Here's Tennent Bagley's entire personnel file

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Even if Nosenko was a fake defector (and they didn't know that with certainty), even if he was directly taking directions from Khrushchev through a implanted device in his damned head (to exaggerate my point), you *cannot* treat a person like he was treated. The denial of basic rights, of due process, the isolation, the mistreatment: all intended to break him down. That's unacceptable.

No fair minded American can defend that. That is, fair minded Americans who aren't deranged. I would think even a Joe McCarthy would say this was unacceptable. It seems to me that Bagley later recognized this and tried to cover his tracks (as Angleton did). But continued approving the mistreatment despite any contrary evidence showing he was wrong.

Just to note: Hoover thought Nosenko was a legitimate defector. Is the claim now that Hoover was a Soviet agent? Or he was surrounded by KGB agents in the FBI who manipulated him? How insane is this going to get?

At this point, as is usually the case with this conspiracy nonsense, it's useless. You are trying to reason with unreasonable people.

[Tom Graves]

Even if Nosenko was a fake defector (and they didn't know that with certainty), even if he was directly taking directions from Khrushchev through a implanted device in his damned head (to exaggerate my point), you *cannot* treat a person like he was treated. The denial of basic rights, of due process, the isolation, the mistreatment: all intended to break him down. That's unacceptable.

No fair minded American can defend that. That is, fair minded Americans who aren't deranged. I would think even a Joe McCarthy would say this was unacceptable. It seems to me that Bagley later recognized this and tried to cover his tracks (as Angleton did). But continued approving the mistreatment despite any contrary evidence showing he was wrong.

Just to note: Hoover thought Nosenko was a legitimate defector. Is the claim now that Hoover was a Soviet agent? Or he was surrounded by KGB agents in the FBI who manipulated him? How insane is this going to get?

At this point, as is usually the case with this conspiracy nonsense, it's useless. You are trying to reason with unreasonable people.

Dear Steve M.,

1) If you'd read Bagley's Spy Wars, and/or John M. Newman's Uncovering Popov's Mole (which he dedicated to Bagley), you'd realize that Nosenko was sent by KGB General Oleg Gribanov to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies. One of the things that convinced Bagley of this was the fact that, even though Nosenko had (supposedly) worked in a different part of the highly compartmentalized KGB than Golitsyn, the cases he told Bagley and Kisevalter about were exactly the same ones that Golitsyn had told Angleton about a few months earlier, and Nosenko's telling of them contradicted Golitsyn's telling of them in every respect. And they all minimized the possibility that the Agency had been penetrated.

Bagley believed Nosenko was protecting Edward Ellis Smith, Pyotr Popov's incompetent and honey-trapped dead drop setter-upper in Moscow who was fired by the CIA in late 1956 and whom Bagley believed had betrayed Popov to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington, D.C., movie houses in January 1957, and perhaps had helped Kovshuk recruit another unknown CIA officer.

Newman, on the other hand, believes Nosenko was protecting CIA's primary mole hunter, Bruce Solie, and that Solie had not only betrayed Popov to Kovshuk in those movie houses but had given him the specifications of the U-2 spy plane, as well, and had done so with logistical support from James McCord of future Watergate notoriety and the aforementioned Edward Ellis Smith.

Newman believes Angleton naively shared what Golitsyn was telling him with Solie, and that Solie was able to relay this intel back to Gribanov in Moscow through some high-level moles in French Intelligence and a travelling KGB officer by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal so that Gribanov could tailor Nosenko's "legend" right before he "walked in" to Bagley and (probable mole, imho) George Kisevalter in Geneva in June 1962.

2) Did you know that when Nosenko was caught in a couple of legend-destroying lies in 1964, he nearly "broke"?

Bagley recounts it in Spy Wars:

“You recently told about tailing Embassy security officer John Abidian and observing him setting up a dead drop on Pushkin Street.”

“Yes, we staked out the place but no one came. I was getting the reports week after week.”

“When was that?”

“I remember exactly. At the end of 1960.”

"And you left the American Embassy section at the very end of 1961?”
 
“Yes, I’ve told you that.”

“But in 1962 you were telling us about your systematic coverage of Abidian. Why didn’t you tell us then about seeing him set up a dead drop?”

Nosenko looked blank, speechless.

We resumed. “Are you absolutely sure of the date?”

