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:
. . . . . . .
Dear Steve M.,
Here's a post I made back on 12 June 2025 on my thread titled "KGB disinfo re: Clay Shaw & the CIA, and the effect on The Jolly Green Giant," which was read 1183 times, but you didn't reply to.
Perhaps you missed it?
Major Vasily Mitrokhin, the KGB’s official archivist who was given the task of organizing its operations files and moving them to a new building, was supposedly so distraught by Khruschev’s 1956 anti-Stalin speech and the 1968 USSR / Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that he hand-copied 25,000 KGB documents between 1972 and 1985, retyped them, hid them under the floorboards of his dacha, and smuggled them to the West after the fall of The Iron Curtain — and no one noticed him doing it.
Really?
The putative KGB documents that MI5’s official historian, Christopher Andrew, wrote about in his books The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB and The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, either repeat what CIA already knew or strongly suspected (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter was a KGB forgery, and Mark Lane was financially supported by the CPUSA) or, if new, add little to our overall understanding of The Cold War. What’s more interesting to me is what they do not mention, e.g., that Yuri Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and that MI5’s Roger Hollis was a Soviet spy. In fact, they lend “documentary support” to what KGB-influenced espionage writers like Tom Mangold and David Wise have written about those cases.
One can only wonder why.
(sarcasm)
It’s interesting to note, however, that one of Mitrokhin’s documents says a 1967 KGB “active measures” operation involved "placing an article in a NYC newspaper.”
Hmm.
Okay, but it would have been nice if Andrew and Mitrokhin had admitted that the article (see below) was placed in the "National Guardian," a left-wing NYC independent weekly newspaper on 18 March 1967, and that the article referenced another article — one which the KGB had published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, "Paese Sera," on 4 March 1967.
Bertrand Russell’s London secretary, Ralph Schoenman, gave Garrison the translated-into-English "Paese Sera" article, and Garrison's assistant from LIFE magazine, Richard Billings, wrote in his journal on 16 March 1967, "Garrison now interested in possible connections between Shaw and the CIA [...] Two leads re: CIA tie: article in March issue of Humanite [sic; L'Humanité]."
These articles motivated the overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful Garrison to change his reason for having arrested Clay Shaw, a highly successful and closeted gay New Orleans businessman, from suspecting he had masterminded a homosexual "thrill-kill" assassination to fervidly believing he had organized it for the evil, evil CIA.
How did that work out, you ask?
Well, the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict in less than an hour, Garrison wrote a specious book, On the Trail of the Assassins, about the case in 1988, the book’s far-left publisher, Ellen Ray, gave a copy of it to Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone at a Havana film festival, and in 1991 Stone partly based his self-described mythological (“to counter the myth of the Warren Report”) pseudo-documentary, “JFK,” on it.
Which film helped to make our body politic cynical, paranoiac, and apathetic to the point that “former” KGB officer Vladimir Putin, with help from his professional St. Petersburg trolls, et al., was able to install “useful idiot” (or worse) Donald J. Trump as our president in 2017 and 2025.
Here, for your reading pleasure, is the first part of the longish National Guardian article. The bit about "Paese Sera" is in bold text.
By Robert L. Allen on 18 March 1967:
The complicated skein of events involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy became even more tangled with the arrest March 1 of Clay L. Shaw, described in the press as "a prominent New Orleans businessman." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who made the arrest, contended in a search warrant that at secret meetings in September 1963, "there was an agreement and combination among Clay Shaw (alias Clay Bertrand), Lee Harvey Oswald, and David W. Ferrie and others to kill John F. Kennedy." . . .
The Guardian has received reports from Rome linking Shaw with various right-wing organizations and individuals, and possibly with the CIA. The Guardian's Rome correspondent, Phyllis Rosner, quoting the Rome daily PAESE SERA, reported that from 1961 till 1965 Shaw was on the board of directors of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, which the paper said was engaged in obscure dealings in Rome . . .
. . . . . . .
My comments:
1) To counter the misconceptions and misstatements in the above "National Guardian" article, I highly suggest that you read Patricia Lambert’s 1998 book, False Witness, about Dean Andrews, Jack "Suggs" Martin, Perry Russo, and overly ambitious, scandal-plagued, and revengeful Jim Garrison, et al. ad nauseam. To read it for free, google “false witness” and “archive” simultaneously.
2) In his 1988 memoir, Garrison said he wasn’t aware of the Paese Serra, L'Humanité, and National Guardian articles until after the 1969 trial, but Ralph Schoenman’s ex-wife, JFKA conspiracy theorist Joan Mellen, told researcher Max Holland, after conferring with Schoenman, that he had given the Paese Serra article to Garrison in 1967.
3) It’s interesting to note that on 25 April 1967, the New Orleans-States Item newspaper referenced or summarized claims from the Paese Sera articles, particularly the CIA-PERMINDEX angle involving Shaw's Italian connections, and that one of the newspaper’s former editors told investigator Max Holland that the newspaper got said information from Jim Garrison.
4) The fact that Andrew and Mitrokhin included this partial nugget in The Sword and the Shield but said nothing about the likes of Igor Kochnov, Yuri Guk, "Alexander Kislov," Oleg Gribanov, Aleksey Kulak, Dmitry Polyakov, Boris Orekhov, and Roger Hollis, et al. ad nauseam, lends support to James Angleton's statement, "A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies and really mess you up, boy."
Or words to that effect.
-- Tom
