The guy my nemesis seems to be fixated on at the moment (he's recently posted on multiple threads the dude's long and discredited report) is Bruce L. Solie, the jerk in CIA's FBI-like Office of Security who was bamboozled by a KGB triple-agent (Igor Kovhnov) and a false-defector (Yuri Nosenko), who lost a true-defector (Nikolas Artamonov aka"Nicholas Shadrin") to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in the so-called "Kittyhawk Affair," and who coached his boy, false-defector Yuri Nosenko, through his final polygraph exams.
Emma Best mentions Solie several times in the following (poorly written and therefore confusing) article.
The guy my nemesis seems to be fixated on at the moment (he's recently posted the same long and discredited document written by the dude on multiple threads) is Bruce L. Solie, the dude in CIA's FBI-like Office of Security who was bamboozled by a KGB triple-agent (Igor Kovhnov) and a false-defector (Yuri Nosenko), who lost a true-defector (Nikolas Artamonov aka"Nicholas Shadrin") to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in the so-called "Kittyhawk Affair," and who coached his boy, false-defector Yuri Nosenko, through his final polygraph exams.
Emma Best mentions Solie several times in the following (poorly written and therefore confusing) article.
Here's the first part, slightly edited by me:
[In 1968,] eleven years before the House Select Committee on Assassinations declared they were “certain Yuri Nosenko lied about Lee Harvey Oswald - whether it was to the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency in 1964, or to the committee in 1978, or perhaps to both," the CIA's internal security report [written by Bruce L. Solie] abandoned logic to conclude that the Soviet defector was a trustworthy individual who hadn’t been sent over by the KGB.
In light of what’s known today, each of the criteria [Solie] used to declare Nosenko a bona fide defector now point to the opposite conclusion. The case for Nosenko's being a double-agent is so strong that his former CIA handler [Tennent H. Bagley] wrote a book [Spy Wars] whose conclusions were later confirmed by a former KGB Chief [Sergei Kondrashev, in Bagley's book Spymaster].
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/10/cia-nosenko-logic/
Cheers!
-- MWT 
Here's the first part, slightly edited by me:
[In 1968,] eleven years before the House Select Committee on Assassinations declared they were “certain Yuri Nosenko lied about Lee Harvey Oswald - whether it was to the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency in 1964, or to the committee in 1978, or perhaps to both," the CIA's internal security report [written by Bruce L. Solie] abandoned logic to conclude that the Soviet defector was a trustworthy individual who hadn’t been sent over by the KGB.
In light of what’s known today, each of the criteria [Solie] used to declare Nosenko a bona fide defector now point to the opposite conclusion. The case for Nosenko's being a double-agent is so strong that his former CIA handler [Tennent H. Bagley] wrote a book [Spy Wars] whose conclusions were later confirmed by a former KGB Chief [Sergei Kondrashev, in Bagley's book Spymaster].
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/10/cia-nosenko-logic/
Cheers!
-- MWT
The following well-written chapter from Tennent H. Bagley's
Spy Wars is much easier to understand than Emma Best's full article, above, and it gives the open-minded reader a good idea of what a gullible jerk
Bruce L. Solie was.
Head in the Sand In June 1966 the earth began to move under
the Nosenko case. The resultant tsunami swept away all the doubts and cleared Nosenko’s path to acceptance and success in America— for the KGB. The first tremor came one Sunday morning with the ring of a telephone at
Richard Helms’s house. The caller, in accented English, identified himself as a KGB officer on an operational mission in Washington and anxious to take up contact with CIA. Helms agreed that CIA would meet the caller at his designated place and time. Helms was then in the process of taking over as director of Central Intelligence. He called for an urgent meeting with Clandestine Services chief
Desmond Fitzgerald and Counterintelligence Staff chief
James Angleton. They assembled that afternoon.
