[SpyTalk] In the 1950s, the British intelligence community and the British press were riveted on the subject of espionage. Two diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected to Moscow and it was clear that they had spied for the Soviets from within the heart of Britain’s national security establishment. But was there a "Third Man?" Suspicion soon centered on Kim Philby, the former MI6 liaison officer to the CIA and confidant of the agency’s top mole hunter, James Angleton. For years, however, nothing could be firmly pinned on him.
According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, author of the forthcoming The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin's Russia, the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community are in a similar liminal period. Since the mid-1980s, there have been lingering suspicions that Moscow had a major spy within the CIA, a spy who is yet to be caught. Baer refers to this person as "the Fourth Man," counting the CIA’s Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen as the first three traitors. He tells us that since the mid-1990s there has been a candidate for the Fourth Man, a prominent figure in the CIA, but that nothing can be pinned definitively on this officer who is now retired but still alive.
Baer previously authored a memoir of his time at the agency, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the War on Terrorism, with former New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh, as well as several other non-fiction books and a novel. At one point in his career, while head of the branch in charge of the Caucasus and Central Asia in the Directorate of Operations’ Central Eurasia (CE) Division, he worked with a woman named Laine Bannerman. She was a counterintelligence officer who had been a key player in the hunt for the Fourth Man. When she came to Baer’s branch, however, she was a refugee from that work. At the time, she never breathed a word about it, but when Baer, in retirement, became aware of the Fourth Man controversy, she and a significant number of other former officers were willing to tell him at least portions of what they know about the subject. Drawing on these bits and pieces as well as two key books, Circle of Treason, by retired CIA mole hunters Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, and The Main Enemy, by Milt Bearden and journalist James Risen, Baer has produced a compelling account of the ongoing search for the Fourth Man. |