Michael,
I'll be dealing with at least some of the things I've highlighted in the obituary.
One day in June 1962, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the Soviet specialist at the CIA station in Berne, was instructed to take the train to Geneva to handle the case of a KGB officer attached to the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference, who was offering his services to the Americans. That short journey turned Bagley into a central figure in perhaps the most controversial and baffling spy story of the entire Cold War.The KGB officer's name was Yuri Nosenko. At that first meeting he agreed to return to Moscow as a CIA agent-in-place. But in January 1964 he was back in Geneva with the Soviet arms delegates, insisting his cover was about to be blown and that he had to come over to
the West. But was he the real thing, or a fake defector sent by the KGB to confuse? If he was a plant, the strategy succeeded brilliantly. For the next dozen years the Nosenko case tied the CIA in knots, paralysing the Agency's vital espionage efforts against its Cold War adversary and destroying careers in the process. Bagley's background was typical in the Agency's early days. He came from an old US Navy family, studded with admirals; his uncle had been the first American killed in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Bagley himself had served in the Marines and studied at Princeton and the University of Geneva before joining the CIA in 1950. He seemed to have it all. He was tall and all-American handsome, talented and ambitious. Some senior figures in the Agency saw him as a future CIA director. He was also a friend of James Angleton, the Agency's formidable counter-intelligence chief. And then Yuri Nosenko came on the scene. Initially Bagley had no doubts. Nosenko was the first senior defector from the KGB's Second Directorate, responsible for internal security and monitoring – and if possible recruiting – personnel in the US Embassy as well as visiting American tourists, businessmen and academics. The information he provided at the 1962 debriefings at a CIA safe house in Geneva was top-class, including details of KGB surveillance methods and leads that hastened the unmasking of several Soviet spies in the West (among them the UK Admiralty clerk, John Vassall). "Jim, I'm involved in the greatest defector case ever," Bagley enthused to Angleton when he returned to Washington. But the older man was visibly unimpressed, and handed Bagley a file to read. "When you finish this, you'll see what I'm saying," he told him. The file essentially consisted of the theorizing of a previous KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had come across in 1961.
Golitsyn had managed to convince the paranoid Angleton that not only did the KGB have high-level moles in US and British intelligence, but was running a gigantic disinformation campaign against the West. Nothing was what it seemed, and every defector, according to Golitsyn, was in fact a plant – among them, naturally, Yuri Nosenko. The file planted doubts in Bagley's mind too, and his suspicions were further aroused by discrepancies in Nosenko's initial story. In 1964 those doubts exploded. The defector claimed to have information that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the murder of President Kennedy just two months earlier and, astonishingly, that the KGB didn't even have contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, during the three mysterious years that the one-time US Marine lived in the Soviet Union, between 1959 and 1962. Nosenko's tale seemed too good to be true, exonerating Moscow just as the Warren Commission was starting work amid widespread suspicion that Oswald was indeed a real-life Manchurian Candidate controlled by the KGB. Soon after landing on US soil, Nosenko found himself a prisoner, held incommunicado in a safe house in Virginia and subjected to harsh interrogation, hunger and sleep deprivation. But he never broke, passing lie detector tests and resisting every effort of Bagley and his fellow sceptics to extract a confession. Gradually the upper echelons of the CIA split into warring camps, of "Fundamentalists" like Angleton and Bagley, and those who believed Nosenko was the real thing, and who were increasingly appalled by the way he was being treated. Ultimately the latter group prevailed. By 1967 Nosenko's ordeal was over, and in 1969 he was formally cleared, placed on the CIA payroll as a consultant and given a new identity. By then Bagley was long since off the case, posted to Brussels, where he would spend five years as station chief before retiring from the Agency in 1972. Amazingly Nosenko never held his harsh treatment against the US, nor regretted his original decision to defect. Bagley, though, remained obsessed by the case, convinced until the end that Nosenko was a plant: "this KGB provocateur and deceiver," as he put it in his 2007 memoir Spy Wars, a powerful argument of the anti-Nosenko case. The book led the CIA to cancel a planned lecture that Bagley was to give: four decades on, old wounds were still bleeding. Nosenko himself died in 2008. A few years earlier, someone asked Bagley what he'd say to Yuri Nosenko if he ever ran into him. His answer was, "Don't shoot."
