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

[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]

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.

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 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 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 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 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. Good grief, they were all over the place. 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. But he carried it much too far (there's an understatement) and needed to be reined in. And nobody did.

[Tom Graves]

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.

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]

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 ...

Poor TG, who is as far into his KGB/TDS ozone as the most rabid Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. Once a virus such as this takes control of one's brain, I fear there is no cure.

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.

TG is the LN counterpart of a gung-ho Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. He doesn't care about reality, only about promoting his KGB stuff and somehow tying it into his TDS stuff. He's a one-dimensional crank. Like an H&L enthusiast, he just says the same things over and over (and over and over) and has the same mantra-like responses every time someone points out that what he says is Flat Earth kind of stuff. Since Royden was the Director of Counterintelligence and had access to materials that will never see the light of day, I'm going with his analysis.

[Tom Graves]

Poor TG, who is as far into his KGB/TDS ozone as the most rabid Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. Once a virus such as this takes control of one's brain, I fear there is no cure.

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.

TG is the LN counterpart of a gung-ho Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. He doesn't care about reality, only about promoting his KGB stuff and somehow tying it into his TDS stuff. He's a one-dimensional crank. Like an H&L enthusiast, he just says the same things over and over (and over and over) and has the same mantra-like responses every time someone points out that what he says is Flat Earth kind of stuff. Since Royden was the Director of Counterintelligence and had access to materials that will never see the light of day, I'm going with his analysis.

Dear Fancy Pants Rancid,

The following is what your bugbear, Tennent H. Bagley, wrote about John L. Hart, his anti-Golitsyn "Monster Plot" report and his pro-Nosenko HSCA testimony.

Read it and weep.

My comments are in brackets.


While paying lip service to the need for vigilance, [CIA Director William] Colby saw counterintelligence mainly as an impediment to intelligence collection. His impatience and disinterest came out in the form of simplification and sarcasm. “I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow [Counterintelligence Staff chief Angleton’s] tortuous theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in the heart of allied and neutral nations and sending its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy. I confess that I couldn’t absorb it, possibly because I did not have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, possibly because Angleton's explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn’t add up to his conclusions. ... I did not suspect Angleton and his staff of engaging in improper activities. I just could not figure out what they were doing at all.” 17

Colby soon got to work reorganizing the Counterintelligence Staff and divesting it of some of its components. Then in 1974 the New York Times exposed the fact that in apparent violation of the Agency’s charter, Angleton’s staff had been checking international mail to and from some left- wing Americans. This gave Colby the ammunition he needed to rid himself of this nuisance. At the end of that year, he demanded Angleton’s resignation and was glad to see Angleton’s chief lieutenants Raymond Rocca, William Hood, and Newton Miler follow him into retirement.

To steer a less troubling course, Colby appointed to head the Counterintelligence Staff George Kalaris, a man without experience in either
counterintelligence or Soviet bloc operations, and, as his deputy, Leonard McCoy, a handler of reports, not an operations officer, who had already
distinguished himself as a fierce advocate for Nosenko.

Now began an extraordinary cleanup inside the Counterintelligence Staff — and the disappearance of evidence against Nosenko. Miler’s carefully accumulated notes on this and related cases were removed from the files and disappeared, along with a unique card file of discrepancies in
Nosenko’s statements. 18

Shortly afterward Colby appointed an officer to review the files anew. John L. Hart [emphasis added] was assisted by four officers. They worked for six months, from June to December 1976. I caught a glimpse of their aims and work methods when Hart came to Europe to interview me. He had not bothered to read what I had written (though he said nothing new had come to light on the question of Nosenko’s bona fides) and seemed interested only in why, eight years earlier, I had warned that bad consequences might flow from Nosenko’s release. I saw that his aim was not to get at the truth but to find a way to clear Nosenko, so I refused to talk further with him.

As I later learned, Hart’s team did not even interview the Counterintelligence Staff officers who had analyzed the case and maintained files
on it for nine years. Among them were two veteran analysts who, having come “cold” to the case, had concluded on their own that Nosenko was a
plant — and had written their reasons.

