Anyone but Tom understand what the "KGB stuff" is all about?

[Lance Payette]

I suppose I could be accused of a fallacious appeal to authority here, but wouldn't most folks agree that Larry Hancock is solidly in the sane wing of CTers? Wouldn't most folks agree that he is among the most thorough, thoughtful and respected of CTers and of JFKA researchers in general?

Almost a year ago, I started a thread about Larry and David Boylan's latest book, THE OSWALD PUZZLE: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4162.8.html.

Larry described at the Ed Forum the intense work that went into this book. The book is, absolutely, the LN narrative right up to the events in Dealey Plaza. Oswald was simply who the LN narrative says he was. Then it goes off the deep end, IMO: Oswald knew nothing about the assassination and was a complete patsy of anti-Castro types. Alas, the book really just doesn't deal with how this would have worked and all the (to me) unanswerable questions it raises. But that's OK - Larry and David will surely flesh it all out at some point.

My point here is that they COMPLETELY REJECT all the CIA/KGB intrigue stuff. Oswald was simply who and what I believe he obviously was: Just a garden-variety defector who quickly became as disillusioned with the USSR as he had been with America. Neither CIA material, witting or unwitting, nor KGB material by a long shot.

Look, the CIA/KGB stuff is fun, way more fun than the LN narrative. Spy stuff in general is fun - "Mission Impossible" and all that. Opportuniies for speculation are endless: Oswald was on the CIA payroll; no, wait, he was an unwitting dangle; no, wait, he was a witting dangle; no, wait, he was a patriotic ultra-right-winger; no, wait, yada yada. It's fun, but NONE OF IT really fits the facts.

I am struck by how much conspiracy theorizing requires Oswald to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of who he was, 180 degrees removed from the real man. Ditto for other people and events connected with the JFKA - conspiracy theorizing requires them to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the evidence tells us. This is perhaps the most bizarre aspect of conspiracy thinking - i.e., its fondness for up being down, white being black, and absolutely nothing being the way common sense and the evidence tells us it is.

Anyway, TG's KGB stuff is just fun (up to a point) and entertaining (up to a point) goofiness. That's all. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

I leave TG and you (as far as this thread is concerned, anyway) with a quotation from Senator William J. Fulbright, ironically enough from a book published in 1963:

The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace - not so much because of what it has done,
but because of the excuses it has provided us for our own failures.

[Tom Graves]

[...]

FPR posted while I was editing and expanding my previous post, so here it is again:

Here's an excerpt from what FPR had posted:

"Skeptical about Nosenko" is one thing. "Skeptical about Nosenko" scarcely describes the Angleton/Bagley paranoia that came to be called the Monster Plot. "Skeptical about Nosenko" scarcely describes the breadth and depth of TG's KGB stuff insofar as the CIA is concerned. "Skeptical about Nosenko" greatly understates the reality. Do we actually know there were and are "plenty" of people in the CIA (as opposed to the CT community) skeptical about Noskenko [sic]? Were there protests against the Hart Report or Royden's peer-reviewed article in Studies in Intelligence? One can certainly be skeptical that Nosenko was all he said he was and knew all he said he did without thinking he was a KGB-sponsored false defector. There was essentially no suspicion the Soviets were responsible for the JFKA, so why would the KGB and Nosenko himself undertake this fantastically risky mission - and why would Nosenko endure the ghastly treatment he received? (emphasis added by T.G.)


Here's my edited-and-expanded reply:

Sez Trump-loving Fancy Pants Rants, who evidently doesn't have the gonads or the horse sense to read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, or even his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," but would rather take KGB-and-Trump-approved cheap shots at Bagley, Angleton, and Golitsyn from the Fancy Pants Rants Peanut Gallery.


https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

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


It's funny that Fancy Pants keeps referencing HSCA perjurer John L. Hart, even after I showed him Bagley's 170-page HSCA testimony in which he ripped Hart the proverbial new one.

Here it is again.

Note: "Mr. X" is KGB true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn.

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


As I said in a previous post,

FPR thinks Bagley, a PhD'd former Marine Lieutenant during WW II whose father and two older brothers were Admirals, whose Great Uncle on his mother's side was Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who received a medal when he retired from the Agency, and whom Richard Helms said, in so many words, was on the fast track to become Director of CIA until putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. -- was a scam artist.

