The CIA also had its share of long-term successes, such as Alex

158 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS The CIA also had its share of long-term successes, such as Alex- ander Poteyev, who fed the CIA secrets for over ten years while burrowing into Russian intelligence. In the choreography of these operations, as in Le Carré’s fiction, rival intelligence services ensnared and sacrificed recruits, as if playing a chess game, to advance their moles. Despite notable successes such as Felfe and Poteyev, a great number of these elaborate conspiracies fail to insinuate a mole into their adversaries’ confidence. Intelligence services therefore also take advantage of a more prosaic source: the self-generated spy, or, as they are called in the trade, a “walk-in.” Although they are largely unsung in novels, these walk-ins are an important part of espionage. A counterespionage review done for the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) in 1990 found that most U.S. spies in the Cold War had taken documents on their own volition and only afterward offered them to an adversary service. Self-generated spies have diverse motives. Some intelligence workers steal secrets for financial gain. Others take them to further an ideological interest. As opportunistic enterprises, intelligence ser- © vices do not turn walk-ins away if they have valuable intelligence. © Indeed, some of the most successful moles were not recruited, or even controlled, by spy agencies. They were self-generated penetrations, or “espionage sources,” as the KGB preferred to call them, who first stole secrets and later voluntarily delivered them to an adversary. Hanssen, who successfully penetrated the FBI for the Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001, according to the assessment of a 2002 presidential commission, had caused “the worst intelli- gence disaster in US history.” Eleven years later, George Ellard, a former NSA inspector general who had been a member of that com- mission, compared Hanssen with Snowden “in that they both used very well-honed IT abilities to steal and disclose classified informa- tion vital to our national security.” It is also possible to exploit a walk-in even after he has left his service. For example, the KGB major Anatoliy Golitsyn was an ideo- logical self-generated spy who walked into the U.S. embassy in Hel- sinki on December 15, 1961. He asked to see the CIA officer on duty and announced to him that he had collected a trove of KGB secrets, including information that could identify its key spies in the West. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 158 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019646