Spam away, Thomas (emphasis added by Muddy Wrassler Tommy aka "Thomas")
Michael,
In retrospect, I am very happy, indeed, that you decided to post (see above) an ostensible "Golitsyn-condemning" / "Nosenko-extolling" page from John L. Hart's so-called "Monster Plot" report, grossly over-enlarged and discolored as you've made it, because it gives me an opportunity to bring to the attention of our guests and interested members the true facts surrounding KGB's 1) uncovering, 2) secret arrest and "doubling" of, 3) and eventual public arrest, trial, and execution of GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov.
Here they are -- the true facts -- from Tennent H. Bagley's 2014 PDF,
Ghosts of the Spy Wars.
How Did the KGB Really Catch Popov?For some reason the KGB leaders felt the need to misinform the CIA about when and how they had caught Pyotr Popov, CIA's great spy inside Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU).
It was by sheer chance, they said. They happened to have been routinely following an American diplomat [George Winters] in Moscow when they saw him drop a letter in a street mailbox. Dredging it out, they found it addressed to Popov.
That much was true—a diplomatic helper of CIA had mailed the letter—but to assert that this mailing first put them on Popov's trail was a palpable effort to deceive.
The KGB started pumping out this deceptive story early, and continued for years:
After secretly arresting Popov in November 1958 they forced him to act as a double agent against the Americans in Moscow. In that status in September 1959 he “surreptitiously” passed a written message to his CIA contact [Russell Langelle], telling that he had been caught because of “KGB surveillance of the recontact letter mailing.”
Shortly after publicly arresting Popov in October 1959, the KGB issued a secret official brief (obzor) to its own personnel, attributing Popov's discovery to the letter-mailing. (Now any leak from inside—including purposeful ones—could “officially” confirm the tale.)
Then in late 1961 a defector from their ranks, Anatoly Golitsyn—universally agreed to be genuine—told the CIA that the KGB had actually tumbled upon Popov's treason in 1957, getting onto him from a source [recently-fired CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith] met in Washington, whom Vladislav Kovshuk, heading the KGB's work against the American Embassy in Moscow, had traveled to Washington to meet. (fn 31)
Shortly after Golitsyn defected with that new version, the KGB sent Yuri Nosenko to tell authoritatively the old KGB version (among other things). “I know how Popov was caught,” he blurted as he was leaving his first meeting with me in Geneva in late May 1962. (fn 32) He “knew” because he himself had been supervising the KGB's watch over the American who occupied the post previously held by the CIA's contact man to Popov. The truth, he said, was that the KGB had first tumbled to Popov when KGB surveillants chanced to see American Embassy officer George Winters drop a letter to him.
The mailbox story was demonstrably false. CIA knew, of course, when Winters had posted that letter. It was on 29 January 1959, more than two months
after the KGB had lured Popov to Moscow on a ruse. The KGB must have arrested him on arrival on 17 November 1958, because within two weeks the GRU chief was publicly fired and replaced on 8 December by KGB Chairman Ivan Serov himself. (fn 33) That the KGB would allow Popov freedom during this time is unthinkable because, having been alerted by the public firing of his chief, he could have fled. Moreover, the KGB later admitted to having “seen” (no doubt actually controlled) Popov's meeting his CIA contact twice in January, weeks before the letter mailing. (fn 34)
The KGB didn't need to use such an obvious lie to calm the CIA, least of all through a false defector like Nosenko, where telling this obviously false story would cause suspicion. It had more plausible versions available. Once the KGB first got onto Popov in 1957, as Golitsyn revealed, the KGB found lots of clues that had been lying unconnected in their files:
1.
A secret [1957] lecture in Berlin [by Defense Marshal
Zhukov] (attended by Popov) had fallen into CIA hands;
2.
Popov, after an extramarital dalliance with a Yugoslav woman in Vienna, had later recommended her as an agent for his GRU base on the Baltic;
3.
