He boosted Nosenko's bona fides, kidnapped a defector and said oilmen killed JFK

[Tom Graves]

[RIF: 104-10322-10101]

Date: 29 November 1978

Memorandum for: Deputy Director of Central Intelligence [Frank Carlucci]

Via: Deputy Director for Operations Acting Chief, Soviet / East European Division

From: Donald F. Vogel, DCSE/ORP

Subject: Talking Paper for Briefing Chairman Stokes, HSCA, on KITTY HAWK

SECRET SENSITIVE

1. The Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassination, Mr. G. Robert Blakey, has requested access to “all reports and documents referring to an operation code named KITTY HAWK” [Igor Kochnov], which Mr. Blakey describes as “a project concerning the debriefing of a Soviet defector and a KGB analysis of the Kennedy assassination.” You propose to provide Chairman Stokes an oral response to this request.

2. Chairman Stokes may be informed that “KITTY HAWK” is not a defector but is a very sensitive [quarter sentence redacted] with whom we have [one-and-a-half lines redacted] mention of KITTY HAWK in the press in connection with the current investigation of the fate of Nicholas Shadrin, an FBI-CIA double agent who disappeared in 1975 while in Vienna for a meeting with the KGB. In spite of the unfortunate publicity, however, KITTY HAWK has apparently been able to survive KGB scrutiny thus far, and we continue to abide by the Director’s statutory obligation to protect his identity.

3. We have reviewed our holdings on KITTY HAWK and have found no reference to any “KGB analysis of the Kennedy assassination” or any other information pertinent to the Committee’s interest. Discussion of the assassination of President Kennedy took up only a small portion of the time spent in debriefing KITTY HAWK. You may wish to inform Chairman Stokes that in 1966 KITTY HAWK volunteered his impression that Kennedy’s assassination “was planned and carried out by the VIPs, possibly due to Kennedy’s opposition to Texas oil interests.” He added that he believed that the KGB was embarking on a “disinformation” campaign to have the assassination blamed on President Johnson, but he had no specific details of this campaign. KITTY HAWK also said that he was “personally well acquainted” with Lee Harvey Oswald’s background because he had helped prepare the file on Oswald which was turned over to the United States Government by Soviet Government. KITTY HAWK was not questioned further on this point, and there is no further reference in the KITTY HAWK file to any KGB or Soviet Government activity with respect to the assassination.

4. Although strictly speaking it is not relevant to this inquiry, you should be aware of the fact that KITTY HAWK supported Nosenko’s bona fides by reporting that Nosenko had done the KGB considerable damage (more than Golitsyn) and that the KGB was looking for Nosenko and intended to kill him if they found him. This is pertinent because those who hold to the theory that any KGB source or defector who supported Nosenko’s bona fides was also KGB-controlled. Introduction of KITTY HAWK into the assassination controversy can only serve the purpose of obfuscation. (emphasis added)

. . . . . . .

My comments:

KITTY HAWK was KGB Major Igor Kochnov, whose ostensible mother-in-law was Politburo member / Khrushchev’s mistress Yekaterina Furtseva. (It was she who had allegedly overruled Yuri Nosenko and others and permitted Lee Harvey Oswald to continue living in the USSR after he’d allegedly tried to kill himself in October 1959.)

Kochnov called soon-to-be Director of CIA Richard Helms at home in June 1966 and offered to work for the CIA as an agent-in-place if the Agency would boost his status with the Kremlin by arranging for him to pretend-recruit a former Soviet destroyer captain, Nicholas Shadrin (original name Nikolay Artamonov), who had defected to the U.S. years earlier.

James Angleton and others, believing that Kochnov was a “plant” and having been led to believe that there was a KGB mole in the Soviet Russia Division by Angleton’s confidant and mole-hunting superior, probable mole Bruce Solie in the Office of Security, decided to “play” Kochnov back against the KGB by allowing him to “recruit” Shadrin. Unfortunately, none other than Solie was chosen to be Kitty Hawk’s CIA case officer. FBI agent Elbert Turner became Kochnov’s Bureau case officer but wasn’t told that the CIA was going to play Kochnov back against the Soviets.

Solie chose probable mole Leonard V. McCoy and his loyal assistant, Cynthia Hausmann to “run” Shadrin with help from the aforementioned Turner. Factoid: around 1983, McCoy and Hausmann were instrumental in getting the FBI's belated 1976 determination that FEDORA was fake switched back to the original “He was really spying for the FBI!”

Solie, McCoy, and Hausmann were warned by Angleton to not allow Shadrin to leave the country to meet with the KGB, but they did – three times – once in Canada and twice in Vienna.

The third time they let Shadrin leave the U.S. was to meet with his ostensible (or actual?) KGB case officer, Kochnov, in Vienna in December 1975, at which time he was kidnapped by the KGB and “accidentally” killed while being transported into Czechoslovakia. (We know that he was accidentally killed because "former" KGB General Oleg Kalugin -- who swears Yuri Nosenko and Vitaly Yurchenko were true defectors and has described Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars, as "absurd ... trash" -- says so!)

Another interesting thing or two about Kochnov is that he confirmed for mole-hunter Solie that Igor Orlov -- who had earlier gone by the name “Alexander ‘Sasha’ Kopatzsky” and had retired from the CIA in 1961 -- was Golitsyn’s mole SASHA, and he fingered Orlov’s former CIA boss in Germany, Army Major Alexander “Sasha” Sogolow -- who confessed and wasn't prosecuted because he allowed himself to be played back against the KGB -- as Yuri Nosenko’s 1964 (but-not-mentioned-in-1962) mole, “Sasha.”