Bagley's step-by-step rebuttal of Steve M. Galbraith's hero, Oleg Kalugin

[Tom Graves]

Dear Steve M.,

I'll be going through the index of Kalugin's 2009 book in alphabetical order and comparing what Kalugin wrote about certain people with what Bagley wrote about him or her in his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, and in his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars."

I suspect that Bagley wrote lots about certain KGB-loyal double and triple-agents whom Oleg "Yuri Nosenko Was A True Defector!" Kalugin didn't even mention in his book because, well, "they were just too hot to handle," but we'll see.

I'll begin with a two-for-one combo: Nikolay Artamonov and Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov). The following is what Kalugin wrote about them. I'm sorry that it's so long, Steve M., but the Russians seem to believe that if they embellish a lie enough, we gullible Americans will believe it. After all, their Kremlin-loyal double / triple agents and false defectors all tend to support each other's "legend," so it gets very complicated -- and longwinded! -- indeed.

Pages 104-07:

Under Solomatin, our station also stepped-up efforts to locate Soviet defectors from the postwar era. In some cases, such as that of Yuri Nosenko, our assignment was to carry out the death sentences handed down by Soviet courts. These assassination efforts were known as “wet jobs,” and in my time in Washington our superiors in Moscow were extremely reluctant to order such killings. I’m certain that had we found Nosenko we would have received permission to kill him, but it was a moot point. We never located him. We did, however, manage to find other defectors. Our goal was to re-recruit them or lure them back to the Soviet Union to score a propaganda coup against the United States. One of these cases was initiated by Nikolai Popov, who came to Washington around 1967 as the new chief of counterintelligence. He worked closely with Solomatin and me to locate Soviet defectors on American soil. Perhaps the most intriguing story was that of Nikolai Fyodorovich Artamonov. The effort to bring Artamonov back to Russia was a convoluted affair involving double and triple dealing. Before it was over, Artamonov’s case would also be the only time, in all my years with the KGB, when I was present at the death of a spy with whom I had become involved. Nikolai Artamonov was a tall, handsome seaman who had served with a Soviet naval squadron in the Polish port of Gdansk in the 1950s. He was extremely bright and regarded by his superiors as one of the finest young officers in the Soviet Baltic fleet. While only in his early thirties, he was given command of a torpedo-equipped destroyer. He was being considered for transfer to the Naval Forces Staff, where he would have been promoted to admiral in due time. Artamonov, however, fell in love with a Polish woman, and in June 1959 he commandeered a launch and defected with his lover to Sweden. He left behind a wife and young son. In Sweden — and later in America — Artamonov told the CIA everything he knew about the Soviet navy and its Baltic operations. The damage he caused was considerable, though not catastrophic. A Soviet court sentenced him to death in absentia, and KGB stations around the world were alerted to keep an eye out for Artamonov. Through various intelligence channels, the KGB received word that Artamonov had moved to America and was working as an analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence. By the time I arrived in Washington in 1965, the hunt for Artamonov had dragged on six years. When the new counterintelligence chief, Popov, arrived, were doubled our efforts to locate Artamonov. We put out feelers to members of the émigré community in Washington, but to no avail. Then, around 1967, one of our sources in the academic community informed us that a former Soviet naval officer was giving a series of lectures at Georgetown University on Soviet military policy. We sent an agent to one of the lectures with a picture of Artamonov and, to our surprise and great satisfaction, the lecturer turned out to be none other than the dashing defector himself. He was lecturing under the name of Nicholas Shadrin. We found his address and began discreetly tailing him. Soon we had a good idea of his schedule and habits. Simultaneously, in Leningrad, the KGB met with his wife and son. They were persuaded to write heart-tugging letters to Artamonov, pleading with him to return home. The boy was just about to enter college, and the KGB told him to write that his father’s treachery had ruined his life. I do not have a copy of the son’s letter, but it went something like this: “Father, I want to become a navy officer like you, but because of what you’ve done my dream will probably never come true. Father, we love you dearly! You still have a chance to repent and serve your country and do your duty by your family. Please come home!” Moscow sent a special agent working under diplomatic cover to Washington to make the initial contact. We had long ago decided it would be best not to assassinate Artamonov, but rather to persuade him to work for us and then return to the Motherland to expose his appalling treatment at the hands of the CIA and the decadence of life in the West. We knew that approaching him would be highly risky, since he had already been working for years for the CIA. We decided to make contact with Artamonov in a public place where there would be no risk of a bug and chose a suburban supermarket. Armed with two letters, one from Artamonov’s spurned wife and one from his son, the Moscow KGB man walked up to the defector in a grocery store aisle and said in Russian, “Hello, sir. We’ve been looking for you. I think we need to have an important chat.” Artamonov was visibly shaken. But he pulled himself together, and he and the Moscow KGB officer went to a nearby restaurant and began to talk. The officer handed Artamonov the two letters, which he read with a stricken look on his face. In a matter of minutes, Artamonov agreed to turn against the CIA and begin working with us. The Artamonov case was marked from the start by Byzantine duplicity. I only recently learned that the KGB officer from Moscow who approached Artamonov was already in contact with the CIA. He was Igor Kochnov, a KGB colonel, who got in touch with the CIA in Washington and volunteered his services. He undoubtedly alerted the Americans from the start about our approach to Artamonov. Later, when I was head of foreign counterintelligence in the 1970s, we strongly suspected Kochnov of being a CIA agent and put him under surveillance. But we were never able to prove it. Kochnov, the son-in-law of the USSR’s minister of culture [Yekaterina Furtseva], died of a heart attack at a relatively young age before his treason was revealed in a recent American book. Interestingly, despite the fact that Kochnov supplied the Americans with valuable information, the CIA’s notoriously paranoid head of counterintelligence, James JESUS Angleton, never believed that Kochnov and several other defectors were for real. At the time, we thought we had a major accomplishment on our hands in the re-recruitment of Artamonov, whose code name became Lark. On the day he was first approached by our Moscow officer, Artamonov wrote an impassioned letter promising to do “everything” to pay for the crime he had committed against the Soviet Union and towork wholeheartedly for the KGB. The letter was moving, and, though we in Washington and our superiors in Moscow were skeptical of Artamonov, we were impressed by his repentance. We waited to see what he would deliver. Artamonov had been promised a pardon and restoration of his military rank if he honestly cooperated with us. In addition, his son was to be admitted to a Soviet naval academy. That in fact happened, and Artamonov and his family were pleased. The KGB assured the son that his father was not a traitor but rather a hero who had been playing a double game all these years. The KGB also began giving Artamonov’s wife and son a monthly allowance. At first we had no reason to suspect that Lark was deceiving us and had become a double (or was it a triple?) agent. Our plan, which he carried out, was to keep him working as a consultant for the Office of Naval Intelligence, using his position to supply us with classified material. He came through, handing us a variety of classified documents. He furnished us, for example, with U.S. assessments of Soviet naval capabilities, including analyses of our latest missile tests in the Black and North Seas. We pushed him to pinpoint the source of the information on our missile testing; by getting more specific, Artamonov might have been able to help the KGB determine whether there was, for example, an American spy on the missile-testing range itself. But Artamonov was never able to give us more detailed information. His data and reports were of good, but not blockbuster, quality. In hind
sight, this should have aroused my suspicions. In the Washington station and at KGB headquarters we were excited about Artamonov’s cooperation for another reason: he said he knew the defector Yuri Nosenko and had a general idea of where Nosenko lived in the United States. The KGB had been searching for Nosenko for years; perhaps in our zeal to get our hands on Nosenko, we were too trusting of Artamonov. I continued to help oversee and analyze Artamonov’s work while I remained in the American capital. It wasn’t until several years later, when I was back in Moscow in foreign counterintelligence, that I became convinced Lark had once again turned against the Soviet Union. I would set in motion an elaborate ruse to lure this double dealer back to his homeland — a plot that would come to a bad end along the Austrian-Czech border on a cold, moonless night in 1975. But that was yet to come. The story played a dramatic role in my subsequent life and I will return to it later.