Perhaps FPL is a scam artist, himself, and projects his defective character onto anyone, dead or alive, who appears to him to challenge the legitimacy of The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx")?

FPR doesn't want to learn about said mole-protecting putative KGB staff officer / false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 Yuri Nosenko because Nosenko isn't a "hoot," and because he intuits that if he did learn about him, he'd have to consider the possibility that the KGB* really DID install The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") as our "president."

*Today's SVR and FSB


Bagley wrote the following in Spy Wars:


There is no indication that CIA ever answered the extraordinary and unprecedented number of questions that arose about the defector Yuri Nosenko. Here is a sample of thirty of them, with references to the pages where they are discussed in Spy Wars.

Nosenko claimed that through the entire years 1960-61 he was deputy chief of the American-Embassy section of the American department of the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) of the KGB. It was this post (especially his claim to have there personally supervised all KGB work against the embassy's code clerks and security officer) that gave him access to all the most important information he gave CIA.

1. Why then, while supervising this top-priority work, was Nosenko performing low-level tasks for a different department? (Spy Wars pp. 94-95, 160-62, 235, 250, 280)

[He himself described his activity during this period, handling street-level homosexual provocateurs of the Tourist Department, recruiting homosexual tourists (one as far away as Sofia), helping the Tourist Department chief in meeting a visiting American travel agent, and traveling abroad repeatedly as watchdog for Soviet industrial delegations.]

2. Why did at least three KGB insiders later state that Nosenko never held that position? [They included i) a visitor to that section at the time, ii) a former member of the section itself, and iii) a former head of foreign counterintelligence, Oleg Kalugin.

3. How does one explain Nosenko's many changes of stories about his KGB career, even about when and how he entered service, and the evidence that the stories were false? (pp. 93, 160-62, 235, 248-50) .[Not a single KGB source during or after the Cold War, even among those who insisted that Nosenko genuinely defected, has confirmed the dates and assignments of his claimed KGB career.]

4. How does one explain Nosenko's authoritative claim that, up to the time he defected, the KGB did not recruit any American Embassy code clerk? (pp. 156-59, 241-42)

[in fact that section of the KGB recruited at least one code clerk and there were compelling signs that Nosenko was hiding the truth about two others.]

5. Why was Nosenko unaware of the operational mission to Helsinki during that period of his direct subordinate Kosolapov as part of a promising attempt to recruit an American Embassy cipher clerk? (pp. 157-60, 242)

6. How could Nosenko err by an entire year - and thus destroy his story about holding this job - by reporting i) that under his supervision KGB surveillants had spotted the American Embassy security officer visiting a certain dead drop site in late 1960 and ii) that for many weeks thereafter, as supervisor, he had received regular reports on the KGB's stakeout of that site. (pp. 88-89, 147-50, 186, 203-4)

[The visit actually happened in late 1961, so any stakeout would have been conducted after Nosenko left the job.]

7. Why did Nosenko fail to mention that dead drop visit when he was telling CIA in 1962 about his coverage of the security officer? (pp. 16, 147, 203)

8. If Nosenko was personally watching over the American Embassy's security officer, why did he not know that the officer traveled from Moscow to his ancestral homeland, Armenia? (Nosenko himself recognized that his failure to answer this question undermined his whole life story.) (pp. 186-87)

Nosenko preserved and brought to Geneva in 1964 the KGB's authorization for his travel in December 1963 to search for a fleeing KGB officer, Vladimir Cherepanov. (pp. 87, 167-68, 250-51)

9. How did he keep this document and why did he bring it to Geneva, whereas KGB regulations - as Nosenko agreed -- required that it be turned in before the next payday and before any further official travel could be authorized?

10. Why was that travel authorization (signed by the SCD chief Gribanov) made out to "Lt. Col. Nosenko", the rank he claimed, whereas under detailed questioning he admitted having been only a captain (as even the KGB now confirms)?

11. Is it mere coincidence that in 1962, long before this erroneous travel authorization, he was already lying about his rank, then calling himself a major,?

