My Substack article about a Lone Nutter who thinks we won The Cold War.

[Tom Graves]

Posted on my free-to-read Substack page, "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI" (which currently has 261 "subscribers" and 835 "followers").

My reply to a Lone Nutter who thinks we won The Cold War


Background:

Lance, a JFK Assassination “Lone Nutter” (as am I) and apparent believer (which I am not) that “The Cold War is Over and We Won!,” posted the following yesterday at a JFKA forum in response to my earlier posts on the general subject of how the KGB has zombified the CIA and the FBI, and how it has taken advantage of the anomaly-replete JFK assassination to spread body politic-debilitating disinformation.

Lance wrote:

[...]

I performed an interesting little experiment yesterday: Because of the incessant drumbeat about “Newman,” “Popov,” “Solie,” etc., by a seemingly obsessed member of this forum [My comment: he’s referring to me], I did a number of Google searches. I started with Newman’s Uncovering Popov’s Mole, published in 2022. To start with, the book is self-published; this tells you something, and it isn’t good. By the fourth volume of your massive study, you can't find a publisher?

Know how many reviews this book has received outside of the CT community? None. Know how many mentions this book has received outside of the CT community? None. It has received zero, nada, zilch attention in the community of mainstream historians and historical journals. Know how much discussion the theory has generated? None. Zero, nada, zilch.

Oh, yes, there are mainstream, peer-reviewed historical journals. There is, for example, the Journal of Cold War History, published by MIT Press as part of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, https://direct.mit.edu/jcws. There is the scholarly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence,

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ujic20/about-this-journal#editorial-board.

There is Studies in Intelligence, published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/.

There is the Journal of American History, published by the Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/.

Does Newman take his work to respected, peer-reviewed outlets such as this? No, he self-publishes what have been aptly described as poorly edited document dumps. And the CT community laps them up.

On the Wikipedia entry, presumably written by our obsessed local hero, one will find that “no espionage writer or former intelligence agent has attempted to rebut Blunt's (September 2021) or Newman's (October 2022) evidence, or Bagley's (2012) suspicion that Solie was a KGB mole” – a CT euphemism for “no one has paid any attention to this stuff.” Indeed, my intrepid Googling revealed that by far the biggest promoter of this stuff is our obsessed local hero.

It’s all rather telling, is it not?

Really: Wake up, CTers. You’re being had. If this is all just your alternative to a Star Trek convention, fine. But if you think it’s something more, you’re being had.

(I’ll confess, I find the Popov’s Mole stuff boring and mind-numbing. In my Googling, however, I did stumble upon two documents you might find interesting. The first is a CIA-released draft of an article for the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Intelligence entitled "James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the 'Monster Plot': Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations" by longtime CIA official Barry J. Royden:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/JAMES%20J.%20ANGLETON%2C%20ANATOL%5B15725929%5D.pdf

It apparently wasn’t published in the journal, probably due to the CIA redactions, but it’s an interesting overview of how Angleton’s KGB-obsessed paranoia affected CIA operations. Related are the proceedings of a 2012 Wilson Center symposium in which Royden (and Edward Epstein!) participated: Moles, Defectors and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence,

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/event/moles_defectors_and_deceptions_james_angleton_conference_report.pdf.)

. . . . . . . . .

My reply:

Dear Fancy Pants Lance,

What do you know about Tennent H. Bagley?

Hint: He was from an illustrious Navy family, he attended USC and Princeton, he earned a PhD in political science from the University of Geneva after WW II (during which he was a Marine Lieutenant on an aircraft carrier), he joined the CIA in 1951, he helped handle GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov when he defected to the U.S. in 1952, he helped exfiltrate KGB Major Pyotr Deriabin in 1954, he was instrumental of the defection of Polish KGB officer Mikhail Goleniewski to the U.S. in January 1961, etc., etc.. Bagley became the primary case officer of false-defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko when he "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 "desperately needing to exchange some KGB secrets for $300 worth of Swiss francs," and he was on the fast-track to become Director of CIA until January 1964, at which time Nosenko recontacted Bagley and (probable "mole") George Kisevalter in Geneva, saying that he now wanted to physically defect to the U.S (and leave his beloved-in-1962 wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves), that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in Moscow (how fortunate for J. Edgar Hoover!) and therefore knew for a fact that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with Oswald in the USSR!

