The Fallacies of Howard J. Osborn and Richards J. Heuer, et al.

[Thomas Graves]

Gee, thanks Moondoggie.

"Moondoggie"?

Close ... but no cigar.

"Underdog"

Bastard son of  Bob "Bob Dog" Mahon, the 6' 3" 190-pound Juvenile Hall Probation Officer who was quick enough and strong enough to get (former) bad-ass San Diego cop Norm Veasman in a headlock and make him drop his gun on the old Bahia Bridge, in 1964.

... but not "Moondoggie".

Get it?

[Steve Logan]

"Moondoggie"?

Close ... but no cigar.

"Underdog"

Bastard son of  Bob "Bob Dog" Mahon, the 6' 3" 190-pound Juvenile Hall Probation Officer who was quick enough and strong enough to get (former) bad-ass San Diego cop Norm Veasman in a headlock and make him drop his gun on the old Bahia Bridge, in 1964.

... but not "Moondoggie".

Get it?

I know póg mo thóin (you should give that a try)

I know Poch ma hon (you can give that a go too)

Never heard of Bob "Bob Dog" Mahon.

Speaking of surfing , did you know the recently departed "King of The Surf Guitar" was born in my home town?

[Thomas Graves]

I know póg mo thóin (you should give that a try)

I know Poch ma hon (you can give that a go too)

Never heard of Bob "Bob Dog" Mahon.

Speaking of surfing , did you know the recently departed "King of The Surf Guitar" was born in my home town?

Of course you wouldn't.

Didn't mean to suggest that you would.

But, bearing in mind that if he were alive today he'd be 88 years old, the real old timers at Old Mission Beach Athletic Club, of which he was a founding member, know who I'm referring to.

You might find his long obit in The San Diego Union newspaper online. I don't know if it's still there.  And no, I'm not "of" the Czech Republic, but I was teaching English there when he died.

Dick Dale was from YOUR hometown?

Yeah, I'd heard rumours to that effect.

LOL

[Thomas Graves]

Note to self:  It obviously ain't gonna happen, ergo, the deafening sound of crickets ... "on the make" ... in the night.

--  MWT   


The context:

Last week A couple of months ago, Michael Clark posted a 1970s memo (see below) by spiteful and under-endowed Howard J. Osborn, former head of CIA's FBI-like Office of Security, in which he claimed that Yuri Nosenko, the "defector" who said in January 1964 that KGB had had nothing whatsoever to do with Oswald in the USSR, had greatly helped the CIA over the years.

At that time, I challenged Michael to post the name of anyone whom Nosenko had helped the CIA or FBI to "uncover" who: 1) wasn't already suspected, 2) was still actively working for the KGB/GRU, or 3) still had access to classified materials.  In other words, KGB or GRU spy who wasn't of the "throw away" variety for the Ruskies, you know, ... to help Nosenko build up his so-called "bona fides".

I'm still waiting for Michael's response.

Anyone care to help him?

Edit: I've already shot down Michael's John L. Hart-inspired profferings on the subject on my "Monster Plot" thread.

Anyone wanna try to help him?

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf


TOP SECRET

13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

 
Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security



-- MWT   

[Thomas Graves]

Dear Michael,

What a load of crap.  (EDIT: I'm referring to Howard J. Osborn's memo, here.)

To help clear up some of your confusion, here are the first ten pages or so of a must-read 35-page PDF.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

GHOSTS OF THE SPY WARS

By Tennent H. Bagley (2014)

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.

1 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.

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 Division had concluded, on the basis of years of debriefing, interrogation, investigation, observation, and analysis, that the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence; today's FSB) 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 (true) defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The Soviet Block 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 Soviet Block Division, alerted to the notebook's existence by a colleague ...

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.

4 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, pp. 197–220.

THE LEONARD MCCOY INTERVENTION

The Soviet Block (SB) Division's "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 ...

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.

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 [true] 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 ...

1. How Did They Know That?

The affair called “Tophat” may be the most complex and least understood of all the spy episodes of the Cold War. CIA insiders have called it their greatest spying success against the Soviet Union—which it may have been—but unbeknownst to them, the KGB's hand had lain behind it. An extraordinary twist had transformed it from a KGB provocation to a CIA triumph. The Soviet unit that launched the operation—the KGB's internal-security directorate (Second Chief Directorate) kept it so secret that they allowed only two people in the KGB's entire foreign intelligence directorate (First Chief Directorate) to know even of its existence. As a result, even today, a quarter-century after the Cold War and a half-century after it began, the story remains only partly known—East or West—and no one can answer with authority all the questions it left hanging.

Among the unknowns lurks a KGB mole inside the CIA.

