Historians/History
tags: Cold War, CIA, espionage, Double Agents

Tim Tate is a multi award-winning documentary filmmaker, investigative journalist and best-selling author. His latest book, Agent Sniper: The Cold War Super Agent & The Ruthless head of The CIA will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the USA on December 14.

Polish intelligence officer Michal Goleniewski was a valuable CIA asset between his defection and the Agency's decision to cast him out.

Sixty years ago the West’s most important Cold War spy defected to the United States. For almost three years, Lt. Col. Michał Goleniewski, a senior officer of Poland’s intelligence service, simultaneously employed by the KGB in Moscow, had operated undercover behind the Iron Curtain as a CIA-controlled “Agent In Place.” His self-chosen cover name was Heckenschuetze: the German word meaning “sniper.”

According to Agency internal records, Goleniewski handed over to the United States several hundred pages of Moscow’s most vital military secrets and exposed 1,693 communist bloc spies, a haul which was unprecedented then and has never been equalled since.

Those spies were not mere minnows. Goleniewski’s information led to the capture of some of the most serious Soviet espionage agents operating undercover in Britain, Europe and the United States. Among them were George Blake, Moscow’s mole inside MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service; Gordon Lonsdale and Peter and Helen Kroger, long-term KGB agent runners...

Read Full Story: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/181947