JFK Assassination Forum

And here a few more examples:

-- If Arnold Rowland was telling the truth when he insisted he saw two men with rifles on the TSBD’s sixth floor 5-15 minutes before the shooting, the lone-gunman theory collapses.

The WC bent over backward to accept Howard Brennan’s problematic, contradictory testimony, but they looked for any excuse, no matter how lame or petty, to reject Rowland’s testimony, even though Rowland’s wife confirmed that he had immediately told her about seeing a man holding a rifle on the west end of the sixth floor (i.e., the opposite end of the building from the sniper’s nest). In a display of glaring bias, the WC not only rejected Rowland’s testimony but went to great lengths to discredit him as a witness and as a person.

By any reasonable standard, Rowland was a credible witness who had no reason to lie about seeing two men with rifles on the sixth floor shortly before the shooting. See chapter 4, pp. 19-21, in Hasty Judgment: Why the JFK Case Is Not Closed, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JuHmh8_AXyoKFyCt0RPXEUoHDPy-qakz/view.

Several men who were in the county jail in the Criminal Courts Building also saw two men on the TSBD’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. One of them was Johnny Powell. He said the men were handling a scope on a rifle. Powell logically assumed the men were security officers.

Ruby Henderson was another person in the plaza who saw two men on the Depository’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. In agreement with Rowland, she said one of the men had a dark complexion.

Carolyn Walthers was another witness who saw two men on the TSBD’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. She said one of the men had a rifle. In agreement with four other witnesses, she said one of the men was wearing a light-colored shirt (but Oswald wore a brown, rust-colored shirt to work that day, and was seen wearing that shirt in the second-floor lunchroom less than 90 seconds after the shooting). It is instructive to note that Walthers reported that FBI agents tried to get her to change her story.

Powell’s, Henderson’s, and Walthers’ accounts are discussed in “Overlooked Witnesses,” https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth339748/.

-- If Secret Service agent Paul Landis was telling the truth when he reported, shortly before he died, that he found a virtually undamaged bullet in the back seat of JFK’s limo and placed it on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, the lone-gunman theory collapses.

Dr. James Robenalt, a historian who worked with Landis to prepare him for the publication of his disclosure, believes the disclosure “is really the most significant news in the assassination since 1963.”

When Landis came forward with his disclosure, he knew he was dying. He had no reason to fabricate such an account.

-- If the three pathologists at Methodist Hospital in Dallas who actually handled and examined the Harper Fragment were correct in identifying it as occipital bone, the lone-gunman theory collapses. Occipital bone is located only in the back of the skull.

One of those pathologists, Dr. A. B. Cairns, was the chief of pathology at Methodist Hospital. The two other pathologists were Dr. Jack Harper and Dr. Gerard Noteboom. All three identified the fragment as occipital bone. Their identification confirms the dozens of eyewitness accounts of a large hole in the right-rear part of JFK’s skull.

When Dr. David Mantik interviewed Dr. Noteboom in a recorded interview in November 1992, Dr. Noteboom confirmed that the Harper Fragment was occipital bone and that he actually held the fragment in his hands as he examined it.

Predictably, the Harper Fragment disappeared after the FBI gave it to Dr. George Burkley. We have the two FBI photos of the fragment, but not the fragment itself. Drs. Cairns, Harper, and Noteboom were the only pathologists who actually held the fragment in their hands and examined it, and all three said it was occipital bone.

Dr. David Mantik has confirmed that the fragment was occipital bone. See his detailed analyses of the Harper Fragment in his book JFK Assassination Paradoxes and The Final Analysis. See also the segments on the Harper Fragment in Dr. Mantik’s online articles “The JFK Autopsy Materials,” https://themantikview.org/pdf/The_JFK_Autopsy_Materials.pdf, and “The Medical Evidence Decoded,” https://themantikview.org/pdf/The_Medical_Evidence_Decoded.pdf.

By the way, Dr. John Ebersole, the radiologist at the autopsy, told the HSCA that one of the skull fragments that arrived late at the autopsy was “a large fragment of the occipital bone” (Testimony of John H. Ebersole, Medical Panel Meeting, HSCA, 3/11/78, p. 5).

There's a you-know-what load of lies (or "misstatements") by Fancy Pants Lance's hero, Barry Royden, in his anti-Golitsyn / pro-Nosenko "Monster Plot" screed that FPR posted on my other thread.

