Nosenko, Angleton and Oswald

[Douglas Caddy]

Ghost of the Cold War

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, April 11, 20075

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don't know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK's death?

Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handled Oswald's KGB file, and he knows the spy service had never considered dealing with him.

For many spy buffs, the Nosenko story has always seemed too good to be true. How convenient that he defected at the very moment the KGB's chiefs were eager to reassure the Warren Commission about Oswald's sojourn in Russia. What's more, Nosenko brought other goodies that on close examination were also suspicious -- information that seemed intended to divert the CIA's attention from the possibility that its codes had been broken and its inner sanctum penetrated.

The Nosenko case is one of the gnarly puzzles of Cold War history. It vexed the CIA's fabled counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, to the end of his days. And it has titillated a generation of novelists and screenwriters -- most recently providing the background for Robert De Niro's sinuous spy film "The Good Shepherd."

Now the CIA case officer who initially handled Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, has written his own account. And it is a stunner. It's impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko's bona fides. Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along -- that Nosenko was a phony, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.

That's not the official CIA judgment, of course. The agency gave Nosenko its stamp of approval in 1968 and again in 1976. Indeed, as often happens, the agency itself became the villain, with critics denouncing Angleton, Bagley and other skeptics for their harsh interrogation of Nosenko. In its eagerness to tidy up the mess, the agency even invited Nosenko to lecture to its young officers about counterintelligence.

It happens that I met Angleton in the late 1970s, in the twilight of his life in the shadows. I was a reporter in my late 20s, and it occurred to me to invite the fabled counterintelligence chief to lunch. (Back then, even retired super-spooks listed their numbers in the phone book. I can still hear in my mind his creepily precise voice on the answering machine: "We are not in, at present. . . .") Angleton arrived at his favorite haunt, the Army and Navy Club on Farragut Square, cadaverously thin and dressed in black.

He might have been playing himself in a movie. He displayed all the weird traits that were part of the Angleton legend, clasping his Virginia Slims cigarette daintily between thumb and forefinger and sipping his potent cocktail through a long, thin straw.

And he was still obsessed with the Nosenko case. He urged me, in a series of interviews, to pursue another Russian defector code-named "Sasha," who he was convinced was part of the skein of KGB lies. The man ran a little picture-framing shop in Alexandria and seemed an unlikely master spy. I gradually concluded that Angleton had lost it, and after I wrote that he himself had once been accused of being the secret mole, he stopped returning my calls.

Bagley's book, "Spy Wars," should reopen the Nosenko case. He has gathered strong evidence that the Russian defector could not have been who he initially said he was; that he could not have reviewed the Oswald file; that his claims about how the KGB discovered the identities of two CIA moles in Moscow could not have been right. According to Bagley, even Nosenko eventually admitted that some of what he had told the CIA was false.

What larger purpose did the deception serve? Bagley argues that the KGB's real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited one American code clerk in Moscow in 1949 and perhaps two others later on. The KGB may also have hoped to protect an early (and to this day undiscovered) mole inside the CIA.

Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane and you are reminded just how good the Russians are at the three-dimensional chess game of intelligence. For a century, their spies have created entire networks of illusion -- phony dissident movements, fake spy services -- to condition the desired response.

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

[Robert Howard]

While I share your interest in the book, the history of the Nosensko affair, with the CIA ostensibly split over the issue of his bona fides; Nosensko, came out of the situation alive, which is more than some CIA officials of the 1970's. Say......Arthur Paisley for example. I would think the sex parties alone would have made him expendable, and I certainly don't think the KGB did it. One wonders if he would have testified before the HSCA, Oh well, guess we'll never know.

But back to the book....While you have no expressed an observation regarding the Nosensko affair.......

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

After Pres. Clinton was elected and then Pres. Yeltsin turned over their JFK Assassination records, there were allegations that the really interesting material was not made available to the research community at large.....Whether that is true or not I do not profess to know. But I would argue that our government has for 44 years shown one consistent pattern of "making it look like they are resolving the remaining unanswered questions re the circumstances surrounding Pres. Kennedy's assassination," there is a consistent body of opinion that the collective efforts constitute one big dog and pony show.

Example The very intrinsically connected to the events in Dealey Plaza Ruth & Michael Paine were not available to the ARRB, even though some researchers offered to pay their air fare to appear!

But the media mouthpieces marginalize this segment of the population by laughing to scorn anyone who isn't a devotee of Gerald Posner. So much for truth and honesty

But I would offer my own reflection to the Nosensko affair and Oswald's stay in the USSR, instead of re-investigating the Nosensko affair, how about re-investigating Oswald's circle of contacts while in the USSR?

Even though Alexander Ziger passed on years ago, his family had some interesting tales to tell when they were interviewed by Ignacio Zuleta in 1995. Another person of interest would be Robert Webster and the RAND Corporation, and his contacts, which it is said, include Marina Prusakova

[Thomas Graves]

While I share your interest in the book, the history of the Nosensko affair, with the CIA ostensibly split over the issue of his bona fides; Nosensko, came out of the situation alive, which is more than some CIA officials of the 1970's. Say......Arthur Paisley for example. I would think the sex parties alone would have made him expendable, and I certainly don't think the KGB did it. One wonders if he would have testified before the HSCA, Oh well, guess we'll never know.

But back to the book....While you have no expressed an observation regarding the Nosensko affair.......

