Half-Clever Matt Cloud and Three-Quarters-Right Joe Trento

A fervid Trump supporter and self-described 1/6 participant by the name of Matt Cloud (who believes Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan was a KGB “mole” and that he may even have been the same person as CIA Deputy Director John N. McMahon!!!) recently posted in reply to one of my Substack articles a 1978 newspaper article by espionage writer Joe Trento, in which Trento reported that the FBI had finally determined (correctly) that two Soviet “informants” at the Bureau’s NYC field office — KGB Major Aleksei Kulak for fifteen years and GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov for one year — were actually Kremlin-loyal triple agents who had been sent there by the KGB.

Matt ”The Riddler” Cloud probably thought he was impressing me with his knowledge and/or embarrassing me by accusing me of either liking and/or being like occasionally misinformed Trento.

Funny thing is, I took it as a compliment seeing as how I agreed with everything Trento said in that article.

I do, however, disagree with a lot of what Trento has written over the years.

It’s just that “The Riddler” chose the perfectly wrong example.


Here are some other things Trento has said over the years that I agree with —

1) John Arther Paisley was a KGB “mole” in the CIA.

2) Nicholas Shadrin may have been a false defector. I like this idea because it dovetails with my theory that Bruce Solie at CIA headquarters and Shadrin’s primary field handlers in his ostensible meeting with Kochnov as a double agent in Vienna in 1975 — Leonard V. McCoy (read my Substack articles on him) and Cynthia Hausmann — were KGB “moles.” It would help to explain how they, going against the warning by CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton to not let Shadrin meet with anyone outside the country, enabled and/or encouraged him to do so three times (once in Ottawa and twice in Vienna), and how they managed to “lose” him to KGB kidnappers who, according to probable Kremlin-loyal Oleg Kalugin, accidentally killed him while transporting him across the Austria - Czechoslovak border. (It’s interesting to note that, according to Bagley, Artamonov / Shadrin was spotted in Moscow in 1980.)

3) [I’ll think of something . . .]


Here is some of the (imho) disinformation that Trento has unwittingly spread over the years —

1) The most powerful woman in the USSR, Yekaterina Alekseevna Furtseva, dissuaded KGB chief Semichastny from recruiting JFK’s future assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in Minsk during the two-and-one-half years he lived there.

2) In the interest of advancing the KGB career of her son-in-law (Igor Kochnov, aka Igor Kozlev), Furtseva suggested to him that he go to the U.S. and recruit former defector Nikolay Artamonov (aka Nichola Shadrin), and, while he was at it, convince the CIA that Nosenko had told the truth about Oswald’s not being recruited by the KGB — as evidenced by the “fact” that Furtseva had talked Semchastny out of it.

3) KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was nuts in claiming that the KGB had a newish Sun Tzu-based “Master Plan” (called the “Monster Plot” by Angleton’s and Golitsyn’s detractors) according to which it was waging deception-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies by forming feedback loops between dispatched “informants” / false-defectors and already-in-place “moles,” which feedback loops were enabling the KGB to take effective control of those services.


My advice to Matt “The Riddler” Cloud and Joe Trento —

Fead former CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles Mysteries and Deadly Games, and his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” and realize that Golitsyn was telling the truth.

(FWIW, those works can be read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously and “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.)