The Monster Plot, by CIA's Very Own KGB Apologist John L. Hart!

[Thomas Graves]

Thomas, You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on here. This is not your thread. You have nothing to teach me, and if you did, you don’t have the means to do it. You don’t address Hart’s work at all and, like you have for years, simply reply...”... but... Bagely”. You have been shilling his work for so long and so hard ho one even hears you.

Bagley’s folly was condemned by his peers, his superiors, professional psychiatrists, historians, the FBI an I could go on.

The Monster Plot is a joke, except the fact that some important people did believe it and they crippled themselves and their organizations and wasted gazillions of dollars and ruined lives. Yet you still believe it. You still believe that it is happening today. That’s fine, but if you feel the need to spread your paranoia far and wide, well, expect to be isolated. And Thomas, you are so nasty that very few people will have, or risk showing, any compassion or understanding to you.

This is not your thread. I will not read your ridicuoulously constructed sentences. I won’t answer the stupid questions that you ask over and over and over and over again.

So make an argument, like a man, like an adult. Put yourself at risk. See what happens. Don’t hide your fragile ego behind inane questions. Drop the dogma. Try your hand with critical arguments and drop the normative verbal tools of a four year old.

Michael,

No, although you don't realize it yet, you are the joke, my friend.

And a bad one, at that. One without a serviceable "punch line".  Mortifying stand-up comedy on amateur night.

By the way, according to Hart's HSCA testimony "The Monster Plot Report" was written between mid June and late December, 1976.

I guess the CIA didn't release it until 2017 because they knew it stunk to high heaven, seein' as how, for example, the FBI finally realized in 1980 that "Fedora"  (one of the Ruskies who vouched for Nosenko's "bona fides") was a triple-agent, after all, etc, etc, etc.

https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol2/html/HSCA_Vol2_0247b.htm

Cheers!

-- MWT 

[Thomas Graves]

.
Michael Clark loves to post long excerpts from Richards J. Heuer's 1987 essay Five Paths to Judgement and John L. Hart's 1976 The Monster Plot Report.

I like to post long excerpts from my "bible," Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 book Spy Wars.



From the chapter "Lingering Debate":


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 fides) 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 (THE MONSTER PLOT REPORT) that affirmed total trust in Nosenko. 19

Having decreed their faith and gotten rid of disbelievers, the CIA leadership banned further debate. One experienced officer in the Soviet Bloc 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 refute) 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. 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 Congress— 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. 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 he told the Americans about Oswald— though pre- sumably 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 ap pointed a Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It inter viewed 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.” 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. 23 To the amazement of the HSCA members the CIA director’s designatedrepresentative 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 "in- credible,” "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.” 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.” 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 contributed 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 semi-fictional drama on the Nosenko case. When the him appeared on television the CIA retirees’ association published a review of it in their quarterly newsletter. 26 Neither he 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, Mangold 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 . 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 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 impression every one of these pages .” 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. Conse- crated 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 pathos of the fate of a stupidly misunderstood, genuine defector who had 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 delu-sion 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

19. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 145 (as noted elsewhere, this book acknowledges McCoy's imprint on its every page).

20. Hart, The CIA's Russians.

21. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 495.

22. Ibid.; Hart, The CIA’s Russians, 139.

23. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

24. FBI testimony, HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 539.

25. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 492.

26. Hart, The CIA’s Russians.

27. Turner, Secrecy and Democracy.

28. HSCA Hearings, Vol. 2, 496.

.......


-- MWT   

[Michael Clark]

[Thomas Graves]

Bagley had more "choice" things to say about John L. Hart (and Bruce Solie, and Leonard McCoy) in other parts of his book.

Can you find Hart and Solie and McCoy in the following excerpts, or shall I "highlight" them for you?


PAGE 258 -- APPENDIX B

But because Washington ordained it, they had to accept Nosenko’s defection (in January 1964 in Geneva) and fly him to the United States. There, from behind the scenes, the earlier defector Golitsyn “was masterminding the examinations [of Nosenko] in many ways.” "Angleton showed Golitsyn all the CIA’s reports of Nosenko’s debriefing, from which [Golitsyn] concocted a wide range of accusations to challenge Nosenko’s reliability. This achieved its purpose so completely that the agency turned on its defector [Nosenko].” "Angleton led [others] to the light: Golitsyn infallible, Nosenko phony” and Golitsyn’s theories became "the definitive view.” “For six years whatever Yuri [Nosenko] said was submitted for final judgment by” Golitsyn. 7

These “anti-Nosenko plot adherents . . . prejudged Nosenko’s bona fides before they ever debriefed him. ” Their “treatment of Nosenko was never . . . devoted to learning what . . . Nosenko said. What they really wanted was only to break him." They made a “convoluted effort to make Nosenko the living incarnation of [their] theory. ” They set out to “prepare a case against Nosenko . . . not to get information but to pin on [him ] the label of a KGB agent sent to deceive us." 8

To make their case, these sick-thinking Cl A fundamentalists subjected Nosenko to a hostile interrogation. Of course— because he was innocent— Nosenko failed to confirm their theories. So they put him in a “torture vault" or “dungeon” for years, and drugged him.

There were wiser and cooler heads in CIA who opposed this mistreatment of an honest defector, so an “internal warfare" ensued that “split the CIA” for several years until CIA director Richard Helms’s “intervention brought it to an end” and common sense and professionalism finally prevailed. The “fundamentalists” were removed and more reasonable CIA officers set out to re-question Nosenko and re-examine the case against him. They found logical explanations for “all” the apparent discrepancies in Nosenko’s stories, particularly “the two most controversial ones" involving the recall telegram and his KGB rank. They also found that the “fundamentalists” had “deliberately suppressed" solid leads from Nosenko.

In sum, the Nosenko “case” boils down to a simple matter of incompetent CIA handling. “Even the most cursory examination would have demonstrated Nosenko’s innocence. ” 9

Happily, after years of confusion, CIA finally arrived at the truth: the whole case against Nosenko had been “sheer nonsense. ” 10

In early October 1968, after months spent reviewing the case and consulting with Nosenko, CIA security officer Bruce Solie submitted a long report that wiped out all doubts about Nosenko. Within hours, evidently without taking the time to assess the validity of the report, CIA made its “final decision.” Its deputy director ruled "that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. . . . [He] has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us and there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides." 11

This decision was validated by yet another CIA review (by John L. Hart) of the Nosenko case in 1976. Just how firmly it supported Nosenko’s bona fides was demonstrated two years later when the CIA director sent the leader of that review process to testify for him before Congress in September 1978. As described above, the director’s spokesman (Hart) testified under oath to Nosenko’s complete honesty and the incompetence and failure of those who distrusted him. 12

CIA’s adamant state of denial was baldly expressed by one of its top counterintelligence officials. He declared flatly that if Nosenko ever told fibs, they “were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB" but only “to inflate his personal prestige, . . . self-serving braggadocio ... [to make himself] more important, more decent, perhaps more like what his father would have wished him to be.” 13

To these findings a director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, gave his top-level authority. He proclaimed to CIA personnel in writing that “it was eventually determined that [Nosenko] had defected of his own free will, had not sought to deceive us and had indeed supplied very valuable intelligence information to the U.S. Government. The hypothesis which had led to the original . . . [conclusion that Mr. Nosenko had defected under KGB orders] was found to have been based on inadequate evidence.” In his memoirs, moreover, Turner described those who had distrusted Nosenko as “a group of Agency paranoids.” 14

How did this happen? How did truth get buried and fiction become doctrine?

The first, essential step for anyone anxious to believe in Nosenko and to clear him of suspicions was to suppress the facts of the case.

Not one of Nosenko’s defenders addressed the questions raised by, for example, Nosenko’s association with Guk and Kislov in Geneva, or the clash between Nosenko’s (authoritative) account and the real circumstances of Kovshuk's trip to Washington, or the connections of Nosenko’s stories with the KGB’s uncovering of CIA’s great spies Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky. In presenting a “true" version of Nosenko's life and career they failed to mention that it was a sixth or seventh version (and not the last).

Ignoring the inconvenient aspects, the myth-makers fabricated a wholly new picture. They did this by 1) misrepresenting Nosenko the man and his truthfulness, 2) grossly exaggerating the value of his reporting, 3) building a straw man of (false) reasons for suspecting him, then knocking the straw man down rather than addressing the real reasons, 4) vilifying CIA colleagues who suspected Nosenko, 5) diverting attention from the real issues, and 6) ridiculing the very idea of Soviet deception.

1. Misrepresenting Nosenko’s truthfulness:

Nosenko’s defenders abandoned objectivity, consistency, and truth in extolling his personal qualities. One wrote of the "fundamental nobility” of his nature while another testified under oath that “anything that [Nosenko] has said has been said in good faith.” Nosenko “neither embroidered nor distorted” and "had no knack for lying or dissembling.” Indeed it had been his very honesty that had caused his temporary downfall at the hands of CIA. There is “no reason to think that [Nosenko] has ever told an untruth,” except due to forgetfulness, ignorance, or drunken exaggeration. Any little white lies, as noted above, were mere braggadocio. Though Nosenko's defender Hart found him “hard to believe" on the subject of Oswald, he falsely called that a one-time aberration. Though he had studied the file, he could not remember anything substantive that Nosenko said that had been proven to be incorrect. 15

In fact, Nosenko's sworn testimony on Lee Harvey Oswald was so evasive and contradictory that the congressional committee, having questioned him at length, recognized and officially declared that Nosenko was lying. Ten years afterward his defenders tried to wipe that out, evidently relying on the ignorance or forgetfulness of readers. No, Hart wrote, Nosenko's testimony on Oswald was not at all incredible. On the contrary, Nosenko “was telling the truth about his involvement in Oswald’s case." 16

Had Nosenko’s reporting on Oswald been the only aberration in an otherwise normal performance, as the CIA spokesman testified that it was, it might indeed have been shrugged off. But CIA officers who interviewed Nosenko encountered the same sorts of evasion, contradiction, and excuses from Nosenko whenever he was pinned down on practically any subject— just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations did on his Oswald story. This included his KGB career and activities, his travels and contacts, how he had learned what he told us, and even his private life.

Nosenko himself admitted that he had lied repeatedly about KGB activities and about the career that gave him authority to tell of them. In a written statement dated 23 April 1966 he said he had simply been unable to tell the truth throughout 1964 and 1965. But he was never willing to tell which of his statements were lies, except his KGB rank and certain of his claims to have recruited foreigners and the commendation these acts had earned him. This confession in no way inhibited his continued lying. He proceeded to tell tales no more believable than the earlier ones. Moreover, several witnesses from Moscow since the Cold War have belied Nosenko’s KGB career and his claimed knowledge of Oswald.

2. Misstating the value of Nosenko’s reporting:

Nosenko, said one of his defenders, was "the most valuable defector from the KGB yet to come over to the West.” He provided a “solid layer of counterintelligence gold.” Another delivered, under oath, the breathtaking misstatement that Nosenko provided “quantitatively and qualitatively” far greater information than Golitsyn did. 17

Nosenko’s defenders cite his uncovering of John Vassall, the British Admiralty employee, as a great contribution although they knew that Golitsyn had previously exposed Vassall. To explain that away, they went further in inventiveness: the British weren’t really on Vassall's track at all, they said. Had it not been for Nosenko’s information the British might have mistaken Golitsyn’s lead to Vassall for a totally different Admiralty source, the Houghton-Gee-Lonsdale network earlier uncovered by Goleniewski. 18 In fact, no such confusion was even remotely possible.