12. Why was it "Colonel" Nosenko's story that a Soviet official journalist tried to peddle to the Western press shortly after Nosenko's defection in 1964? (page 163)

13. And why would Nosenko be sent out to search for Cherepanov if, as suggested in questions 1-7 above, Nosenko was not deputy chief of the SCD's American-Embassy section?

Nosenko in 1962 volunteered information that his boss Kovshuk had traveled to the United States five years earlier to restore contact with a KGB-recruited American cipher-machine mechanic codenamed "Andrey." [it became evident that the real reason for Kovshuk's travel was to exploit the KGB recruitment of a CIA officer.] (pp. 67-71, 185)

14. Is it mere coincidence that just when Nosenko was telling CIA about Kovshuk's trip, the two KGB officers closest to him in Geneva, his sole KGB companion there, Yuri Guk, and his hotel roommate Kislov, were precisely the two KGB operatives who had worked with Kovshuk on that trip?

15. Why did Nosenko, having read Kislov's KGB file, certify to CIA that Kislov had no connection with the KGB? (pp. 65-67)

16. Why did Nosenko in 1962 say (and repeat) that "Andrey" was recruited in "1949¬1950" but later, in 1964, report that he himself had been in the KGB (entered 1953) while "Andrey" was still in Moscow?

17. Nosenko told CIA in 1962 that he had personally participated in the KGB Moscow attempt to recruit CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith. Why then did he in 1964 deny any knowledge of the name or the case? (p. 188)

Other questions:

18. Why did he refer in 1962 to KGB relations with the Finnish president, but then in 1964 deny any knowledge of it? (p. 186)

19. How does one explain Nosenko's mention in 1962 of the name "Zepp" - which at that moment was of intense interest to KGB counterintelligence - and his failure to recognize the name by early 1964? (pp. 15-16, 150-55, 162, 203)

20. If Nosenko was really in Geneva in 1962 and 1964 as the security watchdog of a Soviet conference delegation, as he claimed, why did even his KGB bosses say, after the Cold War, that he had gone there for other, "serious operational purposes"? (pp. 5, 237, 253)

21. How does one explain Nosenko's inability to describe even the most routine KGB procedures? (pp. 83-86, 191-92, 251-55)

22. How come this eleven-year veteran of KGB CI operations was unable to disclose to the U.S. a single KGB spy who at the time of uncovering, i) was still active and ii) had current access to US or NATO-country official secrets and iii) had previously been unsuspected by Western counterintelligence?

23. Is it true, as Nosenko authoritatively reported, having heard it from three different KGB authorities directly involved, that it was by chance Moscow surveillance of British diplomats that the KGB first learned of the treason of CIA's great spy Oleg Penkovsky? [KGB authorities have since denied it and suggested that the source was a mole.] (pp. 2I-22, 86-87, 235, 243)

Nosenko highlighted to CIA in 1962 that the KGB first uncovered Pyotr Popov, CIA's spy in the GRU (Military Intelligence) by chance surveillance of an American diplomat mailing a letter in Moscow in late January 1959. (pp. 11-12, 16-17, 24, 68¬75, 189, 241-43)

24. How does one equate this with the KGB's later admission that the GRU chief was fired from his post as a result of Popov's treason, almost two months before the letter mailing?

25. Or with the fact that KGB surveillants spotted Popov meeting CIA twice, at least two weeks before the letter mailing?

26. Or with the KGB's admission, in a book published in Moscow in 2000, that it had earlier recruited Edward Ellis Smith, the CIA officer who had supported the Popov case in Moscow?

Nosenko claimed inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union, having participated in early decisions when Oswald defected to the USSR and later having read the KGB file on Oswald. Later, the KGB chairman at the time and other KGB veterans denied it and stated that Nosenko was lying about this. (So too did the House Select Committee on Assassinations after interviewing Nosenko many times in 1977-78.) (pp. 83-86, 95-96, 191, 210, 249)

27. If Nosenko did not have his claimed access to the Oswald case and did not really study the KGB's file, where did he get his information? And why does he continue to make that claim to this day?

