JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on January 19, 2026, 04:11:46 PM
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How future LHO-KGB apologist George Kisevalter helped protect a mole in 1962
The following is a long excerpt from Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, which you can read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.
Background:
CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov was betrayed by a high-level mole in the CIA in early 1957. Instead of arresting him right away, the KGB fabricated at least three scenarios so he could be secretly arrested twenty-two months later in such a way that wouldn’t implicate the mole. First, the KGB reposted him from Vienna to Germany where he was responsible for sending KGB “Illegals” to the U.S. An Illegals officer he didn’t know, Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov [who would implausibly “walk in” to the FBI’s NYC field office in late 1961 when everyone who had been involved with Popov was being recalled to Moscow], escorted an Illegal by the name Margarita Tairova to him so she could be sent on her way to NYC. She later said she’d noticed an FBI surveillance team following her in Germany [the FBI didn’t surveil her there] and another one in The Big Apple when she arrived there, and that’s why she’d terminated the operation and returned to Moscow. Second, when Popov was at his own birthday party in Moscow, a GRU officer he hadn’t seen for a long time showed up unexpectedly. Third, a Serbian woman he’d recruited years earlier in Vienna and who had become his mistress, turned anti-Communist after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and told the Viennese police that she was in a romantic relationship with Popov. This intel soon made its way to Moscow.
Here’s the excerpt from Spy Wars.
My comments are in brackets.
On 18 March 1959, nearly two months after [George Winters, a CIA co-optee at the American Embassy, had mailed an unnecessary-and-intercepted-by-KGB letter to him], Popov [who’d been recalled to Moscow in November 1958 from his Illegals job in Berlin ostensibly regarding an American student he’d recruited] came to a meeting in the uniform of a full colonel in the Transportation Corps, to which he had been transferred from the GRU. He gave [his CIA handler, Russell] Langelle a booklet of notes and said he was soon to be transferred to the Sverdlovsk region. In July CIA passed him questions about missile launch facilities in that area. Popov’s information was now noticeably less valuable than what he had supplied in Germany. This worried CIA, of course, but could be explained by his reduced access to top-level information. The real reason became clear in September. The KGB had arrested Popov and doubled him back against us. In the men’s room of the Aragvi Restaurant, after motioning Langelle to be silent and indicating that he was wired for sound, Popov passed to him a cigarette-sized roll of paper. On both sides of seven or eight narrow pieces of toilet paper -- about half the size of a square of Western toilet paper, and of a rough brown texture -- Popov had neatly block-printed in pencil a message that I present here translated and paraphrased:
• I was arrested as a result of KGB surveillance of the mailing [by George Winters] of the re-contact letter.*
• I was under suspicion and recalled from Berlin because of my relations with Mili with [his mistress in Yugoslavia] and because of the Illegal woman in New York [Margarita Tairova, whom future false defector to the FBI, Dmitry Polyakov had escorted to him in East Berlin to forward to NYC], who fled after she noted that her baggage had been tampered with in her U.S. hotel. She claimed that she’d been tailed all the way from Germany. [In reality she’d been surveilled by the FBI only in NYC]
• I told them that you recruited me at the end of November 1953, and that I had given you no documentary material and nothing in writing except during the Schwerin period. Apart from these two lies, I told them the whole truth.
• Because the KGB believed I had confessed fully, they are using me in this double agent game. I was told that if I cooperate, my sentence might be only fifteen years. Thus I beg you to act as if you know nothing about the trap.
• I will keep you informed about my situation and the KGB’s intentions.
• I hope that if this meeting and the next one go well, the KGB will trust me and maybe let me go to Berlin, where I may have a chance to escape.
• Do not take any chances. When you go to a meeting with me, take plenty of cover.
