Some Info about Malcom Blunt and Bruce Solie

[Tom Graves]

He was in the Office of Security, heading the Research staff. Read his HSCA testimony as to the scope of his duties. Moreover, Shaw's attorneys were posing questions as to Shaw's possible CIA connections (and even whether the CIA had files on THEM!). We have no idea what the "inquiry" may have related to in the context of Solie's position.

In fact, the All-Seeing Eye of AI tells me this is exactly what Solie was doing - assisting in the inquiry as to whether Shaw in fact had any CIA connections as alleged. Moreover, there are many materials with Solie's name in reference to WC critics like Weisberg and Epstein and characters like Nagell. Why? Because these were potential SECURITY issues and he headed the RESEARCH staff. Indeed, pesky Mr. AI interrupted my breakfast to add, "Bruce Solie, a high-ranking official in the CIA’s Office of Security (OS) and its Security Research Staff (SRS), was interested in Jim Garrison’s investigation because it threatened to expose sensitive CIA operations and personnel."

On pages 11-17 of this PDF are organizational charts for the Office of Security. It wasn't exactly "Howard Osborn and Bruce Solie sharing a desk in the corner."

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32404556.pdf

This is my problem with characters like Blunt, whom I put in the same category as Newman. They absolutely BURY themselves (and you, their eager readers) in documents and acronyms and fill in the vast gaps with dark speculation driven by what they want to see. "Read Newman's Jesus book," advises the sage Mr. Payette. You will realize that Newman and Blunt, your heroes, are, in their own little way ... absolutely nutty.

Memo to Solie referencing Garrison's investigation = Solie is outside his assigned area = Solie is monitoring the Garrison investigation = Solie is a KGB mole.

Dear Fancy Pants Rants,

Was it "nutty" of Blunt to show to Bagley an April 1964 memo to Warren Commission attorney W. David Slawson in the margins of which Slawson had written that Solie had tried to convince him in a (now missing) letter or memo to let Nosenko testify to the Warren Commission, even though harsh (but not tortuous) interrogations of Nosenko had just begun, and even though many officers in the Soviet Russia Division and the Counterintelligence Staff doubted that Nosenko was bona fide?

Was it "nutty" of Blunt to show Bagley some CIA documents that Bagley hadn't been privy to in 1959-1960 which indicated that someone in Solie's office had arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to have all of the incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald's upcoming defection be sent to Solie's office instead of where they would normally go -- the Soviet Russia Division?

-- Tom

[Benjamin Cole]

LP--

Fair points.

But Solie's actions regarding the WC, and then testimony to the HSCA, sure look like he was eager to absolve Nosenko of wrongdoing in the eyes of investigating bodies. That seems to extend beyond his professional ken.

Bagley thought Nosenko was a rat. By all accounts, Bagley was smart and experienced, had done good service for the CIA. Even if Bagley was "wrong on Nosenko," one would expect Bagley to be shuffled sideways, or even "kicked upstairs." Instead the professional noose was brought out.

This lines up with Ambassador Mann and State Dept'er Charles Thomas having their careers ended merely for being interested in LHO-Cuba ties.

Victor Marchetti said decades ago that the CIA was so laced with KGB he was not sure who was working for who.

It may be G2 assets egged LHO on, or maybe helped on 11/22.

Solie? Fishier than the Starkist tuna factory.

[Tom Graves]

Even if Bagley was "wrong on Nosenko" . . . 

"BC",

Despite what Fancy Pants Rants and Steve M. say, Bagley wasn't wrong on Nosenko.

The following is from Bagley's 2014 article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars."

Note: People forget that Nosenko first "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962, offering to trade two bits of "intel" for $250 worth of "desperately needed" Swiss francs. He initially met one-on-one with Russian-speaking Bagley in a safe house and subsequently with both Bagley and fluent-Russian-speaking (and probable mole) George Kisevalter for four meetings and gave them lots more than those two bits of "intel." In January 1964, he reappeared in Geneva saying he'd decided to physically defect to the U.S. and leave his formerly beloved wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves

Remember that when Nosenko told the HSCA that the KGB didn't even interview former Marine U-2 radar operator Oswald in the USSR, they practically laughed him out of the joint.


