Podcast Episode #56 - The Last Cold War Mole with Robert Baer
The existence of a possible fourth high-level mole in the US intelligence community has been a persistent rumor for more than twenty years.
Shortly after the arrest of case officer Aldrich Ames in February 1994, a team of analysts working inside the CIA came to the conclusion that not all of the catastrophic losses the agency had suffered over the previous decade could be attributed to either Ames or Edward Lee Howard, another former case officer who defected to the Soviet Union in September 1985. Beginning in 1985, the agency’s assets in Russia were systematically uncovered and eliminated. By 1994, they were virtually blind to the inner workings of the Russian government.
At the time, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who had been passing information to the Russians since 1979, still hadn’t been identified and wouldn’t be arrested until 2001. However, even his own betrayals couldn’t explain every loss the agency had suffered.
A team of four CIA and FBI analysts, led by Laine Bannerman, began a highly compartmentalized, months-long study of not just every lost agent, but every case officer and senior administrator who might have known about them. The list was short and included the names of some of the most powerful and longest-serving personnel in the entire agency. They gradually eliminated one name after another until there was only a single likely candidate remaining.
In November 1994 they presented their findings to a panel of two senior CIA and one FBI official. In an almost unbelievable turn of events, not publicly revealed until this year, the man they identified as the most likely candidate was one of the two senior CIA men in the room with them for the presentation.
For episode 56 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Robert “Bob” Baer, author of The Fourth Man. Baer himself had a storied career with the CIA and didn’t learn about the hunt for the fourth man until many years later. We discussed the ramifications of the team’s findings, and what happened in the aftermath.
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