Passport to Assassination

[Tom Graves]

Passport to Assassination is the title of a 1993 book written by Oleg Nechiporenko, one of three (or four?*) KGB officers posing as diplomats in Mexico City who allegedly met with visa-seeking Lee Harvey Oswald two months before he assassinated JFK in Dallas, Texas.

One wonders why Nechiporenko, instead of concentrating on Oswald’s life in the USSR, etc., would write fifty pages about a KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko, who had nothing to do with the assassination, and the “stupid” CIA case officer who “misunderstood and mistreated” him so badly?

Nosenko had “defected-in place” to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 and physically defected to the U.S. two months after the 11/22/63 assassination, claiming to have been Oswald’s KGB case officer in Moscow and therefore knowing for sure that the KGB had nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-one-half-years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

In those fifty pages, Nechiporenko says Nosenko’s primary case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, was stupid to not accept Nosenko as a true defector and to have incarcerated him and subjected him to harsh interrogations for more than three years.

In his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, Bagley tells us how he became convinced Nosenko was a false defector when he read the CIA’s thick file on a defector by the name of Anatoliy Golitsyn and realized that the KGB cases Nosenko had told another CIA officer and himself about in Geneva a week earlier implausibly overlapped and contradicted the ones Golitsyn had recently told James Angleton, CIA’s Counterintelligence chief, about.

”Implausibly overlapped” because Golitsyn and Nosenko had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB. “Contradicted” because Bagley realized that Nosenko had been sent to Geneva to protect a KGB “mole” or two in the Agency from being uncovered by Golitsyn’s information.

Bagley writes quite a lot about Nechiporenko’s book in Spy Wars.

Here are some excerpts:

Nosenko told us that the KGB had not known that Oswald was going around with Marina Prusakova. “There was no surveillance of her” until he applied to marry her. But a KGB file reported by KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko (see below) revealed that the KGB checked on Marina as soon as she first met Oswald, on 17 March 1961.

. . . . .

An experienced KGB foreign-intelligence operative interviewed Oswald to judge his suitability for use as a spy. It didn’t matter that this KGB officer talked to Oswald under some guise, for the file would have revealed to Nosenko the KGB officer’s involvement, just as it had to Nechiporenko.

. . . . . . .

A KGB veteran told me after the Cold War that Nosenko did not hold the KGB jobs he listed for CIA and that the circumstances suggested to him that the SCD (specifically, its 14th Department, for operational deception) had dispatched Nosenko to deceive CIA. Quite a different story came from a clumsy KGB effort to support and enhance Nosenko’s image in American eyes. In the early 1990s they put an official hie on Nosenko into the hands of KGB veteran Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko. It was ostensibly to help him write a memoir of his encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City a few weeks before Oswald assassinated President Kennedy— never mind that Nosenko was entirely irrelevant to this subject. Nechiporenko thereupon devoted fifty pages— under the title “Paranoia vs. Common Sense’’— to make the point that CIA (and specifically me, Pete Bagley) had been stupid not to recognize the great good luck that had fallen into CIA’s lap with Nosenko’s defection. Like others, he stressed the “colossal damage” that this defection had done to the KGB and the near-panic it caused to high-level KGB chiefs and to Khrushchev himself. But the attempt backfired. That KGB file contradicted a lot of what Nosenko had told us about his early life and entry into the KGB, and Nechiporenko’s book told things about Oswald that Nosenko must have known if he had really had access to Oswald’s file — but did not know. [8]

Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko’s own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty. You are naive, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, “was a link, a part of an operation . . . And this operation isn’t completed.” If the author were to tell all, “CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.” [9]

