This is some of what Tennent H. Bagley says about Yuri Loginov and Cherpanov in his book
Spy Wars:
On 4 November 1963— after Nosenko had told CIA about the power of KGB surveillance in Moscow and how that surveillance had discovered CIA’s contact with Pyotr Popov— another Moscow source chimed in to confirm the story.
A KGB retiree named
Aleksandr Cherepanov handed a newspaper-wrapped bundle of papers to an American visitor to his office at the book concern, International Book (Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga), asking him to pass it to the American Embassy. Opened there, it disgorged a stack of reports and drafts from inside the KGB.
The top American diplomats’ reaction was astonishment— and dismay. Fearing a KGB provocation, they decided that the papers were too hot to handle, so they ordered that they be turned over to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. CIA’s Moscow representative Paul Garbler tried unsuccessfully to prevent it but managed to have the documents photographed before they were taken away.
When the photos arrived in Langley, we recognized the handwritten and typed KGB drafts as having originated, about four years earlier, in the American Embassy section of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate— where our new source Nosenko, still in place in Moscow, had worked.
The Embassy’s pusillanimous and pointless act robbed American intelligence of a rare opportunity. These papers were outdated but their source had obviously been in the KGB and was willing to cooperate with us. Now, before we could even contact him, Cherepanov would have been identified and arrested.
Our examination of the documents, however, raised more questions than despair.
Until two years ago, when Golitsyn had told CIA of the organization and activities of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate— handling counterintelligence inside the USSR— the West had gleaned only fragmentary information about it from its victims, refugees, and informants, but had never had a source from inside. Now in rapid succession we had Nosenko and Krotkov (who duped Bruce Solie into believing Nosenko was a true defector) and Cherepanov. Krotkov had just reported on the same
French operation as had Nosenko. Cherepanov and Nosenko had worked in the same section, reported on the same time period, told about KGB observation of the same American officials, and volunteered information about the same KGB surveillance techniques.
And these “Cherepanov papers,” as we came to call them, told the same story of how the KGB caught Popov: a routine street surveillance in January 1959 had chanced to see George Winters posting a letter to Popov. In fact,
Popov was the focus of Cherepanov’s packet. No fewer than half its documents dealt with him, with his Moscow contact Russell Langelle, and with the letter mailer George Winters. They included 1) a summary of the KGB’s arrest of Popov and his use as a double agent against Langelle, 2) a
short handwritten note stating explicitly— in case the first document had not made the point clearly enough— that Popov had been caught by surveillance of Winters, and 3) a bundle of surveillance and operational reports on Winters, dating from the summer of 1959. These were the only raw surveillance reports among the Cherepanov papers and somehow— I thought strangely— they did not include the allegedly fatal January observation of his letter mailing. But they made the point: that Winters was routinely tailed. Nosenko on his return to Geneva told of the incident (as already mentioned). “Everyone was amazed when they saw the papers the Americans had turned over. We had no trouble finding out who had sent them. It was a guy who had worked under me in the American Department, Cherepanov. As they were closing in on him he got wind of the suspicions and ran away before they could arrest him. We launched a nationwide search for him. I was sent out on the search myself.’’
"How come you got involved?’’
"Someone near Gorky had reported seeing a person they thought might be Cherepanov. I could identify him because he had worked for me in the American Department, so Gribanov sent me there.”
"Look,” he said, taking a small sheet of paper from his pocket and laying it in front of us. “Here’s the authorization for my trip.” It was the original of an official KGB travel authorization for Lieutenant Colonel Nosenko’s travel to Gorky Oblast, signed by Second Chief Directorate chief Oleg Gribanov and duly marked with certifications of his arrivals in Gorky and Shakhuniye on 16 and 17 December 1963.
