That’s it.

That’s the post.

Background:

Putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 — sent to the CIA there to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, was telling CIA about probable penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies — and a false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.

A few days after his final meeting with Nosenko in Geneva in mid-June 1962, his primary CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, convinced Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton at CIA headquarters that Nosenko was fake because, upon reading the thick file on Golitsyn, he realized that the cases that Nosenko had spoken dismissably about were the same cases that Golitsyn had been telling Angleton about.

Problem was, Golitsyn and Nosenko had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.

Although the Soviet Russia Division and Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff were convinced that Nosenko was a provocateur, he was allowed to physically defect to the U.S. in February 1964 because the Warren Commission was just beginning to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, and because Nosenko was claiming in Geneva — where he was once again (implausibly) acting as the security officer for a Soviet arms negation delegation — to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer and to have just received a “return to Moscow immediately” telegram from KGB headquarters. Nosenko said he had read the file on Oswald four times — twice before and twice after the assassination — and swore that the KGB had nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR.

Upon arriving in the U.S., Nosenko refused to fully cooperate with his CIA interviewers, and after a couple of months the CIA decided to detain him and subject him to a polygraph exam and hostile, but non-tortuous, interrogations.

Around 2010, British researcher Malcolm Blunt found a document at the National Archives that indicated that Bruce Solie, Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, had tried in April 1964 to talk the Warren Commission’s W. David Slawson into allowing Nosenko to testify to the Commission, even though the Soviet Bloc Division and James Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff seriously doubted Nosenko’s bona fides.

Fast-forward a couple of years to 1966 . . .

KGB Major Igor Kochnov, posted to the Soviet Embassy as a diplomat, calls Richard Helms at home on a Saturday morning in June and offers to spy for the CIA in exchange for being allowed to recruit, or appear to recruit, former defector Nicholas Shadrin. Angleton thinks he’s fake, and, fearing that the Soviet Bloc Division has been penetrated by a mole, chooses inexperienced Solie to be Kochnov’s CIA case officer. Solie and FBI agent Elbert Turner meet with Kochnov, and Kochnov tells them that he was sent to Washington to track down and either kidnap or kill both Golitsyn and Nosenko. He also flatters Solie by telling him he was right to suspect that Igor Orlov — aka Alexander “Sasha” Kopatzky — was Golitsyn’s long-sought mole, SASHA. (Orlov had been forced to retire from the Agency five years earlier.)

The $64,000 Question:

Given the above, was Bruce Solie, who also “cleared” Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report and was instrumental in Kochnov’s kidnapping of Shadrin in Vienna in 1975, a KGB mole?

It sure seems that way to me.


That’s it.

That’s the post.

Photo: Tennent H. Bagley


Why is it that so many CIA officers, former or otherwise, refuse to read and/or believe the 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, by Tennent H. Bagley, PhD., or his 2014 thirty-five-page follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” or even, I suspect, my 2023 Wikipedia article on Bagley?

Is it because they’ve been turned off against “Pete” by espionage writers like Tom Mangold (whose primary source for his 1991 book, Cold Warrior, was probable mole Leonard V. McCoy) and David Wise (whose primary source for his 1992 book, Molehunt, was a probable mole, Russia-born George Kisevalter)?

Would they prefer not to realize that the Agency’s and the Bureau’s official position on putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko (for whom Bagley was primary case officer from June 1962 to September 1967) — i.e., that he was a true defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and a true physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 — is because another probable mole, James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Solie in the Office of Security, “cleared“ Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report?

Would they prefer not to realize that KGB Major Aleksey Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA “Fedora”) at the FBI’s NYC field office from early 1962 to 1977, was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent?

Would they prefer not to realize that CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, wasn’t uncovered due to sloppy CIA tradecraft (George Winters’ mailing an unnecessary letter to him) and superior KGB surveillance in early 1959, but because he was betrayed by a mole in January 1957 in Washington, D.C., movie houses, and, in the interest of “source protection,” allowed to continue spying for the Agency until December 1958, at which time he was secretly arrested and “played back” against the CIA until he was publicly arrested on 16 October 1959?

That sort of thing?


That’s it.

That’s the post.



PS Both of those writings by Bagley can be read for free. Just google “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously (scroll down to the second entry on the hit list) and google “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.

As for the Wikipedia article, google “tennent h bagley” and “wiki” simultaneously.

Sean replied:

Tom -- I respect your opinion, but Google AI didn’t spend 30 years working against Russian intelligence, I did---the target is democracy and our country writ-large...we as Americans waste far too much time and energy with fighting each other, but feel free to go down that path, I just refuse to do it, there is no point to it...the issue was investigated, extensively, I quote the SSCI report and the DNI report...and in my book! Hope you will read it; it is far more entertaining than Goggle AI as well! ...but I appreciate your views.

. . . . . . .

My reply:

Dear Sean,

My point of view is that there are oodles and gobs of long-serving high-level CIA officers — many now deceased — who mistakenly believe TOP HAT (Polyakov) and FEDORA (Kulak) really did spy for the FBI’s NYC field office, that Yuri Nosenko really was a true defector-in-place in Geneva in May-June 1962 (and a true physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964), that Igor Kochnov really was being truthful when he told CIA’s Bruce Solie and the FBI’s Bert Turner in 1966 that Nosenko was real-deal and shared the still-important (and, ironically, correct) information with them that Igor Orlov (aka Alexander “Sasha” Kopatzky") was Golitsyn’s mole SASHA (five years after Orlov had retired from CIA), and that CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, really was uncovered in early 1959 due to sloppy CIA tradecraft and superior KGB surveillance, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

I could go on and on but suffice it to say that I totally agree with you that “former” KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin’s target is American democracy and our country writ large.

Where I differ from you is that I believe that the six decades of KGB disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations (which you seem to dismiss — as evidenced by your belief that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector) that have been waged against us and our NATO allies ever since the KGB set up Department D in the FCD and Department 14 in the SCD in 1959, did dumb-us-down, did get us at each other’s throats, and did get us to drop our guard to such a degree that he was able to install corrupt, anti-democracy Donald J. Trump as our so-called president on 20 January 2017, and . . . yep . . . did so to further the KGB’s long-term Sun Tzu-based goal of getting us to defeat ourselves.

A little history lesson:

The disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations that Department D in the FCD and Department 14 in the SCD started waging against us and our NATO allies in 1959 -- with the latter’s sending Polyakov (who later “flipped” to Jim Flint in Rangoon in 1966) and Kulak to the FBI’s NYC field office in late-1961 and early-1962, respectively, false defector-in-place Nosenko to CIA in Geneva in May-June 1962, and Igor Kochnov secretly to the FBI in 1965 and to CIA in 1966, etc., etc., and the planting of an anti-Clay Shaw / anti-CIA article in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper (Paese Sera) in March 1967 (which eventually gave rise to the 1991 anti-CIA film, “JFK”), etc., etc., have all contributed to the state we find ourselves in — with a corrupt, anti-Democracy “president” who has even intimated that he might cancel the midterm elections and/or the general election under the pretext of “national emergency.”

