Ten years ago, the British Security Service quietly wrapped up one of the most enigmatic operations in British intelligence history. Even many within the agencies were unaware of the existence of this highly secretive mole hunt. Known only as Operation Wedlock, it was born from a tip, not from evidence.
The Guardian revisited the operation and rekindled interest in the open-ended investigation. It began with a single whisper from a foreign service suggested that a senior MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) officer might be working for Moscow. The warning was thin, speculative, unverifiable. No matter how thin one can’t ignore it, and thus the CIA’s whisper to the Security Service served as the ignition to the machinery of suspicion and the wheels began to turn, quietly and relentlessly. What followed was a decades-long surveillance campaign, sprawling across continents, guided not by proof but by the belief that the absence of it might be the ultimate sign of guilt.
A CIA tip
Wedlock began with the CIA tip. A senior MI6 officer, codenamed “1A,” was suspected of working for the Russians. There was no direct evidence. No communications intercepts. No financial anomalies. Just a possibility. That was enough. MI5 launched a sprawling surveillance campaign that would last nearly 20 years. Dozens of officers were deployed across Europe and the Middle East. Surveillance was conducted from rented flats and parked vans. A fake private security firm was even established across from MI6’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. The mole, if there ever was one, was never uncovered.
Angelton’s mole hunt
The operation’s core logic was that the absence of evidence could indicate greater skill in concealment, which resonated with the worldview of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s longtime head of counterintelligence. Convinced that the KGB had deeply penetrated Western services, Angleton led a sweeping internal mole hunt based more on intuition than proof. He believed that the deeper the deception, the cleaner the surface. During his tenure, the KGB surveilled, sidelined, or drove out far too many CIA officers. No mole was ever found. But the damage was lasting. Trust eroded. Missions failed. Lives were derailed by shadows that never solidified.
This same logic consumed the CIA’s treatment of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected in 1964. Nosenko claimed inside knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald and Soviet espionage protocols. Nosenko was declared suspect because his narrative contradicted that of earlier defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and arrived precisely when Angleton expected a “planted” defector. He was imprisoned by the CIA for more than three years without charge, kept in solitary confinement, and interrogated to exhaustion. Eventually, the CIA deemed him genuine, but the cost of that doubt continues to tarnish the historical record.
Ames’s perfidy
Years later, the mole Angleton feared did appear, but not in the way anyone expected. Aldrich Ames, who I knew personally, betrayed U.S. operations for nearly a decade. Ames didn’t just pass secrets; he sent more – he sent warnings. He knew my Russian operations and those of my colleagues, and he alerted the Soviets. The messages were received and acknowledged. He either compromised our agents and targets or warned them. Lives were lost. His betrayal was not abstract; it had names, faces, and coordinates. I remember that day, February 21, 1994, sitting in a station abroad, having just been informed of Ames’s arrest. The reasons behind the many operational setbacks in the Soviet Union and beyond became clear in a heartbeat, Ames. Ames didn’t operate in secrecy; instead, he routinely passed through the CIA’s badge reader to reach his desk. He personally handled the cases he compromised, wearing a badge that symbolized trust.
FBI’s mole hunt
That institutional breach bled directly into the next. When Robert Hanssen was finally arrested in 2001, the FBI realized it had spent years chasing the wrong suspects. I was one of them. Along with other CIA officers, I was placed in “the hopper,” a purgatory of accusation, “We think you are a spy,” which, for me, spanned multiple years. None of us were charged. Eventually all were cleared. But that occurred after the removal from our positions, reassignment to unclassified work, and placement on administrative leave. Our careers were stalled, damaged, or ended. The most visible casualty was Brian Kelly, a brilliant and decent man with whom I enjoyed professional success against the hard targets and with whom I shared the pain of false accusations. Hanssen never was a suspect. The FBI looked only in the CIA for their suspect until the tape was played and all heard the voice of Ramon (Hanssen) and realized the investigative dogs had been barking up the wrong tree. However, there was a cost, and it was borne.
The need for certainty
These stories form a composite of intelligence services seduced by their need for certainty. In each case, the tip became the trap. The search for betrayal eclipsed the search for truth.
Angleton once described espionage as “a wilderness of mirrors.” He was right, but what he missed was that the mirrors sometimes face inward. When institutions lose faith in their vision, when they treat ambiguity as guilt and silence as evidence. They become instruments not of clarity, but of distortion.
The need for 360-degree vision
It is the goal of every competent intelligence service to penetrate the halls of the adversary. Angleton wasn’t wrong; Operation Wedlock was prudent. The hunts for both Hanssen and Ames were appropriate; counterespionage work is seldom joyful, always tedious, and rarely rewarded. The weakness can be found in the lack of 360-degree vision and predisposed belief as to what they were seeking and what those investigating and analyzing believed to be true. This enabled recursive logic, where innocence becomes suspicious precisely because it is too complete, a classic case of epistemic inversion. It mirrors the same pattern seen in the Nosenko affair and Angleton’s mole hunts: the deeper the silence, the louder the alarm.
We revisit these cases now not to lay blame, but to mark the residue. The stakes of narrative integrity are not hypothetical. They are human. And they do not fade.
