Edward Jay Epstein

CIA Documents from the US embassy in Iran were shredded into thin strips and Iranians managed to piece them back together. In 1983 they were published in 54 volumes titled "Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den"

The heart of the intelligence business is the an illegal enterprise: the surreptitious theft of state secrets from other nations. The surreptitious part of the equation is crucial since it provides unexpected knowledge. This endeavor also requires air-tight secrecy because the usefulness of the intelligence derived from this data depends on the other side not realizing that it is missing or compromised. Once an adversary realizes that a particular secret is known, it can take effective action to diminish its value. For example, if a nation finds out that one of its diplomatic codes has been broken, it can either change the code or use it as a channel to transmit messages it wants its adversary to read.

To maintain their flow of unexpected secrets, intelligence service have a double job. First, they must steal secrets of value, which is the easy part. Second, they must conceal all traces of the theft for as long as they want the information to remain valuable. To meet this latter requisite, espionage agents are instructed to photocopy documents in place rather than tampering with them or removing them ; and, in situations where this is not possible, intelligence services employ technical staffs of experts to obliterate any clues that the documents gave been tampered with, or temporarily removed to be copied. The security problem does not end, however, with hiding the original theft. Intelligence services must protect the secret that they have stolen valuable information, such as a code, even after it is put to use-- so it can be of future use. This final task of intelligence often requires the creation of a set of alternative false, through plausible sources, to prevent the adversary from figuring out from the use of the intelligence what--or who-- could possibly have compromised or supplied it. The protection of sources and methods involves not only keeping a secret but also fabricating "red herrings" to divert, confuse and overload enemy investigations with extraneous and false information. When British intelligence learned of German military operations in the second world war through its intercepts of coded signals, it protected the secret by creating fictional human agents who could be plausibly assigned the credit for the coup. In the same manner, human sources are often hidden by behind a screen of fictional scientific devices.

This necessary practice of intelligence services protecting truths with bodyguards of lies or red herrings has also resulted in the systematic pollution of public knowledge about espionage through deliberately-planted fictions. Intelligence services employ entire covert actions staffs to muddy the waters around important cases by leaking selected bits of information. For example, the "story" of Oleg Penkovskiy, a Soviet GRU officer in contact with British intelligence in the mid 1950s and then again in the early 1960s, has been put out in different versions by three intelligence services-- the CIA, the KGB and the British. The CIA indeed fabricated a diary for him which became a best-selling book in the United States. Although both CIA and British counterintelligence had grave suspicions about the information Penkovskiy supplied, especially during his latter career, the CIA's public version gave him credit for events to which he had no connection. While such sprinklings of untruths into the historic record may be justifiable from the point of view of protecting sources and methods, and therefore vital to the integrity of the intelligence organization, the distortions that they produce may it virtually impossible for outsiders to understand the intelligence business (which may not be entirely unintentional). Indeed, even in the United States, except for the rare glimpses provided by Congressional hearings, such as those of the Church Committee, the public perception of the secret world of intelligence has always been closely controlled by the intelligence services themselves either through contract employees who write books they submit for review or defectors, under contract to the CIA, FBI or DIA, who, after being briefed, contact journalists or Congressional staffs.

This was the situation up until November 1979 when Iranian students seized an entire archive of CIA and State Department documents, which represented one of the most extensive losses of secret data in the history of any modern intelligence service. Even though many of these documents were shredded into thin strips before the Embassy, and CIA base, was surrendered, the Iranians managed to piece them back together. They were then published in 1982 in 54 volumes under the title "Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den", and are sold in the United States for $246.50. As the Tehran Embassy evidently served as a regional base for the CIA, The scope of this captures intelligence goes well beyond intelligence reports on Iran alone. They cover the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. There are also secret analysis of arcane subjects ranging from the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence to Soviet oil production. Presumably, these thousands of documents, which include cryptnyms and routing instructions from and to concerned agencies of the United States government, have been extensively analyzed by the KGB and other intelligence service interested in the sources and methods used by the CIA.

The most revealing documents are the CIA's own internal directives that span a twenty year period. When these are read in chronological order, they trace a remarkable conceptual changes in the way the CIA conceived of its job-- and enemy. It indeed casts an entirely new light on the bitter battles that tore the CIA apart in the mid-1970s, and it explains some of its more recent failures to properly evaluate intelligence defectors.