After the Cold War much was learned about a previously unknown SCD department for operational deception, which was actively handing false sources to Western intelligence services to mislead them. It was learned that this department was closely supervised by Nosenko's sponsor General Oleg Gribanov. And that among its officers were Nosenko's friend Yuri Guk, who was meeting Nosenko before and after each CIA meeting in Geneva in 1962 (pp. 6, 9, 66, 236); Aleksandr Kislov, who was rooming with Nosenko in Geneva in 1962 (p. 7, 66, 70-71, 235, 236); and Vladimir Chelnokov, who took him along on an operational mission to Odessa in 1960 (p. 235).

28. Why did Nosenko not report on the existence of this department?

29. Why did Nosenko not tell that his close KGB associates at various times were members of it?

30. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko replayed to CIA in 1962 each of these specific cases that six months earlier had been compromised to the Americans by KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn?

i) Vassall (pp. 14, 24, 97, 179, 187, 189, 206, 261)

ii) Preisfreund (pp. 25, 28, 158-59)

iii) Belitsky (pp. 17, 25, 179)

iv) Kovshuk's "trip" to Washington (pp. 24, 65-66, 69, 75-78)

v) Nine others including a Canadian and a French ambassador and a French businessman (pp. 4, 14, 25, 165, 206).

While an objective observer tries to answer each of these thirty questions in a manner consistent with his answers to the other questions, a thirty-first question will have occurred to him. How could so many questions - even a fraction of this number - have arisen about any genuine defector?

[Lance Payette]

One more, which is somewhat off-topic, but the epistemological aspects of what we see on forums such as this continue to fascinate me.

It occurred to me on our morning walk (4 miles after Achilles surgery on August 21, thanks for asking) that, apart from all the psychological/sociological jargon, there are really four defining characteristics of far-fetched conspiracy thinking (as opposed to more rational conspiracy thinking, such as I credit Larry Hancock with doing). We see these again and again throughout this forum and the JFKA community in general:

1. An inability – more than a mere stubborn refusal, I think – to step back and view things from the proverbial 30,000-foot level. An inability to ask, “How would my theory have worked, from A to Z, out in the real world? What would it actually have looked like, out in the real world? Would it have made any sense, out in the real world?”

2. An obsession with irrelevant minutiae – attaching huge importance to people and evidence that are actually of little or no importance at all. Together with #1, this results in the proverbial inability to see the forest for the trees (and the shrubs, and the weeds, and the pine cones).

3. A perverse desire for everything to be different – indeed, the very opposite – from what common sense and the evidence tell us it is. Those who simply follow the evidence and apply common sense just don’t “get it,” just don’t grasp how diabolical the conspirators were.

4. An almost cult-like reliance on authorities and sources that mainstream historians, academics and researchers regard as being of dubious expertise and reliability. To the conspiracist, the mainstream thinkers likewise just don't "get it" and are either pawns of or fellow travelers with the conspirators.

These collectively result in the conspiracy theory being almost bullet-proof and the conspiracist’s belief being almost unshakeable.

Why these are the defining characteristics of believers in far-fetched conspiracy theories, even believers who are otherwise intelligent and rational and high-functioning, is where the psychological and sociological studies kick in. But you don’t need them to be able to look at many of the denizens of JFKA World and say, “Yes, that’s exactly who he is and what he's doing.”

Whether this has anything to do with anyone on this thread I leave to others to decide. 

[Tom Graves]

One more, which is somewhat off-topic, but the epistemological aspects of what we see on forums such as this continue to fascinate me.

It occurred to me on our morning walk (4 miles after Achilles surgery on August 21, thanks for asking) that, apart from all the psychological/sociological jargon, there are really four defining characteristics of far-fetched conspiracy thinking (as opposed to more rational conspiracy thinking, such as I credit Larry Hancock with doing). We see these again and again throughout this forum and the JFKA community in general:

1. An inability – more than a mere stubborn refusal, I think – to step back and view things from the proverbial 30,000-foot level. An ability to ask, “How would my theory have worked, from A to Z, out in the real world? What would it actually have looked like, out in the real world? Would it have made any sense, out in the real world?”

