Nosenko said he had the answer. The KGB wasn’t behind Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, the KGB had been so concerned about Oswald’s past and the appearance of Soviet ties that it had searched its own records and couldn’t find any evidence that he was working for them.
Yet by the time Nosenko told the CIA what he knew, the agency had already decided he had been sent across to lie. Angleton was convinced Nosenko was a double agent and persuaded others at the CIA that he’d been sent by Moscow to tie them in knots about Oswald and dozens of other sensitive cases. He was encouraged in his paranoia by an earlier KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had told Angleton that every defector after him would be a double agent. It was the perfect story for Golitsyn to tell—it ensured his continued influence, even after he had run out of secrets to reveal. But to believe Golitsyn was to descend willingly into a swamp of paranoia and confusion. For years, Nosenko was locked away in his specially constructed prison at “the Farm,” the agency’s training center at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, quarantined like a deadly virus.
With his power base secure thanks to his close relationship with CIA Director Richard Helms, Angleton had managed to co-opt key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB. Soon, case officers trying to recruit agents from behind the Iron Curtain had to jump through hoops to convince Angleton and his acolytes that their cases were worth pursuing. Those who persisted or challenged the prevailing paranoia were in danger of coming under suspicion of being Soviet agents themselves.
Angleton was certain that the Soviets had penetrated the CIA and launched a mole hunt that lasted for years, ruining one career after another. Ultimately, the investigation turned on its own, and Angleton himself came under scrutiny as a possible Soviet spy. The Salem witch trials had come to CIA headquarters.
The end result of these mind games was virtual paralysis in the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union throughout much of the 1960s. The last great Soviet agent to work for the CIA without facing Angleton’s paranoid scrutiny was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a top aide on the Red Army general staff who spied from 1960 until his arrest in 1962. One of the most important spies in CIA history, Penkovsky was the first to pull back the shroud on the Soviet high command and reveal that the Kremlin was operating on bluster and hollow threats. He helped show the West that the supposed missile gap was a myth and that the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability was woefully inadequate to challenge the United States. Penkovsky’s information helped give President Kennedy the edge over Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet many of the major cases in the years after Penkovsky were challenged by Angleton. The counterintelligence chief set the bar so high that CIA officers around the world simply stopped targeting Soviets, knowing that these cases would ultimately go nowhere. Worse, recruiting a Russian might bring them under suspicion. Developing a Soviet as a recruitment target would inevitably lead to a confrontation with Angleton’s people. The clear implication was always that the case officer in the field couldn’t know what part the case played in the broader KGB “monster plot” to deceive the CIA.
By the time Gerber read the files, the agency was in the process of trying to forget, even cover up, the whole sordid Nosenko affair. But Gerber could see the broader effects of the Angleton excesses. Not only had case officers largely stopped trying to target Soviets, the Soviet Division had also been turning away dozens of “volunteers,” Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States. The Golitsyn-fed paranoia had convinced the CIA that these volunteers were in fact KGB provocateurs seeking to turn the agency inside out.
Gerber analyzed the files, going back over fifteen years, files specifically on Soviets who had volunteered in Moscow or elsewhere in the Soviet Union, to test Angleton’s theories. Was there any evidence to support Angleton’s fears? No one had ever dared sift through the CIA’s records to challenge the spy hunter’s assumptions in such a methodical way. The simple but powerful answer was that the sick-think theories didn’t stand up to scrutiny. To Gerber, the facts strongly suggested that the CIA had been turning away one genuine volunteer in Moscow after another, simply out of fear of contamination. The result was that the agency had probably missed out on a gold mine of secrets from citizens of the Soviet empire who had sought to change sides. There would always be dangles and provocations sent against the CIA by the KGB, but that was the cost of doing business. If the CIA was afraid to talk to Soviets, Gerber reasoned, then it might as well close up shop.
Gerber wrote an exhaustive report detailing his findings, concluding that the CIA was killing its chances for success by turning away so many Soviet volunteers. The overwhelming majority of them appeared to be legitimate, and Gerber offered sensible guidelines to ferret out the few who might be dangles. Above all, Gerber concluded, there was no evidence that the Soviets had ever allowed a serving KGB staff officer to approach the CIA as a double agent. Moscow simply didn’t trust them enough. KGB officers who volunteered were almost certainly genuine.
Gerber was proud of his work, which he finished in the spring of 1971, just as Angleton’s power over Soviet operations was about
