JFK Assassination Forum

Off Topic => News - Off Topic - Weird & Wacky => Topic started by: Thomas Graves on July 06, 2019, 10:46:25 AM

Title: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Thomas Graves on July 06, 2019, 10:46:25 AM
Several months ago, Morley posted on his website, JFK Facts -- 

"A reader (me, Thomas Graves) asks:

Do you still believe Nosenko was a true defector, Jeff?

Have you read Tennent H. Bagley’s “Spy Wars,” or even his 35-page PDF 'Ghosts of the Spy Wars'?"

...


Morley's reply:

Yes, I did read Bagley’s Spy Wars. I also interviewed him. And yes, I do believe Nosenko was a true defector.

I think Bagley was wrong, for two reasons: lack of a plausible suspect and lack of damage to CIA operations.

Remember Angleton’s theory that Nosenko was a dispatched defector is inextricably bound up in the theory that Nosenko was dispatched to protect a mole already working inside the CIA as of January 1964.  So the  reader’s question is really two, was Nosenko a mole? And, if so, who was he protecting?

As I asked in THE GHOST, if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?

Those who argue that Nosenko was a controlled defector need to answer these two questions. I was especially convinced by George Kisevalter, the most experienced CIA officer handling Russian defectors. Kisevalter always vouched for Nosenko’s bonafides.

From THE GHOST --

“(George) Kisevalter’s opinion was not idiosyncratic. In 1997, he received the agency’s Trailblazer Award recognizing him as one of fifty top CIA officers in its first fifty years, an honor Angleton did not receive. There was never any doubt in Kisevalter’s mind about the bona fides of Yuri Nosenko. Three subsequent reviews by senior CIA officers reached the same conclusion. So did Cleveland Cram, the former London station chief who wrote the definitive study of Angleton’s operations.. So did Benjamin Fischer, a career officer who became the agency’s chief historian.

“The Great Mole Hunt or Great Mole Scare of the late 1960s turned the CIA inside out ruining careers and reputations in search for Soviet penetrations that may or may not have existed,” Fischer wrote.

The dissenters from the institutional consensus about the Mole Hunt were mostly officers who had served Angleton on the Counterintelligence Staff. The Angletonians, as they called themselves, were a dogged bunch. Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch–which is true. They also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the Mole Hunt–which it is not.

Angleton and his acolytes would speak many words in his defense and write more than a few books. They cited scores of statements by Yuri Nosenko that they said were not credible or misleading, and indeed, Nosenko had exaggerated and embellished as defectors often do.  But if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?

The CIA has learned from hard experience what happened when the Soviets succeeded in their operations: agents were arrested and executed. But even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the opening of significant portions of KGB archives, the Angletonians could not identify any operations compromised by the putative mole [allegedly protected by Nosenko]. They could not even offer up the name of a single plausible candidate. After the passage of five decades, the likeliest explanation is that there wasn’t a mole.”

...

My reply (which I just now posted, but doubt he'll publish):

1) Given all of the evidence provided by Bagley in his books Spy Wars and Spymaster, and in his PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, why don’t you find Edward Ellis Smith (or an unknown person in the Soviet Russia Division he helped KGB to recruit) “a plausible suspect” as Popov’s Mole?

Even the Russians said after the Cold War that he was the first CIA officer the KGB had ever recruited (in Moscow in 1956). For what it's worth, there were, according to Bagley, even other never-uncovered moles in U.S. Intelligence, like, for example, the traitor (not Ames or Hanssen) who informed KGB that Dimitri Polyakov was telling CIA "more than he was supposed to" after he'd left the U.S. and was posted in Burma, India, and Moscow. 

2) With help from uber-territorial and uber-vindictive J. Edgar Hoover, probable mole Richard Kovich, KGB triple-agent Aleksiy Kulak, and CIA “gullibles-or-worse” Leonard McCoy, John L. Hart, Bruce Solie, and Cleveland Cram, Nosenko managed to discredit true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and the leads he was giving CIA (until Bagley wrote “Spy Wars,” that is), and to wreak so much havoc in CIA as to render it impotent against the KGB and the GRU.

...

PS  It's interesting to note that all of the "big time" KGB defectors George Kisevalter handled ended up being arrested by the KGB, "tried," and executed.

'''''

PPS  Regarding Morley's book The Ghost, please read my one-star review of it on Amazon, under my username "dumptrumputin".

PPPS  "Benjamin Fischer, a career officer who became the agency’s chief historian."  How about David Robarge, CIA's current official historian, Jeff?

PPPPS  "Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch–which is true. They also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the Mole Hunt–which it was not."

I don't know about Hood, but Bagley (and Newton "Scotty" Miler, who ran his own investigation of Nosenko for SR/CI) said exactly the opposite in his 2007 book Spy Wars, and his 2014 follow-up PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, so where did you come up with that piece of garbage, Jeff, you intellectually dishonest P.O.S., you?

-- MWT   ;)




Title: Re: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Michael Clark on August 24, 2019, 02:13:56 PM

...the many inquisitive "guests" (52 at the moment) who invariably show up on this thread whenever I've been posting on it for several minutes.

--  MWT  ;)


And....




To all of my faithful followers --

...........

--  MWT   ;)


Lol! 45 days later and this apparently less interesting thread has, wait for it................... 160........... views!
Title: Re: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Thomas Graves on August 24, 2019, 03:05:02 PM
And....


Lol! 45 days later and this apparently less interesting thread has, wait for it................... 160........... views!

Michael,

Thank you for publicizing it!

--  MWT   ;)

Title: Re: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Michael Clark on October 23, 2019, 12:05:08 AM
Interesting


https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf


TOP SECRET

13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security
Title: Re: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Thomas Graves on October 23, 2019, 01:02:11 AM
Interesting

Michael,

How so?

-- MWT  ;)
Title: Re: Here's My Reply To Jefferson Morley On His Website
Post by: Thomas Graves on November 06, 2019, 10:42:37 PM
Interesting


https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf


TOP SECRET

13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security

Michael,

Howard J. Osborn?

The guy who, after a very short time, lost his job as Chief of the Soviet Russia Division to David Murphy, and whose close colleague in Security was none other than Bruce "Gumshoe" Solie, the guy who was bamboozled by several KGB triple-agents and who managed to lose a true defector ("Shadrin") to KGB kidnappers in Vienna?

LOL

--  MWT  ;)