![]() ![]() Regardless, says Baer, there were unexplained compromises of CIA agents that could not be accounted for by Ames or Howard and, therefore, the assumption was there was yet another insider.īaer makes Zaporozhsky the central character throughout The Fourth Man, alleging “Max” at some point told his CIA handlers that the “fourth man” was in a senior position at the Agency, in a position that afforded that officer attendance at Directorate of Operations (DO) staff meetings. But importantly for this story, and unfortunately for Baer, the author says no one he talked to for this book could recall exactly when or where Zaporozhsky made such a claim. So, when Zaporozhsky made the sensational claim there was yet another KGB penetration in the CIA, one more senior and even better placed than Ames, the hunt for the “fourth man” was on. Yet Zaporozhsky, says Baer, had “credibility.” After all, his information helped identify Ames and Hanssen. Baer admits that Zaporozhsky (known as “Max” inside the CIA and FBI) was said to be a handling problem given his “eccentric nature.” He says Max’s unreliability was most noticeable when it came to agreeing to and making meetings with the case officers handling him, and his propensity to occasionally exaggerate what he knew. Not knowing their names, Zaporozhsky provided enough clues to help the CIA’s CI team eventually leading to Ames’ arrest in February 1994, and subsequently to the arrest of Hanssen in February 2001.Īfter serving as an in-place asset for the CIA, Zaporozhsky defected and was resettled in the US. So, Baer asks the question: Who was or is this “fourth man?”īaer starts his story by recounting how Alexander Zaporozhsky, a KGB colonel who the CIA recruited in East Africa in the late 1980’s, helped to identify two penetrations of US intelligence, one in the CIA and one in the FBI. According to Baer, this lapse includes vital intelligence on the rise and circumstances that brought Vladimir Putin to power. That person, according to Baer, is still alive, and Baer believes this person contributed at least equally, if not more so than the other three, to the near total dismantling and collapse of the CIA’s intelligence efforts against the Soviet Union and Russia, ramifications of which, he says, are felt even today. He says that despite the damage done by traitors Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen in the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was yet another double agent in the CIA who was never caught. Baer’s claim in this book is that the CIA not only remains vulnerable to foreign penetration, but that it failed to uncover perhaps one of the most damaging spies in CIA’s history. So, what is Baer’s story? The Fourth Manis about mole hunting and the discipline of counterintelligence (CI), two activities endemic and practiced by virtually every reputable intelligence service in the world. But his prominence comes with a price, the responsibility to present the truth based on fact, and not on what many in the intelligence business comedically calls “RUMINT” intelligence based on rumors and, yes, assumptions. Baer, a former CIA case officer, is an experienced writer and storyteller, the author of four New York Times bestsellers, and an intelligence analyst for CNN. Unfortunately, this is the case in Robert Baer’s The Fourth Man. Should one simple assumption be wrong in the paradigm, then the ultimate story itself becomes fatally flawed. Assumptions lead to more assumptions, that lead to presumed conclusions that, therefore, are assumptions themselves. ![]() REVIEW - Nonfiction writers, like intelligence analysts, should always be leery of assumptions. The Reviewer - Joseph Augustyn is a 28-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and is former Director of CIA’s Defector Resettlement Operations Center. Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Joseph Augustyn To exaggerate the importance of a problem etc.BOOK REVIEW: The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia ![]()
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