CIA Espionage Operations

The CIA or Central Intelligence Agency is America's overseas espionage outfit. It is in the business of spying and is in addition to the NSA or National Security Agency which deals with SIGINT or signals intelligence rather than HUMINT or human intelligence.

It would be nice to think that the CIA's reports were accurate, informative and used well. Their track record leaves plenty of scope for doubt. One source which tells us about these things is Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the Twentieth Century by Ernest Volkman. Here are summaries of his stories.

Our Man in Havana - Cuban Double Agents 1961 - 1987
Page 16 onwards
In July 1987 the CIA in Langley, Virginia got a letter from the DGI, Cuba's intelligence agency which said: You have been had. Every one of the agents they had found over 26 years had been turned. Whoops. They had gotten reports from Cuba but they never did any good. Once one had been recruited but decided not to stay recruited the rest flowed on. Then of course there was the Bay of Pigs invasion which failed and the little matter of the exploding cigars which were meant to murder Castro but made them look stupid. So it was back to the drawing board and Castro is still firmly in power almost twenty years later.

 

Dmitri Polyakov and  Aldrich Ames
Page 126 onwards
General Polyakov was in the Russian GRU and enormously valuable to the CIA, feeding them information for almost 25 years. Then Ames, a  drunken, incompetent third rater betrayed him. The CIA had their mole all right but they didn't bother to take any of the obvious measures like checking why a man with mediocre pay was running a Jaguar and had an expensive house. So much for James Angleton and counter intelligence.

 

CIA versus the KGB 1961 - 1974
Page 139 onwards.
Every big espionage outfit has  a counter espionage group which has access to everything. Its job is to look for double agents and false information which being fed in to mislead. The CIA's man was James Angleton and paranoia was his downfall. It led him to show a KGB defector the personal records of many of their most important people while searching for a mole. He committed a number of crimes including putting another defector in a secret prison for three years. He also did a huge amount of damage to the CIA's effectiveness.