"Absolutely.”

“But you’re wrong, and so is your story. Abidian went to that drop at the end of 1961, not 1960. How could you be getting the stakeout reports if you were no longer in the American Embassy Section?”

"That’s not true. I know it was 1960.”

"No. We know. It was our dead drop.”

Nosenko was flabbergasted. He fell into a sullen silence.

“Your job was to watch over John Abidian. Would you know of any trips he took outside Moscow?”

“Of course. We had him under full-time surveillance. Any travel by Embassy staff was reported in advance to us. In the case of Abidian, and of the code clerks, I would be told and we would prepare coverage where they were going.”

“Did Abidian make any trips outside Moscow?”

"None.”

"Think hard.”

"Of course I would have to know.”

"He made a very big trip. Where did he go?”

"He did not travel.”

"Not only did he travel, but he traveled to the land of his Armenian ancestors, to Armenia itself.”

"Impossible. That would be big news to us. It would offer opportunities.”

Silence. Nosenko, morose, remained sunken in thought. We waited. Suddenly we heard him muttering, as if talking to himself. "If I admit I wasn’t watching Abidian, then I’d have to admit that I’m not George, that I wasn’t born in Nikolayev, and that I’m not married.”

That strange sentence — recorded on tape — might have been nothing more than rhetoric, but to all evidence Nosenko was not serving in the American Embassy Section and of course was not watching Abidian. Such were the contradictions in his life story and his seeming forgetfulness of wife and children that we doubted he was telling the truth about them. His odd reaction suggested that now, for some reason, we had struck a chord that might impel him to confess.

The silence continued. Finally, perceptibly, he shook himself out of his near-trance and refused to answer any more questions. He tucked himself into a sort of crouch on his chair, his face closed and grim.


3) No, J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t a KGB agent, but his psychological makeup was such that it was easy for the KGB to manipulate him into unwittingly helping it take control of his beloved Bureau and the hated CIA. For more on that, google "wedge" "riebling" and "archive" simultaneously" and read Mark Riebling’s 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA.

https://archive.org/details/WedgeFromPearlHarborTo911HowTheSecretWarBetweenTheFBIAndCIAHasEndangeredNationalSecurity


4) Mistreatment? You mean the barbarous torture that John L. Hart described in great detail in 1978 in a successful effort to deflect the HSCA's attention away from Nosenko's lies and contradictions?

Bagley in Spy Wars:

Nosenko’s defenders presented his case as essentially "a human phenomenon” and that the "human factors involved have a direct bearing on some of the contradictions which have appeared in the case.” As one put it, any questions of Nosenko’s truthfulness are “poignantly overshadowed by Nosenko’s personal tragedy, arising from CIA’s handling of his defection.” "We may not allow ourselves to forget," he wrote, “that this story deals with a living person.” 

The central issue of the case, they were implying, was CIA’s mistreatment of Nosenko. They expressed outrage that “duplicity” had been practiced against Nosenko and that the polygraph machine had been used more as an instrument of interrogation than as a fair test of Nosenko ’s truth. They misrepresented the reason Nosenko was incarcerated. They raised a horrifying vision of his being thrown into a “torture vault," as one put it, or a “dungeon,” in another’s words. By 1989 the former CIA senior officer John Hart had so lost touch with the truth that he asserted in writing that the interrogators had deprived Nosenko of sensory stimuli for more than three years, and another told an investigative reporter that Nosenko had been starving and close to death. 30 They must have been aware that Nosenko had regular (as I remember, weekly) visits by a doctor to ascertain his health and the adequacy of his diet. He was never ill, much less "close to death.”

They were contradicting the documented record. CIA director Richard Helms and Nosenko’s former handlers testified under oath that Nosenko had been incarcerated only to prevent him from evading questions about contradictions and anomalies in his stories. (These were the ones that touched upon Oswald, the possible breaking of American ciphers, and penetration of American Intelligence.) We were preventing what happened in 1985, when the later defector Vitaly Yurchenko walked out and back to the KGB.

Whereas this case had damning interconnections with other cases like that of Kulak/“Fedora,” Nosenko’s defenders avoided this subject. One mentioned the cases of Cherepanov and Loginov only to imply that they, like Nosenko, were innocent individuals whom CIA had stupidly misunderstood. 31


-- Tom