I might as well start off with one I found on page 9 (there are oodles and gob of other lies -- or "misstatements" if you prefer -- before this one).

My comments are in brackets.

Tennent “Pete" Bagley was one of two case officers who debriefed Nosenko in Geneva [the other was a probable mole, Russia-born George Kisevalter]. Bagley reportedly believed Nosenko was a legitimate volunteer until Angleton, using information from Golitsyn, convinced him that Nosenko had to be a provocation.[7] [7]That he ever believed in Nosenko as a genuine defector is an assertion Bagley vigorously denied in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2007).

My comment:

At no point in Spy Wars does Bagley deny (much less vigorously deny) that he originally thought Nosenko was a true defector.

In fact, this is what he wrote on page 9:

When the door closed behind Yuri Nosenko [after the first 1962 meeting], I hardly caught my breath before jotting notes on highlights and my initial impressions for a priority cable to Headquarters. It would go with an extra code word to limit its distribution there. This affair was promising enough to merit special security precautions. First, I noted, Nosenko gave every indication that he was really a KGB officer. Only an insider could have spoken so easily about secret Soviet places, KGB people unknown to the general public, and secret operations like Popov. This, to me, seemed to establish his bona fides. Second, he had not yet indicated any significant interest in or access to military or political information. I would mention some of the specifics Nosenko had reported and close with the suggestion that Headquarters pack a more fluent Russian speaker [Kisevalter] onto the next flight to Geneva. At no time had we had the slightest communication problem; he never had trouble finding words and never had to ask me to repeat anything. But I did not want to risk losing nuances when he slipped into Russian.

Regarding the same issue, this is what Bagley wrote on page 17:

"We never managed to recruit any American code clerk,” Nosenko said [during the second meeting]. “The closest we ever came was ‘Andrey.’” He was referring to the cipher machine mechanic whom he had mentioned in our first meeting. Kisevalter remembered that CIA’s first representative in Moscow, years before, had reported that the KGB tried to recruit him. He asked Nosenko, "Do you know about the approach to Ed Smith?” "Sure,” he responded without hesitation, "I even took part in it. We gave him the code name ‘Ryzhiy’ [Redhead].” He paused and chuckled. “We used to call him ‘Ryzhiy Khui.’” Turning to me he translated (unnecessarily in this case), “red-headed prick. He went to bed with his Russian maid, our agent, and we staged a scene that made it look like a criminal offense. You know.” Yes, we knew. The KGB did not always use the classical approach of presenting, after the event, clandestinely taken pictures or films that would compromise a marriage or a career. Sometimes, for shock effect, an indignant “husband” (or wife) or local authorities would break into the love nest at a key moment and threaten punishment under Soviet laws. A benevolent “uncle” might appear in time to smooth things out with the law — if the Westerner would demonstrate his friendship toward his hosts. We waited, expectantly. “Well,” Nosenko shrugged, “nothing doing. Ryzhiy refused, reported it to the ambassador, and was pulled back to the States. Case closed.” This squared with what Kisevalter knew and testified once again to Nosenko’s inside knowledge and authority. He grew further in our esteem.


And regarding Royden's insinuation that Angleton convinced Bagley that Nosenko was fake, the following is what Bagley wrote on pages 22–28. As you can see, Bagley convinced Angleton that Nosenko was fake, not the other way around.

