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KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn

David C. Martin, a national security reporter for CBS News since 1993, had covered intelligence affairs for the Associated Press and Newsweek. Despite its age, Wilderness of Mirrors remains the most balanced treatment of Angleton and CIA counterintelligence. It helped deflate the emerging Angleton mythology and established a more objective frame of reference within which to evaluate the merits of the dueling defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors, now over 30 years old, remains the most balanced treatment of Angleton and CIA counterintelligence.

Golitsyn, a mid-ranking KGB espionage officer, defected at a fortuitous time for the CIA, still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster. He was the first KGB staffer to change sides since 1954 and initially provided a trove of useful intelligence, but then began making sensational allegations about Soviet moles and deceptions that caused years of disarray in several Western services. His CIA and FBI handlers put up with his arrogance and irascibility because after Popov's compromise and Goleniewski's loss of access, the CIA had no wellplaced current sources on Soviet intelligence activities, and its best stock of information on the KGB was at least seven years old. Golitsyn's reporting, extensive in its own right, soared in value in the absence of other comparable HUMINT.

By early 1963, however, officers in the Soviet Division concluded that Golitsyn had nothing else to offer beyond his "analysis" of intelligence that U.S. and foreign services gave him. There was little resistance at Langley when Golitsyn accepted an invitation from Britain's MI-5 to help it hunt Soviet agents in London. Angleton wanted Golitsyn back, however, and may have contrived (through a press leak in a British tabloid) to force him out of England.

After Golitsyn returned to America in August 1963, Angleton - who had scrutinized his debriefings from the first - took over his case from the Soviet Division. Golitsyn was Angleton's first "agent" and shared his baroque view of Moscow's methods and intentions. With his reservoir of current information having run dry, however, Golitsyn began telling grandiose tales about Soviet strategic deception and making outlandish charges that prominent Americans and Britons were Kremlin spies.