Posted on 08/27/2004 1:12:08 PM PDT by christie
Yet Papich knew that FBI resentment of CIA's star defector 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 Golitsynism 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 Scotch-loving Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, nicknamed "Fatso" by his Bureau handlers and officially code-named Fedora. He served under cover 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 Soviet 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.
SNIP
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."
I thought it might be something along those lines...
With all the suspense and intrigue of a Cold War thriller, Operation Solo tells the remarkable and true story of Morris Childs, code named "Agent 58", who, for twenty-seven years, provided the United States with the Kremlin's innermost secrets during fifty-two clandestine missions to the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe.
It'll be here shortly. Thanks...
You're most welcome! It's a good book!
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