"[At CIA headquarters a couple of days later, Soviet Russia Division Chief Jack Maury said,] “Before you leave, Pete, you’ll want to look into some new information we’ve got. There’s been an important defection from the KGB. He’s here in Washington.” This was Anatoly Golitsyn, the KGB officer whose name Nosenko had tossed at me on the balcony in Geneva. He had defected to CIA in Helsinki six months before Nosenko had walked in. “And do check in with Jim Angleton. He’s aware of Nosenko’s contact with us but he’ll want to have your details. He has all the Golitsyn data, too. You could read that here, but you might as well get it from Jim.” James Angleton, chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, was not above an occasional bit of drama, but his office was less a stage setting than it appeared. The drawn Venetian blinds covering the wide windows behind his desk were a shield against the summer sun and not a dramatic artifact. A table lamp on the long oak desk provided the necessary light. A pile of thick hies on each end of the desk framed the scene. Angleton’s bony thinness emphasized his sharp-hewn features. With his piercing eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, and his large, expressive mouth, it was not hard to understand why one of CIA’s early leaders, thinking about a design for the new intelligence agency’s official seal, pointed at Angleton and exclaimed "Hah! I have it! That face!” In the event, other designs prevailed for the seal, but Angleton’s striking appearance, his habit of rather formal dress in dark colors, the air of mastery of recondite matters that hung about him, and the quick mind with which he absorbed and synthesized facts into complex perceptions embodied CIA counterintelligence of that time. Angleton and I had built a relationship of friendly mutual trust during the years when I had supervised operations against Polish Intelligence. There had been the long, Martini-eased lunches for which he was well known, and dinner parties. Charades were often played in those days, and I still remember the desperate antics of one guest trying to convey an obscure line from Jim’s favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, “clot the bedded axle tree.” Jim had a select inner circle of friends, including Dick Helms and other veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that he had served in its counterintelligence branch, X-2. That I was among them despite my relatively recent arrival on the CIA scene I owed to a warm introduction years earlier by William Hood, who had been my boss in CIA’s Vienna Station in the early 1950s. Hood cared deeply for the counterintelligence aspect of American Intelligence-handling its clandestine operations with realistic appreciation of the hazards, while exploiting the openings offered by the clandestine work of our adversaries. In Vienna he had recognized and fostered my interest in this field and brought me into this personal relationship with the otherwise closeted and very busy counterintelligence staff chief. My confident relations with Angleton were to play a role in what was to come. It was no small matter at the CIA to get the attention of the right senior officers to the right matters. Jim listened with evident interest to my account of the meetings with Nosenko and was upbeat about the possibilities. All the while his attention seemed fixed on penciling an elaborate geometric design on notepaper. As I finished, Jim dropped his pencil into his out-tray, glanced approvingly at his completed doodle, tore it to bits, and dropped the remains in the classified trash box at the corner of his desk. He reinforced Maury’s suggestion that for future meetings with Nosenko I would do well to take aboard the Golitsyn data. Jim summoned Bertha, nominally his secretary but in actuality his de facto office manager and personal assistant, handed me an armload of files, and asked her to take me across the hallway to what he referred to as the counterintelligence conference room, where I could study the new defector’s reports in complete privacy. Conference room, indeed. It was windowless, with barely space for the worn table and six government-issue, straight-back chairs. I suspected that before its christening as a conference room it had been a comfortable closet. The fascinating sweep and detail of Golitsyn’s revelations offset the absent creature comfort. My hours there were, as Maury and Angleton had foreseen, an essential background for any future Nosenko meetings. But the reports were also unsettling. They contained repeated references to incidents and operations that Nosenko had just described in Geneva. Reading one after another I began to feel uneasy. I knew from experience that any two colleagues working in different sections of an intelligence service might glean knowledge of the same secret operations. But it stretched coincidence that two officers from such separated elements of the KGB would both know of so many, especially of a kind unlikely to be widely known within a service as tightly disciplined as the KGB. It seemed even more of a coincidence that one of these overlapping sources arrived almost on the heels of the other. And strikingly, and all too often, Nosenko’s versions differed from Golitsyn’s with the effect of dismissing or diverting suspicions that the earlier reports had evoked. Golitsyn was the first source to reveal — five years after the fact — Vladislav Kovshuk’s trip, the same trip that Nosenko had described at our first meeting. Had it been known at the time that the chief of KGB operations against the American Embassy in Moscow had traveled to Washington, the question would have screamed— as it still did— “Why?” It seemed more than fortuitous that shortly after Golitsyn’s revelation, Kovshuk’s deputy Nosenko had come and explained that long-ago trip — authoritatively, but in a banal, almost benign light. Concerning the KGB discovery of CIA’s contact with Pyotr Popov, Golitsyn’s version did not square with Nosenko’s. Golitsyn placed it so much earlier that it could not have resulted from the KGB’s chance surveillance of a diplomat [George Winters] mailing a letter in Moscow. Here, too, in these files was the KGB recruitment of the British naval attaché office member in Moscow. Golitsyn in KGB Headquarters had been handling reports from spies in NATO, and among these papers were secret documents from that office. So accurately had he described them after his defection that already, according to a note in this file, the British were on the heels of the traitor, having narrowed their list of suspects to three. Nosenko had given us something we were about to learn anyway. There were many more similarities. Golitsyn reported that a certain Canadian ambassador had been recruited. Nosenko reported the same case. Golitsyn, while in Vienna, had known that Gribanov came there to meet an agent, a French businessman. The French had identified him as Frangois Saar Demichel— whom Nosenko had just named to us. Golitsyn had studied the hie of the KGB’s double agent case against CIA using Soviet radio journalist Boris Belitsky. Golitsyn would have had to sign, per KGB regulations, for accessing it, and after his defection KGB investigators dredged up any such hies. Quite a coincidence that a few months later an unidentified KGB man in Geneva is seized by such a fit of indiscretion that he tells Nosenko, a visiting delegation watchdog, about that tightly held operation. All in all, this was hard to believe. Even more striking was the next coincidence, fact for fact. Golitsyn recounted a visit to his KGB residency in Helsinki by Gennady Gryaznov, a KGB officer from Moscow who was targeting the American Embassy there. To facilitate his development for recruitment of an American code clerk (unnamed), Gryaznov wanted to borrow an agent. Because the American Embassy restricted socialization between its code clerks and Russians, he knew that this Finn agent, a businessman who traveled occasionally to Moscow, could more easily make friends with the American target. Golitsyn agreed and lent Moscow the agent — a certain Preisfreund. Preisfreund? That’s an unusual name for a Finn, and easy to remember. Nosenko not only had met Preisfreund but had made a drinking buddy of him in Moscow, the only such foreign friend Nosenko had mentioned. In Geneva he had recounted the same operation against the code clerk, whom he named (and whom I here call “Will”). It was only on the outcome of the venture that Golitsyn and Nosenko differed. Gryaznov later told Golitsyn that the KGB’s attempt succeeded. But Nosenko reported— having been personally involved and supervising Gryaznov — that the operation had failed. Of course, I thought, Gryaznov may have simply been exaggerating or inventing to impress his colleague Golitsyn. But even so, the coincidence of such parallel reporting by two volunteer sources from widely separated elements of the KGB was enough to stir an ugly question. On top of all that: I now saw that what I had thought to be Nosenko’s unique and fresh information about KGB operations against tourists in the USSR had already been exposed. Golitsyn had reported in great detail on this subject, having had on-the-job training in early 1959 in the Second Chief Directorate’s Tourist Department and long talks with an officer of the department. In addition, Golitsyn had received at his rezidentura in Helsinki a KGB Moscow study dated 7 April 1961 detailing its work against foreign visitors to the USSR — and had given CIA a copy. It was in that tiny room, poring over thick files and busily penciling page after page of notes on a lined yellow pad, that doubts began to arise that had not occurred to me in Geneva. Might the KGB have sent Nosenko to CIA to divert Golitsyn’s leads? On the face of it, that seemed hardly conceivable. The Soviet bloc counterintelligence services had been sending scores of false refugees to the West to mislead us, but never in the KGB’s forty-five years — at least, to my knowledge — had they sent one directly out of their own halls. To do that, I thought, they must have powerful reasons. Deception is risky: if the intended dupe recognizes it he may ask himself why the opposition went to such a bother, and may perceive the truth it was designed to hide.