And . . . gasp . . . that he had just received a "Return to KGB Headquarters Immediately" telegram! (Later disproved by the NSA.)

Bottom line: Although Bagley and CIA top management were convinced that Nosenko was fake, they had to let him in so he could testify to the Warren Commission about Oswald and Marina in the USSR. (After Nosenko was in the U.S., Richard Helms talked Earl Warren out of letting him testify.)

Fast forward:

In 2008, JFKA CT and National Archives habitué Malcolm Blunt met JFKA LNer Bagley at the Raleigh Spy Conference, and they became friends. In 2012, Blunt showed retired-from-CIA-in-1972 Bagley some CIA documents that he hadn't been privy to in 1959-60. These documents led Bagley to proclaim that Oswald had to have been a "witting defector," i.e., that he had knowingly been sent by the CIA to Moscow in 1959. Blunt shared this information with his JFKA CT colleague, John N. Newman, a former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and Executive Assistant to the Director of NSA. As a result, Newman stopped blaming evil, evil, evil James Angleton for the assassination, proclaimed Yuri Nosenko a false defector, revealed that Bruce Leonard Solie was a KGB "mole," and dedicated his 2022 self-published book, Uncovering Popov's Mole, to JFKA LN Bagley.

Newman points out in said book that CIA's spy, the aforementioned Pyotr Popov, told his CIA case officer, the aforementioned George Kisevalter, in West Berlin in April 1958 that he had recently heard a drunken GRU Colonel brag that the Kremlin had all of the top-secret specifications of the U-2 spy plane (this is written about in former high-level CIA officer William Hood's book, Mole), and when word of this got back to CIA headquarters, James Angleton and his mole-hunting superior, Bruce Solie in the mole-hunting Office of Security (which just happened to have the specifications of the U-2), had to organize a hunt for the traitor.

Newman concludes that Solie, himself, was the traitor -- as suggested by all of the negative things Bagley says about him in his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, plus (among other things):

1) The fact that Solie's travel records suggest that he visited Kim Philby in Beirut in February 1957,

2) The fact that his travel records show that he flew to Paris for two very short visits within thirty days of each other in mid-1962 -- before and after he showed up unexpectedly at the Geneva safe house to "ask" Nosenko about the names of possible moles that Golitsyn had recently told Angleton about (and which Angleton had naively shared with Solie), and

3) The fact that somebody in the Office of Security's mole-hunting Security Research Staff office (where Solie was the deputy of swamped-by-ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD Paul Gaynor) arranged in advance for all of the incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald's defection to be routed to it instead of where they would have normally gone -- the Soviet Russia Division -- and that said cables disappeared into a "black hole" for at least six months,

. . . and concluded that Solie had leaked the U-2 secrets and betrayed Popov to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington, D.C., movie houses in early 1957.

In this context, it's interesting to note that one of the bits of disinformation that false-defector-in-place Nosenko shared with Bagley during their first meeting in Geneva in 1962 was that "his boss," Kovshuk, had gone the U.S. to "reestablish contact with our most important American recruit in Moscow, the Embassy's cipher machine mechanic, ‘Andrey.'" 

This "Andrey" turned out to be a now-worthless-to-KGB dude by the name of Dayle W. Smith, whom Kovshuk didn't bother to visit for ten months even though he was listed in the phone book. Instead, Kovshuck and two KGB-types were seen by the FBI so often near D.C. movie houses that it dubbed them "The Three Musketeers," and, during the same time period, recently-fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith (Popov's incompetent and honey-trapped former dead drop setter-upper in Moscow) told a CIA friend of his that he chanced to bump into in D.C. that he was "watching a lot of movies and waiting for a job to open up in California."

(Smith's friend had the presence of mind to report this conversation to the CIA.)

