The Fallacies of Howard J. Osborn and Richards J. Heuer, et al.

[Michael Clark]

Note: The original title of this thread, before Thomas edited it, was: Re: Standing Challenge To Michael Clark (Or Anyone Else Who Wants To Give It A Shot)

Dear Michael,

1)  Highly relevant?  Osborn was duped by Nosenko (and KGB agents Loginov, Kochnov, and Kulak, et al.), and his own colleagues at CIA (Solie, McCoy, Hart, probable-mole Kisevalter, et al.), and by Mr. Gullible, himself -- J. Edgar Hoover) into believing that Nosenko was a true defector, and that he had been imprisoned and horribly tortured by Bagley.

LMFAO

2)  Please do try to get your facts straight, Michael. Osborn wasn't one of Bagley's superiors.

3)  Regardless, have you been able to reconcile, so that it will "fit in" snugly with your own paradigm, the fact that John Newman so firmly believed Bagley's assessment of Nosenko in Spy Wars and Spymaster that he was able to convince none other than Peter Dale Scott of same, i.e., that Nosenko was a false defector?

Hmm?

-- MWT 


PS  Here's another CIA guy who was taken in, Richards J. Heuer, Jr.

What a load of crap.

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/alpha_folder/H_folder/Heuer_on_NosenkoV1.pdf

 https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf


TOP SECRET

 13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

 2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security

[Thomas Graves]

 https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32359254.pdf


TOP SECRET

 13 October 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

Subject: BAGELY, Tennant, Harrington

#386 38

1) On Wednesday, 7 October 1970 I briefed Colonel L. K. White, Executive  Director-Controller on certain reservations I have concerning the proposed promotion of subject to a supergrade position.

 2)  I was very careful to explain to Colonel White at the outset that my reservations had nothing whatsoever to do with Bagely's security status. I explained that it was my conviction that Bagely was almost exclusively responsible for the manner in which the Nosenko case had been handled by our SR division. I said I considered that Bagely lacked objectivity and that he had displayed extremely poor judgment over a two year period in the handling of this case. Specifically as one example of Bagely's extreme prejudice I pointed out that the SR division had neglected to follow up several leads provided by Nosenko which subsequently had been followed up by this office (Bruce Solie) and that this lead us to individuals who have confessed their recruitment and use by the Soviets over an extensive period of time.

3)  I explained further that Bagely displayed extremely poor judgment in the actions he took during that time that  Nosenko was incarcerated at ISOLATION. On many occasions, as the individual responsible for Nosenko's care, I refuse to condone Bagely's  instructions to my people who are guarding him. In one instance Bagely insisted that  Nosenko's food ration be reduced to black bread and water three times daily. After I had briefed Colonel White, he indicated that he would refresh the Director's memory on Bagely's role in the Nosenko case at the time he reviews supergrade promotions. 

Howard J. Osborn

Director of Security

Dear Michael,

LOL

-- MWT   

[Thomas Graves]

Quote from: Thomas Graves on July 09, 2019, 07:53:55 PM

Dear Michael,

1)  Highly relevant?  Osborn was duped by Nosenko (and KGB agents Loginov, Kochnov, and Kulak, et al.), and his own colleagues at CIA (Solie, McCoy, Hart, probable-mole Kisevalter, et al.), and by Mr. Gullible, himself -- J. Edgar Hoover) into believing that Nosenko was a true defector, and that he had been imprisoned and horribly tortured by Bagley.

LMFAO

2)  Please do try to get your facts straight, Michael. Osborn wasn't one of Bagley's superiors.

3)  Regardless, have you been able to reconcile, so that it will "fit in" snugly with your own paradigm, the fact that John Newman so firmly believed Bagley's assessment of Nosenko in Spy Wars and Spymaster that he was able to convince none other than Peter Dale Scott of same, i.e., that Nosenko was a false defector?

Hmm?

-- MWT 


PS  Here's another CIA guy who was taken in, Richards J. Heuer, Jr.

What a load of crap.

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/alpha_folder/H_folder/Heuer_on_NosenkoV1.pdf

.......


Dear Michael,

Does it bum you out that Tennent H. Bagley convinced Professor John M. Newman that Yuri Nosenko (the guy who swore up and down that the KGB had had nothing whatsoever to do with Marxist Marine Corps radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two and one-half years he lived in the U.S.S.R.) was a false defector, and that Newman convinced Peter Dale Scott of same on March 3, 2018?

For reference:

-- MWT   

[Michael Clark]

Note: The original title of this thread, before Thomas edited it, was: Re: Standing Challenge To Michael Clark (Or Anyone Else Who Wants To Give It A Shot)

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/alpha_folder/H_folder/Heuer_on_NosenkoV1.pdf

“As critics have accurately noted, deception was taken as a premise; it was not a finding arrived at after careful investigation of Nosenko's story. Field- house concluded ". . . there was never an honest effort to establish Nosenko's bona fides. There was only a determined effort to prove Nosenko was mala fide and part of a KGB deception meant to mislead CIA into believing it was not penetrated-thereby covering up the 'real' reason for the compromise of Popov and Penkovskiy." Hart observed that "... at no time from June 1962 to October 1967yvas Nosenko afforded the land of systematic, objective, non- hostile interrogation . . . which otherwise had been standard operating 'proce-
dure' in dealing with similar sources."
It is noteworthy that none of the background on assumed penetration of
CIA or the Soviet disinformation program is included in the formal SB Division assessments of Nosenko's bona fides. It is documented in limited distribution memorandums of that period, but those who doubted Nosenko believed they could and should prove their case only on the basis of anomalies and inconsis- tencies in Nosenko's own statements, without reference to penetration of CIA or to all the other Soviet operations that were considered part of the master plot. Except for Jack Fieldhouse, those who subsequently defended Nosenko adopted these same ground rules, so systematic refutation of many master plot arguments is lacking in their analysis.
The principal counterargument was the simple assertion that the KGB would never mount such a deception because ofthe cost to itselfin information given away (to be discussed later) and the risk that a KGB defector, penetra- tion, or disaffected provocateur might compromise the entireenterprise at any time. It was also noted that, to obtain Politburo approval to place one ofits own staff personnel in contact with the enemy as a false defector, the KGB would have to be able to demonstrate that this was the best and least costly, perhaps the only, way to achieve its objectives. This too seemed quite implausible. No
objectives were ever suggested that could not be achieved by less costly or less
risky means.
This counterargument has passed the test oftime. It seems impossible that
the KGB could have concealed such an extensive and all-inclusive deception for so many years, given the steady flow of new KGB defectors and sources in a position to reveal such a conspiracy had it actually existed. One may, of course, argue that many ofthese subsequent sources up to the present day are also part ofthe plot. This would imply however that the entire KGB as we have known it
for 25 years is, unbeknownst to most of its officers, little more than a cover organization for deception, with the truly secret work being done elsewhere. “

