A plethora of "misstatements" by Fancy Pants' hero, Barry Royden

[Tom Graves]

There's a you-know-what load of lies (or "misstatements") by Fancy Pants Lance's hero, Barry Royden, in his anti-Golitsyn / pro-Nosenko "Monster Plot" screed that FPR posted on my other thread.

I might as well start off with one I found on page 9 (there are oodles and gob of other lies -- or "misstatements" if you prefer -- before this one).

My comments are in brackets.

Tennent “Pete" Bagley was one of two case officers who debriefed Nosenko in Geneva [the other was a probable mole, Russia-born George Kisevalter]. Bagley reportedly believed Nosenko was a legitimate volunteer until Angleton, using information from Golitsyn, convinced him that Nosenko had to be a provocation.[7] [7]That he ever believed in Nosenko as a genuine defector is an assertion Bagley vigorously denied in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2007).

My comment:

At no point in Spy Wars does Bagley deny (much less vigorously deny) that he originally thought Nosenko was a true defector.

In fact, this is what he wrote on page 9:

When the door closed behind Yuri Nosenko [after the first 1962 meeting], I hardly caught my breath before jotting notes on highlights and my initial impressions for a priority cable to Headquarters. It would go with an extra code word to limit its distribution there. This affair was promising enough to merit special security precautions. First, I noted, Nosenko gave every indication that he was really a KGB officer. Only an insider could have spoken so easily about secret Soviet places, KGB people unknown to the general public, and secret operations like Popov. This, to me, seemed to establish his bona fides. Second, he had not yet indicated any significant interest in or access to military or political information. I would mention some of the specifics Nosenko had reported and close with the suggestion that Headquarters pack a more fluent Russian speaker [Kisevalter] onto the next flight to Geneva. At no time had we had the slightest communication problem; he never had trouble finding words and never had to ask me to repeat anything. But I did not want to risk losing nuances when he slipped into Russian.

Regarding the same issue, this is what Bagley wrote on page 17:

"We never managed to recruit any American code clerk,” Nosenko said [during the second meeting]. “The closest we ever came was ‘Andrey.’” He was referring to the cipher machine mechanic whom he had mentioned in our first meeting. Kisevalter remembered that CIA’s first representative in Moscow, years before, had reported that the KGB tried to recruit him. He asked Nosenko, "Do you know about the approach to Ed Smith?” "Sure,” he responded without hesitation, "I even took part in it. We gave him the code name ‘Ryzhiy’ [Redhead].” He paused and chuckled. “We used to call him ‘Ryzhiy Khui.’” Turning to me he translated (unnecessarily in this case), “red-headed prick. He went to bed with his Russian maid, our agent, and we staged a scene that made it look like a criminal offense. You know.” Yes, we knew. The KGB did not always use the classical approach of presenting, after the event, clandestinely taken pictures or films that would compromise a marriage or a career. Sometimes, for shock effect, an indignant “husband” (or wife) or local authorities would break into the love nest at a key moment and threaten punishment under Soviet laws. A benevolent “uncle” might appear in time to smooth things out with the law — if the Westerner would demonstrate his friendship toward his hosts. We waited, expectantly. “Well,” Nosenko shrugged, “nothing doing. Ryzhiy refused, reported it to the ambassador, and was pulled back to the States. Case closed.” This squared with what Kisevalter knew and testified once again to Nosenko’s inside knowledge and authority. He grew further in our esteem.


And regarding Royden's insinuation that Angleton convinced Bagley that Nosenko was fake, the following is what Bagley wrote on pages 22–28. As you can see, Bagley convinced Angleton that Nosenko was fake, not the other way around.

