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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 7: Closing In Peter Karlow still had no idea yet that both the CIA and the FBI now suspected that he was Sasha, the elusive Soviet mole whose true name, according to Anatoly Golitsin, began with the letter K. Karlow was reporting to work at the State Department each day as the CIA's representative in the operations center. By early in 1962, the entire, massive security apparatus of the United States government had targeted Karlow, who had become a goldfish in a bowl. The case was considered so important that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, had been alerted, and CIA director John A. McCone was being kept fully informed of the progress of the highly secret investigation. The first inkling Karlow had that something might be wrong had initially caused him only a vague sense of unease, as one might experience in the stillness before a summer storm. It had occurred, that tiny harbinger, late in 1962 when he was told to report to an unmarked CIA building at 1717 H Street in downtown Washington. There two FBI agents were waiting. "They were two routine-looking dark suits," Karlow remembered. "White shirts, dark ties, brown hair. The two agents asked me about a German forger whom I'd worked with. He was an ethnic German who had grown up in Russia, but he had made his way through the lines to Germany during the war. They told me he wanted to defect to the Soviets. They said this particular guy, the old forger, who was living in Bethesda, had an aunt who was urging him to return to the Soviet Union. I knew that was the last thing he would do. The forger was working as a private engraver in Washington -- I had seen him from time to time. Ostensibly, they wanted me to assess the chances he would redefect. I told them there was no way he was going back. I knew this was a cock-and-bull story. He had nothing to gain by going back. "I realized something was wrong, but I didn't know what. My reaction was, how could the two FBI agents be so far off the mark, and why me? Looking back on it, it was a pretext interview to have an excuse to meet me." The FBI agents wanted to get a closer look at the man they had been told might be a Soviet spy. But at the time, Karlow did not dwell on the incident. He wrote an "eyes-only" memo to Richard Helms, the D.D.P., reporting on his odd FBI interview, and put it out of mind. A few weeks later, another small blip crossed Karlow's radar screen. Two other FBI agents showed up at Karlow's home on Klingle Street in Northwest Washington, where he lived with his wife, Libby. "They said there was a suspicious couple down the street who are German, but may be spies for a hostile country. Could they use my garage to set up listening equipment? The next morning my phone sounded tapped." Karlow, after all, was a technical expert for the CIA, and knew the signs. "There was a slow response on the dial tone, because the tap puts additional drain on the line. The phones were just not behaving right." [1] By now, Karlow knew he was the target of some sort of investigation, but he was not overly worried. He still hoped that after his tour at the State Department ended Helms would appoint him head of the Technical Services Division. Perhaps the FBI visits were simply part of an unusually thorough security vetting for that sensitive post. Even so, the weird encounters with the FBI were unnerving. Karlow was getting jumpy. He looked out the window one morning and saw a man working on a telephone pole outside his home. "I called the phone company and they said, 'There is no work order for your street.'" Soon afterward, a fourth strange incident took place. "A company arrived to clean our furnace for free, courtesy of Washington Gas Light. I told them I'd just had it cleaned. They cleaned it anyway." *** Backstage, inside the security apparatus, a hidden drama was unfolding. A number of factors had combined to make Karlow the prime suspect in the mole hunt almost immediately after Golitsin's arrival in Washington. There was, first, the document the Soviet defector had brought out; it suggested the KGB knew about the CIA's attempt to copy the Soviet bug that had been discovered inside the Great Seal in the American embassy in Moscow. And that in turn had led the sleuths to focus on Karlow, whose Technical Requirements Board was working on EASY CHAIR, the effort to develop the device. Since, in addition, Karlow's name began with the letter K, he had served in Germany, and his name at birth sounded Slavic -- elements that seemed to fit Golitsin's profile of Sasha -- the CIA's investigators were sure that the mole was within their grasp. On January 9, 1962, only a little more than three weeks after Golitsin defected, Sheffield Edwards, the director of the CIA's Office of Security, decided that the Karlow case was of sufficient gravity that the FBI would have to be alerted and its help enlisted. [2] That would have been a natural enough decision by Edwards, since the security chief was widely considered to be Hoover's man inside the CIA. By January 15, government records show, "installation of [deleted] coverage on the Subject" was in place, a clear reference to the wiretaps on Karlow. [3] Three days later "the FBI was formally advised of the agency concern that KARLOW could be identical to the [deleted]," an obvious reference to Sasha. [4] On February 5, Sheffield Edwards met with Sam Papich, Hoover's liaison to the CIA, and briefed him and another FBI agent on the Karlow case. Ominously, Edwards told the FBI men that "certain meetings ... had been held in the recreation room in the basement of the home of the Subject." The CIA security chief was right, although the irony escaped him; Karlow and his wife had hosted a German beer and wurst party in their basement to mark the tenth anniversary of the agency's Technical Aids Detachment that Karlow had set up in Germany on orders from Richard Helms. The guests were all present or former CIA technical people. According to a CIA memorandum of Edwards's meeting with Papich, the FBI was informed that "Subject is still at the Operations Center, Department of State, but that plans are being made for a transfer of the Subject." The CIA, Edwards told Papich, "desired that the FBI conduct a full covert investigation of the subject." The CIA "would give any and all assistance possible." There is always an inbuilt tension between the two agencies in cases of suspected espionage. The CIA, as an intelligence agency, wants to assess damage, and if possible, to make operational use of what it learns. The FBI, as an arm of the Justice Department, wants to put spies in prison. These two objectives conflict, a point that the CIA tried to finesse as it asked the FBI for help in the Karlow investigation. At the meeting, the FBI representatives noted that "the general aim of the FBI was, of course, prosecution if a criminal case can be established." The CIA, Edwards smoothly assured the FBI agents, had an "open view" in regard to criminal prosecution, although "the primary interest of this Agency, of course," was to determine whether Peter Karlow was a Soviet spy, "and if so what Agency information has been compromised by Subject." Four days later, on February 9, "Mr. Papich advised that the matter had been brought to the attention of Mr. Hoover and a decision made that the FBI would investigate the Subject case in full." [5] Not satisfied with the pace of the FBI probe, the agency urged that the bureau conduct a "pretext interview" of Karlow. J. Edgar Hoover did not at all like to be told how to run the FBI, especially by the CIA. On March 6, Hoover frostily advised McCone, the CIA director, that the FBI had decided to conduct a "discreet investigation" of Karlow's "background and present activities." Hoover added: "... accordingly, we do not intend to approach him for interview at this time." But during the course of the FBI investigation, Hoover added, "Karlow will be appropriately interviewed" and the CIA advised of the results. [6] Karlow was placed under heavy surveillance, his every move closely watched for one year. When Karlow traveled to Philadelphia, carrying a large box, FBI agents trailed him, hoping this might be the big break in the case. He was seen entering a building and emerged three hours later without the box. To the watching FBI agents, Karlow's actions appeared sinister, the more so because they were unable to peer inside the building. The FBI surveillance report described the problem: "Observation at 1127 South Broad by a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that this was a three-story row brick structure. ... It is noted that nothing can be observed within the business establishment inasmuch as Venetian blinds extend across the entire window in the front of the store and are kept tightly closed." If the FBI men thought that Karlow had delivered a box full of CIA secrets to a Soviet installation, they would have been disappointed to learn the truth. Karlow had gone to Philadelphia to be fitted for a new artificial limb to replace the one he was wearing. "It was my leg man," Karlow explained. "And the sign right on the front of the building said 'B. Peters & Company, Orthotics and Prosthetics.'" He paused, and added: "My leg was in the box." *** There is a strong streak of nativism among many counterintelligence and security officials, a presumption that what is alien may well be traitorous, and at the very least, un-American. So when the CIA's Office of Security, the CI Staff, and the intelligence division of the FBI began digging into Karlow's background, they found enough alarming material to reinforce their natural xenophobia. To begin with, Karlow's name at birth, and until he was sixteen, wasn't Karlow, it was Klibansky. Not only did his original name begin with the letter K, it was Slavic as well. It takes little imagination to picture how the same sleuths whose suspicions were aroused when a war hero carried his artificial leg in a box to Philadelphia would have reacted to the discovery of his family's Russian-sounding name. This was, after all, the era of J. Edgar Hoover. And in fact, when Karlow was finally confronted by the FBI and interrogated, more than a year after the CIA had launched the secret investigation, the bureau's