[Thomas Graves]

[.....]

Dear Michael,

What a load of crap.

To help clear up some of your confusion, here are the first ten pages or so of a must-read 35-page PDF.

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

GHOSTS OF THE SPY WARS

By Tennent H. Bagley (2014)

The history of Cold War espionage—KGB vs. CIA—remains incomplete, full of inaccuracies, and cries out for correction. It received a big infusion after 1991 by the opening of some files from both East and West, but that left the more biting questions unanswered—like those pertaining to still-unknown moles inside Western governments and intelligence services. Those undiscovered traitors still hover like ghosts over that history.

I saw and had a share in some doings of the first half of the Cold War. The facts and events of which I write here are all part of the public record and have been officially cleared for publication, like my own books Spy Wars and Spymaster.

1 Tennent H. Bagley , Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

But details are easily forgotten, so pulling some out from their present context and getting a glimpse of the ghosts lurking behind them may be useful. In the future an alert journalist or historian, inspired by some new revelation, may remember one or another of these old ghosts and dig deeper to lay them to rest.

Most of the ghosts I stir up here still hover undetected because back in the second half of the 1960s the CIA changed its mind and decided that the deeply-suspected KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had, after all, genuinely defected and had been telling CIA the truth.

2 Throughout this article I treat Yuri Nosenko as a sent KGB plant, deceiving the Americans. The CIA's official position since 1968 has been the opposite. For some insight into the debate, see the Appendix.

That change of mind began in 1967, five years after Nosenko first appeared to the CIA. By then the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division had concluded, on the basis of years of debriefing, interrogation, investigation, observation, and analysis, that the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence; today's FSB) sent Nosenko to CIA with the aim (among others) of diverting leads to its spies in the West that CIA had been given a few months earlier by the genuine KGB (true) defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The Soviet Block Division summarized its reasons in a 439-page report, one copy of which they apparently mounted in a “notebook.”

But then the tide shifted. A Reports-and-Requirements (R&R) officer of the Soviet Block Division, alerted to the notebook's existence by a colleague ...

3 The colleague was Richard Kovich, who though not involved in the (closely-held) handling of Nosenko, had been subtly seeking for a year or more to learn—and had evidently found out—the dire assessment of Nosenko's bona fides and his situation

... got hold of it and, without checking with his Division superiors, drafted a forty-page paper and three memoranda for higher Agency supervisors, pleading that his Division's position on Nosenko as set out in the notebook was wrong, mindless, and indefensible. He urged that it be reconsidered “by a new team of CIA officers.”

This evidently launched the Agency's re-review of the case, with new interviews of Nosenko by others, culminating in a 1968 report by security officer Bruce Solie that exonerated Nosenko and led to his acceptance as an advisor to the Agency's anti-Soviet operations.

4 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, pp. 197–220.

THE LEONARD MCCOY INTERVENTION

The Soviet Block (SB) Division's "Reports and Requirements" officer who started the process, Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new CI Staff chief, previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides ...

5 See, for example, Spy Wars pp. 218–219 and its Appendix A with its endnote 3. Also, Leonard McCoy, “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” CIRA Newletter, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1983.

... and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the CI Staff's existing file material that (independent of SB Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith.

6 As testified by CI Staff operations chief Newton S. (“Scotty”) Miler in a handwritten memorandum which is in the files of T. H. Bagley.


Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act “with no objection from CIA.”

McCoy opened, as we can now see, with his own finding and with a plea: “After examining the evidence of Nosenko's bona fides in the notebook,” he wrote, “I am convinced that Nosenko is a bona fide defector. I believe that the case against him has arisen and persisted because the facts have been misconstrued, ignored, or interpreted without sufficient consideration of his psychological failings.” The evidence, he said, is that Nosenko is “not a plant and not fabricating anything at all, except what is required by his disturbed personality.” He recommended “that we appoint a new judge and jury for the Nosenko case consisting of persons not involved in the case so far” and proposed six candidates.

According to McCoy, it was not only Nosenko's psychology that should determine his bona fides, but also his reporting. “The ultimate conclusions must be based on his production,” McCoy asserted, specifically claiming to be the only person qualified to evaluate that production. Certain of Nosenko's reports were important and fresh, he stated, and could not be considered KGB “throwaway” or deception, as the notebook described them.

In reality, however, the value of Nosenko's intelligence reports had not been a major factor in the Division's finding. It had judged him a KGB plant on the basis of the circumstances of the case (of the sort listed in the “40 Questions” of the Appendix).