Even if this still-living KGB was carrying on an unfinished operation, its use of Nechiporenko to attack me was like using a battering ram against an open door. CIA itself had disowned my position, had used some of the same words as Nechiporenko to denigrate me (and others who had distrusted Nosenko), and had been happily employing Nosenko for a quarter of a century. Why then this late, gratuitous assault? Could they still fear that CIA might reverse its position on Nosenko and finally look into the implications underlying his case? As far as I know, the KGB need have no fear on that front. Nechiporenko’s position in this ongoing KGB game contrasts oddly with the new line on Nosenko that was emerging in Moscow. After years of vilifying Nosenko for the damage he did the KGB and condemning him to death, KGB spokesmen were beginning to suggest that Nosenko did not defect at all. Their new line was that he fell into a trap and was kidnapped by CIA. After the assassination of President Kennedy, so this story goes, CIA learned (through what a KGB-sponsored article fantasized as a far-flung agent network in Russia) that a KGB officer named Nosenko had inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald. So, when that target came to Geneva (to recruit a woman connected with French Intelligence) a CIA “action group” under Pete Bagley, working on direct orders from CIA director Richard Helms and Soviet Division chief David Murphy, drugged and kidnapped him, in order to pump him for information about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. [10] One can only speculate on the KGB’s purpose in creating such a fantasy. Might they be preparing Nosenko ’s return to Russia without punishment like the later “CIA kidnap victim” Yurchenko? Whatever the reason, this change of posture reflected Moscow’s growing readiness to admit that Nosenko’s defection was not as previously presented. Finally, CIA will be left alone in believing in Nosenko.

. . . . . . . .

My comments:

*The two other KGB officers masquerading as diplomats who allegedly met with Oswald at the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City in 1963 on Friday the 27th and Saturday the 28th were Pavel Yatskov and Valery Kostikov.

It’s interesting to note that on 22 November 1993, “The National Enquirer” published an article by a fourth KGB officer who had allegedly met with Oswald at the Soviet diplomatic compound -- Colonel Nikolai Leonov, who said Oswald interrupted warmups for a volleyball game on Sunday the 29th and that he and Oswald retired to his office where Oswald, desperately requiring a Soviet visa so he could return to Russia, started complaining about the FBI and ended up weeping and brandishing his revolver.

Even more interesting is the fact that Nechiporenko forgot to mention Leonov’s tête-à-tête with Oswald on Sunday.

In fact, Nechiporenko doesn’t even mention Third Secretary / Assistant Cultural Attache Leonov (who was Raul Castro’s and Che Guevara’s mentor, who supplied weapons to Communist insurgents in Latin America, and whom some believe was the short, skinny, blond-haired, very-thin-faced “Oswald” that Silvia Duran and Eusebio Azcue dealt with at the Cuban Consulate on or around 27 September 1963) in his book.

Questions:

Why did Leonov — aka “The Blond Oswald in Mexico City” — wait thirty years to mention his dramatic Sunday meeting with emotionally unstable Oswald?

Was the KGB still trying to convince us in 1993 that there was no way that emotionally unstable Oswald could have fired his rifle accurately enough to kill JFK, and therefore . . . gasp . . . the evil, evil CIA or [fill in the blank] must have done it?

[Benjamin Cole]

TG-

My layman's assessment is that Nosenko was phonier than a $3 bill, and Solie's interview with the HSCA was indicative of that.

It makes one wonder how compromised the CIA was at that time (1960s to 1970s). Why did the CIA lean away from Bagley, by all accounts a straight shooter, and the man who would be a best judge of the situation?

John Newman uses words like "riddled" to describe KGB infiltration of the CIA.

Were there people above Solie who were also compromised?

Sorry to bother you. You have linked to an article written by Bagley, in addition to his book.

Do you have the link to the article (again, sorry).

Maybe you do, maybe you don't.

[Tom Graves]

TG-

My layman's assessment is that Nosenko was phonier than a $3 bill, and Solie's interview with the HSCA was indicative of that.

It makes one wonder how compromised the CIA was at that time (1960s to 1970s). Why did the CIA lean away from Bagley, by all accounts a straight shooter, and the man who would be a best judge of the situation?

John Newman uses words like "riddled" to describe KGB infiltration of the CIA.

Were there people above Solie who were also compromised?

Sorry to bother you. You have linked to an article written by Bagley, in addition to his book.

Do you have the link to the article (again, sorry).

Maybe you do, maybe you don't.

Don't forget the 1950s.

Edward Ellis Smith was honey-trapped and recruited in 1956.

Smith and/or Bruce Leonard Solie (see below) betrayed GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov in early 1957.


In my post, I quoted excerpts from one of his books, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.

It was published in 2007.

Here it is.

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames


Bagley wrote a 35-page follow-up article in 2014 titled "Ghosts of the Spy Wars."

He finished it the day before he died.

