JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Thomas Graves on September 24, 2019, 09:32:02 PM
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By Paul "Word Twister" Trejo:
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It took Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty 33 years to publish his book about the JFK assassination: Assignment Oswald (1996).
I reviewed this book last month, and it suddenly struck me that Bill Simpich's recent eBook, State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City (2014) offers the best interpretation of James Hosty's biased slant on the JFK murder.
The theme of James Hosty's book is that KGB assassin, Valeriy Kostikov, was the accomplice of Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) in Mexico City, and supported LHO in the JFK assassination. Hosty goes further, and insists that the FBI, the State Department, the CIA and the Secret Service all knew about Kostikov's connection to LHO in 1963, and deliberately kept this information from Hosty.
If these evil US Government forces would have told him the truth, implies Hosty, he could have saved JFK, his beloved President, for whose funeral he wept. This is the thematic undercurrent of Hosty's 1996 book, Assignment Oswald, from chapter one to the final chapter.
Starting on page 48 of his book, Hosty sets up the chronology. In late October, 1963, Jeff Woolsey, INS officer, asked Hosty: "How about Oswald in Mexico City contacting the Russians?" Hosty replies that he never heard of this, and asked for more information, but Jeff Woolsey exclaimed that he shouldn't have said anything, and hurried away.
Later that week, Hosty claimed that he saw an FBI communique of 10/18/1963 from the CIA, saying that Oswald was in Mexico City and contacted Valeriy Kostikov. Hosty then asked himself, melodramatically setting up the theme for his book, "Who is the world is Valeriy Kostikov?"
The theme is carried out throughout the book in tiny snippets, In the center of his book is a photograph of Kostikov, and his text is peppered with allusions to his many murders in Mexico City, and the failure of the FBI and CIA to arrest him.
Hosty concludes that the JFK plot began in Mexico City, not NOLA (as Jim Garrison proposed) and on page 244, in his final chapter, Hosty claims that FBI Directors Clarence Kelly and William Webster both agreed that the FBI failed to give Hosty information about Valeriy Kostikov -- thus confirming Hosty's innocence of any role in the JFK assassination.
The trouble with Hosty's account is seen in vivid color by implication from Bill SImpich's brilliant eBook from 2014, State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City. This eBook is free for the taking on the Mary Ferrell web site, and IMHO one cannot offer an informed opinion about the JFK assassination today without reading this eBook. It's free, so there's really no excuse.
What Bill Simpich shows, by using a careful analysis of recent FOIA releases of CIA documents from 1963, is that the legend that LHO contacted Valeriy Kostikov in Mexico City was started by an underground plot in Mexico City, by somebody who impersonated LHO over the telephone of the Cuban consulate, calling the USSR Embassy, which was the most heavily wire-tapped telephone on the planet in 1963.
Calls on this telephone had to be transcribed into English and placed on the Mexico City CIA Director's Desk within 15 minutes.
When this was done, the conclusion was clear -- the caller was not LHO. The caller claimed to be LHO, and directly asked the clerk about Valeriy Kostikov -- thereby linking the names of the two men for the record. The CIA concluded that the caller knew that the phone would be tapped -- and therefore the impersonation had to be an inside job. Somebody in the CIA or in the FBI in Mexico City did this -- as a rogue operation -- as a Mole -- completely unknown to the CIA high-command -- deliberately to link the names of LHO and Kostikov.
Bill Simpich proved that a high-level CIA Mole Hunt emerged from this scenario, and Simpich traces that CIA Mole Hunt for more than a year after this event. The CIA sought the mole, but never caught the mole. [...]
[emphasis added]
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Okay, thanks, Word Twister.
In my humble opinion, this is where Simpich (and you) go horribly wrong:
The caller did not directly ask "the clerk" about Kostikov -- the "clerk" volunteered Kostikov's radioactive name to the caller!
By actually reading the transcript of the phone call, we can see the the person on the other end of the line, embassy security guard (and suspected KGB officer) Ivan Obyedkov, "suggested" the name "Kostikov" to the Oswald impersonator (whom I believe was Cuban Consulate's Duran and Azcue's "Blond Oswald in Mexico City," KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov).
Now, what's interesting about this is twofold:
1) Obyedkov, mispelled by the "court reporter" or the transcriber as "Byetkov*?" in James Angleton's June 19,1975 Church Committee testimony ...
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1447&search=Angleton#relPageId=16&tab=page
... was a KGB triple-agent whom CIA thought it had recruited but who was actually still loyal to the Kremlin, and
2) KGB officer Kostikov's name had already been made Dept. 13 "Radioactive" by another triple-agent, Aleksey Kulak (FBI's "Fedora"), in cahoots with FBI's rather mysterious East German Guenter Schulz ("Tumbleweed"), true Dept.13 officer, Oleg Brykin (who was working undercover at the UN, and Valiery Kostikov, himself, in Mexico City.
-- MWT ;)
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https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/ec498402-3465-453a-a17b-5f106a4e85fe/downloads/WHAT%20JANE%20ROMAN%20SAID.pdf?ver=1569647030587
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https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/ec498402-3465-453a-a17b-5f106a4e85fe/downloads/WHAT%20JANE%20ROMAN%20SAID.pdf?ver=1569647030587
Michael,
Point being?
Aren't you able to extrapolate from all of the documents and essays you like to post and synthesize your own ideas and theories out of them and actually communicate them to us?
If you can, then what's the bottom line, Mike?
That we live in an evil, evil, evil "Deep State," controlled by an evil, evil, evil Military Industrial Intelligence Community Complex, just like Donald Sutherland said in JFK?
A military and intelligence complex that we have absolutely no need for, now, except to fight Islamic terrorists, of course, because, hey, "The Cold War Is Over!" ?
That Oswald was held very tightly in a "vest pocket" operation by evil, evil, evil James Angleton and/or the mysterious Special Affairs Staff, not to uncover moles and/or triple-agents in the Soviet Russia Division (George Kisevalter comes to mind as an excellent candidate) mind you, but to patsy, goddammit, in the planned-since-at-least-1947 Assassination of JFK in such a way as to "justify" our nuking the bejesus out of Russia and invading Cuba, too?
And ... shhhhh...... so that George Soros, and the Clintons, and the Koch Bros and their ilk could take over the world, leaving us to read The Warren Report and 1984 over and over and over again?
-- MWT ;)
PS Which "impressive" document, in lieu of your very own "brainwashed"-by-Morley-and-"Jumbo Duh" half-baked thoughts, are you going to post for us now, Mike?
Something that you've already posted three or four times?
LOL
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Excerpt from Morley's What Jane Roman Said:
Paraphrased: "Some sneaky rotten CIA xxxxxxxx had a closely-held operational interest in Oswald seven weeks before JFK was assassinated."
My comment: "Okay"
-- MWT ;)
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Michael,
Point being?
Aren't you able to extrapolate from all of the documents and essays you like to post and synthesize your own ideas and theories out of them and actually communicate them to us?
If you can, then what's the bottom line, Mike?
That we live in an evil, evil, evil "Deep State," controlled by an evil, evil, evil Military Industrial Intelligence Community Complex, just like Donald Sutherland said in JFK?
A military and intelligence complex that we have absolutely no need for, now, except to fight Islamic terrorists, of course, because, hey, "The Cold War Is Over!" ?
That Oswald was held very tightly in a "vest pocket" operation by evil, evil, evil James Angleton and/or the mysterious Special Affairs Staff, not to uncover moles and/or triple-agents in the Soviet Russia Division (George Kisevalter comes to mind as an excellent candidate) mind you, but to patsy, goddammit, in the planned-since-at-least-1947 Assassination of JFK in such a way as to "justify" our nuking the bejesus out of Russia and invading Cuba, too?
And ... shhhhh...... so that George Soros, and the Clintons, and the Koch Bros and their ilk could take over the world, leaving us to read The Warren Report and 1984 over and over and over again?
-- MWT ;)
PS Which "impressive" document, in lieu of your very own "brainwashed"-by-Morley-and-"Jumbo Duh" half-baked thoughts, are you going to post for us now, Mike?
Something that you've already posted three or four times?