McCoy did not explain—or even mention—a single one of these circumstances in his paper, so his arguments were irrelevant to the matter he pretended to deal with. His was not a professional assessment of a complex counterintelligence situation but, instead, an emotional plea. He referred with scorn to his superiors' “insidious conclusions” and “genuine paranoia” and called their analysis “very strange, to say the least.” The case against Nosenko, he wrote, was based on (unnamed) “assumptions, subjective observations, unsupported suspicions, innuendo, insinuations [… and] relatively trivial contradictions in his reporting.”

Nosenko's failure to pass the lie detector test, McCoy asserted, “rules out Nosenko immediately” as a plant—because the KGB would have trained him to beat it. He dismissed (unspecified) findings as “trivial, antique, or repetitive” and cited one which “borders on fantasy. … In fact, it is fantastic!” (sic—with exclamation point). “I cannot find a shred of solid evidence against Nosenko,” he wrote, “The case would be thrown out of court for lack of evidence.” Closing his paper he asked, “What kind of proof do we need of his innocence, when we call him guilty with none?”

McCoy used as argument his speculation about what the KGB would or would not do. His paper was studded with untruths, distortions, and unsupported assertions like those cited above—all designed to discredit any doubts or doubters of Nosenko's bona fides. For instance, he judged the [true] defector Pyotr Deryabin, a former KGB Major of more than ten years' experience, to be “not experienced.” When Deryabin decided that Nosenko was a KGB plant, wrote McCoy, he was making a “snap judgment … after having been briefed on the mere facts of the case.” In reality, Deryabin had spent years reviewing and commenting upon the full record of this and related cases, listening to tapes (and correcting the transcripts) of every meeting with and debriefing of Nosenko—and had then personally questioned Nosenko in twelve long sessions.

McCoy told the demonstrable untruth that Nosenko “damaged the Soviet intelligence effort more than all the other KGB defectors combined” and that “no Soviet defector has identified as many Soviet agents.” Had Nosenko not uncovered William Vassall as a spy, McCoy wrote, certain secret British documents (shown by Golitsyn to be in KGB hands) “could have been assumed to come from the Lonsdale-Cohen-Houghton net”—though they could not conceivably have been. He said that Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson “would still be operating against us” had Nosenko not uncovered him—though by then, in fact, Johnson had already lost his post and his wife was publicly denouncing him as a Soviet spy. McCoy asserted that it was Nosenko who identified Kovshuk's photo whereas Golitsyn had made the identification. He confused two separate KGB American recruits, following Nosenko's line and successfully hiding the active, valid one. And he made uncounted other equally unfounded assertions.

But by then the Nosenko case—the CIA's holding of a suspected KGB plant—had become a thorn in the side of the Agency leadership, an “incubus” and “bone in the throat,” as Director Richard Helms put it. So the CIA happily accepted McCoy's authority and as a result many KGB moles were never identified.


Let's have a look at some of these ghosts ...

1. How Did They Know That?

The affair called “Tophat” may be the most complex and least understood of all the spy episodes of the Cold War. CIA insiders have called it their greatest spying success against the Soviet Union—which it may have been—but unbeknownst to them, the KGB's hand had lain behind it. An extraordinary twist had transformed it from a KGB provocation to a CIA triumph. The Soviet unit that launched the operation—the KGB's internal-security directorate (Second Chief Directorate) kept it so secret that they allowed only two people in the KGB's entire foreign intelligence directorate (First Chief Directorate) to know even of its existence. As a result, even today, a quarter-century after the Cold War and a half-century after it began, the story remains only partly known—East or West—and no one can answer with authority all the questions it left hanging.

Among the unknowns lurks a KGB mole inside the CIA.

The first breach in the wall of security surrounding this case came long after the end of the Cold War, from one of those two KGB foreign-directorate higher-ups who knew. 7 I base my account of the affair on the most recent revelations from inside both CIA and KGB. The American details were recounted by the responsible CIA desk officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book Circle of Treason (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), pp. 26–54. The Soviet side was revealed to me by KGB Lieutenant General Sergey A. Kondrashev and reported in my book Spymaster: Startling Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief, pp. 213–222.
 [Google Scholar]

Thanks to him we can now see that the “Tophat” story really began long before Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) Colonel Dmitry Polyakov contacted American Intelligence, not then in late 1961 but almost five years earlier, at that shocking moment in 1957 when the KGB learned (from a mole inside CIA—see #3 below) that a traitor was stripping the country's military secrets. So damaging was this leak, so widespread its political and strategic implications, that the investigation was taken over by the chief of Soviet counterintelligence himself, KGB General Oleg Gribanov, “the Soviet J. Edgar Hoover.”

In mid-November 1958 he had GRU Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr S. Popov recalled on a ruse from his post in East Berlin, [secretly] arrested, and interrogated.

Popov confessed. For six years he had been passing to the CIA secrets of Soviet weapons developments and tactics for atomic warfare. In addition, he had opened up his own service to the CIA: the GRU's procedures, some of its spies abroad, and hundreds of its officers. The GRU chief, General Mikhail A. Shalin, was fired, and in early December, the KGB chief Ivan Serov himself moved over to replace him and straighten things out.

But to Oleg Gribanov this shattering of the GRU looked more like opportunity than disaster.

Long experience had taught his organization that in counterintelligence work, “he who takes the initiative, all other things being equal, achieves the best results.” 8 Istoriya Sovetskikh Organov Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; Uchebnik [Hereafter: The History of Soviet Organs of State Security; A Textbook] (Moscow: KGB Higher School, 1977), classified TOP SECRET. Page references are to an English translation.

Not to wait passively to detect spies but to go out aggressively to find them (or make them). Working on this principle, the KGB had formed, taken over, and manipulated organizations of resistance to their own regime. They had used these fraudulent structures to expose and mislead their opponents inside the country and abroad; to maneuver hostile intelligence services onto false paths, and to get into contact with their personnel with the aim of compromising them and recruited them as moles. So successful had they been that some of these operations like “Trust” and “Sindikat-2” of the 1920s became celebrated in Soviet history, novels, and films, and this “aggressive counterintelligence” [nastupatelnost'] became the KGB's “guiding principle.” 9 So defined in the KGB's own in-house secret dictionary, brought out by Vasily Mitrokhin and published in English as KGB Lexicon (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 261.

