Of Moles and Men : MOLEHUNT: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA <i> By David Wise</i> , <i> (Random House: $22; 304 pp.) </i>

Pity the poor secret policeman inside a democracy: anonymous, unloved, encouraged to be paranoid, then condemned for screaming at his own reflections as they close in upon him for the final vengeance. Pity him, and then let’s give him his gold watch and pension. He’s history.

During the ‘60s, James Jesus Angleton, America’s most celebrated spy-catcher, spent more than a decade failing to find a KGB mole within the CIA, mainly because there was none. David Wise in “Molehunt” (a secondhand title; Nigel West used it first) shows how in the course of his investigations, Angleton destroyed scores of CIA officers’ careers and almost brought the Soviet intelligence-gathering side of the agency to a full stop. He formed a close working relationship with a dotty Soviet KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had been formally diagnosed as paranoid by a CIA psychologist. For reasons that have never been made clear, this diagnosis fell through the cracks in the CIA’s floors and was never filed. Together this folie a deux did their best to contaminate not only the confidence of the CIA but also most other Western intelligence agencies with their neurotic Angst that the KGB had somehow gained a half nelson on all its counterparts in the course of the twilight struggles between the intelligence services.

In fact, the reverse was the truth, and with some notable exceptions, the CIA was so far ahead it was virtually a no-contest. The human damage inflicted 30 years ago by this idiocy remains etched in the heartbreaking stories told by the victims today. Loyal CIA operators whose only crime was to have been born in the old White Russia, or sport a surname beginning with the letter K, or speak Russian, or to have been student socialists in the ‘30s, fell victim to the paranoia that rolled like a poisonous fog bank through the corridors of Langley.

David Wise peers through the gloom to trace the now familiar path beaten by Angleton and his Sancho Panza in pursuit of the shadows cast by their own delusions and blinkered view of the CIA’s true strengths. So this unattractive duo rode from Washington to London to Paris to Oslo to Ottawa, the unspeakable chasing the untraceable (to paraphrase Wilde). Like two deranged bounty hunters operating at the very edge and often outside the law, they struck spitefully at the innocent, specializing in the back-shot and out of town before anyone knew they’d been around.

They remained shamefully blameless for their terrible mistakes, finding succor and protection from Establishments that believed then--and now--that counterintelligence has some great magik that gives it immunity from morality, decency, efficiency or accountability. Their by now well-documented list of victims remains no less poignant for the retelling, a black marble wall of CIA veterans who were destroyed by not-so-friendly fire:

Pete Karlow and Paul Garbler, two officers who were politely ordered to resign and who remain tortured to this day by the memory of the disgrace and humiliation. Jim Bennett, the RCMP officer unceremoniously kicked out of the service and, when I last saw him, only just on the right side of sanity. Yuriy Loginov, a KGB defector who was talked into staying in place to work as a CIA agent--a risk equivalent to attempting a triple somersault on the high trapeze after four pints of beer; for his pains, Angleton and the mole-hunters had him hurled back to the U.S.S.R. and almost certain execution. (Here, incidentally, I disagree with Wise. Loginov, unbelievably, is still alive.) Yuriy Nosenko--as sane and prolific a KGB defector as Golitsyn was cracked and infertile--arrested, mentally tortured, physically abused, held in solitary for two years in a CIA prison in Virginia before an embarrassed agency released him and placed him on its “consultancy” payroll for life. The list is endless.

In Britain, the Golitsyn/Angleton virus soon infected the paranoids within MI5, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson fell early victim, as did Sir Roger Hollis, loyal director-general of MI5 itself.

How did it happen? Who allowed it to happen? Why was it not stopped until 1973? What must the Soviets have thought of it all? Could it happen again? These questions, sadly, are not confronted in Wise’s otherwise taut and muscular book. Perhaps there are no easy answers beyond the uncomfortable truth that as long as knowledge is such valuable currency, the secret policeman will be secretly encouraged, even by those who profess the loudest to seek his demise. Angleton and Golitsyn thrived in the frost of the Cold War and the easy tolerance of intelligence directors, such as Richard Helms, who never seemed to make it their business to go down to the second floor where Angleton and the mole-hunters were preparing their charts, and actually peer over their shoulders and ask pertinent questions. The failure of managerial supervision of counterintelligence within the CIA during the ‘60s is one of the more serious scandals highlighted in this account. No corner drugstore should have been run this way, let alone the world’s biggest intelligence agency.