Pages 171-79

In addition to continued attempts to recruit current and former Western intelligence officers, I had in my arsenal many other weapons, including the increased use of Soviet double agents. Among them was a man whose case I had come to know in Washington, the spy with the code name “Lark.” Soon the Lark affair would blow up into a major international incident. Lark was Nikolai Fyodorovich Artamonov, the Soviet naval officer who had commandeered a torpedo boat in 1959 and fled with his Polish girlfriend to Sweden. He ultimately defected to the United States, where my officers, after a long search, found him lecturing at Georgetown University. Using the name Shadrin, he was working as an analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and we decided to attempt to re-recruit him as a double agent. After we promised to grant him a full pardon, help his Russian family financially, and arrange the admission of his son into a Soviet naval academy, Lark agreed to work for us secretly while pretending to continue working for the Americans. When I left Washington in 1970, Artamonov had been supplying us with some useful information about U.S. military operations. After taking the helm of foreign counterintelligence in 1973, I decided to press Artamonov for more valuable information; there was a nagging feeling at headquarters that he was not living up to his potential. Sakharovsky, the head of intelligence, had been skeptical of Lark from the moment we tried to re-recruit him. When I first returned to Moscow in 1970, a colleague informed me that Sakharovsky was suspicious of the meager quantities of material coming from Artamonov and feared he was still working for the CIA. I, however, never doubted Artamonov’s sincerity and was convinced he was on our side once again. But when, as head of Directorate K, I sat down and painstakingly went over Artamonov’s file, I also began to experience doubts. There was something strange about his case. Lark had supposedly been working for us in Washington since 1967. Although much of the material he had furnished the KGB was marked secret, it shed little light on U.S. military and intelligence operations. He had made numerous promises to us, such as turning up the whereabouts of the defector Yuri Nosenko, but all Artamonov ever told us about Nosenko was that he was probably living near Washington, D.C. Artamonov wasn’t pulling his weight, and I instructed our people in Washington to tell him to pass us some rudimentary documents that would show whether he was genuinely working for our side. One document I asked for was the classified internal telephone directory of the Office of Naval Intelligence, something Artamonov should have had no trouble procuring. At their next meeting in Washington, Artamonov’s KGB handler asked him to provide us with a copy of the phone directory. He danced around the request, saying he could get his hands on the phonebook but that copying it was out of the question; too many people used it, he said, and he would be unable to take it away unnoticed. Our officer said we would give him a special miniature camera for the job, but Artamonov retorted that he would never be able to smuggle a camera into his office. Then our officer replied that we were going to supply him with a Minox camera disguised as a pack of cigarettes. All Artamonov needed to do was run the end of the cigarette pack over the phone book, thus automatically photographing the pages. Artamonov finally agreed, and several weeks later his handler gave him the camera. When Artamonov handed back the Minox, we developed the film and found that it was dark and unreadable. Artamonov swore that he had worked the camera correctly and that it had malfunctioned, so we gave him another “cigarette pack” and sent him back to the Office of Naval Intelligence. For the second time, none of his film turned out. Our specialists tested the camera and found it working perfectly. Sitting in Moscow, I became increasingly convinced that Artamonov had once again double-crossed his country. “There’s one way to find out if he’s genuine,” I told one of my assistants. “Let’s invite him to Canada.” We had a high-ranking mole inside the counterintelligence section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and there was a good chance that if we could get Artamonov to Canada, we could find out who he really was working for. I knew by then which buttons to push at the CIA and the FBI, so we devised a pretext for Artamonov’s travel north of the border that we thought the Americans would find impossible to resist. Artamonov’s KGB handler in Washington told him that we wanted him to travel to Canada to meet the KGB man in charge of illegal operations in North America. FBI counterintelligence salivated whenever it got the chance to learn anything about illegals—deep cover KGB agents posing as American citizens. Artamonov quickly agreed to go to Canada, where he met one of my assistants from Moscow who had flown in posing as our handler for illegals. Several weeks later, our fears were confirmed. Our mole in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided us with a report clearly stating that a Soviet working for the FBI recently had come to Montreal to meet with a KGB agent. The RCMP also said that the FBI’s Soviet agent had recorded some of his conversations with the KGB man. Now it was clear: Lark had fooled us for six years and was still working for the Americans. The next question was, What to do with him? His death sentence, which had been annulled after he began working for us, was reinstated. But I had other ideas about how to handle Artamonov. The tricky part was getting our hands on him. We knew that U.S. intelligence customarily allowed defectors to meet with Soviets only in America and Canada. But our plan involved luring Artamonov to Austria, where we could abduct him, drive him into Czechoslovakia, and whisk him off to Moscow. Once again we needed some bait, and once again we devised a scheme that we figured the Americans would find irresistible. We spent months working on the plan and waiting for the right moment. Finally, in 1975, Artamonov’s KGB handler met him and said he wanted him to travel to Austria, where he would learn how to operate a secret radio that would enable him to contact his new handler in the United States. To make our trap even more inviting, we told Artamonov that his new handler would be an illegal living undercover in America. And, to top it off, we promised Artamonov that he would have the chance to meet this illegal in Vienna so that the two could become acquainted and work out the best way to contact each other in the United States. As further justification, we told Artamonov that there was growing surveillance of our operations in North America and that it would be far safer to meet in Vienna. U.S. intelligence officials, desperate for information about our network of illegals, gobbled up the bait and gave Artamonov permission to travel to Vienna. In December 1975, Artamonov, accompanied by his wife, arrived in Austria, ostensibly on a ski holiday. Two U.S. officials were assigned to keep an eye on him. Meanwhile, I was on my way to the Austrian Czech border. For two days, our officers in Vienna met with Artamonov and taught him how to use a secret radio transmitter. They also began talking with him in vague terms about illegal operations in the United States. We promised Artamonov a meeting on the third day with the illegal who would be his new U.S. contact. For some reason, be it laziness or the fact that the Americans had been lulled into thinking all was well, Artamonov’s U.S. handlers had stopped following him. Our people didn’t spot any tails, and our informers in the Austrian police also told us that the Americans—probably from the CIA—were rarely venturing out of their hotel. They trusted Shadrin, and apparently they were satisfied that we trusted him too and wouldn’t attempt to abduct him. So, on the evening of the third day, several KGB officers picked up Lark on a Vienna street. Among the officers was a tough, hulking man who went on to become security officer at the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Several minutes after Artamonov sat down, the husky KGB man slapped a chloroform-soaked cloth over the agent’s face. Lark, who weighed about 220 pounds, began struggling in the backseat. Our man then pulled out a syringe filled with a powerful sedative and jabbed in the needle. Artamonov lost consciousness after the Vienna