Bagley believed that Smith had betrayed Popov to Kovshuk in those movie houses; Newman believes that it was Solie (who, as I mentioned earlier, had access to the U-2's secrets in the Office of Security) who betrayed him, with logistical support from Smith and James McCord of future Watergate notoriety.

Given the above circumstantial evidence (plus oodles and gobs more) and the fact that, as I alluded to, above, someone had arranged in advance with the Office of Mail Logistics and the Records Integration Divion for all of the incoming non-CIA cables (e.g., from Consul Richard Snyder in Moscow, from the Naval Attache in Moscow, and from the Department of the Navy in Washington) on Oswald's defection were routed to Solie's office rather than where they would have normally gone and that they disappeared into a "black hole" there for at least six months (some of them didn't resurface until after the assassination), Newman logically concludes that Solie sent (or duped his confidant, protege, and mole-hunting subordinate, James Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA.

Which mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart, protected Solie from being uncovered, and drove Angleton nuts.

I could go on and on, Fancy-Pants Lance, but I suspect that this is too complicated for you and/or it causes too much cognitive dissonance in your conspiracy-eschewing / "The KGB is a World-Class Humanitarian Organization Compared to the Evil, Evil CIA" / "The Cold War Is Over And We Won!" / "I Wuv Donald Trump!" "mind."

Tak.

Regarding "The Monster Plot" (John L. Hart's derogatory term for true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn's warning of the KGB's 1959-on Sun Tzu-based "Master Plan" to get us to defeat ourselves by waging disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based (can you say "Bruce Solie" and "Leonard V. McCoy"?) strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies (Hmm ... can you say "Donald J. Trump"?), Bagley ripped Hart "a new one" during his 172-page HSCA testimony in 1978.

Have you read it, yet, Fancy Pants?

Here’s how to find it if you haven’t:

Google “Mary Ferrell Foundation,” click on “Documents” in the upper right-hand corner, choose “House Select Committe on Assassinations (HSCA)” on the left side, type in the name “Bagley” in the search box in the upper right-hand corner, click on it, and then click on the top document in the “hit list — it’s Bagley’s 172-page 11/16/78 HSCA testimony. (The first three searches for non-members are free.)

Enjoy!

— Tom

PS Although I think Newman’s a kook for believing that some high-level military officers killed JFK because he was refusing to nuke Moscow and Peking during the “closing window of opportunity” year of 1963, there’s no particular shame in his having to self-publish his book.

After all, Wikipedia, which published my article on Tennent H. Bagley (have you read it yet?), refused to publish my article on Bruce Leonard Solie because . . . gasp . . . “not enough established authors have written about him.”

LOL!

You can still read a version of it for free on the Internet, though.

Just google “Bruce Leonard Solie.”

PPS Bagley published his Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, in 2007, and he published his 35-page follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," one day before he died of cancer in February 2014.

PPPS Although I've already told you many times that you can read Bagley's book, Spy Wars, and his article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," for free by googling "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously and "ghosts of the spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously, it's obvious that you haven't done so. I'm guessing that it's because you think it wouldn't be a "hoot." Am I  correct?

[Michael T. Griffith]

Excuse me for saying so, but anyone who does not believe we won the Cold War deserves to have their grasp of reality questioned. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The Soviet Union lost all of its satellite nations in Europe, and lost 23% of its own territory. Two of the Soviet Union's largest republics, Ukraine and Georgia, became independent nations. The USSR's four largest satellite nations--Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria--joined NATO.

Anyone who thinks this does not qualify as winning the Cold War--indeed, resoundingly winning the Cold War--has a serious credibility problem, to put it gently.

[Tom Graves]

Excuse me for saying so, but anyone who does not believe we won the Cold War deserves to have their grasp of reality questioned. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The Soviet Union lost all of its satellite nations in Europe, and lost 23% of its own territory. Two of the Soviet Union's largest republics, Ukraine and Georgia, became independent nations. The USSR's four largest satellite nations--Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria--joined NATO.

Anyone who thinks this does not qualify as winning the Cold War--indeed, resoundingly winning the Cold War--has a serious credibility problem, to put it gently.

If that were the case, why, then, do we have a president who is either a "useful idiot" or an actual Russian agent?