Their first decision was easy— to inform the FBI, responsible for operations inside the United States— but not the second. The caller had asked for CIA and was based in Moscow, so the Agency should participate. Who then? Wary of recent indications that the KGB might have a mole inside our Soviet Bloc Division, they decided to assign CIA’s handling of the case to others. It did not matter, apparently, that only in the SB lay the experience and knowledge needed to assess and draw the maximum from a source at this level. Operational security would take precedence.(fn 1) Instead, they called on a security officer—
Bruce Solie, who had been following up clues to hostile penetration of the Agency staff. This was a strange, and in the event fateful, choice.
Solie had only a shallow knowledge of the Soviet scene, knew little about the KGB, and possessed no experience in handling foreign agents. Perhaps they comforted themselves with the thought that
Solie would be guided by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and accompanied by the FBI’s man.
The FBI assigned an experienced operative,
Elbert (“Bert”) Turner, and together he and
Solie made the scheduled meeting. No details of the operation that ensued, code-named "Kitty Hawk,” have been officially revealed to this day. Its outlines eventually became public knowledge, and I learned more
from KGB veterans after the Cold War.
The KGB visitor identified himself as
Igor Kochnov of the foreign counterintelligence component of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence; today's SVR). He could expect eventual promotion to head that department’s work against Americans, he said, if he were to succeed in at least one of his missions in Washington. The first of these was to recruit for the KGB a Soviet navy defector named
Nikolay Artamonov, who was living in Washington under the name of
Nicholas Shadrin.(fn 2) In return for CIA’s help in achieving his goal, Kochnov was willing to act as its agent inside the KGB staff.
Almost as exciting to the Americans was Kochnov’s other mission in Washington: he had been sent to locate the KGB defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko, presumably so they could eventually be lured back or assassinated. Wonderful news for CIA! Since the KGB evidently regarded Nosenko as it did Golitsyn, there’s an end to the doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides!
So juicy were Kochnov’s future prospects that the Americans decided to play along and get Artamonov to pretend to cooperate with the KGB. Artamonov loyally accepted the role of double agent despite the danger and despite the unpleasant condition that he take a lower-level job with U.S. Naval Intelligence, to remove him (and the KGB) from access to the sensitive information he had been working with.
Thus began a double agent operation with Artamonov that was to last nearly nine years and bring little profit to the Americans— and death to Artamonov.(fn 3)
From the outset, members of the Counterintelligence Staff looked with a skeptical eye on Kochnov. Why would the KGB send a traveler from Moscow to do jobs for which the KGB’s Washington rezidentura was better qualified and equipped? They sensed that the KGB had sent Kochnov to CIA in order to hide a KGB penetration of American Intelligence, to convince CIA of Nosenko's genuineness, and perhaps to find out why Nosenko (note: who had been "incarcerated" by CIA in early 1964) had dropped off the KGB radar screen.
But this skeptical view was not held by all. The participants came to this case with varying views and objectives. The Counterintelligence Staff treated it as a KGB provocation and sought to use it to test whether and where the KGB may have penetrated the ranks of CIA’s Soviet operations. To this end they designed questions to be put to Kochnov to provoke revealing answers or actions.
On the other hand the FBI case officer Turner and CIA’s Solie firmly believed that Kochnov was genuine. Believing in Kochnov’s message, Solie became unshakably convinced that Nosenko was a genuine defector— and did not even pose the questions the Counterintelligence Staff had concocted. CIA was soon left with little reason to believe in Kochnov. His golden promise of promotion to the top of KGB American operations proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp. After recruiting Artamonov he turned over the contact to a Washington KGB man and went back to Moscow— and was never met again. (According to one report, he was spotted once or twice in Moscow.) But CIA and FBI continued the double agent case hoping that it might eventually offer a way to restore contact with Kochnov and hoping that the KGB would, as the Washington KGB handler had told Artamonov, turn Artamonov over to handling by a KGB Illegal.
The KGB later claimed it never discovered Kochnov’s “treason” until his case was exposed in American publications in 1978, around which time he coincidentally died of a heart attack. However, after the Cold War
KGB veterans gave me reason to believe that the KGB had indeed dispatched Kochnov to contact CIA and that the game was connected with penetration of Western intelligence services. It is a deep and complex story waiting to be told.