The first breach in the wall of security surrounding this case came long after the end of the Cold War, from one of those two KGB foreign-directorate higher-ups who knew. 7 I base my account of the affair on the most recent revelations from inside both CIA and KGB. The American details were recounted by the responsible CIA desk officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book Circle of Treason (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), pp. 26–54. The Soviet side was revealed to me by KGB Lieutenant General Sergey A. Kondrashev and reported in my book Spymaster: Startling Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief, pp. 213–222.
 [Google Scholar]

Thanks to him we can now see that the “Tophat” story really began long before Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) Colonel Dmitry Polyakov contacted American Intelligence, not then in late 1961 but almost five years earlier, at that shocking moment in 1957 when the KGB learned (from a mole inside CIA—see #3 below) that a traitor was stripping the country's military secrets. So damaging was this leak, so widespread its political and strategic implications, that the investigation was taken over by the chief of Soviet counterintelligence himself, KGB General Oleg Gribanov, “the Soviet J. Edgar Hoover.”

In mid-November 1958 he had GRU Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr S. Popov recalled on a ruse from his post in East Berlin, [secretly] arrested, and interrogated.

Popov confessed. For six years he had been passing to the CIA secrets of Soviet weapons developments and tactics for atomic warfare. In addition, he had opened up his own service to the CIA: the GRU's procedures, some of its spies abroad, and hundreds of its officers. The GRU chief, General Mikhail A. Shalin, was fired, and in early December, the KGB chief Ivan Serov himself moved over to replace him and straighten things out.

But to Oleg Gribanov this shattering of the GRU looked more like opportunity than disaster.

Long experience had taught his organization that in counterintelligence work, “he who takes the initiative, all other things being equal, achieves the best results.” 8 Istoriya Sovetskikh Organov Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; Uchebnik [Hereafter: The History of Soviet Organs of State Security; A Textbook] (Moscow: KGB Higher School, 1977), classified TOP SECRET. Page references are to an English translation.

Not to wait passively to detect spies but to go out aggressively to find them (or make them). Working on this principle, the KGB had formed, taken over, and manipulated organizations of resistance to their own regime. They had used these fraudulent structures to expose and mislead their opponents inside the country and abroad; to maneuver hostile intelligence services onto false paths, and to get into contact with their personnel with the aim of compromising them and recruited them as moles. So successful had they been that some of these operations like “Trust” and “Sindikat-2” of the 1920s became celebrated in Soviet history, novels, and films, and this “aggressive counterintelligence” [nastupatelnost'] became the KGB's “guiding principle.” 9 So defined in the KGB's own in-house secret dictionary, brought out by Vasily Mitrokhin and published in English as KGB Lexicon (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 261.

By the 1970s the KGB had “mastered complex undercover agent-operational schemes” and infiltrated Western intelligence services by “presenting our [Soviet] trusted agents for their recruitment, … conducting operational games using methods similar to those used in the 1920s and 1930s, [and …] recruiting staff personnel of American Intelligence.” KGB people “are obliged to carefully study this postwar experience.” 10 The History of Soviet State Security Organs; A Textbook. These quotes are from Chapter 10, parts 3 and 4 and conclusions.

Gribanov was inspired by all that. Looking over the debris of Popov's betrayal he saw that this fund of GRU secrets—now exposed and no longer truly secret—offered a weapon he could turn back against American Intelligence. He code-named the Popov affair “Boomerang."

To wield this weapon Gribanov created a new “14th Department” within his internal-counterintelligence directorate and gave it the mission of “mounting complicated counterintelligence operations and operational games to penetrate foreign intelligence services.”  11 As defined by the KGB itself, per the Internet:
www.soldat. ru

He would direct it personally, but installed as its chief his principal assistant during their investigation and interrogation of Popov, Colonel Valentin Zvezdenkov.

Together they set out to hand the CIA yet another high GRU officer, but this time their own. He would re-use Popov's information (and a bit more) to win the CIA's trust and in the best tradition of nastupatelnost' would expose it, lead it astray, and draw its officers into compromising situations.

Here some intelligence professionals say “Stop!” Hand the enemy a spy from inside your own ranks? Unthinkable! No intelligence service would take such a risk. So firmly did the CIA leaders believe this that in the 1970s and 1980s they even adopted it as a rule of thumb to judge the bona fides of Soviet walk-ins: if one was a Soviet intelligence officer, he was ipso facto a genuine defector. 12 Milton Bearden, former head of CIA's Soviet Division (citing his predecessor Burton Gerber) and his co-author James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (London: Century, 2003), pp. 20–23.

That false faith burns brightly in America to this day. As recently as 2013 an FBI “counterintelligence expert” stated flatly, “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector.” 13 David Major, cited by David Wise in “When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on its Staff,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2013.

The truth was—and is—quite different. Gribanov's new 14th Department (and other KGB components) did it time and again, from within both the GRU and KGB. General Sergey Kondrashev spoke after the Cold War of “repeated” proposals for such operations in his own First Chief Directorate disinformation unit. He himself had been invited to shift over to the Second Chief Directorate to help Gribanov run the Nosenko provocation. Another KGB veteran even thought that “most” of the CIA spies inside the KGB who were betrayed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames in 1985 were in fact loyal staffers pretending to help the CIA. 14 Aleksandr Kouzminov , Biological Espionage: Special Operations in the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), p. 59.
 

