JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on December 27, 2025, 05:50:40 AM
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False defector-in-place in 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in 1964, Yuri “The KGB Had Nothing to Do with Oswald in the USSR” Nosenko, was polygraphed three times: April 1964, October 1966, and August 1968.
The questions for the first two tests were drawn up by the Soviet Russia Division (which “incarcerated” Nosenko from April 1964 to September 1967), and those for the third test were drawn up by probable KGB “mole” Bruce Solie of the mole-hunting Office of Security.
Polygraph expert Richard O. Arther was retained by the HSCA to analyze all three tests and Nosenko’s answers (and attendant “reactions," if any).
He determined that the 1966 test was the most reliable of the three, and that the 1968 test was "atrocious."
The following is an excerpt from Arther’s 1978 report:
During the October 18, 1966, examination, Nosenko was asked 32 questions in which the name Oswald appeared. On my blind analysis, I selected the following questions as containing valid indicators of emotional disturbances, which are usually indicative of lying:
1. Did you receive special instructions about what to tell the Americans about the Oswald case? (NO)
2. Was Oswald recruited by the KGB as an agent? (NO)
3. Did the KGB consider Oswald abnormal? (YES)
4. To your knowledge, did Oswald talk to a KGB officer in Mexico? (NO)
5. Is your contact with the Oswald case part of your legend? (NO)
6. Did you hear of Oswald prior to President Kennedy’s assassination? (YES)
7. Did you hear of Oswald only after President Kennedy's assassination? (NO)
8. Did you personally order [Rastrusin], in 1959, to collect material on Oswald? (YES)
9. Did the KGB instruct you to tell us Oswald was a bad shot? (NO)
10. Did the KGB give the Oswalds any kind of help in their departure from the Soviet Union? (NO)
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Victor Marchetti thought it possible the reason the CIA clammed up after the JFKA...was to hide the intensive KGB infiltration of the agency.
John Newman would later write that KGB'er Bruce Solie was running LHO.
Gus Russo would write that G2'ers were somehow involved with LHO in New Orleans. Probably in MC too.
LHO would visit Valery Kostikov, likely KGB wetworks leader, in MC.
I wonder who helped LHO with the Walker shooting? G2'ers?
My take on the Z-film is shots struck Gov. JBC at ~Z-295 and JFK at Z-313. The M-C was a good rifle, and LHO was familiar with guns. (The recent assassination of Kirk, and the just-missed attempt on Trump are clues one doesn't have to be a pro to hit a target at range. The M-C was manufactured to military specs to be accurate to 200 meters).
But LHO could not have fired both those rounds.
So...who were LHO confederates? I don't know.
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LHO could not have fired both those rounds.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
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Verily!
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Victor Marchetti thought it possible the reason the CIA clammed up after the JFKA...was to hide the intensive KGB infiltration of the agency.
John Newman would later write that KGB'er Bruce Solie was running LHO.
Gus Russo would write that G2'ers were somehow involved with LHO in New Orleans. Probably in MC too.
LHO would visit Valery Kostikov, likely KGB wetworks leader, in MC.
I wonder who helped LHO with the Walker shooting? G2'ers?
My take on the Z-film is shots struck Gov. JBC at ~Z-295 and JFK at Z-313. The M-C was a good rifle, and LHO was familiar with guns. (The recent assassination of Kirk, and the just-missed attempt on Trump are clues one doesn't have to be a pro to hit a target at range. The M-C was manufactured to military specs to be accurate to 200 meters).
But LHO could not have fired both those rounds.
So...who were LHO confederates? I don't know.
Question: Where does/did Russo say G2 agents were "somehow involved" with Oswald? I have his two major works - "Brothers in Arms" and "Live by the Sword" - and I can't find him making this. Did he say this elsewhere?
Here is what he wrote in "Live by the Sword." Note all of the qualifiers he has: "If" and "could" and "possibly" and "possible" and "anecdotes."