APPENDIX 1: FORTY QUESTIONS ABOUT NOSENKO'S BONA FIDES

Throughout the passages above I have referred to Yuri Nosenko as a fake defector, sent to the CIA by the KGB. Some, to the contrary (including the CIA officially), are convinced that he genuinely defected and told the truth. But the KGB's foreign-intelligence [i.e., First Chief Directorate -- today's SVR] deputy chief for disinformation [General Sergey Kondrashev] has revealed (see Spymaster, pp. 195–199) that he himself was invited by the KGB's counterintelligence [i.e., Second Chief Directorate -- today's FSB] chief Oleg Gribanov to help run the Nosenko provocation against the CIA. Moreover, the CIA's faith in Nosenko leans on shaky generalities while disregarding dubious circumstances of the case.

Background

Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (1927–2008), a KGB officer, secretly contacted the CIA in Geneva in the spring of 1962 while on a temporary KGB assignment from Moscow. Coming abroad again in late January 1964, he defected outright and was taken to the United States. At first under suspicion of having been sent by the KGB to deceive the CIA, he was submitted to interrogation and detention, but finally cleared in 1968 [by probable mole Bruce Solie]. He then worked with the CIA, retired, and died in 2008.

CIA and FBI Faith in Nosenko

CIA leaders and spokesmen have repeatedly expressed, in writings and sworn testimony, their total faith in Yuri Nosenko as a genuine defector. The power of that faith can be felt in their published statements, some sworn under oath:

“There is no reason to believe that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.”

“He defected of his own free will and has not sought to deceive us.”

“Anything he has said has been said in good faith.”

If a contradiction appears, it “is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”

Any untruths that Nosenko might have told were “not at the behest of the KGB.”

“Any claim we [in CIA] may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency's judgment in this case—that Nosenko was always bona fide and our colleagues [who suspected him] made a terrible mistake.”

These are the reasons they have expressed for this credo:

a.    
No intelligence service would send one of its own genuine staff officers into enemy hands as a false defector. An ex-FBI counterintelligence specialist proclaimed as recently as 2013, “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector.” It would not run the risk that he might be influenced or pressured to tell what he really knows and expose the very truths the deception operation was intended to hide.

b.    
The Soviet regime sentenced Nosenko to death in absentia and several KGB sources have said that the KGB was looking for him with the intent to assassinate him.

c.    
Insiders reported that real KGB staffers suffered real punishment as a result of his defection or as a result of their own misbehavior uncovered during the KGB's investigation of it. Even the chief of counterintelligence, Oleg Gribanov, was fired.

d.    
Later defectors have testified [in broad generality, all hearsay] to the genuineness of his defection and have claimed that it damaged the Soviet regime.

e.    
After he was cleared of CIA suspicions in 1968, Nosenko stayed in the United States for the forty years remaining in his life, became an American citizen, and helped Western operations against the KGB.

f.    
Repeated CIA reviews and analyses of the case over thirty years have again and again cleared Nosenko of all suspicion. [Never mind that earlier CIA reviews and analyses had reached the opposite conclusion.]

g.    
CIA insiders have stated under oath [although untruthfully] that nothing Nosenko said contradicts what genuine KGB defectors had reported.

h.    
Nosenko exposed many secret KGB “cases.” [Never mind that not a single case that he revealed in the first five years of his debriefing by the CIA was (1) active at the time he revealed them and (2) currently producing important NATO-government secrets and (3) previously unsuspected by Western counterintelligence.]

i.    
“A number of intelligence coups have been based on information from” Nosenko, said the CIA's Deputy Director to a congressional body in 1978. As he put it, “That Mr. Nosenko has proven so useful a man subsequently is the final test of the matter.” [Never mind that in the thirty-five years since then not a single such “coup” has been even remotely alluded to in public, though it could hardly have remained secret after practically all successful CIA and FBI anti-Soviet operations were exposed by Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, and Robert Hanssen.]

j.    
An official KGB document in the so-called “Mitrokhin archive” tells of the (genuine) defector Nosenko's ranting about questions of his rank. [Never mind that this document contradicted Nosenko's own account of his career and never mind that many documents with false or misleading information are known to have been inserted into official KGB files to hide or obscure sensitive information.]