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

After Pres. Clinton was elected and then Pres. Yeltsin turned over their JFK Assassination records, there were allegations that the really interesting material was not made available to the research community at large.....Whether that is true or not I do not profess to know. But I would argue that our government has for 44 years shown one consistent pattern of "making it look like they are resolving the remaining unanswered questions re the circumstances surrounding Pres. Kennedy's assassination," there is a consistent body of opinion that the collective efforts constitute one big dog and pony show.

Example The very intrinsically connected to the events in Dealey Plaza Ruth & Michael Paine were not available to the ARRB, even though some researchers offered to pay their air fare to appear!

But the media mouthpieces marginalize this segment of the population by laughing to scorn anyone who isn't a devotee of Gerald Posner. So much for truth and honesty

But I would offer my own reflection to the Nosensko affair and Oswald's stay in the USSR, instead of re-investigating the Nosensko affair, how about re-investigating Oswald's circle of contacts while in the USSR?

Even though Alexander Ziger passed on years ago, his family had some interesting tales to tell when they were interviewed by Ignacio Zuleta in 1995. Another person of interest would be Robert Webster and the RAND Corporation, and his contacts, which it is said, include Marina Prusakova

__________________

Thanks, Mr. Caddy--

Interesting stuff!

--Thomas

_________________

Edited April 12, 2007 by Thomas Graves

[Douglas Caddy]

While I share your interest in the book, the history of the Nosensko affair, with the CIA ostensibly split over the issue of his bona fides; Nosensko, came out of the situation alive, which is more than some CIA officials of the 1970's. Say......Arthur Paisley for example. I would think the sex parties alone would have made him expendable, and I certainly don't think the KGB did it. One wonders if he would have testified before the HSCA, Oh well, guess we'll never know.

But back to the book....While you have no expressed an observation regarding the Nosensko affair.......

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

After Pres. Clinton was elected and then Pres. Yeltsin turned over their JFK Assassination records, there were allegations that the really interesting material was not made available to the research community at large.....Whether that is true or not I do not profess to know. But I would argue that our government has for 44 years shown one consistent pattern of "making it look like they are resolving the remaining unanswered questions re the circumstances surrounding Pres. Kennedy's assassination," there is a consistent body of opinion that the collective efforts constitute one big dog and pony show.

Example The very intrinsically connected to the events in Dealey Plaza Ruth & Michael Paine were not available to the ARRB, even though some researchers offered to pay their air fare to appear!

But the media mouthpieces marginalize this segment of the population by laughing to scorn anyone who isn't a devotee of Gerald Posner. So much for truth and honesty

But I would offer my own reflection to the Nosensko affair and Oswald's stay in the USSR, instead of re-investigating the Nosensko affair, how about re-investigating Oswald's circle of contacts while in the USSR?

Even though Alexander Ziger passed on years ago, his family had some interesting tales to tell when they were interviewed by Ignacio Zuleta in 1995. Another person of interest would be Robert Webster and the RAND Corporation, and his contacts, which it is said, include Marina Prusakova

__________________

Thanks, Mr. Caddy--

Interesting stuff!

--Thomas

_________________

I appreciate your comment, Thomas.

Here is a follow-up article:

April 15, 2007

KGB ghost stirs JFK mystery

Tony Allen-Mills in New York

The Sunday Times (UK)

A GHOST from the cold war has returned to haunt the CIA. A book to be published this month by a veteran American spy is raising startling new questions about Yuri Nosenko, the Russian defector who played a key part in the inquiry into the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

Conspiracy theorists have long been obsessed with Nosenko’s supposed role as the KGB officer who handled the Moscow file of Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, who had lived for three years in the Soviet Union.

After Nosenko’s defection in 1964 — a few months after Kennedy was shot in Dallas — he assured the CIA that the KGB had never tried to recruit Oswald, who was regarded as “too unstable” to be of use.

It was a crucial moment in the cold war, an apparent intelligence breakthrough that may have prevented a nuclear conflict had America concluded that Moscow was behind the assassination. But what if Nosenko was a fraud?

That tantalising possibility is examined in Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, by Tennent H Bagley, the former CIA case officer who was initially in charge of Nosenko’s defection.

James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counter-intelligence unit, went to his grave in 1987 suspecting that Nosenko was a double agent whose main task was to distract the agency from a KGB mole. “The book goes a long way toward rehabilitating [the idea] that Angleton was right in calling him a KGB plant,” said Ron Rosenbaum, a New York journalist who spoke to Bagley earlier this year.

Bagley, who now lives in Brussels, argues that the KGB’s aim was to steer the CIA away from realising that the Russians had recruited an American agent in Moscow in 1949 and perhaps two others later. The book raises the possibility that a KGB mole may have worked at the CIA during the cold war.

Nosenko is believed to be now living under an assumed name somewhere in America. He never gave evidence to the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, but largely as a result of his assurances Washington never took seriously the idea that the KGB plotted to murder Kennedy.

If Nosenko was never who he claimed to be, it is not only Angleton’s reputation that may have to be revised. Bagley’s book seems certain to inflame America’s most formidable group of conspiracy theorists: those who are convinced that Oswald did not act alone.

[Ron Ecker]

I have not studied Angleton much, so I would like to be clear on something, as the Nosenko case has always confused me.

If Angleton was a participant in the JFK conspiracy, as some suspect, then he knew full well that Nosenko was a phony, he just couldn't say how he knew. (This I assume would also apply to others in the CIA who may have been conspirators, e.g. Richard Helms.) OTOH if Angleton was not part of the conspiracy, then his suspicion of Nosenko could be genuine, without sure knowledge that Nosenko was a phony.

Does that about sum it up regarding Angleton and Nosenko? Am I stating the obvious, or am I missing something?

