Dear Steve M.,
Thanks for the link to Oleg Kalugin’s book,
Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West.Now, I hate to rain on your “I Like Oleg Kalugin and Yuri Nosenko" parade, but the former is full of beans and KGB disinformation whether he realizes it or not, and the latter was a false defector.
I’d like to think that "former" KGB officer Kalugin was just fed "doomed pilot" disinformation by the First Chief Directorate’s deception-based Department D or by the Second Chief Directorate’s deception-based Department 14, but I doubt it.
It’s more likely that he’s what James Angleton was referring to when he said (in so many words), “A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies and really mess you up, boy.”
Like former COS Saigon, John Limond Hart — whose wife, Katharine Colvin Hart, was head of the SRD’s omnipresent and omniscient Reports & Requirements section and the boss of probable “mole” Leonard V. McCoy and notorious Robert Lubbehusen — Kalugin claims to believe that Nosenko was grossly misunderstood and very badly treated due to his high consumption of alcohol, his telling self-promoting fibs, and his (non-existent) language difficulties.
LOL
Hart slandered Nosenko’s former primary case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, during the 1978 HSCA hearings. He did so in an effort to shift the committee’s focus — from the implausibility of Nosenko’s claim that the KGB didn’t interview former Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR — to the “stupidity” and evil, evil doings of Bagley and his boss, David E. Murphy. The centerpiece of Hart’s presentation was a note that he allegedly found in Bagley’s office which was written in pencil and which listed possible ways to resolve the Nosenko case — including “drug him and send him to the funny farm” and “liquidate him.”
Bagley said he didn’t remember writing it, however, and that if he did write it, it was done as a mental exercise and therefore not intended to be taken seriously.
More recently, a British JFK assassination researcher and National Archives habitue who befriended Bagley in 2008 by the name of Malcolm Blunt has said that he thinks the CIA, which “cleared” Nosenko in October 1968, forged the note. Blunt convinced Bagley, by showing him some CIA documents that he hadn’t been privy to in 1959-60 and 1964, that the guy who “cleared” Nosenko via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report, Bruce Leonard Solie in the Office of Security, may have been a KGB “mole.”
When Hart was testifying to the HSCA, another friend of Bagley’s was watching the hearing on C-Span and called him in Brussels to apprise him that Hart was “crucifying” him on national T.V.
Bagley wrote to HSCA head G. Robert Blakey and requested that he be granted an opportunity to rebut Hart’s testimony.
His request was granted.
Bagley’s testimony was given to the HSCA on 16 November 1978. It was comprised of a 40-page prepared statement plus 140 pages of under-oath answers to the committee’s questions.
Here it is.
Spoiler Alert: “Pete” ripped Hart a new one.
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32273600.pdfGet back to me, Steve M., after you’ve read it as well as Dr. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book,
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” and my Wikipedia article on Tennent H. Bagley. To read the first two for free, google “spy wars” and “archive" simultaneously and “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.
Regarding your boy, Kalugin, the following is a short excerpt from a 2002 panel discussion that he took part in with former CIA officer Paul Redmond and author/professor Allen Weinstein:
Weinstein:
I’ve just listened to Oleg’s twelve reasons for the [1985] redefection of [Vitaly] Yurchenko, and it has opened my mind on this once again — at least each one of them sounds in its own way somewhat persuasive, but I don’t know. I don’t know. You obviously have thought about this a lot yourself, and it may be that there’s still something you don’t want to tell us.
Kalugin:
Why should I try to fool you?
Weinstein:
Why not?
It’s interesting to note that Kalugin characterized Bagley’s Yale University Press book,
Spy Wars, as “absurd trash.”
Harvey Klehr in Commentary magazine:
Sources in the American intelligence community denounced Bagley’s book as “radioactive poison,” and Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB officer who relocated to the United States after the collapse of the USSR, called it “absurd … trash.”Do you think Bagley’s book is absurd trash, Steve M.?
Have you even read it?
Do you agree with the (KGB-encouraged) general consensus that he was duped by Angleton, who, in turn, was duped by Golitsyn?
