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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 18: The Mole Relief Act In 1964, even though Richard Kovich realized his CIA career had mysteriously stalled, he dutifully continued to work as an agency "headhunter," a Russian-speaking officer who could fly anywhere on a moment's notice to make a recruitment pitch to a KGB man. In the fall of 1966, Kovich was assigned to the Farm to teach agency trainees the skills he had acquired. After three years, he returned to headquarters, did some lecturing and training, but seemed to be marking time. By the beginning of 1974, at age forty-seven, it was clear he was going nowhere. In February, "Dushan" Kovich decided to pack it in. By now he was aware that Ingeborg Lygren (SATINWOOD 37), Mikhail Federov (UNACUTE), and Yuri Loginov (AEGUSTO), three of his important agents, were suspect. But he did not know that he himself had come under intense investigation as a presumed Soviet mole. At Kovich's retirement ceremony, William Colby presented him with a CIA medal and two other awards he had earned in his twenty-four years of distinguished service with the agency. [1] With his wife, Sara, Kovich disappeared into a life of retirement. Or so he thought. Soon afterward, Kovich got a telephone call from a CIA colleague. Could he get on a plane and go and meet someone? Kovich protested that he was retired. But, like an old firehorse, he responded to the call and by 1975 was back globe-trotting for the agency on contract, making his recruitment pitches as of old. Early in March 1976, Kovich was finally told that he had been suspected of working for the Soviets. Three aides on the staff of John H. Waller, the CIA's inspector general, met with Kovich and broke the news. Kovich was also informed that he was no longer under suspicion. By now, Colby had fired Angleton and himself been dismissed by President Ford in the wake of the various investigations into the intelligence agencies touched off by Seymour Hersh's story about CIA domestic spying in the New York Times. [2] But before Colby left, he ordered that Kovich be allowed to see his files. As he read the files, Kovich's hair stood on end. He had not realized the enormity of the charges against him. He had not known it was a cause for suspicion to have a name that began with the letter K. It was like watching his life through the wrong end of the telescope. The mole hunters in SIG, the gumshoes in OS, had really thought he was a traitor. To Kovich, it was unbelievable. He discovered that in December 1965, after Ingeborg Lygren's false arrest, the CIA was so worried that Kovich might bolt that it asked the FBI to prevent him from entering any Soviet installation in the United States. Kovich had laughed bitterly when he saw that in the files; he had never had any intention of fleeing to the Soviets, of course, he was a loyal CIA officer, but he knew that the FBI had no blanket authority to stop anyone from entering a Soviet building. The FBI knew it, too, and had rejected the CIA request. After reading the files, Kovich realized he could no longer work for the CIA, and he so informed George Bush, the new director. In a letter to Bush in July, Kovich summarized the false accusations that had destroyed his career. Soon afterward, Bush wrote back, expressing regret for what had happened. He hoped, Bush added, that Kovich might take some comfort from the fact that he had been cleared. [3] In the fall, after winding up the project he was working on, Kovich retired from the agency again, this time for good. Kovich was determined to remove any doubts about his loyalty, however, and if possible to receive compensation. He contacted Stanley H. Gaines, a former CIA colleague who had also retired from th agency and was practicing law. It wasn't the money primarily, Kovich told Gaines. He had given his best for his country, and now he wanted his good name restored and a terrible injustice rectified. Gaines and Kovich opened discussions with the CIA's inspector general and with its Office of General Counsel. Around the same time, Robert B. Barnett, an attorney for Paul Garbler, had also contacted the agency for the same reason. By now, President Carter had been elected and had appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director. Just as Paul Garbler had been told by Admiral Turner he would need an act of Congress to be compensated, Kovich was informed that a law would have to be passed. "We couldn't find any specific authority we could fit this kind of relief into," a representative of the CIA's Office of General Counsel recalled. "What this required was legislation on the Hill to grant relief by the agency to people whose careers had been damaged by unfounded mole allegations. The inspector general explored this with us -- he said, 'We think this is a case where some injustice was done. What can we do for these people?' That's when we decided we needed legislation, which we supported." Although the CIA attorney, who had reviewed the files at my request, thought the agency had given its backing to remedial legislation, initially, at least, that was not the case. In a letter to Paul Garbler's attorney in 1978, Anthony A. Lapham, then the CIA's general counsel, wrote: "I continue to feel that any tangible damages suffered by Mr. Garbler are speculative at best." While Garbler's career had without question been "sidetracked," Lapham argued, there was no