[John Simkin]

I have not studied Angleton much, so I would like to be clear on something, as the Nosenko case has always confused me.

If Angleton was a participant in the JFK conspiracy, as some suspect, then he knew full well that Nosenko was a phony, he just couldn't say how he knew. (This I assume would also apply to others in the CIA who may have been conspirators, e.g. Richard Helms.) OTOH if Angleton was not part of the conspiracy, then his suspicion of Nosenko could be genuine, without sure knowledge that Nosenko was a phony.

Does that about sum it up regarding Angleton and Nosenko? Am I stating the obvious, or am I missing something?

It is impossible to consider Nosenko without looking at the case of Golitsin.

In December 1961, Anatoli Golitsin, a KGB agent, working in Finland, defected to the CIA. He was immediately flown to the United States and lodged in a safe house called Ashford Farm near Washington. Interviewed by Angleton, Golitsin supplied information about a large number of Soviet agents working in the West.

In these interviews Golitsin argued that as the KGB would be so concerned about his defection, they would attempt to convince the CIA that the information he was giving them would be completely unreliable. He predicted that the KGB would send false defectors with information that contradicted what he was saying.

In June 1962 Yuri Nosenko made contact with the CIA in Geneva. He was deputy chief of the Seventh Department of the KGB. His main responsibility was the recruitment of foreign spies. He like Golitsin, provided evidence that John Vassall was a Soviet agent. However, most of his evidence undermined that given by Golitsin. This included Golitsin's claim that a senior figure in the Admiralty was a spy.

In July 1963, Golitsin traveled to London to be interviewed by Arthur Martin. Soon afterwards a senior MI5 officer leaked information to British newspapers that they were interviewing a KGB defector in London. As soon as this story appeared in the press, Golitsin returned to the United States and refused to give any more information to MI5.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Richard Helms was given the responsibility of investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. Helms initially appointed John M. Whitten to undertake the agency's in-house investigation. After talking to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, Whitten discovered that Oswald had been photographed at the Cuban consulate in early October, 1963. Scott had not reported this matter to Whitten, his boss, at the time. Nor had Scott told Whitten that Oswald had also visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. In fact, Whitten had not been informed of the existence of Oswald, even though there was a 201 pre-assassination file on him that had been maintained by the Counterintelligence/Special Investigative Group.

John M. Whitten and his staff of 30 officers, were sent a large amount of information from the FBI. According to Gerald D. McKnight "the FBI deluged his branch with thousands of reports containing bits and fragments of witness testimony that required laborious and time-consuming name checks." Whitten later described most of this FBI material as "weirdo stuff". As a result of this initial investigation, Whitten told Richard Helms that he believed that Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

On 6th December, Nicholas Katzenbach invited John M. Whitten and Birch O'Neal, Angleton's trusted deputy and senior Special Investigative Group (SIG) officer to read Commission Document 1 (CD1), the report that the FBI had written on Lee Harvey Oswald. Whitten now realized that the FBI had been withholding important information on Oswald from him. He also discovered that Richard Helms had not been providing him all of the agency's available files on Oswald. This included Oswald's political activities in the months preceding the assassination.

John M. Whitten had a meeting where he argued that Oswald's pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination, especially his attempt to shoot the right-wing General Edwin Walker, his relationship with anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, and his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Whitten added that has he had been denied this information, his initial conclusions on the assassination were "completely irrelevant."

Helms responded by taking Whitten off the case. James Jesus Angleton was now put in charge of the investigation. According to Gerald McKnight (Breach of Trust) Angleton "wrested the CIA's in-house investigation away from John Whitten because he either was convinced or pretended to believe that the purpose of Oswald's trip to Mexico City had been to meet with his KGB handlers to finalize plans to assassinate Kennedy." Over the next few months Angleton worked with William Sullivan of the FBI in providing information to the Warren Commission.

During this period Angleton continued to interview Anatoli Golitsin. He now claimed that Hugh Gaitskell had been murdered in January 1963 to allow Harold Wilson, a KGB agent, to become leader of the Labour Party. Angleton believed Golitsin but few senior members of the CIA agreed with him. They pointed out that Gaitskell had died after Golitsin had left the Soviet Union and would have had to know in advance what was about to take place.

Golitsin also suggested that W. Averell Harriman had been a Soviet spy, while he was the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Angleton was convinced by this story as he knew someone was involved in spying the negotiations that took place between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, other CIA officers thought the story ridiculous and Harriman was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as ambassador-at-large for Southeast Asian affairs.

In January 1964 Yuri Nosenko contacted the CIA and said he had changed his mind and was now willing to defect to the United States. He claimed that he had been recalled to Moscow to be interrogated. Nosenko feared that the KGB had discovered he was a double-agent and once back in the Soviet Union would be executed. Nosenko also claimed that he had important information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He insisted that although Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union he was not a KGB agent.

Nosenko arrived in the United States on 14th February, 1964. However, soon afterwards, Nosenko was undermined by the US National Security Agency who had been monitoring communications between Moscow and Geneva. It discovered that Nosenko had lied about being recalled to the Soviet Union. He was now taken to a CIA detention cell and after extensive interrogation he admitted the story about him being recalled was untrue.

Angleton believed that Anatoli Golitsin was a genuine double-agent but argued that Nosenko was part of a disinformation campaign. However, other CIA officers believed Nosenko and considered Golitsin was a fake.

Some researchers have claimed that Angleton was involved in covering up CIA's involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, claimed in his book, The Ends of Power: "After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up. The CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA... in fact, Counter intelligence Chief James Angleton of the CIA called Bill Sullivan of the FBI and rehearsed the questions and answers they would give to the Warren Commission investigators."