Here it is.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362


Golitsyn thought there may have been as many as thirty "moles" in the CIA.

I wouldn't be surprised.


Bruce Leonard Solie was the CIA's primary mole hunter. As such, he was effectively Angleton's boss.

Leonard V. McCoy was in the omnipresent and omniscient Reports & Requirements section of the Soviet Russia Division for many years, and in 1975 he became Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence and set about destroying the files of Angleton and Newton S. Miler (look him up).

Most, if not all, of the KGB defectors whom Russia-born George Kisevalter handled were eventually arrested by the KGB and executed.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The Nechiporenko book can be read here: https://archive.org/details/passporttoassass0000nech

As he points out in the book, shortly after the assassination the then head of the KGB (Vladimir Semichastny) secretly reported to the Politburo and personally to Khrushchev that the KGB did not recruit Oswald for any operation. They viewed him as too unreliable.

I could quote the Norman Mailer book, the Oleg Kalugin book (see below), and other sources that support the view that Oswald was *not* used by the KGB. But if you think that all of that is disinformation or based on disinformation - that Kalugin is really an agent for Putin - then never mind.

One point about Kalugin: He is, as far as I can tell, the highest ranking KGB agent ever to defect to the US. He was in charge of all KGB operations operating out of Washington and then was named head of foreign counterintelligence for the First Directorate. Has there even been a higher ranking KGB agent to defect? Putin issued a death sentence on him and he calls Putin a fascist war criminal *and suggests that Putin is a pedophile (!!). Kalugin writes in his book that Nosenko's defection caused all sorts of problems for the KGB (and himself); numerous agents were recalled (he was one) and several operations canceled; and that in response the Soviets issued a death sentence to Nosenko. And then went through great lengths to try and find him in the US in order to persuade him to return or kill him. Yes, kill him. Furthermore, he says that it was the policy of the KGB to NOT use fake defectors. Shorter: He says that Nosenko was a real defector, was a drunk, womanizing incompetent that was an embarrassment but was an agent. Hardly the type of person, it seems to me, that the KGB would use for such an important mission.

But again, if you think Kalugin's a fake defector than there's no reasoning possible.

*Correction: In a recent interview Kalugin mentioned a claim made by Alexander Litvinenko that Putin was a pedophile. Kalugin doesn't make the allegation, Livinenko said it. In fact told he said he told Litvinenko (who was later poisoned by Putin) that he shouldn't have made the allegation.

The Kalugin book can be read here: https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/government_information/intelligence_and_espionage/Spymaster.pdf

[Tom Graves]

The Nechiporenko book can be read here: https://archive.org/details/passporttoassass0000nech

As he points out in the book, shortly after the assassination the then head of the KGB (Vladimir Semichastny) secretly reported to the Politburo and personally to Khrushchev that that KGB did not recruit Oswald for any operation. They viewed him as too unreliable.

I could quote the Norman Mailer book, the Oleg Kalugin book (see below), and other sources that support the view that Oswald was *not* used by the KGB. But if you think that all of that is disinformation or based on disinformation - that Kalugin is really an agent for Putin - then never mind.

One point about Kalugin: He is, as far as I can tell, the highest ranking KGB agent ever to defect to the US. He was in charge of all KGB operations operating out of Washington and then was named head of foreign counterintelligence for the First Directorate. Has there even been a higher ranking KGB agent to defect? Putin issued a death sentence on him and he calls Putin a fascist war criminal and suggests that Putin is a pedophile (!!). Kalugin writes in his book that Nosenko's defection caused all sorts of problems for the KGB (and himself); numerous agents were recalled (he was one) and several operations canceled; and that in response the Soviets issued a death sentence to Nosenko. And then went through great lengths to try and find him in the US in order to persuade him to return or kill him. Yes, kill him. Furthermore, he says that it was the policy of the KGB to NOT use fake defectors. Shorter: He says that Nosenko was a real defector, was a drunk, womanizing incompetent that was an embarrassment but was an agent. Hardly the type of person, it seems to me, that the KGB would use for such an important mission.

But again, if you think Kalugin's a fake defector than there's no reasoning possible.

