Next, I will highlight some of the many inaccuracies in Morley's reply (see the previoulooks post for the text) and endeavor to explain why they are misleading or worse.
MORLEY: The dissenters from the institutional consensus about the Mole Hunt were mostly officers who had served Angleton on the Counterintelligence Staff.
Dubious claim. Many of the CIA officers who believed Nosenko was a false defector did not work in Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff, but in the totally separate Russia Division's Counterintelligence section.
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MORLEY: The Angletonians, as they called themselves, were a dogged bunch. Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch–which is true.
I doubt that Tennent H. Bagley considered himself an "Angletonian". Athought Bagley liked and respected Angleton and they shared information which helped them independently determine that Nosenko was a false defector, they did have their "moments," particularly regarding true-defctor Golitsyn's "take" on Penkovsky.
MORLEY: They (i.e., the "Angletonians") also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the Mole Hunt–which is not.
Sorry, Jeff, but Bagley (who was on the fast track to become DCI before Nosenko "defected" in 1964) would have disagreed with you, as can be inferred from this excerpt from the chapter titled "Lingering Debate" in his book:
Richard Helms never considered the doubts [about Nosenko] truly resolved and viewed the Agency’s formal acceptance as a matter of convenience. Nosenko had to be released, and one way to do it was to clear him, at least officially.11 These doubts faded in the second half of the 1960s with the advent of Igor Kochnov [a KGB triple-agent who duped Bruce Solie into believing he'd been sent to the U.S. to assassinate both Golitsyn and Nosenko] and the departure from Headquarters of myself and Dave Murphy. The man who replaced Murphy as Soviet Bloc Division (SB) chief, Rolf Kingsley, had not previously focused on Soviet matters and had little patience with counterintelligence. He called for a fresh review of the case by “more neutral” officers who concluded that Nosenko was probably genuine.12 Finally, when [suspected mole] William E. Colby became director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, the Agency’s approach to counterintelligence changed and the shadows over Nosenko were cleaned away. (At this time I had already retired, so I learned of these events only later from those who lived through them.) CIA Director William Colby gave a strong push to the growing myth surrounding the Nosenko affair (see Appendix B). In his memoirs he asserted that some former CIA people believed in an all-knowing KGB that was well on the way to dominating the world. “The Soviet Block Division produced operations and intelligence,” Colby wrote, "but the [counterintelligence] staff believed that those operations and intelligence were controlled by the KGB ... to mislead the United States in a massive deception program.’’ 13
Colby also derided a "paralysis” that he claimed had overtaken Soviet operations. “I sensed a major difficulty,” he wrote. “Our concern over possible KGB penetration, it seemed to me, had so preoccupied us that we were devoting most of our time to protecting ourselves from the KGB and not enough to developing the new sources and operations that we needed to learn secret information. ... I wanted to consider the KGB as something to be evaded by CIA, not as the object of our operations nor as our mesmerizing nemesis.”14 If one were to believe one of its later chiefs, the Soviet Division in that dark earlier time “had been turning away dozens of volunteers, Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States.”15 In reality the caution that Murphy— not Angleton— introduced into CIA’s efforts to recruit Soviets was never allowed to hinder the acceptance of a single Soviet volunteer, nor did it preclude any well-considered recruitment approach. None of these assertions of “paralysis” has cited a single rejection of a volunteer, defector, or proposal for action. Ironically, it was these latter-day critics who themselves started turning away Soviet defectors— on the grounds that CIA had all it needed or could handle.
Among those whom CIA turned away— on specific orders from Headquarters— was Vasily Mitrokhin, who had stolen and stashed a large hunk of KGB operational archives.16
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MORLEY: Angleton and his acolytes cited scores of statements by Yuri Nosenko that they said were not credible or misleading, and indeed, Nosenko had exaggerated and embellished as defectors often do.
It was far worse than that, Jeff. Nosenko was sent to CIA in Geneva in June, 1962, and to the U.S. in January, 1964, to discredit true defector Golitsyn (who had defected to the U.S. in December 1961), and at times he said things and mentioned dates -- all of which were secretly recorded by CIA -- that conflicted with his "legend". Like, for example, when he told Bagley and Kisevalter in 1962 that an American Embassy employee, John Abidian, had been spotted "setting up" a dead drop for Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow in December, 1961. But according to his "legend," Nosenko at that time wasn't in a position to know about those non-existent KGB monitoring operations. So, in 1964, after Penkovsky had been arrested in Moscow and allegedly executed, Nosenko disingeneously denied having said that and claimed that he had said instead that Abidian had been spotted "checking up on" Penkovsky's dead drop in December of 1960, when Nosenko was allegedly in a position at KGB to know about it. In reality, Abidian had entered a building on Puskin Street to check (not set up) Penkovsky's dead drop only one time -- in December 1960.
The fact that your trusted source, Kisevlter, lied when he "confirmed" Nosenko's phony account of this, and also falsely said that Nosenko was "always drunk" during the 1962 and 1964 meetings in Geneva (which destroys that "excuse" for Nosenko's poor memory, etc, etc), makes Kisevalter look like a mole, imho.