They pumped up Sergeant “Andrey,” (Army Sgt. Dayle W. Smith) Nosenko’s "most important lead" in 1962, to unrecognizable proportions. So little access to secrets did the sergeant really have that the KGB had dropped contact with him even before he retired from the army, and American authorities found that he could not have betrayed secrets and saw no reason to prosecute him. But Nosenko’s cleansers magically transformed this KGB reject into a “code clerk" who “had supplied the Soviets with top secret U.S. military codes," permitting the KGB to break “the most sensitive U.S. communi-cations. [ Even worse:] ‘Andrey’ had later transferred to the super-sensitive communications agency NSA that would give him even greater access to cipher information.” 19

In fact, Nosenko uncovered nothing that truly harmed the Soviet regime. He did not uncover a single KGB asset that the KGB could not have sacrificed— not one that had current access to NATO governmental secrets, was actively cooperating at the time, and had previously been unsuspected by Western counterintelligence agencies.

3. Distorting the reasons Nosenko fell under suspicion:

Nosenko’s CIA defenders repeated publicly that their CIA predecessors had wrongly “prejudged” him even before debriefing him and without “even the most cursory examination,” which would have demonstrated Nosenko's innocence. Essentially, they “fabricated a case” to incriminate Nosenko. 20

They only suspected Nosenko because of paranoid theorizing by the earlier defector Anatoly Golitsyn. Having adopted Golitsyn’s theories, Nosenko’s handlers didn’t even try to find out what Nosenko had to say but simply set out to break him. 21

This aspect of the myth required its creators to invent a role for Golitsyn in the Nosenko investigation. One of the mythmakers testified under oath that Golitsyn had "a substantial influence on the case” and “was masterminding the examinations [of Nosenko] in many ways. It is with this in mind that we have to approach everything that happened.” Golitsyn was "made part of [the anti-Nosenko] investigating team,” Golitsyn had current access to the debriefing of Nosenko, and “for six years whatever Yuri [Nosenko] said was submitted for final judgment by" Golitsyn. 22

Pure invention. No member of the “investigating team” (which was in Soviet Block Division) ever saw Golitsyn or asked or got information or comment from him. He was being handled by the Cl Staff and even they did not give him details of the case before 1967, aside from the fact of Nosenko's defection and his claimed biography. This was long after the Soviet Bloc Division's interrogation and conclusions. Even then Golitsyn declined to comment because he had not read the file. How, then, could he have ever exercised even an influence, much less a “final judgment”?

It was not until 1968 that Golitsyn reviewed transcripts of meetings. Then he stated unequivocally that Nosenko was a plant.

Because there is no substance to the myth’s claim that Golitsyn participated or influenced anything, we need not dwell here on the myth-makers’ denigration of Golitsyn— as a paranoid with “mind-boggling pipe dreams” and "outlandish theories." However, it is worth noting their own truly mind-boggling falsehood, that Golitsyn “never compromised any important Soviet agent.” 23

The myth-makers never revealed details of how Nosenko’s reports overlapped those of Golitsyn. They dismissed the question by claiming Golitsyn learned a few facts from his brief orientation period in Nosenko’s directorate, all of which Nosenko naturally knew better. This was a subterfuge: in reality, the Golitsyn tips that Nosenko diverted had nothing to do with Golitsyn’s “orientation period” but were from his service in Finland and his handling of reports from spies within NATO governments.

The mythmakers reached out even further to misrepresent why Nosenko fell under suspicion.

• Drunkenness: One, under oath, testified that CIA came to suspect Nosenko because he had made some drunken misstatements. Yet the only time in all those years that Nosenko might have been drunk while reporting anything whatsoever to CIA was during one meeting in 1962, and even then he showed no sign of being under the influence.

• Language problems : In sworn testimony the representative of CIA’s director asserted that language difficulties in Geneva caused "crucial misunderstandings.” Yet he knew that a native Russian speaker had been present at all but the first meeting and even during that meeting the only misunderstandings involved one school Nosenko claimed to have attended and one detail about his father. The FBI had no problem debriefing Nosenko in English. 24

• Faulty transcripts: CIA’s representative testified that "discrepancies” in the transcriptions of the recordings of the 1962 meetings were “very important in the history of this case because [they] gave rise to charges within the Agency that Nosenko was not what he purported to be." 25 But the witness, who had studied the case, must have known that no discrepancies ever gave rise to any such charge. Moreover, any errors in the transcripts were early detected and corrected by Peter Deriabin.

4. Vilifying those who suspected Nosenko:

Why, asked a congressman in 1978, would CIA director Stansfield Turner let his representative "create smashing anti-CIA headlines” by publicly attacking his own former colleagues?

The answer was that, lacking substantive arguments, CIA’s spokesmen fell back on ad hominem attacks on Nosenko’s detractors.

In sworn testimony the director’s personal envoy publicly accused his former colleagues of fabricating a case, torturing, misusing Agency techniques, and contemplating murder. He rated their performance as “zero,” “miserable,” and “abominable." They were “naive,” "utterly insensitive,” “extremist,” prone to “fanatic theories,” blindly biased, “paranoid,” and of “muddled mind.” 26 Lumped into a never-defined category of “fundamentalists,” they were derided as “zealots” and “true believers." A CIA director ticked off Nosenko’s early handlers— whom he had never met— as “a group of Agency paranoids." 27

So far gone in paranoia was this "group" that they thought “CIA could not have a bona fide Soviet operation" and turned away honest people who were offering to become spies for CIA. Nosenko’s defenders never cited a single example because in fact CIA had never turned down any volunteer from a Soviet bloc government who met normal security criteria. It even accepted ones it knew to be provocateurs, like the Soviet lieutenant of the “Sasha and Olga” case I mention in Chapter 4, simply to get their stories.

John Hart, a former division chief in CIA, was under oath when he told Congress that the two top officers of the Soviet Division (David Murphy, its chief, and me, its deputy chief) “had been discredited" for their work on the Nosenko case and that this had “caused them to be transferred out ... to foreign assignments." 28  But as the Headquarters supervisor of both these posts abroad, Hart knew that we had both opted for those challenging and prestigious assignments long before any “discrediting" began.

Never did Nosenko’s defenders mention any positive results of the hostile interrogation. Indeed, the CIA director’s spokesman testified that it had "failed miserably.” In fact, it was by confronting Nosenko under circumstances he could not evade and where he could get no outside coaching that CIA established firmly that Nosenko was a KGB plant and documented some of the KGB’s purposes in planting him.

5. Diverting attention from the underlying issue:

Nosenko’s defenders presented his case as essentially "a human phenomenon” and that the "human factors involved have a direct bearing on some of the contradictions which have appeared in the case.” As one put it, any questions of Nosenko’s truthfulness are “poignantly overshadowed by Nosenko’s personal
tragedy, arising from CIA’s handling of his defection.” "We may not allow our-selves to forget," he wrote, “that this story deals with a living person.” 29

The central issue of the case, they were implying, was CIA’s mistreatment of Nosenko. They expressed outrage that “duplicity” had been practiced against Nosenko and that the polygraph machine had been used more as an instrument of interrogation than as a fair test of Nosenko’s truth. They misrepresented the reason Nosenko was incarcerated. They raised a horrifying vision of his being thrown into a “torture vault," as one put it, or a “dungeon,” in another’s words. By 1989 the former CIA senior officer John Hart had so lost touch with the truth that he asserted in writing that the interrogators had deprived Nosenko of sensory stimuli for more than three years, and another told an investigative reporter that Nosenko had been starving and close to death. 30 They must have been aware that Nosenko had regular (as I remember, weekly) visits by a doctor to ascertain his health and the adequacy of his diet. He was never ill, much less "close to death.”

They were contradicting the documented record. CIA director Richard Helms and Nosenko’s former handlers testified under oath that Nosenko had been incarcerated only to prevent him from evading questions about contradictions and anomalies in his stories. (These were the ones that touched upon Oswald, the possible breaking of American ciphers, and penetration of American Intelli-gence.) We were preventing what happened in 1985, when the later defector Vitaly Yurchenko walked out and back to the KGB.

Whereas this case had damning interconnections with other cases like that of Kulak/“Fedora,” Nosenko’s defenders avoided this subject. One mentioned the cases of Cherepanov and Loginov only to imply that they, like Nosenko, were innocent individuals whom CIA had stupidly misunderstood. 31

6. Ridiculing the “theory” of Soviet deception:

CIA spokesmen conveyed the idea that Soviet deception was a figment of paranoia. Golitsyn, said one, “was given to building up big, fantastic plots, and he eventually built up a plot . . . which was centered around the idea that the KGB had vast resources which it was using to deceive . . . Western governments. This plot was able to deceive the West . . . because [the KGB] had penetrations at high levels . . . within the intelligence services of these countries, including our own.” They displayed contempt for those who believed in such a crazy idea as “a plot against the West," an idea that stemmed only from “historical research.” “I don’t happen to be able to share this kind of thing,” said one. “The so-called plot was sheer nonsense.” 32 Thus did CIA’s official spokesman dismiss as mad fantasy the documented history of sixty years of such KGB "plots" of the sort described in
Chapters 10, 11, and 12 of this book.

A top CIA counterintelligence officer attacked this “historical research” from a different angle. He admitted that Soviet deception operations had indeed taken place— but by Nosenko’s time they were irrelevant. The classic prewar deception operation “Trust,” he wrote, had existed “in a ‘totally different KGB and a totally different world." He pointed out that in those distant days [the KGB] had had to deal with large-scale resistance from elements of the population who got support from emigration groups abroad. But both the resistance and the groups had since dwindled away— and with them, the need for this sort of operation. 33

This denial became CIA doctrine— but not the KGB’s. As set out explicitly in the KGB’s in-house secret history of 1977, there was an unbroken continuum from “Operation Trust" to the present day. The KGB was teaching today’s officers that this “aggressive counterintelligence” was the best way to succeed in counterintelligence work.

The myth thus created was accepted not only by investigative reporters who could not know the truth but also by reputable historians— and even CIA personnel.

A writer in the 1990s, after talking to Agency insiders, could say with no fear of being contradicted, "Although [Nosenko] was in fact a genuine defector, Angleton became convinced that he was a fake.” 34 A BBC interviewer asked a reputable British historian about the doubts that had circulated concerning Nosenko’s bona fides. The historian answered confidently that there had never been genuine doubts but only paranoid views that had been fully discredited. Later this same historian wrote that CIA’s suspicions of Nosenko were a “horrendous misjudgment" and its investigation “appallingly mishandled.” 35

Another prestigious historian in 1994 described “Lieutenant Colonel” Nosenko as “the highest-ranking officer of the KGB to fall into CIA hands." Though CIA had kept Nosenko “in sub-human conditions for five years, his evidence is now regarded as far more reliable than all that Angleton’s protege Golitsyn ever provided.” 36  The myth became doctrine within CIA itself. So deeply rooted did this fiction become that even later chiefs of the Soviet operations division adopted it and passed it on with their special authority. Two successive chiefs had so little knowledge of the Nosenko case that they propagated the myth that “Angleton . . . persuaded others at the CIA that [Nosenko] had been sent by Moscow to tie them in knots about Oswald and dozens of other sensitive cases. He was encouraged in his paranoia by an earlier KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had told Angleton that every defector after him would be a double agent. . . . Angleton had managed to co-opt key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB. . . . Those who . . . challenged the prevailing paranoia were in danger of coming under suspicion of being Soviet agents themselves. . . . The end result of these mind games was virtual paralysis in the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union. . . . CIA officers largely stopped trying to target Soviets [and] the Soviet Division had been turning away dozens of ‘volunteers, ’ Soviets and Eastern Europeans [. . . offering] to work for the United States .” 37 As stated in Chapter 20, this was unfounded nonsense, and not a single Soviet volunteer was turned away.

