"The McCoy Intervention" from Tennent H. Bagley's 2014 PDF,
Spy Wars ...
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[Intro]
The history of Cold War espionage—KGB vs. CIA—remains incomplete, full of inaccuracies, and cries out for correction. It received a big infusion after 1991 by the opening of some files from both East and West, but that left the more biting questions unanswered—like those pertaining to still-unknown moles inside Western governments and intelligence services. Those undiscovered traitors still hover like ghosts over that history.
I saw and had a share in some doings of the first half of the Cold War. The facts and events of which I write here are all part of the public record and have been officially cleared for publication, like my own books
Spy Wars and
Spymaster. footnote1: Tennent H. Bagley ,
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and
Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).
But details are easily forgotten, so pulling some out from their present context and getting a glimpse of the ghosts lurking behind them may be useful. In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest. Most of the ghosts I stir up here still hover undetected because back in the second half of the 1960s the CIA changed its mind and decided that the deeply-suspected KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had, after all, genuinely defected and had been telling CIA the truth.
footnote 2: Throughout this article I treat Yuri Nosenko as a sent KGB plant, deceiving the Americans. The CIA's official position since 1968 has been the opposite. For some insight into the debate, see the Appendix.
That change of mind began in 1967, five years after Nosenko first appeared to the CIA. By then the CIA's Soviet Bloc (SB) Division had concluded, on the basis of years of debriefing, interrogation, investigation, observation, and analysis, that the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence) sent Nosenko to CIA with the aim (among others) of diverting leads to its spies in the West that CIA had been given a few months earlier by the genuine KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The SB Division summarized its reasons in a 439-page report, one copy of which they apparently mounted in a “notebook.” But then the tide shifted. A reports-and-requirements (R&R) officer of the Division, alerted to the notebook's existence by a colleague,...
footnote 3: The colleague was Richard Kovich, who though not involved in the (closely-held) handling of Nosenko, had been subtly seeking for a year or more to learn—and had evidently found out—the dire assessment of Nosenko's bona fides and his situation.
... got hold of it and, without checking with his Division superiors, drafted a forty-page paper and three memoranda for higher Agency supervisors, pleading that his Division's position on Nosenko as set out in the notebook was wrong, mindless, and indefensible. He urged that it be reconsidered “by a new team of CIA officers.” This evidently launched the Agency's re-review of the case, with new interviews of Nosenko by others, culminating in a 1968 report by security officer Bruce Solie that exonerated Nosenko and led to his acceptance as an advisor to the Agency's anti-Soviet operations.
footnote 4: Tennent H. Bagley,
Spy Wars, pp. 197–220.
THE MCCOY INTERVENTIONThe Soviet Bloc Division "Reports and Requirements" officer who started the process, Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new CI Staff chief, previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides ...
footnote 5: See, for example,
Spy Wars pp. 218–219 and its Appendix A with its endnote 3. Also, Leonard McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” CIRA Newletter, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1983.
... and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the CI Staff's existing file material that (independent of SB Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith.
footnote 6: As testified by CI Staff operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler in a handwritten memorandum which is in the files of T. H. Bagley.
Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act “with no objection from CIA.” McCoy opened, as we can now see, with his own finding and with a plea: “After examining the evidence of Nosenko's bona fides in the notebook,” he wrote, “I am convinced that Nosenko is a bona fide defector. I believe that the case against him has arisen and persisted because the facts have been misconstrued, ignored, or interpreted without sufficient consideration of his psychological failings.” The evidence, he said, is that Nosenko is “not a plant and not fabricating anything at all, except what is required by his disturbed personality.” He recommended “that we appoint a new judge and jury for the Nosenko case consisting of persons not involved in the case so far” and proposed six candidates. According to McCoy, it was not only Nosenko's psychology that should determine his bona fides, but also his reporting. “The ultimate conclusions must be based on his production,” McCoy asserted, specifically claiming to be the only person qualified to evaluate that production. Certain of Nosenko's reports were important and fresh, he stated, and could not be considered KGB “throwaway” or deception, as the notebook described them. In reality, however, the value of Nosenko's intelligence reports had not been a major factor in the Division's finding. It had judged him a KGB plant on the basis of the circumstances of the case (of the sort listed in the “40 Questions” of the Appendix). McCoy did not explain—or even mention—a single one of these circumstances in his paper, so his arguments were irrelevant to the matter he pretended to deal with. His was not a professional assessment of a complex counterintelligence situation but, instead, an emotional plea. He referred with scorn to his superiors' “insidious conclusions” and “genuine paranoia” and called their analysis “very strange, to say the least.” The case against Nosenko, he wrote, was based on (unnamed) “assumptions, subjective observations, unsupported suspicions, innuendo, insinuations [… and] relatively trivial contradictions in his reporting.” Nosenko's failure to pass the lie detector test, McCoy asserted, “rules out Nosenko immediately” as a plant—because the KGB would have trained him to beat it. He dismissed (unspecified) findings as “trivial, antique, or repetitive” and cited one which “borders on fantasy. … In fact, it is fantastic!” (sic—with exclamation point). “I cannot find a shred of solid evidence against Nosenko,” he wrote, “The case would be thrown out of court for lack of evidence.” Closing his paper he asked, “What kind of proof do we need of his innocence, when we call him guilty with none?” McCoy used as argument his speculation about what the KGB would or would not do. His paper was studded with untruths, distortions, and unsupported assertions like those cited above—all designed to discredit any doubts or doubters of Nosenko's bona fides. For instance, he judged the defector Pyotr Deryabin, a former KGB Major of more than ten years' experience, to be “not experienced.” When Deryabin decided that Nosenko was a KGB plant, wrote McCoy, he was making a “snap judgment … after having been briefed on the mere facts of the case.” In reality, Deryabin had spent years reviewing and commenting upon the full record of this and related cases, listening to tapes (and correcting the transcripts) of every meeting with and debriefing of Nosenko—and had then personally questioned Nosenko in twelve long sessions. McCoy told the demonstrable untruth that Nosenko “damaged the Soviet intelligence effort more than all the other KGB defectors combined” and that “no Soviet defector has identified as many Soviet agents.” Had Nosenko not uncovered William Vassall as a spy, McCoy wrote, certain secret British documents (shown by Golitsyn to be in KGB hands) “could have been assumed to come from the Lonsdale-Cohen-Houghton net”—though they could not conceivably have been. He said that Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson “would still be operating against us” had Nosenko not uncovered him—though by then, in fact, Johnson had already lost his post and his wife was publicly denouncing him as a Soviet spy. McCoy asserted that it was Nosenko who identified Kovshuk's photo whereas Golitsyn had made the identification. He confused two separate KGB American recruits, following Nosenko's line and successfully hiding the active, valid one. And he made uncounted other equally unfounded assertions. But by then the Nosenko case—the CIA's holding of a suspected KGB plant—had become a thorn in the side of the Agency leadership, an “incubus” and “bone in the throat,” as Director Richard Helms put it. So the CIA happily accepted McCoy's authority and as a result many KGB moles were never identified. Let's have a look at some of these ghosts.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362...
-- MWT
