An Existential Question for Lance

[Tom Graves]

Dear Fancy Pants Lance,

Given the fact that the KGB, in all its iterations, had a 30-year head start on the CIA, and given the fact that British Intelligence was penetrated by Soviet "moles" Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Roger Hollis, and George Blake, why are you so averse to the idea that Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office from 1962 to 1977, and that the CIA was penetrated by a few "moles" before Aldrich Ames became one in 1985, e.g., Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, John Paisley, and Russia-born George Kisevalter?

Do you think Yuri "The KGB Had Absolutely Nothing To Do With Former Marine U-2 Radar Operator Lee Harvey Oswald During the Two-and-One-Half Years He Lived In The USSR" Nosenko was a true defector?

Caveat: He may have been a clever rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to support through FEDORA, SHAMROCK, AND KITTYHAWK, et al., because he was telling the CIA and a very grateful J. Edgar Hoover what it desperately wanted them to hear, but he was for-sure a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent there by General Oleg Gribanov to discredit what recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton -- and which gullible JJA was sharing with his confidant and mole-hunting superior, (probable "mole") Bruce Solie -- about possible penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies.

If so, doesn't it bug you at least a little bit that after Solie "cleared" him via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report in October 1968, Nosenko was hired by the Agency to lecture its and the FBI's new recruits on "counterintelligence"?

Is your aversion to the idea that the CIA was heavily penetrated by the Ruskies due to your refusing to believe that "former" KGB officer Vladimir Putin installed your boy, The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx"), as our "president" on 20 January 2017?

[Tom Graves]

I guess FPL is too busy thinking about UFOs to answer my question.

[Lance Payette]

Ah, what a small world it is. Tom embarked on what eventually became his KGB mania in 2007, when Douglas Caddy posted at the Ed Forum a Washington Post review of Bagley’s book Spy Wars. "Interesting stuff!" Tom said back then. Ironically, the review concluded “Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane …” Even more ironically, Caddy is the leading proponent of the theory that JFK knew the dark truth about UFOs and was killed because he was going to reveal the Alien Secret. But now Tom takes his little dig at my longtime interest in UFOs. And so it goes.

I know the rudiments of the Nosenko affair and the Angleton/Bagley KGB paranoia. I have no idea what Nosenko was all about and really don't care. My guess would be, a genuine defector who pretended to be more than he was. He certainly didn’t defect for any reason directly related to the JFKA.

Regardless of what, if anything, Nosenko actually knew about Oswald, what he had to say is surely pretty close to the truth even if he was operating on the basis of nothing more than common sense and guesswork. In the preparation of Oswald’s Tale, Norman Mailer spoke with KGB officers and viewed KGB files. The portrait of Oswald that emerged was entirely consistent with what Nosenko said and what common sense would tell us: The KGB quickly realized Oswald was a pathetic loser, of no conceivable intelligence use.

Certainly, the KGB would have assessed and monitored Oswald. Pretty much everyone from Rimma (his Intourist guide) on down had some KGB affiliation. Were there really no formal intelligence-type interviews, as Nosenko said? Quite possibly. Oswald had nothing to offer them about the U-2 program they didn’t already know; their only puzzle was how to reach, with aircraft or missiles, the height at which they knew the U-2 was flying. Apart from the U-2 stuff they already knew, Oswald had nothing to offer them. Indeed, he was such unlikely intelligence material that the KGB at one point speculated as to whether weirdos like him were some new CIA program (so obviously not intelligence material that he actually was intelligence material!).

Does it make any rational sense that the Soviets would send a false defector, and that Nosenko would endure all he endured (dying as a U.S. citizen in 2008), to spread the tale that “We really had no interest in Oswald” when pretty much no one thought they did? Since Nosenko defected at just about the time the WC was getting rolling, I would assume he included his Oswald material because he knew ears would perk up.

When I first joined this forum several months ago, I and my especially my wife, who lived in Minsk for decades and was in a responsible position with the city until 2008, helped Tom identify the KGB school that Oswald supposedly lived near. It was a graduate-level training academy that began in Gomel in 1946 for those who wanted to join the KGB in any capacity. It was not a school for spies. There is a description of it beginning on page 20 of this document: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989481.pdf.

My wife tells me it’s “invisible” in the sense that Minsk citizens like her never give it a thought (she didn’t even know what the building was until she started trying to help Tom!). Ernst Titovets said in a fairly recent interview that he had no awareness of it and that it had only been brought to his attention in connection with questions about Oswald. No one – Marina, Titovets or anyone else in Minsk – has ever suggested any connection whatsoever between Oswald and this school.

Yet, all over the internet, Tom continues to trumpet the fact that “Oswald lived within a half mile of a KGB school” as though this were some major smoking gun. The fact is, Oswald was given an extremely nice (by Soviet standards) apartment near the Svisloch River (yes, I’ve seen it). It’s in midtown Minsk. One walks from the apartment, across Victory Square (which is the center of Minsk), and either walks or takes the bus down the main street to the radio factory (two bus stops down the road but within easy walking distance). The KGB school is on the other side of the main street – i.e., separated from Oswald’s apartment by Victory Square.

This would be like saying that everyone living within a half mile of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington is somehow suspicious, with utterly no connection apart from the bare fact of this proximity. Or, as CTers are wont to do, like saying that someone whose distant second-cousin Shirley is a secretary in building maintenance at Langley has, on this basis alone, “suspicious CIA connections.”

Tom, I now realize, is in the grip of some obsessive KGB fixation that I was not aware of when I joined. This is a different Tom than I had encountered at the Ed Forum years ago, who was goofy but kind of fun (like me!). I do have him on Ignore because I find his KGB mania boring and slightly scary. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, ever.

