The Monster Plot, by CIA's Very Own KGB Apologist John L. Hart!

[Thomas Graves]

Michael,

I'll be dealing with at least some of the things I've highlighted in the obituary.


One day in June 1962, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the Soviet specialist at the CIA station in Berne, was instructed to take the train to Geneva to handle the case of a KGB officer attached to the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference, who was offering his services to the Americans. That short journey turned Bagley into a central figure in perhaps the most controversial and baffling spy story of the entire Cold War.The KGB officer's name was Yuri Nosenko. At that first meeting he agreed to return to Moscow as a CIA agent-in-place. But in January 1964 he was back in Geneva with the Soviet arms delegates, insisting his cover was about to be blown and that he had to come over to
 the West. But was he the real thing, or a fake defector sent by the KGB to confuse? If he was a plant, the strategy succeeded brilliantly. For the next dozen years the Nosenko case tied the CIA in knots, paralysing the Agency's vital espionage efforts against its Cold War adversary and destroying careers in the process. Bagley's background was typical in the Agency's early days. He came from an old US Navy family, studded with admirals; his uncle had been the first American killed in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Bagley himself had served in the Marines and studied at Princeton and the University of Geneva before joining the CIA in 1950. He seemed to have it all. He was tall and all-American handsome, talented and ambitious. Some senior figures in the Agency saw him as a future CIA director. He was also a friend of James Angleton, the Agency's formidable counter-intelligence chief. And then Yuri Nosenko came on the scene. Initially Bagley had no doubts. Nosenko was the first senior defector from the KGB's Second Directorate, responsible for internal security and monitoring – and if possible recruiting – personnel in the US Embassy as well as visiting American tourists, businessmen and academics. The information he provided at the 1962 debriefings at a CIA safe house in Geneva was top-class, including details of KGB surveillance methods and leads that hastened the unmasking of several Soviet spies in the West (among them the UK Admiralty clerk, John Vassall). "Jim, I'm involved in the greatest defector case ever," Bagley enthused to Angleton when he returned to Washington. But the older man was visibly unimpressed, and handed Bagley a file to read. "When you finish this, you'll see what I'm saying," he told him. The file essentially consisted of the theorizing of a previous KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had come across in 1961.
Golitsyn had managed to convince the paranoid Angleton that not only did the KGB have high-level moles in US and British intelligence, but was running a gigantic disinformation campaign against the West. Nothing was what it seemed, and every defector, according to Golitsyn, was in fact a plant – among them, naturally, Yuri Nosenko. The file planted doubts in Bagley's mind too, and his suspicions were further aroused by discrepancies in Nosenko's initial story. In 1964 those doubts exploded. The defector claimed to have information that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the murder of President Kennedy just two months earlier and, astonishingly, that the KGB didn't even have contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, during the three mysterious years that the one-time US Marine lived in the Soviet Union, between 1959 and 1962. Nosenko's tale seemed too good to be true, exonerating Moscow just as the Warren Commission was starting work amid widespread suspicion that Oswald was indeed a real-life Manchurian Candidate controlled by the KGB. Soon after landing on US soil, Nosenko found himself a prisoner, held incommunicado in a safe house in Virginia and subjected to harsh interrogation, hunger and sleep deprivation. But he never broke, passing lie detector tests and resisting every effort of Bagley and his fellow sceptics to extract a confession. Gradually the upper echelons of the CIA split into warring camps, of "Fundamentalists" like Angleton and Bagley, and those who believed Nosenko was the real thing, and who were increasingly appalled by the way he was being treated. Ultimately the latter group prevailed. By 1967 Nosenko's ordeal was over, and in 1969 he was formally cleared, placed on the CIA payroll as a consultant and given a new identity. By then Bagley was long since off the case, posted to Brussels, where he would spend five years as station chief before retiring from the Agency in 1972. Amazingly Nosenko never held his harsh treatment against the US, nor regretted his original decision to defect. Bagley, though, remained obsessed by the case, convinced until the end that Nosenko was a plant: "this KGB provocateur and deceiver," as he put it in his 2007 memoir Spy Wars, a powerful argument of the anti-Nosenko case. The book led the CIA to cancel a planned lecture that Bagley was to give: four decades on, old wounds were still bleeding. Nosenko himself died in 2008. A few years earlier, someone asked Bagley what he'd say to Yuri Nosenko if he ever ran into him. His answer was, "Don't shoot."


--  MWT   

To all of my faithful followers (LOL) --

Okay, I've already covered the first six highlighted items in the obituary, so now it's time for me to enlighten you on the next three.

