Michael,
Shall we play "Dueling Excerpts"?
Okay
Here's my first salvo, an excerpt from chapter 20 of Tennent H. Bagley's excellent 2007 book
Spy Wars. The excerpt "sets the scene" and will give members and guests an inkling of just how duplicitous and biased was your
John L. Hart, CIA supporter of a KGB "defector" who swore from day one that the KGB had had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR ...
.....
For a few years after the Agency in 1968 made its official finding in Nosenko’s favor, CIA did not speak with a single voice. The leadership of its Counterintelligence Staff under James Angleton judged Nosenko to be a KGB plant, and its operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler continued to probe into what lay behind the KGB’s operation.
Two former KGB officers, Peter Deriabin and Anatoly Golitsyn, after learning about Nosenko’s case in detail (Deriabin had even questioned him personally— see Appendix A) were certain that Nosenko had been dispatched by the KGB and was lying about his KGB activities and career. As Deriabin put it, any KGB officer knowing the facts would be equally convinced. He was right. After the Cold War a KGB officer (General Sergei Kondrashev), after reading some of CIA’s questions and Nosenko’s answers, laughed out loud and asked me an unanswerable question, “How could your service ever have trusted such a person?”
(Richard) Helms never considered the doubts truly resolved and viewed the Agency’s formal acceptance as a matter of convenience. Nosenko had to be released, and one way to do it was to clear him, at least officially. (fn 11)
These doubts faded in the second half of the 1960s with the advent of (triple-agent Igor) Kochnov and the departure from Headquarters of myself and Dave Murphy. The man who replaced Murphy as Soviet Bloc Division (SB) chief, Rolf Kingsley, had not previously focused on Soviet matters and had little patience with counterintelligence. He called for a fresh review of the case by “more neutral” officers, who concluded that Nosenko was probably genuine. (fn 12) Finally, when William E. Colby became director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, the Agency’s approach to counterintelligence changed and the shadows over Nosenko were cleaned away. (At this time I had already retired, so I learned of these events only later from those who lived through them.)
Colby gave a strong push to the growing myth surrounding the Nosenko affair (see Appendix B). In his memoirs he asserted that some former CIA people believed in an all-knowing KGB that was well on the way to dominating the world. “The [SB] Division produced operations and intelligence,” Colby wrote, "but the [counterintelligence] staff believed that those operations and intelligence were controlled by the KGB ... to mislead the United States in a massive deception program.’’ (fn 13)
Colby also derided a "paralysis” that he claimed had overtaken Soviet operations. “I sensed a major difficulty,” he wrote. “Our concern over possible KGB penetration, it seemed to me, had so preoccupied us that we were devoting most of our time to protecting ourselves from the KGB and not enough to developing the new sources and operations that we needed to learn secret information. ... I wanted to consider the KGB as something to be evaded by CIA, not as the object of our operations nor as our mesmerizing nemesis.” (fn 14)
If one were to believe one of its later chiefs, the Soviet Division in that dark earlier time “had been turning away dozens of volunteers, Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States.” (fn 15) In reality the caution that Murphy -- not Angleton -- introduced into CIA’s efforts to recruit Soviets was never allowed to hinder the acceptance of a single Soviet volunteer, nor did it preclude any well-considered recruitment approach. None of these assertions of “paralysis” has cited a single rejection of a volunteer, defector, or proposal for action. Ironically, it was these latter-day critics who themselves started turning away Soviet defectors -- on the grounds that CIA had all it needed or could handle. Among those whom CIA turned away -- on specific orders from Headquarters— was Vasily Mitrokhin, who had stolen and stashed a large hunk of KGB operational archives. (fn 16)
While paying lip service to the need for vigilance, Colby saw counterintelligence mainly as an impediment to intelligence collection. His impatience and disinterest came out in the form of simplification and sarcasm.
... (fn 17)
Colby soon got to work reorganizing the Counterintelligence Staff and divesting it of some of its components. Then in 1974 the New York Times exposed the fact that in apparent violation of the Agency’s charter, Angleton’s staff had been checking international mail to and from some leftwing Americans. This gave Colby the ammunition he needed to rid himself of this nuisance. At the end of that year he demanded Angleton’s resignation and was glad to see Angleton’s chief lieutenants Raymond Rocca, William Hood, and Newton Miler follow him into retirement.
