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The following classified-”Secret” document is an undated blind memo which was originally released, with redactions, in 1998, thirty years after the CIA had pronounced Yuri Nosenko a true defector. This unredacted version was released in 2017.
Subject: The Bona Fides of Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko
1. KGB officer Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko first contacted the CIA in Geneva in June 1962. Over the course of five meetings, he provided sufficient information to enable the two officers from CIA Soviet Russia Division who met him to establish that he was a bona fide source. The major information furnished by him at that time was the identification of a U.S. code technician who had been recruited by the KGB, and the identification of the location of KGB microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, 52 of which were later found.
2. When CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff was informed of Nosenko’s 1962 approach, its management regarded this news within the context of what they had been hearing from a KGB defector whom they were then debriefing, Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn. Golitsyn, who had defected in December 1961, was a counterintelligence officer who was obsessed with the subject of KGB deception operations. Even though Golitsyn was diagnosed in early 1962 as a “paranoid personality,” the CI Staff had complete faith in the validity of his story of his theories and analyses. A sanitized version of the of Nosenko’s information was therefore shown to Golitsyn, who flatly concluded that Nosenko was acting under KGB control. The CI Staff accepted Golitsyn’s analysis and persuaded the management of SR Division also to accept it.
3. By the time Nosenko was again heard from, in January 1964, again in Geneva, the management of SR Division and CI Staff was firmly committed to the position that Nosenko was part of a KGB deception operation. Nosenko actually defected on 4 February 1964.
4. In October 1967 the DCI turned Nosenko’s case over to the Office of Security for final resolution, and at the same time the FBI began a review of the information it had obtained from Nosenko. The results of these two very thorough investigations were set forth in a memorandum from the Office of Security dated 1 October 1968 and one from the FBI dated 20 September 1968, both of which concluded that Nosenko was who he claimed to be and was a bona fide defector. Since that time this has been and is the position of CIA.
5. Nosenko was probably the most valuable source of counterintelligence information that the U.S. government has ever had, and the enormous scope and value of his information attest conclusively to his bona fides as a defector. He identified some [2000] KGB officers and [300] Soviets who were acting as KGB agents. He provided information on some [238] Americans in whom the KGB had displayed some interest, including many who had been recruited. For example, one of his identifications led to the trial and a sentence of 25 years for U.S. Army Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson. Nosenko also provided information on some 200 foreign nationals in 36 countries in whom the KGB had taken an active interest, and the friendly foreign governments with which we shared this information were able to neutralize a number of important KGB agents as a result. For example, the British were able on the basis of Nosenko’s information to identify William John Vassall, a high Admiralty official, as a KGB agent and sentence him to 18 years.
. . . . . . .
My comments:
The “U.S. code technician” turned out to be a never-valuable-to-KGB cipher machine mechanic by the name of Dayle W. Smith (codenamed “Andrey”) who had worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the early 1950s. Nosenko told his primary case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, during their one-on-one first meeting in Geneva in June 1962 that the most important thing he could tell him was that his boss in the American Embassy part of the Second Chief Directorate, General Vladislav Kovshuk, had made a special short trip to Washington to recontact “Andrey.” With Golitsyn’s photo identification of ostensible diplomat “Vladimir Komarov” as Vladislav Kovshuk, Bagley learned that he had gone to Washington in January 1957 — not on a short trip but for ten months of a two-year diplomatic gig — and that he had done so to meet with just-fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith in D.C. movie houses so that Smith could betray to him CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov.
Note: Author John M. Newman, who dedicated his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, to Bagley, thinks Popov was betrayed in those movie houses by James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Solie — with logistical support from Smith and James McCord of future Watergate notoriety.
. . . . . . .
Regarding Nosenko’s claim that the KGB hadn’t planted any microphones in the Embassy’s new-in-1962 north wing, when the U.S. tore down the Embassy in 1964, 40 hidden mikes were found in that wing.
Bagley wrote the following in his 2007 book, Spy Wars:
Microphones in the American Embassy? Everyone from the ambassador to the janitor knew they existed — as they do in every embassy the Politburo might be interested in. Golitsyn had confirmed that well-known fact.
”[What Nosenko told us about his reading transcripts of bugged conversations from different Embassy offices] confirmed what CIA knew about the KGB’s precautions in handling the take from phone taps and microphones and other eavesdropping devices. We knew that transcripts were hand-carried in special folders to the few officers having direct need to know. In fact, I was surprised that Nosenko or anyone else could have read transcripts or had occasion to listen to tapes from so many different emplacements. No one but a high supervisor could have such access, and this, I reasoned, testified to Nosenko ’s [false] claim to have had overall supervision of the American Embassy section during the two years preceding his departure for Geneva.”
. . . . . .
Regarding the memo’s stating that James Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff accepted Golitsyn’s analysis of the sanitized report on Nosenko and persuaded the management of the Soviet Russia Division to accept his determination that Nosenko was a false defector, Bagley tells us in Spy Wars that he became convinced in late June 1962 that Nosenko was fake when he read, at Angleton’s suggestion, the thick file on Golitsyn and realized that what Nosenko had told Kisevalter and himself a few days earlier implausibly overlapped (and contradicted) at least fourteen things that Golitsyn had said even though they had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.
. . . . . . .
”In October 1967, the DCI turned Nosenko’s case over to the Office of Security for final resolution.”
Bruce Leonard Solie, Deputy Chief of the Office of Security’s mole-hunting Security Research Staff and Chief of its records-hoarding Research Branch, wrote an 18-page paper in mid-1967 explaining how Nosenko was a misunderstood and mistreated true defector, and suggesting that a new review of the case be undertaken. Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms, hoping to get rid of the Nosenko problem, chose Solie to do that review.
On 1 October 1968, Solie “cleared” Nosenko via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report.
(You can read about it by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.)
. . . . . . .
”Nosenko was probably the most valuable source of counterintelligence information that the U.S. government has ever had, and the enormous scope and value of his information attest conclusively to his bona fides as a defector.”
Bagley tells us in Spy Wars that Nosenko didn’t betray anyone who either wasn’t already suspected or who still had access to classified information.
. . . . . . .
Regarding Robert Lee Johnson.
Bagley wrote: “The spy in the Orly [Airport] courier center, Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson, had been very important indeed — when active. But by the time Nosenko told us about him, Johnson had lost his access to the courier center, and his mentally unhinged wife was broadcasting her knowledge that he was a Soviet spy. The case was stone-cold dead, and the KGB knew it before Nosenko handed it to us.”
Regarding Vassall:
"By the time Nosenko walked into CIA in Geneva and pinpointed the British naval source William Vassall, the KGB already knew Vassall to be compromised by Golitsyns defection. They even played a game to build up Nosenko in Western eyes: after Golitsyn’s defection, against all logic, they restored their contact with Vassall, which they had suspended while the British investigated an Admiralty lead from an earlier source.”
PS
“Nosenko identified 2000 KGB officers, 300 KGB agents, and 238 Americans in whom the KGB had displayed some interest”?
You don’t really expect us to believe that do you?
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