LOL
Thomas, you really a rotten thread-mate. I WAS being low Key and onobtrusive.
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Good to see Clark and Graves sharing the love on here. LOL
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Thomas, you really a rotten thread-mate. I WAS being low Key and onobtrusive.
Michael,
Yeah, you're right.
I can't do anything right by you, can I.
Your buddy, Mudd Wrassler Tommy ;)
PS That all you got?
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Michael,
.........
-- MWT ;)
PS Which "impressive" document, in lieu of your very own "brainwashed"-by-Morley-and-"Jumbo Duh" half-baked thoughts, are you going to post for us now, Mike?
Something that you've already posted three or four times?
LOL
And it is fantastically rich that you accuse me of posting the same thing repeatedly.
For three years no one has heard anything from you except: “... but, but, but Bagely... he’s so, so, so.. well-endowed. Just look! And, and, and,... there is this video you should watch.”
Your desperate attempts to be either relevant or annoying, come hell or high-water, are hopefully going to become a thing of the past soon. Take pottery classes or something, please.
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And it is fantastically rich that you accuse me of posting the same thing repeatedly.
For three years no one has heard anything from you except: “... but, but, but Bagely... he’s so, so, so.. well-endowed. Just look! And, and, and,... there is this video you should watch.”
Michael,
Thanks for reminding me (and confessing that you haven't watched John Newman's two-part 2018 "Spy Wars" video in its entirety yet) --
Did you ever finish that letter to Newman and Professor Scott? You know, the one in which you're gonna set 'em straight about your hero, false-defector Yuri Nosenko?
-- MWT ;)
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That two-part John Newman youtube video is too convoluted, too complicated, it has way too many Russian names in it, and, most importantly of all, it doesn't portray James Angleton as an evil, evil man,Tennent H. Bagley as the sadistic incompetent he obviously was, and Anatoliy Golitsyn as an over-the-top Paranoiac Delusional ...
... so there's really no reason for you to watch it, right?
Especially since you already know everything there is to know about the humanitarian organization formerly known as the KGB!
THE COLD WAR IS OVER!
LOL
-- MWT ;)
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Michael,
Thanks for reminding me (and confessing that you haven't watched John Newman's two-part 2018 "Spy Wars" video in its entirety yet) --
Did you ever finish that letter to Newman and Professor Scott? You know, the one in which you're gonna set 'em straight about your hero, false-defector Yuri Nosenko?
-- MWT ;)
Like I said........
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That two-part John Newman youtube video is too convoluted, too complicated, it has way too many Russian names in it, and, most importantly of all, it doesn't portray James Angleton as an evil, evil man,Tennent H. Bagley as the sadistic incompetent he obviously was, and Anatoliy Golitsyn as an over-the-top Paranoiac Delusional ...
... so there's really no reason for you to watch it, right?
Especially since you already know everything there is to know about the humanitarian organization formerly known as the KGB!
THE COLD WAR IS OVER!
LOL
-- MWT ;)
The same tired song.... over and over and over and over again...
Yawn.....
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The same tired song.... over and over and over and over again...
Yawn.....
Poor Michael Clark, who, like most Americans, is incredibly ignorant on matters KGB because he not only refuses to read what I've suggested to him and won't watch a two-part video by CTer extraordinaire John Newman, but has swallowed the message of Oliver Stone's JFK so "hook, line and sinker" that he believes we were living in an evil, evil, evil "Deep State" until the Ruskies helped Donald Trump get "elected," or at least doesn't realize that they did.
Sad. Very, very sad ...
-- MWT ;)
PS What's older and more tiring than the "The Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Community-Complex Murdered JFK" song?
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Poor Michael Clark, who, like most Americans, is incredibly ignorant on matters KGB because he not only refuses to read what I've suggested to him and won't watch a two-part video by CTer extraordinaire John Newman, but has swallowed the message of Oliver Stone's JFK so "hook, line and sinker" that he believes we were living in an evil, evil, evil "Deep State" until the Ruskies helped Donald Trump get "elected," or at least doesn't realize that they did.
Sad. Very, very sad ...
-- MWT ;)
PS What's older and more tiring than the "The Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Community-Complex Murdered JFK" song?
You do know that John Newman believes that elements of the US government - probably (if I read him correctly) in the Pentagon - killed JFK?
He hasn't released his last work yet but his two previous books outlined what appears to be his belief that the assassination was an "Operation Northwoods" type plot engineered by elements in the Defense Department (Lemnitzer et al.) who opposed JFK for his policies on Cuba and Southeast Asia.
So I am curious as to why you quote Dr. Newman to support your view that the Soviets were behind the assassination? Newman's views are closer to the Stone's thesis in JFK than yours is.
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You do know that John Newman believes that elements of the US government - probably (if I read him correctly) in the Pentagon - killed JFK?
He hasn't released his last work yet but his two previous books outlined what appears to be his belief that the assassination was an "Operation Northwoods" type plot engineered by elements in the Defense Department (Lemnitzer et al.) who opposed JFK for his policies on Cuba and Southeast Asia.
So I am curious as to why you quote Dr. Newman to support your view that the Soviets were behind the assassination? Newman's views are closer to the Stone's thesis in JFK than yours is.
Thomas believes in the “Monster Plot”. He likes the Newman Video because, at the time, Newman believed Nosenko to be a a false defector. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had no interest in Oswald. Thomas believes that LHO didit, at the behest of the KGB.
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Thomas believes in the “Monster Plot”. He likes the Newman Video because, at the time, Newman believed Nosenko to be a a false defector. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had no interest in Oswald. Thomas believes that LHO didit, at the behest of the KGB.
Michael,
"At the time," as in March, 2018? Gasp ... a whole year-and-a-half ago?
Has Professor John Newman changed his mind back to believing Yuri Nosenko was a true defector? (If he ever believed that, that is.)
Where can I read his saying that, or watch him say that in a more recent video, Mike?
Gasp ... Did you finally send him that letter informing him about Richards J. Heuer's essay and ... gasp ... HSCA perjurer John L. Hart's full 187-page, unredacted report that wasn't released until 2017?
LOL
Or did you just make that up, when you used the past tense and put in the phrase "at the time"?
Regarding LHO, not necessarily. Being a true (although underinformed) Marxist or Marxist-Leninist, and being fed up with both Soviet and U.S. culture and society, and maybe fed up with being used as a pawn by both the KGB and the CIA/FBI, he may have given them both the middle finger salute and taken matters into his own hands -- to speed up the "Dialectics".
-- MWT ;)
PS Do you believe we live in an evil, evil, evil "Deep State," Mike?
I do.
Well, at least a stupid, stupid, stupid country (the U.S.) that's manipulated by the evil, evil, evil Deep State that used to be called the KGB (and the GRU), but nowadays is called the FSB and the SVR (they sound so nice, da?).
And the good-old GRU, of course, home of the 13 Ruskie "Guccifer 2.0" hackers and DNCLeaks denizens who helped bring Donad "Useful Idiot" Trump to power.
Possible civil war looming now in the U.S., and First Chief Directorate Counterintelligence Division Lieutenant-Colonel (Ret.) multi-multi-billionaire Vladimir Putin is jumping for joy.
Keep up the good work, Mike, I'm pretty sure Vladimir loves what you, and James "Jumbo Duh" DiEugenio at the so-called Education Forum, et al., do.
PPS Did you know that on page 407-408 of his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Mark Riebling says that by the end of 1993, almost 94 percent of the falsifiabe things Nosenko's nemesis, Anatoliy Golitsyn, had predicted in his 1984 "Monster Plot" book, New Lies for Old, had already come true?
https://archive.org/details/WedgeFromPearlHarborTo911HowTheSecretWarBetweenTheFBIAndCIAHasEndangeredNationalSecurity
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You do know that John Newman believes that elements of the US government - probably (if I read him correctly) in the Pentagon - killed JFK?
He hasn't released his last work yet but his two previous books outlined what appears to be his belief that the assassination was an "Operation Northwoods" type plot engineered by elements in the Defense Department (Lemnitzer et al.) who opposed JFK for his policies on Cuba and Southeast Asia.
