’
The Smashing Pumpkins were among the most popular bands in the 1990s, with three records achieving at least platinum-selling status and 1995’s “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” reaching diamond status.
Now, among other ventures, Corgan hosts “The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan” podcast and recently had writer Conrad Flynn as his guest. The pair discussed dark influences in Hollywood culture, which led Corgan to reveal that he himself had been approached by the government in past decades.
Siamese scheme
“At different times, I’ve been approached by elements of the U.S. government to be involved in things that were just way above my pay grade,” he explained. “I’ve never talked about them in any depth publicly, but I’ve had experiences where I would find myself in a room with people and think, ‘Why are they talking to me?’ It was something out of, like, ‘Eyes Wide Shut,'” Corgan said, referring to the movie about the occult.
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Corgan explained that his experiences led to interactions with government officials hoping to capitalize on his influence.
“All I can say is I’ve experienced supernatural things and I’ve experienced things where I’ve had elements of the U.S. government reach out to me because they somehow want to hook my influence, which is not that great, into whatever they’re after.”
Chart of the deal
This led the singer to speak on the music industry, which is “certainly [his] area of expertise,” while adding the notion that “there are elements in popular music where people have been compromised, knowingly.”
“They were offered kind of a Faustian bargain. Pick door No .1 and we’re going to push you to the moon. … There are people who are protected, and they get every benefit of that protection, and I know it because I know the game, because I’ve lived it. And there are other people where they just, they decide to press a button and throw them off the ship.”
Some of these musicians may have been dumped for bad behavior, Corgan admitted, but in “other cases,” he said, it was likely because “they won’t do the bidding that people want them to do.”
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Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images
Disarmed
The culmination of political influence on music — particularly rock music — resulted in the severe lack of edgy rock artists since the turn of the millennium.
“Here we are 25 years into the 21st century, and rock couldn’t be less of an influence on the on the social political order,” Corgan continued, noting how influential the genre was in the second half of the 1900s.
“Does anybody think that that’s kind of strange? That somebody decided to push a button somewhere and make sure that people like myself don’t say certain things any more?”
Corgan soon cut the conversation short, telling his guest he was not willing to directly state what he was asked and by whom.
Infamous CIA officer turned Soviet spy dies in prison
After more than 30 years since pleading guilty to espionage that reportedly compromised several United States assets during the Cold War, an infamous Central Intelligence Agency officer has died in prison.
Aldrich Ames died on Monday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.
Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve ‘financial troubles, immediate and continuing.’
Ames was held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving a life sentence without parole.
Ames, a career CIA agent, was arrested in 1994 on espionage charges years after he began cooperating with KGB agents in 1985. The information he provided to the Soviets is thought to have directly contributed to the compromising of several CIA and FBI sources, some of whom were executed after their discovery.
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Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images
Over nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”
“Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that,” Ames said in an interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News.
“I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment,” he added. “There’s simply no question about this.”
Ames’ wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage.
Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death.
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Cold War Interlude
Is there a more purely entertaining British novelist writing today than William Boyd? I doubt it, and I would even go a step further than that. Since his crowning achievement with 2002’s whole-life novel Any Human Heart, Boyd has pivoted from the witty, Evelyn Waugh-ish literary books with which he began his career to a series of period-set spy novels that focus on what it’s like to be an innocent caught up in events beyond their comprehension. From 2006’s mega-bestseller Restless to 2012’s Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd has consistently proved himself the purveyor of high-class, page-turning espionage fiction. Warmer and funnier than le Carré, less jaded than Mick Herron, his novels are page-turners par excellence.
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McCloskey’s Latest Spy Thriller Turns a New Page
In just five years, David McCloskey has gone from being a complete unknown to his current status as one of our leading writers of spy fiction, a remarkably rapid ascent. While his first three novels—Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023), and The Seventh Floor (2024)—were set in the same fictional universe, centered around the CIA (where McCloskey himself spent seven or eight years as an analyst, mostly in the Middle East), The Persian marks a new departure.
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