JFK Assassination Forum

The following is an 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. My comments are in brackets.


“Isn’t it terrible?” said Jerry, as he stepped out of the elevator.

"Probably not as bad as all that, Jerry,” Sid said flippantly. Jerry stopped.
 
"No, listen. Haven’t you heard?” he said, "The President has been shot in Dallas!”

We rushed to our offices on the fifth floor where radios were on. Sickened, we talked in subdued voices, stirring each other’s hope for that brief moment before the sad, final news was flashed. Soon the radio announced that the assassin had been captured and, not long after that, identified him.

A later news bulletin galvanized us: Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and had returned to the United States only a year and a half ago.

The Counterintelligence Staff, with its established liaison with the FBI and other government agencies, was quickly designated as the Agency’s coordinating point for all Clandestine Services efforts to collect information on Oswald and his connections. Among the traces that James Angleton’s shop first uncovered was a recent report from Mexico City on Oswald’s contact with the Soviet Embassy when he applied for a visa to return to the USSR. The “consular officials” he met were both KGB officers. By itself this was no surprise, because the KGB occupied almost all consular slots throughout the world. But one of those whom Oswald met was Valery V. Kostikov, whom we knew [sic; believed] to have been a member of the First Chief Directorate’s 13th Department, the one responsible for sabotage and “liquid affairs” abroad — murder.

The Counterintelligence Staff handled the microscopic search of Agency files, but everyone stretched to make any possible contribution. It was Lee Wigren, our Counterintelligence section research chief, who made the section's first contribution. On his own initiative he leafed through the Agency’s photographic files on the remote chance that some detail of Minsk, where Oswald had lived, might assist in visualizing his environment in the Soviet Union.

Photo in hand, Lee burst into my office.

“Look at this,” he exclaimed. “I asked for pictures of landmarks and public buildings in Minsk and got this one of the opera house.” An American tourist had taken photos in August 1961 during a trip to the USSR and, thinking they might be of some interest, he had turned them over to a CIA representative he knew. In due course, the snapshots were filed. Among them was the one in Lee’s hand, of the opera house in Minsk.

"So, what do you think?”

I thought as Lee did. Standing there, undeniably, was Lee Harvey Oswald himself. This useful confirmation of Oswald’s presence there was passed on to the investigators and later appeared in the Warren Commission Report on the assassination. 11

The circumstances — Oswald’s defection to the USSR, his return to the United States with a Soviet wife, his contact with Kostikov only two months before the assassination — opened the question of whether the Soviet government had had a hand in the assassination. It seemed entirely unlikely but could not be disregarded.

Incredibly, it was only a few weeks later that I would be listening to a denial of any Soviet involvement in the assassination, delivered with rare
authority by my agent at work in the USSR.

. . . 

"Come in, Pete. There’s news,” said David Murphy over the internal phone line. I hurried along the corridor to the corner office of the chief of the Soviet Russia Division.

It was 23 January 1964, eighteen months after [probable mole] George Kisevalter and I had said farewell to Yuri Nosenko [in Geneva]. Meanwhile, Jack Maury had been assigned abroad, Howard Osborn had held the post for a short time, and in August 1963 David Murphy had taken over as division chief. His appointment added hugely to the professionalism of CIA’s operations against the USSR. He had a keen interest in and deep knowledge of the Soviet Union, he spoke Russian, he had long operated in the held against Soviet bloc targets (and had overseen the handling in Berlin of Pyotr Popov), and he came to this job directly from years of supervising our operations against the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union. He brought to the task a unique verve, activism, and initiative — tempered by a well-informed, realistic insight into Soviet bloc counterintelligence capabilities. It was one of those rare cases of the right man in the right job, and a major influence on the course of events I will describe here.

As I stepped into his office I saw that Kisevalter was there. Dave greeted me with a smile. "Nosenko’s back.”

Kisevalter, in evident good cheer, added, "The telegram came in last night, exactly as we arranged it. Even better, it’s Geneva again.”

I clenched my fist and faked a short right-hand punch. "We’re off.” We were ready. In the months since Nosenko had left Geneva, George and I had had time to prepare and update meeting plans and questions for future encounters.

