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

[Thomas Graves]

On page 7 of this thread, Michael Clark posted a grossly over-enlarged (and unpaginated, of course) page from John L. Hart's virtually treasonous propaganda piece, The Monster Plot Report.

That page (pg. 81) and the ones surrounding it in The Monster Plot Report extol all of the wonderful help false-defector Yuri Nosenko gave the CIA and FBI, specifically all of the KGB and GRU agents he'd helped them to "uncover".

On page 8 of this thread, I posted a detailed rebuttal (see below) to those assertions, but Clark has made no effort to challenge said rebuttal in his own words, choosing instead to "appeal to authority" by continuing to post the same garbage from his favorite gullible (or worse) discredited* sources:  Howard J. Osborn, Richards J. Heuer and, of course, the HSCA perjurer and author of The Monster Plot Report, John L. Hart, himself.

In my humble opinion, it's almost as though Clark is secretly working for KGB-boy Vladimir Putin in trying to convince gullible members and guests here (and at the so-called Education Forum) that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector (and Anatoliy Golitsyn a crazy or false one), despite the fact that world-class "The CIA Killed JFK" CTer and former Army Intelligence analyst John Newman was so convinced by what Tennent H. Bagley wrote in his 2007 Spy Wars and his 2013 Spy Master that he now believes that Nosenko was a false defector (interestingly, Newman convinced none other than Peter Dale Scott of same in March 2018), and that true-defector Golitsyn was a valuable source of information for CIA (and could have been for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which organization, having been so thoroughly hoodwinked by "Fedora" and others, wouldn't give Golitsyn "the time of day").  *read Bagley's 2007 Spy Wars, 2014 Ghosts of the Spy Wars, and 2013 Spymaster, and Mark Riebling's 1994 Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA.

Does Michael Clark realize how foolish (or worse) and troll-ish he looks here?

Here's a list from my page-7 reply summarizing the specific allegations Hart made in that (pg. 81) piece of garbage Michael had posted there a little earlier :

KGB Souces Yuri Nosenko Allegedly Uncovered For CIA and FBI:

1)  U.S. Army sergeant Robert L. Johnson

2)  -- a buncha technical military stuff

3)  U.S. Sergeant Dayle W. Smith

4)  James A. Mintkenbaugh

5)  Some microphones in the American Embassy in Moscow

6)  William John Cristopher Vassall !

7)  and ... gasp ... about 200 unnamed spies in unnamed European countries, as attested to by three unnamed CIA officers who had the wherewithal to know!

.....

 
Now for the really good stuff from my Reply #73 on: August 18, 2019, 06:29:31 AM on page 8 of this thread):


Michael,

Well, not hearing from you as to whether or not that list of spies allegedly uncovered by Nosenko that I drew up is comprehensive, and seein' as how you replied to my post with some difficult-to-read stuff about two of my heroes (Anatoliy Golitsyn and Pyotr Popov) in a discolored and grossly over-enlarged page from Hart's "Monster Plot," instead, I guess I'll just go ahead and start with Number 1 on the list -- U.S. Army Sergeant Robert L. Johnson, okay?

Let's see what another of my heroes, Tennent H. Bagley, has to say about him, whaddaya say?

Robert L. Johnson

From page 179 of Bagley's 2007 book Spy Wars:

The spy in the Orly (Paris airport) 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.


--  MWT   


NEXT UP --  Sergeant Dayle W. Smith !


Dayle W. Smith

From Bagley's book Spy Master (with-and-about former KGB General Sergei Kondrashev):

Sergeant Dayle W. Smith (KGB's "Andrey") confessed to having been recruited while in Moscow during 1953-1955. But the American authorities saw no reason to prosecute him because he had had no access to sensitive information and never passed any to the Soviets. For the KGB, he was a free “give-away.”

And this from page 179 of Spy Wars:

The most important (according to Nosenko) suspect, (KGB's) "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.


-- MWT   


NEXT UP:  James A. Mintenbaugh !  (... Who??)


James A. Mintkenbaugh

From the Wikipedia article on Robert Lee Johnson (see above):

(Johnson) also recruited a former Army friend, James Mintkenbaugh. Johnson worked for the KGB between 1953 and 1964, and passed on information while stationed at various sites in Europe and the U.S. ... In 1964, Johnson was turned in by his wife and, like Mintkenbaugh, received a 25-year prison sentence in 1965.

