They are solitary animals with small eyes and no external ears. They
dig complicated underground nests and eat worms. We call them “moles,” and
they exist all over the world — even in the U.S. government.
Moles are pests. They can cause a lot of damage and they’re hard to
get rid of. A garden hose can sometimes be used to flood their burrows and
force them — wet and trembling — to the surface. But this method has not
been successful against moles in government.
Something more than a garden hose is needed.
It’s a serious problem to have moles in your government. Some
researchers and scholars believe that the Third Reich collapsed because of a mole.
(A big and highly specialized mole, to be sure.) This mole was a Soviet agent
working inside Hitler’s headquarters. His codename was “Werther.” The
importance of Werther lies in the fact that he was able to transmit
Hitler’s plans to Stalin in a matter of hours. In some instances, Stalin saw
Germany’s war plans before the German field commanders saw them.
In a book entitled “Hitler’s Traitor,” Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Louis Kilzer now claims to have discovered the identity of Werther.
Using previous secret World War II archives, Kilzer builds a convincing case
that Werther was none other than Martin Bormann, Hitler’s most trusted deputy.
Shortly before committing suicide with his bride, Eva Braun, Hitler’s
confidence in Bormann is shown in the Fuhrer’s last will and testament,
which states, “I nominate as my Executor my most faithful Party comrade,
Martin Bormann. He is given full legal authority to make all decisions.”
One of the most fascinating claims made by Kilzer concerns
declassified American intelligence files that document advanced warnings given to
Stalin about Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia. Among the intelligence Stalin
received prior to Hitler’s attack was a message from Werther stating the
exact date of the invasion — June 22, 1941.
According to Kilzer, this vital intelligence was dismissed by Moscow
because the German attack was thought to be months away. In reality, it
would happen in a matter of days. When Hitler’s troops attacked on June
22, as predicted, Werther’s value was fully understood by the Soviet leadership.
It is interesting to note that the spy ring that supported Werther
was funded through Hollywood. According to Kilzer, money was first
transferred from the Soviets to dummy corporations in the United States. “In July
1941,” reports Kilzer, “only days after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union,
an RKO Pictures representative in Switzerland began handing over the money
to the Red Army spies.”
Kilzer’s account is fascinating and deserves a wide readership.
Perhaps more fascinating than the pure espionage angle, is Kilzer’s
assertion about Bormann’s role as saboteur. As historical testimony and
documentation shows, Martin Bormann directly ordered the brutal
treatment of Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the occupied East. These orders were
given after Hitler had suggested a different approach. It wasn’t that Hitler
was against “reducing” the Slavic people, but he wanted to lull these people
to sleep, and not make enemies of them “too soon.” Bormann apparently
subverted Hitler’s plan, making Nazi brutality totally obvious to everyone.
In his history of the Second World War, British Gen. J.F.C. Fuller
said that Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union if he had treated the
Russian people as allies and friends. Many Russians and Ukrainians
initially saw the Germans as liberators. But Kilzer says that Bormann put a quick
end to this.
Ironically, Kilzer paints a picture of a Soviet agent instigating
atrocities against Soviet people. In the world of grand strategy,
purposeful and spectacular cruelty by the Nazis could only serve to strengthen the
Soviet population’s will to resist.
According to Kilzer, many German leaders suspected there was
something wrong with Bormann. Germany’s top intelligence professionals, from
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to Reinhard Gehlen, speculated on the possibility that
Bormann was a Soviet mole. But Bormann was too close to Hitler. He was
beyond their reach.
After the war, SS Gen. Walter Schellenberg said that Bormann had
inspired Hitler to undertake pogroms that were “beneficial to Stalin.” Also
agreeing with this evaluation, Albert Speer told his Allied interrogators that
“Bormann’s influence on Hitler was a national disaster.”
Kilzer even goes so far as to say that Bormann was “the point man for
the Holocaust.” And if that is true, assuming that Bormann was Stalin’s
agent, then the crimes that sealed Germany’s fate were connived at and
exploited by conspirators whose ruthlessness was even greater than Hitler’s.
The significance of Werther and the fall of the Third Reich should
not be missed. The Russians did not stop planting moles in other countries with
the end of World War II. In fact, at the same time Bormann was steering
Hitler to defeat, President Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair was being steered at a
place called Yalta by another Soviet mole named Alger Hiss.