The morning after my final night of study, after long reflection that had left me little sleep, I went back to Angleton. "Thanks, Jim. You were right. I needed this information. But at the same time, I’ve got to tell you something. We may have a problem.” I told him about the curious coincidences and persistent overlapping of the two men’s reports. Jim frowned, thought for a moment, shook his head and said, “Please jot down these points for me. I want to look carefully at this.” The next day I gave Bertha an envelope with my handwritten list of the most significant fourteen points of parallel reporting. I could have listed more, but it did not seem worth mentioning the many events and people that both sources had reported but that any two KGB officers could be expected to know. That afternoon Jim called me back to his office. “You may be on to something here,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Golitsyn himself said he expected the KGB to make some effort to divert the leads he could give us. Maybe that’s what we’ve got on our hands now.”

We agreed that there wasn’t enough data to make a case and that Nosenko was to be handled as if there were no doubts.“Just leave this with me,” Jim said. “We can look deeper into it when you come on duty this fall.” He shook his head and added, "Pity. You’d be in for a medal for this, but that wouldn’t be appropriate in this new light, would it?” Indeed it would not. I shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.” Jim tossed another pencil aside and stood to shake hands. "Meanwhile, let’s not tell anyone else about this problem.” "I have to tell Jack,” I said. "Of course.” Jack Maury had too many other operations on his mind to have absorbed the details of Golitsyn’s reporting and he cared little about the practices of Soviet counterintelligence. I painted the picture for him, but because it was too early to ring alarm bells I closed on a high note. "What the hell, there’s probably some innocent explanation. We should be able to clear it up next time we meet Nosenko.” "Good.” Jack seemed relieved. Like many other senior officers, he disliked dealing with the minutiae of counterintelligence and viewed them as time-wasting impediments to what he considered a different and higher priority, the task of collecting "positive” intelligence. He was happy to let me cope with those details. "Okay, you work it out with Jim and we’ll go on handling the case as if it’s straight. George seems to be happy with it. If he should mention any doubts of his own, I'll let you know.”


https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

Are there photos of Alpha 66 members and LHO together? Are you speaking figuratively?

