Large, affable, Russia-born George Kisevalter (who was called in to help adequate-Russian-speaking Tennent H. Bagley interview adequate-English-speaking Yuri Nosenko in Geneva in 1962) somehow had the reputation of being CIA's premier "agent handler" although both of his very important charges, Popov and Penkovsky, were arrested and executed.
Kisevalter disagreed with Bagley on everything Nosenko-related, and seems to have gone out of his way to make 150 "errors" in his transcriptions of the tape recordings of the six 1962 Nosenko interviews.
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As David Wise writes on page 20 of his book
Molehunt, "Kisevalter's prestige within the agency was so great that it probably saved him from becoming a suspect himself. His name, after all, began with K, he had a Slavic background, and he had served in Germany.
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Wise is, of course, referring to the agency's molehunt for "Sasha," about whom true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had given CIA the above-mentioned clues.
-- MWT