"[At CIA headquarters a couple of days later, Soviet Russia Division Chief Jack Maury said,] “Before you leave, Pete, you’ll want to look into some new information we’ve got. There’s been an important defection from the KGB. He’s here in Washington.” This was Anatoly Golitsyn, the KGB officer whose name Nosenko had tossed at me on the balcony in Geneva. He had defected to CIA in Helsinki six months before Nosenko had walked in. “And do check in with Jim Angleton. He’s aware of Nosenko’s contact with us but he’ll want to have your details. He has all the Golitsyn data, too. You could read that here, but you might as well get it from Jim.” James Angleton, chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, was not above an occasional bit of drama, but his office was less a stage setting than it appeared. The drawn Venetian blinds covering the wide windows behind his desk were a shield against the summer sun and not a dramatic artifact. A table lamp on the long oak desk provided the necessary light. A pile of thick hies on each end of the desk framed the scene. Angleton’s bony thinness emphasized his sharp-hewn features. With his piercing eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, and his large, expressive mouth, it was not hard to understand why one of CIA’s early leaders, thinking about a design for the new intelligence agency’s official seal, pointed at Angleton and exclaimed "Hah! I have it! That face!” In the event, other designs prevailed for the seal, but Angleton’s striking appearance, his habit of rather formal dress in dark colors, the air of mastery of recondite matters that hung about him, and the quick mind with which he absorbed and synthesized facts into complex perceptions embodied CIA counterintelligence of that time. Angleton and I had built a relationship of friendly mutual trust during the years when I had supervised operations against Polish Intelligence. There had been the long, Martini-eased lunches for which he was well known, and dinner parties. Charades were often played in those days, and I still remember the desperate antics of one guest trying to convey an obscure line from Jim’s favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, “clot the bedded axle tree.” Jim had a select inner circle of friends, including Dick Helms and other veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that he had served in its counterintelligence branch, X-2. That I was among them despite my relatively recent arrival on the CIA scene I owed to a warm introduction years earlier by William Hood, who had been my boss in CIA’s Vienna Station in the early 1950s. Hood cared deeply for the counterintelligence aspect of American Intelligence-handling its clandestine operations with realistic appreciation of the hazards, while exploiting the openings offered by the clandestine work of our adversaries. In Vienna he had recognized and fostered my interest in this field and brought me into this personal relationship with the otherwise closeted and very busy counterintelligence staff chief. My confident relations with Angleton were to play a role in what was to come. It was no small matter at the CIA to get the attention of the right senior officers to the right matters. Jim listened with evident interest to my account of the meetings with Nosenko and was upbeat about the possibilities. All the while his attention seemed fixed on penciling an elaborate geometric design on notepaper. As I finished, Jim dropped his pencil into his out-tray, glanced approvingly at his completed doodle, tore it to bits, and dropped the remains in the classified trash box at the corner of his desk. He reinforced Maury’s suggestion that for future meetings with Nosenko I would do well to take aboard the Golitsyn data. Jim summoned Bertha, nominally his secretary but in actuality his de facto office manager and personal assistant, handed me an armload of files, and asked her to take me across the hallway to what he referred to as the counterintelligence conference room, where I could study the new defector’s reports in complete privacy. Conference room, indeed. It was windowless, with barely space for the worn table and six government-issue, straight-back chairs. I suspected that before its christening as a conference room it had been a comfortable closet. The fascinating sweep and detail of Golitsyn’s revelations offset the absent creature comfort. My hours there were, as Maury and Angleton had foreseen, an essential background for any future Nosenko meetings. But the reports were also unsettling. They contained repeated references to incidents and operations that Nosenko had just described in Geneva. Reading one after another I began to feel uneasy. I knew from experience that any two colleagues working in different sections of an intelligence service might glean knowledge of the same secret operations. But it stretched coincidence that two officers from such separated elements of the KGB would both know of so many, especially of a kind unlikely to be widely known within a service as tightly disciplined as the KGB. It seemed even more of a coincidence that one of these overlapping sources