I think there is a possibility of a couple of guys, possibly Alpha 66'ers, somehow hoodwinking or cooperating with LHO in the JFKA. One was the GK smoke-and-bang show, and the other was a second shooter behind JFK.

But there is no hard evidence of this scenario. It is speculative. 

In general, I suspect a very small JFKA plot (three guys), which is why everything is vapors when it comes to explaining larger plots.

LHO's connections to G2 and KGB'ers have never been heavily researched, except somewhat by Gus Russo.

Dear FPR,

You've posted the same heart-warming story two or three times, now.

Every time I read it, I weep profusely and then I start wondering whether or not Maria Butina whispered the same sort of things into the ears of Patrick M. Bryne and Paul Erikson as she nibbled on them.

Their ears, that is.

And it also reminds me, in a roundabout way, of Marina Oswald, whom some people say was a hooker for the KGB* in Leningrad before she married her Handsome Prince Charming within a month of meeting him, even though she later claimed, "everybody hated him."

*Today's SVR and FSB

-- Tom

Sounds like you are beginning to realize that Oswald was  not exactly a lone nut like  the WC wishes us all to believe.

By the way, you were in error when  you confused me with that hooded avatar forum poster when you stated that I was the kook advocating  the Hickey accidental firing of his AR 15 scenario.

Poor TG, who is as far into his KGB/TDS ozone as the most rabid Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. Once a virus such as this takes control of one's brain, I fear there is no cure.

No, Hart did not coin the term "Monster Plot." Here is his 184-page report: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=219394#relPageId=1.

Quoting from page 6: "[W]e shall for ease of reference from time to time allude to the these regarding KGB operations and intentions - elaborated by Golitsyn and others - as the 'Monster Plot.' In fairness, it must be allowed that this term was in common usage not by the thesis' proponents but by its detractors; yet no other term serves so aptly to capsulize what the theorizers envisaged as a major threat to United States' security."

Moreover, both Hart and his 1976 report are referenced and cited by Royden in his 2011 article, so TG's assumption that I was unaware of Hart simply reveals that TG went into his usual knee-jerk response mode and didn't even look at the Royden article. While Hart was specifically charged with an analysis of the Nosenko case, he notes that he could not resist straying outside those narrow boundaries because the mishandling of Nosenko was symptomatic of the much larger problems Royden later discussed.

TG is the LN counterpart of a gung-ho Harvey & Lee or Prayer Man enthusiast. He doesn't care about reality, only about promoting his KGB stuff and somehow tying it into his TDS stuff. He's a one-dimensional crank. Like an H&L enthusiast, he just says the same things over and over (and over and over) and has the same mantra-like responses every time someone points out that what he says is Flat Earth kind of stuff. Since Royden was the Director of Counterintelligence and had access to materials that will never see the light of day, I'm going with his analysis.

Dear Fancy Pants Rancid,

The following is what your bugbear, Tennent H. Bagley, wrote about John L. Hart, his anti-Golitsyn "Monster Plot" report and his pro-Nosenko HSCA testimony.

Read it and weep.

My comments are in brackets.


While paying lip service to the need for vigilance, [CIA Director William] Colby saw counterintelligence mainly as an impediment to intelligence collection. His impatience and disinterest came out in the form of simplification and sarcasm. “I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow [Counterintelligence Staff chief Angleton’s] tortuous theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in the heart of allied and neutral nations and sending its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy. I confess that I couldn’t absorb it, possibly because I did not have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, possibly because Angleton's explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn’t add up to his conclusions. ... I did not suspect Angleton and his staff of engaging in improper activities. I just could not figure out what they were doing at all.” 17

Colby soon got to work reorganizing the Counterintelligence Staff and divesting it of some of its components. Then in 1974 the New York Times exposed the fact that, in apparent violation of the Agency’s charter, Angleton’s staff had been checking international mail to and from some left-wing Americans. This gave Colby the ammunition he needed to rid himself of this nuisance. At the end of that year, he demanded Angleton’s resignation and was glad to see Angleton’s chief lieutenants Raymond Rocca, William Hood, and Newton Miler follow him into retirement.