(https://www.drivehq.com/file/DFPublishFile.aspx/FileID13095718482/Key03oks8fh18wr/live by the sword.png)
Nothing in this says that Oswald met with G2 agents or were involved with him in New Orleans. He theorizes - not claims - that Oswald interacted with the anti-Castro exile community and that Cuba had thoroughly infiltrated that community. And from that it's "possible" that Oswald came into contact with those Cuban agents through that infiltration. Again, possibly, could have, maybe. He says similar things about Mexico City. That possibly or maybe or perhaps Oswald met pro-Castro or Cuban agents there. Again, it's all speculative.
Russo's main argument, as I read him, is that these possible connections between Oswald and Cuban agents or pro-Castro people were not adequately investigated after the assassination. Why not? For a mix of reasons - fear that the covert war would be revealed, that the assassination plots and Mob connections would be exposed, that the possible consequences (or rumors) of a Cuban connection would lead to war. But he says these were rumors and claims and allegations and possibilities but nothing proven.
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Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.
I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.
The defectors:
Igor Kochnov (1966);
Oleg Lyalin (1971);
Rudolf Herrmann (1980);
Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1980);
Vladimir Kuzichkin (1984);
Viktor Gundarev (1985);
Vitaliy Yurchenko (1985);
Oleg Gordievskiy (1985);
Vasiliy Mitrokhin (1991);
Oleg Kalugin (2004)
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Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.
I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.
Dear Steve M.,
The following is an excerpt from the chapter titled "Lingering Debate" in Pete Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. You can look up the footnotes yourself. Just google "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously.
. . . . . . .
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 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 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 non-operational 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 hie 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]
Nechiporenko revealed that books like his own were actually parts of ongoing KGB operations. A West German editor complained to him, at about the time Nechiporenko’s own book was appearing, that another author, Oleg Tumanov, was refusing to fill in the details in his manuscript recounting his twenty years as a KGB penetration agent inside Radio Liberty. You are naive, Nechiporenko replied, to expect details. Tumanov, he explained, “was a link, a part of an operation. . . . And this operation isn’t completed.” If the author were to tell all, "CIA would know what the KGB was doing today and tomorrow. The KGB is not dead.” [9] 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.
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Here's a partial list (ten) of the KGB agents who defected to the West (with date of defection) and who then told the CIA, among other revelations damaging to Moscow, that Nosenko was a legitimate defector. And most important, that the KGB did not recruit Oswald. In fact, it's more than ten. According to the FBI and CIA, if I have the last totals correct, it was something closer to 18.
I'll just add: if the KGB wanted to mislead the CIA about Oswald or other matters Nosenko didn't need to physically defect. He could have stayed in the USSR (Geneva, New York, et cetera) and given them this mis/disinformation. Allowing/instructing him to defect means they lose control of him. How would they know he wouldn't break and reveal the operation? In fact, the head of KGB counterintelligence operations - Oleg Kalugin - said the KGB didn't use fake defectors because it made the USSR/KGB look bad and because once the agent defected they lost control of him. He could turn and reveal the operation and much more than he was initially directed to give.
The defectors:
Igor Kochnov (1966);
Oleg Lyalin (1971);
Rudolf Herrmann (1980);
Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1980);
Vladimir Kuzichkin (1984);
Viktor Gundarev (1985);
Vitaliy Yurchenko (1985);
Oleg Gordievskiy (1985);
Vasiliy Mitrokhin (1991);
Oleg Kalugin (2004)
Dear Steve M.,
Let's start with false-defector Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov), shall we?
-- Tom
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Dear Steve M.,
You say we should believe Yuri "The KGB Had Nothing to Do with Oswald in the USSR" Nosenko was a true defector because oodles and gobs of later defectors, including Igor Kochnov (1966), said he was.
(Did you know that Kochnov's mother-in-law, Yekaterina Furtseva, allegedly overrode Nosenko and allowed Oswald to continue living in the USSR after he allegedly tried to kill himself?)
