The lies of Yuri "The KGB Had Nothing to Do with LHO in the USSR" Nosenko

[Tom Graves]

False defector-in-place in 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in 1964, Yuri “The KGB Had Nothing to Do with Oswald in the USSR” Nosenko, was polygraphed three times: April 1964, October 1966, and August 1968.

The questions for the first two tests were drawn up by the Soviet Russia Division (which “incarcerated” Nosenko from April 1964 to September 1967), and those for the third test were drawn up by probable KGB “mole” Bruce Solie of the mole-hunting Office of Security.

Polygraph expert Richard O. Arther was retained by the HSCA to analyze all three tests and Nosenko’s answers (and attendant “reactions," if any).

He determined that the 1966 test was the most reliable of the three, and that the 1968 test was "atrocious."


The following is an excerpt from Arther’s 1978 report:


During the October 18, 1966, examination, Nosenko was asked 32 questions in which the name Oswald appeared. On my blind analysis, I selected the following questions as containing valid indicators of emotional disturbances, which are usually indicative of lying:


1. Did you receive special instructions about what to tell the Americans about the Oswald case? (NO)

2. Was Oswald recruited by the KGB as an agent? (NO)

3. Did the KGB consider Oswald abnormal? (YES)

4. To your knowledge, did Oswald talk to a KGB officer in Mexico? (NO)

5. Is your contact with the Oswald case part of your legend? (NO)

6. Did you hear of Oswald prior to President Kennedy’s assassination? (YES)

7. Did you hear of Oswald only after President Kennedy's assassination? (NO)

8. Did you personally order [Rastrusin], in 1959, to collect material on Oswald? (YES)

9. Did the KGB instruct you to tell us Oswald was a bad shot? (NO) 

10. Did the KGB give the Oswalds any kind of help in their departure from the Soviet Union? (NO)

[Benjamin Cole]

Victor Marchetti thought it possible the reason the CIA clammed up after the JFKA...was to hide the intensive KGB infiltration of the agency.

John Newman would later write that KGB'er Bruce Solie was running LHO.

Gus Russo would write that G2'ers were somehow involved with LHO in New Orleans. Probably in MC too.

LHO would visit Valery Kostikov, likely KGB wetworks leader, in MC.

I wonder who helped LHO with the Walker shooting? G2'ers?

My take on the Z-film is shots struck Gov. JBC at ~Z-295 and JFK at Z-313. The M-C was a good rifle, and LHO was familiar with guns. (The recent assassination of Kirk, and the just-missed attempt on Trump are clues one doesn't have to be a pro to hit a target at range. The M-C was manufactured to military specs to be accurate to 200 meters).

But LHO could not have fired both those rounds.

So...who were LHO confederates? I don't know.

[Tom Graves]

LHO could not have fired both those rounds.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

[Benjamin Cole]

Verily!

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Victor Marchetti thought it possible the reason the CIA clammed up after the JFKA...was to hide the intensive KGB infiltration of the agency.

John Newman would later write that KGB'er Bruce Solie was running LHO.

Gus Russo would write that G2'ers were somehow involved with LHO in New Orleans. Probably in MC too.

LHO would visit Valery Kostikov, likely KGB wetworks leader, in MC.

I wonder who helped LHO with the Walker shooting? G2'ers?

My take on the Z-film is shots struck Gov. JBC at ~Z-295 and JFK at Z-313. The M-C was a good rifle, and LHO was familiar with guns. (The recent assassination of Kirk, and the just-missed attempt on Trump are clues one doesn't have to be a pro to hit a target at range. The M-C was manufactured to military specs to be accurate to 200 meters).

But LHO could not have fired both those rounds.

So...who were LHO confederates? I don't know.

Question: Where does/did Russo say G2 agents were "somehow involved" with Oswald? I have his two major works - "Brothers in Arms" and "Live by the Sword" - and I can't find him making this. Did he say this elsewhere?

Here is what he wrote in "Live by the Sword." Note all of the qualifiers he has: "If" and "could" and "possibly" and "possible" and "anecdotes."



Nothing in this says that Oswald met with G2 agents or were involved with him in New Orleans. He theorizes - not claims - that Oswald interacted with the anti-Castro exile community and that Cuba had thoroughly infiltrated that community. And from that it's "possible" that Oswald came into contact with those Cuban agents through that infiltration. Again, possibly, could have, maybe. He says similar things about Mexico City. That possibly or maybe or perhaps Oswald met pro-Castro or Cuban agents there. Again, it's all speculative.

Russo's main argument, as I read him, is that these possible connections between Oswald and Cuban agents or pro-Castro people were not adequately investigated after the assassination. Why not? For a mix of reasons - fear that the covert war would be revealed, that the assassination plots and Mob connections would be exposed, that the possible consequences (or rumors) of a Cuban connection would lead to war. But he says these were rumors and claims and allegations and possibilities but nothing proven.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.