For example, Winston Scott, was CIA station chief in 1963. He retired in 1969 and wrote a memoir about his time in the FBI, OSS and the CIA. He completed the manuscript, It Came To Little, and made plans to discuss the contents of the book with CIA director, Richard Helms, in Washington on 30th April, 1971.

Scott died on 26th April, 1971. No autopsy was performed, and a postmortem suggested he had suffered a heart attack. His son, Michael Scott told Dick Russell that he took away his father's manuscript. Angleton also confiscated three large cartons of files including a tape-recording of the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald. Michael Scott was also told by a CIA source that his father had not died from natural causes.

Michael Scott eventually got his father's manuscript back from the CIA. However, 150 pages were missing. Chapters 13 to 16 were deleted in their entirety. In fact, everything about his life after 1947 had been removed on grounds of national security.

Angleton became convinced that the CIA had been penetrated by a "mole" working for the KGB. He ordered his assistant, Clare Edward Petty, of the ultra-secret Special Investigation Group (SIG), to carry out a study into the possibility that a Soviet spy existed in the higher levels of the CIA. Angleton suggested that David Murphy, a former chief of the Soviet Division, was a spy. Petty eventually produced a 25 page report on Murphy that concluded that he was "probably innocent". Angleton disagreed and insisted he was a spy.

Petty also investigated Pete Bagley, another former chief of the Soviet Division. His report on Bagley ran to over 250 pages and concluded that he was a "good candidate for the mole". Angleton disagreed and insisted that his friend was a loyal CIA officer.

Petty now became suspicious of Angleton and decided to carry out a private investigation into his past. As he later pointed out: "I reviewed Angleton's entire career, going back through his relationships with Philby, his adherence to all of Golitsyn's wild theories, his false accusations against foreign services and the resulting damage to the liaison relationships, and finally his accusation against innocent Soviet Division officers."

As a result of his investigation, Petty concluded that there was an "80-85 percent probability" that Angleton was a Soviet mole. Petty showed his report to several senior CIA officials including William Colby, William Nelson and David Blee. Colby instructed Bronson Tweedy, another senior CIA officer to review Petty's findings. After several months of study, Tweedy argued that there was no justification whatsoever for assuming Angleton to be a Soviet agent.

In February, 1973, James Schlesinger replaced Richard Helms as Director of the CIA. Angleton immediately went to see Schlesinger and gave him a list of more than 30 people that he considered to be Soviet agents. This list included top politicians, foreign intelligence officials and senior CIA officials. Those named included Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, Willy Brandt, chairman of the West German Social Democratic Party, Averell Harriman, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lester Pearson, the Canadian prime minister and Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon. Schlesinger listened to Angleton for seven hours. After consulting with other senior figures in the CIA he concluded that he was suffering from paranoia. However, he liked Angleton and decided against forcing him into retirement.

In July 1973, James Schlesinger became President Nixon's Secretary of Defence and William Colby became the new Director of the CIA. Angleton now presented his list of suspected agents to Colby. He reacted by carrying out an investigation into Angleton. He later recalled that he could not find any evidence "that we ever caught a spy under Jim". He added: "That really bothered me... Now I don't care what Jim's political views were as long as he did his job properly, and I'm afraid, in that respect, he was not a good CI chief."

Colby was also concerned about Angleton's mental health. However, he found it difficult to sack him. On 20th December, 1973, Seymour Hersh contacted William Colby and told him that he had evidence that Angleton had organized a massive spying campaign against thousands of American citizens. This action had violated the CIA charter. Hersh informed Colby that he planned to publish the story a few days later. Colby immediately called Angleton to his office and was ordered to resign.

In March, 1976, James Truitt gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot Meyer , who had been murdered on 12th October, 1964, was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".

Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time of the murder. She phoned Ben Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."

Angleton admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that she had taken LSD with Kennedy before "they made love".

In 1976 Cleveland Cram, the former Chief of Station in the Western Hemisphere, met George T. Kalaris and Ted Shackley at a cocktail party in Washington. Kalaris, who had replaced Angleton as Chief of Counterintelligence, asked Cram if he would like to come back to work. Cram was told that the CIA wanted a study done of Angleton's reign from 1954 to 1974. "Find out what in hell happened. What were these guys doing."

Cram took the assignment and was given access to all CIA documents on covert operations. The study entitled History of the Counterintelligence Staff 1954-1974, took six years to complete. As David Wise points out in his book Molehunt (1992): "When Cram finally finished it in 1981... he had produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages. Cram's approximately four-thousand-page study has never been declassified. It remains locked in the CIA's vaults."

On 16th May, 1978, John M. Whitten appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He criticised Richard Helms for not making a full disclosure about the Rolando Cubela plot to the Warren Commission. He added " I think that was a morally highly reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his oath of office or any other standard of professional service."

Whitten also said that if he had been allowed to continue with the investigation he would have sought out what was going on at JM/WAVE. This would have involved the questioning of Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, Rip Robertson, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell and Thomas G. Clines. As Jefferson Morley has pointed out in The Good Spy: "Had Whitten been permitted to follow these leads to their logical conclusions, and had that information been included in the Warren Commission report, that report would have enjoyed more credibility with the public. Instead, Whitten's secret testimony strengthened the HSCA's scathing critique of the C.I.A.'s half-hearted investigation of Oswald. The HSCA concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald and unidentifiable co-conspirators."

John M. Whitten also told the HSCA that James Jesus Angleton involvement in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was "improper". Although he was placed in charge of the investigation by Richard Helms, Angleton "immediately went into action to do all the investigating". When Whitten complained to Helms about this he refused to act.

