The Kremlin assured SOLO that the KGB had nothing to do with LHO!!!

[Tom Graves]

Operation SOLO required a huge expenditure of FBI time, money, and ingenuity. The Bureau had to cut ethical and legal corners, deceive other government agencies, and even facilitate the operations of the CPUSA by transferring Soviet money that enabled the US party to pay its fulltime staff, publish its newspapers, and subsidize travel overseas by its cadres.

— Pro-SOLO Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes in 2022


If you’ve been reading my "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI" Substack posts, you know I’m convinced that Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and George Kisevalter were KGB “moles” at CIA, that putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko and KGB Colonel Vitali Yurchenko were false defectors, that Top Hat (GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov) and Fedora (KGB Major Aleksei Kulak) at the FBI’s NYC field office were Kremlin-loyal triple agents, and that Kitty Hawk (KGB Major Igor Kochnov) was a KGB “dangle.”

What about J. Edgar Hoover’s highly valued “penetrations of CPUSA and the Kremlin,” those two Russian Empire-born brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, collectively known as SOLO? Did they really spy for the Bureau while acting as bagmen and couriers for the Kremlin, or were they, like Nosenko, Kulak, Kochnov, Yurchenko, and (before he flipped abroad to CIA) Polyakov — Kremlin-loyal, too?

On 17 September 1981, NYT columnist William Safire seemed to think it was the latter.

My comments are in brackets.

By 1976, I am informed, the FBI had largely concluded that FEDORA [KGB Major Aleksei Kulak] was not their double agent, but was the Russians’ triple agent -- passing on disinformation to the FBI, and misleading our CIA. In the current Reader’s Digest, Henry Hurt breaks the news of the FBI’s decision to disbelieve FEDORA, dating the decision in 1980 [Tennent H. Bagley says 1977]. We now know (1) that the men in charge of American counterespionage had been hoodwinked for 15 years, and (2) that the FBI had been persuaded that its Soviet source was a phony for the last five years. In 1977 New York agents urged that FEDORA be arrested before slipping back to the Soviet Union; they were overruled. One of these days a story of a similar operation will come out: in SOLO [Morris and Jack Childs] we thought we had two men penetrating the Communist Party apparatus. With one of these triple agents dead and the other dying, we can only surmise the extent of that disinformation operation. With new eyes, we can now look back and change black to white, correcting the disinformation. What were FEDORA and SOLO sent here to mislead us about? The most important use we made of our Soviet spy in New York was to establish the bona fides of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came to us shortly after the Kennedy assassination to assure the CIA that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a Soviet agent. FEDORA told us to believe Mr. Nosenko. For nearly two decades, our CIA has been split between those who distrusted Mr. Nosenko and suspected he was a ‘’plant,” among them James Angleton, and to some extent Richard Helms, and those who believed Mr. Nosenko, including William Colby and Stansfield Turner. In recent years the disbelievers at the Agency were labeled “paranoid” and pushed out, while analysts who embraced Mr. Nosenko were promoted. Mr. Nosenko has been a lecturer at the CIA, teaching counterintelligence to our spies, which the writer Edward Jay Epstein rightly calls ‘’the crowning absurdity.” Here is the significance: if the FBI’s FEDORA tricked us, as the FBI has believed for some years and now quietly admits, then we were systematically misled about Mr. Nosenko. James Angleton was right, and the ‘’new-boy network’‘ at the CIA was horrendously wrong. The other shoe has not dropped. Half the Soviet disinformation plot stands revealed, the other half sits in place. At the CIA, a wholesale reevaluation should be taking place -- not only reversing the verdicts of the past, which assured us that Soviet missiles were not accurate, but to question the judgment of those who were taken in. Former Director Turner’s friends are now spreading the word that the reason he fired a flock of hard-liners in his 1977 purge of realists was somehow connected to an investigation of renegade agents selling terrorist techniques to Libya. [Note: See my article “Angleton on Edwin Wilson, Nosenko, and the Sino-Soviet Split” regarding THAT can of worms.] I think that is part of his cover-up for being suckered by Mr. Nosenko, FEDORA and the disinformation scheme.