The Counterintelligence Staff, concerned for Artamonov’s safety, recommended in writing that he never be allowed to meet the KGB outside the United States. But the KGB’s lures proved too strong for
Solie and Turner. They permitted Artamonov to meet the KGB in Canada, and then even in Vienna, infamous as the site of kidnappings and close to Soviet-controlled territory. Again in Vienna in December 1975, Artamonov went off to a scheduled meeting with the KGB and never returned. KGB foreign counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin later reported that he saw Artamonov die as he was carried into Czechoslovakia, accidentally overdosed with sedatives during the kidnapping.(fn 4)
A signal success of the KGB’s operation with Kochnov— in addition to eliminating the defector Artamonov— was
the restoration of Yuri Nosenko’s fortunes in the West. Although I knew none of this at the time, I sensed in the second half of 1 966 the CIA leadership’s growing skepticism, not just impatience, concerning our case against Nosenko. It was evident that some unknown factor was influencing them. This became clearer at the end of that year when they ordered a fresh review of the case— not so much to get new insights as to find ways to rationalize the doubts and to whitewash Nosenko to prepare his release.
Deputy Director Rufus Taylor called in
Gordon Stewart, a CIA veteran and old friend of Helms, to take a fresh, detached look at this forbidding can of worms. Stewart enjoyed a reputation for integrity and had the added quality of knowing nothing of the Nosenko case and little about KGB deception.
To simplify Stewart’s review I organized the essential file materials (including my “1000-page” hie summary) with an explanatory table of contents, and turned them over to Stewart in early 1967. This was my parting shot, for I was already preparing my assignment abroad (note: as Chief of Station in Brussels).
After my departure the Soviet Block— without telling me— condensed this huge file summary into some 440 pages, lumping together many separate points of doubt into broad categories, each category to support a “conclusion.” In effect, they transformed justifable points of doubt into debatable (and unnecessary) conclusions, making a case against Nosenko. He did not have the naval service he claimed, it said, adding that he did not join the KGB when or how he said, did not serve in the KGB’s American Embassy Section, and had not been deputy chief of its Tourist Department.
Stewart thus found himself faced with a mass of material loaded with indications of Nosenko’s bad faith and lacking any innocent explanation. To his professorial eye, these papers looked “unscholarly” (as he said to associates) and “more like a prosecutor’s brief.” Indeed, a hie summary is not an academic dissertation, and the Soviet Block's report’s conclusions were unproven. So he called for a critique of the Soviet Block report. In mid-1967
Helms selected for this task the same
Bruce Solie who had learned from Kochnov, the KGB volunteer, that Nosenko was a genuine defector.
Solie submitted eighteen pages of critique of the 440-page Soviet Block report and of the previous handling of Nosenko. He recommended a new and “untainted” questioning in a friendlier, less confrontational, and “more objective” atmosphere. So Helms and Taylor picked him to do the job himself.
Solie was a taciturn, cigar-smoking man whose lean features gave him an air of the American farmlands. He had sat in on some of our interrogations of Nosenko prior to Kochnov’s advent, not contributing but maintaining a generally approving if reserved demeanor. Now, with Nosenko ’s earlier interrogators removed from the scene and being himself
convinced by Kochnov of Nosenko ’s genuineness,
Solie set out to prove that we had been wrong.
Behind Solie’s effort lay the hopes of CIA leaders that he would find ways to believe in Nosenko and rid the Agency of what Director Richard Helms later called this “incubus,” this “bone in the throat.” They picked the right man -- Solie delivered the goods. Starting in late 1967, sometimes accompanied by FBI Special Agent Turner,
Solie talked in a friendly manner for nine months with Nosenko and together they worked out ways things might— somehow— be made to look plausible.
One who read the transcripts of these interviews described to me the way they were conducted:
Solie: “Wouldn’t you put it this way, Yuri?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
On another sticking point, Solie: “But you really meant to say it differently, didn’t you?”
Nosenko: "Sure.”
