JFK Assassination Forum

To repeat: After all of the abuse Nosenko went through - mental and physical, the denial of fundamental rights, the utter lawless treatment of him, he came out later after all of this and became an American citizen. He said he loved America, he was proud to be one. Again, even after all of that mistreatment.

A Soviet agent, a fake defector, simply doesn't do that. He sues the CIA, takes them to court and exposes what they did to the world. To hurt them and the US. That's exactly what a fake defector working for Moscow does. To help the Soviet cause and hurt the US.

Not only did Nosenko not do this, he did the opposite. He defended the US.

Dear Steve M.,

You're full of high-fructose beans and KGB disinformation whether you realize it or not.

(And I suspect that you do)

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames


-- Tom

[...]

Dear Fancy Pants Rants,

Please note that in his Bagley-attacking memo, Howard Osborn mentions that he’s “getting feedback on the Nosenko situation from [probable mole] Bruce Solie” — or words to that effect.

One of your big problems, FPR, is that you can't seem to grasp the idea that the person who "cleared" Yuri Nosenko via a bogus polygraph exam (one of the worse that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen, according to what he told the HSCA) and a coached and specious report was none other than probable mole Bruce Leonard Solie (look him up).

Bagley's primary source from 1994 to 2007 was former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev (look him up) who was still living when Bagley's Yale University Press book, Spy Wars, was published. Do you think he should have revealed the name of still-living Kondrashev?

As far as your boy Royden's and Bagley's not exchanging haymakers, the latter was always diplomatic, he was 86 years old, he was dying of cancer, and he was calling in from Brussels (where he'd chosen to be COS in 1967, and where he retired to in 1972).

You keep bringing up HSCA perjurer John Limond Hart.

Evidently you don't have the cajones to read Bagley's 170-page HSCA testimony in which he rips him "a new one."

What's the matter?

Won't your wife let you?

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32273600.pdf

Note: "Mr. X" is KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn.


The following is from Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. You can read it for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.

Read it and weep.


A signal success of the KGB’s operation with [Kremlin-loyal triple agent Igor] Kochnov — in addition to eliminating the defector Nikolay Artamonov [aka Nicholas Shadrin] — was the restoration of Yuri Nosenko’s fortunes in the West. Although I knew none of this at the time, I sensed in the second half of 1966 the CIA leadership’s growing skepticism, not just impatience, concerning our case against Nosenko. It was evident that some unknown factor was influencing them. This became clearer at the end of that year when they ordered a fresh review of the case — not so much to get new insights as to find ways to rationalize the doubts and to whitewash Nosenko to prepare his release.

Deputy Director Rufus Taylor called in Gordon Stewart, a CIA veteran and old friend of Helms, to take a fresh, detached look at this forbidding can of worms. Stewart enjoyed a reputation for integrity and had the added quality of knowing nothing of the Nosenko case and little about KGB deception.

To simplify Stewart’s review I organized the essential file materials (including my “1000-page” file summary) with an explanatory table of contents, and turned them over to Stewart in early 1967. This was my parting shot, for I was already preparing my assignment abroad.

After my departure the Soviet Bloc Division — without telling me — condensed this huge file summary into some 440 pages, lumping together many separate points of doubt into broad categories, each category to support a “conclusion.” In effect, they transformed justifiable points of doubt into debatable (and unnecessary) conclusions, making a case against Nosenko. He did not have the naval service he claimed, it said, adding that he did not join the KGB when or how he said, did not serve in the KGB’s American Embassy Section, and had not been deputy chief of its Tourist Department.

Stewart thus found himself faced with a mass of material loaded with indications of Nosenko’s bad faith and lacking any innocent explanation. To his professorial eye, these papers looked “unscholarly” (as he said to associates) and “more like a prosecutor’s brief.” Indeed, a file summary is not an academic dissertation, and the SB report’s conclusions were unproven. So, he called for a critique of the SB report. In mid-1967 Helms selected for this task the same Bruce Solie who had learned from Kochnov, the KGB volunteer, that Nosenko was a genuine defector. Solie submitted eighteen pages of critique of the 440-page SB report and of the previous handling of Nosenko. He recommended a new and “untainted” questioning in a friendlier, less confrontational, and “more objective” atmosphere. So, Helms and Taylor picked him to do the job himself. 