I don’t know if the Russians were behind the JFK assassination or not, but some strange things are said to have happened in Mexico City two months before the assassination, and they seem to have involved a putative Department 13 officer (Valery Kostikov), a short, skinny, blond-haired, very-thin-faced, Prince of Wales suit-wearing “Oswald” at the Cuban Consulate (Nikolai Leonov?), a phone-answering KGB security officer (Ivan Obyedkov) at the Soviet Embassy whom the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited, and, a few months earlier, a Snyder, Oklahoma, German national former reconnaissance pilot for Hitler by the name of Heinz Guenter Schulz who was interred in a British POW camp, recruited by the NKVD/KGB at some point, allegedly “flipped” to the OSS/CIA, and eventually sent by the FBI and the CIA to Mexico City and NYC in a combined op against KGB Colonel Valery Kostikov and his colleagues at the Soviet Embassy and Consulate.
Whether the KGB was behind the assassination or not, it has been making geopolitical “hay” from the anomalies in it since literally Day One, and that's one of the reasons “former” KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin was able to install Donald Trump as our “president” in January 2017 and January 2025.
I tend to agree with the theory proposed by former CIA officer W. Allen Messer in his 2013 article, “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited,” in which he agrees with Bagley that Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent there by General Gribanov to discredit what Golitsyn was telling Angleton, but Messer disagrees with Bagley’s idea that Nosenko was a false physical defector to the U.S. in late February 1964, arguing instead that he “went rogue” with the misinformation he’d been told to lay on Bagley and (probable mole) Kisevalter in Geneva, and that the KGB had no choice but to support his bona fides through its agents Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA at the FBI’s NYC field office), Kremlin-loyal triple-agent Igor Kochnov -- who arranged (apparently with Bruce Solie’s and Len McCoy’s help) the ostensible kidnapping of former “defector” Nicholas Shadrin in Vienna in 1975 -- , and through the aforementioned Vitaliy “Homesick” Yurchenko, et al., not to mention your boy, Oleg K.
Whose involvement, if true, just confirms Malcolm Blunt’s statement to Bart [The You-Know-What] Kamp during a 2021 YouTube interview that “Nosenko is MEGA.”
*Today’s SVR and FSB
. . . . . . . .
Dear Steve M.,
Thanks, once again, for turning me onto Kalugin’s free-to-read book,
Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West.As you know, Kalugin claims Yuri “The KGB Had Nothing To Do With Lee Harvey Oswald In The USSR” Nosenko was a true defector, whereas I believe that he was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 — sent to the CIA to discredit what Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton about 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 late January 1964, two months after the assassination of JFK.
I'll be going through the index of Kalugin's 2009 book in alphabetical order and comparing what Kalugin wrote about certain people with what Bagley wrote about him or her in his 2007 book,
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, and in his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars."
I suspect that Bagley wrote about certain KGB-loyal double and triple-agents whom Oleg "Yuri Nosenko Was A True Defector!" Kalugin didn't even mention in his book because, well, "they were just too hot to handle," but we'll see.
I'll begin with a two-for-one combo:
Nikolay Artamonov (aka
Nicholas Shadrin) and
Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov).
I'm sorry that it's so long, Steve M., but the Russians seem to believe that if they embellish a lie enough, we gullible Americans will believe it. And given the fact that their Kremlin-loyal double and triple agents and false defectors all tend to support each other's "legends," it gets very complicated -- and longwinded! -- indeed!!!
Condensed and semi-paraphrased from pages 104-07:
We tried to find
Nosenko in the U.S. so we could kill him. We never located him. We did, however, manage to find other defectors. Our goal was to re-recruit them or lure them back to the Soviet Union to score a propaganda coup against the United States. The most intriguing one was Nikolai Artamonov. We found him. He repented. We decided to let him move back to Russia to he could let it be known how evil the CIA was and how corrupt the U.S. was. At the time, we thought we had a major accomplishment on our hands in the re-recruitment of Artamonov, whose code name became Lark. We were impressed by his repentance. We waited to see what he would deliver. Artamonov had been promised a pardon and restoration of his military rank if he honestly cooperated with us. Our plan, which he carried out, was to keep him working as a consultant for the Office of Naval Intelligence, using his position to supply us with classified material. He came through, handing us a variety of classified documents. He furnished us, for example, with U.S. assessments of Soviet naval capabilities, including analyses of our latest missile tests in the Black and North Seas. We pushed him to pinpoint the source of the information on our missile testing; by getting more specific, Artamonov might have been able to help the KGB determine whether there was, for example, an American spy on the missile-testing range itself. But Artamonov was never able to give us more detailed information. His data and reports were of good, but not blockbuster, quality. In hindsight, this should have aroused my suspicions.