guarantee that he would have been promoted anyway. It would not be "appropriate for the Agency to initiate or formally support" legislation to redress Garbler's misfortunes, Lapham wrote, but "neither would we oppose such a measure." [4] Stansfield Turner's general counsel was saying that the agency would not back a private bill to help Garbler, although it would not stand in his way. A private bill applies only to one individual, a public law to whole classes of people. Now with Kovich pushing for action, the agency was saying it could not compensate anyone without a public law that would apply to all those who had been wronged by the search for moles. Within the CIA, however, there were strong pockets of resistance to the idea. The reason for the agency's ambivalence was easy to see. A law giving the director of the CIA power to pay victims of the agency's own mole hunt might slip through unnoticed by the press, but there was always a chance that an alert reporter would spot the provision, that the law would attract unfavorable publicity, leading to all sorts of questions. It was, after all, a breathtaking concept: a secret agency that had wronged its own officers was being asked to turn around, admit its mistakes, and compensate those injured. No bureaucracy, let alone a powerful secret agency, likes to admit error. Moreover, the CIA feared that a law providing compensation for victims of the mole hunt might be opening up a Pandora's box. The agency had visions of dozens, even hundreds, of ex-officers filing claims running into millions of dollars. But Kovich, acting as the point man, kept plugging away. In 1977 he wrote to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and in August 1978 he testified to the senators for several days in closed session. William Green Miller, the powerful staff director of the permanent Senate Intelligence Committee, was impressed by Kovich's arguments. Senator Birch Bayh, who had succeeded Inouye as chairman of the intelligence panel, and Senator Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., the Maryland Republican, supported the idea of legislation. Kovich met with Daniel B. Silver, who had replaced Lapham as general counsel of the CIA in 1979, and with Ernest Mayerfeld, another CIA lawyer and a former clandestine officer for the agency. The House Intelligence Committee joined with its Senate counterpart in supporting the bill. "The issue," Miller said, "was how do you compensate for a mistake that jeopardized, harmed an individual personally or inflicted mental distress? The reason for the legislation was to make clear in law the right to rectify. There was an earnest desire by the CIA to resolve he issue in a fair way." The CIA's desire was perhaps more earnest because by now Miller, Birch Bayh, and the Senate and House intelligence committees were breathing down its neck. On September 30, 1980, Congress passed the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 1981. Tucked away in its pages was an obscure clause, Section 405 (a). In its entirety, it read: "Whenever the Director of Central Intelligence finds during fiscal year 1981 that an employee or former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency has unfairly had his career with the Agency adversely affected as a result of allegations concerning the loyalty to the United States of such employee or former employee, the Director may grant such employee or former employee such monetary or other relief (including reinstatement and promotion) as the Director considers appropriate in the interest of fairness." On October 14, 1980, the bill was signed by President Carter and became Public Law 96-450. Within the CIA, the law became known as "the Mole Relief Act." [5] The following month, Ronald Reagan was elected President and named his campaign manager, William J. Casey, as the new CIA director. Both Kovich and Paul Garbler had been told they would receive compensation under the Mole Relief Act. On February 3, 1981, Garbler received a check from the United States Treasury, under the new law. In the spring, Kovich received a letter of apology from the CIA, and by July, he, too, had received his settlement. Although neither former CIA officer wished to discuss the amount he received, intelligence sources said one payment was more than $100,000, the other somewhat lower. Four other former CIA officers, including Peter Karlow, applied for compensation under the 1980 act. They were all turned down. But Karlow resolved to continue his fight. There was a catch to the Mole Relief Act, however. The provision was good for just one year. It opened up a window for the victims of the mole hunt, but only if they knew about it and could persuade the agency of the merits of their case before the law expired. [6] From the CIA's viewpoint, everything was being managed well, that is, quietly. The agency was pleased that the number of mole victims who actually came forward was low. It was pleased as well that the press, except for one article in Newsweek, had missed the extraordinary story. [7] A secret government agency had falsely accused its own officers and was now paying them large sums of money under an act of Congress of which the public was, for the most part, unaware. The CIA today refuses officially to confirm the names of the officers compensated under the Mole Relief Act, or the amounts paid out, or even the total amount of the payments it made to victims of the mole hunt. "Under