The Kalugin book can be read here: https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/government_information/intelligence_and_espionage/Spymaster.pdf

Dear Steve M.,

It's possible that your boy Kalugin (whom Bagley, himself, quotes a few times in his book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games) was fed disinformation by the First Chief Directorate's deception-based Department D or by the Second Chief Directorate's deception-based Department 14, but I doubt it.

It's more likely that he is what Angleton was referring to when he said (in so many words), "A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies and really mess you up, boy."

Regarding your (and, unfortunately, the CIA's / FBI's) boy, Nosenko, former COS Saigon, John Limond Hart (whose wife, Katharine Colvin Hart, was head of the aforementioned Soviet Russia Division’s Reports & Requirements section and therefore the boss of probable “mole” Leonard V. McCoy and Robert Lubbehusen – look him up), and your boy Kalugin agree that Nosenko was just a misunderstood ("due to drunkenness, self-promoting lies, and pesky language difficulties, etc., etc.") and very, very, very mistreated true defector!

Hart slandered Bagley during C-Span’s coverage of the HSCA hearings, and shifted the Committee’s focus -- from the implausibility of Nosenko’s claim that the KGB didn’t even interview former Marine U-2 radar operator Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR -- to the barbarous insensitivities and intentions of Bagley and his boss, David E. Murphy.

(Side note: Researcher and JFKA conspiracy theorist Malcolm Blunt, who befriended Bagley in 2008, believes the CIA forged-in-pencil Bagley's allegedly found-by-Hart "note" in which Bagley supposedly listed possible ways to resolve the obdurate Nosenko case, and wrote such self-incriminating things as "drug him up and send him to the funny farm" and "liquidate him.")

A friend of Bagley’s (who happened to be a former defector, himself), was watching C-Span and called Bagley in Brussels to apprise him that Hart was “crucifying” him on national T.V.

Bagley wrote to Blakey and requested that he be granted an opportunity to rebut Hart’s testimony.

His request was granted.

Bagley testified in front of the HSCA 16 November 1978. His testimony was comprised of 40 pages of prepared testimony and one-hundred-and-thirty pages of live “questions-and-answers” testimony.

Here it is.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32273600.pdf

Get back to me, Steve M., after you’ve read it as well as Dr. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” and my Wikipedia article on Tennent H. Bagley.

Regarding Kalugin, google the names Kalugin Redmond and Weinstein simultaneously to find the article titled "Panel III . . . ", scroll down to page xx, and read Kalugin’s multitudinous reasons for believing Vitaliy Yurchenko was a true defector. Then scroll down to page 44 and read Allen Weinstein’s terse rebuttal.

Here it is:

Professor Weinstein:

I’ve just listened to Oleg’s twelve reasons for the redefection of Yurchenko, and it has opened my mind on this one again, at least each one of them sounds in its own way somewhat persuasive, but I don't know. I don't know. You obviously have thought about this a lot yourself, and it may be that there's still something you don't want to tell us.

General Kalugin:

Why should I try to fool you?

Professor Weinstein:

Why not?


It's interesting to note that Kalugin characterized Bagley’s book as "absurd trash."

Harvey Klehr in Commentary magazine:

Sources in the American intelligence community denounced Bagley’s book as “radioactive poison,” and Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB officer who relocated to the United States after the collapse of the USSR, called it “absurd … trash.”


Do you think Bagley’s book is absurd trash, Steve M.?

Have you even read it?

Do you agree with the (KGB-encouraged) general consensus that he was duped by Angleton, who, in turn, was duped by Golitsyn?


I don’t know if the Russians were behind the JFK assassination or not, but some strange things are said to have happened in Mexico City two months before the assassination, and they seem to have involved a putative Department 13 officer (Kostikov), a short, skinny, blond-haired, very-thin-faced, Prince of Wales suit-wearing “Oswald” at the Cuban Consulate (Leonov?), a phone-answering KGB security officer (Obyedkov) at the Soviet Embassy whom the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited, and, a few months earlier, a Snyder, Oklahoma, German national former reconnaissance pilot for Hitler by the name of Heinz Guenter Schulz who was interred in a British POW camp, recruited by the NKVD or the KGB at some point, allegedly "flipped" to the OSS or the CIA, and eventually sent by the FBI and the CIA to Mexico City and NYC in a combined op against the KGB, and, apparently, specifically against KGB Colonel Valery Kostikov.