Popov had dispatched [to New York City from Berlin] an Illegal named [Margarita] Tairova who then claimed to have been surveilled by the Americans as soon as she arrived in New York and thus had fled home (only Popov knew of her travelling identity);
4.
Popov had chanced to meet and recruit an American student in Berlin in circumstances so questionable that the KGB used a discussion of this case as the pretense to lure Popov back to Moscow—and arrest.
In addition, the KGB found other past incidents, apparently insignificant at the time, like Popov's having been questioned after a late-night passage on an underground train through the American Sector of Berlin.
Even the CIA, later analyzing the case, was satisfied that all these other incidents adequately explained Popov's downfall. But from that the Agency jumped to the further conclusion that there was no further need to worry that a mole inside CIA might have betrayed him. (fn 35) The CIA accepted as genuine Popov's “surreptitious note” and Nosenko's certification of the mailbox story, and simply brushed aside Golitsyn's revelation that Kovshuk's 1957 trip had put the KGB onto Popov.
Why then did the KGB push out that evidently-false mailbox story? We don't know, but I can only suppose that, fearing the CIA would immediately accept Golitsyn's story and look into the circumstances and identify the real source of Popov's betrayal, they impulsively used the most convenient explanation at hand.
It was a blunder. All the CIA had to do was check the records (once it identified Kovshuk's traveling pseudonym) and find that the KGB had not just sent him off on a “trip” of a week or two, as Nosenko asserted, but instead had transferred him on permanent assignment to the Soviet Embassy in Washington while—as both Golitsyn and Nosenko had reported—his Moscow supervisory position was kept open for him. He actually stayed in Washington for ten months.
Nosenko “knew” that the only purpose of Kovshuk's “short” trip had been to restore contact with an American cipher-machine mechanic whom the KGB had recruited eight years earlier. In reality, not until October, at the very end of this long sojourn in Washington, did Kovshuk contact the sergeant-mechanic “Andrey” (see #4), and even then only once and accompanied by another KGB officer who did all the talking. Moreover, “Andrey” was by no means the KGB's “most important spy ever recruited in Moscow” as Nosenko had called him, nor would he have justified Kovshuk's long absence. Instead, he was an easy KGB “give-away.”
As we later deduced, (fn 36), Kovshuk had really gone to Washington to meet and debrief Edward Ellis Smith, the CIA officer who had been sent to Moscow in 1953 to find dead drops and meeting sites for Popov's eventual recall from Vienna to Moscow. In September 1956 Kovshuk had caught Ed Smith in a honey-trap with his Soviet maid and offered him a way out—cooperation with the KGB. Yuri Nosenko in 1962 told the CIA that he himself had participated with Kovshuk in confronting Smith; he even gave the KGB's nickname for Smith, “Rizhy” [Redhead], so he was evidently speaking with authority when he told the CIA that Smith had refused Kovshuk's offer.
But this was KGB deception. Even by Nosenko's own account of his career, he was not in Kovshuk's section when the pitch to Ed Smith was made—and by the time he next met the CIA a year and a half later, Nosenko had completely forgotten what he had previously been told to say. Now he denied, even when confronted with a tape of his 1962 statements, ever having heard of Ed Smith or the KGB operation against him.
Smith failed to immediately report this KGB approach, the delay being enough for the CIA to recall him to Washington in early October to explain. Distrusting his account, the Agency fired him on the spot. By early November it was clear that Smith would never return to Moscow, and that is when Kovshuk and “Aleksandr Kislov” started preparing to go to the United States. (fn 37) In the course of his service in the CIA's Soviet Division and Moscow, Ed Smith had almost certainly learned enough about the CIA's secret source to enable the KGB to identify Popov. (fn 38) (And after the Cold War the KGB admitted to having recruited him in the 1950s. (fn 39)
Any KGB-recruited CIA Soviet-operations specialist would justify a KGB deceptive effort to hide him—perhaps even five years after losing access to secrets—if he kept contact with his old CIA colleagues. And even as a scholar in California [Smith] may have offered continued possibilities for the KGB. But to make such a protective effort so long after he had lost access to secrets raises a reasonable doubt:
might Ed Smith have led the KGB to recruit another CIA Soviet specialist whose continued activity was really what the KGB deception was hiding? [emphasis added]
If there was someone, neither he or she has ever been identified, nor has anyone else—except Ed Smith—who was betraying as early as 1957, when the KGB got onto Popov, or 1959 when the Soviets began the deception.