But these are mere generalities. Even if all the points listed above were valid—and many, as noted, were not—they do not resolve specific doubtful circumstances that demand explanation. It is by errors of detail, sometimes small and seemingly trivial, that deceivers inadvertently betray a game that might, in all other ways, seem convincing.

In order to discredit circumstantial evidence, one must have some reasonable alternative explanation for it. To justify such faith in Nosenko, the CIA would have to have found an innocent answer to every one of the questions below, each answer consistent with the others. Yet no CIA spokesman and no defender of Nosenko's bona fides has publicly answered even one. To read public defenses of Nosenko, one would suppose that these questions never existed.

Specific Questions

An unprecedented number of suspicious circumstances arose in Nosenko's case, so many and so revealing that the only possible answer to all of them must be that the KGB sent Nosenko to the CIA to tell certain stories, and that Gribanov's planning of this mission and its execution by Nosenko were sloppy and incompetent.

Following are 40 questions about those circumstances. Any defender of Nosenko's bona fides, to be convincing, must answer every one of them. I include references to the pages each is discussed in my book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Nosenko claimed that through the entire calendar years 1960 and 1961 he was deputy chief of the KGB section that spied on, and recruited agents in, the American Embassy in Moscow. In this post his specific responsibilities included supervising all KGB work against the embassy's code clerks and its security officer. This position gave him authority to recount the most important matters he revealed to CIA.

1.    
If Nosenko was supervising this top-priority KGB work, why was he, by his own accounts of this period, performing low-level tasks for a different KGB department? For example, by his own statements, he was handling street-level homosexual provocateurs of the Tourist Department, recruiting homosexual tourists (one as far away as Sofia), helping the Tourist Department chief meet a visiting travel agent in faraway Odessa, and traveling abroad repeatedly as a security watchdog for Soviet delegations. (Spy Wars, pp. 94–95, 160–162, 235, 250, 280)

2.    
Why have at least four authoritative KGB insiders stated that Nosenko did not hold that position? They include (a) the defector KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn who visited that American-Embassy section more than once during this period; (b) Roman Markov, a leading member of the section at the time; (c) KGB Lt. Gen. Sergey A. Kondrashev, a top-level supervisor of KGB operations who had himself earlier held that exact position; and (d) Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who had headed KGB foreign counterintelligence.

3.    
Why have no KGB insiders, not even those thinking that Nosenko was a genuine defector, confirmed that Nosenko did hold that position?

4.    
Why did Nosenko, with the authority of that position, certify that up to 1962 the KGB in Moscow had not recruited any American code clerk? (It is now known—from the recruiter himself—that the section recruited at least one code clerk before 1960–1961 and evidence from a reliable KGB defector suggests that two more were recruited during that period. (See Spy Wars, pp. 156–159, 241–242)

5.    
Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko was able to reassure the CIA that his immediate subordinate Gryaznov's attempt to recruit an American Embassy code clerk had failed, whereas Gryaznov had indicated to the defector Golitsyn that the operation succeeded? (Spy Wars, p. 25)

6.    
Why was Nosenko not aware of the trip to Helsinki of his immediate subordinate Kosolapov as part of an operation aimed at recruiting a Moscow-based American Embassy communications official? (Spy Wars, pp. 157–160, 242)

7.    
How could Nosenko mistake by an entire year the date when Moscow surveillants under his direct supervision spotted American Embassy Security Officer John Abidian visiting a dead drop site in “late 1960”? (Spy Wars, pp. 88–89, 147–150, 186, 203–204)

