Roger Fong

Here's another shot of Seymour: less stubble, neater hair. Not out of the question that he could impersonate Oswald. Was he or was he not also the "Leon" of the Odio incident? (Photo from Gary Shaw)

This is pure speculation, but the ultimate irony would be that this whole mole business was a KGB disinformation campaign. If so, then the Soviets succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and the plot is worthy of John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. Just imagine if the Soviets managed to manipulate Angleton (without his knowledge) into paralyzing the CIA.

Angleton was wrong, but I think he was basically a patriot. He was paranoid, for sure. And his thinking was more than a little twisted. He was probably too smart for his own good (and ours). And yes, he ruined many careers. He thought he was doing the right thing for his country. And it's unlikely that he himself was a mole. He was wrong, but probably not evil. There's a difference.

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.

The Nosenko movie starring Tommy Lee Jones (he plays a character called Steve Daley who is actually Tennent "Pete" Bagley, Deputy Chief CIA's Soviet Division and Nosenko's handler) concludes with a statement that Fedora, the FBI's mole in the Soviet UN delegation was eventually exposed (after Hoover's death) as a double agent. Fedora had originally backed up some Nosenko's statements that were later exposed to be lies. Specifically, Nosenko claimed that he was a Lieutenant Colonel (he was actually a Captain) and he claimed that he had received a cable in Geneva ordering him to return to Moscow which was the reason he gave for having to defect immediately (there was no such cable). I have not been able to locate another reference that states that Fedora was a double agent. Does anyone have information about this? (the movie, available at Netflix, is otherwise quite accurate, if incomplete).

Speaking of Bagley. He appeared before the House Select Committee and gave a strong rebuttal to John Hart's testimony (reproduced above in Tim's post). Bagley's name is not listed; he's referred to as Deputy Chief, Soviet Bloc Division, or Mr. D.C. (Vol. 12, beginning on page 571).

Shanet,

What's your opinion of Epperson's book? My 1995 copy was the sixteenth printing.

A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History (Publius Press, 1985)

Roger

Re: interrogation of Nosenko, see John Hart's testimony in HSCA Vol II; Nosenko's testimony in HSCA Vol XII; Posner, Chapter 3; and Wise, Chapter 11.

The Nosenko case is extremely complex. There are hundreds of pages of testimony and narrative in the HSCA 12 volumes. Mark Reibling's book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA add some interesting insights. I'm working my way through these and other sources: Posner, Weisberg's rebuttal of Posner, David Wise's Molehunt, and an earlier work, David Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors.

There is a Nosenko thread started by Jim Root. I'll post my findings there or start a new thread. But it might be awhile. There's a lot of material to digest.

2.  Although Nosenko was a "dispatched agent", what he was telling us about no KGB/LHO relationship was true (but remember his 1966 polygraph showed deception in response to this line of questioning).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nosenko was put through three polygraph tests. The first two were under extremely hostile conditions. In October of 1967, Nosenko was taken from his isolation cell, moved to a safe house, and review of the case was assigned to Bruce Solie of the Office of Security. On August 8, 1968, Nosenko was given a third polygraph test. Nosenko passed this test and this is the only one that the CIA now accept as valid.

When the HSCA assigned Richard Arther, president of Scientific Lie Detection, Inc., to do an independent analysis, he concluded that the second test (in 1966) was the most valid, but he did not know about the hostile conditions under which this test was administered.

There hasn't been much new information about Jack Ruby - not that I'm aware of. This is an area that deserves greater attention. Gary Cartwright's article for Texas Monthly (November 1975) is a good read. Be sure to catch his update published in the same journal on December 1990. His roommate in 1963 was going out with the stripper Jada and he claims that Jada confirms Beverly Oliver's story about Oswald being in the Carousel Club.

Another excellent source is Seth Kantor's book, "The Ruby Cover-up." I have the 1992 paperback, but it was first published in 1978 under a different name. Kantor was the person who saw and talked to Ruby at Parkland Hospital.

"Jack Ruby's Girls", by Alice Anderson and Diana Hunter, is of interest mostly for adding a little "color" to the story. The book doesn't show any photos of the Carousel, but it has an excelllent description of the club and how it operated. This book is hard to come by, so I've scanned an excerpt. (The statement about not seeing Oswald at the club deserves some comment which I'll save for a later post).

Class on Commerce Street

(from Jack Ruby's Girls, by Diana Hunter and Alice Anderson, 1970)

Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club was a night club with girls and drinks and strippers. It was like a lot of other clubs in Dallas, but then it wasn’t like any one of them. Dallas has never been a city famous for its night life—strong church influence prevents that—but the Carousel always had a certain reputation.