arrived almost on the heels of the other. And strikingly, and all too often, Nosenko’s versions differed from Golitsyn’s with the effect of dismissing or diverting suspicions that the earlier reports had evoked. Golitsyn was the first source to reveal — five years after the fact — Vladislav Kovshuk’s trip, the same trip that Nosenko had described at our first meeting. Had it been known at the time that the chief of KGB operations against the American Embassy in Moscow had traveled to Washington, the question would have screamed— as it still did— “Why?” It seemed more than fortuitous that shortly after Golitsyn’s revelation, Kovshuk’s deputy Nosenko had come and explained that long-ago trip — authoritatively, but in a banal, almost benign light. Concerning the KGB discovery of CIA’s contact with Pyotr Popov, Golitsyn’s version did not square with Nosenko’s. Golitsyn placed it so much earlier that it could not have resulted from the KGB’s chance surveillance of a diplomat [George Winters] mailing a letter in Moscow. Here, too, in these files was the KGB recruitment of the British naval attaché office member in Moscow. Golitsyn in KGB Headquarters had been handling reports from spies in NATO, and among these papers were secret documents from that office. So accurately had he described them after his defection that already, according to a note in this file, the British were on the heels of the traitor, having narrowed their list of suspects to three. Nosenko had given us something we were about to learn anyway. There were many more similarities. Golitsyn reported that a certain Canadian ambassador had been recruited. Nosenko reported the same case. Golitsyn, while in Vienna, had known that Gribanov came there to meet an agent, a French businessman. The French had identified him as Frangois Saar Demichel— whom Nosenko had just named to us. Golitsyn had studied the hie of the KGB’s double agent case against CIA using Soviet radio journalist Boris Belitsky. Golitsyn would have had to sign, per KGB regulations, for accessing it, and after his defection KGB investigators dredged up any such hies. Quite a coincidence that a few months later an unidentified KGB man in Geneva is seized by such a fit of indiscretion that he tells Nosenko, a visiting delegation watchdog, about that tightly held operation. All in all, this was hard to believe. Even more striking was the next coincidence, fact for fact. Golitsyn recounted a visit to his KGB residency in Helsinki by Gennady Gryaznov, a KGB officer from Moscow who was targeting the American Embassy there. To facilitate his development for recruitment of an American code clerk (unnamed), Gryaznov wanted to borrow an agent. Because the American Embassy restricted socialization between its code clerks and Russians, he knew that this Finn agent, a businessman who traveled occasionally to Moscow, could more easily make friends with the American target. Golitsyn agreed and lent Moscow the agent — a certain Preisfreund. Preisfreund? That’s an unusual name for a Finn, and easy to remember. Nosenko not only had met Preisfreund but had made a drinking buddy of him in Moscow, the only such foreign friend Nosenko had mentioned. In Geneva he had recounted the same operation against the code clerk, whom he named (and whom I here call “Will”). It was only on the outcome of the venture that Golitsyn and Nosenko differed. Gryaznov later told Golitsyn that the KGB’s attempt succeeded. But Nosenko reported— having been personally involved and supervising Gryaznov — that the operation had failed. Of course, I thought, Gryaznov may have simply been exaggerating or inventing to impress his colleague Golitsyn. But even so, the coincidence of such parallel reporting by two volunteer sources from widely separated elements of the KGB was enough to stir an ugly question. On top of all that: I now saw that what I had thought to be Nosenko’s unique and fresh information about KGB operations against tourists in the USSR had already been exposed. Golitsyn had reported in great detail on this subject, having had on-the-job training in early 1959 in the Second Chief Directorate’s Tourist Department and long talks with an officer of the department. In addition, Golitsyn had received at his rezidentura in Helsinki a KGB Moscow study dated 7 April 1961 detailing its work against foreign visitors to the USSR — and had given CIA a copy. It was in that tiny room, poring over thick files and busily penciling page after page of notes on a lined yellow pad, that doubts began to arise that had not occurred to me in Geneva. Might the KGB have sent Nosenko to CIA to divert Golitsyn’s leads? On the face of it, that seemed hardly conceivable. The Soviet bloc counterintelligence services had been sending scores of false refugees to the West to mislead us, but never in the KGB’s forty-five years — at least, to my knowledge — had they sent one directly out of their own halls. To do that, I thought, they must have powerful reasons. Deception is risky: if the intended dupe recognizes it he may ask himself why the opposition went to such a bother, and may perceive the truth it was designed to hide.