Other CIA officers, without access to the files, typically knew only what they had been taught. One wrote, "The KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was badly and illegally mistreated . . . because James Angleton and the CIA were mesmerized by the paranoid ravings of a previous defector, Anatoly Golitsyn." 38

Wrote another CIA veteran a generation afterward, “When Nosenko offered a version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn't fit the agency’s corporate view, he was sent to solitary confinement . . . for three years.” 39

With historians accepting it and CIA insiders reciting it, and with its high- level sponsorship, the myth has prevailed. Wishful thinking triumphed.

.....

Plus these short "bios" --

Hart, John L.: CIA officer who had served in the Far East and later became head of its European division. With assistants, he reviewed the Yuri Nosenko* case in 1976 and cleared Nosenko of any suspicions lingering after the Bruce Solie* report of 1968. In 1978, as personal representative of CIA director Turner, testified to HSCA during its review of President Kennedy’s assassination— instructed (as he admitted under oath) not to talk about the assassin Oswald but to denigrate CIA personnel who had doubted Nosenko's bona fides.

and this

McCoy, Leonard V.: CIA reports officer who handled information coming into Soviet Block Division* from Pyotr Popov* and later Oleg Penkovsky*. (Note: Both of whom were uncovered by the KGB and executed. - MWT) Later became deputy chief of the Counterintelligence Staff. He became a ferocious defender of Yuri Nosenko's* bona fides and published and fed to investigative reporters false information promoting this viewpoint and attacking those with differing views.

and this

Solie, Bruce: CIA security officer who worked on personnel security matters. Was assigned as case officer for (Note: triple-agent) Igor Kochnov* in 1966 and came to believe Yuri Nosenko* was a genuine defector. Criticized the 1967 report by CIA’s Soviet Block Division and then spent months devising a new story with Nosenko. Solie wrote a report that, by 1 October 1968, finally cleared away CIA official doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides.

.....

Footnotes:

7. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II; Hart obituary; McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22; Hart, The ClA's Russians, 139.

8. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 495.

9. Hart obituary; Mangold, Cold Warrior, 175.

10. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 519.

11 . Memorandum of deputy director of Central Intelligence Rufus Taylor, 4 October 1968. HSCA Hearings, Vol. IV, 46.

12. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 508, 510, 526, 527.

13. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

14. Stansfield Turner, Notes from the Director, no. 30, 21 September 1978, and his Secrecy and Democracy— The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 985).

15. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 508, 510, 526, 527. “Fundamental nobility” were the words of Leonard McCoy, deputy head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, in McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

16. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

17. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22, 18; Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 495.

18. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

19. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 145 (as noted elsewhere, this book acknowledges McCoy's imprint on its every page).

20. Hart, The CIA's Russians.

21. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 495.

22. Ibid.; Hart, The CIA’s Russians, 139.

23. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

24. FBI testimony, HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 539.

25. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 492.

26. Hart, The CIA’s Russians.

27. Turner, Secrecy and Democracy.

28. HSCA Hearings, Vol. 2, 496.

29. Hart, HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 490; McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

30. Hart, The CIA’s Russians; Mangold, Cold Warrior.

31. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22.

32. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 494, 519, 535; Vol. XII, 581 and 586.

33. McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” 22; Mangold, Cold Warrior, 39-40.

34. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 3.

35. Christopher Andrew, speaking on the BBC and in two other books in which he quoted Nosenko in ways that demonstrated the author's complete confidence in the myth.

36. Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy. The Life of Allen Dulles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 551.

37. Milton Bearden, talking of himself and Burton Gerber. Milton Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy (London: Century, 2003), 20-23.

38. Frederick L. Wettering, “Counterintelligence: The Broken Triad,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1 3, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 267. The author is there
     described as “a retired . . . [CIA] operations officer [who] managed clandestine operations in Europe and Africa."

39. Robert Baer, See No Evil. The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (New York: Crown, 2002), 256-57.

.....


Cheers!

--  Mudd Wrassler Tommy   

[Michael Clark]

Bagley had more choice things to say about John L. Hart (and Bruce "Gumshoe" Solie, and Tommy Mangold's buddy Leonard "I Have No Counterintelligence Experience" McCoy) in the remainder of his book.

Can you find them in these excerpts, or shall I "highlight" them for you?


In early October 1 968, after months spent reviewing the case and consulting with
Nosenko, CIA security officer Bruce Solie submitted a long report that wiped out
all doubts about Nosenko. Within hours, evidently without taking the time to
assess the validity of the report, CIA made its “final decision.” Its deputy director
ruled "that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. . . . [He] has not knowingly and
willfully withheld information from us and there is no conflict between what we
have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or infor-
mants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides." 11

This decision was validated by yet another CIA review of the Nosenko case in
1976. Just how firmly it supported Nosenko’s bona fides was demonstrated two
years later when the CIA director sent the leader of that review process to testify
for him before Congress in September 1978. As described above, the director’s
spokesman (John L. Hart) testified under oath to Nosenko’s complete honesty
and the incompetence and failure of those who distrusted him. 12



APPENDIX B 259


CIA’s adamant state of denial was baldly expressed by one of its top coun-
terintelligence officials. He declared flatly that if Nosenko ever told fibs, they
“were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB" but only “to inflate his personal
prestige, . . . self-serving braggadocio ... [to make himself] more important, more
decent, perhaps more like what his father would have wished him to be.” 13

To these findings a director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, gave
his top-level authority. He proclaimed to CIA personnel in writing that “it was
eventually determined that [Nosenko] had defected of his own free will, had not
sought to deceive us and had indeed supplied very valuable intelligence informa-
tion to the U.S. Government. The hypothesis which had led to the original . . .
[conclusion that Mr. Nosenko had defected under KGB orders] was found to have
been based on inadequate evidence.” In his memoirs, moreover, Turner described
those who had distrusted Nosenko as “a group of Agency paranoids.” 14

How did this happen? How did truth get buried and fiction become doctrine?

The first, essential step for anyone anxious to believe in Nosenko and to clear
him of suspicions was to suppress the facts of the case.

Not one of Nosenko’s defenders addressed the questions raised by, for exam-
ple, Nosenko’s association with Guk and Kislov in Geneva, or the clash between
Nosenko’s (authoritative) account and the real circumstances of Kovshuk's trip to
Washington, or the connections of Nosenko’s stories with the KGB’s uncovering
of CIA’s great spies Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky. In presenting a “true" ver-
sion of Nosenko's life and career they failed to mention that it was a sixth or
seventh version (and not the last).

Ignoring the inconvenient aspects, the mythmakers fabricated a wholly new
picture. They did this by 1) misrepresenting Nosenko the man and his truthful-
ness, 2) grossly exaggerating the value of his reporting, 3) building a straw man of
(false) reasons for suspecting him, then knocking the straw man down rather
than addressing the real reasons, 4) vilifying CIA colleagues who suspected No-
senko, 5) diverting attention from the real issues, and 6) ridiculing the very idea
of Soviet deception.

1. Misrepresenting Nosenko’s truthfulness:

Nosenko’s defenders abandoned objectivity, consistency, and truth in extol-
ling his personal qualities. One wrote of the "fundamental nobility” of his nature
while another testified under oath that “anything that [Nosenko] has said has
been said in good faith.” Nosenko “neither embroidered nor distorted” and "had
no knack for lying or dissembling.” Indeed it had been his very honesty that had
caused his temporary downfall at the hands of CIA. There is “no reason to think
that [Nosenko] has ever told an untruth,” except due to forgetfulness, ignorance,
or drunken exaggeration. Any little white lies, as noted above, were mere brag-
gadocio. Though Nosenko's defender Hart found him “hard to believe" on the
subject of Oswald, he falsely called that a one-time aberration. Though he had
studied the file, he could not remember anything substantive that Nosenko said
that had been proven to be incorrect. 15

In fact, Nosenko's sworn testimony on Lee Harvey Oswald was so evasive
and contradictory that the congressional committee, having questioned him at
length, recognized and officially declared that Nosenko was lying. Ten years after-
ward his defenders tried to wipe that out, evidently relying on the ignorance or
forgetfulness of readers. No, Hart wrote, Nosenko's testimony on Oswald was not



260 APPENDIX B


at all incredible. On the contrary, Nosenko “was telling the truth about his in-
volvement in Oswald’s case." 16

Had Nosenko’s reporting on Oswald been the only aberration in an otherwise
normal performance, as the CIA spokesman testified that it was, it might indeed
have been shrugged off. But CIA officers who interviewed Nosenko encountered
the same sorts of evasion, contradiction, and excuses from Nosenko whenever he
was pinned down on practically any subject— just as the House Select Committee
on Assassinations did on his Oswald story. This included his KGB career and
activities, his travels and contacts, how he had learned what he told us, and even
his private life.

Nosenko himself admitted that he had lied repeatedly about KGB activities
and about the career that gave him authority to tell of them . In a written statement
dated 23 April 1 966 he said he had simply been unable to tell the truth throughout
1964 and 1965. But he was never willing to tell which of his statements were lies,
except his KGB rank and certain of his claims to have recruited foreigners and the
commendation these acts had earned him. This confession in no way inhibited his
continued lying. He proceeded to tell tales no more believable than the earlier
ones. Moreover, several witnesses from Moscow since the Cold War have belied
Nosenko’s KGB career and his claimed knowledge of Oswald.

2. Misstating the value of Nosenko ’s reporting:

Nosenko, said one of his defenders, was "the most valuable defector from
the KGB yet to come over to the West.” He provided a “solid layer of counter-
intelligence gold.” Another delivered, under oath, the breathtaking misstatement
that Nosenko provided “quantitatively and qualitatively” far greater information
than Golitsyn did. 17

Nosenko’s defenders cite his uncovering of John Vassall, the British Admi-
ralty employee, as a great contribution although they knew that Golitsyn had
previously exposed Vassall. To explain that away, they went further in inventive-
ness: the British weren’t really on Vassall's track at all, they said. Had it not been for
Nosenko’s information the British might have mistaken Golitsyn’s lead to Vassall for
a totally different Admiralty source, the Houghton-Gee-Lonsdale network earlier un-
covered by Goleniewski. 18 In fact, no such confusion was even remotely possible.

They pumped up Sergeant “Andrey,” Nosenko’s most important lead in 1962,
to unrecognizable proportions. So little access to secrets did the sergeant really
have that the KGB had dropped contact with him even before he retired from the
army and American authorities found that he could not have betrayed secrets
and saw no reason to prosecute him. But Nosenko’s cleansers magically trans-
formed this KGB reject into a “code clerk" who “had supplied the Soviets with top
secret U.S. military codes," permitting the KGB to break “the most sensitive U.S.
communications. [ Even worse:] ‘Andrey’ had later transferred to the super-sensitive
communications agency NSA that would give him even greater access to cipher
information. ” 19

In fact, Nosenko uncovered nothing that truly harmed the Soviet regime. He
did not uncover a single KGB asset that the KGB could not have sacrificed— not
one that had current access to NATO governmental secrets, was actively coop-
erating at the time, and had previously been unsuspected by Western counter-
intelligence agencies.

