IS A "MOLE" IN THE SVR BEHIND RECENT U.S. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SUCCESSES?

According to the Russian magazine Ogonek, American intelligence has a highly-placed spy in Moscow, who is giving the U.S. security services information on Americans cooperating with Russian intelligence. The magazine claims that there are no less than five agents of the FBI and the National Security Agency suspected of espionage. "There is only one source of these unprecedented American counterintelligence successes — a highly-placed CIA agent in Moscow, who has access to lists of the foreigners who cooperate with our foreign intelligence."

The magazine also observed that "pay for spies is inexorably going down. According to the American security services, FBI agent Earl Edwin Pitts, who was arrested for espionage on December 18, had received ‘only’ $224,000 from Russian intelligence, which is nothing compared with the honoraria received by, say, Aldrich Ames. Pitts was taken after he handed only 22 secret documents over to FBI agents who were pretending to be Russian agents." (Ogonek, No. 1, 1997)

If this report is not specially planted disinformation, then, based on the cases of Ames, Pitts, and Harold Nicholson (a CIA officer arrested on November 16), who were recruited by officers of the former KGB, one may easily assume that American counterintelligence’s source of information is a high-ranking official of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the former First Main Directorate of the KGB, and cannot have anything to do with the Russian military intelligence (GRU). In this sense, one may only guess at what sort of important political, economic, and military information this source in Moscow, who has access to the "holy of holies" of any intelligence service — the names of its agents — is providing American intelligence.

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