The following is what former CIA Chief of Soviet Russia Division / Soviet Bloc Division Counterintelligence (and Nosenko's primary case officer for five years), Tennent H. "Pete" Bagley, wrote about your boy, Kochnov, in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.
Perhaps you've heard of it?
My comments are in brackets.
The autumn of 1966 was Nosenko ’s low point, but the tide was about to turn in his favor. By then our chiefs’ patience had worn thin and their confidence in our assessment of Nosenko had been eroded by a new source, then unknown to me, who was somehow persuading them that Nosenko was a genuine defector. Nosenko could not be held indefinitely, and, after I left [to be Chief of Station in Brussels], CIA’s top people finally took the only practical course: to ostensibly clear him and let him go. Had I been there, I would have recommended that Nosenko be resettled far enough from Washington that he would find it more difficult to harm U.S. interests. But I was not there, and things turned in a quite
different direction. Our doubts were not just put in a closet, they were swept clean away. Unbelievably, the CIA leadership certified formally, in writing, its wholehearted belief in Nosenko. They brought him into collaboration with CIA. Later the director sent a personal envoy to Congress to publicly vilify those who had distrusted Nosenko. Nosenko’s release became his exoneration.
In June 1966 the earth began to move under the Nosenko case. The resultant tsunami swept away all the doubts and cleared Nosenko’s path to acceptance and success in America — for the KGB. The first tremor came one Sunday morning with the ring of a telephone at Richard Helms’s house. The caller, in accented English, identified himself as a KGB officer on an operational mission in Washington and anxious to take up contact with CIA. Helms agreed that CIA would meet the caller at his designated place and time. Helms was then in the process of taking over as director of Central Intelligence. He called for an urgent meeting with Clandestine Services chief Desmond Fitzgerald and Counterintelligence Staff chief James Angleton. They assembled that afternoon. Their first decision was easy — to inform the FBI, responsible for operations inside the United States — but not the second. The caller had asked for CIA and was based in Moscow, so the Agency should participate. Who then? Wary of recent indications that the KGB might have a mole inside our Soviet Bloc Division (SB) [Per John M. Newman, Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, probable KGB “mole” Bruce Solie, convinced Angleton of this when GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov’s CIA handler in West Berlin, George Kisevalter, had sent a cable to headquarters in April 1958 saying Popov -- who had been betrayed by Solie in early 1957 -- told him that he’d heard a drunken GRU Colonel say at a New Year’s Eve party that the Kremlin had all of the top-secret specifications of the U-2 spy plane], they decided to assign CIA’s handling of the case to others. It did not matter, apparently, that only in the SB lay the experience and knowledge needed to assess and draw the maximum from a source at this level. Operational security would take precedence. [1] Instead, they called on a security officer — [probable KGB "mole"] Bruce Solie, who had been following up clues to hostile penetration of the Agency staff. This was a strange, and in the event fateful, choice. Solie had only a shallow knowledge of the Soviet scene, knew little about the KGB, and possessed no experience in handling foreign agents. Perhaps they comforted themselves with the thought that Solie would be guided by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and accompanied by the FBI’s man. The FBI assigned an experienced operative, Elbert (“Bert”) Turner, and together he and Solie made the scheduled meeting. No details of the operation that ensued, code-named "Kitty Hawk,” have been officially revealed to this day [2007]. Its outlines eventually became public knowledge, and I learned more from KGB veterans after the Cold War. The KGB visitor identified himself as Igor Kochnov of the foreign counterintelligence component of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence). He could expect eventual promotion to head that department’s work against Americans, he said, if he were to succeed in at least one of his missions in Washington. The first of these was to recruit for the KGB a Soviet navy defector named Nikolay Artamonov, who was living in Washington under the name of Nicholas Shadrin. 2 In return for CIA’s help in achieving his goal, Kochnov was willing to act as its agent inside the KGB staff. Almost as exciting to the Americans was Kochnov’s other mission in Washington: he had been sent to locate the KGB defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko, presumably so they could eventually be lured back or assassinated. Wonderful news for CIA! Since the KGB evidently regarded Nosenko as it did Golitsyn, there’s an end to the doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides! So juicy were Kochnov’s future prospects that the Americans decided to play along and get Artamonov to pretend to cooperate with the KGB. Artamonov loyally accepted the role of double agent despite the danger and despite the unpleasant condition that he take a lower-level job with U.S. Naval Intelligence, to remove him (and the KGB) from access to the sensitive information he had been working with. Thus began a double agent operation with Artamonov that was to last nearly nine years and bring little profit to the Americans — and death to Artamonov. [3] From the outset, members of the Counterintelligence Staff looked with a skeptical eye on Kochnov. Why would the KGB send a traveler from Moscow to do jobs for which the KGB’s Washington rezidentura was better qualified and equipped? They sensed that the KGB had sent Kochnov to CIA in order to hide a KGB penetration of American Intelligence, to convince CIA of Nosenko s genuineness, and perhaps to find out why Nosenko had dropped off the KGB radar screen.