Regardless, the KGB* has been making geopolitical "hay" from the anomaly-replete assassination since literally Day One, and it’s one of the reasons “former” KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin was able to install Donald Trump as our “president” in January 2017 and January 2025.

I tend to agree with the theory proposed by former CIA officer W. Allen Messer in his 2013 article, “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited,” in which he agrees with Bagley that Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent there by General Gribanov to discredit what Golitsyn was telling Angleton, but Messer disagrees with Bagley’s idea that Nosenko was a false physical defector to the U.S. in late February 1964, arguing instead that he “went rogue” with the misinformation he’d been told to lay on Bagley and (probable mole) Kisevalter in Geneva, and that the KGB had no choice but to support his bona fides through it agents Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA, at the FBI’s NYC field office), through Kremlin-loyal triple-agent Igor Kochnov -- who arranged (apparently with Bruce Solie’s and Len McCoy’s help) the ostensible kidnapping of former "defector" Nicholas Shadrin in Vienna in 1975 -- and through the aforementioned Vitaliy “Homesick” Yurchenko, et al., not to mention your boy, Oleg K.

Whose involvement, if true, just confirms Malcolm Blunt’s statement to Bart [The You-Know-What] Kamp during a 2021 YouTube interview that

“Nosenko is MEGA.”

*Today's SVR and FSB

[Benjamin Cole]

As he (Nechiporenko) points out in the book, shortly after the assassination the then head of the KGB (Vladimir Semichastny) secretly reported to the Politburo and personally to Khrushchev that that KGB did not recruit Oswald for any operation. They viewed him as too unreliable.---SMG

I think you should say that a claim is made that Semichastny said the KGB did not recruit LHO.

1. The Semichastny story could be a narrative leaked for Western audiences.

2. It may be the KGB did recruit LHO, and elements within the KGB ran LHO, but after the JFKA, the KGB clammed up and claimed it did nothing with LHO and lied to Khrushchev.

Many accept that the CIA misled JFK or other presidents (and the public), and elements within the CIA were rogue.

So why not consider the same is true of the KGB?

In addition, it appears the CIA was riddled with KGB assets in the 1960s.

Bruce Solie's HSCA testimony is nearly comical. He says he believes Nosenko, that the KGB had nothing to do with LHO, as they cannot prove Nosenko is lying about that. When in fact Nosenko had no job roles that would have allowed Nosenko to know one way or the other.

Solie's behavior re Nosenko is hard to fathom, unless Solie was compromised.

[Tom Graves]

As he (Nechiporenko) points out in the book, shortly after the assassination the then head of the KGB (Vladimir Semichastny) secretly reported to the Politburo and personally to Khrushchev that that KGB did not recruit Oswald for any operation. They viewed him as too unreliable.---SMG

I think you should say that a claim is made that Semichastny said the KGB did not recruit LHO.

1. The Semichastny story could be a narrative leaked for Western audiences.

2. It may be the KGB did recruit LHO, and elements within the KGB ran LHO, but after the JFKA, the KGB clammed up and claimed it did nothing with LHO and lied to Khrushchev.

Many accept that the CIA misled JFK or other presidents (and the public), and elements within the CIA were rogue.

So why not consider the same is true of the KGB?

In addition, it appears the CIA was riddled with KGB assets in the 1960s.

Bruce Solie's HSCA testimony is nearly comical. He says he believes Nosenko, that the KGB had nothing to do with LHO, as they cannot prove Nosenko is lying about that. When in fact Nosenko had no job roles that would have allowed Nosenko to know one way or the other.

Solie's behavior re Nosenko is hard to fathom, unless Solie was compromised.

Correct, but "compromised" is too mild a term.

Regardless, it's interesting that Nosenko said that it was Yekaterina Furtseva, the politically powerful mother-in-law of the aforementioned Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov; see my previous post), who overrode poor Yuri and not only let LHO stay in The Worker's Paradise ("to avoid a PR fiasco") after he allegedly tried to kill himself (question: did he slice one wrist, or two -- his Historic Diary says one thing whereas Boskin Hospital records say another), but also prevented Semichastny from trying to recruit him.

So, there you have it -- The KGB did NOT recruit Oswald!!!

Yuri said so!!!

(LOL)