Whitten believes that Angleton's attempts to sabotage the investigation was linked to his relationship with the Mafia. Whitten claims that Angleton also prevented a CIA plan to trace mob money to numbered accounts in Panama. Angleton told Whitten that this investigation should be left to the FBI. When Whitten mentioned this to a senior CIA official, he replied: "Well, that's Angleton's excuse. The real reason is that Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them."

Whitten also pointed out that as soon as Angleton took control of the investigation he concluded that Cuba was unimportant and focused his internal investigation on Oswald's life in the Soviet Union. If Whitten had remained in charge he would have "concentrated his attention on CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami, Florida, to uncover what George Joannides, the station chief, and operatives from the SIG and SAS knew about Oswald."

James Angleton died of lung cancer at Washington's Sibley Memorial Hospital on 11th May, 1987, and was buried in his hometown of Boise, Idaho.

In 1993 Cleveland Cram completed a study carried out on behalf of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI). Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature. This document was declassified in 2003. In the document Cram reveals that several senior CIA officers, including Clare Edward Petty, Angleton's assistant, were convinced that the former Chief of Counterintelligence, was a KGB agent.

[Thomas Graves]

On 4/11/2007 at 8:36 AM, Douglas Caddy said:

Ghost of the Cold War

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, April 11, 20075

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don't know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK's death?

Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handled Oswald's KGB file, and he knows the spy service had never considered dealing with him.

For many spy buffs, the Nosenko story has always seemed too good to be true. How convenient that he defected at the very moment the KGB's chiefs were eager to reassure the Warren Commission about Oswald's sojourn in Russia. What's more, Nosenko brought other goodies that on close examination were also suspicious -- information that seemed intended to divert the CIA's attention from the possibility that its codes had been broken and its inner sanctum penetrated.

The Nosenko case is one of the gnarly puzzles of Cold War history. It vexed the CIA's fabled counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, to the end of his days. And it has titillated a generation of novelists and screenwriters -- most recently providing the background for Robert De Niro's sinuous spy film "The Good Shepherd."

Now the CIA case officer who initially handled Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, has written his own account. And it is a stunner. It's impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko's bona fides. Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along -- that Nosenko was a phony, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.

That's not the official CIA judgment, of course. The agency gave Nosenko its stamp of approval in 1968 and again in 1976. Indeed, as often happens, the agency itself became the villain, with critics denouncing Angleton, Bagley and other skeptics for their harsh interrogation of Nosenko. In its eagerness to tidy up the mess, the agency even invited Nosenko to lecture to its young officers about counterintelligence.

It happens that I met Angleton in the late 1970s, in the twilight of his life in the shadows. I was a reporter in my late 20s, and it occurred to me to invite the fabled counterintelligence chief to lunch. (Back then, even retired super-spooks listed their numbers in the phone book. I can still hear in my mind his creepily precise voice on the answering machine: "We are not in, at present. . . .") Angleton arrived at his favorite haunt, the Army and Navy Club on Farragut Square, cadaverously thin and dressed in black.

He might have been playing himself in a movie. He displayed all the weird traits that were part of the Angleton legend, clasping his Virginia Slims cigarette daintily between thumb and forefinger and sipping his potent cocktail through a long, thin straw.

And he was still obsessed with the Nosenko case. He urged me, in a series of interviews, to pursue another Russian defector code-named "Sasha," who he was convinced was part of the skein of KGB lies. The man ran a little picture-framing shop in Alexandria and seemed an unlikely master spy. I gradually concluded that Angleton had lost it, and after I wrote that he himself had once been accused of being the secret mole, he stopped returning my calls.

Bagley's book, "Spy Wars," should reopen the Nosenko case. He has gathered strong evidence that the Russian defector could not have been who he initially said he was; that he could not have reviewed the Oswald file; that his claims about how the KGB discovered the identities of two CIA moles in Moscow could not have been right. According to Bagley, even Nosenko eventually admitted that some of what he had told the CIA was false.

What larger purpose did the deception serve? Bagley argues that the KGB's real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited one American code clerk in Moscow in 1949 and perhaps two others later on. The KGB may also have hoped to protect an early (and to this day undiscovered) mole inside the CIA.

Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane and you are reminded just how good the Russians are at the three-dimensional chess game of intelligence. For a century, their spies have created entire networks of illusion -- phony dissident movements, fake spy services -- to condition the desired response.

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

 

I've just now come upon this 2007 post by Douglas Caddy, so I'm bumping it for y'all.

--  TG

Edited May 13, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[David Josephs]

It would have to follow then that Leonard McCoy was also KGB as it was he who reopened the conclusions about Nosenko and convinced CIA He was for real....   Without McCoy's paper none of this happens and we go on believing Golitsyn.

His analysis and summary of his work are in the recent release...

I just find it hard to talk Nosenko and not include McCoy....  

Edited March 24, 2018 by David Josephs

[Thomas Graves]

5 hours ago, David Josephs said:

It would have to follow then that Leonard McCoy was also KGB as it was he who reopened the conclusions about Nosenko and convinced CIA He was for real....   Without McCoy's paper none of this happens and we go on believing Golitsyn.

His analysis and summary of his work are in the recent release...

I just find it hard to talk Nosenko and not include McCoy....  

David,

Excellent point.

