JFK Assassination Forum

Once again quoting myself - the sincerist form of flattery - but I was struck by how apt this post from six months ago still is.

Ah, what a small world it is. Tom embarked on what eventually became his KGB mania in 2007, when Douglas Caddy posted at the Ed Forum a Washington Post review of Bagley’s book Spy Wars. "Interesting stuff!" Tom said back then. Ironically, the review concluded “Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane …” Even more ironically, Caddy is the leading proponent of the theory that JFK knew the dark truth about UFOs and was killed because he was going to reveal the Alien Secret. But now Tom takes his little dig at my longtime interest in UFOs. And so it goes.

I know the rudiments of the Nosenko affair and the Angleton/Bagley KGB paranoia. I have no idea what Nosenko was all about and really don't care. My guess would be, a genuine defector who pretended to be more than he was. He certainly didn’t defect for any reason directly related to the JFKA.

Regardless of what, if anything, Nosenko actually knew about Oswald, what he had to say is surely pretty close to the truth even if he was operating on the basis of nothing more than common sense and guesswork. In the preparation of Oswald’s Tale, Norman Mailer spoke with KGB officers and viewed KGB files. The portrait of Oswald that emerged was entirely consistent with what Nosenko said and what common sense would tell us: The KGB quickly realized Oswald was a pathetic loser, of no conceivable intelligence use.

Certainly, the KGB would have assessed and monitored Oswald. Pretty much everyone from Rimma (his Intourist guide) on down had some KGB affiliation. Were there really no formal intelligence-type interviews, as Nosenko said? Quite possibly. Oswald had nothing to offer them about the U-2 program they didn’t already know; their only puzzle was how to reach, with aircraft or missiles, the height at which they knew the U-2 was flying. Apart from the U-2 stuff they already knew, Oswald had nothing to offer them. Indeed, he was such unlikely intelligence material that the KGB at one point speculated as to whether weirdos like him were some new CIA program (so obviously not intelligence material that he actually was intelligence material!).

Does it make any rational sense that the Soviets would send a false defector, and that Nosenko would endure all he endured (dying as a U.S. citizen in 2008), to spread the tale that “We really had no interest in Oswald” when pretty much no one thought they did? Since Nosenko defected at just about the time the WC was getting rolling, I would assume he included his Oswald material because he knew ears would perk up.

When I first joined this forum several months ago, I and my especially my wife, who lived in Minsk for decades and was in a responsible position with the city until 2008, helped Tom identify the KGB school that Oswald supposedly lived near. It was a graduate-level training academy that began in Gomel in 1946 for those who wanted to join the KGB in any capacity. It was not a school for spies. There is a description of it beginning on page 20 of this document: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989481.pdf.

My wife tells me it’s “invisible” in the sense that Minsk citizens like her never give it a thought (she didn’t even know what the building was until she started trying to help Tom!). Ernst Titovets said in a fairly recent interview that he had no awareness of it and that it had only been brought to his attention in connection with questions about Oswald. No one – Marina, Titovets or anyone else in Minsk – has ever suggested any connection whatsoever between Oswald and this school.

Yet, all over the internet, Tom continues to trumpet the fact that “Oswald lived within a half mile of a KGB school” as though this were some major smoking gun. The fact is, Oswald was given an extremely nice (by Soviet standards) apartment near the Svisloch River (yes, I’ve seen it). It’s in midtown Minsk. One walks from the apartment, across Victory Square (which is the center of Minsk), and either walks or takes the bus down the main street to the radio factory (two bus stops down the road but within easy walking distance). The KGB school is on the other side of the main street – i.e., separated from Oswald’s apartment by Victory Square.

This would be like saying that everyone living within a half mile of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington is somehow suspicious, with utterly no connection apart from the bare fact of this proximity. Or, as CTers are wont to do, like saying that someone whose distant second-cousin Shirley is a secretary in building maintenance at Langley has, on this basis alone, “suspicious CIA connections.”

Tom, I now realize, is in the grip of some obsessive KGB fixation that I was not aware of when I joined. This is a different Tom than I had encountered at the Ed Forum years ago, who was goofy but kind of fun (like me!). I find his KGB mania boring and slightly scary.

