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

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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:

--- Quote from: Lance Payette on January 23, 2026, 05:33:17 PM ---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.  ::)

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: Lance Payette on January 23, 2026, 07:05:46 PM ---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:


--- End quote ---

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.

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