To steer a less troubling course, Colby appointed to head the Counterintelligence Staff George Kalaris, a man without experience in either
counterintelligence or Soviet bloc operations, and, as his deputy, Leonard McCoy, a handler of reports, not an operations officer, who had already
distinguished himself as a fierce advocate for Nosenko.

Now began an extraordinary cleanup inside the Counterintelligence Staff — and the disappearance of evidence against Nosenko. Miler’s carefully accumulated notes on this and related cases were removed from the files and disappeared, along with a unique card file of discrepancies inmNosenko’s statements. 18

Shortly afterward, Colby appointed an officer to review the files anew. John L. Hart [emphasis added] was assisted by four officers. They worked for six months, from June to December 1976. I caught a glimpse of their aims and work methods when Hart came to Europe to interview me. He had not bothered to read what I had written (though he said nothing new had come to light on the question of Nosenko’s bona fides) and seemed interested only in why, eight years earlier, I had warned that bad consequences might flow from Nosenko’s release. I saw that his aim was not to get at the truth but to find a way to clear Nosenko, so I refused to talk further with him.

As I later learned, Hart’s team did not even interview the Counterintelligence Staff officers who had analyzed the case and maintained files
on it for nine years. Among them were two veteran analysts who, having come “cold” to the case, had concluded on their own that Nosenko was a
plant — and had written their reasons.

Hart then wrote a report that affirmed total trust in Nosenko. 19

Having decreed their faith and gotten rid of disbelievers, the CIA leadership banned further debate. One experienced officer in the Soviet Bloc Division — my old colleague Joe Westin, who knew so much about this case — took a late stand against Nosenko’s bona fides. He was told by higher-ups, “If you continue on this course, there will be no room for you in this Division”— and his future promotion was blocked. Peter Deriabin, who kept trying to warn Agency officials about Nosenko, was told to desist or his relations with CIA would be threatened (see Appendix A).

Nosenko’s rescuers then set out to discredit those who had distrusted him. They first labeled them as paranoid (a charge always difficult to refute) and then moved on to distort the record.

One of Nosenko’s now well-placed friends [McCoy] told an investigative reporter [Tom Mangold] that Angleton’s successor Kalaris had made the appalling discovery that the bad Angleton had ticked off the FBI’s Soviet Military Intelligence source code-named "Nicknack” as a provocateur and thus had locked away his important leads to spies abroad. The good Kalaris, said this insider, proceeded to dig out one of those leads and personally carried it to Switzerland, where the Swiss Federal Police quickly identified the spy as a brigadier named Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. They convicted him of betraying military technological secrets to the Soviets. 20

The accusation was pure invention. Angleton was impressed with Nicknack’s leads to spies abroad and had asked William Hood to be sure that
they were acted upon. Hood then — not Kalaris years later— personally carried the Swiss item to Bern.

Other misrepresentations were tacitly abetted. For instance, the new Agency leadership did little to counter Nosenko’s claim that he was drugged. This canard played for years in the media and was allowed to circulate even in the halls of CIA. CIA director Stansfield Turner even hinted that it might be true, although his own subordinates had submitted to Congress — as sworn testimony on his behalf— a list of every medicament ever given to Nosenko, which proved the contrary. As I know, Nosenko was never drugged. 21

The flimsy structure of CIA’s defense of Nosenko was shaken in 1977 when investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein got wind of the Nosenko debate. While researching a book on Lee Harvey Oswald he came upon the fact, until then hidden, that a defector named Nosenko had reported on Oswald and that some CIA veterans questioned that defector’s bona fides. Digging into this potentially explosive subject, Epstein interviewed former CIA director Richard Helms, James Angleton, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and, on Helms’s recommendation, me.

Thus in my retirement did I come back into the debate on Nosenko. I told Epstein some of the things in the preceding chapters. His book, Legend: The Secret Life of Lee Hanley Oswald, came out in 1978.

With its evidence that Nosenko was a KGB plant, the book logically concluded that what he told the Americans about Oswald — though presumably true in its basic message that the Soviets had not commanded Oswald’s act — was a message from the Soviet leadership.