3. Distorting the reasons Nosenko fell under suspicion:

Nosenko’s CIA defenders repeated publicly that their CIA predecessors had



APPENDIX B 261


wrongly “prejudged” him even before debriefing him and without “even the most
cursory examination,” which would have demonstrated Nosenko's innocence.
Essentially, they “fabricated a case” to incriminate Nosenko. 20

They only suspected Nosenko because of paranoid theorizing by the earlier
defector Anatoly Golitsyn. Having adopted Golitsyn’s theories, Nosenko’s han-
dlers didn’t even try to find out what Nosenko had to say but simply set out to
break him. 21

This aspect of the myth required its creators to invent a role for Golitsyn
in the Nosenko investigation. One of the mythmakers testified under oath that
Golitsyn had "a substantial influence on the case” and “was masterminding the
examinations [of Nosenko] in many ways. It is with this in mind that we have
to approach everything that happened.” Golitsyn was "made part of [the anti-
Nosenko] investigating team,” Golitsyn had current access to the debriefing of
Nosenko, and “for six years whatever Yuri [Nosenko] said was submitted for final
judgment by" Golitsyn. 22

Pure invention. No member of the “investigating team” (which was in SB
Division) ever saw Golitsyn or asked or got information or comment from him.
He was being handled by the Cl Staff and even they did not give him details of the
case before 1967, aside from the fact of Nosenko's defection and his claimed
biography. This was long after the Soviet Bloc Division's interrogation and con-
clusions. Even then Golitsyn declined to comment because he had not read the
file. How, then, could he have ever exercised even an influence, much less a “final
judgment”?

It was not until 1968 that Golitsyn reviewed transcripts of meetings. Then he
stated unequivocally that Nosenko was a plant.

Because there is no substance to the myth’s claim that Golitsyn participated
or influenced anything, we need not dwell here on the mythmakers’ denigration
of Golitsyn— as a paranoid with “mind-boggling pipe dreams” and "outlandish
theories." However, it is worth noting their own truly mind-boggling falsehood,
that Golitsyn “never compromised any important Soviet agent.” 23

The mythmakers never revealed details of how Nosenko’s reports overlapped
those of Golitsyn. They dismissed the question by claiming Golitsyn learned a
few facts from his brief orientation period in Nosenko’s directorate, all of which
Nosenko naturally knew better. This was a subterfuge: in reality, the Golitsyn tips
that Nosenko diverted had nothing to do with Golitsyn’s “orientation period” but
were from his service in Finland and his handling of reports from spies within
NATO governments.

The mythmakers reached out even further to misrepresent why Nosenko fell
under suspicion.

• Drunkenness: One, under oath, testified that CIA came to suspect Nosenko
because he had made some drunken misstatements. Yet the only time in all
those years that Nosenko might have been drunk while reporting anything
whatsoever to CIA was during one meeting in 1962, and even then he
showed no sign of being under the influence.

• Language problems : In sworn testimony the representative of CIA’s director
asserted that language difficulties in Geneva caused "crucial misunder-
standings.” Yet he knew that a native Russian speaker had been present at
all but the first meeting and even during that meeting the only misunder-
standings involved one school Nosenko claimed to have attended and one



262 APPENDIX B


detail about his father. The FBI had no problem debriefing Nosenko in
English. 24

• Faulty transcripts: CIA’s representative testified that "discrepancies” in the
transcriptions of the recordings of the 1962 meetings were “very important
in the history of this case because [they] gave rise to charges within the
Agency that Nosenko was not what he purported to be." 25 But the witness,
who had studied the case, must have known that no discrepancies ever
gave rise to any such charge. Moreover, any errors in the transcripts were
early detected and corrected by Peter Deriabin.

4. Vilifying those who suspected Nosenko:

Why, asked a congressman in 1978, would CIA director Stansfield Turner let
his representative "create smashing anti-CIA headlines” by publicly attacking his
own former colleagues?

The answer was that, lacking substantive arguments, CIA’s spokesmen fell
back on ad hominem attacks on Nosenko’s detractors.

In sworn testimony the director’s personal envoy publicly accused his for-
mer colleagues of fabricating a case, torturing, misusing Agency techniques, and
contemplating murder. He rated their performance as “zero,” “miserable,” and
“abominable." They were “naive,” "utterly insensitive,” “extremist,” prone to “fa-
natic theories,” blindly biased, “paranoid,” and of “muddled mind.” 26 Lumped
into a never-defined category of “fundamentalists,” they were derided as “zealots”
and “true believers." A CIA director ticked off Nosenko’s early handlers— whom he
had never met— as “a group of Agency paranoids." 27

So far gone in paranoia was this "group" that they thought “CIA could not
have a bona fide Soviet operation" and turned away honest people who were
offering to become spies for CIA. Nosenko’s defenders never cited a single exam-
ple because in fact CIA had never turned down any volunteer from a Soviet bloc
government who met normal security criteria. It even accepted ones it knew to be
provocateurs, like the Soviet lieutenant of the “Sasha and Olga” case I mention in
Chapter 4, simply to get their stories.

John Hart, a former division chief in CIA, was under oath when he told
Congress that the two top officers of the Soviet Division (David Murphy, its chief,
and me, its deputy chief) “had been discredited" for their work on the Nosenko
case and that this had “caused them to be transferred out ... to foreign assign-
ments." 28 But as the Headquarters supervisor of both these posts abroad, Hart
knew that we had both opted for those challenging and prestigious assignments
long before any “discrediting" began.

Never did Nosenko’s defenders mention any positive results of the hostile in-
terrogation. Indeed, the CIA director’s spokesman testified that it had "failed
miserably.” In fact, it was by confronting Nosenko under circumstances he could
not evade and where he could get no outside coaching that CIA established firmly
that Nosenko was a KGB plant and documented some of the KGB’s purposes in
planting him.

5. Diverting attention from the underlying issue:

Nosenko’s defenders presented his case as essentially "a human phenome-
non” and that the "human factors involved have a direct bearing on some of the
contradictions which have appeared in the case.” As one put it, any questions
of Nosenko’s truthfulness are “poignantly overshadowed by Nosenko’s personal



APPENDIX B 263


tragedy, arising from CIA’s handling of his defection.” "We may not allow our-
selves to forget," he wrote, “that this story deals with a living person.” 29

The central issue of the case, they were implying, was CIA’s mistreatment of
Nosenko. They expressed outrage that “duplicity” had been practiced against
Nosenko and that the polygraph machine had been used more as an instrument
of interrogation than as a fair test of Nosenko ’s truth. They misrepresented the
reason Nosenko was incarcerated. They raised a horrifying vision of his being
thrown into a “torture vault," as one put it, or a “dungeon,” in another’s words. By
1989 the former CIA senior officer John Hart had so lost touch with the truth that
he asserted in writing that the interrogators had deprived Nosenko of sensory
stimuli for more than three years, and another told an investigative reporter that
Nosenko had been starving and close to death. 30 They must have been aware that
Nosenko had regular (as I remember, weekly) visits by a doctor to ascertain his
health and the adequacy of his diet. He was never ill, much less "close to death.”

They were contradicting the documented record. CIA director Richard Helms
and Nosenko’s former handlers testified under oath that Nosenko had been in-
carcerated only to prevent him from evading questions about contradictions
and anomalies in his stories. (These were the ones that touched upon Oswald,
the possible breaking of American ciphers, and penetration of American Intelli-
gence.) We were preventing what happened in 1985, when the later defector
Vitaly Yurchenko walked out and back to the KGB.

Whereas this case had damning interconnections with other cases like that
of Kulak/“Fedora,” Nosenko’s defenders avoided this subject. One mentioned the
cases of Cherepanov and Loginov only to imply that they, like Nosenko, were
innocent individuals whom CIA had stupidly misunderstood. 31

6. Ridiculing the “theory” of Soviet deception:

CIA spokesmen conveyed the idea that Soviet deception was a figment of
paranoia. Golitsyn, said one, “was given to building up big, fantastic plots, and he
eventually built up a plot . . . which was centered around the idea that the KGB
had vast resources which it was using to deceive . . . Western governments. This
plot was able to deceive the West . . . because [the KGB] had penetrations at high
levels . . . within the intelligence services of these countries, including our own.”
They displayed contempt for those who believed in such a crazy idea as “a plot
against the West," an idea that stemmed only from “historical research.” “I don’t
happen to be able to share this kind of thing,” said one. “The so-called plot was
sheer nonsense.” 32 Thus did CIA’s official spokesman dismiss as mad fantasy the
documented history of sixty years of such KGB "plots" of the sort described in
Chapters 10, 11, and 12 of this book.

A top CIA counterintelligence officer attacked this “historical research” from
a different angle. He admitted that Soviet deception operations had indeed taken
place— but by Nosenko’s time they were irrelevant. The classic prewar deception
operation “Trust,” he wrote, had existed “in a ‘totally different KGB and a totally
different world." He pointed out that in those distant days [the KGB] had had to
deal with large-scale resistance from elements of the population who got support
from emigration groups abroad. But both the resistance and the groups had since
dwindled away— and with them, the need for this sort of operation. 33

This denial became CIA doctrine— but not the KGB’s. As set out explicitly in
the KGB’s in-house secret history of 1977, there was an unbroken continuum



264 APPENDIX B


from “Trust" to the present day. The KGB was teaching today’s officers that this
“aggressive counterintelligence” was the best way to succeed in counterintel-
ligence work.

The myth thus created was accepted not only by investigative reporters
who could not know the truth but also by reputable historians— and even CIA
personnel.

A writer in the 1990s, after talking to Agency insiders, could say with no fear
of being contradicted, "Although [Nosenko] was in fact a genuine defector, Angle-
ton became convinced that he was a fake.” 34 A BBC interviewer asked a reputable
British historian about the doubts that had circulated concerning Nosenko’s
bona fides. The historian answered confidently that there had never been genuine
doubts but only paranoid views that had been fully discredited. Later this same
historian wrote that CIA’s suspicions of Nosenko were a “horrendous misjudg-
ment" and its investigation “appallingly mishandled.” 35

Another prestigious historian in 1994 described “Lieutenant Colonel” No-
senko as “the highest-ranking officer of the KGB to fall into CIA hands." Though
CIA had kept Nosenko “in sub-human conditions for five years, his evidence is
now regarded as far more reliable than all that Angleton’s protege Golitsyn ever
provided.” 36

The myth became doctrine within CIA itself. So deeply rooted did this fiction
become that even later chiefs of the Soviet operations division adopted it and
passed it on with their special authority. Two successive chiefs had so little knowl-
edge of the Nosenko case that they propagated the myth that “Angleton . . .
persuaded others at the CIA that [Nosenko] had been sent by Moscow to tie them in
knots about Oswald and dozens of other sensitive cases. He was encouraged in his
paranoia by an earlier KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had told Angleton that
every defector after him would be a double agent. . . . Angleton had managed to co-
opt key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies
they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB. . . . Those
who . . . challenged the prevailing paranoia were in danger of coming under suspi-
cion of being Soviet agents themselves. . . . The end result of these mind games was
virtual paralysis in the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union. . . . CIA officers
largely stopped trying to target Soviets [and] the Soviet Division had been turning
away dozens of ‘volunteers, ’ Soviets and Eastern Europeans [. . . offering] to work
for the United States .” 37 As stated in Chapter 20, this was unfounded nonsense,
and not a single Soviet volunteer was turned away.