the terms of the settlement I'm not at liberty to disclose the amounts," the attorney in the CIA's Office of General Counsel said. "They didn't all get the same amount." But it was, nevertheless, an astonishing story, even if the CIA had been able largely to keep the lid on it. The fact that many former CIA officers, including those whose careers were affected, were not aware that the law existed in part explains the low numbers of those who came forward during the one-year window. An example was Stephen Roll, who spent twenty-six years as a CIA officer but strongly suspected Angleton had blocked his promotions because of suspicions of his Slavic background. "In 1980, I didn't know about the law," he said. "I heard about it much ater through the grapevine." By then it was too late. Roll was born in central Pennsylvania, and both his parents were Ukrainians. His rather worked as a track repairman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Roll went to college, learned Russian, did graduate work at Yale, and joined the CIA in 1949. He worked in Munich as chief of counterintelligence, parachuting emigres into the Ukraine in the CIA's ill-fated Red Sox operation, then moved to the Soviet division as a counterintelligence officer. After serving as a chief of base in Libya, he applied for an opening on Angleton's staff. Given his strong counterintelligence background, he expected to get the job, but was rejected without explanation. Roll remembered what he had been told by Peer de Silva, a fellow officer in the Soviet division. De Silva had sat on a promotion board that considered the name of Richard Kovich. There were comments around the table. When it was Angleton's turn to speak, de Silva said, he turned thumbs down on Kovich, saying: "We can't trust these Slavs." Roll had realized that something was wrong. "I asked myself, why didn't I get better jobs? Why wasn't I given a promotion? Why was I rejected for the job on Angleton's staff? I can only assume it was because of Angleton, given his attitude toward Russian-speakers. They needed us, but didn't want us to get too high." Other case officers despaired of proving that their careers had been affected by the search for penetrations. They may have suspected what went on, but producing the evidence was like chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. Angleton loyalists made the opposite argument -- that it was easy for mediocre officers whose careers had fizzled to blame it on the mole hunt. "Everybody denied a promotion said the mole hunt was the reason," Scotty Miler, Angleton's former deputy, contended. But the fact remained that it was difficult to prove harm, and years later to pinpoint decisions made by unidentified bureaucrats whose reasons for shunting aside some officers may never have been committed to paper. There was another even more basic problem that prevented many agents from taking advantage of the Mole Relief Act: most CIA officers placed on the SIG's list of "hard core" suspects were unaware of that fact. They did not realize that their careers were affected, because they were never told. Still others chose not to reopen old wounds; they had retired and did not care to fight the agency, or to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer to present their cases. *** In the months of maneuvering that led to his financial settlement, Paul Garbler was also determined to find out more about how and why he had come under suspicion as a traitor. He understood that the main reason for his years of exile was the fact that he had been Sasha Orlov's case officer in Berlin -- and that the mole hunters suspected that Orlov had recruited him. But he could hardly believe the file of CIA documents, several inches thick, that he ultimately received from the agency under the Freedom of Information Act. Garbler was astonished to discover from the documents that he had also become a suspect because he had played tennis with George Blake. "When I lived in Korea," Garbler said, "there was a British legation active until June of 1950. The minister was Sir Vivian Holt, one of few living holders of the Victoria Cross. Florence and I became friendly with Holt, who was an eccentric bachelor. He had two officers working for him, Sidney Faithful and George Blake. Up pops the devil. My next-door neighbor was an army major, and he and I played doubles with Faithful and Blake. When the North Koreans came south, Holt said, 'I'm not leaving; this is my legation and British soil. If I have to, I'll fight them with my sword.' He kept a sword over the mantel and brandished it frequently. So he and Faithful and Blake were taken and imprisoned. At least theoretically, that's when Blake was turned." [8] To the counterintelligence mind, the fact that Garbler had been a tennis partner of George Blake took on ominous significance. The CI men, after all, were paid to perceive sinister patterns. Their occupational weakness was that they might see those patterns even, as in Garbler's case, where they did not exist. [9] To his dismay, Garbler also discovered from the documents that the CIA had asked the FBI to investigate him, his sex life, his bank accounts, even his parents. "The FBI never called me in," Garbler said. He no longer has his file. "After I got the documents from the CIA, I burned them in disgust around 1979 or 1980. I was made quite nauseous." As he thought back on his case, Garbler was disturbed by the role of Richard