Unless you knew the Carousel was there, you might have missed it, sandwiched between a parking garage and a short-order restaurant, except for the pictures of Jack Ruby’s girls in scanty costumes and inviting poses pasted around the entrance to lure the customers inside. The location was 1312½ Commerce Street, right in the middle of downtown Dallas, halfway between the county jail and the police station. Jack Ruby knew people who’d been locked up in both places, but although he had been arrested for minor offenses on numerous occasions, he had never been locked up in either one himself—never, that is, until November 24, 1963, the day he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. After that, he was never out of one jail or the other until he was taken to Parkland Hospital to die.

Across the street from the Carousel Club stood the old Adolphus Hotel, built by the Busch beer family of St. Louis. Adjacent to it, also on Commerce, was the Baker Hotel. We thought you’d like to know this because these two hotels were where so many of our out-of-town customers, and some local ones, too, spent the night after we’d fleeced them right out of their socks.

The club itself was one flight up a narrow stairway that led from the street level entrance, which explains the “½” on the address. That’s the way they number upstairs locations in Dallas. At the top of the stairs was a tiny cashier’s booth where customers stopped to pay a two-dollar cover charge before they could go inside. The booth had one of those two-way mirrors in the back, with a mirror on the inside which was a window from the outside, something Jack Ruby used frequently to spy on his cashiers and make certain they weren’t pocketing any of the receipts.

Inside, the Carousel was a single, square, barn-like room with dark red carpeting and large booths, covered in black plastic, lined up against the walls. The focal point was a stage about the size of a boxing ring where the strippers performed. An orchestra, usually four or five pieces, sat at the back of the stage and played for the performances and between acts. There wasn’t a dance floor. The Carousel wasn’t that kind of club. Most of our customers were men, and they didn’t come to dance. They came to watch us dance.

Occupying the entire wall to the left of the stage was the bar, a huge boomerang-shaped affair with the bottom part covered in the red rug fabric and the top finished in gaudy gold padded plastic. The area above the bar was decorated with gold crowns suspended from the ceiling. There were crown decorations on the other walls, too, and a big fleur de lis flanking each side of the stage. Gold mesh draperies hung over the windows on the wall opposite the bar, but they weren’t really needed because the Carousel was never open when it was light outside. The only other decoration in the club was an enormous gold painting of a stallion, done in a kind of three-dimensional relief style, that Jack Ruby treasured. He always said it was real class.

Most of the other parts of the Carousel you couldn’t see unless you worked there. A kitchen opened from behind the bar where we cooked pizza, the only food the Carousel ever served. Dressing rooms for us girls were behind the stage area. Jack Ruby’s dingy little office, equipped with a grey metal desk and a small safe, was off the hallway to the left of the bar. The restrooms were back that way, too. They got a lot of use.

A large part of the Carousel’s customers were regulars who’d been coming there since Ruby opened the club in 1960. New customers generally came because someone had told them about the club, or they’d read about it somewhere. A few wandered in off the streets. Those who did had a surprise or two waiting for them when they got inside.

Somebody made a point once that Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club was in the heart of a city that never took the Carousel to its heart. Now what kind of talk is that? True, many of our customers were from outside Dallas, but we had some steady local clientele. They weren’t all hicks and farmers, either. We could count on a cross-section of the adult male population to walk through the Carousel’s doors at one time or another; politicians, salesmen, attorneys, doctors, football players, insurance men, oilmen, truck drivers, newspapermen, everybody. Even a few preachers. Most of these people weren’t ordinarily big spenders, but we coaxed them with a hint that we were really interested in showing them a good time. Once inside Jack Ruby’s club, they either began spending money or soon were back on the street. Ruby had a way of getting rid of the no-spenders, just as he did of tossing out customers who became loud or obnoxious. Those stairs saw plenty of action.

Speaking of customers, we want to state right now for the record that none of us who were Jack Ruby’s girls ever saw Lee Harvey Oswald, or his brother Robert Oswald, or Officer J.D. Tippit, in the Carousel Club. True, a lot of cops came to the Carousel off duty, sometimes even with their wives. But we never saw Officer Tippit there. And we’re as sure as we can be that Jack Ruby didn’t know anything about or have anything to do with the assassination and was not part of any conspiracy.

The Carousel opened at eight every evening, including Sundays, and customers could stay until it closed at two, but they had to stop drinking hard stuff promptly at midnight, one o’clock on Saturday nights. They could buy beer and champagne. If they wanted liquor, they had to bring their own bottle and pay to order ice and a glass. All this was the situation which the Texas curfew and liquor laws imposed on its citizens and visitors at the time when the incidents of this book took place in the early 1960’s.

Jack Ruby frankly admitted that the beer served at the Carousel was the cheapest he could buy, although it went for sixty cents a thick-bottomed glass. His champagne was, to use his own term, pure rotgut. He didn’t encourage his girls to drink the stuff, only to waste it.

