Steve M.,
Why is it that despite all the evidence (Lone Nutter) Tennent H. Bagley lays out in his book
Spy Wars (which you kinda claim to have read), you prefer to believe Yuri Nosenko was a true defector?
Is it because Nosenko said the KGB didn't even monitor or interview
Oswald in the USSR, and you really, really want to believe that?
Or is it because you realize that believing Nosenko was a
false defector tends to go hand-in-hand with accepting that Anatoliy Golitsyn (the "crazy" KGB major who correctly identified putative diplomat "Vladimir Komarov" as high-level counterintelligence officer Vladislav Kovshuk, told British intelligence the final clues that enabled it to nail Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, said the CIA and the FBI were heavily penetrated (the FBI, especially), the Sino-Soviet Spit was a ruse, a top-secret "KGB within the KGB" had been created in 1959 to wage Sun Tzu- like deception operations against the U.S. and its allies, there was a mole in the CIA code named "Sasha," Harold Wilson was a mole, the Soviet Union would be intentionally broken up to get the West to drop its guard, etc., etc. ... was a
true one?
A little of both?
You've heard of the mole Golitsyn called "Sasha," right? The one James Angleton "tore the CIA apart" trying to find?
Want to know whom I believe was "Sasha"?
None other than Bagley's "helper" in interviewing Nosenko in Geneva, George Kisevalter!
Who swore that Nosenko was a true defector, of course, and who was noticed (by Bagley) giving unauthorized chatty "intel" to Nosenko when he was supposed to be interviewing him.
Slavic background (born in Saint Petersburg), name starts with a "K", married to a foreigner, served in Germany, both of his really important Soviet agents (Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky) were arrested by the KGB and executed, was buddy-buddy with probable mole Richard Kovich, and, due to his exalted reputation in the CIA as an agent handler, was never interviewed during The Great Mole Hunt.
It's interesting to note that Kisevalter contradicted all of Bagley's counterintelligence conclusions about everything, contradicted Bagley about Nosenko's relative sobriety and ability to speak good English, contradicted Bagley on whether Nosenko had said that security officer John Abidan at the Moscow American Embassy had been seen "setting up" a dead drop in (for Penkovsky) in 1960 or in 1961, and made
150 substantive "errors" while transcribing Nosenko's taped Geneva interviews.
etc., etc., etc.
-- MWT