In the Washington station and at KGB headquarters we were excited about Artamonov’s cooperation for another reason: he said he knew the defector
Yuri Nosenko and had a general idea of where Nosenko lived in the United States. The KGB had been searching for Nosenko for years; perhaps in our zeal to get our hands on Nosenko, we were too trusting of Artamonov. I continued to help oversee and analyze Artamonov’s work while I remained in the American capital. It wasn’t until several years later, when I was back in Moscow in foreign counterintelligence, that I became convinced Lark had once again turned against the Soviet Union. I would set in motion an elaborate ruse to lure this double dealer back to his homeland — a plot that would come to a bad end along the Austro-Czech border on a cold, moonless night in 1975. But that was yet to come. The story played a dramatic role in my subsequent life and I will return to it later. [Artamonov was escorted to Vienna by probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy to meet with Kochnov. He was kidnapped by the KGB there and allegedly died as they were taking him across the Austro-Czech border "because they gave him too much chloroform to quiet him down."]
Page 237:
Vitaly Yurchenko stayed in Washington until 1983, when he was transferred back to Moscow and, because of high connections like Usatov, was made deputy chief of security for foreign intelligence. Not only did he learn about our efforts to ferret out defectors and spies, but he also became familiar with some of the more scandalous cases our directorate had been involved in, including kidnapping Artamonov from Vienna and participating in the murder of Georgi Markov. Later he was transferred to the intelligence directorate, where he was deputy chief of the department that directed operations against the United States and Canada. Yurchenko learned of the existence of some of our top spies in the United States, including Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton, a National Security Agency employee who for six years fed us detailed information about that top secret organization. So, despite the fact that I and numerous other officers viewed Yurchenko as a sloppy, unreliable officer, he had risen to a high position in the KGB and knew details of secret agents and operations. Then, during a trip to Italy in 1985, Yurchenko defected to the United States. It was an enormous blow to us as the disgruntled KGB man exposed Pelton, who was arrested, and Howard, who had to flee the country. He also told the CIA about the Markov assassination, the
Artamonov abduction, and many other operations. The damage was considerable. After several months in America, however, Yurchenko grew increasingly unhappy.
. . . . . . .
Dear Steve M.,
Now let's see, now, what
Bagley wrote about the
Artamonov and
Kochnov in his book,
Spy Wars, shall we?
My comments are in brackets.
-- Tom
Pages 197-208:
In June 1966 the earth began to move under the
Nosenko case. The resultant tsunami swept away all the doubts and cleared
Nosenko’s path to acceptance and success in America — for the KGB.
The first tremor came one Sunday morning with the ring of a telephone at Richard Helms’s house. The caller, in accented English, identified himself as a KGB officer on an operational mission in Washington and anxious to take up contact with CIA. Helms agreed that CIA would meet the caller at his designated place and time.
Helms was then in the process of taking over as director of Central Intelligence. He called for an urgent meeting with Clandestine Services chief Desmond Fitzgerald and Counterintelligence Staff chief James Angleton. They assembled that afternoon.
Their first decision was easy — to inform the FBI, responsible for operations inside the United States — but not the second. The caller had asked for CIA and was based in Moscow, so the Agency should participate. Who then? Wary of recent indications [from probable KGB "mole"
Bruce Solie] that the KGB might have a mole inside our Soviet Bloc Division (SB), they decided to assign CIA’s handling of the case to others. It did not matter, apparently, that only in the SB lay the experience and knowledge needed to assess and draw the maximum from a source at this level. Operational security would take precedence. 1
Instead, they called on a security officer —
Bruce Solie, who had been following up clues to hostile penetration of the Agency staff. This was a strange, and in the event fateful, choice.