Note: Bagley doesn't seem to talk about Mintkenbaugh in his books or in his PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, but I think it's reasonable to assume that since Robert Lee Johnson was already "toast" when Nosenko "uncovered" him, that Mintkenbaugh was "throw away" material, as well.


--  MWT   


NEXT UP:  Some Microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow!


Microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow


From page 179 of Bagley's Spy Wars:

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.

Note: Bagley goes into this in some detail in his HSCA testimony.  He starts talking about them at the bottom of this page:
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol12/html/HSCA_Vol12_0299b.htm


--  MWT   


NEXT UP:  William John Cristopher Vassall !!!


William John Cristopher Vassall


For background on this dude, here's the Wikipedia article on him.  I don't know how accurate the article is because I haven't read it yet.  (I'll read it later today and let you know if there's anything egregiously wrong in it ...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vassall


And here's something on him in Bagley's Spy Wars, page 179:

By the time Nosenko walked into CIA in Geneva (in May 1962) and pinpointed the British naval source William Vassall, the KGB already knew Vassall to be compromised by Golitsyns defection (in December of 1961). 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.(fn 1)


And this, also from Spy Wars, page 260:

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 un- covered by Goleniewski.(fn 18)  In fact, no such confusion was even remotely possible.

(There's more, but it's getting late, even here in Paradise-on-Earth known as La Jolla, California ...)


-- MWT   

.....


-- MWT   

[Michael Clark]

On page 7 of this thread, Michael Clark posted a grossly over-enlarged (and unpaginated, of course) page from John L. Hart's virtually treasonous propaganda piece, The Monster Plot Report.

That page (pg. 81) and the ones surrounding it in The Monster Plot Report extol all of the wonderful help false-defector Yuri Nosenko gave the CIA and FBI, specifically all of the KGB and GRU agents he'd helped them to "uncover".

On page 8 of this thread, I posted a detailed rebuttal (see below) to those assertions, but Clark has made no effort to challenge said rebuttal in his own words, choosing instead to "appeal to authority" by continuing to post the same garbage from his favorite gullible (or worse) sources:  Howard J. Osborn, Richards J. Heuer and, of course, the HSCA perjurer and author of The Monster Plot Report, John L. Hart, himself.

In my humble opinion, it's almost as though Clark is secretly working for KGB-boy Vladimir Putin in trying to convince gullible members and guests here (and at the so-called Education Forum) that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector (and Anatoliy Golitsyn a crazy or false one), despite the fact that world-class "The CIA Killed JFK" CTer and former Army Intelligence analyst John Newman was so convinced by what Tennent H. Bagley wrote in his 2007 Spy Wars and his 2013 Spy Master that he now believes that Nosenko was a false defector (interestingly, Newman convinced none other than Peter Dale Scott of same in March 2018), and that true-defector Golitsyn was a valuable source of information for CIA (and could have been to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which organization, having been so thoroughly hoodwinked by "Fedora" and others, wouldn't give Golitsyn "the time of day").

Does Michael Clark realize how foolish (or worse) and troll-ish he looks here?

Here's a list from my page-7 reply summarizing the specific allegations Hart made in that (pg. 81) piece of garbage Michael had posted there a little earlier :

KGB Souces Yuri Nosenko Allegedly Uncovered For CIA and FBI:

1)  U.S. Army sergeant Robert L. Johnson

2)  -- a buncha technical military stuff

3)  U.S. Sergeant Dayle W. Smith

4)  James A. Mintkenbaugh

5)  Some microphones in the American Embassy in Moscow

6)  William John Cristopher Vassall !

7)  and ... gasp ... about 200 unnamed spies in unnamed European countries, as attested to by three unnamed CIA officers who had the wherewithal to know!

.....

 
Now for the really good stuff from my Reply #73 on: August 18, 2019, 06:29:31 AM on page 8 of this thread):


Michael,

Well, not hearing from you as to whether or not that list of spies allegedly uncovered by Nosenko that I drew up is comprehensive, and seein' as how you replied to my post with some difficult-to-read stuff about two of my heroes (Anatoliy Golitsyn and Pyotr Popov) in a discolored and grossly over-enlarged page from Hart's "Monster Plot," instead, I guess I'll just go ahead and start with Number 1 on the list -- U.S. Army Sergeant Robert L. Johnson, okay?

Let's see what another of my heroes, Tennent H. Bagley, has to say about him, whaddaya say?