But this skeptical view was not held by all. The participants came to this case with varying views and objectives. The Counterintelligence Staff
treated it as a KGB provocation and sought to use it to test whether and where the KGB may have penetrated the ranks of CIA’s Soviet operations. To this end they designed questions to be put to Kochnov to provoke revealing answers or actions. On the other hand the FBI case officer Turner and CIA’s Solie firmly believed that Kochnov was genuine. Believing in Kochnov’s message, Solie became unshakably convinced that Nosenko was a genuine defector — and did not even pose the questions the Counterintelligence Staff had concocted. CIA was soon left with little reason to believe in Kochnov. His golden promise of promotion to the top of KGB American operations proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp. After recruiting Artamonov he turned over the contact to a Washington KGB man and went back to Moscow — and was never met again. (According to one report, he was spotted once or twice in Moscow.) But CIA and FBI continued the double agent case hoping that it might eventually offer a way to restore contact with Kochnov and hoping that the KGB would, as the Washington KGB handler had told Artamonov, turn Artamonov over to handling by a KGB Illegal. The KGB later claimed it never discovered Kochnov’s “treason” until his case was exposed in American publications in 1978, around which time he coincidentally died of a heart attack. However, after the Cold War KGB veterans gave me reason to believe that the KGB had indeed dispatched Kochnov to contact CIA and that the game was connected with penetration of Western intelligence services. It is a deep and complex story waiting to be told. The Counterintelligence Staff, concerned for Artamonov’s safety, recommended in writing that he never be allowed to meet the KGB outside the United States. But the KGB’s lures proved too strong for Solie and Turner. They permitted Artamonov to meet the KGB in Canada, and then even in Vienna [accompanied by probable KGB "mole" Leonard V. McCoy and his trusty sidekick, Cynthia Hausmann. Hausmann, along with Sandra Grimes, was instrumental around 1980 in getting the FBI to flip-flop back to its original position that FEDORA was truly spying for the Bureau], infamous as the site of kidnappings and close to Soviet- controlled territory. Again in Vienna in December 1975, Artamonov went off to a scheduled meeting with the KGB and never returned. KGB foreign counterintelligence chief Oleg Kalugin later reported that he saw Artamonov die as he was carried into Czechoslovakia, accidentally overdosed with sedatives during the kidnapping. [4] A signal success of the KGB’s operation with Kochnov — in addition to eliminating the defector Artamonov — was the restoration of Yuri Nosenko’s fortunes in the West. Although I knew none of this at the time, I sensed in the second half of 1966 the CIA leadership’s growing skepticism, not just impatience, concerning our case against Nosenko. It was evident that some unknown factor was influencing them. This became clearer at the end of that year when they ordered a fresh review of the case — not so much to get new insights as to find ways to rationalize the doubts and to whitewash Nosenko to prepare his release.