KGB team, concerned about his size, administered twice the normal dose needed to knock out a man. The KGB car sped out of Vienna, heading for the Czechoslovakian border. Several colleagues from Moscow and I had been at the border for two days, scouting out locations where our officers from Vienna could cross with Artamonov. We told the head of the Czech border police that we were meeting on the frontier with an illegal, and the Czech gave us free rein. Dressed in camouflage fatigues, my colleagues and I had spent two days pretending to hunt along the border, all the while scouting a good rendezvous site. We soon found one—an old asphalt road that ran through a wooded area. The road was seldom used and had no border checkpoint, but it was still possible to drive to the frontier from the Austrian side. On the Czech side, the road ran through a no-man’s-land where we were planning to meet the KGB car from Vienna. Several hundred yards beyond the no-man’s-land were the barbed wire fences and lookout towers of the Czech border guards. The night of the rendezvous was cold and moonless. Though it was below freezing, there was no snow on the ground. In front of us were the woods and a field. It was pitch black, and the only sound was the faint whispering of the wind through the dry leaves that had remained on the trees from autumn. As we waited in some bushes, my stomach was churning in anticipation. Our plan was to get Artamonov back to Moscow, where he would be informed he had a choice: either tell us everything he knew about U.S. intelligence operations and other agents working against the Soviet Union or face a firing squad. We were certain he would tell all, at which point we would parade him before the press in Moscow, where he would describe his many years of working as a loyal Soviet mole inside the dastardly U.S. intelligence community. Suddenly we saw the headlights of a fast-moving car heading down the road on the Austrian side. The lights illuminated the Austrian border markers, about twenty yards in front of us. The car roared up the road and came to a halt a few yards from our position in the bushes. Car doors slammed, and we heard the excited whispers and curses of our three KGB colleagues. When I walked up to the car, our colleagues from Vienna were huffing and puffing as they dragged Artamonov out of the vehicle and plopped him on the road. He was breathing heavily and occasionally letting out a moan “A stretcher!” someone called out. “There’s no other way we can carry this boar!” Someone had brought a large canvas poncho, and we slid it under the unconscious Artamonov. Four of us began the arduous task of hauling Lark back to the Czech border point and our car. We made it halfway there when we decided to take a break. We laid him on the ground, and someone pulled out a pocket flashlight to see how our prisoner was doing. Illuminating his face, we saw, to our horror, that he wasn’t breathing. We massaged his chest, then forced open his clenched jaws and poured brandy down his throat. Nothing worked. We hustled to the checkpoint, where we instructed the guards to call a doctor. We already knew, however, that we didn’t need a doctor to make this diagnosis: Lark was dead. The Czech doctor arrived and tried in vain to revive him with injections and a heart massage. After several minutes he gave up, saying with a shrug, “It’s useless. He’s gone.” Spread-eagled on the poncho, his arms flung out wide, Artamonov looked peaceful, as if he had forgiven everybody, including himself, for the damage done and the pain he had caused. He would be telling no one now about the arduous life of a double agent, about the furies that had hounded him ever since he fell head-over-heels for some Polish beauty sixteen years before and chucked everything—his wife, his son, his homeland—and headed west. Artamonov was dead. And so was an excellent opportunity to learn about U.S. intelligence and use Lark as our main character in a stirring propaganda show. I felt bad for Artamonov but worse for myself. After all, he was a traitor and probably had it coming. Now, because one of our men had a heavy hand with a sedative, we had lost a valuable espionage prize we had spent years trying to snare. My officers went through Artamonov’s pockets, finding a hotel registration card, $700 in cash, and the name and telephone number of an American woman in Vienna, apparently his CIA handler. We returned to Moscow with Artamonov’s body, where Yevgeni Chazov—the head of the Kremlin Medical Department and a future Soviet minister of health—performed an autopsy. Artamonov had died of heart failure resulting from the sedative overdose, though the autopsy showed he also had the beginnings of kidney cancer. He was buried secretly in a Moscow cemetery under a Latvian alias. Within weeks, an international storm broke over Lark’s disappearance. Artamonov’s Polish wife in Washington appealed to President Gerald Ford to help find her husband. Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, asked Brezhnev to find out what had happened. Other American officials and Sovietologists accused the KGB of abducting and executing the defector. In typical Soviet style, Brezhnev stonewalled Ford, saying the USSR also would like to know what became of Artamonov. The accusations and recriminations went on for more than a year, and no one could say where the man had gone. Several books were published worldwide, concluding that it was impossible to say what had happened to Artamonov and for whom he had been working. Finally, the KGB struck back, using one of our “pet” Soviet journalists who always did our bidding. He was Genrikh Borovik, who published an article titled “Overdriven Horses Are Shot, Aren’t They?” in Literaturnaya Gazeta faithfully setting forth the KGB’s view of the case. The article, purportedly relying on documents and inside information, described how the CIA had actually killed Artamonov when it realized he was playing a double game and working for the Soviets. When I was feeding Borovik our account of what had occurred, he asked me several times, “Now, Oleg, are you sure that this is the way it really happened? Artamonov was really working for us?” “Absolutely, Genrikh,” I answered.“ It’s the truth, I swear.” In all the years I was in foreign counterintelligence, Literaturnaya Gazeta was our prime conduit in the Soviet press for propaganda and disinformation. Whenever we called the editor, Alexander Chakovsky, and asked him to print an article, he complied. Sometimes we wrote the stories under the names of nonexistent authors. Sometimes journalists such as Borovik or Iona Andronov wrote the stories, using information supplied by the KGB. But whatever the method, Literaturnaya Gazeta, which oddly enough went on to become one of the leading publications during glasnost, was one of our preferred publications. I viewed the Lark case as a badly botched job on our part, and though I certainly wasn’t responsible for his death, I felt some measure of blame and considered the failed abduction one of the low points of my career. I was, then, quite surprised when Kryuchkov summoned me to his office a few months after Artamonov’s death and asked me, “Which medal do you want: the October Revolution or the Combat Red Banner?” I was speechless. Were we now receiving awards because we had, however inadvertently, carried out the death sentence against Artamonov? “Well, why are you acting so confused?” said an impatient Kryuchkov. “Which one do you like better? I already have Andropov’s approval. Go on, take your pick.” I mumbled that it would be best for the leadership to decide which award I deserved, and Kryuchkov dismissed me with a wave of his hand. A short while later, the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics issued a decree announcing that I and several other officers involved in the Artamonov case had been awarded the prestigious Order of the Red Banner. Until now, the full story of Artamonov’s fate has never been told. In 1992, Artamonov’s Polish wife telephoned me after hearing from sources that I had supervised the abduction of her husband. “You took part in the operation,” she told me. “Did my husband die?” “Yes, he did,” I replied. “How did he die?” she asked. “I feel sorry for you,” I answered,“ but I can’t tell you anything over the telephone. I can only confirm that he died, and that we didn’t intend to kill him.” After the Lark affair, we continued our efforts to go head to head with the CIA and recruit some of its agents.