7)  The file essentially consisted of the theorizing

The file on Golitsyn that Angleton had Bagley read in 1962 did not contain theorizing by Golitsyn, but specific memories regarding his experiences in the KGB, and KGB personnel he either knew personally, or about whom he'd read in KGB reports from several European countries.

8 )  paranoid Angleton

LOL  You'd be a little paranoid, too, if your job was to protect the CIA from being penetrated and it had lost a highly placed Soviet intelligence asset (Popov, in October of 1959), your president had been assassinated by, apparently, a former defector to the USSR, and you had a new defector (Golitsyn) who was warning you about the shennagins of a new, top secret "KGB within the KGB" -- Department 14 (aka Department D) of the Second Chief Directorate.

9)  every defector, according to Golitsyn, was a plant

A bit of hyperbole.  The CIA already had some true defectors (like Pyotr Deriabin and Yuri Rastvorov, both of whom defected in 1954).  Regarding future defectors, although Golitsyn (who defected in December 1961) knew that Department 14 (see above) had already sent out someone (Polyakov in 1959; "activated" in 1961) on a "strategic deception" mission, and that KGB would dispatch false defectors (like Yuri Nosenko in January 1964) and triple agents (like Aleksey Kulak in March 1962) to contradict what he, Golitsyn, was trying to tell CIA and the FBI about KGB penetrations of said agencies, as well as about KGB penetrations of several European intelligence agencies and governments, he didn't claim that every single future defector or volunteer double-agent would necessarily be a "plant," but that they should, obviously, be looked at very closely by CIA and/or FBI while trying to determine their "bona fides" or "mala fides," and that they should rely on him to help them make those judgments. 


--  MWT   

[Michael Clark]

To all of my faithful followers (LOL) --

Okay, I've already covered the first six highlighted items in the obituary, so now it's time for me to enlighten you on the next three.

7)  The file essentially consisted of the theorizing

The file on Golitsyn that Angleton had Bagley read in 1962 did not contain theorizing by Golitsyn, but specific memories regarding his experiences in the KGB, and KGB personnel he either knew personally, or about whom he'd read in KGB reports from several European countries.

8 )  paranoid Angleton

LOL  You'd be a little paranoid, too, if your job was to protect the CIA from being penetrated and it had lost a highly placed Soviet intelligence asset (Popov, in October of 1959), your president had been assassinated by, apparently, a former defector to the USSR, and you had a new defector (Golitsyn) who was warning you about the shennagins of a new, top secret "KGB within the KGB" -- Department 14 (aka Department D) of the Second Chief Directorate.

9)  every defector, according to Golitsyn, was a plant

A bit of hyperbole.  The CIA already had some true defectors (like Pyotr Deriabin and Yuri Rastvorov, both of whom defected in 1954).  Regarding future defectors, although Golitsyn (who defected in December 1961) knew that Department 14 (see above) had already sent out someone (Polyakov in 1959; "activated" in 1961) on a "strategic deception" mission, and that KGB would dispatch false defectors (like Yuri Nosenko in January 1964) and triple agents (like Aleksey Kulak in March 1962) to contradict what he, Golitsyn, was trying to tell CIA and the FBI about KGB penetrations of said agencies, as well as about KGB penetrations of several European intelligence agencies and governments, he didn't claim that every single future defector or volunteer double-agent would necessarily be a "plant," but that they should be looked at very closely by CIA and/or FBI while trying to determine their "bona fides" or "mala fides," and that they should rely on him to help them make those judgments. 


--  MWT   

The third one is going take a while to sort-out.

[Thomas Graves]

The third one is going take a while to sort-out.

Michael,

I personally can't think of any post-Golitsyn true defectors or true KGB double-agents who worked for CIA and/or FBI, although I think Bagley insinuates that there might have been a few.

In my eyes, Oleg Kalugin (who was not really a defector), Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin are all suspect (as is, btw, MI-5's official historian, Christopher Andrew), for the simple reason that they all claim that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector.

Andrew even has the gall to deny that Sir Roger Hollis was a traitor, when it's almost certain that he betrayed Oleg Penkovsky about two weeks after he'd been recruited by MI-6 and CIA.

All of which reminds me of what James Angleton said during his Church Committee testimony: "A triple-agent will tell you the truth about basically unimportant things 98 percent of the time, and will lie to you about important things the other 2 percent of the time, and he'll really mess you up, boy" (or words to that effect).

Caveat: As Bagley points points out in Spy Wars, Department 14 was so shut-off from other KGB departments that sometimes KGB intentionally lied to its own officers, knowing that they would unwittingly perpetuate the myth of whatever Department 14 deception was being, or had been, run.