Other CIA officers, without access to the files, typically knew only what they
had been taught. One wrote, "The KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was badly and
illegally mistreated . . . because James Angleton and the CIA were mesmerized by
the paranoid ravings of a previous defector, Anatoly Golitsyn." 38

Wrote another CIA veteran a generation afterward, “When Nosenko offered a
version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn't fit the
agency’s corporate view, he was sent to solitary confinement . . . for three years.” 39

With historians accepting it and CIA insiders reciting it, and with its high-
level sponsorship, the myth has prevailed. Wishful thinking triumphed.



APPENDIX C

Self-deception— Bane of
Counterintelligence


The most amazing part of the story of Arthur Or-
ton, the imposter better known as “the Tichborne claimant,” is that he nearly
prevailed.

The butcher’s apprentice Orton (if this was really who he was— he never
admitted it) sailed from Australia to pose as the long-missing heir to the fortune
and title of the Tichborne family in Victorian England. He was undeterred by his
ignorance; he later proved unable to name a single one of the real heir's boyhood
friends or schoolteachers. Also, he could not say what was written in a letter that
the heir had left behind with his best friend and could not speak French although
the heir had spent his boyhood in Paris. Whereas the heir was well educated, the
claimant could not spell or write grammatically; worse, he was older, fatter, and
looked quite different.

To compensate for all that, Orton had going for him the con man’s equip-
ment: a confident and persuasive air, quick thinking, skill in playing back infor-
mation given to him, and— most important of all— the natural gullibility of others.

He managed to persuade the heir's own mother that he was her son and got
more than eighty witnesses from the heir’s army service, school, and other circles
to certify that they recognized him. His claim caught the public’s imagination,
won organized support, and proved so difficult to judge that Orton’s trial— which
finally condemned him— spanned a total of 827 days and stands in the Guinness
Book of Records as the longest in British history. 1

Is this really so amazing? Frauds have succeeded with even less foundation.
A late-eighteenth-century forger managed to convince renowned scholars that
his hastily turned out letters and manuscripts were really written by Shakespeare
despite errors and anachronisms that to one expert revealed "forgery palpable to
the meanest capacity.” Inspired by a drawing of the ancient British King Vorti-
gern that hung prominently in his father’s study, William Henry Ireland pro-
ceeded to write "Shakespeare’s” manuscript of a play by that name. When his
father told visitors the stunning and quite unbelievable news that this play had
been unearthed, they simply considered it an "enchanting coincidence [that]
Ireland should so long have owned a drawing on the same subject." 2

“How willingly,” the forger recognized, “people will blind themselves on



266 APPENDIX C


any point interesting to their feelings. Once a false idea becomes fixed in a per-
son’s mind, he will twist facts or probability to accommodate it rather than ques-
tion it.” 3

Among such con men and imposters feeding at the trough of human cred-
ulity are more dangerous predators: traitors and provocateurs, stealing not just
money but the safety of nations. Not surprisingly, governments maintain orga-
nizations of specialists to detect and thwart them. What is surprising is that
gullibility and self-deception flourish among these professional skeptics almost
as extravagantly as along the patent medicine trail.

Looking back at the long string of successful Soviet bloc provocations from
the "Trust” operation of the 1920s, we might suppose that naive Westerners are
the natural dupes of ruthless Eastern guile. Nothing of the sort: wily Russian
conspirators too (as we shall see) have been undone by almost transparent dup-
ery. Gullibility respects no frontiers or organizational fences; while the British in
World War Two were cunningly manipulating Nazi agents in England in the
famous “Double Cross” operations, other British were at the same time being
duped on the continent by the Nazi counterespionage services.

The colorful and never-ending history of fraud continues to unfold in our
daily newspapers with stories of innocent oldsters being gulled— and profes-
sional intelligence services as well. A defecting Cuban intelligence officer startled
CIA in the late 1980s by revealing that every CIA spy in Cuba was working under
the control of the Soviet-trained Cuban counterintelligence service. Defectors
during the Prague Spring of 1968 gave CIA the unwelcome news that Czecho-
slovak officials the CIA thought had been successfully recruited by one of its fast-
rising operatives in Asia had actually been pushed into CIA’s overeager and under-
skeptical nets by Czech-Soviet controllers.

Clearly, this tendency to deceive ourselves deserves the attention of any stu-
dent of counterintelligence.

We cannot and need not try to cover the whole subject of dupes and duplicity.
That would lead us far back in history, far out in geography, and deep down into
abstruse realms of psychology and epistemology. But we can usefully recall to
mind some famous disasters and the human foibles that made them possible. We
cannot help wondering whether the CIA handlers of those Cuban and Czech
double agents— and others we will meet here— might have averted trouble for
themselves and their organizations had they remembered their adversaries’ pen-
chant for deception and their own penchant for self-deception.

Among the plotters trying to overthrow the tsarist regime in Russia, none were
more active than the Socialist Revolutionaries, and among these SRs none were
more dangerously exposed than the members of their terrorist wing, the so-called
combat organization. They lived with nerves stretched and sensitive to any un-
usual occurrence because they knew that the Okhrana, the Tsarist political po-
lice, was trying to insert agents provocateurs into their ranks.

How strange it seems, then, that they blinded themselves to the most threat-
ening evidence. When their plans went astray and their members fell into police
traps, they failed again and again to draw the seemingly inescapable conclu-
sion. They even rejected precise warning that came to them from within the
Okhrana itself.

In early 1903 a friendly Okhrana agent slipped the word to Khristianinov, a
member of the combat organization, that the Okhrana would refrain from raid-



APPENDIX C 267


ing the organization’s secret weapons assembly shop “because it has an agent
there already.” Now, only a handful of the members even knew of the existence of
that shop, so the finger pointed at the man who had set it up— their leader, Yevno
Azev. But after Khristianinov had ineptly presented the facts and Azev, on the
contrary, had defended himself lucidly and convincingly, an investigating group
concluded that all was well and that Azev (who had, after all, organized the
assassination of the tsarist Interior Minister Plehve) stood above suspicion.

Three years later came an anonymous letter from within the Okhrana, giving
the names of two members of the combat organization who were police spies: "T.,
an ex-convict, and the engineer Azev who recently arrived from abroad.” The SRs
took this warning seriously enough; they immediately recognized "T” as Tatarov
and checked, interrogated, and verified the accusation, and killed him. But with
half the Okhrana message proven correct— excluding the ever-present menace of
false denunciations— the SRs still could not bring themselves to accept the other
half. Not even when, after another year, they got more news from inside the
Okhrana. Their friend, the journalist and historian Vladimir Burtsev, confirmed
that there was a traitor high in the SR leadership and even gave his police pseu-
donym, “Raskin." Despite the earlier warning, and despite the growing signs of
betrayal from within, the SRs chose to treat Burtsev as “a ridiculous and harmful
maniac.” They accused him of trying to disrupt the revolutionary movement by
discrediting Azev, its most formidable terrorist, and they warned him to desist.
Lacking legal proof, Burtsev stood alone and helpless.

Again and again the SR combat organization’s missions failed, and its mem-
bers were arrested, but still the leaders rejected Burtsev’s pleading as “idle chat-
ter," the more so because the accused Azev was at that moment planning an
assassination attempt against the tsar himself.

Finally Burtsev got the proof he needed. In Germany he met the retired, dis-
credited Okhrana chief Lopukhin and, while telling him something that Lopuk-
hin had not known, that Azev had masterminded Plehve ’s assassination— tried
out on him the pseudonym "Raskin.” In that dramatic moment in a train com-
partment Lopukhin answered, “I know nobody by the name of Raskin but I have
met the engineer Yevno Azev several times.”

Now Burtsev forced the SR party leadership to react by printing an open
letter to it, accusing Azev. So how did they react? They sought to silence Burtsev
by putting him on trial for libeling Azev. The judges were cold and hostile until he
finally revealed Lopukhin’s words, and even then one of them called it “slander.”
Finally they began the investigation of Azev that confirmed his guilt and in Janu-
ary 1909 precipitated his flight from the country. But this happened six years
after the necessary evidence had been at hand, too late to restore the will and
cohesion of the shattered combat organization. 4

Lenin could also be deceived, despite the rosy view expressed by his wife and
closest associate Krupskaya: "Of our entire group Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] was the
best prepared in the field of conspiracy; he knew his way about and was able to
dupe spies superbly.”

In 1912 this paragon of wariness promoted Roman Malinovsky to member-
ship in the Bolsheviks' first Central Committee and made him his deputy inside
Russia and the leading Bolshevik of the Social Democrat (SD) representation in
the tsarist parliament (Fourth Duma). When Lenin’s close collaborators Bukha-
rin and Troyanovsky gave him solid reasons to suspect that Malinovsky was a



268 APPENDIX C


tsarist police provocateur, Lenin angrily rejected the charges and threatened that
if Bukharin joined this “dark campaign of slander” Lenin would publicly brand
him a traitor. (Bukharin desisted.)

At the Duma Malinovsky gave the SDs’ first major speech of the parliamen-
tary session. Though its main purpose was to present two major platform items,
Malinovsky (on Okhrana instructions) omitted precisely those two items. He
explained afterward that he had been nervous in his maiden speech and had lost
his place. When the SD newspapers then printed the passage that Malinovsky had
omitted, the police confiscated the whole issue. Sill Malinovsky was able to brush
suspicions aside. He even survived a later, more blatant episode: in February
1914a new Okhrana chief, appalled at the potential scandal of running an op-
position parliamentary deputy as a spy, forced Malinovsky to resign his Duma
post without any logical excuse. To many this meant that Malinovsky must be a
traitor. But not to Lenin.

By June of that year the Menshevik leaders Martov and Dan were “convinced
beyond any doubt" that Malinovsky was a traitor and that the Okhrana controlled
the internal Bolshevik organization around the newspaper Pravda, which Mali-
novsky had helped set up (with capital provided by another tsarist provocateur).
But Martov recognized that "whether we shall succeed in proving it is another
question, because we are handcuffed by our own people.” How right he was;
Lenin again refused to investigate these "dark rumors" and again turned on the
accusers: “We do not regard them as honest citizens.” As late as 1916 he was still
speaking of the “dirty fabrications" against Malinovsky. He said that the “party
leadership" had reached “the unqualified and unshakable conviction that . . . the
legend of his being an agent provocateur was invented by conscious calumnia-
tors." Still later he called the charges “absolutely absurd.” 5

When the Okhrana files were opened after the tsar’s fall in February 1917,
Malinovsky was revealed, of course, to have been a provocateur from the outset.
After the Bolshevik coup d’etat, Lenin had him shot.

Leon Trotsky, old conspirator and co-founder of the Bolshevik state, was no more
astute than Lenin in this way.