-- MWT 
To all of my faithful followers --
In an earlier post, this thread, I challenged the veracity of the first three
highlighted items in the above obituary of Tennent H. Bagley.
Now for the next three:
4)
In Geneva in May, 1962, Nosenko was (ostensibly) the first senior defector from the KGB's Second Directorate, responsible for internal security and monitoring -- and if possible recruiting -- personnel in the U.S. embassy (in Moscow) (emphasis added)
From
Spy Wars, page 93 --
Me:
During Nosenko's first two months in the U.S., i.e., during the period of time that CIA, upon request, took him to Hawaii for a much-needed vacation, and therefore during the period of time before he was so brutally incarcerated (sarcasm), ...Bagley: Like every defector Nosenko was asked to sit down and take as many hours or days as he needed to write about his personal life— family, schooling, military service, and professional career. These leisurely considered reflections, we hoped, would correct things he might have said carelessly in the haste of safe house meetings in Geneva. He might have led himself into contradictions by boasting to impress us but now, firmly accepted in the West, he would have little reason for self-puffery.
What he now wrote did indeed contradict things he had said before but instead of clarifying old discrepancies it created new ones. His stories of his marriages and divorces rang false, his military service made no sense, and his manner of leaving military service and entering the KGB clashed with the administrative requirements known to us from other sources. When we called him on such anomalies he readily shifted details, but this produced further contradictions and questions.
Even his accounts of his career varied, beginning with the date he entered the KGB. In Geneva he had written in an autobiographical note that he had entered in the spring of 1952, and told us he had received a ten-year certificate. Now he placed his entry in the spring of 1953, but could not remember whether before or after the death of Stalin. This was as easy for a Soviet citizen to remember as for an American asked when he learned of President Kennedy’s assassination, especially given the near-chaos that reigned in the service when Beria rose and fell at that time.
Nosenko said he had come, without training or preparation, directly into the American Department of the Second Chief Directorate. His first job was to spy on (and recruit as spies) American press correspondents in Russia. A year afterward he was shifted within the same section to work against the personnel of the military attache offices of the American Embassy.
Preparing to debrief him on this critical subject, we checked the American Embassy security records to see what American personnel had said about KGB attempts to recruit them. We turned up incidents that had occurred in Nosenko’s time and sector, but, strangely, he did not know about them. The KGB had staged two provocations against Nosenko’s own military attache targets and expelled them in a loud press campaign of outrage— scandals that were the talk of the whole service (one veteran later referred to them as “famous” affairs) and not just among the officers working directly against those attaches. But Nosenko had never heard of either of them. Moreover, we could find no mention of anyone resembling Nosenko in American Embassy reports of contacts with Russians.
Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador in Moscow from April 1953 to April 1957, remembered that during this period “there were about twelve cases, mostly of [our] clerical personnel but in one instance of a security officer, getting into trouble, usually with women. The secret police [KGB] took incriminating infrared pictures, then tried to recruit the Americans for espionage. All of these people were out of the country in twenty-four hours.’’1 Nosenko knew of none of these cases except (he said in 1962) that of the security officer Edward Ellis Smith.
The KGB was well aware that the Americans were collecting intelligence from their Embassy premises via long-range photography, radio intercept, and other techniques. To thwart these efforts the KGB was using sophisticated countermeasures which the Embassy people could perceive.
“What measures do your people take against American intercept work from inside the Moscow Embassy?” I asked Nosenko.
"I don’t know anything about that,” he answered.
"Well, anyone who looks at the Embassy can see the antennas. In your coverage of the Embassy, did you never look into this?”
"No, never.”
"The antennas were on the roof,” I said. As you’ve said, the top floors held the substantive sections where only the Americans were allowed. How many such classified floors were there?”
Nosenko answered confidently. “Two. As I’ve told you, we had mikes in there.”
How could a supervisor of the section working against the Embassy not know that there were in fact three classified floors? Nosenko was queried about KGB officers and their work against Embassy personnel. Whenever our interviewer would ask which colleague was responsible for work against a targeted American, Nosenko had a ready answer. But it became apparent that he was relying not on personal memory but on some sort of memorized table of organization. When his answers were collated they presented an absurd imbalance in the workloads of his section mates and sometimes contradicted what he had said earlier.