So I am curious as to why you quote Dr. Newman to support your view that the Soviets were behind the assassination? Newman's views are closer to the Stone's thesis in JFK than yours is.
Steven,
Of course I'm aware that John Newman is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist who apparently doesn't realize that the probable KGB triple-agent who "volunteered" to an Oswald impersonator (who naturally couldn't speak English very well, and who evidently pretended he couldn't speak Russian very well at all) the made-radioactive-by-KGB name "Kostikov" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA Soviet embassy phoneline was ... well ... as I said, a probable KGB triple agent -- a KGB triple-agent whose name was misspelled "Byetkov" in the transcript of Angleton's June 19, 1975 Church Committee testimony. (Can you say Ivan Obyedkov?; have you ever seen his highly redacted 48- page "201" file?)
Ahh, but I digress.
I do admit to having been a bit "blown away" and pleasantly surprised when I realized in March of 2018 that Newman had not only read Spy Wars and Spymaster by my hero, (Lone-Nutter) Tennent H. Bagley, but had been heavily influenced by them.
I really must read his new two-or-three-or-four part tome to see how he "spins" Bagley's "Nosenko was a false defector, and Golitsyn was a true one" stuff, if at all.
Which one do you recommend?
Does he talk about KGB active measures counterintelligence operations and strategic deception counterintelligence operations?
Hmm?
Have you watched Newman's two-part Spy Wars youtube presentation from March, 2018, yet? The one in which he actually convinced PDS that Yuri Nosenko was a false defector, and tried to convince him that Anatoliy Golitsyn was a sane and true one?
Despite what I've written above, I'm no longer so sure that the Soviets were actually "behind" the assassination (unless Ion Pacepa is correct when he says the KGB programmed/trained Oswald in the USSR, and Khruschev was unable to call the mission off after Oswald had returned to the U.S.), but they certainly took advantage of it through people like Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone, Roger Stone, Robert Morrow, Alex Jones, et al. So effective that we now have a CT-plagued country with have a dumbed-down, gullible electorate who helped the Kremlin put Donald "Useful Idiot" Trump in office and as a result we're now facing the prospect of a civil war.
LOL
-- MWT ;)
PS Did you know that Golitsyn told CIA in December 1961 that KGB was planning to assassinate an unknown-to-him Western political leader?
PPS Did you know that KGB triple-agent Boris Orehkov (FBI'S "Shamrock") misled Hoover in 1966 into believing that the Kremlin had undertaken a six-month investigation after the assassination, which "investigation" concluded that the evil, evil, evil Military Industrial Complex had conspired to assassinate our beloved president. And did you know ... aww, never mind. Probably "in one ear and out the other," right?
Couple of hints as to what I was gonna "launch" into: Undercover FBI agent Morris Childs in Moscow on 11/22/63, and Khrushchev's button-holing of Drew Pearson at a party of some sort in Cairo in early 1964.
PPS Please don't run away, now, Steven, like you almost always do ...
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Steven,
Of course I'm aware that John Newman is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist who apparently doesn't realize that the probable KGB triple-agent who "volunteered" to an Oswald impersonator (who naturally couldn't speak English very well, and who evidently pretended he couldn't speak Russian very well at all) the made-radioactive-by-KGB name "Kostikov" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA Soviet embassy phoneline was ... well ... as I said, a probable KGB triple agent -- a KGB triple-agent whose name was misspelled "Byetkov" in the transcript of Angleton's June 19, 1975 Church Committee testimony. (Can you say Ivan Obyedkov?; have you ever seen his highly redacted 48- page "201" file?)
Ahh, but I digress.
I do admit to having been a bit "blown away" and pleasantly surprised when I realized in March of 2018 that Newman had not only read Spy Wars and Spymaster by my hero, (Lone-Nutter) Tennent H. Bagley, but had been heavily influenced by them.
I really must read his new two-or-three-or-four part tome to see how he "spins" Bagley's "Nosenko was a false defector, and Golitsyn was a true one" stuff, if at all.
Which one do you recommend?
Does he talk about KGB active measures counterintelligence operations and strategic deception counterintelligence operations?
Hmm?
Have you watched Newman's two-part Spy Wars youtube presentation from March, 2018, yet? The one in which he actually convinced PDS that Yuri Nosenko was a false defector, and tried to convince him that Anatoliy Golitsyn was a sane and true one?
Despite what I've written above, I'm no longer so sure that the Soviets were actually "behind" the assassination (unless Ion Pacepa is correct when he says the KGB programmed/trained Oswald in the USSR, and Khruschev was unable to call the mission off after Oswald had returned to the U.S.), but they certainly took advantage of it through people like Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone, Roger Stone, Robert Morrow, Alex Jones, et al. So effective that we now have a CT-plagued country with have a dumbed-down, gullible electorate who helped the Kremlin put Donald "Useful Idiot" Trump in office and as a result we're now facing the prospect of a civil war.
LOL
-- MWT ;)
PS Did you know that Golitsyn told CIA in December 1961 that KGB was planning to assassinate an unknown-to-him Western political leader?
PPS Did you know that KGB triple-agent Boris Orehkov (FBI'S "Shamrock") misled Hoover in 1966 into believing that the Kremlin had undertaken a six-month investigation after the assassination, which "investigation" concluded that the evil, evil, evil Military Industrial Complex had conspired to assassinate our beloved president. And did you know ... aww, never mind. Probably "in one ear and out the other," right?
Couple of hints as to what I was gonna "launch" into: Undercover FBI agent Morris Childs in Moscow on 11/22/63, and Khrushchev's button-holing of Drew Pearson at a party of some sort in Cairo in early 1964.
PPS Please don't run away, now, Steven, like you almost always do ...
Your views of the assassination are really not much different than the Bill Simpich/DiEugenio/Peter Dale Scott "Everyone in the US government killed JFK" conspiracy view other than you substitute the KGB for the US government.
According to the former head of KGB operations in the US - Oleg Kalugin - Nosenko's defection created a crisis for the KGB. Numerous operations had to be shut down and several operatives and assets had to be recalled. Kalugin defected to the US in the 1990s (the Russians issued a warrant for his arrest), says Putin is a monstrous criminal, and views the KGB as a evil institution.
But you will respond that Kalugin is a Putin agent, the KGB reaction to Nosenko's defection was part of that plan and everything else indicating Nosenko was a legitimate defector is proof that he was illegitimate.
So what's the use of a discussion? Whatever evidence I present will be viewed by you as evidence of your conspiracy. This is exactly how the Simpichs and DiEugenios respond.
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Your views of the assassination are really not much different than the Bill Simpich/DiEugenio/Peter Dale Scott "Everyone in the US government killed JFK" conspiracy view other than you substitute the KGB for the US government.
According to the former head of KGB operations in the US - Oleg Kalugin - Nosenko's defection created a crisis for the KGB. Numerous operations had to be shut down and several operatives and assets had to be recalled. Kalugin defected to the US in the 1990s (the Russians issued a warrant for his arrest), says Putin is a monstrous criminal, and views the KGB as a evil institution.
But you will respond that Kalugin is a Putin agent, the KGB reaction to Nosenko's defection was part of that plan and everything else indicating Nosenko was a legitimate defector is proof that he was illegitimate.
So what's the use of a discussion? Whatever evidence I present will be viewed by you as evidence of your conspiracy. This is exactly how the Simpichs and DiEugenios respond.
Your views of the assassination are really not much different than the Bill Simpich/DiEugenio/Peter Dale Scott "Everyone in the US government killed JFK" conspiracy view other than you substitute the KGB for the US government.
Steven,
I know that's the way it must seem to you in your (imho) brainwashed by Lane, Garrison, Stone, Newman, Simpich, Jumbo Duh, et al., mind, but I suggest that you read my post, again, especially where I posit that true-Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald, equally pissed off at the failed Soviet Promise and the Fascistic American System, decided to assist the Dialectical Materialism Process by taking matters into his own hands.
Please don't run away now, Steven.
-- MWT ;)
PS The KGB was known to intentionally misinform its own officers from time-to-time, especially as regards "that traitor" Yuri Nosenko. So it's hard to know whether or not that's what happened with your boy Oleg Kalugin (and Oleg Gordievsky), or whether he is, as I suspect, an after-the-so-called-fall-of-USSR "triple-agent".