But I digress.

If you don’t think much of Google AI, here’s Perplexity AI:

ME: In 2015/2016, were the SVR’s, FSB’s, and GRU’s operations against the RNC, the Trump Campaign, and other Republican organizations and/or individuals as robust and as aggressively waged as the ones against the DNC, the Clinton Campaign, and other Democratic organizations and/or individuals?

Perplexity AI: No. The public record supports a clear asymmetry: Russian services cast a wide collection net that included Republican-associated targets, but the sustained, high-value intrusion-and-release campaign was directed far more heavily at Democratic institutions and the Clinton campaign—and it was paired with an overt influence effort intended to damage Clinton and aid Trump.

The central distinction

It helps to separate three questions:

Intelligence collection and targeting: Russian activity against Democratic and Clinton-related targets was broad and sustained. Republicans and Republican-aligned entities were also targeted, with some limited successful compromises.

Penetration of core campaign and party systems: The DNC was compromised from July 2015 until at least June 2016, and the DCCC and Clinton-linked email accounts were also breached. By contrast, there is no public finding that Russian actors successfully penetrated the active RNC’s core infrastructure or the Trump campaign’s core systems.

Theft, exploitation, and public release: The Democratic intrusions produced a large-scale theft of documents that were subsequently released in stages through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks. No comparable public-release operation involving stolen Trump campaign or active-RNC material has been documented.

Political objective: The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian operation aimed to discredit Hillary Clinton and diminish her electoral prospects, while assisting Donald Trump’s candidacy.

The Intelligence Community said Russian intelligence collected against targets associated with both major parties, including primary campaigns, think tanks, and lobbying groups considered relevant to future U.S. policy. But that statement describes the broad reconnaissance/collection universe, not equivalence in operational effort or political exploitation.

The Democratic operation was demonstrably more intensive

The documented GRU operation against Democratic targets was sustained and operationally deep:

• GRU gained access to DNC networks in July 2015 and retained access until at least June 2016.

• GRU Unit 26165 spearphished Clinton campaign personnel, including Chairman John Podesta, stole credentials and email content, and used credentials to access other systems.

• GRU penetrated the DCCC and DNC, monitored dozens of employees, deployed hundreds of malware files, stole very large volumes of documents, and maintained infrastructure to support the operation.

• GRU Unit 74455 then conducted the influence/exploitation phase: creating or using DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 and transferring material for publication through WikiLeaks.

• The ICA concluded, with high confidence, that Putin directed an influence campaign aimed at undermining confidence in U.S. democracy, disparaging Clinton, reducing her chances, and helping Trump.

That is not merely “hacking both sides.” It is a combined clandestine collection, compromise, exfiltration, laundering, timed publication, and political-influence operation focused on one side of the contest.

The Republican operation was real but not comparable

The evidence indicates Russian actors did go after Republican entities and people. Comey testified that the FBI had identified successful penetrations of some Republican groups and campaigns, especially at the state level, and “limited penetration” of old, inactive RNC domains. But he said the FBI had not found evidence that the current RNC or the Trump campaign had been successfully hacked.

This was therefore not an absence of Republican targeting. It was a substantially different operational result:

• Old/inactive RNC domains are not equivalent to compromising the current RNC infrastructure.

• State-party or state-campaign penetration is not equivalent to penetrating the presidential campaign’s senior staff, data systems, and national party networks.

• The public record identifies no Republican equivalent to the DNC/DCCC penetration, Podesta compromise, massive exfiltration, or DCLeaks/Guccifer/WikiLeaks dissemination pipeline.

SVR, FSB, and GRU

The available public attribution must be handled carefully. The detailed criminal indictment and Mueller account assign the DNC, DCCC, and Clinton campaign intrusion operation specifically to GRU Units 26165 and 74455.

The January 2017 ICA spoke more broadly of “Russian intelligence services” conducting cyber operations against targets tied to both parties. That does not establish that the SVR, FSB, and GRU each conducted parallel, equally robust campaigns against every Republican and Democratic target category. The public record provides the strongest specific attribution and operational detail for the GRU’s Democratic-target operation.

The FSB was sanctioned by the Obama administration in December 2016 in connection with election-related malicious cyber activity, but the public official accounts do not supply a comparably granular account showing an FSB or SVR operation against Republican targets on the scale of GRU’s DNC/DCCC/Clinton campaign operation.

Bottom line

The best evidence-based answer is:

Russian services investigated and, in some cases, penetrated Republican-associated targets, but the publicly documented 2015–16 operation was not symmetric. The most sustained, successful, and aggressively exploited cyber campaign targeted the DNC, DCCC, Clinton campaign personnel, and Democratic-linked institutions. It was then integrated into a public active-measures campaign designed to hurt Clinton and favor Trump.

That conclusion does not require claiming that every Russian cyber action against Republicans is known. It rests on the disparity in what U.S. investigators publicly documented: duration of access, depth of compromise, scale of theft, and political dissemination.

— Tom

PS

I’ve already read your book. It’s very good. With one caveat (see above).

PPS

Here’s some more Perplexity AI for you:

ME: Has Trump intimated that he might cancel the midterm elections and/or the general election due to a “national emergency”?

Perplexity AI: Yes—there are reported remarks that can reasonably be read as intimating openness to canceling or delaying the 2026 midterms, though he has also expressly denied that he was considering a national-emergency declaration for that purpose.

In January 2026, according to reporting summarized by the Center for American Progress, Trump said: “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election,” and, about a week later, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” In August, he reportedly responded to a suggestion of declaring an emergency to restrict voting with: “stranger things have happened.” Those are not an announced cancellation plan, but they go beyond a wholly hypothetical discussion and can fairly be described as suggestive or exploratory language.

Important qualification

On February 27, Trump denied reports that he was considering a national emergency related to the midterms. Asked directly, he reportedly said, “No,” and “I’ve never heard about it.” He instead indicated that he might seek election-related changes through legislation or executive action.

So, the accurate formulation is:

Trump has made comments that critics reasonably interpret as signaling openness to delaying, canceling, or otherwise disrupting the midterm election, and he has been linked in reporting to a proposed emergency-based election-control framework. But he has not publicly announced a decision or formal plan to cancel the midterms, and he has denied considering a national-emergency declaration for that purpose.

