We’re talking about careers ruined, about mass resignations of counterintelligence people convinced that the CIA has been irrevocably penetrated by KGB pawns, about men we thought were our moles in Moscow arrested and shot, and about schizophrenic distortions of our own perceptions of Soviet policy.īut before we start naming names of Big Mole suspects-and I happen to have a little list-before we plunge into the murky waters of mole literature for some conjectural detective work, let’s look at the Big Mole mystery in historical perspective. Deadly serious: charges of treason, unresolved allegations against individuals at the very heart of the heart of the American diplomatic and intelligence establishment, some still in government service. Or did he ever exist at all? Might he be a delusion engendered by the fevered fantasies of the hierophants of counterintelligence theory-a product of paranoid “sick think,” as the complacent victors in the Great Mole War, the current chiefs of the espionage establishment, have called it? Worse, might the entire twelve-year-long hunt for the American mole and the civil war within the clandestine world that it created have been a massive deception operation? Might Big Mole merely be a chimera craftily conjured up by the KGB of Kim Philby and Yuri Andropov in order to provoke and profit from the divisiveness and paralysis, the self-destructive finger-pointing futility that followed?įor those of you whose knowledge of mole literature is limited to Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and who might still assume that somewhere, somehow, some real-life George Smiley has tracked down some real-life Big Mole and mopped up the stain of treachery-well, the real-life case of the Big Mole, the frenzied twelve-year hunt for the American Philby, makes the complications of Tinker, Tailor seem like the child’s play of the title.īecause we have serious matters to consider here. Is he still among us, still a trusted figure operating at the highest levels of government, still burrowing ever deeper into our most sensitive secrets, as embittered exiles from our espionage establishment, the losing side in the Great Mole War of the past decade, contend? Is he, even now, sitting in some comfortable Capitol district office and reading these words, chuckling contentedly?
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