Coincidentally, the U.S. House of Representatives at this point appointed a Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It interviewed Nosenko five times about his knowledge of Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union — and simply could not believe him. In its final report the committee stated flatly, “Nosenko was lying.” 22

Aware of the HSCA’s doubts, and by now committed to a different image of Nosenko, CIA director Turner designated a personal representative to testify. It was none other than the man who had most recently whitewashed Nosenko, John Hart.

Hart spent his entire prepared testimony of an hour and a half defending Nosenko and degrading his own colleagues who had suspected him. He attacked me viciously, to the point of accusing me publicly of contemplating murder, though he knew it was nonsense. 23

To the amazement of the HSCA members the CIA director’s designated representative did not even mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. When they asked him why, Hart admitted that he “knew nothing about Oswald’s case but hoped that by explaining misunderstandings within the Agency” and by attesting to Nosenko’s ‘‘general credibility” he could "clear up the committee’s problems with Nosenko” so that “allegations concerning [Nosenko] would go away.”

But the committee’s problem was not with Nosenko, but with what Nosenko had said about Oswald. So, they forced Hart to address this question. Thereupon even he admitted that he found Nosenko’s testimony "incredible,” "hard to believe,” and “doubtful.”

"I am intrigued,” House committee member (later Senator) Christopher Dodd said to Hart, "as to why you limited your remarks to the actions of the CIA and their handling of Nosenko, knowing you are in front of a committee that is investigating the death of a President and an essential part of that investigation has to do with the accused assassin in that case. Why have you neglected to bring up his name at all in your discussion?”

Hart replied that the Agency had asked him to talk “on the Nosenko case” and had accepted his unwillingness to talk about Oswald, of whom he knew nothing. “So,” concluded Dodd, "really what the CIA wanted to do was to send someone up here who wouldn’t talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.” 24

Still, the congressmen could not understand why a CIA officer, acting on the orders of the CIA leadership, would “throw up a smoke screen and get the Agency in the worst possible light as far as the newspapers are concerned.” Why would he attack his own colleagues and create “smashing anti-CIA headlines?” "Puzzled and mystified,” one congressman called “the whole scenario totally unthinkable.” He added, “no one I know in the Agency has come up with any sensible explanation.” 25

While Hart was in the process of attacking his own organization — and me especially — I got a phone call in the middle of the night, European time. “They’re crucifying you, Pete!” cried Yuri Rastvorov, who was watching the HSCA proceedings on C-Span television in the United States. This KGB veteran, who had defected in 1954, was outraged, having learned enough about the Nosenko case to have concluded on his own that Nosenko must be a KGB plant. I thanked him for the warning, went back to bed, and then waited while another friend fast-shipped to me the transcript of Hart’s statement.

Reading this intensely subjective attack and the discussions that followed it, I could sense the committee’s skepticism and wondered why they hadn’t called on me to present my side — all the more when I learned that Helms, in his testimony, had recommended that they do so. Fearing that someone in CIA might be trying to prevent my appearing, I wrote the HSCA subcommittee chairman, Congressman Richardson Preyer, a rebuttal to Hart’s testimony, asking for the opportunity to answer in public what had been a public attack. On the side, suspecting that the subcommittee’s counsel was cooperating to keep me out, I contacted Congressman Preyer directly. Thus, I was finally invited and flew from Europe to testify, pointing out Hart’s untruths and evasions. Though I appeared only in executive (closed) session, Preyer courteously saw to it that my testimony (as “Mr. D. C.”— for “deputy chief’’ of the Soviet Bloc Division) was included in the published record of the hearings.

Now I was back in the debate, though still carrying on my business activities in Europe and writing, with Peter Deriabin, a book on the KGB. In early 1981, when newly elected President Reagan appointed William E. Casey as director of Central Intelligence, I saw it as an opportunity to reopen the case and addressed a long report to him (to which Deriabin contributed what appears in this book as Appendix A). It was judged inadequate to overcome the Agency’s evidence supporting Nosenko.

In 1987, I was interviewed by English playwright Stephen Davies, who was writing a semifictional drama on the Nosenko case. When the him appeared on television the CIA retirees’ association published a review of it in their quarterly newsletter. 26

Neither him nor the reviewer took a position on the basic question — was Nosenko a KGB plant? But to the CIA at that time it was heresy even to leave a wisp of suspicion hanging over the hero of the myth. Leonard McCoy jumped to Nosenko’s defense. In a passionate letter to the editor he lauded Nosenko and attacked the earlier handlers of the case in such splenetic terms that the editor (as he told me) refused to publish it until it had been toned down. McCoy’s letter was full of misstatements, as I pointed out in a rebuttal.