Sorry, dude.
PS Here's Gordievsky's subtly misleading and scurrilous review of Tennent H. Bagley's excellent 2007 book Spy Wars.
https://www-spectator-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.spectator.co.uk/2007/05/untangling-the-web-of-deception/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15701301387063&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spectator.co.uk%2F2007%2F05%2Funtangling-the-web-of-deception%2F
Have you read it, yet? (The book, that is?)
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/page/n3
Didn't think so.
Way too complicated, way too many Russian names, and way too much agonizing "cognitive dissonance" for you to handle, right, Steven?
Aww, dat's too bad ...
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Your views of the assassination are really not much different than the Bill Simpich/DiEugenio/Peter Dale Scott "Everyone in the US government killed JFK" conspiracy view other than you substitute the KGB for the US government.
Steven,
I know that's the way it must seem to you in your (imho) brainwashed by Lane, Garrison, Stone, Newman, Simpich, Jumbo Duh, et al., mind, but I suggest that you read my post, again, especially where I posit that true-Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald, equally pissed off at the failed Soviet Promise and the Fascistic American System, decided to assist the Dialectical Materialism Process by taking matters into his own hands.
Please don't run away now, Steven.
-- MWT ;)
PS The KGB was known to intentionally misinform its own officers from time-to-time, especially as regards "that traitor" Yuri Nosenko. So it's hard to know whether or not that's what happened with your boy Oleg Kalugin (and Oleg Gordievsky), or whether he is, as I suspect, an after-the-so-called-fall-of-USSR "triple-agent".
Sorry, dude.
PS Here's Gordievsky's subtly misleading and scurrilous review of Tennent H. Bagley's excellent 2007 book Spy Wars.
https://www-spectator-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.spectator.co.uk/2007/05/untangling-the-web-of-deception/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15701301387063&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spectator.co.uk%2F2007%2F05%2Funtangling-the-web-of-deception%2F
Have you read it, yet? (The book, that is?)
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/page/n3
Didn't think so.
Way too complicated, way too many Russian names, and way too much agonizing "cognitive dissonance" for you to handle, right, Steven?
Aww, dat's too bad ...
I am brainwashed by Newman and Simpich et al? I am not the person citing their opinions to support my conspiracy view. That would be you.
To be explicit about my view: Lee Oswald shot JFK. We'll never understand his motives (those went with him) but they were probably, in part, because of JFK's covert war on Castro and Cuba. And also because of his extreme hatred of the US system in general and because he wanted to become a historic figure.
About 10 days before the assassination he visits the FBI headquarters in Dallas and leaves a rather "provocative" note. That's not the act of someone conspiring to kill the president ten days later. He's drawing attention to himself. The day before the assassination he retrieves his old rifle. He has to get a ride the next day from a co-worker.
These are the acts of a desperate person, working on his own, using his meager resources. It's not the act of any conspiracy. Where is the help?
Norman Mailer interviewed several dozen former KGB agents when he went to Minsk. These were the men assigned to the Oswald matter. All said that Oswald was viewed as a crank, an unstable person and they didn't want anything to do with him. He was simply not someone they could use. Mailer also interviewed many of Oswald's colleagues, associates and co-workers. None describe him as being missing for any length of time where he would have received this KGB training.
All of this evidence that Begley ignores completely undermines his argument that Nosenko was a triple agent or a "fake" defector. Even assuming for the sake of it that Nosenko was a false defector, it's an absurd leap to argue that because he said the KGB never used Oswald that in fact Oswald was a trained KGB operative sent back to the US. You need proof of this training and there isn't any.
Finally, no on here responds to your posts because you come across as not exactly the type of guy a person wants as his neighbor. In other words, you need to work on your charm and charisma if you want people to talk with you.
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I am brainwashed by Newman and Simpich et al? I am not the person citing their opinions to support my conspiracy view. That would be you.
To be explicit about my view: Lee Oswald shot JFK. We'll never understand his motives (those went with him) but they were probably, in part, because of JFK's covert war on Castro and Cuba. And also because of his extreme hatred of the US system in general and because he wanted to become a historic figure.
About 10 days before the assassination he visits the FBI headquarters in Dallas and leaves a rather "provocative" note. That's not the act of someone conspiring to kill the president ten days later. He's drawing attention to himself. The day before the assassination he retrieves his old rifle. He has to get a ride the next day from a co-worker.
These are the acts of a desperate person, working on his own, using his meager resources. It's not the act of any conspiracy. Where is the help?
Norman Mailer interviewed several dozen former KGB agents when he went to Minsk. These were the men assigned to the Oswald matter. All said that Oswald was viewed as a crank, an unstable person and they didn't want anything to do with him. He was simply not someone they could use. Mailer also interviewed many of Oswald's colleagues, associates and co-workers. None describe him as being missing for any length of time where he would have received this KGB training.
All of this evidence that Begley ignores completely undermines his argument that Nosenko was a triple agent or a "fake" defector. Even assuming for the sake of it that Nosenko was a false defector, it's an absurd leap to argue that because he said the KGB never used Oswald that in fact Oswald was a trained KGB operative sent back to the US. You need proof of this training and there isn't any.
Finally, no on here responds to your posts because you come across as not exactly the type of guy a person wants as his neighbor. In other words, you need to work on your charm and charisma if you want people to talk with you.
Steven,
Glad to see you and I agree that Oswald shot JFK.
My hero, your Tennent H. Begley [sic], was, by all accounts, not a student of the assassination. He was intrigued, however, by the fact that false defector Yuri Nosenko not only implausibly claimed to have been in charge of Oswald's KGB file three or four times (and to have been the one who recommended his not being allowed to stay in the USSR, etc), but that the KGB hadn't even interviewed the former Marine Corps radar operator.
Newman, trusting (hopefully not on all things!) KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, believes KGB interviewed Oswald twice.
Meebe more.
(I can't find it now, but I've read somewhere that Bagley believed Nosenko's implausible statement indicated that the KGB had had a prior relationship with Oswald.)
Bagley's main concern was trying to protect the CIA (and the FBI, too, I suppose) from being penetrated by Soviet intelligence, and for his employer, the CIA, to penetrate Soviet intelligence. As a result of his very thorough "studying" and with a little help from James Angleton (who insisted he read Golitsyn's file right after he and fluent Russian-speaker George Kisevalter had interviewed Nosenko five times in Geneva in 1962) he became convinced that Golitsyn was a true defector and Nosenko a false one.
Bagley, no "sadistic incompetent" as Michael Clark claims, realized that Anatoliy Golitsyn and Pyotr Deriabin and a few others were true defectors, and that Aleksey Kulak (FBI's Fedora) and Dimitri Polyakov (FBI's Top Hat; CIA's Bourbon) and several others were triple-agents, that Yuri Nosenko and a few others were false defectors, and that never-uncovered Edward Ellis Smith (and probably someone in the SR Division he helped KGB to recruit), and a never-uncovered code-clerk called "Jack" by the KGB, and possibly one or two others (my personal favorite: Bagley's erstwhile colleague in interviewing Nosenko -- George Kisevalter) were "moles".
As far as the JFK assassination was concerned, he, like you, was what people in the so-called research community call a "Lone Nutter".
I vacillate between being a "Lone Nutter" and a "Conspiracy Theorist," but that doesn't mean I sometimes believe Oswald conspired with the evil, evil, evil CIA, or the Mafia, or The Minutemen. If he conspired at all, it was with the likes of Igor Vaganov, Miguel Casas Saez, Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, and/or long-term KGB "illlegal" George DeMohrenschildt (yes, I know he wasn't in town at the time, but still ...)
Have a nice day, and I mean it goddammit.
Your buddy,
Mudd Wrassler Tommy ;)
PS If I were in my "Oswald Was Trained Or Programmed By The KGB" mode right now, in answer to your demand that I produce evidence of same, I would either refer you to Ion Pacepa's book, or would reply to you that I'm seriously thinking about filing some "Freedom of Information" requests in that highly transparent country known as The Great Russian Empire.
A little sarcasm, there, Steven. To brighten up your day. Please don't run away, now ...