The watershed year was 1973-- just after the retirement of Richard Helms. That year there was an 180 degree switch in the crucial policy concerning the recruitment of Soviet Bloc officials, called appropriately RED TOPS. At issue, was the way that these RED TOPS, primarily Communist diplomats, intelligence officers, or military attaches stationed abroad, were to be treated if they "walked in", and surreptitiously approached American officials and offered either to defect or to remain in place and supply U.S. intelligence with Soviet secrets. Would they assumed to be sincere defectors, and enrolled in American espionage? Or would they be suspected of being KGB disinformation agents, and held in limbo? This conceptual determination is central to the spy business.

Up until 1973, the CIA had assumed that Soviet intelligence services commonly used "provocations" as a technique to test and manipulating its opponents in the intelligence game. As bait in these provocations, the KGB would order Soviet embassy officials to make contact with U.S. officials and feign disloyalty. In fact, over the years, the CIA had found that a large number of RED TOP officials who contacted the CIA, ostensibly to defect, turned out to be under the control of the KGB; and used to confuse American intelligence with disinformation, lead it on a wild goose chase, expose its sources or methods, or simply embarrass it by contriving an incident. As early as 1959, to guard against KGB-controlled provocateurs, the CIA had insisted that the bona fides of a RED TOP walk-in be established through a counterintelligence investigation before he is treated as a source of intelligence. This procedure was explicitly defined in "Director of Central Intelligence Directive 4/2", signed by Allan Dulles. It states:

The establishment of bona fides of disaffected persons will be given particular attention because of the demonstrated use of defector channels by hostile services to penetrate or convey false or deceptive information to U.S. Intelligence services. (Volume 53, p.8)

The responsibility for making this determination of "bona fides" had been assigned to the chief of the counterintelligence staff, James Angleton, and it obviously gave him great power over the recruitment of REDTOPS. It also led to considerable rivalries within the CIA, and especially with the Soviet Russia Division, which wanted to control its own recruitments among Soviet officials.

In 1973, William E. Colby, the son of a Jesuit missionary, whose main experience in the CIA had been in paramilitary and political activities, became first the comptroller, then Director, of Central Intelligence. It was the beginning of a revolution. As he explains in his autobiography, he rejected the complicated view of KGB strategic deception. Instead of worry about such enemy tricks, he saw the job of the CIA as a straight forward one of gathering intelligence for the President. And, to accomplish this, he believed "walk in" defectors should be encouraged and given the benefit of the doubt, rather than suspected. He complained that in the past the CIA "spent an inordinate amount of time worried about false defectors and false agents." What now emerges from the Tehran archive was how far Colby went in abruptly revising this doctrine on REDTOPS. A top secret order, entitled "Turning Around REDTOP walk ins", which went out to all CIA stations in 1973, advised:

Analysis of REDTOP walk-ins in recent years clearly indicates that REDTOP services have not been seriously using sophisticated and serious walk-ins as a provocation technique. However, fear of provocations has been more responsible for bad handling than any other cause. We have concluded that we do ourselves a disservice if we shy away from promising cases because of fear of provocation...We are confident that we are capable of determining whether or not a producing agent is supplying bona fide information. ( Volume 53, p.32)

Instead of holding in abeyance REDTOPS until their bona fides could be established, this new doctrine gave case officers in the Soviet Bloc Divisions carte blanc to recruit "producing agents" on the assumption that their worth would be established after the fact by the quantity and quality of information they furnished. This new order changed the entire philosophy of the CIA in a single swoop. By effectively eliminating the prior task of establishing bona fides, it undermined Angleton's position in the CIA, and made superfluous his counterintelligence staff. In light of this change, it is not surprising that Angleton, after bitterly fighting this new policy, which contradicted the empirical findings of the past 20 years, was forced out. Although Angleton was fired in December 1974, after Colby first planted a Pulitzer Prize news leak with the NY Times, the full dimensions of this power struggle only became known through the documents in the Tehran archive.

These top secret internal directives also reveal that in 1973 there was a sudden increase in the CIA's confidence in its ability to run and service agents in hostile territory. Up until 1973, the CIA considered such contacts behind enemy lines to be a very difficult--and dangerous--enterprise. Not only did the KGB maintain a full-court press of surveillance, especially around the embassy, but it was known to use double-agents to entrap intermediaries that might be used as couriers. In January 1973, there was a dramatic change in the CIA's appreciation of this situation. On January 9th, in a top secret cable, The CIA`s Soviet Bloc division, code named BK Herald, informed all stations abroad:

BK Herald can and does run many resident agents inside the REDTOP countries. We have the capability to mount and support such operations over an indefinite period, and we currently are able to exfiltrate agents, in most cases with their families, from the REDTOP countries when it is time for them to leave.