Solie had only a shallow knowledge of the Soviet scene, knew little about the KGB, and possessed no experience in handling foreign agents. Perhaps they comforted themselves with the thought that
Solie would be guided by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and accompanied by the FBI’s man.
The FBI assigned an experienced operative, Elbert (“Bert”) Turner, and together he and
Solie made the scheduled meeting. No details of the operation that ensued, code-named "Kitty Hawk,” have been officially revealed to this day [2007]. Its outlines eventually became public knowledge, and I learned more from KGB veterans after the Cold War.
The KGB visitor identified himself as
Igor Kochnov of the foreign counterintelligence component of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence [today's SVR]). He could expect eventual promotion to head that department’s work against Americans, he said, if he were to succeed in at least one of his missions in Washington. The first of these was to recruit for the KGB a Soviet navy defector named
Nikolay Artamonov, who was living in Washington under the name of
Nicholas Shadrin. 2 In return for CIA’s help in achieving his goal,
Kochnov was willing to act as its agent inside the KGB staff.
Almost as exciting to the Americans was
Kochnov’s other mission in Washington: he had been sent to locate the KGB defectors
Golitsyn and
Nosenko, presumably so they could eventually be lured back or assassinated. Wonderful news for CIA! Since the KGB evidently regarded
Nosenko as it did
Golitsyn, there’s an end to the doubts about
Nosenko’s bona fides!
So juicy were
Kochnov’s future prospects that the Americans decided to play along and get
Artamonov to pretend to cooperate with the KGB. Artamonov loyally accepted the role of double agent despite the danger and despite the unpleasant condition that he take a lower-level job with U.S. Naval Intelligence, to remove him (and the KGB) from access to the sensitive information he had been working with.
Thus began a double agent operation with Artamonov that was to last nearly nine years and bring little profit to the Americans — and death to
Artamonov.
3 From the outset, members of the Counterintelligence Staff looked with a skeptical eye on
Kochnov. Why would the KGB send a traveler from Moscow to do jobs for which the KGB’s Washington rezidentura was better qualified and equipped? They sensed that the KGB had sent
Kochnov to CIA in order to hide a KGB penetration of American Intelligence, to convince CIA of
Nosenko's genuineness, and perhaps to find out why
Nosenko had dropped off the KGB radar screen.
But this skeptical view was not held by all. The participants came to this case with varying views and objectives. The Counterintelligence Staff treated it as a KGB provocation and sought to use it to test whether and where the KGB may have penetrated the ranks of CIA’s Soviet operations. To this end they designed questions to be put to
Kochnov to provoke revealing answers or actions. On the other hand the FBI case officer Turner and CIA’s
Solie firmly believed that
Kochnov was genuine. Believing in
Kochnov’s message, Solie became unshakably convinced that
Nosenko was a genuine defector— and did not even pose the questions the Counterintelligence Staff had concocted.
CIA was soon left with little reason to believe in
Kochnov. His golden promise of promotion to the top of KGB American operations proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp. After recruiting
Artamonov he turned over the contact to a Washington KGB man and went back to Moscow— and was never met again. (According to one report, he was spotted once or twice in Moscow.) But CIA and FBI continued the double agent case hoping that it might eventually offer a way to restore contact with
Kochnov and hoping that the KGB would, as the Washington KGB handler had told
Artamonov, turn
Artamonov over to handling by a KGB Illegal.
The KGB later claimed it never discovered
Kochnov’s “treason” until his case was exposed in American publications in 1978, around which time he coincidentally died of a heart attack. However, after the Cold War KGB veterans gave me reason to believe that the KGB had indeed dispatched
Kochnov to contact CIA and that the game was connected with penetration of Western intelligence services. It is a deep and complex story waiting to be told.