Not long after Hitler’s death, two former Soviet agents — Elizabeth
Bentley and Whittaker Chambers — testified to direct knowledge of three
groups of moles operating inside the U.S. government. They were
identified as the Ware cell, the Silvermaster cell and the Perlo cell. These cells
had penetrated the U.S. Justice Department, the National Labor Relations
Board, the Department of Agriculture, the Pentagon and the Air Force, along
with the State Department and the Treasury Department.
James Burnham wrote a book about Russia’s underground networks inside
the U.S. government entitled “The Web of Subversion.” Burnham suspected
that Soviet moles burrowed inside the U.S. government were responsible for
several communist victories. He pointed to disastrous restrictions placed on
our fighting men in Korea, the loss of China to communism, the West’s
abandonment of the anti-communist forces under Mihailovitch in Yugoslavia, the
swallowing of Eastern Europe by Stalin, the communist conquest of French and
Italian trade unions and the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union of half a
million anti-communist war prisoners, refugees and deserters.
America was not the only Western country penetrated by moles. In the
1950s and early 60s it was discovered that key British officials had
secretly working for Moscow. These were the so-called “Cambridge moles.”
The most important of these was Harold “Kim” Philby, who worked for MI6; Guy
Burgess, formerly of British intelligence; Donald Maclean, a British
diplomat; and Sir Anthony Blunt, a one-time MI5 officer.
In 1987 Peter Wright, the former Assistant Director of MI5 (the
British secret service), wrote a book entitled “Spycatcher,” in which he
suggested that the head of MI5 in the 1960s, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet agent.
The book was so controversial it was banned in Britain. A few years later,
British analyst and researcher William J. West, published a book which
confirmed Wright’s suspicions. West presented documentary evidence and
testimony that Hollis had been associated with a group of Stalin’s
agents who plotted against the British government in the early days of World War II.
Judging from the moles we’ve seen in the past, one might ask where
all the moles are today. A large volume could not begin to address this
question. But let us look at a couple of intriguing examples.
Many books and articles have been written about the “evil CIA agent,”
Gen. Manuel A. Noriega. Few researchers, however, bother to note that on
Oct. 27, 1989, the Bush administration officially designated Noriega as an
agent of communist Cuba. This was not mere propaganda, as a close examination
of Noriega’s career will show. Noriega was recruited by the
Spanish-speaking branch of the KGB — the Cuban DGI.
The moles that exist today must be numerous. U.S.
counterintelligence has never been weaker. No example better illustrates this than a recent
case out of Peru. A conspirator named after Vladimir Lenin, who did not even
bother to change his name, rose to become the leading anti-communist
fighter in Peru. But as he fought the Chinese-backed Shining Path guerrillas of
Peru and pretended to cooperate with the CIA, he simultaneously facilitated
Russian subversion and penetration of the country. Vladimiro Lenin
Montesinos, formerly the iron right hand of Peruvian President Alberto
Fujimori, is now the most wanted man in Peru. Rising to become the chief
of Peruvian intelligence, he used video cameras to record and exploit
corrupt officials. His conspiracy only collapsed when a tape of him bribing a
legislator got away and was played on television. Subsequent
investigation has shown that Montesinos’ Swiss bank accounts contain millions of
dollars from Russian companies.
If you follow the money, you discover the ultimate paymaster.
The Russian intelligence services are brilliant. Their operations are
wide-ranging and often successful. If Louis Kilzer is right about
Martin Bormann, then the value of a single agent can decide the fate of
millions. There is also another lesson here. By using their agents to commit
outrageous crimes under the flag of an enemy, the Russians are able to exploit the
resulting resentment and outrage. And just as Noreiga’s evil has been
linked to so-called “U.S. imperialism” in Latin America, the deeds of
Montesinos will also be blamed on the U.S.
Of course, America is to blame. We have allowed all these solitary
animals with small eyes and no external ears to run loose. We are the
ones who have allowed them to them dig complicated underground nests beneath
At the same time, in a free society with a protected “right to
privacy,” we are yet defenseless against moles. In this regard it might be said
that moles are a protected species. Meanwhile, the rest of us may become