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A succinct and authoritative counterpoint to TG's "KGB stuff"

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Lance Payette:
I’ll cheerfully admit, I have no interest in, or patience with, TG’s Boris-and-Natasha Spy vs. Spy KGB Boogeyman posts that I loosely characterize as his “KGB stuff.” For those who share my non-interest, here FWIW is an interesting 15-page article that nicely summaries what it’s all about and how wacky it is:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/JAMES%20J.%20ANGLETON%2C%20ANATOL%5B15725929%5D.pdf

To anyone actually interested in TG’s KGB stuff, this article is surely familiar – but to those who share my non-interest it’s a short, readable and authoritative orientation to the topic. Oddly, Google returns few citations, and I don’t find it discussed on JFKA forums at all.

It was published in the December 2011 edition of Studies In Intelligence, which is a peer-reviewed academic journal on intelligence published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence within the CIA. The journal contains both classified and non-classified articles. Since this was approved for release in 2019, I assume it was originally classified (or perhaps it’s just this version with the reviewer’s annotations and redactions that was classified).

It is entitled “James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitysn, and the ‘Monster Plot’: Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations.” The apt description before the title is, “A Fixation on Moles.”

The author is Barry G. Royden, who worked for the CIA for almost 40 years and was the Director of Counterintelligence from 1998 to 2000. He later taught counterintelligence at the Department of Defense’s Joint Military College. (He's also in the Bradford (CT) Sports Hall of Fame!)

The gist of the piece is that Angleton was possibly even more obsessed with the KGB than TG. Royden explains that Angleton was convinced of a “vast, complex  Communist conspiracy” that had been in operation for decades, with the KGB as a fantastically capable “10 feet tall” Superman, “head and shoulders ahead of the CIA in the intelligence profession,” with its tentacles everywhere, specifically in the form of moles throughout the U.S. and allied intelligence communities. What Angleton called the Communist “Master Plan” came to be derisively referred to as the “Monster Plot” within the CIA by those who saw the damage Angleton’s paranoia had done.

TG will now explain to us (well, not to me, but to those who read his obsessive posts) how Royden was in fact a KGB stooge and how Tenant Bagley (whose book Spy Wars is briefly mentioned in the article) was the real deal. I’m sorry to post this since it will inevitably set TG off on one of his rants, but I did stumble upon it while waiting in Room 247 at Langley for my annual performance review and found it worthwhile.

Tom Graves:

--- Quote from: Lance Payette on January 16, 2026, 04:27:55 PM ---I’ll cheerfully admit, I have no interest in, or patience with, TG’s Boris-and-Natasha Spy vs. Spy KGB Boogeyman posts that I loosely characterize as his “KGB stuff.” For those who share my non-interest, here FWIW is an interesting 15-page article that nicely summaries what it’s all about and how wacky it is:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/JAMES%20J.%20ANGLETON%2C%20ANATOL%5B15725929%5D.pdf

To anyone actually interested in TG’s KGB stuff, this article is surely familiar – but to those who share my non-interest it’s a short, readable and authoritative orientation to the topic. Oddly, Google returns few citations, and I don’t find it discussed on JFKA forums at all.

It was published in the December 2011 edition of Studies In Intelligence, which is a peer-reviewed academic journal on intelligence published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence within the CIA. The journal contains both classified and non-classified articles. Since this was approved for release in 2019, I assume it was originally classified (or perhaps it’s just this version with the reviewer’s annotations and redactions that was classified).

It is entitled “James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitysn, and the ‘Monster Plot’: Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations.” The apt description before the title is, “A Fixation on Moles.”

The author is Barry G. Royden, who worked for the CIA for almost 40 years and was the Director of Counterintelligence from 1998 to 2000. He later taught counterintelligence at the Department of Defense’s Joint Military College. (He's also in the Bradford (CT) Sports Hall of Fame!)

