OPINION:
On Aug. 25, 1978, I exposed John Arthur Paisley — a senior CIA manager of analysis who should be considered the CIA’s greatest mole of the Cold War — which set off an internal investigation.
A hostile interrogation and polygraph examination of Paisley that was scheduled for Sept. 27 of that year never occurred. Instead, he mysteriously disappeared from his sailboat in the Chesapeake Bay two days earlier in the dark of night.
Although never officially admitted, for over four decades, the CIA has secretly considered Paisley a confirmed Soviet KGB mole, and I can now reveal this fact.
The CIA must now officially declassify the relevant damage assessment and its cover-up and admit to this embarrassing institutional shortcoming.
In the recent book by bestselling author and Pulitzer nominee Howard Blum, “The Spy Who Knew Too Much” as well as the 1989 book “Widows” by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento and Joseph J. Trento, this almost-forgotten “last great secret of the Cold War, ” as Mr. Blum, put it, was chronicled, along with my role in officially accusing Paisley of being a mole before I voluntarily resigned from CIA the same day. The fact that Paisley then disappeared a month later — in what was officially deemed an “undetermined cause of death,” possibly a murder, suicide, or disguised escape or extraction executed brilliantly and successfully by the KGB — deserves a Hollywood movie.
There is a history of the KGB having successfully disguised the exfiltrations of their agents as ambiguous suicides or murders, and this is one of the prime examples.
Paisley was an experienced covert operator. He visited Russia several times during World War II and joined the CIA in 1948 as an undercover agent in Israel with the United Nations as cover. He moved to Langley as a CIA staff officer in 1953.
By 1969, he had become deputy chief of the Office of Strategic Research, a senior agency post.
While he held that influential position, the man who initially hired him, the ill-famed counterintelligence chief for the CIA James Jesus Angleton, made Paisley a covert operative for the “Plumbers,” the notorious culprits of the Watergate fiasco, which Paisley helped orchestrate and cover up with them, according to “Widows.”
“Retiring” in 1974 amid the Watergate turmoil within the CIA, Paisley continued to have an office and full clearance at Langley headquarters — the perfect position for a freelance mole.
Even after officially “retiring,” Paisley continued to wield destructive influence in the CIA, including sabotaging my work by having been appointed coordinator of presidentially authorized competitive intelligence exercises in which I was involved. He also took part in suppressing some of my most important written intelligence analyses. In this very period, the CIA suspiciously lost extremely significant human and technological sources and methods, according to “Widows.”
While the conclusive smoking gun evidence has not yet been declassified, more than 36 items of credible, circumstantial, unclassified evidence indicate a masterful KGB active-measure deception operation to fake Paisley’s “death” and disguise his escape or exfiltration to Russia. This escape was followed by a botched CIA and FBI investigation and deliberate, high-level cover-up by the CIA, both books revealed.
For example, there were at least eight characteristics of the body found in the Chesapeake Bay six days after Paisley’s disappearance that did not correspond to his known biometrics, including that the body was 4 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter.
Nevertheless, “investigators” from the CIA, FBI, police and military ignored these eight discrepancies and concluded that this mysterious cadaver had been Paisley’s. These “investigators” also dismissed or ignored mysterious and ominous phone calls — ostensibly from a previously unheard of “Muslim War Council” — to two newspapers just after Paisley’s unexplained disappearance was publicly reported. The calls mentioned a “CIA man Paisley” and described his “kidnapping,” dismissing them as a “hoax” when they served to obscure the real story.
Additionally, a highly credible retired KGB lieutenant general, Sergey Kondrashev, revealed decades later that “an important [long-term KGB] agent [who was a mole inside the CIA] who was never uncovered” was pseudonymously buried in a special Moscow spy cemetery.
Finally, Angleton secretly divulged to Paisley’s wife, Marianne Paisley, in the 1980s that he had belatedly realized that the then-disappeared Paisley had been the long-term KGB mole described by Kondrashev, Mr. Blum said.
Angleton, as CIA counterintelligence chief, ignored the strong evidence that the CIA had been penetrated at a high level for several decades. By 1960, credible defectors reported that a mole had existed in the KGB’s Moscow Center as early as 1954.
Finally, there is no evidence that Marianne Paisley, who had also worked for the CIA, was ever polygraphed or investigated after her husband’s suspicious disappearance. Still, she received many anonymous postcards from foreign countries, quoting Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” her favorite book. She apparently destroyed the postcards.
Intelligence history is an underlying component of and background for both diplomatic and military history, and its lessons must be known and learned before the mistakes implied by them can be corrected. It is well overdue that the CIA publicly acknowledge Paisley’s mole-hood and its botched investigation and cover-up.
• David S. Sullivan is a former CIA analyst and former professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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