We asked Nosenko about his previous travel abroad but were unable to get a coherent or believable explanation for trips that made no sense in his career. While overseeing in Moscow some of the KGB’s highest priority counterintelligence work, he was off at least eight times on the unrelated task of security-watchdogging various types of Soviet groups traveling abroad. He escorted boxing teams to London in August 1957 and October 1958 and to the Caribbean in 1959, and during the period 1960-1961 did things impossible for someone actually supervising work against the American Embassy as he claimed to be doing (see Chapter 15). Only a month after moving back to the Tourist Department with a promotion to section chief, his name was submitted for a Swiss visa to watchdog a months-long conference in Geneva. On his return to Moscow, having
spent hardly three months on the job, he was promoted again. A year later— having had no apparent professional success— he was upped to a still higher post as first deputy department chief. But mere days afterward, off he went again on an extended delegation-watchdog assignment to Geneva. Such a career had no relation to the real KGB, or indeed to any functioning organization.
As we probed into KGB internal procedures, Nosenko proved to be ignorant of routine practices that he supposedly practiced daily, like sending telegrams or checking files. (ETC, ETC, ETC)
Also this, from page 169:
The shadows over Nosenko’s code-clerk stories turned blacker a few days
later. Murphy called me to his office.
"Jim Angleton has been talking to Golitsyn,” he said, as I passed up the leather couch and took a seat beside his desk. “Now that Nosenko’s defection is public, Jim passed Golitsyn the facts of Nosenko’s personal history and KGB career— nothing more— and Golitsyn hit the roof.”
“Just because of the personal history?”
“Especially the KGB career— Nosenko’s claim to have been deputy chief of the SCD’s [Second Chief Directorate’s] American Embassy section in 1960-61. Golitsyn visited the section in Moscow during that time and talked with the chief. He knows Nosenko was not a member then.”
“He’s sure?”
"Absolutely,” Dave said. “He had heard of Nosenko, says he met him once, but knew him only as a minor figure, certainly not as any kind of supervisor.” Dave hunched toward me over his desk. “In fact, Golitsyn doubts that anyone below the section chief would have been supervising Gryaznov and Kosolapov. He isn’t even sure the section had a deputy chief at that time.”
"Damn it to hell,” I said. "That explains it. You remember, we’ve been having trouble with that story, too. We couldn’t see how Nosenko could possibly have held that job. Looks like Golitsyn was right about this.”
Our debriefings of Nosenko were producing strange results. Nosenko did not know some things that he should have, if he had held the American Embassy section job. Even stranger, he had been describing things he himself was doing in 1960 and 1961 that made no sense whatever for some- one supervising operations against the Embassy in Moscow— entrapping homosexual tourists, for example, and escorting delegations.
"Moscow isn’t that much different from here,” Dave said. “People in key jobs don’t run around on dumb errands. Remind me.”
“I’ve forgotten some of it, Dave. Wait a minute while I go get my notes on this.” Five minutes later I was back, and started to run through the things we had noticed.
"When Tom was debriefing him the other day on his operations against tourists, Nosenko boasted that he had recruited an American tourist in Sofia by homosexual compromise, and even named the guy [call him "L”] and gave the date: May 1961. Tom was surprised and asked what the hell he was doing in Sofia when he was supposed to be working against the American Embassy in Moscow. Nosenko was taken aback. He came up with an explanation— he just happened to be in Sofia instructing Bulgarian
State Security how to operate against the American Embassy in Sofia. Tom was sure he was improvising but just nodded and went on. I had told him not to pin Nosenko down on his contradictions.”
If Nosenko was in Sofia on embassy-operations business, how could he get diverted there to the homosexual compromise of an American tourist? We knew that KGB pitches to foreigners need a plan and advance approval. In Sofia, moreover, the Bulgarians could handle that sort of thing without any help from Moscow.
Dave interjected, “Some homosexual provocateur would have had to set up L. Where the hell did he pop up from at just that moment? I can’t swallow this story.”
“I can’t either, Dave. And that’s just one. Here are some others.”
I read out for Dave some (but not all) of the other activities in 1 960 and 1961 that Nosenko had described, any one of which would be hardly imaginable for a person in his claimed position:
• In mid- 1960 Nosenko was to be security watchdog for a group of Soviet automobile manufacturers visiting the American industry in Detroit. The only reason he did not go was that the trip was cancelled at the last minute.