"I saw the guy. It wasn’t Cherepanov,” he said. "But he got caught later as he tried to get across a border in the south. They brought him back to Moscow.” 4
How had Nosenko managed to keep that travel authorization and bring it to Geneva to show to us? KGB procedures require an official traveler to turn in this authorization upon return before receiving his next paycheck and before he could be authorized for further travel. When we cited these procedures Nosenko confirmed that our information was correct— but could not explain how he still had it.
We knew Cherepanov, like Krotkov, as an earlier provocateur. Under diplomatic cover in Yugoslavia five years earlier, this KGB officer had led a British intelligence officer to think he was contemplating defection and might cooperate secretly. His behavior finally persuaded the British that he was provoking them on behalf of the KGB and they backed off—
whereupon Cherepanov abruptly disappeared from the scene. Nosenko told, straight-faced, an impossible story perhaps designed to explain away Cherepanov’s earlier provocative brush with Western intelligence (though we had not mentioned it to him). The KGB, he said, had detected an effort by Cherepanov to defect to the West from his KGB post in Belgrade. They recalled him to Moscow and, to punish his treasonous act and remove him from the temptations of the West, General Gribanov moved him out of foreign operations— into the Counterintelligence directorate, to work in Moscow against the top-priority American Embassy target.
Nosenko’s story was not only ludicrous but also demonstrably false. Those in Soviet enterprises, like International Book, who are allowed to deal with Westerners— as Cherepanov was— were not only fully trusted by the KGB but often KGB officers or reservists themselves.
Moreover, Nosenko could not have been supervising Cherepanov in the first place, because, as pointed out in the previous chapter, he had not held the American Embassy position that he claimed to have held.
Another source of ours chimed in. The KGB Illegal
Yuri Loginov had walked in to CIA in 1961 and had since been met in Western locations as he prepared for Illegal missions. Now he offered both an eyewitness account of the KGB’s search for Cherepanov and eyewitness evidence of the genuineness and importance of Nosenko’s defection.
A friend of Loginov’s father had a dacha next door to Cherepanov’s and in November saw KGB cars roaring up and men encircling and searching the dacha. Cherepanov, he learned, had hoarded KGB documents through the years and passed a sample to the American Embassy through a tourist, hoping to sell them all— but the Embassy had returned the papers to the Soviet government.
It was an extraordinary coincidence that CIA should get even one eyewitness confirmation of such a secret event, but it defied coincidence that we now had two. It seemed even more unlikely when Loginov, on another occasion, attributed the dacha observation not to his father’s friend, but to his own KGB radio trainer.
Loginov also told of the events of a day in February 1964 while he was undergoing radio training in Moscow for a mission abroad. His KGB trainers appeared disturbed, whispered among themselves, came and went excitedly, and finally suspended his training for several weeks. One of them confided that the whole KGB was in turmoil as the result of “a tremendously important defection” from its ranks. They did not mention any name (nor did Loginov to his CIA case officer afterward), but CIA could not fail to recognize that "tremendously important” defector as the only person who had defected at that moment—
Nosenko.
This tale made no sense. The KGB need not interrupt the training of an Illegal— outside the headquarters building and walled off even from other parts of the foreign directorate— because someone defected from an entirel separate directorate. Like Kulak’s bizarre exaggerations of Nosenko’s importance, Loginov’s story smelled of an effort to build up Nosenko in CIA eyes.
Indeed, suspicions had accumulated. For instance, Loginov blundered in Africa by telling his CIA case officer of a radio message he had received from Moscow— before it was actually transmitted. And the denouement of Loginov’s case left no doubt that the KGB had planted him on us.
He had originally come to the Americans saying he wanted to defect and live in the West, but CIA had ostensibly talked him into staying in place. Now he revealed his true colors. He was arrested by South African authorities and told his story, exposing KGB activities and personnel in Belgium and Africa, and won headlines in the Western press. Now, instead of defecting after this “treason” had become publicly known, he preferred to be spy-swapped back to Russia. Had the KGB not sent him out in the first place, his return would have been fatal— but as it happened, he went unpunished and in 2004 was still living and doing business in Moscow.
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/page/n3..
-- MWT