MORLEY: But if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?
If Jeff had read Spy Wars as he said he did, and lent Bagley a some much-deserved credence, he'd know the answer to that question: Edward Ellis Smith, the first CIA officer recruited by the KGB (honey-trapped in Moscow in 1956), plus an unknown officer in Soviet Russia Division's Operations or Reports section he probably helped KGB to recruit.
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Another mole was possibly George Kisevalter, who had debriefed Oleg Penkovsky in London in 1961 -- traitor Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 couldn't have known everything about Penkovsky that led to his being uncovered by KGB just two weeks after he was recruited.
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MORLEY: I was especially convinced (that Nosenko was a true defector) by George Kisevalter, the most experienced CIA officer handling Russian defector. Kisevalter always vouched for Nosenko’s bonafides. Kisevalter’s opinion was not idiosyncratic. In 1997, he received the agency’s Trailblazer Award recognizing him as one of fifty top CIA officers in its first fifty years, an honor Angleton did not receive. There was never any doubt in Kisevalter’s mind about the bona fides of Yuri Nosenko.
Unfortunately, Jefferson Morley unwisely relies on the pronouncements of probable mole George Kisevalter, CIA's "highly esteemed agent handler" (and Tennent H. Bagley's Russia-born Nosenko co-interrogator) who not only contradicted nearly every salient fact Tennent H. Bagley uncovered about Yuri Nosenko (and the triple-agents who tried to "cover" for the false defector), but actually seems to have gone out of his way to subvert Bagley's findings by, for example, purposefully mis-transcribimg the five interviews he sat in on in Geneva in 1962.
Even David Wise, in his somewhat factual book Molehunt, had this to say about Kisevalter in the context of the Hoover-Angleton HONETOL mole-hunt which was looking for a mole Golitsyn had warned Angleton about, claiming that he was of Slavic ancestry, that his last name started with "K", that he had served with U.S. Intelligence in Germany, and that his last name might have ended with "-sky" or "-ski":
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"Kisevalter's prestige within the agency was so great that it probably saved him from becoming a suspect himself. His name, after all, started with K, he had a Slavic Background (Kisevalter was of Russian ancestry and was born in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution), and he had served in Germany."
This is what politic "Pete" Bagley said about Kisevalter's apparently lackidasical attitude regarding Nosenko, with the Belitsky Case included for context:
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Two days later (in Geneva in January, 1964) Nosenko told us more about KGB activities, including some information he’d picked up from chats with colleagues while visiting the local rezidentura in connection with his delegation security responsibilities. "I was there yesterday, and the guy I was talking to had a file on his desk. I saw its code name, ‘Scorpion.’ He told me it was the rezidentura’s file on CIA in Geneva. It was real thin, couldn’t have had more than a couple of sheets of paper in it. Obviously they don’t know much about you here.” Strange, I thought, for a couple of reasons. Earlier sources had told CIA that traveling KGB officers were admitted into residency premises only if they had a specific need to come inside there. Contacts between the local KGB and their visiting colleagues on conference delegations were customarily maintained outside the sacrosanct KGB enclave. Even the existence of such a hie as this “Scorpion” was questionable. To our knowledge, no KGB rezidenturas in the West retained subject files of this sort. Aside from occasional special requirements from Moscow, their safes held little more than the individual officers’ working hies, and even those were usually reduced to cryptic notes. Well, I thought, maybe the Geneva residency does. But if it does, this hie sounds too thin. The KGB knew more than that about CIA in Geneva. Nosenko himself had told us in 1962 that the KGB was running a double agent (the Soviet radio reporter Boris Belitsky) against CIA. Belitsky was sometimes in Geneva, and that alone should have told them more than they could put on a couple of sheets of paper. One more oddity to tuck away.
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I did not discuss these oddities with George Kisevalter. He was clearly reveling in his role, once again, as case officer to an important source inside Soviet Intelligence. He seemed primarily concerned with projecting his own avuncular image and impressing the agent with his knowledge. (I had winced internally in 1962 each time he tossed out to Nosenko details about senior Soviet regime figures that could only have come from another secret source, though I did not then know about Oleg Penkovsky.) In our friendly talks between meetings George never evinced any suspicion of Nosenko. In fact, he gave no sign then or later that he had noticed the contradictions and anomalies popping up in this case. While he and I— on orders— were keeping from our colleagues the existence of this operation, I was keeping from George and others my growing suspicions. (I was sharing them only with a few of my section mates, with the Soviet Division chief, and with Counterintelligence Staff chief Angleton.) I still clung to a shred of optimism that we might eventually be able to discard them as coincidence or see them in a different light, so why spread doubts prematurely?
(to be expanded ...)
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PS Later on, Lord willing, I'll post the interesting "debate" Morley and CIA's official historian, David Robarge, had about Morley's abominable book, The Ghost.