agents questioned him repeatedly about his father's background and nationality, and about the conflict over his father's birthplace in various documents that Karlow had filled out. Sergei Klibansky was born on April 18, 1878, in Frankfurt, Germany. He was a singer and voice coach, and by age thirty was the youngest director of a major Berlin music conservatory. Karlow's mother, Ferida Weinert, came from an affluent family that owned a textile mill in Silesia. In 1910, Sergei and Ferida Klibansky came to New York, where Karlow's father had been offered a position as a singing instructor. "They were adopted by a very fast social set," Karlow said, "patrons of the opera, people like George Washington Hill. Then the war broke out." The Klibanskys remained in the United States. They became naturalized American citizens in 1921, the same year that their son, Serge Peter, was born. His father, although German, had sometimes claimed to have been born in Russia. "In World War I, it was better to be a Russian than a German," Karlow said. He speculated that his father, moving in a musical world, may also have thought it was better for his career to be a Russian. Whatever the reasons, Sergei Klibansky could not have divined that his minor rewriting of his past was, almost half a century later, to cause major difficulties for his son. [7] Sergei's career prospered. "He taught stars at the Met, Geraldine Farrar and others," Karlow said. And in the roaring twenties, the Klibanskys lived a glittering life among the international set, plying the Atlantic first class on ocean liners and dividing their time between Berlin and an apartment on Manhattan's West Side. "My parents went back to Germany every year or two. By the time I was fourteen, I'd crossed the ocean fourteen times. I was in grade school in Berlin for a year, in the first grade." It all came crashing down in the Depression. "My father had everything on ten percent margin," Karlow said. Early on the morning of September 17, 1931, while Karlow, his older sister, and his mother slept in the adjoining room of their apartment, his father went into the kitchen and turned on the gas oven. Within a few moments, at the age of fifty-three, he was dead. Peter was graduated from McBurney Prep in 1937, the same year that the family legally changed its name to Karlow. He won a scholarship to Swarthmore, and when war came, joined the Navy and the OSS. In 1947, when the newly created CIA heeded Karlow's arguments for developing more sophisticated spy gadgetry, he joined the agency. He ran the Special Equipment Staff, tinkering with bugs and other espionage devices, until Richard Helms sent him to Germany in 1950 to set up his lab outside Frankfurt. In 1952, while stationed in Germany, Karlow married Elizabeth "Libby" Rausch, who had joined the agency not long after she was graduated from Smith College, and had been sent to Hochst to work in Karlow's technical detachment. She later worked in counterintelligence in the Soviet division in Frankfurt and Munich, but left the agency around the time their first child was born in 1953. Karlow's mother also worked for the CIA for a time, in the Office of Training and later as a part-time language instructor in German and Italian. Karlow returned to headquarters in 1956; his jobs in the Eastern European division and as deputy chief of the Economic Action Division followed. In 1959, he organized and became secretary of the Technical Requirements Board, the CIA unit that, among other projects, was attempting to copy the bug in the Great Seal. In the summer of 1961, Helms sent him to the operations center at State. Six months later, Golitsin defected, and Karlow, who had risen to senior positions in the CIA, was suddenly, and without his knowledge, suspected of being a Soviet spy and a traitor to his country. In the climate of the time, it seemed to matter not in the least that he had nearly died defending it. *** In the summer of 1962, Karlow went to see Helms and asked out of the State Department. "I asked to be relieved because my career was going nowhere. The job I wanted was chief of the Technical Services Division. Helms didn't turn me down, but didn't offer the job either." To Karlow, Helms seemed to leave the door open. "But Helms said, 'In the meantime, clean up some things for me. Go back to the Economic Action Division.'" The CIA's deputy director for plans did not spell things out, but Karlow felt that Helms was tacitly suggesting that some of the unit's operations, if not the entire division, be phased out. It was a delicate mission, since Karlow had worked in the division several years earlier. Now he would be coming back to wield the ax for Helms. It was not a role likely to make him very popular with his former colleagues in the division. When Karlow reported in to his old shop, he found himself confronted with a zany agency operation that might have come straight out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. The target was the West African nation of Guinea. "A businessman from Brooklyn was being paid to buy a freighter and import products from Guinea, to show the Guineans the beauty of the free market," Karlow