"LHO's KGB case officer" Yuri Nosenko: False Defector, or Rogue?

[Tom Graves]

We know that putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent to the CIA to discredit what recent defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling the Agency about possible penetrations of our intelligence services and those of our NATO allies.

But we don’t know if Nosenko, who claimed to have been the manager of Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB file in the USSR, was a false physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, or a rogue one who used his putative Oswald “intel” to gain entrance to The Land of Milk and Honey.

In either case, we need to explain how KGB Major Aleksey Kulak, an ostensible informant to the FBI’s NYC field office who “walked in” in broad daylight in early 1962, came to know in early 1964 that Nosenko had recently been promoted from major to lieutenant colonel and that right after recontacting his CIA case officers in Geneva, he’d received a telegram from KGB headquarters ordering him to return immediately to Moscow — which revelation, in combination with his claim to have been Oswald’s case officer, forced CIA’s hands into letting him physically defect to the U.S.

Interestingly, when Nosenko was later confronted with evidence and admitted that he’d lied about those two things, Kulak came up with convoluted excuses for having “verified” them in the first place.

The question remains: Who told Kulak, who was not in contact with Nosenko, to tell those lies?

I suggest that it was a relentless Nosenko-defender in the Soviet Russia Division’s Reports & Requirements section by the name of Leonard V. McCoy. Reading the reports that Nosenko’s case officers sent to headquarters, McCoy would have been privy to the lies Nosenko told them in Geneva in June 1962 and in February 1964, as well.