To steer a less troubling course, Colby appointed to head the Counterintelligence Staff George Kalaris, a man without experience in either counterintelligence or Soviet bloc operations, and, as his deputy, Leonard McCoy, a handler of reports, not an operations officer, who had already distinguished himself as a fierce advocate for Nosenko.
Now began an extraordinary cleanup inside the Counterintelligence Staff -- and the disappearance of evidence against Nosenko. Miler’s carefully accumulated notes on this and related cases were removed from the files and disappeared, along with a unique card file of discrepancies in Nosenko’s statements. (fn 18)
Shortly afterward Colby appointed an officer to review the files anew.
John L. Hart was assisted by four officers. They worked for six months, from June to December 1976. I caught a glimpse of their aims and work methods when
Hart came to Europe to interview me. He had not bothered to read what I had written (though he said nothing new had come to light on the question of Nosenko’s bona hdes) and seemed interested only in why, eight years earlier, I had warned that bad consequences might flow from Nosenko’s release. I saw that his aim was not to get at the truth but to find a way to clear Nosenko, so I refused to talk further with him.
As I later learned,
Hart’s team did not even interview the Counterintelligence Staff officers who had analyzed the case and maintained files on it for nine years. Among them were two veteran analysts who, having come “cold” to the case, had concluded on their own that Nosenko was a plant -- and had written their reasons.
Hart then wrote a report that affirmed total trust in Nosenko. (fn 19, referencing HSCA Hearings Vol. II, pg. 490)
Having decreed their faith and gotten rid of disbelievers, the CIA leadership banned further debate. One experienced officer in the Soviet Bloc Division -- my old colleague Joe Westin, who knew so much about this case -- took a late stand against Nosenko’s bona hdes. He was told by higher-ups, “If you continue on this course, there will be no room for you in this Division-- and his future promotion was blocked. Peter Deriabin, who kept trying to warn Agency officials about Nosenko, was told to desist or his relations with CIA would be threatened (see Appendix A).
Nosenko’s rescuers then set out to discredit those who had distrusted him. They first labeled them as paranoid (a charge always difficult to re-
fute) and then moved on to distort the record.
One of Nosenko’s now well-placed friends told an investigative reporter that Angleton’s successor Kalaris had made the appalling discovery that the bad Angleton had ticked off the FBI’s Soviet Military Intelligence source code-named "Nicknack” as a provocateur and thus had locked away his important leads to spies abroad. The good Kalaris, said this insider, proceeded to dig out one of those leads and personally carried it to Switzerland, where the Swiss Federal Police quickly identified the spy as a brigadier named Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. They convicted him of betraying military technological secrets to the Soviets. (fn 20)
The accusation was pure invention. Angleton was impressed with Nicknack’s leads to spies abroad and had asked William Hood to be sure that they were acted upon. Hood then -- not Kalaris years later— personally carried the Swiss item to Bern.
Other misrepresentations were tacitly abetted. For instance, the new Agency leadership did little to counter Nosenko’s claim that he was drugged. This canard played for years in the media, and was allowed to circulate even in the halls of CIA. CIA director Stansfield Turner even hinted that it might be true, although his own subordinates had submitted to Congres -- as sworn testimony on his behalf -- a list of every medicament ever given to Nosenko, which proved the contrary. As I know, Nosenko was never drugged. (fn 21)
The flimsy structure of CIA’s defense of Nosenko was shaken in 1977 when investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein got wind of the Nosenko debate. While researching a book on Lee Harvey Oswald he came upon the fact, until then hidden, that a defector named Nosenko had reported on Oswald and that some CIA veterans questioned that defector’s bona fides. Digging into this potentially explosive subject, Epstein interviewed former CIA director Richard Helms, James Angleton, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and, on Helms’s recommendation, me.
Thus in my retirement did I come back into the debate on Nosenko. I told Epstein some of the things in the preceding chapters. His book Legend.
