George Kisevalter, Yuri Nosenko, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Igor Danchenko

[Tom Graves]

George Kisevalter and Igor Danchenko

Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 — sent there to discredit what recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was known by the KGB to be telling the CIA, and he was a false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in 1964 — two months after the assassination of President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-described Marxist who had lived in the USSR for two-and-a-half years. (Nosenko claimed that he’d read the KGB file on Oswald four times — twice before and twice after the assassination — and therefore knew for a fact that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator in The Worker’s Paradise.)

When, in June 1962, English-speaking Major Lt. Col. Captain Nosenko, who was ostensibly in Geneva to provide security to a Soviet arms control delegation and “desperately needed $250 worth of Swiss francs,” defected-in-place to CIA’s Tennent H. Bagley, Russian-speaking George Kisevalter — already legendary within the Agency for having handled destined-to-be-uncovered-and-executed Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky — was brought in from Washington to help the Russian-understanding Bagley interview him.

When Nosenko returned to Moscow a couple of weeks later with the Soviet negotiators, it was Kisevalter’s task to transcribe the tapes from the four meetings that he and Bagley had had with Nosenko plus the first one that Bagley had with him one-on-one.

In 1965, Bagley asked a trusted defector, KGB Major Pyotr Deriabin, to listen to the tapes and correct any errors in Kisevalter’s transcriptions.

Deriabin found one-hundred-and-fifty of ‘em.


Fast-forward thirteen years:

Nosenko-defending John L. Hart told the HSCA in 1978 that these 150 mistakes proved that Nosenko had been grossly misunderstood by his debriefers.

Which somehow reminds me of how probable KGB agent Igor Danchenko fed Christopher Steele unfalsifiable “intel” for his opposition research dossier on Donald Trump.