Solie was a taciturn, cigar-smoking man whose lean features gave him an air of the American farmlands. He had sat in on some of our interrogations of Nosenko prior to Kochnov’s advent, not contributing but maintaining a generally approving, if reserved, demeanor. Now, with Nosenko’s earlier interrogators removed from the scene and being himself convinced by Kochnov of Nosenko’s genuineness, Solie set out to prove that we had been wrong.

Behind Solie’s effort lay the hopes of CIA leaders that he would find ways to believe in Nosenko and rid the Agency of what Director Richard Helms later called this “incubus,” this “bone in the throat.”

They had picked the right man: Solie delivered the goods. Starting in late 1967, sometimes accompanied by FBI Special Agent Turner, Solie talked in a friendly manner for nine months with Nosenko and together they worked out ways things might — somehow — be made to look plausible. One who read the transcripts of these interviews described to me the way they were conducted:

Solie: “Wouldn’t you put it this way, Yuri?”

Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”

On another sticking point, Solie: “But you really meant to say it differently, didn’t you?”

Nosenko: "Sure.”

Solie: “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, for example, that . . . ?”

Nosenko: “Yup, yup.”

Solie submitted his report on 1 October 1968. That whitewash had been the purpose from the outset was revealed by the speed with which the CIA leadership adopted its conclusions. They could not have studied it and had perhaps not even read it before, three days later, Deputy Director Taylor informed Director Helms that

“I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides. Most particularly I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsyn has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector. 6

So well had Solie done the job that CIA gave him a medal for his travails. One can only concur in their assessment of him as a “true hero.” 7  The task he performed was truly Herculean and required tricks as cunning as those of Hercules himself. Solie seems to have hidden from Taylor facts that flatly contradicted the deputy director’s conclusions. In reality there were significant “conflicts” between what Nosenko reported and “the information and opinions Golitsyn . . . provided.” And an "other defector,” Peter Deriabin, had cast an indelible stain of doubt on Nosenko’s bona fides. Deriabin was outraged by Taylor’s statement.

A question inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows of the accumulated doubts described in previous chapters. How, in the face of all that, could CIA have ever believed in Nosenko?

The answer must lie partly in the human psyche — our incurable penchant to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t. (I discuss that general problem in Appendix C.)

So desperately did CIA’s leaders desire to be rid of the ugly implications that underlay the Nosenko affair — KGB penetration of CIA and perhaps breaking of American ciphers — that they embraced a shaky, corrupt, and unsubstantial report— offered by an ill-qualified investigator — that fed that desire. Solie’s report would deserve attention if for no other reason than to illustrate the power of desire over reason. But it is no mere curiosity; the Solie report led to CIA’s final conclusion on the Nosenko case. It was crucial; its impact was permanent. Only through this corrupt gateway would future CIA officers gain access to the Nosenko case. It was declassified to make its wisdom accessible to trainees in counterintelligence. This is all that later CIA officers came to know, which is why they repeat its nonsense as fact in their memoirs today.

So, it merits attention.

Solie began by adopting the (dubious) position that all he needed to do to prove Nosenko’s innocence was to discredit the general conclusions of the SB report. Then he carefully selected the questions he would deal with, sidestepped some major anomalies as if they had never existed, and falsely assured his readers, in the passive voice, that "all areas of major significance have been examined .” 8

Despite its bulk, Solie’s report presented no significant new information, though he and Nosenko had adjusted some details. It amounted essentially to a fresh interpretation of selected parts of the old data — an interpretation based on credulity rather than skepticism. Inevitably, the way Solie chose to explain one contradiction would conflict with the way he would explain a different one, but he did not call attention to this. And if he could not find any way to explain an oddity, he would fall back on this comforting thought: if the KGB had dispatched Nosenko, they would have surely prepared him better— ipso facto, the KGB had not dis- patched him.