recalled. "He had managed to buy a shipload of bananas from Guinea. They were green with black spots. He was trying to sell them to Gerber, the baby-food company. Someone from Gerber didn't think they were just what they wanted. He ended up selling the shipload of bananas to Poland at a loss, which the agency paid for." Not only did Gerber not want green bananas with spots for its baby food, there was a small fiscal problem as well. "There was one hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for in that Guinea trader operation. I recommended that the operation be closed down, which the people in the division thought I was doing out of malice. But I found there were already three major American companies established in Guinea. I questioned the premises of the operation." By early fall, Karlow had wound up his work in the Economic Action Division and was marking time. "I was on ice. I had no reason for knowing I was under suspicion. I felt there was a lingering vendetta against me by the EAD people. So when my career started to go badly I thought maybe it was a result of this internal feud." Still, when the strange visits from the FBI and the furnace cleaners began occurring, Karlow was briefly encouraged to think his fortunes were improving. They might be checking him out for the Technical Services Division job after all. By Christmas, however, Karlow had received devastating news. He had been turned down for the position of chief of TSD. "I blew my fuse and went to see Helms," Karlow said. Having worked with Helms for years, Karlow decided he knew him well enough to call on the deputy director for plans at his home. On a Sunday evening early in the new year, Karlow drove to Helms's house on Fessenden Street, in Northwest Washington. Confronting the DDP, Karlow demanded to know what was going on. "'Okay,' Helms said, 'you'll hear on Monday.'" Helms did not elaborate, but Karlow left that evening feeling that at least some sort of new assignment was in the offing. And sure enough, on Monday, Karlow got a call from Howard Osborn of the CIA's Office of Security. "Osborn said they'd cleared it with Helms that I should work on a sensitive security case." He would be doing the work, Karlow was told, in the Washington Field Office of the FBI in the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. "I called Helms, who was out of town. I reached Tom K., his deputy, who said yes, go ahead and do that." [8] What Karlow did not realize was that he was the sensitive security case. On Monday, February 11, Karlow reported in to the FBI field office. Two agents, Aubrey S. "Pete" Brent and Maurice A. "Gook" Taylor, were waiting. "They said to me, 'You have the right to remain silent.'" The words struck like a thunderbolt. Now Karlow knew that his worst suspicions were true. The man on the pole, the pretext interview about the German forger, the furnace cleaners, the slow dial tone on his telephone -- everything he had tried not to face was now a reality. For Karlow, a veteran of American intelligence for twenty-one years, the moment was surreal. Like a character in a Kafka novel, he groped to find out what he was being accused of and why. The FBI agents would not tell him. "What is this about?" Karlow demanded. Silence. That, the agents said, would emerge in their meetings. Karlow asked if he was entitled to counsel. And if so, how could a lawyer who was not in the CIA be cleared? Karlow asked the agents to let him make a telephone call to Lawrence R.
Houston, the agency's general counsel, who was also a close friend. He
reached the CIA attorney. "I asked him, 'Who shall I get as a lawyer?
Can you assign me one of your people?' He couldn't. He advised me to
answer the questions, and if I couldn't to say nothing and call him
back. Larry was in a double position -- he was a friend, and he was the
agency's counsel." In the classic "good cop, bad cop" ploy, one agent was friendly, the other hostile. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. "You're playing games and wasting time," Karlow snapped at one point. If there was something wrong, something that had been misinterpreted in his background, he was anxious to get it cleared up. Stone-faced, the agents told Karlow to come back the next day. On Tuesday, Karlow said, the interrogation went this way:
The FBI men questioned Karlow in endless detail about members of his family, every place he had lived, every school he had attended, every job he had held. Karlow pointed out that all of this information was on the record; since he had worked for OSS and the CIA for more than two decades, with frequent review for security clearances, it was all in the files. We want to get it all straight, the FBI agents replied. And on they went for hours, examining Karlow's entire life in microscopic detail. "I asked again and again what the purpose was, we could save time if they stopped playing games. No reaction." On Wednesday, it was back to his family. What were the names of his father's parents? If his grandfather's name was Michael, why had he sometimes listed it as Misha? Karlow explained the names were the same, it was like John and Jack. The FBI agents pounced again.