Deputy Director Rufus Taylor called in Gordon Stewart, a CIA veteran and old friend of Helms, to take a fresh, detached look at this forbidding can of worms. Stewart enjoyed a reputation for integrity and had the added quality of knowing nothing of the Nosenko case and little about
KGB deception. To simplify Stewart’s review, I organized the essential file materials (including my “1000-page” file summary) with an explanatory table of contents, and turned them over to Stewart in early 1967. This was my parting shot, for I was already preparing my assignment abroad. After my departure the Soviet Bloc Division — without telling me — condensed this huge file summary into some 440 pages, lumping together many separate points of doubt into broad categories, each category to support a “conclusion.” In effect, they transformed justifiable points of doubt into debatable (and unnecessary) conclusions, making a case against Nosenko. He did not have the naval service he claimed, it said, adding that he did not join the KGB when or how he said, did not serve in the KGB’s American Embassy Section, and had not been deputy chief of its Tourist Department. Stewart thus found himself faced with a mass of material loaded with indications of Nosenko’s bad faith and lacking any innocent explanation. To his professorial eye, these papers looked “unscholarly” (as he said to associates) and “more like a prosecutor’s brief.” Indeed, a file summary is not an academic dissertation, and the SB report’s conclusions were unproven. So, he called for a critique of the SB report. In mid-1967 Helms selected for this task the same Bruce Solie who had learned from Kochnov, the KGB volunteer, that Nosenko was a genuine defector.
Solie submitted eighteen pages of critique of the 440-page SB report and of the previous handling of Nosenko. He recommended a new and “untainted” questioning in a friendlier, less confrontational, and “more objective” atmosphere. So, Helms and Taylor picked him to do the job himself. Solie was a taciturn, cigar-smoking man whose lean features gave him an air of the American farmlands. He had sat in on some of our interrogations of Nosenko prior to Kochnov’s advent, not contributing but maintaining a generally approving if reserved demeanor. Now, with Nosenko’s earlier interrogators removed from the scene and being himself convinced by Kochnov of Nosenko ’s genuineness, Solie set out to prove that we had been wrong. Behind Solie’s effort lay the hopes of CIA leaders that he would find ways to believe in Nosenko and rid theAgency of what Director Richard Helms later called this “incubus,” this “bone in the throat.”
They had picked the right man: Solie delivered the goods. Starting in late 1967, sometimes accompanied by FBI Special Agent Turner, Solie
talked in a friendly manner for nine months with Nosenko and together they worked out ways things might— somehow— be made to look plausible. One who read the transcripts of these interviews described to me the way they were conducted:
Solie: “Wouldn’t you put it this way, Yuri?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
On another sticking point, Solie: “But you really meant to say it differently, didn’t you?”
Nosenko: "Sure.”
Solie: “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, for example, that . . . ?”
Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”
Solie submitted his report on 1 October 1968. That whitewash had been the purpose from the outset was revealed by the speed with which the
CIA leadership adopted its conclusions. They could not have studied it and had perhaps not even read it before, three days later, Deputy Director Taylor informed Director Helms that
I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides. Most particularly I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsyn has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector. [6]
So well had Solie done the job that CIA gave him a medal for his travails. One can only concur in their assessment of him as a “true hero.” [7]
The task he performed was truly Herculean and required tricks as cunning as those of Hercules himself. Solie seems to have hidden from Taylor facts that flatly contradicted the deputy director’s conclusions. In reality there were significant “conflicts” between what Nosenko reported and “the information and opinions Golitsyn . . . provided.” And an "other defector,” Peter Deriabin, had cast an indelible stain of doubt on Nosenko’s bona fides. Deriabin was outraged by Taylor’s statement.