Hart then wrote a report that affirmed total trust in Nosenko. 19

Having decreed their faith and gotten rid of disbelievers, the CIA leadership banned further debate. One experienced officer in the Soviet Bloc Division — my old colleague Joe Westin, who knew so much about this case — took a late stand against Nosenko’s bona fides. He was told by higher-ups, “If you continue on this course, there will be no room for you in this Division”— and his future promotion was blocked. Peter Deriabin, who kept trying to warn Agency officials about Nosenko, was told to desist or his relations with CIA would be threatened (see Appendix A).

Nosenko’s rescuers then set out to discredit those who had distrusted him. They first labeled them as paranoid (a charge always difficult to refute) and then moved on to distort the record.

One of Nosenko’s now well-placed friends [McCoy] told an investigative reporter [Tom Mangold] that Angleton’s successor Kalaris had made the appalling discovery that the bad Angleton had ticked off the FBI’s Soviet Military Intelligence source code-named "Nicknack” as a provocateur and thus had locked away his important leads to spies abroad. The good Kalaris, said this insider, proceeded to dig out one of those leads and personally carried it to Switzerland, where the Swiss Federal Police quickly identified the spy as a brigadier named Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. They convicted him of betraying military technological secrets to the Soviets. 20

The accusation was pure invention. Angleton was impressed with Nicknack’s leads to spies abroad and had asked William Hood to be sure that
they were acted upon. Hood then — not Kalaris years later— personally carried the Swiss item to Bern.

Other misrepresentations were tacitly abetted. For instance, the new Agency leadership did little to counter Nosenko’s claim that he was drugged. This canard played for years in the media and was allowed to circulate even in the halls of CIA. CIA director Stansfield Turner even hinted that it might be true, although his own subordinates had submitted to Congress — as sworn testimony on his behalf— a list of every medicament ever given to Nosenko, which proved the contrary. As I know, Nosenko was never drugged. 21

The flimsy structure of CIA’s defense of Nosenko was shaken in 1977 when investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein got wind of the Nosenko debate. While researching a book on Lee Harvey Oswald he came upon the fact, until then hidden, that a defector named Nosenko had reported on Oswald and that some CIA veterans questioned that defector’s bona fides. Digging into this potentially explosive subject, Epstein interviewed former CIA director Richard Helms, James Angleton, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and, on Helms’s recommendation, me.

Thus in my retirement did I come back into the debate on Nosenko. I told Epstein some of the things in the preceding chapters. His book, Legend: The Secret Life of Lee Hanley Oswald, came out in 1978.

With its evidence that Nosenko was a KGB plant, the book logically concluded that what he told the Americans about Oswald — though presumably true in its basic message that the Soviets had not commanded Oswald’s act — was a message from the Soviet leadership.

Coincidentally, the U.S. House of Representatives at this point appointed a Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It interviewed Nosenko five times about his knowledge of Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union — and simply could not believe him. In its final report the committee stated flatly, “Nosenko was lying.” 22

Aware of the HSCA’s doubts, and by now committed to a different image of Nosenko, CIA director Turner designated a personal representative to testify. It was none other than the man who had most recently whitewashed Nosenko, John Hart.

Hart spent his entire prepared testimony of an hour and a half defending Nosenko and degrading his own colleagues who had suspected him. He attacked me viciously, to the point of accusing me publicly of contemplating murder, though he knew it was nonsense. 23

To the amazement of the HSCA members the CIA director’s designated representative did not even mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald.
When they asked him why, Hart admitted that he “knew nothing about Oswald’s case but hoped that by explaining misunderstandings within the Agency” and by attesting to Nosenko’s ‘‘general credibility” he could "clear up the committee’s problems with Nosenko” so that “allegations concerning [Nosenko] would go away.”