Robert L. Johnson

From page 179 of Bagley's 2007 book Spy Wars:

The spy in the Orly (Paris airport) 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.


--  MWT   


NEXT UP --  Sergeant Dayle W. Smith !


Dayle W. Smith

From Bagley's book Spy Master (with-and-about former KGB General Sergei Kondrashev):

Sergeant Dayle W. Smith (KGB's "Andrey") confessed to having been recruited while in Moscow during 1953-1955. But the American authorities saw no reason to prosecute him because he had had no access to sensitive information and never passed any to the Soviets. For the KGB, he was a free “give-away.”

And this from page 179 of Spy Wars:

The most important (according to Nosenko) suspect, (KGB's) "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.


-- MWT   


NEXT UP:  James A. Mintenbaugh !  (... Who??)


James A. Mintkenbaugh

From the Wikipedia article on Robert Lee Johnson (see above):

(Johnson) also recruited a former Army friend, James Mintkenbaugh. Johnson worked for the KGB between 1953 and 1964, and passed on information while stationed at various sites in Europe and the U.S. ... In 1964, Johnson was turned in by his wife and, like Mintkenbaugh, received a 25-year prison sentence in 1965.

Note: Bagley doesn't seem to talk about Mintkenbaugh in his books or in his PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, but I think it's reasonable to assume that since Robert Lee Johnson was already "toast" when Nosenko "uncovered" him, that Mintkenbaugh was "throw away" material, as well.


--  MWT   


NEXT UP:  Some Microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow!


Microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow


From page 179 of Bagley's Spy Wars:

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.

Note: Bagley goes into this in some detail in his HSCA testimony.  He starts talking about them at the bottom of this page:
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol12/html/HSCA_Vol12_0299b.htm


--  MWT   


NEXT UP:  William John Cristopher Vassall !!!


William John Cristopher Vassall


For background on this dude, here's the Wikipedia article on him.  I don't know how accurate the article is because I haven't read it yet.  (I'll read it later today and let you know if there's anything egregiously wrong in it ...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vassall


And here's something on him in Bagley's Spy Wars, page 179:

By the time Nosenko walked into CIA in Geneva (in May 1962) and pinpointed the British naval source William Vassall, the KGB already knew Vassall to be compromised by Golitsyns defection (in December of 1961). 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.(fn 1)


And this, also from Spy Wars, page 260:

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 un- covered by Goleniewski.(fn 18)  In fact, no such confusion was even remotely possible.

(There's more, but it's getting late, even here in Paradise-on-Earth known as La Jolla, California ...)


-- MWT   
.......

[Thomas Graves]

Edit: In my previous post I forgot to mention yet another source open-minded members and guests can read to help them understand how thoroughly gullible jerks, liars and/or virtual traitors (or worse) McCoy, Hart, Solie, Heuer and George Kisevalter have been thoroughly discredited (one could say "outed"), to wit:  Tennent H. Bagley's 1978 HSCA Testimony (in Hearings, volume XII), where he's referred to as "Mr. D. C.", as in (former) Deputy Chief of CIA's Soviet Russia/Soviet Block Division.

--  MWT   

[Michael Clark]

[Thomas Graves]

.....

Michael,

I'll be making about ten corrections to that piece by John Le Carre's Half-brother.

Piecemeal, maybe even one-by-one, so as to "cover" as many of your propagandistic posts as possible.

Cheers!

--  MWT   

PS  When are you going to send that letter to John Newman and Peter Dale Scott, telling them how wrong they are about Nosenko?

[Michael Clark]

Michael,

I'll be making about ten corrections to that piece by John Le Carre's Half-brother.

Piecemeal, maybe even one-by-one, so as to "cover" as many of your propagandistic posts as possible.

Cheers!

--  MWT   

PS  When are you going to send that letter to John Newman and Peter Dale Scott, telling them how wrong they are about Nosenko?

That’s pretty funny. I didn’t know if you would thank me or go all-out freak, like you did. I thought it was pretty neutral. It is so topical that I am really shocked, nee, amused at your reaction. Does it even say ten things?

Anyroads, it’s nice to know that I keep you busy...

[Thomas Graves]

That’s pretty funny. I didn’t know if you would thank me or go all-out freak, like you did. I thought it was pretty neutral. It is so topical that I am really shocked, nee, amused at your reaction. Does it even say ten things?