A question inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows of the accumulated doubts described in previous chapters. How, in the face of all that, could CIA have ever believed in Nosenko? The answer must lie partly in the human psyche — our incurable penchant to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t. (I discuss that general problem in Appendix C.) So desperately did CIA’s leaders desire to be rid of the ugly implications that underlay the Nosenko affair— KGB penetration of CIA and perhaps breaking of American ciphers — that they embraced a shaky, corrupt, and unsubstantial report — offered by an ill-qualified investigator — that fed that desire. Solie’s report would deserve attention if for no other reason than to illustrate the power of desire over reason. But it is no mere curiosity; the Solie report led to CIA’s final conclusion on the Nosenko case. It was crucial; its impact was permanent. Only through this corrupt gateway would future CIA officers gain access to the Nosenko case. It was declassified to make its wisdom accessible to trainees in counterintelligence. This is all that later CIA officers came to know, which is why they repeat its nonsense as fact in their memoirs today.
So it merits attention.
Solie began by adopting the (dubious) position that all he needed to do to prove Nosenko’s innocence was to discredit the general conclusions of the SB report. Then he carefully selected the questions he would deal with, sidestepped some major anomalies as if they had never existed, and falsely assured his readers, in the passive voice, that "all areas of major significance have been examined.” [8] Despite its bulk, Solie’s report presented no significant new information, though he and Nosenko had adjusted some details. It amounted essentially to a fresh interpretation of selected parts of the old data — an interpretation based on credulity rather than skepticism. Inevitably, the way Solie chose to explain one contradiction would conflict with the way he would explain a different one, but he did not call attention to this. And if he could not find any way to explain an oddity, he would fall back on this comforting thought: if the KGB had dispatched Nosenko, they would have surely prepared him better — ipso facto, the KGB had not dispatched him.
Among the “areas of major significance”— all of which Solie claimed to have examined — was how Nosenko’s reporting touched on the case of Oleg Penkovsky. In this one case, aside from all the others, Nosenko had twice exposed the KGB’s blundering hand on him— first in erring by a whole significant year about Abidian’s visit to Penkovsky ’s dead drop, and second by mentioning (and later forgetting) “Zepp.” How did Solie manage these hurdles? He simply ran around Zepp— didn’t mention it at all. He struggled desperately to explain the dead drop visit and Nosenko’s failure to mention it in 1962, exposing the absurd quality of this whole whitewash:
• Solie accepted as "not implausible” Nosenko’s preposterous suggestion (to Solie, never to us earlier) that he had failed to tell us in 1962
because “the stakeout had long been dropped”— so long that he had forgotten all about it. But only a couple of paragraphs earlier Solie had recognized that Abidian’s visit actually occurred only at the end of 1961. Thus Nosenko’s stakeout, by his own account, would have been still active when he departed for Geneva in March 1962 and would be fresh in his mind when, in June, he told us about Abidian and Moscow surveillance.
• Or maybe, Solie and Nosenko agreed, Nosenko had somehow got confused and only imagined that he had been getting stakeout reports.
• Perhaps, instead, he had only “been advised” of the stakeout by other KGB officers. And maybe only after he had met CIA in 1962 — perhaps at the time of the Penkovsky publicity. (How then could Nosenko have failed to relate the drop to Penkovsky when he told of it?)
• Or possibly Nosenko “consciously exaggerated his involvement with the visit and its aftermath.” (How then did he know the details?)
• Or maybe “the evident distortions arose from honest confusion” — without explaining how.
• Anyway, Nosenko’s errors and contradictions prove that he is genuine. "If dispatched, Nosenko presumably would have had the date right.”
• Then Solie had one wonderful, final argument: it wasn’t Nosenko’s fault, but the fault of his CIA interrogators who had “confused matters to the point where complete clarification appears impossible.” [9] In pushing out such nonsense, Solie must have assumed that his readers would not know that Nosenko had given, and repeated in detail, his stories of Abidian, of the drop, and of the stakeout long before any interrogation began.
Solie then exposed his intent — whitewash, not professional assessment: he dismissed the whole issue. The fact "that Nosenko is not able to
properly date the visit of Abidian to Pushkin Street is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”
Aside from its nonsense, the very structure of Solie’s report amounted to a trick. By focusing on the SB report’s (unproven) conclusions it skirted
the impossible task of explaining the specific inconsistencies, contradictions, and lies that had led to those conclusions. The uninformed reader
would never know they had existed.