Both Hart and McCoy knew Nosenko personally and had studied the case from positions of direct authority. Hart boasted of his own “standards of scholarship’’ and told Congress that he would never "go beyond the bounds of certainty” nor “extrapolate from facts.” As for McCoy, on whose statements the writer Tom Mangold relied for his book Cold Warrior, Mangold described him as “a mature and meticulous intelligence officer, with an obsession about factual accuracy in all matters.” So, one might expect these two to dismantle any opposing argument point by point, using sure and accurate facts. Instead, both of them twisted the very nature of the affair and concealed major aspects of it. In Hart’s sworn testimony were no fewer than thirty errors, twenty misleading statements, and ten major omissions, and dozens in McCoy’s article. 27

They (and CIA) had made an act of faith, perhaps not the best base for judging a complex counterintelligence question. Hart stated that Nosenko had never intentionally lied — never mind that Nosenko himself had admitted in writing a years-long inability to tell the truth to CIA. McCoy — as deputy head of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff — epitomized the Agency’s position by writing that if by any mischance Nosenko had told a few fibs,” They were not [spoken] at the behest of the KGB.” CIA’s deputy director certified this act of faith, making it the Agency’s official position that “there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.’’

Soon after the debate in the CIA retirees’ newsletter, Nosenko and his defenders presented their case to investigative journalist Tom Mangold, who incorporated it in a book attacking James Angleton as a paranoid. Mangold acknowledged his debt to McCoy, who had “left an indelible imprint on every one of these pages.” 28 His book accurately reflected CIA’s defense of Nosenko and was thus studded with error, omission, misrepresentation, and invention, and colored by emotional bias for Nosenko and against his detractors.

These misstatements congealed into a myth that by its frequent repetition has become conventional wisdom inside and outside CIA. Consecrated by the sworn testimony of high CIA officials, it is treated as serious history. It is a tale of how a band of buffoons and demons — paranoid “fundamentalists”— tried wickedly and vainly to discredit a shining hero. It has been taught — without the facts on which it is supposedly based— to CIA trainees who, thinking it true, have passed it on to later generations of CIA people. Today, a generation later, one can see it repeated in their memoirs as an “inside” fact.

To create this myth its makers had to do some fancy twisting and inventing. Dismissing massive evidence to the contrary, they asserted that Nosenko always told the truth. Not only was and is he truthful, but he has been a veritable cornucopia of "pure gold,” vast quantities of valuable information. To give substance to this wild claim, the mythmakers resorted to pure invention. They transfigured poor “Andrey” the mechanic, for example, into a code clerk who enabled the Soviets to break America’s top-secret codes and moved dangerously into the code-breaking National Security Agency. They had Nosenko pinpointing fifty-two microphones in the American Embassy, something no one outside the KGB’s technical services could even pretend to do. They gave color to their tales by the breathtaking misstatement that Nosenko told more, and of far greater value, than had the earlier defector Golitsyn. (Golitsyn, this story goes, never uncovered a single spy in the West.)

The mythmakers dismissed onetime suspicions of Nosenko as nothing but the product of potted preconceptions and wild theorizing by since-disgraced colleagues, incompetent and paranoid "fundamentalists.”

The myth makes no mention of the underlying issues: the signs of penetration of American government and ciphers. Its focus, instead, is the pathos of the fate of a stupidly misunderstood, genuine defector who had been cruelly and duplicitously treated — until his saviors came along.

Finally, the mythmakers ridiculed as "nonsense” the idea that the Soviets would mount a deceptive operation of this magnitude— at least, after the first decade or two of Bolshevik rule — and labeled the very idea a delusion of some “monster plot.” As a corollary, the myth asserts— without a trace of evidence — that this paranoia “paralyzed” CIA’s intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.

Because it has become history, the myth’s creation, its details, and the motives of its creators deserve attention (see Appendix B).

This myth enveloped CIA in a warm blanket of complacency (and aversion to “mole hunting”) that later contributed to the Agency’s long failure to deal effectively with even more glaring evidence of treason in its midst — that of Aldrich Ames.


-- Tom

PS:  You can look up the footnotes yourself.

It will be good for you.

https://archive.org/stream/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/Spy%20Wars%20-%20Moles%2C%20Mysteries%2C%20and%20Deadly%20Games_djvu.tx