Was SOLO a Kremlin-loyal triple agent?

[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.


My comment: FBI agent James Nolan's 1977 determination that FEDORA was fake was overturned in 1983 by counterintelligence-hating James Geer with help from a couple of Nosenko-loving / Angleton-and-Golitsyn-hating CIA "researchers" (Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann), provided to him by probable KGB mole, Leonard V. McCoy.

- - - - - - - -

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.

- - - - - - - -

More factoids:

After the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover sent one (or both?) of the Childs brothers to Havana to learn about Oswald’s interactions with Cuban diplomats in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination.

Morris and/or Jack reported back that Castro had told him/them that Oswald had gone to the Cuban Embassy and offered to kill JFK, and that the diplomats had turned him down.

Problem is, Oswald (or an imposter; I'm guessing KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, aka "The Blond Oswald in Mexico City") visited the Cuban Consulate, not the Cuban Embassy, and did so on a Friday (and, according to CIA wiretappers, possibly the next day when it was supposed to be closed), and, supposedly furious that the Cubans wouldn't give him a visa, was thrown out by Consul Eusebio Azcue — but here's the deal -- neither Azcue nor his secretary, Sylvia Duran, said anything to the authorities in Mexico City or Washington about Oswald’s threatening to kill JFK.

- - - - - - - -

In his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Mark Riebling wrote that, having discredited Nicaragua intelligence agent Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte's claim to have seen Oswald accept $6,500 from a "tall, redheaded Negro who spoke with a Cuban accent" at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, but fearing that CIA's preliminary determination regarding KGB officer Valery Kostikov might be true, i.e., that Kostikov, with whom Oswald had met in Mexico City, was a Department 13 officer, the FBI announced that it had uncovered no evidence to suggest that the assassination was a conspiracy.

Riebling: 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.

[Benjamin Cole]

TG--

Great post.

Gus Russo is of the view that LHO acted alone, but was goaded by Cubans and Russians.

However, Russo also said G2'ers had some sort of interaction with LHO in New Orleans (though Russo has not answered my inquiries on this matter).

As is well known, Hoover settled on the LN narrative fairly quickly, and LBJ wanted the LN theory to prevail to avoid any possibility of a war with Russia.

While most of the JFKA crowd has concluded the LN argument was constructed to protect CIA'ers, in fact the closing off of investigations may have suffocated leads into the KGB and G-2 as well, including plants within the CIA (noted by you) and anti-Castro Cubans in the US.

You are echoing Victor Marchetti's concerns: The CIA was so riddled with KGB'ers he was not sure who was running LHO.

G-2 had penetrated most anti-Castro groups.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

TG--

Great post.

Gus Russo is of the view that LHO acted alone, but was goaded by Cubans and Russians.

However, Russo also said G2'ers had some sort of interaction with LHO in New Orleans (though Russo has not answered my inquiries on this matter).

As is well known, Hoover settled on the LN narrative fairly quickly, and LBJ wanted the LN theory to prevail to avoid any possibility of a war with Russia.

While most of the JFKA crowd has concluded the LN argument was constructed to protect CIA'ers, in fact the closing off of investigations may have suffocated leads into the KGB and G-2 as well, including plants within the CIA (noted by you) and anti-Castro Cubans in the US.

You are echoing Victor Marchetti's concerns: The CIA was so riddled with KGB'ers he was not sure who was running LHO.

G-2 had penetrated most anti-Castro groups.

As I mentioned before, I have Russo's two main books on the assassination: "Brothers in Arms" and "Live By the Sword." Nowhere in those two books does he say Oswald had contact with G2ers in New Orleans or that the Russians or Cuban "goaded" Oswald into shooting JFK. Particularly the Russians. He says Oswald *may* - that's an important qualifier - may have had contacts with either Cuban agents or pro-Castro people (two entirely different things) who *may* (another qualifier) have encouraged or inflamed him to shoot JFK; that they *may* have told him about the Kennedys covert war on Cuba, perhaps the assassination plots, and that from this he was driven to shoot JFK in retaliation. But again, Russo says it's all rumors and allegations and possibilities. Maybe, perhaps, possibly. Nothing definitive.