The Mysterious Polyakov

For this particular enterprise Gribanov and Zvezdenkov chose GRU Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Polyakov. 15 They picked him, said Kondrashev, at least partly because Polyakov had already had “a certain contact.” That might have been his contact with Popov when escorting a GRU Illegal operative named Margarita Tairova from Moscow to Berlin for Popov to dispatch onward to New York. At the time Popov expressed unease because he had never known Polyakov in illegal-support work. Another such pertinent contact would be Polyakov's contact with GRU Illegal Kaarlo Tuomi who came under FBI control but turned back later to Soviet control. (See my Spy Wars, pp. 171–172, and Spymaster, pp. 196, 216, and 291n7.)
 
As a first step they dispatched him in October 1959 to New York, where he had already served in the past, as a military functionary in the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. The operation was not truly launched until two years later, however, because Polyakov had first to establish himself in his cover position, and then because Gribanov delayed the operation while dealing with an unexpected complication. Having discovered a new, real traitor within the GRU, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, Gribanov had to weigh the effects on his planned operation. So not until the fall of 1961, after safely “cornering [Penkovsky] like a bear in its den,” 16 As expressed by the Soviet Prosecutor at a press conference at the time of Penkovsky's trial in May 1963. did Gribanov feel ready to launch the operation.

Polyakov asked an American military officer to put him in touch with the CIA.

The FBI made the contact, it being their jurisdiction, and for several months they met him secretly in New York (code-naming him “Tophat”). Enthusiastic at the time about what Polyakov was revealing, fifteen years later the FBI looked back and wondered whether Polyakov had been deceiving them during those months. He had wasted their time on useless trails, and nothing he had told them had importantly damaged the Soviet Union beyond what Popov had earlier reported.

After a few months in New York, Polyakov returned to Russia in the fall of 1962 and was not heard from until years later, when he told via a Moscow dead drop, that he would soon come out again. He did, in 1966, as Soviet military attaché and GRU chief in Rangoon, Burma. Because operations abroad are the CIA's jurisdiction, the FBI soon turned over contact to the Agency, which continued to meet Polyakov in Burma from then until his tour of duty expired in 1969.

In his early meetings with Polyakov, CIA case officer Jim F. had the strong impression that he was dealing with a KGB plant, but after a time he noted such dramatic improvement in the reporting that he became convinced that Polyakov was genuinely cooperating. 17 As Jim F. told a close colleague on the operation, who told me in 1970.

For years thereafter, Polyakov continued direct and indirect contacts with the CIA, turning over priceless military and intelligence secrets first in Rangoon, then in Moscow, and then in two separate tours of duty in New Delhi where he enjoyed the rank of one-star general, making him the highest-ranked secret source that CIA ever had in Soviet Russia.

But then, in May 1980, the operation came to an abrupt end. On the pretext of a supposed meeting of military attachés, Polyakov was recalled to Moscow and never heard from again.

Ten years later, in 1990, out of the blue, the Soviets announced that they had arrested Polyakov ...

... tried him in secret for being a CIA spy, and executed him. Their publicity chose to date the arrest as 1986, the trial and execution as March 1988.

It took another dozen years to begin explaining these oddities: the secret trial, so unlike Penkovsky's; the lack of even a fuzzy explanation of how the KGB had caught Polyakov; the inexplicable dates; and unusual publicity. The only KGB foreign-operations officer who had known of the SCD's operation, General Sergey Kondrashev (the KGB deputy for disinformation mentioned above), years later revealed to me that Gribanov had sent Polyakov out in the first place. 18 The circumstances of Kondrashev's revelation are described in Tennent H. Bagley, Spymaster, pp. 213–216.


“But they executed Polyakov!” I said. “Why would the KGB execute a man whom they themselves had sent out to commit this treason?”
“Because they found out he was giving you more than he was supposed to.”
“Found out? How?”
“Through some source inside American Intelligence.”

Kondrachev would say no more. But the question hung there: Who could have known exactly how much Polyakov was reporting to CIA?


It had to be someone inside CIA's Soviet operations staff. And someone still undiscovered. Two Americans who knew something of the Polyakov case were later discovered to have been traitors, but neither of them could be the answer. Robert Hanssen of the FBI had told the Soviets in 1979 about Polyakov's 1962 "cooperation" in New York, but of course he knew nothing of what Polyakov later reported to the CIA. And even in the unlikely event that CIA traitor Aldrich Ames had learned the full details of Polyakov's reporting, Ames did not begin betraying until 1985, five years after the KGB had recalled Polyakov on a ruse and terminated the operation.

Not one of the later-discovered CIA traitors could even remotely have been aware of these details. In fact, only a handful of specially-placed CIA operatives even knew that the Agency had a relationship with Polyakov, much less what Polyakov was reporting. In each report that the CIA passed to military and other government agencies it disguised the source and attributed reports on different subjects to different sources.

The whole gamut of Polyakov's reporting could have been known only to his CIA handlers and those dealing with his raw reports.


So the question remains unanswered: Who told the KGB what Polyakov was telling the CIA?

.....

The read the remaining twenty pages or so, click on this:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362


-- MWT   

Boy-oh-boy, that Tennent H. Bagley really knew what he was talking about!

Are there any open-minded, willing to learn "guests" who haven read his 35-page PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, yet?

It is very highly recommended by Mudd Wrasser Tommy, you know ...

--  MWT