Page 215:

In 2001 Canadian television (CBC) broadcasted a documentary about the Koecher case. I was interviewed for the film, along with Koecher and former KGB chief V. Kryuchkov. Both attacked me viciously as a traitor. Alexander Sokolov also appeared in the film, asserting, to my great amusement, that I had been recruited by the CIA in 1959 and betrayed the Koechers and other Soviet moles in the West. Sokolov served in the Washington KGB station in the early 1970s and handled double agent Artamonov-Shadrin. In 1972 he was accused of attempted rape by a male colleague in New York. Both were recalled to Moscow and investigated. Subsequently Sokolov was fired from the KGB. He worked later as a civilian employee at one of the Moscow institutes. He was never charged because his wife was the daughter of Stalin’s finance minister, and the KGB wanted to avoid public embarrassment. Sokolov joined the chorus of my critics pretty late. Kryuchkov, who became the chief of intelligence in late 1974, did not know about Sokolov’s scandalous past. However, he would pick up any scum who was willing to pour dirt on me.

Page 237:

Yurchenko stayed in Washington until 1983, when he was transferred back to Moscow and, because of high connections like Usatov, was made deputy chief of security for foreign intelligence. Not only did he learn about our efforts to ferret out defectors and spies, but he also became familiar with some of the more scandalous cases our directorate had been involved in, including kidnapping Artamonov from Vienna and participating in the murder of Georgi Markov. Later he was transferred to the intelligence directorate, where he was deputy chief of the department that directed operations against the United States and Canada. Yurchenko learned of the existence of some of our top spies in the United States, including Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton, a National Security Agency employee who for six years fed us detailed information about that top secret organization. So, despite the fact that I and numerous other officers viewed Yurchenko as a sloppy, unreliable officer, he had risen to a high position in the KGB and knew details of secret agents and operations. Then, during a trip to Italy in 1985, Yurchenko defected to the United States. It was an enormous blow to us as the disgruntled KGB man exposed Pelton, who was arrested, and Howard, who had to flee the country. He also told the CIA about the Markov assassination, the Artamonov abduction, and many other operations. The damage was considerable. After several months in America, however, Yurchenko grew increasingly unhappy.