Karlow was incredulous. "I laughed when I realized what had happened. They'd found my father's birth certificate in Frankfurt and couldn't read Gothic. In the zigzag, handwritten old German, which was dropped between the wars, the letter 'u' has a line over it. Without a line, it's an 'n.' There was no line over the 'u' but the FBI couldn't read it." More detailed questions about schools, and political groups Karlow had joined at Swarthmore. Then back to his father. Was he born in Germany, or Russia? The agents began questioning Karlow about people he had known over a lifetime, every name he had listed on the Personal History Statement he had filled out when he joined the CIA, every name he had mentioned in agency memos, former CIA employees, even that of Richard Helms. "They went alphabetically through everyone I knew. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and for each they asked, 'Was he a homosexual?' 'Did you know Jones? Was he a homosexual? Did he make any advances to you? Is Helms a Communist?' I said, 'I'm not going to answer that, it's too ridiculous.'" On Thursday, the FBI men began interrogating Karlow in detail about CIA operations to penetrate the Soviet Union. "They were particularly interested in my knowledge of bugging devices." The agents pressed Karlow on the code name for the CIA project to replicate the bug in the Great Seal. Karlow refused to yield up the name EASY CHAIR. "The FBI asked if I gave the Soviets any information on American knowledge of this gadget. My answer was no. The total of my information was that R&D work was continuing and involved a technician in Holland." At CIA, Karlow had also worked on the development of "a non-detectable car bug that could be quickly planted. The idea was to take a tiny unit and plant it behind the dash of a car. It would allow you to follow the car and listen to conversation at a discreet distance. It would be powered by self-contained batteries." In the course of his research, Karlow had visited an electronics laboratory at Montauk, on the tip end of Long Island, that was conducting similar research for the FBI. As a result, Karlow was also aware of the bureau's own efforts to eavesdrop on cars. Now Karlow's interrogators turned to that subject. '"They asked me about the bugging of automobiles that were supposed to have been delivered to the Soviets in Mexico City. I knew about it." It had been a joint operation. "The FBI and the CIA had bugged four Fords which were to be delivered to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1959. To install the bugs, the FBI stripped the cars down to the chassis, so the bugs were theoretically not findable, yet the Soviets knew right away. So the FBI pointed the finger at me. The FBI said, "You were the guy who leaked that information to the Soviets.' It was nonsense, of course." The FBI seemed fully aware of the operation involving the Brooklyn businessman who had tried to off-load the CIA's spotted bananas on the Gerber baby-food company. "They insisted on knowing the name of the agent -- the businessman -- and the extent of the money unaccounted for, which was over a hundred thousand dollars." The FBI agents pressed Karlow repeatedly on how many times he had been to East Berlin. Karlow thought two or three times, at most, and always on CIA orders. The agents appeared convinced that the CIA harbored homosexuals. They kept coming back to that subject. "The FBI asked about why there were so many 'queers' in the CIA's German stations in the early 1950s." Next, the agents grilled Karlow about secret inks. When Karlow was in Germany, headquarters had asked for secret writing inks for use in Eastern Europe and sent along two samples. "We had them analyzed and found one was aspirin and one was vinegar. Both can be used. We ran an investigation and found that the best stuff around for secret writing was being used by the Russians. I said we needed something better than aspirin. We came up with secret writing formulas in Germany." The FBI wanted to know about Karlow's formulas. Why had he developed the new inks? "They seemed to be trying to put an interpretation on it that I was coming up with secret writing methods that were better than anything Washington had but that I was also giving them away to the Russians." Karlow was told to come back on Friday. He was to be "fluttered" -- given a lie-detector test. On Friday morning, facing the polygraph, Karlow again demanded an explanation. PK: Now will you tell me what this is about? "I couldn't believe it. I laughed and said, I thought I had done something serious, like leaving a safe open." But Karlow's bravado masked a terrible realization. "I knew right there my career was over. 'This ends my career,' I told them. 