Solie: “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, for example, that . . . ?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
Solie submitted his report on
1 October 1968. That whitewash had been the purpose from the outset was revealed by the speed with which the CIA leadership adopted its conclusions. They could not have studied it and had perhaps not even read it before, three days later, Deputy Director Taylor informed Director Helms that "I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona hdes. Most particularly I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsyn has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector."(fn 6)
So well had Solie done the job that CIA gave him a medal for his travails. One can only concur in their assessment of him as a “true hero .” (fn 7) The task he performed was truly Herculean and required tricks as cunning as those of Hercules himself. Solie seems to have hidden from Taylor facts that flatly contradicted the deputy director’sconclusions. In reality there were significant “conflicts” between what Nosenko reported and “the information and opinions Golitsyn . . . provided.” And an "other defector,” Peter Deriabin, had cast an indelible stain of doubt on Nosenko’s bona fides.
Deriabin was outraged by Taylor’s statement. A question inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows of the accumulated doubts described in previous chapters. How, in the face of all that, could CIA have ever believed in Nosenko?
The answer must lie partly in the human psyche— our incurable penchant to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t. (I discuss that general problem in Appendix C.)
So desperately did CIA’s leaders desire to be rid of the ugly implications that underlay the Nosenko affair—
KGB penetration of CIA and perhaps breaking of American ciphers— that they embraced a shaky, corrupt, and unsubstantial report— offered by an ill-qualified investigator— that fed that desire. Solie’s report would deserve attention if for no other reason than to illustrate the power of desire over reason. But it is no mere curiosity;
the Solie report led to CIA’s final conclusion on the Nosenko case.
It was crucial; its impact was permanent. Only through this corrupt gateway would future CIA officers gain access to the Nosenko case. It was declassified to make its wisdom accessible to trainees in counterintelligence. This is all that later CIA officers came to know, which is why they repeat its nonsense as fact in their memoirs today.
So it merits attention.Solie began by adopting the (dubious) position that all he needed to do to prove Nosenko’s innocence was to discredit the general conclusions of the (note: 440-page) Soviet Block report. Then he carefully selected the questions he would deal with, sidestepped some major anomalies as if they had never existed, and falsely assured his readers,
in the passive voice, that "all areas of major significance have been examined .”(fn
Despite its bulk, Solie’s report (note: 278 pages) presented no significant new information, though he and Nosenko had adjusted some details. It amounted essentially to a fresh interpretation of selected parts of the old data— an interpretation based on credulity rather than skepticism. Inevitably, the way Solie chose to explain one contradiction would conflict with the way he would explain a different one, but he did not call attention to this. And if he could not find any way to explain an oddity, he would fall back on this comforting thought:
if the KGB had dispatched Nosenko, they would have surely prepared him better— ipso facto, the KGB had not dispatched him.
Among the “areas of major significance”— all of which Solie claimed to have examined— was how Nosenko’s reporting touched on the case of
Oleg Penkovsky. In this one case, aside from all the others,
Nosenko had twice exposed the KGB’s blundering hand on him— first in erring by a whole significant year about Abidian’s visit to Penkovsky ’s dead drop, and second by mentioning (and later forgetting) “Zepp.” How did Solie manage these hurdles? He simply ran around Zepp— didn’t mention it at all. He struggled
desperately to explain the dead drop visit and Nosenko’s failure to mention it in 1962, exposing the absurd quality of this whole whitewash: • Solie accepted as "not implausible” Nosenko’s preposterous suggestion (to Solie, never to us earlier) that he had failed to tell us in 1962 because “the stakeout had long been dropped”— so long that he had forgotten all about it. But only a couple of paragraphs earlier Solie had recognized that Abidian’s visit actually occurred only at the end of 1961. Thus Nosenko’s stakeout, by his own account, would have been
still active when he departed for Geneva in March 1962 and would be fresh in his mind when, in June, he told us about Abidian and Moscow surveillance.
• Or maybe, Solie and Nosenko agreed, Nosenko had somehow got confused and only imagined that he had been getting stakeout reports.