The morning after my final night of study, after long reflection that had left me little sleep, I went back to Angleton. "Thanks, Jim. You were right. I needed this information. But at the same time, I’ve got to tell you something. We may have a problem.” I told him about the curious coincidences and persistent overlapping of the two men’s reports. Jim frowned, thought for a moment, shook his head and said, “Please jot down these points for me. I want to look carefully at this.” The next day I gave Bertha an envelope with my handwritten list of the most significant fourteen points of parallel reporting. I could have listed more, but it did not seem worth mentioning the many events and people that both sources had reported but that any two KGB officers could be expected to know. That afternoon Jim called me back to his office. “You may be on to something here,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Golitsyn himself said he expected the KGB to make some effort to divert the leads he could give us. Maybe that’s what we’ve got on our hands now.”

We agreed that there wasn’t enough data to make a case and that Nosenko was to be handled as if there were no doubts.“Just leave this with me,” Jim said. “We can look deeper into it when you come on duty this fall.” He shook his head and added, "Pity. You’d be in for a medal for this, but that wouldn’t be appropriate in this new light, would it?” Indeed it would not. I shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.” Jim tossed another pencil aside and stood to shake hands. "Meanwhile, let’s not tell anyone else about this problem.” "I have to tell Jack,” I said. "Of course.” Jack Maury had too many other operations on his mind to have absorbed the details of Golitsyn’s reporting and he cared little about the practices of Soviet counterintelligence. I painted the picture for him, but because it was too early to ring alarm bells I closed on a high note. "What the hell, there’s probably some innocent explanation. We should be able to clear it up next time we meet Nosenko.” "Good.” Jack seemed relieved. Like many other senior officers, he disliked dealing with the minutiae of counterintelligence and viewed them as time-wasting impediments to what he considered a different and higher priority, the task of collecting "positive” intelligence. He was happy to let me cope with those details. "Okay, you work it out with Jim and we’ll go on handling the case as if it’s straight. George seems to be happy with it. If he should mention any doubts of his own, I'll let you know.”


https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

[Tom Graves]

"Conspiracy theories can be terrifyingly effective at ensnaring anyone with OCD symptoms or obsessive tendencies. Conspiracies take advantage of a number of different patterns of thinking: relational framing, narrative psychology, apophenia, explanation-seeking, and experiential learning. And once they get in your head, they quickly become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. These patterns are tricky to escape."

Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/triggered/202101/ocd-and-qanon-the-obsessive-appeal-conspiracy-theories.

Alas for OCD/TDS Tom, Royden served nearly 40 years with the CIA, was Director of Counterintelligence, and taught counterintelligence at the Joint Military College of the Department of Defense.

Alas for OCD/TDS Tom, Royden's article was published in Studies In Intelligence,, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the CIA-affiliated Center for the Study of Intelligence (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/) and that serves as "the US Intelligence Community's professional journal," publishing pieces by "intelligence experts and scholars throughout the world." What I linked was not declassified until 2019. It was not a popular-level, hope-this-sells-and-makes-me-some-money-in-my-old-age grudge-settling fluff piece.

"Screed," indeed.

Tennent Bagley, not so much. His once-meteroic career stalled and he took "early retirement" (wink wink) at age 46 in 1972 precisely because his perspective on Nosenko and obsession with moles was deemed "just a bit" off-kilter. All of this, of course, makes him the voice of authority to OCD/TDS Tom, who occupies that curious end of the human psychology spectrum where white is black, truths are lies, up is down, speculation is fact - and the more preposterous a conspiracy theory is, the more likely it is to be true by virtue of its very preposterousness.

OCD/TDS Tom is, of course, the ultimate JFKA ideologue. Such is his TDS that he needs - NEEDS - his KGB stuff to be true in order to explain the rise of The Donald. This is true even though, even if the KGB stuff were true, it would not even vaguely explain The Donald. Indeed, OCD/TDS Tom's efforts to connect his KGB stuff to his TDS stuff are the most preposterous aspects of his theory.

As predicted in my original post, I have triggered OCD/TDS Tom. My folly, I suppose, but perhaps some of you had not seen Royden's piece.

Dear FPR,

It's clear to me that you don't have the "gonads" to actually read honored-by-CIA Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars, or even his 2014 follow--up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," or ... gasp ... even my Wikipedia article on him (which you or any other "useful idiot" can try to permanently edit).

Perhaps your wife told you not to? (wink-wink)

-- Tom

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennent_H._Bagley

[Tom Graves]

[...]

Dear Fancy Pants Rants,

Some quick, “tip of the iceberg,” points:

1) The position of Deputy Chief of the Soviet Russia Division (in all its incarnations) was a two-year one for everybody, ergo, Bagley's tenure there was planned-in-advance to end when it did. Furthermore, he chose to be Chief of Station in Brussels when that time came.

2) Regarding the fact that Bagley was once considered to be a possible “mole” by one person in the Agency, the following is what Angleton-and-Golitsyn-hating David Wise wrote in his 1992 book, Molehunt, about that allegation.

My comments are in brackets.