Outmaneuvered by Stalin, exiled and driven from one country to another,
some of his helpers killed, Trotsky could not fail to be wary— but he proved unable
to read the warnings he was getting. His faithful Dutch follower Sneevliet gave
him good reason to believe that Mark Zborowski, the closest associate of Trots-
ky’s son Leon Sedov in the Paris-based International Secretariat of the move-
ment, was an NKVD (early designation of the KGB) provocateur. Trotsky, instead
of ridding himself of Zborowski, called for a tribunal to condemn Sneevliet for
sowing discord. It must have jolted him two years later, when his son died myste-
riously in a Paris hospital; few beside Zborowski had even known Sedov’s where-
abouts. (Indeed, as was later learned, the KGB, with Zborowski’s help, had found
and murdered Sedov.)

Two years later, an anonymous source from inside the NKVD (identifying
himself after his defection as Aleksandr Orlov, a senior official) sent a message
telling Trotsky that Zborowski was an NKVD agent. Trotsky derisively rejected
the warning as an NKVD effort to spread suspicion in his organization.

Orlov’s message also told Trotsky that Stalin was trying to have him killed.
Confirmation, if any was needed, came in the spring of 1940 when a team of
assassins raided Trotsky's house in Mexico and sprayed seventy-five bullets into



APPENDIX C 269


his bedroom, miraculously missing him and his wife. As a result, every morning
thereafter Trotsky is said to have exulted, “Another lucky day; we are still alive.”

All this was still not enough to alert him to the suspicious signs that his
future assassin was scattering about. Ramon Mercader had insinuated himself
from nowhere, introduced by his Trotskyite girlfriend, into Trotsky’s guarded
household. He was known to be using a false passport and the life story he gave,
even his identity documents, could not withstand the most superficial check. And
his character changed, too; once inside Trotsky’s circle this formerly apolitical
and ignorant drifter became so sharp and involved that Trotsky thought he might
become a useful member of the movement.

Two days before the killing, in an almost blatant rehearsal, Mercader oddly
kept his hat on while in Trotsky’s study and, despite the warm weather, kept his
coat (which would later hide the murder weapon) under his arm while he sat
impolitely close by Trotsky’s side rather than apart in a chair. This irritated rather
than alarmed Trotsky, who complained to his wife that night, “I don’t like the
man." She remarked, moreover, that “he never wears a hat.” When Mercader
appeared at the house two days later, he appeared to Mrs. Trotsky strangely pale
and troubled. But he was allowed in, again with his hat and coat, this time hiding
the fatal ice axe . 6

The success of the much-publicized Soviet deception operation called the “Trust”
has been attributed to the cunning of its perpetrators in the KGB (then called
OGPU), but it depended as much upon the gullibility of its victims.

These were people who, more than others, should have been wary. Military
exiles driven from Russia after long civil war and terror, they knew the ruthless
hand of the OGPU and knew it would reach out and try to neutralize them in their
places of refuge abroad. Their clubs in Paris and Germany and their paramilitary
units in Yugoslavia should be bastions of disenchantment, sprouting antennas
sensitive to the slightest hostile move or beguilement from Soviet Russia, and
ready to react with skepticism and outrage.

Nothing of the sort. They responded with simple joy when, hardly a year
after their military defeat, a messenger brought news of a resistance to Bolshevik
rule growing secretly in the form of a “Monarchist Organization of Central Rus-
sia” (MOCR), with secret sympathizers inside the OGPU and other Soviet agen-
cies. They admired the uncanny ability of these new “friends” to move into and
out of the tightly policed country, to procure false identities backed by authentic
Soviet documentation, and even to spring co-conspirators from jail. When the
MOCR set up “windows” for couriers to pass through the borders of Poland,
Finland, or Estonia, the emigres spent less time asking how were the wires cut or
the guards bribed than in exulting over these openings to the homeland. Even in
Paris their “secret” plots were the talk of the cafes, but they deluded themselves
that unbeknownst to the OGPU whole roomfuls of conspirators could safely meet
in Moscow and Petrograd.

Western intelligence services were sucked in, too. Neglecting Machiavelli’s
warning about emigres, they saw this “resistance organization” not as a trap but
as an opportunity to get information from the forbidden land . 7 After a while some
recognized Trust’s intelligence as spurious, and others drew back after experi-
enced operatives Sidney Reilly and pre-Revolutionary SR terrorist Boris Savin-
kov (Azev’s onetime deputy) had gone to their doom in Soviet Russia through
MOCR “windows." But even these deceived themselves long enough to permit the



270 APPENDIX C


OGPU to close out the hoax at a time of its own choosing and to use this closure to
open yet another trap— into which the outsiders again leaped.

This and similar KGB provocations neutralized resistance to Bolshevik rule
in its early years. But even after they were exposed, their victims’ embarrassment
was still not intense enough to cure gullibility. The Poles, for example, had been
among the first to recognize that the Trust’s information was useless and decep-
tive, but hardly twenty years later some of these same individuals, by then in
emigration themselves, allowed themselves to be duped by a carbon copy of the
Trust. The same Soviet manipulators organized a new “resistance” to Soviet rule,
this time in Poland with Polish communist helpers, in an organization called
“WiN” (Polish initials for “Freedom and Independence"). It accomplished its So-
viet aims for five years but then the Soviets chose to close it down at the end of
1 952 in order to use its closure, as they had that of Trust, as part of another Soviet
operation. 8

The British in World War Two used captured spies as double agents to mislead
the Germans concerning the time and place of the Allies’ 1944 invasion of
Europe— and were playing a risky game. A single mistake might be enough to
alert the German handlers and expose what the British were hiding: the real
invasion plans.

In fact, the British controllers of the double agents did make some slips, and
mishaps did occur. But they were protected by the adversaries’ gullibility. If the
German handlers noticed (wrote one of the British officers involved), they man-
aged to find “far more credible explanations of what had occurred than the true
explanation that the agent was a double cross. ... It was far more reasonable to
suppose that he had been misled by the British than that he had over a period of
years tricked and deceived his German paymaster. ... It was extremely, almost
fantastically difficult to ‘blow’ a well-established agent." 9

Not only the Germans were gullible. While the British were deceiving them, they
were deceiving the British. Whole networks of Allied agents dedicated to sabo-
tage in occupied Europe were taken under German control. The German han-
dling of these double agents was flawed— more than one managed to radio to
London the prearranged signal that he had fallen under German control— but like
the Germans, the British “found more credible explanation for what had oc-
curred than the true explanation that the agent was a double cross." So at the end,
as Allied armies advanced through Europe, the last German-controlled message
from the ostensibly British “North Pole” agent network in Holland, addressed by
name to the British handlers in London, shed crocodile tears of “regret” that “we
[Germans] have acted for so long as your sole representatives in this country."

In 1 94 1 the German battleship Bismarck, having intercepted and sunk the British
battle cruiser Hood, and having fought off other warships, escaped into the vast
Atlantic. In a surprisingly short time a huge force assembled and then intercepted
and sank the Bismarck. The German naval command asked itself, might the
British have broken the Germans’ ciphers? (Indeed they had, in the now famous
"Ultra" affair.)

No, decided the German board of inquiry. “It is not necessary to put the
blame on a breach of security as regards the code and cipher tables.” There is the



APPENDIX C 271


defensive reaction of almost any organization: “not necessary,” meaning in effect
not easy, not pleasant.

The question kept popping up. Some convoys supplying Rommel’s corps in
the North African desert from across the Mediterranean were spotted with sus-
picious speed (one as it emerged from dense fog) and were attacked and sunk
from sea and air. The Germans were forced again to ask themselves about the
security of their ciphers. Then U-boat losses to Allied aircraft rose startlingly. In
mid- 1943 they were being spotted suspiciously often in many different areas (in
fact, thanks to Ultra). Again a German board reviewed communications security.
Each of these reviews concluded smugly that the ciphers were safe. As late as
1959 Grand- Admiral Doenitz still refused to believe they were not, and ascribed
his navy’s losses to the excellence of British radar.


This kind of self-deception joined with a lack of courtroom-quality proof to grant
to Kim Philby many extra years to do the work that has since caused him to be
labeled (perhaps prematurely) as “the spy of the century.”

Philby's career was jolted on 25 May 1953 when British diplomats Guy Bur-
gess and Donald Maclean fled England to the USSR just after Burgess had re-
turned to London from Washington, where he had lived for a year with Philby,
and just three days before Maclean was to have been interviewed by British
counterintelligence. As MI6 chief in Washington, Philby had been one of the few
people to know of the impending move against Maclean (exposed by a break of
KGB ciphers code-named "Venona”). Now the CIA and FBI refused to deal fur-
ther with Philby, so he was recalled to London and questioned about “indiscre-
tions" and “misconduct.”

His interrogators, Milmo and Skardon, considered Philby a traitor and they
had better reasons than the “third man” warning to Burgess and Maclean. One
was Philby’s communist first wife, another was “the nasty little sentence in Krivit-
sky’s evidence” (as Philby later called it). NKVD operative Walter Krivitsky, after
defecting in 1937, had told the British that the NKVD had sent a young English
journalist to Spain during the civil war there. This had caused Philby no problem
at the time because many fit this description. But the lead hung there waiting for
a cross-bearing.

Pointing more directly toward Philby were four fingers left behind by the
ghost of Konstantin Volkov. This British-desk NKVD officer had contacted the
British Consulate in Istanbul in August 1945 offering information about Soviet
spies in the British government. His information could have uncovered Philby,
Maclean, and Burgess (and doubtless others) but fate— and Soviet manipulation
—had placed Philby across his path. Philby had become head of counterintelli-
gence work against the USSR and was the logical choice, as he pointed out, to
handle the case. He quickly alerted the NKVD, which removed Volkov before he
could make his next contact. But these pointers remained:

• Volkov had told the British Consul that a “head of a British counteres-
pionage organization” was an NKVD agent. Philby was now head of a
recently formed MI6 organization to counter Soviet espionage.

• Within MI6 Philby had handled the Volkov matter almost single-handedly.
Any suspicion that a leak might have caused Volkov’s untimely disappear-
ance would necessarily point toward him.



272 APPENDIX C


• Philby had so dragged his fee and delayed the British response to Volkov’s
appeal that the British Consul correctly concluded that unless Philby was
criminally incompetent, he must be a Soviet agent.

• "Two days after the Volkov information reached London," as Philby learned
from his British interrogator Milmo, "there had been a spectacular rise in
the volume of NKVD wireless traffic between London and Moscow, fol-
lowed by a similar rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul.”

But this had not been enough. It took the Burgess-Maclean flight, eight years
later, to halt Philby’s rise toward the top of MI6. And even that was not enough to
make him confess. MI6 dropped him for errors of judgment, not for treason, and
a few years later, in what may have been an accident of parliamentary procedure,
he was publicly cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan. So those ice-
bergs of suspicion gradually melted in the warm waters of organizational self-
deception and forgetfulness— and Philby sailed on. Incredibly, MI6 rehired him.
Its chiefs, like many MI6 officers, had scoffed at the very thought that Philby
might be a traitor, and at the paranoid idea that the Soviets might have pene-
trated their ranks. Now they set him up as a journalist in Beirut where they
thought his contacts would prove useful.

