Yuri Nosenko and Anatoli Golitsin

[John Simkin]

Does anyone have photographs of Yuri Nosenko and Anatoli Golitsin?

Here is a photograph of Igor Gouzenko who fled to the west in 1945.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

John

He bears a striking resemblence to John Merrick.

[Shanet Clark]

John Merrick, ie the ELEPHANT MAN?

John Hurt played him in the film....

[Roger Fong]

The following photos of Golitsyn are respectively from Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior and David Wise's Molehunt:

In the Mangold book, there is another photo of Golitsyn which I haven't scanned. It shows Golitsyn with Angleton.

Under the topic "Disputed Photos of Yuri Nosenko" I posted all of the known (to me) photos of Nosenko. When I asked Edward Jay Epstein to comment about these photos, he said that none of them look like the Nosenko that he interviewed. However, he said that Wise's photo was probably the real Nosenko when he was young and that Nosenko has probably had plastic surgery.

[Tim Gratz]

Shouldn't this be on the Nosenko thread?

[Greg Kooyman]

Shouldn't this be on the Nosenko thread?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Here's a Blockbuster clue for you Tim...

When the moderater of this forum posts a thread...maybe you let him post his thread.

If you choose not to, Don't read the thread. You did this to me on another thread and as far as I am concerned, you have started far too many incredulous threads to mention here to postulate your own theories.

Please don't misunderstand me. I feel you have every right to post whatever thread you please. However, when you try to decide which threads ought to be moved, changed or whatever, I feel you are out of your element.

As an avid reader of this forum, I pick and choose my posts here, however, when I see this kind of pettiness, it only serves me to conclude that as far as researchers go, we ALL have little time to waste making such comments. Stick to research. Isn't that truly what we are all after here?

Respectfully,

Greg Kooyman

[James Richards]

This is supposedly a genuine photograph of Yuri Nosenko.

James

[John Simkin]

Thank you Roger and James for that. What a great research community this is.

[Stephen Roy]

Does anyone have photographs of Yuri Nosenko and Anatoli Golitsin?

Here is a photograph of Igor Gouzenko who fled to the west in 1945.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

As for Gouzenko, there is a pic of him in some intelligence book. As I recall, he's with his wife in an airport or something, walking toward the camera. I'll try to find it. It might be in a Chapman Pincher book. Or one of the books about Intrepid.

BTW, one cannot underestimate how the battle over Golitsyn, Nosenko, Fedora etc and the whole mole hunt must have affected the JFK matter. The inside accounts show that the mole hunt was at a peak in late 63, and the emergence of Nosenko in an assassination related role must have caused some deep suspicion in intelligence circles. (I am one of those who thinks that many intel people believed in Oswald's image as a lefty and were deeply alarmed about his time in the USSR and his Mexico City trip.)

[John Simkin]

Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (1985)

Exactly one year after these hearings on drug experimentation, the CIA was back in the press for another error of the past. This time it was the prolonged incarceration of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came to the United States in 1964, a few months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Nosenko came to public attention in 1978, when a special committee was set up in the House of Representatives to study the assassination again. Nosenko had been a KGB officer during the time that Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in the Soviet Union, from 1959 to 1962. When Nosenko first arrived in the United States, he was extensively debriefed by the intelligence agencies. He was especially interrogated about any connection between Oswald and the KGB. He contended that the KGB had paid no attention to Oswald. Now, in 1978, this special House committee wanted to review Nosenko's testimony on that issue. This led to an airing of the disgraceful way the CIA had attempted to determine whether Nosenko was telling the truth.

It was the job of the counterintelligence branch under James Jesus Angleton (whom Schlesinger had mentioned to me warily) to check on whether a defector was truly defecting or pretending to defect in order to spy on the United States. Angleton concluded that since Oswald had worked on the U2 spy plane when he was in the U.S. Marine Corps, it was unlikely that the KGB would have overlooked him entirely when he was in the Soviet Union. There was, then, cause to be suspicious of Nosenko's story about Oswald. It appeared to Angleton that the Soviets might have sent Nosenko to plant a story that would absolve them of any complicity with Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. Angleton's suspicions were heightened by an earlier Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, who claimed he knew Nosenko was a double agent. In Nosenko's favor, if he were a genuine defector, was that his knowledge of Soviet intelligence operations would have been more current than Golitsyn's, making him more valuable to us than Golitsyn.