Early in 1967, Bagley, then the Deputy Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, was offered the post of Chief of Station in Brussels. By September, he was in place. Bagley's exit was soon followed by David Murphy's departure for Paris. But no one was safe from the suspicion pervading the CIA. Now, Bagley himself became a target of Angleton’s mole hunters. Ed Petty, a member of the SIG [Angleton’s Special Investigation Group] began digging into his background. Petty fastened on an episode that had taken place years earlier, when Bagley had been stationed in Bern, handling Soviet operations in the Swiss capital. At the time, Bagley was attempting to recruit an officer of the UBC, the Polish intelligence service, in Switzerland. Petty concluded that a phrase in a letter from Michal Goleniewski, the Polish intelligence officer who called himself Sniper and who later defected to the CIA, suggested that “two weeks after approval of the operation by headquarters,” the KGB had advanced knowledge of the Swiss recruitment attempt --  the advance knowledge that could only have come from a mole in the CIA. Bagley said it proved nothing of the sort. “I was running the correspondence phase of Sniper in Switzerland,” he said. “We wrote a letter to a Polish security officer when I was in Bern station.” The letter, an attempt to recruit the Pole to work for the CIA, “mentioned the man's boss. Sometime later, Goleniewski wrote again, mentioning the name of the UB chief in Bern, “whose name you already know,” which meant that Goleniewski knew of our letter. But that doesn't mean that there was a mole in CIA. It means the target turned the letter into his service and our guy [Sniper] was high up enough to know about it.” Bagley said that Petty had interpreted the episode to mean that “the UB knew of the recruitment attempt in advance, which is quite different.” Petty, nevertheless, wrote an analysis of the Swiss recruitment episode, and of Bagley’s file, and concluded that “Bagley was a candidate to whom we should pay serious attention.” The study gave Bagley the cryptonym GIRAFFE. Petty said he submitted his paper “with some trepidation” because “I was well aware that Bagley had long been a protégé of Jim Angleton. Petty turned in his report to James Ramsay Hunt, Angleton’s deputy. “Hunt said, ‘This is the best thing I've seen yet.’” But, Petty added, he heard nothing from Angleton. “The Bagley report stewed in Angleton's inbox for a considerable time,” Petty said. “Then one day he called me in to discuss the Nosenko case. He brought up some of the points in Bagley's 900-plus-page [sic; 835-page] study. “And I said, ‘If there is a penetration [there probably was – Bruce Solie and/or Leonard V. McCoy], then Nosenko could not have been genuine.’” A mole in the CIA, Petty argued, would have told the KGB of Nosenko’s initial contact with the agency in 1962, and, Nosenko, had he been a true asset, would never have come back in 1964. “I said to him, ‘You don't need all these points in Bagleys 900-pager -- it's much simpler than that.” “Angleton sat there and mulled this point over for some time. Then he said to me, ‘Pete is not a Soviet spy.’” At that moment, Petty saw the light, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It suddenly hit him; not Bagley but Angleton himself was the mole. “I was flabbergasted,” Petty said. “Because the subject of my paper about Pete had not arisen. It was at that point that I decided I'd been looking at it all wrong by assuming Golitsyn was good as gold. I began rethinking everything. If you turned the flip side, it all made sense. Golitsyn was sent to exploit Angleton. Then the next step, maybe not just an exploitation, and I had to extend it to Angleton. Golitsyn might have been dispatched as the perfect man to manipulate Angleton or provide Angleton with material on the basis of which he [Angleton] could penetrate and control other services.” [Either that, or Petty was all wet, and the mole was father-figure-requiring Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the mole-hunting Office of Security, Bruce Leonard Solie -- look him up.]

3) Regarding your hero, John L. Hart, read his lie-filled HSCA testimony and then read Bagley’s in which he rips Hart the proverbial new one.

4) It’s funny how far-right you and far-left Mike Clark (you can look up his posts on this forum) both denigrate Bagley’s character. You because you're secretly scared to death that KGB-trained-but-fascistic Vladimir Putin may have installed your fascistic buddy, The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") in 2017 and 2025. Smith because Bagley knew that Yuri “The KGB Had Nothing To Do With Oswald In The USSR” Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place-in-Geneva-in-June-1962 and a false (or perhaps rogue?) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.

5) I'm happy to see that you finally bucked up enough courage to read my Wikipedia article on Tennent H. Bagley. Feel free to permanently edit it if you can.

