The Warren Commission vs. the House Select Committee on Assassinations

[Benjamin Cole]

https://thomasgraves.substack.com/p/was-cia-officer-bruce-leonard-solie

Well, this was interesting. And well-written.

Is it The Truth?

I am not in a position to say. I suspect so.

As I have posted a few times, Marchetti was not sure who in CIA was compromised or a KGB asset, and who was not, but he indicated the CIA seemed riddled with Moscow minions.

[Tom Graves]

https://thomasgraves.substack.com/p/was-cia-officer-bruce-leonard-solie

Well, this was interesting. And well-written.

Is it The Truth?

I am not in a position to say. I suspect so.

As I have posted a few times, Marchetti was not sure who in CIA was compromised or a KGB asset, and who was not, but he indicated the CIA seemed riddled with Moscow minions.

Here's the article I wrote about Solie which Wikipedia refused to publish because "not enough established authors have written about him."

LOL!

What, if anything, do you suspect might not be true?

BRUCE LEONARD SOLIE was a commendation-garnering, career-long officer in the CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security who was best known for his exoneration of controversial KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, his uncovering of Igor Orlov / Alexander Kopatzky as Anatoliy Golitsyn's mole "Sasha," and his involvement in the tragic (?) Nicholas Shadrin spy case.

Solie, as the CIA’s chief mole hunter in the Office of Security, was Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's mole-hunting superior. He was also, like British traitor Kim Philby, Angleton’s highly trusted confidant and mentor. Solie was described by former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley as being "dour, plodding, risk-averse, and ultra-cautious ... a country boy made good," and by espionage writer David Wise as "given to long pauses between sentences." Former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and NSA officer John M. Newman believes Solie sent (or duped Angleton into sending) President John F. Kennedy's future accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for “Popov’s U-2 Mole” / “Popov’s Mole” (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA, i.e., the Soviet Russia Division. The hunt for the mole lasted nine years, tore the SRD apart, and drove Angleton nuts. Bagley, who was Nosenko's primary case officer for five years, wrote scathingly about Solie in his book, “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games,” and near the end of his life came to suspect he was a KGB "mole." He suggested that Solie be "put on the list" of mole suspects because he had inexplicably provided "rock-like protection" for Nosenko over the years, he had lobbied a Warren Commission lawyer to allow Yuri Nosenko to testify to the Warren Commission before the issue of his bona fides had been settled, and because Solie's sister-in-law had allegedly married the ostensible KGB defector (we now know that Nosenko married a different woman and that Solie was his best man). Author John M. Newman and his British colleague, National Archives denizen Malcolm Blunt (who befriended Bagley in 2008 and showed him CIA documents that he hadn’t been privy to in 1959 - 60), contend that Solie was probably a KGB agent at the heart of the CIA.

Solie’s Supporters

At the time of the revising of this article (April 2025), I’m not aware of any historian, espionage writer, or former or current intelligence officer who has attempted to rebut Blunt's or Newman's evidence, or Bagley's (late-in-life) suspicion that Solie was a KGB "mole." Lots of so-called experts in the past have, however, sided with Solie in his assessment that Nosenko was a true defector, that Igor Kochnov was a really spying for the U.S., that "Popov's Mole" was ensconced in the Soviet Russia Division, and that Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) was really spying for the FBI for fifteen years (1962 to 1977) and Dmitry Polyakov for one (1962). Among these “experts” are former CIA officers like Leonard V. McCoy, John L. Hart, George Kisevalter, Cleveland Cram, Richards J. Heuer, and espionage writers like Tom Mangold, David Wise, and Jefferson Morley.

Background

Solie was born to a dairy farmer and his wife in Wisconsin on November 12th, 1917, and he died on December 23rd, 1992. He became a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, and met his future wife (Mary Elizabeth Matthews) during WW II at Rosecrans Field (known today as Rosecrans Air National Guard Base) in St. Joseph, Missouri. They were married on February 22, 1944, and lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and Homestead, Florida, until Solie was stationed overseas as a bomber pilot. They eventually had a son and two daughters. At the conclusion of WW II, they moved to "Badger Village," a housing facility devised to handle the influx of WWII veterans attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from which school he earned degrees in economics and law. In 1951 they relocated to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he began a career with the CIA which lasted until his retirement in 1979.

