IN HIS DEFECTOR HE TRUSTED
Résumé
No process is as old and simple as that of intelligence: using a defector to obtain information from the “other side”, especially in the case of a closed political system such as the Soviet Regime. In the first twenty years of the Cold War, the CIA was not very familiar with this game1. Reasons were diverse: its inability to operate in the USSR before 1961, because of the opposition of the State Department; the strong control of the KGB in the Soviet territory, that made it quite impossible for an American to operate freely, and on the Soviet people during Stalin’s era. A logical consequence were the technical programs devised by the CIA to obtain Signal and Image Intelligence data. At the same time, the CIA was the object of many suspicions and attacks in the USA due to the fact that it remained a permanent intelligence agency, even in peacetime2. Following revelations of major soviet infiltrations in Roosevelt’s administrations and Donovan’s set, the second “Red Scare”, organised by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and led by John Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the CIA was a firm target. In a way, the main attack that happened was not against Cord Meyer, in the summer of 1953, when he was accused of being a communist; it was more against Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby, a Special Intelligence Service liaison with the CIA between 1949 and 1951. Both were close friends of James J. Angeton3, who was soon to become the first and most powerful Counterintelligence director of the next twenty years.
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