• Perhaps, instead, he had only “been advised” of the stakeout by other KGB officers. And maybe only after he had met CIA in 1962— perhaps at the time of the Penkovsky publicity. (How then could Nosenko have failed to relate the drop to Penkovsky when he told of it?)
• Or possibly Nosenko “consciously exaggerated his involvement with the visit and its aftermath.” (How then did he know the details?)
• Or maybe “the evident distortions arose from honest confusion”— without explaining how.
• Anyway, Nosenko’s errors and contradictions prove that he is genuine. "If dispatched, Nosenko presumably would have had the date right.”
• Then Solie had one wonderful, final argument: it wasn’t Nosenko’s fault, but the fault of his CIA interrogators who had “confused matters to the point where complete clarification appears impossible .”(fn 9) In pushing out such nonsense, Solie must have assumed that his readers would not know that Nosenko had given, and repeated in detail, his stories of Abidian, of the drop, and of the stakeout long before any interrogation began.
Solie then exposed his intent— whitewash, not professional assessment: he dismissed the whole issue. The fact "that Nosenko is not able to properly date the visit of Abidian to Pushkin Street is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”
Aside from its nonsense, the very structure of Solie’s report amounted to a trick. By focusing on the (440-page) Soviet Block report’s (unproven) conclusions it skirted the impossible task of explaining the specific inconsistencies, contradictions, and lies that had led to those conclusions. The uninformed reader would never know they had existed.
Other aspects of his report were similarly questionable.
• When giving Nosenko’s now "true” version of one story or another, Solie neglected to mention it was often a third or fourth version, nor did he describe the earlier, conflicting versions— or speculate on why there had been so many changes.
• Solie implied that thanks to his new, nonconfrontational manner Nosenko had become cooperative, consistent, and "relaxed” as never before and that Nosenko’s “material assistance to the interviewer” (including writing reports) was a major departure from the past. In reality, Nosenko had invariably been cooperative except when cornered. He had written many reports for us. And his stories might have seemed consistent back then, too, had they not been challenged. Solie’s role was not to challenge or question, but with Nosenko’s help to shape some plausible explanation.
• Solie sought to discredit earlier investigations. At least ten times he referred to points he said had not been looked into or to situations in which he said his predecessors had misunderstood what Nosenko had been trying to say. Solie was wrong each time— but a reader with no access to the record would not know that.
• Again and again Solie made assertions as definitive as they were unfounded. He usually couched them impersonally,
often in the passive voice, to hide the fact that they were nothing more than his own opinions. He proclaimed, for example, “The information Nosenko gave is commensurate with his claimed position.”(fn 10) “Nosenko,” he wrote, “has furnished adequate information so that his claimed assignment during 1953-1955 is considered sufficiently substantiated.”(fn 11) Nosenko’s knowledge of the office of the Military Attache supports his claim “that he was an officer of the First Section with the indicated assignment as related by him.”(fn 12) Yet again: "The only unresolved problem considered of any significance in regard to the 1955-59 period is the [XYZ] case,”(fn 13) whereas in fact that particular case posed only minor problems compared with others.
• Solie failed to mention most of the other Soviet sources whose bona fides were also doubted, or about their connections to Nosenko’s case.