'If you want my badge, you're welcome.'" Stunned by the accusation, outraged and angry, stricken by what it meant to his future, Karlow pressed the FBI agents for details. "What was I supposed to have done and where? The FBI said, 'We ask the questions -- you'll have plenty of time to find out.'" Karlow was wired to the polygraph machine. The operator strapped a corrugated rubber tube around his chest, a pneumograph that would expand and contract to measure his respiration rate. An inflatable pressure cuff, called a cardiosphygmomanometer, was wound around Karlow's arm, to record his blood pressure and pulse. Finally, the most scary object of all, a pair of metal electrodes were attached to his palm with surgical tape. The device, a psychogalvanometer, would measure Karlow's galvanic skin response (GSR) to electric current. The reading would vary with how much he perspired as he was questioned. All of these instruments were hooked up to a recording device that would measure his responses as squiggly lines on a roll of moving graph paper. "The polygraph cuff was making my arm turn blue. They kept pushing on how many times I had been in East Berlin. Was my Soviet case officer so-and-so? It was a woman's name, I'm not sure of what name it was, I think they said Lydia." From the line of questioning, it appeared that the FBI believed that Karlow had met with "Lydia" in East Berlin. "They asked about addresses in East Berlin. They wanted to see my reaction, did I know those addresses. I said no to all of them." The most dramatic moment of the lie-detector test was now at hand. "You are supposed to answer questions yes or no," Karlow explained. "They asked, 'Do you know Sasha?' I said yes, and the needle jumped. Because I was thinking of Sasha Sogolow. In Berlin in the 1950s, Sasha to me was only one person -- Sasha Sogolow. A big booming Russian type. He'd always say, 'I'm Russian and a Jew and they [the Soviets] love me.' He'd go with a case officer to meet an agent. He'd be the 'chauffeur.' And he'd come back and say, 'The KGB chauffeur was Colonel so-and-so.' I would meet with Sasha Sogolow often. He was in Berlin. We fixed him up with a fake driver's license." [9] Karlow could see the flurry of excitement among the FBI agents when he reacted to the name Sasha. He was not sure why. "I was thinking of Sasha Sogolow. But that wasn't the Sasha they were thinking of," as Karlow later learned. "They never asked any motivational questions. I finally said, 'Why would I want to be a Soviet spy? I've got a great wife, two gorgeous children, and a good job.'" The FBI agents did not answer his question. It was Friday afternoon before the polygraph test was over. Karlow had been grilled for five days. "Afterward, I went tearing over to Houston's house in Georgetown. 'What's going on?' Larry said, 'Well, it's a difficult case.'" The CIA general counsel, Karlow said, asked him to "write a report of everything you can think of that might have caused his security problem. "Monday, I went steaming into Helms's office. He greeted me, as usual, as 'Sergeyevich.' Helms always called me Sergeyevich [son of Sergei]. This time I said maybe the humor of the nickname is no longer appropriate under the circumstances." Helms, too, asked Karlow to write a report "of everything I could think of." Having been accused as a Soviet spy, and a traitor to his country, Karlow was now being asked by the agency's senior officials to provide the reasons, a twist that, again, could have been crafted by Kafka. "Helms said, 'Consider yourself under Larry Houston's authority.' I said, 'Well, this means the end of my career. So this is goodbye.' But I told Helms, 'I'm going to do everything I can to get this cleared up.'" Karlow had one more stop on his rounds. He went down to the second floor, to the Counterintelligence Staff, and called on James Angleton. Angleton, chain-smoking as usual, sitting stooped over his desk, had a warning for Karlow. He spoke deliberately. "This is a very uncertain and highly dangerous situation," he said. "There is more that goes on here than I can possibly explain to you. It has to do with a Russian defector." Angleton leaned forward and added: "Please don't discuss this with anyone." It was dizzying. Not only had Karlow been accused of high treason, and then asked to explain why, he was now being ordered to remain silent. The counterintelligence chief had made it clear: the fact that Karlow had been accused as a mole, his career destroyed, and his life all but ruined was a CIA secret. _______________ Notes: 1. At the time, Karlow said, "my wife was chairman of a Smith College benefit in honor of Helen Hayes and the phone calls were pouring in. In retrospect, it amused me to think of all the conversations that the FBI had to monitor." 2. CIA Memorandum for the Record, January 13, 1975. What happened inside the CIA and the FBI can be pieced together from heavily censored secret documents declassified and made available many years later by the CIA, and additional material obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. This account draws in part on those materials. 3. FBI Headquarters memorandum, January 15, 1962. 4. CIA Memorandum for the Record, January 13, 1975. 5. The account of the February 5 CIA-FBI meeting and Hoover's agreement to conduct a full investigation of Karlow are from "CIA Memorandum to File, February 14, 1962." The signature on the document was blanked out by CIA censors, but it is almost certainly that of Sheffield Edwards, the director of the CIA's Office of Security. 6. Memorandum, Hoover to McCone, March 6, 1962. 7. When Karlow was born on March 5, 1921, his birth certificate listed his father's birthplace as Russia. But the following month, in April, his father correctly listed Germany as his country of birth on his naturalization papers. The FBI went to the trouble of confirming this by locating Sergei Klibansky's birth certificate in Frankfurt am Main. 8. Thomas H. Karamessines, then the CIA's assistant deputy director for plans, was universally known inside the agency as Tom K. 9. Sogolow, who was born in Kjev, joined the CIA in 1949 and served as a CIA case officer in Germany and in the Soviet division at headquarters. He died in 1982.
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