Angleton was a clever, patient and fastidious secret policeman, yet paradoxically he had all the political savvy of a third-former. He never grasped the most fundamental political realities, such as the difference between detente and coexistence, the differences among a Fabian Socialist, a Euro-Communist and a Stalinist. He also lacked faith in the strength of his own nation’s democracy and the vision to imagine that one day, the good guys would win by example rather than by war. Spiritually, Angleton would have defined himself as a true democrat, yet his tools were the miserable implements of authoritarian communism: the informers, the half-baked allegations, the suspicions so easily lit, so hard to douse. Only Angleton, the most powerful secret policeman in the West, could devote months of his time and life to the relentless and malevolent hunting down of the politically innocent Russian girlfriend of a Canadian journalist.

Happily, the mole-hunters left little more than a tiny blot on the changing canvas of east-west relations. Although they hated all liberals, were suspicious of right-wing radicals like Kissinger and remained obsessed by the maintenance of the status quo, they, like their opposite numbers in Eastern Europe, were unable to stand against the tide when it turned. As Kissinger and Nixon played the China card and opened up new games with Moscow, Angleton and his pals were still wasting literally thousands of hours listening to buffoons like Golitsyn as he whinged on, demanding personal audiences with the President, or a personal slush fund of millions of dollars to destroy the KGB. While the mole-hunters pored obsessively over the personal files of dedicated CIA officers and agents, the world moved quietly on.

Angleton missed the true significance of the Khrushchev revolution, and his operators continued to ignore the opportunities for real inside knowledge presented by scores of potential KGB defectors whose applications to live in the free world were refused by--yes, you’ve got it--our old chum Golitsyn.

It cannot be without significance that when the historic moment came, and the West needed to take the long view on a new man called Gorbachev, it was a British-recruited defector, Oleg Gordievskiy, former deputy- rezident in the Soviet Embassy in London, who advised Thatcher who advised Reagan that here was a man with whom the West could do business. The rest is history, and, as Angleton would have acknowledged, history is the propaganda of the victors. And we won. David Wise reminds us that in the post-Cold War era, the business of intelligence-gathering, counterintelligence and analysis urgently need a blast of glasnost and perestroika.

Ask your nearest friendly intelligence officer “What difference did you guys make?” and he will wink and nod and touch his nose knowingly and sigh heavily, saying, “If only I could tell you all.” But history will record that the Cold War ended despite their activities and not because of them. Had we listened to the dismal Johnnies of counterintelligence rattling their bones at us and shaking sticks at all the wrong suspects, we’d still be neck-deep in a cold war staring eyeball to eyeball at the guys we’re trying to save from starvation today. Yet listen to Angleton’s old mates now, good men like Scotty Miler out in the Arizona desert, and you will still hear them mouthing the same old mystic mumbo jumbo, as if nothing had changed. The great KGB conspiracy remains alive to this day. Nothing, they argue, has really changed. Nothing, one suspects, ever will change for them. “The fat lady hasn’t sung, the opera’s not over,” says Miler knowingly. Oh yes she has, and it is.

When I become the King of the World I shall politely disband peacetime counterintelligence units and hand their functions over to the open and accountable establishments of the American FBI and the British Special Branch. If the price is that a couple of Saddam Hussein’s agents get through, well, that’s a risk worth taking. I shall also place the CIA and MI6 in mothballs, like the great battleships Missouri and New Jersey, to await the next war. Their functions will be passed to the diplomats in our expensive overseas embassies who have the specialist knowledge to be efficient peacetime spies while hopefully eschewing the opportunities to start private wars in funny places such as Central America (without first asking Congress how it feels about it). Hopefully, they will be asked and encouraged to use every dirty trick in the book to steal every last technical secret from the Japanese, the Koreans and the Taiwanese.

Meanwhile, authors like David Wise, who invest painstakingly in logging the once-secret history of unaccountable spy-catching gone crazy, deserve our whoops of support. Let the record bulge with information about how bad the bad old days were.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Molehunt,” see the Opinion section. Page 3.