I have never seen evidence beyond reasonable doubt that Solie and McCord were KGB assets.
It is a reasonable suspicion or deduction, but not much more.
It is a CT about Solie and McCord, that they conspired with the KGB.
Dear "BC,"
Regarding McCord, take your beef to John M. Newman.
Regarding Solie, Read Tennent H. Bagley's
Spy Wars for background, and Newman's
Uncovering Popov's Mole for specifics.
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames-- "TG"
PS
Here's one of my 659 free-to-read Substack posts at "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI":
Bruce Solie: KGB Mole, or Duped-by-Kremlin-Loyal Triple Agent Igor Kochnov into Believing Yuri Nosenko was a True Defector?
Background:
Putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 — sent to the CIA there to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, was telling CIA about probable penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies — and a false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.
A few days after his final meeting with Nosenko in Geneva, his primary CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, convinced Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton at CIA headquarters that Nosenko was fake. He did so after reading, at Angleton's suggestion, the thick file on Golitsyn and realizing that the cases that Nosenko had spoken dismissably about were the same ones that Golitsyn had been telling Angleton about even though Golitsyn and Nosenko had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.
Although the Soviet Russia Division and Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff were convinced that Nosenko was a provocateur, he was allowed to physically defect to the U.S. in February 1964 because the Warren Commission was just beginning to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, and because Nosenko was claiming in Geneva — where he was once again (implausibly) acting as the security officer for a Soviet arms negation delegation — to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer and to have just received a “return to Moscow immediately” telegram from KGB headquarters. Nosenko said he had read the file on Oswald four times — twice before and twice after the assassination — and swore that the KGB had nothing to do with the former Marine sharpshooter and U-2 radar operator during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR.
Upon arriving in the U.S., Nosenko refused to fully cooperate with his CIA interviewers, and after a couple of months, the CIA decided to detain him and subject him to a polygraph exam and hostile, but non-tortuous, interrogations.
At one point, having been caught in a lie about his alleged KGB crew's surveillance of John Abidian, the security officer at the American Embassy, in its attempt "to catch another Popov," Nosenko was recorded mumbling to himself in a trance-like state, "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.”
Around 2010, British researcher Malcolm Blunt found a document at the National Archives that indicated that Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the Office of Security, Bruce Solie, had tried in April 1964 to talk the Warren Commission’s W. David Slawson into allowing Nosenko to testify to the Commission even though the Soviet Bloc Division and James Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff seriously doubted Nosenko’s bona fides and the aforementioned interrogations of Nosenko had just begun.
Fast-forward a couple of years to 1966 . . .
KGB Major Igor Kochnov, posted to the Soviet Embassy as a diplomat, calls Richard Helms at home on a Saturday morning in June and offers to spy for the CIA in exchange for being allowed to recruit, or appear to recruit, former defector Nicholas Shadrin. Angleton thinks he’s fake, and, fearing that the Soviet Bloc Division has been penetrated by a mole, chooses inexperienced Solie to be Kochnov’s CIA case officer. Solie and FBI agent Elbert Turner meet with Kochnov, and Kochnov tells them that he was sent to Washington to track down and either kidnap or kill both (true defector) Golitsyn and (false defector) Nosenko. He also flatters Solie by telling him he was right to suspect that Igor Orlov — aka Alexander “Sasha” Kopatzky — was Golitsyn’s long-sought mole, SASHA. (Orlov had been forced to retire from the Agency five years earlier.)
The $64,000 Question:
Given the above, was Bruce Solie, who “cleared” Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report and was instrumental in Kochnov’s kidnapping of Shadrin in Vienna in 1975, a KGB mole?
It sure seems that way to me.