By the 1970s the KGB had “mastered complex undercover agent-operational schemes” and infiltrated Western intelligence services by “presenting our [Soviet] trusted agents for their recruitment, … conducting operational games using methods similar to those used in the 1920s and 1930s, [and …] recruiting staff personnel of American Intelligence.” KGB people “are obliged to carefully study this postwar experience.” 10 The History of Soviet State Security Organs; A Textbook. These quotes are from Chapter 10, parts 3 and 4 and conclusions.

Gribanov was inspired by all that. Looking over the debris of Popov's betrayal he saw that this fund of GRU secrets—now exposed and no longer truly secret—offered a weapon he could turn back against American Intelligence. He code-named the Popov affair “Boomerang."

To wield this weapon Gribanov created a new “14th Department” within his internal-counterintelligence directorate and gave it the mission of “mounting complicated counterintelligence operations and operational games to penetrate foreign intelligence services.”  11 As defined by the KGB itself, per the Internet:
www.soldat. ru

He would direct it personally, but installed as its chief his principal assistant during their investigation and interrogation of Popov, Colonel Valentin Zvezdenkov.

Together they set out to hand the CIA yet another high GRU officer, but this time their own. He would re-use Popov's information (and a bit more) to win the CIA's trust and in the best tradition of nastupatelnost' would expose it, lead it astray, and draw its officers into compromising situations.

Here some intelligence professionals say “Stop!” Hand the enemy a spy from inside your own ranks? Unthinkable! No intelligence service would take such a risk. So firmly did the CIA leaders believe this that in the 1970s and 1980s they even adopted it as a rule of thumb to judge the bona fides of Soviet walk-ins: if one was a Soviet intelligence officer, he was ipso facto a genuine defector. 12 Milton Bearden, former head of CIA's Soviet Division (citing his predecessor Burton Gerber) and his co-author James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (London: Century, 2003), pp. 20–23.

That false faith burns brightly in America to this day. As recently as 2013 an FBI “counterintelligence expert” stated flatly, “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector.” 13 David Major, cited by David Wise in “When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on its Staff,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2013.

The truth was—and is—quite different. Gribanov's new 14th Department (and other KGB components) did it time and again, from within both the GRU and KGB. General Sergey Kondrashev spoke after the Cold War of “repeated” proposals for such operations in his own First Chief Directorate disinformation unit. He himself had been invited to shift over to the Second Chief Directorate to help Gribanov run the Nosenko provocation. Another KGB veteran even thought that “most” of the CIA spies inside the KGB who were betrayed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames in 1985 were in fact loyal staffers pretending to help the CIA. 14 Aleksandr Kouzminov , Biological Espionage: Special Operations in the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), p. 59.
 

The Mysterious Polyakov

For this particular enterprise Gribanov and Zvezdenkov chose GRU Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Polyakov. 15 They picked him, said Kondrashev, at least partly because Polyakov had already had “a certain contact.” That might have been his contact with Popov when escorting a GRU Illegal operative named Margarita Tairova from Moscow to Berlin for Popov to dispatch onward to New York. At the time Popov expressed unease because he had never known Polyakov in illegal-support work. Another such pertinent contact would be Polyakov's contact with GRU Illegal Kaarlo Tuomi who came under FBI control but turned back later to Soviet control. (See my Spy Wars, pp. 171–172, and Spymaster, pp. 196, 216, and 291n7.)
 
As a first step they dispatched him in October 1959 to New York, where he had already served in the past, as a military functionary in the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. The operation was not truly launched until two years later, however, because Polyakov had first to establish himself in his cover position, and then because Gribanov delayed the operation while dealing with an unexpected complication. Having discovered a new, real traitor within the GRU, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, Gribanov had to weigh the effects on his planned operation. So not until the fall of 1961, after safely “cornering [Penkovsky] like a bear in its den,” 16 As expressed by the Soviet Prosecutor at a press conference at the time of Penkovsky's trial in May 1963. did Gribanov feel ready to launch the operation.

Polyakov asked an American military officer to put him in touch with the CIA.

The FBI made the contact, it being their jurisdiction, and for several months they met him secretly in New York (code-naming him “Tophat”). Enthusiastic at the time about what Polyakov was revealing, fifteen years later the FBI looked back and wondered whether Polyakov had been deceiving them during those months. He had wasted their time on useless trails, and nothing he had told them had importantly damaged the Soviet Union beyond what Popov had earlier reported.

After a few months in New York, Polyakov returned to Russia in the fall of 1962 and was not heard from until years later, when he told via a Moscow dead drop, that he would soon come out again. He did, in 1966, as Soviet military attaché and GRU chief in Rangoon, Burma. Because operations abroad are the CIA's jurisdiction, the FBI soon turned over contact to the Agency, which continued to meet Polyakov in Burma from then until his tour of duty expired in 1969.

In his early meetings with Polyakov, CIA case officer Jim F. had the strong impression that he was dealing with a KGB plant, but after a time he noted such dramatic improvement in the reporting that he became convinced that Polyakov was genuinely cooperating. 17 As Jim F. told a close colleague on the operation, who told me in 1970.

For years thereafter, Polyakov continued direct and indirect contacts with the CIA, turning over priceless military and intelligence secrets first in Rangoon, then in Moscow, and then in two separate tours of duty in New Delhi where he enjoyed the rank of one-star general, making him the highest-ranked secret source that CIA ever had in Soviet Russia.

But then, in May 1980, the operation came to an abrupt end. On the pretext of a supposed meeting of military attachés, Polyakov was recalled to Moscow and never heard from again.