The Secret Life of Lee Harvey Oswald came out in 1978. With its evidence that Nosenko was a KGB plant, the book logically concluded that what Nosenko told the Americans about Oswald -- though presumably true in its basic message that the Soviets had not commanded Oswald’s act -- was a message from the Soviet leadership.
Coincidentally, the U.S. House of Representatives at this point appointed a Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to re-investigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It interviewed Nosenko five times about his knowledge of Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union -- and simply could not believe him. In its final report the
committee stated flatly, “Nosenko was lying.” (fn 22)
Aware of the HSCA’s doubts, and by now committed to a different image of Nosenko, CIA director Turner designated a personal representative to testify. It was none other than the man who had most recently whitewashed Nosenko,
John Hart.
Hart spent his entire prepared testimony of an hour and a half defending Nosenko and degrading his own colleagues who had suspected him. He attacked me viciously, to the point of accusing me publicly of contemplating murder, though he knew it was nonsense. (fn 23)
To the amazement of the HSCA members the CIA director’s designated representative did not even mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. When they asked him why,
Hart admitted that he “knew nothing about Oswald’s case, but hoped that by explaining misunderstandings within the Agency” and by attesting to Nosenko’s ‘‘general credibility” he could "clear up the committee’s problems with Nosenko” so that “allegations concerning [Nosenko] would go away.”
But the committee’s problem was not with Nosenko, but with what Nosenko had said about Oswald. So they forced
Hart to address this question. Thereupon even he admitted that he found Nosenko’s testimony "incredible,” "hard to believe,” and “doubtful.”
"I am intrigued,” House committee member (later Senator) Christopher Dodd said to
Hart, "as to why you limited your remarks to the actions of the CIA and their handling of Nosenko, knowing you are in front of a committee that is investigating the death of a President and an essential part of that investigation has to do with the accused assassin in that case. Why have you neglected to bring up his name at all in your discussion?”
Hart replied that the Agency had asked him to talk “on the Nosenko case” and had accepted his unwillingness to talk about Oswald, of whom he knew nothing. “So,” concluded Dodd, "really what the CIA wanted to do was to send someone up here who wouldn’t talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.” (fn 24)
Still, the congressmen could not understand why a CIA officer, acting on the orders of the CIA leadership, would “throw up a smoke screen and get the Agency in the worst possible light as far as the newspapers are concerned.” Why would he attack his own colleagues and create “smashing anti-CIA headlines?” "Puzzled and mystified,” one congressman called “the whole scenario totally unthinkable.” He added, “no one I know in the Agency has come up with any sensible explanation.” (fn 25)
While
Hart was in the process of attacking his own organization -- and me especially -- I got a phone call in the middle of the night, European time. “They’re crucifying you, Pete!” cried Yuri Rastvorov, who was watching the HSCA proceedings on C-Span television in the United States. This KGB veteran, who had defected in 1954, was outraged, having learned enough about the Nosenko case to have concluded on his own that Nosenko must be a KGB plant. I thanked him for the warning, went back to bed, and then
waited while another friend fast-shipped to me the transcript of Hart’s
statement.
Reading this intensely subjective attack and the discussions that followed it, I could sense the committee’s skepticism and wondered why they hadn’t called on me to present my side -- all the more when I learned that Helms, in his testimony, had recommended that they do so. Fearing that someone in CIA might be trying to prevent my appearing, I wrote the HSCA subcommittee chairman, Congressman Richardson Preyer, a rebuttal to
Hart’s testimony, asking for the opportunity to answer in public what had been a public attack. On the side, suspecting that the subcommittee’s counsel was cooperating to keep me out, I contacted Congressman Preyer directly. Thus I was finally invited and flew from Europe to testify, pointing out Hart’s untruths and evasions. Though I appeared only in executive (closed) session, Preyer courteously saw to it that my testimony (as “Mr. D. C.” -- for “deputy chief’’ of the Soviet Bloc Division) was included in the published record of the hearings.
Now I was back in the debate, though still carrying on my business activities in Europe and writing, with Peter Deriabin, a book on the KGB. In early 1981, when newly elected President Reagan appointed William E. Casey as director of Central Intelligence, I saw it as an opportunity to reopen the case and addressed a long report to him (to which Deriabin what appears in this book as Appendix A). It was judged inadequate to overcome the Agency’s evidence supporting Nosenko.