Other aspects of his report were similarly questionable.
• When giving Nosenko’s now "true” version of one story or another, Solie neglected to mention it was often a third or fourth version, nor
did he describe the earlier, conflicting versions or speculate on why there had been so many changes.
• Solie implied that thanks to his new, nonconfrontational manner Nosenko had become cooperative, consistent, and "relaxed” as never
before and that Nosenko’s “material assistance to the interviewer” (including writing reports) was a major departure from the past. In reality, Nosenko had invariably been cooperative except when cornered. He had written many reports for us. And his stories might have seemed consistent back then, too, had they not been challenged. Solie’s role was not to challenge or question, but with Nosenko’s help to shape some plausible explanation.
• Solie sought to discredit earlier investigations. At least ten times he referred to points he said had not been looked into or to situations in which he said his predecessors had misunderstood what Nosenko had been trying to say. Solie was wrong each time — but a reader with no access to the record would not know that.
• Again and again, Solie made assertions as definitive as they were unfounded. He usually couched them impersonally, often in the passive voice, to hide the fact that they were nothing more than his own opinions. He proclaimed, for example, “The information Nosenko gave is commensurate with his claimed position.” 10 “Nosenko,” he wrote, “has furnished adequate information so that his claimed assignment during 1953-1955 is considered sufficiently substantiated.” [11] Nosenko’s knowledge of the office of the Military Attache supports his claim “that he was an officer of the First Section with the indicated assignment as related by him.” [12] Yet again: "The only unresolved problem considered of any significance in regard to the 1955-59 period is the [XYZ] case,” [13] whereas in fact that particular case posed only minor problems compared with others.
• Solie failed to mention most of the other Soviet sources whose bona fides were also doubted, or about their connections to Nosenko’s case.
Solie even administered a new polygraph test in 1968 and cited it as proof of Nosenko’s truth — though Nosenko had been polygraphed prior to
detention with contrary findings. Solie was ignoring, too, the chief polygraph specialist of the Office of Security, who had decreed in 1966, after
CIA had made extended use of the polygraph as an interrogation tool, that no polygraph test of Nosenko after his detention would be valid or could be presented as evidence one way or the other.
Solie accepted as true things Nosenko said that were actually unthink- able in the real Soviet and KGB world of which Solie knew so little. As
he hacked away at the SB report’s conclusions, avoiding its details, Solie failed to clarify the new picture he was thus composing. If Nosenko were now telling Solie the whole truth, the reader would have to accept (as CIA did, in its desperation) things like these:
• that the KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors,
• that what Nosenko told Solie about his life was the final truth — even though it was a fourth or fifth version and still full of unlikely events and would later undergo further changes by Nosenko and contradiction even by Soviet sources,
• that a ten-year veteran staff officer of the KGB need not know or remember how to perform routine tasks he must have been doing
daily, such as sending telegrams, distinguishing between different kinds of files, entering buildings, and using elevators,
• that a KGB operative need not remember any details of his own operations, not even the names of agents he had handled for years,
• that an officer responsible for the KGB’s coverage and knowledge of the American Embassy building needn’t himself know about it, or about his own service’s measures to counter the technical spying the Americans were doing from that building — or even that that technical spying was being done at all,
• that an English-speaking rising star in KGB operations against the American Embassy would never appear in any of the many approaches the KGB is known to have made to Embassy personnel during his time, nor even have heard of them,
• that a supervisor of operations against the American Embassy would be setting up homosexual compromises of visiting tourists, and giving low-level assistance to an officer of another department,
• that a newly appointed supervisor of KGB operations against tourists inside the USSR would be sent abroad — twice — for months’ long work ensuring the security of a conference delegation, work normally done by a department specifically set up for the purpose.