[Charles Black]

The length of time and the treatment which Nosenko recived as an international guest of the CIA, would be unimagineable to most.

The only thing that I can offer is that I find it

impossible to even consider that the OZ was not thoroughly debriefed at both ends. I feel certain that the KGB was no doubt listening "live" to his comments in the U.S. embassy/consulate?

I feel that even were he absolutely identified as a bonafide American spy, that they would still toy with him. It is difficult for me to believe that they felt that he was not "worth the effort".

We are so prone to think in a conventional manner that we are assured that he was debriefed by "the Count".....which he probably was. But it is very possible that he was first debriefed by a U.S. asset while he was still in the Soviet Union.

Charlie Black

[John Simkin]

Christopher Andrew has published this week a book called "The Defence of the Realm". This is the first "authorized" history of an intelligence agency. Andrew has been for a long-time a willing propagandist for MI5 so this does not come as an unexpected decision. After inspecting MI5 files Andrew has reached the conclusion that MI5 made no attempt to overthrow Harold Wilson's government. This of course goes against the account that appeared in MI5 agent, Peter Wright's book Spycatcher.

Andrew admits that some MI5 officers did believe the testimony of Anatoli Golitsyn that Wilson was a KGB agent: "Sadly, a minority of British and American intelligence officers … were seduced by Golitsyn's fantasies."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSgolitsin.htm

[Denis Pointing]

Christopher Andrew has published this week a book called "The Defence of the Realm". This is the first "authorized" history of an intelligence agency. Andrew has been for a long-time a willing propagandist for MI5 so this does not come as an unexpected decision. After inspecting MI5 files Andrew has reached the conclusion that MI5 made no attempt to overthrow Harold Wilson's government. This of course goes against the account that appeared in MI5 agent, Peter Wright's book Spycatcher.

Andrew admits that some MI5 officers did believe the testimony of Anatoli Golitsyn that Wilson was a KGB agent: "Sadly, a minority of British and American intelligence officers … were seduced by Golitsyn's fantasies."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSgolitsin.htm

IMO Golitsyn must have been a genuine defector, whist the KGB may have been willing to sacrifice Maclean and Burgess for the sake of planting a dis- info agent into the CIA I cant believe they would have sacrificed Philby, who was far too importaint an asset. If it took nearly 50 years for the British people to find out King Edward was a Nazi collaborator who knows what may yet be revealed about Harold Wilson in years to come? You should know John, as an historian, that no matter how ridiculous an accusation or innuendo may seem at the time it's often latter proven to be true. Is it, in your opinion John, totally impossible Wilson just may have actually been a KGB agent? This is not a rhetorical question, I would really appreciate the perspective of a left wing historian. Thank you.

Edited October 6, 2009 by Denis Pointing

[Denis Pointing]

This a very interesting thread...at least to me, so I'm gonna bump!! Hope no one objects.

[John Simkin]

You should know John, as an historian, that no matter how ridiculous an accusation or innuendo may seem at the time it's often latter proven to be true. Is it, in your opinion John, totally impossible Wilson just may have actually been a KGB agent? This is not a rhetorical question, I would really appreciate the perspective of a left wing historian. Thank you.

Of course the KGB recruited agents from the UK. It has been the strategy for those on the right to try and smear those on the left as being Soviet agents. In fact, the KGB did not work in this way. What we know about the Philby group is that they were recruited as agents by MI5 because they were right-wing activists. Philby and Burgess, for example, were both active in Neo-Nazi groups in the early 1930s. They were recruited by Maxwell Knight, who had been a founder member of the British fascists. MI5 and MI6 were established to stop socialism spreading to Britain.

Wilson was smeared as a KGB agent because he had been elected to form a Labour government in 1964. The far-right is not very keen on democracy when the people elect a left-wing government. The very first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald was smeared as a Soviet agent via the forged Zinoviev Letter. This cost him the 1924 General Election.

Attempts by Winston Churchill to portray Clement Attlee as a communist in 1945 failed, and even though he was on the right of the party, he provided us with the best period of British government in the 20th century.

Wilson was only the third elected Labour prime minister. It therefore fitted the historical pattern to smear him as a Soviet spy. It was even worse than this. MI5 attempted to organize a coup against him. If we ever really elected a left-wing government, there is no doubt in my mind that the ruling elite would attempt to organize a military coup.