Ten years later, in 1990, out of the blue, the Soviets announced that they had arrested Polyakov ...

... tried him in secret for being a CIA spy, and executed him. Their publicity chose to date the arrest as 1986, the trial and execution as March 1988.

It took another dozen years to begin explaining these oddities: the secret trial, so unlike Penkovsky's; the lack of even a fuzzy explanation of how the KGB had caught Polyakov; the inexplicable dates; and unusual publicity. The only KGB foreign-operations officer who had known of the SCD's operation, General Sergey Kondrashev (the KGB deputy for disinformation mentioned above), years later revealed to me that Gribanov had sent Polyakov out in the first place. 18 The circumstances of Kondrashev's revelation are described in Tennent H. Bagley, Spymaster, pp. 213–216.


“But they executed Polyakov!” I said. “Why would the KGB execute a man whom they themselves had sent out to commit this treason?”
“Because they found out he was giving you more than he was supposed to.”
“Found out? How?”
“Through some source inside American Intelligence.”

Kondrachev would say no more. But the question hung there: Who could have known exactly how much Polyakov was reporting to CIA?


It had to be someone inside CIA's Soviet operations staff. And someone still undiscovered. Two Americans who knew something of the Polyakov case were later discovered to have been traitors, but neither of them could be the answer. Robert Hanssen of the FBI had told the Soviets in 1979 about Polyakov's 1962 "cooperation" in New York, but of course he knew nothing of what Polyakov later reported to the CIA. And even in the unlikely event that CIA traitor Aldrich Ames had learned the full details of Polyakov's reporting, Ames did not begin betraying until 1985, five years after the KGB had recalled Polyakov on a ruse and terminated the operation.

Not one of the later-discovered CIA traitors could even remotely have been aware of these details. In fact, only a handful of specially-placed CIA operatives even knew that the Agency had a relationship with Polyakov, much less what Polyakov was reporting. In each report that the CIA passed to military and other government agencies it disguised the source and attributed reports on different subjects to different sources.

The whole gamut of Polyakov's reporting could have been known only to his CIA handlers and those dealing with his raw reports.


So the question remains unanswered: Who told the KGB what Polyakov was telling the CIA?

.....

The read the remaining twenty pages or so, click on this:

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


-- MWT   

[Michael Clark]

Note: The original title of this thread, before Thomas edited it, was: Re: Standing Challenge To Michael Clark (Or Anyone Else Who Wants To Give It A Shot)

[Thomas Graves]

.....

Fascinating stuff, Michael! Can't you blow it up any more than that?

(sarcasm)

Do you know who wrote that piece of garbage? (You didn't photoshop it, did you?) If so, would you care to share his or her name name with us? Thanks!

Here's the link to the full 35-page PDF, followed by Bagley's 40 or so questions for Nosenko:

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


APPENDIX 1: FORTY QUESTIONS ABOUT NOSENKO'S BONA FIDES

Throughout the passages above I have referred to Yuri Nosenko as a fake defector, sent to the CIA by the KGB. Some, to the contrary (including the CIA officially), are convinced that he genuinely defected and told the truth. But the KGB's foreign-intelligence deputy chief for disinformation has revealed (see Spymaster, pp. 195–199) that he himself was invited by the KGB's counterintelligence chief Oleg Gribanov to help run the Nosenko provocation against the CIA. Moreover, the CIA's faith in Nosenko leans on shaky generalities while disregarding dubious circumstances of the case.

Background

Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (1927–2008), a KGB officer, secretly contacted the CIA in Geneva in the spring of 1962 while on a temporary KGB assignment from Moscow. Coming abroad again in late January 1964, he defected outright and was taken to the United States. At first under suspicion of having been sent by the KGB to deceive the CIA, he was submitted to interrogation and detention, but finally cleared in 1968. He then worked with the CIA, retired, and died in 2008.


CIA and FBI Faith in Nosenko

CIA leaders and spokesmen have repeatedly expressed, in writings and sworn testimony, their total faith in Yuri Nosenko as a genuine defector. The power of that faith can be felt in their published statements, some sworn under oath.

[Examples:]

“There is no reason to believe that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be.”

“He defected of his own free will and has not sought to deceive us.”

“Anything he has said has been said in good faith.”

"If a contradiction appears, it is in no way indicative of KGB dispatch.”

"Any untruths that Nosenko might have told were “not at the behest of the KGB.”

“Any claim we [in CIA] 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 [who suspected him] made a terrible mistake.”

These are the reasons they have expressed for this credo:

a. No intelligence service would send one of its own genuine staff officers into enemy hands as a false defector. An ex-FBI counterintelligence specialist proclaimed as recently as 2013, “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector.” It would not run the risk that he might be influenced or pressured to tell what he really knows and expose the very truths the deception operation was intended to hide.

b. The Soviet regime sentenced Nosenko to death in absentia and several KGB sources have said that the KGB was looking for him with the intent to assassinate him.

c. Insiders reported that real KGB staffers suffered real punishment as a result of his defection or as a result of their own misbehavior uncovered during the KGB's investigation of it. Even the chief of counterintelligence, Oleg Gribanov, was fired.

d. Later defectors have testified [in broad generality, all hearsay] to the genuineness of his defection and have claimed that it damaged the Soviet regime.

e. After he was cleared of CIA suspicions in 1968, Nosenko stayed in the United States for the forty years remaining in his life, became an American citizen, and helped Western operations against the KGB.

f. Repeated CIA reviews and analyses of the case over thirty years have again and again cleared Nosenko of all suspicion. [Never mind that earlier CIA reviews and analyses had reached the opposite conclusion.]

g. CIA insiders have stated under oath [although untruthfully] that nothing Nosenko said contradicts what genuine KGB defectors had reported.