Dave reviewed our communications arrangements. No one would be told where we were going or why we were away, and we would book separate flights to avoid notice that we had gone out together. Our messages to Headquarters from the held would carry a special indicator to ensure that the smallest possible number of people would become aware of this source.

As we left his office Dave said, “Let’s hope he can stay for a while.’’

"Amen to that,’’ I muttered, and, as we went off to pack for the trip, I reminded George that Geneva was cold and wet in January.

Thirty-six hours later we were in Geneva, checking the safe house accommodation. This time we had a larger apartment in a handsome building in the residential district in which I had lived as a student. The techs had already rigged the audio equipment, and an administrative clerk was providing the food and drink supply. (Neither they nor other officers in Geneva knew whom we would be meeting in the apartment they so carefully arranged for us.) The problem of getting the safe house address to Nosenko was more to the point. All things being equal, according to plan he would be expecting to meet us tonight at seven forty-five.

"The first movie theater in the phone book is the ABC,” I told George. “I know it well. I’ll go there tonight, slip him a paper with this address, and we’ll assume he can get here on his own. If he arrives before I can get back, you’ll be here. And if he doesn’t show up, I’ll phone you and then hang around in town for the alternate meeting an hour later.”

An hour before the appointed time, I bundled into my overcoat and donned a black Styrian hat. With the horn-rimmed glasses that I rarely wore, this minimal effort would at least lessen the chances of being recognized by someone who might know me from my earlier years here. I strolled awhile in the chilly air, caught a bus to the town center, and got off a few blocks from the theater.

Walking toward the brightly lit open foyer by the ticket booth of the "ABC,” I spotted Nosenko standing off to the left, a typical moviegoer waiting for his date. It was movie time and others were milling about, so he didn’t see me coming. I brushed quickly past, thrusting a paper with the address and phone number into his hand and moving without pause out of the foyer into the darkness of the street.

Nosenko must have found a taxi immediately because by the time I got back to the apartment he and Kisevalter were standing in the living room chatting. I left my coat and hat in the vestibule and, rubbing my hands from the cold, walked into a warm reunion. But right off, Nosenko asked with apparent concern, “Who was it that passed me the note?”

“Didn’t you recognize me?” He shook his head in disbelief as I led him out to the vestibule, opened the closet, and pointed to the black hat. He continued to shake his head, surprisingly upset that he had failed to spot his own contact.

“Yuri has a bit of a surprise for us,” said George with less than his usual enthusiasm. "He wants to stay.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Stay where?” I turned to Nosenko, “You don’t mean defect, do you?”

Nosenko nodded. “Yes, and right now. I don’t want to go back.”

"Well, well,” I said. “We’d better sit down and talk about this — and let’s have a drink. I could use one.” On a scale of safe house surprises, this
ranked close to the top. But higher was yet to come.

George had already put zakouskies — snacks — on a tray, and I served Nosenko the scotch whisky that he preferred. We raised our whisky glasses to this reunion, and I broke the silence. “I don’t understand. You said you would never leave your country and family. Is something wrong?”

“Yes, I don’t know exactly what, but I’ve been getting the feeling that they might be onto me. It would be too risky to go on.”

Odd, I thought. He had left the USSR three days before, again to act as security officer for the Soviet delegation to the resumed disarmament talks. We knew — and as a KGB officer, he knew much better — that if there had been the slightest reason for distrust, the KGB would not have signed off on this assignment abroad, especially for a mission unrelated to his Moscow responsibilities.

“Can you give us any specifics? This is damned important.”

"No, nothing special. Just the way people look at me. I’m worried.”

Suppressing my astonishment I said, matter-of-factly, “Of course, you can come over any time you want, and we will welcome you. But I still don’t understand. What about your family, the little girls?”

"Oh, they’ll be okay,” he answered offhandedly. Doubts flashed through my mind. We knew how the regime treated the families left behind by defectors, and it was anything but "okay.” Close relatives were fired from responsible jobs and ostracized by friends and colleagues. The family would be kicked out of their apartment and probably be exiled to a distant city, the children shunned as the offspring of a traitor. They would never be allowed to join him in the West, and he would never return to Russia, for he would be under sentence of death for treason.