Bottom line: Maybe the guys I mentioned, above, aren't "false defectors" per se, but former KGB officers who were lied to, regarding Nosenko, by their superiors .

But, then again ...


Cheers!

--  MWT   

[Thomas Graves]

To all of my faithful followers (LOL) --

Okay, I've already covered the first six highlighted items in the obituary, so now it's time for me to enlighten you on the next three.

7)  The file essentially consisted of the theorizing

The file on Golitsyn that Angleton had Bagley read in 1962 did not contain theorizing by Golitsyn, but specific memories regarding his experiences in the KGB, and KGB personnel he either knew personally, or about whom he'd read in KGB reports from several European countries.

8 )  paranoid Angleton

LOL  You'd be a little paranoid, too, if your job was to protect the CIA from being penetrated and it had lost a highly placed Soviet intelligence asset (Popov, in October of 1959), your president had been assassinated by, apparently, a former defector to the USSR, and you had a new defector (Golitsyn) who was warning you about the shennagins of a new, top secret "KGB within the KGB" -- Department 14 (aka Department D) of the Second Chief Directorate.

9)  every defector, according to Golitsyn, was a plant

A bit of hyperbole.  The CIA already had some true defectors (like Pyotr Deriabin and Yuri Rastvorov, both of whom defected in 1954).  Regarding future defectors, although Golitsyn (who defected in December 1961) knew that Department 14 (see above) had already sent out someone (Polyakov in 1959; "activated" in 1961) on a "strategic deception" mission, and that KGB would dispatch false defectors (like Yuri Nosenko in January 1964) and triple agents (like Aleksey Kulak in March 1962) to contradict what he, Golitsyn, was trying to tell CIA and the FBI about KGB penetrations of said agencies, as well as about KGB penetrations of several European intelligence agencies and governments, he didn't claim that every single future defector or volunteer double-agent would necessarily be a "plant," but that they should, obviously, be looked at very closely by CIA and/or FBI while trying to determine their "bona fides" or "mala fides," and that they should rely on him to help them make those judgments. 


--  MWT   

To all of my dear followers (lol) --

Something I forgot to include in my rebuttal of the obituary's "The top-secret Golitsyn file that Bagley read in 1962 essentially contained only Golytsyn's theories" bit, above, is a very important thing I was reminded of by re-reading, this morning, parts of Mark Riebling's fine 1994 book Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA -- that Golitsyn had brought with him a top-secret 1959 KGB document detailing the decisions taken at the Twentieth Communist World Congress to not only designate the U.S. the "Main Enemy" from then on, but to try a new approach: the establishing of a top-secret "KGB within the KGB" (Department 14 of the Second Chief Directorate), charged with winning the Cold War -- without the USSR's actually going to war -- by waging Sun Tzu-like "strategic deception" counterintelligence  operations (akin to Lenin's "Operation Trust," and "Sindikat-2"), and interweaving them with traditional "active measures" counterintelligence operations so as to form devastating "feedback loops" against the CIA and the FBI.

In other words, the Golitsyn file that wise James Angleton had Tennent H. Bagley read, right after having interviewed Nosenko for a week in Geneva,  described the new-since-1959 so-called "Monster Plot" that true-and-sane defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was trying to warn those very same agencies about, and of which Yuri Nosenko was a major part at the time.

--  MWT 

[Michael Clark]

To all of my dear followers (lol) --

........

..... true-and-sane defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was trying to ....

--  MWT 

Thomas, who said that Golitsyn wasn’t sane?

[Thomas Graves]

Thomas, who said that Golitsyn wasn’t sane?

Michael,

Well, didn't your boy John L. Hart say he was a certified "Paranoid," or was that your other hero, Richards J. Heuer?

Leonard "I Destroyed Scotty Miler's Records on Nosenko" McCoy?


It's so hard to keep all of those wishful-thinking, spiteful, under-endowed virtual traitors straight!

Cheers!

--  MWT   

PS  Cleveland Cram?  Bruce "Gumshoe" Solie?

[Michael Clark]

Michael,

Well, didn't your boy John L. Hart say he was a certified "Paranoid," or was that your other hero, Richards J. Heuer?

Leonard "I Destroyed Scotty Miler's Records on Nosenko" McCoy?


It's so hard to keep up will all those wishful-thinking, spiteful, under-endowed virtual traitors ...

Cheers!

--  MWT   

“I find your knowledge of who is, and who is not, “well endowed” disturbing”