. . . . . . .

Dear Steve M.,

Now let's see, now, what Bagley wrote about the Artamonov and Kochnov in his book, Spy Wars, shall we?

-- Tom

PS Here it is!


PPS My comments are in brackets.


In June 1966 the earth began to move under the Nosenko case. The resultant tsunami swept away all the doubts and cleared Nosenko’s path to acceptance and success in America — for the KGB. The first tremor came one Sunday morning with the ring of a telephone at Richard Helms’s house. The caller, in accented English, identified himself as a KGB officer on an operational mission in Washington and anxious to take up contact with CIA. Helms agreed that CIA would meet the caller at his designated place and time. Helms was then in the process of taking over as director of Central Intelligence. He called for an urgent meeting with Clandestine Services chief Desmond Fitzgerald and Counterintelligence Staff chief James Angleton. They assembled that afternoon. Their first decision was easy — to inform the FBI, responsible for operations inside the United States — but not the second. The caller had asked for CIA and was based in Moscow, so the Agency should participate. Who then? Wary of recent indications [from probable KGB "mole" Bruce Solie] that the KGB might have a mole inside our Soviet Bloc Division (SB), they decided to assign CIA’s handling of the case to others. It did not matter, apparently, that only in the SB lay the experience and knowledge needed to assess and draw the maximum from a source at this level. Operational security would take precedence. 1 Instead, they called on a security officer— Bruce Solie, who had been following up clues to hostile penetration of the Agency staff. This was a strange, and in the event fateful, choice. Solie had only a shallow knowledge of the Soviet scene, knew little about the KGB, and possessed no experience in handling foreign agents. Perhaps they comforted themselves with the thought that Solie would be guided by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and accompanied by the FBI’s man. The FBI assigned an experienced operative, Elbert (“Bert”) Turner, and together he and Solie made the scheduled meeting. No details of the operation that ensued, code-named "Kitty Hawk,” have been officially revealed to this day [2007]. Its outlines eventually became public knowledge, and I learned more from KGB veterans after the Cold War. The KGB visitor identified himself as Igor Kochnov of the foreign counterintelligence component of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence [today's SVR]). He could expect eventual promotion to head that department’s work against Americans, he said, if he were to succeed in at least one of his missions in Washington. The first of these was to recruit for the KGB a Soviet navy defector named Nikolay Artamonov, who was living in Washington under the name of Nicholas Shadrin. 2 In return for CIA’s help in achieving his goal, Kochnov was willing to act as its agent inside the KGB staff. Almost as exciting to the Americans was Kochnov’s other mission in Washington: he had been sent to locate the KGB defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko, presumably so they could eventually be lured back or assassinated. Wonderful news for CIA! Since the KGB evidently regarded Nosenko as it did Golitsyn, there’s an end to the doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides! So juicy were Kochnov’s future prospects that the Americans decided to play along and get Artamonov to pretend to cooperate with the KGB. Artamonov loyally accepted the role of double agent despite the danger and despite the unpleasant condition that he take a lower-level job with U.S. Naval Intelligence, to remove him (and the KGB) from access to the sensitive information he had been working with. Thus began a double agent operation with Artamonov that was to last nearly nine years and bring little profit to the Americans— and death to Artamonov. 3 From the outset, members of the Counterintelligence Staff looked with a skeptical eye on Kochnov. Why would the KGB send a traveler from Moscow to do jobs for which the KGB’s Washington rezidentura was better qualified and equipped? They sensed that the KGB had sent Kochnov to CIA in order to hide a KGB penetration of American Intelligence, to convince CIA of Nosenko s genuineness, and perhaps to find out why Nosenko had dropped off the KGB radar screen. But this skeptical view was not held by all. The participants came to this case with varying views and objectives. The Counterintelligence Staff treated it as a KGB provocation and sought to use it to test whether and where the KGB may have penetrated the ranks of CIA’s Soviet operations. To this end they designed questions to be put to Kochnov to provoke revealing answers or actions. On the other hand the FBI case officer Turner and CIA’s Solie firmly believed that Kochnov was genuine. Believing in Kochnov’s message, Solie became unshakably convinced that Nosenko was a genuine defector— and did not even pose the questions the Counterintelligence Staff had concocted. CIA was soon left with little reason to believe in Kochnov. His golden promise of promotion to the top of KGB American operations proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp. After recruiting Artamonov he turned over the contact to a Washington KGB man and went back to Moscow— and was never met again. (According to one report, he was spotted once or twice in Moscow.) But CIA and FBI continued the double agent case hoping that it might eventually offer a way to restore contact with Kochnov and hoping that the KGB would, as the Washington KGB handler had told Artamonov, turn Artamonov over to handling by a KGB Illegal. The KGB later claimed it never discovered Kochnov’s “treason” until his case was exposed in American publications in 1 978, around which time he coincidentally died of a heart attack. However, after the Cold War KGB veterans gave me reason to believe that the KGB had indeed dispatched Kochnov to contact CIA and that the game was connected with penetration of Western intelligence services. It is a deep and complex story waiting to be told. The Counterintelligence Staff, concerned for Artamonov’s safety, recommended in writing that he never be allowed to meet the KGB outside the United States. But the KGB’s lures proved too strong for Solie and Turner. They permitted Artamonov to meet the KGB in Canada, and then even in Vienna, infamous as the site of kidnappings and close to Soviet- controlled territory. Again in Vienna in December 1975, Artamonov went off to a scheduled meeting with the KGB and never returned. KGB foreign counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin later reported that he saw Artamonov die as he was carried into Czechoslovakia, accidentally overdosed with sedatives during the kidnapping. 4 A signal success of the KGB’s operation with Kochnov— in addition to eliminating the defector Artamonov— was the restoration of Yuri Nosenko’s fortunes in the West. Although I knew none of this at the time, I sensed in the second half of 1 966 the CIA leadership’s growing skepticism, not just impatience, concerning our case against Nosenko. It was evident that some unknown factor was influencing them. This became clearer at the end of that year when they ordered a fresh review of the case— not so much to get new insights as to find ways to rationalize the doubts and to whitewash Nosenko to prepare his release. Deputy Director Rufus Taylor called in Gordon Stewart, a CIA veteran and old friend of Helms, to take a fresh, detached look at this forbidding can of worms. Stewart enjoyed a reputation for integrity and had the added quality of knowing nothing of the Nosenko case and little about KGB deception. To simplify Stewart’s review I organized the essential file materials (including my “1000-page” hie summary) with an explanatory table of contents, and turned them over to Stewart in early 1967. This was my parting shot, for I was already preparing my assignment abroad. After my departure the Soviet Bloc Division — without telling me — condensed this huge file summary into some 440 pages, lumping together many separate points of doubt into broad categories, each category to support a “conclusion.” In effect, they transformed justifiable points of doubt into debatable (and unnecessary) conclusions, making a case against Nosenko. He did not have the naval service he claimed, it said, adding that he did not join the KGB when or how he said, did not serve in the KGB’s American Embassy Section, and had not been deputy chief of its Tourist Department. Stewart thus found himself faced with a mass of material loaded with indications of Nosenko’s bad faith and lacking any innocent explanation. To his professorial eye, these papers looked “unscholarly” (as he said to associates) and “more like a prosecutor’s brief.” Indeed, a hie summary is not an academic dissertation, and the SB report’s conclusions were unproven. So, he called for a critique of the SB report. In mid-1967 Helms selected for this task the same Bruce Solie who had learned from Kochnov, the KGB volunteer, that Nosenko was a genuine defector. Solie submitted eighteen pages of critique of the 440-page SB report and of the previous handling of Nosenko. He recommended a new and “untainted” questioning in a friendlier, less confrontational, and “more objective” atmosphere. So Helms and Taylor picked him to do the job himself. Solie was a taciturn, cigar-smoking man whose lean features gave him an air of the American farmlands. He had sat in on some of our interrogations of Nosenko prior to Kochnov’s advent, not contributing but maintaining a generally approving if reserved demeanor. Now, with Nosenko’s earlier interrogators removed from the scene and being himself convinced by Kochnov of Nosenko ’s genuineness, Solie set out to prove that we had been wrong. Behind Solie’s effort lay the hopes of CIA leaders that he would find ways to believe in Nosenko and rid the Agency of what Director Richard Helms later called this “incubus,” this “bone in the throat.” They had picked the right man: Solie delivered the goods. Starting in late 1967, sometimes accompanied by FBI Special Agent Turner, Solie talked in a friendly manner for nine months with Nosenko and together they worked out ways things might — somehow — be made to look plausible. One who read the transcripts of these interviews described to me the way they were conducted:

Solie: “Wouldn’t you put it this way, Yuri?”

Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”

On another sticking point, Solie: “But you really meant to say it differently, didn’t you?”

Nosenko: "Sure.”

Solie: “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, for example, that . . . ?”

Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”

Solie submitted his report on 1 October 1968. That whitewash had been the purpose from the outset was revealed by the speed with which the CIA leadership adopted its conclusions. They could not have studied it and had perhaps not even read it before, three days later, Deputy Director Taylor informed Director Helms that I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides. Most particularly, I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsyn has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector . 6 So well had Solie done the job that CIA gave him a medal for his travails. One can only concur in their assessment of him as a “true hero .” 7 The task he performed was truly Herculean and required tricks as cunning as those of Hercules himself. Solie seems to have hidden from Taylor facts that flatly contradicted the deputy director’s conclusions. In reality there were significant “conflicts” between what Nosenko reported and “the information and opinions Golitsyn . . . provided.” And an "other defector,” Peter Deriabin, had cast an indelible stain of doubt on Nosenko’s bona fides. Deriabin was outraged by Taylor’s statement. A question inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows of the accumulated doubts described in previous chapters. How, in the face of all that, could CIA have ever believed in Nosenko? The answer must lie partly in the human psyche— our incurable penchant to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t. (I discuss that general problem in Appendix C.) So desperately did CIA’s leaders desire to be rid of the ugly implications that underlay the Nosenko affair— KGB penetration of CIA and perhaps breaking of American ciphers— that they embraced a shaky, corrupt, and unsubstantial report — offered by an ill-qualified investigator— that fed that desire. Solie’s report would deserve attention if for no other reason than to illustrate the power of desire over reason. But it is no mere curiosity; the Solie report led to CIA’s final conclusion on the Nosenko case. It was crucial; its impact was permanent. Only through this corrupt gateway would future CIA officers gain access to the Nosenko case. It was declassified to make its wisdom accessible to trainees in counterintelligence. This is all that later CIA officers came to know, which is why they repeat its nonsense as fact in their memoirs today. So, it merits attention. Solie began by adopting the (dubious) position that all he needed to do to prove Nosenko’s innocence was to discredit the general conclusions of the SB report. Then he carefully selected the questions he would deal with, sidestepped some major anomalies as if they had never existed, and falsely assured his readers, in the passive voice, that "all areas of major significance have been examined .” 8 Despite its bulk, Solie’s report presented no significant new information, though he and Nosenko had adjusted some details. It amounted essentially to a fresh interpretation of selected parts of the old data— an interpretation based on credulity rather than skepticism. Inevitably, the way Solie chose to explain one contradiction would conflict with the way he would explain a different one, but he did not call attention to this. And if he could not find any way to explain an oddity, he would fall back on this comforting thought: if the KGB had dispatched Nosenko, they would have surely prepared him better— ipso facto, the KGB had not dispatched him. Among the “areas of major significance” — all of which Solie claimed to have examined — was how Nosenko’s reporting touched on the case of Oleg Penkovsky. In this one case, aside from all the others, Nosenko had twice exposed the KGB’s blundering hand on him — first in erring by a whole significant year about Abidian’s visit to Penkovsky’s dead drop, and second by mentioning (and later forgetting) “Zepp.” How did Solie manage these hurdles? He simply ran around Zepp — didn’t mention it at all. He struggled desperately to explain the dead drop visit and Nosenko’s failure to mention it in 1962, exposing the absurd quality of this whole whitewash:

• Solie accepted as "not implausible” Nosenko’s preposterous suggestion (to Solie, never to us earlier) that he had failed to tell us in 1962 because “the stakeout had long been dropped”— so long that he had forgotten all about it. But only a couple of paragraphs earlier Solie had recognized that Abidian’s visit actually occurred only at the end of 1961. Thus, Nosenko’s stakeout, by his own account, would have been still active when he departed for Geneva in March 1962 and would be fresh in his mind when, in June, he told us about Abidian and Moscow surveillance.

• Or maybe, Solie and Nosenko agreed, Nosenko had somehow got confused and only imagined that he had been getting stakeout
reports.

• Perhaps, instead, he had only “been advised” of the stakeout by other KGB officers. And maybe only after he had met CIA in 1962 — perhaps at the time of the Penkovsky publicity. (How then could Nosenko have failed to relate the drop to Penkovsky when he told of it?)

• Or possibly Nosenko “consciously exaggerated his involvement with the visit and its aftermath.” (How then did he know the details?)

• Or maybe “the evident distortions arose from honest confusion” — without explaining how.

• Anyway, Nosenko’s errors and contradictions prove that he is genuine. "If dispatched, Nosenko presumably would have had the date right.”

• Then Solie had one wonderful, final argument: it wasn’t Nosenko’s fault, but the fault of his CIA interrogators who had “confused matters to the point where complete clarification appears impossible .” 9 In pushing out such nonsense, Solie must have assumed that his readers would not know that Nosenko had given, and repeated in detail, his stories of Abidian, of the drop, and of the stakeout long before any interrogation began.

Solie then exposed his intent — whitewash, not professional assessment: he dismissed the whole issue. The fact "that Nosenko is not able to properly date the visit of Abidian to Pushkin Street is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.” Aside from its nonsense, the very structure of Solie’s report amounted to a trick. By focusing on the SB report’s (unproven) conclusions it skirted the impossible task of explaining the specific inconsistencies, contradictions, and lies that had led to those conclusions. The uninformed reader would never know they had existed.

Other aspects of his report were similarly questionable.

• When giving Nosenko’s now "true” version of one story or another, Solie neglected to mention it was often a third or fourth version, nor did he describe the earlier, conflicting versions— or speculate on why there had been so many changes.

• Solie implied that thanks to his new, nonconfrontational manner Nosenko had become cooperative, consistent, and "relaxed” as never before and that Nosenko’s “material assistance to the interviewer” (including writing reports) was a major departure from the past. In reality, Nosenko had invariably been cooperative except when cornered. He had written many reports for us. And his stories might have seemed consistent back then, too, had they not been challenged. Solie’s role was not to challenge or question, but with Nosenko’s help
to shape some plausible explanation.

• Solie sought to discredit earlier investigations. At least ten times he referred to points he said had not been looked into or to situations in
which he said his predecessors had misunderstood what Nosenko had been trying to say. Solie was wrong each time— but a reader with no access to the record would not know that.

• Again and again Solie made assertions as definitive as they were unfounded. He usually couched them impersonally, often in the passive voice, to hide the fact that they were nothing more than his own opinions. He proclaimed, for example, “The information Nosenko gave is commensurate with his claimed position.” 10 “Nosenko,” he wrote, “has furnished adequate information so that his claimed assignment during 1953-1955 is considered sufficiently substantiated.” 11 Nosenko’s knowledge of the office of the Military Attache supports his claim “that he was an officer of the First Section with the indicated assignment as related by him.” 12 Yet again: "The only unresolved problem considered of any significance in regard to the 1955-59 period is the [XYZ] case,” 13 whereas in fact that particular case posed only minor problems compared with others.

• Solie failed to mention most of the other Soviet sources whose bona fides were also doubted, or about their connections to Nosenko’s case.

Solie even administered a new polygraph test in 1968 and cited it as proof of Nosenko’s truth — though Nosenko had been polygraphed prior to detention with contrary findings. Solie was ignoring, too, the chief polygraph specialist of the Office of Security, who had decreed in 1966, after CIA had made extended use of the polygraph as an interrogation tool, that no polygraph test of Nosenko after his detention would be valid or could be presented as evidence one way or the other. Solie accepted as true things Nosenko said that were actually unthinkable in the real Soviet and KGB world of which Solie knew so little. As he hacked away at the SB report’s conclusions, avoiding its details, Solie failed to clarify the new picture he was thus composing. If Nosenko were now telling Solie the whole truth, the reader would have to accept (as CIA did, in its desperation) things like these:

• that the KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors,

• that what Nosenko told Solie about his life was the final truth — even though it was a fourth or fifth version and still full of unlikely events
and would later undergo further changes by Nosenko and contradiction even by Soviet sources,

• that a ten-year veteran staff officer of the KGB need not know or remember how to perform routine tasks he must have been doing daily, such as sending telegrams, distinguishing between different kinds of hies, entering buildings, and using elevators,

• that a KGB operative need not remember any details of his own operations, not even the names of agents he had handled for years,

• that an officer responsible for the KGB’s coverage and knowledge of the American Embassy building needn’t himself know about it, or
about his own service’s measures to counter the technical spying the Americans were doing from that building— or even that that technical spying was being done at all,

• that an English-speaking rising star in KGB operations against the American Embassy would never appear in any of the many ap- proaches the KGB is known to have made to Embassy personnel during his time, nor even have heard of them,

• that a supervisor of operations against the American Embassy would be setting up homosexual compromises of visiting tourists, and giv- ing low-level assistance to an officer of another department,

• that a newly appointed supervisor of KGB operations against tourists inside the USSR would be sent abroad— twice— for months’ long work ensuring the security of a conference delegation, work normally done by a department specifically set up for the purpose.