Legal reality

A presidential declaration of national emergency would not, by itself, authorize cancellation or postponement of a federal election. Federal law sets the general-election date as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years; the Constitution assigns the principal authority over election administration to the states, subject to Congress’s power to regulate federal elections. The Congressional Research Service likewise describes the states as having initial and principal authority over the time, place, and manner of federal elections.

For the 2026 midterms, changing the nationwide federal-election date would require congressional action. A president could attempt legally contentious executive measures, potentially producing immediate litigation and serious practical disruption, but could not lawfully cancel the election by unilateral emergency proclamation.

ME: You wrote, “But he has not publicly announced a decision or formal plan to cancel the midterms.” Question: Given that today is 21 August 2026. Would you expect him to have done that by now?

Perplexity AI: No—not necessarily. As of August 21, there are still about 10½ weeks before the November 3 midterms, and an attempt to disrupt them could begin with measures short of a plainly announced “cancellation”: an emergency declaration, an executive order purporting to impose national rules, litigation-triggering federal action, pressure on state officials, or efforts affecting voting access and certification. The election date remains November 3, 2026.

Why a formal announcement is not required

If someone intended to use an emergency claim as leverage, an early declaration of “I will cancel the election” would be politically and legally self-defeating. It would:

• Clarify the target for immediate injunctions and congressional opposition.

• Make it harder to portray later action as a response to an asserted new emergency.

• Create an unmistakable record of intent to interfere with an election.

• Alert state election officials, Congress, courts, candidates, and the public sooner than necessary.

So, the lack of a formal cancellation announcement is not reassuring evidence by itself. It says only that no such formal plan has been publicly declared.

What has changed

The more accurate update to my prior wording is that Trump has not announced a formal plan to cancel or postpone the midterms, but he has publicly left open an emergency-based effort to assert greater federal control over them.

On August 11, when commentator Wayne Allyn Root urged Trump to declare a national-security emergency over elections to impose voter-ID, proof-of-citizenship, and mail-ballot restrictions without Senate action, Trump responded: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.” That is not an announcement of cancellation, but it is a deliberate refusal to rule out the proposed emergency gambit.

What to watch for

The legally and factually meaningful warning signs would be concrete government acts, not merely whether Trump says the word “cancel”:

• A presidential national-emergency proclamation identifying elections, voting, migration, foreign interference, civil disorder, or fraud as its basis.

• An executive order that claims authority to supersede state election procedures or impose federal voting rules.

• Federal directives or deployments involving polling places, ballot handling, election offices, or state certification.

• Litigation by DOJ, state governments, election officials, campaigns, or civil-rights groups challenging such measures.

• Congressional action seeking to terminate a declared emergency.

A national-emergency declaration does not itself grant a president election-control power: it must be tied to a statute that actually authorizes the specific action, and the National Emergencies Act is a procedural framework rather than a free-standing power to alter elections.

Bottom line

I would not expect a candid advance declaration that he intends to cancel the midterms if he were contemplating an unlawful or constitutionally dubious intervention. But I also would not infer an imminent cancellation plan from ambiguous remarks alone. The strongest current conclusion is narrower: he has publicly signaled that an emergency-based attempt to influence or federalize election rules is not off the table, while no announced plan to cancel or postpone the November election has been identified.

ME: Not necessarily?

LOL!

Perplexity AI: Fair criticism. “Not necessarily” was too bloodless and overly cautious.

Given the proximity to the November 3 election—and the legal and political implausibility of a president openly advertising an intention to cancel it—you should not expect an advance, explicit announcement saying, “I intend to cancel/postpone the midterms.” The absence of such an announcement tells us little.

The relevant issue is not whether he has used the word cancel in a formal declaration. It is whether he is setting up a claimed emergency, asserting federal power over state-run election processes, or creating conditions that could obstruct voting or certification. His August 11 “stranger things have happened” response is therefore more significant than the absence of an explicit cancellation announcement.

Photo: Brian D. Litman


Mr. Litman posted this a few hours ago in response to my earlier article on him and “former” KGB* officer Oleg Nechiporenko - -

Mr. Graves ... a few clarifications:

(1) I am not exactly, as you have represented, an “Espionage Writer”. The exception being that I am now, as time allows, releasing vignettes which should later compile into a book concerning my work, in the early 1990’s with just-retired KGB officers who, in the chaos of the August 1991 putsch against Gorbachev and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR in Dec 1991 were in a circumstance which enabled a rare degree of access and openness (which I seized upon).

More correctly, I was trying to develop writers from the ranks of the KGB veterans to whom I was introduced in January & February of 1992. This, pursuant to an extraordinary agreement I negotiated with KGB/SVR via their AFIO-like organization called FIVA. (See my Substack for articles pertaining to this, such as LA Times: https://tinyl.co/4rVI) [Wrong link, Brian.]

Accordingly, I am better framed as a Producer of intellectual property directly from the intelligence officers’ experiences and corresponding files that Yasenevo would make available.

This is precisely what happened with my first client, KGB Colonel Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko with whom I spent about a year discussing and co-editing his book - which I secured the contract for - (and entitled) “Passport to Assassination”.

I sent you the preface to this book which correctly references my deep involvement with not only Oleg but also with other KGB officers and leaders. These included the redoubtable KGB Col. Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov and KGB Col. Pavel Antonovich Yatskov who both engaged with LHO in Mexico City. (Along with another officer who retired at the top of PGU.)

[Did you know that the only reason the CIA and the FBI believed KGB Colonel / “diplomat” Valery Kostikov was the head of Department 13 (assassinations & espionage) for the Western Hemisphere on 23 November 1963 was because a Kremlin-loyal triple-agent at the Bureau’s NYC field office, Aleksey Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from CIA “Fedora”), had told it a few months earlier that Kostikov’s charge at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was Department 13? As you may know, Kostikov was the guy whose name was “volunteered” to Oswald or “Oswald” over a sure-to-be-taped phone line on 1 October 1963 by another Kremlin-loyal triple-agent, Ivan Obyedkov.]

(2) Therefore, I did not, as you wrote, “interview” Oleg Maximovich. I was materially involved in creating his book. A book whose realization included many intrigues that I shall address in my Substack).

(3) In this process while a resident of Moscow, I was introduced to past and then-current leadership in Soviet Intelligence - not the least of whom included former KGB Chairman Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny (in power 1961~67).

Semichastny was engaging and opinionated. He invited me to lunch on several occasions to discuss business ... and history. He was KGB Chairman during an momentous time frame including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the JFK Assassination - which is how I came to meet him in the first place. I wanted to confirm or clarify certain facts that Oleg had told me about Oswald that were absolutely novel and staggering.

Some of these facts I will illuminate in the coming weeks in “Codename: Nalim”, my “Substack”.