In other words, the new CIA took the position that it could not only recruit untested REDTOP walk-ins at foreign embassies but, after they returned to Moscow, it could contact them with impunity, employ them as "resident agents" (or moles), and then, if necessary, smuggle them, and their families, out of Russia. ( Volume 53, p.29) This fearless bluster, presumably had been based on doubts about the efficiency of the Soviet security services-- "The KGB is not 10 feet tall" -- proved to be disastrously short lived. By 1978, the KGB had arrested a large number of the CIA's "resident agents" in Moscow, including Anatoli Filatov, Alexandr Ogorodnik and Vladimir Kalinin, and had used other CIA recruits, such as Sanya Lipavsky, as provocateurs to discredit the dissident movement.

The Tehran documents also provide a surprisingly lucid picture of the basic exercises involved in espionage. The "first imperative", according to the January 9th 1973 directive, is to discourage any potential REDTOP dissident from actually defecting. If he does, it will be known to the Soviets, and they can be expected to take measures to nullify the value of his information. Instead, he should be persuaded to return to his post, and maintain secret contact. In CIA parlance, this is a "turn around". In cases where the REDTOP is not a position of access, the CIA explains "we are prepared to guide and assist him in his career [in the Soviet government], running him in place until he develops the access we need". The CIA, in other words, operated on the premise that it could promote Soviet personnel in their careers in the Soviet foreign office, Armed Forces and KGB through supplying them with information and, by doing so, maneuver them into positions where they could steal or intercept secrets that were valuable to the United States. The idea is to develop a mole. "Our ultimate objective is to have the walk-in return to his home country and continue his agent relationship while working inside"(Vol 53, p.28-9)

These directives also include the nuts and bolts details of espionage. There are, for example, step-by-step instructions for recruiting for the job of a mole a Soviet Bloc official who contacts a US Embassy ( If the officer on duty doesn't speak his language, there are convenient cards in Russian and Chinese ). First, the walk-in is told to return to his comrades, and say nothing to them about the contact. Then, he is handed a chemical Secret Writing kit [SW] (which allows him to develop invisible addendum to letters). He is also assigned his "Indicator", or code word, which signals that an otherwise innocuous-looking letter contains a message. In return, the Soviet Bloc official is asked to supply a home mailing address or to address an envelope to himself. He is told he can" expect a letter (mailed securely in his own country by a BKHERALD officer) containing an SW message with instructions two to three months after his return"(Vol 53 p.30) Next, the CIA sends a so-called "ops package" to the Soviet Union (or wherever) "containing covert communications materials, reporting requirements and other instructions" for the agent-to-be which is "dead dropped" --IE, stashed in a safe location such as a tree trunk. Finally, a message in secret writing is mailed to him telling the walk-in where to pick up this "ops package". Once he receives this equipment, the recruit becomes a full fledge spy-- photocopying requested documents, answering CIA questionnaires, etc and depositing the data in his dead drop.

Other documents in the archives show that the CIA did not merely sit around waiting for REDTOP walk-ins to stray into the embassy. It sets up operations ( "ops") to approach, tempt, compromise and recruit their diplomats and intelligence officers. To begin these "ops", U.S. intelligence officers poured through "biographical" research reports, prepared by U.S. and allied embassies, on Soviet diplomatic personnel in Iran and sifted out from them possibly vulnerable REDTOPS. For example, it was reported that one recently transferred Soviet diplomat's wife had been President Nikolai Kosygin's mistress. If true, it might make him amenable to betraying his country. As it turned out, the report was false (she had merely been Kosygin's secretary), and the "op" was scrapped.(volume 52, pp32-36) After a "target" is finally found, the "op" frequently employed intermediaries, called "access agents" to approach him. The longest such case involved the use of an American doctor, who worked with Soviet doctors in a hospital in Tehran-- for the task of befriending the targets. (Vol 52, pp 44-75) The code name for the agent was "Larry Giel". If the "op" then went well, the REDTOP was then maneuvered into a meeting of the CIA recruiter, who would then attempt to trick or induce him into cooperating. As it turned out, despite persistent efforts by the CIA and Air force intelligence, these "ops" against REDTOPS rarely, if ever, succeeded in Iran (at least not in the published documents). The CIA had more apparent success in recruiting Iranian diplomats in the period following the overthrow of the Shah in 1978. An entire volume of CIA documents is devoted to the intriguing arrangements necessary for clandestine contacts with two such Iranian officials, code named SDLURE and SDROTTER (Volume 9)