The gist of the piece is that Angleton was possibly even more obsessed with the KGB than TG. Royden explains that Angleton was convinced of a “vast, complex  Communist conspiracy” that had been in operation for decades, with the KGB as a fantastically capable “10 feet tall” Superman, “head and shoulders ahead of the CIA in the intelligence profession,” with its tentacles everywhere, specifically in the form of moles throughout the U.S. and allied intelligence communities. What Angleton called the Communist “Master Plan” came to be derisively referred to as the “Monster Plot” within the CIA by those who saw the damage Angleton’s paranoia had done.

TG will now explain to us (well, not to me, but to those who read his obsessive posts) how Royden was in fact a KGB stooge and how Tenant Bagley (whose book Spy Wars is briefly mentioned in the article) was the real deal. I’m sorry to post this since it will inevitably set TG off on one of his rants, but I did stumble upon it while waiting in Room 247 at Langley for my annual performance review and found it worthwhile.

--- End quote ---

Dear Fancy Pants Rancid,

I will endeavor to enlighten you later (and in a different thread) on the finer points of Royden's par-for-the-course, full-of-misstatements screed.

For now, please be aware that the term "Monster Plot" was coined by a CIA operations officer by the name of John Limond Hart*, who wrote an article titled "The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko" in 1976 and who, in 1978, was delegated by clueless CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner to defend to the HSCA the "bona fides" of putative KGB staff officer and false-defector-in-place-June-1962-in-Geneva / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in January 1964, Yuri Nosenko. Hart did so by avoiding altogether Nosenko's contradictions, palpable lies, and ever-changing stories, and by concentrating instead on how "stupidly" Tennent H. Bagley and his Soviet Russia Division boss, David E. Murphy, had misunderstood Nosenko, and how "sadistically" they had treated the stressed-out, forgetful, hard-drinking and language-challenged "defector." 

Bagley, having resettled in Brussels after his gig as Chief of Station naturally expired there, petitioned G. Robert Blakey to be allowed to rebut Hart's scurrilous charges, and permission was granted.

Here's Bagley's 170-page (40 pages written-in-advance) HSCA testimony, in which "Pete" rips Hart a "new one."

Enjoy!

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

PS The other point I'd like to make right now is that James JESUS Angleton, brilliant though he was counterintelligence-thinking-wise, seems to have had a Father Figure Obsession, as evidenced by the fact that he was duped by both Kim Philby and his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie, in the mole-hunting Office of Security.

It interesting to note that during a long 29 June 1964 meeting, during which Angleton and Murphy were trying to get Golitsyn to resume cooperating with Solie, Angleton said that Solie's office (he was Deputy Chief of the Security Research Staff and Chief of its Research Branch) was the only one in the CIA that he wasn't afraid was penetrated by the KGB.

LOL!

How ironic.

*Hart's wife, Katherine Colvin Hart, was, "ironically," the boss of probable KGB mole Leonard V. McCoy and sketchy Robert Lubbehusen (look him up) in the omniscient and omnipresent Soviet Russia Division's Reports & Requirements section.


-- Tom

Steve M. Galbraith:
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union (and before) we've seen dozens of KGB agents defect to the West, historians/reporters interview other ex-agents and obtain access to Soviet intelligence files, e.g., Mitrokhin, Volgonov et al. To my knowledge *none* of them revealed or found anything resembling some sort of "Master Plan" or plot by the Soviets that entailed, among other things, faking the Sino-Soviet split. There's no there there. The KGB was evil but they weren't ten feet tall. So, what's the evidence of this plan?

As for Oswald and the KGB: Here are 10 KGB defectors (there are more) who told the CIA that the KGB didn't recruit Oswald, that they found him unreliable and of no use. And that Yuri Nosenko was not a false defector but a real one that did enormous damage to their operations.

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)

If you insist these were all triple agents sent by Moscow (even *after* the demise of the USSR?) then what evidence would you accept? You are making an unfalsifiable claim just as those conpiracists who say the CIA killed JFK make unprovable claims. It's remarkably similar. Just switch CIA for KGB or vice versa. The deranged Jim Garrison said you must think in looking at the assassination and the CIA that up is down and down is up. That's how his followers reason. But up isn't down. It's up. And down is down not up. And whether it's the CIA or KGB up is up and down is down.

