Unsolved mysteries and loose ends

Thirty Years Later, We Still Don’t Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies

...Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected.

“Some of it just didn’t add up,” he says. “The mole isn’t just some guy who stole a few secrets. He might be dead, or he’s living in his dacha now. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. These things have to be run to ground.”

If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. If it should turn out that the mole is no longer alive, the intelligence agencies would still run a damage assessment to try to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed.

“That the KGB ran a ‘fourth mole’ is undeniable,” Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA.

It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it.