Indications that Solie May Have Been a KGB “Mole”

Travel Records

Researcher Newman found some of Solie's travel records which had been posted on a genealogical website in 2010. Since he was told by his publisher that they were too faint to be published, they weren't included in his 2022 book, "Uncovering Popov's Mole," and were put his on his website, instead. (Go to https://jmnjmu.com/ and click on “Uncovering Popov’s Mole — Supplement”) They indicate that Solie, not known to have been on official business at the time, flew to Beirut, Lebanon, in February of 1957 — six months after Kim Philby had moved there — and visited Paris twice within one month in 1962 -- the first time just before Nosenko walked into the CIA in Geneva, and the second time on the last day that Nosenko met with Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva. Newman believes Solie visited Philby to learn from him how to control Angleton, and that his short and close-together visits to Paris were to meet with some high-level KGB “moles” in French Intelligence and a shadowing high-level KGB officer from Moscow by the name of Mikhail Tysmbal so that they could convey to Nosenko's case officer in Moscow, General Oleg Gribanov, what recent true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling Angleton (and Angleton was naively confiding to Solie) about possible KGB penetrations of U.S and other NATO countries' intelligence services. Newman believes Solie's second visit to Paris was to inform those "moles" and Tsymbal what he had learned about Bagley's and Kisevalter's interactions with Nosenko in Geneva.[1]

The Popov's Mole / Lee Harvey Oswald Defection Cases

According to former high-level CIA officer William Hood in his book “Mole: The True Story of the First Russian Intelligence Officer Recruited by the CIA,” in April of 1958, GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov told his CIA handler, George Kisevalter (whom Hood called “Gregory Domnin” in his book), in West Berlin that he had recently heard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin knew all of the technical specifications of the CIA's U-2 spy plane. According to Newman, Solie and his mole-hunting subordinate, CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, decided to initiate a top-secret search for the leaker of the intel, and sent former Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald (who had served at a U-2 base in Japan) to Moscow in late 1959 as a "dangle" in a search for the mole whom Solie said had to be in the Soviet Russia Division.

Newman determined that all of the incoming non-CIA cables (e.g., from State and Navy) about Oswald's 31 October defection had been arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to be routed to the Security Research Staff (where Solie, as Deputy Chief, was effectively Chief due to Paul Gaynor’s being preoccupied with projects ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD) in the Office of Security rather than where they would have normally gone, the Soviet Russia Division. This led Newman to conclude that Solie must have known ahead of time that Oswald was going to defect to the USSR, which in turn led him to conclude that Solie was a KGB "mole" and that he had sent Oswald to Moscow on a planned-to-fail mole hunt. Newman points out that all of those cables disappeared into a “black hole” in the Office of Security, and that they didn’t resurface for at least six weeks (and that some of them didn’t reappear until after the assassination of JFK).

Solie Apparently Hid Information on Oswald's Defection From the FBI

Although the CIA had received a cable about Oswald's defection from the Department of the Navy on 4 November 1959, when he was asked on that date by the FBI's liaison to the CIA, Sam Papich, if the Agency knew anything about Oswald, Solie wrote to Angleton's Counterintelligence liaison, "Mr. Papich was advised that we had no info on subject."

The "Sasha" Case

KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in Helsinki, Finland. Four days after he arrived in the U.S. he told Solie that, based on what he had surreptitiously read in a KGB file in Moscow ten years earlier, there was a "mole" in the CIA whose codename was "Sasha" (the Slavic nickname for "Alexander"), that “Sasha” had served in U.S. Intelligence in West Germany, that his name started with a "K" and ended in "-ski" or "-sky," and that he had leaked information about the development of a top-secret CIA listening device.[2] Solie showed Golitsyn a list of CIA personnel who had been stationed in Germany, whose names started with a "K" and ended with the suffix "-ski" or "-sky." The list evidently didn't include the name Alexander Kopatzky, one of the many earlier names of Igor Orlov -- a Russia-born CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in West Germany after WW II and whose agents were often uncovered by the KGB in the USSR -- so Golitsyn chose the name "Peter Klibanski" (the original name of Peter Karlow) from the list, instead.[3] Karlow, who was already under suspicion of being a "mole" because he had directed the leak-plagued top-secret "Easy Chair" electronic-listening project and had managed several agents who had been caught by the KGB, was summarily fired from the CIA. Karlow was later cleared of suspicion of being "Sasha" and financially compensated for his troubles. The aforementioned Igor Orlov / Alexander "Sasha" Kopatzky, who had been forced to retire from the CIA in 1961 after he’d caused an automobile accident in Germany and he and his wife had moved to the U.S., was belatedly determined by Solie to have been Golitsyn's "Sasha.” This identification was confirmed by controversial KGB defector Igor Kochnov in 1966, who in-so doing enhanced both his and Solie's reputations with the CIA and the FBI.

The Yuri Nosenko Case

In late May or early June (accounts vary) of 1962, putative KGB officer Yuri Nosenko "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland and offered to exchange some KGB intelligence for $250 of "desperately needed" funds. Tennent H. Bagley flew in from Bern and met with Nosenko one-on-one in a CIA "safe house," and they were joined two days later by Russia-born agent-handler George Kisevalter. There were five meetings altogether, and during the final one on 15 June, Solie showed up unannounced, hoping to show Nosenko a list of suspected "moles" in the CIA. Kisevalter and Bagley, who had already become Nosenko's primary case officer, didn't allow Solie to meet face-to-face with Nosenko, but they did let him sit in the next room and pass questions to him. Bagley wrote in his book that Nosenko "drew a blank" on all of the names and codenames that were presented to him, and that he later learned that they were leads which recent KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had given to the CIA.[4] Solie flew to Paris for the second time in six months that same day, and Nosenko, who was ostensibly serving as the security officer for a Soviet arms negotiation delegation, flew back to Moscow with the delegation the next day.[5]