After a glance at Kisevalter, who just shrugged, I turned to Nosenko, “Okay, but give yourself and us a little time. Stay where you are, at least for a few days. If you sense any real danger, you can come here any time. They won’t kidnap you in Switzerland. Well need the time to make arrangements with Washington for your entry into the U.S. And we want to know what you might learn here.’’

George and I knew that CIA would strongly have preferred that he stay where he was. An agent in place has a future and offers opportunities,
while the value of most defectors is finite. But as we sipped at our drinks and nibbled at the snacks I began to see the brighter side of Nosenko’s
decision. At least now there would be the opportunity to question him in detail about things we had barely touched upon in the hurry of spy meetings abroad. There would also be the chance to plumb any knowledge of political and strategic matters that he might have learned during his years in the inner core of the system.

He agreed to wait "maybe for a week or so,” and we settled down to our meeting.

On the register of operational surprises, Nosenko’s next remark scored a perfect ten.

He had personal, not to say intimate, knowledge of the stay in the Soviet Union of Lee Harvey Oswald, who two months earlier had assassinated President Kennedy.

For weeks the Warren Commission had been turning Washington inside out in investigating every conceivable aspect of the crime. High on the list were the circumstances of Oswald’s bizarre decision to defect to the Soviet Union, his apparent change of heart and return to the United States with a Soviet wife; his pro-Cuban political activity; and his visit to the Soviet consulate in Mexico City two months before the assassination. Now, in this most timely fashion, CIA’s only source inside the KGB had come out with direct knowledge. If President Johnson himself had been sitting in this safe house, his first question would have been, "What can you tell us about the assassination of President Kennedy?” And George and I had spent all this time discussing Nosenko’s future!

"I was personally involved in this case,” he said. "When Oswald came to the Soviet Union in 1959, he told his Intourist guide he wanted to stay in the country and become a Soviet citizen. I was deputy chief of our section dealing with American and British Commonwealth tourists to the USSR.
Krupnov, one of my case officers, was handling the young guide. When Krupnov reported to me, I called up everything we knew about Oswald—
from the guide, from his visa application, and from the staff at the Hotel Berlin, where he was staying. On the basis of this, Krupnov and I judged
that Oswald was of no interest and would probably just be a nuisance. So, I decided to reject his request.”

George and I listened without interrupting Nosenko’s story. It seemed unlikely to me that a KGB officer at Nosenko’s level would be allowed to
make such a decision but this was not the time to mention it.

“When Oswald was told he couldn’t stay, he went back to the hotel and tried to commit suicide. They found him in his room with his wrist cut
open, and got him to a hospital. We still didn’t want to let him stay, but higher-ups decided it would be too embarrassing if he should really succeed in killing himself in our country. So they let him stay. But we saw to it that he would not be allowed to stay in the Moscow area. The Red Cross found him a job in Minsk.”

As I moved to top off Nosenko’s glass with soda water, he motioned me to stop, took the whiskey bottle himself, and poured more on top of the
soda. “Didn’t you even suspect he might be an American spy?” I asked.

"We thought of it, but it was clear he was somehow abnormal, and not the type. Anyway, that sort of thing would be looked into only if he was to be allowed to remain in the country. And we didn’t think that would happen.”

“Didn’t any KGB people at least interview him, to get their own impressions? To see if he might be useful to the KGB? After all, he had just left the
marines. Even if that was of no importance to you, wouldn’t the GRU have an interest?”

"No. No one ever bothered. He was obviously low level, just a corporal or something. And after the suicide attempt it was even clearer that he was not normal.” 1 George and I took notes (neither waiting for nor relying on the tapes that were recording everything) and avoided interrupting Nosenko’s account with detailed questions.

“Then came the news about his assassination of President Kennedy. When the top people found out that the killer had recently lived for three
years in our country, they went into a spin. The Americans might get the idea that they had something to do with it. So Khrushchev himself asked
my boss Gribanov if the KGB had had anything to do with Oswald. Immediately, Gribanov told me to get the KGB file from Minsk. I phoned Minsk
and they flew a man right away with their file on Oswald.

"The guy from Minsk delivered it to me, and as Khrushchev had ordered, I personally reviewed it to see if the KGB there had had any relation-
ship whatever with Oswald.”

George and I leaned forward, expectantly. "And?”