Here’s the school in its present incarnation as the National Security Academy. They even have a website: https://aml.university/en/uchastniki-aml/akademiya-nacional-noy-bezopasnosti-respubliki-belarus. If you visit, tell them Comrade Lance sent you.

Is anyone other than Tom able to follow the logic of what I lovingly call the “KGB stuff?" It quickly loses me. (Don’t bother, TG. You’re on Eternal Ignore. I now wear a COVID mask to avoid being exposed to even the tiniest micro-nuttiness from your invisible posts. I’m just wondering if anyone else can actually follow whatever it is TG is talking about.)

As I understand it (while not pretending to actually understand it) ...

LHO is dispatched to the USSR, apparently unwittingly, to ferret out moles (I love saying that!  ). While there, he attends the mysterious “KGB school” in Minsk and is somehow trained for an eventual mission (what mission?) in the U.S., even though those closest to him have absolutely no clue that this is going on. He returns to the U.S., presumably at the behest of his KGB masters, with his KGB-indoctrinated wife Marina (indoctrinated when and for what purpose?), and they proceed to live pretty much like impoverished bums (their KGB cover?).

LHO then engages in activities and writes things that are hard to square with any KBG mission (proof of just how clever the KGB is?). The time finally arrives for LHO to assassinate JFK (for what KGB-related purpose?), and Marina then lives the next 60+ years in pretty thorough Texas-housewife obscurity (for what KGB-related purpose?), evolving from a veritable LNer to a CTer (for what KGB-related purpose? was this her KGB mission?).

The supermen of the KGB then spend the next 50+ years destroying America from within via their infiltration of the CIA, the proverbial “long march through the institutions” and whatnot (and having rather astonishing success as far as I can tell). The chaotic Monty Python skit that calls itself the “JFKA research community” is apparently part of this dastardly plot (how? why?).

In 2016, the KGB, or at least KGB guy Putin, then causes Kremlin stooge The Donald to defeat Hillary Clinton, even though Hillary is a card-carrying "Rules for Radicals" sort of leftie and The Donald’s platform consists mostly of promises to unravel all that the KGB has accomplished over the past 50+ years (how does that work?). But wait, then Putin and the supermen of the KGB fumble the ball and Team Biden is somehow elected in 2020 (what the heck?). Team Biden, which apparently doesn't grasp the KGB's new Trumpian agenda, then does its best to restore the long march through the institutions, doing quite an excellent job of it, and Team Kamala promises to pretty well finish off the destruction of America (why would Putin and the supermen of the KGB not want this?).

But, no, Vladimir and the gang once again step in and cause their stooge The Donald to be elected in 2024, even though The Donald is now even more hellbent to stop the long march through the institutions and restore America to its former glory as a chest-thumping, war-mongering capitalist state and may be slightly unhinged to boot (the KGB wants this – why?).

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the Big Picture. Or perhaps I'm actually an unwitting KGB stooge, sent here to ferret out moles! I have literally no idea what the “KGB stuff” is all about or how it makes any sense at all. Anyone seeing it more clearly than I am?

Dear FPR,

All you've got to do is read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and John M. Newman's 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole (but disregard the part where he says high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Peking and Moscow in 1963).

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

Bagley, who was Yuri Nosenko’s primary case officer from June 1962 to September 1967, details how he came to realize that Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent to the CIA there to discredit what a recent true defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies and thereby protect a high-level mole or two in the Agency.

Are you with me so far?

Although the CIA believed Nosenko was fake -- after Bagley had been given the opportunity right after the 1962 meetings to read Golitsyn’s thick file and realized in-so-doing that Nosenko had said many things that overlapped what Golitsyn had said six months earlier (even though they had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB) and that what Nosenko said invariably contradicted what Golitsyn had said -- it allowed him to physically defect to the U.S. when he recontacted Bagley and (probable mole, imho) George Kisevalter in Geneva in February 1964 because he claimed to have read Oswald’s file on four different occasions and especially because he claimed he’d just received a “Return To Moscow Immediately” telegram from KGB headquarters (Nosenko later admitted that he’d “made it up to improve my chances of being allowed to go to the U.S.” after NSA had determined that no such cable had been sent).

