So this rogue CIA operation that you think killed JFK and then altered all of the evidence - the films, the photos, the x-rays - and then covered that all up didn't have anyone who could speak fluent Russian?
If they didn't have anyone who could speak Russian why have them try and speak Russian? Just speak English.
You do realize how bizarre your arguments and thinking are? You think Babushka Lady "probably" shot JFK with a camera gun. And Sirhan was hypnoprogrammed to shoot RFK and he didn't know what he was doing. This is what you think?
In any case, the KGB officers who met Oswald - it was Oswald - said his Russian that day was poor and hard to understand. The same thing the CIA translator said.
Dear Steve M.,
I'm glad that you're putting Comrade Griffith in his place, but I do wish you wouldn't rely so much on "former" KGB Colonel Nechiporenko's book,
Passport to Assassination, which bit of KGB disinformation is supposed to be about Oswald's visiting Soviet "diplomats" and Cuban diplomats in Mexico City in late-September / early-October 1963, but implausibly devotes
fifty pages to excoriating "stupid, stupid, stupid" Tennent H. Bagley and "confirming" the bona fides of an ostensible traitor to Moscow -- false-defector-in-place-in-Geneva-in-June-1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, KGB
Major Lt. Col. Captain Yuri Nosenko.
You're gagging me with a KGB spoon, Steve M.!
Here's what your bugbear, Bagley, wrote about your favorite source, Nechiporenko, in his 2007 Yale University Press book,
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. A KGB veteran [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 (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.
-- Tom