This aptly summarizes his theory (note the qualifiers):


"Either Oswald had found out what the Kennedys were up to [on his own], OR someone loyal to Fidel had so informed him." He doesn't know which of the two happened because for a variety of reasons the "leads" were not fully investigated.

[Tom Graves]

Gus Russo is of the view that LHO acted alone but was goaded by Cubans and Russians.

How does this tie in with my OP?

[Michael T. Griffith]

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.


My comment: FBI agent James Nolan's 1977 determination that FEDORA was fake was overturned in 1983 by counterintelligence-hating James Geer with help from a couple of Nosenko-loving / Angleton-and-Golitsyn-hating CIA "researchers" (Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann), provided to him by probable KGB mole, Leonard V. McCoy.

[SNIP]

Why do you think a fake Oswald called and visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City? Why do you think Oswald pretended to be pro-Castro, while working closely with virulently anti-Castro Cubans? Obviously, he was being framed as a Castro-loving Soviet assassin.

The Soviets and the Cubans were the last people on Earth who had any motive to kill JFK. Khrushchev had grown to like JFK and saw a real possibility for detente with JFK. As Castro rationally and logically explained to the HSCA, he knew that any involvement by his people in any JFK murder plot risked giving American hawks the perfect excuse to topple his regime.

RFK and Jackie both realized immediately that the Soviets had nothing to do with JFK's death, and they sent a private message to the Soviets through a trusted friend to assure them they knew the Soviets had no involvement in JFK's death and that the plot was carried out by JFK's domestic enemies.

The plotters took advantage of Oswald's Soviet and Cuban connections to scare the daylights out of U.S. officials to get them to reject any evidence of conspiracy and to quickly proclaim the lone-gunman scenario. We know that the fear of "40 million dead Americans" in a nuclear war with the Soviets was used repeatedly to intimidate U.S. officials into going along with the cover-up.

[Tom Graves]

The Soviets and the Cubans were the last people on Earth who had any motive to kill JFK. Khrushchev had grown to like JFK and saw a real possibility for detente with JFK.

From Mark Riebling's 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA:

But what would the Soviets possibly gain from Kennedy’s death that would be worth the risk of U.S. retaliation? From a pragmatic Western perspective, there seemed little profit indeed, but James Angleton thought about the problem with more subtlety. First of all, the nuclear age precluded any massive U.S. retaliation — as Johnson’s craven cover-ups of all possible communist connections were already demonstrating. Second, if the Soviets had truly penetrated the Soviet Division at CIA, as Angleton believed, the KGB might even have hoped to steer U.S. investigation of the crime. As for the Soviet motive: Out was Kennedy, a charismatic leader who could “sell” a socially conscious anticommunism in the Third World and even to Western liberals. In was Johnson, who would only “heighten the contradictions” between East and West and therefore hasten (by Leninist dialectical reasoning) the ultimate collapse of late capitalism. Angleton also took seriously the observations marshaled in a November 27 memo by defector Pyotr Deriabin, who cited the Kennedy administration’s opposition to long-term credits to the Soviets, which he said were vital to survival of the USSR. Johnson, by contrast, came from an agricultural state and had always supported grain sales to Russia. Moreover, Western pressure on the USSR “would automatically ease up” if the KGB murdered the president. As evidence, Deriabin noted a “conciliatory telegram” by a frightened and disoriented Lyndon Johnson to Khrushchev. A more amenable America would “strengthen Khrushchev’s hand” at a time when the Soviet leader was under intensifying internal pressures because of mismanagement of the 1963 harvest and disputes with China. Kennedy’s death, as Deriabin put it, thus “effectively diverts the Soviets’ attention from their internal problems. It directly affects Khrushchev’s longevity.” Finally, Deriabin ventured that “the death of President Kennedy, whether a planned operation or not, will serve the most obvious purpose of providing proof of the power and omniscience of the KGB.” Much later, Angleton would obliquely compare the Soviets’ probable motivation to a famous scene in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, in which a Mafia chieftain puts a horse’s head into the bed of a stubborn film producer, in order to demonstrate “pure power.”