The reason all of this is important – British researcher Malcolm Blunt says “Nosenko is MEGA” – is because the mole or moles Nosenko was protecting were never uncovered, and because lots of other false defectors and Kremlin-loyal double and triple agents were sent to the U.S. or otherwise contacted the CIA and/or the FBI over the years in order to “verify,” in a multi-tasking kind of way, Nosenko’s bona fides.

That, and the fact that Nosenko was eventually “cleared” by the very same "probable" mole he'd been sent to the CIA in 1962 to protect -- the aforementioned Bruce Solie -- via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report, and was . . . yep . . . hired by the Agency a few years later to teach “counterintelligence” to its and the FBI’s new recruits.

Any questions so far?

In addition to the warnings that the aforementioned true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, tried to give to the CIA and the FBI (and to MI5 and MI6 in late 1962) about possible KGB penetrations of those services and the intelligence services of our NATO allies, he also tried to warn them about the KGB’s 1959-on deception-based “Master Plan,” which Nosenko-protectors came to derisively refer to as the “Monster Plot.”

Said “Master Plan” is explained in Golitsyn’s book, New Lies for Old, and in Edward J. Epstein’s book, Deception.

https://archive.org/details/newliesforoldcom0000goli/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetweenTheKGBAndTheCIA

It was created in the late 1950s in the KGB “think tank” that Golitsyn worked in, and it involved a return to Sun Tzu’s strategy of defeating one’s enemies through deception, as Operation Trust had done so effectively in the 1920s and WiN had done in Poland in the early 1950s, i.e., to defeat them by getting them to tear themselves apart. Under this new “Master Plan,” the KGB set up a top-secret deception-based Department D in the First Chief Directorate (today’s SVR) to wage disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against the U.S. and our NATO allies. Not to be outdone, General Oleg Gribanov, head of the Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB) set up Department 14 in that part of the KGB, and as soon as CIA’s spy Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been “trapped like a bear in its cave” in Moscow in such a way that wouldn’t  reveal  who in the CIA or British Intelligence had betrayed him in April 1961, sent GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak to the FBI’s NYC field office to “volunteer” to spy for it at the U.N. Golitsyn and Angleton realized the “Master Plan” included  the idea that feedback loops would be established between Kremlin-loyal triple agents like Polyakov and Kulak and a mole or two (Solie and Leonard V. McCoy?) so that the KGB could constantly modify what those “outside men” were telling their CIA case officers and ensure that the KGB would effectively control the CIA by telling it what the CIA wanted to hear.

Earlier I said that the 1959-on “Master Plan” involved waging disinformation and “active measures” ops against the U.S. and its NATO allies so as to defeat them by getting them to tear themselves apart.

Several examples of these kinds of ops have been identified. Operation INFEKTION, for example.

Another example was when a KGB article was published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Paese Sera, four days after Jim Garrison had arrested Clay Shaw on suspicion of organizing a “homosexual thrill-kill” assassination of JFK.* Said article motivated Garrison to change his theory against Shaw to “he organized it for the CIA.”

Oliver Stone partially based his 1991 anti-Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex film, “JFK,” on Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. That movie, which Stone admitted was mythological (“to counteract the myth of the Warren Report”) was instrumental in my becoming, for several years, a tinfoil-hat JFKA conspiracy theorist, and I believe it had a similar effect on millions of other people.

I believe that the effect of the disinformation and “active measures” ops the KGB has waged against us since late 1961 (when Gribanov sent Polyakov to the FBI) have had such a deleterious effect on our body politic that it enabled “former” SVR counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin to install, with help from even more disinformation and “active measures” ops, "spotted"-by-KGB-in-1980 Donald J. Trump as our “president” in January 2017 and January 2025, which helps to explain why we find ourselves in an Incipient Civil War II / Incipient NATO-Unraveling / Incipient Avian Flu Pandemic moment as I type this.