"And nothing. There was no sign whatever that the KGB in Minsk had taken any interest in him.”

"Didn’t they watch him, or bug his apartment, or put agents next to him?” George asked.

"No, nothing of the sort.”

"What did the file look like? How big was it?”

"One volume, thick like this,” Nosenko answered, holding his thumb and index finger about an inch and a half apart.

"Did you read it all?”

“I had to. I had to be absolutely sure of my answer to Gribanov and Khrushchev. I read it carefully.”

He paused, then added, “If anyone wants to know whether the Soviet government was behind Oswald, I can answer. It wasn’t. No one in the
KGB paid any attention to him.”

Yes, I thought, you can damned well be sure that the Warren Commission and just about everyone else will be interested. George and I ex-
changed glances, but did not interrupt our guest.

After a long swallow of his drink, Nosenko recalled another contact with the Oswald affair.

"A few months ago, in September, long before the assassination, I happened to be visiting an office in the First Chief Directorate. One of the guys said it was good I was there, because I might be able to throw some light on a cable that had just come in from the residency in Mexico City.
They showed it to me. The cable reported this guy Oswald had come into the consulate saying he had lived in the USSR and wanted to go back. He was asking for a visa to return here. I told them I vaguely remembered something about his visit and request to stay, and the problems we’d had with that.”

“How long was the cable, exactly what did it say?” George asked.

"About half a page, no more. As I remember, it just gave the identifying data on Oswald and his Soviet wife, and told what he had said about
having lived in the USSR and gone back to the States. I heard the guys talking it over. They decided there would be no good reason to let him
come back. So they sent a cable telling Mexico to refuse the request.”

By any measure we were getting a most extraordinary break — and witnessing a stunning coincidence. CIA’s only source among the thousands of
KGB officers in the USSR arrives straight from Moscow two months after the JFK assassination, to report having had no fewer than four points of
contact with the case of Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR. First, he’d been a key figure in 1959 in the initial refusal (later rescinded) to let him stay. Second, he had personally observed Moscow’s refusal to let Oswald return to the USSR in September 1963. Third, he had personally intervened to get the file from Minsk, and fourth, he had reviewed the entire KGB file on Oswald.

The Nosenko operation had clearly taken a major turn. Now our agent in place had placed himself as a witness— probably the only one— to a
question facing the American government concerning one of the most dramatic and potentially dangerous incidents of the Cold War. This over-
whelmed all the questions and doubts and shadows that had fallen over this case in the preceding months, all the reservations that piled up about
Nosenko’s truthfulness. I doubted that this sensational turn of events was coincidence — new doubts added to so many — but that didn’t matter. Now it was certain: his defection would be accepted, and he would be brought into the United States [where, in October of 1968, he would be "cleared" by probable mole Bruce Leonard Solie and hired by the CIA a couple of years later to teach "counterintelligence" to its and the FBI's new recruits].

TG-

You are a special and wonderful human being, standing like the Colossus of Rhodes over the JFKA research community.

Please tell me something that I don't already know.

TG-

Verily. I only have so much interest in the internecine Spy v Spy blackjacks inside the CIA of the 1950-60s.

In fact, my interest in the whole JFKA smear is somewhat fading. I find bogus treatments of the JFKA legacy worth talking about. I may post on that going forward. You say the Monika Wiesak post. 

I defer to you on the CIA 1950-60s, as you seem to have a lot of insights and a very deep interest in the topic. I agree with your takes, as much as I know.

My IQ was high enough at one point, but I have not been tested in decades. Maybe I have lost a step.

And 70s, 80s, and 90s.

TG-

Verily. I only have so much interest in the internecine Spy v Spy blackjacks inside the CIA of the 1950-60s.

In fact, my interest in the whole JFKA smear is somewhat fading. I find bogus treatments of the JFKA legacy worth talking about. I may post on that going forward. You say the Monika Wiesak post. 

I defer to you on the CIA 1950-60s, as you seem to have a lot of insights and a very deep interest in the topic. I agree with your takes, as much as I know.

My IQ was high enough at one point, but I have not been tested in decades. Maybe I have lost a step.

TG--

I work quickly.

You could read two pages a day -- unless, of course, it would cause you too much cognitive-dissonance agony.