I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.

The defectors:
Igor Kochnov (1966);
Oleg Lyalin (1971);
Rudolf Herrmann (1980);
Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1980);
Vladimir Kuzichkin (1984);
Viktor Gundarev (1985);
Vitaliy Yurchenko (1985);
Oleg Gordievskiy (1985);
Vasiliy Mitrokhin (1991);
Oleg Kalugin (2004)

[Tom Graves]

Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.

I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.

Dear Steve M.,

The following is an excerpt from the chapter titled "Lingering Debate" in Pete Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. You can look up the footnotes yourself. Just google "spy wars" and "archive"  simultaneously.

. . . . . . .

After they had decided once and for all that Nosenko genuinely defected and was telling the truth, CIA insiders spread the happy word that they had received “convincing” confirmation from later KGB sources.  “All of the KGB defectors since 1964 — who were in a position to know about the Nosenko case and whose bona fides have been absolutely verified by the CIA — have strongly supported Nosenko,” they told an investigative journalist [Tom Mangold] in the 1980s. They numbered “more than fifteen in all” and were “uniformly incredulous to learn from the Americans that Nosenko was ever doubted.” [1] An official CIA spokesman was later to tell Congress the same story. [2]

Fifteen confirmations might make a convincing case — but not these fifteen. In actuality these sources had not been “in a position to know,” nor were their "bona fides absolutely verified.” Five of them had never mentioned Nosenko at all, and others were not even in the KGB when Nosenko defected. [3] Not one of the fifteen had firsthand knowledge, much less had any of them been in a position to learn of the KGB’s tightly compartmented deception operations. Those who were not lying or fabricating were presumably repeating what they had been told either officially or by corridor gossip — and in fact false accounts were being circulated. Another KGB officer was told that no fewer than “forty colonels” had been bred as a result of Nosenko’s defection — but after reflection and discussion with other officers recognized the story to be false and an intentional plant within the KGB. [4] Three KGB veterans who talked with me after the Cold War seemed to believe these planted tales or rumors because they assumed (wrongly, as later events would show) that the KGB would never use one of its staff officers as a defector. One Illegal, alias “Rudy Herrmann,’’ reported that he had been told to try to find Nosenko in the United States — but he could not know why. (The KGB must have been wondering why Nosenko had dropped off their radar screen.) To label all these sources "absolutely verified bona fide” was grotesque. Suspicions hung over six of the fifteen. [5] If even one of those six was a KGB plant, a skeptic might wonder why the KGB, through that plant, had vouched for Nosenko. There were, outside this list, more authoritative KGB sources, with more direct knowledge. What did they say about Nosenko — especially in the more relaxed conditions after the end of the Cold War? Some said flatly that Nosenko was lying, others inadvertently revealed it by contradicting Nosenko’s stories, and the best-informed felt sure the KGB had planted him on CIA. For example:

• In his 1995 memoirs, Filipp Bobkov, deputy chief of KGB counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate, or SCD) and Nosenko’s boss at the time, twisted the facts and ignored Nosenko’s 1962 meetings with CIA, by then well-known even to the public. He wrote that Nosenko went to Geneva for “serious operational tasks”— not the way the KGB describes delegation watchdogging. The KGB chairman at the time, Vladimir Semichastniy, said Nosenko had been sent to Geneva to work on “some woman” with an aim to recruit her. (Nosenko apparently did not know this.) Semichastniy said Nosenko had been “expelled from every school he attended” and had got into the KGB only with the help of (then deputy) chairman Ivan Serov. (Nosenko did not know this, either; he named a different high-level sponsor, equally unlikely.) [6]

• A later KGB chairman, Vadim Bakatin, along with former KGB foreign-counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin, told the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Nosenko had “exaggerated and lied about his knowledge of Oswald.” [7]

• Oleg Kalugin reported that Nosenko did not serve in the American Department of the SCD in 1960-1961.

• A veteran of the SCD’s American Department at the time said Nosenko had served only one year, from 1952 to 1953, in the American Department. He had performed badly and was shunted off to the non-operational department that handled routine liaison with other Soviet institutions.

• 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 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.
 

[Tom Graves]

Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.

I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.

The defectors:
Igor Kochnov (1966);
Oleg Lyalin (1971);
Rudolf Herrmann (1980);
Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1980);
Vladimir Kuzichkin (1984);
Viktor Gundarev (1985);
Vitaliy Yurchenko (1985);
Oleg Gordievskiy (1985);
Vasiliy Mitrokhin (1991);
Oleg Kalugin (2004)

Dear Steve M.,

Let's start with false-defector Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov), shall we?

-- Tom