-- Tom

*The last time I mentioned this to you, you were incredulous that Garrison would actually consider charging anyone with conspiring in a homosexual "thrill-kill." The following is a conversation I just now had with GROK on the subject. Note that our very own Fred Litwin is mentioned.

Me: In which book can we read about Jim Garrison and his original intention to charge Clay Shaw with organizing a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK?

GROK: The specific claim—that Garrison originally intended to charge Clay Shaw (or framed his suspicions around Shaw) with organizing a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK—stems from contemporary reporting on Garrison's private statements during the early phase of his investigation (around late 1966 to early 1967, before the formal charges shifted emphasis).This is most directly and prominently documented in journalist James Phelan's accounts. Phelan, who met with Garrison in Las Vegas to discuss the case, quoted him describing the assassination as a "homosexual thrill killing," akin to the Loeb-Leopold murder, motivated by envy of JFK's virility and the thrill of a perfect crime, involving figures like David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and Jack Ruby (all alleged to be homosexual in Garrison's view at the time). Phelan's recollection appears in his writings, including articles for "The Saturday Evening Post" (where he published on Garrison) and later referenced in books and critiques of the Garrison probe.

This anecdote is widely cited in secondary sources analyzing Garrison's investigation, such as:

•   Dave Reitzes' detailed essay "Jim Garrison's Bizarre Behavior — JFK Assassination a Homosexual Thrill Killing" (on jfk-assassination.net), which quotes Phelan extensively and contextualizes it as Garrison's early fixation before "sanitizing" it in favor of the CIA narrative.

•   Fred Litwin's On the Trail of Delusion: Jim Garrison—The Great Accuser (2020), which discusses this phase of Garrison's thinking.

•   Other critical works like Patricia Lambert's False Witness or discussions in Wikipedia entries and articles (e.g., Newsweek, New York Times pieces on the Shaw trial) that reference Phelan's quote to highlight the homophobic and speculative origins of the probe.

Garrison's public and published case evolved away from this (especially after Perry Russo's testimony and the arrest of Shaw in March 1967), focusing instead on conspiracy with intelligence ties. The "thrill-kill" phrasing does not appear in Garrison's books like On the Trail of the Assassins or A Heritage of Stone (1970), which omit or downplay it.

For primary sourcing on this original intention/motive attribution, look to Phelan's contemporaneous reporting and interviews rather than a single book by Garrison. If seeking a book-length treatment covering this detail critically, Reitzes' analysis or Litwin's On the Trail of Delusion captures it well.

. . . . . . .


Tangentially,

Given the fact that Kim Philby started spying for the NKVD in England in 1934 and was soon followed by Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and, in 1950-51, George Blake, do you think they did any damage to British and U.S. Intelligence, or do you think it was just a big “hoot” for everybody?

Concomitantly, do you think there were probably some moles in the CIA before Aldrich Ames started spying for the KGB in 1985?

If not, why not?

Do you find it interesting that a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and false (or perhaps “rogue”) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, Yuri Nosenko, told his CIA case officers and interrogators and the HSCA that the KGB didn’t even interview Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR, but Oleg Nechiporenko (who had allegedly met with Oswald in Mexico City in September 1963) wrote in his book, Passport to Assassination, that the KGB interviewed Oswald twice in Moscow?



-- Tom

I see the button but . . .

TIA

Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.

fred

Well, that's one vote for my sanity.

To TG: I am not interested in being "convinced." I am not interested in how the KGB stuff makes sense to you, because that would tell me nothing.

I simply wish to know if this KGB stuff actually makes sense to anyone else and, if so, whether that individual would care to explain it in 200 words or less of plain English, without reference to Bagley, Solie and the rest of TG's pantheon.

Here, I'll make it easy: We will assume arguendo, for purposes of this post only, that everything TG says is absolutely true. Please, just connect the dots in plain English in a way that makes any rational sense at all. Just do that. What would it have looked like, out there in the real world? How would it have worked, out there in the real world?

This is pretty much the challenge I issue to every Gee-Whiz True Believer in some notion that strikes me as nonsense.

Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.

fred