Some CT'ers say the CIA was riddled with KGB assets in 1963, including Bruce Solie and James McCord.
Dear "BC,"
Is someone a "CTer" if he or she believes the earth is round, that we really did go to the moon in 1969, and that LHO killed JFK all by himself if they also happen to believe that the CIA was penetrated by at least five moles (Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, George Kisevalter, John Paisley, and Edward Ellis Smith*) before Aldrich Ames started spying for the KGB in 1985?
*Edward Ellis Smith was the incompetent dead drop setter-upper and eventually honey-trapped-and-recruited-in-1956 first "Moscow Station" who'd been sent there in advance of the return-to-Moscow of CIA's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, when Vienna was to be "de-sectionized" in 1965. Interestingly, Smith, after being fired or "fired" by the CIA, ended up being a Stalin scholar at the conservative Hoover Institution, a Commonwealth Club official, and a San Francisco banker. He died in a semi-mysterious hit-and-run accident in a well-marked intersection in Redwood City in 1982.
A 2000 KGB-authorized book** (published in the Russian language) about the history of the KGB boasted that Smith was the first CIA officer it had ever recruited.
Steve M.'s and Fancy Pants Rants' bugbear, Tennent H. Bagley, was convinced that Smith had betrayed Popov to Nosenko's boss, Vladislav Kovshuk (aka "diplomat" Vladimir Komarov) in Washington, D.C., movie houses in January 1957, and that he also may have helped it recruit a never-uncovered mole (Bruce Solie?).
**A. Kolpakiki and G. Prokhorov, Vneshnyaya Razveda Rossii (Russian Foreign Intelligence) (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000), 70.
-- "TG"
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