Here’s the school in its present incarnation as the National Security Academy. They even have a website: https://aml.university/en/uchastniki-aml/akademiya-nacional-noy-bezopasnosti-respubliki-belarus. If you visit, tell them Comrade Lance sent you.

[Tom Graves]

[...]

Dear Intellectually Dishonest Fancy Pants Lance,

You suggested that Bagley (who was on the fast track to become Director of CIA until Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. in February 1964) was paranoiac when you wrote, "Ironically, the [Washington Post] review [of Bagley's 2007 book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games"] concluded, 'Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane …'”

Truth-be-told, the author of the article, David Ignatius, seemed to think Bagley's book was pretty darn good.

Here's the full text of his review:

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don't know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK's death?

Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handled Oswald's KGB file, and he knows the spy service had never considered dealing with him.

For many spy buffs, the Nosenko story has always seemed too good to be true. How convenient that he defected at the very moment the KGB's chiefs were eager to reassure the Warren Commission about Oswald's sojourn in Russia. What's more, Nosenko brought other goodies that on close examination were also suspicious -- information that seemed intended to divert the CIA's attention from the possibility that its codes had been broken and its inner sanctum penetrated.

The Nosenko case is one of the gnarly puzzles of Cold War history. It vexed the CIA's fabled counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, to the end of his days. And it has titillated a generation of novelists and screenwriters -- most recently providing the background for Robert De Niro's sinuous spy film "The Good Shepherd."

Now the CIA case officer who initially handled Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, has written his own account. And it is a stunner. It's impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko's bona fides. Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along -- that Nosenko was a phony, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.

That's not the official CIA judgment, of course. The agency gave Nosenko its stamp of approval in 1968 and again in 1976. Indeed, as often happens, longtime agency operatives became the villains as critics inside and outside the agency denounced Angleton, Bagley and other skeptics for their harsh interrogation of Nosenko. In its eagerness to tidy up the mess, the agency even invited Nosenko to lecture to its young officers about counterintelligence.

It happens that I met Angleton in the late 1970s, in the twilight of his life in the shadows. I was a reporter in my late 20s, and it occurred to me to invite the fabled counterintelligence chief to lunch. (Back then, even retired super-spooks listed their numbers in the phone book. I can still hear in my mind his creepily precise voice on the answering machine: "We are not in, at present. . . .") Angleton arrived at his favorite haunt, the Army and Navy Club on Farragut Square, cadaverously thin and dressed in black.

He might have been playing himself in a movie. He displayed all the weird traits that were part of the Angleton legend, clasping his Virginia Slims cigarette daintily between thumb and forefinger and sipping his potent cocktail through a long, thin straw.

And he was still obsessed with the Nosenko case. He urged me, in a series of interviews, to pursue another Russian defector code-named "Sasha," who he was convinced was part of the skein of KGB lies. The man ran a little picture-framing shop in Alexandria and seemed an unlikely master spy. I gradually concluded that Angleton had lost it, and after I wrote that he himself had once been accused [by Counterintelligence officer Clare Edward Petty, who had earlier accused Bagley of being a KGB "mole"] of being the secret mole, he stopped returning my calls.

Bagley's book, "Spy Wars," should reopen the Nosenko case. He has gathered strong evidence that the Russian defector could not have been who he initially said he was; that he could not have reviewed the Oswald file; that his claims about how the KGB discovered the identities of two CIA moles in Moscow could not have been right. According to Bagley, even Nosenko eventually admitted that some of what he had told the CIA was false.

What larger purpose did the deception serve? Bagley argues that the KGB's real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited one American code clerk in Moscow in 1949 and perhaps two others later on. The KGB may also have hoped to protect an early (and to this day undiscovered) mole inside the CIA.

Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane and you are reminded just how good the Russians are at the three-dimensional chess game of intelligence. For a century, their spies have created entire networks of illusion -- phony dissident movements, fake spy services -- to condition the desired response.

Reading Bagley's book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with us today?

. . . . . . .

Dear Fancy Pants,

One would think that you would have done some due diligence and found a review of Bagley's book by someone like probably-still-Kremlin-loyal Oleg Kalugin and Oleg Gordievsky, or Tom Mangold (whose main source for his anti-Angleton book, Cold Warrior, was probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy), or David Wise (whose main source for his book, Molehunt, was probable "mole" George Kisevalter). 

You really shouldn't be so lazy, Fancy Pants.

And so intellectually dishonest.

-- Tom

[Tom Graves]

Ah, what a small world it is. Tom embarked on what eventually became his KGB mania in 2007, when Douglas Caddy posted at the Ed Forum a Washington Post review of Bagley’s book Spy Wars. "Interesting stuff!" Tom said back then. Ironically, the review concluded “Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane …” Even more ironically, Caddy is the leading proponent of the theory that JFK knew the dark truth about UFOs and was killed because he was going to reveal the Alien Secret. But now Tom takes his little dig at my longtime interest in UFOs. And so it goes.

Dear Fancy Pants,

What's really ironic is that Harley Schlanger of the pro-Russia Lyndon LaRouche organization contacted Caddy in early 2016 and asked him to introduce him to Roger Stone, which Caddy did. Caddy says that Stone and Schlanger (who had recently returned from Moscow) met at a restaurant in Austin, Texas, a short time later (i.e., about the time that Papadopoulos was meeting with Mifsud in Rome) and that afterwards, Stone sent Caddy a thank-you email which said that he and Schlanger had hit it off, that they were "fighting the globalists," and that he had "a back channel to Trump."

-- Tom