Michael,

I'll be dealing with at least some of the things I've highlighted in the obituary.


One day in June 1962, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the Soviet specialist at the CIA station in Berne, was instructed to take the train to Geneva to handle the case of a KGB officer attached to the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference, who was offering his services to the Americans. That short journey turned Bagley into a central figure in perhaps the most controversial and baffling spy story of the entire Cold War.The KGB officer's name was Yuri Nosenko. At that first meeting he agreed to return to Moscow as a CIA agent-in-place. But in January 1964 he was back in Geneva with the Soviet arms delegates, insisting his cover was about to be blown and that he had to come over to
 the West. But was he the real thing, or a fake defector sent by the KGB to confuse? If he was a plant, the strategy succeeded brilliantly. For the next dozen years the Nosenko case tied the CIA in knots, paralysing the Agency's vital espionage efforts against its Cold War adversary and destroying careers in the process. Bagley's background was typical in the Agency's early days. He came from an old US Navy family, studded with admirals; his uncle had been the first American killed in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Bagley himself had served in the Marines and studied at Princeton and the University of Geneva before joining the CIA in 1950. He seemed to have it all. He was tall and all-American handsome, talented and ambitious. Some senior figures in the Agency saw him as a future CIA director. He was also a friend of James Angleton, the Agency's formidable counter-intelligence chief. And then Yuri Nosenko came on the scene. Initially Bagley had no doubts. Nosenko was the first senior defector from the KGB's Second Directorate, responsible for internal security and monitoring – and if possible recruiting – personnel in the US Embassy as well as visiting American tourists, businessmen and academics. The information he provided at the 1962 debriefings at a CIA safe house in Geneva was top-class, including details of KGB surveillance methods and leads that hastened the unmasking of several Soviet spies in the West (among them the UK Admiralty clerk, John Vassall). "Jim, I'm involved in the greatest defector case ever," Bagley enthused to Angleton when he returned to Washington. But the older man was visibly unimpressed, and handed Bagley a file to read. "When you finish this, you'll see what I'm saying," he told him. The file essentially consisted of the theorising of a previous KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had come across in 1961.
Golitsyn had managed to convince the paranoid Angleton that not only did the KGB have high-level moles in US and British intelligence, but was running a gigantic disinformation campaign against the West. Nothing was what it seemed, and every defector, according to Golitsyn, was in fact a plant – among them, naturally, Yuri Nosenko. The file planted doubts in Bagley's mind too, and his suspicions were further aroused by discrepancies in Nosenko's initial story. In 1964 those doubts exploded. The defector claimed to have information that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the murder of President Kennedy just two months earlier and, astonishingly, that the KGB didn't even have contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, during the three mysterious years that the one-time US Marine lived in the Soviet Union, between 1959 and 1962. Nosenko's tale seemed too good to be true, exonerating Moscow just as the Warren Commission was starting work amid widespread suspicion that Oswald was indeed a real-life Manchurian Candidate controlled by the KGB. Soon after landing on US soil, Nosenko found himself a prisoner, held incommunicado in a safe house in Virginia and subjected to harsh interrogation, hunger and sleep deprivation. But he never broke, passing lie detector tests and resisting every effort of Bagley and his fellow sceptics to extract a confession. Gradually the upper echelons of the CIA split into warring camps, of "Fundamentalists" like Angleton and Bagley, and those who believed Nosenko was the real thing, and who were increasingly appalled by the way he was being treated. Ultimately the latter group prevailed. By 1967 Nosenko's ordeal was over, and in 1969 he was formally cleared, placed on the CIA payroll as a consultant and given a new identity. By then Bagley was long since off the case, posted to Brussels, where he would spend five years as station chief before retiring from the Agency in 1972. Amazingly Nosenko never held his harsh treatment against the US, nor regretted his original decision to defect. Bagley, though, remained obsessed by the case, convinced until the end that Nosenko was a plant: "this KGB provocateur and deceiver," as he put it in his 2007 memoir Spy Wars, a powerful argument of the anti-Nosenko case. The book led the CIA to cancel a planned lecture that Bagley was to give: four decades on, old wounds were still bleeding. Nosenko himself died in 2008. A few years earlier, someone asked Bagley what he'd say to Yuri Nosenko if he ever ran into him. His answer was, "Don't shoot."


--  MWT   

[Michael Clark]

Michael,

I'll be dealing with at least some of the things I've highlighted in the obituary.