In 1987 I was interviewed by English playwright Stephen Davies, who was writing a semifictional drama on the Nosenko case. When the him appeared on television the CIA retirees’ association published a review of it in their quarterly newsletter. (fn 26)
Neither they nor the reviewer took a position on the basic question -- was Nosenko a KGB plant? But to the CIA at that time it was heresy even to leave a wisp of suspicion hanging over the hero of the myth. Leonard McCoy jumped to Nosenko’s defense. In a passionate letter to the editor he lauded Nosenko and attacked the earlier handlers of the case in such splenetic terms that the editor (as he told me) refused to publish it until it had been toned down. McCoy’s letter was full of misstatements, as I pointed out in a rebuttal.
Both
Hart and McCoy knew Nosenko personally and had studied the case from positions of direct authority.
Hart boasted of his own “standards of scholarship’’ and told Congress that he would never "go beyond the bounds of certainty” nor “extrapolate from facts.” As for McCoy, on whose statements the writer Tom Mangold relied for his book Cold Warrior, Man gold described him as “a mature and meticulous intelligence officer, with an obsession about factual accuracy in all matters.” So one might expect these two to dismantle any opposing argument point by point, using sure and accurate facts. Instead, both of them twisted the very nature of the affair and concealed major aspects of it. In
Hart’s sworn testimony were no fewer than thirty errors, twenty misleading statements, and ten major
omissions, and dozens in McCoy’s article . (fn 27)
They (and CIA) had made an act of faith, perhaps not the best base for judging a complex counterintelligence question.
Hart stated that Nosenko had never intentionally lied -- never mind that Nosenko himself had admitted in writing a years-long inability to tell the truth to CIA. McCoy -- as deputy head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff -- epitomized the Agency’s position by writing that if by any mischance Nosenko had told a few fibs, ” They were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB. ” CIA’s deputy director certified this act of faith, making it the Agency’s official position that “there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.’’
Soon after the debate in the CIA retirees’ newsletter, Nosenko and his defenders presented their case to investigative journalist Tom Mangold, who incorporated it in a book attacking James Angleton as a paranoid. Mangold acknowledged his debt to McCoy, who had “left an indelible imprint on every one of these pages .” (fn 28) His book accurately reflected CIA’s defense of Nosenko and was thus studded with error, omission, misrepresentation, and invention, and colored by emotional bias for Nosenko and against his detractors.
These misstatements congealed into a myth that by its frequent repetition has become conventional wisdom inside and outside CIA. Consecrated by the sworn testimony of high CIA officials, it is treated as serious history. It is a tale of how a band of buffoons and demons -- paranoid “fundamentalists”-- tried wickedly and vainly to discredit a shining hero. It has been taught -- without the facts on which it is supposedly based -- to CIA trainees who, thinking it true, have passed it on to later generations of CIA people. Today, a generation later, one can see it repeated in their memoirs as an “inside” fact.
To create this myth its makers had to do some fancy twisting and inventing. Dismissing massive evidence to the contrary, they asserted that Nosenko always told the truth. Not only was and is he truthful, but he has been a veritable cornucopia of "pure gold,” vast quantities of valuable information. To give substance to this wild claim, the mythmakers
resorted to pure invention. They transfigured poor “Andrey” the mechanic, for example, into a code clerk who enabled the Soviets to break America’s top-secret codes and moved dangerously into the code-breaking National Security Agency. They had Nosenko pinpointing fifty-two microphones in the American Embassy, something no one outside the KGB’s technical services could even pretend to do. They gave color to their tales by the breathtaking misstatement that Nosenko told more, and of far greater value, than had the earlier defector Golitsyn. (Golitsyn, this story goes, never uncovered a single spy in the West.)
The mythmakers dismissed onetime suspicions of Nosenko as nothing but the product of potted preconceptions and wild theorizing by since-disgraced colleagues, incompetent and paranoid "fundamentalists.”
