"Spy Handler" (Basic Books, 338 pages $26) by Victor Cherkashin
Mr. Epstein's "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood" will be published in February.
Posted on 12/30/2004 9:01:40 AM PST by OESY
Recently a number of former CIA officers received an invitation from the Spy Museum in Washington to attend a luncheon for former KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin. The event, as the invitation said, would afford "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine and dish with an extraordinary spymaster." In the heyday of the Cold War, such an offer, delivered with slightly more discretion, might have been the prelude to a KGB recruitment operation. Now it's merely the notice for a book party celebrating yet another memoir by a former KGB officer recounting how the KGB duped the CIA.
In this case, there is a great deal to tell. Victor Cherkashin served in the KGB from 1952, when Stalin was still in power, until the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. During most of that time his mission was to organize KGB operations aimed at undermining the integrity, confidence and morale of the CIA. He seems to have been good at his job. His big opportunity came when he was the deputy KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington between 1979 and 1985.
Those years were the height of a ferocious spy war within the Cold War. In "Spy Handler" Cherkashin describes in detail how he helped convert two American counterintelligence officers -- one well-placed in the CIA's Soviet Russia Division, the other in the FBI -- into moles. Their names are notorious now, but over the course of a decade Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen operated with anonymous stealth, compromising most of the CIA's and FBI's espionage efforts in the Soviet Union.
But that wasn't the end of Mr. Cherkashin's glory. Returning to Moscow, he helped run "dangle" operations in which KGB-controlled diplomats feigned a willingness to be recruited by their American counterparts, only to hand over disinformation when they were finally "recruited."...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"Spy Handler" (Basic Books, 338 pages $26) by Victor Cherkashin
Mr. Epstein's "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood" will be published in February.
THe KGB has always been clever - they really had brillant directors, real chess masters.
Both. There were warning signals with both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen that were ignored. To give him credit, Hanssen put on a pretty good act, but I think he'd have been caught if someone had monitored him more closely.
KGB cleverness and U.S. incompetence do not seem to exhaust the possibilities. What about treason higher up, the moles who never were detected? The saga of Sybil Edmonds (sp?) suggests that our services are still hopelessly compromised.
Just curious...did they ever figure out what Sandy Berger was going to do with the papers in his sock? Was he really just tring to plug some holes in his shoes so his feet would not get wet?
The Sandy Berger burglaries seem to have died out and no prosecution that I've heard about.
If it were a Republican.......
It still amazes me that there are two sets of laws, and rules for press coverage: one for (R) and quite another for (D).
Serious answer: He was removing annotated copies of memos in which he had minimized or dismissed the threat of terrorism during the Clinton Administration.
Let me run this by you one more time. In the absence of new information, "news", the MSM media is just an echo chamber for the Democratic Party. If they even pay any attention to such Republican criticism at all, it will only be for the purpose of belittling the critics and making them appear shrill and hysterical. Even when Berger is inevitably indicted, they'll play it up as Republican vindictiveness. I cite the SBVT as the golden precedent.
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