Solie even administered a new polygraph test in 1968 and cited it as proof of Nosenko’s truth— though Nosenko had been polygraphed prior to detention with contrary findings. Solie was ignoring, too, the chief polygraph specialist of the Office of Security, who had decreed in 1966, after CIA had made extended use of the polygraph as an interrogation tool, that no polygraph test of Nosenko after his detention would be valid or could be presented as evidence one way or the other. Solie accepted as true things Nosenko said that were actually unthinkable in the real Soviet and KGB world of which Solie knew so little. As he hacked away at the SB report’s conclusions, avoiding its details, Solie failed to clarify the new picture he was thus composing. If Nosenko were now telling Solie the whole truth, the reader would have to accept (as CIA did, in its desperation) things like these:
• that the KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors,
• that what Nosenko told Solie about his life was the final truth— even though it was a fourth or fifth version and still full of unlikely events and would later undergo further changes by Nosenko and contradiction even by Soviet sources,
• that a ten-year veteran staff officer of the KGB need not know or remember how to perform routine tasks he must have been doing daily, such as sending telegrams, distinguishing between different kinds of files, entering buildings, and using elevators,
• that a KGB operative need not remember any details of his own operations, not even the names of agents he had handled for years,
• that an officer responsible for the KGB’s coverage and knowledge of the American Embassy building needn’t himself know about it, or about his own service’s measures to counter the technical spying the Americans were doing from that building— or even that that technical spying was being done at all,
• that an English-speaking rising star in KGB operations against the American Embassy would never appear in any of the many approaches the KGB is known to have made to Embassy personnel during his time, nor even have heard of them,
• that a supervisor of operations against the American Embassy would be setting up homosexual compromises of visiting tourists, and giving low-level assistance to an officer of another department,
• that a newly appointed supervisor of KGB operations against tourists inside the USSR would be sent abroad— twice— for months’ long work ensuring the security of a conference delegation, work normally done by a department specifically set up for the purpose.
CIA was accepting Nosenko as genuine because this one man Solie would accept such nonsense and was unable (as he himself confessed) to “perceive any evidence of KGB deception or of any Soviet objective which might have justified their dispatching Nosenko.” Someone knowing a bit more:
• might have recalled KGB deceptions whose goals could not have been perceptible to their victims,
• would have noticed the signs of source protection in many of Nosenko’s reports, such as 1 ) his contradiction of Golitsyn’s pointers to KGB recruitment of American code clerks, 2) his misleading story about Kovshuk’s trip to Washington, and 3) his accounts of how Popov and Penkovsky were caught,
• would have recognized the many other signs of deception that smeared Nosenko’s reports, such as his probing about Zepp; his story of Penkovsky ’s Pushkin Street dead drop; his unlikely multiplicity of contacts with the Lee Harvey Oswald case; and his claim of seeing a KGB hie in Geneva showing they knew nothing about CIA there,
• would have seen that all of Nosenko’s major leads— “Andrey,” Sergeant Johnson of the Orly courier station, the British Admiralty source, Dejean, Gribanov’s French businessman agent Saar Demichel, the microphones in the American Embassy, and others— borethe marks of deceptive "chicken feed” in that 1 ) Nosenko could never get straight how he learned these hot items and 2) the KGB knew that all of them had previously been exposed or had lost their value to the KGB;
• might not have dismissed so offhandedly the only deceptive aim that Solie could envisage: that the KGB might be trying to saturate Western security services, busying them with leads to minor and useless KGB agents to keep them off more valuable ones. In fact, some FBI officers thought that at least in New York the anti-Soviet operatives had been saturated. More than fifty percent of their time, they later calculated, had been spent pursuing innocuous leads provided by Kulak (note: FBI's "Fedora") and Polyakov (note: GRU colonel Dimitri Polyakov was the first intelligence officer sent out, in 1959, by the brand-new and top-secret "Department D" of the Second Chief Directorate). Solie never mentioned these sources or their connections with the Nosenko case.
The twisted and shaky edifice that Solie thus constructed would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal. But it was never intended to endure either. It needed only seem solid to an uninformed and casual reader, for with few exceptions this was the only kind of reader it would ever reach. Future CIA officers would be taught its conclusion but would never see the data on which it was based.
Had it not been for Jim Angleton I might never have seen this "Solie report” and been left wondering what miracle had resuscitated Nosenko. Those who had salvaged Nosenko didn’t want me to see the flimsy and corrupt way they had done it, and my “need to know” could be said to have expired with my assignment abroad. But during my routine visit to Headquarters in late 1968 Angleton took the initiative of showing it to me, along with the (note: 440-page) Soviet Block report it attacked (which I then saw for the first time).
