Wise, David. Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA.
New York: Random House, 1992. 325 pages.
Along with "Cold Warrior" by Tom Mangold, "Molehunt" tells the story
of defector Anatoli Golitsin and his protege James Angleton. Golitsin's
tall tales, together with Angleton's paranoia and power, led to a hunt for
double agents that effectively ended the careers of some loyal CIA officers.
Mangold concentrates on Angleton himself and manages to interview Yuri
Nosenko, a defector who was locked up in solitary by the CIA for over two
years and mentally tortured, all because Golitsin and Angleton decided he
was a false defector. Wise's book is more name-intensive and takes a closer
look at the careers of some of the other players affected by this drama.
With all of the literature about the CIA over the past two decades, it
is easy to forget that for the first half of the Agency's history, almost
nothing was in the public domain. Washington journalist David Wise changed
all of that with "The Invisible Government" in 1964. CIA director John
McCone called in Wise and co-author Thomas Ross to demand deletions on the
basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained. When that didn't work, the
CIA formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to secure bad
reviews, even though the CIA's legal counsel had found the book "uncannily
accurate." As the unofficial dean of intelligence journalists, Wise is
still working on future books from his Washington office.
ISBN 0-394-58514-3
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