h. Nosenko exposed many secret KGB “cases.” [Never mind that not a single case that he revealed in the first five years of his debriefing by the CIA was (1) active at the time he revealed them and (2) currently producing important NATO-government secrets and (3) previously unsuspected by Western counterintelligence.]

i. “A number of intelligence coups have been based on information from” Nosenko, said the CIA's Deputy Director to a congressional body in 1978. As he put it, “That Mr. Nosenko has proven so useful a man subsequently is the final test of the matter.” [Never mind that in the thirty-five years since then not a single such “coup” has been even remotely alluded to in public, though it could hardly have remained secret after practically all successful CIA and FBI anti-Soviet operations were exposed by Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, and Robert Hanssen.]

j. An official KGB document in the so-called “Mitrokhin archive” tells of the (genuine) defector Nosenko's ranting about questions of his rank. [Never mind that this document contradicted Nosenko's own account of his career and never mind that many documents with false or misleading information are known to have been inserted into official KGB files to hide or obscure sensitive information.]

But these are mere generalities. Even if all the points listed above were valid -- and many, as noted, were not -- they do not resolve specific doubtful circumstances that demand explanation. It is by errors of detail, sometimes small and seemingly trivial, that deceivers inadvertently betray a game that might, in all other ways, seem convincing.

In order to discredit circumstantial evidence, one must have some reasonable alternative explanation for it. To justify such faith in Nosenko, the CIA would have to have found an innocent answer to every one of the questions below, each answer consistent with the others.

Yet no CIA spokesman and no defender of Nosenko's bona fides has publicly answered even one. To read public defenses of Nosenko, one would suppose that these questions never existed.


Specific Questions

An unprecedented number of suspicious circumstances arose in Nosenko's case, so many and so revealing that the only possible answer to all of them must be that the KGB sent Nosenko to the CIA to tell certain stories, and that Gribanov's planning of this mission and its execution by Nosenko were sloppy and incompetent.

Following are 40 questions about those circumstances. Any defender of Nosenko's bona fides, to be convincing, must answer every one of them. I include references to the pages each is discussed in my book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Nosenko claimed that through the entire calendar years 1960 and 1961 he was deputy chief of the KGB section that spied on, and recruited agents in, the American Embassy in Moscow. In this post his specific responsibilities included supervising all KGB work against the embassy's code clerks and its security officer. This position gave him authority to recount the most important matters he revealed to CIA.

1. If Nosenko was supervising this top-priority KGB work, why was he, by his own accounts of this period, performing low-level tasks for a different KGB department? For example, by his own statements, he was handling street-level homosexual provocateurs of the Tourist Department, recruiting homosexual tourists (one as far away as Sofia), helping the Tourist Department chief meet a visiting travel agent in faraway Odessa, and traveling abroad repeatedly as a security watchdog for Soviet delegations. (Spy Wars, pp. 94–95, 160–162, 235, 250, 280)

2. Why have at least four authoritative KGB insiders stated that Nosenko did not hold that position? They include (a) the defector KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn who visited that American-Embassy section more than once during this period; (b) Roman Markov, a leading member of the section at the time; (c) KGB Lt. Gen. Sergey A. Kondrashev, a top-level supervisor of KGB operations who had himself earlier held that exact position; and (d) Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who had headed KGB foreign counterintelligence.

3. Why have no KGB insiders, not even those thinking that Nosenko was a genuine defector, confirmed that Nosenko did hold that position?

4. Why did Nosenko, with the authority of that position, certify that up to 1962 the KGB in Moscow had not recruited any American code clerk? (It is now known—from the recruiter himself—that the section recruited at least one code clerk before 1960–1961 and evidence from a reliable KGB defector suggests that two more were recruited during that period. (See Spy Wars, pp. 156–159, 241–242)

5. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko was able to reassure the CIA that his immediate subordinate Gryaznov's attempt to recruit an American Embassy code clerk had failed, whereas Gryaznov had indicated to the defector Golitsyn that the operation succeeded? (Spy Wars, p. 25)

6. Why was Nosenko not aware of the trip to Helsinki of his immediate subordinate Kosolapov as part of an operation aimed at recruiting a Moscow-based American Embassy communications official? (Spy Wars, pp. 157–160, 242)

7. How could Nosenko mistake by an entire year the date when Moscow surveillants under his direct supervision spotted American Embassy Security Officer John Abidian visiting a dead drop site in “late 1960”? (Spy Wars, pp. 88–89, 147–150, 186, 203–204)

8. How could he claim that for many weeks thereafter he had received regular reports on the KGB's stakeout of that dead drop site? (The visit actually occurred in late 1961, not late 1960 as Nosenko said, and by his own statements, he would have by then moved to a different job.) (Spy Wars, pp. 147, 186)

9. Why did Nosenko say in 1962 that the most important finding from the KGB's watch over Abidian was a pair of girl's panties in his room—and then in 1964 tell of seeing Abidian visit the dead drop site in late 1960? (Spy Wars, pp. 16, 147, 203)

10. If Nosenko was personally directing the KGB's coverage of Abidian, why was he ignorant of Abidian's travel from Moscow to his ancestral homeland of Armenia? (Nosenko himself recognized that his failure to answer this question undermined his whole life story. (See Spy Wars, p. 187)  Nosenko repeatedly changed his accounts of his KGB career, even dating his entry on duty variously as 1951, 1952, and March 1953 (and for that month, unable to remember whether before or after the death of Stalin). Moreover, not a single KGB source during or after the Cold War, not even among those who believed that Nosenko genuinely defected, has confirmed any precise date or detail of his career.