Scroll down to some of what Bagley had to say about Leonard McCoy in his PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, a 2014 follow-up to his excellent 2007 book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games :

 

The history of Cold War espionage—KGB vs. CIA—remains incomplete, full of inaccuracies, and cries out for correction. It received a big infusion after 1991 by the opening of some files from both East and West, but that left the more biting questions unanswered—like those pertaining to still-unknown moles inside Western governments and intelligence services. Those undiscovered traitors still hover like ghosts over that history. I saw and had a share in some doings of the first half of the Cold War. The facts and events of which I write here are all part of the public record and have been officially cleared for publication, like my own books Spy Wars and Spymaster. ¹ Tennent H. Bagley , Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief(New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013). [Google Scholar]   But details are easily forgotten, so pulling some out from their present context and getting a glimpse of the ghosts lurking behind them may be useful. In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest. Most of the ghosts I stir up here still hover undetected because back in the second half of the 1960s the CIA changed its mind and decided that the deeply-suspected KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had, after all, genuinely defected and had been telling CIA the truth. ²Throughout this article I treat Yuri Nosenko as a sent KGB plant, deceiving the Americans. The CIA's official position since 1968 has been the opposite. For some insight into the debate, see the Appendix. [Google Scholar]  That change of mind began in 1967, five years after Nosenko first appeared to the CIA. By then the CIA's Soviet Bloc (SB) Division had concluded, on the basis of years of debriefing, interrogation, investigation, observation, and analysis, that the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence) sent Nosenko to CIA with the aim (among others) of diverting leads to its spies in the West that CIA had been given a few months earlier by the genuine KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The SB Division summarized its reasons in a 439-page report, one copy of which they apparently mounted in a “notebook.” But then the tide shifted. A reports-and-requirements (R&R) officer of the Division, alerted to the notebook's existence by a colleague, ³ The colleague was Richard Kovich, who though not involved in the (closely-held) handling of Nosenko, had been subtly seeking for a year or more to learn—and had evidently found out—the dire assessment of Nosenko's bona fides and his situation. [Google Scholar]  got hold of it and, without checking with his Division superiors, drafted a forty-page paper and three memoranda for higher Agency supervisors, pleading that his Division's position on Nosenko as set out in the notebook was wrong, mindless, and indefensible. He urged that it be reconsidered “by a new team of CIA officers.” This evidently launched the Agency's re-review of the case, with new interviews of Nosenko by others, culminating in a 1968 report by security officer Bruce Solie that exonerated Nosenko and led to his acceptance as an advisor to the Agency's anti-Soviet operations. ⁴Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, pp. 197–220. [Google Scholar]

THE MCCOY INTERVENTION

The SB/R&R (Soviet Bloc Reports-and-Requirements) officer who started the process, Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new CI Staff chief, previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides ⁵ See, for example, Spy Wars pp. 218–219 and its Appendix A with its endnote 3. Also, Leonard McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” CIRA Newletter, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1983. [Google Scholar]   and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the CI Staff's existing file material that (independent of SB Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith. ⁶As testified by CI Staff operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler in a handwritten memorandum which is in the files of T. H. Bagley. [Google Scholar]

Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act “with no objection from CIA.”

McCoy opened, as we can now see, with his own finding and with a plea: “After examining the evidence of Nosenko's bona fides in the notebook,” he wrote, “I am convinced that Nosenko is a bona fide defector. I believe that the case against him has arisen and persisted because the facts have been misconstrued, ignored, or interpreted without sufficient consideration of his psychological failings.” The evidence, he said, is that Nosenko is “not a plant and not fabricating anything at all, except what is required by his disturbed personality.” He recommended “that we appoint a new judge and jury for the Nosenko case consisting of persons not involved in the case so far” and proposed six candidates.

According to McCoy, it was not only Nosenko's psychology that should determine his bona fides, but also his reporting. “The ultimate conclusions must be based on his production,” McCoy asserted, specifically claiming to be the only person qualified to evaluate that production. Certain of Nosenko's reports were important and fresh, he stated, and could not be considered KGB “throwaway” or deception, as the notebook described them.

In reality, however, the value of Nosenko's intelligence reports had not been a major factor in the Division's finding. It had judged him a KGB plant on the basis of the circumstances of the case (of the sort listed in the “40 Questions” of the Appendix). McCoy did not explain—or even mention—a single one of these circumstances in his paper, so his arguments were irrelevant to the matter he pretended to deal with.

His was not a professional assessment of a complex counterintelligence situation but, instead, an emotional plea. He referred with scorn to his superiors' “insidious conclusions” and “genuine paranoia” and called their analysis “very strange, to say the least.” The case against Nosenko, he wrote, was based on (unnamed) “assumptions, subjective observations, unsupported suspicions, innuendo, insinuations [… and] relatively trivial contradictions in his reporting.”

Nosenko's failure to pass the lie detector test, McCoy asserted, “rules out Nosenko immediately” as a plant—because the KGB would have trained him to beat it. He dismissed (unspecified) findings as “trivial, antique, or repetitive” and cited one which “borders on fantasy. … In fact, it is fantastic!” (sic—with exclamation point). “I cannot find a shred of solid evidence against Nosenko,” he wrote, “The case would be thrown out of court for lack of evidence.” Closing his paper he asked, “What kind of proof do we need of his innocence, when we call him guilty with none?”

McCoy used as argument his speculation about what the KGB would or would not do. His paper was studded with untruths, distortions, and unsupported assertions like those cited above—all designed to discredit any doubts or doubters of Nosenko's bona fides. For instance, he judged the defector Pyotr Deryabin, a former KGB Major of more than ten years' experience, to be “not experienced.” When Deryabin decided that Nosenko was a KGB plant, wrote McCoy, he was making a “snap judgment … after having been briefed on the mere facts of the case.” In reality, Deryabin had spent years reviewing and commenting upon the full record of this and related cases, listening to tapes (and correcting the transcripts) of every meeting with and debriefing of Nosenko—and had then personally questioned Nosenko in twelve long sessions.