CIA was accepting Nosenko as genuine because this one man, Solie, would accept such nonsense and was unable (as he himself confessed) to “perceive any evidence of KGB deception or of any Soviet objective which might have justified their dispatching Nosenko.” Someone knowing a bit more:

• might have recalled KGB deceptions whose goals could not have been perceptible to their victims,

• would have noticed the signs of source protection in many of Nosenko’s reports, such as 1 ) his contradiction of Golitsyn’s pointers to
KGB recruitment of American code clerks, 2) his misleading story about Kovshuk’s trip to Washington, and 3) his accounts of how
Popov and Penkovsky were caught,

• would have recognized the many other signs of deception that smeared Nosenko’s reports, such as his probing about Zepp; his story of Penkovsky’s Pushkin Street dead drop; his unlikely multiplicity of contacts with the Lee Harvey Oswald case; and his claim of seeing a KGB file in Geneva showing they knew nothing about CIA there,

• would have seen that all of Nosenko’s major leads— “Andrey,” Sergeant Johnson of the Orly courier station, the British Admiralty source, Dejean, Gribanov’s French businessman agent Saar Demichel, the microphones in the American Embassy, and others — bore the marks of deceptive "chicken feed” in that 1 ) Nosenko could never get straight how he learned these hot items and 2) the KGB knew that all of them had previously been exposed or had lost their value to the KGB;

• might not have dismissed so offhandedly the only deceptive aim that Solie could envisage: that the KGB might be trying to saturate Western security services, busying them with leads to minor and useless KGB agents to keep them off more valuable ones. In fact, some FBI officers thought that at least in New York the anti-Soviet operatives had been saturated. More than fifty percent of their time, they later calculated, had been spent pursuing innocuous leads provided by Kulak and Polyakov. Solie never mentioned these sources or their connections with the Nosenko case.

The twisted and shaky edifice that Solie thus constructed would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal. But it was never intended to endure either. It needed only seem solid to an uninformed and casual reader, for with few exceptions this was the only kind of reader it would ever reach. Future CIA officers would be taught its conclusion but would never see the data on which it was based. Had it not been for Jim Angleton I might never have seen this "Solie report” and been left wondering what miracle had resuscitated Nosenko. Those who had salvaged Nosenko didn’t want me to see the flimsy and corrupt way they had done it, and my “need to know” could be said to have expired with my assignment abroad. But during my routine visit to Headquarters in late 1968 Angleton took the initiative of showing it to me, along with the SB report it attacked (which I then saw for the first time). I was appalled. In the vain hope of resuscitating that fleeting chance we had had to dig behind Nosenko’s tales, I wrote a long rebuttal, containing the objections mentioned above and many more, and sent it to Angleton in January 1969 from my field station. My rebuttal was ignored, except in the Counterintelligence Staff, which was unable or unwilling to fight the case further. 14 As soon as Solie’s report and Taylor’s memo had cleared Nosenko, CIA moved him to the Washington area and soon took him in as a consultant for its and the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence operations. 15 Eventually he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. Nosenko is said to have boosted CIA and FBI operations. He pointed to recruitment targets among Soviets in the United States, and in the 1970s one of them was successfully recruited. 16 As the director of Central Intelligence later described it to all CIA personnel, Nosenko had "conducted numerous special security reviews on Soviet subjects of specific intelligence interest, and . . . proven himself to be invaluable in exploring counterintelligence leads.” 17 In defending Nosenko later against the implication in a TV docudrama that there might be some substance to the old accusations that he was a phony, a CIA counterintelligence leader came to his defense. Among other things, Leonard McCoy expressed outrage that Nosenko’s "dignity, self- respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this him,” and that therefore “it is fitting that CIA recently called him in and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him.” Speaking for all CIA officers past and present, McCoy concluded, "Any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency’s judgment in this case— that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you, Yuri Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country.” 18 Nosenko had won — but voices continued to rise both against him and in his defense. The debate was decided, but not the truth.

. . . . . . .


NEXT . . . . . ANATOLY GOLITSYN !!!


The following is the only thing Kulagin says about him.

Page 109:

Toward the end of my tour of duty in Washington, I undertook yet another unsuccessful bid to entice one of our countrymen back to the USSR. In retrospect, I am amazed we wasted so much energy on such silly exercises designed to give us a brief—and transparently artificial— victory in the propaganda war with America. This case involved a Soviet couple from Armenia who had emigrated years ago and gone to work for the CIA, all the while secretly serving as agents for the KGB. The man was a double agent, working for KGB foreign counterintelligence. He had barely started working for us when a high-ranking KGB officer, Anatoly Golitsyn, defected in 1961 and we became concerned Golitsyn might expose the Armenian double agent. The Armenian laid low; it later turned out that Golitsyn knew nothing about him.


What does Bagley say about him?

Here's a little "teaser" for you from the index of Spy Wars:

Golitsyn, Anatoly, 8, 12, 161, 173, 174, 235, 28 1 , 297nl; on Belitsky, 25; in CIA myth, 256-58, 261, 263-64; defection and KGB damage assessment of, 235-36; information reported by, which Nosenko repeated or diverted, 22-26,67, 162, 189, 236; KGB awareness of reporting to CIA by, 236; on KGB discovery of Popov, 9, 64, 71; on KGB operations, 23-26, 57- 58, 241-42, 283; on KGB recruitments of code clerks, 25, 157; on Kovshuk’s trip, 61-62, 111, 1 12; on Nosenko, 159- 60, 212; on penetration of CIA, 62; value of reporting of, 57; on Vassall, 24, 179