But the committee’s problem was not with Nosenko, but with what Nosenko had said about Oswald. So, they forced Hart to address this question. Thereupon even he admitted that he found Nosenko’s testimony "incredible,” "hard to believe,” and “doubtful.”

"I am intrigued,” House committee member (later Senator) Christopher Dodd said to Hart, "as to why you limited your remarks to the actions of the CIA and their handling of Nosenko, knowing you are in front of a committee that is investigating the death of a President and an essential part of that investigation has to do with the accused assassin in that case. Why have you neglected to bring up his name at all in your discussion?”

Hart replied that the Agency had asked him to talk “on the Nosenko case” and had accepted his unwillingness to talk about Oswald, of whom he knew nothing. “So,” concluded Dodd, "really what the CIA wanted to do was to send someone up here who wouldn’t talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.” 24

Still, the congressmen could not understand why a CIA officer, acting on the orders of the CIA leadership, would “throw up a smoke screen and get the Agency in the worst possible light as far as the newspapers are concerned.” Why would he attack his own colleagues and create “smashing anti-CIA headlines?” "Puzzled and mystified,” one congressman called “the whole scenario totally unthinkable.” He added, “no one I know in the Agency has come up with any sensible explanation.” 25

While Hart was in the process of attacking his own organization — and me especially — I got a phone call in the middle of the night, European time. “They’re crucifying you, Pete!” cried Yuri Rastvorov, who was watching the HSCA proceedings on C-Span television in the United States. This KGB veteran, who had defected in 1954, was outraged, having learned enough about the Nosenko case to have concluded on his own that Nosenko must be a KGB plant. I thanked him for the warning, went back to bed, and then waited while another friend fast-shipped to me the transcript of Hart’s statement.

Reading this intensely subjective attack and the discussions that followed it, I could sense the committee’s skepticism and wondered why they hadn’t called on me to present my side — all the more when I learned that Helms, in his testimony, had recommended that they do so. Fearing that someone in CIA might be trying to prevent my appearing, I wrote the HSCA subcommittee chairman, Congressman Richardson Preyer, a rebuttal to Hart’s testimony, asking for the opportunity to answer in public what had been a public attack. On the side, suspecting that the subcommittee’s counsel was cooperating to keep me out, I contacted Congressman Preyer directly. Thus, I was finally invited and flew from Europe to testify, pointing out Hart’s untruths and evasions. Though I appeared only in executive (closed) session, Preyer courteously saw to it that my testimony (as “Mr. D. C.”— for “deputy chief’’ of the Soviet Bloc Division) was included in the published record of the hearings.

Now I was back in the debate, though still carrying on my business activities in Europe and writing, with Peter Deriabin, a book on the KGB. In early 1981, when newly elected President Reagan appointed William E. Casey as director of Central Intelligence, I saw it as an opportunity to reopen the case and addressed a long report to him (to which Deriabin contributed what appears in this book as Appendix A). It was judged inadequate to overcome the Agency’s evidence supporting Nosenko.

In 1987, I was interviewed by English playwright Stephen Davies, who was writing a semifictional drama on the Nosenko case. When the him appeared on television the CIA retirees’ association published a review of it in their quarterly newsletter. 26

Neither him nor the reviewer took a position on the basic question — was Nosenko a KGB plant? But to the CIA at that time it was heresy even to leave a wisp of suspicion hanging over the hero of the myth. Leonard McCoy jumped to Nosenko’s defense. In a passionate letter to the editor he lauded Nosenko and attacked the earlier handlers of the case in such splenetic terms that the editor (as he told me) refused to publish it until it had been toned down. McCoy’s letter was full of misstatements, as I pointed out in a rebuttal.

