Was the HSCA right about Nosenko?

[Tom Graves]

When putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko testified in 1978 that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with "uninteresting" and "unstable" former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in The Worker's Paradise because it didn't realize he'd been a U-2 radar operator and because he'd allegedly tried to kill himself, the HSCA said he was lying.

Given that, why do so many Lone Nutters and Tinfoil Hat JFKA Conspiracy Theorists alike believe that Nosenko was a true defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and a true physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964?

https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/secclass/pdf/Nosenko_6-20-78.pdf

[Benjamin Cole]

TG--

I defer to Tennent Bagley, widely regarded as a smart, experienced CIA'er, deeply knowledgeable about Russia, who after a large amount of interrogation and exposure to Nosenko, concluded that Nosenko was a phony.

Bruce Solie's sniveling to the WC and HSCA...who knows, maybe the Russians threatened to expose Solie unless he derailed the investigation into Nosenko.

There was a lot of connections between LHO and the KGB and G2, and the Minsk KGB'er said he was running LHO there.

Investigations into LHO-G2-KGB ties were snuffed out, when the LN narrative was asserted.

What happened in Bagley, and US Ambassador Mann to MexicoThomas Mann, and State Dep't'er Charles Thomas suggest that looking into LHO-KGB-G2 would end one's career.

[Tom Graves]

TG--

I defer to Tennent Bagley, widely regarded as a smart, experienced CIA'er, deeply knowledgeable about Russia, who after a large amount of interrogation and exposure to Nosenko, concluded that Nosenko was a phony.

Bruce Solie's sniveling to the WC and HSCA...who knows, maybe the Russians threatened to expose Solie unless he derailed the investigation into Nosenko.

There was a lot of connections between LHO and the KGB and G2, and the Minsk KGB'er said he was running LHO there.

Investigations into LHO-G2-KGB ties were snuffed out, when the LN narrative was asserted.

What happened in Bagley, and US Ambassador Mann to Mexico, Thomas Mann, and State Dep't'er Charles Thomas suggest that looking into LHO-KGB-G2 would end one's career.

Dear "BC"

Bagley didn't conclude that Nosenko was fake "after a large amount of interrogation and exposure" -- he was pretty convinced of that as soon as he'd read the thick file on Anatoliy Golitsyn at CIA headquarters a few days after his final 6/15/62 meeting with Nosenko in Geneva and realized that what Nosenko said implausibly overlapped -- and contradicted -- what Golitsyn had said six months earlier even though they worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.

Bagley didn't know, until Malcolm Blunt showed him around 2012, that John M. Newman had demonstrated in his 1995 book, Oswald and the CIA, that all of the incoming non-CIA cables (i.e., from State, the Navy Attache in Moscow, and the Department of the Navy) on Oswald's defection were routed to the Office of Security's mole-hunting Security Research Staff (where Solie was Deputy Chief) instead of where they normally would have gone -- the Soviet Russia Division. The fact that such rerouting arrangements had to be made in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics led Bagley to exclaim to Blunt that Oswald had to be a "witting," i.e., dispatched, defector.

Newman believes that when Popov allegedly told (probable mole, imho) George Kisevalter in Berlin in April 1958 that the Kremlin had the top-secret specifications of the U-2, Mole Solie protected himself by sending Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle' in a planned-to-fail mole hunt in the Soviet Russia Division for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (Solie in the Office of Security).

When Golitsyn defected to the U.S. on 12/15/61, his leads threatened to expose Solie, so when Nosenko showed up in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit Golitsyn, Solie had no choice but to support him from there on out.

-- "TG"

[Benjamin Cole]

""TG""---

Well, sure Bagley read the "thick file on Anatoliy Golitsyn" and was informed by that.

Still, Bagley conducted intense and lengthy interrogations of Nosenko, and concluded on the basis of those interrogations also that Nosenko was a phony. Such as Nosenko didn't know where was the KGB cafeteria. 

Who takes mere files at face value? Bagley meeting Nosenko face-to-face played a role too.

For me, it is still an open question whether G2 and KGB ties to LHO were only manipulative, and not something more.

""BC""

[Tom Graves]

""TG""---

Well, sure Bagley read the "thick file on Anatoliy Golitsyn" and was informed by that.

Still, Bagley conducted intense and lengthy interrogations of Nosenko, and concluded on the basis of those interrogations also that Nosenko was a phony. Such as Nosenko didn't know where was the KGB cafeteria. 

Who takes mere files at face value? Bagley meeting Nosenko face-to-face played a role too.

For me, it is still an open question whether G2 and KGB ties to LHO were only manipulative, and not something more.

""BC""

Dude.

Bagley and David E. Murphy (those two "incarcerated" Nosenko) and Angleton (who wanted to "play" him) were convinced by late June 1962 in Bagley's and Angleton's case, and by mid-1963 in Murphy's case, that Nosenko was fake, and Bagley and Murphy spent three years (from April 1964 to September or so 1967) trying to "break" him by subjecting him to Spartan living conditions and hostile (but non-tortuous) interrogations.

But probable moles Leonard V. McCoy and Bruce Leonard Solie intervened, and since possibly-"programmed" Nosenko came close to "breaking" only once, Bagley, Murphy, and Angleton eventually ran out of time, and FPR's and Galbraith's beloved Nosenko ended being generously reimbursed for his "troubles," naturalized, given a house, and hired by the Agency to teach its and the FBI's new recruits "counterintelligence."

And, of course, the CIA atoned for its sins by decimating CI and the Soviet Russia Division just in time for Aldrich Ames to start spying for The World-Class Humanitarian Organization known as the KGB*.

*Today's SVR and FSB 

[Benjamin Cole]

OK, no major disagreements.