At another JFK assassination forum a few months ago, a dude who seems to hate everything CIA started a thread titled “Tennent H. Bagley, CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, Soviet Russian Division (C/SR/CI) — Why is he trusted by [former] NSA officer Maj. John M. Newman?”
Newman, of course, is the former high-level Army intelligence analyst and NSA officer who became a JFKA conspiracy theorist and wrote the 1995/2008 book, Oswald and the CIA, the 2008 version of which claimed that James Angleton, CIA’s legendary Chief of Counterintelligence, was the mastermind of the assassination.
In 2022, Newman published Uncovering Popov’s Mole (which he dedicated to Bagley), in which he says Angleton was duped by a KGB mole in the CIA — his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, Bruce Leonard Solie — and that JFK was not killed by the CIA, but by some high-level military officers because he refused to nuke Moscow and Peking in 1963.
It’s interesting that Newman used to be the darling of the CIA-hating JFKA “research community,” but has now become something of a pariah.
I used to be a JFKA conspiracy theorist, myself, but I now believe that a former sharpshooting Marine radar operator by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and did so with or without encouragement and/or logistical support from Khruschev’s KGB or Castro’s DGI.
I’m glad that Newman’s British colleague, researcher Malcolm Blunt, befriended Bagley (R.I.P.) at a 2008 Raliegh, North Carolina, “spy conference,” and later showed him some FOIA CIA documents that he hadn’t been privy to in 1959-60 (he wasn't in the right department at the time to see them) and in1978 (he had retired from the Agency in 1974). These documents convinced Bagley that Oswald must have been a “witting” defector to the USSR in 1959, i.e., that he was knowingly on some sort of mission for the CIA, and that Solie “should be put on the list” of mole suspects.
Blunt turned Newman onto Bagley, and Newman proceeded to read his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2013 book,Spy Master, and his 2014 35-page article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” and came to believe that Bagley was right to pronounce Yuri Nosenko a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and false physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 (I prefer to believe he was a rogue defector in ‘64 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to support), and seems to have understood that KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the U.S. in December 1961, was right about the Kremlin’s 1959-on “Master Plan” according to which the KGB, having created a top-secret "KGB within the KGB," was waging Sun Tzu-like disinformation, “active measures,” and “Inside Man” / “Outside Man” strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies so that we would tear ourselves apart.
Newman now believes Solie sent (or duped his confidant, protégé, and mole-hunting superior, Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible “dangle” in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for “Popov’s U-2 Mole” / “Popov’s Mole” (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA — the Soviet Russia Division — which mole-hunt protected Solie from being uncovered, tore the SRD apart, and drove Angleton nuts.
I tend to agree with him.
PS Bagley, along with James Angleton, Newton "Scotty" Miler, Raymond Rocca, and FBI's William Sullivan, was one of Edward J. Epstein's main sources for his 1978 book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.