Beyond such espionage activities, this archive also provides a measure not ordinarily available of the quality of the diplomatic reporting. This cable traffic between U.S. Embassies and Washington-- which is in effect daily, if unpublished, journalism, was based mainly on conversations with foreign diplomats from both friendly and unfriendly nations. In Iran, for example, U.S. political officers regularly sought out their counterparts in the Soviet Embassy, and, while treating them to dinner at the Tehran Steak House, pressed them with questions about Soviet intentions in countries around the world. The answers were presumed to be the quasi-official Soviet line. (In return, the Soviets invited Americans to the Sauna in the Soviet Embassy). (Volume 50, pp 43-88)

These messages from foreign sources, reviewed in the hindsight of history, show the extent to which nations used diplomatic contacts to test, manipulate and control their adversaries. The way the Soviet Union used diplomatic channels to de-sensitize the United States to it planned coup in Afghanistan in October 1979 is a case in point. The Soviets were, up until that point, facing a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The Socialist government of Taraki and Amin, backed by the Soviets, had seized power in April 1978. But despite over one billion dollars in Soviet economic and military aid, and some 4000 Soviet military advisors, it had been unable to deal with the growing Moslem insurgency, was financed secretly by Saudi Arabia. (Volume 30, pp142-3)

The Soviet Union decided in the summer of 1979 to suppress the rebellion, which meant replacing the Afghan leaders (who still retained some claim of independence from Moscow). In preparing this coup, the Soviets sent a series of messages to the American embassy, beginning in June, through both its own Minister, V.S. Safronchuk and the East German Ambassador, Dr. Hermann Schwiesau. As the American Ambassador reported in the secret section of a July 18th cable to Washington. "Over the last 3 weeks, we had hints of a Soviet assisted internal coup both from GDR Ambassador Schwiesau and from...Safronchuk". He explained that Schwiesau had become the "One of our most important sources of.. Moscow's thinking". The message from the East German ambassador was that Moscow would not allow the socialist coup to interfere, even if it meant direct intervention. He explained: "Safronchuk had been given the task, by Moscow, to bring about a `radical change' in the Government" of Afghanistan. Then, spelling out the course of action-- and even giving the approximate date, he "indicated that a military intraparty coup, deposing of Amin and perhaps others, is what the Soviets intend". (Volume 29, pp 180-181) The message of Moscow's plan to pull a coup was pointedly repeated on at least three other occasions that month. In addition, there were reported in the cable traffic numerous instances of undisguised Soviet military moves to support its intervention in Afghanistan. (Volume 30)

Finally, the Tehran archive reveals something about US intelligence against its allies, notably Israel. The CIA left intact in the embassy archives in Tehran an extremely damaging 47-page report on Israeli intelligence, called Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services. The March 1979 report was not only classified "SECRET," "NOFORN" ( not releasable to foreign nationals) "NOCONTRACT", ( not releasable to contract employees) and "ORCON" ( originator of the report, the CIA`s counterintelligence staff, controlled who in the American government saw it.) (Volume 11, pp. 1-2) Such labels were necessary because it reveals sources and methods of Israel's most secret intelligence services-- including Mossad and Shin Beth. The report closely defines its foreign targets, its tactics, including "false-flag" recruitments (where Israeli agents pose as NATO officers and "surreptitious entry operations" (for example, break into embassies) and its table of organization, personnel, budgets and liaisons with foreign intelligence services with nations with which Israel does not have diplomatic relations such as China.)

The CIA explained "Most of the information in this publication has been derived from a variety of sources including covert assets of the Central Intelligence Agency." And "covert assets" means, in CIA speak, spies, it becomes evident how the CIA obtained at least a portion of Israel's secret documents. It used its moles and other "covert assets" in Israel to furnish it with these documents. They were, it appears, which from the data t provided, would have to be Israeli government employees with access to the most closely held intelligence secrets. These agents in turn had to be recruited and managed by the CIA, which is the essence of espionage. So the CIA was therefore engaged in espionage operations against Israel from 1976-9, when the report in the Tehran Archives was prepared. And, from this espionage, it knew about similar Israel espionage activities against the U.S. The report states, for example, that Mossad routinely "collects" intelligence in the United States through its eighth department. (Volume 11, p.17-18)

From a point of view of keeping secret the legitimate workings of U.S. national security mechanism, it would have been better if these documents had been destroyed before the embassy was surrendered. But since these documents have been published, they cannot be ignored. For just as the archive of Soviet documents at Smolensk, captured intact by the German Army in 1941, and subsequently taken from them by the Americans in 1945, gave rise to an new perspective on the governmental operations of the Soviet Union, the Tehran documents provide missing pieces in a multitude of jigsaw puzzles.

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Source:
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/teheren.htm
Illustration:
http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/bloggraphics/ff_cia11_f.jpg