Among the “areas of major significance”— all of which Solie claimed to have examined — was how Nosenko’s reporting touched on the case of Oleg Penkovsky. In this one case, aside from all the others, Nosenko had twice exposed the KGB’s blundering hand on him — first in erring by a whole significant year about Abidian’s visit to Penkovsky ’s dead drop, and second by mentioning (and later forgetting) “Zepp.” How did Solie manage these hurdles? He simply ran around Zepp — didn’t mention it at all. He struggled desperately to explain the dead drop visit and Nosenko’s failure to mention it in 1962, exposing the absurd quality of this whole whitewash:

• Solie accepted as "not implausible” Nosenko’s preposterous suggestion (to Solie, never to us earlier) that he had failed to tell us in 1962 because “the stakeout had long been dropped”— so long that he had forgotten all about it. But only a couple of paragraphs earlier Solie had recognized that Abidian’s visit actually occurred only at the end of 1961. Thus, Nosenko’s stakeout, by his own account, would have been still active when he departed for Geneva in March 1962 and would be fresh in his mind when, in June, he told us about Abidian and Moscow surveillance.

• Or maybe, Solie and Nosenko agreed, Nosenko had somehow got confused and only imagined that he had been getting stakeout reports.

• Perhaps, instead, he had only “been advised” of the stakeout by other KGB officers. And maybe only after he had met CIA in 1962 — perhaps at the time of the Penkovsky publicity. (How then could Nosenko have failed to relate the drop to Penkovsky when he told of it?)

• Or possibly Nosenko “consciously exaggerated his involvement with the visit and its aftermath.” (How then did he know the details?)

• Or maybe “the evident distortions arose from honest confusion” — without explaining how.

• Anyway, Nosenko’s errors and contradictions prove that he is genuine. "If dispatched, Nosenko presumably would have had the date right.”

• Then Solie had one wonderful, final argument: it wasn’t Nosenko’s fault, but the fault of his CIA interrogators who had “confused matters to the point where complete clarification appears impossible.” 9 In pushing out such nonsense, Solie must have assumed that his readers would not know that Nosenko had given, and repeated in detail, his stories of Abidian, of the drop, and of the stakeout long before any interrogation began.

Solie then exposed his intent — whitewash, not professional assessment: he dismissed the whole issue. The fact "that Nosenko is not able to properly date the visit of Abidian to Pushkin Street is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”

Aside from its nonsense, the very structure of Solie’s report amounted to a trick. By focusing on the SB report’s (unproven) conclusions it skirted the impossible task of explaining the specific inconsistencies, contradictions, and lies that had led to those conclusions. The uninformed reader would never know they had existed.

Other aspects of his report were similarly questionable:

• When giving Nosenko’s now "true” version of one story or another, Solie neglected to mention it was often a third or fourth version, nor did he describe the earlier, conflicting versions — or speculate on why there had been so many changes.

• Solie implied that thanks to his new, nonconfrontational manner
Nosenko had become cooperative, consistent, and "relaxed” as never before and that Nosenko’s “material assistance to the interviewer” (including writing reports) was a major departure from the past. In reality, Nosenko had invariably been cooperative except when cornered. He had written many reports for us. And his stories might have seemed consistent back then, too, had they not been challenged. Solie’s role was not to challenge or question, but with Nosenko’s help to shape some plausible explanation.

• Solie sought to discredit earlier investigations. At least ten times he referred to points he said had not been looked into or to situations in which he said his predecessors had misunderstood what Nosenko had been trying to say. Solie was wrong each time— but a reader with no access to the record would not know that.

• Again and again Solie made assertions as definitive as they were unfounded. He usually couched them impersonally, often in the passive voice, to hide the fact that they were nothing more than his own opinions. He proclaimed, for example, “The information Nosenko gave is commensurate with his claimed position.” 10 “Nosenko,” he wrote, “has furnished adequate information so that his claimed assignment during 1953-1955 is considered sufficiently substantiated.” 11 Nosenko’s knowledge of the office of the Military Attache supports his claim “that he was an officer of the First Section with the indicated assignment as related by him.” 12 Yet again: "The only unresolved problem considered of any significance in regard to the 1955-59 period is the [XYZ] case,” 13 whereas in fact that particular case posed only minor problems compared with others.