Bought by the truckload, the bubbly we served cost $1.60 a bottle. We peddled it to sucker customers for $17.50 a bottle, and they had to pay the price if they expected one of us to sit with them in a booth. Most of the time they handed us a twenty dollar bill for the bottle, and we kept the $2.50 change.

Once the champagne had been purchased, we proceeded to find imaginative ways to use it up as fast as possible. We might drop a napkin in a glass to sop up the liquid, spill a glassful, or even “accidentally” tip over the whole bottle. These tricks were known as “dumping,” a Carousel ritual. Ruby ordered us to do it—partly to keep us from getting drunk as we entertained the customers, but mostly to put more money into the club’s coffers.

And that’s what the Carousel Club was like. In such an atmosphere, the thing Jack Ruby wanted—even more than money—was that his club and his girls would exude “class.” It was the most important thing in life to him, the thing he talked about the dreamed of every moment of every day. But he never found it.

Got the following "answer" (his terminology) from Ed Epstein:

NONE.  The first 3 were fake photos handed out by CIA to protect Nosenko.  4th looks nothing like him

Followed by the following "new answer"

I rechecked: 3 of photos are of Shustov, 4th, lower right, is supposedly Nosenko, although he does not look like Nosenko I interviewed (he no doubt had plastic surgery)

Haven't gotten through to Posner yet.

Sorry to tell you, but the photo didn't post, & that is very suspicious. 

I think it was the CIA - but Tim Gratz says the KGB did it  (kidding, of course)...

(I always click on "insert into post" and the photo goes where the cursor is

blinking in the text box.......)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry, I got an error message when I tried to upload the attachment. Will try to get this fixed so that the photos will appear in the message. Meanwhile, you can find the pictures here:

Nosenko photo

David Wise’s Molehunt, a classic study of the CIA’s search for Soviet spies in its own ranks, was published in 1992. The photo section of this book includes a shot of Yuri Nosenko (see Photo D) with the following caption:

"Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko as a young KGB officer before he defected to the CIA in Geneva early in 1964. This photograph, obtained by the author, is the first ever published of Nosenko. A photograph identified as Nosenko and widely distributed by wire services when the KGB officer defected was actually of another member of the Soviet disarmament delegation, V.V. Shustov."

The earlier photo (Photo A) mentioned by Wise was published in the New York Times on November 12, 1964. The Times printed a short follow-up two days later and correctly identified Shustov.

Between 1964 and 1992, there were at least two other photographs published purporting to be of Nosenko. Photo B appeared in Bernard Fensterwald’s Coincidence or Conspiracy, 1977. Photo C can be found in Chapman Pincher’s Too Secret Too Long, 1984. It’s possible that Photo C is also Shustov. Chapman’s caption indicates that the photo was taken at the Geneva conference where Nosenko defected. I have no information about the provenance of Fensterwald’s photo and it was printed without caption or attribution.

I’ve written to Wise care of his literary agent, and to Chapman at his home in Berkshire, England. Neither has responded. And Fensterwald died in 1991.

I know that both Gerald Posner and Edward Jay Epstein had access to Nosenko, but I don’t know how to get in touch with them.

Does any have information about these photos and do you have suggestions about how I should proceed to sort this out?

There is a film called "Naughty Dallas". I haven't seen it, but apparently it's still available on VHS from a company called Something Weird.

http://www.somethingweird.com/4277.htm

Here's a description from the Something Weird website:

NAUGHTY DALLAS AKA NAUGHTY CUTIES & MONDO EXOTICA

#4277 1964 / color

SOUTHERN BURLESQUE STRIPPERS

Produced by BRECK WALL

Directed by LARRY BUCHANAN

with JADA, KIM ATHAS, PEGGY STEELE

A small-towner with high hopes fantasizes about breaking into show biz and becoming the proud owner of a pink poodle. Dallas, being the entertainment hot spot that it is, naturally attracts the pie-eyed lass. After a day in the big city, she decides that burlesque is her bag & signs up for an amateur-show. Unnerved by the dazzling array of talent on display at the nightclub, she is unable to perform and leaves the stage in tears. Now for the heart -wrenching decision: run home to the country, or stick it out in Dallas ... after all, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. Or maybe not.

Filled to the brim with classic burlesque, Larry Buchanan's (MARS NEEDS WOMEN, ZONTAR THE THING FROM VENUS) naughty nudie was filmed on location at Jack Ruby's actual nightclub. Truly a history making motion picture.

My name is Roger Fong and I live in San Francisco, California. I am a web developer and information systems consultant. I am retired from the US Department of Veterans Affairs where I was director of information systems at a major metropolitan medical center. My educational background includes a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, and graduate studies in anthropology and computer science. In the late 60's I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in north eastern Thailand, near the Mekong River and the Laotian border. After the Peace Corps, I served a tour of duty at the US Army Hospital in Nürnberg, Germany. My interests include the Kennedy assassination, travel, hiking and camping, and choral singing.