LEGEND - Edward Jay Epstein
Epstein's work is approximately 180 degrees removed from the currently prevailing Deep Politics theories, which is why he is dismissed as either a CIA dupe or disinformation agent.
Dear Fancy Pants Rants (FPR),
The thesis of Epstein's 1978 book,
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, is that Marine U-2 radar operator Oswald may have been recruited by the KGB or the GRU in Japan in 1957 or 1958, and that KGB Major I mean Lt. Col. I mean Captain Yuri Nosenko was sent to the U.S. in February 1964 to obscure Oswald’s Soviet intelligence links -- links which J. Edgar Hoover, in the interest of self-preservation, smothered institutionally.
In
Legend, Edward J. Epstein correctly "outed" Yuri Nosenko as not-a-true physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 and disclosed that the FBI's beloved FEDORA (KGB Major Aleksey Kulak) was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent who had duped the Bureau for fifteen years.
Factoid: In 1976, FBI Senior Agent James Nolan conducted an investigation that determined that Kulak / FEDORA was fake. A few years later, counterintelligence-hating Senior Agent James Geer, with help from two CIA researchers, Sandra Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann, provided to him by a Nosenko-protecting probable mole by the name of Leonard V. McCoy, reverted Nolan's appraisal to the original mistaken one.
I say Nosenko was a "not-a-true defector" in 1964 because, although he was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent there to protect at least one high-level KGB mole in the CIA, in February 1964 he was either a false defector or had "gone rogue" -- and used his putative "intel" on Oswald as his "ticket" to The Land of Milk and Honey.
Although Epstein's main source on Nosenko was Nosenko's former principal CIA case officer until October 1967, Tennent H. Bagley (who was on the fast track to become Director of CIA until Nosenko reappeared in Geneva in January 1964), Epstein seems to have been either a really poor listener or an embellisher
par excellence.
To wit: He states Nosenko's self-described career history in the KGB as though it's factual, forgetting to mention that Bagley learned that very little of it, if any, was true.
-- Tom
PS The "mole" that Nosenko was protecting in June 1962 was probably James Angleton's confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie.
It sure would be nice if our resident (or should I say
rezident?) genealogist and Wayback Machine social-pages-reader, Tom "A Beautiful Mind" Scully, would look into Solie and tell us about the man with the Russian-sounding name that was living with the Solies on their dairy farm when Bruce was an impressionable lad.
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