6) You really should start saving your money up so you can afford to pay Substack six bucks a month because then you'll be able to read my 500 free-to-read articles there -- two very recent ones of which are titled "The Convulsive Dance of Fancy Pants Lance" and "FPR 'discredits' Golitsyn's warnings re KGB's 1959-on Master Plan."

That's all for now, FPR, but be forewarned that the above list is subject to expansion after I'd had a cup of coffee . . .

-- Tom

[Tom Graves]

I doubt that FPR has "the gonads" to try to debunk anything I've written or copied-and-pasted in my most recent post on this thread.

But maybe he will.

If his wife lets him.

And, of course, only after he's gotten "the straight skinny" from the likes of Tom Mangold, David Wise, Cleveland Cram, Richards J. Heuer, Jefferson Morley, John L. Hart, George Kisevalter, Leonard V. McCoy, and Jim DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam.

EDIT:

Well, it's been a couple of hours and there's no sign of FPR, so I guess I go ahead with my next installment

Here’s a column that’s chock-a-bock full of Royden’s “misstatements." (It’s interesting to note that the whole column to the left of it is redacted.)

My comments are in brackets.


Nosenko’s Ordeal

By the summer of 1964, Nosenko situation had dramatically worsened. He was held a virtual prisoner in the Washington area while continuous efforts were made to convince him to “confess” his KGB role. In August 1965, Nosenko was moved to [deleted] where he remained until October 1967 in near total isolation.

In December 1965, the first protest of his treatment came from senior Soviet Bloc Division Reports Officer Leonard McCoy, who had been given access to Nosenko materials [Tennent H. Bagley’s thick file on Nosenko was loaned to McCoy by Division Chief David E. Murphy for a few days so that he could come to realize the threat that Nosenko and others posed to the CIA. Murphy did this after reading McCoy’s report about his recent meeting with Kremlin-loyal Aleksei Kulak -- J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA – in which it was obvious to him that McCoy had believed everything Kulak had told him], concluded that Nosenko was a valid defector. McCoy then wrote a 31-page paper in which he detailed the unique value of the counterintelligence information Nosenko had provided, which stood in contrast to many of Golitsyn's vague leads. He also strongly attacked the analysis by which Nosenko had been judged. SB Division Chief Murphy rejected McCoy’s paper, but McCoy jumped the chain of command and in April 1967 sent a memo directly to Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Helms making his case that Nosenko was a valid defector. In October 1967, based on the recommendation of DDCI Admiral Rufus Taylor (and possibly as a result of McCoy's memo to the DCI) Nosenko was turned over to the Office of Security [i.e., probable mole Bruce Solie, who was Deputy Chief of its Security Research Staff] for handling. OS [Solie] immediately removed him from solitary confinement and through August 1968 conducted its own polygraph examinations [sic; examination, singular –- one of the worst ones that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen, according to what he told the HSCA in 1978], which concluded that Nosenko had been substantially truthful on all relevant questions. In September 1968 the FBI concluded after its own interrogations of Nosenko and collateral inquiries that there were no indications of deception by Nosenko and no good reason to doubt his bona fides. Finally, in October 1968, OS officer Bruce Solie [see above] wrote a [long, lie-filled] memorandum which concluded that Nosenko was the person he claimed to be, that he served in the KGB in the positions that he claimed to serve, and that he was not dispatched by the KGB [possibly true, because although he was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, he may have been a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964], and that previous inconsistencies in his debriefings were not of material significance. [blatant lie] The OS report went on to cite voluminous valuable counterintelligence information Nosenko provided. [blatant lie] This included information on some 2000 [2000??] KGB officers and 300 [300??] KGB agents or contacts, some of whom he accurately identified as us the British citizens recruited by the KGB. [Bagley points out in Spy Wars that neither Nosenko nor any of the other false defectors or KGB-loyal "volunteers" betrayed anyone who wasn't either already suspected or still had access to classified information]

Angleton never accepted Nosenko’s rehabilitation. In January 1969 he continued to insist that Nosenko was a provocation, since to judge otherwise would have repudiated Golitsyn, “a proven reliable KGB source.” [That’s not why Angleton believed Nosenko was a false defector – He believed it for several other counterintelligence reasons] Nosenko died in August 2008. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, he had lived under an assumed name [George Martin Rosnek]. The obituary asserted that in 1975 he found Angleton's telephone number and called him; the conversation apparently led nowhere. [correct] 

