In the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet issued a  “prime directive” prohibiting the interference in alien civilizations. Any violation of this sacrosanct order would result in dire consequences.

A cursory examination of our own very real “deep state” and its arcane bureaucracy reveals it, too, has a prime directive: Protect the bureaucracy at all costs. If its prime directive is violated, it will face—gasp!—the dire consequences of transparency and accountability.

As if to demonstrate the unfailing accuracy of this comparison, David S. Sullivan recently wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Times titled “Paisley exposed: Greatest KGB Cold War Mole Inside the CIA.” In it, Sullivan discussed the treasonous betrayal by John Arthur Paisley, a senior CIA manager of analysis. Sullivan further averred that “the CIA must now officially declassify the relevant damage assessment and its cover-up.”

For those who reflexively ask if such a declassification might harm our national security, the CIA has permitted the revelation that it secretly considered Paisley a confirmed Soviet KGB mole. This enabled Sullivan to write about how he first exposed Paisley way back in 1978.

Concisely recounting the events, Sullivan weaves a tale worthy of John le Carre, except le Carre might have thought it too farfetched to inspire that willful suspension of disbelief upon which all novelists must rely.

Paisley’s betrayal of our nation was as indisputable as his presumed death was dubious. Sullivan details how this agent of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security,” aka the KGB) made his long march through America’s premier intelligence institution:

Paisley was an experienced covert operator. He visited Russia several times during World War II and joined the CIA in 1948 as an undercover agent in Israel with the United Nations as cover. He moved to Langley as a CIA staff officer in 1953. By 1969, he had become deputy chief of the Office of Strategic Research, a senior agency post. While he held that influential position… [CIA counterintelligence chief] James Jesus Angleton made Paisley a covert operative for the “Plumbers,” the notorious culprits of the Watergate fiasco, which Paisley helped orchestrate and cover up with them, according to [the book] Widows. “Retiring” in 1974 amid the Watergate turmoil within the CIA, Paisley continued to have an office and full clearance at Langley headquarters—the perfect position for a freelance mole.

It was during his regrettably active “retirement” that Paisely began to undermine Sullivan’s work on behalf of our nation. At the agency, Sullivan coordinated the “presidentially authorized competitive intelligence exercises.” He produced crucial, written intelligence analyses regarding the military capabilities and intentions of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Sullivan rightly concluded how, despite Soviet assurances to the contrary, they were violating arms agreements and aiming to gain military dominance over the United States and our allies.

So, the KGB mole went to work, sabotaging and suppressing Sullivan’s accurate analyses of Soviet capabilities and intentions; and, worse, Sullivan noted how during this time “the CIA suspiciously lost extremely significant human and technological sources and methods.”

Ultimately, Sullivan recognized Paisely’s actions were not merely a case of gross incompetence but part of a pattern of a treasonous conspiracy. Consequently, Sullivan informed his superiors he believed Paisely was a KGB spy and an internal investigation commenced.

In a case of life imitating art, while his interrogation and polygraph examination loomed in two days, Paisley vanished off his sailboat in the Chesapeake Bay. After a “botched” investigation, Paisely’s disappearance was “officially deemed an ‘undetermined cause of death,’ possibly a murder, suicide.” Sullivan notes that “there were at least eight characteristics of the body found in the Chesapeake Bay six days after Paisley’s disappearance that did not correspond to his known biometrics, including that the body was 4 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter.”

One would expect Sullivan to have questioned his superiors about the wisdom of letting a suspected mole go sailing—or go anywhere at all—before being investigated; or to assert his belief that the mole had slipped away through a “disguised escape or extraction executed brilliantly and successfully by the KGB.” But something else happened on Aug. 25, 1978, the day Sullivan initially exposed Paisley as a KGB mole.

David Sullivan voluntarily resigned from the CIA.

Why? Because Sullivan had transgressed the CIA’s “prime directive:” One shall not embarrass the bureaucracy—even in the cause of protecting American national security. Paraphrasing the old agency adage, the only thing worse for someone’s CIA career than being a mole is being the one who exposes the mole.

Fortunately, Sullivan landed on his feet, and was even able to help advise the government on national security matters as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But the loss of his expertise and talents within the CIA was a blow to our national security. It was a boon for the bureaucracy, however, which is precisely what that bureaucracy is designed to seek.

And it is precisely why, when circumstances finally allowed, Sullivan penned his Washington Post op-ed in February. As he insightfully asserts:

Intelligence history is an underlying component of and background for both diplomatic and military history, and its lessons must be known and learned before the mistakes implied by them can be corrected. It is well overdue that the CIA publicly acknowledge Paisley’s mole-hood and its botched investigation and cover-up.

Yet, apparently, more than four decades is not long enough for the deep state to admit a mistake and explain how it may—or, more importantly—may not have taken measures to ensure that such a traitorous mole can never again infiltrate American intelligence agencies and imperil our national security.