McCoy told the demonstrable untruth that Nosenko “damaged the Soviet intelligence effort more than all the other KGB defectors combined” and that “no Soviet defector has identified as many Soviet agents.” Had Nosenko not uncovered William Vassall as a spy, McCoy wrote, certain secret British documents (shown by Golitsyn to be in KGB hands) “could have been assumed to come from the Lonsdale-Cohen-Houghton net”—though they could not conceivably have been. He said that Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson “would still be operating against us” had Nosenko not uncovered him—though by then, in fact, Johnson had already lost his post and his wife was publicly denouncing him as a Soviet spy. McCoy asserted that it was Nosenko who identified Kovshuk's photo whereas Golitsyn had made the identification. He confused two separate KGB American recruits, following Nosenko's line and successfully hiding the active, valid one. And he made uncounted other equally unfounded assertions.

But by then the Nosenko case—the CIA's holding of a suspected KGB plant—had become a thorn in the side of the Agency leadership, an “incubus” and “bone in the throat,” as Director Richard Helms put it. So the CIA happily accepted McCoy's authority and as a result many KGB moles were never identified.

Let's have a look at some of these ghosts.

   .......

 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

.......................................................................

 

--  TG

Edited March 24, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Michael Clark]

Bagely was likely a sadistic, myopic torturer. His later claims about Nosenko are very likely clouded by that part of human nature which demands that we justify what we have done in order to absolve ourselves of guilt. He was also likely incompetent and dangerously-so.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf

Italics are mine...

 

TOP SECRET

13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security

 

  

 

Edited May 13, 2018 by Michael Clark

[Thomas Graves]

On 3/24/2018 at 7:10 AM, Thomas Graves said:

It would have to follow then that Leonard McCoy was also KGB as it was he who reopened the conclusions about Nosenko and convinced CIA He was for real....   Without McCoy's paper none of this happens and we go on believing Golitsyn.

His analysis and summary of his work are in the recent release...

I just find it hard to talk Nosenko and not include McCoy....  

 

David,

Excellent point. 5/13/18 EDIT ALERT:  But I prefer to give McCoy the benefit of the doubt on that.  After all, he might have been just a gullible numb skull, totally inexperienced with Soviet counterintelligence, who was fed up with the paralysis that was starting to come over "Operations" in the Soviet Russia Division, which paralysis was due to ... gasp ... Angleton's "Search for Popov's Mole", etc., made necessary ... gasp ... by said division's probably having been penetrated, as Golitsyn so correctly intimated, and Nosenko so over-the-top denied.

 

Scroll down to some of what Bagley had to say about Leonard McCoy in his PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, a 2014 follow-up to his excellent 2007 book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games :

 

The history of Cold War espionage—KGB vs. CIA—remains incomplete, full of inaccuracies, and cries out for correction. It received a big infusion after 1991 by the opening of some files from both East and West, but that left the more biting questions unanswered—like those pertaining to still-unknown moles inside Western governments and intelligence services. Those undiscovered traitors still hover like ghosts over that history. I saw and had a share in some doings of the first half of the Cold War. The facts and events of which I write here are all part of the public record and have been officially cleared for publication, like my own books Spy Wars and Spymaster. ¹ Tennent H. Bagley , Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief(New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013). [Google Scholar]   But details are easily forgotten, so pulling some out from their present context and getting a glimpse of the ghosts lurking behind them may be useful. In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest. Most of the ghosts I stir up here still hover undetected because back in the second half of the 1960s the CIA changed its mind and decided that the deeply-suspected KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had, after all, genuinely defected and had been telling CIA the truth. ²Throughout this article I treat Yuri Nosenko as a sent KGB plant, deceiving the Americans. The CIA's official position since 1968 has been the opposite. For some insight into the debate, see the Appendix. [Google Scholar]  That change of mind began in 1967, five years after Nosenko first appeared to the CIA. By then the CIA's Soviet Bloc (SB) Division had concluded, on the basis of years of debriefing, interrogation, investigation, observation, and analysis, that the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence) sent Nosenko to CIA with the aim (among others) of diverting leads to its spies in the West that CIA had been given a few months earlier by the genuine KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The SB Division summarized its reasons in a 439-page report, one copy of which they apparently mounted in a “notebook.” But then the tide shifted. A reports-and-requirements (R&R) officer of the Division, alerted to the notebook's existence by a colleague, ³ The colleague was Richard Kovich, who though not involved in the (closely-held) handling of Nosenko, had been subtly seeking for a year or more to learn—and had evidently found out—the dire assessment of Nosenko's bona fides and his situation. [Google Scholar]  got hold of it and, without checking with his Division superiors, drafted a forty-page paper and three memoranda for higher Agency supervisors, pleading that his Division's position on Nosenko as set out in the notebook was wrong, mindless, and indefensible. He urged that it be reconsidered “by a new team of CIA officers.” This evidently launched the Agency's re-review of the case, with new interviews of Nosenko by others, culminating in a 1968 report by security officer Bruce Solie that exonerated Nosenko and led to his acceptance as an advisor to the Agency's anti-Soviet operations. ⁴Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, pp. 197–220. [Google Scholar]

 

THE MCCOY INTERVENTION

 

The SB/R&R (Soviet Bloc Reports-and-Requirements) officer who started the process, Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new CI Staff chief, previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides ⁵ See, for example, Spy Wars pp. 218–219 and its Appendix A with its endnote 3. Also, Leonard McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” CIRA Newletter, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1983. [Google Scholar]   and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the CI Staff's existing file material that (independent of SB Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith. ⁶As testified by CI Staff operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler in a handwritten memorandum which is in the files of T. H. Bagley. [Google Scholar]

Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act “with no objection from CIA.”