Both Hart and McCoy knew Nosenko personally and had studied the case from positions of direct authority. Hart boasted of his own “standards of scholarship’’ and told Congress that he would never "go beyond the bounds of certainty” nor “extrapolate from facts.” As for McCoy, on whose statements the writer Tom Mangold relied for his book Cold Warrior, Mangold described him as “a mature and meticulous intelligence officer, with an obsession about factual accuracy in all matters.” So, one might expect these two to dismantle any opposing argument point by point, using sure and accurate facts. Instead, both of them twisted the very nature of the affair and concealed major aspects of it. In Hart’s sworn testimony were no fewer than thirty errors, twenty misleading statements, and ten major omissions, and dozens in McCoy’s article. 27

They (and CIA) had made an act of faith, perhaps not the best base for judging a complex counterintelligence question. Hart stated that Nosenko had never intentionally lied— never mind that Nosenko himself had admitted in writing a years-long inability to tell the truth to CIA. McCoy — as deputy head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff — epitomized the Agency’s position by writing that if by any mischance Nosenko had told a few fibs, ” They were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB.” CIA’s deputy director certified this act of faith, making it the Agency’s official position that “there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.’’

Soon after the debate in the CIA retirees’ newsletter, Nosenko and his defenders presented their case to investigative journalist Tom Mangold,
who incorporated it in a book attacking James Angleton as a paranoid. Mangold acknowledged his debt to McCoy, who had “left an indelible imprint on every one of these pages.” 28 His book accurately reflected CIA’s defense of Nosenko and was thus studded with error, omission, misrepresentation, and invention, and colored by emotional bias for Nosenko and against his detractors.

These misstatements congealed into a myth that by its frequent repetition has become conventional wisdom inside and outside CIA. Consecrated by the sworn testimony of high CIA officials, it is treated as serious history. It is a tale of how a band of buffoons and demons— paranoid
“fundamentalists”— tried wickedly and vainly to discredit a shining hero. It has been taught— without the facts on which it is supposedly based— to CIA trainees who, thinking it true, have passed it on to later generations of CIA people. Today, a generation later, one can see it repeated in their memoirs as an “inside” fact.

To create this myth its makers had to do some fancy twisting and inventing. Dismissing massive evidence to the contrary, they asserted that
Nosenko always told the truth. Not only was and is he truthful, but he has been a veritable cornucopia of "pure gold,” vast quantities of valu-
able information. To give substance to this wild claim, the mythmakers resorted to pure invention. They transfigured poor “Andrey” the mechanic, for example, into a code clerk who enabled the Soviets to break America’s top-secret codes and moved dangerously into the code-breaking National Security Agency. They had Nosenko pinpointing fifty-two microphones in the American Embassy, something no one outside the KGB’s technical services could even pretend to do. They gave color to their tales by the breathtaking misstatement that Nosenko told more, and of far greater value, than had the earlier defector Golitsyn. (Golitsyn, this story goes, never uncovered a single spy in the West.)

The mythmakers dismissed onetime suspicions of Nosenko as nothing but the product of potted preconceptions and wild theorizing by since-disgraced colleagues, incompetent and paranoid "fundamentalists.”

The myth makes no mention of the underlying issues: the signs of penetration of American government and ciphers. Its focus, instead, is the pathos of the fate of a stupidly misunderstood, genuine defector who had been cruelly and duplicitously treated — until his saviors came along.

Finally, the mythmakers ridiculed as "nonsense” the idea that the Soviets would mount a deceptive operation of this magnitude— at least, after the first decade or two of Bolshevik rule — and labeled the very idea a delusion of some “monster plot.” As a corollary, the myth asserts— without a trace of evidence — that this paranoia “paralyzed” CIA’s intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.

Because it has become history, the myth’s creation, its details, and the motives of its creators deserve attention (see Appendix B).

This myth enveloped CIA in a warm blanket of complacency (and aversion to “mole hunting”) that later contributed to the Agency’s long failure to deal effectively with even more glaring evidence of treason in its midst — that of Aldrich Ames.


-- Tom

PS:  You can look up the footnotes yourself.

It will be good for you.

https://archive.org/stream/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/Spy%20Wars%20-%20Moles%2C%20Mysteries%2C%20and%20Deadly%20Games_djvu.tx