As to Angleton: He and others in CI were clearly spooked, so to speak, by the successes of the Soviets using "The Trust", when Philby defected, the atomic espionage, and when the Venona intercepts revealed that Moscow had more than 350 agents or assets in the US, some of them in key positions of the government. Good grief, they were all over the place and the success of the Soviets during that period was stunning. At that same time the US had zero, no agents inside the Soviet Union. That's remarkable: 350+ versus 0? That would drive anyone a little paranoid. But he carried it much too far (there's an understatement) and needed to be reined in. And nobody did.

Tom Graves:

--- Quote from: Steve M. Galbraith on January 16, 2026, 09:00:09 PM ---Since the collapse of the Soviet Union we've had dozens of KGB agents defect to the West and historians/reporters interview other ex-agents and obtain access to many of the Soviet intelligence files, e.g., Mitrokhin, Volgonov et al. To my knowledge *none* of them revealed or found anything resembling some sort of "Master Plan" or plot by the Soviets that entailed, among other things, faking the Sino-Soviet split. There's no there there. The KGB was evil but they weren't ten feet tall.

Here are 10 KGB defectors who told the CIA that the KGB didn't recruit Oswald, that they found him unreliable. And that Yuri Nosenko was not a false defector but a real one that did enormous damage to their operations.

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)

If you insist they were all triple agents sent by Moscow then what would you accept? You are making an unfalsifiable claim just as those conpiracists who say the CIA killed JFK make unprovable claims. It's remarkably similar. Just switch CIA for KGB or vice versa. The deranged Jim Garrison said you must think that up is down. That's how his followers think. But up isn't down. It's up. And whether it's the CIA or KGB up is up and not down.

As to Angleton: He was clearly spooked, so to speak, by the successes of the Soviets using "The Trust", when Philby defected, and when the Venona intercepts revealed that Moscow had more than 350 agents or assets in the US, some of them in key positions of the government. At that same time the US had zero, no agents inside the Soviet Union. That's remarkable really: 350 versus 0? That would drive anyone a little paranoid.

--- End quote ---

Dear Steve M.,

Other than Bruce Solie -- who may have recruited an unwitting Oswald for a planned-to-fail mole hunt that would protect him from being uncovered as "Popov's U-2 Mole" -- maybe the KGB-proper didn't recruit the former sharpshooting Marine / self-described Marxist.

Regardless, if you'd only buck up your courage and finally read Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games and "Ghosts of the Spy Wars" by Tennent H. Bagley, PhD (look him up), you'd realize that at the very least, two people on your list -- Kochnov and Yurchenko -- were Kremlin-loyal false defectors, and that the others were either "doomed pilot" types or sketchy in their own right.

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

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

-- Tom

Lance Payette:

--- Quote from: Tom Graves on January 16, 2026, 06:46:17 PM ---Dear Fancy Pants Rancid,

I will endeavor to enlighten you later on the finer points of Royden's par-for-the-course screed.

For now, please be aware that the term "Monster Plot" was coined by a CIA operations officer by the name of John Limond Hart*, who wrote an article titled "The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko" in 1976 ...

--- End quote ---

No, Hart did not coin the term "Monster Plot." Here is his 184-page report: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=219394#relPageId=1.

Quoting from page 6: "[W]e shall for ease of reference from time to time allude to the these regarding KGB operations and intentions - elaborated by Golitsyn and others - as the 'Monster Plot.' In fairness, it must be allowed that this term was in common usage not by the thesis' proponents but by its detractors; yet no other term serves so aptly to capsulize what the theorizers envisaged as a major threat to United States' security."

Moreover, both Hart and his 1976 report are referenced and cited by Royden in his 2011 article, so TG's assumption that I was unaware of Hart simply reveals that TG went into his usual knee-jerk response mode and didn't even look at the Royden article. While Hart was specifically charged with an analysis of the Nosenko case, he notes that he could not resist straying outside those narrow boundaries because the mishandling of Nosenko was symptomatic of the much larger problems Royden later discussed.

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