Let me guess: Your enthusiasm for [the] Rozelle/Searce [first, missing-everything shot at pseudo Z-124] has something to do with Bagley, Solie and the KGB - yes? Did old Bagley slap his forehead and screech "It had to be an early shot!" to Blunt, spewing oatmeal all over the latter's yellow note pad?
Dear Lance "Voice of Reason and Heartwarming Anecdotes" Payette,
I just now looked up "Oswald" in the index of Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book,
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, to try to find out if Pete (whom I know was a "Lonenutter") subscribed to the idea that the self-described Marxist and former Marine sharpshooter / U-2 radar operator had a habit of keeping a spent shell in the chamber of his military surplus Carcano for dry-firing and corrosion prevention purposes, but all I found was this:
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 78-79, 283-84; as motive for CIA's "kidnapping” Nosenko in KGB fantasy [similar to the KGB's later fantasy that the CIA had kidnapped KGB Colonel Vitaliy Yurchenko in Rome in 1985], 216-17; Nechiporenko writes about, 211; Nosenko on, 83-86, 95-96, 177-78, 185-86, 189, 206, 249, 259-60, 264, 299n6
Homing in on pages 78-79 and 283-84, this is what I found (my comments are in brackets):
Pages 78-79:
My colleague Sid and I were returning from lunch at a restaurant in nearby McLean, Virginia. Like every American of a certain age I remember where I was at that moment. The date, to be graven in history, was 22 November 1963. 1 had one foot in an elevator in the CIA building in Langley. “Isn’t it terrible?” said Jerry, as he stepped out of the elevator. "Probably not as bad as all that, Jerry,” Sid said flippantly. Jerry stopped. "No, listen. Haven’t you heard?” he said, "The President has been shot in Dallas!” We rushed to our offices on the fifth floor where radios were on. Sickened, we talked in subdued voices, stirring each other’s hope for that brief moment before the sad, final news was flashed. Soon the radio announced that the assassin had been captured and, not long after that, identified him. A later news bulletin galvanized us: Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and had returned to the United States only a year and a half ago. The Counterintelligence Staff, with its established liaison with the FBI and other government agencies, was quickly designated as the Agency’s coordinating point for all Clandestine Services efforts to collect information on Oswald and his connections. Among the traces that James Angleton’s shop first uncovered was a recent report from Mexico City on Oswald’s contact with the Soviet Embassy when he applied for a visa to return to the USSR. The “consular officials” he met were both KGB officers. By itself this was no surprise, because the KGB occupied almost all consular slots throughout the world. But one of those whom Oswald met was Valery V. Kostikov, whom we knew [sic; "believed" would be a better word here*] to have been a member of the First Chief Directorate’s 13th Department, the one responsible for sabotage and “liquid affairs” abroad— murder. The Counterintelligence Staff handled the microscopic search of Agency files, but everyone stretched to make any possible contribution. It was Lee Wigren, our Counterintelligence section research chief, who made the sections first contribution. On his own initiative he leafed through the Agency’s photographic files on the remote chance that some detail of Minsk, where Oswald had lived, might assist in visualizing his environment in the Soviet Union. Photo in hand, Lee burst into my office. “Look at this,” he exclaimed. “I asked for pictures of landmarks and public buildings in Minsk and got this one of the opera house.” An American tourist had taken photos in August 1961 during a trip to the USSR and thinking they might be of some interest, he had turned them over to a CIA representative he knew. In due course, the snapshots were filed. Among them was the one in Lee’s hand, of the opera house in Minsk. "So, what do you think?” I thought as Lee did. Standing there, undeniably, was Lee Harvey Oswald himself. This useful confirmation of Oswald’s presence there was passed on to the investigators and later appeared in the Warren Commission Report on the assassination. 11 The circumstances— Oswald’s defection to the USSR, his return to the United States with a Soviet wife, his contact with Kostikov only two months before the assassination — opened the question of whether the Soviet government had had a hand in the assassination. It seemed entirely unlikely but could not be disregarded. Incredibly, it was only a few weeks later that I would be listening to a denial of any Soviet involvement in the assassination, delivered with rare authority by my [putative] agent at work in the USSR [KGB Major I mean Lt. Col. I mean Captain Yuri Nosenko].
. . . . . . . .
Pages 283-84 [in the Appendix section]:
Oswald, Lee Harvey: Assassin of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Because he had defected to USSR in 1959 after service in the U.S. marines, then changed his mind and returned to the United States in 1962 with a Soviet wife, the question was raised as to whether the Soviets had a hand in the assassination itself. Within weeks, Yuri Nosenko* brought authoritative evidence that the Soviet government had had no interest in, or operational contact with, Oswald.
. . . . . . . .
*Note: The only reason Bagley thought Kostikov was Department 13 on 11/22/63 was because a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office by the name of KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from CIA FEDORA) had told the Bureau in 1962 that Kostikov's charge (pardon the pun) at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was Department 13.
Sorry, but Bagley says nothing about the Single Bullet Hypothesis, or the possibility that JFK's upper torso went back-and-to-the-left (after going forward and downward 2.25 inches between Z-312 and Z-313) was because the right side of his brain had been destroyed, [etc.], etc., etc.
I guess he had more important things to worry about.
Bummer, huh?