11. How does one explain the variation in Nosenko's own accounts? (Spy Wars, pp. 93, 160–162, 235, 248–250)

Nosenko preserved and brought to Geneva in 1964 the KGB document authorizing “Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Nosenko” to travel on a search for a fleeting would-be KGB defector named Cherepanov in December 1963—whereas KGB regulations (as Nosenko agreed when confronted) required that this document be turned in before the next payday and before any further travel could be authorized. (Spy Wars, pp. 87, 167–168, 250–251)

12. How did he keep this document?

13. Why did he bring it to Geneva?

14. Why was that travel authorization (signed by the SCD chief Gribanov) made out to a lieutenant colonel (the rank he claimed) whereas under detailed questioning he admitted having been only a captain (as even the KGB later confirmed)?

15. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko was already lying about his rank back in 1962, then calling himself a major?

16. Why, after Nosenko's defection in 1964, did a Soviet official in Paris—no doubt acting on KGB authority—try to peddle to the Western press the defector “Colonel” Nosenko's family story? (He moreover presented Nosenko's defection as a disaster for the KGB.) (Spy Wars, p. 163)

17. And why would Nosenko have been sent to search for Cherepanov when another KGB unit does such searches and if, as suggested by questions 1–7 above, Nosenko had not been supervising Cherepanov in the SCD's American-Embassy section—his own explanation for his participation?

Nosenko volunteered and stressed to the CIA in 1962 that the KGB first uncovered Pyotr Popov, CIA's spy inside Soviet military intelligence, by its chance surveillance of an American diplomat mailing a letter in Moscow in late January 1959. (Spy Wars, pp. 11–12, 16–17, 24, 68–75, 189, 233, 241–243)

18. How does one equate this with the KGB's later admission that the GRU chief was fired from his post as a result of Popov's treason—almost two months before the letter mailing?

19. Or with the fact that, two weeks before the letter mailing, KGB surveillants (by the KGB's own statement) had spotted Popov meeting CIA twice?

20. Or with the KGB's later admission that long before the letter mailing it had recruited Edward Ellis Smith, the CIA officer who had supported the Popov case in Moscow?

Nosenko claimed inside knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswaldin the Soviet Union, having participated in early decisions after Oswald's defection to the USSR and having later read the KGB file on Oswald. The KGB chairman at the time and other KGB veterans have denied this and stated that Nosenko was lying about it. (So too did the House Select Committee on Assassinations after interviewing Nosenko many times in 1977–1978.) (Spy Wars, pp. 83–86, 95–96, 191, 210, 249)

21. Why did the KGB chairman state that Nosenko lied about his knowledge of Oswald?

22. If Nosenko did not have his claimed access to the Oswald case and did not really study the KGB's file on Oswald, where did he get his information? And why did he continue to make that claim to his dying day?

After the Cold War much was learned about a previously little-known KGB Counterintelligence (SCD) department formed in 1959 for operational deception under the immediate supervision of SCD chief General Oleg Gribanov (Nosenko's sponsor). It was actively handing false sources to Western intelligence services to mislead them and to penetrate their ranks. Among this “14th Department's” leading officers were:

Valentin Zvezdenkov, who handled the KGB's investigation of CIA spy Pyotr Popov (Spy Wars, pp. 74, 233–234, 286).

Vladimir Chelnokov, who took Nosenko along on an operational mission to Odessa in 1960 (Spy Wars, p. 235),

Yuri Guk, who was meeting Nosenko before and after each CIA meeting in Geneva in 1962, and who returned from an operational trip to Moscow just before Nosenko first contacted CIA. (Spy Wars, pp. 6, 9, 66, 132, 236)

Aleksandr Kislov [probably a pseudonym] who was rooming with Nosenko in Geneva in 1962, far from the delegation Nosenko was supposedly watching. (Spy Wars, pp. 7, 66, 70–71, 236) See also my book Spymaster, pp. 206–210 and 289n13.

23. Why did Nosenko not report on the existence of this department?

24. Why did Nosenko not tell CIA that his Geneva associates Guk and Kislov were members of it (even denying that Kislov had any KGB connection at the time)?

Nosenko in 1962 volunteered information that his KGB boss Kovshuk had traveled to Washington five years earlier to restore contact with a KGB-recruited American cipher-machine mechanic codenamed “Andrey.” Nosenko thought the trip had lasted “a week or so”—unaware that Kovshuk (while keeping his American-Embassy Section job in Moscow) had been sent ostensibly on permanent assignment and actually stayed in Washington for ten months. And it later became obvious that “Andrey” could not have been the real reason for the “trip” and that Kovshuk really went to Washington to follow up his Moscow recruitment of CIA officer Edward E. Smith, who had been supporting CIA's contact with Pyotr Popov. The earlier defector Anatoly Golitsyn had learned that Kovshuk's trip contributed to the KGB's uncovering of Popov. (Spy Wars, pp. 67–71, 185) After the Cold War the KGB admitted having recruited Smith. (Spy Wars, p. 188)

25. Is it mere coincidence that at the very moment that Nosenko in Geneva in 1962 was telling the CIA about Kovshuk's 1957 “trip” to Washington (where the FBI spotted him working with Yuri Guk and Aleksandr Kislov), Guk was Nosenko's constant KGB companion and Aleksandr Kislov was his hotel roommate?

26. Why did Nosenko, claiming as a security watchdog to have read the KGB file on Kislov along with those of all other delegates, certify to the CIA that Kislov had no connection with the KGB? (pp. 65–67)

27. Why did Nosenko have no idea of how long Kovshuk had really stayed in Washington?

Nosenko said (and repeated) in 1962 that the KGB recruited “Andrey” in “1949–1950”—i.e., years before Nosenko joined the KGB. Yet in 1964, evidently forgetting what he had said in 1962, he said he had learned about the case from overhearing section colleagues talking as they returned from meeting “Andrey” during Nosenko's time in the American-Embassy section 1953–1955. (Spy Wars, pp. 7–8, 90–91, 185) (In fact the KGB recruited “Andrey”—later identified as Sgt. Dayle W. Smith—in 1953. Smith was identified and confirmed as a mere mechanic who did not and could not have passed any classified information to the KGB after they recruited him in 1953 by sexual compromise. (He was not even prosecuted.)