• Solie failed to mention most of the other Soviet sources whose bona fides were also doubted, or about their connections to Nosenko’s case.

Solie even administered a new polygraph test in 1968 and cited it as proof of Nosenko’s truth— though Nosenko had been polygraphed prior to detention with contrary findings. Solie was ignoring, too, the chief polygraph specialist of the Office of Security, who had decreed in 1966, after CIA had made extended use of the polygraph as an interrogation tool, that no polygraph test of Nosenko after his detention would be valid or could be presented as evidence one way or the other.

Solie accepted as true things Nosenko said that were actually unthinkable in the real Soviet and KGB world of which Solie knew so little. As he hacked away at the SB report’s conclusions, avoiding its details, Solie failed to clarify the new picture he was thus composing. If Nosenko were now telling Solie the whole truth, the reader would have to accept (as CIA did, in its desperation) things like these:

• that the KGB actually operated under procedures different than those reported by all earlier (and subsequent) defectors,

• that what Nosenko told Solie about his life was the final truth— even though it was a fourth or fifth version and still full of unlikely events and would later undergo further changes by Nosenko and contradiction even by Soviet sources,

• that a [putative] ten-year veteran staff officer of the KGB [Nosenko]  need not know or remember how to perform routine tasks he must have been doing daily, such as sending telegrams, distinguishing between different kinds of files, entering buildings, and using elevators,

• that a KGB operative need not remember any details of his own operations, not even the names of agents he had handled for years,

• that an officer responsible for the KGB’s coverage and knowledge of the American Embassy building needn’t himself know about it, or about his own service’s measures to counter the technical spying the Americans were doing from that building — or even that that technical spying was being done at all,

• that an English-speaking rising star in KGB operations against the American Embassy would never appear in any of the many approaches the KGB is known to have made to Embassy personnel during his time, nor even have heard of them,

• that a supervisor of operations against the American Embassy would be setting up homosexual compromises of visiting tourists, and giving low-level assistance to an officer of another department,

• that a newly appointed supervisor of KGB operations against tourists inside the USSR would be sent abroad — twice — for months’ long work ensuring the security of a conference delegation, work normally done by a department specifically set up for the purpose.

CIA was accepting Nosenko as genuine because this one man Solie would accept such nonsense and was unable (as he himself confessed) to “perceive any evidence of KGB deception or of any Soviet objective which might have justified their dispatching Nosenko.” Someone knowing a bit more:

• might have recalled KGB deceptions whose goals could not have been perceptible to their victims,

• would have noticed the signs of source protection in many of Nosenko’s reports, such as 1) his contradiction of Golitsyn’s pointers to KGB recruitment of American code clerks, 2) his misleading story about Kovshuk’s trip to Washington, and 3) his accounts of how Popov and Penkovsky were caught,

• would have recognized the many other signs of deception that smeared Nosenko’s reports, such as his probing about Zepp; his story of Penkovsky’s Pushkin Street dead drop; his unlikely multiplicity of contacts with the Lee Harvey Oswald case; and his claim of seeing a KGB file in Geneva showing they knew nothing about CIA there,

• would have seen that all of Nosenko’s major leads — “Andrey,” Sergeant Johnson of the Orly courier station, the British Admiralty source, Dejean, Gribanov’s French businessman agent Saar Demi- chel, the microphones in the American Embassy, and others — bore the marks of deceptive "chicken feed” in that 1 ) Nosenko could never get straight how he learned these hot items and 2) the KGB knew that all of them had previously been exposed or had lost their value to the KGB;

• might not have dismissed so offhandedly the only deceptive aim that Solie could envisage: that the KGB might be trying to saturate Western security services, busying them with leads to minor and useless KGB agents to keep them off more valuable ones. In fact, some FBI officers thought that at least in New York the anti-Soviet operatives had been saturated. More than fifty percent of their time, they later calculated, had been spent pursuing innocuous leads provided by Kulak and Polyakov. Solie never mentioned these sources or their connections with the Nosenko case.