Golitsyn’s Slide into Irrelevance

After his involvement in the HONETOL investigations [which commission had six members, one of whom was Solie], Golitsyn became increasingly removed from operational activities. In July 1965, the FBI broke off all contact with him. [J. Edgar Hoover always hated him because what he said made the FBI look incompetent] From then on, Golitsyn became immersed in writing books with his analysis of Soviet government behavior and goals and what he thought the West needed to do to defend itself. For the most part, he withdrew from contact with CIA or other intelligence services. He has produced two books that maintain his conspiracy and deception theories. A Facebook page is kept in his name; 38 people have “liked” the page as of the end of 2011. [Point being?]

[Tom Graves]

I doubt that FPR has "the gonads" to try to debunk anything I've written or copied-and-pasted in my most recent post on this thread.

But maybe he will.

If his wife lets him.

And, of course, only after he's gotten "the straight skinny" from the likes of Tom Mangold, David Wise, Cleveland Cram, Richards J. Heuer, Jefferson Morley, John L. Hart, George Kisevalter, Leonard V. McCoy, and Jim DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam.

EDIT:

Well, it's been a couple of hours and there's no sign of FPR, so I guess I go ahead with my next installment

Here’s a column that’s chock-a-bock full of Royden’s “misstatements." (It’s interesting to note that the whole column to the left of it is redacted.)

My comments are in brackets.


Nosenko’s Ordeal

By the summer of 1964, Nosenko situation had dramatically worsened. He was held a virtual prisoner in the Washington area while continuous efforts were made to convince him to “confess” his KGB role. In August 1965, Nosenko was moved to [deleted] where he remained until October 1967 in near total isolation.

In December 1965, the first protest of his treatment came from senior Soviet Bloc Division Reports Officer Leonard McCoy, who had been given access to Nosenko materials [Tennent H. Bagley’s thick file on Nosenko was loaned to McCoy by Division Chief David E. Murphy for a few days so that he could come to realize the threat that Nosenko and others posed to the CIA. Murphy did this after reading McCoy’s report about his recent meeting with Kremlin-loyal Aleksei Kulak -- J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA – in which it was obvious to him that McCoy had believed everything Kulak had told him], concluded that Nosenko was a valid defector. McCoy then wrote a 31-page paper in which he detailed the unique value of the counterintelligence information Nosenko had provided, which stood in contrast to many of Golitsyn's vague leads. He also strongly attacked the analysis by which Nosenko had been judged. SB Division Chief Murphy rejected McCoy’s paper, but McCoy jumped the chain of command and in April 1967 sent a memo directly to Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Helms making his case that Nosenko was a valid defector. In October 1967, based on the recommendation of DDCI Admiral Rufus Taylor (and possibly as a result of McCoy's memo to the DCI) Nosenko was turned over to the Office of Security [i.e., probable mole Bruce Solie, who was Deputy Chief of its Security Research Staff] for handling. OS [Solie] immediately removed him from solitary confinement and through August 1968 conducted its own polygraph examinations [sic; examination, singular –- one of the worst ones that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen, according to what he told the HSCA in 1978], which concluded that Nosenko had been substantially truthful on all relevant questions. In September 1968 the FBI concluded after its own interrogations of Nosenko and collateral inquiries that there were no indications of deception by Nosenko and no good reason to doubt his bona fides. Finally, in October 1968, OS officer Bruce Solie [see above] wrote a [long, lie-filled] memorandum which concluded that Nosenko was the person he claimed to be, that he served in the KGB in the positions that he claimed to serve, and that he was not dispatched by the KGB [possibly true, because although he was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, he may have been a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964], and that previous inconsistencies in his debriefings were not of material significance. [blatant lie] The OS report went on to cite voluminous valuable counterintelligence information Nosenko provided. [blatant lie] This included information on some 2000 [2000??] KGB officers and 300 [300??] KGB agents or contacts, some of whom he accurately identified as us the British citizens recruited by the KGB. [Bagley points out in Spy Wars that neither Nosenko nor any of the other false defectors or KGB-loyal "volunteers" betrayed anyone who wasn't either already suspected or still had access to classified information]