The Counterintelligence Staff, concerned for Artamonov’s safety, recommended in writing that he never be allowed to meet the KGB outside the United States. But the KGB’s lures proved too strong for
Solie and Turner. They permitted
Artamonov to meet the KGB in Canada, and then even in Vienna, infamous as the site of kidnappings and close to Soviet- controlled territory. Again in Vienna in December 1975, Artamonov went off to a scheduled meeting with the KGB and never returned. KGB foreign counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin later reported that he saw Artamonov die as he was carried into Czechoslovakia, accidentally overdosed with sedatives during the kidnapping. 4
A signal success of the KGB’s operation with
Kochnov — in addition to eliminating the defector
Artamonov— was the restoration of Yuri
Nosenko’s fortunes in the West. Although I knew none of this at the time, I sensed in the second half of 1966 the CIA leadership’s growing skepticism, not just impatience, concerning our case against
Nosenko. It was evident that some unknown factor was influencing them. This became clearer at the end of that year when they ordered a fresh review of the case — not so much to get new insights as to find ways to rationalize the doubts and to whitewash
Nosenko to prepare his release.
Deputy Director Rufus Taylor called in Gordon Stewart, a CIA veteran and old friend of Helms, to take a fresh, detached look at this forbidding can of worms. Stewart enjoyed a reputation for integrity and had the added quality of knowing nothing of the
Nosenko case and little about KGB deception.
To simplify Stewart’s review I organized the essential file materials (including my “1000-page” file summary) with an explanatory table of contents, and turned them over to Stewart in early 1967. This was my parting shot, for I was already preparing my assignment abroad. After my departure the Soviet Bloc Division — without telling me — condensed this huge file summary into some 440 pages, lumping together many separate points of doubt into broad categories, each category to support a “conclusion.” In effect, they transformed justifiable points of doubt into debatable (and unnecessary) conclusions, making a case against
Nosenko. He did not have the naval service he claimed, it said, adding that he did not join the KGB when or how he said, did not serve in the KGB’s American Embassy Section, and had not been deputy chief of its Tourist Department.
Stewart thus found himself faced with a mass of material loaded with indications of
Nosenko’s bad faith and lacking any innocent explanation. To his professorial eye, these papers looked “unscholarly” (as he said to associates) and “more like a prosecutor’s brief.” Indeed, a file summary is not an academic dissertation, and the SB report’s conclusions were unproven. So, he called for a critique of the SB report. In mid-1967 Helms selected for this task the same
Bruce Solie who had learned from
Kochnov, the KGB volunteer, that
Nosenko was a genuine defector.
Solie submitted eighteen pages of critique of the 440-page SB report and of the previous handling of
Nosenko. He recommended a new and “untainted” questioning in a friendlier, less confrontational, and “more objective” atmosphere. So Helms and Taylor picked him to do the job himself.
Solie was a taciturn, cigar-smoking man whose lean features gave him an air of the American farmlands. He had sat in on some of our interrogations of
Nosenko prior to
Kochnov’s advent, not contributing but maintaining a generally approving if reserved demeanor. Now, with
Nosenko’s earlier interrogators removed from the scene and being himself convinced by
Kochnov of
Nosenko’s genuineness,
Solie set out to prove that we had been wrong.
Behind
Solie’s effort lay the hopes of CIA leaders that he would find ways to believe in
Nosenko and rid the Agency of what Director Richard Helms later called this “incubus,” this “bone in the throat.”
They had picked the right man:
Solie delivered the goods. Starting in late 1967, sometimes accompanied by FBI Special Agent Turner,
Solie talked in a friendly manner for nine months with
Nosenko and together they worked out ways things might — somehow — be made to look plausible. One who read the transcripts of these interviews described to me the way they were conducted:
Solie: “Wouldn’t you put it this way, Yuri?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
On another sticking point,
Solie: “But you really meant to say it differently, didn’t you?”
Nosenko: "Sure.”
Solie: “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, for example, that . . . ?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
Solie submitted his report on 1 October 1968. That whitewash had been the purpose from the outset was revealed by the speed with which the CIA leadership adopted its conclusions. They could not have studied it and had perhaps not even read it before, three days later, Deputy Director Taylor informed Director Helms that
I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides. Most particularly, I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsyn has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector. 6
So well had
Solie done the job that CIA gave him a medal for his travails. One can only concur in their assessment of him as a “true hero.” 7 The task he performed was truly Herculean and required tricks as cunning as those of Hercules himself.
Solie seems to have hidden from Taylor facts that flatly contradicted the deputy director’s conclusions. In reality there were significant “conflicts” between what
Nosenko reported and “the information and opinions
Golitsyn . . . provided.” And an "other defector,”
Peter Deriabin, had cast an indelible stain of doubt on
Nosenko’s bona fides. Deriabin was outraged by Taylor’s statement.