2. An obsession with irrelevant minutiae – attaching huge importance to people and evidence that are actually of little or no importance at all. Together with #1, this results in the proverbial inability to see the forest for the trees (and the shrubs, and the weeds, and the pine cones).

3. A perverse desire for everything to be different – indeed, the very opposite – from what common sense and the evidence tell us it is. Those who simply follow the evidence and apply common sense just don’t “get it,” just don’t grasp how diabolical the conspirators were.

4. An almost cult-like reliance on authorities and sources that mainstream historians, academics and researchers regard as being of dubious expertise and reliability. To the conspiracist, the mainstream thinkers likewise just don't "get it" and are either pawns of or fellow travelers with the conspirators.

These collectively result in the conspiracy theory being almost bullet-proof and the conspiracist’s belief being almost unshakeable.

Why these are the defining characteristics of believers in far-fetched conspiracy theories, even believers who are otherwise intelligent and rational and high-functioning, is where the psychological and sociological studies kick in. But you don’t need them to be able to look at many of the denizens of JFKA World and say, “Yes, that’s exactly who he is and what he's doing.”

Whether this has anything to do with anyone on this thread I leave to others to decide. 

Dear FPR,

Why didn't you mention your beloved John L. Hart, again?

You know, the guy DCI Stansfield Turner brought back to assassinate Bagley's character to the HSCA and thereby protect false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, Yuri Nosenko?

You know, the guy for whom Bagley ripped "a new one" during his own testimony to said committee?

Have you had an opportunity to read it yet?

Here it is for you, again, FPR:

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

(Note: "Mr. X" is KGB true defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn)


From Spy Wars:

To steer a less troubling course [after Angleton was fired in December 1974], [William] Colby appointed to head the Counterintelligence Staff George Kalaris, a man without experience in either counterintelligence or Soviet bloc operations, and, as his deputy, [probable mole] Leonard V. 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. [Newton "Scotty"] Miler’s carefully accumulated notes on this and related cases were removed from the files [by McCoy] 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 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

My comment:

To see how full-of-lies Hart's 1976 report was, you're going to have to read Bagley's HSCA testimony (see above).


-- Tom

[Lance Payette]

I would be far out over my skis if I purported to speak knowledgeably about the Bagley stuff with which TG is obsessed, so I don't want to give that impression. I did, however, read a number of reviews of Bagley's Spy Wars, which apparently serves as TG's bible. One noted that Bagley "rather conveniently" relies heavily on information provided to him by supposed - but unnamed - KGB sources. More than one noted Bagley's bitterness at his downfall with the CIA, a motivation that I believe simply must be taken into consideration in regard to all of Bagley's latter-day revelations.

Set forth below is the review from the London Sunday Times. The reviewer, Christoper Andrew, had met with Nosenko and is the co-author, with defector Vasili Mitrokhin, of several books on the famed 300,000 document Mitrokhin Archive. As you can read, he was distinctly unimpressed with Spy Wars.. The review itself appears at: https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/spy-wars-moles-mysteries-and-deadly-games-n7j9f67n78p.

I'm going to have to get at least one of the Mitrokhin Archives books, which all seem to be available at Amazon:



Anyway, here's the review of Spy Wars:

Spy Wars is the story of one of the biggest bungles in the history of the CIA. The bungle began in January 1964, two months after President Kennedy was assassinated, with the defection of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer, to America. Recruited as a CIA agent 18 months earlier, Nosenko brought with him a number of leads from KGB files, including information that, while staying in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, had been assessed by the KGB as too mentally unstable to use as an agent.

Nosenko's CIA interrogators, however, found apparent gaps in his story and quickly became suspicious. The intelligence that seemed to exonerate the KGB of involvement with Oswald was, they concluded, Soviet disinformation. Their suspicions were strengthened by a previous KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, an unreliable conspiracy theorist who warned that bogus defectors would be dispatched by the KGB to discredit him. He claimed that Nosenko was one of them.

In April 1964, Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA, and deprived of ordinary human contact and reading material, while his interrogators tried to make him admit that he was a plant. Nosenko refused. Four years later, he was exonerated by the CIA leadership, given financial compensation and hired as a consultant. Later agency investigations also concluded Nosenko was genuine. Thirty years after his incarceration, he was invited to give a lecture at the CIA and was given a standing ovation.