Useful they were, but mainly for the KGB. Though removed from MI6’s
central files, Philby kept in touch with former colleagues and other Westerners of
interest to KGB recruiters. These Westerners still trusted Philby; even those who
thought he might have warned Burgess and Maclean did not suspect he had done
it on the KGB’s behalf. A former CIA official in the area wrote, “When I went to
Beirut in 1957 to set up a consulting firm I was told by both CIA officers and SIS
officers that Philby was still suspect, although he had been formally cleared of
any connection with Burgess and Maclean, and that I would be doing a great
service to my country were I to keep an eye on him. I did, as did other British and
American laymen who were friends of his. Like all the others, I didn’t have the
slightest suspicion that he was a Soviet agent and, in fact, wouldn’t believe it until
he surfaced in Moscow. . . . Believe me, it was a terrible shock.” 10

Finally, in 1962 new information pointed unmistakably at Philby, and MI6
had to act. A longtime colleague, Nicholas Elliott, got a partial confession from
him, but then he fled to the Soviet Union and until his death in 1988 kept on
helping the KGB damage the West.

Alger Hiss was another beneficiary of willful neglect of the obvious. His secret
collaboration with Soviet Intelligence was known to Western authorities long
before he moved up to play a substantive role in conferences where America’s
posture toward the Soviet regime was being worked out, and more than a decade
before he was finally brought before a court. Here is how:

• In 1937 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, when he met the former So-
viet diplomat Alexander Barmine in Paris, named Hiss as an agent.

• In September 1939 French Intelligence passed to American Ambassador
Bullitt information (presumably from Krivitsky) that Alger and his brother
Donald Hiss were Soviet agents. Bullitt told President Roosevelt soon
thereafter.

• On 2 September 1939 the journalist Isaac Don Levine, Krivitsky s friend,
escorted Whittaker Chambers to the home of Assistant Secretary of State
Adolph Berle, where Chambers gave details of his Soviet and Communist



APPENDIX C 273


Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) intelligence activity and
clandestine contacts with Alger and Donald Hiss. Berle took notes and
reported to President Roosevelt— who laughed it off. Others also told Roo-
sevelt about the suspicions, but neither he nor Berle passed the informa-
tion to the FBI.

• In 1941 the FBI got its first news of Hiss directly from Chambers. Despite
their initial interest, they neglected to follow up.

• In April 1945 at the San Francisco Conference, which founded the United
Nations, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko indiscreetly told American
Secretary of State Stettinius that he would be “very happy to see Alger Hiss
appointed temporary secretary general, as he had a very high regard for
Hiss, particularly for his fairness and impartiality.”

• In August 1945 the GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko defected and reported
that an assistant to Secretary Stettinius was a Soviet spy.

• In November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a communist underground courier,
named to the FBI Soviet spies in government, including some who had
been previously named by Chambers. She had been told about Hiss. FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover asked President Truman for permission to take
action against Hiss, but Truman remained "stubbornly antagonistic” to the
allegations.

Hiss’s career path to the top was blocked only when Congress took an interest
in him after a 1946 grand jury in New York had begun looking into Soviet es-
pionage. This finally forced the State Department to remove him from access to
secrets. In mid- 1948— more than ten years after he had first been exposed— the
spotlight finally shone on him. The House Un-American Activities Committee
called Chambers to testify and arranged his dramatic confrontation with Hiss.
Chambers then revealed the famous “pumpkin papers” that documented Hiss’s
treason. He denied under oath having ever known Chambers, but when con-
fronted with contrary facts began to back off and equivocate. The committee
“kept Hiss on the stand, leading him point by point over his past testimony,
leading him to dodge, bend and weave— a spectacle of agile and dogged indignity
—through his discrepancies and contradictions, but never bringing him com-
pletely to lose his footing or to yield an inch in his denials.” To one committee
member Hiss’s testimony appeared “clouded by a strangely deficient memory."

Nevertheless the press echoed public sympathy for Hiss (“tall, handsome,
well-educated, a brilliant law student”) and skepticism and contempt for Cham-
bers: “Not only was he untidy,” commented a biographer of President Truman,
“but he had had an erratic career and was clearly far gone into paranoia.”

In 1977 the writer Allen Weinstein, helped by Hiss and intending to prove his
innocence, set out to review all the data. But he was an honest man and the facts
he found convinced him (as they do any reader of his book) that Hiss was guilty.
Still some journalists kept suggesting that Hiss had been diabolically framed. 1 1

Why do we fall prey to hoaxes, deceptive tricks, impostures, lies, and misrepre-
sentations that seem obvious to others less emotional or less involved? Why, once
duped, do we then hang on to our misconception, sometimes against the evi-
dence of our senses? Why, when supplied with that evidence, are we more likely
to attack its suppliers— a Burtsev, Bukharin, Martov, Sneevliet, or Chambers—
instead of the deceiver?



274 APPENDIX C


And why do professional intelligence officers, trained to expect such hoaxes
and paying fulsome lip service to alertness, fall again and again into traps? Why
does the harsh light of skepticism so often diffuse into a rosy glow of wishful
thinking?

You might blame a training that fails to instill skepticism, or you could
criticize bureaucratic structures that let responsibility fall between stools, but
that would be too easy. The reason lies deeper— far down in the recesses of the
human mind. It is not our eyes and ears that shape our reality but our brain,
which biters and translates their perceptions, a brain produced by a unique set of
needs and desires so that different people may make different interpretations and
draw different conclusions from the same evidence.

Here we touch upon the classic conbict between mind and heart, reason and
emotion, sun and moon, a conbict which, as we are reminded by ancient poems
and aphorisms, is as old as humanity. Scientibc enlightenment has not resolved
that conbict. Our brains still biter in the perceptions they desire and biter out
those they do not. They still lead us unconsciously toward “reasonable” choices
that favor our self-interest or our ease and— in debance of warning, instruction,
or experience— lead us away from those that bother or threaten. Hence we suffer
from that “universal inability to distinguish true from false, right from wrong,
when the false is cast in the image of the world's desire and the true is nothing
that the world can fathom, or wants to." 12

Alger Hiss knew this and cynically built it into his defense. In essence, he
asked the committee to disregard the evidence and follow its emotions. “It is
inconceivable that there could have been on my part, during hfteen years or more
in public office . . . any departure from the highest rectitude without its becoming
known. It is inconceivable that the men with whom I was intimately associated
during those hfteen years should not know my true character better than this
accuser. It is inconceivable that . . . [etc.]" How right he was: we have seen two
presidents bnding it inconceivable, Roosevelt "laughing it off” and Truman “stub-
bornly antagonistic.”

Trained and experienced intelligence officers are only human. As a KGB
(then OGPU) officer said to calm the nerves of a Trust provocateur he was dis-
patching to contact Western Intelligence, “You’ll have no problem. They want to
believe and trust you." 13 Indeed “they” do— as they showed through the decades
by falling for hoax after Soviet hoax, false defectors, double agents, and opera-
tional traps, and by failing to recognize penetration agents in their midst.

Perhaps those German case officers noticed oddities in their agents’ reports
from England, but their own careers and prestige depended on these agents and
obscured their concern for winning the war. Those SR conspirators genuinely
could not imagine that Azev would betray them. Those MI6 leaders could not
believe Philby to be a traitor, because that would annul all their hard work and
devoted careers.

If Americans are not alone in suffering this form of blindness, they are par-
ticularly predisposed to it. Whittaker Chambers wrote of that "invincible igno-
rance, rooted in what was most generous in the American character, which be-
cause it was incapable of such conspiracy itself, could not believe that others
practiced it. It was rooted, too, in what was most singular in the American experi-
ence, which because it had prospered so much apart from the rest of the world,
could not really grasp . . . why [Communists] acted as they did." Regarding the
sincere belief of Hiss’s lawyer, Marbury, in Hiss’s innocence, Chambers concluded



APPENDIX C 275


that Marbury “knew that my charges could not be true because . . . Communists
simply could not occur in [his] social and professional world. . . . Marbury ’s mind
was closed to certain possibilities and a part of its natural acuteness blunted— a
condition that would seem to be almost as dangerous to a lawyer as to a general
in the field .” 14

This, perhaps, helps explain why many American intelligence officers refuse
to accept the idea of Soviet deception operations. After a lifetime in intelligence
work, former director of Central Intelligence William Colby seemed proud to
admit that he “could just not figure out at all” what [his own counterintelligence
staff] were doing .” 15 A veteran supervisor of CIA operations abroad dismissed
sixty years of KGB deception operations as a sort of paranoid fantasy and ad-
mitted with candor, “I don’t happen to be able to share this kind of thing ." 16

Having committed himself to an erroneous position— having been duped— a
person is likely to react to contrary evidence in the same way as those German
handlers of the "double cross” agents: by refusing to admit it. “Faith, fanatic
Faith," a poet wrote, “once wedded fast/To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the
last.” Samuel Ireland, father of that faker of Shakespeare, was a renowned expert
and collector of Elizabethan manuscripts. Ridiculed for (unwittingly) lending his
prestige to his son’s forgery by publishing it, he never to his death allowed himself
to believe they were false, despite expert evidence and even his son’s repeated
confession.......

[Michael Clark]

[Thomas Graves]

Michael,

Why did you post it before I'd reformatted it and deleted some of it to make it shorter?  (Now you'll have to actually read it, and twice at that, just to see if I'm telling the truth about the "deleted" bit.)

Do you realize how immature, desperate and troll-ish you look?

--  MWT   

PS   You don't wear red lipstick, do you?  (That's what it looks like, my friend.)

PPS  Thanks for the "bump," btw.  (Un-formatted though it is.)

PPPS  Why did you make it so large?  Were you afraid it wouldn't get noticed?

[Thomas Graves]

From Richards Heuer’s:   Nosenko: Five paths to judgement

Nosenko provided identification of, or leads to, some 238 Americans and about 200 foreign nationals in whom the KGB had displayed varying degrees of interest, and against whom they had enjoyed varying degrees of success. He provided information on about 2,000 KGB staff officers and 300 Soviet national agents or contacts of the KGB. His information on the methods and scope of Second Chief Directorate operations against foreign diplomats and journalists in Moscow and visitors to the Soviet Union filled a large gap in our knowledge and had an enormous impact on the raising of CIA's consciousness of these operations; the result was important improvements in the physical security of U.S. installations and the personal security of U.S. officials and advisors to the USSR. The Soviet Union suffered additional costs through the adverse publicity and deterrent effect of Nosenko's defection and the arrest of several agents he identified.

Full Transcription: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25943-richards-heuer-nosenko-five-paths-to-judgement/?tab=comments#comment-405084.

Michael,

If you'd read Spy Wars, you'd realize Nosenko didn't provide leads to anyone who: 1) wasn't already suspected, 2) still had access to confidential information, or 3) was still working for the KGB/GRU.

In other words, the few people he "betrayed" to the CIA and/or the FBI were "throwaways", and the only reason he "uncovered" them was to build up his so-called bona fides in those agencies' eyes and thereby more effectively detract from and contradict what true-defector Golitsyn was telling them.

Didn't you read the excerpt I posted the other day?  (I'll post an encapsulation, here, in a few minutes, plus the rest of the chapter for background, so you won't miss it, and you'll be able to refer to Dayle W. Smith (aka "Andrey"), and Robert Lee Johnson, and Boris Belitsky, and William Vassall, in your own words, next time, and try to convince me, in your own words, how they really were unsuspected, active spies for the KGB when Nosenko "uncovered" them for the CIA and the FBI!)  Oh yeah, and about the and the 52 microphones in the American Embassy that nobody even suspected, and the 100 or so microphones in the new wing, the wing your boy Nosenko assured CIA didn't have any because Khrushchev was hoping and praying for better relations with the U.S.