Helms. Admittedly, Garbler had little use for Helms. He would see him in the basement gym where both went to run. Helms nodded but never spoke. But why, Garbler wondered, had Helms never tried to help? "He must have known I was a loyal and capable officer. He should have known that I was a case officer who just wanted to serve the company and his country." But Helms had never intervened, Garbler said. "He left me swinging in the wind." Late in 1977, Helms had been convicted in federal court of misleading Congress about the CIA's role in Chile. But to the agency's old boys, Helms was a hero for stonewalling. Like many former CIA officers, Garbler was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, based in McLean, Virginia. At an association lunch at nearby Fort Myer some months after Helms's court appearance and around the time Garbler got his CIA file, "when Helms walked in everyone rose and applauded. Some had tears in their eyes. The entire room was on their feet applauding for Helms." But not Paul Garbler. "Why should I?" he asked. "He left me out there to rot." _______________ Notes: 1. Normally, CIA officers receive medals during the course of their careers for particular operations. Checking the files, someone in the bureaucracy noticed that Kovich had received none. Colby remedied the oversight. 2. Colby was dismissed by Ford in November 1975 but agreed to remain on until George Bush could be sworn in to succeed him as CIA director on January 30, 1976. Colby thought he knew the immediate cause of his dismissal; he was convinced that he was done in by the CIA poison dart gun he had produced at the demand of the Church committee. Chairman Frank Church had waved the gun at a Senate hearing, and the resulting photograph made front pages around the world. It was too much for the White House, which already felt that Colby had been excessively candid with the investigating panels. At one point, Vice President Rockefeller, whose commission was supposed to be uncovering the abuses of the intelligence agencies, drew Colby aside and asked: "Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?" In the White House situation room, during a meeting to map strategy to deal with the investigations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, aware that Colby was a practicing Roman Catholic, turned to him and said: "The trouble with you, Bill, is that whenever you go up on the Hill, you think you're going to confession." 3. Because Bush's letter mentioned some of the sensitive cases Kovich had handled, Kovich could not hang it on the wall or show it to anyone. He had to read the original in a special room at headquarters; later he was given a copy to keep. 4. Letter, Anthony A. Lapham to Robert B. Barnett, December 6, 1978. 5. See, for example, "Serge Peter Karlow -- Request for Relief Under Section 405 of Public Law 96-450 ('Mole Relief Act')," memorandum, Stanley Sporkin, CIA general counsel, to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, August 21,1981, declassifed and approved for release February 5, 1987. Although many CIA officers disdain the word "mole" as an invention of John le Carre, life imitates art, and the term, as noted earlier, has crept into the vocabulary of real spies. 6. For some reason, most of those who brought about the passage of the Mole Relief Act were reluctant to discuss it. Almost all of the CIA and congressional officials whom I was able to interview appeared to have suffered severe memory lapses about the legislation they helped to create. For example, Daniel B. Silver, Admiral Turner's general counsel when the bill was enacted and a participant in the discussions that led to the passage of the measure, professed to have almost no memory of it and said he could find no one else who knew anything about it. Silver said he had checked with some former members of his staff but could not shed any light on the legislation. The conversation then went this way:
7. The article, by Tom Morganthau with David C. Martin, of the magazine's Washington bureau, appeared on August 11, 1980. 8. "When Holt was released," Garbler said, "he came through Berlin, and Florence and I went out to Tempelhof to meet him. He was just passing through. He cried when he saw us. We cried a little bit. He told us Faithful and Blake were alive and well. Or as well as he was. He'd lost about fifty pounds; he looked haggard and wan." 9. As it happened, George Blake had almost derailed Garbler's career for another, unrelated reason. In 1961, as Garbler was getting ready to go to Moscow, the CIA learned that Blake, who had been arrested in April, told British authorities that he had rifled the files of the MI6 officers who had talked with Garbler and other CIA representatives some months earlier about a CIA program to debrief tourists who traveled behind the Iron Curtain. The worldwide CIA operation was known as the "legal travel program." Blake, the CIA was told, transmitted all the information to the Soviets. Garbler recalled a confrontation with Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Office of Security at the time. "Sheff Edwards said, 'Y-y-you can't go to Moscow, you are known to the Soviets.' Sheff stuttered. Jack[Maury] and I argued with him. I said I'd waited all my life to go to Moscow. Also that the Blake operation would be so highly compartmented it would not circulate within the KGB. He finally gave in."
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