LOL
PPS I moved to the Czech Republic in 1993, and I detected paranoia among many of the older people who were living there.
One can only wonder at how paranoid (and controlled?) Mailer's interviewees were in 1992, or whenever.
Just sayin'.
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Glad to see you and I agree that Oswald shot JFK. -- LOL
Otto,
Well at least you read my post, so there's hope for you yet that you might eventually learn something real.
Btw, are you saying that Steven M. Galbraith doesn't believe Oswald killed JFK?
-- MWT ;)
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Certainly not, from what I've seen, Galbraith is firmly rooted in the Von P landfill, like this one
Otto,
It's a pity (British English) you're so ignorant on matters JFK Assassination, even though you've probably got xxxxxxxxxx memorized by heart.
-- MWT ;)
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I'm not sure what "matter" you're referring to as the case, IMO, is so vast that a single person can not be expected to cover everything even in a lifetime.
Good luck with your Galbraith buddy project!
Otto,
My android ran out of juice and then I forgot that I wanted to fill "xxxxxxxxxxxx," above (couldn't remember the title at the time).
CROSSFIRE: THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, by Jim Marrs.
LOL
-- MWT ;)
-
Well, since we now have the substitution in place I kinda hate break it to you: your assumption was wrong.
Don't let it ruin your day ;-)
Hey Otto.
What's with the attitude?
-- MWT ;)
PS What brought you to this forum?
1) Oliver Stone's JFK
or
2) General hatred of the USA?
-
Neither.
Perfect Engish.
Tak.
-- MWT ;)
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https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10111-10250.pdf
Dear Michael,
I just now stumbled upon this old thread and was pleasantly surprised to find that you had posted a 1971 memo written by one of my heroes, Newton "Scotty" Miler (in evil, evil, evil James Angleton's evil, evil, evil CI/SIG), about his being informed by someone in the European Division that a CIA officer by the name of Russell [S.] Hibbs had complained to him that evil, evil, evil Tennent H. Bagley wasn't taking (false -- or perhaps rogue -- physical defector to the U.S.) Yuri "The KGB Had Absolutely Nothing With Oswald In The USSR" Nosenko's "leads" seriously.
What I found particularly interesting is that probable KGB "mole" Bruce Leonard Solie (look him up), Deputy Chief of the Office of Security's mole-hunting Security Research Staff, had written in big, bold letters on the memo, "DON'T SHOW THIS MEMO TO ANYBODY" or words to that effect, and that "useful idiot" (or worse) John (Limond) Hart (look him up) was mentioned in the memo, too.
For your reading pleasure I've copied and pasted a chapter from Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames
In which he writes extensively about your boy, Hart (for whom Bagley "ripped a new one" during his HSCA testimony).
Have you read "Pete's" testimony, yet?
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32273600.pdf
CHAPTER 20 -- LINGERING DEBATE
After they had decided once and for all that Nosenko genuinely defected and was telling the truth, CIA insiders spread the happy word that they had received “convincing” confirmation from later KGB sources.
“All of the KGB defectors since 1964 — who were in a position to know about the Nosenko case and whose bona fides have been absolutely verified by the CIA— have strongly supported Nosenko,” they [Leonard V. McCoy] told an investigative journalist [Tom Mangold] in the 1980s. They numbered “more than fifteen in all” and were “uniformly incredulous to learn from the Americans that Nosenko was ever doubted.” 1 An official CIA spokesman [John L. Hart] was later to tell Congress the same story. 2
Fifteen confirmations might make a convincing case— but not these fifteen. In actuality these sources had not been “in a position to know,” nor were their "bona fides absolutely verified.” Five of them had never mentioned Nosenko at all, and others were not even in the KGB when Nosenko defected. 3 Not one of the fifteen had firsthand knowledge, much less had any of them been in a position to learn of the KGB’s tightly compartmented deception operations. Those who were not lying or fabricating were presumably repeating what they had been told either officially or by corridor gossip — and in fact false accounts were being circulated. Another KGB officer was told that no fewer than “forty colonels” had been bred as a result of Nosenko’s defection— but after reflection and discussion with other officers recognized the story to be false and an intentional plant within the KGB. 4 Three KGB veterans who talked with me after the Cold War seemed to believe these planted tales or rumors because they assumed (wrongly, as later events would show) that the KGB would never use one of its staff officers as a defector. One Illegal, alias “Rudy Herrmann,’’ reported that he had been told to try to find Nosenko in the United States— but he could not know why. (The KGB must have been wondering why Nosenko had dropped off their radar screen.)
To label all these sources "absolutely verified bona fide” was grotesque. Suspicions hung over six of the fifteen. 5 If even one of those six was a KGB plant, a skeptic might wonder why the KGB, through that plant, had vouched for Nosenko.
There were, outside this list, more authoritative KGB sources, with more direct knowledge. What did they say about Nosenko — especially in the more relaxed conditions after the end of the Cold War? Some said flatly that Nosenko was lying, others inadvertently revealed it by contradicting Nosenko’s stories, and the best-informed felt sure the KGB had planted him on CIA. For example:
• In his 1995 memoirs, Filipp Bobkov, deputy chief of KGB counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate, or SCD) and Nosenko’s boss at the time, twisted the facts and ignored Nosenko’s 1962 meetings with CIA, by then well known even to the public. He wrote that Nosenko went to Geneva for “serious operational tasks”— not the way the KGB describes delegation watchdogging. The KGB chairman at the time, Vladimir Semichastniy, said Nosenko had been sent to Geneva to work on “some woman” with an aim to recruit her. (Nosenko apparently did not know this.) Semichastniy said Nosenko had been “expelled from every school he attended” and had got into the KGB only with the help of (then deputy) chairman Ivan Serov. (Nosenko did not know this, either; he named a different high-level sponsor, equally unlikely.) 6
• A later KGB chairman, Vadim Bakatin, along with former KGB foreign-counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin, told the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Nosenko had “exaggerated and lied about his knowledge of Oswald.” 7
• Oleg Kalugin reported that Nosenko did not serve in the American Department of the SCD in 1960-1961.
• A veteran of the SCD’s American Department at the time said Nosenko had served only one year, from 1952 to 1953, in the American Department. He had performed badly and was shunted off to the nonoperational department that handled routine liaison with other Soviet institutions.
• A KGB veteran told me after the Cold War that Nosenko did not hold the KGB jobs he listed for CIA and that the circumstances suggested to him that the SCD (specifically, its 14th Department, for operational deception) had dispatched Nosenko to deceive CIA.
Quite a different story came from a clumsy KGB effort to support and enhance Nosenko’s image in American eyes. In the early 1990s they put an official file on Nosenko into the hands of KGB veteran Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko. It was ostensibly to help him write a memoir of his encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City a few weeks before Oswald assassinated President Kennedy — never mind that Nosenko was entirely irrelevant to this subject. Nechiporenko thereupon devoted fifty pages — under the title “Paranoia vs. Common Sense’’— to make the point that CIA (and specifically me, Pete Bagley) had been stupid not to recognize the great good luck that had fallen into CIA’s lap with Nosenko’s defection. Like others, he stressed the “colossal damage” that this defection had done to the KGB and the near-panic it caused to high-level KGB chiefs and to Khrushchev himself. But the attempt backfired. That KGB file contradicted a lot of what Nosenko had told us about his early life and entry into the KGB, and Nechiporenko’s book told things about Oswald that Nosenko must have known if he had really had access to Oswald’s file — but did not know. 8
Even if this still-living KGB was carrying on an unfinished operation, its use of Nechiporenko to attack me was like using a battering ram against an open door. CIA itself had disowned my position, had used some of the same words as Nechiporenko to denigrate me (and others who had distrusted Nosenko), and had been happily employing Nosenko for a quarter century. Why then this late, gratuitous assault? Could they still fear that CIA might reverse its position on Nosenko and finally look into the implications underlying his case? As far as I know, the KGB need have no fear on that front.