The twisted and shaky edifice that Solie thus constructed would not stand up even to the gentlest breeze of skepticism, much less to professional or even scholarly appraisal. But it was never intended to endure either. It needed only seem solid to an uninformed and casual reader, for with few exceptions this was the only kind of reader it would ever reach. Future CIA officers would be taught its conclusion but would never see the data on which it was based.

Had it not been for Jim Angleton I might never have seen this "Solie report” and been left wondering what miracle had resuscitated Nosenko. Those who had salvaged Nosenko didn’t want me to see the flimsy and corrupt way they had done it, and my “need to know” could be said to have expired with my assignment abroad. But during my routine visit to Headquarters in late 1968 Angleton took the initiative of showing it to me, along with the SB report it attacked (which I then saw for the first time).

I was appalled. In the vain hope of resuscitating that fleeting chance we had had to dig behind Nosenko’s tales, I wrote a long rebuttal, containing the objections mentioned above and many more, and sent it to Angleton in January 1969 from my field station. My rebuttal was ignored, except in the Counterintelligence Staff, which was unable or unwilling to fight the case further. 14

As soon as Solie’s report and Taylor’s memo had cleared Nosenko, CIA moved him to the Washington area and soon took him in as a consultant for its and the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence operations. 15 Eventually he began lecturing regularly at counterintelligence schools of the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and other agencies and from the mid-1970s often entered the CIA Headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.

Nosenko is said to have boosted CIA and FBI operations. He pointed to recruitment targets among Soviets in the United States, and in the 1970s one of them was successfully recruited. 16 As the director of Central Intelligence later described it to all CIA personnel, Nosenko had "conducted numerous special security reviews on Soviet subjects of specific intelligence interest, and . . . proven himself to be invaluable in exploring counterintelligence leads.” 17

In defending Nosenko later against the implication in a TV docudrama that there might be some substance to the old accusations that he was a phony, a CIA counterintelligence leader came to his defense. Among other things, Leonard McCoy expressed outrage that Nosenko’s "dignity, self-respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this him,” and that therefore “it is fitting that CIA recently called him in and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him.” Speaking for all CIA officers past and present, McCoy concluded, "Any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency’s judgment in this case— that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you, Yuri Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country.” 18

Nosenko had won — but voices continued to rise both against him and in his defense. The debate was decided, but not the truth.

The KGB Virus suggestion seems to be that Bruce L. Solie was some towering CIA figure (in addition to being a KGB mole, of course) who stepped in to rescue his boy Nosenko. Uh, no. Both the Office of Security (the aforementioned Howard L. Osborn) and the Office of General Counsel had expressed to director Helms and his deputy Admiral Taylor concerns about the legal, ethical and organizational concerns raised by the SR Division's hostile treatment of Nosenko. The Office of Security was assigned to provide a fresh perspective on Nosenko. Solie was the Deputy Chief of the Security RESEARCH Staff - rather a logical choice, it might seem to those of us not suffering from the KGB Virus. Not to mention Solie's at least tangential involvement in the Nosenko case dating back to 1962, as described in his HSCA testimony. He explains his selection by Osborn and Taylor on pages 27-29 of his HSCA testimony. His 286-page report describes in detail the number of other CIA divisions and other agencies (including the FBI) involved in verifying Nosenko's bona fides after the transfer of the case on October 30, 1967; the report is scarcely some Solie fluff piece. In his HSCA testimony, he also makes clear the number of other professionals who assisted in the investigation and preparation of his report.

Good grief, read his 98-page HSCA testimony under fairly hostile questioning:

https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/secclass/pdf/Solie_6-1-78.pdf

Does this REALLY sound to you like a KHB mole tap-dancing and dissembling? REALLY?

To be honest, I had long ago placed Newman in precisely the same box as John Armstrong of Harvey & Lee fame. My peek down the KGB rabbit hole only confirms this. And the KGB Virus seems to be every bit as potent as the H&L Virus.

