Born in Los Angeles and raised in Colorado, Baer attended UCLA before completing a degree at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and then joining CIA’s Clandestine Service as a case officer. It would later become known to many in the closed world of American counterintelligence as the “Big Case” and later still as the hunt for “the Fourth Man.” The case would run for the next thirty years. So startling were Max’s revelations that the CIA launched an internal probe to find the mole. As if this was not chilling enough, the mystery man was also a regular at exclusive meetings attended only by CIA division chiefs. All Max knew was that he had provided unique documents pinpointing sites used by CIA officers to meet agents in Moscow. It wasn’t long before Max, now considered the Agency’s top KGB source, dropped a new bombshell – his service had another well-placed source at the highest levels of CIA. That little nugget led to the espionage arrest of Aldrich Ames, then head of CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence unit.
For some time, Max had been a lackluster agent relegated to a backburner until the day he dropped the secret of an unauthorized meeting in Caracas, Venezuela between a CIA officer and another KGB officer. The story opens in 1992 on the streets of Moscow with the hunt for “Max,” nickname for Alexander Zoporozhsky, a First Chief Directorate counterintelligence officer with information vital to the CIA. Someone with knowledge of every important source the CIA and FBI were running against the Russians. It was with thoughts of the pall Angleton held over the Agency for so long that I recently (in June 2022) read The Fourth Man, a new book written by Robert Baer, published in May 2022 by Hatchette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC.īaer weaves a complex tale of a possible KGB mole working at the senior levels of CIA’s ultra–secret Soviet Operations Division during the 1980s and 90s. In the end leaving America blind and deaf to Russian thinking at a most dangerous time in the Cold War. During all this time, he managed to upend Agency operations, create an atmosphere of fear and distrust, and derail careers – all in an attempt to find a spy who never existed.
#Fbi undercover agent mole 1980s series#
Angleton also ordered all KGB and GRU officers offering to spy for the CIA turned away as Russian provocateurs if they disagreed with his thesis.Īnd finally, there was his religious belief, a groundless paranoia of sorts, that Moscow had penetrated the highest ranks of the CIA requiring him to conduct a series of “mole hunts” in an effort to unmask the traitor. First among his disasters was an unshakable belief in a so-called Monster Plot, a baseless Sino-Soviet strategic deception campaign cooked up in Moscow and Beijing to convince the West of an ideological rift between the two Marxist giants. Over those twenty years, his growing influence produced an Agency tied up in knots. Seven years later, Allen Dulles appointed him head of counterintelligence where he remained until his ouster in August 1974. In 1947, Angleton joined the newly-created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). One important influence on him was Kim Philby, a close friend, head of counterintelligence for British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and a star of the notorious Cambridge Spy Ring that for years passed secrets to Moscow. A product of Yale University and Office of Strategic Services, the dark and brooding Angleton spent much of World War II in London learning the counterintelligence trade at the feet of British experts believed to be among the world’s best at this practice. This year marks forty–eight years since William Colby fired James J. The Ghost of Angleton - Review of The Fourth Man (pdf)
It was a review about The Fourth Man by Robert Baer: I wrote a book review in the summer of 2022 for the Fall 2022 issue of the Association of Former Intelligence Officer’s (AFIO) official publication, The Intelligencer: Journal of US Intelligence Studies.
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