8.    
How could he claim that for many weeks thereafter he had received regular reports on the KGB's stakeout of that dead drop site? (The visit actually occurred in late 1961, not late 1960 as Nosenko said, and by his own statements, he would have by then moved to a different job.) (Spy Wars, pp. 147, 186)

9.    
Why did Nosenko say in 1962 that the most important finding from the KGB's watch over Abidian was a pair of girl's panties in his room—and then in 1964 tell of seeing Abidian visit the dead drop site in late 1960? (Spy Wars, pp. 16, 147, 203)

10.    
If Nosenko was personally directing the KGB's coverage of Abidian, why was he ignorant of Abidian's travel from Moscow to his ancestral homeland of Armenia? (Nosenko himself recognized that his failure to answer this question undermined his whole life story. See Spy Wars, p. 187)

Nosenko repeatedly changed his accounts of his KGB career, even dating his entry on duty variously as 1951, 1952, and March 1953 (and for that month, unable to remember whether before or after the death of Stalin). Moreover, not a single KGB source during or after the Cold War, not even among those who believed that Nosenko genuinely defected, has confirmed any precise date or detail of his career.

11. How does one explain the variation in Nosenko's own accounts? (Spy Wars, pp. 93, 160–162, 235, 248–250)

Nosenko preserved and brought to Geneva in 1964 the KGB document authorizing “Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Nosenko” to travel on a search for a fleeting would-be KGB defector named Cherepanov in December 1963—whereas KGB regulations (as Nosenko agreed when confronted) required that this document be turned in before the next payday and before any further travel could be authorized. (Spy Wars, pp. 87, 167–168, 250–251)

12. How did he keep this document?

13. Why did he bring it to Geneva?

14. Why was that travel authorization (signed by the SCD chief Gribanov) made out to a lieutenant colonel (the rank he claimed) whereas under detailed questioning he admitted having been only a captain (as even the KGB later confirmed)?

15. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko was already lying about his rank back in 1962, then calling himself a major?

16. Why, after Nosenko's defection in 1964, did a Soviet official in Paris—no doubt acting on KGB authority—try to peddle to the Western press the defector “Colonel” Nosenko's family story? (He moreover presented Nosenko's defection as a disaster for the KGB.) (Spy Wars, p. 163)

17. And why would Nosenko have been sent to search for Cherepanov when another KGB unit does such searches and if, as suggested by questions 1–7 above, Nosenko had not been supervising Cherepanov in the SCD's American-Embassy section—his own explanation for his participation?

Nosenko volunteered and stressed to the CIA in 1962 that the KGB first uncovered Pyotr Popov, CIA's spy inside Soviet military intelligence, by its chance surveillance of an American diplomat mailing a letter in Moscow in late January 1959. (Spy Wars, pp. 11–12, 16–17, 24, 68–75, 189, 233, 241–243)

18. 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?

19. Or with the fact that, two weeks before the letter mailing, KGB surveillants (by the KGB's own statement) had spotted Popov meeting CIA twice?

20. Or with the KGB's later admission that long before the letter mailing it had 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 after Oswald's defection to the USSR and having later read the KGB file on Oswald. The KGB chairman at the time and other KGB veterans have denied this and stated that Nosenko was lying about it. (So too did the House Select Committee on Assassinations after interviewing Nosenko many times in 1977–1978.) (Spy Wars, pp. 83–86, 95–96, 191, 210, 249)

21. Why did the KGB chairman state that Nosenko lied about his knowledge of Oswald?

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

After the Cold War much was learned about a previously little-known KGB Counterintelligence (SCD) department formed in 1959 for operational deception under the immediate supervision of SCD chief General Oleg Gribanov (Nosenko's sponsor). It was actively handing false sources to Western intelligence services to mislead them and to penetrate their ranks. Among this “14th Department's” leading officers were:

Valentin Zvezdenkov, who handled the KGB's investigation of CIA spy Pyotr Popov (Spy Wars, pp. 74, 233–234, 286).

