On December 5, Steve M. Galbraith wrote:
Tommy: As you probably know, KGB officer Yuri Nosenko defected shortly after the assassination (January of '64) and said he was in charge of the KGB's monitoring of Oswald. He said that Oswald was never considered being used by the KGB - Oswald was considered too unstable and risky - and that he was monitored while in Minsk under suspicion he was a CIA agent. Additionally, the late Norman Mailer interviewed over a dozen KGB agents and saw a number of files on Oswald and none showed that the KGB used him for any intelligence purposes.
It's true that the Soviet KGB and the Belarus KGB have never released all of the files they had on Oswald. But Yeltsin gave some to Clinton in 1992 and there's other evidence that Oswald was considered an "oddball" by the KGB.
As to Soviet files on Oswald: here's an interesting piece by Max Holland on this material:
https://www.washingtondecoded.com/.m/site/files/a_coldwar_odyssey.pdfFor me, there's frankly no evidence for your theory.
The CIA file on Obyedkov indicates he was just that: an Embassy guard although there were suspicions he was working for the KGB.
Obviously if one thinks this was all disinformation then there's nothing I can say to persuade them otherwise.
.......
Steve,
DECEMBER 28 EDIT OF MY DECEMBER 05 POST:
Have you read the pertinent parts of Angleton's June 19, 1975 Church Committee testimony (in which he mentions the name "Byetkov*?" at the very top of MFF's page 16) and his February 9, 1976 testimony in which he talks about triple-agent "Byetkov*?" / Obyedkov not by name but under the rubric of "the second hangnail" (the first being short, blond, very thin-faced, 35 year-old Nikolai Leonov)?I don't remember saying that the KGB definitely recruited Marine Corps radar operator Oswald while he was living in the USSR for two and one-half years (although I must admit that I rather fancy Ion Pacepa's assertions in that regard).
Regardless, if you believe Nosenko on anything, then it's obvious to me that you have neither read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 book
Spy Wars, nor watched John M. Newman's two-part "Spy Wars" presentation from March of this year.
Question: What are we to make of Angleton's assertion to the Church Committee that the Russian guy who volunteered the radioactive name "Kostikov" to Oswald (or, more likely, to an Oswald impostor) over a surely-known-by-him-to-be-tapped-by-the-CIA Soviet Embassy phone line on 10/01/63, Ivan Obyedkov, was not the double-agent that the CIA thought it had successfully recruited, but a triple-agent, still loyal to the Kremlin?
(More to come, later ...)
But right now, directly from the Lieutenant Columbo "Oh, Just One More Thing" Department:
1) Do you really believe Aleksei Kulak (Fedora) was a true double-agent, i.e., secretly working for the FBI for 15 years?
2) Do you believe Obyedkov was not recruited as a double-agent by the CIA? What are we to make, then, of the enormous number of redactions in Obyedkov's 201 file?
-- Tommy
Bagley's book:
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/page/n3Part I of Newman's "Spy Wars" presentation:
(Edited and bumped for Steve M. Galbraith)
-- Tommy