Contrary to certain other senior officers, Semichastny had a unique assessment of Nosenko.

And to the extent that all assessments in the field as to what really “went down” in the Nosenko Affair resolved to his Inbox — as Chief of KGB — I was bothered with the irregularities he conveyed to me.

Nevertheless, what mostly concerned me about Nosenko was his accuracy as to the reportage of the Moscow case officers vis-a-vis Oswald’s suspected treason and the conveyance of any classified info he could possibly have retained as a U2 radar operator.

My impression was that Yuri Ivanovich was solid in his analysis about KGBs immediate disappointment with Oswald as being anyone with operative value.

And, especially after his antics in Moscow as his tourist visa was set to expire - KGB was keen to see the back of him.

. . . . . . .

My reply:

Dear Brian,

Here’s a long but pertinent excerpt from Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars (which anyone can read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously and scrolling down to the second entry on the hit list).

Emphasis added.

My comments are in brackets.


After they had decided once and for all that Nosenko genuinely defected and was telling the truth, CIA insiders spread the happy word that they had received “convincing” confirmation from later KGB sources. “All of the KGB defectors since 1964 — who were in a position to know about the Nosenko case and whose bona fides have been absolutely verified by the CIA — have strongly supported Nosenko,” they told an investigative journalist [Tom Mangold] in the 1980s. They numbered “more than fifteen in all” and were “uniformly incredulous to learn from the Americans that Nosenko was ever doubted.” [1] An official CIA spokesman [John L. Hart] was later to tell Congress the same story. [2]

Fifteen confirmations might make a convincing case — but not these fifteen. In actuality these sources had not been “in a position to know,” nor were their “bona fides absolutely verified.” Five of them had never mentioned Nosenko at all, and others were not even in the KGB when Nosenko defected. [3] Not one of the fifteen had firsthand knowledge, much less had any of them been in a position to learn of the KGB’s tightly compartmented deception operations. Those who were not lying or fabricating were presumably repeating what they had been told either officially or by corridor gossip — and in fact false accounts were being circulated.

Another KGB officer was told that no fewer than “forty colonels” had been bred as a result of Nosenko’s defection — but after reflection and discussion with other officers recognized the story to be false and an intentional plant within the KGB. [4]

Three KGB veterans who talked with me after the Cold War seemed to believe these planted tales or rumors because they assumed (wrongly, as later events would show) that the KGB would never use one of its staff officers as a defector. One Illegal, alias “Rudy Herrmann,’’ reported that he had been told to try to find Nosenko in the United States — but he could not know why. (The KGB must have been wondering why Nosenko had dropped off their radar screen.) To label all these sources “absolutely verified bona fide” was grotesque. Suspicions hung over six of the fifteen. [5] If even one of those six was a KGB plant, a skeptic might wonder why the KGB, through that plant, had vouched for Nosenko.

There were, outside this list, more authoritative KGB sources, with more direct knowledge. What did they say about Nosenko — especially in the more relaxed conditions after the end of the Cold War? Some said flatly that Nosenko was lying, others inadvertently revealed it by contradicting Nosenko’s stories, and the best-informed felt sure the KGB had planted him on CIA. For example:

• In his 1995 memoirs, Filipp Bobkov, deputy chief of KGB counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate, or SCD) and Nosenko’s boss at the time, twisted the facts and ignored Nosenko’s 1962 meetings with CIA, by then well-known even to the public. He wrote that Nosenko went to Geneva for “serious operational tasks” — not the way the KGB describes delegation watchdogging. The KGB chairman at the time, Vladimir Semichastniy, said Nosenko had been sent to Geneva to work on “some woman” with an aim to recruit her. (Nosenko apparently did not know this.) Semichastniy said Nosenko had been “expelled from every school he attended” and had got into the KGB only with the help of (then deputy) chairman Ivan Serov. (Nosenko did not know this, either; he named a different high-level sponsor, equally unlikely.) [6]

• A later KGB chairman, Vadim Bakatin, along with former KGB foreign-counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin, told the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Nosenko had “exaggerated and lied about his knowledge of Oswald.” [7]

• Oleg Kalugin reported that Nosenko did not serve in the American Department of the SCD in 1960-1961.

• A veteran of the SCD’s American Department at the time said Nosenko had served only one year, from 1952 to 1953, in the American Department. He had performed badly and was shunted off to the nonoperational department that handled routine liaison with other Soviet institutions.

• A KGB veteran [Sergey Kondrashev] told me after the Cold War that Nosenko did not hold the KGB jobs he listed for CIA and that the circumstances suggested to him that the SCD (specifically, its 14th Department, for operational deception) had dispatched Nosenko to deceive CIA.

Quite a different story came from a clumsy KGB effort to support and enhance Nosenko’s image in American eyes. In the early 1990s they put an official file on Nosenko into the hands of KGB veteran Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko. It was ostensibly to help him write a memoir of his encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City a few weeks before Oswald assassinated President Kennedy — never mind that Nosenko was entirely irrelevant to this subject. Nechiporenko thereupon devoted fifty pages — under the title “Paranoia vs. Common Sense’’— to make the point that CIA (and specifically me, Pete Bagley) had been stupid not to recognize the great good luck that had fallen into CIA’s lap with Nosenko’s defection. Like others, he stressed the “colossal damage” that this defection had done to the KGB and the near-panic it caused to high-level KGB chiefs and to Khrushchev himself. But the attempt backfired. That KGB file contradicted a lot of what Nosenko had told us about his early life and entry into the KGB, and Nechiporenko’s book told things about Oswald that Nosenko must have known if he had really had access to Oswald’s file — but did not know. [8]

Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko’s own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty. You are naive, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, “was a link, a part of an operation. . . . And this operation isn’t completed.” If the author were to tell all,” CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.” [9]

Even if this still-living KGB was carrying on an unfinished operation, its use of Nechiporenko to attack me was like using a battering ram against an open door. CIA itself had disowned my position, had used some of the same words as Nechiporenko to denigrate me (and others who had distrusted Nosenko), and had been happily employing Nosenko for a quarter century. Why then this late, gratuitous assault? Could they still fear that CIA might reverse its position on Nosenko and finally look into the implications underlying his case? As far as I know, the KGB need have no fear on that front.

