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

[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.