Yes, I believe Nosenko was a true defector....
And I'm well aware that there were men with far more information than I who argued both pro and con....Some were convinced that he was a Russsia agent while others thought he was a true defector....He was given a false identity and a good retirement pension....
Dear Walt,
Have you read the five-page section in Bagley's
Ghosts of the Spy Wars called "The McCoy Intervention"?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362-- Mudd Wrassler Tommy
PS I'll post some of it here:
The Soviet Block R&R officer who started the process [of "clearing" Nosenko and setting him free], Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new CI Staff chief, previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides [footnote 5 -- See, for example,
Spy Wars pp. 218?219 and its Appendix A with its endnote 3. Also, Leonard McCoy, "Yuri Nosenko, CIA," CIRA Newletter, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1983] and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the CI Staff's existing file material that (independent of SB Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith. [footnote 6 -- As testified by CI Staff operations chief Newton S. ("Scotty") Miler in a handwritten memorandum which is in the files of T. H. Bagley]. Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act "with no objection from CIA.?"
McCoy opened, as we can now see, with his own finding and with a plea: "After examining the evidence of Nosenko's bona fides in the notebook," he wrote, "I am convinced that Nosenko is a bona fide defector. I believe that the case against him has arisen and persisted because the facts have been misconstrued, ignored, or interpreted without sufficient consideration of his psychological failings." The evidence, he said, is that Nosenko is "not a plant and not fabricating anything at all, except what is required by his disturbed personality." He recommended "that we appoint a new judge and jury for the Nosenko case consisting of persons not involved in the case so far" and proposed six candidates.
According to McCoy, it was not only Nosenko's psychology that should determine his bona fides, but also his reporting. "The ultimate conclusions must be based on his production," McCoy asserted, specifically claiming to be the only person qualified to evaluate that production. Certain of Nosenko's reports were important and fresh, he stated, and could not be considered KGB "throwaway?" or deception, as the notebook described them.
In reality, however, the value of Nosenko's intelligence reports had not been a major factor in the Division's finding. It had judged him a KGB plant on the basis of the
circumstances of the case (of the sort listed in the "40 Questions" of the Appendix). McCoy did not explain or even mention a single one of these circumstances in his paper, so his arguments were irrelevant to the matter he pretended to deal with.
His was not a professional assessment of a complex counterintelligence situation but, instead, an emotional plea.
[It gets even better, Walt. Why don't you read it?]
