Was Tennent H. Bagley's 1962 Nosenko co-handler,
George Kisevalter, a CIA hero, or a KGB mole?
I suspect the latter.
For now, I will list five reasons.
.
1)
Kisevalter claimed until his dying day that false defector Yuri Nosenko (the KGB "colonel" who swore KGB hadn't interviewed Oswald in the USSR, and whom we now know was sent here to discredit true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn)
was a true defector.
2) Two of Kisevalter's other high-profile charges,
Pyotr Popov and
Oleg Penkovsky, were uncovered by KGB and executed.
.
3) Kisevalter contradicted the other 1962 handler of Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, on what Nosenko had told them regarding the timing (i.e., December 1960 versus December 1961) of KGB's monitoring of American Embassy security officer
John Abidian as he was checking up on a dead drop that CIA had set up for
Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow.
4) Kisevalter, according to his biographer Clarence Ashley, was told by Nosenko (in Geneva in 1962) that one of the reasons he was temporarily in Geneva was to help handle a double-agent by the name of
Boris Belitsky for the KGB. Bagley, on the other hand, said in his 2007 book
Spy Wars that Nosenko told them that he had learned Belitsky was a double-agent because the (unnamed)
residentura at the Geneva USSR embassy had let that highly classified information "slip" during a casual conversation.
.
5) Russia-born and fluent Russian-speaking Kisevalter transcribed all of the 1962 and 1964-on tape recordings of Noseno's interviews/interogations. In his 1978 HSCA testimony, Bagley pointed out that Kisevalter's transcriptions were so full of errors that he had had to bring in true-defector (1954) Pyotr Deriabin to go over them and correct them, and that when it was all said and done, Deriabin had found a total of
150 highly misleading "mistakes".
.
I could go on and on and on, and maybe I will one of these days ...
-- MWT
PS Factoid: Due to his exalted status as "CIA's greatest handler," Kisevalter was never interviewed during the "notorious"
HONETOL mole investigations ...