Just to add to the mystery: Angleton was still on board when Bagley was sent packing. Did he kick and scream and march in protest, or was he happy not to be (at that point) one of the sacrificial lambs? According to Wikipoodia, in 1974 three of Angleton's senior aides resigned the week it was made clear they would be reassigned to Siberia, and the counterintelligence staff was reduced from 300 to 80. I know nothing about all the intrigue, but it seems pretty clear that Bagley was scarcely the only one who was deemed "surplus." I read that it was Stansfield Turner who brought Hart out of retirement to investigate the handling of Nosenko. Turner did not join the CIA as Director until 1977, so he seemingly had no Nosenko axe to grand. My guess would be that Hart was chosen precisely because he wasn't involved either and obviously had no bias against Bagley. The subsequent history of Nosenko's information proving true and other defectors vouching for his bona fides would seem to make Bagley the odd man out unless the KGB was indeed the Omniscient Villain that the KGB Virus demands it to be. Virtually every article on Bagley mentions that his late-in-life supposed KGB informants were always conveniently unnamed.

"Well ... in 1970, in his capacity as Chief of the European Division, Hart was enthusiastically recommending Bagley for "supergrade" promotion to GS-17 (page 7 of the above PDF).

According to Hart, Bagley was "one of our very finest station chiefs, possessed of imagination, intellect and ability personally to handle operations which very few of his colleagues can match. He is one of those on whom the future of the Organization is going to depend, and I believe that the promotion is more than justified." --LP, citing Hart.

Something is fishy here. Obviously, and by all accounts, Bagley was a smart guy, experienced, knowledgable, and earnest. Give him that.

One would think that someone in the CIA would say (even if this were true), "OK, Bagley went overboard on Nosenko. One mistake in a lifetime of high-quality service. Assign Bagley to an equal position elsewhere."

But instead Bagley is jettisoned.

Reminds me of the US Ambassador to Mexico, Mann, and Charles Thomas, the State Department guy in MC, both of whom thought LHO was a G2 asset.

They were jettisoned too.

There was streak there in the 1960s-70s when even suspecting KGB-G2 in the JFKA was radioactive.

That is normal?

Seems fishy like the National Aquarium.

I really don't think it's fishy at all. Bagley had been almost solely (no pun intended) responsible for the handling of Nosenko. The CIA reached a conclusion that Bagley's handling and conclusions were flat-out wrong. The CIA put its weight solidly behind Nosenko's bona fides. Bagley, as we well know, wouldn't let the matter rest. It had been extremely divisive within the CIA, and the Agency finally said "Enough." Bagley willingly took retirement as an alternative to being terminated. How many other Nosenko unbelievers met the same fate, I don't know. I just thought Hart's recommendation less than two years before the forced retirement was interesting. My guess would be that he, as the European Division Chief, had no real knowledge of the Nosenko affair or of how badly Bagley had handled it. Perhaps that's precisely why Hart was brought back out of retirement to write his report.

I have posted this previously. It's a 2012 event at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and Georgetown University entitled "Moles, Defectors and Deception: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence" -

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/event/moles_defectors_and_deceptions_james_angleton_conference_report.pdf

Bagley, Royden and many others participated. No fistfights erupted.

Bagley noted that unnamed - always unnamed - KGB sources had described to him their "handling" of Nosenko's false defection. Royden responded politely:

In response, to Mr. Bagley’s saying that he’s had
contacts in the East with former KGB officers who
have told him that, in fact, Nosenko was run by
them; I would hope that you would all have healthy
skepticism for former KGB officers telling the truth
to Tennent Bagley, who of course has always been a
supporter of the Angleton thesis. I have not found
that former KGB officers sitting in Moscow have
been good sources of honesty about their operations
against the U.S.

But I realize that attempting to bring a rational perspective to these discussions is fruitless. The KGB stuff is a virus like every other CT virus. Once it takes hold, there is no cure. (Gotta add that to my "Beginner's Guide," too!)