A question inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows of the accumulated doubts described in previous chapters. How, in the face of all that, could CIA have ever believed in
Nosenko?
The answer must lie partly in the human psyche — our incurable penchant to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t. (I discuss that general problem in Appendix C.)
So desperately did CIA’s leaders desire to be rid of the ugly implications that underlay the
Nosenko affair— KGB penetration of CIA and perhaps breaking of American ciphers— that they embraced a shaky, corrupt, and unsubstantial report — offered by an ill-qualified investigator— that fed that desire.
Solie’s report would deserve attention if for no other reason than to illustrate the power of desire over reason. But it is no mere curiosity; the Solie report led to CIA’s final conclusion on the
Nosenko case. It was crucial; its impact was permanent. Only through this corrupt gateway would future CIA officers gain access to the
Nosenko case. It was declassified to make its wisdom accessible to trainees in counterintelligence. This is all that later CIA officers came to know, which is why they repeat its nonsense as fact in their memoirs today.
So, it merits attention.
Solie began by adopting the (dubious) position that all he needed to do to prove
Nosenko’s innocence was to discredit the general conclusions of the SB report. Then he carefully selected the questions he would deal with, sidestepped some major anomalies as if they had never existed, and falsely assured his readers, in the passive voice, that "all areas of major significance have been examined.” 8
Despite its bulk,
Solie’s report presented no significant new information, though he and
Nosenko had adjusted some details. It amounted essentially to a fresh interpretation of selected parts of the old data — an interpretation based on credulity rather than skepticism. Inevitably, the way
Solie chose to explain one contradiction would conflict with the way he would explain a different one, but he did not call attention to this. And if he could not find any way to explain an oddity, he would fall back on this comforting thought: if the KGB had dispatched
Nosenko, they would have surely prepared him better— ipso facto, the KGB had not dispatched him.
Among the “areas of major significance” — all of which
Solie claimed to have examined — was how
Nosenko’s reporting touched on the case of
Oleg Penkovsky. In this one case, aside from all the others,
Nosenko had twice exposed the KGB’s blundering hand on him — first in erring by a whole significant year about
Abidian’s visit to
Penkovsky’s dead drop, and second by mentioning (and later forgetting) “
Zepp.” How did
Solie manage these hurdles? He simply ran around
Zepp — didn’t mention it at all. He struggled desperately to explain the dead drop visit and
Nosenko’s failure to mention it in 1962, exposing the absurd quality of this whole whitewash:
•
Solie accepted as "not implausible”
Nosenko’s preposterous suggestion (to
Solie, never to us earlier) that he had failed to tell us in 1962 because “the stakeout had long been dropped”— so long that he had forgotten all about it. But only a couple of paragraphs earlier
Solie had recognized that
Abidian’s visit actually occurred only at the end of 1961. Thus,
Nosenko’s stakeout, by his own account, would have been still active when he departed for Geneva in March 1962 and would be fresh in his mind when, in June, he told us about Abidian and Moscow surveillance.
• Or maybe,
Solie and Nosenko agreed,
Nosenko had somehow got confused and only imagined that he had been getting stakeout
reports.
• Perhaps, instead, he had only “been advised” of the stakeout by other KGB officers. And maybe only after he had met CIA in 1962 — perhaps at the time of the
Penkovsky publicity. (How then could
Nosenko have failed to relate the drop to Penkovsky when he told of it?)
• Or possibly
Nosenko “consciously exaggerated his involvement with the visit and its aftermath.” (How then did he know the details?)
• Or maybe “the evident distortions arose from honest confusion” — without explaining how.
• Anyway,
Nosenko’s errors and contradictions prove that he is genuine. "If dispatched,
Nosenko presumably would have had the date right.”