I was appalled. In the vain hope of resuscitating that fleeting chance we had had to dig behind Nosenko’s tales, I wrote a long rebuttal, containing the objections mentioned above and many more, and sent it to Angleton in January 1969 from my field station. My rebuttal was ignored, except in the Counterintelligence Staff, which was unable or unwilling to fight the case further.(fn 14)
As soon as Solie’s report and Taylor’s memo had cleared Nosenko, CIA moved him to the Washington area and soon took him in as a consultant for its and the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence operations.(fn 15) Eventually he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
Nosenko is said to have boosted CIA and FBI operations. He pointed to recruitment targets among Soviets in the United States, and in the 1970s one of them was successfully recruited.(fn 16) As the director of Central Intelligence later described it to all CIA personnel, Nosenko had "conducted numerous special security reviews on Soviet subjects of specific intelligence interest, and . . . proven himself to be invaluable in exploring counterintelligence leads.”(fn 17)
In defending Nosenko later against the implication in a TV docudrama that there might be some substance to the old accusations that he was a phony, a CIA counterintelligence leader came to his defense. Among other things,
Leonard McCoy expressed outrage that Nosenko’s "dignity, self-respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this him,” and that therefore “it is fitting that CIA recently called him in and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him.” Speaking for all CIA officers past and present, McCoy concluded, "Any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency’s judgment in this case— that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you, Yuri Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country.”(fn 18)
Nosenko had won— but voices continued to rise both against him and in his defense. The debate was decided, but not the truth.
Footnotes1. Angleton told me many years later that he and Helms had thought to brief me
personally at the time, but decided against it because to ask me to keep such an operation
secret from my own boss, the chief of SB Division, might cause a conflict of loyalties.
Indeed it would have.
2. As Helms became director of Central Intelligence, the chief of Naval Intelligence,
Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor, was coming in as his deputy. Taylor had been acquainted with
Artamonov, who had supplied the U.S. navy with fresh and important information from his
(demonstrated) experience as a destroyer captain.
3. A decade later this case, at first so secret, came to be widely publicized, beginning in
May 1978 with an article by Strobe Talbott in Time. The case has since been treated in books
in varying ways: sketchily by D. C. Martin in Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and
Row, 1 980), seriously by Henry Hurt in Shadrin. The Spy Who Never Came Back (New York:
Reader’s Digest Press, 1981), and with basic errors and vacuous speculation by W. R.
Corson and S. and J. Trento, Widows (New York: Crown, 1989), and by J. Trento, The Secret
History of the CIA (New York: Forum/Prima, 2001).
4. The then head of the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence operations, Oleg Kalugin,
asserted that it was only in the Canada meeting, six years after the case began, that the KGB
first realized that Artamonov was under American control. As a test, he said, the KGB sent
Artamonov to meet in Canada to see whether the Americans would inform the Canadian
security service, where the KGB had a mole who would hear of it (Oleg Kalugin, The First
Directorate [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994], 95-96 and 152-58).
5. House Select Committee on Assassinations, 95th Congress, Hearings (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1979) (hereafter HSCA Hearings), Vol. II, 450-51.
6. Memorandum for the director, from Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Rufus
Taylor, 4 October 1968. HSCA Hearings, Vol. 4, 46.
7. These words were used to describe Solie when his report was declassified in the
1990s to show learners how to do truly professional counterintelligence analysis.
8. The Nosenko Report, declassified 1994. Cl Online, Counterintelligence Center’s
Counterintelligence and Security Program (CISP$), Section II. 3.
9. Ibid., Section IV.E, 5-8.
10. Ibid., II.D.l (emphasis added).
11. Ibid., III.B.4 (emphasis added).
12. Ibid., IV.C.3.
13. Ibid., TV.D (emphasis added).
14. The rebuttal has remained hidden but was implicitly declassified when CIA de-
classified Solie’s report in 1994.
1 5. As CIA reported to the HSCA in 1978. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 458-59, 485; Vol. IV,
37-38, 60-61, 77-78, 93-94.
1 6. A senior CIA official told me this in 1 98 1 .
17. “Notes from the Director,” no. 30, 21 September 1978, declassified.
18. Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” CIRA Newsletter XII, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 22.
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/page/n3 .....
-- MWT