Vladimir Chelnokov, who took Nosenko along on an operational mission to Odessa in 1960 (Spy Wars, p. 235),

Yuri Guk, who was meeting Nosenko before and after each CIA meeting in Geneva in 1962, and who returned from an operational trip to Moscow just before Nosenko first contacted CIA. (Spy Wars, pp. 6, 9, 66, 132, 236)

Aleksandr Kislov [probably a pseudonym] who was rooming with Nosenko in Geneva in 1962, far from the delegation Nosenko was supposedly watching. (Spy Wars, pp. 7, 66, 70–71, 236) See also my book Spymaster, pp. 206–210 and 289n13.

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

24. Why did Nosenko not tell CIA that his Geneva associates Guk and Kislov were members of it (even denying that Kislov had any KGB connection at the time)?

Nosenko in 1962 volunteered information that his KGB boss Kovshuk had traveled to Washington five years earlier to restore contact with a KGB-recruited American cipher-machine mechanic codenamed “Andrey.” Nosenko thought the trip had lasted “a week or so”—unaware that Kovshuk (while keeping his American-Embassy Section job in Moscow) had been sent ostensibly on permanent assignment and actually stayed in Washington for ten months. And it later became obvious that “Andrey” could not have been the real reason for the “trip” and that Kovshuk really went to Washington to follow up his Moscow recruitment of CIA officer Edward E. Smith, who had been supporting CIA's contact with Pyotr Popov. The earlier defector Anatoly Golitsyn had learned that Kovshuk's trip contributed to the KGB's uncovering of Popov. (Spy Wars, pp. 67–71, 185) After the Cold War the KGB admitted having recruited Smith. (Spy Wars, p. 188)

25. Is it mere coincidence that at the very moment that Nosenko in Geneva in 1962 was telling the CIA about Kovshuk's 1957 “trip” to Washington (where the FBI spotted him working with Yuri Guk and Aleksandr Kislov), Guk was Nosenko's constant KGB companion and Aleksandr Kislov was his hotel roommate?

26. Why did Nosenko, claiming as a security watchdog to have read the KGB file on Kislov along with those of all other delegates, certify to the CIA that Kislov had no connection with the KGB? (pp. 65–67)

27. Why did Nosenko have no idea of how long Kovshuk had really stayed in Washington?

Nosenko said (and repeated) in 1962 that the KGB recruited “Andrey” in “1949–1950”—i.e., years before Nosenko joined the KGB. Yet in 1964, evidently forgetting what he had said in 1962, he said he had learned about the case from overhearing section colleagues talking as they returned from meeting “Andrey” during Nosenko's time in the American-Embassy section 1953–1955. (Spy Wars, pp. 7–8, 90–91, 185) (In fact the KGB recruited “Andrey”—later identified as Sgt. Dayle W. Smith—in 1953. Smith was identified and confirmed as a mere mechanic who did not and could not have passed any classified information to the KGB after they recruited him in 1953 by sexual compromise. (He was not even prosecuted.)

28. How can one explain Nosenko's self-contradiction?

Shortly before Nosenko came to the CIA in 1962, the genuine KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn had told the CIA that the KGB had recruited an American Embassy Moscow code clerk in the late 1940s and codenamed him “Jack.” After the Cold War this 1949 recruitment (and code name) were confirmed by the KGB recruiter himself. See my Spymaster, Chapter 1.

