Why they didn't let a KGB defector testify to the W.C.

[Tom Graves]

Although the CIA still denies it, we know from Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, that KGB Major ... uh ... Lt. Col. ... uh ... Captain Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place when he walked in to the CIA (Bagley and probable mole -- imho -- George Kisevalter) in Geneva in June 1962 and offered to tell the Agency some secrets in exchange for $250 worth of desperately needed Swiss francs. In his book, Bagley shows that Nosenko was sent to Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling CIA's Counterintelligence Chief, James Angleton, about possible penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies (which intel, author John M. Newman believes, Angleton shared with his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Solie, and Solie shared with KGB moles in French intelligence and a travelling high-level KGB officer during two short visits to Paris between mid-May and mid-June 1962).

(One of the strongest clues that Nosenko was fake was his asking Bagley and Kisevalter during one of the five June 1962 "safe house" meetings about an ostensible Indonesian military attaché by the name of "Zepp." It turned out years later that he was referring to "Zeph" -- short for Stephanie -- a London bargirl with whom CIA's and MI6's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky, had fallen in love and whose name was spoken -- and picked up by a state-of-the-art "bug" -- in a Moscow restaurant conversation between Penkovsky and his MI6 contact, Greville Wynne, within two weeks of his April 1961 recruitment.)

When Nosenko showed up again in Geneva in late January, 1964, he told Bagley and Kisevalter that he had been Oswald's case officer in Moscow, and that he therefore knew for a fact that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine U-2 radar operator during the two-and-one-half-years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

In April of 1964, within two months of his defection -- and about the time that Richard Helms, realizing that Nosenko was a false defector, convinced Earl Warren to not let Nosenko testify to the Warren Commission -- Solie tried to convince Commission attorney W. David Slawson to let him testify. Solie did this by telling Slawson that the reason Nosenko had contradicted himself so many times during his debriefings with the CIA and the FBI was due to stress, alcohol, and language difficulties.

Although the letter Solie sent to Slawson on the issue went missing a long time ago (it's interesting that some of Solie's Office of Security files on Oswald were withheld from the Church Committee and the HSCA), Slawson wrote some marginalia about it in an unrelated memo which JFKA researcher Malcolm Blunt found at the National Archives.

When JFKA conspiracy theorist Blunt showed the memo to Lonenutter Bagley (they became friends in 2008) around 2012, Bagley said "let's put Solie on the list" (of suspected moles in the Agency).

FWIW, Solie "cleared" Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam -- which polygraph expert Richard O. Arther told the HSCA was one of the worst one he'd ever seen -- and a specious report which Bagley rips apart in his book.

You can read Tennent H. Bagley's book for free by googling "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously (and you might even want to read my Wikipedia article about him while you're at it).

PS "Pete" was on the fast track to become Director of CIA before Nosenko reappeared in Geneva in late January 1964 -- two months after the JFK assassination.

[Benjamin Cole]

Interesting.

LHO as a KGB or G-2 asset has been under-explored.

Or even a de facto KGB asset, if LHO believed Solie was a true-blue CIA'er.