Tennent "Pete" Bagley was one of Nosenko's main CIA interrogators. Remarkably, in Spy Wars he sticks to his 40-year-old conclusion that Nosenko was a "provocateur" sent by the KGB to deceive the CIA. His book is deeply unconvincing. As Bagley himself admits, although there had been numerous bogus Soviet refugees, "never in the KGB's 45 years . . . had they sent one directly out of their own halls".

Bagley is still angry with his agency colleagues who cleared Nosenko. He dismisses the first report to do so, by Bruce Solie, as "nonsense" and Solie himself as deeply ignorant of the "real Soviet and KGB world". CIA senior management thought differently and gave Solie an award. For Nosenko, Bagley still feels evident contempt. Nosenko, he claims, was clearly ignorant of "things any KGB officer would know about his own workplace". Why the KGB would choose such an ignorant officer for a mission to deceive the CIA is a question that, surprisingly, does not seem to occur to Bagley.

Twenty years ago, I spent an enjoyable day with Nosenko at the Washington home of Cleve Cram, a CIA historian. Nosenko's explanation for his ordeal at the hands of the CIA was far more convincing than that of Spy Wars. He believed he was one of a series of innocent victims of the culture of conspiracy theory that had developed in the CIA's counter-intelligence staff while it was headed by James Jesus Angleton, an able intelligence officer who, partly under the influence of Golitsyn, had developed paranoid tendencies. Angleton even took seriously Golitsyn's claim that the bitter Sino-Soviet split was a charade devised by Moscow and Beijing to deceive the West.

My final encounter with the Nosenko case came in the late 1990s when I was writing a book with another defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, who had smuggled out of KGB archives an unprecedented volume of top-secret material (highly rated by both the CIA and FBI) on operations in America and elsewhere. This material confirmed that Nosenko was a genuine defector. It also revealed that the KGB (unaware that Nosenko had been imprisoned by the CIA) was making plans in the mid1960s to track him down and assassinate him.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

I would be far out over my skis if I purported to speak knowledgeably about the Bagley stuff with which TG is obsessed, so I don't want to give that impression. I did, however, read a number of reviews of Bagley's Spy Wars, which apparently serves as TG's bible. One noted that Bagley "rather conveniently" relies heavily on information provided to him by supposed - but unnamed - KGB sources. More than one noted Bagley's bitterness at his downfall with the CIA, a motivation that I believe simply must be taken into consideration in regard to all of Bagley's latter-day revelations.

Set forth below is the review from the London Sunday Times. The reviewer, Christoper Andrew, had met with Nosenko and is the co-author, with defector Vasili Mitrokhin, of several books on the famed 300,000 document Mitrokhin Archive. As you can read, he was distinctly unimpressed with Spy Wars.. The review itself appears at: https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/spy-wars-moles-mysteries-and-deadly-games-n7j9f67n78p.

I'm going to have to get at least one of the Mitrokhin Archives books, which all seem to be available at Amazon:

Mitrokhin Archive can be read online here: https://archive.org/details/mitrokhinarchive0000andr

The KGB went through great efforts to try and locate Nosenko. The plan was to try and isolate him and kill him. Kalugin book also goes over the plans the KGB had to try and either kidnap or kill Nosenko. Kalugin, who was head of counter intelligence for the KGB (sort of a Soviet equivalent of James Angleton), said Nosenko caused a lot of damage to the KGB including forcing him to return to the USSR. I used to believe that Nosenko was a false defector - the evidence was strong; but a great deal of new evidence that came out, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, indicates he was legitimate. Yes, he told lies, made up stories, puffed up his credentials; but so did Golitsyn, e.g., the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse.

Nut graf from Mitrokhin:

 

[Lance Payette]

Thanks much, Steve!

Given what I now know, it's hard for me to understand the enthusiasm for Bagley - except that what he said fits nicely with the narrative some people would prefer to believe. Him sitting down with Malcolm Blunt strikes me as bizarre at best.

I guess I've always been predisposed to believe Nosenko because it's literally impossible for me to believe the KGB (or the CIA, for that matter) would have had any interest in Lee Harvey Oswald.