Ex-CIA case officer Robert Baer's book The Fourth Man is at the center of unprecedented Spy vs. Spy bickering over a KGB mole hunt.

An extraordinary public spat has erupted between former CIA officers over the hunt for a suspected KGB spy who may have infiltrated the top ranks of the Agency during the Cold War - a case known as The Fourth Man that remains open today.

At the heart of the dispute is ex-CIA case officer Robert Baer, played by George Clooney in his Oscar-winning movie Syriana. Baer published an explosive book in 2022, The Fourth Man, in which he outlines a never-before-told story about a CIA mole hunt he oversaw after the initial investigation in the 1990s ended without an arrest. 

Three ex-CIA counterintelligence chiefs - Mark Kelton, Lucinda Webb, and Michael Sulick - reopened The Fourth Man controversy in February 2023 by publishing an ‘opinion’ article denouncing Baer’s conclusions, sources, and the implication that a high-ranking CIA officer might be a KGB spy: “We found the book to be riddled with errors and what we found to be irresponsible, false assumptions from Mr. Baer’s primary sources.” The three ex-CIA officers asked Baer to issue a retraction, an apology, and stop publicizing The Fourth Man. 

“I stand by everything in the book,” Baer told SPYSCAPE. “My sources are first-hand - the three living members of the Special Investigative Unit (SIU) from 1994. All of them reviewed the manuscript by email for errors of judgment and fact, as did the FBI. I have the emails documenting this.”

Baer was not asked to comment on the 3,800-word article criticizing his book before the opinion piece was published online almost a year after The Fourth Man went on sale in bookshops: “The article came as a surprise. The timing is equally mysterious.” Baer called the idea of a retraction ‘preposterous’.

“The story I told in the book was the same one I told the FBI when they interviewed me in April 2021. In other words, a retraction is preposterous. Lying to the FBI is a crime,” he said, adding, “The book stirred some people up, I take it?”
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Who is The Fourth Man? ‍

Baer and the three ex-CIA counterintelligence chiefs aren't the only ex-spooks to wade into the murky waters. Paul J. Redmond, who served 34 years in the CIA and led the Agency investigation that identified CIA-KGB spy Aldrich Ames, set out his opinion about Baer's book in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence in early 2023, followed by former CIA officers Dr. Richard Rita and W. Allen Messer. The list goes on.

Robert Eringer aired his opinion in the Santa Barbara News-Press. Eringer has been described as a 'freelancer' for the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Division with ties to a former CIA director of Operations. Relying on his own sources, Eringer states: "I have little doubt that a fourth spy exists based on my own adventures in espionage."

In CIA lore, a dangerous Moscow double agent is believed to have embedded himself in the Agency in the 1980s - known as the ‘Decade of the Spy’ after the arrests of the FBI-KGB double agent Robert Hanssen and the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, and Edward Lee Howard. The hunt for a possible ‘Fourth Man’ began after the arrest of Ames, who is serving a life sentence in prison without parole.

While tales about spies and moles may seem like quaint Cold War stories, the arrests of US nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe and Green Beret Peter Debbins prove there are still dangerous operatives swarming around America’s nest of spies.

So who is The Fourth Man? Or does he even exist? No formal charges have been levied and SPYSCAPE does not endorse any one conclusion to the Fourth Man case. “The evidence says it's somebody who's been at headquarters. It's somebody who was head of USSR operations. It's somebody who is counterintelligence,” Baer told the True Spies podcast.

The suspects include a long-serving CIA officer - a rock star who worked on the Ames and Hanssen cases. For the record, the now-retired officer has flatly denied being a Russian spy. Even Baer is not convinced of his guilt: “I find it totally implausible that he's a spy but I haven't seen all the evidence.”

In fact, while there are lingering questions, there is nothing that can be pinned definitively on any CIA officer and no arrests for decades yet, curiously, the case remains open.

So where's it all headed? Possibly to court where a defamation claim could be filed, but that would mean even more CIA secrets spilling into the public domain.
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Spy vs Spy

Former CIA officers Kelton, Webb, and Sulick emphasize that they are not dismissing the idea that another double agent may exist but argue that it is wrong to imply a former CIA counterintelligence officer is the mole. 

“We do not suggest that all the spies have been caught - 4th, 5th, 6th man or woman and beyond. That has not been, and never will be, the case. The US government (and other organizations) has been - and always will be - penetrated by our adversaries.” 

The former CIA officers noted that because of classification issues they couldn’t get into specifics to support their opinion. “Even though we had access to sensitive details in our former roles, we cannot include all of the intelligence to which we were privy, which would further strengthen our findings.”

As for Baer, he was never certain his late-in-the-day investigation would end in an arrest - nor was that the point. Baer, who quit the Agency in 1997, writes in The Fourth Man that his former CIA boss proposed that he “blow the dust off the Fourth Man investigation and see what I could do to restore it to life.”

“He didn’t think I’d solve it, let alone put the Fourth Man in jail; the FBI had tried its best and failed. But (his) hope was that in my poking through the ashes, it would come to the Fourth Man’s attention and make him pay the piper in the currency of sleepless nights. That’s of course if the man indeed were guilty; if not, he’d ridicule the whole enterprise as conspiratorial bulls*** and not give it a second thought.”

Baer told SPYSCAPE that he scrupulously fact checked his book and did his utmost to get the perspective of everyone involved, including the suspected KGB mole.

“I sent the manuscript to everyone in the ‘94 SIU allowing them to remove errors of fact and unsupported assumptions. I even had two respected journalists call my sources to make sure they’d heard the same story I had. They did on both counts. I’m unaware of any national security journalist who’s gone to this extent to fact check a story. And by the way, any bias that bleeds through the narrative is not mine but rather the investigators. Throughout the book I point out that bias."

“As for guilt and innocence of anyone, as I sit here I have no opinion," he added. "For all I know, one of the Fourth Man investigators is the mole. I myself distrust matrices and thin intelligence having fallen victim to it.”