Len McCoy's problematic reason for believing Yuri Nosenko was a true defector.

[Tom Graves]

Putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko, the ostensible deputy chief of the Second Chief Directorate’s British and American Tourists section who had implausibly been chosen to serve as the security officer of a Soviet Arms Negotiation Delegation in Geneva in 1962 and 1964, “walked in” to the CIA there in June 1962, offering to trade two or three bits of KGB intelligence for $250 worth of “desperately needed” Swiss francs. He ended up telling his two case officers, Tennent H. Bagley and probable mole George Kisevalter, lots more than just two secrets during the five meetings they had in a Geneva safe house.

One of the things he told them was that his drinking buddy, KGB officer Yuri Guk, (one of “The Three Musketeers” the FBI saw acting suspiciously so often around D.C. movie houses in early 1957) was able to get him admitted to the KGB’s top-secret Rezidency in Geneva where a garrulous officer inexplicably told him that CIA’s spy, Boris Belitsky, a famous radio personality in Russia, was actually a Kremlin-loyal triple agent.

Probable mole Leonard V. McCoy (R.I.P.) of the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division Reports & Requirements department, tells us in an article on his website, “Ironbark, Inc.” that the reason he decided Nosenko was a true defector was because Kisevalter told him the above story and thereby “confirmed his suspicions” that Belitsky was fake despite his having passed a polygraph exam with flying colors.

Bagley, on the other hand, tells us in his book, Spy Wars, that true defector Anatoly Golitsyn, who had defected to the U.S. six months earlier, knew about Belitsky and that KGB headquarters “knew that he knew.”

To “dot the I” on the last point, Bagley’s friend, former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev, told him a few years after the Cold War that the committee that was set up to determine the extent of damage caused by Golitsyn’s December 1961 defection told him that it definitely knew that Golitsyn had told the CIA about him

In other words, there was a high-level mole in the CIA.

Background:

Golitsyn quickly and furtively (because he wasn’t supposed to have it) read the file on the KGB’s mole in Germany, SASHA, at KGB headquarters around 1951. About all he could remember about SASHA when he defected in December 1961 was that he was based in West Germany, that he was married to a foreigner, and that his name started with a “K” and ended with a “-ski” or “-sky.” Golitsyn mistakenly believed that the KGB agent's codename was SASHA when in fact it was his nickname.

We know that Golitsyn met with the Office of Security’s Bruce Solie four days after he arrived in the U.S. in late December 1961 — when Solie may have tricked him into choosing Serge Klibansky’s name rather than Alexander Kopatzky’s from a list of SASHA suspects — and we also know that Solie was James Angleton’s mole hunting superior and confidant — the last point is evidenced by the fact that Angleton, trying in vain to get Golitsyn to resume working with Solie, told Golitsyn, David E. Murphy, and Raymond Rocca on 29 June 1978 that Solie’s office was the only one that he didn’t fear was penetrated by the KGB.

Ironically, in October 1968 Angleton’s confidant cleared his and Bagley’s bugbear, Nosenko, via a bogus polygraph exam — one of the worst that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen in 1978 — and a specious report.

Point being:

If Counterintelligence Chief Angleton was Golitsyn’s primary contact at CIA headquarters soon after he arrived from Helsinki (as is very probable), Golitsyn probably told him about Belitsky and Kondrashev. Angleton may have shared that intel with his trusted Philby-like confidant, Solie, and Solie, in turn, probably shared it with KGB headquarters.

P.S. The birthname of Peter Karlow (who was already suspected in the Easy Chair case) was Serge Klibansky, and one of Igor Orlov’s many former names was Alexander "Sasha" Kopatsky.

P.P.S. Angleton described Orlov/Kopatzky as a long-running master Soviet spy in his 1978 HSCA testimony.