• Then
Solie had one wonderful, final argument: it wasn’t
Nosenko’s fault, but the fault of his CIA interrogators who had “confused matters to the point where complete clarification appears impossible.” 9 In pushing out such nonsense,
Solie must have assumed that his readers would not know that
Nosenko had given, and repeated in detail, his stories of
Abidian, of the drop, and of the stakeout
long before any interrogation began.Solie then exposed his intent — whitewash, not professional assessment: he dismissed the whole issue. The fact "that
Nosenko is not able to properly date the visit of
Abidian to Pushkin Street is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”
Aside from its nonsense, the very structure of
Solie’s report amounted to a trick. By focusing on the SB report’s (unproven) conclusions it skirted the impossible task of explaining the specific inconsistencies, contradictions, and lies that had led to those conclusions. The uninformed reader would never know they had existed.
Other aspects of his report were similarly questionable.
• When giving
Nosenko’s now "true” version of one story or another,
Solie neglected to mention it was often a third or fourth version, nor did he describe the earlier, conflicting versions— or speculate on why there had been so many changes.
•
Solie implied that thanks to his new, nonconfrontational manner
Nosenko had become cooperative, consistent, and "relaxed” as never before and that
Nosenko’s “material assistance to the interviewer” (including writing reports) was a major departure from the past. In reality,
Nosenko had invariably been cooperative except when cornered. He had written many reports for us. And his stories might have seemed consistent back then, too, had they not been challenged.
Solie’s role was not to challenge or question, but with Nosenko’s help
to shape some plausible explanation.
•
Solie sought to discredit earlier investigations. At least ten times he referred to points he said had not been looked into or to situations in
which he said his predecessors had misunderstood what
Nosenko had been trying to say.
Solie was wrong each time — but a reader with no access to the record would not know that.
• Again and again
Solie made assertions as definitive as they were unfounded. He usually couched them impersonally, often in the passive voice, to hide the fact that they were nothing more than his own opinions. He proclaimed, for example, “The information
Nosenko gave is commensurate with his claimed position.” 10 “
Nosenko,” he wrote, “has furnished adequate information so that his claimed assignment during 1953-1955 is considered sufficiently substantiated.” 11
Nosenko’s knowledge of the office of the Military Attache supports his claim “that he was an officer of the First Section with the indicated assignment as related by him.” 12 Yet again: "The only unresolved problem considered of any significance in regard to the 1955-59 period is the [XYZ] case,” 13 whereas in fact that particular case posed only minor problems compared with others.
•
Solie failed to mention most of the other Soviet sources whose bona fides were also doubted, or about their connections to Nosenko’s case.
Solie even administered a new polygraph test in 1968 and cited it as proof of
Nosenko’s truth — though Nosenko had been polygraphed prior to detention with contrary findings.
Solie was ignoring, too, the chief polygraph specialist of the Office of Security, who had decreed in 1966, after CIA had made extended use of the polygraph as an interrogation tool, that no polygraph test of Nosenko after his detention would be valid or could be presented as evidence one way or the other.
Solie accepted as true things Nosenko said that were actually unthinkable in the real Soviet and KGB world of which
Solie knew so little. As he hacked away at the SB report’s conclusions, avoiding its details,
Solie failed to clarify the new picture he was thus composing. If
Nosenko were now telling
Solie the whole truth, the reader would have to accept (as CIA did, in its desperation) things like these:
• that the KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors,
• that what
Nosenko told
Solie about his life was the final truth — even though it was a fourth or fifth version and still full of unlikely events and would later undergo further changes by
Nosenko and contradiction even by Soviet sources,
• that a ten-year veteran staff officer of the KGB need not know or remember how to perform routine tasks he must have been doing daily, such as sending telegrams, distinguishing between different kinds of files, entering buildings, and using elevators,
• that a KGB operative need not remember any details of his own operations, not even the names of agents he had handled for years,
• that an officer responsible for the KGB’s coverage and knowledge of the American Embassy building needn’t himself know about it, or about his own service’s measures to counter the technical spying the Americans were doing from that building— or even that that technical spying was being done at all,
• that an English-speaking rising star in KGB operations against the American Embassy would never appear in any of the many ap- proaches the KGB is known to have made to Embassy personnel during his time, nor even have heard of them,
• that a supervisor of operations against the American Embassy would be setting up homosexual compromises of visiting tourists, and giv- ing low-level assistance to an officer of another department,
• that a newly appointed supervisor of KGB operations against tourists inside the USSR would be sent abroad — twice— for months’ long work ensuring the security of a conference delegation, work normally done by a department specifically set up for the purpose.