Nechiporenko’s position in this ongoing KGB game contrasts oddly with the new line on Nosenko that was emerging in Moscow. After years of vilifying Nosenko for the damage he did the KGB and condemning him to death, KGB spokesmen were beginning to suggest that Nosenko did not defect at all. Their new line was that he fell into a trap and was kidnapped by CIA. After the assassination of President Kennedy, so this story goes, CIA learned (through what a KGB-sponsored article fantasized as a far- flung agent network in Russia) that a KGB officer named Nosenko had inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald. So, when that target came to Geneva (to recruit a woman connected with French Intelligence) a CIA “action group” under Pete Bagley, working on direct orders from CIA director Richard Helms and Soviet Division chief David Murphy, drugged and kidnapped him, in order to pump him for information about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. 10
One can only speculate on the KGB’s purpose in creating such a fantasy. Might they be preparing Nosenko ’s return to Russia without punishment like the later "CIA kidnap victim” Yurchenko? Whatever the reason, this change of posture reflected Moscow’s growing readiness to admit that Nosenko’s defection was not as previously presented. Finally, CIA will be left alone in believing in Nosenko.
For a few years after the Agency in 1968 made its official finding in Nosenko’s favor, CIA did not speak with a single voice. The leadership of its
Counterintelligence Staff under James Angleton judged Nosenko to be a KGB plant, and its operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler continued to probe into what lay behind the KGB’s operation.
Two former KGB officers, Peter Deriabin and Anatoly Golitsyn, after learning about Nosenko’s case in detail (Deriabin had even questioned
him personally — see Appendix A) were certain that Nosenko had been dispatched by the KGB and was lying about his KGB activities and career. As Deriabin put it, any KGB officer knowing the facts would be equally convinced. He was right. After the Cold War a KGB officer, after reading some of CIA’s questions and Nosenko’s answers, laughed out loud and asked me an unanswerable question, “How could your service ever have trusted such a person?”
Helms never considered the doubts truly resolved and viewed the Agency’s formal acceptance as a matter of convenience. Nosenko had to be
released, and one way to do it was to clear him, at least officially. 11
These doubts faded in the second half of the 1960s with the advent of [Igor] Kochnov and the departure from Headquarters of myself and Dave Murphy. The man who replaced Murphy as Soviet Bloc Division (SB) chief, Rolf Kingsley, had not previously focused on Soviet matters and had little patience with counterintelligence. He called for a fresh review of the case by “more neutral” officers, who concluded that Nosenko was probably genuine. 12 Finally, when William E. Colby became director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, the Agency’s approach to counterintelligence changed and the shadows over Nosenko were cleaned away. (At this time I had already retired, so I learned of these events only later from those who lived through them.)
Colby gave a strong push to the growing myth surrounding the Nosenko affair (see Appendix B). In his memoirs he asserted that some former CIA people believed in an all-knowing KGB that was well on the way to dominating the world. “The [SB] Division produced operations and intelligence,” Colby wrote, "but the [counterintelligence] staff believed that those operations and intelligence were controlled by the KGB ... to mislead the United States in a massive deception program.’’ 13
Colby also derided a "paralysis” that he claimed had overtaken Soviet operations. “I sensed a major difficulty,” he wrote. “Our concern over possible KGB penetration, it seemed to me, had so preoccupied us that we were devoting most of our time to protecting ourselves from the KGB and not enough to developing the new sources and operations that we needed to learn secret information. ... I wanted to consider the KGB as something to be evaded by CIA, not as the object of our operations nor as our mesmerizing nemesis.” 14
If one were to believe one of its later chiefs, the Soviet Division in that dark earlier time “had been turning away dozens of volunteers, Soviets and Eastern Europeans who had contacted American officials with offers to work for the United States.” 15 In reality the caution that Murphy not Angleton — introduced into CIA’s efforts to recruit Soviets was never allowed to hinder the acceptance of a single Soviet volunteer, nor did it preclude any well-considered recruitment approach. None of these assertions of “paralysis” has cited a single rejection of a volunteer, defector, or proposal for action. Ironically, it was these latter-day critics who themselves started turning away Soviet defectors — on the grounds that CIA had all it needed or could handle. Among those whom CIA turned away — on specific orders from Headquarters — was Vasily Mitrokhin, who had stolen and stashed a large hunk of KGB operational archives. 16
While paying lip service to the need for vigilance, Colby saw counterintelligence mainly as an impediment to intelligence collection. His impatience and disinterest came out in the form of simplification and sarcasm. “I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow [Counterintelligence Staff chief Angleton’s] tortuous theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in the heart of allied and neutral nations and sending its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy. I confess that I couldn’t absorb it, possibly because I did not have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, possibly because Angleton's explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn’t add up to his conclusions. ... I did not suspect Angleton and his staff of engaging in improper activities. I just could not figure out what they were doing at all.” 17
Colby soon got to work reorganizing the Counterintelligence Staff and divesting it of some of its components. Then in 1974 the New York Times exposed the fact that in apparent violation of the Agency’s charter, Angleton’s staff had been checking international mail to and from some left-wing Americans. This gave Colby the ammunition he needed to rid himself of this nuisance. At the end of that year he demanded Angleton’s resignation and was glad to see Angleton’s chief lieutenants Raymond Rocca, William Hood, and Newton Miler follow him into retirement.
To steer a less troubling course, Colby appointed to head the Counterintelligence Staff George Kalaris, a man without experience in either counterintelligence or Soviet bloc operations, and, as his deputy, Leonard McCoy, a handler of reports, not an operations officer, who had already distinguished himself as a fierce advocate for Nosenko.
Now began an extraordinary cleanup inside the Counterintelligence Staff — and the disappearance of evidence against Nosenko. Miler’s carefully accumulated notes on this and related cases were removed from the files and disappeared, along with a unique card file of discrepancies in
Nosenko’s statements. 18
Shortly afterward Colby appointed an officer to review the files anew. John L. Hart was assisted by four officers. They worked for six months, from June to December 1976. I caught a glimpse of their aims and work methods when Hart came to Europe to interview me. He had not bothered to read what I had written (though he said nothing new had come to light on the question of Nosenko’s bona hdes) and seemed interested only in why, eight years earlier, I had warned that bad consequences might flow from Nosenko’s release. I saw that his aim was not to get at the truth but to find a way to clear Nosenko, so I refused to talk further with him.
As I later learned, Hart’s team did not even interview the Counterintelligence Staff officers who had analyzed the case and maintained files on it for nine years. Among them were two veteran analysts who, having come “cold” to the case, had concluded on their own that Nosenko was a plant— and had written their reasons.
Hart then wrote a report that affirmed total trust in Nosenko. 19 Having decreed their faith and gotten rid of disbelievers, the CIA leadership banned further debate. One experienced officer in the Soviet Bloc Division — my old colleague Joe Westin, who knew so much about this case — took a late stand against Nosenko’s bona fides. He was told by higher-ups, “If you continue on this course, there will be no room for you in this Division”— and his future promotion was blocked. Peter Deriabin, who kept trying to warn Agency officials about Nosenko, was told to desist or his relations with CIA would be threatened (see Appendix A).
Nosenko’s rescuers then set out to discredit those who had distrusted him. They first labeled them as paranoid (a charge always difficult to refute) and then moved on to distort the record. One of Nosenko’s now well-placed friends [probable KGB "mole" Leonard V. McCoy] told an investigative reporter [Tom Mangold] that Angleton’s successor, Kalaris, had made the appalling discovery that the bad Angleton had ticked off the FBI’s Soviet Military Intelligence source code-named "Nicknack” as a provocateur and thus had locked away his important leads to spies abroad. The good Kalaris, said this insider, proceeded to dig out one of those leads and personally carried it to Switzerland, where the Swiss Federal Police quickly identified the spy as a brigadier named Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. They convicted him of betraying military technological secrets to the Soviets. 20 The accusation was pure invention. Angleton was impressed with Nicknack’s leads to spies abroad and had asked William Hood to be sure that they were acted upon. Hood then — not Kalaris years later— personally carried the Swiss item to Bern.