Angleton never accepted Nosenko’s rehabilitation. In January 1969 he continued to insist that Nosenko was a provocation, since to judge otherwise would have repudiated Golitsyn, “a proven reliable KGB source.” [That’s not why Angleton believed Nosenko was a false defector – He believed it for several other counterintelligence reasons] Nosenko died in August 2008. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, he had lived under an assumed name [George Martin Rosnek]. The obituary asserted that in 1975 he found Angleton's telephone number and called him; the conversation apparently led nowhere. [correct] 

Golitsyn’s Slide into Irrelevance

After his involvement in the HONETOL investigations [which commission had six members, one of whom was Solie], Golitsyn became increasingly removed from operational activities. In July 1965, the FBI broke off all contact with him. [J. Edgar Hoover always hated him because what he said made the FBI look incompetent] From then on, Golitsyn became immersed in writing books with his analysis of Soviet government behavior and goals and what he thought the West needed to do to defend itself. For the most part, he withdrew from contact with CIA or other intelligence services. He has produced two books that maintain his conspiracy and deception theories. A Facebook page is kept in his name; 38 people have “liked” the page as of the end of 2011. [Point being?]

Fancy Pants Rants is back!

[Tom Graves]

Your Honor, may the record reflect that the learned counsel for Mr. Bagley just used the term "straight skinny" in the same sentence with names like Jefferson Morley and Jim DiEugenio? If Your Honor will permit, may the court reporter be permitted to use emojis - to wit:  - in the official transcript? Thank you, Your Honor.

My client confesses to being somewhat confused by learned counsel's inclusion of John L. Hart as a purveyor of the straight skinny since one might have thought learned counsel would regard him as a purveyor of non-straight non-skinny, or whatever the correct term may be. But whatever, Your Honor, we have no objection. May the record reflect that the name Cleveland Cram - whoever he was - strikes my client as a bit of a hoot as well? Thank you, Your Honor.

Yes, Your Honor, my client is fully aware of Leonard "Bones" McCoy. Beam us up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life here, etc., etc. Learned counsel's inclusion of Bones in the straight-skinny list is, we will concede, a nice touch of persiflage.

BTW, Your Honor, in law school I actually had a classmate named Roger Gonad. He covered his bases by pronouncing it go-NAHD, but I always thought that must be a hell of a burden to carry through life. Yes, Your Honor, I believe that's all we have on this.

Bada boom, bada bing. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants. No, really, I could go on like this all day ...

Dear FPR,

In failing to find an error -- any error -- in what I've written in this thread and/or my reasoning, your desperate attempt to charmingly change the subject by pretending to not recognize the import of the scare quotes around the phrase the straight skinny and tell yuk-yuk jokes, instead, betrays your fake persona or should I say personas.

What's really sad, though, is your refusing to countenance anything that might challenge the sacrosanct-but-fake "patriotic brand" of your hero, The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx").

-- Tom

[Tom Graves]

I choose to spend mine amusing myself by being silly, exposing the occasional factoid, playing golf, being the male version of the crazy cat lady, and not obsessing over things I can't control and that really have pretty much nothing to do with my life.

Dear FPR,

I can totally understand your not giving a flying you-know-what if your beloved Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") is owned by a fascistic revanchist multi-billionaire thug with a "Master Plan" skill set, as long as he (The Traitorous Orange Bird -- rhymes with "Xxxx") follows through on implementing Project 2025 and deporting all people of Godless color from your lily-white EDIT: future Disneyland.

Your disinterest in things KGB explains why you're so ignorant about (or actually love?) what it's been doing to us and our NATO allies since 1959, might be causing you to miss out on different perspectives on your favorite hoot -- the JFKA -- and definitely explains why you carelessly post anti-Golitsyn / pro-Nosenko screeds by the likes of "useful idiot" Barry Royden.

In a nutshell (pardon the pun), because it scares you to death to countenance the possibility that Putin, plus his St. Petersburg professional trolls and his KGB/GRU hackers and Julian Assange and Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik and Oleg Deripaska and Fox News, et al. ad nauseum (and, most importantly, oodles and gobs of highly intelligent but ignorant-as-all-get-out zombified-by-fifty-plus-years-of-KGB-"active measures" goombahs like you) installed you-know-who in 2017 and 2025.

Hint: The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx").

And you thought you were being so clever.

-- Tom