Nechiporenko’s position in this ongoing KGB game contrasts oddly with the new line on Nosenko that was emerging in Moscow. After years of vilifying Nosenko for the damage he did the KGB and condemning him to death, KGB spokesmen were beginning to suggest that Nosenko did not defect at all. Their new line was that he fell into a trap and was kidnapped by CIA. After the assassination of President Kennedy, so this story goes, CIA learned (through what a KGB-sponsored article fantasized as a far-flung agent network in Russia) that a KGB officer named Nosenko had inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald. So, when that target came to Geneva (to recruit a woman connected with French Intelligence) a CIA “action group” under Pete Bagley, working on direct orders from CIA director Richard Helms and Soviet Division chief David Murphy, drugged and kidnapped him, in order to pump him for information about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. [10]

One can only speculate on the KGB’s purpose in creating such a fantasy. Might they be preparing Nosenko’s return to Russia without punishment like the later “CIA kidnap victim” Yurchenko? Whatever the reason, this change of posture reflected Moscow’s growing readiness to admit that Nosenko’s defection was not as previously presented. Finally, CIA [and Brian D. Litman?] will be left alone in believing in Nosenko.


. . . . . . . .

PS Did you have an opportunity to interview Nikolai Leonov (RIP), the KGB colonel / “diplomat” (who later became a general and a member of the Duma) at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City when Oswald or “Oswald” is alleged to been there in September-October 1963?

Interestingly, he wrote in a Russian-language book and told the National Enquirer on 22 November 1993 that Oswald had intercepted him during volleyball warm-ups on Sunday, September 29, 1963. He said that they retired to Leonov’s office in the Embassy (not the Consulate) where Oswald proceeded to brandish his revolver and start weeping, just as he had (allegedly) done in front of Nechiporenko and the boys the previous day at the Consulate.

Also interesting is the fact that Leonov is a perfect match for the “Oswald” that Cuban Consul Eusebio Azcue allegedly encountered a day or two before the 27th at the Consulate — “30-ish, thin, very thin-faced, blond-haired, and wearing a blue Prince of Wales suit with reddish pinstripes.”

Factoid: Azcue’s receptionist/secretary, 5’ 3.5” Silvia Duran, also described the “Oswald” she dealt with on the 27th at the Consulate as blond-haired, and added that he was “short.”

FWIW, Leonov was 5’ 6” or 5’ 7” whereas Oswald was 5’ 9.5”.


— Tom


*Today’s SVR and FSB

Photo: Milton Bearden


Milton Bearden joined the CIA in 1964. In February of that year, putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko was allowed to physically defect to the U.S. despite the fact that, based on what he had told CIA officers Tennent H. Bagley and George Kisevalter during five meetings in Geneva in June 1962, the Soviet Russia Division and James Angleton’s Counterintelligence section were convinced he was fake.

During his thirty-year CIA career, Bearden served as station chief in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Germany, and was appointed Chief of the Soviet / East European Division during the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2003, he wrote a book with journalist James Risen titled The Main Enemy. In it, he favorably mentions Burton Gerber several times. Gerber joined the CIA in the 1950s and, among other things, was Chief of Station in Moscow from 1980 to 1982.

Background: GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov volunteered to spy for the FBI’s NYC field office in late 1961, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in December 1961, and KGB Major Aleksey Kulak followed Polyakov’s steps to the Bureau’s NYC field office in March 1962.

The following is an excerpt from pages 20 - 23 in The Main Enemy.

My comments are in brackets.

[Burton] Gerber was a driven man who was fascinated by the intricacies of espionage. By 1970, he had risen to the middle ranks in the CIA Soviet Division, joining the cult-like world of Soviet counterintelligence. He was one of the very few people with access to information about the Agency’s most sensitive operations against Moscow, including the sordid tale of a [putative] KGB officer who had defected to the United States, only to be held incommunicado for three years, including more than two years in a nightmarish prison, custom-built by the CIA. Never arrested or charged with any crime, he was kept in solitary confinement, not allowed [at times] to read or write. For a time, lights in his ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell were kept on twenty-four hours a day to disorient him and prevent him from developing a regular sleeping pattern. The defector’s name was Yuri Nosenko, and his case became enmeshed in a [so-called] witch hunt within the upper echelons of the CIA that had not yet run its course as Gerber read the files.

Nosenko began meeting with CIA officers [Bagley and probable mole George Kisevalter] in 1962, defected in 1964, and brought with him the answer to the most pressing question facing the CIA at the time. Was Moscow behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? The Warren Commission had concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, but inside the CIA, officials still brooded over his Soviet connections. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union after serving in the Marines, including a stint at an intelligence gathering post [a U-2 spy plane base where he was a radar operator] in Japan, and then, in a bizarre twist, had returned to the United States with a Russian wife shortly before shooting the President. The CIA had not made public its doubts about Oswald -- in fact, it had shared few of its concerns with the Warren Commission -- but the truth was that the Agency had been unable to determine one way or another whether Oswald had been working for the KGB. The question hung in the air at Langley., and when Yuri Nosenko finally came to the United States, the Agency was still trying to figure out whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a real-life Manchurian Candidate.

Nosenko [who implausibly claimed to have read the KGB file on Oswald four times — twice before and twice after the assassination] said he had the answer. The KGB wasn’t behind Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, the KGB had [allegedly] been so concerned about Oswald’s past and the appearance of Soviet ties that it had [allegedly] searched its own records and couldn’t find any evidence that he was working for them.

[In April 1964, just as hostile, but non-tortuous, interrogations of Nosenko were beginning, probable mole Bruce Solie — James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security — tried to talk the Warren Commission’s W. David Slawson into letting Nosenko testify to the Commission.]

Yet by the time Nosenko told the CIA what he knew, the Agency had already decided that he had been sent across to lie [because what Nosenko had told Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in June 1962 implausibly discredited what Golitsyn had been telling Angleton — “implausibly” because he claimed to have worked in a different part of the highly compartmentalized KGB than Golitsyn had]. Angleton was convinced that Nosenko was a double agent and persuaded others at the CIA that he’d been sent by Moscow to tie them in knots about Oswald and dozens of other sensitive cases [Angleton didn’t “persuade” Bagley, he suggested to him that he read his thick file on Golitsyn about a week after Bagley’s final meeting with Nosenko in Geneva in June 1962; Bagley did so and, for the reasons I mentioned above, ended up convincing Angleton that Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place]. He was encouraged in his paranoia [if I’m right that Solie was a KGB mole, Angleton had plenty of reasons to be “paranoiac”] by an earlier KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who told Angleton that every [sic; that the next] defector after him would be a double agent. It was the perfect story for Golitsyn to tell -- it ensured his continued influence, even after he had run out of secrets to reveal. But to believe Golitsyn was to descend willingly into a swamp of paranoia and confusion. [Bagley tells us in “Spy Wars” that Golitsyn was a very valuable source, especially for the first two years]. For years, Nosenko was locked away in his specially constructed prison at the “the Farm,” the Agency’s training center at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, quarantined like a deadly virus.