Other misrepresentations were tacitly abetted. For instance, the new Agency leadership did little to counter Nosenko’s claim that he was drugged. This canard played for years in the media, and was allowed to circulate even in the halls of CIA. CIA director Stansfield Turner even hinted that it might be true, although his own subordinates had submitted to Congress -- as sworn testimony on his behalf — a list of every medicament ever given to Nosenko, which proved the contrary. As I know, Nosenko was never drugged. 21
The flimsy structure of CIA’s defense of Nosenko was shaken in 1977 when investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein got wind of the Nosenko
debate. While researching a book on Lee Harvey Oswald he came upon the fact, until then hidden, that a defector named Nosenko had reported on Oswald and that some CIA veterans questioned that defector’s bona fides. Digging into this potentially explosive subject, Epstein interviewed former CIA director Richard Helms, James Angleton, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and, on Helms’s recommendation, me.
Thus in my retirement did I come back into the debate on Nosenko. I told Epstein some of the things in the preceding chapters. His book Legend: The Secret Life of Lee Hanley Oswald came out in 1978. With its evidence that Nosenko was a KGB plant, the book logically concluded that what he told the Americans about Oswald — though presumably true in its basic message that the Soviets had not commanded Oswald’s act— was a message from the Soviet leadership.
Coincidentally, the U.S. House of Representatives at this point appointed a Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It interviewed Nosenko five times about his knowledge of Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union — and simply could not believe him. In its final report the committee stated flatly, “Nosenko was lying.” 22
Aware of the HSCA’s doubts, and by now committed to a different image of Nosenko, CIA director Turner designated a personal representa- tive to testify. It was none other than the man who had most recently whitewashed Nosenko, John Hart. Hart spent his entire prepared testimony of an hour and a half defending Nosenko and degrading his own colleagues who had suspected him. He attacked me viciously, to the point of accusing me publicly of contemplating murder, though he knew it was nonsense. 23 To the amazement of the HSCA members the CIA director’s designated representative did not even mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. When they asked him why, Hart admitted that he “knew nothing about Oswald’s case, but hoped that by explaining misunderstandings within the Agency” and by attesting to Nosenko’s ‘‘general credibility” he could "clear up the committee’s problems with Nosenko” so that “allegations concerning [Nosenko] would go away.”
But the committee’s problem was not with Nosenko, but with what Nosenko had said about Oswald. So, they forced Hart to address this question. Thereupon even he admitted that he found Nosenko’s testimony "incredible,” "hard to believe,” and “doubtful.”
"I am intrigued,” House committee member (later Senator) Christopher Dodd said to Hart, "as to why you limited your remarks to the actions of the CIA and their handling of Nosenko, knowing you are in front of a committee that is investigating the death of a President and an essential part of that investigation has to do with the accused assassin in that case. Why have you neglected to bring up his name at all in your discussion?”
Hart replied that the Agency had asked him to talk “on the Nosenko case” and had accepted his unwillingness to talk about Oswald, of whom he knew nothing. “So,” concluded Dodd, "really what the CIA wanted to do was to send someone up here who wouldn’t talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.” 24
Still, the congressmen could not understand why a CIA officer, acting on the orders of the CIA leadership, would “throw up a smoke screen and
get the Agency in the worst possible light as far as the newspapers are concerned.” Why would he attack his own colleagues and create “smashing anti-CIA headlines?” "Puzzled and mystified,” one congressman called “the whole scenario totally unthinkable.” He added, “no one I know in the Agency has come up with any sensible explanation.” 25
While Hart was in the process of attacking his own organization — and me especially — I got a phone call in the middle of the night, European time. “They’re crucifying you, Pete!” cried Yuri Rastvorov, who was watching the HSCA proceedings on C-Span television in the United States. This KGB veteran, who had defected in 1954, was outraged, having learned enough about the Nosenko case to have concluded on his own that Nosenko must be a KGB plant. I thanked him for the warning, went back to bed, and then waited while another friend fast-shipped to me the transcript of Hart’s statement.
Reading this intensely subjective attack and the discussions that followed it, I could sense the committee’s skepticism and wondered why they hadn’t called on me to present my side— all the more when I learned that Helms, in his testimony, had recommended that they do so. Fearing that someone in CIA might be trying to prevent my appearing, I wrote the HSCA subcommittee chairman, Congressman Richardson Preyer, a rebuttal to Hart’s testimony, asking for the opportunity to answer in public what had been a public attack. On the side, suspecting that the subcommittee’s counsel was cooperating to keep me out, I contacted Congressman Preyer directly. Thus I was finally invited and flew from Europe to testify, pointing out Hart’s untruths and evasions. Though I appeared only in executive (closed) session, Preyer courteously saw to it that my testimony (as “Mr. D. C.”— for “deputy chief’’ of the Soviet Bloc Division) was included in the published record of the hearings.
Now I was back in the debate, though still carrying on my business activities in Europe and writing, with Peter Deriabin, a book on the KGB. In early 1981, when newly elected President Reagan appointed William E. Casey as director of Central Intelligence, I saw it as an opportunity to reopen the case and addressed a long report to him (to which Deriabin contributed what appears in this book as Appendix A). It was judged inadequate to overcome the Agency’s evidence supporting Nosenko.
In 1987 I was interviewed by English playwright Stephen Davies, who was writing a semifictional drama on the Nosenko case. When the film
appeared on television the CIA retirees’ association published a review of it in their quarterly newsletter. 26
Neither he nor the reviewer took a position on the basic question — was Nosenko a KGB plant? But to the CIA at that time it was heresy even
to leave a wisp of suspicion hanging over the hero of the myth. Leonard McCoy jumped to Nosenko’s defense. In a passionate letter to the editor
he lauded Nosenko and attacked the earlier handlers of the case in such splenetic terms that the editor (as he told me) refused to publish it until
it had been toned down. McCoy’s letter was full of misstatements, as I pointed out in a rebuttal.
Both Hart and McCoy knew Nosenko personally and had studied the case from positions of direct authority. Hart boasted of his own “standards of scholarship’’ and told Congress that he would never "go beyond the bounds of certainty” nor “extrapolate from facts.” As for McCoy, on whose statements the writer Tom Mangold relied for his book Cold Warrior, Mangold described him as “a mature and meticulous intelligence officer, with an obsession about factual accuracy in all matters.” So one might expect these two to dismantle any opposing argument point by point, using sure and accurate facts. Instead, both of them twisted the very nature of the affair and concealed major aspects of it. In Hart’s sworn testimony were no fewer than thirty errors, twenty misleading statements, and ten major omissions, and dozens in McCoy’s article . 27
They (and CIA) had made an act of faith, perhaps not the best base for judging a complex counterintelligence question. Hart stated that Nosenko had never intentionally lied— never mind that Nosenko himself had admitted in writing a years-long inability to tell the truth to CIA. McCoy — as deputy head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff— epitomized the Agency’s position by writing that if by any mischance Nosenko had told a few fibs, "They were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB.” CIA’s deputy director [Stansfield Turner] certified this act of faith, making it the Agency’s official position that “there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.’’
Soon after the debate in the CIA retirees’ newsletter, Nosenko and his defenders presented their case to investigative journalist Tom Mangold, who incorporated it in a book attacking James Angleton as a paranoid. Mangold acknowledged his debt to McCoy, who had “left an indelible imprint on every one of these pages .” 28 His book accurately reflected CIA’s defense of Nosenko and was thus studded with error, omission, misrepresentation, and invention, and colored by emotional bias for Nosenko and against his detractors.
These misstatements congealed into a myth that by its frequent repetition has become conventional wisdom inside and outside CIA. Consecrated by the sworn testimony of high CIA officials, it is treated as serious history. It is a tale of how a band of buffoons and demons— paranoid
“fundamentalists”— tried wickedly and vainly to discredit a shining hero. It has been taught— without the facts on which it is supposedly based— to CIA trainees who, thinking it true, have passed it on to later generations of CIA people. Today, a generation later, one can see it repeated in their memoirs as an “inside” fact.