One day in June 1962, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the Soviet specialist at the CIA station in Berne, was instructed to take the train to Geneva to handle the case of a KGB officer attached to the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference, who was offering his services to the Americans. That short journey turned Bagley into a central figure in perhaps the most controversial and baffling spy story of the entire Cold War.The KGB officer's name was Yuri Nosenko. At that first meeting he agreed to return to Moscow as a CIA agent-in-place. But in January 1964 he was back in Geneva with the Soviet arms delegates, insisting his cover was about to be blown and that he had to come over to
 the West. But was he the real thing, or a fake defector sent by the KGB to confuse? If he was a plant, the strategy succeeded brilliantly. For the next dozen years the Nosenko case tied the CIA in knots, paralysing the Agency's vital espionage efforts against its Cold War adversary and destroying careers in the process. Bagley's background was typical in the Agency's early days. He came from an old US Navy family, studded with admirals; his uncle had been the first American killed in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Bagley himself had served in the Marines and studied at Princeton and the University of Geneva before joining the CIA in 1950. He seemed to have it all. He was tall and all-American handsome, talented and ambitious. Some senior figures in the Agency saw him as a future CIA director. He was also a friend of James Angleton, the Agency's formidable counter-intelligence chief. And then Yuri Nosenko came on the scene. Initially Bagley had no doubts. Nosenko was the first senior defector from the KGB's Second Directorate, responsible for internal security and monitoring – and if possible recruiting – personnel in the US Embassy as well as visiting American tourists, businessmen and academics. The information he provided at the 1962 debriefings at a CIA safe house in Geneva was top-class, including details of KGB surveillance methods and leads that hastened the unmasking of several Soviet spies in the West (among them the UK Admiralty clerk, John Vassall). "Jim, I'm involved in the greatest defector case ever," Bagley enthused to Angleton when he returned to Washington. But the older man was visibly unimpressed, and handed Bagley a file to read. "When you finish this, you'll see what I'm saying," he told him. The file essentially consisted of the theorising of a previous KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had come across in 1961.
Golitsyn had managed to convince the paranoid Angleton that not only did the KGB have high-level moles in US and British intelligence, but was running a gigantic disinformation campaign against the West. Nothing was what it seemed, and every defector, according to Golitsyn, was in fact a plant – among them, naturally, Yuri Nosenko. The file planted doubts in Bagley's mind too, and his suspicions were further aroused by discrepancies in Nosenko's initial story. In 1964 those doubts exploded. The defector claimed to have information that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the murder of President Kennedy just two months earlier and, astonishingly, that the KGB didn't even have contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, during the three mysterious years that the one-time US Marine lived in the Soviet Union, between 1959 and 1962. Nosenko's tale seemed too good to be true, exonerating Moscow just as the Warren Commission was starting work amid widespread suspicion that Oswald was indeed a real-life Manchurian Candidate controlled by the KGB. Soon after landing on US soil, Nosenko found himself a prisoner, held incommunicado in a safe house in Virginia and subjected to harsh interrogation, hunger and sleep deprivation. But he never broke, passing lie detector tests and resisting every effort of Bagley and his fellow sceptics to extract a confession. Gradually the upper echelons of the CIA split into warring camps, of "Fundamentalists" like Angleton and Bagley, and those who believed Nosenko was the real thing, and who were increasingly appalled by the way he was being treated. Ultimately the latter group prevailed. By 1967 Nosenko's ordeal was over, and in 1969 he was formally cleared, placed on the CIA payroll as a consultant and given a new identity. By then Bagley was long since off the case, posted to Brussels, where he would spend five years as station chief before retiring from the Agency in 1972. Amazingly Nosenko never held his harsh treatment against the US, nor regretted his original decision to defect. Bagley, though, remained obsessed by the case, convinced until the end that Nosenko was a plant: "this KGB provocateur and deceiver," as he put it in his 2007 memoir Spy Wars, a powerful argument of the anti-Nosenko case. The book led the CIA to cancel a planned lecture that Bagley was to give: four decades on, old wounds were still bleeding. Nosenko himself died in 2008. A few years earlier, someone asked Bagley what he'd say to Yuri Nosenko if he ever ran into him. His answer was, "Don't shoot."


--  MWT   

Why don’t you Just “deal with them”, instead of posting...... Twice...... that you are going to deal with them?