(LOL)


--  MWT   


Here it is.


PART FOUR -- Confrontation

 
CHAPTER 17  -- Crunch Time


The expression on (Chief of the Soviet Russia Division, aka the Soviet Block Division) Dave Murphy’s face reflected that he knew I had come in to present him a problem— one he had hoped would simply go away.

I confirmed his apprehension. “We have to do something about Nosenko,'’ I said. “The debriefing is winding down. There’s not much water left in the well. Almost every day it looks more like we have a bad one on our hands. The time has come, Dave. We’ve got to decide what to do next.”

Dave took no pleasure from this. He was aware of the mounting mass of anomalies in Nosenko’s reporting and of the contradictions we were finding on the side. We had both hoped that with time we could find some innocent explanation, but none had materialized.

“Of course,” I added, “we might just walk away from this.” Only a few people were aware of our suspicions. We could resettle Nosenko some- where, get him a job, try to keep an eye on him, and remain alert for any new data we might uncover. “Maybe that’s our only course, but it would cost us our chance to clarify what’s behind all this— and that will come back to haunt us.”

“Yes,” Dave said. "Certainly his story about Lee Harvey Oswald will.”

Dave was right. As we re-questioned Nosenko about President Kennedy’s assassin, it was becoming ever more likely that his story was a message from the Kremlin to reassure the American government that the KGB had not commanded the deed. That message might well be true, but Nosenko was wildly exaggerating the KGB’s indifference to Oswald. He was saying and repeating (with claimed but unlikely authority) that neither KGB nor GRU had paid the slightest attention to this, their first Marine defector who moreover had been a radar operator at a U-2 spy plane base in Japan and was eager to help the Soviets any way he could. This tale was so hard to believe that it might cause someone to jump to the conclusion that Nosenko was covering up a contrary truth— that the KGB did form some relationship with Oswald and that the Soviet Politburo really did order JFK’s assassination.

We paused, thinking no doubt along the same lines.

“The Oswald story is one big question,” I added, “but there are others— the code clerks.” Nosenko had certified, with an authority that we now saw was spurious, that the KGB had failed to recruit any American code clerks. Golitsyn’s information had given us reason to think the KGB may have nailed two of them— and Nosenko seemed to be diverting us from precisely those two. "If the Sovs are deciphering U.S. military communications, we’d better find out about it.”

Dave nodded. “Yes, and about CIA security, too.” He remembered how Nosenko’s phony story of Kovshuk’s trip to Washington had hidden the betrayer of Popov. He remembered, too, Nosenko’s screwy account of Penkovsky’s dead drop that could be hiding a KGB penetration agent inside CIA who betrayed Penkovsky.

We lapsed into silence. Dave sighed. "No other explanation? Maybe he was just boasting? Pretending he did things he didn’t? Claiming personal involvement in operations he’d only heard about in corridor gossip? That he’s a congenital liar, a con man?”

"Hell, Dave, we’ve been through this before. You know we’ve tested every one of these propositions over and over again. I’ve had Joe and Sally argue them as persuasively as they can. They all collapse.”

"How about all the KGB spies he’s uncovered? Would the KGB sacrifice them?”

"Try to name one who was previously unknown and had access to secrets at the time Nosenko uncovered him. There aren’t any.”

Dave knew that we had looked into each of Nosenko’s ostensibly important leads and they had all come up dry. Nevertheless, I ran through them again.

• The most important suspect, "Andrey” the sergeant-mechanic of cipher machines, left service six months before Nosenko fingered him —and had never had access to cipher secrets even while active.

• The spy in the (Paris airport) Orly courier center, Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson, had been very important indeed— when active. But by the time Nosenko told us about him, Johnson had lost his access to the courier center, and his mentally unhinged wife was broadcasting her knowledge that he was a Soviet spy. The case was stone-cold dead, and the KGB knew it before Nosenko handed it to us.

• Microphones in the American Embassy? Everyone from the ambassador to the janitor knew they existed— as they do in every embassy
the Politburo might be interested in. Golitsyn had confirmed that well-known fact.

• Nosenko had heard that a U.S. army captain had been recruited but knew nothing that could single him out from the thousand or more fellow captains in Germany.

• The Belitsky double agent case had already been exposed by Golitsyn— and the KGB knew it.

• By the time Nosenko walked into CIA in Geneva and pinpointed the British naval source William Vassall, the KGB already knew Vassall to be compromised by Golitsyns defection. They even played a game to build up Nosenko in Western eyes: after Golitsyn’s defection, against all logic, they restored their contact with Vassall, which they had suspended while the British investigated an Admiralty lead from an earlier source. 1

"Okay,” Dave said, “So Nosenko didn’t expose any active or valuable spies. But all the same, a lot of people around here believe the KGB would never send out one of their own staff officers as a defector.”

"That may or may not be true,” I answered, and reminded him that Nosenko was not deputy chief of the American Embassy Section in 1960- 1961, where he ostensibly got all his more important information. "He can only tell us what he’s been briefed to pass along. That’s a far cry from ‘sending out a KGB officer as a defector.’ ” When asked about the general run of stuff any KGB officer would have to know, Nosenko had proved unbelievably ignorant— or was pretending to be. He either could not or would not give sensible answers to our questions on internal KGB procedures. "When he can’t dodge these questions,” I added, "he says stupid, impossible things.” Moreover, it was no part of the original KGB plan to put Nosenko into our hands as a “defector” who would have to undergo detailed questioning. In 1962 he insisted that he would never defect and told why. He would meet us only when he happened to travel abroad. That way the KGB could limit the frequency and duration of face-to-face meetings and prevent our getting too deeply into any subject.

Obviously something unexpected had caused the KGB to change its plan and have Nosenko defect. It was not hard to guess what that was. The assassination of the American president by a recent resident of the USSR would have panicked the Politburo. If the U.S. government became persuaded that the Kremlin had ordered the assassination it might even cause war. This panic was confirmed after the Cold War. KGB General Oleg Kalugin recalled the Kremlin’s reaction when they learned that the assassin Oswald had enjoyed their hospitality and had a Soviet wife. They turned to the KGB. In the Soviet Embassy in Washington, “We began receiving nearly frantic cables from KGB headquarters in Moscow, ordering us to do every- thing possible to dispel the notion that the Soviet Union was somehow behind the assassination. . . . The Kremlin leadership was clearly rattled by Oswald’s Soviet connection, and in cable after cable the message we were to convey was clear: ‘Inform the American public through every possible channel that we never trusted Oswald and were never in any way connected with him.’” 2

The Soviet leaders were known to turn to the KGB when they wanted to slip an “inside” message to the American government. For years they had been establishing back channels during international conferences. One tactic was to have KGB diplomats “confide” in journalists as they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To put American minds to rest about Lee Harvey Oswald, the Kremlin’s message— that they had nothing to do with the killing— needed to be more authoritative and convincing than diplomatic chitchat.

That would require defection, even if only temporary, of someone with convincing authority. The Warren Commission could not be satisfied with a written report from some (necessarily unnamed) CIA agent-in-place whom they could not question or from whom they could not ascertain how he had obtained the information.

Dave nodded. "I can see it. Just when they needed a channel like this they found it, ready-made: a KGB officer already established as a trusted CIA agent.”

“Yes, but he would have to ‘defect.’ ”

Dave chuckled at the thought. “Wouldn’t the KGB guys who set this up hate to see their long-range operation go up in smoke just to pass Khrushchev’s message to the Yanks. I can feel their pain. But they sure couldn’t say no.”

"Moreover,” I added, “I don’t think Nosenko intends to stay long as a defector.” I reminded Dave of the lack of interest that Nosenko had shown toward the country he had ostensibly chosen as his new home. “After he’s done his gig with the Warren Commission, he’ll probably find some excuse to get mad at us and return to the USSR .” 3

"At least we’d be rid of him,” Dave observed with a smile.

"And of any chance to get behind his stories,” I said. “That’s what it’s all about. We should confront him and at least try to get a better idea of what’s behind all this. Then maybe we can persuade the FBI to dig into the code clerk cases we think Nosenko’s stories are covering up.”

"Okay,” Dave said, “go ahead— confront him.”

Again he was joking but I still reminded him, "We’ve been tiptoeing all over the place just to keep Nosenko from getting wind of our suspicions,” I said. “Once he does, he’ll split— fly the coop. He steps out the door and sells his story to a newspaper, and there goes the ball game. Even with all we know, we’re having a hell of a time evaluating his stuff. Can you imagine a journalist even trying?”

Dave groaned. "Okay, so how can we confront him? What’s ever to stop him walking out the door?”

"The only possibility I see is to put him under guard while we put the tough questions to him. Depending on his answers we should learn enough to either clear him or decide beyond question that he is a plant.”

"And in that case?”

There was the problem. We had no realistic options.

There was no way even to expel him. The U.S. government would not turn Nosenko back to the Soviets unless he himself asked for that, in writing. The Swiss would have no reason whatsoever to allow him back into their alpine republic— he wasn’t their problem. The West Germans would not be interested. Neither would any other Western democracy. One by one, we reviewed and eliminated the possibilities. We would have to admit that CIA could not establish the bona fides of this defector whom we had
brought from Europe— and resettle him as an immigrant in the United States. "Far from Washington, I would hope.”

After a moment’s reflection Dave remarked, “But that still leaves the problem of his legal status in the country. He’s on parole to CIA and the law says we have to certify that he is who he said he is, that he had real access to the information he gave, and that we believe the reasons he gave for defecting. I couldn’t certify a single one of those points.”

"Nor that ‘we have no information that any foreign intelligence service influenced his defection.’ Hell, we’re up to our ass in just such info.”

Any discussion of resettling Nosenko outside the United States was probably pointless— because of Nosenko’s claimed knowledge of Oswald. We could not send away the only source allegedly able to throw light, even if false light, on the Soviet role in the assassination.

"We will have to tell the Warren Commission how we evaluate Nosenko’s information,” I said. "That alone would be cause to detain and confront him— to assess whether his Oswald info is invention or a KGB message.”

Dave summarized. "It boils down to this: either we hold and confront him, or we drop the whole thing and pretend to take Nosenko at face value.” Helms to see whether there’s even a possibility of the first alternative.”

To put the question and, if the answer were yes, to get the necessary authority, Helms, Murphy, and the CIA’s legal counsel went to Attorney
General Nicholas Katzenbach on 2 April 1964. Although they did not ask for any specific length of time, they presumably delivered the impression we had given them, that by holding Nosenko for two or three weeks of interrogation we should be able to throw more light on the validity and probable background of his information.

The attorney general considered the terms of Nosenko’s parole that made CIA responsible for ensuring that Nosenko’s presence would not harm U. S . interests . In the light of our current opinion that his presence was in fact specifically designed to harm those interests, the Attorney General gave the go-ahead.

Now we prepared for the confrontation that, we hoped, would throw light on this extraordinary affair.

.....

Footnotes

1 . John Vassall, Vassal l. The Autobiography of a Spy (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), 132-34.

2. Oleg Kalugin, The First Directorate (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 57-58.

3. We foresaw— and forestalled— what was to happen twenty years later. After a few weeks in the West the ostensible KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko, having betrayed “secrets,” walked out on CIA in Washington and returned to Moscow, not to be punished as a traitor but to resume his KGB employment and to be given a medal.

.....

Cheers!

-- MWT