In his 2007 book, “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games” (which you can read for free by googling "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously), former CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley says putative* KGB officer Yuri Nosenko, who physically defected to the U.S. in February 1964, had "walked in" to the CIA (Bagley and Russia-born George Kisevalter) in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what an earlier defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible penetrations of U.S. Intelligence and the intelligence services of our NATO allies.
Many JFK assassination students believe Nosenko was a true defector, probably because he said the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with former Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-one-half years he lived two blocks from a KGB school in Minsk.
In "Spy Wars," Bagley writes scathingly about Bruce Solie, the CIA officer in the Office of Security who “cleared” Nosenko in 1968 via what Bagley calls a bogus polygraph test and a specious report. Bagley also says he believes a recently-fired-from-CIA officer by the name of Edward Ellis Smith betrayed CIA's spy GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov in early 1957 by meeting with a high-level KGB officer in Washington D.C. movie houses.
In his 2022 book, “Uncovering Popov’s Mole” (which he dedicated to Bagley), Newman, who believes some unnamed high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Moscow and Peking in 1963, takes the Solie story a step farther by suggesting that he was a KGB "mole" who not only betrayed Popov in the aforementioned D.C. movie houses (with logistical help from Edward Ellis Smith and future Watergate burglar James McCord) but sent (or duped his confidant, protégé, and mole-hunting subordinate, Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible “dangle” in a planned-to-fail hunt for “Popov’s Mole” (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA -- the Soviet Russia Division -- which mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the SRD and Angleton’s CI Staff apart, and drove Angleton nuts.
I personally subscribe to what former CIA officer W. Alan Messer wrote in a 2013 article, “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited" – that Nosenko was a false defector in Geneva in 1962 and a rogue defector in 1964 whom the KGB had no choice but to support his “bona fides” in the U.S. because he was telling the CIA and the FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear -- that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with Oswald in the USSR.
From the FWIW department, shortly after Solie "cleared" Nosenko, the CIA hired him to teach counterintelligence to its and the FBI's new recruits.
Thoughts?
*I wrote that Nosenko was a "putative" KGB officer because true KGB defector Major Pyotr Deriabin (1954) interviewed him for several hours and determined that he didn't know basic things like how to send a cable, how many of the floors at the U.S. Embassy were dedicated to the CIA (3), and where the cafeteria was located at KGB headquarters.