McCoy opened, as we can now see, with his own finding and with a plea: “After examining the evidence of Nosenko's bona fides in the notebook,” he wrote, “I am convinced that Nosenko is a bona fide defector. I believe that the case against him has arisen and persisted because the facts have been misconstrued, ignored, or interpreted without sufficient consideration of his psychological failings.” The evidence, he said, is that Nosenko is “not a plant and not fabricating anything at all, except what is required by his disturbed personality.” He recommended “that we appoint a new judge and jury for the Nosenko case consisting of persons not involved in the case so far” and proposed six candidates.

According to McCoy, it was not only Nosenko's psychology that should determine his bona fides, but also his reporting. “The ultimate conclusions must be based on his production,” McCoy asserted, specifically claiming to be the only person qualified to evaluate that production. Certain of Nosenko's reports were important and fresh, he stated, and could not be considered KGB “throwaway” or deception, as the notebook described them.

In reality, however, the value of Nosenko's intelligence reports had not been a major factor in the Division's finding. It had judged him a KGB plant on the basis of the circumstances of the case (of the sort listed in the “40 Questions” of the Appendix). McCoy did not explain—or even mention—a single one of these circumstances in his paper, so his arguments were irrelevant to the matter he pretended to deal with.

His was not a professional assessment of a complex counterintelligence situation but, instead, an emotional plea. He referred with scorn to his superiors' “insidious conclusions” and “genuine paranoia” and called their analysis “very strange, to say the least.” The case against Nosenko, he wrote, was based on (unnamed) “assumptions, subjective observations, unsupported suspicions, innuendo, insinuations [… and] relatively trivial contradictions in his reporting.”

Nosenko's failure to pass the lie detector test, McCoy asserted, “rules out Nosenko immediately” as a plant—because the KGB would have trained him to beat it. He dismissed (unspecified) findings as “trivial, antique, or repetitive” and cited one which “borders on fantasy. … In fact, it is fantastic!” (sic—with exclamation point). “I cannot find a shred of solid evidence against Nosenko,” he wrote, “The case would be thrown out of court for lack of evidence.” Closing his paper he asked, “What kind of proof do we need of his innocence, when we call him guilty with none?”

McCoy used as argument his speculation about what the KGB would or would not do. His paper was studded with untruths, distortions, and unsupported assertions like those cited above—all designed to discredit any doubts or doubters of Nosenko's bona fides. For instance, he judged the defector Pyotr Deryabin, a former KGB Major of more than ten years' experience, to be “not experienced.” When Deryabin decided that Nosenko was a KGB plant, wrote McCoy, he was making a “snap judgment … after having been briefed on the mere facts of the case.” In reality, Deryabin had spent years reviewing and commenting upon the full record of this and related cases, listening to tapes (and correcting the transcripts) of every meeting with and debriefing of Nosenko—and had then personally questioned Nosenko in twelve long sessions.

McCoy told the demonstrable untruth that Nosenko “damaged the Soviet intelligence effort more than all the other KGB defectors combined” and that “no Soviet defector has identified as many Soviet agents.” Had Nosenko not uncovered William Vassall as a spy, McCoy wrote, certain secret British documents (shown by Golitsyn to be in KGB hands) “could have been assumed to come from the Lonsdale-Cohen-Houghton net”—though they could not conceivably have been. He said that Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson “would still be operating against us” had Nosenko not uncovered him—though by then, in fact, Johnson had already lost his post and his wife was publicly denouncing him as a Soviet spy. McCoy asserted that it was Nosenko who identified Kovshuk's photo whereas Golitsyn had made the identification. He confused two separate KGB American recruits, following Nosenko's line and successfully hiding the active, valid one. And he made uncounted other equally unfounded assertions.

But by then the Nosenko case—the CIA's holding of a suspected KGB plant—had become a thorn in the side of the Agency leadership, an “incubus” and “bone in the throat,” as Director Richard Helms put it. So the CIA happily accepted McCoy's authority and as a result many KGB moles were never identified.

Let's have a look at some of these ghosts.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

 

--  T.G.

 

 

expanded with duly noted edit

Edited May 13, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Michael Clark]

8 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

Bagely was likely a sadistic, myopic torturer. His later claims about Nosenko are very likely clouded by that part of human nature which demands that we justify what we have done in order to absolve ourselves of guilt. He was also likely incompetent and dangerously-so.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf

Italics are mine...

 

TOP SECRET

13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of Bagely to a supergrade position.

2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security

 

  

 

I should have noted that the above was part of the recent document release.

------------------------

And

Two Documents by Leonard McCoy On Nosenko

 

1978 8 page Cronology of an Effort to Inspire Objective Review of the Nosenko Case

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/2018/104-10095-10126.pdf

 

1965  58 page conclusion that Nosenko was a true defector 

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/2018/104-10095-10151.pdf

 

Edited May 14, 2018 by Michael Clark
Docs added

[Thomas Graves]

7 minutes ago, Michael Clark said:

I should have noted that the above was part of the recent document release.

 

Probable against-the-rules "bump"; duly-noted and "screen-captured."

--  T.G.

 

Edited May 13, 2018 by Thomas Graves