With his power base secure thanks to his close relationship with CIA Director Richard Helms, Angleton had managed to co-op key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB [most of them were]. Soon, case officers trying to recruit agents from behind the Iron Curtain had to jump through hoops to convince Angleton and his acolytes that their cases were worth pursuing. Those who persisted or challenged the prevailing paranoia were in danger of coming under suspicion of being Soviet agents themselves. [Probable mole Leonard V. McCoy in the Soviet Russia Division’s Reports & Requirements section comes to mind.]

Angleton was certain that the Soviets had penetrated and launched a mole hunt that lasted for years, ruining one career after another. Ultimately, the investigation turned on its own, and Arlington himself came under scrutiny as a possible Soviet spy [by Counterintelligence officer Clare Edward Petty, who had just abandoned his case against Bagley]. The Salem witch trials had come to CIA headquarters.

The end result of these mind games was virtual paralysis in the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union throughout much of the 1960s. [Bagley tells us in “Spy Wars” that no bona fide KGB volunteer was turned away.] The last great Soviet agent to work for the CIA without facing Angleton’s paranoid scrutiny was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a top aide on the Red Army general staff who spied from 1960 until his arrest in 1962. [In “Spy Wars,” Bagley shows us how the “Zepp Incident” proves that Penkovsky was betrayed by a mole in the CIA or British Intelligence within two weeks of his April 1961 recruitment, and, in the interest of “source protection,” was allowed to continue spying for the CIA until late 1962.] One of the most important spies in CIA history, Penkovsky was the first to pull back the shroud on the Soviet high command and reveal that the Kremlin was operating on bluster and hollow threats. He helped show the West that this supposed missile gap was a myth and that the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability was woefully inadequate to challenge the United States. Penkovsky’s information helped give President Kennedy the edge over Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. [Angleton and Golitsyn believed that Penkovsky became a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at some point and was instrumental in getting JFK to remove our Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey and to effectively abandon the Monroe Doctrine.]

Yet many of the major cases in the years after Penkovsky were challenged by Angleton. The counterintelligence chief set the bar so high that CIA officers around the world simply stopped targeting Soviets, knowing that these cases would ultimately go nowhere. Worse, recruiting a Russian might bring them under suspicion. Developing a Soviet as a recruitment target would inevitably lead to a confrontation with Angleton’s people. The clear implication was always that the case officer in the field couldn’t know what part of the case played in the broader KGB “Monster Plot” to deceive the CIA. [Golitsyn and Angleton referred to the Kremlin’s shift to Sun Tzu-like tactics and strategies in 1959, with its creation of Department D in the First Chief Directorate and Department 14 in the Second Chief Directorate, as “The Master Plan,” whereas their critics referred to it as “The Monster Plot.”]

By the time Gerber read the files, The Agency was in the process of trying to forget, even cover up, the whole sordid Nosenko affair. But Gerber could see the broader effects of the Angleton excesses. Not only had case officers largely stopped trying to target Soviets, the Soviet Division had also been turning away dozens of “volunteers,” Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States. The Golitsyn-fed paranoia had convinced the CIA that these volunteers were in fact KGB provocateurs seeking to turn the Agency inside out. [See my above comments.]

Gerber analyzed the files, going back over fifteen years, files specifically on Soviets that volunteered in Moscow or elsewhere in the Soviet Union, to test Angleton’s theories. Was there any evidence to support Angleton’s fears? No one had ever dared sift through the CIA’s records to challenge the spy hunter’s assumptions in such a methodical way. The simple but powerful answer was that the sick think theories didn’t stand up to scrutiny. To [gullible?] Gerber, the facts strongly suggested that the CIA had been turning away one genuine volunteer in Moscow after another, simply out of fear of contamination. The result was that the Agency had probably missed out on a gold mine of secrets from citizens of the Soviet Empire who had sought to change sides. There would always be dangles and provocations sent against the CIA by the KGB, but that was the cost of doing business. If the CIA was afraid to talk to Soviets, Gerber, reasoned, they then it might as well close up shop.

Gerber wrote an exhaustive report detailing his findings, concluding that the CIA was killing its chances for success by turning away so many Soviet volunteers. The overwhelming majority of them appeared to be legitimate, and Gerber offered sensible guidelines to ferret out the few who might be dangles. Above all, Gerber concluded, there was no evidence that the Soviets had ever allowed a serving KGB staff officer to approach the CIA as a double agent. [See my comments on Polyakov and Kulak, above.] Moscow simply didn’t trust them enough. KGB officers who volunteered were almost certainly genuine.

. . . . . . .

My comments:

Bagley wrote in Spy Wars:

If one were to believe one of its later chiefs, the Soviet Division in that dark earlier [pre-1973] time “had been turning away dozens of volunteers, Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States.” [15] In reality the caution that [Soviet Russia Division Chief David E.] Murphy — not Angleton — introduced into CIA’s efforts to recruit Soviets was never allowed to hinder the acceptance of a single Soviet volunteer, nor did it preclude any well-considered recruitment approach. None of these assertions of “paralysis” has cited a single rejection of a volunteer, defector, or proposal for action. Ironically, it was these latter-day critics who themselves started turning away Soviet defectors — on the grounds that CIA had all it needed or could handle. Among those whom CIA turned away — on specific orders from Headquarters — was Vasily Mitrokhin, who had stolen and stashed a large hunk of KGB operational archives. [16]

[15] Burton Gerber, cited by his deputy Milton Bearden. Milton Bearden and James
Risen, The Main Enemy (London: Century, 2003), 23.

[16] Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive. The KGB in
Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1999).

Photo: Tennent H. Bagley


If you want to read Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, for free, google “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously and click on the second one on the Google hit list — not the first one that says, “Spy wars : T. H. Bagley : Free Download, Borrow, and …”


That’s it.

That’s the post.

If the photo before you could be published in the medium of the once-novel “Scratch ‘n Sniff” inserts of 1970’s-era magazines, the pungent odor emitted would be that of a quite overripe herring.

A Red Herring, to be precise.

This, because to this day, the bloodhounds of the JFK assassination research community have been led astray by his misidentification by CIA in Nov of ‘63.

Assassination researchers christened him as “The Mexico City Mystery Man”.

Both Kostikov and Nechiporenko solved the mystery for me back in 1992 when I asked them to identify this man from CIA’s photo of the man, post-departure from the Soviet Embassy.

And of course, everything you think you know ... is wrong.

I will provide the key to this black & white cipher in an upcoming article.

ME: Dear Brian, how in the world can anyone believe “former” KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko after he dedicated fifty pages of Passport to Assassination to how “stupid” Tennent H. Bagley (Yuri Nosenko’s primary CIA case officer from June 1962 to September 1967) was to not realize that Nosenko was a true defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and a true physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964?