Nosenko recontacted Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in late January 1964, two months after the assassination of JFK. Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he wanted to physically defect to the U.S., now, and leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves, because he suspected that the KGB was aware of his treason. Nosenko then claimed that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in the USSR, and that he therefore knew for a fact that the KGB hadn't even interviewed the "abnormal" former Marine radar operator during the two-and-one-half-years he lived there. When he told Bagley and Kisevalter a few days later that he had just received a recall telegram from Moscow, CIA headquarters gave Bagley and Kisevalter permission to take him to Frankfurt, West Germany so that he could be processed for possible entry into the U.S. Once Nosenko was actually in the U.S., he refused to cooperate fully with his Agency debriefers.[6] After being taken by Bagley to Hawaii on a two-week vacation, Nosenko was detained in April in a Maryland "safe house" by the CIA and subjected to a polygraph exam and hostile interrogations.[7]

That same month, April 1964, Solie tried to convince Warren Commission lawyer W. David Slawson that Nosenko should be permitted to testify to the Commission and that the reason he had given contradictory and constantly changing information to Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva and to other debriefers in the US was because he had been drunk at his meetings in Geneva, because there had been a severe language problem between himself and Bagley (who met one-on-one only during the first meeting), and because he was under intense stress now in America. British researcher Malcolm Blunt, who befriended Bagley in 2008, says he was astounded when Blunt showed him some documents which suggested Solie had tried to convince Slawson that Nosenko was a true defector so soon after his physical defection to the US.

For security reasons, Nosenko was moved from the residential-area "safe house" to a more austere, bunker-like building that was built especially for him at Camp Peary, and he was subjected to two more years of hostile (but not tortuous, according to Bagley) interrogations and, in 1966, another polygraph exam.

In 1967, Solie was given the task of conducting a new, independent investigation to determine whether or not still-incarcerated Nosenko was a true defector. To do this, he moved Nosenko into a more comfortable "safe house," and proceeded to elicit explanations from him that could make his previous contradictory statements more plausible. A year later, after administering a final polygraph exam to Nosenko (which polygraph expert Robert O. Arther later read at CIA headquarters and said was unreliable[8]) Solie, contradicting the negative assessment of Nosenko by the Soviet Russia Division's 450-page condensation of Bagley's 840-page report, concluded in his own report that Nosenko was a true defector. This conclusion was quickly accepted by CIA leadership, and Nosenko was released, "cleared," financially compensated, resettled under a new name, and hired by the CIA to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.[9]

The Igor Kochnov / Shadrin Affair

In June of 1966, shortly before he assumed the position of Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms received a phone call at home from Washington-based KGB officer Igor Kochnov. Kochnov told Helms he was willing to spy for the CIA on the condition that the Agency would help boost his status in Moscow by pretending to turn over to him Nicholas Shadrin (original name Artamonov), a former Soviet destroyer captain who had defected to the U.S. several years earlier. Helms and Angleton, believing Kochnov to be a "plant" and still fearing that the Soviet Russia Division was penetrated by a KGB "mole," decided to "play" Kochnov back against the Soviets, and turned him over, for handling, to Solie from the Office of Security and FBI agent Albert "Bert" Turner. Before Kochnov returned to Moscow a few months later, never to return to the U.S., he turned Shadrin over to another KGB officer at the Soviet embassy. Out of fear that he would be kidnapped or killed by the KGB, Angleton warned Shadrin's handlers to not let him leave the country, but they soon allowed him to travel to Canada in an espionage intrigue, and in 1975 permitted him (and his wife) to travel to Vienna, Austria, so that he could meet with Kochnov. Due to his handlers failure to provide counter-surveillance for the meeting, Shadrin was kidnapped by the KGB and he died, according to Oleg Kalugin, when he was he was given too much of a "knock out" drug. According to Henry Hurt's 1980 book, "Shadrin: The Spy Who Didn't Come Back, Solie, dour and non-apologetic, accompanied Mrs. Shadrin back to the U.S.

The Clay Shaw Trial

In a September 2021 YouTube video in which researcher Malcolm Blunt is interviewed about Yuri Nosenko, Blunt says Solie was omnipresent in the JFK assassination investigation, and that he was "all over" Clay Shaw for New Orlean's District Attorney Jim Garrison. [10]

OH, AND ONE OTHER THING

Solie hid some Office of Security documents on the JFK assassination from the Church Committee and the HSCA. See Malcolm Blunt’s 10/9/21 YouTube interview on Yuri Nosenko. (Google “malcolm blunt” and “nosenko” simultaneously.)

Amazingly, Solie described his technique in a 1978 memo you can read by googling "david l christ" and "bruce l solie" simultaneously and scrolling down to page 2.