• In the December meeting I will supply a detailed report. 8
This KGB game, said the note [which had been written by the KGB and which the KGB had created a wound to Popov’s hand so it could be “hidden” under the bandage], was being handled by KGB officers Zvezdenkov and Sumin under the direction of counterintelligence chief Oleg Gribanov. It added gratuitously that the KGB “knows a lot about the American Embassy” and mentioned by name, for no apparent reason, some of Popov’s former GRU colleagues. The note claimed, quite improbably, that Popov himself, and not the KGB, had provided some (unspecified) parts of the information he had passed to CIA while under KGB control. It also speculated that the KGB might be planning to use Popov in a propaganda coup. CIA was of course willing to carry on playacting to protect Popov, but at the next brush pass on 9 October 1959 -- the meeting that his note had begged CIA to attend with “plenty of cover” -- the KGB brought the play to an abrupt halt. As Langelle stepped off a Moscow bus on which Popov had slipped him some written information, the KGB arrested him. After Langelle had refused their offer to help him out of his trouble if he would cooperate, the KGB expelled him from the country. They left George Winters [the Embassy employee who had mistakenly mailed the unnecessary letter to Popov] untouched and unmentioned to the end of his tour of duty more than a year later. 9 Only years later did the Soviet press begin vilifying Winters as a spy and even then without referring to the Popov case. On 20 October 1959 Izvestiya, as always the voice of the government, briefly noted the expulsion of Langelle, without naming the spy he had been meeting. It was not until a year later that the Soviet press mentioned -- without connecting this to Langelle -- that an “Army Lt. Col. P.” had been executed. In publications through the 1960s and as late as 1979 they still withheld his name, giving it variously as “P” or “Petrov.” Through the 1960s, writings by leading KGB officials intentionally distorted the details of the affair to convey the impression that the KGB did not even know when CIA recruited Popov, giving dates varying from 1951 to 1956. If CIA were to accept [false defector-in-place Yuri] Nosenko’s (and the Popov note’s) account of the letter mailing -- and Nosenko’s version of [KGB General Vladislav] Kovshuk’s trip to Washington [to ostensibly reestablish contact with a cipher machine mechanic he’d recruited in Moscow but in reality to meet in January 1957 with just-fired-from-CIA Edward Ellis Smith or high-level Office of Security officer Bruce Solie in D.C. movie houses so they could betray Pyotr Popov to him] -- it could breathe a sigh of relief in the confidence that Popov’s tragic downfall was due to mischance -- not something more sinister, like a mole. But Nosenko’s version clashed with known facts. Even high-level KGB sources later said GRU chief General Shalin was fired because of the revelation of Popov’s treason -- and he was fired in early December 1958, right after Popov’s return to Russia and seven weeks before the letter mailing to which Nosenko had attributed Popov’s downfall. And surely the KGB would not have left Popov free, perhaps to run away, when alerted to his danger by the (published) news of Shalin’s fall. The KGB itself admitted after the Cold War that it had Popov under tight surveillance (more likely, under control) and that the surveillants saw him meet Langelle more than a week before the letter mailing. 10 Veterans conversant with the KGB’s detention procedures stated categorically that Popov could not have genuinely written, hidden, and passed this note undetected -- much less with such excess verbiage and without any strikeover or sign of haste. A picture was taking shape. One could see the KGB taking pains to protect its real source (Smith) [and/or Solie] by delaying [from January 1957 until late 1958] Popov’s recall [to Moscow] from Berlin and using him, after a secret arrest, as a double agent in Moscow. This would draw a CIA person from the Embassy [Langelle] to contact him so he could ostensibly be exposed by “routine surveillance of diplomats” -- the story told by Popov’s note and by Nosenko. Indeed, Kovshuk did not go to Washington for the cipher-machine mechanic [whom he waited nine months to finally look up]. When Andrey [Dayle W. Smith] was finally identified and interviewed by the FBI, his account made that clear.
. . . . . . . .
My comments:
*Interestingly, probable mole George Kisevalter “confirmed” the letter story to Bagley in June 1962 right after false defector-in-place Nosenko had told them about it in a Geneva safe house.
The following is from Bagley’s Spy Wars.
In the course of our first meeting with George, Nosenko told us how Popov was caught.
“It was surveillance,” he said. “Our guys were routinely tailing George Winters, an attaché at your embassy. Some time in early 1959 they saw him drop a letter into a street mailbox. It was written in Russian with a false return address and addressed to Popov.
“That was all we needed — diplomats don’t post innocent letters to GRU officers. Popov was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Within a few days they followed him to a clandestine meeting with [Russell] Langelle, the American Embassy security officer. They arrested Popov a few days later, interrogated and got his confession, and ran him for a while as a double agent before closing the operation down. Langelle was arrested moments after Popov handed him some reports the KGB had concocted.
As usual in such cases, they tried to recruit him. Langelle refused and got kicked out on his diplomatic ass. Popov was tried and shot.”
Here was poignant confirmation for Kisevalter, who knew that Popov had told the same story in a note he surreptitiously passed to Langelle a month before the fatal meeting.
“Yes,” George told me after the meeting, “Winters did mail that damned letter, and that was never published in the press. This guy really has the inside story.”
George and I had debriefed many a source in our careers and knew the areas of primary national intelligence and counterintelligence interest. Headquarters intervened only once, with a list of names and code names brought to Geneva by a Headquarters security officer [probable mole Bruce Solie]. We weren’t told their origin, and I learned only later that they were follow-ups to leads given by the recent KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn [to Solie’s confidant, protege, and mole-hunting subordinate, James Angleton]. Nosenko drew a blank on all of them.
My comment:
Kisevalter defended Yuri "The KGB Had Nothing To Do With Oswald In The USSR" Nosenko from Tennent H. Bagley after he physically "defected" to the U.S. in February 1964.