CIA was accepting Nosenko as genuine because this one man,
Solie, would accept such nonsense and was unable (as he himself confessed) to “perceive any evidence of KGB deception or of any Soviet objective which might have justified their dispatching
Nosenko.” Someone knowing a bit more:
• might have recalled KGB deceptions whose goals could not have been perceptible to their victims,
• would have noticed the signs of source protection in many of
Nosenko’s reports, such as 1 ) his contradiction of
Golitsyn’s pointers to KGB recruitment of American code clerks, 2) his misleading story about
Kovshuk’s trip to Washington, and 3) his accounts of how
Popov and
Penkovsky were caught,
• would have recognized the many other signs of deception that smeared
Nosenko’s reports, such as his probing about
Zepp; his story of
Penkovsky’s Pushkin Street dead drop; his unlikely multiplicity of contacts with the
Lee Harvey Oswald case; and his claim of seeing a KGB file in Geneva showing they knew nothing about CIA there,
• would have seen that all of
Nosenko’s major leads— “Andrey,” Sergeant Johnson of the Orly courier station, the British Admiralty source, Dejean, Gribanov’s French businessman agent Saar Demichel, the microphones in the American Embassy, and others — bore the marks of deceptive "chicken feed” in that 1 )
Nosenko could never get straight how he learned these hot items and 2) the KGB knew that all of them had previously been exposed or had lost their value to the KGB;
• might not have dismissed so offhandedly the only deceptive aim that
Solie could envisage: that the KGB might be trying to saturate Western security services, busying them with leads to minor and useless KGB agents to keep them off more valuable ones. In fact, some FBI officers thought that at least in New York the anti-Soviet operatives had been saturated. More than fifty percent of their time, they later calculated, had been spent pursuing innocuous leads provided by
Kulak and
Polyakov. Solie never mentioned these sources or their
connections with the
Nosenko case.
The twisted and shaky edifice that
Solie thus constructed would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal. But it was never intended to endure either. It needed only seem solid to an uninformed and casual reader, for with few exceptions this was the only kind of reader it would ever reach. Future CIA officers would be taught its conclusion but would never see the data on which it was based.
Had it not been for Jim Angleton I might never have seen this
"Solie report” and been left wondering what miracle had resuscitated
Nosenko. Those who had salvaged Nosenko didn’t want me to see the flimsy and corrupt way they had done it, and my “need to know” could be said to have expired with my assignment abroad. But during my routine visit to Headquarters in late 1968 Angleton took the initiative of showing it to me, along with the SB report it attacked (which I then saw for the first time).
I was appalled. In the vain hope of resuscitating that fleeting chance we had had to dig behind Nosenko’s tales, I wrote a long rebuttal, containing the objections mentioned above and many more, and sent it to Angleton in January 1969 from my field station. My rebuttal was ignored,
except in the Counterintelligence Staff, which was unable or unwilling to fight the case further. 14
As soon as
Solie’s report and Taylor’s memo had cleared
Nosenko, CIA moved him to the Washington area and soon took him in as a consultant for its and the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence operations. 15 Eventually he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
Nosenko is said to have boosted CIA and FBI operations. He pointed to recruitment targets among Soviets in the United States, and in the 1970s one of them was successfully recruited. 16 As the director of Central Intelligence later described it to all CIA personnel,
Nosenko had "conducted numerous special security reviews on Soviet subjects of specific intelligence interest, and . . . proven himself to be invaluable in exploring counterintelligence leads.” 17
In defending
Nosenko later against the implication in a TV docudrama ["Yuri Nosenko: KGB"] that there might be some substance to the old accusations that he was a phony, a CIA counterintelligence leader came to his defense. Among other things,
Leonard McCoy expressed outrage that
Nosenko’s "dignity, self- respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this him,” and that therefore “it is fitting that CIA recently called him in and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him.” Speaking for all CIA officers past and present,
McCoy concluded, "Any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency’s judgment in this case — that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you,
Yuri Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country.” 18
Nosenko had won — but voices continued to rise both against him and in his defense. The debate was decided, but not the truth.