To create this myth its makers had to do some fancy twisting and inventing. Dismissing massive evidence to the contrary, they asserted that
Nosenko always told the truth. Not only was and is he truthful, but he has been a veritable cornucopia of "pure gold,” vast quantities of valu-
able information. To give substance to this wild claim, the mythmakers resorted to pure invention. They transfigured poor “Andrey” the mechanic,
for example, into a code clerk who enabled the Soviets to break America’s top-secret codes and moved dangerously into the code-breaking National Security Agency. They had Nosenko pinpointing fifty-two microphones in the American Embassy, something no one outside the KGB’s
technical services could even pretend to do. They gave color to their tales by the breathtaking misstatement that Nosenko told more, and of far greater value, than had the earlier defector Golitsyn. (Golitsyn, this story goes, never uncovered a single spy in the West.)
The mythmakers dismissed onetime suspicions of Nosenko as nothing but the product of potted preconceptions and wild theorizing by since-disgraced colleagues, incompetent and paranoid "fundamentalists.”
The myth makes no mention of the underlying issues: the signs of penetration of American government and ciphers. Its focus, instead, is the pathos of the fate of a stupidly misunderstood, genuine defector who had been cruelly and duplicitously treated— until his saviors came along.
Finally, the mythmakers ridiculed as "nonsense” the idea that the Soviets would mount a deceptive operation of this magnitude— at least, after the first decade or two of Bolshevik rule— and labeled the very idea a delusion of some “monster plot.” As a corollary, the myth asserts— without a trace of evidence— that this paranoia “paralyzed” CIA’s intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.
Because it has become history, the myth’s creation, its details, and the motives of its creators deserve attention (see Appendix B). This myth enveloped CIA in a warm blanket of complacency (and aversion to “mole hunting”) that later contributed to the Agency’s long failure to deal effectively with even more glaring evidence of treason in its midst— that of Aldrich Ames.
NOTES
1 . Of the fifteen, thirteen are named: “Kitty Hawk” [Igor Kochnov], Ilya Dzhirkvelov,
Yuri Loginov, Aleksandr Cherepanov, Vitaly Yurchenko, and apparently Yuri Krotkov, as
well as Vladimir Kuzichkin, Viktor Gundarev, Ivan Bogatyy, the Illegal “Rudolf Herrmann,”
Vladimir Vetrov (alias "Farewell”), Oleg Gordievsky, and Oleg Lyalin. Tom Mangold, Cold
Warrior. Janies Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York and London: Simon
and Schuster, 1991), 365 n53.
2. House Select Committee on Assassinations, 95th Congress, Hearings (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1979) (hereafter HSCA Hearings), Vol. 4, 60.
3. Those five were Cherepanov, Loginov, Krotkov, Lyalin, and Vetrov. Loginov, as men-
tioned elsewhere, heard of an “important defection” that (by its date) presumably referred
to Nosenko's, but he claimed not to know who it was, nor did he claim any other knowledge
about the incident.
4. Stanislav Levchenko to Peter Deriabin; Deriabin to the author, in conversation,
1981.
5 . In this book alone can be found some of the reasons to suspect Cherepanov, Loginov,
Krotkov, Yurchenko, and Kochnov, while Dzhirkvelov fabricated his account of personal
knowledge of Nosenko and Gribanov.
6. Filipp Bobkov, KGB I Vlast’ (KGB and State Power) (Moscow: Publishing House
"Veteran MP,” 1993), ch. 22. He wrote that Nosenko went out in 1964— not 1962— to get
medicine for his daughter’s illness, and on “serious operational business,” not delegation
watchdogging. Semichastniy’s statements are from his memoirs, cited in Krasnaya Zvezda
(Red Star), 6 September 2002.
7. Washington Post, Outlook Section, 7 November 1993. Kalugin later confirmed this
to me.
8. Oleg M. Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination (New York: Birch Lane Press,
1993), 214-64 and especially 225-26 and 233-35.
9. Henno Lohmeyer, foreword to Oleg Tumanov, Tumanov. Confessions of a KGB Agent
(Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo and Moscow: edition q, 1993), x.
10. This nonsense, presumably sponsored and undoubtedly cleared by the KGB (cur-
rently called FSB and SVR), appeared under the title “Predatel'stvo ili— Pokhishcheniye?”
(Treason or-Abduction?) in Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), 29 August, 6 September, 1 1 Sep-
tember, and 19 December 2002. Its stated author, Aleksandr Sokolov, was a onetime KGB
counterintelligence officer in Washington. The “trap” citation is from Nosenko’s boss;
Bobkov, KGB I Vlast', 227-29. Another contributor to the kidnapping theme, equating the
kidnapping of Nosenko with the later "kidnapping” of Vitaly Yurchenko in Rome, was KGB
General V. N. Udilov, in Zapiski Kontrrazvedchika (Notes of a Counterintelligence Officer)
(Moscow: Yaguar, 1994), 201-6.
11. For Helms’s testimony on this subject see HSCA Hearings, Vol. IV, 33-34, 61-63,
96, 99. He said the same thing in an interview with David Frost, 22-23 May 1978 (Studies in
Intelligence, Special Unclassified Edition, Fall 2000, 130). Helms expressed this view again
in 2001.
12. Mangold , Cold Warrior, 175.
13. William E. Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men. My Life in the CIA (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1978), 244-45.
14. Ibid., 364. Rolfe Kingsley, Murphys successor as Soviet Division chief, described
this (imaginary) “paralysis” in Mangold, Cold Warrior, 242.
15. Burton Gerber, cited by his deputy Milton Bearden. Milton Bearden and James
Risen, The Main Enemy (London: Century, 2003), 23.
16. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive. The KGB in
Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1999).
17. Colby, Honorable Men, 364.
18. It was McCoy who took the files, as I heard from a member of the Counter-
intelligence Staff who was there. Presumably this was a part of his large-scale destruction
of the files that he himself described to a journalist (Mangold, Cold Warrior, 306).
19. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 490.
20. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 320-21.
21. HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 543. While questioning Nosenko we asked a specialist
whether the much-touted “truth serum” sodium amytal would help, but were told it was
basically ineffective. This has been misrepresented in some writings as a request to use it
which was denied. I made no such “request” and am sure no one else did.
22. Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representa-
tives, Findings and Recommendations (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 20
March 1979), 102.
23. Hart's testimony is in HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 487-536. My rebuttal to that testi-
mony was printed in HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 573-644. The murderous thoughts Hart
attributed to me were contained in a penciled note I jotted while mulling over possible ways
to resolve Nosenko’s status. I had thought of about ten or eleven things to do— possibly
turning him back, handing him to another Western service, locating him in another coun-
try, or resettling him in some remote area of the United States. I also amused myself by
giving vent to frustration in the way a baseball fan might shout, "Kill the umpire!” and stuck
in this list such impossible and impractical things as killing him or rendering him crazy. Of
course I never sent or showed or even discussed these thoughts with anyone. I must have
inadvertently dropped my penciled jottings into the file, where Hart, with evident delight,
found them. He edited out the more serious alternatives as “insignificant” and presented
the facetious but compromising ones to the HSCA as evidence of actual CIA planning. I had
completely forgotten the note (or the ruminations) and learned of its full contents only
through the courtesy of a member of the subcommittee staff.
24. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 509, 511.
25. HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 623, 642.
26. “Yuri Nosenko, KGB,” British Broadcasting Company (BBC), first shown in the
United States by Home Box Office (HBO) on 7 September 1986. Issued as DVD under the
title “Yuri Nosenko, Double Agent.”
27. HSCA Hearings, Vol. II, 490, 515, 522. The original review by Mark Wyatt of the
BBC/HBO telefilm “Yuri Nosenko, KGB” appeared in the CIRA Newsletter (Spring 1987),
and McCoys defense of Nosenko appeared that fall in Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuri Nosenko,
CIA," CIRA Newsletter XII, no. 3 (Fall 1 987): 22. 1 answered McCoy in the edition of Spring
1988 (vol. XIII, no. 2). See also Mangold, Cold Warrior, 270. My general appraisal of Hart’s
testimony is in HSCA Hearings, Vol. XII, 593.
28. Mangold, Cold Warrior, vi.
. . . . . .
Miss you, Mikey.
(And I know you miss me, too, because you check my profile at the so-called Ed Forum about three times-a-year.
I'm glad to see that you're still here!
I guess Duncan decided not to ban you for accusing me back in 2019 of being a Fascist who beats up little old ladies and their pets.
-- Tom