Several months ago, Morley posted on his website,
JFK Facts --
"A reader (me, Thomas Graves) asks:
Do you still believe Nosenko was a true defector, Jeff?
Have you read Tennent H. Bagley’s “Spy Wars,” or even his 35-page PDF 'Ghosts of the Spy Wars'?"
...
Morley's reply:Yes, I did read Bagley’s Spy Wars. I also interviewed him. And yes, I do believe Nosenko was a true defector.
I think Bagley was wrong, for two reasons: lack of a plausible suspect and lack of damage to CIA operations.
Remember Angleton’s theory that Nosenko was a dispatched defector is inextricably bound up in the theory that Nosenko was dispatched to protect a mole already working inside the CIA as of January 1964. So the reader’s question is really two, was Nosenko a mole? And, if so, who was he protecting?
As I asked in THE GHOST, if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?
Those who argue that Nosenko was a controlled defector need to answer these two questions. I was especially convinced by George Kisevalter, the most experienced CIA officer handling Russian defectors. Kisevalter always vouched for Nosenko’s bonafides.
From THE GHOST --
“(George) Kisevalter’s opinion was not idiosyncratic. In 1997, he received the agency’s Trailblazer Award recognizing him as one of fifty top CIA officers in its first fifty years, an honor Angleton did not receive. There was never any doubt in Kisevalter’s mind about the bona fides of Yuri Nosenko. Three subsequent reviews by senior CIA officers reached the same conclusion. So did Cleveland Cram, the former London station chief who wrote the definitive study of Angleton’s operations.. So did Benjamin Fischer, a career officer who became the agency’s chief historian.
“The Great Mole Hunt or Great Mole Scare of the late 1960s turned the CIA inside out ruining careers and reputations in search for Soviet penetrations that may or may not have existed,” Fischer wrote.
The dissenters from the institutional consensus about the Mole Hunt were mostly officers who had served Angleton on the Counterintelligence Staff. The Angletonians, as they called themselves, were a dogged bunch. Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch–which is true. They also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the Mole Hunt–which it is not.
Angleton and his acolytes would speak many words in his defense and write more than a few books. They cited scores of statements by Yuri Nosenko that they said were not credible or misleading, and indeed, Nosenko had exaggerated and embellished as defectors often do. But if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?
The CIA has learned from hard experience what happened when the Soviets succeeded in their operations: agents were arrested and executed. But even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the opening of significant portions of KGB archives, the Angletonians could not identify any operations compromised by the putative mole [allegedly protected by Nosenko]. They could not even offer up the name of a single plausible candidate. After the passage of five decades, the likeliest explanation is that there wasn’t a mole.”
...
My reply (which I just now posted, but doubt he'll publish):1) Given all of the evidence provided by Bagley in his books
Spy Wars and
Spymaster, and in his PDF
Ghosts of the Spy Wars, why don’t you find Edward Ellis Smith (or an unknown person in the Soviet Russia Division
he helped KGB to recruit) “a plausible suspect” as Popov’s Mole?
Even the Russians said after the Cold War that he was the first CIA officer the KGB had ever recruited (in Moscow in 1956). For what it's worth, there were, according to Bagley, even
other never-uncovered moles in U.S. Intelligence, like, for example, the traitor (not Ames or Hanssen) who informed KGB that Dimitri Polyakov was telling CIA "more than he was supposed to" after he'd left the U.S. and was posted in Burma, India, and Moscow.
2) With help from uber-territorial and uber-vindictive J. Edgar Hoover, probable mole Richard Kovich, KGB triple-agent Aleksiy Kulak, and CIA “gullibles-or-worse” Leonard McCoy, John L. Hart, Bruce Solie, and Cleveland Cram, Nosenko managed to discredit true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and the leads he was giving CIA (until Bagley wrote “Spy Wars,” that is), and to wreak so much havoc in CIA as to render it impotent against the KGB and the GRU.
...
PS It's interesting to note that all of the "big time" KGB defectors George Kisevalter handled ended up being arrested by the KGB, "tried," and executed.
'''''
PPS Regarding Morley's book
The Ghost, please read my one-star review of it on Amazon, under my username "dumptrumputin".
PPPS "Benjamin Fischer, a career officer who became the agency’s chief historian." How about David Robarge, CIA's current official historian, Jeff?
PPPPS "Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch–which is true. They also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the Mole Hunt–which it was not."
I don't know about Hood, but Bagley (and Newton "Scotty" Miler, who ran his own investigation of Nosenko for SR/CI) said exactly the opposite in his 2007 book
Spy Wars, and his 2014 follow-up PDF
Ghosts of the Spy Wars, so where did you come up with
that piece of garbage, Jeff, you intellectually dishonest P.O.S., you?
-- MWT