• Later in 1960 he accompanied some Soviet metallurgists to Cuba, acting as their security watchdog. 1
• Nosenko told us he had handled two homosexual provocateurs code-named ‘Shmelev’ and ‘Grigory’ from the time he recruited them in the 1950s until his defection. Dave stopped me here.
“We’re being asked to believe that a supervisor of KGB operations against its top-priority American Embassy target is handling the tourist department’s street-level homosexual provocateurs?” I could only shrug, and went on with my list.
• He traveled to the port of Odessa with V. D. Chelnokov, chief (he said) of the Tourist Department, to meet Chelnokov’s agent, an American travel organizer (“F”) coming in on a cruise ship. The FBI had interviewed F, who confirmed Nosenko’s presence— as a junior, almost menial, assistant to Chelnokov. But this was late 1960.
• Nosenko’s mistake about the date of Abidian’s visit to the Pushkin Street dead drop (see Chapter 14) revealed that he could not have held the job he claimed.
• Nosenko remembered clearly that he was in the Tourist Department when Anatoly Golitsyn defected in Finland. That was in mid-December 1961 (though Nosenko insisted it was mid-January 1962).
• The final item on my list was Nosenko’s proud account of compromising and recruiting two homosexual American tourists— he had even jotted notes of the date and names. But the date was 2 January 1962 and he had left the American Embassy section on the last day of 1961. In those forty-eight hours in the middle of the holiday season he could hardly have got into a new supervisory job, spotted and planned and got approval for provocative sexual compromise of two Americans, and then carried out both jobs. “He must have been in the Tourist Department for a lot longer than one working day,” I pointed out, "if he did it at all.”
We both saw that no member of the American Embassy section, least of all a supervisor, would or could do the things Nosenko claimed. He wasn’t there— and Golitsyn was right.
Dave grasped at a straw. “You don’t suppose he was just embellishing his own career to look better in our eyes, do you?”
"No. This Embassy-section job is at the very heart of his story.” I didn’t need to repeat what Dave knew all too well: that Nosenko had stressed his two personal responsibilities in that job, directly supervising work against the security officer and the code clerks. The two code clerks who did not report to the Embassy any KGB contact were precisely the two— "Will” and "Mott” (Note:
Man
On
The
Train) — implicated in the events Golitsyn learned about in Helsinki.
"Moreover,” I added, “That’s the job that gave Nosenko authority to tell about the Pushkin Street dead drop and about ‘Zepp’— and those things relate to when and how the KGB really uncovered Penkovsky.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
"So many mistakes,” Dave mused, shaking his head. "It looks to me like this job was tacked onto a career legend— maybe at the last minute. That could explain why he’s fouling it up so badly, mixing up work against tourists with work against the Embassy and getting his dates all askew.”
“I agree. Let’s face it, we’ve got a problem. This job claim is what gives him the authority to cover up successful KGB recruitments of code clerks. If the KGB has gained the ability to read enciphered American military communications, they sure would want to hide the fact. Maybe that’s what
this is all about.”
Murphy sighed tiredly. “Fine. But enough for today. There’s a lot to think about.”
5)
The information Nosenko provided at the 1962 debriefings at a CIA safe house in Geneva was top-classIt seemed so at the time, but when the (at least) fourteen instances of overlapping between Nosenko's narrative and Golitsyn's top-secret file were noticed by Bagley a short time later at CIA Headquarters, Nosenko started looking fishy indeed, especially since Golitsyn had worked in the KGB's First Chief Directorate (i.e., foreign) and Nosenko had (allegedly) worked in the Second Chief Directorate (domestic)
6)
Nosenko hastened the unmasking of several Soviet spies in the West (among them the UK Admiralty clerk, John Vassall)At the time of Nosenko's defection, Vassall was already suspected of being a traitor by British Intelligence, one source claiming he was on a "short list" of four suspects, another source says a "short list" of twenty.
Regardless, it's still true that Nosenko did not "uncover" any KGB/GRU agents who were 1) not already suspected, 2) still working for the KGB or GRU, or 3) still had access to confidential information.
Period. Full stop. For now.
-- MWT