29. Why did Nosenko confuse that 1949 recruitment with a much later one (“Andrey”)

Nosenko told CIA in 1962 that he had personally participated in the KGB's (unsuccessful) attempt to recruit CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith in Moscow, and even gave details. After the Cold War the KGB admitted having recruited Smith. (Spy Wars, pp. 71, 233)

30. Why then did he in 1964 deny any knowledge of the name or the case? (Spy Wars, p. 188)

Nosenko and other KGB sources reported that the KGB had discovered the Western spy inside Soviet Military Intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, by chance observation of his contact in Moscow with British diplomats. However, since the Cold War, high KGB authorities have admitted that they really learned earlier about Penkovsky's treason from a secret source. (Spy Wars, pp. 21–22, 86–87, 235, 243)

31. Why did Nosenko contradict himself repeatedly about how he learned that Penkovsky was caught only by chance surveillance? (Each time he reported it, he said he'd been told by one or another of three different KGB officers.)

In early June 1962 Nosenko on his own volition told of the KGB's (insignificant) microphone monitoring of a restaurant conversation in Moscow between the American Assistant Naval Attaché and an Indonesian military attaché named Zepp. Asked to spell the name, he did so carefully, “Z-E-P-P.” However, in 1964 when asked for further information on this Indonesian, Nosenko denied ever having heard that name. It was later learned that throughout the period 1961–1963—in the middle of which Nosenko mentioned to CIA the name “Zepp”—the KGB was intensely interested in that unusual name in connection with its investigation of CIA agent Soviet Col. Oleg Penkovsky, whom they were about to arrest. (Spy Wars, pp. 15–16, 150–155, 162, 203)

32. How does one explain Nosenko's mention in 1962 of that unique name “Zepp” at the very moment that it was of intense interest to KGB counterintelligence? (For example, might he have been trying, on behalf of the KGB, to elicit some insight from his CIA handlers?)

33. Why did Nosenko in 1964 deny recognizing that name, whereas he himself had brought it up only a year and a half earlier?

Vladimir Chelnokov was a member of the KGB's deception unit headed by Gribanov, Nosenko's sponsor. Nosenko said Chelnokov was head of the Tourist Department of Gribanov's SCD.

34. How does one explain that Nosenko (while ostensibly overseeing work against the American Embassy) assisted Tourist Department chief Chelnokov in his 1960 meeting in Odessa with a visiting American travel agent who had earlier been recruited by the KGB?

Other questions:

35. Why was Nosenko, an eleven-year veteran of KGB CI operations, unable to uncover a single KGB operation or spy beyond what the KGB is known to sacrifice to build the credibility of a false defector? (Spy Wars, pp. 178–179)

36. How does one explain Nosenko's inability—or unwillingness—to describe certain everyday KGB procedures? (Spy Wars, pp. 83–86, 191–192, 251–255)

37. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko reported to the CIA in 1962 about each of at least fourteen specific cases that the KGB knew had already been compromised to the Americans six months earlier by KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn?

a.    
Vassall (Spy Wars, pp. 14, 24, 97, 179, 187, 189, 206, 261)

b.    
Preisfreund's target (Spy Wars, pp. 25, 28, 158–159)

c.    
Kosolapov's trip to meet the man on the train (Spy Wars, pp. 157–158)

d.    
Belitsky (Spy Wars, pp. 17, 25, 179)

e.    
Kovshuk's “trip” to Washington (Spy Wars, pp. 24, 65–66, 69, 75–78)

f.    
Nine others including a Canadian Ambassador, a French ambassador, and a French businessman (Spy Wars, pp. 4, 14, 25, 165, 206).

38. Why did Nosenko bring up in 1962 the subject of KGB relations with the Finnish president, but then in 1964 deny having done so or knowing anything whatever about it? (Spy Wars, pp. 8, 186)

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

40. How does one explain that, ostensibly as delegation watchdog in Geneva in 1962, Nosenko was housed (with “Aleksandr Kislov” of the SCD's deception department) two kilometers away from the delegation he was ostensibly watching over? (Spy Wars, pp, 6–7, 66, 236)

A final couple of questions:

41. Could so many questions arise about any genuine defector?

42. How does one explain the more recent revelation by the KGB's top disinformation chief, General Sergey A. Kondrashev, that he himself at the beginning of 1962 was invited to help launch against CIA what could only be the Nosenko case? (Spymaster, pp. 195–199)


-- "TG"