Footnotes:(31) This was “Kovshuk's trip,” whose nature and import touch several of these “ghost stories” and hence cause confusion. Thus I will try to clarify it here, at the risk of anticipating material to be discussed later. The bare facts of the “trip” are as follows: In early November 1956 Kovshuk (under the false name “Komarov”) requested a U.S. visa for permanent assignment to the Soviet Embassy in Washington (normally a minimum two-year tour of duty). He departed for there on 7 February 1957 but, in early November, cut short his Embassy assignment without explanation and returned to Moscow. The KGB attempted to hide the fact that he was not going alone by sending his companion, using the name Aleksandr Kislov, to New York under journalist cover and separating their U.S. visa-requests and travel dates by two days each. Aside from official visa and travel records, at least five sources informed CIA of this “trip”: (1) Golitsyn, who had heard that the trip pointed the KGB to Popov's contact with CIA; (2) the FBI, who spotted him in the spring with KGB officers Yuri Guk and “Aleksandr Kislov” together so often on clandestine activity that they nicknamed them “the three musketeers”; (3) Yuri Nosenko, claiming to have been Kovshuk's deputy, who strangely did not know that the “trip” lasted more than a couple of weeks, but “knew” that Kovshuk had gone to Washington for the sole purpose of restoring contact with a U.S. sergeant cipher-machine mechanic whom he said the KGB had recruited in Moscow eight years earlier and codenamed “Andrey”; (4) that mechanic himself, who was identified and confessed to having been recruited in a sex trap but was not prosecuted because he had never had access to secrets and had freely and fully confessed; and (5) KGB General Sergey Kondashev, a former close colleague of Kovshuk, who said after the Cold War that Kovshuk's Washington stay was to meet with “an important agent—one who was never uncovered” (Tennent H. Bagley,
Spymaster, page viii).
(32) Nosenko refused to tell more until a later meeting, the KGB apparently having instructed him to keep the false mailbox story separate from his equally false story of why Kovshuk had travelled to Washington. Perhaps his lips had loosened as a result of the drinks he imbibed during that first CIA meeting. See Tennent H. Bagley,
Spy Wars, p. 9.
(33) That KGB Chairman Ivan Serov, taking over the GRU because of a betrayal from within, should himself be fired little more than four years later because of yet another betrayal from within the GRU, that of Oleg Penkovsky is ironic.
(34) David E. Murphy , Sergei A. Kondrashev , and George Bailey ,
Battleground Berlin: CIA vs KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 277.
(35) Such was the gist of a 300-page report by CIA analyst Renée Peyton, as recounted by Tom Mangold in
Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 387n.40.
(36) Tennent H. Bagley , Spy Wars, pp. 65–66.
(37) Ibid., pp. 68–71. Sergey Kondrashev was aware that Kovshuk was accompanied by a member of SCD Dept. 14 (Spymaster, p. 289n13) and not having heard the name “Kislov” recognized it as a pseudonym and proposed to me a couple of candidates, but their ages did not fit. I think “Kislov” was actually Col. Valentin Zvezdonkov or, conceivably, his colleague in the investigation of Popov, Lt. Col. Sumin.
(38) See Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 68–69 and 94–96. Silva recruited Ed Smith for this job. The story of Smith's assignment is told by Richard H. Smith in “The First Moscow Station. An Espionage Footnote to Cold War History,”
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 333–346.
(39) A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov , Vneshnaya Razvedka Rossii [Russian Foreign Intelligence] (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000) p. 70. KGB General Sergey A. Kondrashev knew this to be correct, but was unwilling to tell more.
-- MWT