In a March 2018 presentation, John M. Newman, a former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and Executive Assistant to an NSA Director, referenced parts of Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, and convinced none other than Peter Dale Scott (with one of your subscribers, Bill Simpich, sitting next to him) that Nosenko was a false defector, sent to Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about probable KGB moles in the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies. (You can read Bagley’s book for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.)

Mexico City Station’s description of The Mexico City Mystery Man was juxtaposed (as a “barium meal”?) with Oswald’s name in an 8 October 1963 cable to Langley. The particular photo that was referenced by Anne Goodpasture in said cable was later revealed to have been taken by the CIA the day after a forgetful Oswald or “Oswald” had called the Soviet Embassy and spoken over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line with KGB security officer Ivan Obyedkov and was “reminded” by him that he (Oswald or “Oswald”) had met with (Department-13-radioactive) Kostikov a couple of days earlier. Interestingly, James Angleton told the Church Committee that the CIA had mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited Obyedkov. Also interesting is the fact that this phone call scared the living daylights out of LBJ after the assassination because it led him to believe that Oswald might have been a KGB assassin.

Even more interesting is the fact that the only reason CIA and the FBI believed Kostikov was Department 13 on 11/23/63 was because a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI’s NYC field office, KGB Major Aleksey Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) had told the FBI a few months earlier that Kostikov’s charge at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was Department 13.

Litman: Nosenko was a bona fide defector.

ME: Just curious: Do you, like Gerald Posner, say that because Major, I mean Lt. Col, I mean Captain Nosenko told the CIA (and a very grateful J. Edgar Hoover!) in early 1964 that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator known as Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR, or in spite of the fact that, in June 1962 in Geneva, Nosenko contradicted everything true-defector Golitsyn had been telling the CIA — even though Golitsyn and he had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized CIA?

Litman: Golitsyn and Nosenko “worked in”? Or were managed by??

ME: Excellent question, Brian.

At least as regards Nosenko.

We know that Golitsyn was a KGB major in the First Chief Directorate (today’s SVR) who had worked briefly in the Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB), but there’s conflicting evidence as to whether or not Nosenko was even the SCD “captain” he ended up claiming to be. He may have simply been a highly productive “snitch” who had been incarcerated for homosexuality or some such thing whom Gribanov recruited and programmed to discredit what Golitsyn was either known-by-the-KGB via Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie to be telling the CIA, or reasonably presumed, via a “damage assessment,” to be telling it about the KGB’s penetrations of it, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies. (Either that, or Nosenko was a low-level flunky at KGB headquarters who was used by Gribanov for the same purpose.)

The important thing is that in June 1962 in Geneva, Nosenko implausibly tried to discredit what Golitsyn was telling the CIA — implausible because they had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.

Regarding said “damage assessment,” former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev told Bagley in 1994 that he was surprised when he was told by the review panel shortly after Golitsyn’s defection that it had determined that the CIA didn’t just suspect, but actually knew, what he was up to in Vienna. (You can read about it on pages 235-36 of Bagley’s book.)

What’s really interesting is that the book you produced, Passport to Assassination, is based on KGB files that effectively contradict what Nechiporenko said in it about Nosenko.


Bagley:

A KGB veteran [former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev] told me after the Cold War that Nosenko did not hold the KGB jobs he listed for CIA and that the circumstances suggested to him that the SCD (specifically, its 14th Department, for operational deception) had dispatched Nosenko to deceive CIA.

Quite a different story came from a clumsy KGB effort to support and enhance Nosenko’s image in American eyes. In the early 1990s they put an official file on Nosenko into the hands of KGB veteran Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko. It was ostensibly to help him write a memoir of his encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City a few weeks before Oswald assassinated President Kennedy — never mind that Nosenko was entirely irrelevant to this subject. Nechiporenko thereupon devoted fifty pages under the title “Paranoia vs. Common Sense’’— to make the point that CIA (and specifically me, Pete Bagley) had been stupid not to recognize the great good luck that had fallen into CIA’s lap with Nosenko’s defection. Like others, he stressed the “colossal damage” that this defection had done to the KGB and the near-panic it caused to high-level KGB chiefs and to Khrushchev himself. But the attempt backfired. That KGB file contradicted a lot of what Nosenko had told us about his early life and entry into the KGB, and Nechiporenko’s book told things about Oswald that Nosenko must have known if he had really had access to Oswald’s file — but did not know. [8]

Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko’s own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty. You are naive, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, “was a link, a part of an operation. … And this operation isn’t completed.” If the author were to tell all, “CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.” [9]

Even if this still-living KGB was carrying on an unfinished operation, its use of Nechiporenko to attack me was like using a battering ram against an open door. CIA itself had disowned my position, had used some of the same words as Nechiporenko to denigrate me (and others who had distrusted Nosenko), and had been happily employing Nosenko for a quarter century. Why then this late, gratuitous assault? Could they still fear that CIA might reverse its position on Nosenko and finally look into the implications underlying his case? As far as I know, the KGB need have no fear on that front.

Nechiporenko’s position in this ongoing KGB game contrasts oddly with the new line on Nosenko that was emerging in Moscow. After years of vilifying Nosenko for the damage he did the KGB and condemning him to death, KGB spokesmen were beginning to suggest that Nosenko did not defect at all. Their new line was that he fell into a trap and was kidnapped by CIA. After the assassination of President Kennedy, so this story goes, CIA learned (through what a KGB-sponsored article fantasized as a far-flung agent network in Russia) that a KGB officer named Nosenko had inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald. So, when that target came to Geneva [in early 1962] (to recruit a woman connected with French Intelligence) a CIA “action group” under Pete Bagley, working on direct orders from CIA director Richard Helms and Soviet Division chief David Murphy, drugged and kidnapped him, in order to pump him for information about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. [10]

One can only speculate on the KGB’s purpose in creating such a fantasy. Might they be preparing Nosenko’s return* to Russia without punishment like the later “CIA kidnap victim” Yurchenko? Whatever the reason, this change of posture reflected Moscow’s growing readiness to admit that Nosenko’s defection was not as previously presented. Finally, CIA will be left alone in believing in Nosenko.


My comment:

If you want to read the above footnotes, you’re going to have to google “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously and look them up, yourself.

It’ll be good for you.


*Bagley wrote Spy Wars in 2007. Nosenko died in 2008.

Photo: Christopher Andrew


Former high-level CIA operations officer Sean Wiswesser is to be heartily thanked for bringing to our attention the KGB’s (i.e., the SVR’s and the FSB’s) and the GRU’s ongoing waging of highly successful disinformation and “active measures” ops against us and our NATO allies. In a recent Substack post Sean tells us via an interview of him by a Czech newspaper that he was invited by world-famous Dr. Christopher Andrew, official historian of MI5, to speak at a recent convocation of the “Cambridge Intelligence Seminar” in England.