CIA was accepting Nosenko as genuine because this one man Solie would accept such nonsense and was unable (as he himself confessed) to “perceive any evidence of KGB deception or of any Soviet objective which might have justified their dispatching Nosenko.” Someone knowing a bit more:
• might have recalled KGB deceptions whose goals could not have been perceptible to their victims,
• would have noticed the signs of source protection in many of Nosenko’s reports, such as 1) his contradiction of Golitsyn’s pointers to KGB recruitment of American code clerks, 2) his misleading story about Kovshuk’s trip to Washington, and 3) his accounts of how Popov and Penkovsky were caught,
• would have recognized the many other signs of deception that smeared Nosenko’s reports, such as his probing about Zepp; his story
of Penkovsky ’s Pushkin Street dead drop; his unlikely multiplicity of contacts with the Lee Harvey Oswald case; and his claim of seeing a KGB hie in Geneva showing they knew nothing about CIA there,
• would have seen that all of Nosenko’s major leads — “Andrey,” Sergeant Johnson of the Orly courier station, the British Admiralty source, Dejean, Gribanov’s French businessman agent Saar Demichel, the microphones in the American Embassy, and others — bore the marks of deceptive "chicken feed” in that 1) Nosenko could never get straight how he learned these hot items and 2) the KGB knew that all of them had previously been exposed or had lost their value to the KGB;
• might not have dismissed so offhandedly the only deceptive aim that Solie could envisage that the KGB might be trying to saturate Western security services, busying them with leads to minor and useless KGB agents to keep them off more valuable ones. In fact, some FBI officers thought that at least in New York the anti-Soviet operatives had been saturated. More than fifty percent of their time, they later calculated, had been spent pursuing innocuous leads provided by Kulak and Polyakov. Solie never mentioned these sources or their connections with the Nosenko case.
The twisted and shaky edifice that Solie thus constructed would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal. But it was never intended to endure either. It needed only seem solid to an uninformed and casual reader, for
with few exceptions this was the only kind of reader it would ever reach. Future CIA officers would be taught its conclusion but would never see the data on which it was based.
Had it not been for Jim Angleton I might never have seen this "Solie report” and been left wondering what miracle had resuscitated Nosenko. Those who had salvaged Nosenko didn’t want me to see the flimsy and corrupt way they had done it, and my “need to know” could be said to have expired with my assignment abroad. But during my routine visit to Headquarters in late 1968 Angleton took the initiative of showing it to me, along with the SB report it attacked (which I then saw for the first time).
I was appalled. In the vain hope of resuscitating that fleeting chance we had had to dig behind Nosenko’s tales, I wrote a long rebuttal, containing the objections mentioned above and many more, and sent it to Angleton in January 1969 from my field station. My rebuttal was ignored,
except in the Counterintelligence Staff, which was unable or unwilling to fight the case further. [14]
As soon as Solie’s report and Taylor’s memo had cleared Nosenko, CIA moved him to the Washington area and soon took him in as a consultant for its and the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence operations. 15 Eventually he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
Nosenko is said to have boosted CIA and FBI operations. He pointed to recruitment targets among Soviets in the United States, and in the 1970s
one of them was successfully recruited. 16 As the director of Central Intelligence later described it to all CIA personnel, Nosenko had "conducted
numerous special security reviews on Soviet subjects of specific intelligence interest, and . . . proven himself to be invaluable in exploring counterintelligence leads.” [17]
In defending Nosenko later against the implication in a TV docudrama that there might be some substance to the old accusations that he was a
phony, a CIA counterintelligence leader came to his defense. Among other things, Leonard McCoy expressed outrage that Nosenko’s "dignity, self- respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this him,” and that therefore “it is fitting that CIA recently called him in and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him.” Speaking for all CIA officers past and present, McCoy concluded, "Any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency’s judgment in this case — that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you, Yuri Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country.” [18] Nosenko had won— but voices continued to rise both against him and in his defense. The debate was decided, but not the truth.