The myth makes no mention of the underlying issues: the signs of penetration of American government and ciphers. Its focus, instead, is the been cruelly and duplicitously treated -- until his saviors came along.
Finally, the mythmakers ridiculed as "nonsense” the idea that the Soviets would mount a deceptive operation of this magnitude -- at least, after the first decade or two of Bolshevik rule -- and labeled the very idea a delusion of some “monster plot.” As a corollary, the myth asserts without a trace of evidence -- that this paranoia “paralyzed” CIA’s intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.
Because it has become history, the myth’s creation, its details, and the motives of its creators deserve attention (see Appendix B).
This myth enveloped CIA in a warm blanket of complacency (and aversion to “mole hunting”) that later contributed to the Agency’s long failure to deal effectively with even more glaring evidence of treason in its midst -- that of Aldrich Ames.
Footnotes:
11. For Helms’s testimony on this subject see HSCA Hearings, Vol. IV, 33-34, 61-63,
96, 99. He said the same thing in an interview with David Frost, 22-23 May 1978 ( Studies in
Intelligence, Special Unclassified Edition, Fall 2000, 130). Helms expressed this view again
in 2001.
12. Mangold , Cold Warrior, 175.
13. William E. Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men. My Life in the CIA (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1978), 244-45.
14. Ibid., 364. Rolfe Kingsley, Murphy's successor as Soviet Division chief, described
this (imaginary) “paralysis” in Mangold, Cold Warrior, 242.
15. Burton Gerber, cited by his deputy Milton Bearden. Milton Bearden and James
Risen, The Main Enemy (London: Century, 2003), 23.
16. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive. The KGB in
Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1999).
17. Colby, Honorable Men, 364.
18. It was McCoy who took the files, as I heard from a member of the Counter-
intelligence Staff who was there. Presumably this was a part of his large-scale destruction
of the files that he himself described to a journalist (Mangold, Cold Warrior, 306).
19. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 490.
20. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 320-21.
21. HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 543. While questioning Nosenko we asked a specialist
whether the much-touted “truth serum” sodium amytal would help, but were told it was
basically ineffective. This has been misrepresented in some writings as a request to use it
which was denied. I made no such “request” and am sure no one else did.
22. Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representa-
tives, Findings and Recommendations (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 20
March 1979), 102.
23.
Hart's testimony is in HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 487-536. My rebuttal to that testi-
mony was printed in HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 573-644. The murderous thoughts
Hart attributed to me were contained in a penciled note I jotted while mulling over possible ways
to resolve Nosenko’s status. I had thought of about ten or eleven things to do— possibly
turning him back, handing him to another Western service, locating him in another coun-
try, or resettling him in some remote area of the United States. I also amused myself by
giving vent to frustration in the way a baseball fan might shout, "Kill the umpire!” and stuck
in this list such impossible and impractical things as killing him or rendering him crazy. Of
course I never sent or showed or even discussed these thoughts with anyone. I must have
inadvertently dropped my penciled jottings into the file, where
Hart, with evident delight,
found them. He edited out the more serious alternatives as “insignificant” and presented
the facetious but compromising ones to the HSCA as evidence of actual CIA planning. I had
completely forgotten the note (or the ruminations) and learned of its full contents only
through the courtesy of a member of the subcommittee staff.
24. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 509, 511.
25. HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 623, 642.
26. “Yuri Nosenko, KGB,” British Broadcasting Company (BBC), first shown in the
United States by Home Box Office (HBO) on 7 September 1986. Issued as DVD under the
title “Yuri Nosenko, Double Agent.”
27. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 490, 515, 522. The original review by Mark Wyatt of the
BBC/HBO telefilm “Yuri Nosenko, KGB” appeared in the CIRA Newsletter (Spring 1987),
and McCoy's defense of Nosenko appeared that fall in Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuri Nosenko,
CIA," CIRA Newsletter XII, no. 3 (Fall 1 987): 22. I answered McCoy in the edition of Spring
1988 (vol. XIII, no. 2). See also Mangold, Cold Warrior, 270. My general appraisal of
Hart’s testimony is in HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 593.
28. Mangold, Cold Warrior, vi.
-----
-- MWT
(to be continued ...)