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Factoid:

Morris Childs was conveniently in the Kremlin on the day of the JFK assassination, and that night, right after word came in that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested in Dallas, he was told that the KGB had already determined that it had had nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he’d lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

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More factoids:

After the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover sent one of the Childs brothers to Havana to learn about Oswald’s interactions with Cuban diplomats in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination. Morris or Jack reported back that Castro had told him that Oswald had gone to the Cuban Embassy and offered to kill JFK and that the diplomats had turned him down. Problem is, Oswald (allegedly) visited the Cuban Consulate, not the Cuban Embassy. He (or an imposter) allegedly did so on a Friday (and, according to CIA wiretappers, possibly the next day when it was supposed to be closed), and, supposedly angry that he couldn’t get a visa, was thrown out by Consul Eusebio Azcue — but neither Azcue nor his secretary, Sylvia Duran, said anything to the authorities in Mexico City or Washington about Oswald’s threatening to kill JFK.

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In his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Mark Riebling wrote:

That conclusion, reached officially by the FBI on December 9, 1963, had in fact colored the Bureau’s investigation from the start. As Mexico City [FBI] legat Anderson later said, he proceeded at all times under the “impression,” conveyed to him by Bureau headquarters, that Oswald was the sole assassin and not part of any conspiracy. He therefore “tried to stress,” to the skeptical ambassador and to his CIA contacts, “that every bit of information that we had developed in Washington, at Dallas, and elsewhere, indicated that this was a lone job.” That conclusion was bolstered around the turn of the year, when the Bureau sent Jack and Morris Childs, two FBI moles working in the American Communist Party as part of an operation code-named SOLO, to visit the Cuban Embassy. The Childses reported that Oswald had indeed discussed assassination with the Cubans, but that the offer had been turned down. This report matched most FBI agents’ intuitions. Neither the KGB nor its Cuban offshoot, the highly professional DGI, would have hired an unstable loser like Oswald, the Bureau’s reasoning ran. Nor would Castro or Khrushchev have risked U.S. discovery and retaliation — such as an invasion of Cuba, or even world war — merely to replace a liberal like Kennedy with the more conservative Lyndon Johnson. Nor would speculation about a communist role serve either the country or the Bureau well. Therefore, William Sullivan leaked, on what he later said were Hoover’s orders, the news that “An exhaustive FBI report now nearly ready for the White House will indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy.”

. . . . . . . . .

As can be seen in the following FBI memo from A. H. Belmont to W. C. Sullivan on January 1, 1965, the Bureau was desperate to convince CIA that Nosenko was a true defector and that FEDORA was truly spying for it. (Note: "NY 694" was Jack Childs)

Yuri Nosenko defected in Geneva, Switzerland, to the Central Intelligence Agency in January, 1964. This Agency on conducting an exhaustive analysis and interrogation of Nosenko is convinced that he is “a plant” and not a genuine defector from the Soviets to the United States. CIA does make a substantial case to support this conclusion. During the course of CIA's analysis, because of information furnished by our own defector in place, FEDORA, which is quite similar to some information furnished by Nosenko, it was inevitable that the question of FEDORA’s own legitimacy would eventually come up. CIA plans to ultimately present its case to the White House concerning Nosenko, and, therefore, it is imperative to clarify from our standpoint our position that the evidence we have indicates that FEDORA is a legitimate defector and not a plant sent to us by the Soviets. In order to do this, it is necessary to relate FEDORA to information which we have already given CIA in various espionage cases carrying code names of NICKNACK, GUNSON, GLEME, etc. GLEME, a woman Soviet agent, is now dead, and both GUNSON and NICKNACK have returned to Soviet Russia. Further, to show CIA convincingly that FEDORA, as far as we know, is legitimate, we should also refer to NY 694 of our SOLO operation and because FEDORA has furnished us information concerning meetings between NY 694 and a Soviet who provides our informant NY 694 with money for the Communist Party, USA. Judging from what CIA “let drop” over a period of years, it is already aware of the identity of NY 694, although we have never officially advised CIA. As a matter of fact, CIA would have to be a total failure as an intelligence agency not to have identified NY 694, in view of information disseminated and trips which in NY 694 has made to Russia. Because the Nosenko case of CIA will ultimately go to the White House, now is the time to clarify the issue on the FEDORA on our own terms rather than probably being forced to do so later on terms other than our own. Further, this information is very material and important in adjudicating this serious national security case involving Nosenko. The FBI should not be put in a position of withholding material facts from another government agency which has asked FBI assistance in.