Why spies, counterspies, and counter-counterspies are so popular right now.
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FRED KAPLAN
It shouldn't be so surprising that spies and paranoia are back in popular culture or that they've made a rousing comeback in the news.
The box-office hit Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who turns out to be (spoiler alert, but much slighter than it sounds) a sleeper-agent for the KGB, trained from her youth to infiltrate American power centers and await the signal for "Day X," when she'll help the Russian empire rise again and destroy its enemy. A new AMC series, Rubicon, has something to do--it's not yet clear what--with spy networks and paranoia. ("Not all conspiracy theories are theories," the ads intone.) In June, the real-life FBI arrested 10 Russian sleeper-spies who'd been living for years Virginia and New Jersey suburbs (though, again, it's unclear what they were supposed to be doing besides living high on the American hog). And just this month, an Iranian nuclear scientist, who defected to the United States after serving as a CIA informant, redefected to Tehran, where his bosses now say he was a double-agent, feeding misinformation to Langley, Va., all along. It's a producer's dream of good timing--a new movie and TV show, both with preposterous plotlines, coming out at the same time that uncannily similar plotlines are splashed on front-page headlines and take up hours of cable newscasts.
Is the Cold War back? Or is baroque intrigue just the way of the world? How do you tell a real spy from a fake one, and does it matter if you can? The world is more confusing than ever; what's real, and what's not, is prone to endless manipulation. It's only natural that we find ourselves once again wandering through the "wilderness of mirrors."
The phrase was coined by James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA's counterintelligence division from 1954 to 1975, and he was one to know. He went crazy in that wilderness. That's what happens to everybody who plunges in as deeply as he did. It's the nature of the beast.
What happened to Angleton is a classic story and sheds fractured light on all the spy tales now in our midst.
The key turn in the story began in 1961, when a KGB major named Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the West. Angleton interrogated the spy and afterward pronounced him not only the real thing but the most valuable defector in a generation. Golitsyn provided a fair bit of information about Soviet double agents, but he also spewed a lot of nonsense--for instance, that the emerging Sino-Soviet split was an elaborate hoax. (Years later, he wrote books claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were hoaxes, too.) All of this appealed to Angleton's conspiratorial mode of thinking.
Then, in 1964, another KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko, who had been spying for the CIA, defected, claiming that his status as a double agent was about to be discovered. Once brought in from the cold, Nosenko made two claims: that the KGB had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had assassinated John F. Kennedy a few months earlier, and that Golitsyn--by this time Angleton's favorite--was a KGB plant. Golitsyn scoffed and said that, actually, Nosenko was a plant.
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