Christopher Andrew?

Ugg.

I posted this response to Sean’s article:

I agree with everything you said in the Czech article, Sean, but I do not like Christopher Andrew. Why? Because he claims Yuri Nosenko was a genuine defector when he contacted the CIA in Geneva in June 1962. Truth-be-told, Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place -- General Oleg Gribanov sent him there to discredit the information that a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, could be expected to be telling CIA about probable KGB moles in it, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies.

Sean replied:

Thank you for the support! I respectfully disagree and believe—like CIA’s final historical assessment— Nosenko was genuine.

I responded with:

Sorry, Sean, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 — sent there by Oleg Gribanov’s Second Chief Directorate’s Department 14 to protect a mole or two or three in the Agency — and a false (or, IMHO, rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.

Have you read Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, “Spy Wars,” or his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars”? Both are free-to-read. Just google “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously for the former, and “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously for the latter. In lieu of reading those, you could always read my Wikipedia article on Bagley.

You’ve probably heard of Edward Ellis Smith, CIA’s one-man Moscow Station from 1953 to late 1956 (he was Popov’s incompetent dead drop setter-upper and was undercover even to Ambassador Bohlen). Smith was, according to a 2000 Kremlin-authorized book on the glorious history of the KGB, the first CIA officer recruited by it.*

Based on oodles and gobs of circumstantial evidence, Bagley came to the conclusion around 1994 that it was Smith who had betrayed GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk (aka diplomat Vladimir Komarov) in Washington, D.C., movie houses in January 1957.

Tellingly, Nosenko told Bagley during their one-on-one first meeting in 1962 that his boss in the Second Chief Directorate’s American Embassy section, General Kovshuk, had made a very special and very quick trip to Washington to recontact a former cipher machine mechanic (sic) codenamed ANDREY). But it turned out that Kovshuk/Komarov stayed in D.C. for ten months on a two-year diplomatic gig (at which time he returned to his kept-open-for-him KGB job) and waited until the very end of his stay to contact never-of-any-real-use ANDREY (Army Sgt. Dayle W. Smith).

When Nosenko was later asked during interrogation why it had taken Kovshuk such a long time to contact Smith, Nosenko’s reply was, “It took him a long time to locate him.”

Factoid: Smith’s address was in the phone book.

Rhetorical question:

Why did Nosenko tell that lie to Bagley in Geneva in late-May or early-June (accounts vary) 1962?

Answer:

To conflate him with a never-uncovered code clerk, codenamed JACK, whom the KGB had recruited in 1949, and because Kovshuk had gone to Washington not to meet with burnt-out ANDREY, but to meet with a mole in the CIA regarding CIA’s spy, Pyotr Popov. Bagley came to believe after the Cold War that said mole was Edward Ellis Smith, but I tend to agree with author John M. Newman that the movie-going mole was father-figure-requiring James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, Bruce Leonard Solie, and that E. E. Smith helped Kovshuk recruit Solie and/or provided logistical support to him.

By the way, something else you may want to read on the Nosenko topic is W. Alan Messer’s 2013 article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, titled “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited.” In it he agrees with Bagley that Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in 1962 and posits the idea that Nosenko was a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in 1964 whose “legend” the KGB, via Kulak, Kochnov, and Yurchenko, et al., had no choice but to support.

Regarding CIA’s (disastrous) final historical assessment of Nosenko, it was based on a bogus 1967 polygraph exam (one of the worst that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen, according to what he told the HSCA in 1978) and a 1968 specious report by the CIA officer who was very likely the mole that Angleton had futilely searched for so many years — his aforementioned confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, Bruce Solie.

The (equally disastrous) final historical assessment of KGB Major Aleksey Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) was arrived at in the early 1980s via the lame four-month-long analysis of his case by two researchers (Sandra Grimes and Shadrin-losing Cynthia Hausmann) who were provided to the FBI’s counterintelligence-hating James Geer by yet another probable mole in the CIA, Leonard V. McCoy.


*Here’s the Russian book that in 2000 identified Edward Ellis Smith (who died in a semi-mysterious hit-and-run accident in Redwood City, California, in 1982) as a KGB agent:

”A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, Vneshnaya Razvedka Rossii [Russian Foreign Intelligence] (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000) p. 70. KGB General Sergey A. Kondrashev knew this to be correct but was unwilling to tell more.”

Photo: Semyon “Sam” Kislin


The KGB set up deception-based Department D in the First Chief Directorate (today’s SVR) in 1959 to wage disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies. General Oleg Gribanov of the Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB), not to be outdone, set up Department 14 in the SCD and, as soon as CIA’s spy GRU Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been “trapped like a bear in its den” and arrested in such a way that wouldn’t reveal who in the CIA or British Intelligence had betrayed him in April 1961, sent GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksey Kulak to the FBI’s NYC field office to volunteer to be its informants at the U.N. (Polyakov remained at the U.N. until the end of 1962 and eventually “flipped” to the CIA in Rangoon in 1966; Kulak, J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA, duped the Bureau for fifteen years.)

In June of 1962, Gribanov sent putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, was telling the CIA about probable KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our allies. Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. in February 1964, claiming to have read Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB file four times, twice before and twice after the assassination of JFK, and claiming that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR. By 1969, having been defended by the KGB moles Golitsyn had tried to warn the CIA about, Nosenko was hired by the Agency to lecture its and the FBI’s new recruits on “counterintelligence.”

Carrying this narrative forward a few years, Donald Trump was “spotted” in 1980 for possible development by a KGB agent, Sam Kislin, owner of the Joy-Lud electronics store in Manhattan. In 1984, Trump sold five condominiums in Trump Tower to a Russian Mafia figure, David Bogatin, for six million dollars, cash. At least thirteen Russian mafiosi ended up owning condominiums in Trump Tower. In 1986, Trump was unexpectedly visited there by the new Russian ambassador to the U.N. and his daughter — who flattered the you-know-what out of him. A few months later, he was seated next to that ambassador at an Estee Lauder dinner, and a few months after that he was in Moscow, all expenses paid, pursuing the juicy (but never realized) opportunity to build Trump Tower Moscow.

In 1987, having returned from Russia and suddenly entertaining the idea of running for president, Trump placed a full-page anti-NATO / anti-globalist / anti-establishment ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe newspapers.

. . . . . . .

Note: If you want to learn more about Gribanov, Polyakov, Kulak and Nosenko, et al., you can read Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games and his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously and “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.

If you want to learn more about Trump’s relationship with the KGB-connected Russian Mafia, read Craig Unger’s fine books, American Kompromat, and House of Trump, House of Putin.


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