28. How can one explain Nosenko's self-contradiction?

Shortly before Nosenko came to the CIA in 1962, the genuine KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn had told the CIA that the KGB had recruited an American Embassy Moscow code clerk in the late 1940s and codenamed him “Jack.” After the Cold War this 1949 recruitment (and code name) were confirmed by the KGB recruiter himself. See my Spymaster, Chapter 1.

29. Why did Nosenko confuse that 1949 recruitment with a much later one (“Andrey”)

Nosenko told CIA in 1962 that he had personally participated in the KGB's (unsuccessful) attempt to recruit CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith in Moscow, and even gave details. After the Cold War the KGB admitted having recruited Smith. (Spy Wars, pp. 71, 233)

30. Why then did he in 1964 deny any knowledge of the name or the case? (Spy Wars, p. 188)

Nosenko and other KGB sources reported that the KGB had discovered the Western spy inside Soviet Military Intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, by chance observation of his contact in Moscow with British diplomats. However, since the Cold War, high KGB authorities have admitted that they really learned earlier about Penkovsky's treason from a secret source. (Spy Wars, pp. 21–22, 86–87, 235, 243)

31. Why did Nosenko contradict himself repeatedly about how he learned that Penkovsky was caught only by chance surveillance? (Each time he reported it, he said he'd been told by one or another of three different KGB officers.)

In early June 1962 Nosenko on his own volition told of the KGB's (insignificant) microphone monitoring of a restaurant conversation in Moscow between the American Assistant Naval Attaché and an Indonesian military attaché named Zepp. Asked to spell the name, he did so carefully, “Z-E-P-P.” However, in 1964 when asked for further information on this Indonesian, Nosenko denied ever having heard that name. It was later learned that throughout the period 1961–1963—in the middle of which Nosenko mentioned to CIA the name “Zepp”—the KGB was intensely interested in that unusual name in connection with its investigation of CIA agent Soviet Col. Oleg Penkovsky, whom they were about to arrest. (Spy Wars, pp. 15–16, 150–155, 162, 203)

32. How does one explain Nosenko's mention in 1962 of that unique name “Zepp” at the very moment that it was of intense interest to KGB counterintelligence? (For example, might he have been trying, on behalf of the KGB, to elicit some insight from his CIA handlers?)

33. Why did Nosenko in 1964 deny recognizing the name "Zepp"), whereas he himself had brought it up only a year and a half earlier?

Vladimir Chelnokov was a member of the KGB's deception unit headed by Gribanov, Nosenko's sponsor. Nosenko said Chelnokov was head of the Tourist Department of Gribanov's Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB).

34. How does one explain that Nosenko (while ostensibly overseeing work against the American Embassy) assisted Tourist Department chief Chelnokov in his 1960 meeting in Odessa with a visiting American travel agent who had earlier been recruited by the KGB?

Other questions:

35. Why was Nosenko, an eleven-year veteran of KGB CI operations, unable to uncover a single KGB operation or spy beyond what the KGB is known to sacrifice to build the credibility of a false defector? (Spy Wars, pp. 178–179)

36. How does one explain Nosenko's inability—or unwillingness—to describe certain everyday KGB procedures? (Spy Wars, pp. 83–86, 191–192, 251–255)

37. Is it mere coincidence that Nosenko reported to the CIA in 1962 about each of at least fourteen specific cases that the KGB knew had already been compromised to the Americans six months earlier by KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn?.

To wit:

a. Vassall (Spy Wars, pp. 14, 24, 97, 179, 187, 189, 206, 261)

b. Preisfreund's target (Spy Wars, pp. 25, 28, 158–159)

c. Kosolapov's trip to meet the man on the train (Spy Wars, pp. 157–158)

d. Belitsky (Spy Wars, pp. 17, 25, 179)

e. Kovshuk's “trip” to Washington (Spy Wars, pp. 24, 65–66, 69, 75–78)

And nine others, including a Canadian ambassador, a French ambassador, and a French businessman (Spy Wars, pp. 4, 14, 25, 165, 206).

38. Why did Nosenko bring up in 1962 the subject of KGB relations with the Finnish president, but then in 1964 deny having done so or knowing anything whatever about it? (Spy Wars, pp. 8, 186)

39. If Nosenko really was serving in Geneva, as he claimed in 1962 and 1964, as security watchdog of a Soviet conference delegation, why after the Cold War did even his KGB bosses say that he had gone there for other, “serious,” operational purposes? (Spy Wars, pp. 5, 237, 253)

40. How does one explain that, ostensibly as delegation watchdog in Geneva in 1962, Nosenko was housed (with “Aleksandr Kislov” of the SCD's deception department) two kilometers away from the delegation he was ostensibly watching over? (Spy Wars, pp, 6–7, 66, 236)


And now for a final couple of questions:

41. How could so many questions arise about any genuine defector?

42. How does one explain the more recent revelation by the KGB's top disinformation chief, General Sergey A. Kondrashev, that he himself at the beginning of 1962 was invited to help launch against CIA what could only be the Nosenko case? (Spymaster, pp. 195–199)

.......


Author information

Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley

Dr. Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1950, serving in its Clandestine Services Division (then known as the Directorate of Operations) for more than two decades, handling spies and defectors, and rising to become Deputy Chief of Soviet Bloc Division. In 1967, he became Chief of Station in Brussels, Belgium, holding the post until 1972. In the aftermath of his Agency career he became a consultant and later an author. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he received his B.A. from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Among his books was Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), which detailed at length his involvement with Yuri Nosenko, whose authenticity as a defector he continued to challenge. Dr. Bagley died in Brussels on 20 February 2014 at the age of 88. His final comments on the Nosenko case are herein published for the first time (2014).