Intelligence Services

Sweeping up after one of the greatest intelligence failures in American history, the CIA's inspector general has charged that three former agency directors and nine other former and current officials should be held accountable because some disinformation from Soviet double agents was knowingly passed to the President, the CIA reported to Congress on Tuesday. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz recommended that former CIA Directors R. James Woolsey, Robert M. Gates and William H.

CIA officers passed on at least 35 reports to top U.S. policy-makers without disclosing that the information was coming from Soviet double agents, congressional leaders said Thursday. Between 1986 and 1994, in fact, the CIA distributed 95 reports from the double agents and other questionable sources but often failed to disclose to policy-makers that the spy agency had doubts about the reliability of the agents who had provided the materials. Eleven such reports were sent to U.S.

The Clinton Administration, stung by suggestions that it has withheld evidence of Bosnia war crimes, said Wednesday that it will give international prosecutors all relevant information, including sensitive intelligence reports. South African Judge Richard Goldstone, head of the international tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslav federation, recently complained that the U.S. government was dragging its feet on requests for information.

U.S. and South Korean forces concluded Tuesday that an attempt by the North Korean army to infiltrate the South spurred a shooting incident near the Demilitarized Zone, and they agreed to protest jointly to Pyongyang, a U.S. spokesman said. The incident, in which a frogman believed to be a North Korean agent was shot to death, underscored the fact that the North and South remain at each other's throats even as U.S.

Deep in the basement of the Central Intelligence Agency's sprawling headquarters complex in Langley, Va., the staff of the agency's Crime and Narcotics Center sat rigidly at one end of a long conference table, girding for a unique briefing for the Washington press corps. The CIA men--they were all men--were clearly uncomfortable. They had worked in the shadows all their lives, and the media seemed to fill them with more dread than the KGB.

The Central Intelligence Agency has determined that its espionage operations inside Russia in the 1980s and early 1990s were riddled with double agents who fed streams of disinformation back to the United States and were undetected for years until Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames was arrested. What's more, some CIA officials may have realized that their operations had been compromised by the Soviets--and failed to inform the White House or senior U.S. policy-makers of just how badly U.S.

An armed North Korean agent was shot to death today just inside South Korea, the South's Defense Ministry said. The incident was a rare burst of deadly violence near the nations' tense border. South Korean authorities launched an extensive manhunt for more armed Communist agents believed to have infiltrated the area near Paju, 25 miles north of Seoul. An alert was issued for all military units along the roads leading to Seoul. All cars traveling to Seoul from the area were stopped and checked.

It was portrayed as a minor incident, a mere embarrassment to the intelligence community: Five Americans--four of them CIA officers--were accused by France in February of conducting an economic espionage operation against the government in Paris. The French--U.S. allies, after all--expressed outrage. The U.S. ambassador to Paris, Pamela Harriman, summoned by the French to receive an official protest, privately fumed as well. The affair briefly made headlines, then faded. But now, U.S.

Trude Lash doesn't recall Russians ever trying to use her to influence Eleanor Roosevelt. And she wonders why they called her Gertrude, a name she didn't use. "They were very interested, of course, in my husband-to-be, Joseph Lash," she said. "I didn't particularly interest anybody." But the top Soviet KGB agent in New York, Vassily Zubilin, told his bosses in Moscow in 1943 that the woman he knew as Gertrude Pratt was a "great friend" of the President's wife.

In espionage circles, Ed Pechous was nicknamed "The Poison Dwarf," a monicker FBI officials had derisively attached to the diminutive spy, some in the CIA say. But if Pechous seemed like a character torn from the pages of a John Le Carre spy novel, there was nothing fictional about his enormous influence within the shadowy intelligence world during the twilight of the Cold War.